Wyatt’s Hurricane / Bahama Crisis

Hansen blew out his cheeks and let forth a long sigh. ‘Jesus!’ he said reverently and with no intention to swear. He looked up at Wyatt. ‘Make it nearly four hours.’

Wyatt nodded weakly and leaned against the bulkhead. He could feel the knots in his stomach relaxing and was aware of the involuntary trembling of his whole body now that it was over.

II

Wyatt sat at his desk, at ease in body if not in mind. It was still early morning and the sun had not developed the power it would later in the day, so all was still fresh and new. Wyatt felt good. On his return the previous afternoon he had seen his precious tapes delivered to the computer boys and then had indulged in the blessed relief of a hot bath which had soaked away all the soreness from his battered body. And that evening he had had a couple of beers with Hansen.

Now, in the fresh light of morning, he felt rested and eager to begin his work, although, as he drew the closely packed tables of figures towards him, he did not relish the facts he knew he would find. He worked steadily all morning, converting the cold figures into stark lines on a chart – a skeleton of reality, an abstraction of a hurricane. When he had finished he looked at the chart with blank eyes, then carefully pinned it on to a large board on the wall of his office.

He had just started to fill in a form when the phone rang, and his heart seemed to turn over as he heard the well-remembered voice. ‘Julie!’ he exclaimed. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’

The warmth of her voice triumphed over electronics. ‘A week’s vacation,’ she said. ‘I was in Puerto Rico and a friend gave me a lift over in his plane.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘I’ve just checked into the Imperiale – I’m staying here and, boy, what a dump!’

‘It’s the best we’ve got until Conrad Hilton moves in – and if he has any sense, he won’t,’ said Wyatt. ‘I’m sorry about that; you can’t very well come to the Base.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Julie. ‘When do I see you?’

‘Oh, hell!’ said Wyatt in exasperation. ‘I’ll be tied up all day, I’m afraid. It’ll have to be tonight. What about dinner?’

‘That’s fine,’ she said, and Wyatt thought he detected a shade of disappointment. ‘Maybe we can go on to the Maraca Club – if it’s still running.’

‘It’s still on its feet, although how Eumenides does it is a mystery.’ Wyatt had his eye on the clock. ‘Look, Julie, I’ve got a hell of a lot to do if I’m to take the evening off; things are pretty busy in my line just now.’

Julie laughed. ‘All right; no telephonic gossip. It’ll be better face to face. See you tonight.’

She rang off and Wyatt replaced the handset slowly, then swivelled his chair towards the window where he could look over Santego Bay towards St Pierre. Julie Marlowe, he thought in astonishment, well, well! He could just distinguish the Imperiale in the clutter of buildings that made St Pierre, and a smile touched his lips.

He had not known her long, not really. She was an air hostess on a line covering the Caribbean from Florida and he had been introduced to her by a civilian pilot, a friend of Hansen’s. It had been good while it lasted – San Fernandez had been on her regular route and he had seen her twice a week. They had had three months of fun which had come to a sudden end when the airline had decided that the government of San Fernandez, President Serrurier in particular, was making life too difficult, so they dropped St Pierre from their schedule.

Wyatt pondered. That had been two years ago – no, nearer three years. He and Julie had corresponded regularly at first, but with the passage of time their letters had become sparser and more widely spaced. Friendship by letter is difficult, especially between a man and a woman, and he had expected at any moment to hear that she was engaged – or married – and that would be the end of it, for all practical purposes.

He jerked his head and looked at the clock, then swung round to the desk and pulled the form towards him. He had nearly finished when Schelling, the senior Navy meteorologist on Cap Sarrat Base, came in. ‘This is the latest from Tiros on your baby,’ he said, and tossed a sheaf of photographs on to the desk.

Wyatt reached for them and Schelling said, ‘Hansen tells me you took quite a beating.’

‘He wasn’t exaggerating. Look at that lot.’ Wyatt waved at the chart on the wall.

Schelling walked over to the board and pursed his lips in a whistle. ‘Are you sure your instrumentation was working properly?’

Wyatt joined him. ‘There’s no reason to doubt it.’ He stretched out a finger. ‘Eight hundred and seventy millibars in the eye – that’s the lowest pressure I’ve encountered anywhere.’

Schelling ran a practised eye over the chart. ‘High pressure on the outside – 1040 millibars.’

‘A pressure gradient of 170 millibars over a little less than 150 miles – that makes for big winds.’ Wyatt indicated the northern area of the hurricane. ‘Theory says that the wind-speeds here should be up to 170 miles an hour. After flying through it I have no reason to doubt it – and neither has Hansen.’

Schelling said, ‘This is a bad one.’

‘It is,’ said Wyatt briefly, and sat down to examine the Tiros photographs with Schelling looking over his shoulder. ‘She seems to have tightened up a bit,’ he said. ‘That’s strange.’

‘Makes it even worse,’ said Schelling gloomily. He put down two photographs side by side. ‘She isn’t moving along very fast, though.’

‘I made the velocity of translation eight miles an hour – about 200 miles a day. We’d better check that, it’s important.’ Wyatt drew a desk calculator and, after checking figures marked on the photographs, began to hammer the keys. ‘That’s about right; a shade under 200 miles in the last twenty-four hours.’

Schelling blew out his cheeks with a soft explosion of relief. ‘Well, that’s not too bad. At that rate it’ll take her another ten days to reach the eastern seaboard of the States, and they usually don’t last longer than a week. That’s if she moves in a straight line – which she won’t. The Coriolis force will move her eastward in the usual parabola and my guess is that she’ll peter out somewhere in the North Atlantic like most of the others.’

‘There are two things wrong with that,’ said Wyatt flatly. ‘There’s nothing to say she won’t speed up. Eight miles an hour is damned slow for a cyclone in this part of the world – the average is fifteen miles an hour – so it’s very probable she’ll last long enough to reach the States. As for the Coriolis effect, there are forces acting on a hurricane which cancel that out very effectively. My guess is that a high-altitude jet stream can do a lot to push a hurricane around, and we know damn’ little about those and when they’ll turn up.’

Schelling began to look unhappy again. ‘The Weather Bureau isn’t going to like this. But we’d better let them know.’

‘That’s another thing,’ said Wyatt, lifting the form from his desk-top. ‘I’m not going to put my name to this latest piece of bureaucratic bumf. Look at that last request –”State duration and future direction of hurricane.” I’m not a fortune-teller and I don’t work with a crystal ball.’

Schelling made an impatient noise with his lips. ‘All they want is a prediction according to standard theory – that will satisfy them.’

‘We don’t have enough theory to fill an eggcup,’ said Wyatt. ‘Not that sort of theory. If we put a prediction on that form then some Weather Bureau clerk will take it as gospel truth – the scientists have said it and therefore it is so – and a lot of people could get killed if the reality doesn’t match with theory. Look at Ione in 1955 – she changed direction seven times in ten days and ended up smack in the mouth of the St Lawrence way up in Canada. She had all the weather boys coming and going and she didn’t do a damn’ thing that accorded with theory. I’m not going to put my name to that form.’

‘All right, I’ll do it,’ said Schelling petulantly. ‘What’s the name of this one?’

Wyatt consulted a list. ‘We’ve been running through them pretty fast this year. The last one was Laura – so this one will be Mabel.’ He looked up. ‘Oh, one more thing. What about the Islands?’

‘The Islands? Oh, we’ll give them the usual warning.’

As Schelling turned and walked out of the office Wyatt looked after him with something approaching disgust in his eyes.

III

That evening Wyatt drove the fifteen miles round Santego Bay to St Pierre, the capital city of San Fernandez. It was not much of a capital, but then, it was not much of an island. As he drove in the fading light he passed the familiar banana and pineapple plantations and the equally familiar natives by the roadside, the men dingy in dirty cotton shirts and blue jeans, the women bright in flowered dresses and flaming headscarves, and all laughing and chattering as usual, white teeth and gleaming black faces shining in the light of the setting sun. As usual, he wondered why they always seemed to be so happy.

They had little to be happy about. Most were ground down by a cruel poverty made endemic by over-population and the misuse of the soil. At one time, in the eighteenth century, San Fernandez had been rich with sugar and coffee, a prize to be fought over by the embattled colonizing powers of Europe. But at an opportune moment, when their masters were otherwise occupied, the slaves had risen and had taken command of their own destinies.

That may have been a good thing – and it may not. True, the slaves were free, but a series of bloody civil wars engendered by ruthless men battling for power drained the economic strength of San Fernandez and population pressure did the rest, leaving an ignorant peasantry eking out a miserable living by farming on postage-stamp plots and doing most of their trade by barter. Wyatt had heard that some of the people in the central hills had never seen a piece of money in their lives.

Things had seemed to improve in the early part of the twentieth century. A stable government had encouraged foreign investment and bananas and pineapples replaced coffee, while the sugar acreage increased enormously. Those were the good days. True, the pay on the American-owned plantations was small, but it was regular and the flow of money to the island was enlivening. It was then that the Hotel Imperiale was built and St Pierre expanded beyond the confines of the Old City.

But San Fernandez seemed to be trapped in the cycle of its own history. After the Second World War came Serrurier, self-styled Black Star of the Antilles, who took power in bloody revolution and kept it by equally bloody government, ruling by his one-way courts, by assassination and by the power of the army. He had no opponents – he had killed them all – and there was but one power on the island – the black fist of Serrurier.

And still the people could laugh.

St Pierre was a shabby town of jerry-built brick, corrugated iron and peeling walls, with an overriding smell that pervaded the whole place compounded of rotting fruit, decaying fish, human and animal ordure, and worse. The stench was everywhere, sometimes eddying strongly in the grimmer parts of town and even evident in the lounge of the Imperiale, that dilapidated evidence of better times.

As Wyatt peered across the badly lit room he knew by the dimness that the town electricity plant was giving trouble again and it was only when Julie waved that he distinguished her in the gloom. He walked across to find her sitting at a table with a man, and he felt a sudden unreasonable depression which lightened when he heard the warmth in her voice.

‘Hello, Dave. I am glad to see you again. This is John Causton – he’s staying here too. He was on my flight from Miami to San Juan and we bumped into each other here as well,’

Wyatt stood uncertainly, waiting for Julie to make her excuses to Causton, but she said nothing, so he drew up another chair and sat down.

Causton said, ‘Miss Marlowe has been telling me all about you – and there’s one thing that puzzles me. What’s an Englishman doing working for the United States Navy?’

Wyatt glanced at Julie, then sized up Causton before answering. He was a short, stocky man with a square face, hair greying at the temples and shrewd brown eyes. He was English himself by his accent, but one could have been fooled by his Palm Beach suit.

‘To begin with, I’m not English,’ said Wyatt deliberately. ‘I’m a West Indian – we’re not all black, you know. I was born on St Kitts, spent my early years on Grenada and was educated in England. As for the United States Navy, I don’t work for them, I work with them – there’s a bit of a difference there. I’m on loan from the Meteorological Office.’

Causton smiled pleasantly. ‘That explains it.’

Wyatt looked at Julie. ‘What about a drink before dinner?’

‘That is a good idea. What goes down well in San Fernandez?’

‘Perhaps Mr Wyatt will show us how to make the wine of the country – Planter’s Punch,’ said Causton. His eyes twinkled.

‘Oh, yes – do,’ exclaimed Julie. ‘I’ve always wanted to drink Planter’s Punch in the proper surroundings.’

‘I think it’s an overrated drink, myself,’ said Wyatt. ‘I prefer Scotch. But if you want Planter’s Punch, you shall have it.’ He called a waiter and gave the order in the bastard French that was the island patois, and soon the ingredients were on the table.

Causton produced a notebook from his breast pocket. ‘I’ll take notes, if I may. It may come in useful.’

‘No need,’ said Wyatt. ‘There’s a little rhyme for it which, once learned, is never forgotten. It goes like this:

One of sour,

Two of sweet,

Three of strong

And four of weak.

‘It doesn’t quite scan, but it’s near enough. The sour is the juice of fresh limes, the sweet is sugar syrup, the strong is rum – Martinique rum is best – and the weak is iced water. The rhyme gives the proportions.’

As he spoke he was busy measuring the ingredients and mixing them in the big silver bowl in the middle of the table. His hands worked mechanically and he was watching Julie. She had not changed apart from becoming more attractive, but perhaps that was merely because absence had made the heart fonder. He glanced at Causton and wondered where he came in.

‘If you go down to Martinique,’ he said, ‘you can mix your own Planter’s Punch in any bar. There’s so much rum in Martinique that they don’t charge you for it – only for the limes and the syrup.’

Causton sniffed. ‘Smells interesting.’

Wyatt smiled. ‘Rum does pong a bit.’

‘Why have we never done this before, Dave?’ asked Julie. She looked interestedly at the bowl.

‘I’ve never been asked before.’ Wyatt gave one final stir. ‘That’s it. Some people put a lot of salad in it like a fruit cup, but 1 don’t like drinks I have to eat.’ He lifted out a dipperful. Julie?’

She held out her glass and he filled it. He filled the other glasses then said, ‘Welcome to the Caribbean, Mr Causton.’

‘It’s wonderful,’ said Julie. ‘So smooth.’

‘Smooth and powerful,’ said Wyatt. ‘You wouldn’t need many of these to be biting the leg of the table.’

‘This should get the evening off to a good start,’ said Julie. ‘Even the Maraca Club should look good.’ She turned to Causton. ‘Now there’s an idea – why don’t you come with us?’

‘Thank you very much,’ said Causton. ‘I was wondering what to do with myself tonight. I was hoping that Mr Wyatt, as an old island hand, could give me a few pointers on sightseeing on San Fernandez.’

Wyatt looked blankly at Julie, then said politely, ‘I’d be happy to.’ He felt depressed. He had hoped that he had been the attraction on San Fernandez, but apparently Julie was playing the field. But why the hell had she to come to San Fernandez to do it?

It turned out that Causton was foreign correspondent for a big London daily and over dinner he entertained them with a hilarious account of some of his experiences. Then they went on to the Maraca, which was the best in the way of a night-club that St Pierre had to offer. It was run by a Greek, Eumenides Papegaikos, who provided an exiguous South American atmosphere with the minimum of service at the highest price he could charge; but apart from the Officers’ Club at Cap Sarrat Base it was the only substitute for a civilized evening, and one did get bored with the Base.

As they entered the smoke-filled, dimly-lit room someone waved, and Wyatt waved back as he recognized Hansen, who was whooping it up with his crew. At the far end of the room a loud-voiced American was bellowing, and even at that distance it was easy to hear that he was retailing, blow by blow, his current exploits as a game fisherman. They found a table, and as Causton ordered drinks in perfect and fluent French which the waiter could not understand, Wyatt claimed Julie for a dance.

They had always danced well together but this time there seemed to be a stiffness and a tension between them. It was not the fault of the orchestra, poor though it was, for while the tune was weird, the rhythm was perfect. They danced in silence for a while, then Julie looked up and said softly, ‘Hello, Dave. Seen any good hurricanes lately?’

‘See one, you’ve seen them all,’ he said lightly. ‘And you?’

‘About the same. One flight is very like another. Same places, same air, same passengers. I sometimes swear that the air traveller is a different breed from the rest of us common humanity; like Dawson – that man over there.’

Wyatt listened to the raucous voice spinning its interminable fishing yarn. ‘You know him?’

‘Don’t you?’ she said in surprise. ‘That’s Dawson, the writer – Big Jim Dawson. Everyone’s heard of him. He’s one of the regulars on my flight, and a damn’ nuisance he is, too.’

‘I’ve heard of him,’ said Wyatt. Julie was right – there could not have been a corner of the world where the name of Big Jim Dawson was not known. He was supposed to be a pretty good writer, although Wyatt did not feel himself equipped to judge; at any rate, the critics appeared to think so.

He looked down at Julie and said, ‘You don’t appear to find Causton a nuisance.’

‘I like him. He’s one of these polite, imperturbable Englishmen we’re always reading about – you know, the quiet kind with hidden depths.’

‘Is he one of your regulars?’

‘I met him for the first time on my last flight. I certainly didn’t expect to find him here in San Fernandez.’

‘You certainly went out of your way to make him feel at home,’

‘That was just hospitality – looking after a stranger in a strange land.’ Julie looked up with a mischievous glint in her eye. ‘Why, Mr Wyatt, I do believe you’re jealous.’

‘I might be,’ said Wyatt bluntly. ‘If I had anything to be jealous about.’

Julie dropped her eyes and went a little pale. They danced in stiff silence until the melody was finished, then turned to go back to their table, but Julie was whirled away by the exuberant Hansen. ‘Julie Marlowe! What are you doing in this dump? I’m stealing her, Davy Boy, but I’ll return her intact.’ He swept her on to the floor in a caricatured rumba, and Wyatt returned glumly to Causton.

‘Powerful stuff,’ said Causton, holding a bottle to the light. He waved it. ‘Have one?’

Wyatt nodded. He watched Causton fill his glass, and said abruptly, ‘Here on business?’

‘Good lord, no!’ said Causton. ‘I was due for a week’s holiday, and since I was in New York, I decided to come down here.’

Wyatt glanced at Causton’s shrewd eyes and wondered how far that was true. He said, ‘There’s not much here for a holiday; you’d have been better off in the Bermudas.’

‘Maybe,’ said Causton non-committally. ‘Tell me something about San Fernandez. Does it have a history?’

Wyatt smiled sourly. ‘The same as any other Caribbean island – but a bit more so. First it was Spanish, then English, and finally French. The French made the deepest impression – you can see that in the language – although you do find the natives referring to St Pierre and San Pedro and Peter’s Port, and the language is the most mixed-up you’ve heard.’

Causton nodded ruefully, thinking of his recent difficulties with the waiter.

Wyatt said, ‘When Toussaint and Cristophe threw the French out of Haiti at the beginning of the 1800s, the locals here did the same, though it hasn’t had the same publicity.’

‘Um,’ said Causton. ‘How did an American base get here?’

‘That happened at the turn of this century,’ said Wyatt. ‘Round about the time the Americans were flexing their muscles. They found they were strong enough to make the Monroe Doctrine stick, and they’d just got over a couple of wars which proved it. There was a lot of talk about “Manifest Destiny” and the Yanks thought they had a big brotherly right to supervise other people’s business in this part of the world. San Fernandez was in pretty much of a mess in 1905 with riots and bloody revolution, so the Marines were sent ashore. The island was American administered until 1917 and then the Americans pulled out – but they hung on to Cap Sarrat.’

‘Didn’t something of the sort happen in Haiti as well?’

‘It’s happened in most of the islands – Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic’

Causton grinned. ‘It’s happened more than once in the Dominican Republic.’ He sipped his drink. ‘I suppose Cap Sarrat is held under some kind of treaty?’

‘I suppose you could call it that,’ agreed Wyatt. ‘The Americans leased the Cap in 1906 for one thousand gold dollars a year – not a bad sum for those days – but depreciation doesn’t work in favour of San Fernandez. President Serrurier now gets $1693.’ Wyatt paused. ‘And twelve cents,’ he added as an afterthought.

Causton chuckled. ‘Not a bad bit of trading on the part of the Americans – a bit sharp, though.’

‘They did the same in Cuba with Guantanamo Base,’ said Wyatt. ‘Castro gets twice as much – but I think he’d rather have Guantanamo and no Americans.’

‘I’ll bet he would.’

‘The Navy is trying to build up Cap Sarrat as a substitute for Guantanamo in case Castro gets uppity and takes it from them. I suppose there is a possibility that it might happen.’

‘There is,’ said Causton. ‘I don’t think he could just take it by force, but a bit of moral blackmail might do it, given the right political circumstances.’

‘Anyway, here is Cap Sarrat,’ said Wyatt. ‘But it’s not nearly as good as Guantanamo. The anchorage in Santego Bay is shallow – all it will take is a light cruiser – and the base facilities will take twenty years and a couple of hundred million dollars to even approach Guantanamo. It’s very well equipped as an air base, though; that’s why we use it as a hurricane research centre.’

‘Miss Marlowe was telling me about that –’ began Causton, but he was interrupted by the return of Hansen and Julie and he took the opportunity of asking Julie to dance.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me to have a drink?’ demanded Hansen.

‘Help yourself,’ said Wyatt. He saw Schelling come into the room with another officer. ‘Tell me, Harry; how did Schelling come to make Commander in your Navy?’

‘Dunno,’ said Hansen, sitting down. ‘Must be because he’s a good meteorologist, because he’s an officer like a bull’s got tits.’

‘Not so good, eh?’

‘Hell, one thing an officer’s got to do is to lead men, and Schelling couldn’t be a Den Mother for a troop of Girl Scouts. He must have got through on the specialist side.’

‘Let me tell you something,’ said Wyatt, and told Hansen about his conversation that morning with Schelling. He ended up by saying, ‘He thinks that meteorology is an exact science and that what the textbooks say is so. People like that frighten me.’

Hansen laughed. ‘Dave, you’ve come across a type of officer that’s not uncommon in the good old USN. The Pentagon is swarming with them. He goes by the book for one reason and one reason only – because if he goes by the book he can never be proved wrong, and an officer who is never wrong is regarded as a good, safe man to have around.’