Her Name Will Be Faith (38 page)

By the time Jo had managed to contact the yacht, Richard
had arrived
and he listened to the conversation.

"You have to hand it to the guy," he remarked
when Jo finally hung
up. "He has the
confidence of a champion. And if he makes it home
I'll
have to hand it to him." He grinned.
"Don't get me wrong. I hope he
does make it."

"So do I," Jo said. No matter how irreconcilable
their differences,
Michael was her husband,
and the father of her children – and they had experienced a lot together.
"Do you think he can, Richard?"

"If
he can get himself to west of the path, sure he can."

In the circumstances she didn't feel like making love, and
Richard
could understand that. They had a cup of coffee
each, then he kissed her goodnight. "I reckon you want all the sleep
you've been missing the last couple of nights," he said. "And I have
a forecast at seven."

"So
when do you sleep?" she asked.

"About
ten minutes in every hour, on the settee in the office. I haven't been home for
four days. Jayme keeps me supplied with coffee and doughnuts."

"You're
going to make yourself ill," she protested.

He
winked. "By this time next week the world will be back to normal, and
we'll be wondering what all the fuss was about. I'll call you."

To
her surprise, Jo did sleep, very soundly, but she set her alarm, and awoke at a
quarter to seven, in time to switch on the TV while her coffee percolated.

Richard
smiled at her from the screen, but his eyes were grave. "...latest
co-ordinates
are 35°15'N. Latitude. 70°20'W.
Longitude." He moved to the huge wall
map. "That puts Faith 300 miles due east of Cape Hatteras, and
you'll
see..." his wand touched
the last position, "that she is now moving
north-east again, but
still slowly, only about ten knots. She is just over
400 miles southeast of New York, and you'll see from this picture that
the cloud mass extends outwards for all of that and
more. In fact, the
rain we've been having the last couple of days is
definitely what we might call an outlier from Faith. Well, we needed the rain;
if that's all she gives us, we're going to be very lucky people. And in fact,
if she maintains her
present track, she is
going to move straight out into the Atlantic and
trouble no one any more…
except any shipping that happens to be in
her
way. They should all by now have moved out of her path in any
event, if
they have any sense."

Jo opened her atlas, and began measuring off
distances. By her reckon
ing the storm was within 200 miles of
where she reckoned
Esmeralda
should
now be. 200
miles and the gap was closing. Her hand hovered over the telephone… but almost
certainly the yacht was now out of radio range from Hamilton, and not yet
within range of any mainland station. And even if she could raise them and
Michael were to listen to her, she didn't know what he could do about it now.

Dawn
is usually the best part of the day, at sea. At dusk it is possible to
witness the most magnificent sunsets, with the
huge red globe inching its
way beneath the horizon, and seeming to
spread as it does so, so that when it is a third gone it appears to be sitting
on a crimson plinth. But once the sun is gone there is nothing but the lonely
hours of darkness ahead, so that, even in summer, around two o'clock in the
morning it is sure to get pretty chilly.

Dawn
is the promise of a whole new day. The appearance of the sun, rising out of the
ocean with all the majesty of a sunset, but invariably in softer colors,
bringing an immediate suggestion of warmth. For those on watch there is the
certainty of warming coffee, filling breakfast, and then a snug berth for four
hours. For those getting up to take over, it is no hardship to sit in the
cockpit of a yacht, sipping coffee, and enjoying the burgeoning day.

But some dawns can be angry. This morning the wind was
still light
and fitful, but the sun rose, blood red,
out of a mountain of high piling
clouds, and
the swell was bigger than before, so large that when
Esmeralda
sank into a trough the horizon disappeared. And
now there came the first
of the squalls, driving rain in front of the
wind, stinging the skin and
causing drops to
leap out of the sea. "You'd better wake the skipper,"
Larry
told Mark.

Michael was already awake. He had been fast asleep, but he
had felt
the yacht heel to the
sudden wind gust even while unconscious. He rolled
out
of his berth, pulled on his oilskin trousers and top – he had slept in
his clothes – and looked over Sam's shoulder at the chart table, and the
forecast Sam had just scribbled down.

"There we are." Sam made
a neat little pencil 'x' on the chart to indicate the yacht's position –
he had just taken a Loran fix.

"And?" Michael asked.

"Faith is there." He
pointed to another 'x' on the chart. "I make that
180 miles."

Michael frowned. "The bitch has altered
course."

"Yes.
And that's confirmed by the forecast. She's making northeast, and coming
straight at us. Michael, you don't think..."

"No I don't," Michael told him. "She's
doing exactly what I figured
she
would. Okay, right now we're in the dangerous quadrant, but 180
miles…
how fast is she travelling?"

"Still
about ten knots."

"Eighteen
hours to the eye. After midnight tonight. By then we'll be
another 100 miles to the northwest, more if she
gives us a breeze. We'll
be in the safe quadrant then."

"The
safer
quadrant," Sam corrected. "I don't reckon there's any
safe
quadrant where this baby is concerned.
And you do know that we're
gonna have
100-mile-an-hour winds long before the eye actually gets to
us.”

"Listen, friend," Michael said. "I taught
you navigation, remember.
Any increase in
strength?"

"Not really. Highest winds are still reported as 180
miles an hour
around the center.
That's more than 130 knots. You ever been out in 130
knots
of wind, Michael?"

"I guess not," Michael admitted. "We had 60
knots once, a couple of
years ago.
Remember?"

"I wasn't on that one," Sam said thoughtfully.
"I've always been glad
of
that." Now he wished he had at least had that experience. "And the
ship
rode it all right?"

Michael grinned. "She rolled a bit. Everything
depends on where we
are when it hits us, and
the direction it's coming from. Sea room is very important. And right now we
have all the sea room in the world. There's only the Gulf Stream to worry
about. The wind should back round to the northeast when Faith gets close. Put
that over the Stream and we could have some steep seas. Shit, we could be
climbing mountains. So what I want you to do is lay a course north for a
while."

"North?
But that'll take us up to Boston."

"So we'll go to Boston. Listen, Sammy, we can't head
a hurricane
wind. We have to go
with it, right? Therefore, when it blows, it's gonna
take
us west no matter what we do. The further north we get now the slacker the Gulf
Stream will be running, and the weaker the wind. Faith is making northeast.
We'll get into the navigable quadrant yet. So we won't be heading straight for
home. But if we can't make it in time, you know what the golden rule is."

"If
you can't make port in plenty of time, keep the sea," Sam said unhappily.

"And that includes keeping well away from known
hot spots," Michael
reminded him.
"We'll turn for home and the Gulf Stream when Faith
has gone
through."

"You're the skipper,"
Sam agreed. "I just wish I could call either Sally
or Jo, tell them what we're doing? They'll be
worrying."

"Do them good," Michael said. "We'll
call them when we're through."

"That was good work last night, Richard,"
remarked J. Calthrop White.
"We'll have
to think about giving you some more political broadcasting
to do, eh?" He glanced at Kiley, who gave an
anxious smile. "Now, all
we need
is for Faith to act up, and give people a good enough scare to
ask the
same questions we have; my information is that they are already doing that. So
what the hell is all this talk that she's now heading out to sea?"

Richard couldn't figure out what the old buzzard was doing
in the
office on a Friday morning at all; he usually
went out to Long Island on Thursday night, to prepare himself for one of his
wife's lavish luncheon parties. But maybe he wasn't going home at all this
weekend. "Well, JC, I'm afraid that's what she's doing."

"Hm. That's not so good. It'll give the
administration a breathing
space," JC pointed
out. "Yes, indeed. That is a serious disappointment. They'll go back to
the old theme of how a hurricane never will hit New York, and now they'll have
Faith to add to Gloria to prove to the public
that
they're right. And we'll be accused of scaremongering all over again."

"Well,
sir, in many ways their point of view is a correct one," Richard attempted
to explain. "Hurricanes, until they come ashore, do tend to
move in a parabola, as indeed do ordinary wind
currents. They travel
west in the
lower latitudes, and they curve back to the north-east as they
move
higher."

"Then
why did you say yesterday that Faith was still a possible threat to New
York?"

"Because she was. She still is. She's a massive
storm, she's still deepen
ing, and she's moving
very slowly..."

"But
away from New York." JC believed in hammering the important
point in any discussion. "All she's done is
put down one hell of a lot of
rain to spoil tomorrow's golf, and left us
with egg smeared all over our
faces."
He pressed a switch on his intercom. "Alice, call the garage and
tell Murray I won't be staying in town this
weekend after all. Tell him
to have the car ready in ten minutes."

"Right
away, JC," the secretary replied.

JC stood up. "I'm not blaming you, Richard. I
repeat, you did a good
job. And you have the
face to put these things across. You look honest, and even more important, you
look sincere. Indeed you do. Sincerity is what grabs people. No doubt about that.
But there's no doubt either that we'll have lost a lot of oomph when people
tune in to your next forecast and discover this storm is heading out into the
Atlantic. I mean to say, Gloria at least blew down a few trees in Connecticut,
caused one or two deaths. This one isn't even going to do that. A real pity.
Have a good weekend." He left the office.

Richard
and Kiley looked at each other.

"Would
you say I had better start looking for another job?" Richard asked.

"Well… I reckon he was pretty forbearing. But that's
not necessarily
a good thing,"
Kiley pointed out. "Trouble is, Richard, JC is the kind of
man who just has to have someone to blame for
anything that goes wrong.
It's bad luck that you were elected in this
case, but there it is. Wasn't it Napoleon Bonaparte who said he'd rather have a
lucky general than a good one? JC identifies with Bonaparte on a good many
things. Now, if Faith was to turn round and come back..."

"You'd say I was lucky," Richard observed in
disgust. "And JC would
be
happy. You guys have got to be crazy. You actually want that storm
to
hit us. Do you have any idea what it would be like?"

"I saw the movie," Kiley said. "But New
York isn't some Pacific
sandbank. Or a Bahamian
sandbank, either."