And then the waters became still once again. Save for one or two stragglers, the sea seemed empty. In fact, much more empty than before…
Above him, and just a few metres away, he could make out the blurred images of the semi-sub's passengers, their grey faces pressed against the toughened panes. They looked almost comical, but Schneider did not feel like laughing. There was something weird about the stillness all around him.
He realized he was sinking and used his fins to prevent himself going any deeper. Only a few feet down and it was so much darker.
A movement beneath him caught his eye. Something else was rising from below.
Another fish? Too bright, it was too bright.
A diver, it had to be another diver, a diver using a flashlight. Did Barry carry a flashlight? Maybe it was one of those marine scientist blokes on his way up. Maybe he or she caused all the commotion in the first place. Oughta be a law…
Wait on. It was a light all right, but nothing with it, no one holding it. Just a light… a round light, size of a tennis ball… travelling on its own. One of those luminous fishes that hung around on the ocean bed? But it wasn't that deep here.
Getting closer. Closer. And it was pure white, and bright… But no, there were colours around its edge, like a soft rainbow… shimmering… Fascinating.
It passed by him, floating upwards.
Schneider watched its progress, craning his neck, his eyes bright behind the mask. A pale glow, almost like moonlight, washed over the semi-submersible's lower deck, and bloodless spectral shapes observed through the glass.
The globe grew fainter as it approached the water's surface, not because it had dulled, itself, but because it had to compete with the blanketing sunshine above.
Then it broke through and all that Schneider could see was the gentlest of glows, still rising, becoming smaller, becoming lost, until, finally, it was gone.
Schneider remembered to breathe.
He floated in the weighty silence.
Tell'em about that at Jodie's next dreary bash
, he thought.
Even though dulled by the tremendous volume of water around him, the rending
craaack
that came from behind was like a massive thunderclap, brutally raw in its impact, deafening in its intensity. He turned before the full force of disrupted water hit him, his hands instinctively reaching for his covered ears, and saw Barry lifted from the coral as though jettisoned. The diver twisted and squirmed, fighting the currents to gain control of his own body.
From Schneider's position, it was difficult to make out exactly what was happening, but he could see coral breaking away and tumbling like boulders, with flurries of bubbles bursting from the reef itself.
As his own body was buffeted by the sudden surge, he witnessed the most horrific thing in what was to be his comparatively short life.
With a boom that might have come from a hundred cannon, fragments of living polyps shot towards the surface like blasted shrapnel, tearing through the other diver's body as though it were no more than papier-mache. Barry-or the main part of Barry-disappeared in a great swirl of red, while other pieces of him flew upwards with harder fragments to explode into the sunshine above in a furious fountain of blood, coral and flesh.
Schneider screamed into his air tube.
Just before the whole of the coral reef in his vicinity erupted with a violence that pierced every floating thing above-semi-submersible, amphibian plane, catamaran, pontoon, scuba deck and swimmers-splitting every object, soft and hard, with equal ease, tearing them into a million pieces, he managed to curse his doctor, who had ordered this bloody holiday in the first place.
Then Neville Trevor Schneider Ill's number increased a thousandfold.
***
'Coffee, Doc?'
'Uh?' James Rivers turned from the small window, his thoughts still on the interesting cloud formations, mainly cumulonimbus, in the distance.
The stocky, mustachioed man leaning over him raised the beaker he was holding an inch or so. 'Coffee. Gonna be your last chance before the shit hits us.'
Rivers nodded and took the plastic beaker from Gardenia, wincing as the hot liquid burned through to his fingers. He sipped quickly, then switched hands, managing a smile as he did so. The bastard was still having fun with him.
'What altitude are we going in at?' he asked loudly enough to be heard over the droning of the aircraft's four engines.
'Haven't decided yet,' the other man replied, taking a glance at the monitors ranged in front of Rivers. 'I'd kinda like to go in low, say 5,000-we'd get more info that way-but I guess it's up to the pilot. Ten thousand would be a lot safer. How's your stomach?'
'It'll take whatever you decide.'
Gardenia scratched his balding head. 'We've had some bad ones over the past few years-Hurricane Gilbert was the first of them back in'88-but this one's heading up to be the worst. Check those readings.' He stretched over the narrow desk to peer through the double-layered polycarbonate windows, forcing Rivers to press back into his seat.
'Surface wind looks to be eighty or ninety knots right now.' Gardenia's eyes squinted through thick, horn-rimmed glasses. 'That's soon gonna change, though. Hey, what has three humps and sings "Stormy Weather" through its asshole?'
Rivers shook his head, although he had an idea what the answer would be; these jokes had been doing the rounds for two years now, ever since the disaster.
'An Iraqi camel.' Gardenia clucked his tongue, as if embarrassed himself. 'Yeah, I know, bad taste. But the crazy bastards shouldna' messed with things they didn't understand,'specially after they got the crap beat outa them in the war. Jeez, take a look at that up ahead. Don't hold onta that coffee too long, Doc, or you'll end up with a hot pecker. We're in for a bumpy ride.'
Rivers looked past Gardenia at the distant weather. The clouds were even blacker and more angry than a minute ago. They moved as though they were boiling.
'You been through one before, Jim?'
Rivers was glad that Gardenia had dropped the 'Doc'-doctors of physics weren't used to being addressed in that way-but the other man's sudden serious tone was hardly relaxing. Thom Gardenia, despite his crassness, pretended or otherwise, was chief scientist for Hurricane Research at the Miami-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and certainly no fool. His manner might well have been his way of dealing with his own tenseness, a tenseness felt by all members of this particular mission. After the devastation Hurricane Zelda had left behind in Jamaica, everyone on board was aware that this storm was unprecedented. Its power was not just awesome-it was indescribable. Rivers' throat, to use an expression Gardenia himself might use, felt as dry as a mummy's jock-strap.
'I've flown missions in our own C-130 Hercules, but never into anything like this.' He took a sip from the beaker, glad of the coffee's heat. For a moment there a chill had run through him that had nothing to do with altitude-most of the scientific team wore short sleeve shirts, and crew members were in light, blue uniform overalls.
Gardenia's stubby hand clamped his shoulder. 'Don't worry, buddy, we've never lost a Brit yet. You may even enjoy it.'
The NOAA aircraft momentarily dipped a wing and Gardenia's fingers dug hard. His other hand grabbed the edge of the fixed desk. 'Just a coaster ride, Doc.' He grinned, his porcelain-coated teeth rendered even whiter by the thick black moustache above.
Keeping the coffee level, Rivers stared down into the deep waters below and wondered how this one had started. Over Africa? Winds colliding near the Equator, producing low pressure zones? Six out of a hundred might evolve into storms of something like this magnitude, air drawn in and spinning, the Earth's own rotation driving it faster, giving it power so that as it drifted it picked up moisture from the warm sea, eventually pulling up energy into the atmosphere from the ocean itself, feeding the storm, the clouds becoming ever more turbulent, forming an inner wall that would become the hurricane's core, its centre, the eye.
'Jamaica and the tip of Cuba are wrecks,' Gardenia remarked as the aeroplane straightened again, 'and it's still only a category four. Let's hope it'll wear itself out soon.'
'What was the last satellite eye measurement?'
'Twenny-five, twenny-six miles across before it made landfall, about ten now it's back over the ocean. It appears to be reducing rapidly.' His forehead puckered. 'Let's see… we're around twelve miles away right now, so I figure it'll be more like seven or eight miles across when we reach it.'
'It's shrinking that fast?'
''Pears to be.'
'And we go straight through.'
'Uh-huh. Our pilot doesn't like to manoeuvre too much in that kind of space, particularly when it's getting smaller all the time. There's some hard convection inside the eye, and it's pretty intense around those walls.'
'Thunderstorm updraughts?'
'You got it.'
Rivers decided to risk a scalded throat and finish the coffee before the aeroplane took a beating.
A figure in sweater and chinos came along the aisle towards them. He rested an arm against the bank of monitors where the British climatologist was seated.
'Need to take over, Jim. Our skipper's playing it safe and going in at 10,000.'
Rivers rose, taking the drained beaker with him, and Joe Pusey, the flight meteorologist, slipped into the seat. 'Strap yourselves in, guys, things are gonna get rough.'
The climatologist took a seat opposite, placing the beaker by his feet. As an observer from the British division of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, he was not directly involved in this particular operation; he could only sit back while the American scientific officer and his team gathered data and relayed it back to the Hurricane Centre on the mainland. Their prime purpose was to pinpoint the storm's exact centre so that its progress and direction could be charted by the forecasters and warnings to coastal and inland areas could be issued. Probes and sensors mounted on the outside of the plane recorded air pressure, humidity, temperature and wind speeds, while radar showed wind and rain patterns, necessary for predicting the height of the storm surge and assessing potential damage when Hurricane Zelda struck land again.
The message that a particularly severe storm was on its way across the Caribbean had reached Rivers at the Hadley Research Centre in Berkshire only yesterday and the hasty flight to New York and then another going south had left him a little travel-worn.
But all tiredness had left him now: his mind was sharp, his senses heightened.
Along the cabin the small team of researchers and crew members were busy at consoles or computer keyboards, the young meteorologist on Rivers' right now engrossed in the instruments before him, logging readings and conferring with the aircraft's pilot through the headphones he had donned. Everyone had been courteous enough and friendly in a distracted way-even Gardenia's frequent jibes were good-natured-but Rivers felt like an outsider, a 'dude' with no real field experience, a desk boffin who'd never 'ridden the wind', 'tagged the typhoon'. Well, the truth was slightly different, but there was little point in correcting their assumption. He was there as an observer, nothing more than that.
The plane bucked and Gardenia hurriedly strapped himself into a desk-seat in front of the climatologist. He turned to give a thumbs-up. 'Hold tight, buddy. S'long as we don't have any altitude excursions this'll be no worse than a jeep ride over a rocky road.' Rivers nodded, but didn't return the grin. He was more concerned with the array of monitors before Joe Pusey. He leaned over as far as he could. The meteorologist noticed his interest and tapped the headphones he was wearing; then he pointed to a pocket at the side of Rivers' seat. 'Use the cans,' he called.
The climatologist dipped into the pocket and drew out a pair of headphones; he adjusted the thin microphone arm when the set was comfortable over his ears.
'We all keep in communication at this time,' he heard Pusey say.
The aircraft lurched and another voice, the pilot's, came through. 'We're into the storm, gentlemen, as you may have noticed. Okaaay… we're taking her up to ten thou' and we have approximately eighteen miles to get to the eye wall itself. Once inside, I'll endeavour to orbit if that's any use to you.'
'We'll locate the centre and drop a windsonde while you pass through.'
'That suits me fine. I can make as many passes as you want.'
Rivers opened a notebook he'd taken from his pocket; although he'd be provided with a copy of the mission's records later, he wanted to set down his own observations. The plane pitched again and this time his body strained against the seat-belt. A series of bumps followed.
This baby's rough,' a crew member remarked calmly.
'Yeah, a bad one,' said the pilot. 'We've got some 200-knot gusts here.'
Rivers made a note beneath other information he'd already gathered. Minutes passed and the buffeting became harder, almost constant.
'Making some corrections now so's we hit dead centre,' came the pilot's voice.
'We need to find zero winds, so let's condition one.'
'Check. Hang onta your sick bags, fellahs.'
The aeroplane began to rock violently, fierce rain drumming against its fuselage and lashing the windows. Rivers glanced out on his side and saw only grey, driven clouds, a sombre fury moving at incredible speed. His hand clutched the seat's arm-rest when a particularly powerful updraught lifted the aircraft as if it were no more than flotsam on a wave. His pen fell to the floor and he stamped a foot on it before it could roll away. The plastic beaker he'd placed on the floor earlier had tipped over and was turning a semicircle. He reached down to pick up the pen and as he did so everything became blissfully calm.