Park Avenue — Midnight
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 reckoning 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.
The Gulf Stream — 7.00 am
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.”
National American Broadcasting Service Offices, Fifth Avenue — Noon
“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 a
ll 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 deepening, 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.”
“The movie,” Richard said contemptuously. “Did you notice how every time the director wanted his characters to say something the wind dropped, how there was no thunder or lightning, and how they climbed trees to survive? That was hokum. If Faith were to strike Manhattan there wouldn’t be a tree left in Central Park. And a few other things are going to be blown about as well. Come over here.” He went to stand at the plate-glass window looking down on Manhattan; it faced east. “Do we have any shutters for this window?”
“Are you crazy? We’re forty floors up.”
“Well, let me tell you something, Mr Kiley; if Faith hits here with winds of 18o miles an hour or more, that window is going to disappear. You remember that storm which hit Houston a few years back? It was losing force by then, and it had never at any time possessed anything near the strength of Faith, yet the wind sucked out glass like it was paper. This window…” he tapped it, “is going to go, and most of it will fall into the street in pieces as lethal as shrapnel. And if either you or JC happen to be in this office at the time, the odds are you will go with it. Now you tell me something: how many plate-glass windows of roughly this size are there in New York?”
Kiley stared at him.
“Okay,” Richard went on. “Let me make it easier for you. How many windows are there in this building?”
“You’re being hysterical,” Kiley commented. “I have a luncheon date.”
“Enjoy it, and pray that Faith keeps out to sea.” And destroy Michael Donnelly? A man he loathed although he had never even seen him. But there were five other men out there with him, and he had no cause to loathe any of them.
He took the elevator down to the weather room in a thoroughly bad temper. Jayme was out shopping; he had told her he would need her over the weekend. Julian was on the phone, making notes. And his own phone was buzzing. He sat down. “Connors.”
“Hi.”
“Oh, my darling,” he said.
“Any news?”
“Could be something coming in now,” he said, as he saw Julian’s eyebrows bobbing at him. “Listen, I’ll call you right back.”
“I’ll be here.”
He replaced the phone. “Give.”
“That was your friend Mark Hammond. He got back to base fifteen minutes ago. He says Faith has sustained winds at the center of 160 miles an hour, and that she’s still building.”
“160? Give me that.” Richard took the pad and stared at the figures. “You ever seen wind speeds like that before, at ground level?”
“The ultimate storm, eh? But that ain’t all.” Julian took back the pad and flipped the page. “Mark says she’s starting to wobble.”
Richard found himself on his feet. “Where?”
“To the west. There is a definite movement west of north, Mark says. Look at the co-ordinates.”
Richard stared at the paper, then reached for his phone. “Find out if Mr White has left the building yet,” he snapped at the girl on the switchboard. “If you can, stop him. Tell him I have to speak with him again, most urgently.” He replaced the phone, gazed at Julian. “That old bastard could be going to get what he most wants — a major hurricane right on his goddamned doorstep.” Then he thought of Michael Donnelly, trying to get to the west of a storm which was now beginning to move west, and faster than he could sail his yacht. He sighed; Jo had to be told. But Michael Donnelly, and even Jo, were suddenly being upstaged, by Faith herself.
“I’m sorry, Mr Connors,” the switchboard said. “Mr White has already left for Long Island.”
“He has a phone in his car, hasn’t he?”
“Of course, Mr Connors, but we are under strict orders only to call him once he has left the office for the weekend in an extreme emergency.”
“This is an extreme emergency,” Richard snapped. “Get him. And get me the Mayor’s Office as well.”
“The Mayor’s Office?” The woman’s tone conveyed a suspicion that he must have gone mad.
“And the police department.”
“And the police department,” she said sadly.
Richard replaced the phone, then picked it up again and dialed Jo.
“You really feel this is it?” Julian asked.
“This could be it. Those co-ordinates place the storm just 370 miles away from us, and she could be turning this way. If something isn’t done about it, and quick, we could be looking at the disaster of the century. Hi, Jo.”
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing good. Listen. I want you to pack a bag, for yourself and the kids, and leave town.”
“Do what?”
“You heard me, Jo. Leave New York. Go away for the weekend.”
“Now? You’re pulling my leg.”
“I was never more serious in my life.”
“But… will you be coming with us?”
“N
o, I have to stay here. Listen, Jo, I’m very serious. Didn’t you tell me your in-laws have a house in Bognor, Connecticut?”
“Why, yes. But…”
“Go visit with them, just for the weekend. Bognor should be safe enough.”
“I can’t just descend on them, Richard. They’re still suffering from shock.”
“Well, they could be going to get a lot more shock in the next couple of days. Faith is moving west.”
“West? Oh, my God! But Michael…”
“Yeah. I know. Maybe he’ll be able to outrun her. That’s all I can offer. But you, Jo…”
“I can’t go running off when he’s out there, maybe fighting for his life, Richard. I have to be here, in case he wants to get in touch. And anyway, I’m in the center of New York. What danger could there be here?”
“For God’s sake,” he shouted. “Will nobody listen to me? Jo…”
“I have Mr White on the phone, Mr Connors,” the switchboard said.
“Hell… I’ll call you back, Jo,” Richard said, and pressed the transfer button. “JC?”
“Something on your mind, Richard?” JC’s tone was deceptively quiet. “Something important, I hope.”
“I thought you’d like to know that hurricane Faith has stopped moving north-east.”
“Yes?”
“And she’s starting to wobble to the west.”
“Does that mean she may be coming our way after all?”
“It certainly creates that possibility.”
“Well, that is splendid news, Richard. Splendid news. Maybe she’ll come close enough to wipe some of that egg off of our faces. Keep me posted. Call me this evening at home. Well done, Richard.”
“JC,” Richard begged. “If she does come west, she could pose a serious threat to New York.”
“Well, that’s what we’ve been saying all along, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but now we have to stop warning and start doing. JC, I’d like to put out a hurricane alert, right now. I’d like to interrupt the scheduled programming to tell people that Faith could be making straight for us.”
“Richard,” JC said. “Listen to me, boy. I know how interested you are in this hurricane thing. But obviously you’ve let it get on top of you. Now here’s what you do, and this is an order. You hand over the one o’clock forecast to Julian, with strict instructions to give the co-ordinates and the present wind strengths and nothing more, and you go home, and have a drink and a good lunch and a nap, and then you return to the studio this evening, and you call me and give me an update then.”
Her Name Will Be Faith Page 25
