John felt his cheeks become flush. “What? No. The lift is better up there. Plus it’s near the triple point. With the warm front punching north like it is, I’m thinking the discrete stuff is going to have a better chance over there.” He then reached over and checked his cell phone for new text messages.
Captain continued to hold onto his serious look. “How are things with Madeline these days? You’ve checked your phone twenty times now since we started on this.”
John put his phone down but still stared at it just in case he might miss something. “Did I tell you that she might come with us?”
“Oh, so that’s it. There’s the real reason. I wasn’t buying your triple point argument.”
“No, I mean it about the triple point. But she asked to tag along.”
“Only if she sits in the back.”
“Of the truck? You can’t make her do that. She’s never been on one of these before.”
Captain took a sip off of his fountain drink. “Are you saying you want me to sit in the back with all the equipment? Since when did we become tour guides? Are you gonna charge her for this?”
“I’m not going to charge her.”
“Yeah, but if I have to sit in the back…”
“No. It’s just a one-time thing.”
“Good. Because I don’t wanna become Third Wheel Tours.” Captain picked up the road atlas and flipped it to the page for the state of Nebraska. He pointed at the city of Norfolk. “Just northeast of here. EF-3 minimum.”
“Based on what?”
Captain turned the laptop back toward John. On the screen was a skew-T plot of a forecast sounding for the area. “Loaded gun, right there.”
John smiled. “Okay. We’ll start there. And punch north.”
“Did you fix the launcher? I saw the data from the last launch.” Captain shook his head. “Nobody’s gonna give us grant money based on that.”
“I fixed the launcher. I still don’t know why you don’t like me taking the minimum maintenance roads.”
“Don’t test me. You’re testing me.” Captain said. He rotated his arm around and clutched it with his other hand as if he was in pain.
“I’m not testing you.” Just then, John’s cell phone rang. He picked it up. It was an automated phone call using Jared’s voice and promoting the upcoming healing event at the Spirit of Grace Church in Wick. Before the message ended, he hung up.
“Who was it?” Captain asked.
“Spirit of Grace. How’d they get my number? I never gave it to them. I hate them.”
“Madeline?”
“No. She wouldn’t do that. Although it was weird the other night. We met the worship leader on the walking trail outside Madeline’s apartment. I looked the lady in the eyes and she couldn’t focus on anything. Her eyes just kept bobbing back and forth. Never seen anything like it.”
“Now you know why I stay away from church.”
“Yeah, but it sounds like the guy practically owns the town.” John analyzed another computer model run on his laptop and then pointed at the screen. “Did you see this? Take a look at the storm motion numbers. Some of the storms could move at forty knots tomorrow.”
Captain leaned over to look. “Don’t tell me your truck can’t do forty.”
John grinned and daydreamt about getting more good data. “Get your escape routes ready.”
Chapter Eight
Captain sat in the backseat of the truck with his laptop next to him and a camera on his lap. Madeline sat in the passenger seat and checked her cell phone while John drove the truck. They headed north up Highway 81 out of Norfolk, Nebraska, after a row of towering cumulus erupted just north of the city. The clouds were building along a warm front which was connected to a low west of Mitchell, South Dakota. The front was draped to the east-southeast across central Iowa and stretched into western Illinois.
Before heading east, John pulled into a gas station. As he swiped his credit card through the gas pump card reader, a woman in her mid-twenties approached him. He tried to ignore her but then she started to talk to him anyway. Madeline got out of the truck and stood next to him.
“Oh, hi Madeline,” the woman said. “It’s such a nice day, isn’t it?”
“For now,” Madeline said nicely.
“It’s funny seeing you here. I just wanted to let you know as I was getting back into my car the Lord gave me a word,” the woman said without hesitation.
“A word?” Madeline looked at John and pleaded for help with her eyes.
“Yes. A word. The word is treasure. Does that mean anything to you?”
Madeline looked back at the woman. “No. Not really.”
“I’m sure it was meant for you. Maybe God will reveal it to you later in the day.” The woman put a hand on Madeline’s shoulder as if it increased the importance of the conversation.
Madeline pulled back and instead grabbed the windshield squeegee from a nearby holder and began cleaning the windshield of the truck. The woman backed off and waved at her before returning to her car.
“Who was that?” John asked as he finished pumping gas. “Do you know her?”
“Oh, I know her. That’s Jacqueline Moser. She’s from the church.”
“What was that all about?”
“I have no idea. Treasure? I mean, really? This is what I’m talking about. I swear if another person comes up to me from church and says they have a word, I’m gonna scream. None of it is coming from God.”
“Maybe she thinks you’re going to come into a lot of money. There’s a casino further up the highway.”
“John!” She yelled as she flicked windshield cleaning fluid at him. “Maybe she’s on one of those treasure quest things.”
“Treasure quest things?”
“Everybody sits around at a table and waits for a word from God. Then they go out into the community and try to find the word. I did it once with a study group. Everybody got a word except me. I felt like an idiot.”
“Are you saying it wasn’t about gold?”
“Fool’s gold is more like it. Can we get out of here now?” Madeline put the squeegee back into its holder with a splash. She climbed back into the truck.
John tore off his receipt from the gas pump and returned to the driver’s seat. He looked back at the convenience store part of the gas station. “Hey Captain. Have you heard? The word of the day is treasure,” he yelled out the window.
Captain walked toward them with two foil-wrapped hot dogs, a large bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and a 32-ounce cup full of fountain pop. He gave John a quizzical look. “Treasure?”
“Some random lady came up to us and said God told her about treasure.”
“It wasn’t a random lady,” Madeline said, correcting him. “She was from my church. She’s sincere but kind of gullible.”
“Treasure, huh? Think I should go back inside and buy up a bunch of lottery tickets?” Captain joked.
John looked down at a radar image on his cell phone as Captain got into the backseat. “Hey, can you bring up the radar out of Sioux Falls? There’s a cell that’s looking good south of there.”
Captain set down his fountain drink and chips and punched a few keys on his laptop with his free hand. He turned the screen so that John and Madeline could see it.
“I say we go for it,” John said without hesitation. He left the gas station and turned to head back out onto Highway 81.
“What’s your target?” Captain asked as he pulled the laptop back toward himself and took a bite of a hot dog.
John leaned over to look at Madeline. Her hands were folded in her lap, but on top of the road atlas that he wanted to use. “Can you open up that roadmap and name some towns south of Sioux Falls?”
Madeline opened up the atlas and after turning it around, she zeroed in on the area around Sioux Falls with her index finger. She traced her finger along the interstate and then turned to face John. “Harrisburg. Worthing. Ingot.”
“What?”
“Ingot.
It’s a town of about 600 people.”
“Never heard of it. Is it far from the interstate?”
She pointed to the town on the map and held it up for John to see. “It’s east on 18. Want me to GPS it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Two words: signal lost. Ingot it is.”
“That’s it!” Captain exclaimed with a booming voice that caused Madeline to jump in her seat.
“Ingot?” John said.
“No. Treasure. Remember the word we got back there? Get it? An ingot is a metal bar. Sometimes silver. Sometimes gold. Treasure. Ingot. Ingot. Treasure.”
“Maybe you should’ve picked up some lottery tickets,” John said.
“Ingot is a plant town,” Madeline said as she closed the atlas.
“A plant town?” Captain asked from the backseat.
She let out a deep sigh. “A church plant. Jared started a new church over there a year ago. And all his books and teachings came with him.”
As John turned onto Highway 18, the cumulonimbus towers scaled into the heavens like slow-motion rockets. Some of the thunderstorms sprouted anvil heads and cirrus clouds streamed off the top of them and obscured the sun with a thin veil of cotton. Underneath the storms, John studied the bases for signs of wall clouds. “Hey Captain. What’s the velocity like on the storm furthest to the west of Ingot?”
“There’s a small couplet. Maybe twenty to thirty knots of shear,” Captain said.
“Is everything staying discrete?”
John turned to look back at Captain. Captain nodded.
“What do you mean by discrete?” Madeline said.
“The storms are staying separated. That and the storm motion is perpendicular to the front. Which means they’re not cutting off each other’s inflow.”
Madeline gave him a blank stare.
“It means tornado weather.”
* * *
An hour later, John brought them into a position to the southwest of the storm approaching Ingot. A wall cloud had formed during their travel time and the spin on it now lifted his mood and buoyed his hopes of getting good data. As he closed in on the churning dark gray clouds he called back to Captain. “Think we should take a shot with the rockets?”
Captain looked up from his laptop. “From back here? Won’t they get slammed by the rear flank downdraft?”
Although John agreed for the moment, he saw something a little different with this storm. “I think we have a window of a few minutes if we hurry.”
“You’re in charge,” Captain said with a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “Wait. Do I really want that? No. The last time you put us into a ditch on a road I warned you about.”
John stared at Captain a moment in the rearview mirror.
“Oh, go on. Punch the core,” Captain said without looking up.
“Punch the core?” Madeline asked.
“Not with the truck. With the rockets,” John said. He slammed on the brakes and cranked the wheel hard to the right to pull them onto the shoulder. As soon he parked the truck he motioned to her. “Follow me.”
He leapt down out of the truck and ran to the back. He pulled out his black duffel bag full of rockets and set it on the ground. Next, he lowered the tailgate, dragged the launcher out, and set it on the ground. He pulled the rockets out of the bag and slipped them onto the launch rails. After attaching the ignition clips he gave her a thumbs-up signal.
“You really are going to shoot rockets at it, aren’t you?” She said.
“Rockets full of sensors. I just hope they can get through the winds up there.” He could feel a cool downdraft coming out of the storm, but knew the rockets just might be fast enough to make it.
When he was sure everything was ready to go, he got back into the driver’s seat. Beneath the wall cloud dust began to stir and curled upon itself in swift-shifting curtains. He picked up his control box and twisted the safety key.
“Hey, John,” Captain said suddenly. “You’re gonna want to see this.” He turned his laptop computer again so Madeline and John could see what was on the screen. “The velocity couplet is intensifying really fast. If you’re gonna launch the rockets do it now.”
At that, John fired up his rocket launching software on his laptop. The anemometer on the roof of the truck showed a steady fifteen-knot wind. He shook his head and took a deep breath. “Fire in the hole,” he said and punched the launch button.
At intervals of thirty seconds, he launched each rocket and watched for the results on his laptop screen. Each rocket whooshed its way out of the launcher like a smoking orange dart until it disappeared into the base of the storm. His hope was that the rockets would get caught up in the thunderstorm’s updraft before being extinguished or ripped apart. Onscreen, multiple graphs and charts plotted the trajectories of the rockets and then the Ferganut sensors as they burst free from their rocket casings.
When all the rockets were gone, he loaded the launcher back into the truck. He then drove down a county road to get a better view of the storm. Up ahead, a pair of bright gray slender suction vortices materialized but did not completely connect the sky to the ground. The vortices whirled about and rolled to the west, which made little sense to him at first. “This thing is gonna have some punch.”
Captain stirred in the backseat and set his laptop computer aside. He snatched his camera from the floor of the backseat. When John stopped the truck again, Captain jumped out and set up his tripod to snap some pictures.
“Is that headed straight for Ingot?” Madeline said with a hint of worry in her voice.
“Probably,” John said coolly.
“Shouldn’t we warn them?”
“I’m sure they have a siren in town. Pretty sure there’s a warning out already.” John reached into the backseat to check Captain’s laptop computer. “They’re covered.”
He turned back to look at the developing funnel. “That’s weird. I can’t tell what those vortices are doing.”
Just as the first vortices formed they evaporated and were replaced by two new ones that followed the previous ones like a parade. John counted eight vortices in all with each one only lasting a few seconds before being replaced. Then, one unified vortex appeared and began to move to the right. The tornado widened in the mid-levels until it was triangular in shape. It was darker than the storm that approached Flatfoot and quickly took on the color of the topsoil. As it continued its march toward Ingot, brief flashes of blue and white lit up the underside of the funnel as a strong smell of ozone filled the air.
“Lightning?” Madeline asked.
“No,” John said. “They’re power flashes. It’s probably tearing up the transmission lines leading into the town.” He opened up a bag of barbecue potato chips with a squeak but he felt an unsettling feeling come over him. He knew from prior chases that if a tornado like this grew large enough and kept its strength that it could make short work of a tiny town like Ingot. The town itself was probably only a mile or two wide and could be laid to waste in a matter of minutes. He set the chips on the dashboard.
Madeline rolled down the window and called out to Captain. “Getting anything?”
Captain nodded his head in affirmation. By now the wind around them had increased to about twenty-five knots.
The nature of the wind bothered John because with it came the distant sound of the tornado itself. The signature was faint, but in between the crashes of thunder he heard a waterfall noise and the town siren. The wail of the siren gave him hope but chills at the same time.
The tornado darkened further as it inhaled dirt, prairie grass, crops, and whatever else was in its path. A fountain of crimson splinters erupted from the base of the twister which John presumed was either a barn or a house. He looked over to see Madeline’s reaction. She squirmed in her seat and tightened her seat belt. The boards and shingles of the barn were lofted into the air only to come spiraling back down to earth like confetti.
“Do you guys just sit back here and
watch this happen?” She said as the twister threw aside a grain silo like discarded wrapping paper.
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
“Oh my God. It’s headed for the town.”
More power flashes illuminated the bottom of the clouds as jagged electric daggers stabbed at the nearby fields. A bolt hammered a lone birch a half mile down the road and exploded its bark with a puff of smoke and a fountain of orange sparks.
Captain turned to look in the direction of the obliterated tree. He packed up his camera and tripod and wisely returned to the truck. “That’s enough of that,” he said as he ducked back inside. His shirt was spotted with raindrops.
“Did you say those power flashes mean power lines are getting hit?” Madeline said, preoccupied in thought.
“Usually. Or transformers are blowing,” John said.
“What if it cuts off power to the town? What if they can’t hear the sirens?”
John had no clue whether the tornado had ripped out the main line running into the town but he knew they were in no position to drive out ahead of it in time. “I think they’ve heard them by now,” he said as he felt his chest tighten up. “I even heard them a minute ago.”
“Alright. Let’s move,” he said after a moment. He began to drive east again, straight at the tornado.
“What are you doing?” Madeline said. Her voice escalated into a near-panic.
“Driving at it.”
“Why? Are you nuts?”
The tornado continued to expand at the base until it was a half-mile wide. Debris whirled around it like a restless flock of birds, until John realized one of the birds was a bright-white boat trailer. The trailer crashed and bounced off the pavement a mile ahead of them and then rolled into the ditch. John let off on the gas until he was sure the trailer stopped moving.
“It’s going east-northeast. By the time we get there we’ll be in the clear,” he said.
“Then what?”
“We follow it into town,” Captain said as he glanced at his laptop screen then focused back on the sky.
“And take pictures on the way?”
John shook his head no.
“It’s going right into the town,” she said as she pointed toward the front of the truck.
Race the Sky Page 5
