by Bova, Ben
April was at her desk, looking worried. Her computer screen showed an animated weather map. Dan saw the big swirling cyclonic clouds of Hurricane Fernando out in the Gulf moving remorselessly toward the Texas coast.
“Heading our way, huh?” he asked, half-sitting on the corner of her desk.
“Straight toward us,” April replied, her voice a little quavery.
“You’d better get out of here while the ferry’s still running.”
“I’ve still got to get this order for liquid hydrogen processed.”
“It can wait.”
With the hydrogen facility destroyed by the explosion, Dan had to purchase liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the spaceplane from a commercial supplier. He had asked April to handle the task, bypassing his purchasing department because he didn’t know whom he could trust within his own company.
April said, “I can stay—”
“No. We won’t get much work done today. The launch is scrubbed and the crew’s going to tow the bird back into its hangar. Get on home, kid.”
“What about the others?”
“Get on the P.A. and tell ’em that everybody except the launch crew can go home for the day. If the ferry stops they can stay at the motel, on the company.”
The motel was the island’s official storm refuge. It was stocked with emergency food and water and had its own auxiliary power generator for electricity.
As April patched her desk phone into the public address system Dan went into his office. Too nervous to sit at his desk, he stood by the window and watched the booster being lowered to its side by the gantry crane.
Feeling helpless, restless, and more than a little scared, Dan paced his office for a few minutes, then headed back out.
April stopped him. “Call for you from Venezuela,” she said. “Señor Hernandez.”
“He’s got a great sense of timing,” Dan grumbled, turning back to his office. Over his shoulder he said, “I told you to go home, April. Git!”
Sliding into his desk chair, Dan tapped the phone’s ON key. Rafael Hernandez’s handsome face filled his display screen.
“Señor Hernandez,” Dan said, putting on an amiable smile. “Good morning.”
Hernandez smiled back. “Buenas dias, Mr. Randolph. How are you this lovely day?”
Dan couldn’t see much past Hernandez’s head and shoulders. He appeared to be in an office of some kind.
“It may be a fine day in Caracas,” he said. “We have a hurricane bearing down on us.”
“Indeed?”
“Indeed.”
Totally unperturbed by Dan’s troubles, Hernandez said calmly, “I have called to inform you that all the necessary arrangements have been made. You may send your technicians to Caracas as soon as you wish. I will see that they meet the airport’s director of flight operations and anyone else they will need to interact with.”
Dan broke into a genuine smile. “That’s very good news, Señor Hernandez.”
“I am pleased also, Mr. Randolph.”
That means he checked his bank account in Washington and found the money I deposited there, Dan knew.
Aloud, he said, “Please, call me Dan. We’re going to be partners, after all.”
Hernandez dipped his chin in acknowledgment. “And you must call me Rafael.”
They chatted for a few minutes more, then Hernandez pleaded the press of other business and cut the connection. A gust of wind rattled the steel wall of Dan’s office. He looked out the window and saw that it was almost as dark as night. No rain, though. Not yet.
Maybe I should get over to the motel, he said to himself. Then he answered himself: No. I’ll ride it out here. If these hangars don’t hold up to the storm then I might as well be drowned along with everything else.
HURRICANE PARTY
By the time April got to the ferry pier, the last boat had gone. Heavy gusts were lashing frothy whitecaps across the normally tranquil bay. The windswept concrete pier was empty, abandoned, a sign bearing a hand-scrawled CLOSED FOR FERNANDO flapping in the gusts.
So she turned her baby blue Sebring around and drove to the motel. Plenty of cars parked there, she saw. April ran through the strengthening wind into the motel’s lobby. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Kelly Eamons wasn’t on duty at this time of the morning, but the bar was jammed with refugees from the storm, raucous music blaring from the loudspeakers, news coverage of the approaching hurricane on each of the TV screens.
“Hey, April!” one of the men crowding the bar called to her. “Come on over and have a drink.”
It was Len Kinsky. All the booths were jammed, and men were packed three deep at the bar, with a scattering of women among them. April recognized most of them as Astro employees. With a resigned shrug, she went to the bar. When they hand you a lemon, her father had always told her, make lemonade. Good idea, she thought. She ordered lemonade, which the men who quickly surrounded her found uproariously funny. Even the normally sourpussed Kinsky laughed.
They’re already half drunk, April recognized. And it hasn’t even started raining yet.
Kelly Eamons was arguing with the ferryboat skipper at the pier on the mainland side of San Antonio Bay.
“But I’ve got to get over to the island!” she shouted over the howling wind. “I’ll lose my job if I don’t show up for work!”
The skipper looked up from the line he was tying off. He was wearing a polyester windbreaker, its hood bunched up around the collar, and a baseball cap perched on his bald head. His ferry, which had once been a tank-carrying landing boat for the U.S. Marines, was heaving up and down in the swells, grinding its truck-tire bumpers against the length of the concrete pier with a shrieking sound that was almost like fingernails on a blackboard.
“Whattaya think I am, Prince Henry the Navigator? I’m not takin’ her out until this storm passes.”
“It’s only a few miles,” Eamons said.
He turned away from her, muttering, and bent over the line he was knotting. Eamons thought of flashing her FBI badge, but that would blow her cover completely. A few fat drops of rain spattered down. She retreated to her car, parked alone in the lot except for a new-looking SUV, which she assumed belonged to the skipper.
She phoned April’s office. No answer except for her recorded voice saying the office would be closed until after the hurricane had passed. Eamons tried April’s cell phone.
“Hello?” April’s voice, with a lot of noise in the background: voices, music.
“April, it’s Kelly. I’m stuck on the mainland. The ferry’s not running.”
“That’s okay. I’m at the Astro Motel. Looks like we’ll have to stay here until the storm blows over.”
Eamons didn’t like the idea of being out of the action. “Is there some way you can think of that I might get a ride across to the island?”
For a few heartbeats all she could hear was the background of laughter and voices, mostly male. Then April replied, “Maybe Mr. Randolph could do something.”
“Do you have his cell number?”
“I’ll call him,” April said.
“No, let me do it. Give me his number and I’ll call him.”
Again a hesitation, then April gave her the number.
“Okay,” Eamons said, “I’ll call him. With any luck, I’ll get to the motel before the storm hits.”
“I think you ought to stay on the mainland,” April said.
“I probably will,” Eamons admitted. “But I’ll give it a shot anyway.”
Dan was heading along the catwalk, a rain slicker draped over his arm, listening to the wind roaring and the rain pounding on the steel walls of the hangar like machine-gun bullets. The walls were creaking and groaning. Looking up at the roof, Dan wondered if he’d done the right thing when he paid off that building inspector.
Down below the personnel door flapped open and a solitary figure stepped into the hangar, wrapped in a dripping raincoat and a sodden hat that sagged down over his ears.
W
ho the hell would be out in this? Dan wondered, starting down the steps as the newcomer walked slowly across the hangar floor, dripping a trail of puddles. He pulled off the sopping wet hat and Dan saw that it was Passeau.
“What in hell are you doing here?” Dan called as he hurried down the stairs. “Why aren’t you at the motel? Or off the island altogether?”
Passeau made a weak smile as he unbuttoned his raincoat. “I waited too long. The ferry is shut down.”
“Why’d you come back here?”
Looking sheepish, Passeau said, “Actually, I don’t know. I was heading for the motel but I drove right past it and came here.”
“Helluva spot in a hurricane,” Dan grumbled.
“Yes, isn’t it?”
“I was going over to Hangar B to check on the plane.”
“It’s rather wet out there,” Passeau said, shaking out his raincoat.
“Yeah, but it’s better than sitting around here biting my fingernails. Niles is there and we can commiserate with him.”
With a heavy sigh, Passeau struggled back into his raincoat while Dan put on his plastic slicker and pulled up its hood.
“Ready?” Dan asked, striding toward the door.
Passeau slapped his shapeless, dripping hat on his head and nodded unhappily.
Dan had to push hard to get the door open. The wind was like a solid wall, the rain blinding. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed immediately. “Must be right over our heads!” Dan yelled over the raging wind. Passeau said nothing. As soon as Dan let go of the door the wind slammed it shut. The two men trudged to Hangar B, leaning heavily into the wind. Dan felt soaked to the skin despite the slicker. Perspiration, he thought. Double-damned slicker doesn’t breathe, makes you sweat. He knew that fear makes you sweat, too.
Once they got to the hangar, its bulk shielded them from the worst of the wind. Dan pulled the door open and the two of them stumbled into the hangar like a pair of shipwreck victims staggering onto a beach.
Gasping for breath, utterly soaked, Dan pushed back the slicker’s hood and started to undo its Velcro seals.
“Lordy, lordy,” came Niles Muhamed’s deep voice, “look what the cat done dragged in.”
Wiping water from his face, Dan saw that the four walls of the hangar were piled man-high with sandbags. Another double row of sandbags stood around the spaceplane, like a military revetment.
“When the hell did you do this?” Dan asked, waving at the fortifications.
Muhamed smiled grimly. “If you wasn’t traipsin’ off to Washington or Austin or goddam Venezuela and stayed around here, you’d know more about what’s goin’ down.”
Dan laughed. “If I stayed around here, you’d have pressed me into your sandhog gang.”
Muhamed allowed a glimmer of a smile to break his dour expression. “That’ll be the day, you workin’ a shovel.”
Passeau walked slowly toward the spaceplane, his dripping hat in one hand. “It looks safe enough in here,” he said.
“She’d be a lot safer in orbit,” Dan said. “Nothing to worry about up there except micrometeorites.”
“And radiation,” Passeau added.
Dan nodded.
“You white boys need some coffee?” Muhamed asked, jerking a thumb toward a table set up in the far corner of the hangar, next to his desk and workbench.
Heading for the big stainless steel urn sitting on the table, Dan asked, “You alone in here, Niles?”
“Yup. Sent my people home soon’s I looked at the weather satellite pictures.”
“Let’s turn on the Weather Channel and see what’s happening,” Dan said.
Passeau suggested, “Don’t you think we should drive over to the motel, instead?”
“You can go,” Muhamed said, with more than a hint of truculence. “I’m stayin’ here.”
“Not if I—” Dan was interrupted by his cell phone’s “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
As he flicked the phone on and put it to his ear, Muhamed poured steaming coffee into a Styrofoam cup and offered it to Dan.
Dan waved him off as he heard, “Mr. Randolph, it’s Kelly Eamons.”
While Muhamed gave the coffee cup to Passeau, Dan listened to Eamons explaining that she was stuck on the mainland.
“It’s a hurricane, for the love of Neptune,” Dan said. “Nobody’s going to ferry you across the bay. It’s too dangerous. Stay where you are.”
“It’s not that bad yet,” Eamons insisted.
Dan thought a moment, then asked, “Is there some special reason why you have to get over here?”
“No,” Eamons replied slowly, hesitantly. “I just want to be where I’m supposed to be.”
“Forget it,” Dan said. “Take the day off. Everybody else is.” Then he saw Niles Muhamed bending over his computer, his long thin finger flicking across the keyboard like a concert pianist’s. “Almost everybody’s taking the day off,” he amended.
ASTRO MOTEL
April had never seen Kinsky look so cheerful. He must be more than half drunk, she thought as the public relations director steered her to an empty corner of the bar and actually began to dance with her to the strains of “The Tennessee Waltz.” In a minute or two several other couples joined them on the impromptu dance floor.
“I didn’t know you’re such a good dancer,” she said to Kinsky, surprised at how graceful the gangling scarecrow could be.
Kinsky smiled lazily at her. “There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me.”
April expected a routine come-on line. She’d heard quite a few. Kinsky was divorced, so he couldn’t pull the “my wife doesn’t understand me” story. No, she decided, he’s going to go for the “man of mystery” approach.
The song ended and he walked her, with his arm still around her waist, over to one of the rain-spattered windows. Someone had plastered packing tape across all the windows in big X shapes.
“What are you drinking?” Kinsky asked.
April suppressed an urge to giggle. “Lemonade.”
His ginger-red brows shot up. “Lemonade? With vodka?”
“No. Just lemonade.”
He shrugged. “Okay. Wait right here. I’ll be right back.”
As he walked to the crowded bar, April turned and looked out the window. Rain was pelting down so thickly now she could hardly make out her car parked only a few yards away. The wind was blowing the rain almost horizontally. April had never been through a hurricane before; it frightened her a little bit.
Her cell phone buzzed. She fished it out of her purse.
“Hi, it’s me, Kelly.”
“Did you reach Dan?” April asked.
“Yeah, but it didn’t do any good. He told me to stay on the mainland.”
Nodding, April said, “Might’s well. I’m in the motel. Everything’s tolerable here.”
“Guess I’ll drive back home, then.”
“Okay. I’ll get there when the ferry starts running again.”
“Stay warm and dry,” said Eamons.
“Sure.”
Kinsky came back, an evil-looking concoction full of fruit in one hand and a tall frosted glass in the other. He placed both drinks on the windowsill, ceremoniously removed the paper parasol from his glass and perched it on the lip of April’s.
“Thank you,” she said. She picked up the lemonade carefully, but the parasol tumbled to the floor anyway. “Oh, too bad.”
Shrugging, Kinsky said, “The story of my life. I try to do beautiful things but it never turns out the way I hoped.”
“We all go through that.”
“Not like me,” Kinsky said fervently. “I go and get Dan a meeting with the governor of Texas and an important U.S. senator and he screws it up. Gets on his high horse and tells ’em they can’t help him.”
April felt shocked. “Mr. Randolph did that?”
“Not in so many words, but that’s what he did, baby. That’s what he did.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“
Believe it.” Kinsky took a long swig of his drink, then stared out at the storm. Trees were bending and lightning flashing in the dark, roiling sky. “We never get crap like this in New York,” he muttered.
April tried to lighten his mood. “Are you going to set your hair on fire?”
He almost smiled. “Naw. Not today. Nobody would notice.”
“Or you might set off the sprinklers.”
He grunted. “Burn the place down. That’d be doing Dan a favor. At least he could collect the insurance.”
“I don’t think that would help much,” April admitted.
“Yeah. The company’s going to go belly-up and we’re all going to be thrown out on our asses.”
“Dan’s trying to avoid that.”
“Maybe. But it’s not going to do him any good. We’re going to be out on our rear ends, honey. You and me and all of us. Might as well go outside and let the damned storm drown us.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Dan’s working to keep the company going.”
“He’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, babe. In a few weeks we’ll all be on the unemployment line.”
“No.”
Kinsky took another sip of his drink. “Yes. The ship’s sinking. It’s every man for himself.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Feather your own canoe, babe. Take care of numero uno because nobody else is going to. Not Dan, not anybody. Nobody gives a damn about the little guys.”
April thought that whatever he was drinking, it was making him more morose by the sip.
Abruptly, Kinsky blurted, “April, how’d you like to come to New York with me?”
“New York?”
“Yeah! We could fly up on a Friday and come back Monday. Take a long weekend. We deserve a break from all this.”
She blinked at him. Suddenly he was enthusiastic. She said, “I don’t think I could afford it on my budget. New York’s awfully expensive, isn’t it?”
