Amy, pleasantly, with my help, laying plates at a dining table in an insect-screened porch near the barbecue, exclaimed suddenly to the rest of us, "How good-looking Kris is! And you too, of course Perry. Does the BBC choose the forecasters for their ultra-attractive faces? " Kris grinned.

 

 

"All the time. " I was used to the way Kris looked, but it was true, I knew, that at one time he'd clung onto his job in the aftermath of one of his more outrageous statements only because of the swoon factor in women viewers. Unusually, though, for such a handsome person, he was equally liked by men, and that, I thought, lay somewhere in his manic-depressive spectrum, from which he offered a friendship that could be wildly scatty but had no sex in it. His reliance on me was in the nature of an expedition leader being certain that whatever the catastrophe, he could absolutely rely on base camp being there for him.

 

 

He brought zany lightheartedness to that strange evening in Cayman, but he refused Robin's request for a repeat recital of the Cape Canaveral verses, asked why not, he replied that the genesis of the verses had lain in depression and should stay there.

 

 

I watched Robin thoughtfully contemplate Kris. Robin had got himself more than a good amateur pilot, he'd got a British national celebrity, and I wondered if in his so-far unexplained planning, this celebrity factor had been intentional or unforeseen.

 

 

By six-thirty the next morning, Odin had been firmly declared a Category 4 hurricane, traveling northwest at less than seven miles an hour.

 

 

Straight ahead, if it continued on that path, it would in a day or two smash into the house of Michael and Amy, blowing away its opulence, sweeping through the bright little room with a hundred tons of sand-heavy water.

 

 

Kris came to stand beside me, watching the deadly drama on the screen and being pleased at the sharp definition of the eye.

 

 

"Come on then, " he said, "we might as well go. " His eyes shone like a child's ready for a party. "We're not the only people flying, " he added. "And I'd better file a flight plan. " We went back to the airfield in the orange pickup truck, with directions from Amy, and among a surprising number of light aircraft standing in a separated area designated "general aviation, " Kris singled out and patted approvingly the twin engine propeller-driven Piper that Robin had bought.

 

 

"Why don't you sit in this little beauty while I go and file the flight plan? " Kris suggested. "I won't be long. " "How about a map? " I asked.

 

 

He fiddled about unlocking the door with his back to me and after a while turned and said, "What we really need is a direction to Odin's eye, not a regular map. " "Can they give you that direction from here? " "They sure can. " He more or less trotted off eagerly, leaving me behind.

 

 

He and I, I thought, had been friends for years and I'd seen him through enough suicidally bad times to know when he was avoiding telling me the truth. That morning in Cayman's airport, he wouldn't meet my eyes.

 

 

He came back from the offices waving a sheet of paper, which he thrust into my hands for me to read while he went through his external checks. Those checks, for that aircraft, only semi-familiar to Kris, were in stapled sections of instructions, a small heap of them lying on the captain's seat.

 

 

Kris checked the exterior of the airplane with the appropriate section of instructions in hand to refer to, and I read the flight information sheet he'd filed with the Air Traffic Service.

 

 

Most of it was to me double Dutch. When he'd finished the external checks, I asked him what was meant by the addresses given for instance as MWCRZTZX and MKJKZOZYX.

 

 

"Don't worry about it, " he said.

 

 

"I'm not going unless you tell me. " He stared, astonished, at my mild mutiny. "Well, then, " he said, "the first lot of letters is the address of Grand Cayman Tower, in this airport, and the second is Kingston Airspace, Jamaica, where we'll find Odin, probably. Satisfied? " He pointed lower down the form to our "destination airfield, " which was listed as ZZZZ, because we weren't sure where we were going. "Odin, " he said.

 

 

"And how about a map? " I asked. "I'm really not going with you without a map. " In England he would never have flown anywhere without a map. To set off into the wide Caribbean without one was madness.

 

 

"I know where I'm going, " he said mulishly.

 

 

"Then you don't need a navigator. " "Perry! " "A radio map, " I said. "One with Trox Island on it. " His half-awakened sense of shock came fully alive.

 

 

He frowned. He said, "Robin will be livid. " "Robin's using us, " I answered him.

 

 

"How? " He didn't want to believe it.

 

 

"He's been the tops for us. He's paying everything for us, don't forget. He even bought this airplane from Amy. " I said, "What if he bought himself an aircraft so that he could do what he liked with it? What if he got himself a good amateur pilot, little known in this area, and one, what's more, who's an expert meteorologist, who can deal with and understand cyclonic winds? " "But he's just an enthusiast, " Kris protested.

 

 

I said, "I'll bet he's got you to include the island in our flight... and perhaps it's ZZZZ on the flight plan...

 

 

and I'll bet he persuaded you not to tell me where we're going. " "Perry... " He looked shattered, but denied nothing.

 

 

"So did he tell you why? " I asked. "Did he tell you what to do on Trox Island if we got there? Did he say why he wasn't going himself? And, chief of the difficult questions, what is so odd about the destination or the purpose for going there, that it has to be camouflaged in a hurricane? " CHRIS AND I climbed through the rear door of Amy's/ Robin's truly terrific little airplane and sat in executive-style seats facing each other across a table. It had been designed originally for ten narrow people with only emergency male toilet facilities, but Amy (I guessed) had rearranged things to two flight-deck seats for pilots, four for passengers in comfort in a cabin and, at the rear, a reasonable privy with a lock able door.

 

 

Kris confessed without shame that Robin had indeed persuaded him to leave me out of the flight planning. "Robin was afraid you wouldn't agree to go to Trox Island, " he said, "but I told him I would persuade you. And of course you will go, won't you? I can't do it all without help. " "What would we be going there for? " "To report back on the state of the mushrooms. " "Mushrooms! " I didn't believe him, and disliked the feeling.

 

 

"It's on the way to Odin, " Kris said, cajoling. "Just a dogleg, and a brief stop. " He was trying to rationalize it. "And of course this super airplane has been fitted by Robin with extra instruments which will register air pressure in millibars and record it on tape from second to second, and wind-speed gauges too. They're easy for you to operate from your seat. All you do is press buttons to activate the radio altimeter and it calculates everything by itself and displays the air pressure at sea level. I'll show you. " "And these special altimeter and wind-speed-measuring instruments are expensive? " "Very. They were installed with storms in mind, I think, in time for Hurricane Nicky. That's when Robin bought the airplane from Amy. And as you see, Robin's put so much money into our trip, " Kris said plaintively. "I sort of had to agree to do what he asked. " "Why isn't he going himself? " "You're strong, he isn't. " Kris rethought this and added, "He has an appointment back in Miami that he can't avoid. " "And what he wanted, " I suggested, "was for us to go to Trox, while I thought we were heading straight for Odin, because I had no map? " Kris nodded without embarrassment. "We filled in most of the flight plan yesterday afternoon. " The secrecy appalled me, but I did very much want to fly through a hurricane, and I was unlikely ever to have another chance. I settled for Trox, with or without lies and mushrooms, as the payment for Odin.

 

 

Kris, sensing it, and clearly relieved, pointed to various filled-in spaces on the form.

 

 

"That's the probable overall mileage. That's fuel--we're taking full tanks. That's our cruising speed. That's our flight level. Then, lower down, there's our endurance, that's the time we can stay airborne on full tanks.

 

 

All of those figures allow for a dogleg to the island. Then we circled M, which means maritime because we're going over water, and the circle roundJ says we're carrying life jackets, and F means the life jackets are fluorescent. " "And are they? " I asked. "And do we in fact have life jackets on board? " "Perry! Of course we do. You're so suspicious. " "No, " I sighed. "Just checking, like you do. " "Well... " he hesitated, but pointed again. "To set your mind at rest, that D stands for Dinghy, and we do have one of those too, and it says on this form that it has a cover for shelter, and it's bright orange, and will accommodate ten people.

 

 

" "Where is it? " I asked, and Kris, still slightly hurt, pointed to a wrapped gray bundle occupying one of the passenger seats.

 

 

"Robin bought a new one, " Kris said. "He's made a point of doing everything right. Every one around us knew he was giving us the best equipment. " "Bully for him, " I said dryly, but Kris was oblivious to sarcasm.

 

 

"Then down near the bottom, " he said, continuing to point at the form, "there's the color of this airplane, white, and Robin's name and address as operator, that means owner in this case, and of course my own name as pilot, and my signature, and that's the lot. " l "Great, " I said, though halfheartedly, with reservations.

 

 

"But we still need a map. " Kris surrendered. "All right. All right. We'll take a bloody map. I'll go and get one. " I went with him this time, across the tarmac to a small building set apart from the main passenger areas and into a busy private pilots' room filled with tables, chairs, a rudimentary cafeteria selling coffee and Danish pastries and eight or nine amateur aviators with strung-up nerves pretending icy calm in face of the cross-hurricane adventure.

 

 

Odin in all its terror claimed maximum attention, an update of its position and composition being displayed continuously on a television-type screen. Hurricane Odin, with winds now reported at 155 m. p. h. in the eye wall, had just about reached Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The eye was currently located at 17. 0 degrees north, 78. 3 degrees west, and was moving northwest at six miles an hour. Pressure in the eye had last been measured at 930 millibars, having dropped from 967 overnight. The eye at present measured eleven miles across.

 

 

Two steps at a time, Kris went up the stairs, which apparently led to the desk receiving flight plans and to a kiosk selling small necessities for path finding including topographical and radio maps. Kris bought both, carrying them down like trophies.

 

 

While he was gone, one of the other pilots, following Kris with his gaze, said regretfully,

 

 

"Sad about Bob Farraday, wasn't it?

 

 

I said, "Er... " and was told Bob Farraday, Amy Ford's instructor, had been killed in a car crash a month ago. "She sold her plane then, the one you and your friend are flying in.

 

 

I thought you knew. " I shook my head, but it explained why she'd sold such a gem.

 

 

The consensus among the earnest hurricane hunters all around us put the true direction of the eye at 152 degrees from Grand Cayman's Owen Roberts airport, but that figure had to be modified by the awkward facts that compass needles didn't point to true north, and that the cyclonic winds would change the aircraft's heading from minute to minute. Naturally the whole eye, also, was on the move.

 

 

Listening to the knowledgeable chatter of the others, I thought that Kris and I were attempting an impossible task, but Kris himself, bouncing with energy and grinning with joy, simply took me and the maps back to Robin's Piper and spread the maps out on the table.

 

 

"The eye to Odin is there, " he said firmly, drawing in pencil a small circle on the radio map, and, with the dexterity

 

 

I

 

 

was used to in him, he worked out, with the aid of a pocket calculator, the heading and speed at which he should travel to reach his target. It was, to do him justice, almost exactly the course he'd been going to fly even if I hadn't insisted on the maps. He'd written his chosen headings on half a postcard, which at that point he produced with satisfaction from his shirt pocket, and there were other numbers written below the way to the eye, which after a pause he explained.

 

 

"I suppose you'd better know.... Well, this figure, this second one, is the magnetic heading from Cayman to Trox Island.

 

 

The next one is from Trox Island to Odin's eye, and the fourth

 

 

I

 

 

L

 

 

one is from the eye back to Cayman. If we go right now, these headings will take us round, you'll see. " I stared at him, thinking him halfway to insane. This Piper airplane, though, unlike Kris's own Cherokee at White Waltham, this luxurious little transport did have all sorts of electronic capabilities, so while Kris did all his remaining checks meticulously, I read the slim instruction booklet on how to navigate by radio transmissions.

 

 

The whole enterprise, I reckoned, would degenerate into a jolly little flip far away from Odin, from which calm corner we could return to Grand Cayman safely, thanks to various land based transmitters called non-directional beacons, or NDBs for short.

 

 

I learned much later that low-level navigation over the western Caribbean had once been easy, thanks to three strong directional beacons positioned at Panama, Swan Island and Bimini (in the Bahamas), but that with the advent of the global positioning system used by commercial aircraft, the amateurs' standbys had been dismantled. Kris and I, the day we set off in blithe ignorance to Trox Island, could have benefited hugely from cross references from beacons at Panama, Swan Island and Bimini.

 

 

With Kris's basic navigating kit containing always a set of plastic measuring pieces, I ruled a straight track line from Grand Cayman to Trox on both maps and, having squeezed the information out of Kris, who was still inclined to look backward to his feeling of obligation and to his new alliance with Robin, wrote in the airspeed, and consequently the time, that should deliver us to Trox.

 

 

My arrival time and heading weren't much different from Kris's own calculations, and

 

 

"I told you so, " he said.

 

 

I sat back in my chair. "What does Robin want us to do on Trox Island? You keep avoiding any details. He's spent a lot of money, as you've said, but we still don't know why. " "He wants you to take photographs. " He--and Robin also--who'd come out of the Ford house in his sleeping pajamas to wave us off in the truck, had checked that I hadn't forgotten my camera.

 

 

"Photographs? What of? " Kris shifted in his seat. "He just said photographs..

 

 

as if you would know what he wanted when you saw it. " But Kris, I knew later, was concocting again.

 

 

The enterprise looked less and less sensible to me, but in a stab at normal procedures I suggested we put on the life jackets at that point, leaving them of course un inflated but ready if necessary.

 

 

Kris, having won the bigger battle, meekly strapped himself into the flat orange life vest and ignored it.

 

 

Along the row of parked light aircraft two or three were on the move. With a sharp inspection of his watch, and a grumble about a lot of time wasted, Kris climbed forward into the captain's seat and, looking relieved not to have to answer more questions, finished his pre-takeoff checks by winding his altimeter needle to zero to give the home airfield's present air pressure, which at sea level read 1002 on the millibar scale.

 

 

Then he started the engines and asked the tower for permission to taxi.

 

 

I put on headphones, like Kris, and from the co-pilot's seat, asked for permission for takeoff.

 

 

Permission was granted laconically, the tower on the whole preferring only authorized military aircraft to chase a hurricane's eye. Kris, though, with determination and skill roared down the runway, soared out over water, and steered straight for Odin.

 

 

My surprise lasted about as far as the line-of-sight horizon from Grand Cayman, and then with the ground's attention on the next plane after us, and the next after that, Kris altered course abruptly and headed instead for the mushrooms of rTv lrox.

 

 

Kris was busy with hands on switches, and when everything had settled I found that we were no longer in radio contact with anyone, as the pilot had systematically turned the tuning dials to indicate out-of-area frequencies. We were, as no doubt he and Robin had planned, alone in the wide sky, and the wide sky was developing rough gusty patches, even though the outer edges of the hurricane lay by forecast a long way ahead.

 

 

Through the headsets which we both still wore, Kris said, "Flight time to Trox should now be twenty minutes, but the winds are stronger than I planned for. Start looking ahead in ten minutes. Robin said the island's sometimes difficult to see.

 

 

" I said I thought our radio silence was madness. Kris merely grinned.

 

 

Ten minutes passed, and twenty. The wave crests multiplied over the gray water below us, the cloud shreds were thickening and the aircraft bumped heavily in increasingly unstable air.

 

 

No island. No small insignificant guano-covered rock. I redid all the navigational calculations, and they put us still on course.

 

 

Trox Island, when to my vast relief it at last appeared visibly on our starboard bow, looked at first only like a straighter, longer, white-breaking wave crest. I shook Kris's arm and pointed ahead and downwards, and saw the unacknowledged anxiety clear in a flash from his forehead.

 

 

He grinned again, vindicated. He lowered the aircraft from two thousand feet down to a few hundred, circling the narrow strip of dark-looking land carefully so as not to lose sight of it in the increasing cloud. He'd been told by Robin of the existence of the landing strip, but, look as we might, neither Kris nor I could distinguish it until he made an almost despairing pass across the narrowest width of land at no higher than three hundred feet, and again, as all my attention was looking for it, it was I who first spotted the indistinct flat road like line along the center length of the otherwise rocky strip. The runway, disconcertingly, was greenish-gray, not tarmac, and was made of flattened, consolidated earth, overgrown with grass.

 

 

Kris, seeing the rudimentary strip also, swung closely round and flew the whole length of it at barely more than a hundred feet off the ground, but neither to his eyes nor mine were there any rocks or any other obstructions along its length.

 

 

"Robin swore we could land here. " Kris's voice through the headphones sounded more brave than convinced.

 

 

I thought that Robin hadn't taken the fierce crosswind into account. Had Robin ever landed on the strip himself at all?

 

 

Robin wasn't a flier. But then, nor was I... but I did at least understand wind.

 

 

Hands gripping the control yoke, Kris with tension in his whole body increased the engines' power to near maximum and flew round the island again, gaining height and coming in finally to land from the other end of the runway, still in a @ crosswind but at least this time with a passable on-the-nose l component.

 

 

Fighting the gusts, Kris forgot to lower the wheels--his Cherokee at White Waltham had a fixed undercarriage--and he looked horrified for all of five seconds while I pointed silently at the three lights that should have been green, but weren't. Three green lights, I'd once read in a flying book, meant that all three landing wheels were down and locked in the landing position.

 

 

"God, " Kris shouted, "I've forgotten the downwind checks... I've jorgotten them all... Brakes off, undercarriage down, fuel mixture rich, propellers fully fine... " His busy fingers set everything right... all, I guessed, except his selfrespect. "Harness buckled, hatches closed and locked, autopilot disengaged, as if I'd engaged the bloody thing in the first place, hold on, Perry, hold on, here we go.

 

 

, , He made, in the circumstances, a commendably adequate landing, and I'd been in some commercial tooth-rattlers that had shaken one's spine a great deal worse.

 

 

"Sorry, " he said, which was unlike him. He stretched his fingers, loosening the muscles. "I forgot those bloody checks! " He sounded tragedy-stricken.

 

 

"How could I? " "We got down. Stop fussing, " I said. "What do we do next? " "Um... " In an absentminded trance he could think of nothing but his oversights.

 

 

I tried again. "Kris, we landed safely, didn't we? So here we are, safe. " "Well... yes. Have you looked at the altimeter? " I hadn't, but I did then. The millibar scale still read 1002, but the needle gave our altitude at sea level as minus 360 feet.

 

 

When Kris wound the needle again to zero, the millibars had dropped to 990, and he gazed at this result as if mesmerized.

 

 

"Well, we're not staying here at the end of the runway forever, are we? " I asked. "So how about snapping out of it?

 

 

There's Odin, don't forget. " His awareness seemed to click at once back to normal and as if I were stupid to ask, he said,

 

 

"We flew over some buildings when we came into land, didn't you notice? So that's obviously the place to start. " He turned the airplane and taxied back the length of the grass-grown strip, ending on the edge of what looked like a small model village consisting of three or four white-painted wooden houses, several long low sheds fashioned from hemispherical corrugated iron, a tiny church with a spire and two large solid-looking concrete huts.

 

 

"Robin said the mushrooms grow in the corrugated iron sheds, " Kris announced, jumping down to the ground, "so we'd better take a look. " Unexpectedly, there were no locked doors. Also, as surprising, there were no people.

 

 

Final astonishment... no mushrooms.

 

 

I took a few photographs of no mushrooms.

 

 

There were long waist-height trays in the sheds full of compost containing oak-wood chips, and chanterelles at least, I knew, flourished in oak forests, their natural habitat. The air smelled musty and full of fungus spores. Nothing I could see or smell was worth the trouble of our travels.

 

 

I

 

 

Kris wandered about on his own, and we met at length in one of the thick concrete huts to compare notes.

 

 

No fungi of any kind.

 

 

"Not even a bloody toadstool, " Kris said in disgust. "And very little else. " The houses were empty of people and were untidily furnished with clutter due for discarding. The church had had tablets on the white internal walls, but they had been unscrewed and removed, leaving rectangular darker patches. Water came supplied, not in the pipes provided, but in buckets lifted by ropes from underground rainwater tanks.

 

 

The hut we stood in, cool owing to windowless concrete walls about four feet thick, had once, we guessed, been living quarters of sorts, there were four plank bunk beds but no bedding, and there had once been electric lighting, but all that remained were wires coming out of the walls.

 

 

"There's another hut that looks as if it once held a generator, " Kris said, and I nodded.

 

 

"The mushroom sheds had climate control once, " I said, "and an efficient-looking pumped sprinkler system. " "The whole place has been stripped, " Kris sighed. "We're wasting our time. " "Let's look at the landing stage, " I suggested, and we walked down a hill of dried mud from the village to a wood and concrete dock long enough for a merchant ship's mooring.

 

 

Again, no people and precious little else. No ropes, no chains, no crane. It was as if the last boat out of there had cleared up everything behind it.

 

 

As for living things, apart from humans, there were hundreds of big dark blue birds with brown legs, thousands of all sizes of iguanas and a large slow-moving mixed herd of cattle that wandered free, ate grass and paid us no attention.

 

 

I photographed the lot, but by the end was no nearer understanding what Robin intended us to do there or see, and was still a light-year from the answer to why.

 

 

We'd landed on the island at fourteen minutes after eleven, and by the time we'd concluded our comprehensive but fairly fruitless wander around, it was more than two hours later.

 

 

The wind, which had been intermittently gusty since our arrival, suddenly strengthened into a steady gale from the north, alarming us both, as it meant the outer winds of Odin, cycling counterclockwise, would be buffeting not only us mortals soon, but would be threatening also the airplane, which could look after itself in the air, but might be blown onto its back on the ground.

 

 

We ran, the wind strengthening all the time, and Kris, scrambling into his seat, made only sketchy checks for once before starting the engines, and the briefest of gauge inspections afterwards. Then he pointed the airplane's nose more or less straight up the runway and opened the throttles to maximum.

 

 

The airplane shook with protest but at a low ground speed leapt into the air so fiercely that Kris was fighting with quivering wrists to keep the climbing attitude within safe limits, and although it was the worst minute for it, I thought of the hurricane hunters who had in the past disappeared without trace... and understood how it could have happened.

 

 

Kris, sweating, pushed the nose down and let the airplane rise like a hawk, and within a minute we were at three thouJ sand feet and climbing, and Trox Island had disappeared into the murk behind us.

 

 

It wasn't until that moment that I realized that in our urgent race to be airborne I had somehow dropped my camera. All those careful pictures of nothing! I searched all my pockets and all round my right-hand flight deck seat, but without success.

 

 

Cursing, I told Kris.

 

 

"Well, we're not going back to look for it. " He sounded annoyed, but found this idea preposterous, as I did. It was all he could do to hold the plane steady, but he was also happy to be back in the air, and with visible relief fished in his shirt pocket for his lunatic flight plan.

 

 

"Steer zero eight zero, just north of east, " he shouted, giving me instructions while he fished around for his headset and settled the microphone near his mouth. "That should take us to the eye. " "The eye isn't where it was yesterday, " I yelled back, handing over the controls and putting on my own headset, in my turn.

 

 

"I thought of that, " Kris said, "and factored it in. " What he hadn't factored in, though we didn't know it at the moment, was that Odin, as hurricanes were likely to do, had thoroughly and suddenly changed course. The whole circulating mass was now heading due west, which would, within twenty-four hours, take it inexorably over the island we'd left.

 

 

At Trox we'd taken off our life jackets and left them lying in the cabin, and I went back there, once Kris looked more in control, and put mine on again. I took Kris's forward and against his inclination made him put his on also.

 

 

"We're not going to ditch, " he protested.

 

 

"All the same... " With reluctance he let me put the flat orange jacket over his head and fasten the tapes round his waist.

 

 

Our progress towards the center of Odin wasn't in the least orderly or controlled. Clouds whipped past the window and gradually grew thicker and darker until we were frankly flying in a hundred percent humidity, or in other words, rain.

 

 

Though with his own furrowed forehead and tight mouth giving every physical impression of justifiable worry, Kris told me truculently that we weren't giving up, however adverse the weather. The airplane, he insisted, was tough enough for the job and if I wanted to chicken out I should have done so back in Newmarket.

 

 

"Are you talking to yourself? " I asked. It was, indeed, hard to hear each other even through the headsets. "How fast are we going? " Kris didn't reply. I reckoned that we had had the wind in its fury sweeping us sideways and we were now flying very fast in and through the circulatory pattern. I couldn't even guess at our position on either map and with force insisted that we should join the world again by setting bona-fide frequencies on the radio. Kris tacitly gave in, but I harvested only shrieks and whistles and for human contact, weak and far away, a woman's voice speaking Spanish.

 

 

The reawakened radio, however, prodded me into clearer thought, and so, despite the bumping tumult all around us, I switched on both of Robin's special measuring instruments, ignoring Kris's yelled protests that they were for use only in the eye and eye wall. He shut up, though, and his eyes widened in incredulity when he saw the millibar indicator on the modified radio altimeter descend from the 990 we'd set on Trox down through 980 and 970 and 960 and waver on 950 before shaking there and falling towards 940.

 

 

If we followed the descent of the millibars, surely we would find that they bottomed out in the eye? The air pressure was at its lowest in the eye. Kris, converted by the sliding figures, began slowly and progressively steering left, going round with the winds.

 

 

Regular altimeters measured the outside pressure. Pilots set the sea-level pressure on the instrument and the change between the two was displayed as the altitude in feet. The radio altimeter measured our height by bouncing a radio wave back from the surface of the sea like radar. Without it we would have been in real trouble as we wouldn't have known the sea level pressure even if the sea had been level. If we flew too low, we could hit the waves. It would have helped if I'd been given hours of instruction instead of simply pressing

 

 

"Start" buttons when I felt like it.

 

 

The millibar count went on shrinking fast from 940 to 935... 930... 924. Too low, I thought. The new instrument had to be wrong. Had to be... or I was misreading it..

 

 

yet 880 had been clocked in a storm in the past. 924 wasn't impossible, but 923? 921? We were lost, I thought. My theory was destroying us... 920... 919... it was over.

 

 

. The eye's pressure had stood at 930 at Cayman that morning... it couldn't possibly have dropped so fast... But 919... 919 and still falling... I glanced at the regular altimeter and tried to do the mental arithmetic. We were almost down at sea level...

 

 

dangerous... "Don't go lower, " I told Kris urgently. "We're in cloud just above the water... Go up, go up, we'll hit..

 

 

Kris was a good pilot for a lunch trip to Newmarket. Neither of us had imagined the standard of skill a hurricane demanded. With a stubbornly locked jaw he made a slow left turn at 919 millibars, inching lower... lower... Then steadied on the nose, and I held my breath...

 

 

At just touching 918 millibars on the scale we burst out of cloud into bright sunlight.

 

 

We had hit the eye! We had actually done it! We were at the very heart of Odin. It was in a way our Everest, our lives' peak, the summit we would never see again. To fly through the eye of a hurricane... I had wanted to, but only at that moment did I realize how much.

 

 

We were scraping the limits at 918 millibars. Huge waves like mountains moved close below us, smoothly powerful but not licking upward to swallow our remarkable world.

 

 

There were tears on Kris's pale cheeks and I daresay on mine also.

 

 

In that amazing moment of revelation and fulfillment I felt overwhelmingly and unconditionally grateful to Robin Darcy.

 

 

Never mind that I didn't trust him across a peanut, never mind that he'd persuaded Kris to lie to me, never mind that the escapade to Trox had seriously endangered us, if it hadn't been for his money, his airplane, his instruments, his enthusiasm and--yes--his hidden and possibly criminal purposes, we would both have been keeping our feet on the ground and following Odin's progress from afar on a television screen, and

 

 

I

 

 

' we could never have said, like my grandmother, "Been there.

 

 

Done that. " According to the airspeed indicator we were traveling fast enough to give us barely three minutes of calm before we flew into the fearsome winds in the eye wall opposite, and Kris, making the same calculations, immediately began to hold us in a tight circle, so that we stayed in Odin's calm hub long enough to get used to it.

 

 

Below us--perhaps only two hundred feet below us--the moving sea was blue from the amazing sunshine that shone brightly also on the airplane, and threw angled shadows on our faces. Above us, the funnel, with only soft spirals of cloud in it, led far upwards to brief glimpses of blue sky. Kris kept the airplane circling in a slow climb until we were at, perhaps, four or five thousand feet above sea level, and had become accustomed to our extraordinary situation, and would remember it.

 

 

We were alone in the eye. Down to blue sea, up to blue sky, no one else shared our strange revolving world.

 

 

"Stadium effect, " Kris noted happily.

 

 

I nodded. The stadium effect meant that the eye was wider at the top, and narrower at the water's surface, like a sports stadium, in fact.

 

 

All around the calm hub the terrifying winds in the whirling wall looked impenetrable. It was one thing to reach the golden sun in the center, but now we had to calculate the way home. Kris again produced the card with the headings, though even he admitted that the fourth set was no longer right.

 

 

"Work it out, " he told me. "You can do it. " We hadn't even tried to follow the professional hurricane hunters' flight pattern of three passes straight through the eye at ten thousand feet. We were, in effect, on our own.

 

 

I reckoned by computer that if we headed north we would make a landfall, if not in Cayman, actually a small target, then in Jamaica, or as a last resort, Cuba. We just had time and gas to stay aloft for that, and with luck, long before then we would be alive on the radio again and could ask for directions.

 

 

Embarrassing, but better than crashing.

 

 

Kris agreed to fly north in general but to head east to enter the eye wall, as the counterclockwise winds that were at their maximum there would tend to sweep us round to the north anyway, until we were clear of the first sixty miles or so and had reached the outer areas of the hurricane.

 

 

The second wind of a hurricane on the ground came when the eye had passed, taking with it the illusion that the storm was over. The second wind of a hurricane hit from the southwest like a moving wall of concrete, catastrophically destroying everything that had survived the first onslaught.

 

 

The second wind of a Category 5 hurricane screamed and shrieked and traveled faster than a champion could serve a tennis ace. The second wind brought inches, torrents, of mud-liquefying rain. It brought misery and homelessness and washed away bridges--and to get back safe to Grand Cayman we had to fly again through the storm's fury.

 

 

"Work out our height, " Kris said. His voice sounded unsteady and his eyes were alarmed. I made the simple calculation that air pressure normally fell by one millibar every thirty feet of height... but mental concentration always fell l l with altitude... and neither Kris nor I were any longer razor sharp because of the by-then buffeting noisy leap-around world enveloping us.

 

 

Kris headed east and, at eight thousand feet on the altimeter, resolutely set course for land. Even with full power thundering in the engines we were both sure that we'd underestimated drift and that the rotating wind system was blowing us anywhere but where we wanted to go.

 

 

Blue sky had vanished. The sea tumbled and raced, gray and brown.

 

 

Cloud and rain closed around us. We were blind, and couldn't measure our forward progress. Kris was giving up trying. His thoughts were a straight line.

 

 

For minutes I lived with the certainty that Kris and I and the airplane weren't up to the job. My grandmother's heebiejeebies raised my skin in bumps. Kris, visibly losing his nerve, said, "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday" repeatedly into the headset, broadcasting a plea that no one heard.

 

 

We might have made it, even then, if we'd held to the northerly course and if nothing had gone wrong, but from one second to the next, with the speed of most disasters, a simple mechanical change tossed us straight into the realms of chaos, to the turbulent territory of all the demons.

 

 

The right-hand engine stopped.

 

 

Immediately the whole aircraft lost its balance, tipped sideways, spun in a circle, put its nose up, put it down again..

 

 

Kris was shouting,

 

 

"Full opposite rudder, stick forward, full opposite rudder, " and stamping hard down with his left foot, and I remembered that "stick forward, full opposite rudder" brought a single-engined airplane out of a spin, and I didn't know if it made the asymmetric wildness of a dead twin engine better or worse. I tried the radio again, to broadcast Kris's voice, and heard only Spanish, very faint.

 

 

Space and time got jumbled. Thought became reduced for both of us to one idea at a time. My own mind clamped down onto the one reassurance that there was a life raft dinghy behind me in the passenger cabin, and that as airplanes didn't float, we would need it.

 

 

Bashing around in the restricted tumbling spaces I somehow got my hands onto the big bundle and clutched it, holding on even when any sort of steering became doubtful and Kris, still hauling rightly or wrongly at the control column, began chanting again over and over, "Mayday, Mayday, stick forward, full opposite rudder... Mayday... " and in desperation, "I'm heading back to Trox Island. Back to Trox. " Though his voice chattered on uselessly he nevertheless successfully muscled a lopsided control of the bucking, twisting, rocking aircraft while it dropped against his will from about eight thousand feet, and only when I yelled at him to be ready to jump did he seem to realize that having only one embattled and hard-worked engine overheating in that tempest meant that we were losing the fight. He could see the galloping waves, but even then would have denied their inevitability... except that seawater splashed on the windshield.

 

 

With a screech of awakening terror he stretched out stiff fingers to the switches and pulled the nose up crookedly, with the port engine and propeller still racing at full power, and somehow we met the water flat on the belly on a frightful

 

 

I

 

 

" accelerating wave. At first contact the Piper skipped back up into the air twisting violently to the left and dropping its nose.

 

 

The second strike was heavier and, in that strange way that the mind wanders even in emergencies, I thought of the exam question, set long ago, which discussed the best material for a seat belt and how it had to stretch and absorb the kinetic energy to protect the occupant in a sudden collision. As the airplane buried itself into the near vertical face of the next towering whitecap, our seat belts fulfilled their purpose, absorbed our energy and brought us to a teeth-rattling halt.

 

 

Almost in the second of impact I kicked open the rear door and jumped into the raging water, clutching the dinghy with me for precious survival and yanking at the cord that inflated it. It swelled hugely at once and as it unfolded the weight of it tore it out of my arms, all except a narrow rope circling it, for people in the water to hang onto. I did hang on for a very short while, but the screaming gale made a farce of any strength I might have thought I had, and I devastatingly knew I couldn't hold it in place while Kris too unbuckled himself and left the sinking ship.

 

 

He came very fast indeed out of the front door, though, and by luck jumped first with one foot onto the already flooded wing and then fell straight into the almost fully inflated dinghy, at the moment it tore itself out of my hands. The wind and waves seized the expanding craft instantly and blew it a great way from the sinking airplane, and for a moment I could see Kris's long horror-filled face looking back at me. Then clouds and rain enveloped and parted us violently into invisibility and for only a brief time longer could I see even the waterlogged airplane until it completed a fast wing-down sliding disappearance into oblivion and was gone forever.

 

 

Without much hope I pulled the inflation cords of the life jacket that represented my only chance of survival, and the fact that the jacket ini lated swiftly in the designed manner seemed truly the only faint shred of possible security, and not much of that, anyway.

 

 

My shoes came off, and I slid also out of my pants, so that I wore on]y underpants and a once-white shirt and the orange fluorescent life jacket. The Caribbean water, comparatively warm, might throw me about, but I wasn't going to die of hypothermia. There were comforting stories of lost sailors being picked up after days at sea. Disregard, I thought, the awkward info that they hadn't been battling hurricane-size waves.

 

 

It was daylight, and my watch had stopped, water-filled, at 2,15 P. M. , when we had ditched. At home I kept a cheap waterproof watch for swimming, idiotic that I hadn't brought it.

 

 

Such silly thoughts. Time had no meaning in the sea.

 

 

Yet when Kris and I didn't reappear at the Cayman airport, Robin Darcy would surely send out rescuers. Kris's orange dinghy could be seen for miles, and my life jacket, though a smaller dot in the ocean, was purposely bright. I shut my mind to the driving rain and fearsome colossal waves that would keep a life-jacket-seeking helicopter safe on the ground at home.

 

 

Odin was a slow-moving hurricane, but even the slow ones eventually passed. I, to live, had first to outlast Odin, and then to be visible, and then to be preferably visible on a regular cross-Caribbean air route.

 

 

, l Thoughts came slowly, none of them joyful. For instance, a thought unwelcome, the Caribbean was a very big sea. For another instance, another thought, I might be a practiced surf rider, but first, I didn't have a surfboard handy, and second, no surfboard ever could realistically ride a thirty-foot storm surge.

 

 

With useless jumbled thought, then, and no constructive decisions, I struggled simply to stay afloat with my head up out of the water. The life jacket was at least one of those with the main flotation collar in front supporting one's chin, so that even when overwhelmed by the curling crest of a towering wave, the life jacket slowly righted its wearer--like a saturated..

 

 

cora rlsmg.

 

 

One could swallow saltwater and gasp painfully for air.

 

 

One could claw oneself constantly upright into surface-whipping winds and stay there for a while, just able to breathe, but after the late afternoon had passed miserably into darkness, one could begin, in the endless heavy battering of racing waves, to feel that nothing, now, could grant deliverance, or reprieve.

 

 

One could pass into delirium, and one could drown.

 

 

LONGTIME AFTER coherent thought of any kind had stopped... when flashes of illusion still made me believe my grandmother in silver was swimming in the waves not far ahead... a long time after the apparitions of Robin and Kris, holding hands, had dissolved from beckoning me wetly towards them to be shot... in the roaring nonhuman severity of Odin, while the remains of instinct flickered still in heart valves and groped for life in brain stem, a monstrous wave picked me up and lifted me high and flung the rag doll I'd become against an impossibly towering peak.

 

 

The peak wasn't water... it was rock.

 

 

Far from giving me joy, it knocked me out.

 

 

This gift of a spared life, I gleaned a fair time later, came from the rock wall forming one end of the deserted jetty where ships had once docked to unload the life-blood stores for Trox Island.

 

 

There were the remains of scrubby bushes and stick like saplings still growing indomitably from cracks and ledges, and it was among them, and gripped by them against an uneven and abrasive rock face, that I had come to rest.

 

 

Held fast there, I slowly seeped back to consciousness, and it seemed at first natural, and then with woozy reflection, extremely unnatural, that I should know where I was.

 

 

The knowledge came without strength or desire to do anything about it. I turned myself slightly to look along to the end of the dock and found that more than half of the structure, though built of very heavy timber and rooted in concrete, had been torn away as if made of cardboard.

 

 

Consciousness drifted away again into a troubled bad dream-filled utterly exhausted state that was as much daze as sleep.

 

 

Several centuries or so later I noticed it had been raining ever since I'd opened my saltwater-swollen eyes. Rain washed the salt from my limbs but all my skin was crinkled from too long an immersion, and in spite of water water everywhere nor any drop to drink, I had like any ancient mariner a scorchingly painful salt-induced thirst.

 

 

Rain... I opened my mouth to it hungrily. It filled my throat, it filled my mind. I realized that my grandmother wasn't really out there in silver, swimming. Robin Darcy's gun was back in Sand Dollar Beach, scaring the shit out of intruders.

 

 

Weakness went on, however, encouraging me to lie still.

 

 

On the other hand, I was halfway up a low cliff, lying among roots that the constant rain was loosening, and as if on cue, some of the bushes slid out of their anchorage and sent me 11 f l tumbling and slithering with a lot of scratches down and down until I reached the hard surface of the dock itself.

 

 

By good luck the dock, though now smashed, had originally been built for the mooring of merchant ships, which meant the surface of the dock itself was above the turgid water. Brown rough waves sped threateningly along beside its length now, but only a few slapped heavily over its surface, as if searching for things to suck back into their grasp. The height and vigor of the waves that had managed my arrival had died down by nearly half. Seas of the present weight couldn't have ripped up something as heavy as the dock.

 

 

So I lay a bit longer in the rain and thought of Kris and the eye of Odin, and the whole day seemed unreal.

 

 

The whole day... The light was gray... but it wasn't night, and it had been night when I'd been on the edge of drowning.

 

 

Yesterday, I thought with incredulity... Kris and I had come here yesterday... and I'd spent all night in the black water, and I'd seen the shape of the cliff I'd crashed onto because the tired old world was spinning slowly towards the return of gray morning.

 

 

Turning over again on the shattered dock, I realized that it hadn't been so much damaged on the day before. There hadn't been any damage at all. I simply hadn't the energy to do more than conclude that the destructive winds of Odin had crossed the island since we'd left. Soon, I told myself, soon I would go back up the hill to the little village. Soon I would get on with living. I had actually never before felt so weak.

 

 

As if to prod my flagging spirits, the heavy rain abruptly stopped.

 

 

To make some sort of start, I fiddled with the clips fastening the life jacket and managed only to tie the tapes into more difficult knots. Undoing them took ages. It was stupid how much my arms ached.

 

 

I still had no impression of hours. Day was light, night was dark. When day began fading again I finally put some resolution into things and with more effort than normal struggled to my bare feet and very slowly trudged up from sea level to the village, which sat on the cliff top at a height of roughly two hundred feet. Storm surge waves might not wash away whole communities at such a height, but hurricane winds came with no such inhibitions. The little village of the day gone by, the houses, the church and the mushroom sheds, all had been blown to destruction.

 

 

I stood stock still, the life jacket dangling from my hand.

 

 

The concrete rectangles where the houses had stood were still in place, the roofs had vanished and the timbers of their walls were heaped and scattered with broken window frames twisted, glass gone. The water-catching cisterns were full of debris and mud, with no buckets to be seen.

 

 

The church had no roof. The spire and two walls had collapsed.

 

 

All the mushroom sheds had vanished, though on the ground in outline one could see where they had been.

 

 

The only structures still standing were the two ultra-thick walled concrete huts, and even they showed marks of battery from other flying debris.

 

 

Without shoes--and with socks sea-lost also--I found the village area made for even more uncomfortable progress than the hill, but I trod my way gingerly to the nearest of the thick-walled huts, the one that had contained the bunk beds, and went inside.

 

 

The doorway--with no door--led through the four-foot thick wall into deepening gloom, where my eyes took time to adjust. The entrance, I reckoned at length, had been almost face-on to the wind, in view of the chaotic results. A good quantity of wood was still inside the hut, even though no longer neatly organized into bunks. Hefty planks seemed to have been hurtled across the interior space to crash like battering rams into the walls. The force needed for the holes they had dug in the plastered walls gave me the thankful shivers, Kris and I might have thought we would find safe shelter in there if the storm had caught us on land.

 

 

Shelter... It occurred to me that the roof hadn't blown off, as it had off everything else, except perhaps off the other hut.

 

 

The tangled planks, and the concrete floor, were mostly dry.

 

 

Outside it was still not raining, though the light was fading against a heavy sky.

 

 

No one would come now before night. No one could have seen little Trox earlier in blinding rain. Accept it, I thought with tiredness, in twelve hours, but not before, someone would come.

 

 

Believe it.

 

 

Someone will come.

 

 

In the remains of light I laid several planks side by side on the dank inhospitable concrete, and with the flotation collar for a pillow I lay down on my back... and couldn't sleep.

 

 

Thirst had passed, but hunger burrowed like a screw in my stomach. I'd eaten nothing since the barbecue dinner in the ,ej Ford house, and I hadn't wanted breakfast in the run up to the Odin hunt. The uneaten Danish pastries of Owen Roberts airfield tantalized my emptiness until I could almost smell them. In the morning I'd find food and drink, I told myself, but without shoes I wasn't going foraging in the dark.

 

 

The island air, at least, was sweetly warm, and if it rained again, I would be dry. Hurricanes, particularly those like Odin, that formed and gained their strength in the Caribbean, not the Atlantic, were notoriously unpredictable in their travel, but they seldom turned right round one hundred and eighty degrees and retraced their former path. If it had happened, the occurrences had been so rare that it wasn't worth worrying about.

 

 

I closed my eyes, but after its sluggish day my brain accelerated and relentlessly reviewed, remembered and relived all the steps to my present troubles. There were still whole prairies of unanswered questions defeating the simplest speculations, like why grow mushrooms on a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea? Like why send two meteorologists to race a hurricane to see what state the mushrooms were in? But surely Robin Darcy wouldn't have bought an airplane just for that... and he'd bought it for Nicky, not Odin.

 

 

I supposed that someone, somewhere, might make sense of it. Robin had to know... didn't he?

 

 

I spent a long time imagining Kris in the orange dinghy, his face looking back at me in horror as the screaming elements seized his future. If he managed to stay in the dinghy he would whirl across the face of the waters faster than racing speedboats.

 

 

According to the instructions I'd followed too carelessly about how to open the dinghy (I should have climbed in to start with) there were a rudder and two paddles to steer with, but the calm sea they needed lay long hours ahead.

 

 

I switched off at the possibility that the gales had sucked the dinghy airborne. I balked at the probability that the canvas inflated shell had gone somersaulting over and over across the seas until Kris fell out into the water and met no Trox cliffs to scoop him to land.

 

 

I shifted restlessly on my hard plank bed, and long before dawn went outside to sit with my back against the hut's exterior wall, my sight filled unexpectedly with stars.

 

 

The hurricane had gone over. The night was cloudless and still. Only the waves, heavily hurrying along the ruined mooring stage with a distant slap and hiss, spoke of the terrible force unleashed a day earlier on the little wrecked hamlet.

 

 

Hunger set me moving as soon as I could see where I was treading, but I already knew all the cupboards were bare, even if any were still standing. When the people of Trox Island had left they'd packed their lives to go with them. I looked in vain for a container that would hold liquids, and ended by sucking up spoonfuls of rainwater from any sort of hollow I came across.

 

 

There was nothing to eat except muddy grass.

 

 

I navigated carefully over to the second thick-walled hut, which had been empty anyway on our first visit, and stood inside looking in puzzlement at the change high winds had wrought.

 

 

For a start, the inner surface of two of the walls had been peeled away, leaving bare cinderblocks in view. The two huts, , though appearing the same from outside, were constructed differently within. The hut I'd passed the night in had been built of solid concrete with a plaster facing. The second hut's thick walls had been lined with prefabricated panels of plaster like walling, and it was several of these that had been torn off their fastenings and broken in pieces.

 

 

Because I was expecting to see nothing but destruction, it took me a while to notice that there were differences in these ripped-off walls, and that, in particular, one panel, dangling half off its fixings, was half-hiding a door of sorts underneath.

 

 

I went over for a closer look and found that the inner door, behind the loose bit of walling, was fastened shut by a combination lock and was the front, in fact, of a safe.

 

 

If the thoroughness of the rest of the exodus was anything to go by, that safe too would be as bare as Mother Hubbard's.

 

 

I tried to pull it open, on the basis that the wind had weakened or destroyed everything it reached, but this one barrier stood obstinately fast and, giving it up, I returned to my hunt for food.

 

 

The big blue birds with brown legs looked tantalizing, but without shoes I couldn't catch one, and without fire I'd have to eat one raw, and I wasn't yet desperate enough to try it. I could perhaps catch one of the larger iguanas, which moved more slowly than the little ones, but again the lack of cooking deterred me.

 

 

But where were the cows?

 

 

Cows gave milk, and milk was food. There had been a large free-roaming herd of cattle on the island two days ago, and surely some of them had had calves, and calves needed milk..

 

 

I

 

 

As long as the whole herd hadn't been blasted into the sea, as long as I could get a cow to stand still, as long as I could find any decent container such as an empty Coca-Cola can to drink from, my worst and most immediate predicament would be solved.

 

 

Problem, I couldn't see the herd.

 

 

Trox was a mile long, with the village at one end and the consolidated grass airstrip extending from it to the other. I carefully walked to the beginning of the strip, from where we'd raced to get off in the airplane, but search as I could for cows, I saw not so much as a tail swishing.

 

 

What I did find, though, to my delight, was my dropped camera. Second thoughts cooled the enthusiasm somewhat as although it was supposed to be waterproof and was still in its protective leather slipcover, it had been lying deep in mud as if I'd also stamped on it when I'd dropped it. I picked it up sadly and held it dangling with its straps entwined in the tapes of the life jacket.

 

 

With hunger still a priority I set off along one side of the runway, seeing a rocky fringe of land sloping down between the flat grass and the tossing sea. There was room for a herd there, but not a cow in sight. Depressed, I left that side of the runway and crossed over it to the other, and on the way thought that although that landing strip had been fabricated of earth and grass, it had been quite a feat of engineering, as its dimensions were wide and long enough to accommodate full-sized cargo and passenger aircraft, not just small twin engined toys.

 

 

On the other side of the runway there was a much wider extent of rocky land, much of it scraped bare by abrasive winds. Palm trees lay on their sides, roots helpless in the air, palm crowns like sodden mop heads on the ground. Palm trees... coconuts... I diverged from cows to coconut milk and lost a bit more skin from legs and feet in descending from runway height down nearer to sea level.

 

 

Before I found a coconut, I found the cows.

 

 

They were lying in a long dark group, their stomachs on the ground. A low cliff beyond them had given shelter of sorts against the gales, and I supposed their own weight and mass had done the rest.

 

 

Many of them turned their heads as I approached, and a few lumbered to their feet, at which point I took note of bulls among the cows and wondered if the milking expedition wasn't after all a bad idea.

 

 

Three of the bulls were heavy-shouldered Brahmans. Two were cream-colored Charolais. Four were brownish red-and white Herefords. Four more were what in horse circles would have been called chestnut in color, but were outside my rudimentary agriculture. Several were black-and-white Friesians.

 

 

Satisfied that I meant no harm, the gentlemen of the herd lost interest, moved their great heads around without menace and settled down again in peace.

 

 

As Friesians, I distantly remembered, were lavish milk producers, I inched a wincingly careful way round the vast throng of big animals until I came to a large docile-looking Friesian cow with a satisfied calf lying beside her. I hadn't actually ever milked a cow before, and as soon as I touched her the big creature lumbered to her feet and looked at me balefully with mournful off-putting eyes. If hunger hadn't been so pressingly painful I would have stopped right there, particularly when she stretched her neck and issued a long, hollow comment, which brought a whole lot of her companions to their feet.

 

 

The only container I had was the slipcover of my camera, a filthy, muddy, soaking-wet soft black leather pouch.

 

 

I went down on my knees to the Friesian lady, who looked round in manifest surprise at my attempt to use her milk as dish-washing liquid, and although my best efforts yielded little, by the fourth filling, rubbing and emptying, the contents of the pouch looked whiter and cleaner and getting on for drinkable.

 

 

I sipped the sixth pouchful. The milk was warm, rich and frothy, and tasted faintly of mud. I tested the next few amounts with increasing confidence, and I drank the pretty clean tenth pouchful entirely, before the cow ran out of patience, swished her tail in my face and with dignity swayed conclusively away.

 

 

With a stomach quietened for the moment I walked back to the ruined village and by one of the mud-laden rainwater cisterns rinsed the pouch as best I could. Using a damp shirttail, I wiped mud from my now-dry camera until when I pressed the shutter release button for a third try, it actually worked, and not only clicked but automatically wound on the film.

 

 

I used two more exposures taking views of the village's destruction. I would probably then have snapped the cattle, most of whom had followed me slowly up the island and were now standing around watching me in curiosity, except that of the roll of thirty-six exposures I'd begun with, there were only a few left. Cows were cows were cows anywhere. Cows were as interesting as no mushrooms.

 

 

SUNSHINE RETURNED TO the Caribbean.

 

 

By midday, judging time according to the sun's height in the sky, no one had come.

 

 

Two days had passed since Kris and I had left Grand Cayman. We would surely be missed.

 

 

Someone would come.

 

 

I WANDERED INTO the second of the thick-walled huts merely for something to do, and in the same aimless fashion pulled the loose flapping panels of off-white walling entirely away from the concrete underneath. Minus its cover, the safe was revealed as a square gray metal box of about two feet by two, let bodily into the wall at waist height. I frowned. If it hadn't been for the hurricane, the safe would have remained out of general sight, and it wasn't unusual, I thought, to find some way of camouflaging the very existence of a cache.

 

 

I tried again to open its door, but it seemed a hurricane proof steel box could easily deny access to the soft hands of meteorologists.

 

 

The way in consisted most obviously of a short flat lever, but to allow the lever to be moved there was an electronic key pad--letters as well as numbers--like that of a touch telephone.

 

 

It seemed a complicated lock to find on a mushroom farm, just one more mystery, in the whole series of unanswerable questions.

 

 

Sighing, I strolled outside again, where the cattle now populated what was left of the village's foundations and were behaving with aversion round the uncovered parts of the muddy cisterns. If they stretched their necks down far enough they might just be able to drink the filthy water, but thirst hadn't yet driven them to such lengths.

 

 

It was interesting, I thought, that the cattle mostly hadn't sorted themselves into separate breeds but stood in haphazard groups, Charolais mixed with Friesians, a Brahman bull from sacred-cow India in a clump of beef-producing Herefords, and on the fringes there were a few hulking dark shapes that I hadn't noticed before, of black Aberdeen Angus.

 

 

The brain plays odd tricks, and besides, taught by my grandmother, I'd always given brain-cell room to random connections of apparently unconnected thoughts.

 

 

I'd had a friend called Angus when we were both about ten, and he had had very large stick-out ears. Teasing, people laughed at him and called him Aberdeen because his stick-out ears looked like a cow's, and he had cried about it, and sank so deep in depression that his parents had let him have cosmetic surgery, and then other boys had teased him about "pinning back his lug holes until he cried about that too. My grandmother had told

 

 

"Aberdeen" Angus to his sad little face to be glad he had ears at all, it was better then being deaf.

 

 

Trox Island was a ridiculous place to be remembering stick out-ears Angus. My grandmother would be admonishing me that I might not have food better than milk, nor shoes, nor comfort, but I did have life.

 

 

I went back into the concrete hut and without hesitation / -- tapped out ANGUS in numbers--26487--on the touch pad of the combination lock of the safe.

 

 

Nothing happened. No clicks, no encouraging blips. Stickout-ears Angus didn't work the lever to open the box, and of course there was no reason to suppose it would.

 

 

With nothing much else to do to pass the time I walked across what might have been a sort of village square and looked again at the damaged interior of the hut I'd spent half the night in.

 

 

Why did a mushroom farm need a hut with walls four feet thick and a hurricane-proof roof? A mushroom farm didn't, was the concise answer, but a meteorological or seismic station might. The instruments and the records would have left with the general inhabitants, but a building that housed a seismograph, for instance, would need to be constructed to be of extreme inertia in itself before it could measure earthquake tremors far away. The concrete floor, I guessed, would be at least as thick as the walls.

 

 

Outside again, I looked up at the clear blue sky and listened to the subsiding march of the waves, but what I really needed was a rescuing aircraft, and of that there was no sign.

 

 

Evelyn, perhaps, was lying in the sun on Sand Dollar Beach wondering where Kris and Perry had got to. But Odin was still on the rampage somewhere, and Evelyn, perhaps, had taken to the hills... of which Florida had few.

 

 

Thoughts dribbled on. In Robin's house the police came waving guns at house guests who swam at three in the morning, and the security checked by telephone to make sure all was well. "Yes, " Robin had said easily, "yes, it's Hereford. " Hereford? I stood on Trox looking at a red and white cow, a Hereford. So what if Robin's Hereford was to the Sand Dollar Beach security firm a sort of password. Hereford...

 

 

Hereford... All is well.

 

 

Why not?

 

 

People used the same password over and over in many different configurations, because it was easier to remember one password than many.

 

 

With still all the time in the world, I was simply playing games. I went back to the touch pad of the safe and tapped 4373 (HERE) and 3673 (FORD) and instantly there was a loud click.

 

 

Astonished, I grasped the lever by its flat handle and tried lifting it upwards, and without the slightest stiffness in its travel the lever rose upward and the door silently opened.

 

 

Treasure there was none, or at least not to my eyes at that first meeting. Two objects only lay on the cloth-covered lining of the gray metal safe. One of them was a yellow box, an electronic-looking instrument complete with a dial with a pointer and a short rod on the end of a curled cable like that on a telephone. It seemed to me from much past acquaintance that the box was probably a Geiger counter, and when I lifted it out and pressed an on-off switch, it rewarded me with slow irregular un urgent clicks. A Geiger counter indeed, with few Geigers to count. Technically, a Geiger counter counted highspeed particles emitted by the decay of radioactive material.

 

 

The short rod contained a tube invented long ago by physicists Geiger and Muller. A high-energy particle, entering the tube, ionized the gas inside, which allowed the gas to conduct electricity, thus creating a pulse of current, which in turn caused the click.

 

 

Lying beside the Geiger counter, the only other thing hidden away was a single fawn folder, the sort used universally in offices to help with filing.

 

 

The folder, when I lifted it out in its turn, contained roughly twenty sheets of paper, nearly all in different sizes, with and without formal headings, and a]l in foreign scripts, most of which I didn't recognize. There were combinations of letters-with-numbers on almost every page, whatever the language, and it was those that I recognized positively and with alarm. A few sheets were stapled together in pairs and two seemed to be lists of addresses, though as they were written in a script I thought might be Arabic, I couldn't read any of them.

 

 

I put the folder back in the safe, but left the door open, and went thoughtfully outside again into the sun. The cattle turned their heads to watch me. Several of them mooed, several more made slopping pats of steaming waste. As a day's entertainment, they were hardly a riot.

 

 

Counting, I found I had four exposures left on my reel of film. I changed my mind and took one view of the cattle, including in it as many different breeds as I could find grouped in one place. Then I went back to the safe, to sort out which three of the papers in the folder were most worth immortality.

 

 

Trying to assess them all carefully out in bright daylight made the choice no easier, but in the end I settled on four of them, photographing two separately, and the last two side by side. The film ran out after that last exposure, and to my frustration the automatic rewind stopped and stuck at the place where I had cleaned off the mud. There was no way of knowing if any pictures at all had survived, though I didn't think it mattered enormously if they were ruined. However, to save it from any further rain, I tied the camera by its strap to a convenient beam near the safe, high up and out of reach of cows.

 

 

I wondered, as I put the papers back in the folder and the folder back in the safe, whether or not I should leave everything locked in as I had found it, and I did so chiefly to keep the papers too away from the cows, some of whom had come after me with so much curiosity that they were crowding the doorway and trying to push themselves and their big heads inside. I shooed them out again, but in a strange way I was glad of their company, and not as lonely as I would have been without them.

 

 

The day seemed endless, and nobody came.

 

 

TwELVE HOURS OF darkness. A long time until dawn.

 

 

I slept in brief patches, uncomfortably, and woke finally in the early gray light to the sole comfort that in the setting sun's rays the evening before, I had seen a gleam which had proved to be an empty soup can wedged into the ruins of one of the houses, and although it was misshapen and filled with dusty debris, it made a better milk-carton than the camera case.

 

 

The cows had given me supper, and also an early breakfast, and then they moved off in a herd as if of one mind towards the runway, where they put their heads down to the grass, and kept it both fertilized and short.

 

 

l When the sun rose it was three days since Kris and I had flown out of Grand Cayman Island.

 

 

The eye of Hurricane Odin, after traveling northwest for three days at seven miles an hour, might at that moment, I thought, be raising gales and storm surges along the Cayman shores. It wasn't reasonable, I told myself, to expect anyone in those circumstances to come looking for foolhardy aviators who had most certainly crashed at sea.

 

 

I put together a rough low seat of timbers in a place that would afford shadow when the sun was highest, and sat there to give my still bare feet a respite. Cuts, scratches and insect bites round my ankles itched abominably and refused to heal.

 

 

I went through a long morning of self-pitying depression, unable to believe I would have to spend much more time there and unwilling in consequence to start building a bearable way to live.

 

 

I thought of my grandmother, who, apart from any anxiety she might have had if anyone had told her I was missing, would certainly have issued brisk and bracing instructions along the lines of, "Perry, build yourself a house, filter some drinking water, weave some sandals, look for coconuts, keep a log of the days, go for a swim... don't mope. " She had never complained, neither when her legs stopped working, nor ever since. She had taught me always simply to bear as best I could whatever could not possibly be put right, and in that category she had included my lack of father or mother.

 

 

She wouldn't have thought much of my spinelessness on Trox. Her presence sat with me at midday in the patch of shade, sympathe ic but unforgiving. It was my grandmother therefore who prodded me that afternoon into walking to the other end of the runway, shoes or no shoes, and I came across a way down to a white-sandy beach there, from which I swam, pitting my diminished strength against still heavy rough surf, but feeling clean and refreshed afterwards.

 

 

Down that end of the island there was a veritable forest of snapped-off hardwood trees as well as uprooted coconut palms and the stripped remains of what I guessed were broad-leaved banana trees. By scavenging I found two viable coconuts and, still attached to its stalk, a full-grown ripe mango, a feast.

 

 

But the blue sky remained empty, and no one came.

 

 

BY THE NEXT morning even the gray tossing sea had returned to Caribbean blue.

 

 

To pass the dragging time, I took the folder of papers out of the safe, and in the sun sat staring at each one separately, trying to make even the smallest sense of languages I couldn't read. The nearest I came to recognition was a paper I guessed to be in Greek, on account of the symbols Q and x, omega and pi.

 

 

All of the papers were scattered with numbers, and where numbers occurred they were written in the script known as Latin, or otherwise ordinary English.

 

 

Eventually, letting ideas drift, I thought that some of the bunch might be an inventory, a stock-taking, of round-the world species and quantities, possibly of the mushrooms that had once grown in the now blown-away sheds.

 

 

Fine, I thought, but why the Geiger counter?

 

 

I replaced the folder and spent an idle hour listening to irregular but fairly frequent clicks as I walked around the dead village raising live evidence of radiation.

 

 

I expected the counter to count, as background radiation was all around us all the time, a combination from naturally occurring radioactive material in the earth's crust and "cosmic rays, " high-energy particles arriving from outer space emitted by the sun about ten minutes and ninety-three million miles ago.

 

 

But there seemed to be rather a high count rate, especially near to the bases of the blown-away houses. High count rates were not unusual. Residents of Aberdeen, the Granite City of Scotland, experienced a higher background than normal, as granite contained many radioactive atoms. I looked around me and tried to remember what my pal in Miami had said-"Constructed of bird droppings, guano, coral and limestone rock. " Were bird droppings radioactive? No, I thought not.

 

 

Putting the rod near the cracks in the concrete floors raised an endless stream of clicks, clicks so fast that they coalesced into one sound.

 

 

I thought of radon. Radon gas could be a problem the world over as it was produced by the decay of naturally occurring uranium in rocks and seeped unseen and un smelled into people's homes, giving them cancer. But, I thought, radon needed an enclosed space to congregate and the hurricane had ensured there were no enclosed spaces left. And besides, limestone had little radioactive uranium in it to decay.

 

 

So what was causing the count? Was this perhaps why the islanders had left, not because of Nicky, still less because of Odin, but because they feared the radioactivity under their feet?

 

 

If the Geiger counter was energized round the houses, it practically took off over the outlined remnants of the foundations of the mushroom sheds. Frowning, I made a long detour down and off the runway to see if the cattle en masse were emitting strong radioactivity too, but to my relief they weren't. I hadn't, it seemed, drunk quantities of radioactive milk.

 

 

Eventually the Geiger counter lost its attraction as entertainment and I restored it to the safe. The folder lay there also, each sheet familiar but reproaching my lack of scholarship.

 

 

I closed the safe and locked it, and again in the idyllic air I added one more piece of wood to a growing line. Each piece of wood represented a day, and at that moment there were four of them. Four long days and longer nights.

 

 

Despair was too strong a word for it.

 

 

Perhaps despondency was better.

 

 

WHEN THE CAME for me, they came with guns.

 

 

IN THE THE afternoon of my fifth day on the island while I swam in the sea off the small sandy beach at the far end of the landing strip, a twin-engined airplane droned in, dropped down neatly over the distant village and rolled nearly halfway down the strip before pausing, turning and taxiing back to what, before Odin, had been habitation.

 

 

Every day I had lain the bright yellow-orange life jacket conspicuously on the runway and weighted it with stones in the hope that it would be visible from any passing low-flying aircraft, and although the cattle had thoroughly dirtied it a couple of times I had washed it well enough for the purpose in one of the filthy cisterns. With absolute joy then, I reckoned that the jacket had successfully delivered its intended message, and I scrambled with haste up the winding rocky path from the little beach, aiming, sore feet or not, to run towards my rescuers so they should see me before believing the island to be deserted and flying off again.

 

 

In my anxiety to be seen I gave no thought at all to the possibility that the newcomers might not be friendly. They had come in an aircraft that would take eighteen or so passengers comfortably, the sort of aircraft regularly used for flying people to and from small islands. The sort of aircraft sensibly sent out to survey small islands for hurricane survivors. A workhorse aircraft, unremarkable.

 

 

I was surprised but not disturbed that no one emerged from it as I shuffled and ran and struggled up the runway. It was a scorching hot day and I thought only that they would have air-conditioning and glorious cold drinks on board. I was about twenty yards away when the rear door opened and unfolded to enable five figures to walk down a short stairway to the ground.

 

 

They all wore the same thing shiny metallic coveralls with great hoods coming down over their shoulders, with smoked plastic rectangles instead of faces, more like space suits than suitable wear for a stifling Caribbean afternoon. I'd seen those outfits before radiation protection suits. I'd seen what they were carrying before too--deadly black assault rifles, which they aimed like a firing squad at my chest.

 

 

I stopped. I found it less than amusing to be a target again, but at least no one this time read me my "rights. " No one told me I could remain silent but if I said anything it would be held against me in court. No one mentioned a court of any description. Silence, however, agreed with me fine.

 

 

One of the suits took a hand off his weapon long enough to beckon to me to walk forward and, seeing no advantage in trying to run, I slowly advanced until signaled to stop.

 

 

I must have looked a bit primitive. I wore only what Odin l

 

 

L

 

 

had left me, underpants and torn shirt. My chin was dark with unshaven beard and my feet were bruised and swollen. The television audience back home, used to my well-brushed tidy screen self, would have been affronted and disbelieving.

 

 

The five suits talked to each other for a while but were too far away for me to hear what they said. I hopefully guessed in the end that they weren't so much concerned about their exposure to radioactivity as about preventing me from recognizing them if I saw them anywhere again in future. This helpfully implied that they'd voted against killing me casually and chucking my corpse into the sea--from where it might wash up again inconveniently--and also, I thought, it meant that they hadn't known I would be on the island at all.

 

 

I'd had four long days and nights for thinking, and many things in that time had grown clearer. If they gave me a reasonable chance to act, they could report me to be as ignorant when they found me as I'd been when I got lost.

 

 

Three of the suits peeled off and headed for the village area, leaving only two with their un amiable black machinery pointing my way. These two in fact looked nervous more than murderous, shuffling uncertainly from foot to foot, but nervous gunmen frightened me more than those who knew their business. I stood very still and didn't speak, and was glad not to be sweltering inside heavy protective gear.

 

 

When eventually the other three returned from their walkabout, they were carrying in plain sight both the Geiger counter and the folder of papers. If they'd found my camera in its new out-of-cow-reach perch near the top of a high tangle of timbers, they weren't telling.

 

 

All five conferred near the aircraft, then a different group of

 

 

12C D I

 

 

three walked up the entry stairs and pulled the door shut behind them.

 

 

My spirits sank to zero when they started both of the engines, but as the two left to guard me continued unemotionally to do so, I waited as patiently as I could manage, even if screaming inside. Food, sleep and shoes, I needed all of those.

 

 

On that island paradise I'd had a surfeit of hunger, thirst, heat, insects and general deprivation, and I was perilously near to begging.

 

 

Turn your mind, I told myself, to something else.

 

 

A gentle wind was blowing steadily up the runway towards the village, but the aircraft, though traveling the right way for takeoff, was going far too slowly to achieve lift. Eventually it stopped altogether, disgorging one figure who walked to an edge of the runway to survey the rocky terrain between landing strip and sea. The figure returned and reboarded, and the travel-stop-search procedure was repeated again and again.

 

 

They were looking for the cattle, I realized, and although I could have saved them time, I didn't. I let them stop and search, stop and search, stop and search until they came across the peaceful beasts lying and chewing the cud down at the far end of the island, where there was a patch of more succulent grass.

 

 

The airplane turned back after a lengthy herd inspection and stopped where it had been before.

 

 

Another general discussion took place, which resulted in two of my longtime guards advancing on me nervously, one with gun held ready, the other to tie first a blindfolding scarf around my head and next a thinner uncomfortable restraint round my wrists, behind my back.

 

 

I thought of several protests, both verbal and physical, but saw no point in any of them, and nor did I complain when roughly prodded, blindly stumbling, up the stairs into the body of the aircraft to be pushed into a rear seat. The engines roared immediately as if in a hurry to be gone and the aircraft lifted easily into the blue.

 

 

I consequently didn't see Trox Island or its familiar ruins when I was leaving it, but if three of my captors thought I didn't know who they were, they were wrong.

 

 

BY THE TIME we touched down, at a guess thirty-five to forty minutes later, I'd added cramp to my woes, a minor inconvenience compared to not having been flung overboard into the deep Caribbean. The aircraft taxied a good way after it landed, and then waited, with the engines ticking over, until the rear door was lowered and some of the passengers left through it. Then the door closed again and the aircraft taxied lengthily again, and again it stopped with the engines still running. Again I heard the rear door being lowered, and with sweat and rapid heartbeat I thought that if death were on its way to me it would be here at the end of a long taxi ride to nowhere.

 

 

Prods and pushes propelled me stumbling down the steps onto stony ground. This exit wasn't followed immediately by a bullet through the brain, but by a blind walk through a squeaking gate in a rattling fence. Rough hands gave me an overbalancing final thrust forward, and while I tottered to stand upright I heard the squeaky gate slam shut behind me and with immense thankfulness understood I'd been unmistakably shoved free into the living present.

 

 

I swallowed, shuddered, felt sick. The aircraft taxied away into limbo. I thought with banality that it's remarkable how stupid one feels standing half naked and blindfolded with one's wrists tied, in the middle of God knows where.

 

 

After a while, in which I tried unsuccessfully to free my hands, a voice at my shoulder asked in puzzlement,

 

 

"What you doing out here, mon? " and I answered with husky, out-of use vocal chords, but endless gratitude, "If you untie me, I'll tell you. " He was big, black and laughing at my predicament, and he held the white cotton triangular bandage that had been wrapped round my head.

 

 

"You got bandages where you don't need them, mon, " he said happily. "Who trussed you up like a chicken, eh? Your woman, eh? " He tore and untied with strong fingers the bandages round my wrists. "Where are your shoes, mon? " he asked. "Your feet have been bleeding. " He saw the whole thing as a joke.

 

 

I smiled stiffly in return and asked where I was. It was evening, on the edge of night. Lights everywhere in the distance.

 

 

"On Crewe Road, of course. Where've you been? " I said neutrally, "On Trox Island. " A frown replaced the laugh. "The hurricane wiped out that place, they say. " I was standing on a grass verge of a road beside a wire mesh fence that skirted a medium-sized commercial airport. When I asked my laughing helper if it were Jamaica or Grand Cayman, he told me with more good humor than ever that it was l Owen Roberts, mon, Cayman. Of course Hurricane Odin had passed south of here, praise the Lord. He himself, now, he was from Jamaica, mon, but Crewe Road was in George Town, Grand Cayman.

 

 

He was naturally and endlessly curious about the state he'd found me in, but accepted that if I'd been set upon and robbed of my clothes and money and everything else I was mainly in need of transport, and cheerfully offered me a ride in his brother-in-law's Jeep, which he was driving along Crewe Road when he saw me standing there helpless... and where did I want to go?

 

 

To Michael Ford's house, I said, if he knew it, and he shrugged and drove me there with much less warmth if not with outright disapproval, and he merely nodded when at the Fords' front gate I thanked him profoundly for his kindness. He thrust the bandages into my hands, said, "Not good people" and drove off as if he were sorry he had stopped for me at all.

 

 

MICHAEL AND AMY Ford greeted me with extreme astonishment.

 

 

"We thought you were dead... ! " "Kris said... " Kris said.

 

 

Michael and Amy warmly gestured me to come in, and led the way to the same sitting room as before.

 

 

"Kris is alive? " I asked. "Is it true? " Michael said heartily, "Of course he's alive. " He looked me up and down in the sitting-room lights. "My dear man, what a state you're in. " With a grimace I asked if my clothes and passport were still in their house and was relieved when Amy said she hadn't yet sent them to England.

 

 

"And my grandmother... " I said. "Can I pay you for a call to her? " "My dear man, be our guest. " He pushed a telephone my way. "She'll be asleep, though. It's midnight in London. " I pressed the buttons.

 

 

"She'll want to know I'm alive. " The voice that answered was predictably that of a nurse.

 

 

Less predictably, it was the voice of Jett van Els, who exclaimed, "We were told you were dead... " My grandmother, awakened, remarked toughly that she'd known all along that I was still alive and then rather spoiled the effect by sobbing.

 

 

"I said... " She swallowed and paused. "I told them you could outswim any hurricane. I said it, even if it isn't true. " "Who is them? " I asked.

 

 

"The BBC. They wanted to put a tribute to you on the weather forecast and I told them to wait. " I smiled, wished her a peaceful sleep, promised to call the next day and, as I put down the receiver, asked Michael and Amy if they knew where to find Kris.

 

 

"There's no search-and-rescue facility on Cayman, " Amy said. "Robin called and said he felt responsible for letting Kris and you set off on such a risky flight and he organized a helicopter from Florida when you didn't return and sent it out looking for both of you, after the worst of the storm had passed, and it did find Kris in the life raft, which was pretty amazing considering... " "But... " Michael continued as Amy paused. "Kris told me l

 

 

I

 

 

the airplane had sunk in terrible waves and he saw you being swept away and all you had was a life jacket and he said not even a very good swimmer like you could have lived through waves more than thirty feet high. " "I was lucky, " I said. "When was he found? " "Don't you want to get dressed? " Amy interrupted sympathe ically.

 

 

"And your poor feet... ! " I was being careful to stand on her tiles so as not to dirty her rugs. "My feet are O. K.... when did the helicopter find Kris?

 

 

" Michael, frowning, answered vaguely, "Not yesterday..

 

 

the day before, I think. " He looked for confirmation to Amy, who indecisively nodded.

 

 

"And, er... " I asked without pressure, "where is he now? " Amy answered, but after thought. "He went home to England. He said he was due back at work. Now, do put better clothes on. All your things are still in the room you used here.

 

 

" I gave in to her housekeeperly urging and in deep luxury showered, got rid of the stubbly beginnings of beard, and dressed in clean soap-smelling shirt, cotton trousers and flip flop sandals. Amy greeted the result with hands held high and multiple compliments, and Michael said he had lit the barbecue fire and was baking potatoes to go with the steak.

 

 

It wasn't until after the food that they asked where I'd been and how I'd survived, and they showed shock and interest in suitable intensities at my account.

 

 

I explained that Kris in the last minute of control before the aircraft crashed into the sea had said that he was going to try to reach Trox Island, and that by some miracle the currents had actually swept me back there, where we had landed earlier on some errand for Robin.

 

 

"What errand? " Michael asked intently.

 

 

I said I didn't know. I said I didn't think Kris was clear about it either. I looked blankly puzzled. I told them that most extraordinarily I'd been brought back to Cayman in some sort of semi-military aircraft with a crew wearing radiation suits and carrying assault weapons. The crew hadn't spoken to me or done anything I understood. It was all very odd, but anyway they'd blindfolded me, tied my wrists with bandages from--I supposed--the first-aid box every aircraft had to carry, and when they'd landed here on Cayman, they let me go. A Jamaican man who was passing had kindly untied me and driven me to the Fords' door.

 

 

"Good heavens! " Amy exclaimed. "How dreadful! " "Are you going to the police? " Michael asked, frowning.

 

 

"I shouldn't think so, " I confessed. "I don't want to get that crew into trouble. I don't think they were pleased I was on the island, but, even if they tied me up to do it, they did bring me back here safely. Whatever they were doing there, it's none of my business. " Michael and Amy smiled broadly with evident approv'L I didn't tell them I knew for a certainty that three of my captors/ rescuers had been Michael and Amy themselves, and Robin Darcy too.

 

 

I didn't thank them for working out how to get me back to civilization without my seeing their faces, though I was pleased they had done it.

 

 

I didn't say that I'd had ages to memorize the aircraft's registration letters and numbers--which began with N, and were therefore American.

 

 

I

 

 

L

 

 

I certainly didn't tell them I'd opened their safe and had had little else to do for lengthy days but try to decipher the messages of the foreign-language letters.

 

 

Amy crossed the sitting room, raised her arms again, stood on tiptoes and kissed my cheek. She smelled sweetly of the same scent as one of the crew, the slender guard who had had to stretch up high to tie the blindfold tightly round my head.

 

 

Robin, rotund round Robin, had had to wear his just visible heavily framed eyeglasses inside his silver helmet to see what he was doing, and also, in the sort of unconscious mannerism everyone has, he had stood with his wrists crossed below his stomach, as he had done both in Newmarket and on his own terrace when the police had come to deal with his "intruder. " Amy, short and slender, and Michael, broad-shouldered and bow-legged, had completed and revealed the trio's back view unmistakably as they walked away from the aircraft towards the thick-walled huts.

 

 

Identifying them, in view of their intention not to be known, had sent the severe flutter of fear through my gut that had kept me silent, passive and concentrated in front of their guns.

 

 

With excuses of real tiredness I put an early end to the smiling artificiality of the evening, and, to my hosts' perceptible relief, went to bed.

 

 

ODIN, AS I discovered heavy-eyed from the television after another night of bad dreams, had changed direction yet again since Kris and I had left Trox Island to search for the eye.

 

 

Michael having waved me permissively towards his telephone, I reached my meteorological colleague in Miami and shocked him into believing that Lazarus had nothing on P. Stuart.

 

 

When I asked if he could spare the time to have me call on him in his office on my way back to England he said with enthusiasm that he'd leave word at the front desk, and later that day, after the friendliest of farewells from Michael and Amy, who drove me to Owen Roberts airport in their orange truck, I landed in Miami, sought out my so far unseen good telephone pal, and was shown into the tracking heart of the hurricane center.

 

 

My pal, Will, turned out to be about twenty-five, tall, thin, dedicated and full of welcome.

 

 

Yousre in here only because you're you, " he said. "Your BBC employers gave you the thumbs-up. " "Good of them. " He looked sharply at my face, correctly interpreted my mild cynicism and took me to meet the team of meteorologists dealing with Odin. So it was I who was the other damn fool, they said, who'd flown through Odin's eye and ditched near the eye wall? I was.

 

 

It was crazy to have attempted a fly-through, they said.

 

 

Amateur hurricane hunters were a pest. The U. S. Air Force's 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Flight alone had enough experience and instrumentation.

 

 

I meekly agreed. My pal Will returned my cynicism doubled, accepted my contrition and showed me how the storm trackers were still worried about Odin, which had changed s ,. , direction yet again and was now very slowly passing from the Caribbean into the Gulf of Mexico, where it at present distantly threatened Galveston in Texas. The warm Gulf waters were again strengthening the circulation dangerously. Neither Will nor I could understand how I'd survived the weight of the towering seas.

 

 

When I suggested a thank-you drink at the end of his shift Will looked at his watch and said he'd already arranged for me to meet someone I might find interesting, and when we were settled at a small sidewalk table under a red-and-blue sun umbrella, we were joined by a lanky bearded sixtyish eccentric who slapped Will vigorously on the back, told me his name was Unwin and demanded, "What exactly do you want to know about Trox Island? " Taken by surprise I said

 

 

"Er... " irresolutely, and then with gratitude, "More or less anything you can tell me. " He could tell me about forty minutes' worth, he said.

 

 

He'd done the research for a book on Trox, but couldn't find a publisher interested. He had been to the island many times himself as pilot of the weekly Dakota, an ancient DC-3 that had flown in with perishable supplies for the thirty or more people who lived there.

 

 

He said those residents were mostly meteorologists and seismologists--who employed him--and mushroom growers and timber and coconut merchants, and in the past there had been a great trade in guano. He said there were thousands of booby birds making the guano and hundreds of thousands of iguanas doing nothing. He said the island had once been used as a communications post by undercover agents from the United States, but the C. I. A. was now denying it. They had built the runway, though, and they once had a radio transmitter there, but it had been dismantled years ago.

 

 

I asked to whom the island belonged, and Unwin took a long time over his reply. "Once it was British, then American, " he said eventually. "Then a whole bunch of South American countries claimed it, but no one wanted to keep it longer than for their own purposes because thereSs no running water there, only rain caught in cisterns, and no electricity, since one group who took it over looted the generator. So when they've finished with it each group just abandons it, it seems to me. Long before Hurricane Nicky, let alone Odin, a company called the Unified Trading Company were running things, but about a month ago they suddenly slammed down the shutters on harmless people like me. " He grinned, unexpectedly showing large yellow teeth. "If you want to own the island yourself, just go and live there, say it's yours, and fight off all boarders. " He interrupted his saga to attend to the cold Heineken ordered for us all by Will, and then, as if delighted to open the floodgates, went on.

 

 

"There was something funny about those mushrooms. I mean, a couple of real mushroom farmers I talked to said you'd never try to grow even exotic mushrooms on a commercial basis on such a small scale. They were experimental mushrooms, people said, but the Unified Trading Company brought in their own workers, from Europe, so no one local even knew what was really going on. And it was the same for the cows. " "Cows? " Will asked, mystified. "What cows? " Unwin the Trox specialist showed his teeth again.

 

 

"One day when I was there a whole shipload of bulls and cows was disembarked and they walked up from the jetty, and through the village, and spread out all over the island. There was a heck of a fuss about it with the residents, but the bulls never chased or gored any humans. They just gored each other and rogered the cows, and bit by bit they grew tamer and had calves and spent most of their time keeping the runway grass short. Hell knows what Odin did to them. I should think they all died. " Will reminded him I'd been on the island since Odin, and I told him how the cattle survived by huddling flat on their stomachs all together like a carpet. And why were they there in the first place? I asked, but the expert said he didn't know.

 

 

He changed the subject to the scientists who had built both of the thick-walled huts and measured earthquakes on seismographs there and sent up radiosonde balloons to measure air pressure and temperature aloft each day. He knew them all by name as he worked for them, flying the Dakota.

 

 

The Unified Trading Company had taken over the second hut, and Unwin, frowning, said that towards the end the residents had told him the second hut had had a man guarding it with a rifle all the time, so that no one except the top men in the company could go in there. Those top men had said that as long as they were there as caretakers, the island belonged to them.

 

 

"A right muddle, " I commented. "Why did the caretakers leave? " Unwin leaned back in the wrought-iron cafe chair and assessed me from under lowered lids.

 

 

"Something frightened the residents, " he slowly said.

 

 

I asked, "Do you know what it was? " Unwin hesitated, then said they were told the mushroom sheds had become radioactive and the houses were unsafe, with radon gas coming up from their foundations. "A boat came for everyone, though, and they loaded all their belongings onto it and sailed to Cayman, where most of them have relatives. But everybody left Trox at least a month ago, and no one's developed radiation sickness, as far as I know. " I let a minute or two pass, and asked, "Did you see any of the top men of Unified Trading guarding the hut when you were there? " Unwin nodded and finished his beer. I waited with stifled impatience while he arranged for refills, but at length the source of all explanations agreed that yes, the top men, about five of them, had taken it in turns to stand guard over the hut, only actually they had sat on a chair in the doorway with a gun across their knees, and that had gone on for about a week, until the fishing boat arrived and took everyone to Cayman.

 

 

"Did the Unified Trading men come from Cayman? " I asked.

 

 

After deliberation he answered, "Some of them did. " "And the others? " Unwin answered straightforwardly, "I don't know. First of all before they started the evacuation they brought a big heavy cardboard box in off the boat and rolled it up to the second hut, on a sort of cart with wheels they used there, and don't ask me what was in the box. I don't know. " He paused.

 

 

"Every one watched. "

 

 

I

 

 

The safe had been in the box, I thought.

 

 

"Did you go into the hut afterwards? " I asked.

 

 

"Every one went in. The Traders didn't stop people anymore but no one knew what they'd brought in the box, and there was nothing to see except the seismograph, which had been there before. " "And... um... what did the top men look like? " Unwin pondered and sighed. "They were all forty or fifty.

 

 

They wore baseball caps, but they weren't young. It was three or four weeks ago. I can't remember. " He swallowed half a pint of beer, stood up and flapped a hand in a forty-minute farewell. "I'm going back to Trox next week, " he said. "I'm supposed to be taking people and things to help to rebuild the meteorological station. " "What was all that about radioactivity? " Will asked, still mystified, watching Unwin's vanishing back.

 

 

I looked at Will vaguely. "I don't really know. Where does he live? " "Over a hippie tee-shirt store, next road to the right.

 

 

Unwin's a funny fish. I thought he'd be more interesting.

 

 

Sorry. " I said, "He knew a lot about the place. " Will nodded ruefully and said, "I'd hardly heard of Trox Island before you asked me about it. " "That makes two of us. Let's just forget it. " His fast agreement to this shuffling-off suggestion was the basis of all our future friendship, he didn't want to have to take anything seriously--except the weather, of course.

 

 

So I didn't tell him I'd been sucked into some sort of conspiracy, and now the conspirators regretted it and would like to spit me out again, so to speak, but they wanted to be sure first that I hadn't recognized them or understood why they needed to blindfold me to rescue me. All of that was more likely to alienate Will than engage his further help.

 

 

We finished our beers in easy accord, and he invited me without hangups to go on sharing his world wind news, while I offered him, as we parted, tours of the meteorological headquarters, back home at Bracknell, Berkshire.

 

 

Unwin, when I went looking for him, was sitting under another sun umbrella, drinking another beer.

 

 

I sat beside him. He shrugged and said, "Trox used to be a pretty place, you know. " "Will you get back there by DC-3? " "Sure. " "Did the Unified Trading Company, too, use a regular airplane of their own to service their staff? " Unwin, bored, drank his beer, yawned, and said that mostly they rented one, it was cheaper.

 

 

Did he know which airplane they rented?

 

 

He knew the type. When I wrote out the registration number, he nodded positively with recognition and awakening interest. "That's the one. It belongs to Downsouth Air Rentals.

 

 

You can charter it with or without pilot by the hour, day, week, whatever you like. " He accepted another refill.

 

 

"If anything much happens on Trox, " I suggested, "anything odd, I mean, would you pass the info to Will, to forward it to me? " I gave him some money I could hardly afford and he counted it without enthusiasm.

 

 

I

 

 

I

 

 

-- "All right, " he agreed.

 

 

"I left my camera there, in one of the thick-walled huts, tied up by its strap to a beam near the roof, out of the cows' reach.

 

 

The camera's useless. It's all stuck up with mud. But I'd quite like it back, if you find it. If you send it to me, mud and all, how about a full case of Heineken? " "Two cases, " he said. We shook on it, and I wrote for him my grandmother's address.

 

 

I touched the small paper with the aircraft registration number on it and asked without hope, "I don't suppose you know where I would find the fishing boat that did Trox Island's evacuation? " Unwin's yellow teeth spread wide in a grin and he jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

 

 

"You walk a bit lame, " he observed, "and you have a long way to go. She's the Darnwell Rose, down to the end of the road, turn left, third... no, fourth dock along. It's not really a fishing boat. It's an all-purpose offshore merchantman. " I thanked him sincerely and started down the long road, and presently found him catching me up.

 

 

"I know the master. He's sailing tonight. I owe him a beer, " he said, and I was glad of his company and his introduction.

 

 

The master of the Darnwell Rose, bulky, with gold sleeve rings, bushily bearded, went below with Unwin to more beer in his cabin, and sent up a fearsomely tough-looking secondin-command to unbutton to me about Trox.

 

 

"A trading company, Unified Traders, had chartered the Darnwell Rose to ship a whole load of household goods from Trox Island to Grand Cayman, " he said, "and there had been a question about clearing everything from regulations about radon gas, but they'd had no problem in the end. None of the furniture was radioactive, so we did the job. " I asked, "Do you remember taking to Trox Island a heavy cardboard container? " "The safe, do you mean? " "Yes, " I nodded.

 

 

"Look, " he said. "If I tell you what happened, I'll deny it. " "I would expect nothing less. " He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

 

 

"So, " he said, "to stop it getting damaged on the journey the safe door was wedged open with a lot of screwed-up paper and there was a folder type of thing lying in a drawer in a desk nearby, and as we were to take all the furniture, one of the deckhands put the folder in the safe and took the desk, and when everything had been cleared by the Geiger counter they put that too in the safe, meaning both things only to be there for a minute or two, but a seaman shut the safe door and they couldn't open it again so they just put the whole safe into the slot in the wall that was ready for it, and left it there, and no one ever complained. The master reckoned the trading company that chartered us knew how to get the door open again. Is that what you wanted to know? " "That's fine, thank you. " I gave him the rest of my dollar bills, thanked Unwin and the master and gratefully accepted their offer of a ride to the airport.

 

 

Deciding, before I caught the night flight to London, that helping the conspirators to get rid of me neatly involved a polite goodbye to Robin Darcy (who'd lost his airplane to our foolhardiness, after all), I called his number but heard only Evelyn's voice saying, "Please leave a message. " "I'll write, " I said, grateful for the let-off, and traveled home, knees-under-chin, trying to sleep, but with the reality of sore feet and the memory of guns and hurricanes keeping me awake.

 

 

WHEN I REACHED her in the morning my grandmother sat with her mouth open, disapproving of my appearance.

 

 

"Hi, Gran, " I said mildly. "How's things? " She shed her shock briefly. "You do know you're due on the screen today? You look awful, Perry. " "Thanks so much. " "And you've got all those extra Fireworks Night shows. " "It will rain, " I said. "Can I sleep tonight on your sofa? " She agreed at once without question.

 

 

"And I want to talk to you about what I should do. " She looked with seriousness into my face. The few times I'd asked her for help in that way had meant an adult-to-adult evaluation of the known facts with no gender or generation gap involved. The one rule we'd kept so far had been to give any life-altering decisions a chance to mature, which meant never acting on impulse.

 

 

Her decision to go on travel-writing through her later seventies had had input from a whole parade of specialists, and for my abandonment of a career in physics for the presentation of the vagaries of wind and temperature over the British Isles she had called in a casting agency expert in assessing personality.

 

 

She had taken days to agree to the ongoing expense of having a private nurse, but, once it was decided, she had sold her precious diamonds, gifts from her husband (my grandfather), to refurbish the whole shabby apartment and to buy a runabout for me and a customized car for herself, to take her and her motor wheelchair on expeditions for her travel firm. We would live, she persuaded me, in style.

 

 

The nurse came out of the kitchen and offered me coffee.

 

 

Coffee, I thought, was nowhere near enough.

 

 

"Go for an hour's walk, my dear, " my grandmother said sweetly to her, and smiled with age-old wiles.

 

 

Jett van Els, working beyond her week-on, week-off schedule, asked if I would still be there if she returned in an hour.

 

 

I could have said I would be there whenever... but after she'd gone out into the chilly damp all-too-English November day I called a different young woman first.

 

 

Tentatively, I spoke to Belladonna, who replied in an ear-drum shattering shriek.

 

 

"Perry! Dad told me yesterday you were alive. I can't believe it! We all thought you'd drowned. " "Well... no, " I assured her calmingly, and asked where

 

 

I

 

 

could find Kris.

 

 

"I'm supposed to be marrying him, did you know? " " Congratulations. " "He asked me when I'd thought him dead all day. It's not fair. " "Your true feelings came out. " I smiled. "Where is he? " "Here. He drove to see Oliver Quigley, heaven knows why, that poor man's a frightful wreck even though Dad's not going to sue him over the filly after all, and then Kris is going to work, he's on his way now, actually, he spent the night here.

 

 

.

 

 

with me. Not the first time... why am I telling you. " I sorted out her meanings and inquired about the filly.

 

 

Alive or dead?

 

 

"Alive, " Bell said. "Sick to death but not dying, except that her mane and tail are thinning out, and now the equine research place are talking about what's wrong with her isn't ragwort in her hay, which they thought had been fed to her to nobble her, but, and you'll never believe it, they think it may be due to radiation sickness, I ask you! " I sat on my grandmother's sofa as if punched breathless.

 

 

I said

 

 

"Uh? " uselessly.

 

 

"Radiation sickness, " Bell repeated disgustedly. "They say, in the filly it's very mild, if it can ever be said to have a mild, but probably terminal, complaint. They say she's probably been exposed to radium or something similar. And where did she get it? Dad's absolutely furious. Kris said you would have known where to get radium. He said you'd have known about uranium and plutonium too because you were a physicist as well as a weather forecaster. " "Mm, " I said. "Well, it's very difficult to get hold of radium but not impossible. Marie Curie isolated it from pitchblende a hundred years or more ago in Paris. But the others... " I stopped abruptly, and then said, "Did Kris talk about me as if I were dead? " "I'm so sorry, Perry, we all did. " I said not to worry, learned where Kris would be when and sent good wishes to her father. Then I sat in the armchair beside my grandmother's wheels, and told her everything significant I had seen and felt and thought since Caspar Harvey's invitation to lunch at Newmarket.

 

 

She listened as if she'd been everywhere with me, as if her eyes and ears had duplicated my own.

 

 

At the end, she said in great alarm, "You need to ask someone for information, Perry, and for help. " "Yes, " I agreed, "but who? " That corny old phrase "going to the authorities" raised its banal head. Who, exactly, was an authority? Could I walk into the local nick and expect to be believed? No, I couldn't.

 

 

"Maybe, " I said after thought, "I'll try the Health and Safety Executive. " "Who are they? " "They inspect factories. " My grandmother shook her head, but I looked them up under civil service departments in the phone book and got them to agree to a meeting in an hour. Being Perry Stuart, weatherman and widely known TV face, had its uses.

 

 

Jett van Els returned to the minute with the warmth of Eve in her brown eyes and the chill of November on her cheeks.

 

 

There had been other nurses in my life with generous and willing impulses as temporary as their employment, but my all seeing grandparent, whileJett made coffee in the kitchen, un.

 

 

expectedly warned me this time not to awaken what I couldn't later put back to sleep. In amusement I promised, but a promise wasn't enough.

 

 

"I mean it, " my grandmother said. "When you want to be, you're too powerful for your own good. " Powerful wasn't the word for my impact on the motherly fiftyish official I at length met as my first true "authority. " I was not, she pointed out, a factory.

 

 

"I'm talking about a trading company, " I said.

 

 

She pursed her mouth. "Has it anything to do with weather? " "No. " She looked aimlessly for a while into the distance, sighed, then wrote a few words on a slip of paper and handed it to me.

 

 

"Try here, " she said. "You never know. " The "here" of the instruction was an office high in the premises of a textbook publishing house in Kensington. I rode an elevator as directed by an entrance-hall name-taker, and was met when the doors slid open by a young female general assistant with long untidy brownish hair and a long creased brownish skirt.

 

 

"I'm Melanie, " she announced, and then exclaimed, "I say!

 

 

Aren't you Perry Stuart? Good heavens! Come this way. " The office she led me into was small and its occupant, large.

 

 

Four bare walls and a skylight housed a desk, two chairs of soso comfort and a gray metal filing cabinet. The tall man who rose to a sketchy handshake and an introduction of himself as John Rupert could easily have filled the part of textbook publisher downstairs.