Second Wind

Chapter 4

Kris and I climbed through the rear door of Amy’s/Robin’s truly terrific little aeroplane and sat in executive-style seats facing each other across a table. Designed originally for ten narrow people with only emergency male toilet facilities, 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 lockable 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 dog-leg, and a brief stop.’ He was trying to rationalise it. ‘And of course this super aeroplane 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 aeroplane 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 re-thought 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 dog-leg to the island. Then we circled M, which means maritime because we’re going over water, and the circle round J 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 grey bundle occupying one of the passenger seats.

‘Robin bought a new one,’ Kris said. ‘He’s made a point of doing everything right. Everyone 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 colour 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.’

‘Great,’ I said, though half-heartedly, 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 mph in the eye-wall, had just about reached Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The eye was currently located at 17.04 degrees North, 78.3 degrees west, and was moving north-west at 6 miles an hour. Pressure in the eye had last been measured at 930 millibars, having dropped from 967 overnight. The eye at present measured 11 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 pathfinding, 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 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 aeroplane, 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’ stand-bys 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 always containing 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. ‘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 pyjamas 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 uninflated, 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-take off 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 take-off.

Permission was granted laconically, the Tower on the whole preferring only authorised 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 Trox.

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 grey 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 re-did 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 centre length of the otherwise rocky strip. The runway, disconcertingly, was greenish-grey, 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 to neither 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 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 forgotten them all... Brakes off, undercarriage down, fuel mixture rich, propellers fully fine...’ His busy ringers set everything right... all, I guessed, except his self respect. ‘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 mesmerised.

‘Well, we’re not staying here at the end of the runway for ever, 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 aeroplane 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 woods, 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.

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 rainwater underground 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 concrete and wood 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 iguana 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, that 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 anti-clockwise, would be buffeting not only us mortals soon, but would be threatening also the aeroplane, 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 aeroplane’s nose more or less straight up the runway and opened the throttles to maximum.

The aeroplane 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 aeroplane rise like a hawk, and within a minute we were at three thousand feet and climbing, and Trox Island had disappeared into the murk behind us.

It wasn’t until that moment that I realised that in our urgent race to be airborne I had somehow dropped my camera. All those careful pictures for 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 head-set 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 head-set, 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 centre 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 per cent 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 aeroplane, 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 head-sets. ‘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 re-awakened 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 919 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 realise 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 fulfilment 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 aeroplane, 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 we could never have said, like my grandmother, ‘Been there. Done that.’

According to the airspeed indicator we were travelling 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 aeroplane, 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 aeroplane 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 centre, 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 petrol 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 anticlockwise 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 south-west 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 travelled 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 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, grey 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 aeroplane weren’t up to the job. My grandmother’s heebie-jeebies 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 aeroplane 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 aeroplanes 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 lop-sided 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 realise 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 sea water splashed on the windscreen.

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 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 aeroplane 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 aeroplane, 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 aeroplane until it completed a fast wing-down sliding disappearance into oblivion and was gone for ever.

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 inflated 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 out of my trousers, so that I wore only 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 gen that they hadn’t been battling hurricane-size waves.

It was daylight, and my watch had stopped, water-filled, at 2:15 pm, 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 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 out-last Odin, and then to be visible, and then to be preferably visible on a regular cross-Caribbean air route.

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 practised 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 cork rising.

One could swallow salt water 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.