‘Don’t worry. Whatever’s going on back there, Biddy’ll keep on top of it.’
‘You’d sure as hell better not get underneath it. Or anywhere near the middle of it.’
He slid an arm round her waist and gave her a reassuring hug as she snuggled her head against his shoulder.
‘Take care, sailor,’ she said. ‘Take very special care.’
‘You would never, ever believe,’ he growled, ‘how careful Biddy, the Bell and I are going to be.’
It never occurred to him that he should warn her to be careful too. Maxima was so sleek, solid, stable; so outstandingly designed, so painstakingly constructed, so well maintained, so excellently crewed. Everything, in fact, that the Titanic had been on her maiden voyage.
Five minutes later, he was buckling himself into the co-pilot’s seat while Biddy went through the pre-flight instrument checks. ‘You ready?’ she asked as she completed the shortest possible formalities.
‘Ready,’ he said. The Bell elevated gently, almost imperceptibly, and reversed off the deck as he spoke. Then, nose down with her flood-lit launch pad already falling away upwind of her, she swung round to face the northerly wind head on. Richard turned in his seat and looked back as the brightness of Maxima passed beneath them and became blurred by a writhing haze almost at once as it fell away into distance and darkness surprisingly swiftly. Biddy began to power the suddenly frail-seeming Bell upwards and forwards, into the enormous darkness ahead.
It became obvious within the first fifteen minutes that the game little chopper did not like the conditions through which she was flying. The thick wind battered her with unexpected force and solidity, making the windscreen in front of them vibrate and seem to flex, while the doors on either side of them rattled as though invisible giants were trying to break in. Biddy ran out of conversation almost at once, and a glance at her closed face, lit by multicoloured brightness from the displays, frowning in concentration, made Richard decide against disturbing her. It seemed incredible how rapidly the storm swept over them. Fair enough, Biddy had pushed the engine controls to maximum and the Bell was doing a very respectable one hundred and fifty knots — say two hundred and fifty kilometres per hour — into a wind that seemed to be coming against them at the better part of fifty knots. ‘How much flying time do we have?’ he asked casually after the longest silence he could bear.
‘Three hours or so, like I said. Plenty to get us there if I can shake this headwind,’ she grated. ‘I have a practical ceiling of about eleven thousand feet, and we’re fully fuelled but otherwise unladen, so that’ll help. Let’s go up and see how far we get.’
‘You won’t get over the top of the ARkStorm,’ Richard warned her, thinking back to Dr Jones’s briefing yesterday morning. ‘There are likely to be cumulonimbus thunderheads peaking above twenty thousand feet somewhere quite close ahead. Certainly between us and Long Beach. Think of the Himalayas.’
‘Hunh,’ she grunted. ‘Like the weather predictor on Maxima didn’t already tell me all I wanted to know about that. Well, maybe we can go round whatever’s there. The top of my ceiling will put us a thousand feet above the highest peaks of the Sierra Juarez, so maybe we’ll just take a little detour …’ As she spoke she twisted her controls and the Bell swung to the right as it continued to climb. The wind continued to push back against her at first, but then Richard began to suspect that, in among the northerly gusts, there were occasional squalls coming in from the east. These had a beneficial effect to begin with, pushing them over the thin ribbon of land that was the Baja California.
After a while, Richard began to make out the jewel-bright lights of major highways winding like necklaces from north to south and, as the flight proceeded towards the end of its first forty-five minutes, the wider webs of brightness that denoted villages and towns. While the battering from the thick black northerly continued to intensify, he thought grimly, the sight of solid ground and civilization — even if it was sparse — was reassuring. Or it was so to begin with. After three-quarters of an hour or so of an unsettling flight, the Bell swooped eastwards and the ground began to rise towards the peaks of the Cerro Picacho del Diabolo towering above the National Park of Sierra de San Pedro Martir, their bright red warning lights designed to inform such aircraft that might want to venture nearby that these were mountains more than ten thousand feet high. The colour and the elevation of the red warning lights put Richard in mind of the glimpse Robin and he had shared that evening of the silver-skinned Dragon Dream airship burning low in the sunset sky. The bright red gleams were far ahead on what Richard would have called the starboard forequarter on a ship. In at two o’clock on a clock face.
But even as Richard fixed on the bright beacons that functioned as lighthouses for aircraft, their ruby brilliance was abruptly swept away. Or, he realized, as he narrowed his eyes and strained for a clearer view, they were simply washed away.
‘What the hell …’ snarled Biddy.
‘What?’ asked Richard.
‘Easterly squall like a boot in the ribs,’ she answered tersely. ‘Now where the hell did that come from?’ No sooner had Biddy said this than the Bell was hurled further to the right by something more than the wind. A pounding deluge swept in over her, thundering against the canopy and smashing into the windows like a hailstorm. Richard swung round to look past Biddy into the blackness west of them, his all-too-vivid memory full of the raindrops outside the Sky Room. Raindrops the size of baseballs. They were coming at the Bell now as though there were some kind of rail gun out there firing from high in the sky. No sooner did he do so than the familiar pyrotechnic display began. Great white bolts of lightning began to slam down out of the clouds, igniting their writhing bases in a series of instantaneous flashes that also seemed to give depth to the night and some kind of illumination to the wild seas close beneath the writhing thunderheads.
Another gust of water-laden wind battered in from the west, swinging the Bell’s fuselage like a pendulum beneath the four whirling rotors that fought to grip its howling thickness and keep the sturdy machine aloft. The windows went opaque, while the old-fashioned dials and gauges on the video display screens beneath them seemed to spin out of all control. The thunder of rain and wind all but drowned out the roaring of the twin Pratt and Witney engines fighting to keep them aloft.
But no sooner had the blinding blast from the west obscured everything around them than another counter-blast from the north replaced it, scouring the panoramic windscreen just beyond their knees clear in an instant. The blood-red light of the Picacho del Diabolo returned — seemingly a little closer this time. Or it did so for a gleaming instant before the next vicious squall roared in from the west to obscure it once more. ‘If it gets much worse than this I’ll be putting down at Cielito Lindo airfield,’ warned Biddy grimly. ‘That’s just across the bay to the east of the San Quintin light.’