The priest said politely: 'You are looking for someone, Señor?'
Whitmore: 'Just a guy, Father.'
'On business, Señor?'
'He ordered some… merchandise. I just hauled it in over thehüls.'
The priest nodded. "That is your hoss in the – goddamn it, I meanjeep?
The director howled: 'Cut!'
The priest shook his head and spat sadly. 'Hell, Boss, Iknew I'd forget this one ain't a Western.'
Behind me, J.B. said softly: 'Don't we ah1?'
I got to Boscobel soon after eleven, and for once the joint was jumping. Mechanics and pilots were shoving the crop-spray planes into the single hangar; other pilots and a couple of local farmers who owned light planes were crowding the counter of the terminal hut, studying a weather chart, listening to a transistor radio, yelling at the clerk to ring Palisadoes met office yet again.
I asked the latest news and five people told me. Clara wasstillmoving along roughly in our direction – slightly south of westwards, and had last been seen about two hundred and fifty miles north-east of the República.
'She's big,' a spray pilot added. 'Fifty-knot gusts reported 300 miles ahead of the eye.'
'But what d'you bet we learn from the Repúblicaand Haiti and Cuba?' the man at the radio asked sourly.
That was a snag – three snags. Clara would be affecting the Repúblicanow, probably Haiti and Cuba by midnight. But all three were notoriously bad at broadcasting useful weather reports. Cuba and the Repúblicabecause they were just naturally secretive, Haiti because it's just Haití.
And while American weather flights would track the eye of the hurricane well enough they wouldn't necessarily check all its edges – and it was the edges, particularly the leading edge, that interested me.
The spray pilot said cheerfully: 'Sorry there's no room in the hangar, Keith.'
Til send you a postcard from Caracas,' I said. 'Sun shining, light sea breeze, wish you were here.'
The man with the radio chuckled. 'Just after he'd got the girl from Caracas installed at Shaw Park. Man, have youseen her?' He took his hands off the radio long enough to make Miss Jiminez-shaped gestures in the air.
Tveseen her,' the spray pilot said. 'You know, Keith – I'd say God was watching you. You bring in a girl and He sends a hurricane to test you: if it's really love you wouldn't let a little wind stop you.'
'As the actress said to the bishop,' the radio man added.
I stepped to the door and looked up at the sky. So, super-stitiously, did every other pilot in the group. But it was still clear and blue except for the fluffy white cumulus building up on the Blue Mountains; the wind was the normal gentle easterly. Nothing to see – yet.
But the eye of a hurricane isn't big; the hard core, the 150-mph winds spinning around the calm centre, isn't usually more than forty miles across. And that's the part that does the real damage: guts houses, throws steamers halfway up Main Street, flips heavy aircraft on their backs. But it's still only theyolk of a broken egg; the white spreads far and wide. Clara could be changing clouds 1,000 miles from her eye, dragging winds into an anti-clockwise spiral 500 miles ahead.
And there was our trouble: coming as she was, the first hint we'd get of Clara would be a shift of wind so it came from the north. And with only an east-west runway – like every runway in Jamaica -a north wind would be a crosswind. It might be too much crosswind to risk a take-off. So I could find myself pinned down with the eye still nearly five hundred miles off -and even if it didn't arrive for another twenty-four hours, me and die Mitchell would still be here when it did.
The spray pilot asked: 'Going this afternoon?'
It would make sense. Yet the first wind-shift could hardly come before three o'clock in the morning. And it might not come at all. Sooner or later Clara wouldhave to recurve – turn north and east. And Caracas, or anyornersafe airport south of here, was a lot of petrol away…
'I'll wait,' I decided.
'It must be love,' the radio man said.
The spray pilot snorted. 'If he's got any sense he'll be sleeping with the plane tonight.'
I nodded. It would be nice to trust die met office to ring me at the hotel if the wind shifted northerly and reached more than, say fifteen knots, but… I'd be sleeping widi die plane. I was the aircraft captain.
I walked up the runway to see how die electricians were getting on and warn diem not to leave any loose ends diis evening. But diey were just about finished. A new set of clean, bright plastic-covered wires direaded along the dowdy soundproofing behind the cockpit; a neat little panel of one master switch and four press-buttons on the instrument panel.
'Works okay,' the chief assured me. 'And when they've finished the scene, we'll strip it out. Can use them coils and magnets again. Unless you was thinking of setting up professionally as a bomber?'
Big joke. Everybody laughed brightly.
I had a quick drink at the Golden Head, dienback to diehotel to stockpile a little sleep, stopping on the way to buy an oil lamp.
At seven I woke up and rang the Palisadoes met office – and Clara was still coming. Reports were also in about what she'd done to Puerto Rico during the early morning: trees and telephone lines down, flooding, landslips in the interior – the usual catalogue. But all at a range of three hundred miles at least. The Repúblicamust have got the same treatment during the day. Well, I just hoped General Boscogot caught out of doors without a raincoat.
But not me. I wanted no part at all of sister Clara. She sounded a very big girl by now.
I washed, had a solitary drink at the bar, a leisurely dinner, and finally forced myself to head for Boscobel at half-past nine.
TWENTY-TWO
At this time, I had the strip to myself. The terminal hut was dark and locked, the hangar of small planes quiet. At diis end of the island, Hurricane Clara was strictly my problem from now on.
I walked down to the east end of the runway with the hurricane lamp, lit it, and hung it up on a tree just right of the runway. At 3,000 feet it would be just a spark of light, but that's all you really need for a night takeoff: an aiming point. As long as I remembered to aim left of it.
I walked back up to the Mitchell. There, I took off the rudder control locks so that the first north wind would bang the rudders and wake me – in the unlikely event of my being asleep. Then, because you don't officially start a sleepless night until you start trying to sleep, I sat down against the nose-wheel, lit my pipe, and breathed smoke at the sky.
It drifted away slowly. The night was very still, very clear and very dark, with that gigantic echoing distant darkness youonly get in the tropics. Not quiet, though: the trees and bushes – not quite a jungle – on either side of the runway buzzed and clicked and purred busily, with an occasional squawk or squeal to break the monotony. But a tropical night never gets spooky the way a northern night can. At least, not on an island where the worst things that can bite you are scorpions and hotels.
I smoked and looked at several thousand stars and wondered if, somewhere out there among the bug-eyed green monsters, there wasn't some poor bug-eyed green bastard sitting under an old bomber waiting for an ammonia storm and looking out at the stars and wondering if, somewhere out there…
On an engineering-type guess at the stars and odds involved, I decided there probably was. And maybe he was even thinking about how he'd come to get mixed up in somebody else's war and trying to work out how he felt about it. And perhaps remembering that he'd have no bomb-aimer, so he'd have to go in low, like a fighter-bomber, and wondering how low he dared go with 500-pounders. Even assuming the delayed-action fuses worked on bombs that had probably been stockpiled for years in the steam heat of some Central American hideout…