A cheer goes up over the TWISTEX frequency.
North of the mesonets, on the other side of the tornado, are Tim, Carl, and Grzych—packed into Tim’s new rig with a Discovery cameraman. They hurry east along Highway 12 toward Bowdle. The vortex drills down onto the horizon, tethering earth and sky. “This thing is moving northeast,” Tim says. “It’s coming toward us.”
“Wow,” Carl exclaims, “it’s right there!”
The tornado churns along the wide South Dakota prairie, closing in on a slice of highway that’ll be their best shot at a deployment. Even with the new probe truck and its big diesel, Tim is struggling to head it off. “The thing’s gonna translate across the road,” he says.
“Are we going to deploy the probe here?” Grzych asks.
“I’m not sure. I can’t get a handle on the direction.”
But this is it, now or never.
Carl brings the truck to a stop in the breakdown lane and leaves the engine running as they step out, clothes snapping in the wind. Tim kneels beside the truck, strokes his chin, and looks for the sign. The cloud motion overhead is vigorous, boiling. The tornado has momentarily roped out, but there is little doubt that it will return. The question is when.
Tim peers up at the wall cloud, hovering like a mother ship. He sees low-level moisture drift beneath the updraft like tatters of low fog. This is good. It means the wall cloud is cycling, gathering its strength for the next pulse. The storm could produce another tornado any second now.
The internal clock that guides Tim’s deployment timing is ticking down. The circulation is closing in. He turns to Carl and Grzych. “Let’s do it.”
They remove the tie-downs, lower the lift gate, and strain to pull TOWER onto the asphalt. Tim yanks the smoke-canister pins and orange braids belch forth and stream across the field toward the storm. He raises the lift gate and stands watching for a moment until he realizes how quickly the developing circulation is narrowing the distance.
It looks like the storm is falling from the sky. The wedge descends and vortices start daggering from its underside.
Leaves and wheat stalks bombard them. The men scuttle around the truck and pile in. The cab becomes a wind tunnel as inflow blasts through the open doors. “Get in! Get in! Get in!” they shout at the Discovery cameraman, his lens still trained on the tornado.
As the cab’s detritus takes flight, they muscle the doors shut. Carl pushes the accelerator to the floor. The diesel engine roars.
Grzych peers through the rear window at the receding TOWER and the strengthening vortex.
“It’s going in,” he announces. “It’s going in!”
Carl raises his fist and the cab rings with joyful hollering.
“All right! All right!” Tim says. “Carl, pull over! Pull over! We gotta record it!”
A short distance up the road, Carl again swings into the breakdown lane and throws the truck into park. The men spill from the GMC. They can see the inflow coursing low over the hay fields—a deadly river of radial wind known to chasers as the ghost train. The funnel isn’t quite fully condensed, more like a wedge in gestation, trailing a bolus of swirling condensation over TOWER. In its current form, this may be no Manchester beast, but at least this field test has provided proof of concept: even from here, Tim can see that TOWER stands stubbornly rooted to the asphalt.
Tim’s voice rises above the deafening wind almost to the breaking point, his composure utterly lost now. “It’s right in there! It’s right in there!”
He jabs his fists at the air and throws his arms roughly around his comrades in the bar ditch. Over the years, Tim’s fortunes have risen and fallen. The creation of TOWER, the most technologically sophisticated in situ probe ever devised, was the jolt his research program needed. Now it’s proven worth it. His invention has shown it can stand strong in the guts of a growing tornado. Tim has a reason to smile and laugh again, like a storm chaser in the thrall of his first intercept.
Off to the west, the mesonets steer toward TOWER’s position, dataloggers humming. Driving point, M1 has the tornado in its sights. Sitting at the dead center of the highway ahead, Tim’s fledgling twister has matured and looms ever larger, its color the pale hue of bone. They’re in the presence of the beast now, an enormous incisor sunk into the horizon. Somehow, Lee sounds like he’s directing traffic. “Let’s keep spread out so we can get a good gradient data set off to the west within this RFD until it crosses the road,” he says over the radio. “Then we’ll scoot in just south, and underneath it, and back up.”
As they move in closer, the span of M1’s windshield is almost entirely filled with a vortex whose manifestation from one instant to the next is utterly novel, a transfixing, almost hypnotic sight. It is a reminder that a tornado isn’t an object in the same way we think of a stone or a handful of earth. It isn’t a thing, it’s a process, a wholesale redistribution of pressure and air. The effects of this process, however, are all too tangible. Off to the left, M1 is the first to notice leaning power poles, a defoliated line of trees, a house with an exposed span of attic lumber, and pastures strewn with debris of every size and shape.
Directly across the highway, TOWER smokes defiantly; its anemometers wheel, and the orange canisters suffuse the mesonets with the scent of their acrid orange plume. Another cheer goes up over the radio. Laubach screams jubilantly, almost involuntarily: “Motherfucker!” Tim has done it again.
As they enter the outskirts of Bowdle, the wail of the town’s siren presses in through the windows. The storm is continuing to grow; they’re on the trail of a giant. Its broad shadow sweeps across the plains to the north
