To devote his full attention to the road ahead, Carl passes the DSLR to Tim. He turns left onto Reno, the tornado now visible out the passenger window.
An intercept is not yet out of the question, but Carl knows they will first have to gain on the tornado, pass it, and put some distance in between for the deployment. He needs to drive fast to keep their hopes alive, sixty miles per hour or more down a rain-slicked country road in a hard and veering wind.
Tim is unnerved by their speed, but not because he doubts Carl’s ability to handle the sedan in these conditions—he’s done so many times before. What frightens Tim is the specter of all that can go wrong farther down the line. The tornado, he knows, is like a steel tooth on a coil-spring bear trap. The question is not whether it will snap shut, but when. Once the rear-flank gust front coils around the updraft, it could dislocate the tornado and send it caroming into them, dying but no less deadly. Tim has seen it happen any number of times, and fears they are driving straight into the jaws of the trap.
“Okay, we’ve gotta be careful in case this thing wraps up. . . . I would slow up here, because if this thing starts moving to the north, we’re in trouble,” he says. “Slow up. . . . We’re almost right alongside of it here. Slow up! Let the thing go off to the east a little bit . . . see if that thing transverses us.”
Carl sees nothing but clear road ahead, and he believes they can’t afford to lose any more ground. It is a familiar push and pull between Tim’s relative caution and Carl’s aggression. This is their opportunity to overtake the tornado, he insists.
But what Carl can’t know is that the usual distinctions of vortex anatomy have become virtually meaningless. This is more like the storm Wurman encountered in Geary, Oklahoma, when the DOW became a probe. The entire mesocyclone has sunk to the ground, creating a tornado that’s practically purpose-built to ensnare chasers with its hazy boundaries, torrential rains, and roving pockets of lethal wind.
Even with access to real-time mobile radar, Wurman strayed inside at Geary. Tim and Carl have no such advantage. In fact, it’s apparent they don’t know what they’re looking at from one moment to the next. Is that merely rain, or is it the outer circulation? Is the visible funnel the full tornado, or simply a part of something much larger? How big is this thing? The problem is one of perspective. This is not the kind of tornado they think it is. It does not end where they think it ends. With nothing but their eyes and updates every five minutes from the weather service’s stationary Doppler, their decisions aren’t fully informed.
Shortly after they pass south of the airport, the current shifts suddenly. A stiff headwind out of the east wedges and pries at the hood of the sedan. Without realizing it, they have entered the outer circulation of the tornado.
Tim spies hanging motes of dark chaff in the sky all around them. “We’ve got debris in the air,” he says. As if to drive home his point, something heavy glances off the Cobalt. “That’s the problem.”
Tim sets the camera down on the floorboard, where it remains for the rest of the journey, and he begins to chart a new course.
He instructs Carl to take Reformatory Road, the next north option, shortly before 6:15. Wind and debris continue to batter the sedan. As they reach the corner, it’s unlikely they mark the alteration in vortex structure that occurs at the same moment.
Directly to their south, the storm is pouring rain onto the empty fields, heavier and heavier with each passing second, darkening to the point of opacity. Then, the absolute gray surrounding the tornado breaks and admits a weak light. Alternating bands of rain and wind-cleared air sweep toward the heart of the storm, one after the next. But one of the rain bands is different from the others, cohering, hardening; it isn’t rain. It sweeps down out of the cloud base, dark as onyx, drifting over the fields like the slow lashing of a dragon’s tail.
A careful observer would be able to see the birth of an embedded subvortex—a tornado within the tornado. But Tim, Carl, and Paul are likely too distracted by the unrelenting inflow and their precarious footing to take note. Behind them, the subvortex takes root and begins to trace a near-concentric orbit within the parent tornado. From the Cobalt, it would have been visible for only a moment, then seemingly reabsorbed. But it isn’t done. Before long, it will return.
At 6:16 p.m., Josh Wurman levels DOW6 on a short paved drive off State Highway 4, where a steel gate opens onto broad pasturage to the east. The hydraulic outriggers cantilever the bright blue seventy-ton International truck. The 250-kilowatt magnetron transmitter buzzes in the steel-fortified rear cabin. A communications mast periscopes fifty-six feet above, all of it giving the rig the appearance of a Transformer in metamorphosis. Roughly fifteen miles west, far beyond the low, single-story shingle roofs of a suburban Yukon subdivision, the tornado traces a snaking path.
Three miles to the southwest of DOW6, a second unit, the Rapid-Scan DOW, has taken up an ideal position in the farm country, with almost nothing taller than a stalk of wheat between the antenna and the storm. For sampling an eastward mover, the team is well situated, at least for the moment.
Wurman and his colleague Karen Kosiba should be on a plane to Helsinki right now for a conference, but
