Now, the antenna rotating on its axis, Wurman’s DOW6 has begun to scan. RSDOW follows suit two minutes later. Much of what follows will be discovered only after he has analyzed the radar data in detail.
At around 6:17, DOW6 detects near-concentric tornadic circulations, one 2,000 meters in diameter, and a second 150-meter subvortex nested almost directly within its core flow. This is what Tim, Carl, and Paul would have just been able to glimpse through the rain curtains. By 6:19, other vortices northwest of the parent tornado are ingested into the circulation. Then, a profound evolution takes place. At 6:20, the embedded subvortex becomes dislocated. It drifts from the center toward the farthest boundary of the circulation and embarks on an entirely novel orbit. “It’s hard to know why it changed in structure, from something internal to something external,” Wurman says. “You could speculate, but because it was such a difficult storm, nobody got the data they were hoping for. It was just too hard. There are a lot of questions that probably won’t get answered.”
Those questions will come later, however. For now, across the street from the Canyon Creek subdivision, Wurman peers into the display inside a cramped cabin, cooking in the radiative heat of high-voltage electronics. He knows only that the DOW is reading a baffling and nearly incomprehensible bolus of violent wind. He studies the screen with growing puzzlement, attempting to orient the other DOW and his pod-deployment team in time and space. Yet he can’t discern the pattern. Where will the most violent winds show up a minute from now? Five minutes from now? Even with DOW6 scanning a full 360 degrees every seven seconds, he can’t make sense of any of it. It will be impossible to direct the pod deployment team with any degree of safety. What’s worse, it is clear the subvortex, once unleashed from its tight orbit within the main circulation, contains winds of deadly intensity—well over 200 miles per hour.
Wurman is not going to lead himself or his crew anywhere near velocities like that. “You’d better be careful with that kind of thing,” he says, “because it could kill us.” He calls off his pod deployment team.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE CROSSING
TIM, CARL, AND Paul hit the turn onto Reformatory Road just after 6:15. Rain now rips over the road in dense horizontal sheets. Objects plunge through the air like knots of sparrows. Carl rounds the corner and guns it north, with conditions pushing the Cobalt to its limits. Each second is precious. Whether or not they realize it, the tornado is lunging for them.
The moment they crossed into the core flow, with debris ringing off of the Cobalt’s frame, the vortex snapped its jaws to the northeast, just as Tim had warned. Reformatory becomes an escape route. If not for their turn here, the vehicle would have been overtaken.
Even after Tim has predicted its next move, the hair’s-width margin comes as a shock. This tornado is far larger, and moving far faster, than they could have expected.
The white Cobalt now shoulders through an inflow current like a boat struggling upriver. It’s harrowing driving, but they’re able to open up a buffer. Judging by the chatter in the car, they’re relieved to be out ahead of the beast. They plot their next maneuvers: “Now we go up north,” Tim says, “then east.”
Distance, however, does not gain them perspective. The stiff southbound inflow winds are attended by a slug of rain winding centrifugally around the tornado’s northern flank. What had once been so clear, so readily tracked, quickly dissolves into the gray. Only chasers to the south of the storm can see the tornado now.
As they make their way farther north and plot a new route, Tim’s phone rings. It’s a New York producer with whom he’s been working, calling for an update at a particularly inopportune time. “Yeah, yeah. We’re at . . . the tornado is about five hundred yards away. I really can’t talk right now!” Tim says. “It’s just south of El Reno. It’s gonna be on the ground for a long time, and it’s heading right for Oklahoma City.”
Tim does his level best to end the phone call quickly, but in a burst of pique, it sounds as though he mutters “Goddamnit!” under his breath. He hangs up after forty-five seconds. It must seem like an eternity under the circumstances.
A mile up Reformatory Road, Carl swings east again onto Reuter. They’re still angling for an intercept, even though they’ve been given every reason to abandon it. Between the untimely dead end at the airport, the perilous push to the south, and their brief penetration of the debris core, the chase has proven problematic from the first.
But Tim isn’t the same chaser he was on that dirt road near Last Chance some twenty years ago, or even at Manchester. He’s spent so much time in the presence of violent storms that the old pang of fear has dulled. And while he has often said that nothing scares him more than the tornado he can’t see, he and Carl have penetrated the rain before not knowing what awaited them on the other side. No-man’s-land is where Tim found his greatest victories. He has succeeded by toeing the line between danger and safety.
