Clear and Present Danger

'Left standard rudder, aye, coming to new course three-three-five.' The helmsman turned the wheel, then reached for the throttle controls. 'Two thirds, sir.'

'Very well. How you feel, Obrecki?' the skipper asked.

'Hell of a coaster, but I'm wondering when the ride is going to stop, sir.' The youngster grinned, but didn't take his eyes off the compass.

'You're doing just fine. Let me know if you get tired, though.'

'Aye aye, sir.'

Oreza and Riley appeared a minute later. 'What gives?' the former asked.

'We go to flight quarters in thirty minutes,' the captain told them.

'Oh, fuck!' Riley observed. 'Excuse me, Red, but... shit!'

'Okay, Master Chief, now that we've gotten that behind us, I'm depending on you to get it done,' Wegener said sternly. Riley accepted the rebuke like the pro he was.

'Beg pardon, Cap'n, you'll get my best shot. Put the XO in the tower?'

Wegener nodded. The executive officer was the best man to command the evolution from the flight-control station. 'Go get him.' Riley left and Wegener turned to his quartermaster.

'Portagee, I want you on the wheel when we go Hotel Corpin. I'll have the conn.'

'Sir, there ain't no Hotel Corpin.'

'That's why you're on the wheel. Relieve Obrecki in half an hour and get a feel for her. We gotta give him the best target we can.'

'Jesus.' Oreza looked out the windows. 'You got it, Red.'

Johns held the aircraft down, staying a scant five hundred feet above ground level. He disengaged the automatic flight controls, trusting more to his skill and instinct now, leaving the throttle to Willis and concentrating on his instruments as much as he could. It started in an instant. One moment they were flying in clear air, the next there was rain pelting the aircraft.

'This isn't so bad,' Johns lied outrageously over the intercom.

'They even pay us to do it,' Willis agreed with no small irony.

PJ checked the navigation display. The winds were from the northwest at the moment, slowing the helicopter somewhat, but that would change. His eyes flickered from the airspeed indicator to another one that worked off a Doppler-radar aimed at the ground. Satellite and inertial navigation systems told a computer display where he was and where he wanted to go, a red dot. Another screen held the display of a radar system that interrogated the storm ahead, showing the worst sections in red. He'd try to avoid those, but the yellow areas he had to fly through were bad enough.

'Shit!' Willis shouted. Both pilots yanked up on the collective and twisted to maximum power. They'd caught a downdraft. Both pairs of eyes locked onto the dial that gave them vertical velocity in feet per minute. For an instant they were headed down at over a thousand, less than thirty seconds of life for an aircraft at five hundred feet. But microbursts like that are localized phenomena. The helicopter bottomed out at two hundred and clawed its way back up. PJ decided that seven hundred feet was a safer cruise altitude at the moment. He said one word:

'Close.'

Willis grunted by way of reply.

In back, men were strapped down to the floor. Ryan had already done that, and was holding onto his minigun mount as though it would make a difference. He could see out the open door - at nothing, really. Just a mass of gray darkness occasionally lit by lightning. The helicopter was jolting up and down, tossed like a child's kite by the moving masses of air, except that the helicopter weighed forty thousand pounds. But there was nothing he could do. His fate was in the hands of others, and nothing he knew or did mattered now. Even vomiting didn't make him feel any better, though he and others were doing that. He just wanted it to be over, and only intellect told him that he really did care how it ended - didn't he?

The buffeting continued, but the winds shifted as the helicopter penetrated the storm. They had started off from the northeast, but shifted with measurable speed counterclockwise, and were soon on the port quarter of the aircraft. That increased their ground speed. With an airspeed of one-fifty, they now had a ground speed of one- ninety and increasing.

'This is doing wonders for our fuel economy,' Johns noted.

'Fifty miles,' Willis replied.

'CAESAR, this is CLAW, over.'

'Roger, CLAW, we are five-zero miles from Alternate One, and it's a little bumpy -' A little bumpy, my ass , Captain Montaigne thought, roller-coastering through lighter weather a hundred miles away '- otherwise okay,' Johns reported. 'If we cannot make the landing, I think we can try to slingshot out the other side and make for the Panamanian coast.' Johns frowned as more water struck the windshield. Some was ingested into the engines at the same time.

'Flameout! We've lost Number Two.'

'Restart it,' Johns said, still trying to be cool. He lowered the nose and traded altitude for speed to get out of the heavy rain. That, too, was supposed to be a local phenomenon. Supposed to be.

'Working on it,' Willis rasped.

'Losing power in Number One,' Johns said. He twisted the throttle all the way and managed to get some of it back. His two-engine aircraft was now operating on one of its engines at 80 percent power. 'Let's get Two back, Captain. We have a hundred foot per minute of 'down' right now.'

'Working,' Willis repeated. The rain eased a little, and Number Two started turning and burning again, but delivered only 40 percent. 'I think the P3 loss just got worse. We got a shit sandwich here, Colonel. Forty miles. We're committed to Alternate One now.'

'At least we have an option. I never could swim worth a damn.' PJ's hands were sweaty now. He could feel them loose inside the handmade gloves. Intercom time: 'AC to crew, we're about fifteen minutes out,' he told them. 'One-five minutes out.'

Riley had assembled a group of ten, all experienced crewmen. Each had a safety line around his waist, and Riley checked every knot and buckle personally. Though all had life preservers on, finding a man overboard in these conditions would require a miracle from an especially loving God who had lots of things to keep Him busy tonight, Riley thought. Tie-down chains and more two-inch line was assembled and set in place, already secured to the deck wherever possible. He took the deck crew forward, standing them against the aft-facing wall of the superstructure. 'All ready here,' he said over the phone to the XO in flight control. To his people: 'If any of you fuck up and go over the side, I'll fucking jump overboard an' strangle you myself!'

They were in a whirlpool of wind. According to the navigational display, they were now north of their target, traveling at nearly two hundred fifty knots. The buffet now was the worst it had been. One downburst hurled them down at the black waves until Johns stopped at a bare hundred feet. It was now to the point that the pilot wanted to throw up. He'd never flown in conditions like this, and it was worse than the manuals said it was. 'How far?'

'We should be there right now, sir!' Willis said. 'Dead south.'

'Okay.' Johns pushed the stick to the left. The sudden change of direction relative to the wind threatened to snap the helicopter over, but he held it and crabbed onto the new course. Two minutes later, they were in the clear.

' Panache , this is CAESAR, where the hell are you?'

'Lights on, everything, now!' Wegener shouted when he heard the call. In a moment Panache was lit up like a Christmas tree.

'Goddamn if you don't look pretty down there!' the voice said a few seconds later.

Adele was a small, weak, disorganized hurricane, now turning back into a tropical storm due to confused local weather conditions. That made her winds weaker than everyone had feared, but the eye was also small and disorganized, and the eye was what they needed now.

It is a common misconception that the eye of a hurricane is calm. It is not, though after experiencing the powerful winds in the innermost wall of clouds, the fifteen knots of breeze there seem like less than nothing to an observer. But the wind is unsteady and shifting, and the seas in the eye, though not as tall as those in the storm proper, are confused. Wegener had stationed his ship within a mile of the northwest edge of the eye, which was barely four miles across. The storm was moving at about fifteen knots. They had fifteen minutes to recover the helicopter. About the only good news was that the air was clear. No rain was falling, and the crew in the pilothouse