Her Name Will Be Faith (35 page)

"Ten million people flooding the streets, and
wardens telling them
where to go, with maybe only a few minutes in hand? How
many wardens
do you have? One million?"

The Assistant Commissioner pointed. "You guys trying
to be funny?
Sure not everyone
will make it. We all know that in the event of an atomic
war
there's going to be casualties, maybe as high as sixty per cent. The
Pentagon talks about mega deaths. Who am I to
argue with the Pentagon?
And what the hell has an atomic attack to do
with the weather?"

"Nothing," Richard agreed. "Save that I'd
like to ask, these fall-out
shelters, where are
they?"

"Why don't you go look them up on the map? They're
everywhere,
and they're
adequate. No goddamned Commie is going to catch us
napping."

"Well, would I be correct in assuming that they're
all in subways,
cellars, and that kind
of thing? In fact, underground."

"Well, Jesus," the Assistant Commissioner
remarked. "I've never
heard of putting
fall-out shelters in penthouses."

"Would I be right in assuming that the entire area
between 34th Street
and the Battery is less
than 50 feet above sea level?" Richard persisted, refusing to abandon his
smile.

"Don't
ask me, Mr Connors. I'm not the City Engineer."

"Well, I can tell you that according to the ordnance
map, it is. So if a
lot of people were to
start going down into subways and cellars, you are
talking about them going down to sea level or even beneath it. What
would happen if you had a tidal surge of 25 or 30
feet coming through
the Narrows, and your population had all taken
refuge in the fall-out shelters?"

The
Assistant Commissioner looked at Kimmelman again. "Say, what the hell is
this guy talking about? Atomic bombs or weather?"

"In
his book, they're the same thing," Kimmelman explained.

"Thirty
feet of water coming through the Narrows?" The Assistant Commissioner
scratched his head in bewilderment.

"Look," Richard said. "All I want to know
is this: does the NYPD
have
an emergency plan for the evacuation of the city of Manhattan in
the
event of a situation which might require such an evacuation, but not
necessarily an enemy atomic attack? It could be an outbreak of plague, an
incipient earthquake, or a major storm. Anything which might make the use of
fall-out shelters irrelevant or even dangerous."

"Think maybe of a 24-hour warning of a Commie attack,
rather than
six minutes,"
Kimmelman suggested brightly. "A whole Commie task
force
somehow spirited across the Atlantic and ready to invade."

That
was a tactical error. The Assistant Commissioner gave him a withering look.
"And you want me to tell you guys that, to blare over the
networks? Next thing the Commies would be blowing
all the bridges, and
where would we be then?''

The studio was quiet. The
late-night news programs were finished,
and
now there was only a midnight chat show going out, to be followed by two old
movies. Richard took Jo into the weather room, where Julian was sifting through
various charts. "Well, hey, Richard," he remarked. "What kept
you?"

"I was dining out,"
Richard told him. "You remember Josephine
Donnelly, from
Profiles?"

"Hi, Jo," Julian said. "Don't tell me,
you want to look at that system." He laid an enlarged photograph on the
desk. "I'll tell you, it
is
a system."

Richard studied the print, and Jo
looked round his arm. She could
make out the coast of Africa, and the offshore islands;
they had been
inked in. Stretching from
immediately west of the Cape Verdes – which
were now clear of cloud – a considerable distance out into the
Atlantic
was a white mass, very like the whipped cream on the photograph
of hurricane Anita in Richard's office, with just the traces of a circulatory
movement.

"Your friend Mark Hammond called," Julian
said. "He just got back
from having a
closer look. Flew right into it, and couldn't find any clearly
defined
eye as yet, but he says it's tightening all the time."

"Course?" Richard asked.

"Oh, just north of west, and
moving real slow. Not more than ten
knots.
Mark says it still hasn't got winds of more than forty knots round the center.
But as I said, he reckons it's going to improve on that."

"It's enormous," Jo
whispered. She was realizing that if Anita had
seemed to cover the entire Gulf of Mexico, this system lay across a
good half of the Atlantic Ocean.

"It's the biggest I have ever seen," Richard
agreed. "Where's the jet stream?"

Julian pulled out the latest
weather chart, and pointed. "Moving north
all the time."

"Christ almighty!" Richard commented.

"Is that really so important?" Jo asked.

"Yes," he told her. "The jet stream is
one of those rivers of air I was talking about. It's the only one we can really
identify, as a matter of fact. It's very big, very high, and very fast; you
really are talking about
phenomenal speeds up
there, two hundred miles an hour plus. Usually
it has only a marginal
effect on surface weather; obviously, when it's blowing from the Arctic towards
the south you get cold upper altitude winds and a general drop in temperature,
and vice versa. It's also very important to high altitude flying, either for or
against – it can make quite
a
difference in time between here and London, for instance, depending
on
whether a pilot can use it or has to buck it. But it is also useful for
dispersing hurricanes.

"You remember I told you, when hot air rises very
fast and very high
you have a hurricane. Now
obviously, the higher that wind can get into
the atmosphere, without
dissipating, the stronger the circulation around
the center of the depression is going to be. The jet stream plays an
important part in this. In fact, I am pretty sure
it's been responsible for
the fact that not one of those five storms
we've had so far this year have developed. It's been unusually far south, you
see, and coming out of the central Pacific, too. So those storms each started
their upward spiral, and
when they got above
110,000 feet, the jet stream blew them apart, and
they collapsed. But if
it's now moving north, this system could be left to develop as much as it
wants. And it has the time." He looked at the map again, and then at the
satellite photograph. "Ten knots, you say, Julian? Working on where the
center should be now, that means five days to Puerto Rico, on that course. Five
days over some of the warmest water we've had for ages."

"So you reckon this could be the big one,"
Jo said.

He shrugged. "After what's happened so far this
year, your guess is as good as mine. But it is one hell of a big system. If
that circulation does increase… we could have a problem."

"Your ultimate storm?"

He grinned. "Any system could become my ultimate
storm, if all the conditions were right."

"And you've just said they could be right,
now."

"Well… yes. But they've seemed to be right
before, and we haven't had that big one. The odds are against it happening this
time."

"If it does become a storm," she asked,
"what might it be called?"

"All the names are selected before the hurricane
season even begins."

Julian looked at the list pinned
up over his desk. "As it will be number
six for this year, it'll be a she, and her name will be Faith. Now, how
can a system with a name like Faith cause any damage?"

"Let's all have faith that you're right,"
Richard quipped, and held Jo's hand as he escorted her out of the office.

J. Calthrop White glanced down the
page of notes. "We could have a
whole
barrel of dynamite here, Richard," he remarked. "So you're pretty
sure there is no evacuation plan?"

"Pretty sure, JC. Partly because the only real
emergency the authorities
seem
able to consider is an atomic attack, when there wouldn't be time
to evacuate the population anyway. There is no way
anyone down at City
Hall seems able to
envisage the damage a major hurricane might do."

"But
you can. And you're sure of your facts."

Richard
drew a long breath. "Yes, JC, I think I can envisage the
probabilities."

"Don't let me hear that word 'think' again." He
glanced at Kiley.
"How much time can
you give him without screwing the schedule up?"

Kiley
studied the chart he had brought into the office. "Three minutes at the
end of the early evening forecast, by cutting two news items."

"Okay,
Richard, use that time, and blast them this evening." White pointed his
pencil. "This storm isn't going to fizzle, I hope."

"I don't..." Hurriedly Richard changed what he
was going to say.
"No, JC, it isn't
going to fizzle," he said, and fled down to the weather office. "When
the hell," he complained to Julian and Jayme, "will the average
layman understand that pinpoint weather forecasting, with a system like Faith,
is just not a practical proposition? And this set up,
where I have virtually to guarantee that she's a real threat to New
York,
is just ridiculous. We should all be praying for her to turn due
east and lose herself out at sea. Where the hell is she now, anyway?"

Julian
showed him the latest chart.

Richard frowned. "But for Christ's sake, she hasn't
moved more than
a couple of miles in six
hours."

"That's
right," Julian agreed. "She's stalled."

"Two hundred miles south-east of Cape Hatteras,"
Jayme added.
"They're
reporting 70-mile-an-hour winds down there, and high seas.
And
that's the navigable semi-circle."

"Stalled,"
Richard said, and sat at his desk. Stalled, he thought. That
would at least maintain interest in Faith for
another couple of days, which
would
give JC time to launch his attack on the incompetency of City
Hall. But stalled! The most dangerous storms in
history were always
those which had
stalled, because then they could go anywhere. Sometimes
they even turned
back on themselves, like Betsy in 1965, which had
stalled,
then reversed itself after passing the Bahamas and gone back to
hit
the islands with renewed force just when everyone supposed the worst
was
over. And Faith's present position was just over 500 miles from New
York.
He looked out of the window – it was raining, from a total overcast sky,
but the wind was light; as Jayme had said, they were still to the west
of the
storm, the area of least danger, and they were beyond the gale
limit. "What wind
strengths?" he asked.

"Oh,
they're big," Julian said. "The last navy plane into the eye
recorded 150 miles an
hour."

"Just short of a
Category Five. Shit!"

"And
the Hurricane Centre reckons she could still build," Julian added.
"They're sending
another plane out in a couple of hours."

"So… you going ahead
with blasting City Hall?" Jayme asked.

"If
you do, and Faith does fizzle," Julian said, "what do you reckon
JC's reaction would be to
that?"

Richard
brooded for a few seconds longer. Then he said, "I don't see
that
it matters if Faith fizzles or not. If she does, it may take the heat off
the
administration, and have everybody calling me a scaremonger – which
they're
doing anyway – but that doesn't alter the fact that she
could
hit
here,
and that even if she doesn't, one day a major storm most certainly
will, and therefore that
the city should have a plan to deal with it."