achieved a detailed photographic inventory of the three chambers and their artifacts, she passed the camera to Dirk, who disassembled the lights and slipped it back into its aluminum container. Rather than reattaching it to Summerâs back, he held the grip handle tightly in one hand as insurance against losing or damaging the case.
He made a final check of both their air gauges and determined they had more than an ample air reserve for the journey back to their habitat. Well trained by their father, Dirk and his sister were cautious divers who had yet to come remotely close to the fatal danger of empty air tanks. He led the way this time, having memorized the bends and curves in the coral they had passed through earlier.
When they finally reached the comfort of Pisces and passed into the main lock, the waves above were rising, driven by a mushrooming wind that forced the waves to build and pound the reef like a jackhammer against a piling. As Dirk took his turn at fixing dinner, he and Summer looked forward to discovering the riddle of the underwater ghost temple. They relaxed and ate dinner under a false security. Neither had any conception of how vulnerable they were fifty feet beneath the surface of a vicious sea, certainly not with waves that were about to reach a hundred feet high, with troughs that would expose the habitat to the full force of the horrendous killer storm.
7
P UNCHING INTO THE whirling wall of the hurricane, scourged by screaming winds, blankets of hail and rain, and tossed by downdrafts and updrafts through unimaginable turbulence, the twenty-nine-year-old Orion P-3 Hurricane Hunter aircraft took the beating in stride. Her wings flexed and fluttered like blades on a fencerâs sword. The big propellers on her four Allison forty-six-hundred-horsepower engines chopped her through the deluge at three hundred knots. Built in 1976, the Navy, NOAA and NUMA had never found a better aircraft that could stand up to the punishment of violent weather.
Remarkably stable, Galloping Gertie, as she was affectionately named, with an animated painting of a cowgirl riding a bucking bronco on her bow, carried a crew of twenty: two pilots, a navigator and flight meteorologist, three engineering and electronic communication specialists, twelve scientists and a media passenger from a local TV station who asked to come aboard when he learned that Hurricane Lizzie was building into a record-setting storm.
Jeff Barrett sat relaxed in the pilot seat, his eyes sweeping the instrument panel every other minute. Six hours into a ten-hour flight, the gauges and lights were all he had to look at, since the only thing to be seen through the windshield was a view similar to peering inside a washing machine on the soap cycle. With a wife and three children, Barrett saw no more danger in his job than if he were driving a trash truck through a downtown alley.
But danger and death lurked in the swirling cloud of moisture smothering the Orion, especially when Barrett made passes so low over the water that salt spray spun off the propellers and glazed the windows with a frostlike film before he spiraled up to seven thousand feet, flying in and out of the worst part of the storm. Corkscrew penetration was the most efficient way to record and analyze the hurricaneâs strength.
It was not a job for the unintrepid. Those who flew into hurricanes and typhoons were a special breed of scientists. There could be no observing storms from a distance. They had to get down and dirty, flying directly through the aerial maelstrom, not once but as many as ten times.
They flew without complaint under incredibly appalling conditions to sample wind speeds and direction, rain, air pressure and data on a hundred other measurements they sent to the hurricane center. There, the information was fed into computer models so meteorologists could forecast the strength of the storm and issue warnings for people living in the predicted track to
He made a final check of both their air gauges and determined they had more than an ample air reserve for the journey back to their habitat. Well trained by their father, Dirk and his sister were cautious divers who had yet to come remotely close to the fatal danger of empty air tanks. He led the way this time, having memorized the bends and curves in the coral they had passed through earlier.
When they finally reached the comfort of Pisces and passed into the main lock, the waves above were rising, driven by a mushrooming wind that forced the waves to build and pound the reef like a jackhammer against a piling. As Dirk took his turn at fixing dinner, he and Summer looked forward to discovering the riddle of the underwater ghost temple. They relaxed and ate dinner under a false security. Neither had any conception of how vulnerable they were fifty feet beneath the surface of a vicious sea, certainly not with waves that were about to reach a hundred feet high, with troughs that would expose the habitat to the full force of the horrendous killer storm.
7
P UNCHING INTO THE whirling wall of the hurricane, scourged by screaming winds, blankets of hail and rain, and tossed by downdrafts and updrafts through unimaginable turbulence, the twenty-nine-year-old Orion P-3 Hurricane Hunter aircraft took the beating in stride. Her wings flexed and fluttered like blades on a fencerâs sword. The big propellers on her four Allison forty-six-hundred-horsepower engines chopped her through the deluge at three hundred knots. Built in 1976, the Navy, NOAA and NUMA had never found a better aircraft that could stand up to the punishment of violent weather.
Remarkably stable, Galloping Gertie, as she was affectionately named, with an animated painting of a cowgirl riding a bucking bronco on her bow, carried a crew of twenty: two pilots, a navigator and flight meteorologist, three engineering and electronic communication specialists, twelve scientists and a media passenger from a local TV station who asked to come aboard when he learned that Hurricane Lizzie was building into a record-setting storm.
Jeff Barrett sat relaxed in the pilot seat, his eyes sweeping the instrument panel every other minute. Six hours into a ten-hour flight, the gauges and lights were all he had to look at, since the only thing to be seen through the windshield was a view similar to peering inside a washing machine on the soap cycle. With a wife and three children, Barrett saw no more danger in his job than if he were driving a trash truck through a downtown alley.
But danger and death lurked in the swirling cloud of moisture smothering the Orion, especially when Barrett made passes so low over the water that salt spray spun off the propellers and glazed the windows with a frostlike film before he spiraled up to seven thousand feet, flying in and out of the worst part of the storm. Corkscrew penetration was the most efficient way to record and analyze the hurricaneâs strength.
It was not a job for the unintrepid. Those who flew into hurricanes and typhoons were a special breed of scientists. There could be no observing storms from a distance. They had to get down and dirty, flying directly through the aerial maelstrom, not once but as many as ten times.
They flew without complaint under incredibly appalling conditions to sample wind speeds and direction, rain, air pressure and data on a hundred other measurements they sent to the hurricane center. There, the information was fed into computer models so meteorologists could forecast the strength of the storm and issue warnings for people living in the predicted track to
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