Her Name Will Be Faith Read online

  Her Name Will Be Faith

  Christopher Nicole

  Diana Bachmann

  Thirty years ago, the events depicted in this book were dismissed as impossible, because it could never happen. Now we know better. Hurricane Sandy proves that New York could by hit by a major storm, and Sandy’s strength never exceeded Category 2 (100 mph). Hurricane Faith is a Category 5 storm, with sustained winds of more than 150 mph, and gusts of far greater strength. Christopher Nicole and Diana Bachmann have created an unforgettable picture of the devastating forces that Nature can command, tracing in carefully researched detail the genesis of this ultimate storm from its inception off the coast of Africa to its terrifying climax.

  But it is also the story of the people attempting to live through it from the handsome, debonair weather expert, Richard Connors, who know what is coming but can find no one to believe him, to journalist Jo Donnelly, estranged wife of millionaire sportsman Michael Donnelly, whose relationship grows with the approach of the storm. But it also tells of the many others, rich and poor, caught up in events they do not understand and with which they cannot cope, until the devastating, heart-stopping climax as the storm strikes and the greatest city on earth is laid waste about them.

  HER NAME WILL BE FAITH

  By Christopher Nicole

  under the pseudonym “Max Marlow”, written in conjunction with Diana Bachmann

  ‘Tropical cyclones are the most energetic and destructive of all weather systems.’

  The Times Atlas of the Oceans

  CHARACTERS

  THE DONNELLYS

  Josephine (Jo), Englishwoman on editorial staff of Profiles magazine

  Michael, junior, her husband, partner in the New York stockbroking firm of Donnelly and Son

  Owen Michael, their son

  Tamsin, their daughter

  Michael, senior (Big Mike), Michael’s father and senior partner in Donnelly and Son

  Barbara (Babs), his wife

  Belle Garr, their elder daughter

  Lawson Garr, son-in-law, real estate agent in Nassau, Bahamas

  Marcia, their younger daughter, an artist

  Benny, her fiancé

  Dale, their younger son

  Florence Bennett, Jo Donnelly’s housekeeper

  NATIONAL AMERICAN BROADCASTING SYSTEM

  J. Calthrop White, President and chief shareholder

  Kiley, Executive Vice-President

  Richard Connors, chief weather forecaster

  Julian Summers, his assistant

  Jayme, his secretary

  Dave, newsreader

  Rod Kimmelman, reporter

  Maisie, switchboard operator

  Joe Murray, J. Calthrop White’s chauffeur

  HURRICANE TRACKING TEAM

  Dr Eisener, official at the United States Hurricane Tracking Center, Coral Gables, Florida

  Captain Mark Hammond, United States Navy, seconded to the Weather Bureau

  Bob Landry, his co-pilot

  Mackenzie, his navigator

  THE ROBSON FAMILY

  Neal, friend of the Donnellys

  Margaret (Meg), his wife

  James, their son

  Suzanne, their daughter

  MICHAEL DONNELLY’S YACHT CREW

  Larry Simmons

  Pete Albicete

  Mark Godwin

  Jon Tremayne

  Sam Davenport

  Sally, Sam’s wife (not in crew)

  Beth, Larry’s wife (not in crew)

  ON ELEUTHERA

  Melba, the Donnellys’ cook

  Josh, her husband, their gardener Goodson, their nephew

  Christabel, airline agent

  JO DONNELLY’S INTERVIEWEES

  Washington Jones, janitor at the junior Donnellys’ New York apartment building

  Celestine, his wife Patsy, their daughter

  Lila Vail, widow from Florida, now living in New York with Tootsie, her widowed sister

  Dai Evans, their neighbor

  Nancy Duval, Joe’s hairdresser

  Bill, her husband Ernest, his brother

  Alfred Muldoon, a New York cab driver

  Stuart Alloan, a dropout

  Garcia, a criminal fugitive, his friend

  NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT

  Commissioner Grundy

  Assistant Commissioner McGrath

  Captain Harmon

  Captain Wright

  Captain Jonsson

  Captain Luther

  Bert, Florence Bennett’s husband

  Ed Kowicz, Managing Editor of Profiles

  Gordon, a Florida weather forecaster

  Bill Naseby, Mayor of New York Mitch, his assistant

  Seth Hatton, President of the Hunt National Bank

  The President of the United States.

  MAY: The Beginning?

  WEDNESDAY 24 MAY

  The Atlantic

  The big amphibian was alone in the sky. Four hundred miles due east of Puerto Rico, Captain Mark Hammond looked down on fleecy white clouds, and, where they had drifted apart, on to the surging blue of the North Atlantic Ocean.

  It was a sight with which he was thoroughly familiar. Since his secondment to the Weather Service a year earlier, he had flown out here at least once a week, looking, watching… May was traditionally the quietest month of the year, weather-wise, but there had been major storms in May before. And now the month was drawing to a close; next Thursday would mark the official beginning of the hurricane season. If there was a Tropical Storm about, it was his duty to find it, and let the scientists determine its potential, long before it could approach land.

  Dr Eisener was at his shoulder. “You can take her down now, Mark.”

  Mark’s long thin neck moved as he nodded; his neck matched both his body, which seemed to be coiled even in the spacious flight deck, and his face, in which a long nose and pointed chin gave him a certain resemblance to a cigar-store Indian. A Californian, he had volunteered for a spell in the Weather Service to see how the other half of the country lived, and often wished he had stayed at home: Miami to him was like a poor man’s San Francisco… and California had been hit by three hurricanes last year: Florida, protected by the natural breakwaters of Cuba and the Bahamas, by none at all.

  He gave the signal to his co-pilot, and the aircraft began to sink through the clouds. If she wore navy colors, she was still the very latest in flying laboratories, only a few hundred hours old, with sensors protruding from her roof and wings and belly to record every possible aspect of the atmosphere in which she found herself… and her true commander was

  Eisener, surrounded back in the main cabin by his staff and their various computers and radars; if the satellites whirling high in space above their heads were photographing every cloud over the ocean, it was Eisener who was going to add the fine print for the nation’s busy weather forecasters.

  Mark certainly didn’t wish a major storm on anyone. But as discovering such an event was, at the moment, his sole reason for existing, he hoped one day to justify that existence. There hadn’t been a truly major storm, a Category Four hurricane; for instance, in the North Atlantic since before he had been born. So Category Three storms, of which Gloria back in 1985 remained the most famous, could do a whole lot of damage — it was still the possibility of a really big one, which fascinated everyone connected with Atlantic weather. One was about due.

  The aircraft sank lower and lower. The clouds were above them now, the dark blue of the ocean below them coming closer every second. There was clearly very little wind; only the occasional wave flopped into a whitecap, dissolving in a splurge of foam; even the trade wind was in a May-like mood.

  Now Mark
was skimming the surface of the sea, the huge turbos throttled back almost to stalling point as he allowed Eisener to suck seawater into his tanks. Although it was calm enough to splash down without difficulty — and get up again — if he had to, this was always the most tense part of the patrol; he breathed a sigh of relief when Eisener’s voice came through the intercom, “Okay, Mark, take her up.”

  The engines increased power, the plane rose like a bird, and a moment later was through the clouds.

  “Home, I think,” Eisener said, coming up to the flight deck. “Anything?” Mark asked.

  “Why, yes. Something.”

  Mark turned his head in surprise. “Today? It all looks pretty good to me.”

  “It all is pretty good,” Eisener agreed. “Save for the water temperature. I have a reading of 27° Centigrade.”

  “At the end of May?”

  “Interesting, isn’t it? Especially when we add it to all those other readings.”

  “Yeah, Doctor,” Mark said. “Goddamned interesting.”

  The aircraft droned back over Puerto Rico and Haiti, gaining height to fly across the serrated mountains of Communist Cuba, then dipping lower again as the tiny Bahamian islands came into view — splashes of green against the pale colors of the immense sandbank on which they rested — before landing at Key West soon after six. Mark went straight to the public telephone after debriefing, dialed a New York number. “Hi,” he said. “Richard about?” He waited, drumming a finger on the glass wall of the booth.

  “Connors,” said the voice on the end of the line.

  “Mark.”

  “Hi, old buddy. Something for me?” Richard Connors’ drawl was suddenly animated.

  “Could be. How does a water temperature of 27° Centigrade in mid-Atlantic grab you.”

  “On 24 May?”

  “That’s what the man says. And let me give you some more.” He listed numbers, slowly, giving his friend time to write them down. “Yeah,” Connors said, thoughtfully. “Yeah. Thanks a million, Mark. You coming north any time?”

  “I’ve a furlough next month. You got an apartment yet?”

  “Maybe. We’re talking terms this afternoon. There’ll be a bed in the lounge.”

  “So I’ll see you. Guess what. Or who, I saw the other day. Pam.”

  “Great,” Connors said without enthusiasm. “How’s she doing?”

  “Looks pretty good to me. Tall, tanned…”

  “And terrific,” Connors agreed, and sighed. He could picture her in front of him. But her predilection for sun, sand, and sea, and the beach bums who went with those things, had been the prime reason for his divorce. Without which, he thought grimly, he would never have left Florida… not even to be on nationwide television. “Next time, give her my regards. And Mark… keep me up to date on those water temperatures, eh?”

  “You got it,” Mark said, and hung up.

  MAY: The Last Week

  THURSDAY 25 MAY

  National American Broadcasting Service Offices, Fifth Avenue

  “I have Connors outside, JC,” Kiley said.

  J. Calthrop White grunted as he perused the financial pages of the New York Times, and Kiley twisted his fingers together. He might be network manager, but the company president was a difficult man to work for, or with. J. Calthrop White was a short, thin man, whose energy belied his shock of white hair, and whose irascibility made a nonsense of his puckish features; his more junior employees were wont to refer to him as Jesus Christ, and his more senior staff sometimes supposed that he also might have mistaken his initials.

  “Who’s Richard Connors?” he asked.

  “The new forecaster, JC,” Kiley explained.

  “From Florida,” White remarked, still studying his paper.

  “Well, from California, actually, JC,” Kiley said nervously. “But he worked in Florida, yes. For three years.”

  “So what decided you to bring him up here, for Chrissake?”

  “Well, JC…” Kiley’s fingers were tying themselves in knots. “Down in Miami he was big. He’s got it all. Looks, personality, charm, knowhow… and an almost prescient way of forecasting the weather. He was getting seventy plus letters a week down with WJQT. I reckon he’ll make an impact on the ratings up here.”

  “Weather forecasters make impacts?”

  “Everyone watches the weather, JC; it’s right after the News. Give them a face they like watching, a guy who sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, and they just start watching one particular channel to listen to that guy again.”

  J. Calthrop White at last raised his head. “How much?” he asked. Kiley knew that although his boss was thinking of the ratings, he wasn’t actually referring to them. “Well, I had to go a little over the odds,” he said.

  “How much?” White repeated.

  “Well, seventy-five.”

  White leaned back in his chair. “Kiley, you are paying some shavetail beachbum as much as a cabinet minister to tell me it’s gonna rain tomorrow? Jesus Christ!”

  “He’s good,” Kiley said. “And it’s only a one-year contract, renewable.”

  “He had better be good,” White said. “Show him in.”

  Kiley almost ran to the door. “Mr White can see you now, Richard.”

  He held the door ajar, and Richard Connors entered the big office which looked down the length of Fifth Avenue from the top floor of the National American Broadcasting Service building. White looked him up and down. The new weather forecaster was six feet three inches tall, and had an undeniably handsome face except for the broken nose which had mended slightly off the straight, but this in turn gave him an attractively macho appearance. His shoulders were good and it was easy to tell he was fit. He also exuded confidence. These were all characteristics which J. Calthrop White personally disliked in other men, as he possessed none of them himself. Except confidence.

  “Footballer, eh?” he inquired.

  “Why, yes, Mr White,” Connors agreed. “UCLA.”

  “I hate football,” White informed him. “Kiley tells me you can forecast the weather.”

  “That’s my job, Mr White,” Connors said, refusing to be overawed.

  “So tell me what sort of a summer we’re gonna have.”

  Kiley was back to his finger twisting; he knew that JC never joked, and would remember whatever he was told.

  “It’ll be hot,” Connors said.

  “Yeah? That’s easy. It’s goddamned hot already.”

  “It’ll be hotter,” Connors insisted. “And there’ll be more hurricane activity than usual.”

  “Now, how the hell can you tell that?”

  “Because the ocean is much warmer than is usual at this time of year, Mr White. Warm water spawns tropical storms.”

  “Richard is an expert on hurricanes, JC,” Kiley put in, eagerly.

  “We don’t have hurricanes in New York,” White pointed out. “You’re not in Florida now. Have a good day.”

  Kiley was waggling his eyebrows, and Connors nodded. “Thank you, Mr White,” he said, and left the office.

  “Seventy-five thousand,” White remarked, and pressed his buzzer. “Alice, get me Mike Donnelly.”

  “Senior, or junior, JC?”

  “For Chrissake, when I want to talk to some kid I’ll tell you,” JC growled and released the switch to glare at Kiley. “Seventy-five thousand.” He pointed. “He’d better be as good as you say, Kiley.”

  The phone buzzed. “I have Mr Donnelly senior, Mr White.”

  Calthrop White arranged his features into a smile, as if hoping thereby to influence his voice. “Mike, you old son of a gun. How’s it going? Yeah, damned hot. How’s the boy?… Already? I thought the yacht-racing season didn’t start until June?… Is that a fact. Mike, I want to float a stock issue.” This time he had to listen somewhat longer before he could speak again. “Oh, sure, sure,” he said at last. “I read my papers. But this has to be, Mike. There’s a franchise coming up in England this autumn… I reckon 125
million will do it… Sure, Mike, sure. I can swing my board, and my stockholders. For Chrissake, most of them are relatives anyway. Listen, why don’t you come over and talk about it… Sure, bring Michael if you want, whenever he can spare the time from playing with his little boat. But make it soon… It has to be this summer, Mike. Sure, sure, but in my book, nothing is impossible if you really get to it. You come on over. Love to Babs and the kids.” He replaced the phone, leaned back in his chair, gazed at Kiley. “Goddamned Irish shit,” he remarked. “Can’t be done, he says. What the hell is a stockbroker for, Kiley? You tell me that. Racing goddamned little yachts up and down the coast?”

  FRIDAY 26 MAY

  West Bay Street, Nassau, Bahamas

  The automobile lights flickered under Lawson Garr’s hand, and the rollover garage door lifted to allow the sleek white Cadillac to slide into place beside Belle’s Lotus. They could hear the kitchen phone bleeping as the key turned in the lock, and Belle threw her purse on to the counter, kicking off her high heels as she grabbed the receiver. Blonde and statuesquely beautiful — she took after her mother, Barbara Donnelly — she moved with an elegant grace even after several cocktails. “One of your clients,” she said, passing the phone to her husband and grabbing her purse and shoes back again.

  “Okay, I’ll be right behind you.” Lawson sat on a stool, pulling a pad open towards him. “Good evening, Lawson Garr here. Can I help you?” Tall, bronzed and athletic, he was the perfect mate for the American girl, at least physically; the attraction had been instant and mutual, parent-proof even if it meant Belle being married to a Limey ex-colonial and exiled two thousand miles from Bognor, Connecticut. That Belle shared Lawson’s extravagant tastes, which made them a very unstable couple, financially — real estate in Nassau had not exactly boomed since Independence — was a more serious cause of worry to Mike and Babs Donnelly. But Lawson worked as hard as he played. “Why, hello, Mr McKinley,” he said. “Nice to hear from you…”