Free Atlantic Fury by Hammond; Innes Page A

something like that building up.’ He was entirely engrossed in the picture he had drawn from memory. ‘It’s fluid, you see; always a shifting pattern, never still. It’s a battlefield of pressures and temperatures and humidity; Highs versus Lows, with the cold fronts and the warm fronts the points of engagement. A breakthrough at one point can spell disaster a thousand, two thousand miles away – a ship overwhelmed, breakwaters demolished, the flooding of lowlands, the destruction of houses, death to men and livestock.’
    He was being carried away again on the tide of his imagination. But then he suddenly stopped. ‘It was a long time ago. But I can remember it – by God I can.’ He picked up the map he’d drawn, stared at it for a moment, then crumpled it up and threw it into the biscuit tin that acted as a wastepaper basket. ‘That’s just one of dozens of maps I could draw you – weather I’ve known … Some of it I covered in my book. And when this High disintegrates or that Low fills in it’s something different again.’ He turned with a quick movement of his head to stare at the map framed on the wall, the Chinagraph bright on the Perspex. ‘Those two Lows coming in … Look at them. I’m already getting figures that complicate the whole picture. They may behave normally. They may remain separate entities. But somehow, I don’t know why exactly, they worry me. That’s something you learn in this game, you see – it’s ninety per cent science, a matter of filling in figures, but there’s the other ten per cent … your instinct comes into it then, instinct based on experience.’ He gave a little laugh and shook his head. ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said, ‘whilst I catch up on my homework.’ He glanced at the clock. ‘Another fifteen minutes and then we’ll go over to the Mess for lunch. I expect you could do with a drink. I certainly could.’
    I sat and watched him checking his instruments, going through the teleprinter sheets, flying a balloon to check ceiling height, marking up his meteorological forms, phoning his report through to Pitreavie, and all the time I was thinking of Iain, trying to remember him as I had last seen him, nineteen years old and wearing battledress, the sergeant’s stripes white-new on his arm. He’d been drunk that night and within the week he’d sailed with his unit out of the Clyde, bound for North Africa – Operation ‘Torch’. ‘Can I have a piece of paper?’ I said, and when Morgan passed me a scribbling pad, I began pencilling a sketch from memory. The result was the same as when I had tried it in my studio with that bloody little Canadian businessman breathing down my neck. I wondered what Lane was doing now – would he come up here to bust Braddock’s identity wide open?
    I didn’t like the thought of that. The wild streak in Iain had always bordered on violence. That poor devil of a lieutenant, his jaw smashed – and there had been other incidents, before that; big Neil McNeill knocked senseless with an oar after he’d shot a seal. My fault that time. I hadn’t wanted the seal killed and when it was done I’d flown at Big Neil, blubbering with anger, and got a kick in the groin that sprawled me screaming in the bottom of the boat. And in Glasgow, at that factory – they’d called him Black Iain – black because of his temper and his dark features and his arrogance. They’d picked him up drunk one night and he’d knocked out three policemen and got away. That was the night he joined the Army.
    â€˜That’s Braddock.’ I looked up to find Morgan standing over me with a puzzled look. ‘Yes, Braddock,’ I said. I’d have to call him Braddock now. I’d have to think of him as Braddock. I tore the sheet from the pad, crumpled it, and tossed it into