Wyatt's Hurricane / Bahama Crisis

Author:Desmond Bagley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins

The day wore on and again San Fernandez was subject to the agony of the hurricane. Once more the big wind tormented the island, sweeping in from the sea like a destroying angel and battering furiously at the central core of mountains as though it would sweep even those back into the sea from where they had come. Perhaps the hurricane did contribute towards the time when this small piece of land would be finally obliterated—a landslide here, a new watercourse gouged in the earth there, and a fraction of a millimetre removed from the top of the highest mountain in the Massif des Saints. But the land would survive many more hurricanes before being finally defeated.

Life was more vulnerable than inanimate rock. The soft green plants were uprooted, torn from the soil to fly on the wind; the trees broke, and even the tough grasses, stubbornly clumped with long spreading roots, felt the very earth dissolve beneath. The animals of the mountains died in hundreds; the wild pig was flung from the precipice to spill its brains against the stone, the wild dog whimpered in its rocky shelter and scratched futilely against the earthfall that sealed the entrance, and the birds were blown from the trees to be whirled away in the blast and to drown in the far sea.

And the people?

On the slopes of the Negrito alone were almost 60,000 exposed men, women and children. Many died. The old and tired died of exposure, and the young and fit died of the violence of air. Some died of stupidity, not having the sense to find proper shelter, and some died in spite of their intelligence through mere ill-luck. Others died of illness—those with weak hearts, weak chests and other ailments. Some, even, died of shock; perhaps one can say that these died of surprise at the raw violence of the world in which they lived.

But not as many died as would have perished if they had stayed in the ruined city of St Pierre.

For ten hours the storm raged at the island—the hurricane—the big wind. Ten hours, every minute of which was a stupefying eternity of shattering noise and hammering air. There was nothing left to do except to cower closer to the earth and hope to survive. Wyatt and Dawson crouched in their shallow trench behind the rock and, as Dawson had said, they ‘sat this one out’.

At first Wyatt thought in some astonishment of what Delorme had said, and he smiled sardonically. So this was how legends were created. He was to be cast as a saviour, a hero of San Fernandez—the man who had saved a whole population and won a war. He would be praised for the good he had done and the bad he had been unable to prevent. Obviously Delorme had been quite sincere. To him, Serrurier and all who followed him had been devils incarnate and deserved no better than they had received. But to Wyatt, Serrurier had been sick with

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