Chapter Four
OKAY, WE’RE ALL CAUGHT UP
As the first Administrator of NOAA to have her own plane, Gale tended toward breaking the mold of how things have always been done, This tendency could either be embraced as an exciting, refreshing change from the status quo, filled with new adventures and vast untapped potential, or not. It took Gale and Tripp a full six months to identify and fire the "nots" from the Administrator's office staff, get sued for firing them, rehire them, transfer them, and finally hire several new staffers, all of whom had to be called "temporary special advisers" regardless of their roles, so as to give the outward appearance that nothing had changed and all applicable personnel policies could remain intact.
Tripp knocked on the office door, still adjusting to the idea of a plane having an office door. Actually he was still adjusting to the way Gale treated things like airplanes as if they were taxis. He wore a new dark blue suit he’d purchased on super sale from Nordstrom Rack, a store specializing in clothing that was three seasons out of fashion. Regardless, the suit fit him well and it allowed him to feel slightly less like a vagabond while riding on a multi-million-dollar private jet.
"Come in, Wally."
Tripp cringed. "Wally?"
"I'm trying it out," Gale responded. She was wearing another of her power suits, candy apple red this time. He’d worked with her for six months and he couldn’t remember seeing a repeat outfit yet. He guessed her closet must be bigger than his apartment. It was.
"Do you have to? I'm pretty sure I was wedgied by someone calling me Wally in fifth grade." He shifted uncomfortably in the way only someone who has actually been wedgied can appreciate, despite the fact that the boxer shorts he was wearing would probably tear well before any wedging occurred, which led him down a mental path best not explored with your boss as 30,000 feet. He shifted uncomfortably again, but now for a totally different reason.
"You could just call me Tripp, like everyone else," he refocused.
"Can't do it," she stated matter-of-factly. "Was part of the hiring agreement."
"What agreement? You stole me from Mr. Franklin."
"Okay, well yes. More of a personal preference, than an actual agreement," she conceded. "What's up?"
"The hurricane hunter is almost to Carl. I thought you might want to listen in, since it's your first hurricane as Administrator. With the cutbacks in research flights, this might be the only flight for this one," Tripp noted.
"Definitely," Gale answered enthusiastically jumping out of her seat like a five-year-old who just heard the ice cream truck coming down the block. Even her irritation with the President for cutting some of NOAA’s funding despite his promise to her faded in anticipation of getting to be in the loop with scientists flying right into the middle of a goddamn hurricane. She’d get that money back and get these research flights back in the air. She was not going to let Henry ruin her fun by trying to balance a federal budget that hadn’t been balanced in decades and almost certainly wouldn’t be anytime soon despite his efforts to cut anything he couldn’t pronounce.
Off the coast of North Carolina, a tricked-out Gulf Stream jet flew through the night buffeted by tropical force winds. The “Hurricane Hunter” was NOAA's newest jet--only three generations behind Gale's and it was being crewed by some seriously impressive geeks.
Captain Warren "Speck" Thompson is a forty-four, six foot one, Caucasian with brown hair, brown eyes and a small mole on his cheek (hence the nickname). He's a by-the-book pilot not known for buzzing towers or maliciously causing nausea in his crew. He drives his 2010 Volvo at or maybe two miles per hour over the speed limit. He's married to Tiffany, who is a lovely woman and, most assuredly not a stripper, which Speck would have been fine with if she was, but was glad to learn her mother had just liked the color robin egg blue. He loves her without question. They have no children despite trying at 3:00 pm every third Wednesday of the month as dictated by an app recommended to Tiffany by a social media algorithm that also seems to think they needed new throw pillows.
Lieutenant Charles "Buttercup" Benjamin, is thirty-two, five foot eleven, African American, dark-skinned with a shaved head and a lean athletic body. He's single, has profiles on every major dating website in North America. He believes a night spent alone is a waste of one's life. If Speck is by the book, Buttercup is the extraneous text a good editor would have removed well before publication. He believes there is no such thing as a short conversation and thinks Twitter’s character limit is a crime against humanity. He is gregarious, often unfocused, at times insolent, but would and, in fact did, walk into a flaming building to save a kitten--hence the nickname.
Dr. Theresa "Prius" Gomez is thirty-five, five foot four, the product of a conjugal merger between Mexico and Sudan and, therefore, obviously, "Prius" to her colleagues. She's divorced, shares custody of her daughter with her ex-husband in an amicable fashion defined by mutual indifference to each other, but shared adoration for the kid. Prius has a Ph.D. in meteorology from Penn State and is working towards a second Ph.D. in psychology, because that's just the type of person she is.
Dr. Jebidiah Horatio "Pronoun" Sorrenstan, is a twenty-eight-year-old, five foot seven, skinny-as-Hell Kansas boy with an absent-minded professor personality better suited to a sixty-eight-year-old retiree. For a nickname explanation, search “Schoolhouse Rock” pronouns. A lifelong weather junkie, Pronoun is a frequent contributor to various online weather discussion groups, which double as his social life.
Tom is an intern, so whatever.
"Folks, keep the language clean. We've got the Administrator listening in," Captain Speck announced through everyone's headphones.
Gale's voice soon followed. "Just pretend I'm not here."
"Won't be difficult, ma'am. You are not, in fact, here. And we're pretty busy at the moment," Speck replied. Did I mention he's a pretty literal guy?
"Don't mind him, ma'am," Lieutenant Buttercup interjected. "We're happy to have you along for the ride. Nice to know someone at headquarters cares."
Doctors Prius and Pronoun pantomimed various acts of lips interacting with asses, which just goes to show maturity and excessive amounts of education are often inversely related.
The plane suddenly shook so violently that if this were a commercial airline flight--say to Cleveland out of New York--passengers would be texting last words to loved ones and flight attendants would be cursing every order of red wine. For the crew of this particular Gulf Stream, it was simply an indication to get back to work.
"We're through the eye wall," announced Captain Speck.
"No, we're not" countered Prius.
"Dr. Gomez, I can assure you, having flown twenty-seven of these missions, logging thousands of flight hours and having graduated from THE United States Air Force Academy, that we are through the eye wall," counter-countered Captain Speck.
“Does it feel like we are through the eye wall?” a now indignant Dr. Prius shot back. To make her point, the plane bucked upward like a bull trying to shed its rider.
Not wanting to get in the middle of a good argument, but also compelled by the righteous indignation of scientific fact, Dr. Pronoun felt compelled to say, "I think the eye wall might be a little bit farther to the East. What's it look like out the window?"
Tom, the intern, went pale.
Whoa. Out the window? This was the meteorological equivalent of a "your mama" joke. The Gulf Stream was NOAA's technological marvel, packed with the latest monitoring equipment, radar, ultra-wideband access to up-to-the-minute modeling, and a supercomputer. The last thing anyone needed to do was look out the window, a practice dismissively referred to as "nowcasting." Any idiot could look out a window. Captain Speck looked out the window.
"Shit."
Back on her own plane somewhere over Kansas, Gale pressed the mute button. "Um."
Tripp responded, "I was thinking the same thing."
The Captain recovered quickly. "We are right where we should be according to the readings we got thirty minutes ago. Are you telling me this son-of-bitch turned left without asking?"
Prius and Pronoun typed feverishly while talking acronyms with their colleagues on the ground. Speck and Buttercup flew onward through what was most assuredly not the eye of a hurricane. Tom interned really intently.
Finally, after some uncomfortable finger pointing and ass covering, it was determined that the plane was exactly where it was supposed to be, but Carl was not. This discovery was a relief to the Captain, but had concerning implications for the eastern seaboard of the United States.
********************
Rain pelted the front windshield of the pickup as it inched along I-95 North towards Washington, DC. Kayla lay across the back seat of the large cab watching the water cascade down the side window. Sleep was impossible with the endless staccato of rain drops on the roof. She turned her attention to her father and Jason, the truck driver who had miraculously rescued them from the side of the road twenty-five miles earlier.
"Seriously, man, I can't thank you enough for stopping. We'd be out to sea if you hadn't come by," Maurice said for at least the fifth time (the “thank you” part, not the out to sea part. That was new).
"Dude, really, no problem. Glad to have the company. Just can't believe this storm. A little rain near Richmond and then clear to DC is what they said this morning. Talk about getting it wrong. This is biblical, epic." Jason was a big fan of the Bible, religion and the adjectives that come with them. He was headed back to his family in Washington after helping to build a house in North Carolina--a house which, unbeknownst to Jason and despite his more than adequate craftsmanship, now featured a large oak tree laying across the living room and a large oak tree-shaped hole in the roof.
"Sounds like those people out on the coast have it the worst," Maurice noted. "No warning or anything."
"Yeah. Like Job they are. Just getting pummeled for no reason," Jason added. "There's gonna be a lot of dead bodies floating around down there in the morning, I bet."
"Hey," Maurice hissed, glancing back at Kayla, as if she hadn't been listening to the radio news reports for the past hour. She knew it was bad. To take her mind off floating corpses, she watched the rain on the window make winding rivers across the glass and wondered who the guy was that told everyone hurricane Carl was going to turn harmlessly out to sea.
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