Turbulence Read online

  TURBULENCE

  A Novel of the Atmosphere

  Giles Foden

  For Julian, with thanks

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Yesterday, very early in the morning

  Part I: January

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part II: February

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part III: March

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part IV: April

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part V: May

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part VI: June

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Hindcasting the Weather for D-Day

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values – the permanence of memory.

  JOSEPH CONRAD, ‘Henry James, An Appreciation’ (1905)

  DATE: 22 January 1980

  POSITION @ 0600 LOCAL (GMT):

  Latitude 54° 26' South, Longitude 3° 24' East

  Alongside Bouvet Island

  DEPARTED MAWSON STATION: 11 January

  NEXT DESTINATION: Cape Town

  ETA: 1 February

  DISTANCE TO GO: 1277 nm

  CURRENT WEATHER: Overcast and cold

  SEA STATE: Frozen

  WIND: 15 kt Easterly

  BAROMETRIC PRESSURE: 975 mb

  AIR TEMPERATURE:–1.9°C

  SEA TEMPERATURE:–1.5°C

  Yesterday, very early in the morning, something unexpected happened. I went up on deck to find the Habbakuk covered with a thin mist. Darts of morning sun were lancing through. As I walked along the wooden sheathing, a gigantic phantom rose suddenly out of the sea. I started backwards from a tall figure projected against a wall of ice. The wall was an iceberg – and the phantom, I slowly realised, was my own reflection, enormously enlarged.

  I was staring at myself mirrored on the ice, magnified by some trick of the light as it came through the mist. When I moved my arms or legs, the figure on the berg reproduced the same movements, changing its posture as I did. Said joined me, laughing. Soon the whole crew, Arabs and Baluchis, even Schlomborg and the Sheikh were at it. All moving their limbs. All laughing. Ghosts of gaiety. Then, with a hissing noise, the mist burned off and the visions were gone. Such is human life.

  Of my own I shall tell only the substantive part. Four years ago I was approached by the associates of an Arab sheikh. He was seeking scientific advice concerning the towing of icebergs to his own country, in order to deliver fresh water to the desert. Using his considerable resources, he had tracked me down as the last surviving individual to have a copy of Pyke’s plans for a berg ship.

  A few simple calculations told me that it was not a feasible idea to tow a pure iceberg to the desert. However, if Pykerete were to be used rather than pure ice, the idea did not seem so fantastical – no more fantastical, at least, than Pyke’s original scheme for the Habbakuk, which was formulated in the 1940s. (Pyke’s secretary had misspelt the name of the Old Testament prophet used as a codename for the project in Whitehall, and I saw no reason to change it.)

  Ninety-nine per cent of all the earth’s ice is concentrated in Antarctica – the fringed white veil of the world, the untarnished region. It was the obvious starting point for our venture, since going north from there via the East African coast leads directly to Saudi Arabia, our intended destination. The work was done during the Antarctic summer, between mid-November and the end of January, over three consecutive years.

  Among Antarctica’s great shimmering floes and black-basalt rocks – they stick out like feet from under the white burnous of the glacier – I watched our bright work grow, littering the virgin scene with lengths of timber, nets of steel trellis, gargoyle-like pumps, macerators, chipping machines.

  The visual information of the place was dizzying. So much light. It was as if one was gazing at the world through the eyes of another species – one of the albatrosses that circled forlornly above the site, at one with the whirling cloud and the white fog-smoke. Under this gauze, real ice-bergs floated in a concourse of currents; they looked like tombstones, monoliths, monuments of a world destroyed.

  All this was in the open. What remained hidden was my great fear that this grand project, this ‘Mammoth Unsinkable Vessel’, as Pyke once called it, this veritable white elephant resurrected from a war grave, would melt away before it reached its destination.

  But the maths said it wouldn’t. However I shook them, kicked them, beat them, the equations stood up.

  The ship was built in the Australian claim at Mawson Station – that is, between the Dismal Mountains and the Amery Ice Shelf. Mawson sits on an isolated outcrop of rock. Its main climatic feature is the katabatic or gravity-fed wind, which results from drainage of cold air down the steep slopes of the ice sheet. Thousands of emperor penguins compete for space with flocks of southern giant petrels, Antarctic fulmars and skuas.

  Insulated huts were erected to house the members of the expedition. As we worked, I wondered what some future archaeologist would make of all this, discovering the huts and other equipment under a flour-mound of snow many centuries hence.

  The efficiency of the construction was impressive. Many of the crew had worked on desert oil rigs, or in the scrap-metal yards of Sharjah, or been shipwrights in the Gulf, so they were well acquainted with industrial processes. But the cold must have been an intense shock to them and, of course, Habbakuk was something unprecedented. Something out of this world – or at least beyond prior human experience.

  Apart from wood pulp and ice, our materials were timber, steel girders, sea water and below-zero temperatures. I shall never forget the sight of all those dark faces in white-trimmed fur hoods, or the gloved hands spraying salt water from hoses onto the hull of the growing ice ship, constantly building up its thickness and smoothness. Some of the Pykerete was made naturally, using ice slush skimmed off the surface of the ocean and laid out in huge, forty-foot-square trays into which the pulp was poured. The mixture for smaller blocks was prepared in cement mixers.

  It was very hard work for those Baluchis, tough as they were. ‘Our limbs are numb,’ they complained. The expedition doctor devised a procedure to see how insensitive to cold they had become. It involved successive pri
cking with a needle from the ankle or wrist up; ‘testing peripheral neuropathy’, he said. Something like that. I am afraid to say the Sheikh’s ganger treated them no better than the weather. Eight of them died.

  We built up the first part of the ship on large timber rafts, using the larger squares of Pykerete (66 per cent ice, 34 per cent woodchip), stacking them up and fusing them together with freezing water just as Pyke had intended all those years ago. The whole was then gradually sheathed in timber and a layer of insulation (a type of mica) pumped into the narrow cavity between the ice hull and its wooden skin.

  The chance of my involvement in this tale is just as narrow. The Sheikh had previously sought the advice of Godfroy Wildman-Lushington, a post-war director of British Petroleum and the very man who, as Brigadier Wildman-Lushington, had run the original Habbakuk project in the early 1940s. This time round, the Brigadier suggested Julius Brecher as a suitable chief scientist, but Brecher declined and pointed the Sheikh in my direction. More or less everyone else involved was dead.

  I got down to work in my now abandoned rooms at Trinity College in Cambridge, drawing out the plans in ever greater detail. I did so in combination with various bright young sparks from the technical academies of Saudi Arabia, with whom I communicated by the miracle of fax.

  One of my major concerns was that the motor nacelles would generate too much heat and begin to melt the structure, but mounting them externally appears to have solved the problem, since water passes over the shell of the nacelle and cools the engine inside. The vessel is steered by the motors on port and starboard, accelerating or decelerating as necessity dictates. There are fifteen nacelles on each side of the ship – we had them made by Westinghouse and shipped out.

  I still have Pyke’s plans. Enshrined memories, wriggling on the desk in front of me as I write. Caught in gimballed lamp-light, they seem as old as biblical scrolls. I roll out the yellowing volute and read, holding down the edges of the paper with a coffee cup and my tobacco tin.

  Sometimes Pyke strayed into the realms of fantasy. He believed that if the Pykerete fleet carried tanks of supercooled water, this could be sprayed onto enemy shipping, whereupon it would freeze instantly and create a bridge for boarding. Or, he dreamed, the gelid water jet could be used to seal up guns. Another of his ideas was to create ice fortresses onshore, freezing explosive booby-traps in their walls which would detonate if any attempt were made to melt them.

  But the basic idea behind Habbakuk was sound, and when we cruised out of our Antarctic harbour we were as near as possible to reproducing it, taking advantage of whatever new technologies had come along since the war.

  On the day we sailed (11 January 1980), scientists from various research stations across Greater Antarctica showed up to wave us off. There were even some Chinese from Zhongshan Station – a helicopter ride across the ice shelf from Mawson – and also some Japanese and Russians. It is a mark of Habbakuk’s uniqueness that they all turned out, as the scientists in these different claims are by nature fiercely competitive and secretive.

  I remember them standing under the orange glow of the sun amid the sparkling purity of the snow as we slid away. Human figurines with a mass of emperor penguins moving behind. The penguins reminded me of scholars at an academic conference, sipping tea in loose, casual groups during an interval as they waited for the return to seated order of the next plenary session …

  Oh, how I remember those Cambridge days. McClintock and Summerhayes, Yazikov and Lewis, vying to be editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. The abjects who gathered themselves against me, returned in just one puff of my pipe. Better another: if only she could return to me like that for real.

  The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared of balaclavas, bright-hued survival suits, sunglasses. Of flesh and blood only the penguins stayed. Behind them stood the sheds and hangars of Mawson, backed up by lines of sastrugi: ribbed rows of frozen, gale-borne snow, all aligned with the direction of the wind. All as straight as we are on our course to the desert, though the water twirls round us like dancers on a stage.

  That twirl involves turbulence, the last great problem in classical physics. As Einstein is supposed to have put it: ‘Before I die, I hope someone will clarify quantum physics for me. After I die, I hope God will explain turbulence to me.’ (Another version of this story, which is also ascribed to Heisenberg and von Kármán, has the speaker adding: ‘But I wouldn’t want to embarrass God by asking him.’)

  With Schlomborg at the wheel – really a series of buttons and knobs controlling the nacelles – we have reached Bouvet Island, an uninhabited pile of rocks, gravel and glacier where we are replenishing our ice supplies. Bouvetøya, as the Norwegians call it – Norway has dominion over this desolate spot – is said to be the remotest place on earth, i.e. furthest away from any other land.

  As I write, chinstrap penguins are diving for krill outside the porthole. The island is also home to thousands of vast elephant seals, which kill the penguins by shaking them inside out.

  From here we will set a northward course to Cape Town, where supplies will be taken on board, as again at Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. We will then continue along the Kenyan and Somali coasts up to the Arabian Gulf.

  Schlomborg wears the full brass-buttoned, navy-blue uniform of the Swedish merchant marine. He seems to be unaware that the ship he captains is made of ice, affecting a weird indifference whenever I bring up the issue of the vessel’s structural integrity, the guardianship of which is my main purpose on board. But he plays the nacelle steering panel like a first-class organist.

  The fellow who paid for it all, Sheikh Issa, is a dark little man with eyes full of fierce determination. He wears a billowy white robe. I presume he must have woollen long johns underneath, as it is bitterly cold in the Southern Ocean. The wind sweeps down the length of a ship like an animal trying to fasten on its prey. Now and then some small discrete item, such as someone’s boot or hat, is gripped by this great wind and lashed along the deck. By the time it reaches the stern it is out of sight and the thought filling your head as you lean into the blast is that you too could be punched and slapped along the deck like that before being blown off clear.

  Into an immense anonymity of foaming waves.

  Rollend in schäumenden Wellen.

  Rolling in foaming billows, as the aria which narrates the making of seas and rivers in Haydn’s Creation puts it.

  There are about twenty officers on board, mainly young Arab engineers and cadets from the Saudi naval school. No women. For all that, the young Arabs on the ship are obsessed with a heartbreaker called Olivia Newton John. I have seen posters of her on the doors of their cabins.

  There is a fitness centre, a library and a small cinema on the ship, playing mostly old films. The Searchers, The African Queen, Gone with the Wind. Seeing the last again made me think of Krick.

  There is also a little mosque, its minaret competing for verticality with radar apparatus and radio aerial. All is otherwise much as Pyke imagined it, except that rather than the hull being full of planes, as he’d envisioned, it contains very large tanks of supercooled water. This water, as well as the structure of the ship itself, is our cargo for the desert.

  Grease ice, pancake ice, sea-ice sheet, ice floe – we have already fallen in with every kind of ice and through all of it the disgraced Swedish ferry captain has sailed as if born to the task. There is something a bit doltish about him, with his vast bulk and red monarchial beard, but I can’t fault his navigation. He seems very tranquil up on the bridge, issuing orders to Said and his other officers. The only thing that has upset him was the appearance beside the ship one day – it was during lunch – of a sperm whale, but I think that was simply because he wanted to finish his meal. Garlanded with phosphoric radiance, the beast moved alongside us for an hour or two. Or rather, it was as if we were moving alongside an illuminated, saucepan-grey promontory – some piece of lonely land, like this Bouvet Island we’re moored off, but stretching into the sea with a ne
cklace of light.

  Said is the Sheikh’s son. He likes to falcon off the deck, hoping to catch other birds. Mostly young skuas which put up a good fight. Handsome and clever, with an aquiline nose, he has become a particular friend. One day, coming into my cabin and seeing before me this blotted memoir of my wartime days, this other vessel on which I’ve embarked to pass the time at sea, he asked, ‘What are you writing?’

  I told him what, and showed him some, and also pages of the dog-eared diary from which I’m working up the book. And so the custom has begun of him taking and reading the successive chapters as I finish them each day, progressing in that story as, looming out of frozen mists, the Habbakuk makes its way north. I drink tea or whisky, smoke my pipe, listen to cassettes of Haydn oratorios – and write. Now and then I am called upon to give judgement on a scientific issue relating to the ship but otherwise my time is my own.

  Sometimes I overdo it, for an old man. One morning Said found me asleep in bed – among my papers, with manuscript sheets scattered around me. The top of my fountain pen had come off in my lap. The ink had run into the bedsheets, turning their cryptic creases as blue as the ocean through which we are sailing.

  This happened, that happened … The question of where to begin is always hardest. A deep breath is needed before making that decision. For, as Ryman himself said – all mistakes proceed from initial conditions. In the end I chose not my birth or childhood but another journey, undertaken many years ago, when as a callow youth I made my own way north, to see the Prophet.

  January

  1

  The Prophet was a scientist called Wallace Ryman. He was a conscientious objector who devised a special ‘number’ in which the government was interested during the Second World War. Many great scientists have had a number named after them, usually defining the state of a particular physical process. The Mach number, which expresses the speed of an object moving through air divided by the speed of sound, is the one with which most people are familiar.