by Todd Lewan
“What?”
“Forward two hundred —and right one-fifty.”
Then:
“Forward and right, two hundred and fifty.”
Then:
“Left one-fifty, back one twenty-five.”
Under normal conditions, flight mechanics guide pilots to a hoisting position by telling them to fly forward, backward, left or right by distances of thirty feet or less. The closer they get to the survivors, the less extreme the conning commands become. The two work like dance partners, each gradually understanding the other’s timing and needs, until they can anticipate the other’s next move.
What Witherspoon was asking Molthen to do was so extreme it was almost ridiculous. There was no predominant pattern to his conning instructions, no way for Molthen to discern a trend from them. And the instructions were coming too slow. One second, the survivors would be bobbing in a trough off to the right, at two o’clock, and the next they would be underneath the aircraft, then forward and left of the Jayhawk. They were disappearing from view, cloaked by the seas, and reappearing hundreds of yards from the last position Witherspoon had asked for.
After several minutes, the helicopter swung above the survivors.
“Basket’s away!” Witherspoon yelled.
He paid out cable as fast as the winch would allow, hoping for a letup in the wind so that the basket would not trail so close to the tail rotor. On his knees, grunting, shouldering the cable coming off the reel so it would not rub and fray on the door frame, Witherspoon paid out line with a nervous eye. If that basket sails into that rotor, he thought, we’re in the water.
When it dropped a few feet below the glinting disk the tail rotor made, he sighed, relieved.
“Okay, basket’s going down!”
Actually, it was penduluming beneath the pitching aircraft. It swung back and forth until Witherspoon couldn’t stand the cutting pressure on his shoulder and pulled out from underneath the outgoing cable. As he did this, the cable slapped down on the deck and began sawing on the lip of the cabin door and, outside, on the Night Sun, the aircraft’s searchlight.
Witherspoon halted the winch.
“Basket’s in the water!”
He saw the cage floating for a few seconds and then a wave collapsed over it. The line went taut; the hoist screeched. The cable leaped from his hands.
“Shit!”
Through his sleet-glazed visor he saw two pairs of survivors clasped to each other, waving at him, and twenty yards off now, the trailing basket. Witherspoon was six feet tall and could bench-press three hundred pounds. But the basket was making him sweat. He pulled and pulled and pulled but he could not raise the basket an inch. He felt as though he were hooked to an anchor.
“They’re not going for the basket,” he said. “They’re just looking at it.”
“Keep trying,” Adickes told him.
He raised the basket all the way back up, checked the cable for burrs, found none, waited for the helicopter to circle around and then tossed the cage out again.
Then he knelt, turned his head toward the door and retched on the deck. Sansone saw it.
“Sean, you okay?”
“No,” Witherspoon said. He spit, wiped his mouth and turned back to the cable.
He lowered the basket ten more times. He tried dragging it toward the survivors, swinging it to them, dropping it on them. Nothing worked. Every time it looked as though he was making progress, a wave would fold over the basket, the line would go taut and the cable would fly out of his hands.
“Looks like we’re getting it closer,” Sansone said. He was looking over Witherspoon’s shoulder.
Witherspoon slumped back on the deck. “We’re not going to do it! I can’t! I can’t get them!”
Over the intercom, Adickes could hear the flight mechanic gasping for air. Hyperventilating.
“Let’s take a break,” Adickes said. He handed Sansone a water bottle. “Give Sean some of this and see if you can cool him down. Dan, take us up.”
They held an altitude of two hundred feet while Sansone squirted water into the flight mechanic’s mouth. Witherspoon threw up on the cabin floor a second time. Adickes kept talking to him.
“Listen, Sean,” he said. “I grant you it’s horrible weather. Horrible. The worst weather we’ve ever been in. But if we don’t get these people now, with these seas, it’ll be a miracle if they survive.”
Witherspoon said nothing.
After a few minutes they dropped down to somewhere close to a hundred-foot hover, although it was hard to tell, really, how high they were flying. The radar altimeter was making no sense; at first it told Adickes their altitude was zero, then 100 feet, then 20 feet, then 110 feet.
They dropped their last three flares in an arc around the survivors. It helped, but after ten minutes Witherspoon turned to Sansone and said:
“I can’t do this anymore.”
“Sure you can, Sean.”
Witherspoon shook his head.
“No.”
He sat down on the floor, sucking wind, rubbing and rubbing his eyes. They were all water. He could not get them to stop tearing. His lips, knees, fingers, elbows —every joint in his body felt stiff with cold. Sweat ran all over his body.
“I can’t see anything out there, man. I can’t… we can’t… we can’t…”
He leaned back against the wall, laboring for air.
“Mr. Adickes,” Sansone said. “Take us up. Sean needs another break.”
“All right.”
They ascended to 350 feet. Adickes made sure to keep the flares in sight. Sansone unzipped Witherspoon’s flight vest. He handed him the water bottle.
“How are you doing, Sean?”
“I’m cold inside and sweating on the outside.” He gave his partner a pleading look. “I can’t get my fingers to move, Rich. My feet don’t respond.”
“Hang in there.”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can.”
In the cockpit, the pilots were talking.
“This isn’t working,” Adickes said. “We’ve got to try something different.”
“What you thinking?”
“Let me take the controls. I’ll fly the aircraft from the left seat.” He paused. “And I’m going to hover using the goggles.”
Coast Guard pilots used night-vision goggles while searching for distress beacons from high altitudes, but they hadn’t been trained to hoist or hover close to the water with them on. Doing so was a violation of regulations. Adickes knew it. But in the Marine Corps he had flown many night missions using the goggles and was comfortable with them.
“I don’t know, Bill,” Molthen said.
“Look,” Adickes said, “I know what 37:10 says in the book. I know we’re not supposed to use goggles while hoisting. But I’m telling you that it’s worked before in getting people out of the water. It’s risky. And we’re going to hover real close to the water. But I can do it.”
“I don’t know.”
“Dan,” Adickes said, “those flares are going to burn out. And look at Sean —he’s shutting down.”
Molthen hesitated, then nodded.
Adickes turned on the intercom. “Gentlemen,” he said in his most confident voice. “Listen up.” He was going to fly the aircraft from the copilot’s seat. He was going to fly closer to the water, an eighty-foot hover. And he was going to do this while using the night-vision goggles. Stone silence followed.
“Any questions?”
Sansone looked outside the jump door at the swarming snow and sleet. Witherspoon had his eyes clamped shut. He was curled up against the wall in a cold sweat.
“Any questions?”
Nobody in the helicopter said anything.
At first, things improved. The ride smoothed out. The basket went down faster. And with each hoist attempt, Sean Witherspoon dropped the basket closer and closer to the blinking strobe.
If we can just keep doing this, Bill Adickes thought, we’ll get somebody. On
ce you get the first guy up, the battle is won. We’ve just got to break the shell.
On their fifth drop, the basket landed no more than fifteen feet from the strobe. It floated on the surface for more than a minute. But none of the survivors went for it.
“Why aren’t they swimming to the basket?” said Rich Sansone. He was looking over Witherspoon’s shoulder. He shouted out the cabin door: “Swim! Swim!”
Just then a gust rammed the aircraft and sent it hurtling backward.
“Twenty-five feet from the water!” Sansone shouted. “Altitude!”
Adickes pulled full power on the collective and the Jayhawk snapped skyward. They shot up to 125 feet before Sansone said, “That was too close.”
Adickes snapped, “I know, Rich, I know. I was twenty-five feet from the water. Okay. That’s where we’ve got to be if we want to get those guys in the helicopter. So chill out.”
Sansone went silent.
Oh hell, Adickes thought. “I’m sorry, Rich. Keep talking to me. It’s all right. Keep talking to me.”
Witherspoon heaved the basket out again. Adickes could hear his raspy, labored breathing over the intercom. There were longer and longer pauses between his conning commands.
“Sean?”
No response.
“Sean!” Adickes shouted. “Talk to me! I can’t see the survivors from up here!”
“… Forward fifty …”
“Go on—“
“… and right seventy-five—“
“Mr. Adickes?” Sansone interrupted. He was leaning out the jump door, trying to judge the distance to the water. “Sir, I think I could pull this rescue off. If you put me in the water I could get those guys in the basket.”
“Sit down, Rich,” Adickes said. “There’s no way I’m putting you out in this —”
“But-”
“End of conversation, Rich.”
Adickes was talking to himself now in the cockpit. Don’t panic. It would be easy to panic, easy to overcontrol the aircraft. Loosen your grip on the collective. That’s it. Stay focused. Keep your parameters small. Stay close to the water.
He looked at his attitude indicator. Nose looks good. He read the radar altimeter. Seventy feet. Not too bad. Ground speed? Close to zero knots. Flares. Where are the goddamned flares?
He peered out the windscreen.
The basket was swinging and twirling, back to the tail, under the aircraft’s belly, forward of the nose. The two smaller flares had already flamed out but he could see that the Mark-58 was still burning. It was rising on a swell.
Adickes watched it rise and rise and rise, until it was at the top of his windscreen.
Then it disappeared.
“Hey,” Adickes said over the intercom, “the flare just went out.”
Where did it go? It can’t have blown out, he thought. Those Mark-58s burn for fifty minutes and that one’s only been out there for half an hour. Why don’t I see it? What the hell’s going on?
In the water, the survivors saw exactly what was going on.
They were bobbing right beside the flare, riding the crest of a rogue that was looming over the helicopter. They could only gaze down in horror at the rotor blades of the Jayhawk spinning below them.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The second Jayhawk was on the tarmac and the gas was loaded.
“Russ,” David Durham said, hustling across the runway, “which seat you want?”
“You take the right seat.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No, sir,” Russ Zullick said. “I’ll navigate.”
Zullick swung up into the copilot’s seat, strapped himself in and started his preflight checklist. He had more flying time in Southeast Alaska than Durham. But the right seat was the aircraft commander’s seat, and Zullick was not one to tell a senior officer his business in an aircraft.
Besides, he thought, what does it matter who’s got the stick? We’re going to fly cover for Bill Adickes’s crew. We aren’t doing any hoisting.
“Where’s Chris and A. J.?” Durham asked.
“There they are.”
Looking across the runway they saw two men coming out of the hangar. Each had a duffel bag and a helmet in his hand and both were jogging. On the left was the flight mechanic, Chris Windnagle. The other man, the taller one, was A. J. Thompson. He was a rescue swimmer.
“I’m going to start the engines,” Zullick said.
“Go ahead,” Durham said.
Zullick reached up, pressed the starter button, waited and then introduced fuel to the igniters. Both engines caught and ran smoothly. He watched their temperatures come up.
“Engaging the head,” Zullick said.
The rotors, which had been flapping up and down in the wind, thudded to life, losing the sag of their great weight. Windnagle helped them do a standard review of the searchlights, the Night Sun, the circuit breakers, the flight instruments. Thompson loaded his gear through the jump door and took his seat along the rear wall of the cabin. He turned on his cockpit display unit and pulled up a GPS map. Then he turned up the volume on the high-frequency radio and strapped in.
“This better be good,” he said. “I’m missing out on a cozy pillow and a TNT classic.”
“What’s the movie?” Zullick asked him.
“Gone with the Wind.”
“Very funny.”
The brake was set. The ice chalks were in. The stabilator was coming down. They heard a hitch pin clank, the growling motor of the tow tractor and then the clink-clink-clink-clink of the tractor riding back to the hangar.
Zullick peered out the windscreen. The break wall along the edge of the far runway was bordered in clouds of breaking surf. Another shitty night in Alaska, he thought.
Out loud, he said, “How come nobody ever gets in trouble on a nice, sunny day?”
Durham pulled the night-vision goggles down over his eyes.
“There are no nice days to get in trouble.”
They took off to the south with a right turnout into Sitka Sound. It was 9:34 P.M., and nobody aboard Rescue 6029 minded that there was extreme turbulence and pitch darkness in the sound. We’re just going to provide cover for another helicopter that’s probably on its way back to base, Zullick thought. With any luck, we’ll be back on the ground within the hour.
At that moment, a gray Jeep Cherokee sped across the airbase parking lot and swung to a stop outside the operations center. A slender man with thinning, gray hair and glasses jumped out and hurried to the side entrance.
The man was Ted LeFeuvre, the air station’s commanding officer. He was sweating.
Up in the operations center twenty minutes later, Guy Pearce was on the phone with District 17 headquarters in Juneau.
“Any luck getting ahold of Rescue 6018?” He paused. “Roger. Let me know your progress.” He hung up and turned around. “Captain, Juneau’s been calling, Kodiak’s been calling and I’ve been calling. Nothing but dead air.”
Ted LeFeuvre consulted his watch: ten o’clock on the dot.
Well, that meant Bill Adickes and his crew had just missed their fifth radio guard. They had lifted off at eight o’clock, and hadn’t been heard from in an hour and nineteen minutes.
“We’ve got to get ahold of them,” Ted LeFeuvre said.
“Yes, sir,” Pearce said. “You want me to keep trying, Captain?”
“Do that.”
What haven’t I thought of? Ted LeFeuvre said to himself. I just can’t believe there are no other options. Come on. You’re supposed to be so smart. Think. How do you contact a helicopter in bad weather without a C-130 in the area?
“Sir, I’ve got an idea.”
“What is it?”
Pearce swiveled in his chair. “How about if I try the air-traffic control center at the airport up in Anchorage.”
“Anchorage?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll ask air-traffic control there if they have any highfliers transiting the area with HF radios. If they do, we can ask the jetliners to
tune to our frequency and try to call the helicopter.”
“Yogi, that’s brilliant.”
“Let me call Anchorage.”
“Go!”
Pearce got right through to a controller at the Anchorage airport and outlined their scenario. He paused and sat back in his chair.
Ted LeFeuvre pulled at his jaw. Kodiak is going to have to get a C-130 off the ground soon, he was thinking. I do not want to lose comms with another helicopter. Our second bird has been airborne ten minutes now. They’ll penetrate the outer edge of the storm in less than fifteen minutes.
“Yogi?”
Pearce hung up the phone and wheeled around. His eyes bulged.
“Captain,” he said. “Air-traffic control says Alaska Airlines Flight 196 took off a short while ago from Anchorage. It’s heading to Seattle. It’s cruising at thirty-three thousand feet. And sir, it’s passing close to the Fairweather Grounds right now.”
Russ Zullick glanced out his door. Ice had been gathering on the side-view mirror since they had cleared the sound. That was fifteen minutes earlier. The mirror was glazed up now, useless.
“We better watch our icing,” he said to Dave Durham. He tried to sound casual about it. “We need to keep an eye on it.”
“Say again?”
“Icing. We’re getting icing on the airframe.”
“You watch the icing,” Durham said.
He was keeping a cruise altitude of three hundred feet in high turbulence beneath a low, thick cloud cover. Backing winds were shoving the helicopter into a two-hundred-knot sprint. Hail the size of eggs was battering his windscreen and bands of sleet, snow and rain were swinging across his path like slamming doors.
Visibility was so poor that even if he used night-vision goggles Durham would have a hard time making out a C-130 crossing in front of him.
A. J. Thompson, the rescue swimmer, spoke up. “Mr. Zullick?”
“Yeah, A. J.?”
“We’re losing comms,” Thompson said. “I’ve already lost Juneau. And now I can’t understand what Kodiak is saying.”
Zullick adjusted the high-frequency radio on his headset. He heard a garbled, scratchy voice. Then nothing but static.
“Go to five megahertz.”