The Last Run

by Todd Lewan

  They switched frequencies and set the volume as high as it would go.

  “Do you hear that?”

  Thompson frowned. “Barely.”

  The transmission was fading in and out and garbling, yet intermittently, Zullick could pick out a male voice. It was different from the one broadcasting from Kodiak.

  Then:

  “Rescue 6018… repeat… This is Les Dawson on Alaska Airlines 196 … Alaska Airlines 196 …”

  More garble.

  “… Flight 196… say… you are… report…”

  Well, Zullick said to himself, it’s not a C-130. But there’s a jetliner somewhere up there. At least we’re not alone. Let’s see if I can reach him.

  “Alaska Airlines,” Zullick said. “This is Coast Guard Rescue 6029. Are you reading me?”

  The pilot did not answer.

  “… Rescue 6018… Say again, please …”

  As far as Zullick could tell, the commercial jetliner was talking to the first helicopter. Zullick could not hear the other Jayhawk, only the Alaska Airlines pilot.

  “… Say again 6018… Understand you’ve crashed in seventy-foot seas?… Please repeat…”

  Zullick’s stomach tightened.

  “… understand you’re in the water? …”

  It was all black outside and sleet scratched at the windscreen. So, Zullick was thinking to himself, we’re going to be looking for one of our own guys. These Jayhawks don’t float. They don’t float. Gosh, I hope they got their raft out. Wait. Strobe lights. They’ve got strobe lights in their vests. They’ve got strobe lights on their helmets, too. Oh, I hope they got out of the aircraft okay.

  Suddenly he pictured a military funeral. The honor guard handing flags to widows. A twenty-one-gun salute. A helicopter flyby. They’re your friends, he thought. You live on their street. Dan Molthen. He’s got Theresa and Erin and Ben and Shea. Bill Adickes has got Carin and a boy, Ryan. I think she’s pregnant or just had a kid. And Rick Sansone —oh gosh, his wife is expecting, too. And Sean. Sean Witherspoon. He just got married last week.

  All dead.

  “Russ,” Durham asked him. “What’s going on?”

  “Bill and his crew,” Zullick said softly, “might be in the water.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Rich Sansone threw off his radio headset and lunged to the jump door.

  Everything outside —the flares, the rescue basket, the survivors, the swells, the sky —had coalesced into one, black mass.

  Sean Witherspoon, already at the door, was screaming: “ALTITUDE! ALTITUDE!

  Sansone looked up.

  The sea was standing over them.

  Actually, it looked more like a wall —a wall with a black, completely vertical face, down which cascaded delicate, white ripples. This wave had no curling crest, just a thin, silvery sheen, like moonlight on a sword. It made not a whisper as it moved swiftly and stealthily toward them.

  Oh my holy God.

  It was a rogue—a fully developed rogue that was going to engulf them in ten seconds or less if they didn’t move.

  “UP! UP! UP! UP!”

  “DO SOMETHING!”

  Bill Adickes was already pulling power on the collective; he’d seen the rogue just as Witherspoon had seen it. He’d flipped a contingency switch on the stick to give them extra thrust, and was thinking: If all you do is pull power and you don’t pay attention to the helicopter’s attitude you won’t fly out of this. Get the attitude right. You’ve got to get that good climb attitude. Not too much, where you go nose down in the water, not too little, or you’ll start to back down. It’s got to be just right. Once you break the crest you’ll be out of the downdraft. Okay. Here comes the wave. Here it comes.

  He had the collective as far back as it would go and still the helicopter felt as though it was moving sideways, in slow motion; not up or down, but sideways, as if it were a spider scampering up the face of a toppling wall.

  And then the rogue collapsed.

  There was a rush of air and in a white-black crashing the sea collapsed just below the belly of the helicopter and spray and foam were entering the cabin with the force of a power hose. Kneeling, blinded by sleet and snow, hearing the turbines groan and feeling the cabin floor roll under him, Sansone thought: I’m alive. Then the deck lurched under him and the rear of the cabin rose high up and then dove sharply and he was on his back, the sleet covering him.

  The helicopter wobbled upward. Sansone rolled over on his hands and knees. They were free of the wind shear. He felt his helmet. The ICS cord was still in.

  He shrieked: “What in hell are you guys doing up there?”

  “Flying!”

  “Goddammit! That wave almost got us!”

  “We know! We know!”

  “No! You don’t know! That wave missed us by five fucking feet! What the hell are you doing?”

  “Saving our asses!”

  “Do a better job!”

  “That’s enough, Rich!”

  Sansone leaned out of the aircraft and saw the line, swaying and penduluming in the wind beneath them, and at the end of it, the basket, spinning like an uncontrolled yo-yo. The cable had rubbed on the Night Sun. The searchlight was gouged and dented across its grate. He crawled to the winch. The motor was still good. But the cable had come apart while spooling. The reel was jammed. Birdcaged. Crap, he thought. We’re going to have to haul up all that line and the basket by hand.

  “Sean!”

  In the forward part of the cabin, clinging to the avionics rack, Witherspoon had his head down.

  “Sean!”

  Witherspoon didn’t move his head.

  “Sean, help me get this basket in!”

  Witherspoon didn’t move. His breath was coming in lunges. He was shuddering fitfully. Dan Molthen heard raspy breaths over the intercom.

  He asked, “You guys get the basket in yet?”

  “We’re doing it now,” Sansone said. He was pulling the cable up, hand over hand, as fast as his arms would go. I’ve got to get this inside. Damn basket’s moving too much. It could fly right into our tail rotor. Or get pitched up into the main rotor. That would do it. That would do it, all right. There must be more than 150 feet of cable out. God, it’s heavy.

  A rescue basket weighs forty pounds, but by the time Sansone pulled in the last of the line, it felt five times heavier. He grabbed the basket and tossed it in the corner. It made a dull thunk.

  “Clear! We’re clear!”

  “How’s the hoist?” Molthen asked him.

  Sansone was catching his breath. “It’s, uh, birdcaged.” He crawled over to Witherspoon and undid his hands from the latticed rack. Then he pulled the flight mechanic back to his seat. “Mr. Molthen,” he said. “Sean isn’t doing too good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s —he’s out of it,” Sansone said. “He’s not moving anymore. We’re done.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s done. That’s all.”

  Molthen checked the attitude indicator. They were relatively level. He looked at the radar altimeter. The reading was fluctuating between 330 feet and 390 feet. Snow was building up on his windscreen. He looked out through his side window and caught the blink of the strobe. It was hundreds of yards off to the right and upwind of the helicopter now.

  He turned to Adickes.

  “Bill?”

  Adickes was concentrating solely on the instruments before him, correcting constantly for the lurch-lurch-lurch of the aircraft’s nose. When the rogue wave came at them he had shut out all extraneous noise —all noise, really. He hadn’t heard the radar altimeter’s alarm go off or Molthen talking to the crew. Their voices sounded far away, like a radio playing in another room. The inner lining of his dry suit stuck to his body. His teeth were locked in a stiff, tendon-tightened clench. He was feeling that old tightness in his jaw.

  Your jaw is too damned tight, he was thinking. You know what that means. Admit it. You want out of here. You do
. Can you do any more good here like this? No. It’s time to stop everything. It’s time to fly away from here. Pull the collective all the way back and get us out. Come on. Pull it back.

  He heard Molthen and Sansone talking through the intercom.

  “Maybe we should throw out the raft, Rich.”

  “That’s not a good idea, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “What if we go down?”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “We’re done.”

  “Maybe we could go down only as low as a hundred feet and try again.”

  “How? The hoist’s birdcaged.”

  “Yeah,” Molthen said. “Well, we got to do something.” He looked over at Adickes, but Adickes didn’t look back. “You know, there’s no way they’re going to send another plane out here.”

  “Sir,” Sansone said. “Hold on a second.” He had just heard something on the high-frequency radio —a voice.

  “… Coast Guard …”

  He turned up the volume to the highest setting.

  “… 6018… this is Les Dawson of Alaska Airlines, Flight 196 … are you out there?”

  Sansone yelped, “Mr. Adickes! Alaska Airlines is calling us on the HF!”

  When he heard the words Alaska Airlines, Adickes turned his head. It was like he’d come back from a long way away.

  “Well, shit, Rich,” he said. “Talk to them.”

  Sansone gave his name and the helicopter’s number and relayed their latest GPS position. “We’ve spotted four to five survivors in seventy-foot seas,” he said excitedly. “At this time we are making an approach to the water. Do you read?”

  “Say again, 6018… Understand you’ve crashed in seventy-foot seas?”

  “Negative,” Sansone said. “Negative—“

  He heard a crackling silence come back, and then: “… please repeat… Understand you are in the water?… You are egressing into the water?”

  “No!” Sansone shouted. “No! We’re fine! We’re circling the survivors at three hundred fifty feet! We’ve been trying to hoist them for the past hour with no joy!”

  He waited for an answer. If word that they had crashed got back to the air station …

  “Sorry about that,” the pilot said. “Now understand you are okay, correct?”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “Good. Good. Coast Guard 6018, be advised that another aircraft is on its way from Sitka… repeat… a second helicopter is on its way from Sitka… on scene within fifteen minutes… over.”

  It’s a miracle, Sansone thought. We actually got through to somebody. He thanked the pilot and signed off.

  “Mr. Adickes, we got through! We got—”

  “I heard, Rich. I heard. Good job.”

  Adickes had his mind on the fuel gauge. It was well below a half tank. If the fuel-burn calculations you made back in Sitka Sound were accurate, he thought, we’ve got only ten minutes of on-scene fuel left. If we stay here any longer, we won’t have enough to make it back. And how can you be sure you allotted enough gas to fly back against these headwinds?

  “Okay,” he said over the intercom. “Listen up.” He paused. His voice sounded strange to him. Tinny. “I think we’ve done everything that we can do out here. And now we know that the 6029 is only fifteen minutes away, so, uh, it’s —it’s time to go.”

  He got no response.

  “We can’t do any more good out here,” he went on. “We’re almost at BINGO fuel and this weather is as shitty as it gets. We don’t need to make ourselves into another SAR case.”

  Still no one responded.

  They know, Adickes said to himself. They know what I’m saying is crap. But I’ve got to say it. I’ve got to say it and we’ve got to leave four or five guys in the water. We didn’t get them. They’re going to die out there. We’re leaving them to die. Live with that, Adickes.

  “I’m not sure anyone’s going to get those guys in this shit,” he said. “And besides, we can do more good back at the station helping out the other crews than continuing here.”

  Well, that was it. No one had spoken up or even tried to interrupt him. They know, he thought. Now they got to swallow it.

  He sighed.

  “Rescue checklist, part three.”

  The Jayhawk rose in a slow, jerking, climbing stagger and, shuddering against the wind, started for Sitka. Molthen looked out his side window. Four hundred feet below the ocean was a series of white, scalloped crests. The strobe was gone.

  He looked over at Adickes.

  “Bill?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll take the controls.”

  Adickes nodded.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You did good, Bill. You did real good.”

  Adickes eased his grip on the collective and the cyclic, and pulled his feet off the pedals. He would have to keep a close eye on their heading. Now they would race the fuel gauge to the air station.

  “Sure,” he said. “We did great. Just do me a favor and not talk about it.”

  FORTY

  You were lucky, David Durham thought, that the 6018 didn’t go in the water. That would have made things complicated. No, he thought, hellish. Thank God that didn’t happen. They aborted and left four, maybe five survivors in the water. But at least they didn’t crash. I hope they’ve got enough gas to get back. Maybe they’ll ditch onshore. Well, it’s up to us now. If only this storm would lay down a little bit.

  “Dave?”

  He turned his head. Russ Zullick was pointing to a tiny screen on the dash panel, the terminal collision avoidance detector. There was a blip on it.

  “I think that’s them,” Zullick said. “That’s the 6018 on the T-Cast. They’re coming right at us.”

  “How far are they?”

  “Thirty miles, but closing fast.”

  “Let’s try them again on the radio,” Durham said. “We’ve got almost zero visibility. I do not want fly into those guys. We’ve got to talk to them. Right now.”

  “Okay.”

  There was heavy static but once the distance between the helicopters narrowed to within twenty miles Zullick was able to talk freely with Bill Adickes. They agreed to fly at different altitudes. The 6018 would climb to an altitude of seven hundred feet; the 6029 would stay at three hundred feet. The chances of a head-on collision were slim. But this wasn’t a night for carelessness.

  “What are conditions on scene?” Durham asked.

  There was a pause. “Listen, you guys,” came Adickes’s voice. “These are extreme conditions. I can’t stress that enough. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”

  A sharp, prickly wave spread over Zullick’s back and arms. “Okay, Bill,” he said. “We understand that. What are the wind speeds?”

  He heard only static.

  “Say again? Wind speeds?”

  It sounded as though Adickes had said sixteen to seventeen knots, but Durham shook his head when he heard the figure. “No way that’s right,” he said.

  “He must be saying sixty or seventy,” Zullick said. Raising his voice, he said into the microphone: “Bill. Please repeat wind speeds and provide wave heights on scene.”

  There was too much interference. To Zullick, it sounded as though Adickes was saying wind velocities were in excess of seventeen knots, with fifteen- to seventeen-foot seas. But judging by the tailwind, Adickes had to be telling them to expect seventy-five-knot winds, 110-knot gusts and seventy-foot waves, or higher.

  Zullick looked at Durham.

  “Not too nice,” Durham said.

  “No,” Zullick said. “I’d say we are in for it tonight.”

  Into the radio, Zullick said: “We read you on the wind speeds and wave heights… Please give us the survivors’ latest position …” He listened and jotted down the coordinates on his kneeboard. “Roger that. Understood.”

  The transmission was breaking up again.

  “… rogue waves… downdrafts. You… exp
ect them… don’t get too low. Don’t… hovering below a hundred feet. We tried… couldn’t get… basket will… searchlight pretty much ineffective. Use lots of flares… may lose comms… where… C-130 …”

  Zullick turned down the volume.

  “Well,” Durham said, “that’s all we get.”

  “Yeah,” Zullick said, “but I did get the survivors’ position. I’m going to put it into the flight computer.” He tapped in the coordinates that were on his notepad.

  “Okay, it’s in,” he said.

  “Nice,” Durham said. “Now let’s get there.”

  With the exact coordinates, there was no need to leave on the finder, so Zullick switched off the homing device and set a course for the EPIRB. Hurtling along at a 225-knot-per-hour clip, they closed in on the position less than ten minutes later.

  “Moving up on it,” Zullick said. “We should be over them… wait… wait… now!”

  Durham flipped on the flood hover lights, which threw cones from the belly of the helicopter, and aimed the Night Sun straight down so that it would not light up the precipitation engulfing their windscreen and blind them. Zullick peered out through his spotter’s window.

  He could barely see the ocean, even with the night-vision goggles down. He looked and looked. But he didn’t see a strobe. He didn’t see a vessel. He didn’t see anything but the tops of swells whitened by wind.

  “There’s nothing there,” Zullick murmured incredulously. “Where did they go?”

  Three hundred feet below and ten miles downwind, the survivors were drifting fast. The rope tying them together had come loose. All they had left from the La Conte was one buoy ball, tied around Mike DeCapua’s waist, and the handheld 406 EPIRB.

  They were still bobbing in pairs, Bob Doyle supporting his skipper, Mark Morley, and Gig Mork floating on his back and holding Mike DeCapua up on his chest. It was so dark they could barely make out one another’s form, except when the flash of the beacon painted everything around it a skeletal white. The combers were barreling down on them with no warning and burying them for a half minute at a time.

  Each time they went under Bob Doyle could feel the sea tear another layer of heat off his face. One thing he had always dreaded was the cold. He could stand cold as well as most any man, unless it went for too long and wore him down, but now the cold was so numbing that he was beginning to worry about hypothermia and possibly losing a limb. The hope that had electrified him upon seeing the searchlight in the sky, and the anger and emptiness he had felt watching the lights of the first helicopter fading and then vanishing, had passed. They had been replaced by worry. He was worried for his own well-being, certainly, but he was even more worried about his skipper, who he suspected had started his final slide into hypothermia. Morley’s suit was torn at the leg. He had been taking on thirty-eight-degree water since the boat sank. That was more than four hours earlier.