The Last Run

by Todd Lewan

  He looked down.

  Below, the flares shone like bright candles bobbing in a tank of jumping oil.

  “Mr. Zullick,” he said, “I could get those guys in the basket. I’m ready to dress out.”

  “No,” Zullick interrupted him.

  “But I-”

  “No, A. J. We’re not going to put you out. I don’t know if we could get you back.”

  “He’s right, A. J.,” Durham said. “Sorry.”

  Thompson returned to his seat and went back to working the HF radio. He had been ready to go. He had done his job. But now he doubted they would get anybody.

  For twenty-five minutes they hoisted straight by the book: Chris Windnagle operated the winch and conned the pilots into a hoisting position; Dave Durham operated the flight controls; Russ Zullick navigated and backed up the flight commander; and A. J. Thompson maintained their radio guard and helped monitor their fuel and altitude.

  But the survivors, clustered around the strobe and what looked like a fish float, were drifting so fast that Zullick had to reprogram his instruments every few minutes just to keep up. The wind was coming so hard that their rotor wash was lagging sixty to seventy feet behind the helicopter. And each time Windnagle tried to lower the basket, the wind swept it back at a forty-five-degree angle —dangerously close to the tail rotor.

  On the first drop, the basket hit water more than two hundred yards from the survivors. Windnagle winched it in and shouted to Dave Durham:

  “Forward and right… two hundred yards!”

  “What you say?”

  “I said, ‘Forward and right two hundred yards!’”

  “Okay, okay,” Durham said. “Sorry, Chris. I just thought I heard you wrong.”

  Cable was whizzing out as fast as the winch could feed it and the line was so tight it looked as though the winch might get ripped out of the helicopter. When it hit water the swells would scoop it and flick it into a trough, and a breaker would spike it down underwater. They had floats on the basket, though, and within ten seconds the basket would emerge from the froth and the cable would go slack.

  Sometimes Windnagle would give up and try to reel it in, but a swell would rise up beneath the basket and lift it faster than the winch could spool the line, leaving enormous loops of slack cable in the ocean.

  There’s way too much slack out down there, he thought to himself as he hurried to spool the cable. If one of those guys floats inside all of that slack line and a wave bottoms out, that steel cable is going to go taut and sever him in two.

  During one evolution, Windnagle glanced down and saw the survivors had slid under the belly of the helicopter and gone far off to the left of the helicopter.

  “Forward one-fifty! Left one seventy-five!”

  Durham was now bumping the cyclic against the inside of Zullick’s thighs. Under normal conditions, that would be a sign that he was over-controlling the aircraft—stirring paint, aviators called it. But he had no choice; he was fighting the aircraft now, no longer finessing it. The nose was lifting twenty degrees, dropping thirty, the tail was slewing and jerking, and all the time Durham was fighting to find a balance, his face graying and tightening.

  Windnagle, poised at the jump door, shouted: “Hold your position!”

  Durham worked and worked and worked, but he was unable to hold the Jayhawk still for more than a few seconds.

  “Jesus,” Windnagle said. “Why don’t you guys do what I’m telling you to do?”

  “We’re trying, Chris.”

  “Let’s try it again,” Windnagle said. “Go forward seventy-five and right forty!”

  Zullick was monitoring their altitude and how the waves were changing the reading on the dial. He had imagined they would set a 130-foot hover for hoisting; but every now and then he would see a flare on a wave crest rise up until it was almost level with his own line of sight, and then settle back down again. The radar altimeter was cycling from 40 feet to 260 feet in a matter of seconds.

  “Hey, Russ,” Durham hollered to him, “are we going up or down?”

  “Don’t ask me.” Zullick was looking out his windscreen. The bars of white light thrown by the flares were weakening. “We better put out more smokes.”

  They were down to their last one, a Mark-58. Windnagle armed it, and as soon as they looped back around, he let it fly. It hit a swell and shot white light.

  They had three quarters of an hour of light left to work with. No more.

  During those forty-five minutes, Dave Durham did what he could to keep the helicopter over the survivors. Russ Zullick watched their fuel reserve shrink.

  First he reduced their calculated BINGO limit—the fuel they would need to get back to Sitka—by a hundred pounds, then another hundred pounds, and then another hundred.

  “Sir,” Thompson said to Zullick. “We can’t keep dropping our BINGO fuel like this. Soon we won’t even have enough to make to shore to ditch.”

  “We’re dropping it another hundred,” Zullick said. Then to Durham: “Dave, hold your nose up. Hold it up.”

  The helicopter was moving around so wildly that dropping the basket near the survivors was like dropping a clothespin into a milk jug from atop a ten-story building. With each drop, though, Chris Windnagle was honing in on the target; by the time they were forty minutes into the evolution he was consistently putting it into the water no farther than twenty feet from the strobe.

  On his last drop, the basket splashed down in a trough thirty feet behind the helicopter.

  “Oh, man,” Windnagle said excitedly. “I got it, maybe, ten or fifteen feet from them.”

  He waited and watched, but none of the survivors made a move.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Oh, damn it to hell. They’re not going for it. I don’t think they can see it.”

  A comber crashed over the basket and cable raced out. Windnagle kept watching the survivors.

  “It’s fifteen feet from them,” he said. “Shit, they’re not moving!”

  The aircraft was shuddering fitfully now and lurching from side to side, up and down. But there was enough slack in the line so that the basket did not move much. Windnagle shouted:

  “Back us down!”

  Durham eased off on the gas, pulling the nose of the helicopter up just a touch as he did this, and a gust caught the nose and threw them back and down. Reflexes taking over, he jammed the cyclic to the instrument panel to drop the nose.

  The helicopter’s tail leaped up.

  “No, no, no!” Windnagle yelled. “I said back us down! Back us down!”

  Zullick had been listening to the two of them and trying to keep an eye out for rogue waves. When he thought the immediate horizon seemed free of rogues, he glanced at the radar altimeter. It read sixty-two feet.

  Just then it occurred to him that he had lost sight of their last flare.

  His eyes swept the ocean.

  Where is it?

  He looked up.

  The flare was atop a crest of an approaching rogue —forty feet above the aircraft.

  Just as Durham shrieked, “WE’RE GOING IN!” Zullick seized the controls. In one motion he leveled the wings, brought the nose to the horizon and pulled power on the collective with everything he had.

  “ITO!” he screamed. “Instrument Takeoff!”

  “Wait!” Windnagle screamed. “Wait!”

  They were rocketing skyward.

  “I still got the basket out!” Windnagle was shouting. “The basket’s still out the cabin door! I’ve got cable out!”

  In the pit of his stomach Zullick felt an icy chill, as though an icicle were dripping there, and in his temples the pounding of hot blood, and knowing full well that he could not make a mistake and had no more time to think, he pulled more power. He had seconds now, seconds to get them up and away from the black wall fast closing. He was trying to be loose but firm on the sticks, holding his breath and trying not to think of anything but the wave; to pull them free of the downdraft that was heavier no
w than it was when he first saw the rogue closing in.

  Now they were starting to get forward airspeed in addition to the winds coming at them. Zullick heard screams: the wind, the turbines, his flight mechanic, Windnagle, who was fighting to bring in the rescue basket now whipping like a snapped kite and thudding along the airframe just feet from the tail rotor.

  “SHEAR!” Zullick screeched. “SHEAR! SHEAR! SHEAR!”

  “I can get it in!”

  “SHEAR THE CABLE IF YOU HAVE TO!”

  “I can get it!”

  Holding the collective back, feeling the sweat sting his eyes and the spasmodic lurch of the helicopter as it ripped free of the downward smothering draft, Zullick heard it—an erratic, stuttering thump-thump, thump-thump-thump through the airframe and then a door slamming and a sudden, heavy quiet.

  Windnagle punched the rescue basket. Then he stowed it and the hook and slumped back into his seat.

  “We left them,” he said.

  Zullick looked over, and seeing Durham, coldly wet and hollow-eyed, perspiring heavily, he said vaguely, “I have the flight controls.”

  He leaned forward and checked their altitude. They were up to five hundred feet.

  “We left them,” Windnagle said again.

  “Chris,” Zullick said.

  “No, no.” He let out a big sigh. “We left them.”

  “Chris, if we stayed any longer we were going to be—“

  “We left them,” Windnagle said. “And they were still alive.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  After the hammering clatter of the rotors faded and the last of the smoke flares had burned out, Bob Doyle closed his eyes and pulled Mark Morley higher up on his chest so that his mouth was against the skipper’s ear.

  “Mark?”

  “I gotta,” Morley mumbled, the words slurry, as if he had been heavily sedated, “… I gotta get…”

  “Can you hear me?”

  “… on it…”

  “The helicopter’s gone, buddy,” Bob Doyle said into the skipper’s ear. “It flew back to get some gas. But there’ll be another one. I swear.”

  “… got to …”

  The skipper’s head flopped forward.

  “Hey,” Bob Doyle said. “Hey.” He reached around and, clasping Morley’s forehead gently and easing it back, pulled the skipper’s nose out of the water.

  “Mark?”

  The combers were coming faster now, no more than ten seconds apart. Bob Doyle never saw them coming. But he knew when they were approaching because his body would suddenly lose its heaviness and begin to rise, as a leaf rises in a breeze just before a downpour, and although he knew he was no lighter he kept rising and hearing the hollow, sickening rush of water and then a wave would explode. When it came down on him everything lighted up in flashes and wheeled around and blacked out, and then the next thing he knew he was coming up through the surface and breathing spray and seeing white and hearing only the air-splitting howl of wind.

  Then he would claw through the hilly darkness, eyes on fire, head pulsating, stomach bloated with seawater, to search for his skipper. Each time he found Morley floating, head flopping, arms flung out and loose as strands of kelp, breath coming in quick, whining rasps, he would drag the big man up onto his own chest and lie back and pray that his inflated suit would keep them afloat until the next breaker.

  Now he, too, was fast taking on water. It had filled the lower legs of his suit and was halfway up his thighs, and each time a wave rolled him he could feel the water slosh against his crotch, sending a horrific, stabbing shock through his testicles that lighted flashes of light in his eyeballs and left him gasping, shivering from the pain.

  Stop shivering, he told himself. Goddammit. Stop and stop and stop and stop. You are not going to shiver. You can’t. Okay, you can quake a little. Go ahead and quake. But no shivering. You can’t shiver.

  The cold was all through him now, the heavy cold that had numbed away his feet and ears and snaked through the rest of him like a steel, flexible snake, a snake that slid and curled down his throat and down through his chest and stomach to his ankles. Each time a wave spun him or flipped him, the snake coiled firmer and colder in his chest until it felt as though a slippery, freezing eel was slapping around inside of him. He was becoming afraid of the cold now, even though it had been in him for some time, and he wondered what it would feel like to pull a dry warm blanket over his feet and legs and chest for just a minute. But he knew that this was not possible, that there was nothing to do about the cold but take it and take it and take it, and he tried to take his mind off it by thinking about Morley’s suffering. I’m so glad I’m not him, he thought. I’m so glad for that. God, I’m glad I’m not him. The cold is bad in my legs and in my nuts and some now down my back but he lost feeling in his lower body hours ago and he is still fighting it. I wonder how long it takes before you have to amputate a limb or a finger because of hypothermia. Don’t think about that, he told himself. Don’t think about that. But this guy is dying a creeping death. He’s hoping and fighting, but he’s dying even as he’s hoping. Just look at him fight. He’s being frozen alive and still he won’t give up.

  He shook Morley by the shoulder.

  Oh God, he’s not shaking anymore. He’s beyond the shakes. That means his core temperature is below eighty-five. I think that’s right. Well, whatever it is, it’s bad. When you stop shaking you cross a line and he’s stopped shaking. His heart could stop any moment. Oh, goddamn those helicopters. Why couldn’t they get a basket near us? Now he’s going to have a heart attack. Maybe it’s the best thing. I don’t know. I can’t stand watching him go through this, agonizing like this.

  What a lousy, shitty thing to think. What is the matter with you? You’ve got to save him. You’ve got to get him into a rescue basket so he can be hoisted up to one of those helos. You’re going to have to wake him up to do it. There’s no way you’re going to be able to push him up into the basket. He’ll be too heavy, with all that water in his suit. You’ll need him to help you. You’ll need to wake him and keep him thinking clearly until he’s in the basket.

  Christ, this water is cold.

  Stop thinking about it, he thought. Think about the helicopter. Didn’t that second helicopter come real close to buying it, though? Especially that one time the rogue climbed up the hoist cable and took a swipe at them. I don’t know how that wave didn’t catch the belly of that thing. And Giggy, wasn’t he funny screaming at the helicopter like that? Send the fucking diver down! Send the fucking diver down! And you were pretty funny, too. Yelling out your name. Hey, it’s me! Bob Doyle! Real funny, all right. Hilarious.

  “Giggy!”

  Out of the darkness he heard Mork answer: “What do you want?”

  “How’re you holding up?”

  “Not good. I’m still stuck with this asshole.”

  “Hey, Mike!”

  Mike DeCapua groaned.

  “Mike!”

  “What?”

  “Give me your lighter.”

  “What?”

  “I said give me your lighter.”

  “What the fuck for?”

  “I want a cigarette.”

  “You’re fucking cracked.”

  “No,” Bob Doyle said, “I just want a cigarette. Giggy, give me a cigarette?”

  “Kiss my ass.”

  A swell lifted them and sent them tumbling into a trough. When he came up for air, Bob Doyle yelled out: “I know one of you bastards took my cigarettes! Who took them?”

  He heard nothing.

  “Bastards! Who stole my cigs?”

  DeCapua shouted back, “I ain’t giving you shit.”

  “How about you, Gig?”

  “Get your own cigs.”

  “Aw, come on, Giggy. Give me a cigarette. Just one lousy cigarette.”

  Another wave buried them, and then another. When they came up, Mork shouted: “Bob, if we get out of this I’ll buy you a fucking carton of Marlboros.”

 
“Luckies,” Bob Doyle said, “I want Luckies.”

  “Bastard,” Mork said. “Hey, Bob, where are those goddamn Coasties?”

  “They went to cash my retirement check” —Bob Doyle gasped for air —“so we can have beer money once we get back.”

  When he said it, Morley laughed.

  “Hey, man,” Bob Doyle said to him. “Welcome back.”

  The skipper didn’t stop laughing. His laughter had an artificial sound to it, an accent of drunkenness, a shrill overtone of idiocy. It was eerie. It made Bob Doyle think of people in smocks behind bars with mad-dog eyes and chains fastened to their wrists.

  “Hey, hey,” he said, “stop it, Mark. Stop it.”

  And Morley stopped, just as quickly as he had started.

  “Take it easy, man,” Bob Doyle told him. “Just take it easy, okay?”

  “You know, Bob… you need to know it, man … I want you to know it.”

  “What, Mark? Know what?”

  “You’re a good man.”

  “Sure, sure. You just hold on, now. I got you.”

  “You are. You’re a good man.”

  “You just hang in there, Mark. You’re going up first. You hear me?”

  Morley said, “Listen, Bob. You tell my son. You tell him that I love him.”

  “Shut up,” Bob Doyle said.

  “You tell him. You’ll tell him, won’t you?”

  “No,” Bob Doyle said. “You tell him. Hear me? We’re getting you in that basket and —”

  Morley went limp.

  “Hey!”

  He shook the skipper.

  “Hey!”

  He could hardly feel his hand in the lobster fingers of the survival mitten, but Bob Doyle curled up a fist, as tight as he could make it, and drove his knuckles into Morley’s face.

  “Wake up!”

  He hit him again.

  “Fight! Fight, you bastard!”

  Crying, socking his skipper, again and again, he suddenly heard Mark Morley groan.

  “There,” Bob Doyle said, “there, that’s better. You wake up. Mark? Mark? Hey, skipper, listen to me. Listen. The helicopter’s here. It’s right behind us.”