The Last Run

by Todd Lewan

  Groggily, Morley said, “Where?”

  “Right behind us,” Bob Doyle lied. “Pretty soon they’re gonna send the basket down.”

  This was how the four men talked to one another as the ocean raged and they waited for a light to pierce the swarming darkness.

  This sea can look so much like a snake, Bob Doyle was saying to himself. The way it undulates, twists. The way it rolls over and strikes. Maybe a python. It’s got the green of a python. Are pythons green or is it cobras? Who knows. In the light of those smoke flares it sure looked green, though. That pale, pretty green. She sure is pretty when she’s angry, this sea. Like the spray. Looks just like a storm of fireflies, I swear to God. Millions of them. No, it’s more like each wave was a huge sparkler, or fireworks showering a field in Vermont with white sparks. On a summer night. Sure. On July Fourth. Showering the sky with diamond sparks. Diamonds and sapphires and emeralds. That’s it. The curling part of the waves—they’re green, like fiery emeralds.

  Christ, you really are losing it, Doyle, he said to himself. Getting all weird thinking. That’s the hypothermia, he thought. That’s what that is. The cold. It’s making you see things, say things. Just pray it doesn’t make you start doing things.

  He lowered his head and said a prayer.

  When he finished he looked up and saw his little one, Katie, sleeping under rumpled, white sheets, her blond hair spread over the pillow.

  Go ahead, he thought. Talk to her.

  Katie? Katie? I’m in trouble, baby. If you can hear me —I know you’re sleeping, but if you can hear me, honey, Daddy is in a lot of trouble. I don’t want to scare you, honey. But wake up. Please wake up and tell Mommy that Daddy’s in the water.

  The girl did not stir.

  All right. I’ll figure out something, baby. I’ll try to figure it out. But just let somebody know Daddy’s in trouble, baby. And please hurry, Katie. We’re going to die soon.

  Then, suddenly, he saw long prongs of light—the beams of headlights—and he was certain he was riding a highway in California. Hills of grass went slipping past, brown grass, the kind that hugs the California hills in the fall, and he knew he was doing a hundred along the San Jose highway. The sky was black. Chipped diamonds, loads of them, lay scattered about everywhere in the sky and he had the radio on and the wind was howling off his side-view mirror and the car racing faster and faster, up and down the hills.

  He then saw the wave approaching.

  It rose up and over the four of them and came down with a deafening crash and he was twirling in the sea again, wrapped in cold black.

  Now it was as if he was looking through a fog. Then the fog parted into shreds of bright blue and he was gazing up into unending sky. He was looking up and there was black soil on both sides of him and at his feet. And then he was staring down at a cemetery. He was looking down at a neatly rectangular pit and he saw his lovely ones, Katie and Brendan, sobbing, their hands caressing the casket, and he knew he was in it but could not understand how he could be looking down on it from above.

  Katie’s hair was a brilliant, frosted white, tucked partially inside of a beret. Beside Katie stood his mother, and alongside her his kid sister, Sally, who looked no older than nine. Behind them stood his brothers and his father and even his uncle Jim, who looked like he did before the cancer, and every one of them was staring blankly at the casket in the pit. He told them in his mind that he loved them all and how badly he felt for having died on them, and how it had not been his idea to die and that if he could have died any differently he would have.

  And then he noticed Rick Koval, standing over his casket.

  You bastard, he cried out. You smug bastard.

  Koval was standing over the grave leering with those pig eyes of his and laughing—that boorish, insidious laugh of his, the laugh he so hated. And then he saw Koval rest one hand on Katie’s shoulder and, with the other, give his casket the finger.

  His head snapped back.

  Bob Doyle knew where he was. He knew he was in the ocean, frigid, yet alive. He heard a comber barrel toward him but he did not worry about it.

  You, he said, having taken the wave, spinning now in the blackness, are going to survive. Nobody, least of all that bastard, is going to take Katie away from you. You are going to goddamn fucking survive.

  Back at the air station in Sitka, the ground crew had towed the helicopter off the launchpad and over to a fuel pit on the far side of the airstrip.

  In the cockpit of Rescue 6011, Steve Torpey was listening to Bill Adickes over high-frequency radio.

  “Steve,” Adickes said, “it’s nothing like you’ve ever seen before.”

  The first rescue helicopter was flying across Sitka Sound now and the radio transmission was sharp. Still, Adickes’s voice sounded rough.

  He said, “Don’t be surprised by needing very extreme inputs on the controls.”

  “Okay,” Torpey said.

  Adickes said, “The seas are bad. Real bad. Seventy-foot waves with rogues. Watch out for the rogues.”

  “Right.”

  “Don’t even think about hovering or hoisting from any lower than a hundred feet. Watch for downdrafts. They drove us down right in front of big waves. And the winds are extreme. They hit you from all sides.”

  “Okay,” Torpey said.

  “You’ve never been in anything like this.”

  “Okay,” Torpey said. Ted LeFeuvre was listening to the conversation through his headset. Although he appreciated the information, the roughness in Adickes’s voice unsettled him.

  “What else can you tell us?” Torpey asked.

  “Take lots of flares. Lots of flares. As many as you can. Get them in the water fast. You’ll need them for reference. Otherwise, you won’t see the water. You won’t see anything. It’s all black out there. No light. No light at all.”

  “What else?”

  “Load extra gas. You’ll need it. And take another flight mechanic along.”

  “Two flight mechs?”

  “It’s too much for one guy to handle. We lost Sean early on. Now he’s vomiting, hyperventilating. The guy’s totally dehydrated. We think he’s in shock. Is that ambulance going to meet us?”

  “It’s on the way,” Torpey said.

  Ted LeFeuvre hit a switch on his headset so that the crew in the cabin could hear him.

  “Say, Fred,” he said to Fred Kalt, who was sitting back, strapped in, ready for takeoff, “the first helicopter just recommended that we take another flight mech along with us. We’ve got Lee Honnold in the hangar.”

  “I don’t need another flight mech,” Kalt said.

  “You don’t need one.”

  “Sir,” Kalt said, “I can do this myself. I don’t need Lee.”

  Torpey put Adickes on hold for a second. “Fred,” he said, “don’t you think it might be rough enough out there to warrant some extra help?”

  “Mr. Torpey,” Kalt said, “you can’t make it rough enough for me.”

  Torpey looked at Ted LeFeuvre, and the captain lifted his shoulders to show he did not know.

  Torpey went back to talking to Adickes. “All right, Bill,” he said. “Thanks a lot for the warning. Can you give us an idea of what the conditions are looking like out there?”

  While he listened Ted LeFeuvre saw the nose light of the 6018 in the sky. Then the Jayhawk’s silhouette grew steadily and then its hover floodlights danced along the runway. Out front of maintenance control, an ambulance pulled up.

  “Hey,” Torpey said, looking out his side door, “there’s the ambulance.”

  The helicopter touched down and taxied to a stop in front of the operations center. The jump door flew open and the paramedics hustled over. They eased Sean Witherspoon down onto a stretcher, put an IV in his arm, an oxygen mask over his mouth, and wheeled him quickly over to the ambulance.

  The rear doors swung shut and the ambulance roared off, siren wailing. Fred Kalt sat watching its taillights fade in the downpour. He cleared his
throat.

  “Captain LeFeuvre,” he said. “I was thinking.” He paused. “Maybe waiting for Lee isn’t such a bad idea.”

  While Lee Honnold was throwing the last of his gear into a duffel bag and bolting out of the hangar deck and across the tarmac to the waiting helicopter, Bill Adickes was walking through the air station, head doing spins and leg muscles fluttering, down a shiny, gray, fluorescent-lit corridor.

  When he reached the locker room he pushed open the door. He was heading to the showers in the back when he saw Rich Sansone.

  Sansone was on his knees, doubled over a toilet, retching. Adickes stood watching him for a moment. Then he stepped over and put a hand on Sansone’s shoulder. The rescue swimmer did not look up.

  He was not done yet.

  FORTY-FIVE

  They were on scene thirty-nine minutes later, in complete darkness.

  “It’s no good,” Ted LeFeuvre said. He flipped up his night-vision goggles. “I can’t see a thing out there. What about you?”

  “Nothing,” Steve Torpey said.

  “I’m flipping up my goggles. These things aren’t doing me any good.”

  “Me neither.”

  Seconds earlier, they had roared directly over the fly-to position Russ Zullick had radioed to them as he and the second helicopter crew flew back to Sitka. Zullick had warned them not to expect the survivors to still be at same position, since the drift was so strong. But they had to start looking somewhere.

  “Better turn us around,” Ted LeFeuvre said.

  “Hold on.”

  Torpey swung the cyclic. By the time he had steadied the aircraft and the Jayhawk’s nose was pointed squarely into the wind, they were seven miles off the fly-to position.

  “What’s our airspeed?”

  “Eighty-two knots.”

  “What’s our ground speed?”

  “Three knots.”

  “Jesus.”

  It felt as though they were riding a roller coaster, with rushes and sudden swoops and plunges, and each time the helicopter dropped sharply Ted LeFeuvre felt the sickening, hollowing-out, emptying sensation in the pit of his stomach that echoed on through his whole diaphragm. Torpey pushed the engines to 145 knots, and they began moving forward over the ocean.

  “Hey, Steve,” Ted LeFeuvre shouted. Everything was jangling around in the cockpit and he could not hear himself unless he raised his voice.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking. You remember that really bad case a year ago that Adickes and Newby handled?”

  “No.”

  “That real bad one. The one they did in the straits. I can’t remember the name of it.”

  “The Oceanic?”

  “That’s it. Yeah.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, I remember Adickes telling me how bad they were getting beat up. Real bad turbulence. Just like now. Downdrafts. The whole works. And you know what they did?”

  “No.”

  “They divided the controls.”

  Dividing the flight controls was not something pilots were supposed to talk about, let alone attempt, in the Coast Guard. It was an unorthodox technique, considered quite dangerous, and the command summarily discouraged the practice. The pilot was supposed to operate the cyclic, collective and floor pedals; the copilot was supposed to navigate, monitor the radio and program the H-60’s flight computer. The rule book was clear on this. No dividing the controls.

  But nobody’s trained to fly in this, Ted LeFeuvre said to himself. These conditions are too extreme for one pilot to work all of the flight controls. Steve’s already task-saturated. And we’re just riding a tailwind. He’s goingto burn out fast once we start fighting the winds. But if one of us controls altitude and the other takes care of our lateral movements, we’ll not only get crisper movement, we’ll both last longer. Of course, we’re going to have to make our control inputs jell. Can I keep up with you, Steve? I guess we’ll find out.

  “Want to try it?” Ted LeFeuvre asked.

  Torpey hesitated.

  “I’d take the collective and watch the radar altimeter. You’d stay on the cyclic and the pedals.”

  Torpey said nothing.

  “It goes against the book,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “It does that.”

  “All right,” Torpey said. “Why not?”

  “Good,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “All right. Now, I’ll follow your inputs on the collective with my right hand and gradually take it over from you. All right? You let me know what altitude you want me to keep.”

  “Roger.”

  “I’ll do my best to maintain whatever altitude you want to hoist from.”

  “Sure.”

  “One more thing,” Ted LeFeuvre told him. “When we get on scene let’s just skip doing a PATCH.” That stood for precision approach to a control hover. It was a standard approach that pilots used when they could not see the ocean below. “We’ll probably get a visual of the water at a hundred and fifty feet, so why don’t we just do a level-speed change. As soon as we spot the survivors, let’s try to establish a hover anywhere between a hundred and a hundred thirty feet off the water.”

  “Let’s go for it,” Torpey said.

  “Good.”

  Ted LeFeuvre thought of the air rushing at them as a kind of river. It is a very, very wide river, he thought, so wide that if we were in a canoe we would not be able to make out either shoreline from the middle. It’s almost like we’re salmon and this is the last river we’ll ever be fighting against. It’s a mighty river, this one, a surge of white water, and there are many big stones in the river. And it’s a tricky river, he thought. It’s fast and deep and traitorous and one you had better respect. It watches and waits until you think you have just about figured out its direction and then it swings onyou, hard, when you aren’t expecting it. And it always hits you from the angle you least expected. You respect this river, he told himself. Do not relax on it and take nothing in it for granted. That will be your end.

  Steve Torpey instructed the crew to begin preparing the cabin for hoisting.

  “Lee,” Fred Kalt said, “start handing me those glow sticks.”

  “Here.”

  “And let’s get the caps off a couple of flares.”

  “Okay.”

  While Kalt and Honnold cleared the deck and readied the flares and rescue basket, Ted LeFeuvre gradually took over control of the collective. At first he followed Steve Torpey’s movements, touching the stick that controlled their altitude ever so lightly, petting it with his fingertips and the pads of his palm, and then gradually, almost imperceptibly, tightening his clasp on the collective until it was almost an extension of his arm and elbow and wrist and it was he who was moving them up and down, compensating for the plunging and upthrusting of the aircraft.

  It is strange, he said to himself, this business of controlling half a helicopter. Now I know why they discourage us from doing it.

  Most of his Coast Guard career, most of his life, in fact, it had always been his way to take total control of a situation, to shoulder all responsibility when confronting a crisis. And he had always relished playing the role of “Big Mom”—guiding, orchestrating, directing. This was different. Now he and a pilot nearly young enough to be his son were flying the Coast Guard’s most sophisticated helicopter in a hurricane together. Each had the power to take the helicopter in a different direction, but they both had to come together to form a single pilot or they would go in the water. It had taken a freak of nature, an arctic hurricane of mammoth proportions, for him to realize that it was all right to relinquish control, that sometimes one man alone could not do it all. It was not an easy thing to admit; it ran counter to his training as a pilot, to his masculine ego. And yet it was liberating.

  I’ve got to trust him, Ted LeFeuvre said to himself. And he’s got to trust me. Considering how rusty I am in the H-60, that can’t be easy for him. This is no absolute brotherhood. But we have to trust each other. We also have to read each other, time
each other, anticipate each other. The seas aren’t laying down. The wind certainly isn’t letting up. I must say it feelslike we’re flying in the fjords around Sitka, the way the winds are ricocheting around. It’s like they’re being deflected off the sides of mountains. I guess they are in a way. Those waves down there are like small mountains. That’s something to think about, all right. For now you better keep that altitude steady around three hundred feet. That’s enough to do for now. That will be plenty.

  He glanced back and saw Kalt and Honnold tying chemical lights to the rescue basket. It made an amusing image—the silhouettes of two helmeted figures kneeling and hunched over a shiny metal cage, bathed in an eerie, powdery green glow. It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie, he thought.

  “Fred,” Ted LeFeuvre said over the ICS, “it looks like you guys are dressing up a Christmas tree.”

  Kalt grunted. “We’re going to make sure those survivors see this stinking basket.”

  “How could they miss it?”

  “It’ll be their fault if they don’t see it. Lee, give me another glow stick.”

  Right then the direction finder began swinging.

  “I think we got two signals,” Ted LeFeuvre said to Torpey. He squinted at the dial. “Yup. We got two.”

  “Two?”

  Sometimes the needle would swing hard left, and other times hard right. Sometimes it squirreled from side to side. We must be picking up the EPIRB and the data marker buoy left by the first aircrew, Ted LeFeuvre was thinking. It looks as though they are three miles or so apart. One of the beacons must have drifted faster than the other. Well, which one do you go to first? Are the survivors closer to the EPIRB or did they get swept along with the data marker buoy?

  Which signal is which?

  “If you ask me,” Ted LeFeuvre said to Torpey, “I’d say the DMB is the one off to our right.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just a feeling.”

  “So which one do we head to first, sir?”