The Last Run

by Todd Lewan

  The helicopter took an uppercut from a gust and the flares hopped around the cabin.

  Kalt made a grunting noise and, shuffling with his hands on the deck, picked up the flares and then cradled them to his chest.

  “Okay,” Torpey said, “prepare deploy flares.”

  “Hold on,” Kalt said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Kalt said. He could feel the helicopter shooting another approach to the water now. “Almost ready.”

  “All right,” Torpey said. Then, as he came up on his twelve o’clock: “Prepare to deploy flares. Okay… Drop! Drop! Drop!”

  Kalt counted to two before pitching the flares out the door. He wanted the flares spaced farther apart in the water to increase the length of their visual reference. The flight mechanic stuck his head out the cabin and saw the flares burning in an arc just thirty yards upwind of the strobe light.

  “Flares have ignited,” he said in the same deadpan tone of voice that had intensified only slightly since they had departed Sitka. “They’re just upwind of the survivors.”

  “Good.”

  As they were dropping the flares, Ted LeFeuvre had been trying to hold their altitude steady and make some sense out of the radar altimeter, which was swinging between 70 feet and 220 feet. Initially, he had backed up Torpey on the cyclic. But the inputs were changing so quickly and so extremely that he feared that just having his hand on the cyclic might slow Torpey down. So Ted LeFeuvre kept his hand on his thigh and watched as the young pilot steered, though he reminded himself to stay awake and be ready to take over the moment things went awry.

  Something deep inside was urging him to seize control of the aircraft and to fly them far away from there. But he fought the urge off.

  We’re doing all right, he thought. We’re doing better than I’d expected. The kid is flying brilliantly. There aren’t many people who could fly like this kid is now. I wish I could. I wish there was some other way I could help him. Well, you’re helping him plenty. Just let him go. And keep us out of the water. Do that.

  “Captain LeFeuvre,” he heard Mike Fish say. “Watch our altitude, sir. We’re now at seventy-two feet.”

  “Thanks, Mike.” Ted LeFeuvre pulled gently up on the collective. “Taking us back up.”

  This is just like being inside the motion simulator at flight training school in Mobile, he thought. The way you see nothing but black, then a few flares rising up the walls of the waves, then nothing again. But here, he thought, you don’t get a chance to take a break. There are no breaks. No lapses, either. No, you aren’t allowed any of those.

  Sometimes he could see tremendous streaks of foam being ripped off the wave crests and slung in long, white lassos, and he noticed that Torpey was using those foamy streaks as references and angling the helicopter so as to keep the wind planing off the aircraft’s nose. Then everything would go blindingly white again, and he would have only the radar altimeter to focus on again.

  But now, for the first time since they had left Sitka nearly two hours earlier, he was having trouble keeping his thoughts from wandering. He scolded himself, but he found that no matter how hard he tried he could not stay focused on the altimeter and its grave importance. I wonder if I left enough pellets in the stove tonight, he thought. Gosh, it’ll be a real pain if I get home and the house is freezing again. I wonder what Cam is doing right now. Probably sleeping. He better be. Kathy lets that boy get away with murder. She would never listen to me about that boy, though. Gee, that was a big wave. Hey. What is the matter with you? Watch your altimeter. What does it say? Eighty-nine feet. Pull up. Get us back over a hundred. That’s it. I’m too old for this. I’m way too old for this. I should be back in Sitka writing the award citations for these guys. I shouldn’t be here. That’s it in a nutshell. I should not be in this seat. I wonder how I would have handled this when I first came up as a pilot? Stuff like this is for the young guys. This is going to be a heck of an award write-up.

  Good grief. What are you thinking? Oh, no. Watch that wave. Pull us up. Ooh. That was close. That was close that time.

  Over the intercom he could hear Kalt mutter, “Oh, oh.” The flight mechanic had just pitched the rescue basket out the jump door again.

  “Mr. Torpey?” Kalt said.

  “What?”

  “The basket is sailing from side to side.” Kalt was hanging halfway out the door. They could hear his mouthpiece picking up the wind’s howl.

  “The basket is flapping in all of this wind. It’s sailing aft at forty-five degrees.”

  “What can I do?”

  Kalt pulled himself into the cabin. “Let me get it in and try again.” He threw the winch in reverse. “Go forward and right,” he said. “Forward and right—two hundred.”

  They tried turning the helicopter a bit to create a lee but that did not work either. Over and over Kalt threw the basket out, hoping the gusts would stop, trying to time it so that the wind would not fling the cage into the tail rotor. A few times he did get the basket to drop beneath the reach of the rotor blades. But those times the basket did hit water it bounced and twirled from crest to trough, appearing and disappearing in the foam-laced swells.

  After a half hour of attempts Kalt said, “Mr. Torpey, I can’t seem to do this hoisting, sir. Do you want to see if maybe Lee could do it better?”

  All this time Honnold had his six-foot-two-inch frame sprawled stomach down on the deck, his long arms and legs clinging to the floor and the door frame as though he were riding the back of an enormous, bucking bronco. While Kalt worked the winch, Honnold had been sparring with the hoist cable to keep it from rubbing on the helicopter and snapping. His head was ringing, the deck beneath him was pitching and rolling, and he felt sick at his stomach. His arm muscles burned and his hands were cold and losing feeling. He stuck his head out the door, into the torrent of lashing ice, seized the cable and pulled it up on his helmet so that his head served as a guiding shaft; with the line running off his helmet, it no longer caught on the door frame or the searchlight. But each time the helicopter jerked, the great weight of the steel line gouged his helmet and wrenched his neck.

  He was grunting and swearing now.

  Torpey heard it. “No, Fred,” he said. “We’re going to stick with you for now, okay?”

  “Roger that,” Kalt said, and he leaned back out the door. “All right, let’s go forward and right a hundred and fifty.”

  Torpey was really laying into the controls now, no longer banking twentyor twenty-five degrees, but now routinely banking the helicopter at a forty-to forty-five-degree angle. At one point, Ted LeFeuvre began to wonder if the tips on the rotor blades might not snap off under the strain.

  But it began to make a difference.

  Torpey and Kalt found a rhythm and soon the conning commands were not as dramatic: Kalt spoke almost softly, like a surgeon, talking his pilot through the evolution as calmly as if they were setting down on a deserted beach, telling him to go fifty feet this way, thirty feet that way, twenty feet aft, fifteen forward, until they were consistently within a tightening area. The helicopter was still heaving, pitching wildly in the wind; but it was no longer sailing all over the sky.

  Kalt was saying, “That’s it. That’s good. Now back and right ten feet.”

  “Back and right, ten,” Torpey repeated.

  “Forward five.”

  “Going forward five.”

  Down in the churning sea, the basket was bobbing within ten yards of the survivors now.

  “I’ve got the basket near the survivors,” Kalt said, in that same, flat tone. “Paying out slack… okay… Lee… give me some light… right there… hold it… that’s it… hold!”

  Torpey laughed.

  “Hold? In this?”

  “Hold!”

  Kalt could only see blurry shapes in a circle. Then one of the shapes broke from the others and made for the basket. He saw the flash of reflective tape.

  “Someone’s swimming toward the bask
et!”

  Grabbing the hoist cable now, feeling the heavy tautness of the steel fibers sliding through the fingers and palm of his leather hoisting glove, he waited for a tug in the line.

  Then:

  “I think I got somebody! Yes! We got one in the basket! Taking a load!”

  Roughly a hundred feet down from where Kalt was kneeling, Bob Doyle was shouting to Mark Morley:

  “Mark, I’m cutting you free of the rope now!”

  “Just get me close! Just get me close! I’ll get in the thing! I swear it!”

  “Okay, Mark. Take it easy. I’ll get you there. You’re the first one up, okay?”

  “Where? Where?”

  “It’s close by. Close. See what I told you? You’re going to see your kid.”

  Once Bob Doyle had heard the distant throbbing turn to a whining roar and seen the spotlight, he felt the hopeful, singing feeling around his heart, and then the helicopter was overhead, much lower than the others, and then shoots of bright, white light were bursting around them and casting shadows and lighting the waves green again, and then he saw the glint of the hoist cable in the coned light of the belly floods. God, don’t let the waves touch them, he thought. Please don’t let it happen.

  Then the helicopter went hurtling downwind.

  He had watched it go shooting away until it was almost out of sight. Then he had seen it coming back. It had wobbled up from horizon, growing bigger and brighter, and then he saw the shine of flare casings tumbling through the sky and more bursts of the red-white light not far off, and then waves avalanching over the glowing basket, but the basket moving closer, all the time closer, and then he was thinking: God, bring it to me. I’ll grab it and I won’t let it go. I swear. And then, hearing a wave gathering in that same sickening, gurgling rush high above, seeing nothing and breathing nothing and knowing nothing, tumbling in hard, heavy darkness and then snapping free of it, mopping his eyes, he spotted the glowing green rescue basket no farther away than the length of two swimming pools.

  Bob Doyle yanked his suit zipper down to his waist and, feeling the icy shock on his chest, pulled out his fishing knife.

  “Mark,” he said, “I’ll get you in the basket. Two people can fit in that basket. When we get to it, you grab it. You hang on. Even if I can’t get in.”

  “I gotta get in it.”

  He cut the rope around Morley’s waist. “I want you to swim as hard as you can.” He severed his own line. “I’ll be holding you.” He let the knife go. “Giggy, I’m taking Mark up!”

  “Go!”

  Reaching his arm over the skipper’s back, Bob Doyle started kickingand thrashing. Every muscle felt rigid. Needles of pain shot through them. He swam hard. It did not seem like he was moving. The waves kept pushing him back. He had Morley by the collar. The skipper was trying to do a dog paddle and not doing it too well. They took a wave in the face. Bob Doyle spit it out.

  Ahead the green glow was rising and falling in the blackness.

  “Move!”

  His legs felt like lead. The glowing box was coming straight at him. He swam as hard as he could. The swells were lifting him up and down, but the glow was brighter and brighter. He felt a sharp pain on his skull.

  Bob Doyle grabbed the metal cage with his free, left hand, steadied it.

  “Mark! Get in!”

  A swell lifted them high, high, high, and then dropped away and they rolled down its back side. Bob Doyle still had the basket in his fingers. With his free arm he reached around Morley’s waist.

  “Get in!”

  He tried to heave him into the basket. He got behind him and tried to push him by the rump.

  No good.

  “Christ,” he screamed at Morley. “Help me!”

  Get leverage, he thought. Get in the basket and pull him up and into it.

  “Here,” he shouted into Morley’s face. He grabbed the loose, heavy arms, draped them over the top of the wired basket. “That’s it. Now hold on to the cable.”

  Bob Doyle swung around in the water, grabbed the opposite side of the basket and hoisted himself up and in so that his knees pressed off the bottom of the basket.

  “Come on!”

  On his knees, his hands grabbing Morley’s, he pulled with everything he had.

  “Come on!”

  Again he struck back hard against the great weight.

  “Get in here!”

  Just then he felt a heavy jerk.

  As soon as Ted LeFeuvre heard Fred Kalt shout that there was a man in the basket, he pulled full power on the collective. The helicopter shot skyward.

  That’s it, Ted LeFeuvre was thinking. No faster way to lift that basket out of those waves. The hoist can’t lift that basket like I can. Oh, boy, are we going up.

  Lee Honnold had been thrown aside when the helicopter lurched skyward. The cable had whipped down on the deck. It was now sawing against the door frame and along the grating of the Night Sun, the searchlight on the belly of the helicopter.

  Fred Kalt had been catapulted backward. He peeled himself off the back wall and staggered to the door.

  Below, the basket crashed through a comber and, spinning and shedding foam, punched through the far side of the wave.

  “Holy crap!” Kalt shouted. “The survivor’s still in the basket!”

  The winch was taking cable onto the reel in sweeps as fast as the reel could turn. There was no slack at all; the cable was as taut as a tuned fiddle string.

  “Basket’s halfway up!”

  The cage, tiny at first but growing steadily in size, pitched and spun, engulfed in curling curtains of sleet and snow.

  “Basket’s twenty feet below the cabin!”

  Up, up, up it came, until it swayed just outside the jump door.

  “Basket’s outside the cabin door!”

  Kalt reached for it. The basket swung away from him.

  “Bringing the basket in!”

  This time he grabbed the metal cage and pulled. It didn’t budge. He pulled again.

  Stuck.

  “Bringing the basket in!”

  He yanked harder.

  “Attempting… to… bring… the basket… in,” he said, grunting. “It, ah… it… the basket won’t come in the door.”

  Steve Torpey glanced at his rearview mirror. Outside, through a heavy shroud of driving white flecks, he saw the rescue basket. There was acrouched figure inside it. He also saw a flight helmet. And he saw two arms pulling at the cage.

  Kalt was crouching now at the door, shouting to Honnold, “Pull, Lee! Pull!”

  Both men were now leaning back, pulling with all the strength in their cramping muscles.

  “Are you pulling?”

  “I’m pulling! I’m pulling!”

  “It’s not coming in!”

  “I’m pulling as hard as I can!”

  Mike Fish, in his seat monitoring altitude and working the high-frequency radio, looked up. Through an opening between Kalt’s right leg and the jump door, he saw why the basket would not enter.

  A second man was dangling from it.

  Each time Kalt and Honnold tried to yank the basket in, the dangling man’s arms and head got rammed against the lip of the jump door.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Through the driving sleet icing his visor, Fred Kalt could hardly make out the kneeling figure inside the rescue basket just outside the helicopter door. He reached out and gave the basket another yank.

  Something was wrong. No matter how hard he tried, he could not pull the basket inside.

  “FRED!” Mike Fish shouted, behind him. “SOMEONE’S HANGING ON THE BASKET!”

  “Where?” Lee Honnold screamed into the wind. “Where? Where?”

  “FRED!”

  “I can’t see him!” Kalt shouted.

  The man was inches below Kalt’s boots, barely clinging to the bottom of the basket. He lifted his head up, looked into the cabin and locked eyes with Fish.

  For a second. Just one second.

  Time e
nough for everything to pause in Fish’s mind, for the whining sleet and the groaning turbines to hush.

  Time enough for one man’s eyes to scream for mercy, for another’s to scream in horror.

  And then he was gone.

  Not a minute earlier, the basket was eighty feet below the helicopter, bouncing like a yo-yo in the wind and the whirling, thick snow and sleet.

  “We’re getting there!” the man on his knees inside the rescue basket was screaming. “Just hang on!”

  The man dangling from the bottom of the basket yelled back: “Hang on to me!”

  “I got you!”

  “Don’t let me go!”

  “I said I got you!”

  Then there was a hollowing swish through a rushing noise, and then a deafening, rumbling roar, and a wave exploded in a cloudlike burst only feet below the dangling man’s legs. The blast from it rolled up and buffeted them.

  “Don’t drop me!”

  “I got you!”

  The man kneeling inside the basket, Bob Doyle, had his hands under the armpits of the dangling man, Mark Morley, and he was saying to himself: We’re going to be okay now. The sea can’t get us anymore. We’re out of it. We’re out of it.

  The basket kept spinning, twirling, shedding spray and spindrift.

  “We’re almost there!”

  “I can’t hang on anymore!”

  “Give it what you can!”

  “I can’t!”

  “Don’t let go!”

  “Please don’t drop me! Please don’t drop me!”

  “You ain’t gonna drop!”

  “Don’t drop me!”

  “I won’t!”

  They were in the belly lights of the helicopter now. They were fifteen feet below the jump door, and as they climbed Bob Doyle saw, out of the corner of his eye, helmets and shoulders hanging out the side of the helicopter.

  “Don’t drop me!”

  Just then a gust slammed into them. The basket rocked and whirled. Bob Doyle’s hands no longer had his skipper by the armpits; they had slid down his arms and were fastened to Morley’s wrists.

  “Hang on!”