by Todd Lewan
Morley’s hands, which had been clutching the basket, were sliding now.
“Don’t let go!”
Bob Doyle lunged with one hand and grabbed his skipper’s collar. Leaning back, knees digging into the wire mesh of the basket bottom, he swung his other hand around and seized the shoulder. Now he leaned back.
“Bob!”
“I got you!”
The upper half of the basket was now above the deck of the helicopter cabin.
“We’re here!” Bob Doyle screamed hoarsely at the shapes in the doorway. He looked down.
“Hang on, Mark! We’re here!”
“I can’t!”
He thought he could see Morley’s eyes now; they were blank eyes, black as coal, all fear and despair and hope drained and emptied out of them from the fight. There was nothing in them at all. They were bottomless.
The basket lurched.
“Hey!”
There were now two pairs of gloved hands yanking at the basket frame. He tried to shout but the groaning roar of the turbines and the whining sleet swallowed his screams.
“No! Wait!”
Another lurch; this time he saw it. The head of the dangling skipper rammed against a steel rail beneath the door frame.
“No!”
The basket was wobbling.
“No!”
Again the basket lurched. Again Bob Doyle heard the dull, sickening thud of Morley’s head against the fiberglass airframe. This time, Morley lifted his head.
He turned it a little to the left, then turned back and looked straight up and locked wild eyes with the bearded, screaming man in the basket above him.
His friend.
“No!” the man, Bob Doyle, was shrieking. “Oh please, Mark… don’t…”
And then Mark Morley allowed the wind to take him in any direction that it wished.
The altimeter on the central display unit read 103.
One hundred and three feet, Mike Fish was thinking. My God, that’s far for a man to fall.
The clunk of steel on the deck snapped Fish out of his thoughts. It was the rescue basket. Fred Kalt and Lee Honnold had finally pulled it in.
“Basket is in the door!” Kalt shouted. He was elated; they finally had a survivor in the helicopter. There was nothing that could go wrong now.
The man in the basket was hysterical, gesturing, blubbering. Honnold was trying to calm him down.
“What the hell’s wrong with this guy?” Honnold said. “He’s going frickin’ nuts.”
“Fred,” Fish said. He felt a sinking feeling going all through him. “Fred?”
Kalt didn’t hear him.
In all of the confusion, the ICS cord plugged into his helmet had come loose. He could not hear his crewmates. Fish got up and tapped him on the back and Kalt turned around. Fish pointed to his own helmet.
Kalt understood. He picked the cord up from the deck and plugged it back in to his helmet.
“What’s the matter?”
“There was someone hanging on the basket.”
“Are you sure?”
“He just fell.”
Kalt whirled around. “Where?”
“There. He was just there. He fell.”
Kalt just stood looking out the jump door, looking down at the seas.
Beside him, Honnold tilted the basket and the survivor rolled out. The man crawled to the back wall and leaned his head against it. Honnold pulled the man’s hood off.
“You all right?” he shouted over the drone of the rotors.
“The skipper,” the man shrieked. Tears streaked his reddened cheeks. “The skipper just fell. Oh, God, I let him go! I let him go!”
“Who?”
“It’s my fault! I let him fall! I couldn’t hold him!”
The man broke down, sobbing.
“Hey,” Honnold said, confused. He grabbed the man by the shoulders and head-butted him.
“Calm down!”
He head-butted the man again, and shouted: “Listen to me!”
The survivor stared almost fearfully at Honnold. He did not want another head butt.
“You are one lucky bastard!” Honnold yelled at him. “You know that? Do you? Now calm down. Calm down and tell me how many people were on board your boat.”
The man wiped his eyes. “Five.”
“Not four?”
“Five.”
“You say somebody fell? Who fell?”
“Mark Morley, our skipper.”
“Is there anyone else down there who’s alive?”
“Yeah,” the man said. His lips were trembling. Icicles twitched in his beard.
“How many are down there?”
“Two,” the man said. His voice was hoarse, heavy. “Plus the skipper.”
“Okay,” Honnold said, helping the man up. “Here, get in this seat. Easy now. I’m gonna strap you in.”
Tears ran down the man’s cheeks.
“Jesus,” Honnold said, “that’s some mess you got yourself into. It’s a real mess down there.”
The man wiped his eyes and looked at the smoke flares on the cabin deck. “You,” he stammered, “you—you guys need any help with that stuff?”
“No,” Honnold said. He was pulling a strap over the man and buckling him in. “Just take it easy.”
Mike Fish crawled over with a thermal-insulated sack. He was responsible now for checking the survivor for hypothermia and shock. He began to scrutinize the man’s flushed, drawn face, and then froze.
“Hey,” he stammered. “It’s… it’s… Bob Doyle!”
Over the intercom, he heard Steve Torpey break in, “What? Our Bob Doyle?”
Fish reached over and touched Bob Doyle’s beard. “Yeah,” Fish said, and then to Doyle: “Bob, it is you, right?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“What the hell’s he doing out here in this?”
“Wait,” Fish said. “He’s… He’s saying something about the skipper falling … He says the boat’s skipper just fell… That’s the guy who just fell off the basket. Sir, he’s pretty upset.”
“Well,” Torpey said, “just tell him we’re going to do our best. Tell him we’ll get to him.”
“Roger.”
In the cockpit, Ted LeFeuvre was working the collective and watching their altitude on the radar altimeter. He could not keep from hearing their talk. But he had not taken his eyes off the console or the seas, not even when he heard the commotion over the fallen survivor. He wondered how it must be to fall through darkness and not to know when you would hit the water but that distracted him momentarily so he told himself to stop thinking about that. He was having a difficult time as it was concentrating on his inputs and keeping the aircraft in a hover. But when he heard Fish say over the ICS that the man they had rescued was Bob Doyle, he turned his head with a sort-of lunge, stared at the shadowy figure slumped against the back wall and turned back.
I can’t believe it, he thought. We saved Bob Doyle? The guy who caused me so much grief? Throw him back. No, no, no. That’s horrible. That’s bad. Lord, I’m sorry. Truly, I am. But, Lord, of all people—Bob Doyle?
Fish was checking his vital signs. “Mr. Doyle,” he said, “what are you doing out here?”
Bob Doyle thought it felt good to hear someone call him mister. “I’m just glad to be here,” he said, and he sighed. Then he smiled and shook Fish’s hand. “Thank you, Mike. Thank you.”
“That’s all right,” Fish said. He kept working on him. “Are you cold?”
“Very.”
“Do you want me to put you in the thermal bag?”
“No, no,” Bob Doyle told him. “I don’t need that. Save it for the other guys.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“All right,” Fish said. “You just relax, sit back and enjoy the flight.”
“Just get the skipper.”
“We will.”
The basket was already going down again. It splashed in a trough between two enormous waves, ten yard
s from the survivors. Kalt was watching the cable saw back and forth on the grate of the Night Sun. That’s a hell of a sight, all right, Kalt thought. If that cable snaps or birdcages, it’s over.
Below them, riding up and down the crests of the waves, was a man in a survival suit. He was floating, spread-eagled and facedown, but neither his arms nor legs seemed to be moving. He did not know if the man was alive or not, but he certainly was not moving on his own.
A hundred yards off was the strobe light and a jumble of retrotape.
Better go for the ones who look like they’re conscious, Kalt said to himself. Get moving.
He conned Torpey to fly the helicopter far beyond the right of the strobe before putting the basket out. Then he instructed the pilots to move gradually back toward the left, dragging the basket through the water as they went. He and Torpey understood each other perfectly now. He only had to call two or three conning commands to establish a hover position over the strobe.
They were fifteen minutes into the hoist evolution when Ted LeFeuvre noticed the warning light flashing on the fuel gauge.
“Steve,” he said, “we’ve just exceeded our BINGO.”
“Oh.”
“We don’t have enough gas to get back to Sitka.”
Torpey did not answer him. He was banking the helicopter and fighting to hold a position.
“I’ll figure it out.”
He could sense that his brain was slowing down; to calculate a simple fuel-burn rate took Ted LeFeuvre more than a minute. As he figured how much gas they would need to reach shore, he was thinking: We can’t just leave these people here. I didn’t ask to be here. But we’ve gotten this far. If we stop now the rest of those fishermen are going to be fish food.
Since he needed both hands to work the collective, he used the foot switch to make a radio call to the C-130. The plane had arrived on scene just as the second helicopter was aborting mission and returning to Sitka. He had not yet spoken to the C-130; Fish had been working radios. But when Ted LeFeuvre heard the unperturbed voice of the radioman, he felt a renewed sense of calm come into him. Confidence, like fear, was contagious, and now the confidence he had before the first rogue wave had nearly finished them was back.
He identified himself and told the radioman that their flight ops were normal.
“Roger, 6011,” the voice said. “How are things down there?”
“Rough.”
“How bad are the seas?”
“Bad.”
“What can we do for you?”
“Listen,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “I’m pretty worn out and I wondered if you guys could confirm a fuel-burn rate for me. We’re looking to go to Yakutat. Now as I see it, that’s sixty miles north and east, so with a tailwind of seventy-five knots, I’m figuring it will take us fifteen minutes to get there.”
There was a silence.
“Is that what you get?”
“Hold on.”
He waited twenty seconds, each feeling like a full minute, and then heheard the radioman say: “Seventeen minutes flight time is what we get from your present position, over.”
“Thanks,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “We’ll talk in fifteen minutes. Rescue 6011 out.”
He turned to Torpey.
“Listen, from here Yakutat is about fifteen minutes, which means we’ve got enough fuel to safely stay for another hour and forty minutes.”
“Are you sure?”
“I just double-checked my figures with the C-130. They came up with the same thing.”
“Captain,” Torpey said, pointing, “watch that wave there!”
Ted LeFeuvre hit the collective, heard the turbines whine and felt the sudden, hollowing-out thrusting jump of the helicopter in his stomach. A comber—eighty feet at least—swept beneath them. Torpey exhaled.
“Okay,” he said. “We stay longer.”
Below them, the wave buried the basket for almost a minute. But Kalt did not stop dragging it until it was within ten yards of the strobe light.
“Paying out slack,” he said.
Ted LeFeuvre tried to ease the helicopter a little lower, to eighty feet now, to give Kalt an extra twenty or thirty feet of slack cable. With a lot of slack, he figured, there was less pressure on the line, less chance of damaging the winch and the cable itself.
He was dropping their altitude when he heard Kalt shout: “Survivor’s in the basket!”
Just then a gust buffeted the helicopter.
As he pulled lift power he heard the winch screech and the hoist cable lash the airframe. Honnold, Fish and Kalt were shouting. The hoist was screeching. Torpey was holding the cyclic to the dash and yelling something he could not hear. It would not have helped him if he had.
Kalt struggled to the winch, found it in the stop position. The cable was jerking and more than eighty feet of hoist cable were still out.
“I’m pulling it up,” he shouted to Honnold.
He shoved the hoist in gear and, with one hand on the grab rail, leaned halfway out the helicopter. The hoist was still spooling smoothly.
Then wham—the helicopter was over on one side and he was skidding on the deck.
He struggled to his knees, checked his helmet. He was all right. He stood up in a crouch. Lousy, bitching gusts, he said to himself. He looked down out at the raging sleet beneath the helicopter, the flakes long and white as chalk in the floods.
“Hey,” Kalt said. He sounded as though he could hardly believe what he was saying. “Someone’s still in the basket.”
“Move your ass!”
“I am.”
“I said move it!”
“I am moving!”
“You want me to leave you behind?”
“No!”
“Then swim, you fuck!”
Ahead now they could see the green glow of the chemical lights, appearing and vanishing behind the swells. Otherwise the spray and sleet were so thick they could hardly pick out the waves.
“Swim!” Gig Mork shouted.
“I can’t!”
“You lousy cunt! Swim! Swim!”
“I’m trying!”
“Harder!”
Mork was holding Mike DeCapua with one arm and flailing and swimming with the other, and it was as though they were moving uphill and downhill, not sideways, through the breakers. He looked up and the green box was coming closer and he thrashed and fought through the water, the spray clawing at his eyes, and he kept thrashing and swimming even though his lungs felt as though someone had thrust a hot poker through them, the pain from not breathing so great, and everything was turning black and his throat filling with ice water when he felt the hoist basket in his grip.
“Hold this!”
While DeCapua steadied the bobbing cage, Mork grabbed the crossbar and hoisted himself up into the basket.
“Get in!”
The basket slipped right out of DeCapua’s hands. He fell backward. The EPIRB was gone.
Mork had him by the legs.
“I got you!”
He pulled DeCapua on top of himself. With the extra weight and the cable slack, the basket sank.
“Get your leg out of my face!”
Just then a wave toppled down on them like a wall of bricks and the next thing Mork knew he was one leg out of the basket, one foot on the top of the cage, his hand barely holding the cable. The basket was twirling like a slowing top, scudding foam and spray as it twirled, and he knew he was going up. He was going up fast and all he knew was the flying ice and black and the cable, and all he could do was squeeze the cable with his death grip. Don’t let go of this thing. You do and you’re dead. Christ Almighty, speed this son of a bitch up.
The first thing he saw was the door and then he saw a huge man wearing a shiny, black helmet. He was beautiful. Then a big glove reached out and seized the cage and then a second glove was seizing him by the shoulder and he was inside the cabin.
He was lying on the deck alongside two black boots. He coughed out seawater and rolled over on his back.
His knees and elbows hurt.
Only then did Gig Mork realize that he had come up in the basket alone.
FORTY-EIGHT
The basket was going down again. The wind had nearly swept it into the tail rotor after Fred Kalt pitched it out the jump door and he was now hurrying to get it down to the third survivor. Suddenly he felt the line jerk.
He cut the power on the hoist motor and line stopped going out.
“Mr. Torpey,” Kalt said, “I think we’ve got a broken strand in the cable.”
“No.”
“Yeah.”
Throwing the winch in slow reverse, Kalt knelt down and let the cable slide across the palm of the thick, leather glove used for hoisting.
He frowned.
“What is it?” Lee Honnold asked him.
“We got a burr.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. I thought I felt something right around here. How much more line we got out?”
“About forty feet.”
“Damn.”
Kalt kept feeling the line to find the nick. It was dark and hard to see. The pitching and jumping around did not help. The Coast Guard used three-sixteenth-inch cable for hoisting. It was 105 strands of stainless steel, tightly woven, and each cable had a breaking strength of eighteen hundred pounds. But once it had a kink or a burr, you were working on borrowed time.
It won’t take long now, Kalt was thinking. All it takes is one strand to go. Just one little kink. With the tension on it and the beating this thing is taking it’ll be nothing for the whole damned thing to start unraveling.
“You find it?”
“Not yet,” Kalt said.
You can do a quick splice, he was thinking. You’ll have to cut the cable where the strand broke, do a splice, resit the hook. There’s 200 feet of hoist cable. Okay, so if you cut off 40 feet, that’ll leave you 160 to hoist with. Is that enough? Not if we’re hoisting from a height between 100 and 140 feet. We won’t have much left for slack. You need that extra slack to keep the basket from moving around too much in the waves.
Steve Torpey’s voice crackled over the intercom. “How bad is it, Fred?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Kalt said. He was still looking for the kink in the cable. “I’m sure there’s a rough spot, sir. But I can’t find it. Do you want to continue?”
We can keep going for a while, he was thinking. But what if we get that third guy in the basket and start hauling and the line birdcages? Thenwhat? It’s going to be just like when a shoelace starts fraying and you try to pull a strand of it through a hole in your shoe and the rest of it bunches up on one side. The cable is going to bunch up in the guide chute to the drum. Then the reel is going to jam. And then we’re going to have a survivor swinging in the basket forty feet below the helicopter. Then what do we do? Pull him up by hand?