by Todd Lewan
“Mr. Torpey?”
Torpey had been thinking hard. He was finding it more difficult now to concentrate. “Listen, Fred,” he said, after a long delay, “let’s just keep going. If we don’t do something, the man’s dead anyway.”
“Roger.”
Kalt threw the hoist in reverse again.
“Okay,” he said, “line is going out.” He looked down at the churning sea and saw a splash.
He said, “Basket’s in the water.”
Ted LeFeuvre was keeping a close eye on the gas gauge. They had less than forty minutes of fuel left. We’ve got enough for another four, perhaps five basket drops. No more. After that, there’ll be nothing to do but leave whoever is down there to the grace of God.
Down in the sea, Mike DeCapua was just about out of his head. He had not been able to feel anything in his hands and legs for quite some time, and his feet, as far as he could tell, were as good as gone.
He could hear the helicopter, the dull thudding of the rotors mostly, but he had lost sight of it. Some of the flares were still burning. He could see them when a big swell lifted him up above the other waves. But he knew that soon all of the flares would go dark and he remembered he no longer had the EPIRB. That was long gone. No EPIRB, no strobe, no way to find Mike, he thought. Then those flares are going to burn out. Then it’s game over.
I don’t want to give up, he thought, but what choice have I got? No hands, no legs, no feet. I must have the hypothermia. That’s what I got. Christ. If they were to pin me up against a wall and tell me the firing squad would let loose on me if I didn’t stay up on my feet, then I guess I’d just have to shut my eyes and wait for it. It’s a weird thing, this hypothermia. You don’t feel your nuts. But you can feel your body temperature dropping. I wonder how that is? Maybe it’s because you’ve stopped shivering, he thought. But that was a while ago. Still, maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s how you know. I wonder. Well, any way you cut it, it’s weird.
Everybody in Alaska knows about the hypothermia, he was thinking. One of the first things you learn. One of the first things you put out of your head. What is it they say? After you quit shivering you got no more calories to burn. Calories. That’s where you get your heat from. I guess fat people are pretty hot. That’s funny. That’s real funny. A fat, hot woman. Sure. Only in America. Do you suppose I lost my fuel supply? I guess so. My extremities have already shut down. I must be experiencing the numbness that happens when your body quits pumping blood to your extremities. That’s what I’m experiencing. It’s the natural thing, I guess. It’s the way nature must work.
Gee, you’re real smart, Mike. Real fucking smart. You always did have a good theory to explain things after the fact.
I’m tired, he said to himself. Whipped. I wonder if it would do any harm to sleep? Just sleep. That’s all I want to do now. It wouldn’t be that hard to do. It’s never hard to sleep once you’re beaten. Am I beaten? I’m beat. That much I am. I’ll bet if I closed my eyes I’d go right off. Ain’t nobody out here to tell me what to do. It’d be real easy, all right. Just close my eyes and slip right off the edge.
I wonder if this is what Hanlon was feeling when he went under? Or was he hot? They say some guys get real warm at the end. Nice and toasty. Shit. You think the hypothermia would make me feel toasty. How do you suppose he came out of that knot? I tied that cat’s-paw as good as it could be tied. And it’s a damned good knot. It don’t come undone by itself. If you back it up with a half-hitch, it won’t. But it’s an easy knot to break. What do you suppose he did? Maybe he panicked. Got himself in a panic and tried to breathe underwater. Or maybe he said fuck it and just swam off. I don’t know. I tied that buoy ball to him, too. Just like I tied this one to me. Right around my middle. Where is it now? Right around my leg. It must have slid down some. Great. Fucking buoy did me a shitload of good. Fucking buoy ball.
I should have stayed in that fucking basket. If I hadn’t fallen out I’d be up in that helicopter now. I guess Mark and Giggy and Bob are sitting up there right now laughing their asses off and drinking something warm. Well, maybe they ain’t laughing. Christ, that was a bitch of a wave. Knocked me right out of that damned basket. That was some fucking fall, that was. I wonder how far I fell? Twenty feet? Thirty feet? Good thing I’m too cold to feel it. Real good thing. I wonder if I broke anything? Nah. You’d know it if you did. Or would you? All I wanted was to get in that basket. That’s all I wanted. Well, I’m going to sleep now. I’m giving up. I want to go to sleep.
Then his mind started jumping around and he felt something passing through him like waves and then he was crying. He cried for a while, and then after a while it was all right and he started to think about his daughters, Misty Dawn and Melanie. What a stupid thing, he thought, letting nineteen fucking years go by without seeing your kids. I wonder what they look like now. Nineteen years. That was a lifetime to some people. And Mario. Signing those custody release papers on Mario was not one of my better moves. No, sir. All I ever wanted was Mario and Robin. Not her two lousy kids. Well, you made the deal. You signed the papers. I hope Mario’s okay, he thought. I hope Mario is okay and I hope he has a good life. Too bad I was such a prick. He didn’t deserve that. He deserved a dad. Well, I guess he’s got a dad. I guess he’s got a good one now. Sorry, kid. Sorry, girls. I guess we all had to live with it. I never used to realize that, I guess. I just played it along and played it along and never cared about the consequences. I knew about them but just never cared. Well, it looks like I ain’t living with any of it anymore. I guess I find out now whether there’s a heaven or a hell. I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired. The hell with this. I’m going to sleep.
He was just going to curl up into a ball when he saw the rescue basket.
It was riding a swell, a big swell, and at first he thought it was a mirage, a hallucination. It was all lit up, a bright, starry green, sparkling, like a Christmas tree. Then he remembered the glow sticks. There had been glow sticks on the basket. That’s no mirage, he thought. That’s the real thing. That’s a rescue basket.
Jesus.
And he was moving toward it. He did not understand how. His feet were not working. His hands were not working. Yet he was moving toward the basket. He did not know whether he was swimming or not. It did not feel like he was swimming. He was not asking questions. He was just happilygoing toward the basket. Or was the basket coming toward him? He did not know. He did not want to know. He and the basket were getting closer and closer together and everything went calm around him, everything, the waves and the wind and the snow and sleet and spray, and there was a big pause, sort of like a missed breath, like a rest in music, and the waves did not seem as big as before, and he was happy and not asking questions, just saying Thank you, Thank you, and the next thing he knew he was inside the basket and breaking free of the water and something was whispering to him: This is your miracle.
He was clear of the water and rising toward heaven and feeling relief, the lightest, wildest, most unearthly, immense spasm of relief he had ever felt and then Mike DeCapua was in the helicopter and someone was tugging on his legs.
“That’s the last one,” he heard a voice say.
His head flopped on the deck to one side. He saw someone in a survival suit. Then a knife. Someone was leaning over him with a knife.
“Don’t move.”
“Thank you… thank you…”
“Don’t move.”
“I lost it… the EPIRB.”
“Lie still,” the voice said gently. It came from a helmet. A man in a suit was attached to the helmet. He could see him holding a little knife.
“Please,” DeCapua said, trying to shake his head. “Use the zipper. Don’t cut my suit.”
The knife was doing something and then it went away. Hands were tugging on the shoulders of his suit.
“I … I can’t… can’t get up.”
“Lie still.”
He was shaking so hard now that everything in the cabin looked blurry.
“How are you feeling?”
He did not know the voice. It was like a kid’s voice, clear and pleasant sounding. Giddylike. Someone’s hands were stripping him of his suit.
“Cold,” he said. “So… cold…”
“I see that,” the voice said. “You were in the water too long. Didn’t you know you shouldn’t be swimming this time of year? Okay, I’m going to slip a thermal capsule over you.” While the voice went on talking he felt thehands pulling on his suit. Then DeCapua felt something plastic around him. “That’s it. How does that feel in a capsule?”
“Not bad.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“Cigarette?”
“Well,” the voice said, “that won’t happen for a while.”
DeCapua closed his eyes. The shakes were coming worse now. They felt good. He could feel a little spot on the small of his back warming.
He turned his head.
“Where’s Mark?”
Fred Kalt was the first to hear it: a series of dull, clubbing thuds coming through the back wall of the cabin, just aft of the jump door.
He and Lee Honnold leaned out for a look.
A rope had wrapped itself around the black, metal pipe that stuck out near the tail of the aircraft—the high-frequency antenna. On the end of the rope was a buoy ball.
The float was flailing in the wind and bouncing on the stabilator, the fin that kept the tail of the aircraft level. It was hitting no more than three feet from the tail rotor.
“Holy shit.”
“This is nuts!”
Kalt had seen the buoy ball loosely tethered to the leg of the third survivor as they were hoisting him. As soon as they had pulled the fisherman into the cabin, he had severed the rope. The buoy ball, still dangling outside the helicopter, had apparently sailed straight back.
Oh, Christ, Kalt thought. He was feeling the strength drain out of him in a steady, faint nausea.
The taillights shone on the bright yellow ball as it thunk-thunk-thunk-thunked on the stabilator.
We’re in some spot, Kalt was thinking. Some spot. Had that rope not caught on the antenna the way it did, that ball would have flown right into the rotor. And that would have done it. That would have done it for sure.
“What do we do?” Honnold asked him.
Kalt gripped the railing and leaned heavily against the doorjamb, unable to take his eyes off the rapping float.
Forget about the rest of it, he was thinking. Forget all of the other close calls. And forget about getting the survivors. It’s all right there in that ball. If that float hits that rotor, we’re in the water. We’re in the water in fifteen seconds.
“Fred?”
Just then they heard a steely yawn and the antenna snapped off its housing and went twirling off. The buoy ball and rope shot straight up and planed off into the darkness.
Kalt lowered his head and muttered. Honnold rested a hand on his shoulder.
“Cabin crew?”
That was the captain’s voice coming over the intercom they heard. They did not answer him right away.
“Fred?” Ted LeFeuvre asked. “Do you hear me? Fred? How are we doing back there?”
“Fine, sir,” Kalt responded in a little voice. “Everything is just fine.”
The flares were fading now, going out.
“Fred, get some more of those Mark-58s ready,” Steve Torpey said to Fred Kalt. “I’m not going to try to hoist that last guy without them.”
“How many?”
“Six,” Torpey said. “Get six up. But this time I’m going to fly a racetrack pattern when we drop, okay? We’re going to fly over the skipper. Then we’re going to turn, circle around and see if we can’t scoop him. Understood?”
“Roger,” Kalt said.
Torpey turned to Ted LeFeuvre. “How much fuel have we got, sir?”
“A half hour. A little less.”
Torpey nodded.
“Let me know when, Fred,” he said to Kalt.
“Two minutes.”
There’s really nothing else we can do, Ted LeFeuvre was thinking. The skipper apparently had not moved since falling from the basket. But what if the man was just unconscious? What if he was awake but could not move? We’ve got to make a try. These young guys never get tired. I’m tired. But we’ve got to try. Keep your eyes out for that fifth fisherman, too. Hemay be down there. Sure he’s down there. Where exactly, I don’t know. But he’s down there. Somewhere.
Mike Fish spoke up. “Sir, I know what you said earlier, but I could go down and get that guy in the basket real quick. I’m ready to go.”
“No, Mike,” Torpey said firmly. “No.”
“Yes, sir.”
Fish sat back. Gig Mork, who was sitting alongside him against the back wall, tapped him on the shoulder. The rescue swimmer leaned over.
“Yeah?”
“Listen,” Mork said, “if it’s all right with you, I’d just as soon go back down there myself and get him.”
“Oh, no,” Fish said. “Nobody’s going out. You just sit tight. We’re going to try to pick him up now. But nobody’s jumping back out in this.”
Mork looked at Fish and nodded.
They dropped the smokes in a fifty-foot diameter around the survivor and Torpey banked them in a three o’clock hover. Kalt added a weight bag to keep the basket from sailing and splashed it down not five yards from Mark Morley, but the skipper did not seem to move. They winched the basket up, tossed it out again, and this time dragged the basket until it bumped him. Kalt did this three more times. On the sixth drop the basket landed smack on Morley’s outstretched legs. But he made no moves for it.
Kalt even tried scooping him up by dragging the basket through the seas, but that didn’t work either. As he winched the basket up to try again, Torpey, who had said very little except to respond to Kalt’s conning commands, said: “Any change?”
Kalt said, “He’s been floating facedown, spread-eagle, the whole time.”
“No movement at all?”
Kalt was looking out the door. “No,” he said. “None. No movement, sir.”
Ted LeFeuvre had been following their progress through the chin bubble on the cockpit floor. For the most part he had watched, silently, as they dropped and hoisted. He felt Torpey and Kalt had developed a rhythm, an understanding during the first three hoists, and he did not want to break it up. Even then they were working well together, and it was a great thing to watch. But he could see Torpey was tiring. The same difficult maneuvers the young pilot had performed with such grace and sharpness earlier wereno longer as crisp. He’s not quite erratic yet, but he’s getting pretty close, he said to himself.
“How’re you doing?” he asked Torpey.
“Fine.”
Ted LeFeuvre checked the fuel gauge. They were less than ten minutes from the BINGO limit.
“Hey, Steve,” Ted LeFeuvre said, speaking quietly, “it’s time for us to go.”
“Captain?”
“No, Steve. I said it’s time to go.”
“No, wait, wait,” he heard Kalt say over the intercom. “I almost got him that time. We can do this. We can do this, sir!”
“No, Mr. Kalt.” He said it with all the efficiency, coldness and swiftness of a commander who was implementing a strategy that was beyond discussion.
“Captain,” Torpey said to him, “we can get this guy.”
“No,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “It’s time to go. Now.”
Torpey looked at the snow sweeping across on the windscreen. Fish sat reading the radar altimeter. Lee Honnold clicked off the handheld searchlight without a word.
Kalt looked at them all, and nodded.
Ted LeFeuvre said: “Prepare to depart.” There was a silence. “Begin the third rescue checklist.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Roger, Captain.”
“Captain,” Torpey asked, “maybe we should dump some more flares around the skipper so that the next aircraft will more easily spot him.�
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“That’s fine.”
“Steve,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “why don’t I take the controls and fly us to Yakutat?”
“That sounds very good to me.”
“You handle the radio and the flight computer.”
“Fine.”
As Ted LeFeuvre pulled power and the Jayhawk climbed to three hundred feet, Fish and Honnold opened one last batch of flares and handed them to Kalt, who armed and swept them out the cabin door.
Ted LeFeuvre was mapping things out as carefully and deliberately ashe could. Yakutat was about fifteen minutes of flight time away. Let the tailwind do the work, he said to himself. Sixty miles. That’s a snap. Just don’t keep the aircraft too sharply out of trim. Fifteen minutes. Maybe it was sixteen minutes. Gee, I’m tired. Running on fumes. Bank the helicopter. That’s it. Now drop the nose. Turn us slowly. Nice and easy. Okay, now, let’s go to six hundred feet. That’ll put us right below the freezing level. Oh, my. Feel that tailwind. Wow. We’re doing 210 knots. Let’s go, LeFeuvre. Stop watching and start flying. We got three of them. We lost the one. But we got three. No, that’s not right at all. We got more than three. We got eight. Eight of us are going back. And don’t start with the whys. Don’t start that. There are too many whys in this business. Save it for some other time. Just get this plane to Yakutat. Just get us there.
Behind him in the cabin, Kalt was clearing the deck. Honnold and Fish were shaking hands and chatting with Gig Mork and Bob Doyle. They gave the survivors some hot tea and water and then took their seats and strapped themselves in. Mike DeCapua was stretched out on the floor, quietly shaking.
Mork looked at Bob Doyle.
“You need a beer.”