The Last Run

by Todd Lewan

  Bob Doyle tilted his head to one side and said nothing. The indigo cabin lights went out. He closed his eyes.

  Fish asked: “Either you guys want more tea or some coffee?”

  “Sure,” Bob Doyle said.

  Fish handed him a thermos cup of hot tea, and Bob Doyle took a short sip. The tea warmed his throat. It didn’t warm the rest of him. That’ll take some time, he thought. That’ll take a lot more time.

  Kalt slid the door shut and bolted the air lock. He pulled off his helmet and hoist gloves. His face was white and so were his hands. The muscles in his legs fluttered and a queasiness rose in the pit of his stomach. He sat down on the deck. Then he reached for his flight bag, opened it and rummaged around until he found an orange. It was hard to peel the orange. His hand kept shaking.

  At his feet sat the rescue basket. The light sticks attached to it still glowed a feeble green. Kalt stared at the sticks until the glow in them died out.

  BOOK SIX

  FORTY-NINE

  They flew through the dark, keeping the wind at their tail. The sleet and rain had let up and only came occasionally in gusts. Once they made the shoreline they swung north and followed the coast toward Yakutat. They had hoped to see some sign of life below, a light, a ship, breakers on rocks, perhaps. But there was nothing. The ceiling had come up above fifteen hundred feet but it was very dark and the wind was blowing a gale. Steve Torpey turned up the high-frequency radio and started making calls in the blind. He told the world that they were about fifteen miles to the south of Yakutat and preparing their final approach for landing. He advised all aircraft in the vicinity to take note of their course. There was no response. Yakutat was not a tower-controlled field. It was nearly four o’clock in the morning. Nobody would be out there listening. He turned down the radio and sat quietly in his seat.

  For several more minutes they saw no lights, nor did they see the shore, but they flew steadily in the dark riding the tailwind. It was quite rough. Ted LeFeuvre kept the same speed until he saw rocks rise up from below, the waves striking against them, rushing up, falling back. He throttled down the engines a bit and began making a slow turn into the wind. The helicopter shuddered when he did it. They were back out over the ocean. Then he lined them up with the airstrip. The Yakutat airstrip sat two miles inland and was short and straight, running west to east. Ted LeFeuvre wanted to land with the tailwind. The wind was still blowing strong.

  “There it is,” he said.

  Torpey clicked on the nose lamp and the belly floods and they could see the wind driving the spruce so that the tops shook and swayed and shed bows of white, looping snow. There was no moon but it seemed much lighter than it had been before, and they swooped in over the tops of the spruce jaggedly reaching and swaying, and dropping the helicopter on asteady angle now, lining up with the blacktop, Ted LeFeuvre pulled the nose up just a touch and the trees went slipping smoothly by and then there was the familiar, heart-tugging catch of the wheels on the asphalt and they were bumping quickly along the runway. He slowed the Jayhawk into a trot, finishing off his running landing, and then taxied them over to the hangar. He turned the aircraft so that the nose pointed into the wind and then he shut it down.

  The rotor head slowed, then stopped. The blades were full of wind and flapped up and down and smacked the pavement. He sat back in his seat. He was very, very tired of flying. His arms and shoulders and back ached and his hands were stiff. He looked at the airspeed indicator. They were on the ground and the aircraft was stationary. Yet the indicator was still showing sixty knots. Ted LeFeuvre looked at the number for a moment and loosened his chinstrap.

  “Nice landing,” Torpey told him. Ted LeFeuvre pulled off his helmet.

  “Thanks.”

  He tried the door. It felt heavy. He pushed harder and it opened a crack.

  Finally he leaned his shoulder into it and this time the door opened and he stepped down on the wet pavement and was in Yakutat. The tarmac felt very pleasant under his boots. He walked around the nose of the helicopter. It was pleasant to walk on firm ground. There were a lot of people milling about. There was an ambulance and two police vans and some cars and a Dodge pickup truck. Someone must have telephoned the airport manager, Mike Hill, he thought. District 17 must have phoned ahead of their arrival. He stopped and shook hands with Hill, and then he saw Kip Fanning from the Yakutat Lodge and Les Hartley of Gulf Air airlines, and a few other people whose names he had forgotten and was too tired to remember, and he saw the cabin door open. Lee Honnold and Fred Kalt jumped out and patted each other on the chest and then gave each other a bear hug. Then a man in survival gear, short and bleary and shaky, stepped down from the aircraft. He shooed away the medics. He didn’t want their help. The man walked unsteadily, side to side but with a rough dignity, and then climbed up into the ambulance.

  Then he saw Bob Doyle.

  It was not the thick, scraggly beard, the long hair or the gray, drawn facethat made him watch. It was something else. The man was helping a medic with a stretcher. He was helping to carry the shivering survivor, whispering to him as they went, and then Bob Doyle lifted the sagging stretcher up and eased it into the ambulance before climbing in himself. He did not bother to look back. The doors shut and the ambulance pulled away.

  Ted LeFeuvre stood watching it.

  Torpey walked over and stopped beside Ted LeFeuvre. He followed the captain’s gaze. The ambulance was now turning out along a connector road.

  “Unbelievable,” Torpey said. “Unbelievable.”

  The big trees at the end of the runway were swaying far over in the wind. Torpey scratched his head.

  “It’s just so hard to believe.”

  Ted LeFeuvre did not hear him. He was watching the ambulance get smaller and smaller and thinking. After all he’s been through tonight, he said to himself, Bob Doyle had every right to lie down on a stretcher himself and do nothing but take a ride to the hospital. But instead, he thought first about his buddy. He helped his buddy into the ambulance first. It was just a little thing. But pretty noble. That was noble of him, all right.

  He sighed.

  “What’s that, Steve?”

  “I said I just can’t believe it.”

  “Yeah,” Ted LeFeuvre answered, “I can’t believe it myself, Steve. I mean, those were the worst conditions I have ever seen. Those waves and that wind—”

  “No, no,” Torpey interrupted him. “I wasn’t talking about the weather.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  Torpey looked at him.

  “Well, sir, for a whole year I looked high and low for Bob Doyle at the air station and could never find him at his desk. Not one time. Now I fly a hundred and fifty miles offshore at night, in the dead of winter, in a hurricane, and there he is, floating in the Pacific.”

  He shook his head.

  Ted LeFeuvre started laughing and could not stop.

  At daybreak it was still blowing thirty-five knots, but the seas were down to forty feet and the sleet had softened to a cold rain that danced along the swells.

  Two C-130 planes and an H-60 helicopter from Kodiak took off for the Fairweather Grounds while the cutters Anacapa and Planetree steamed out to assist in the search for the two missing crewmen. By 9:40 A.M., a data marker buoy had been dropped at the survivors’ last reported position, 58°22′ north, 138°42′ west; the radio float began drifting in the counterclockwise current of the gulf, and the search area shifted continuously north and westward at about two knots an hour.

  The aircraft crisscrossed the grounds for hours, flying sector searches in an eight-nautical-mile radius, then in twenty-five-mile rectangular grids. But with the rough seas, fog and steady rain, they turned up nothing.

  A little after one o’clock, the oil tanker Arco Juneau arrived on scene. It had been transiting south from Cordova Bay the previous night when its captain, Mike Devins, decided to veer north and west of the Fairweather Grounds and ride out the
blow in deep water. Throughout the night, the tanker slugged its way south and east—120 miles—and, at 1:55 P.M., reported seeing an orange object riding the swells, which it later described as looking like somebody in an orange survival suit. The news was not encouraging. The survivor was floating on his back, arms and legs spread wide, and showed no signs of movement. Despite high, heaving seas, the Arco Juneau promised to keep the survivor in its lee.

  Within thirty-six minutes, an H-60 sent the previous night from Kodiak to Yakutat was on scene and lowering a rescue swimmer in a lift basket.

  It took four minutes to haul up a man in an orange survival suit.

  With his suit full of seawater he weighed close to four hundred pounds. He needed a shave. His open eyes were bloodshot and shiny and almost seemed to hold a self-satisfied expression. His mouth was open a little, as they usually were, and showed big, strong teeth.

  The flight mechanic gently laid the head on the deck, then slit the survival suit. He rummaged in the man’s pockets and found a wallet.

  Stuck to the back of a clammy, wallet-size portrait of Jesus Christ was a photo of a young woman with wide-set, green eyes and a laughing mouth.

  Cute, the flight mechanic thought. Too bad for her. Too bad for him, too. Less than a half hour later, a nurse and a medic wheeled Mark Morley through a corridor in the Yakutat Hospital and into the emergency room. Three fishermen, two of whom had just been released after treatment for hypothermia, were smoking in the lounge when the gurney was wheeled in. They watched the door swing shut.

  A short while later the nurse came out.

  “How is he?” Bob Doyle asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Oh.”

  “He’s dead,” the nurse said. “If you want to go in now and see him, you can.”

  Gig Mork said nothing. Some townsfolk had given them some clothes and donated sneakers. Mork just stood there in his new sneakers, biting his lower lip.

  Mike DeCapua said, “No, not me, thanks.”

  “I’d like to see him,” Bob Doyle said.

  “In here,” the nurse said.

  They walked into a white room where Mark Morley lay on a wheeled table, a sheet over his great body. The fluorescent light left no shadows. Under the harsh light his inflated face looked freshly shiny. The scalp was lacquered red around the gashes. The eyes had that glassy, flat look. Bob Doyle might as well have been looking at a couple of bottle tops.

  His throat had swelled up so it was hard for him to talk.

  “Take your time, Mr. Doyle,” the nurse said. She put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m very, very sorry.” Bob Doyle did not seem to hear her.

  “Oh, Christ,” he said, and he began to cry. “I should have jumped in after you.”

  They left the hospital that afternoon. Bob Doyle and Mork had suffered only mild cases of hypothermia. DeCapua, who looked pretty bad when he arrived at intensive care, recovered quickly. He hadn’t suffered any nerve damage or circulatory problems as a result of his hypothermia and he wouldn’t stop bumming cigarettes off the nurses, so the doctor released him that afternoon.

  The three of them were flown down to Juneau that same night. ScottEchols, who had owned the La Conte, met them at the airport. He drove them straight to the Best Western hotel downtown and paid the bill. He ordered out a pizza and put a hundred-dollar check in each of their hands, along with a one-way plane ticket to Sitka.

  “I’ll take care of you guys,” Echols was saying. “I’ll take good care of you. I owe you guys a lot.”

  Bob Doyle looked at him.

  “The important thing is that you’re alive,” Echols went on. “I want you to know that we’re going to keep in touch, and that if a job ever comes open on a boat of mine, for a fisherman, you guys will be on the top of my list. That’s a promise.”

  They stared blankly at him.

  “Don’t you worry about a thing,” Echols said.

  “I’m not,” Bob Doyle said.

  “Well, good.”

  Mike DeCapua said to Echols, “Say, I got something I got to square with you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s about the suit. The survival suit. That suit—the one Hanlon was in—see, I borrowed that suit from a buddy of mine off another boat, see. I got to give him back something.”

  “Oh.”

  “What I’m saying is, if you don’t mind, I’d like to keep my survival suit. The La Conte suit. The one I still got. To replace the one that Dave is wearing—was wearing.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you already lost a bunch, with the boat and all. It’s just that, well, it wasn’t mine.”

  “Sure,” Echols told him. “That’s okay, Mike. Go ahead. Take the suit.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not a problem. It’s just lost equipment. Don’t worry about it.”

  Bob Doyle was watching him. Echols smiled. “You know, Bob, I had no idea. No idea at all. He should never have taken you guys out there.”

  Bob Doyle looked at him.

  “Look,” Echols told him. “I just want to help you guys out. I feel like I owe you guys.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Listen, Bob. Anything you need. Anything. You just let me know, now, all right?”

  Within a month, Scott Echols had shut down World Seafood Producers, moved out of his duplex in Juneau and relocated with his wife to Guam.

  FIFTY

  It was close to six in the morning when Ted LeFeuvre heard the C-130 plane landing outside. He had been lying in a hard, wood bunk at the Yakutat Lodge with his eyes shut and his mind jumping around. He went to the window and looked out. It was still dark and a light rain was falling. There were glistening, moving patches that the landing lights made across the blacktop and he heard the drone of propellers and voices. He pulled on his flight suit and boots, brushed his teeth and combed his hair and walked down a long corridor to the dining hall.

  He sat in one of the heavy wood chairs and waited for a server to come. No one came out so he went to the counter and got himself a menu and poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher and sat back down and glanced through the menu. After a while a woman with bleary eyes and a smudged apron came over and he asked for hot rolls and scrambled eggs and juice. She went out and he drank the water. He saw the water jump a little in the glass and noticed his hand was still a little shaky. He put the glass down and Lee Honnold, Fred Kalt and Mike Fish came in. They sat down.

  “How did you sleep, Captain?” Kalt asked him. He had those dark bags under his eyes but he looked alert.

  “Fine.”

  “The C-130 is here.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Have they sent over any helos from Kodiak?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, if they haven’t, they probably will in no time,” Honnold said.

  The four of them sat at the table and ate and then Steve Torpey came out and had coffee and eggs and more coffee. Fred Kalt and Lee Honnold ate fairly quietly. Ted LeFeuvre watched them as he drank his juice.

  He had heard them talking in their bunks, after lights-out. The lights had gone out and then Kalt had said something about how they had let the skipper fall. Honnold had wondered why they had not seen the guy dangling from the basket. I don’t know, Kalt had said. I don’t know how we missed that. But we sure missed him all right, Honnold had said, we should have seen him. We should have. There was no excuse for that. No, Kalt had agreed. We should have gotten four, not three survivors. How could we have missed him?

  “By the way, you guys,” Ted LeFeuvre said, looking at Kalt and then at Honnold as they ate their breakfast, “I don’t want to hear any more talk like I did before, at lights-out.”

  “Sir?”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “All that business about that guy falling. That’s no way to talk. I don’t want to hear anyone talking that way.”

  Kalt and Honnold looked down at their plates.r />
  “That was no way to talk,” the captain said. “Remember, three men are going home to their families because of you guys. That’s three happy families. Three. So I don’t want to hear any more about who we lost. No more about that. Is that understood?”

  They nodded and kept on eating.

  When they finished breakfast, Ted LeFeuvre paid the bill and they walked outside to look over the aircraft. A fresh H-60 crew had just deplaned from the C-130. They were doing the maintenance checks on another Jayhawk, the 6041. The 6041, they learned, had flown in from Kodiak during that hour or two that they had lain down to rest. The new crew was going out to the Fairweather Grounds to look for the skipper and the other missing fisherman. They looked sharp and eager. There was a certain quickness to their step that seemed foreign to Ted LeFeuvre. All he wanted was to get home and sleep. It was a bad thing not getting any sleep. Made you nervy. He was actually looking forward to seeing his bed. That was something. That was different.

  For several hours Kalt and Honnold inspected the 6011. The hoist cable was shot. The winch would need an overhaul. There were scratch marks and gouges on the helicopter’s belly and side. Ted LeFeuvre noticed the same gouges on Honnold’s helmet, too, but he did not say anything. The Night Sun was bent. The engine had been overtorqued. They ran some tests on the transmission. It seemed all right, although the auxiliary power unit had broken. It took Honnold most of the morning to repair it and power up the aircraft. They didn’t get airborne until almost two that afternoon.

  Normally they would have saved some time and fuel and flown a straight line south across the gulf to Sitka. This time they hugged the coast. Nobody said anything during the flight. After an hour, Mount Edgecumbe was below them. Its base looked washed and black and there were clouds swathing its flat, white top. A fog was coming over the mountains from the sea. Beyond lay the channel and more mountains and the town, fuzzy in the gray rain.

  As soon as they touched down all of the enlisted personnel at the air station, the mechanics and machinists and shopkeepers and electronics techs, the ones who had worked all night, came walking out on the tarmac. It was drizzling and they all stood outside in the rain and waited for them to step down from the helicopter. Ted LeFeuvre nodded to them and smiled. He felt very, very tired. There was no exhilaration in entering the hangar. He wondered what a hot shower would feel like. He wanted to get home. Then he and Torpey were walking down a hall and through the open door of the operations center. David Durham was at the desk. He hadn’t gone home yet. Ted LeFeuvre looked at the clock. It was nearly half-past three.