No graveyard humor defense mechanism from Vivian. Just a soft curse as Harvey had ascended from the wave-beaten jetty on the winch with a body latched onto his harness.
She’d helped him tuck the kid into a body bag without flinching, then rested a hand on his arm. Just rested it there until he could feel the human connection through the thick neoprene swimmer’s suit. Until he could get past the first time he’d ever handled a dead body in three years as a rescue swimmer. He’d lost people. Saving two off a crab boat before it sank with the other four hands already dead. But he’d never had to recover a dead person before.
He hoped there was no repeat tonight because finding that kid had been the New Year’s present from hell.
Chapter 4
“This is getting to be a habit,” Vivian couldn’t believe that she was back in Workers Tavern—ever. Being here for both Christmas and now New Years was just flat out unnatural.
Mother was threatening to fly out in the family jet to visit her baby girl. Maybe she’d bring Mother here. The graybeards would go crazy over the perfectly-maintained blonde-and-seriously-built Southern belle… Mother just might like that. Vivian blessed that she had taken the darker coloring and slender build of Father’s side, allowing her to blend into the background a little better.
The graybeards’ Christmas hats had been changed. Instead of two frothing beer mugs with “Christmas Cheers,” their hats now had an empty mug and a full one on them and “New Years = New Beers” in silver glitter. They seemed uncertain about climbing the mountain of “Auld Lang Syne” and were now either doing injustice to ABBA’s “Happy New Year” or slaughtering “New Year’s Day” by Taylor Swift to the tune of Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow.”
Tonight she and Harvey were off shift. Not even in the wings as the backup crew. They’d spent five hours in the air looking for the second boy before finding his remains out at the jetty. The Senior Chief had taken one look at Harvey and told her to take him out and get him drunk.
Having only been in Astoria for ten days, Vivian had taken him to the only bar she knew.
She’d had the French Dip with French fries. He’d had the French toast with bacon and sausage, but not risen to the bait of her teasing in French—even after he’d confirmed that he spoke a high school’s worth.
An hour later they were still on their first beers. So much for getting him drunk.
“Tell me something, anything.” It was the first time that he’d actually spoken first since they’d hauled that body aboard. Poor drowned boy. Senior in college which made her about three years and an entire lifetime older, except now his lifetime was done.
How did life get so short?
But that didn’t seem like the right opener at the moment. She didn’t know what to say, so she answered his question with a question, hoping it would help him get past whatever he was feeling.
“Tell me about that Navy swimmer. Joel, was it?” And apparently, she’d hit exactly the right topic.
It rapidly became clear that the young Harvey had taken all that love that his father hadn’t cared about and heaped it on the SEAL sixty years his senior. It sounded so clear in his voice it might have been the ringing of a New Year’s bell, though he spoke no louder than enough to be heard across the table in a noisy bar. The aged regulars at the bar had descended to a vague form of karaoke, singing along with whatever Golden Oldies were being performed in the televised Times Square celebration where it was almost midnight already.
“Joel didn’t know the meaning of half measures,” Harvey actually finished his beer and ordered another. She was driving, so she kept nursing her first one. “He took me out to Catalina Island on the ferry one evening near sunset. All we had was a wetsuit, fins, and a snorkel. As soon as we stepped onto the dock, he pushed me over the side into the water. Figured we’d be doing a little recreational swim or something. I was fourteen and pretty convinced I knew everything I’d ever need to know by that point.”
“Instead?”
“Instead he jumped in beside me, just bobbing up and down for a long moment, then he pointed out of Avalon Harbor toward the mainland.”
She knew that a final, long-distance night swim was part of Rescue Swimmer training. There was a reason the Coast Guard rescue swimmers were considered to be the absolute elite. Them and the Air Force PJs—no one else was better. Their training course typically had an eighty percent failure rate.
But this didn’t sound like he was telling a USCG tale. He was talking about something important. Honest men not just trying to get into her pants were outside her experience, but Harvey kept being that.
“I couldn’t wrap my head around what he meant. Despite the busy harbor and all of the crowded waterfront restaurants and shops, all I can remember was the silence down there on the water at the foot of that long stone pier. It was so vast that it echoed. Joel just looked at me and said, ‘Well, you just gonna tread water all night?’ I thought about telling him to go to hell. Instead, I took one last look at the comfortable ferry that was still unloading, turned the other way, and started swimming. Figured I’d show him just what was what. Seventy if he was a day, he stayed right beside me the whole way. Didn’t speak again for thirty-two-point-three kilometers. That’s the shortest slice across the channel. We actually swam closer to forty by where we finally fetched up.”
“How did you find your way?” He hadn’t mentioned having a compass.
“Stars,” Harvey waved a fork up toward the bar’s ceiling stained black with years of smoke off the kitchen grill. “I navigated back to the mainland using the stars. The ships go every which way through that channel so they gave no clues, though we had to avoid those as well. From the height of a two-meter swell, the horizon lies less than four kilometers away. That’s as far as you can see ahead even under ideal conditions—one-tenth of the distance we covered. We finally fetched up on Balboa Peninsula at Newport Beach seventeen hours later.”
“Seventeen?” She tried to do an hour in the pool a couple times a week. To swim for seventeen straight hours in the ocean was… Vivian didn’t know what it was other than amazing.
“He didn’t speak once that whole time until we landed on the beach in front of those luxury homes and lay like a pair of dead fish. Our throats were raw with sea salt and dehydration. Our faces and the backs of our hands, the only exposed places, were sunburned lobster red. The hardest part was the last five meters, hauling myself out of the water and up onto that dry beach as a crowd of gawkers gathered around us. They actually called the cops on us like we were an invading force.”
“What did he say?” What could Joel have possibly said that could tell a fourteen-year-old boy just how amazing he was, despite his father?
“He said, ‘Now you know what that feels like’.”
“He what?” Her shout was loud enough to get all the graybeards at the bar losing what little rhythm they had as they turned to look over at her. “He didn’t tell you how incredible that was or anything?”
“Nope,” now Harvey was starting to smile for the first time since they’d been called out on this morning’s search for the college kid washed out to sea.
“I don’t get it.”
“Joel gave everything he had to teach me that limits are only there as long as we believe in them. Sure, what I did was a damned tough swim.”
“Duh!”
“What Joel really showed me was that even at seventy he still didn’t believe in limits.”
It was only after she’d taken him home and they’d made love that night—because if Harvey the boy had been incredible, the man he’d become was amazing—that he returned to the story. As New Year’s Eve midnight rolled across the Pacific Time Zone, with her curled up against Harvey and him toying with a single lock of her hair, he whispered so softly as if he was afraid the world would hear.
“He never swam again. Died less than six months later—mercifully fast, a stroke and gone. I always feel as if he passed the best of himself to me durin
g that long night-and-day swim. After that he knew he was done.”
She turned her face into his shoulder to breathe him in. He didn’t smell of the ocean or even of wet neoprene that always seemed to permeate her skin for days after wearing a wetsuit.
“I keep thinking about that kid today. I’m wondering if someone had passed something on to him and now it was cut off.”
“Joel gave you so much,” Vivian almost felt envious. “All you can do is do your best to live up to that.”
He considered, tugged lightly on the lock of her hair once more, then she could feel his nod.
As he turned to make love to her at the start of the new year as he had at the end of the old one, she knew what he smelled like. It was something she had so little experience with that it had taken her lying in his arms for hours to recognize it.
He smelled like hope.
Chapter 5
“Ahoy! I’ve got a flare,” Vivian’s voice sang out loud and clear over the intercom.
Harvey’s eyes actually hurt from the entire hour they’d been quartering back and forth across the violent waves searching for any sign. The silence had been as echoing as that long-ago day by the Catalina Island pier. The whine of the engines, the beat of the rotor, and the howl of the wind did little to penetrate the wall of six people’s lives at stake.
Now a flare. Someone had survived. The helo must have finally flown close enough for the blacked-out boat to have spotted them.
In moments, they were hovering above the pitching craft. It was still afloat, but that was about all it had going for it. The waves—now at least the three stories tall of Sea State 7—were washing it end-to-end. All semblance of “pretty” had been ripped away: canvas, seat cushions, even the plastic windshields were now little more than twisted metal frames. The survivors were huddled miserably in the cockpit. At least they were wearing life vests, but how soon before hypothermia started taking them out—if it hadn’t already—he couldn’t tell from up here.
“What’s the nearest cutter or lifeboat?”
“An hour out.”
Harvey knew exactly what that meant. That boat didn’t have an hour. They’d be lucky if it had fifteen minutes. “How much time do we have left?”
“Bingo fuel in twenty-seven minutes,” Hammond called back. “Fighting the storm really is chewing it up.”
“Let’s get the basket moving! Diver off headset.” Harvey didn’t wait for the response before peeling off his headset and pulling on his swimmer’s hood, googles, and snorkel. Once he had those secure, he began on his fins. He turned to shout at Vivian that they needed to deploy the lift basket now, but she already had it unfolded and was just waiting for him to get out of the doorway.
Perching on the edge, with his feet dangling out over the deep, he waited for her.
She slid her chair close behind him and locked it in place.
When her hand rested on his shoulder, the whole situation snapped into sharp focus. For six weeks since she’d first touched his arm after that failed New Year’s rescue, the merest contact with her did that to him. Whether it was on a mission, walking down the street holding hands, or curled up in bed together didn’t matter.
Right now, he could see the rise and slap of the waves. The way every fifth one slammed through with an extra ferocity. The sluggish wallow of the down-flooded hull. The debris field of canvas and lines dragging off the stern. All that crap served to make a sea anchor that kept the boat’s bow pointed mostly into the waves—that’s what had saved them. But it would be a death trap to a diver.
“Boat or water drop?” Vivian shouted. She didn’t need to ask if he was going in. Any rescue was at the swimmer’s discretion, but as long as there was a soul breathing down there, she knew he was going.
He was about to call for her to winch him down onto the boat when a wave slapped sideways across the boat and nearly tumbled it.
“Water.”
“Definitely. We’ll drop you upwind.”
Harvey set his goggles and allowed himself to feel nothing but her hand on his shoulder. Listen to nothing except the quiet words they shared only in the deepest darkness of the night. Those moments together which oddly felt like when he’d been hanging with Joel. Vivian’s arms were the place he was supposed to be.
The Dolphin had exceptional visibility for the pilots, but the final call was up to the crew chief, because only she could see directly below and even behind.
“Continue at four o’clock.” They eased over and finally passed the boat. “Give me a nudge dead astern.” She placed him exactly upwind.
He was just about to point out that he didn’t want to be swept into the side of the boat by the very first wave that slapped him, but there was no need. Vivian continued her adjustments until she had the helo exactly where she wanted it.
She’d been doing the same to him—or perhaps they’d been doing it to each other. Six years in the Guard and he’d never flown with someone who he could so utterly trust. Not that the other guys had been bad. Nor was it that she was a woman who consumed his waking thoughts as thoroughly as she did his body, though she did. She was simply that exceptionally good.
“Were you top of your class?” Harvey had asked her one night as they lay awake with the dawn.
“Were you?” She shot it back short and sharp. Thankfully, her issues weren’t his issues and he’d long since learned to answer those odd parental-reaction buttons of hers by remaining dead calm. It let her catch herself and cool down rather than heating up even more.
“ ‘A’ School doesn’t quite work like that,” he’d answered her. “To graduate as an Aviation Survival Technician is half a year of learning to survive. If you survive, you’re sent to a two-month EMT course and a six-month internship. Yeah, I could outswim the other guys, but that’s about ten percent of being a Rescue Swimmer.”
“Oh,” she sounded deeply chagrined. Then she buried her face against his shoulder and he’d indulged himself in toying with her softly curling hair. She continued, “Getting to crew chief is a little different. Yes, I was top of my class and we were insanely competitive with each other.” She said it like she was waiting for some judgement of why hadn’t she somehow done better. She’d mentioned that the reverse putdown was also really popular in her family: “Oh, I guess the other people in your class aren’t very good.”
“Thought so,” was all he said.
“Why?” she eventually whispered into his pectoral muscle.
“Because you’re the best crew chief I’ve ever flown with.”
“The best what?” She’d scooted up enough to take his earlobe in her teeth—hard.
“Flying with you is awesome,” he held out.
“And?” She growled through clenched teeth.
“Oh yeah. I like your body, too.”
“Harvey Whitman! You’re—”
He’d never found out what he was, because he’d set about showing her exactly what he thought of her body and the wonderful things it could do to him.
“Swimmer ready?” She shouted over the roar of the rotors, bringing him back to the present.
He gave her a thumbs up.
“Deploying swimmer!” She held his shoulder hard for just a moment, as hard as when the releases shot through her shuddering body, then she slapped his shoulder and he pushed out of the helo.
Her timing was perfect, as always. The helo was hovering two stories above the wave tops, which was five stories above the troughs. A five-story fall into the sea would hurt like hell, ten stories would likely kill him. A two-story drop barely gave him time to grab his goggles with one hand so they weren’t ripped off when he hit the water and wrap the other arm across his chest to keep his extra gear pinned in place.
The cold water was a hard slap anyway, but he was too pumped up to notice more than that. He surfaced with his raised thumb breaking the water first. By the time his head broke the surface, he slammed that raised arm into the water and speed-crawled down the wave face toward the
boat. It took two minutes swimming flat out to reach it, despite body-surfing down the wave faces.
He hit the side of the boat, literally, but managed to grab the chrome bow rail one-handed. He yelled out against the wrenching pull as the boat lifted its nose high off the wave. If he let go, the bow could crash down on his head and the Coast Guard would need a new rescue swimmer.
Harvey hung on until the bow slammed down over the back of the wave. He let himself float up and executed a back flip over the rail and onto the deck as the boat buried its bow underwater.
On the next climb out of the water, he let the runoff sweep him along the deck until he reached the cockpit. There he slid sideways into the seating area and crashed into one of the people huddled there. Pretty clean entry.
“Hi there. My name is Harvey Whitman and I’ll be your Rescue Swimmer today.” The rote phrase marked the move to the next phase of the operation even as it consoled the survivors. “How are we doing, folks?”
He answered the question for himself. Three shaking so badly that they’d need a hospital soon if they were going to live. Two alert. One unconscious or close enough.
“We’re going to be lifting you out by basket today.”
“What about my boat?” Alert Number Two shouted over the wind and the waves, identifying him as both the captain and a man without a clue. Portly was too kind a word to describe the man’s massive girth.
“Let’s worry about your people first, okay?” And your boat is going to the bottom of the ocean any minute; you’re an idiot if you don’t already know that.
Chapter 6
Vivian never tired of watching Harvey work. The world simply moved more smoothly around him. Even as he appeared to be calming someone, he casually raised an arm to signal for her to lower the basket, pointing to the downwind side of the boat.
Flying Beyond the Bar Page 2