She already had it hooked to the winch on the pylon just outside the cargo bay door. As the basket lowered, she kept a gloved hand on the wire. Part of it was so that she could feel any frays to the cable. It also let her dampen oscillations of the swinging basket and feel what the world’s wind was doing, because it was hard to tell up here under the main rotor’s downwash.
A wave slapped the basket, threatening to drive it into the group of survivors despite her lowering it on the downwind side of the boat.
Harvey grabbed it and wrestled it into place. All those miles he did in the pool every morning did far more than give him a magnificent body for her personal pleasure. It made him appear effortless in situations that mere mortals would be lucky to survive.
He’d taught her that so many times since they’d met. Not that he was exceptional—that was a given—but that she was. At first she hadn’t believed him. But there was only so many times you could hear something and refuse to believe it.
That’s what her parents, her family had done. For her entire life up until this last Christmas, she’d always been “less than.” Harvey saw her as “more than.” And he said it so often, that she’d come to believe it as well—almost.
Vivian could see that there was an argument down on the deck, which Harvey solved by bodily lifting someone into the basket, then spinning his arm over his head. For the moment he was touching the basket, she’d swear she could feel him right up the wire clenched in her hand.
As she reversed the winch to lift the basket and the first rescuee, she called to the pilots for a five-meter climb. The Dolphin had a four-axis autopilot that let the pilots set a hover and then spend their time paying attention to everything from remaining fuel to flying debris and rogue waves rather than fighting the controls. Bumping up the hover altitude during the basket lift added work for them, but it also got the survivor clear of the boat and the next wave faster.
The winch lifted the basket to be even with the door, but the survivor was a dead weight. She timed an air gust that robbed the helicopter of some lift and gave a yank just as the person went partly weightless. They tumbled to the cargo deck like an empty sack. All she could do at the moment was snap a safety line on the person and send the basket back down.
With every cycle of the basket down to the wallowing boat and back, each victim’s condition became less acute—Harvey was sending up the worst first, exactly as he should. Frankly it was amazing any of them were alive with how little appropriate gear they wore. The Pacific Northwest winter called for wetsuits and Mustang float jackets, not a sweater and a slicker. The fourth one managed a muttered “Thanks” but was still shaking too hard to even crack her own heat pack. Vivian cracked one for her and tucked it in the front of her jacket. Warming up their extremities was too great a risk. She had to heat their cores first or risk making their maxed-out hearts fail.
On the fifth lift, Harvey nearly had to wrestle the remaining Survivor Number Six to the deck to let the basket rise. Because of the momentary delay, a wave caught the basket—heavily weighted with Survivor Number Five—and smacked it hard into Harvey’s back. It sent him sprawling before she could get it aloft.
It took all the training the Coast Guard had ever given her to keep her cry of fear inside.
Chapter 7
Harvey seriously considered throwing the boat’s owner over the side and let there only be five survivors.
God damn, but his shoulder hurt. And his knee where he’d caught it as he crashed to the deck.
Whatever happened to the old adage of captain being last off? Letting the man go down with his ship sounded pretty good at the moment. Harvey had spent as much time arguing with the guy as watching the waves. Too much time.
It had taken Harvey a while to realize the guy was mostly drunk, just used to hiding it well. He’d certainly seen it on Dad enough times—the “functional” drunk. It should have made Captain Dan far more susceptible to hypothermia, but perhaps his bulk buffered him.
Foolishly, Harvey thought that the self-proclaimed captain made a good distraction from the decaying condition of the boat. The bow wasn’t even lifting clear of the waves anymore.
However, being so distracted from his job that he’d let a basket clobber him absolutely wouldn’t do. He lay sprawled over what had once been the captain’s pride and joy, the pilot’s console with twice the number of controls and readouts than the boat really needed. Sound system controls, remotely operated searchlight (which the guy probably used for illegal night fishing), auto-pilot (that definitely should have been set to never let the guy leave the harbor), and more.
He shrugged a shoulder. Big damn mistake!
He dragged his focus back to the crisis; his head swam with a bout of nausea like he hadn’t had since drown-proof training back in A School. He wasn’t ready for the next wave that plastered him in the face and stole his breath away.
A chance grab at the steering wheel was all that kept him aboard as the biggest wave yet swept the boat. The other hand wasn’t cooperating so well.
Something tried to push him aside. Then it thudded into his gut, but the blow was slowed by the water. Still, it drove out what little air he’d managed to catch. He was about to release his hold and hope he could follow the bubbles to the surface in the dark, when he resurfaced into the storm.
Beneath him, trapped against the deck between the console and the captain’s chair, was the beefy boat’s owner. That’s what had hit him in the gut. But the prolonged dunking seemed to have taken most of the fight out of him.
The basket almost caught Harvey again on the next swing, but he managed to grab it, and heave the sputtering captain in. He was about to latch himself onto the basket and ride up with it from the doomed boat when his head cleared enough to ask the crucial body-count question.
“You’re the last one, right? There were six of you. Right?”
“Six. Sure. Except for the dead one in the cabin.”
Harvey’s blood chilled. Something didn’t sound right. If the others had survived out here in the elements, why would the one in the cabin be dead? He let his harness drop and waved the basket aloft.
“Harve—” Vivian’s voice crackled over the radio. “We’re bing…el in thre…utes.”
“Roger, just have to check something.”
“Repe—” was all he got back. Three minutes to bingo fuel, he didn’t waste time repeating his words. Besides his bad arm was coming online now. The blow that had merely hurt, now screamed like a beast each time he tried to use his right hand.
The cabin door had been shut the entire time. The chances were that it was all that was keeping the boat afloat.
Watching the waves, he waited until they were sliding down the back of one. If he was right, once he opened the hatch, he’d have only ten to fifteen seconds before the next wave or two swept the boat under for good.
The boat punched through a wave rather than climbing over it. A chaotic cross wave actually rolled the boat, but he hung on until it righted itself. After it punched through another wave without going under, there was a momentary lull.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Vivian had lowered a lifting ring in place of the basket—far less likely to clobber him in the storm’s growing chaos. Though he’d have to be sure to watch for the cable weight just above the hook.
He threw open the cabin door.
A truly nasty curse worthy of a severely pissed off crew chief crackled in over the radio, but it wasn’t clear enough to understand so he ignored it. His radio must have taken a hit when the basket had struck him. His headlamp revealed a kitchenette on the left—with granite counters. Open cupboards revealed a pantry, well stocked with expensive alcohols. Couch to the right. Bed straight ahead in the forward point of the cabin. The water floated as high as the mattress—knee deep. No body floating in it.
He turned to exit.
Two doors that he’d rushed past on his way in.
Door Number One led to a closet.
/> Bank on Door Number Two.
A head—marine toilet. With someone slumped on the floor and hugging the commode, sitting in the water up to her chest.
Out of time, he slapped the woman hard on the cheek.
She coughed, sputtered, cursed. And reeked of whisky.
Alive.
Harvey grabbed her by the collar and fought her back to the deck.
She didn’t wear a lifting harness, or even a life preserver.
Out of options, he snagged the lifting collar dangling from the helo’s winch and shoved her arms and head through the opening. He slapped her again, brutally hard, even if it was left-handed.
“Huh? Whassup? I’m alive?” A trickle of blood ran from her lips. “Oh, wish I wasn’t. My aching head.”
“Stay awake and keep your arms down if you want to live. Do you understand?”
She nodded once, then again a little more convincingly.
He signaled Vivian to lift.
Nothing happened.
When his call on the radio went unanswered, he signaled more emphatically.
Chapter 8
Vivian knew what came next.
Bingo fuel wasn’t something that could be argued with. Helicopters were desperately unforgiving about running out of fuel. If they didn’t want to punch a hole in the ocean themselves, they had to turn for shore right now. Any arguments about reserves in the tanks were always shut down—not even up for discussion.
“Is there a cutter closer than the shore?” she begged Hammond even as she continued lifting the seventh victim.
“No. Even if there was, we couldn’t land on it in this weather.”
“I have six aboard, Number Seven on the line. That’s capacity.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
“Swimmer is still in the water.”
“He’s what? Shit! Time?” Hammond wasn’t asking about time until bingo fuel, he’d called that while Harvey was still in the cabin.
“Two full minutes to unload and cycle the winch back down. Have we burned enough fuel to take the extra person?”
“We’re bingo now. Average weight?” Hammond asked, his voice betraying his own anxiety through his professional cool.
Vivian surveyed the rescuees piled up like cordwood on the helo’s deck. “High. Very high.” There wasn’t a single person aboard who could clock in at under two hundred pounds and a couple were three-plus. And even as it ripped at her, she knew what she had to do next.
Hammond held the hover for a moment longer.
Vivian kicked out the raft package. “Raft away.” The container wouldn’t inflate until Harvey reached it. How many rafts had auto-inflated then blown away before the engineers had learned about that one?
Over the last survivor’s head, she saw Harvey diving off the boat as it planed under the water. For some reason he was swimming one-armed toward the raft.
The boat never resurfaced.
Chapter 9
Harvey sat in the Workers Tavern with his arm in a sling.
“No swimming for a month. How am I supposed to stay in shape with one damned arm?”
“How is it that you’re still alive to grouse about it?” Hammond chided him but still sounded relieved.
Sylvester joined in the game, “Couldn’t they have kept you in the hospital longer so that we could eat in peace?”
Vivian just looked sad. He’d told her a dozen times that he’d torn up his shoulder trying to heave the captain into the basket, because she already felt too guilty about having to leave him behind. She didn’t need to know that getting clobbered by the basket had started the problem, then bodily lifting first the captain and then his wife—who her husband had left for dead—had made it so much worse.
Harvey definitely hadn’t told Vivian about the bitter thirty minutes he’d spent trying to get into the raft. Once it had inflated, he could either hang onto it one-handed or get aboard, but it had taken a slow trip through Hell before Charon the mythical boatman gave him a wave that he could ride into the half-flooded raft rather than dragging him across the river Styx into Hell proper.
He did consider telling her about why he’d managed to hang on though.
When the captain’s wife had sobered enough in the hospital to understand that her husband had abandoned her for dead, all she’d said was, “That’s my Dan all over.”
After the challenge of getting on the raft, Harvey then had a three-hour wait for another helo to track down the raft’s emergency transponder and come fetch him. At least they hadn’t had to drop another rescue swimmer into the maelstrom, he’d been able to climb into the basket himself despite the storm continuing to build and his dislocated shoulder.
Riding out a full gale gave a man a lot of time to think.
“I—Shit!” He held a fork in his non-dominant hand and stared at his slab of prime rib. This one-handed lifestyle was gonna suck big time.
“Just jab it up and eat it caveman style,” Hammond suggested, then made a show of cutting a neat piece and stuffing it happily into his mouth.
“Face down in it, dog style,” was Sylvester’s suggestion.
Vivian thumped the butt of her steak knife on the battered table and held it there with the tip pointing straight up. “Either of you want to try sitting on it? Don’t think I can’t make you.”
Both of the guys were officers rather than enlisted and outranked her by at least six inches to boot. But over the last weeks, they’d learned not to argue with Vivian.
Satisfied, she made quick work of cutting her own prime rib into bite size pieces then traded plates with him.
Chapter 10
Harvey stared at the plate she’d cut up until Vivian wondered what she’d done wrong.
“We both had the same dinner.”
He nodded but didn’t look up.
“Not gonna feed you when you’ve got a perfectly good hand.”
He shook his head, that wasn’t it.
She glanced sideways, but Hammond and Sylvester were chatting up a couple of local women who’d sat at the next table over. Vivian might not have much experience at being a woman in addition to being female in a very male world, but even she could see that they were selling it hard: over-bright smiles, teasing giggles, shoulders up and back to display their figures to best advantage. Couldn’t the guys see that? Maybe that’s what guys wanted. Fine, let them fall down that hole and figure their own way back out. Her problem was the rescue swimmer across the table.
“What?” She whispered low enough to not interrupt the pilots’ flirtations with doom.
“It’s stupid.”
“If that ever stopped you, you’d have left that Captain Dan to go down with his boat and gotten on the helo.”
That earned her a brief glance and an almost smile.
“Explain yourself, swimmer boy.”
He slowly forked up a piece of meat and began eating. “Death is a very strange thing.”
“No shit.”
“No,” he looked at her as directly as he always did when he was talking about something important.
Vivian was worse than a deer in the headlights when he looked at her that way. She couldn’t even look down to cut the next piece of her own roast.
“We don’t talk about it. Swimmers I mean. It’s the enemy. We drag people from its jaws. No matter the cost,” he flapped his injured arm then winced as he made his point.
“So others may live. That’s your motto. You embody that really, really well, Harvey.” And it totally scared the shit out of her even if she wouldn’t have him be any other way.
The entire flight back, she’d spent every second tending the seven rescues from the Bayliner. Core heat. Dozens of cuts and bruises from the battering they’d taken—blood welling up as they warmed. Not an instant to herself.
She’d finally got the captain to shut up about suing the US Coast Guard for not saving his boat—did it by ramming an empty flare gun up under his chin and threatening to blow his head off if he said another wor
d. She’d heard Hammond’s bark of laughter over the headset after Sylvester had turned around enough to see what she was doing and then explained it to his fellow pilot over the intercom.
It was the only laugh on the flight back.
Then off-loading everyone into the line of waiting ambulances. The debriefing, the mission reports, the…madness of not being able to go back after Harvey. Their crew had hit their airborne time limit because they’d done a beach patrol flight through the stormy afternoon. The standby crew had been headed aloft even as her bird had landed. But they’d had a backup hydraulic system failure thirty miles out and had to return before reaching Harvey so that they could change birds.
She’d forced herself to remain calm in the back of the command room.
When they’d finally found Harvey. And recovered him. And headed for shore. Only then had she allowed herself to weep. For the first time since childhood—Mother hadn’t approved of emotions other than her own—Vivian had wept. Silently, by herself in the darkness of the empty Ready Room, she’d cried herself sick.
That had been this morning. Now they were at Workers again.
Hammond and Sylvester slid over to the next table, thinking it was their charm that was working on the two local girls, not the girls seeing two Coastie officers as their tickets out of whatever their lives were like.
“Swimmers never talk about Death,” Harvey continued. Death was definitely a person to him. A personified enemy to be fought to the very limits. “We try never to think about it.”
“But you did? Out there in that raft?”
“But I did.” Again he looked down at his plate.
“What did you figure out?” Vivian was having trouble breathing. If Harvey gave up, she didn’t know what she’d do. He’d made her believe that there was a “best” in people that was worth striving for. Sure, the world had plenty of Captain Dans. But a single Harvey could offset a thousand Dans. Ten thousand.
Flying Beyond the Bar Page 3