Big Miracle (32 page)

“Well, there's that ARCO ice bullet,” he said in a tone lacking confidence.

“The what bullet?” asked Carroll.

King gently rubbed his tired face, sat down and let out a sigh. Their efforts to free the barge could have killed him and his men. It was one of the most difficult tasks any of them had ever performed. Remembering all the frostbite, singed lungs, painful coughs, and frozen eyelids, the last thing King wanted was to get out there and start all over again with another one of the gung-ho colonel's crazy ideas. Known by several other names, the “bullet” had one simple function. “Smasher,” “ice crusher,” “ice bomb,” each described a late-twentieth-century Arctic technology at its simplest. The five-ton concrete spike emblazoned with the light blue ARCO corporate logo looked like a giant toy spin-top. The bullet dangled on a steel cable beneath a helicopter. It was winched a hundred feet up in the air and, in a reaffirmation of the laws of gravity, dropped to smash through the ice below. Sophisticated? No. Effective? Always.

The colonel wanted to know more about the bullet, but there wasn't much more King could tell him other than ARCO owned it and lent it regularly to VECO. Based on his incomplete understanding of ice conditions in Barrow, it didn't take much for Carroll to determine that the force of a five-ton shaft of concrete dropped from one hundred feet would obliterate whatever lay beneath it. Colonel Carroll wanted to test it. Late Thursday evening, he called Bill Allen at his Anchorage home to see if he could smooth the way to getting ARCO's permission to use the bullet.

Ever since he touched the whales with his bare hands five days earlier, Bill Allen seemed a changed man. His employees at VECO noticed it the morning after his trip to Barrow. He was more at ease, more attentive. Before his encounter with the giant whales, Allen could not fathom an animal as large and as graceful as the one he gently petted at the top of the world. Unlike ARCO, his colleague Ben Odom's company, VECO had almost no contact with the general public. It sold its products within the oil industry. Except during a 1984 political scandal that rocked the state legislature, hardly anyone outside the “industry” had ever even heard of VECO. Its role in saving the whales could only detract from VECO's bottom line. Bill Allen contributed his company's time, energy and money for one reason. He wanted to save the whales.

Allen's secretary, Pearl Crouse, flung open the door to her boss's office, on Wednesday, October 19, sporting a bright grandmotherly smile. As she ushered in a bundle-laden postman, Crouse nearly burst with pride in the boss she adored. The mailman was carrying a canvas mailbag stuffed full of handwritten letters for the VECO chairman.

Children from schools across the United States and Canada drafted letters to Bill Allen with salutations such as “Dear Mr. Oilman,” and “Dear Whalesaver.” Many of the letters had no address, just “Whale Rescuers, Alaska.” Within seventy-two hours of Operation Breakout's birth, the letters had found their way to VECO's Anchorage headquarters on Fairbanks Street.

Reading the heartwarmingly scribbled notes, Allen's mood improved. Carroll could not have picked a better time to ask him for his help in getting the bullet. In his ebullience, Allen would likely have agreed to almost any suggestion. The entire operation started when he authorized the use of the hoverbarge. But in the time it took for the barge to be rendered impotent, Operation Breakout had taken on a full-fledged life of its own, no longer dependent on any one man. Allen knew there was no stopping the rescue's momentum. Realizing it would proceed with or without him, he was determined to see it through, helping in any way he could.

The colonel had one more solo act to perform. If the bullet passed its test in Prudhoe, the National Guard would start punching its own path of holes out to the open lead, picking up where the Eskimos left off. Carroll briefed his Skycrane pilots about the new plan. They were to test the concrete block to see if it worked. Waiting near the silent Skycranes for the test to begin, Chief Warrant Officer Gary Quarles and his crew stared across the burnt orange horizon, mouths agape as they watched what looked like an extraterrestrial vehicle with six-foot-wide treads slowly crunching its way across the barren landscape.

Arctic men called the odd truck carrying the heavy concrete bullet a “Rolligon.” The oil industry spent millions of dollars to design a machine that could carry heavy loads in the Arctic without damaging the sensitive environment. Since the wide treads dispersed the truck's massive weight over a broader surface area, it could cross fragile tundra and ocean ice without breaking through.

The bullet was attached to a recoilable high-tension cable and hung from the middle of the Skycrane's slender fuselage. Unlike the strain of towing the barge, this test was virtually risk-free. The high powered helicopter would have no trouble lifting the block and dropping it into the ice below. For once during their North Slope assignment, the pilots had it easy. No late-night mathematical computations, no two-way radios, no pep talks. Either the block would break the ice or it wouldn't. Sitting next to his copilot, Gary Quarles powered up the Skycrane, locked in the bullet and prepared to head out to an open area of ice in the middle of Prudhoe Bay. At the last second, Colonel Carroll hopped on board for the ride. The pilots lowered the aircraft to just one hundred feet above the surface of the ice. When it was properly positioned, Quarles firmly gripped the joystick, anticipating the sudden upward thrust when the bullet was released. With a nod from Quarles, the copilot released the winch holding the bullet in the chopper's cargo bay.

Like bomber pilots on a sortie, they pressed their helmets against the side windows for a better view. They peered down to see the effect of their nonexplosive concrete bomb. They looked for the identifying buoy which was supposed to float in the newly opened water. When they spotted the bright orange buoy, it was bobbing up and down among the shattered shards of ice. The bullet worked. It broke clean through the two-foot-thick harbor ice. If the bullet could penetrate through that, it could easily smash the ice half as thick off the tip of Point Barrow. Jabbing vigorously into the air, Colonel Carroll landed an animated smack of congratulations onto Gary Quarles's flight helmet. The copilot pushed the recoil button to raise the bullet back to its resting place under the fuselage. Maybe he wasn't dead weight after all, thought Carroll. Maybe his latest idea would help the Barrow rescue in its quest to free the whales. When they returned to base, Carroll called Morris and Bill Allen to tell them the bullet was on the way.

On Friday morning, October 21, the Skycranes were outfitted for the 270-mile flight to Barrow. The National Guard asked Randy Crosby and his Search and Rescue team to help them look for a local place to set up shop. There was only one place that could accommodate the National Guard and Randy Crosby's hangar was it. Not having much choice, Crosby reluctantly offered to house the Guardsmen and their workaholic colonel in his own facility. He sent one of his workers to restock the hangar with plenty of coffee. Carroll and his men arrived in Barrow exactly two weeks after the whales were first discovered and six days after making his first exploratory trip. Somehow, the whales had survived. Despite unimaginable stress, the whales managed to outmaneuver their own seemingly sealed fate for a fortnight.

With the exception of the still weak baby whale Bone, the mammals seemed as fit as at any time during their 350-hour ordeal. The middle-sized whale had been given the name Poutu, an Inupiat word roughly describing the icy hole it was trapped in. Poutu was breathing normally once again, its pneumonia overcome. The whale biologists Ron Morris summoned from the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle arrived to pronounce the animals in remarkably good condition.

Several of the reporters, including me, asked why the whales weren't being fed during their confinement. The biologists told us that they wouldn't have eaten anyway. Like all other California grays, these three came to Alaska to take advantage of the rich deposits of amphipods that line hundreds of thousands of square miles of the Arctic Ocean's shallow seabed. They just finished spending the last five months fattening themselves up. Each put on several tons of extra blubber during the summer. Once they left on their 4,500-mile journey from the frozen Arctic to balmy Mexico, the whales wouldn't eat again until they returned in the spring.

Craig and Geoff were convinced that a marine miracle kept the whales alive in their tiny hole for two long weeks. The whales managed to balance their survival against a formidable assortment of obstacles. Each of the five thousand breaths each whale had taken required a tricky maneuver against strong ocean currents through a small opening in the ice while fighting exhaustion and mental fatigue. Malik didn't think it was a miracle. He knew it was the whales' inner strength that compelled them to survive. If the bowhead whale could sustain his people for so many years, Malik knew the three grays could surely find a way to save themselves, if one was available. Cindy didn't know what it was that pushed the whales onward in the face of certain death, but she thanked God for it.

During the two weeks of Operation Breakout, the Top of the World lobby was transformed from a modest hotel lounge into an international marketplace whose item of commerce was information about the whales and the effort to rescue them. The hotel was more than just the broadcast and print nucleus for media trying to cover the story. It also became Barrow's social hub. Self-proclaimed experts on just about everything from the Arctic to the whales purveyed their various theories to hordes of anxious newsmen clambering for any unreported angle. Here, rescuer and reporter commingled and cohabitated.

The smell of scotch cut through the smoke-filled lobby. Reporters and technicians clutched their overused and underwashed glasses. When glasses broke, the more determined connoisseurs had to make do with Styrofoam cups, a tradition NBC producer Jerry Hansen started that was soon mimicked by others. Climbing the sharp-edged iron steps of the world's northernmost hotel was an ascent into a rarefied atmosphere in American journalism. Nowhere else could the coordinator of a United States government rescue constantly be seen drinking liquor in front of a passive, mesmerized press corps.

Affected by the cold and the lengthening darkness, the mood in the lobby of the Top of the World Hotel changed noticeably on the morning of Thursday, October 20. News of the deicers' success spread. Reporters hustled to phone in the report to their bureaus. Hours earlier, before going to sleep, their final prognosis could not have been worse. The bitter weather and howling winds threatened to entomb the whales before daybreak. A few reports predicted that the last person to leave the whales would be the last one to see them alive. Ironically, there were no television cameras on the ice with Randy, Cindy, Craig, and the Minnesotan Rick Skluzacek to record the whales' first move toward freedom. An unprecedented international obsession born out of the ability to capture the whales every move on film and video missed the first and only time when something specifically significant happened.

Not every reporter missed Wednesday night's miracle on ice. There were two lucky ones. As they arrived in Barrow on the same flight as Greg and Rick,
People
magazine's Maria Wilhelm and Taro Yamasaki knew they were far behind in their effort to cover the rescue. Most other reporters arrived in Barrow days earlier. Maria figured they already knew where everything and who everyone was. Boarding the plane in Anchorage, she realized she desperately needed an edge to get back in the race. That edge was sitting right across the aisle in the form of two collapsed Minnesotans.

Aside from Jason Davis's
Eyewitness News
team that wouldn't arrive in Barrow until a day later, Maria Wilhelm was the only reporter who could report Greg Ferrian and Rick Skluzacek's story. Maria was ecstatic. Someone answered her prayers. Just hours after stepping off their MarkAir flight, Taro and Maria had the only pictures of the deicers thawing the hole and the whales moving into the new hole. As if to make up for the previous night's blunder, reporters lined up early Thursday morning to get their first shots of the whales since they moved into the new hole. Each morning found ABC's Harry Chittick to be the first network man able to pull himself out of an irresistible Arctic slumber—4:30
A.M.
came early enough in the Lower 48, but after a day in the strength-sapping cold of the Arctic, it was more than most people could bear. Throughout their millennia, the Eskimos always thought of themselves as hibernators. The only respite from the endless frigid night of winter was long, deep sleep. In sleep, a body unprepared to function in the Arctic could slow its rapid-fire metabolism to a more normal rate.

Like the Eskimos themselves, reporters were overcome by the same indescribable exhaustion. No amount of sleep seemed enough. Traditionally light sleepers fell into unwakable comas. The lobby of the Top of the World Hotel was filled with people claiming they were sober when they fell asleep fully clothed, not to stir until ten hours later. After eight hours on the ice with the whales, it was all I could do to stay awake past 9
P.M.
Not everyone responded in the same way. Our cameraman, Steve Mongeau, stayed up drinking and laughing until all hours with our host Rod Benson. After just a few hours of sleep, Mongeau was always the first to get up. Not only that, he worked harder and longer than anyone I saw in Barrow. I couldn't get enough sleep and still was always exhausted.

But interestingly the mononucleosis, which limited me to no more than a few hours of daily activity back in New York, seemed to disappear. Maybe it froze to death. To the marvel of his colleagues, Harry Chittick managed to be not only awake but coherent for his 5:00
A.M.
network conference call. The Vietnam vet and National Guard member claimed his secret came tumbling out of an eight-dollar box of cereal he bought at Barrow's only supermarket. Only the clattering radiator and the rhythmic crunching of Chittick's chewing broke the dark Arctic stillness. Pouring a measured portion from his seven-dollar gallon of milk, he gazed wondrously at the surreal jagged ice mounds of the Chukchi Sea. They reminded him of the unforgettable images transmitted from the surface of Mars during the mission of the Viking space probe, stunning photos zapped across the forty-million-mile void of space. He marveled at the sea's curious and enduring luminance. There was no moon on those particular days to light up the blackest of nights, yet the sculpted surface of the sea was limited only by the bounds of Chittick's imagination.