Big Miracle (34 page)

Sliding open the huge hangar bays, Randy Crosby hooked the tow tractor to the front end of the new Bell Long Ranger 214 whirlybird. According to Crosby's own regulations, one helicopter always had to be ready for an emergency. Since it was just over an hour before the first scheduled media flight out to the whales, they had less than that time in the air to spot a bear. He lifted off the Search and Rescue helipad dimly outlined by faint yellow lines obscured by the windswept snow. He swung the aircraft to the southeast and out to sea five miles due west of Barrow. The pressure ridge that Morris and the Eskimos were looking to cleave was the natural home to one of the world's most ferocious land animals.

As Crosby flew overhead hoping to find bears, Arnold Brower and his Eskimo scouts were down below armed with high-powered rifles to protect them from the deadly and unpredictable animal. In the most dangerous areas, people knew to walk back to back. They did this on the ice. They walked with guns drawn and elbows locked as they scouted the towering ice walls of the pressure ridge looking for a place to cut a path for the whales. They hoped to avoid a confrontation with one of the huge and remarkably agile giants, but if they could not, they were ready to win it.

Crosby flew northeasterly toward the whale site from the open water side of the pressure ridge. He kept the helicopter less than 100 feet from the surface of the gray-black depths of the ice cold water. He told Chittick and his cameraman to keep their eyes intently focused out the right side of the aircraft. Polar bears liked to hunt along the edge of the ice pack where they could easily slip in and out of the food-rich sea. Just as Crosby was about to lift his Long Ranger to a higher altitude to head for another spot where he had seen polar bears, a mass of white fur leapt out from behind a slab of ice and bounded angrily toward the helicopter. Crosby swept the aircraft sharply around at a hard angle and dropped to just ten feet off the water to let the ABC cameraman get the best possible shot of the bear.

Exposing its teeth and swiping its deadly claws, the massive bear started to rise on its hind legs. Chittick was baffled. Did this bear really think it could attack a swirling helicopter flying ten feet off the ground? But as his mind was framing an image of perplexity, Chittick's puzzled face fell expressionless. The bear stood fully erect. Chittick thought his eyes had finally betrayed him. He felt them tilting up to stare the bear in the eye. He was flying in an airborne helicopter and looking up to see the head of a land animal standing on its hind legs. Just how tall was the damned thing? The bear's angry growl was easily audible over the din of the chopper's spinning blades.

Unbelievably, the bear flailed its paws in an attempt to swat down a hovering helicopter. Unbelievable. The ABC cameraman captured the entire dramatic sequence on video. It was not only the most remarkable sight in Harry Chittick's career, it was also some of the best video to come out of the rescue. Because “pure” Eskimos were the only people allowed to kill a polar bear under state and federal law, they were the only armed scouts the networks could hire. (Whether the scouts assented to have their blood tested to verify their “Eskimo purity” no one rightly bothered to ask.) Reporters covering the whales were told never to go more than a few hundred yards away from the whale site without an escort, except on the now heavily traveled ice paths.

On the way back from our first day covering the whales, Masu Kawamura and I parked our balky truck on the side of the road and strolled onto the ice pack. We just couldn't get over that we could drive, walk, and play on top of the Arctic Ocean. Our otherwise fearless cameraman, Steve Mongeau decided to stay in truck. Mongeau had reported from the Arctic before and knew plenty about polar bears. There was no way he was walking “out there” without a gun.

Masu and I marveled at the fact we could probably walk clear across the top of the world and way down the other, all the way to Norway, across a frozen ocean. Suddenly we got hit with a bout of whiteout—a blinding condition caused when swirling snow wipes out visibility. We both dropped to the ground to regain our balance and escape the biting wind. When I looked around for Masu I could see nothing. I knew he couldn't be more than five or six feet from me. We knew we weren't far from the whales because we easily heard the helicopters and the saws. But neither of us could see anything.

As the wind howled, I first wondered what I was looking at below me. Were they Masu's footprints? They couldn't be more than a few seconds old. But they appeared much bigger, if they were footprints at all. I couldn't be sure. Maybe, perhaps probably it was just my imagination. But as the wind died and the whiteout faded, I convinced myself I could see the outline of a massive polar bear that seemed to be staring right at us.

In the shortest instant, it had to have been frightened by the helicopter hovering overhead. Or maybe it wasn't anything at all. Neither of us was prepared to swear we saw anything—certainly to members of our own fraternity who would only laugh at us. That night, our host Rod Benson did exactly that. There was no way, he howled, we were that close to a bear, and besides no one else saw him and if he were that close to shore he would have wandered onto shore where he would have been soon. Masu and I were told that a favorite strategy of the Nanook is to wait for its victims to be blinded by whiteout. It was a good fantasy to engage in: (a) Had there actually been a bear and (b) had it decided to come for us, we wouldn't have had much of a chance and he wouldn't have had much of a meal—so we were even.

Arnold Brower and his scouts came back from their pressure ridge expedition with bad news. They told Morris that while there were certain weak spots, none were shallow enough to be tackled by chain saws. They could not be sure, but it seemed as though most of the ridge was grounded. That meant the huge ice towers reaching thirty feet in the air also reached more than thirty feet below the surface, firmly anchoring the ice to the ocean floor.

By Friday morning, October 21, Operation Breakout needed a breakout of its own. Although the whales had started to use the holes cut for them by the Eskimos, there still seemed no way through the pressure ridge. What could break the ridge? The question asked since day one had only one answer: an icebreaker. The rescue was right back to where it started a week earlier with Cindy Lowry back on the phone making calls to faraway places. Many of them went to Campbell Plowden, her colleague in Washington. Before the first Outside reporter arrived in Barrow to cover the fledgling whale rescue, Plowden was already working behind the scenes to find a ship that could save the whales. Friday morning, October 14, the day after the first news of the stranded whales appeared on
NBC Nightly News
, Plowden called his contacts in the U.S. Coast Guard, which operated two world-class icebreakers.

The flagship icebreaker, the
Polar Sea,
was herself making news. She was mired in the ice-bound Northwest Passage on the way back from a ship rescue. A Canadian vessel was stuck near the western end of the Passage just a few hundred miles east of Barrow. The
Polar Sea
was trying to guide it to safety. Under normal conditions, Plowden was told, the ship would have sailed right past Barrow. But because of the unusually bad weather in the Arctic, the ice at the Northwest Passage's western end was frozen too thick, even for the
Polar Sea
. Instead, both the icebreaker and the ship she came to save had to sail the other way, 1,500 miles across the top of the world and out into north Atlantic waters just a few hundred miles from Iceland. From there it was 12,000 miles back to Barrow through the Panama Canal. Plowden didn't need to ask any more questions. The
Polar Sea
was not an option.

“What about the other icebreaker?” he asked, knowing that the Coast Guard operated a second such vessel. The newer and sleeker
Polar Star
was in drydock at Seattle, undergoing extensive repairs. Neither American icebreaker could help in the cause that was uniting the world. How could the United States military have only two icebreakers? Plowden asked himself? Maybe because it was people like him who always found reasons to oppose any defense spending, let alone $300 million for an icebreaker designed to facilitate the transit of “contaminated” commercial ships through “pristine” waters.

Except for Alaska, which consistently argued for more, the Navy had little use for icebreakers; the Coast Guard even less. In the passion of the rescue, few people paused to reflect that, thankfully, until then we simply didn't need them. Unlike the Soviet Union, not a single U.S. seaport was ever closed for winter, even those in Alaska. In fact, some believed we didn't even need the two we had. Most of the time they assisted Canadian vessels in the Northwest Passage: Canadian waters; and Canada had its fleet of ice breakers—newer, faster, and more reliable than America's.

In his conversations about the U.S. icebreakers Plowden heard reports that there was a private 200-foot icebreaker in Juneau. His calls revealed she would be no use. At less than half the size of the
Polar Sea,
she was much too small to do the job. Designed to break the relatively thin ice in southeast Alaska, she would have enough trouble just getting to Barrow, let alone contending with the huge ice blocks of the pressure ridge. Plowden got the name of a marine services company in Seattle that reportedly worked closely with all the world's big icebreakers. The man at Crowley Maritime Corporation asked Plowden if he had spoken with anyone from the Soviet Merchant Marine office in New York. The Soviet Union operated the world's largest and most powerful fleet of icebreakers. With few warm water ports, they desperately needed them to assure passage of Soviet merchant and military vessels.

Right after he spoke with Crowley Maritime, the same anonymous woman who called Cindy Lowry in Anchorage earlier that morning with word of the VECO hoverbarge phoned Campbell Plowden in Washington.

“Have you thought about the Soviets?” asked Jane Whale. Jane told Plowden she just spoke to Armand Hammer's Los Angeles office. Hammer was the nonagenarian industrialist who made his first fortune acting as international trading agent for the then embryonic Soviet Union. He later parlayed his business interests into a controlling stake in the giant Occidental Petroleum Company, which he ran until his death in 1990. Hammer commented correctly that he was perhaps the only man alive who was close friends with both Vladimir Lenin and Ronald Reagan.

Jane Whale's initial request for Hammer's help met with an icy response. She told Plowden the woman she spoke to was blunt.

Although Cindy told him not to bother, Plowden called David Ramseur, from Alaska governor Steve Cowper's office. He wanted to see if the governor could authorize the Coast Guard to request assistance from the Soviets. “Are you nuts?” came the rough reply. If the state of Alaska didn't ask the United States government to request Soviet assistance when an American ship got stuck or when seven Eskimo hunters were lost at sea, how would Cowper justify doing so for three lousy whales?

By Monday morning, October 17, the whales were already world news. Plowden woke up at 3
A.M.
that day to call David McTaggart, the director of Greenpeace International who was in Rome. McTaggart was sick in bed but his assistant, Brian Fitzgerald, listened as Plowden explained the problem. Plowden wanted McTaggart to persuade his contacts in the USSR Academy of Sciences to send an icebreaker. Fitzgerald promised to convey Plowden's request to his bedridden director. Plowden apologized for being unable to provide more detail. In addition to the expensive international phone rates, he was in a rush. He had to be on the set of ABC's
World News This Morning
for an interview about the rescue. He told them he would be in touch as soon as he was finished with
Good Morning America,
the second ABC News program on which he was scheduled to appear. Fitzgerald took Plowden's message directly to McTaggart. If he could send the Soviets a telegram, that might lubricate the interminably slow-moving machinery of Soviet bureaucracy.

Before leaving ABC's studios, Plowden called in to check for messages. Fitzgerald had just called from Rome. McTaggart agreed to send a telegram to the appropriate Soviet authority, Arthur Chilingarov at the State Committee for Hydrometerology and Control of the Natural Environment, if Plowden would draft the text and find Chilingarov's telex number. Plowden spent the rest of Monday morning trying to get through on the constantly busy phone lines at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. When Plowden finally did get through, the clerk at the embassy gave him the telex number and address of the Moscow office. The man about to be asked to help three whales had an office on Pavlik Morozov Street, the USSR's boy-martyr figure who personified Marxist-Leninist virtue by denouncing his own father to Stalin's NKVD in 1932. Sergei Eisenstein made the “heroism” of Pavel Morozov into a classic Soviet propaganda film in 1937.

Not ten minutes after Plowden got Chilingarov's number in Moscow, a reporter from the CNN called about the Greenpeace request. Plowden was furious. Did someone betray him? How had the news media learned about his plans so quickly? CNN volunteered that the Soviet Embassy informed them of his call during their regular morning beat checks. Plowden had denied any knowledge. Now he would look like the one who leaked the story. If word leaked out before an official request was made, the plan would die. Plowden drafted and faxed a copy of his proposed telegram to Greenpeace's Rome office for McTaggert to approve and forward to Moscow. Less than an hour after he sent the message to Rome, it was in Moscow. When Comrade Chilingarov arrived at work the following morning, Tuesday, October 18, Moscow time, the message from his old Greenpeace friend, David McTaggart, was waiting on his desk.

“Greenpeace urgently requests your assistance to help rescue three California gray whales trapped in ice holes less than a mile off shore from Point Barrow, Alaska,” the message began. The pressure ridge wasn't discovered until several days after that first telex. It continued, “A rescue operation is now underway but it will only succeed if the open lead, now six miles from the whales, does not freeze over. If this lead were to freeze over, would you be able to make an icebreaker available to help clear a path for the whales to escape? Please contact our Washington office which is in direct contact with our people in Alaska. Regards, David McTaggart.”