Big Miracle (43 page)

After introductions and a short pose for the rolling cameras, CNN's Greg Lefevre asked the first question. He was surprised to hear the Soviet captain answer him in excellent English. NOAA interpreter Svetlana Andreeva, brought specially from Washington, was delighted to learn she wasn't needed. Maybe now she could go home. Reshetov invited the Americans to his quarters for an obligatory shot of vodka. Even Randy Crosby pounded one back.

When they reached the captain's cabin, Morris opened up a weathered leather satchel and pulled out the most recent satellite image analysis, charts and other data compiled by federal agencies for presentation to the Soviets. Morris and Admiral Petersen briefed Reshetov on Operation Breakout and the last remaining obstacle to the whale's freedom, the massive pressure ridge. After hearing Morris's summation, Master Reshetov opened his arms, clearly relishing the challenge. He turned to the cameras and said, “Let's cut ice.”

But before work came a little more pleasure: a second toast of vodka, a tour of the ship, and a chance for the Americans to meet its sea-weary crew. Although anxious to be reunited with family and friends, the Soviet sailors seemed eager to help the trapped whales. Together, the Americans and their Soviet counterparts walked to the dreary officers' mess where a Soviet-style lunch of borscht, potatoes, and a tasteless meat stew awaited them.

Before Crosby boarded the helicopter for the return flight to the United States, a few gregarious Soviet crew members rushed to give him an assortment of pins and buttons. They also gave him a fur hat emblazoned with a gold-rimmed scarlet star of the Soviet Red Army.

“Christ,” he chortled as he prepared to lift off from the Russian vessel. “I sure as hell never thought I'd be so damned proud to wear a Commie hat.”

Moments later, the American chopper was back in the United States.

Immediately after the Americans departed, Reshetov consulted with his crew to devise a strategy for attacking the pressure ridge. The Americans doubted whether the Soviet ships could break through. Bridling at the implied American insult, Reshetov determined to prove them wrong. He had to decide which of his two ships should attempt the first assault.

The crew combined the remarkably clear American satellite imagery and its own estimations of ocean depth and ice thickness. It recommended that Reshetov deploy the
Vladimir Arseniev
to see if she could find any exploitable weaknesses. Since the smaller ship had a shallower keel, she could more safely break ice over the dangerous shoals and sandbars off Point Barrow.

Because Reshetov was unfamiliar with the American waters, he didn't want to take any chances. If the
Arseniev
wasn't up to the task, he could always call in his big gun, the
Admiral Makarov,
which was anchored just a few hundred meters off the ridge. A trio of pesky helicopters buzzing like mosquitoes swirled overhead as the
Vladimir Arseniev
engaged new powerful engines and belched a huge plume of black smoke. The big ship easily cut a channel to the ice wall, preparing to strike it head on. The
Arseniev
was ready for her first assault on the pinnacled pressure ridge. Just as the American rescuers fit the stereotype of a country excessively reliant on technology, the Soviets were about to epitomize the world's image of their own nation: brute strength and size.

The helmsman threw the powerful engines into reverse. The Finnish-made ship needed room to build up speed before hitting the outer edge of the ridge. The crew braced itself for the first contact. For several minutes, the men waited expectantly, unsure of the impact. The double hull of reinforced steel was designed to withstand tremendous strain, but Reshetov was uncertain whether the grounded ice would give. He expected the worst and ordered the crew to do the same. The
Arseniev
's bow met the glacial blue wall in a thunderous collision. The deafening sound of 24 million pounds of grinding steel crushing the thick ice was audible for miles.

But the wrenching noise belied the remarkable ease with which the
Arseniev
's bow parted the ice. As his ship plowed ahead undaunted, Reshetov broke into hearty laughter. The crew joined him, breaking the tense silence. The last remaining obstacle to the whales' freedom was falling beneath the mighty bow of the Soviet icebreaker. For the first time since the whales were discovered eighteen days earlier, Operation Breakout, suddenly renamed Operation Breakthrough by the U.S. government, was on the verge of success.

At sea for the past six months, the crew had no comprehension of the dimensions of the rescue it was instructed to assist. Since they received their orders from the highest levels of Soviet government, the crew naturally assumed it was being asked to perform a daring, critical task, perhaps vital to its nation's security. What the Russians just figured out was that the ice they spent the past four days traversing was much more treacherous than that which they were summoned to cut. The ship's massive bow crushed its way ever closer to the curious crowd of onlookers and the whales they came to liberate.

No one, not even the Eskimos, had any idea the Soviet ships could so effortlessly cut through the ridge of grounded ice. Just minutes before, Gary Hufford, the NOAA ice expert brought specially to Barrow to help in the rescue, told reporters he thought the wall might well be impenetrable. After several hundred yards, the pressure of the ridge ground the icebreaker to a halt, a normal occurrence that Master Reshetov expected to happen much sooner. The helmsman backed ship for another run at the ice wall. A huge cheer erupted as news of the icebreaker's success reached the crowd of rescuers and journalists gathered a few miles away. After ten days of setbacks, something finally worked.

Operation Breakout was reaching its finale. The pressure ridge, thought to be the last great obstacle to the whale's freedom, was no match for the
Vladimir Arseniev
. As soon as the Eskimos could finish their path of ice holes, the whales and the world could get on with their lives.

This would be Bill Allen's last chance to help save the whales. Three days earlier, on Saturday, October 22, a C-5A Galaxy, the free world's largest aircraft, landed at Barrow's Wiley Post–Will Rogers Memorial Airport. Barrow's budget director Dan Fauske, who lived across the street from the runway, was outside shoveling snow from his sidewalk when the huge plane blotted out the sky over the tiny town as it swooped in for a landing. He thought Barrow was being invaded, but he didn't know by whom. The airport had to divert all other traffic while the C-5A straddled the end of the runway. It was too big and too heavy to use the tarmac. In a frenzy of activity involving Colonel Carroll's National Guard unit, the United States Air Force, and MarkAir cargo director Ed Rogers, the unwieldy Archimedean Screw Tractor was extracted from the Galaxy's gaping jaw.

Towed to the old Navy hangar just south of NARL, the screw tractor awaited its chance to show the world that VECO could help the whales after all. On Sunday afternoon, Bill Allen demonstrated it to a skeptical Ron Morris. Just across the road from the hangar, the tractor, spinning its huge screws, made its way awkwardly through the sand and onto the ice. For a few embarrassing moments it slid across the slippery surface without breaking through it. When the screw tractor finally found a weak spot, it left a trail of thick ice in its wake. Like the ill-fated bullet a day earlier, the tractor left too much debris.

But Bill Allen wasn't finished. He hadn't spent more than a quarter million dollars not to get in on the drama's last act. The Russians were making it look too easy. They had thrown down the gauntlet to Bill Allen and his American honor. He wanted that tractor on the ice and he wanted it to work. Over the phone to Marvin King, his man at Prudhoe Bay, Allen designed a sled which the Skycrane could tow behind the tractor to clear the broken ice. Allen drew a sketch of it and faxed it to Prudhoe.

“Put it together as fast as you can,” Allen ordered his plant manager. “Carroll says he'll give us a whirl.”

King and his men worked through the night Sunday and all day Monday, welding together the makeshift sled. They had to leave it partially disassembled in order to load it aboard the C-130 Hercules cargo plane, which was standing by to airlift it to Barrow. When it arrived, Billy Bob donned a welder's mask and prepared to use the skill he learned so many years before. When he and Pete Leathard found an acetylene torch, they knew they were in business. Ordering in from Pepe's, the two men went to work and didn't emerge until the sled was complete forty-eight hours later. Allen called Colonel Carroll and told him he planned the test run “down to a gnat's ass.”

But earlier that day, the jinxed Skycrane, linked to the rescue's most conspicuous failures, was grounded with a fractured blade, damage that would require 100,000 taxpayers' dollars to fix. The hundreds of man hours spent furiously constructing the rush-order sled went for naught. Bill Allen's last dream seemed dashed. By Wednesday afternoon, October 26, less than twenty-four hours after the Soviets first appeared off the Barrow coast, the pressure ridge had been reduced to mounds of ice separating dozens of paths which convincingly disproved its invulnerability to escape paths a quarter mile wide. All that remained between the whales and their freedom was a three-mile stretch of virgin ice.

But ironically, just as the rescuers were bridging the final hurdle, public interest suddenly began to falter. The web of shared concern that had bound together many Americans for two extraordinary weeks started to subside. People were getting bored. The characteristic American demands for immediate results were coming to the fore. When the whales weren't freed right away viewers got cranky, angry, even resentful. Just when the Russian ships gave the rescue its first realistic hope of success, Americans do what they always do—they moved on.

Was the extraordinary expense justified? Was it really worth doing more? How much was too much? When balanced against these questions, the rescue started to seem ludicrous. Sympathy turned to cynicism. Talk radio, then in its infancy, but still the miner's canary of American public opinion, succumbed to the first fumes. Newspapers started printing political cartoons which mocked the lavish attention heaped on the whales. Dan Wasserman, a
Boston Globe
political cartoonist, drew one of Operation Breakout's most memorable satires: Two homeless people sitting on a subway grate donning whale costumes in an inventive attempt to solicit help.

Ben Sargent of the
Austin American Statesman
sketched perhaps the most poignant cartoon: Living skeletons of Sudanese refugees languishing near a bombed-out relief truck. Its radio broadcasting the captioned message, “The world stood transfixed today by the heart rending plight of the California gray whales.”

The public's empathy had peaked. The whales didn't have much time and Americans didn't have much patience. Reacting to its audience's changing mood, the press retrenched and subtly began to adopt a more conventional role. By the beginning of Operation Breakout's second week, reporters on the scene started asking the same questions. While not mentioned in any of our reports, the three small children killed in the tragic Barrow house fire served as vivid testimony to our excessive preoccupation with the whales; a watershed of sorts. Just when things looked to be going Ron Morris's way, the first uncomfortable questions were flung at him.

Fortunately for the whales, they were too busy to worry about their growing “image problem.” Hoping for a climactic ending to justify their continued presence, most of the media stuck with the whales. By now, there were hundreds of people on the ice: a score of camera crews, dozens of reporters, the Eskimo ice cutters, Ron Morris's cadre of experts, Colonel Carroll and the National Guard, and countless Barrowans. All were urging the whales on. The Eskimos said the Arctic had probably never seen so much activity in its four-billion-year history. Never had the Arctic ice been subjected to so much man-made stress.

But so far the ice was holding up remarkably well. While fifty million pounds of icebreakers pounded away at the ice's outer edges, millions more pounds stressed its surface. Suddenly, this desolate patch of ice was the work place to hundreds of people and all their heavy effects. The ice was the glassy super highway allowing high speed transit for scores of commuters. It was a Southern Californian's dream, a freeway in every sense of the word, a roadway as wide as it was long, with no limits. There were no barriers and virtually no dangers. Vehicles regularly drove at speeds reaching eighty miles an hour, on sheer ice! If we spun out of control, which was not unusual, the only danger was the driver's overreaction. The ice upon which we all depended was also the landing strip and tarmac to a fleet of helicopters and even light fixed-wing aircraft.

The ice we relied on for access to the whales was the very element that imprisoned them. But as they were boldly making clear, it wouldn't imprison them for long. Just a few hours before Arctic darkness would descend upon them on Wednesday, October 25, the two whales seemed to sense that it might be their last day of captivity. The Eskimos were opening holes at breakneck speed just to keep pace with the frenzied whales. Led by Siku, the larger of the two, the leviathans were trying to surface in new holes before they were finished. The whales were so persistent, they were sticking their vulnerable heads within inches of the lethal chain saws.

Malik was forced to take steps to prevent an accidental slashing. Such a catastrophe would have been particularly tragic now that the whales were so close to freedom. He split his twelve-man crew in half. The lead group cut the outline of a hole with their chain saws and moved on to mark off the next one. Meanwhile, the second crew worked on the first hole, pushing the giant blocks of ice under the rim of the hole allowing the anxious whales to surface. Instead of colliding with a deadly chain saw, the worst the whales would bump into was an aluminum seal pole.