The Last Run (27 page)

It took the Coast Guard more than a year to renovate the place. Nothing inside was salvageable. Ted LeFeuvre ordered the cost of the renovation paid for out of Bob Doyle’s retirement check. He also had accounting deduct an additional $125.13 to cover three checks Bob Doyle had bounced at the Eagle’s Nest, the officers’ club he had been in charge of managing.

That summer, Ted LeFeuvre wrote in Bob Doyle’s twenty-third and final evaluation:

Ted LeFeuvre couldn’t remember ever having written such terrible things about anyone in seventeen years in the Coast Guard. It was unfortunate, he thought. There was no enmity at all in the man. Bob Doyle wasn’t mean at heart. He wasn’t combative or angry. He didn’t have an ax to grind. He’d probably done enough good things to know what path in life he wanted to be on. He was simply incapable at that moment of getting on that path. Perhaps you’re being too coldhearted with him, Ted LeFeuvre said to himself. No. You took the only course available. You had to put him out. It was too bad. But why didn’t Bob Doyle just pull himself together? Why didn’t he just come to work? Work has always helped you, he said to himself. It’s the one thing you can always count on. There was no excuse for Doyle’s behavior. Still, it was a shame watching the man go to pieces like that. Well, it was out of his hands now. There was nothing he could do for Bob Doyle. Not anymore.

F
or breakfast that morning, the thirtieth of January, Ted LeFeuvre had a half bagel with cream cheese, untoasted, and a half can of Dr Pepper. Afterward, he made his bed, folded his pajamas, tucked them under his pillow and took a shower, scrubbing his graying hair with shampoo and rinsing under the prickling drive of the sharp-jetted shower. He brushed his teeth, scraped the stubble off his jaw and chin, parted his hair neatly to one side and surveyed the face in the mirror. It was not a bad face. It was a handsome face. Well, at least he could say it was a face without pity. That much he could say.

He put on his uniform, sat at the foot of the bed and tied his shoelaces, flattened out the wrinkles he had just left on the quilt and glanced at the clock. It was six twenty-six. He went downstairs and checked the pellet stove. Low again. I’m not coming home again to an icebox, he thought. He went out to the garage, filled a used coffee can with pellets and returned to the den and poured the pellets into the stove. Then he picked a coat out of the closet, brushed a few pieces of lint from it, zipped it up and went outside and got into his Jeep. It was cold and the motor would not turn over right away.

The streets gleamed under the streetlamps. There was a heavy mist over Swan Lake. The lake is frozen, he thought, but not yet thick enough for the skaters. He made a right on Harbor Mountain Road. Rain ticked across the windshield. It was hard focusing with the rain and darkness. He was supposed to meet with Paul McCarthy, the pastor, and the other members of the church board at seven. He glanced at the dash clock. Six forty-seven. He sped up a little. He did not like tardiness or keeping people waiting. And he had to be at the air station by eight for the morning briefing.

As it was, the eight o’clock briefing turned out to be totally unremarkable. Engineering had little to report; all three of the Jayhawks had been serviced and were up and running. The duty roster had been posted for February. Staffing had been cut to half of the normal complement for the weekend. Half of his pilots were unavailable. The operations officer, Doug Taylor, was away on vacation, as was Wayne Buchanan, the XO. Jack Newby had the day off. Four other fliers had taken postholiday leave. That left seven pilots, and him. January was not a busy fishing month. Seven was plenty. A low-pressure system was approaching from the Aleutians and was expected to move through the area in the next forty-eight hours. The forecast called for
snain —
snow and rain, mixed—and twenty-knot winds out of the southwest. Typical.

Upstairs in his office he got off a good morning’s work, finishing two personnel evaluations and writing thank-you letters to several volunteers he could not remember meeting. He took a call from a city official in charge of the airport expansion. The city wanted a slice of Coast Guard property so the access road could be moved and the airport building lengthened. At eleven-thirty he changed into his sweatpants and hooded jacket and sneakers and went for a run. On Fridays he jogged along the access road, crossed the O’Connell Bridge, turned around at the intersection of Lincoln and Harbor and jogged back. That day the wind was blowing just enough to annoy him. And it was sleeting. The sleet felt like pinpricks on his face.

Crossing the bridge, he glanced out at the sound. It looked gray, flat. He saw no boats coming or going. It felt good to run on his lunch break. His cheeks smarted from the sleet but he liked the burn in his legs.

After lunch and a hot shower he returned to his paperwork. They were going to rehabilitate the galley, the dining facilities, the medical area and the barracks. There wasn’t enough housing for single people. He had to study the engineering plans. He took a break and went down to the machine shop, then the hangar, and then the ops center to chat with the duty officer. At two-thirty he returned to his desk and finished two more evaluations. He read over what he had typed, corrected a few things, printed out copies, signed them and put them in his drawer. He looked at his watch. It was nearly four. Another day without flying, he thought. He’d not been up in a helicopter since January 12. That was eighteen days. The last time he’d sat in an H-60 he and Dan Molthen had done a two-hour fishery patrol together. Kind of snotty out today, anyway, he thought. Try to go up next week.

He put on his coat and locked his door. He saw Dave Durham in the hallway. Bull was big. Perhaps the shaved head made him look taller than he was. Perhaps that was why they called him Bull. He had never asked him. Durham was on his way home, judging by his gait.

“Captain,” Durham said, “today is Friday, right?”

“Last I checked.”

“You’re home tonight if anything comes up?”

“No,” Ted LeFeuvre told him. “I’ll be at the high school. Tonight’s the big basketball game.”

“Right. I forgot.”

“You can reach me on the beeper.”

“They’re playing against Juneau, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Juneau’s got that big kid. What’s his name?”

“Don’t ask me,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “All I know is that the NBA is scouting him and the place is going to be packed. Police are worried about scalpers.”

They laughed.

“What time’s the game start?”

“Seven.”

He drove straight home in the dark. He needed to get a move on. He had told Betty Jo he would stop by her house before six, and he didn’t like keeping people waiting.

Betty Jo Johns was a Tlingit woman who sat next to him in church on Sundays. She’d been married twice, the last time to a Native fisherman who played around on her, and she had two sons. Some people gossiped that he and Betty Jo were an item. He enjoyed her company. He thought Betty Jo had a tremendous sense of fair play and ethics, and she loved the Lord. But he didn’t want a partner, not just then. He did not miss sex yet. When would he miss it? He did not know. No one knew. That was the funny thing about it.

He arrived at Betty Jo’s a few minutes after six. Her son, Jeff, was still upstairs putting on his uniform. There was a large crowd at the high school. They squeezed into a space two thirds of the way up the bleachers, not far from half court. He and Betty Jo sat and watched the boys warm up. The crowd was excited. Ted LeFeuvre sat down and relaxed. He was not much of a basketball enthusiast. It did feel good, though, to be part of a crowd. It was nice not to think on a Friday night. Thinking did you no good sometimes.

Tip-off was at seven sharp. Exactly seven minutes before the referee blew the starting whistle, a satellite 650 miles above the earth picked up an emergency signal from a radio beacon in the Gulf of Alaska.

SARSAT-4 was one of seven low-earth-orbiting satellites circling the globe on January 30, 1998. It was capable of reading analog signals from 121.5-megahertz EPIRBs, like the one triggered first aboard the
La Conte,
and digital transmissions from 406-megahertz models, like the one Bob Doyle had triggered just before abandoning ship.

That night, however, SARSAT-4 picked up only one signal from the
La Conte —
the one coming from the stronger 406 beacon.

Instantly, the satellite relayed the Mayday to a powerful computer inside the U.S. Mission Control Center in Suitland, Maryland, and the mainframe began checking thousands of boat registries to identify the ship in distress. When a beacon is registered with the Coast Guard, it takes less than a minute to determine the ship’s name, its characteristics, the name of its owner, the owner’s telephone number, the boat’s radio call signal and the phone numbers of two of the skipper’s closest relatives. The computer forwards this information to the Coast Guard headquarters nearest the ship’s port of call so that duty officers can start mobilizing an air rescue.

The computer then fixes the EPIRB’s location. Because it works with sets of digital data, it winds up calculating two Doppler positions —a
true
image, which is where the EPIRB actually is, and a
mirror
image. The computer weighs the composite images by percentage of accuracy, discerns the beacon’s true position and forwards the coordinates to the Coast Guard station closest to the emergency. Ninety-five percent of the time, the computer determines which is the true Doppler image in less than five minutes.

This time, it was not certain.

When Bob Doyle activated the 406 EPIRB aboard the
La Conte,
SARSAT-4 happened to be very low on the horizon. Orbiting the poles at 4.37 miles per second—15,372 mph —the satellite received only a short, incomplete burst of data before it slipped behind the earth.

With little data to work with, the best the Mission Control mainframe could do was offer a
position split—
two possible locations for the emergency beacon.

As the computer saw it, there was a 52 percent chance the distress signal had come from latitude 58°15.5’ north, longitude 138°07.8’ west. But there was also a 48 percent chance it had emanated from latitude 61°28.3’ north, longitude 120°34.5’ west. These coordinates were eight hundred miles apart.

To confirm the EPIRB’s true position, the computer would need more data. It would have to wait. SARSAT-4 took an hour to complete a pass around the earth. And there was one other problem.

The computer had been unable to identify the ship or its crew; the boat’s owner had not bothered to register the EPIRB. If he had, a duty officer in Juneau could have called family and friends of the crew, confirmed that this was not just another false alarm and ordered an immediate launch. It could have shaved fifteen minutes to an hour off the time a helicopter needed to effect a rescue.

That, of course, was no longer possible.

Quartermaster Blake Kilbourne yawned and rubbed his eyes. It was storming outside. He checked his watch: 7:02 P.M. He still had to stand half of a twenty-four-hour watch at the District 17 Rescue Coordination Center in Juneau.

It had been a slow day: a couple of medevacs, a boat that needed a tow and a false EPIRB alarm. Some kid on a docked boat had knocked the beacon out of its magnetic bracket by accident and triggered a Mayday. There was no harm done. Kilbourne had radioed the vessel and aborted a rescue.

Lieutenant Steve Rutz, sitting beside him at the console, asked him, “How you holding up?”

“I could use a nap.”

“Go ahead.”

“You sure?”

“Go ahead. I’ll call you if I need you.”

Kilbourne took their dinner plates to the kitchen, rinsed them and the utensils, stowed everything in the cupboards and went to the bunkroom. He was unfolding his sleeping bag when he heard the zipping noise of the SARSAT-dedicated printer coming from the control room.

“Hey, Steve?”

“Yeah?”

“You got that?”

“I got it,” Rutz called out. “Get some sleep.”

Rutz ripped off the bulletin and scanned it:

What he read next stopped him: the computer was giving two possible positions for the same distress beacon. That’s weird, he thought. Maybe a corrective message will come over. He waited.

Nothing.

Rutz took the bulletin to the chart table and plotted both sets of coordinates on the Alaska map. The positions were eight hundred miles apart. One was close to the Aleutian Islands. The other was ninety miles west of Cape Spencer, on the Fairweather Grounds.

It could be a false alarm, he thought. Let’s see if I can’t call the boat owner or the family of the crew. He read the message again, under the words BEACON DATA:

There was no saying exactly how bad conditions were in the gulf. There wasn’t a single data buoy out there and only one in all of Alaska —near Kodiak. Unless a commercial vessel radioed in data, calculating wave heights, wind speeds and barometric pressure would be educated guesswork.

However, he had some general information, and the news was not good.

The National Weather Service was reporting twenty-foot seas across the Gulf of Alaska, thirty-five-knot winds. If there were people in the water, their chances weren’t good. Water temperatures in the gulf were between thirty-seven and thirty-nine degrees. In water that cold, a two-hundred-pound man in a survival suit had an 83 percent chance of lasting two and a half hours, Coast Guard studies showed. After that, the chances of survival plummeted, especially if wave heights were more than twenty-five feet. The higher the seas the faster a person burned body fat and the less time it took for hypothermia to set in.