The Last Run (32 page)

“Yes.”

“Have you tried eight megs?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, go to five megs. Keep calling. Make calls in the blind if you have to. Just because we can’t hear anybody doesn’t mean someone’s not hearing us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dan,” Adickes said to Molthen. “I’ll keep an eye on the radar altimeter. You just try to get us in a hover over the survivors.”

“How high you think?”

“How about a fifty-foot hover?”

“No,” Molthen said. “We shouldn’t drop any closer than a hundred feet.”

Adickes smiled to himself. The man’s got his confidence and judgment back, he thought. “Fine. Our drop limit will be a hundred feet. I’ll follow your inputs on the controls.”

“We’re going to get those guys,” Molthen said. “I know it.”

“Sure,” Adickes said. “Only let’s not kill ourselves trying.”

Sean Witherspoon was at the cabin door with his hand on the door handle. They had just completed the second part of their rescue checklist.

“Ready for the hoist,” he said.

“Begin hoisting,” Molthen said.

Witherspoon threw open the door to a blast of snow and ice. It stung his face. A chill shot through his body.

“Arrggghh!”

He lowered the visor on the top of his helmet and, grunting, thrust his head out the door. Ice, snow and sleet pelted him. Then he saw it.

Holy shit.

All of Witherspoon’s calculations, all of the mental buildup, all of the plans he had made on the flight out were gone. He had not seen the ocean until now. He had been plotting his moves, thinking out the hoist from beginning to end, in careful detail. But now all the moves were gone. They had sailed clean out of his head the moment he made direct contact with the churning, heaving atmosphere.

He hesitated.

Off to his right, in a trough between two enormous swells, he saw two arms, lined in reflective tape, waving. He shut his eyes.

So this is what it comes down to, Witherspoon thought. All of the training and everything you’ve ever done in your life —this is what it comes down to. One pivotal moment. What are you going to do?

He opened his eyes. His visor had fogged. He flipped it up. As soon as he did, sleet clawed at his eyes and forehead. He wiped his eyes, pulled the visor down. Panting, he said, “I see two guys down there.”

“There’s at least four, maybe five,” Adickes said over the intercom.

“Oh.”

“I want a DMB out there right away, Sean,” Adickes said. “Let’s get that out, now.”

A data marker buoy was a radio float that transmitted a 121.5-megahertz signal. They would lock the drop position into the computer and measure the speed and direction of the current by following the DMB’s drift. Witherspoon pulled out the float, activated it and hurled it out the jump door.

“DMB’s out!”

Adickes recorded the position. “Good. Got it, thanks.”

Witherspoon reached a Mark-25 flare down off the wall rack. He set it on the deck near the door. The Mark-25 was a salt-water-activated flare. It floated and shot white light. It would burn for about twenty minutes. Witherspoon peeled the lid off the flare and popped the top. Sleet and snow were blowing around the cabin. It felt like working in a locust storm.

“Okay, sir,” Witherspoon said, huffing. His breathing was coming faster. “I got a flare ready.”

Adickes’s voice crackled over the intercom. It was a cool voice, free of fear. “Whenever you’re ready, Sean.”

“Flare’s away!”

Witherspoon did not see the flare hit the ocean. He had shoved the steel cylinder pitchpoling out the door when the gust hit them. It was a savage gust, well over 110 knots, and it sledgehammered the aircraft. The next thing Witherspoon knew he was halfway out of the cabin, gripping the jump-door frame.

The aircraft was hurtling back and down, nose up and tail pointed toward the water.

“Nose it over!” he heard Adickes shrieking at Molthen.
“Nose it over, dammit!”

“I’m trying! I’m trying!”

“Nose it over!”

“I’m doing it!”

“We’re backing down!”

“I know!”

Then he heard a sound very few airmen in an H-60 have ever heard—the sound of one force being overcome by a greater one, the sound of two General Electric T-700 1,900-shaft horsepower engines spooling
down.
It was an odd, agonizing drone, like the wail of a wounded coyote. Then he heard the stutter of hail on the fiberglass airframe and the moan of wind in the rotor head. The cockpit lights dimmed. In the flickering light everything seemed to move in slow motion: Molthen and Adickes pulling power on the sticks, Sansone slamming into the rear wall, the aircraft tilting until it seemed to stand on its tail. Witherspoon swung his head. A swell was cresting less than twenty feet below.

If a wave catches our tail, he thought, we’ll spin into the sea and sink.

“UP!”
he screamed.
“UP!”

At first, nothing happened.

Then, slowly, grudgingly, the engines responded. The turbines groaned back to life, the cabin floor leveled off sharply, the altitude indicator on the cabin display stopped falling, and he sensed they were climbing skyward …

When a second gust caught them.

This one made them twist and sway, gyrolike —yet somehow, they kept rocketing up and up and up, all the time swaying and gyrating in the wind. They went up as high as three hundred feet before the aircraft stabilized.

Adickes pulled up their position. In fifteen seconds, the twenty-one-thousand-pound Jayhawk had been blown backward just under a mile. He and Molthen looked at each other.

“You ready for more?” Adickes asked.

Molthen took a deep breath and nodded his head.

Fifteen minutes of bucking, pitching and scampering about the sky, and the Jayhawk was back over the dimly blinking beacon.

“Let’s get another flare out there,” Adickes said. “That first one’s almost out.”

“Roger that,” Witherspoon said. They had two more Mark-25s and a Mark-58, which would burn for a good forty-five minutes. He grabbed a Mark-25, popped the tab and heaved it out. The flare ignited downwind.

“That helps,” Molthen said. Without the flares, the sea to him was nothing but a great, sweeping blob of blackness, streaked with foam. Now at least he had some reference for the ocean’s movement.

“Okay, Sean, let’s hoist.”

“Roger.”

On his knees, wheezing now, Witherspoon clipped the cable to the ring on top of the basket, lifted the cage and, with both hands, pitched it into the wind.

“Basket’s away!”

But instead of dropping down, the forty-pound basket flew straight back toward the tail rotor. Witherspoon stared at it, dumbfounded.

“It’s going straight back!”
There was a panicky timbre to his voice that made Adickes nervous.

“Hey, Sean, take it easy.”

“It’s going straight back!”

“Calm down and pull it in.”

Witherspoon threw the winch in reverse and line came steadily in sweeps onto the reel. When he heard the basket rapping the frame alongside the jump door he reached out, grabbed it and hauled it inside.

Breathe, he reminded himself. Breathe and think about what you need to do here. You need to get us forward of the survivors so that when the wind blows the basket it will blow it back to them. Do that.

He started shouting instructions to Molthen. “Forward two hundred!”

“What?”

“Forward two hundred —and right one-fifty.”

Then:

“Forward and right, two hundred and fifty.”

Then:

“Left one-fifty, back one twenty-five.”

Under normal conditions, flight mechanics guide pilots to a hoisting position by telling them to fly forward, backward, left or right by distances of thirty feet or less. The closer they get to the survivors, the less extreme the conning commands become. The two work like dance partners, each gradually understanding the other’s timing and needs, until they can anticipate the other’s next move.

What Witherspoon was asking Molthen to do was so extreme it was almost ridiculous. There was no predominant pattern to his conning instructions, no way for Molthen to discern a trend from them. And the instructions were coming too slow. One second, the survivors would be bobbing in a trough off to the right, at two o’clock, and the next they would be underneath the aircraft, then forward and left of the Jayhawk. They were disappearing from view, cloaked by the seas, and reappearing hundreds of yards from the last position Witherspoon had asked for.

After several minutes, the helicopter swung above the survivors.

“Basket’s away!” Witherspoon yelled.

He paid out cable as fast as the winch would allow, hoping for a letup in the wind so that the basket would not trail so close to the tail rotor. On his knees, grunting, shouldering the cable coming off the reel so it would not rub and fray on the door frame, Witherspoon paid out line with a nervous eye. If that basket sails into that rotor, he thought, we’re in the water.

When it dropped a few feet below the glinting disk the tail rotor made, he sighed, relieved.

“Okay, basket’s going down!”

Actually, it was penduluming beneath the pitching aircraft. It swung back and forth until Witherspoon couldn’t stand the cutting pressure on his shoulder and pulled out from underneath the outgoing cable. As he did this, the cable slapped down on the deck and began sawing on the lip of the cabin door and, outside, on the Night Sun, the aircraft’s searchlight.

Witherspoon halted the winch.

“Basket’s in the water!”

He saw the cage floating for a few seconds and then a wave collapsed over it. The line went taut; the hoist screeched. The cable leaped from his hands.

“Shit!”

Through his sleet-glazed visor he saw two pairs of survivors clasped to each other, waving at him, and twenty yards off now, the trailing basket. Witherspoon was six feet tall and could bench-press three hundred pounds. But the basket was making him sweat. He pulled and pulled and pulled but he could not raise the basket an inch. He felt as though he were hooked to an anchor.

“They’re not going for the basket,” he said. “They’re just looking at it.”

“Keep trying,” Adickes told him.

He raised the basket all the way back up, checked the cable for burrs, found none, waited for the helicopter to circle around and then tossed the cage out again.

Then he knelt, turned his head toward the door and retched on the deck. Sansone saw it.

“Sean, you okay?”

“No,” Witherspoon said. He spit, wiped his mouth and turned back to the cable.

He lowered the basket ten more times. He tried dragging it toward the survivors, swinging it to them, dropping it on them. Nothing worked. Every time it looked as though he was making progress, a wave would fold over the basket, the line would go taut and the cable would fly out of his hands.

“Looks like we’re getting it closer,” Sansone said. He was looking over Witherspoon’s shoulder.

Witherspoon slumped back on the deck. “We’re not going to do it! I can’t! I can’t get them!”

Over the intercom, Adickes could hear the flight mechanic gasping for air. Hyperventilating.

“Let’s take a break,” Adickes said. He handed Sansone a water bottle. “Give Sean some of this and see if you can cool him down. Dan, take us up.”

They held an altitude of two hundred feet while Sansone squirted water into the flight mechanic’s mouth. Witherspoon threw up on the cabin floor a second time. Adickes kept talking to him.

“Listen, Sean,” he said. “I grant you it’s horrible weather. Horrible. The worst weather we’ve ever been in. But if we don’t get these people now, with these seas, it’ll be a miracle if they survive.”

Witherspoon said nothing.

After a few minutes they dropped down to somewhere close to a hundred-foot hover, although it was hard to tell, really, how high they were flying. The radar altimeter was making no sense; at first it told Adickes their altitude was zero, then 100 feet, then 20 feet, then 110 feet.

They dropped their last three flares in an arc around the survivors. It helped, but after ten minutes Witherspoon turned to Sansone and said:

“I can’t do this anymore.”

“Sure you can, Sean.”

Witherspoon shook his head.

“No.”

He sat down on the floor, sucking wind, rubbing and rubbing his eyes. They were all water. He could not get them to stop tearing. His lips, knees, fingers, elbows —every joint in his body felt stiff with cold. Sweat ran all over his body.

“I can’t see anything out there, man. I can’t… we can’t… we can’t…”

He leaned back against the wall, laboring for air.

“Mr. Adickes,” Sansone said. “Take us up. Sean needs another break.”

“All right.”

They ascended to 350 feet. Adickes made sure to keep the flares in sight. Sansone unzipped Witherspoon’s flight vest. He handed him the water bottle.

“How are you doing, Sean?”

“I’m cold inside and sweating on the outside.” He gave his partner a pleading look. “I can’t get my fingers to move, Rich. My feet don’t respond.”

“Hang in there.”

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can.”

In the cockpit, the pilots were talking.

“This isn’t working,” Adickes said. “We’ve got to try something different.”

“What you thinking?”

“Let me take the controls. I’ll fly the aircraft from the left seat.” He paused. “And I’m going to hover using the goggles.”

Coast Guard pilots used night-vision goggles while searching for distress beacons from high altitudes, but they hadn’t been trained to hoist or hover close to the water with them on. Doing so was a violation of regulations. Adickes knew it. But in the Marine Corps he had flown many night missions using the goggles and was comfortable with them.

“I don’t know, Bill,” Molthen said.

“Look,” Adickes said, “I know what 37:10 says in the book. I know we’re not supposed to use goggles while hoisting. But I’m telling you that it’s worked before in getting people out of the water. It’s risky. And we’re going to hover real close to the water. But I can do it.”