The Last Run (33 page)

“I don’t know.”

“Dan,” Adickes said, “those flares are going to burn out. And look at Sean —he’s shutting down.”

Molthen hesitated, then nodded.

Adickes turned on the intercom. “Gentlemen,” he said in his most confident voice. “Listen up.” He was going to fly the aircraft from the copilot’s seat. He was going to fly closer to the water, an eighty-foot hover. And he was going to do this while using the night-vision goggles. Stone silence followed.

“Any questions?”

Sansone looked outside the jump door at the swarming snow and sleet. Witherspoon had his eyes clamped shut. He was curled up against the wall in a cold sweat.

“Any questions?”

Nobody in the helicopter said anything.

At first, things improved. The ride smoothed out. The basket went down faster. And with each hoist attempt, Sean Witherspoon dropped the basket closer and closer to the blinking strobe.

If we can just keep doing this, Bill Adickes thought, we’ll get somebody. Once you get the first guy up, the battle is won. We’ve just got to break the shell.

On their fifth drop, the basket landed no more than fifteen feet from the strobe. It floated on the surface for more than a minute. But none of the survivors went for it.

“Why aren’t they swimming to the basket?” said Rich Sansone. He was looking over Witherspoon’s shoulder. He shouted out the cabin door:
“Swim! Swim!”

Just then a gust rammed the aircraft and sent it hurtling backward.

“Twenty-five feet from the water!”
Sansone shouted.
“Altitude!”

Adickes pulled full power on the collective and the Jayhawk snapped skyward. They shot up to 125 feet before Sansone said, “That was too close.”

Adickes snapped, “I know, Rich, I
know.
I was twenty-five feet from the water. Okay. That’s where we’ve
got
to be if we want to get those guys in the helicopter. So chill out.”

Sansone went silent.

Oh hell, Adickes thought. “I’m sorry, Rich. Keep talking to me. It’s all right. Keep talking to me.”

Witherspoon heaved the basket out again. Adickes could hear his raspy, labored breathing over the intercom. There were longer and longer pauses between his conning commands.

“Sean?”

No response.

“Sean!”
Adickes shouted. “Talk to me! I can’t see the survivors from up here!”

“… Forward fifty …”

“Go on—“

“… and right seventy-five—“

“Mr. Adickes?” Sansone interrupted. He was leaning out the jump door, trying to judge the distance to the water. “Sir, I think I could pull this rescue off. If you put me in the water I could get those guys in the basket.”

“Sit down, Rich,” Adickes said. “There’s no way I’m putting you out in this —”

“But-”

“End of conversation, Rich.”

Adickes was talking to himself now in the cockpit. Don’t panic. It would be easy to panic, easy to overcontrol the aircraft. Loosen your grip on the collective. That’s it. Stay focused. Keep your parameters small. Stay close to the water.

He looked at his attitude indicator. Nose looks good. He read the radar altimeter. Seventy feet. Not too bad. Ground speed? Close to zero knots. Flares. Where are the goddamned flares?

He peered out the windscreen.

The basket was swinging and twirling, back to the tail, under the aircraft’s belly, forward of the nose. The two smaller flares had already flamed out but he could see that the Mark-58 was still burning. It was rising on a swell.

Adickes watched it rise and rise and rise, until it was at the top of his windscreen.

Then it disappeared.

“Hey,” Adickes said over the intercom, “the flare just went out.”

Where did it go? It can’t have blown out, he thought. Those Mark-58s burn for fifty minutes and that one’s only been out there for half an hour. Why don’t I see it? What the hell’s going on?

In the water, the survivors saw exactly what was going on.

They were bobbing right beside the flare, riding the crest of a rogue that was looming over the helicopter. They could only gaze down in horror at the rotor blades of the Jayhawk spinning below them.

T
he second Jayhawk was on the tarmac and the gas was loaded.

“Russ,” David Durham said, hustling across the runway, “which seat you want?”

“You take the right seat.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No, sir,” Russ Zullick said. “I’ll navigate.”

Zullick swung up into the copilot’s seat, strapped himself in and started his preflight checklist. He had more flying time in Southeast Alaska than Durham. But the right seat was the aircraft commander’s seat, and Zullick was not one to tell a senior officer his business in an aircraft.

Besides, he thought, what does it matter who’s got the stick? We’re going to fly cover for Bill Adickes’s crew. We aren’t doing any hoisting.

“Where’s Chris and A. J.?” Durham asked.

“There they are.”

Looking across the runway they saw two men coming out of the hangar. Each had a duffel bag and a helmet in his hand and both were jogging. On the left was the flight mechanic, Chris Windnagle. The other man, the taller one, was A. J. Thompson. He was a rescue swimmer.

“I’m going to start the engines,” Zullick said.

“Go ahead,” Durham said.

Zullick reached up, pressed the starter button, waited and then introduced fuel to the igniters. Both engines caught and ran smoothly. He watched their temperatures come up.

“Engaging the head,” Zullick said.

The rotors, which had been flapping up and down in the wind, thudded to life, losing the sag of their great weight. Windnagle helped them do a standard review of the searchlights, the Night Sun, the circuit breakers, the flight instruments. Thompson loaded his gear through the jump door and took his seat along the rear wall of the cabin. He turned on his cockpit display unit and pulled up a GPS map. Then he turned up the volume on the high-frequency radio and strapped in.

“This better be good,” he said. “I’m missing out on a cozy pillow and a TNT classic.”

“What’s the movie?” Zullick asked him.

“Gone with the Wind.”

“Very funny.”

The brake was set. The ice chalks were in. The stabilator was coming down. They heard a hitch pin clank, the growling motor of the tow tractor and then the
clink-clink-clink-clink
of the tractor riding back to the hangar.

Zullick peered out the windscreen. The break wall along the edge of the far runway was bordered in clouds of breaking surf. Another shitty night in Alaska, he thought.

Out loud, he said, “How come nobody ever gets in trouble on a nice, sunny day?”

Durham pulled the night-vision goggles down over his eyes.

“There are no nice days to get in trouble.”

They took off to the south with a right turnout into Sitka Sound. It was 9:34 P.M., and nobody aboard Rescue 6029 minded that there was extreme turbulence and pitch darkness in the sound. We’re just going to provide cover for another helicopter that’s probably on its way back to base, Zullick thought. With any luck, we’ll be back on the ground within the hour.

At that moment, a gray Jeep Cherokee sped across the airbase parking lot and swung to a stop outside the operations center. A slender man with thinning, gray hair and glasses jumped out and hurried to the side entrance.

The man was Ted LeFeuvre, the air station’s commanding officer. He was sweating.

Up in the operations center twenty minutes later, Guy Pearce was on the phone with District 17 headquarters in Juneau.

“Any luck getting ahold of Rescue 6018?” He paused. “Roger. Let me know your progress.” He hung up and turned around. “Captain, Juneau’s been calling, Kodiak’s been calling and I’ve been calling. Nothing but dead air.”

Ted LeFeuvre consulted his watch: ten o’clock on the dot.

Well, that meant Bill Adickes and his crew had just missed their fifth radio guard. They had lifted off at eight o’clock, and hadn’t been heard from in an hour and nineteen minutes.

“We’ve got to get ahold of them,” Ted LeFeuvre said.

“Yes, sir,” Pearce said. “You want me to keep trying, Captain?”

“Do that.”

What
haven’t
I thought of? Ted LeFeuvre said to himself. I just can’t believe there are no other options. Come on. You’re supposed to be so smart. Think. How do you contact a helicopter in bad weather without a C-130 in the area?

“Sir, I’ve got an idea.”

“What is it?”

Pearce swiveled in his chair. “How about if I try the air-traffic control center at the airport up in Anchorage.”

“Anchorage?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll ask air-traffic control there if they have any highfliers transiting the area with HF radios. If they do, we can ask the jetliners to tune to our frequency and try to call the helicopter.”

“Yogi, that’s
brilliant.”

“Let me call Anchorage.”

“Go!”

Pearce got right through to a controller at the Anchorage airport and outlined their scenario. He paused and sat back in his chair.

Ted LeFeuvre pulled at his jaw. Kodiak is going to have to get a C-130 off the ground soon, he was thinking. I do not want to lose comms with another helicopter. Our second bird has been airborne ten minutes now. They’ll penetrate the outer edge of the storm in less than fifteen minutes.

“Yogi?”

Pearce hung up the phone and wheeled around. His eyes bulged.

“Captain,” he said. “Air-traffic control says Alaska Airlines Flight 196 took off a short while ago from Anchorage. It’s heading to Seattle. It’s cruising at thirty-three thousand feet. And sir, it’s passing close to the Fairweather Grounds right now.”

Russ Zullick glanced out his door. Ice had been gathering on the side-view mirror since they had cleared the sound. That was fifteen minutes earlier. The mirror was glazed up now, useless.

“We better watch our icing,” he said to Dave Durham. He tried to sound casual about it. “We need to keep an eye on it.”

“Say again?”

“Icing. We’re getting icing on the airframe.”

“You watch the icing,” Durham said.

He was keeping a cruise altitude of three hundred feet in high turbulence beneath a low, thick cloud cover. Backing winds were shoving the helicopter into a two-hundred-knot sprint. Hail the size of eggs was battering his windscreen and bands of sleet, snow and rain were swinging across his path like slamming doors.

Visibility was so poor that even if he used night-vision goggles Durham would have a hard time making out a C-130 crossing in front of him.

A. J. Thompson, the rescue swimmer, spoke up. “Mr. Zullick?”

“Yeah, A. J.?”

“We’re losing comms,” Thompson said. “I’ve already lost Juneau. And now I can’t understand what Kodiak is saying.”

Zullick adjusted the high-frequency radio on his headset. He heard a garbled, scratchy voice. Then nothing but static.

“Go to five megahertz.”

They switched frequencies and set the volume as high as it would go.

“Do you hear that?”

Thompson frowned. “Barely.”

The transmission was fading in and out and garbling, yet intermittently, Zullick could pick out a male voice. It was different from the one broadcasting from Kodiak.

Then:

“Rescue 6018… repeat… This is Les Dawson on Alaska Airlines 196 … Alaska Airlines 196 …”

More garble.

“…
Flight 196… say… you are… report…”

Well, Zullick said to himself, it’s not a C-130. But there’s a jetliner somewhere up there. At least we’re not alone. Let’s see if I can reach him.

“Alaska Airlines,” Zullick said. “This is Coast Guard Rescue 6029. Are you reading me?”

The pilot did not answer.

“…
Rescue 6018… Say again, please
…”

As far as Zullick could tell, the commercial jetliner was talking to the first helicopter. Zullick could not hear the other Jayhawk, only the Alaska Airlines pilot.

“…
Say again 6018… Understand you’ve crashed in seventy-foot seas?… Please repeat…”

Zullick’s stomach tightened.

“…
understand you’re in the water?
…”

It was all black outside and sleet scratched at the windscreen. So, Zullick was thinking to himself, we’re going to be looking for one of our own guys. These Jayhawks don’t float. They don’t float. Gosh, I hope they got their raft out. Wait. Strobe lights. They’ve got strobe lights in their vests. They’ve got strobe lights on their helmets, too. Oh, I hope they got out of the aircraft okay.

Suddenly he pictured a military funeral. The honor guard handing flags to widows. A twenty-one-gun salute. A helicopter flyby. They’re your friends, he thought. You live on their street. Dan Molthen. He’s got Theresa and Erin and Ben and Shea. Bill Adickes has got Carin and a boy, Ryan. I think she’s pregnant or just had a kid. And Rick Sansone —oh gosh, his wife is expecting, too. And Sean. Sean Witherspoon. He just got married last week.

All dead.

“Russ,” Durham asked him. “What’s going on?”

“Bill and his crew,” Zullick said softly, “might be in the water.”

R
ich Sansone threw off his radio headset and lunged to the jump door.

Everything outside —the flares, the rescue basket, the survivors, the swells, the sky —had coalesced into one, black mass.

Sean Witherspoon, already at the door, was screaming: “ALTITUDE! ALTITUDE!

Sansone looked up.

The sea was standing over them.

Actually, it looked more like a wall —a wall with a black, completely vertical face, down which cascaded delicate, white ripples. This wave had no curling crest, just a thin, silvery sheen, like moonlight on a sword. It made not a whisper as it moved swiftly and stealthily toward them.

Oh my holy God.

It was a rogue—a fully developed rogue that was going to engulf them in ten seconds or less if they didn’t move.

“UP! UP! UP! UP!”

“DO SOMETHING!”

Bill Adickes was already pulling power on the collective; he’d seen the rogue just as Witherspoon had seen it. He’d flipped a contingency switch on the stick to give them extra thrust, and was thinking: If all you do is pull power and you don’t pay attention to the helicopter’s attitude you won’t fly out of this. Get the attitude right. You’ve got to get that good climb attitude. Not too much, where you go nose down in the water, not too little, or you’ll start to back down. It’s got to be just right. Once you break the crest you’ll be out of the downdraft. Okay. Here comes the wave. Here it comes.