The Last Run (37 page)

The others nodded.

“Anything else?” Ted LeFeuvre asked.

“How about more flares?” Mike Fish said.

“Where are they?”

“There are crates of them in the pyrotechnics locker.” It was a small depot on the opposite side of the base. It would take at least ten minutes to drive over and get the flares.

“Well,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “go get them. Let’s take every flare we can get our hands on.”

“Yes, sir,” Fish said, and he darted off.

“Sir,” Kalt said, “I think it might help if we dressed the rescue basket up with chem lights.” Chem lights were pencil-size, plastic tubes filled with chemicals that glowed a phosphorescent green when they were snapped in the middle. “There’ll be no way for them not to see it.”

“Good idea,” Torpey said.

“You know,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “one of the biggest problems we had when we flew in Hurricane Juan was getting the basket to the survivors. With sixty-knot winds, that basket went trailing way behind us. It was hard for the flight mechanic to gauge the delivery of the basket because it was paying out at a really severe angle. If we could weigh it down somehow, I know it would help.”

“How about some shot bags?” Kalt said. They looked like beanbags, but were filled with lead shot. Each six-inch-square bag weighed fifty pounds. “We could lay them across the bottom of the basket so the cage doesn’t get whipped around.”

“Great idea, Fred,” Ted LeFeuvre said. He stopped. “Fred,” he said, “what do you say about us taking along another flight mechanic?”

“No,” Kalt said. He looked at Ted LeFeuvre squarely when he said it. “I really don’t need anybody else, sir.”

Ted LeFeuvre nodded. “Okay,” he said.

“Is that it?”

Within minutes Mike Fish had returned with several crates of Mark-58 flares, and he and Fred Kalt loaded them in the aircraft while Torpey and Ted LeFeuvre reviewed the 601l’s maintenance records and signed the sheet for the aircraft. Then the two pilots picked up their helmets and extra gear and walked out through the hangar and across the tarmac.

A fine sleet crackled on the concrete. The wind was creaking the pines on the mountains. They walked out to the far corner of the runway. The Jayhawk sat idle on pad number three.

Fred Kalt looked up from his preflight inspection checklist and shook his head when he saw Ted LeFeuvre approaching with his duffel bag.

“Say, Captain,” he asked, “what’s in the big bag?”

Ted LeFeuvre shook his head. He always brought along the parachute bag and they always razzed him about its size. In it he carried an extra flight suit, clean boxer shorts, T-shirt, long johns, overnight bag, toiletries, helmet sack and day parka.

“Need a hand lifting that, sir?”

“No, thanks, Fred.”

“Hey, Mike, give me a hand with the captain’s bag.”

“I’ve got it, Fred.”

“Now where can I put it?” Kalt was scratching his helmet and feigning a confused look as he stared in the cabin door. “Hey, Mike. Where are we going to stow all of the captain’s cargo?”

“Listen, Fred,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “I’ve broken down too many times in the Alaska tundra and nearly frozen to death. This helicopter’s big enough to carry my stuff.”

Kalt and Fish yucked it up good. Torpey turned away, grinning. Ted LeFeuvre looked at him.

“Did I say something?”

“No, sir. No.”

Ted LeFeuvre walked over to the right side of the aircraft, opened the cockpit door and climbed in. I know I can fly this thing, he was thinking. I’m shaky on that computer. But the aircraft I know I can fly.

Steve Torpey stood at the door, watching him strap in.

“Say, Captain?”

Ted LeFeuvre hadn’t pulled his helmet on yet. He was struggling a bit with the seat buckle.

“Captain?” Torpey asked. He stood there awkwardly. “How do you feel about the right seat?”

Ted LeFeuvre looked up.

“What I mean is—“Torpey paused. “What I mean is, sir, uh, how do you feel about the right seat?”

It was not every day that a lieutenant asked an airbase commander to slide over to the left seat, the copilot’s seat. Ted LeFeuvre looked at his young pilot, looked down at his seat buckle and nodded.

“Steve, I know exactly what you are saying,” he said. “I’d probably ask the same thing if I were you.”

And without another word, Ted LeFeuvre stepped out of the cockpit, walked around the front and, opening the opposite door, climbed into the copilot’s seat. Torpey watched him, and then took his seat.

They started the preflight checklist. As he was about to reach up to hit the starter button, Ted LeFeuvre said, “Steve?”

“Yes, sir?”

“There’s one thing you should know before we take off.”

“What’s that, Captain?”

Ted LeFeuvre grimaced. “It’s just that, well, I’m not very good at navigating with the computer.”

I
t was too dark to fly close to the water. Sky and swells had merged into one black mass.

“Let’s put some flares out,” Dave Durham said to Chris Windnagle. “I’m going to need some visual reference. I can’t find the ocean.”

“Roger that.”

The Mark-25 flares were two feet long and as wide around as a dinner plate. Windnagle cut the heavy metal bindings, tore the Styrofoam casings off three smoke flares, lined them up alongside the jump door and yanked the tabs.

“Flares are ready to go.”

“Say when,” Durham said.

Just then a gust uppercutted the helicopter. The floor heaved and the flares went tumbling.

“Son of a bitch!”

“What is it?”

Windnagle lunged for the flares, scooped them up and cradled them to his chest. Don’t you lose any of these sons-a-bitches, he thought. Not now.

He crawled on his elbows and knees to the edge of the jump door.

“Ready to deploy the flares,” he said.

“On my signal, then.”

Durham overshot the survivors and banked the helicopter forty-five degrees. As soon as he rolled level, he shouted: “Deploy flares!”

Windnagle pitched them out in two-second intervals. They burst to life upwind of the strobe.

“Flares are in the water!”

Durham turned the aircraft’s nose to go downwind; within seconds they were sailing off at 140 knots.

It took them another ten minutes to beat their way back to where they had made the flare drop. When they could see the flares rising and falling on the waves below them, Russ Zullick called for the crew to prepare the cabin for hoisting. A. J. Thompson, the rescue swimmer, hooked up his gunner’s belt and crawled over to the edge of the jump door.

He looked down.

Below, the flares shone like bright candles bobbing in a tank of jumping oil.

“Mr. Zullick,” he said, “I could get those guys in the basket. I’m ready to dress out.”

“No,” Zullick interrupted him.

“But I-”

“No, A. J. We’re not going to put you out. I don’t know if we could get you back.”

“He’s right, A. J.,” Durham said. “Sorry.”

Thompson returned to his seat and went back to working the HF radio. He had been ready to go. He had done his job. But now he doubted they would get anybody.

For twenty-five minutes they hoisted straight by the book: Chris Windnagle operated the winch and conned the pilots into a hoisting position; Dave Durham operated the flight controls; Russ Zullick navigated and backed up the flight commander; and A. J. Thompson maintained their radio guard and helped monitor their fuel and altitude.

But the survivors, clustered around the strobe and what looked like a fish float, were drifting so fast that Zullick had to reprogram his instruments every few minutes just to keep up. The wind was coming so hard that their rotor wash was lagging sixty to seventy feet
behind
the helicopter. And each time Windnagle tried to lower the basket, the wind swept it back at a forty-five-degree angle —dangerously close to the tail rotor.

On the first drop, the basket hit water more than two hundred yards from the survivors. Windnagle winched it in and shouted to Dave Durham:

“Forward and right… two hundred yards!”

“What you say?”

“I said,
‘Forward and right two hundred yards!’”

“Okay, okay,” Durham said. “Sorry, Chris. I just thought I heard you wrong.”

Cable was whizzing out as fast as the winch could feed it and the line was so tight it looked as though the winch might get ripped out of the helicopter. When it hit water the swells would scoop it and flick it into a trough, and a breaker would spike it down underwater. They had floats on the basket, though, and within ten seconds the basket would emerge from the froth and the cable would go slack.

Sometimes Windnagle would give up and try to reel it in, but a swell would rise up beneath the basket and lift it faster than the winch could spool the line, leaving enormous loops of slack cable in the ocean.

There’s way too much slack out down there, he thought to himself as he hurried to spool the cable. If one of those guys floats inside all of that slack line and a wave bottoms out, that steel cable is going to go taut and sever him in two.

During one evolution, Windnagle glanced down and saw the survivors had slid under the belly of the helicopter and gone far off to the left of the helicopter.

“Forward one-fifty! Left one seventy-five!”

Durham was now bumping the cyclic against the inside of Zullick’s thighs. Under normal conditions, that would be a sign that he was over-controlling the aircraft—stirring paint, aviators called it. But he had no choice; he was fighting the aircraft now, no longer finessing it. The nose was lifting twenty degrees, dropping thirty, the tail was slewing and jerking, and all the time Durham was fighting to find a balance, his face graying and tightening.

Windnagle, poised at the jump door, shouted: “Hold your position!”

Durham worked and worked and worked, but he was unable to hold the Jayhawk still for more than a few seconds.

“Jesus,” Windnagle said. “Why don’t you guys do what I’m telling you to do?”

“We’re trying, Chris.”

“Let’s try it again,” Windnagle said. “Go forward seventy-five and right forty!”

Zullick was monitoring their altitude and how the waves were changing the reading on the dial. He had imagined they would set a 130-foot hover for hoisting; but every now and then he would see a flare on a wave crest rise up until it was almost level with his own line of sight, and then settle back down again. The radar altimeter was cycling from 40 feet to 260 feet in a matter of seconds.

“Hey, Russ,” Durham hollered to him, “are we going up or down?”

“Don’t ask me.” Zullick was looking out his windscreen. The bars of white light thrown by the flares were weakening. “We better put out more smokes.”

They were down to their last one, a Mark-58. Windnagle armed it, and as soon as they looped back around, he let it fly. It hit a swell and shot white light.

They had three quarters of an hour of light left to work with. No more.

During those forty-five minutes, Dave Durham did what he could to keep the helicopter over the survivors. Russ Zullick watched their fuel reserve shrink.

First he reduced their calculated BINGO limit—the fuel they would need to get back to Sitka—by a hundred pounds, then another hundred pounds, and then another hundred.

“Sir,” Thompson said to Zullick. “We can’t keep dropping our BINGO fuel like this. Soon we won’t even have enough to make to shore to ditch.”

“We’re dropping it another hundred,” Zullick said. Then to Durham: “Dave, hold your nose up. Hold it up.”

The helicopter was moving around so wildly that dropping the basket near the survivors was like dropping a clothespin into a milk jug from atop a ten-story building. With each drop, though, Chris Windnagle was honing in on the target; by the time they were forty minutes into the evolution he was consistently putting it into the water no farther than twenty feet from the strobe.

On his last drop, the basket splashed down in a trough thirty feet behind the helicopter.

“Oh, man,” Windnagle said excitedly. “I got it, maybe, ten or fifteen feet from them.”

He waited and watched, but none of the survivors made a move.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Oh,
damn
it to hell. They’re not going for it. I don’t think they can see it.”

A comber crashed over the basket and cable raced out. Windnagle kept watching the survivors.

“It’s fifteen feet from them,” he said. “Shit, they’re not moving!”

The aircraft was shuddering fitfully now and lurching from side to side, up and down. But there was enough slack in the line so that the basket did not move much. Windnagle shouted:

“Back us down!”

Durham eased off on the gas, pulling the nose of the helicopter up just a touch as he did this, and a gust caught the nose and threw them back and down. Reflexes taking over, he jammed the cyclic to the instrument panel to drop the nose.

The helicopter’s tail leaped up.

“No, no, no!” Windnagle yelled. “I said back us down! Back us down!”

Zullick had been listening to the two of them and trying to keep an eye out for rogue waves. When he thought the immediate horizon seemed free of rogues, he glanced at the radar altimeter. It read sixty-two feet.

Just then it occurred to him that he had lost sight of their last flare.

His eyes swept the ocean.

Where is it?

He looked up.

The flare was atop a crest of an approaching rogue —forty feet above the aircraft.

Just as Durham shrieked, “WE’RE GOING
IN!”
Zullick seized the controls. In one motion he leveled the wings, brought the nose to the horizon and pulled power on the collective with everything he had.

“ITO!”
he screamed.
“Instrument Takeoff!”

“Wait!”
Windnagle screamed.
“Wait!”

They were rocketing skyward.

“I still got the basket out!” Windnagle was shouting. “The basket’s still out the cabin door! I’ve got cable out!”

In the pit of his stomach Zullick felt an icy chill, as though an icicle were dripping there, and in his temples the pounding of hot blood, and knowing full well that he could not make a mistake and had no more time to think, he pulled more power. He had seconds now, seconds to get them up and away from the black wall fast closing. He was trying to be loose but firm on the sticks, holding his breath and trying not to think of anything but the wave; to pull them free of the downdraft that was heavier now than it was when he first saw the rogue closing in.