The Last Run (40 page)

“We’re working on it.”

To Ted LeFeuvre, Torpey said: “I’m going to descend to a hundred and fifty feet.”

“Roger that.”

Until then, they had only snatched glimpses of the waves. But now, as they descended, Ted LeFeuvre had the feeling of seeing something that had begun normally grow quickly into large, then oversize, then gigantic proportions. It was as if they had tossed a rock into a pond and the ripples had multiplied and magnified in size and had rebounded right back at them as a tidal wave. It had been almost impossible to see through the sleet and snow that overtasked the wipers. But as they dropped down closer he could see the ocean heaving, splitting and pulling apart in craters.

So that’s why the beacon signal keeps coming in and out, he said to himself. The waves are blocking the signal. They block it each time the EPIRB skids down into a trough or gets swamped by a wave. Those seas must be huge. Well, I’m not losing the beacon signal anymore. I’ve got a GPS fix on it.

I hope those guys hung on to the EPIRB, he thought. If they let it go we won’t ever find them.

The helicopter was bouncing off gusts but crabbing forward ever so slowly. Ted LeFeuvre was squinting and scanning the blackness, hoping for a glint or a flash or anything that would give them something to hone in on. I hate this part of a mission, he thought. It’s the uncertainty. Where
are
they? Are we going to find them? Are they dead already? What can we do better? Change our search pattern?

Behind him, Kalt was talking to Honnold.

“Listen,” Kalt said. “The captain and Mr. Torpey are really busy up there. They might not see the survivors.”

“I know.”

“We gotta open the door
now.”

Normally the flight mechanic asked the pilots for permission to open the jump door. But Kalt just strapped on his gunner’s belt, double-checked that it was attached to a cabin hook, slid on his knees over to the door and threw it open without a word.

A blast of flying ice hit him with the force of a fire hose. He leaned back on his heels, mopped his visor.

“Lee,” he shouted. “Get that Maxi-Beam and point it out here, will you?”

Honnold grabbed the handheld light and aimed it down at the ocean.

“That’s it. Over this way.”

When the door opened, Ted LeFeuvre felt a lick of cold air across the back of his neck, and swiveling, seeing the jump door up, Kalt and Honnold swinging outside in their gunner’s belts, slashing at the swirling, flying sleet and snow with the light of the Maxi-Beam, he thought: Good move, guys. Good move. We should have thought of doing that earlier.

The torch lighted up the ice, but sometimes punched a beam through it all the way down to the ocean surface. In the light, the sea looked like it was smoking, rolling over, boiling. At times they could make out a wave below and aft of the Jayhawk, and sometimes they could see a wave before the nose of the helicopter. But sometimes they saw nothing at all. There was no pattern to it.

For several minutes Kalt crouched on the lip of the jump door, the sleet rattling on his visor and helmet, the roar of the wind and turbines in his helmet.

Then he looked up at Honnold and said, with a flat, emotionless voice: “I see them.”

Fred Kalt had that Steve McQueen look: chiseled jaw, sharp nose, cool, steady eyes as blue as ice, not a trace of anxiety in them.

He was sturdy but not burly, and not particularly tall. He kept his hair, hickory brown and touched with gray, cropped and standing at attention. When he smiled, it was a bemused, boyish smile. When he spoke, hiswords rolled out calmly, gently. When he laughed, others laughed with him.

It was a rare day when Kalt got angry on the job. Club Fred. That’s what they called him on the hangar deck. The man least likely to spill his popcorn at a horror flick.

Born on Long Island, raised in Florida by a woman who divorced when he was eight, Kalt entered the air force at eighteen. He wed his teenage sweetheart, moved with her to Syracuse, New York, left her—he walked in on her at home while she was cheating with his buddy—allowed his four-year enlistment to run out, returned to Florida and went to work delivering packages for UPS. A year later he fell ill, a virus, and as he had gotten in the habit of seeing the base doctor for even the most minor of ailments, he skipped the home remedies and saw a physician. A week later the bill came in the mail: four hundred dollars. For the first time in his life, civilian Kalt had to pay out of pocket for a doctor’s visit. It got him to thinking. Within six weeks he was a Coastie.

In 1989, Kalt was the honor graduate at the guard’s Aviation Electronics School at Elizabeth City, North Carolina. He was also a husband again—this time to a woman named Barbara. She had a daughter, Jessica, they had another, Kelly, and then Kalt got shipped out. During the next seven years the Kalts bounced around, from Oregon to Florida to Massachusetts. In 1996, he put in for a transfer to Alaska.

On their second night in Sitka the Kalts were lying in bed, listening to the local radio station, when they heard a report that authorities had just closed the Totem Park trail, just outside of town. Black bears were afoot. Kalt quietly clicked off the radio. His wife shut her eyes, shook her head and said how she wished she were back in civilization. It was June 1996.

Gee whiz, he thought. What do I do now? Get down on my knees and beg her to like it?

Now, eighteen months later, eight days shy of his thirty-fifth birthday, Kalt
was
on his knees—on his knees in the back of an H-60 helicopter that was getting mauled by an Alaska hurricane, and not liking it too much.

“Fred,” Steve Torpey was telling him, “we’ll start by making two flare drops. Let’s dump the first bunch about a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards upwind of the survivors. Then I’m going to let the helicopter slide backward a little bit. Then I’m going to take us forward and right, andthen we’re going to toss some more smokes out at the two o’clock position.”

“Roger.”

“Just remember,” Torpey said, “everything you got you toss as soon as we get to the position.”

“Roger.”

Kalt stuck his head outside.

The strobe had slid beneath the helicopter. Around it, glinting in the beam of the searchlight, he saw a gaggle of reflective tape. There could be two survivors, he thought. There could five. Whatever. They’re alive.

He tried shucking the Styrofoam off the flares, but he could not free the Mark-25s from their casings. Lousy manufacturers, he thought. Just like a ketchup bottle. You’ve got to be a genius to open one.

Then it came to him.

He pulled out the cutters he normally used in emergencies to sever the hoist cable, snipped the nylon bands and was tearing the Styrofoam casings off and arming the flares when he heard Torpey say:

“Stand by to deploy flares.”

“Flares are ready.”

“Drop! Drop! Drop!”

Just like a lineman sends a football through his legs to the holder of a field-goal kicker, Kalt snapped one, two, three flares between his legs and out the door.

“Flares away!”

He spun around and leaned outside. Down below, the flares shot red-white flames across the black water.

“Flares are in the water. Flares have ignited.”

In the cockpit, Steve Torpey saw none of it. Sleet was blanketing his windscreen and everything—the horizon, the sky, the water—had whited out. Oh shit, he thought. This is bad. This is real bad. He looked blankly at his instruments. They seemed foreign to him. He had been flying on visual cues for a while now. There was a mental transition he had to make so that he could start assimilating and interpreting the information on his panel. I don’t like this. His gut was coiling up. Calm down. He eased back on the cyclic just a hair, to let the helicopter slide back a little.

When the gust caught the rotor system they were instantly thirty degrees nose up and backing down. Ted LeFeuvre had no time to readtheir rate of descent; he had only enough time to react, to pull on the collective.

The radar altimeter was unwinding fast.

We’re backing down.

Torpey had the cyclic all the way to the dash to level the nose.

We’re still backing down.

Hearing only the high-pitched, whining growl of the engines, feeling the awful hollowing, scooping sensation in his stomach, the floor of the helicopter seeming to drop out from under him as it went down, down, faster and faster in a backward, plunging rush, his helmet pinned back against the headrest so tightly it felt glued to it, he knew the pace was too much. But he held the collective. He would not let go of it. They were flying backward and he had no idea what was behind them and still he held the collective back, feeling the backward-rushing sensation, as though he was in a station wagon without a rearview mirror, racing in reverse down a hill at 100 mph.

Then came the screams.

“UP!”

“ALTITUDE!”

“EMERGENCY UP!”

And then he saw the wave through his windscreen.

It was all black, except for the white line of drool along the top, and was closing and building with a petrifying smoothness of motion. When it was within fifty yards and Ted LeFeuvre saw the steel, cylindrical casings of the flares embedded in the wave, spinning, not going end over end, but spinning and shining silvery in the bright white light, he squeezed the collective stick harder, his hand now cold-drying wet, his eyes locked on the smoothly coming darkness.

“UP!”

“UP! UP!”

“UP!”

Ted LeFeuvre was trying to be loose but steady, trying to hold his breath and not think about anything but the radar altimeter; to focus and keep his cold-clammy hand on the collective and maintain distance from the wave. The radar altimeter read forty feet. Seconds passed.

The altimeter still read forty.

This can’t be, he said to himself. I’m pulling this helicopter up at
full power.
We should be going
straight up.

Then it hit him.

They
were
going straight up. But below them, the wave was rising at the same speed.

Well, Lord, Ted LeFeuvre thought, I am going to meet You now. But, Lord, do I have to go out being cold and wet? You know how I hate cold and wet.

At that instant the helicopter lurched skyward. The rogue wave broke just beneath them.

By the time Ted LeFeuvre was able to arrest their ascent, the Jayhawk had climbed to six hundred feet above the ocean and sailed a mile downwind of the survivors. It took them another ten minutes to get back on scene.

The Mark-25s were still visible, upwind of the strobe light.

“Okay, guys,” Torpey said over the intercom. “Get those smokes ready. And this time, Fred, don’t use any of those small flares. They burn out too fast. From now on, all that goes in the water are the big ones—the Mark-58s. Got that?”

“Roger.”

Torpey looked at the torque gauge.

It measured the stress on the engine’s gearbox—stress caused by pulling too much power, too suddenly on the collective or cyclic. The H-60’s maximum acceptable torque was 127 percent; anything above that could cause
overtorque
and rupture the transmission or lubricant seals.

They had pulled 132 percent torque.

“Captain,” Torpey said to Ted LeFeuvre. “Did you see that? Did you see the torque gauge, sir?”

“I saw it, Steve.”

“What do we do, sir?”

“Keep flying.” Ted LeFeuvre made his voice sound disinterested. “Just keep flying.”

Torpey went back to work. His movements were as crisp as they had been at takeoff, Ted LeFeuvre thought, as crisp as a machine, and he had no trouble banking the helicopter in a two o’clock position above the survivors. They dumped another seven Mark-58s.

“That was good,” Torpey said. “Okay, let’s complete part two of the rescue checklist. We’re going to do a basket hoist.”

He moved the Jayhawk to his right and slowed his airspeed. The wind shoved the helicopter back. Now they could approach the survivors from the front.

Lee Honnold unhooked the rescue basket from the cargo straps and set it on deck. Fred Kalt slid over to the winch. Ted LeFeuvre flipped up two toggle switches on the console above his head, supplying power to the hoist.

“Backup pump is on,” he said.

“Roger that,” Kalt said.

Torpey said, “Okay, listen up.”

He told the crew to be ready to hoist from an
average
altitude of 110 feet and to dump flares on each approach to the water. Then he reminded Kalt to fully secure the bags of lead shot in the rescue basket so they didn’t get slung back into the tail rotor.

“That’s it,” he said. “Any questions?”

“Mr. Torpey?” Mike Fish, the rescue swimmer, broke in. “You want me to get dressed out? I’m willing to go, sir, if you want. I feel I can do this.”

“Hold on, Mike.”

Torpey muted his ICS line and turned to Ted LeFeuvre. “You know, Captain,” he said, “I don’t think there’s any way we should put a rescue swimmer down in that.”

“No,” Ted LeFeuvre said, softly. “I think we should start with just the basket, too.”

“Okay.”

Torpey clicked on his ICS connection and said, “Sorry, Mike. I don’t think we’re going to use you.”

I wonder whether the other rescue swimmers offered to go in, Ted LeFeuvre was thinking. I’ll bet they did. To help somebody they never met. These swimmers are young guys. With families. Mike here’s got a wife. If he doesn’t come back, she’s nobody’s wife anymore. Nobody thinks of that. That is selflessness. On her part as much as his.

Fish said, “I just wanted to let you know that I’m ready to go if you need me to go.”

“Mike,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “for now, just keeping working comms. Back me up on the radar altimeter, too. Call out altitudes if we go below eighty feet.”

“Roger.”

“Fred?” Torpey said to Kalt.

“Sir?”

“Get ready to work with me now,” Torpey told him, “because you’re going to see some pretty big changes in the way I’m going to fly this thing.”

T
he rescue basket was penduluming now beneath the helicopter. Each time it swung the hoist cable dug deeper into the rail below the door frame and chafed on the Night Sun.