The Last Run (42 page)

His legs felt like lead. The glowing box was coming straight at him. He swam as hard as he could. The swells were lifting him up and down, but the glow was brighter and brighter. He felt a sharp pain on his skull.

Bob Doyle grabbed the metal cage with his free, left hand, steadied it.

“Mark! Get in!”

A swell lifted them high, high, high, and then dropped away and they rolled down its back side. Bob Doyle still had the basket in his fingers. With his free arm he reached around Morley’s waist.

“Get in!”

He tried to heave him into the basket. He got behind him and tried to push him by the rump.

No good.

“Christ,” he screamed at Morley. “Help me!”

Get leverage, he thought. Get in the basket and pull him up and into it.

“Here,” he shouted into Morley’s face. He grabbed the loose, heavy arms, draped them over the top of the wired basket. “That’s it. Now hold on to the cable.”

Bob Doyle swung around in the water, grabbed the opposite side of the basket and hoisted himself up and in so that his knees pressed off the bottom of the basket.

“Come on!”

On his knees, his hands grabbing Morley’s, he pulled with everything he had.

“Come on!”

Again he struck back hard against the great weight.

“Get in here!”

Just then he felt a heavy jerk.

As soon as Ted LeFeuvre heard Fred Kalt shout that there was a man in the basket, he pulled full power on the collective. The helicopter shot skyward.

That’s it, Ted LeFeuvre was thinking. No faster way to lift that basket out of those waves. The hoist can’t lift that basket like I can. Oh, boy, are we going up.

Lee Honnold had been thrown aside when the helicopter lurched skyward. The cable had whipped down on the deck. It was now sawing against the door frame and along the grating of the Night Sun, the searchlight on the belly of the helicopter.

Fred Kalt had been catapulted backward. He peeled himself off the back wall and staggered to the door.

Below, the basket crashed through a comber and, spinning and shedding foam, punched through the far side of the wave.

“Holy crap!” Kalt shouted. “The survivor’s still in the basket!”

The winch was taking cable onto the reel in sweeps as fast as the reel could turn. There was no slack at all; the cable was as taut as a tuned fiddle string.

“Basket’s halfway up!”

The cage, tiny at first but growing steadily in size, pitched and spun, engulfed in curling curtains of sleet and snow.

“Basket’s twenty feet below the cabin!”

Up, up, up it came, until it swayed just outside the jump door.

“Basket’s outside the cabin door!”

Kalt reached for it. The basket swung away from him.

“Bringing the basket in!”

This time he grabbed the metal cage and pulled. It didn’t budge. He pulled again.

Stuck.

“Bringing the basket in!”

He yanked harder.

“Attempting… to… bring… the basket… in,” he said, grunting. “It, ah… it… the basket won’t come in the door.”

Steve Torpey glanced at his rearview mirror. Outside, through a heavy shroud of driving white flecks, he saw the rescue basket. There was acrouched figure inside it. He also saw a flight helmet. And he saw two arms pulling at the cage.

Kalt was crouching now at the door, shouting to Honnold,
“Pull, Lee! Pull!”

Both men were now leaning back, pulling with all the strength in their cramping muscles.

“Are you pulling?”

“I’m pulling! I’m pulling!”

“It’s not coming in!”

“I’m pulling as hard as I can!”

Mike Fish, in his seat monitoring altitude and working the high-frequency radio, looked up. Through an opening between Kalt’s right leg and the jump door, he saw why the basket would not enter.

A second man was dangling from it.

Each time Kalt and Honnold tried to yank the basket in, the dangling man’s arms and head got rammed against the lip of the jump door.

T
hrough the driving sleet icing his visor, Fred Kalt could hardly make out the kneeling figure inside the rescue basket just outside the helicopter door. He reached out and gave the basket another yank.

Something was wrong. No matter how hard he tried, he could not pull the basket inside.

“FRED!” Mike Fish shouted, behind him. “SOMEONE’S HANGING ON THE BASKET!”

“Where?” Lee Honnold screamed into the wind. “Where? Where?”

“FRED!”

“I can’t see him!” Kalt shouted.

The man was inches below Kalt’s boots, barely clinging to the bottom of the basket. He lifted his head up, looked into the cabin and locked eyes with Fish.

For a second. Just one second.

Time enough for everything to pause in Fish’s mind, for the whining sleet and the groaning turbines to hush.

Time enough for one man’s eyes to scream for mercy, for another’s to scream in horror.

And then he was gone.

Not a minute earlier, the basket was eighty feet below the helicopter, bouncing like a yo-yo in the wind and the whirling, thick snow and sleet.

“We’re getting there!” the man on his knees inside the rescue basket was screaming. “Just hang on!”

The man dangling from the bottom of the basket yelled back: “Hang on to me!”

“I got you!”

“Don’t let me go!”

“I said I got you!”

Then there was a hollowing swish through a rushing noise, and then a deafening, rumbling roar, and a wave exploded in a cloudlike burst only feet below the dangling man’s legs. The blast from it rolled up and buffeted them.

“Don’t drop me!”

“I got you!”

The man kneeling inside the basket, Bob Doyle, had his hands under the armpits of the dangling man, Mark Morley, and he was saying to himself: We’re going to be okay now. The sea can’t get us anymore.
We’re out of it. We’re out of it.

The basket kept spinning, twirling, shedding spray and spindrift.

“We’re almost there!”

“I can’t hang on anymore!”

“Give it what you can!”

“I can’t!”

“Don’t let go!”

“Please don’t drop me! Please don’t drop me!”

“You ain’t gonna drop!”

“Don’t drop me!”

“I won’t!”

They were in the belly lights of the helicopter now. They were fifteen feet below the jump door, and as they climbed Bob Doyle saw, out of the corner of his eye, helmets and shoulders hanging out the side of the helicopter.

“Don’t drop me!”

Just then a gust slammed into them. The basket rocked and whirled. Bob Doyle’s hands no longer had his skipper by the armpits; they had slid down his arms and were fastened to Morley’s wrists.

“Hang on!”

Morley’s hands, which had been clutching the basket, were sliding now.

“Don’t let go!”

Bob Doyle lunged with one hand and grabbed his skipper’s collar. Leaning back, knees digging into the wire mesh of the basket bottom, he swung his other hand around and seized the shoulder. Now he leaned back.

“Bob!”

“I got you!”

The upper half of the basket was now above the deck of the helicopter cabin.

“We’re here!” Bob Doyle screamed hoarsely at the shapes in the doorway. He looked down.

“Hang on, Mark! We’re here!”

“I can’t!”

He thought he could see Morley’s eyes now; they were blank eyes, black as coal, all fear and despair and hope drained and emptied out of them from the fight. There was nothing in them at all. They were bottomless.

The basket lurched.

“Hey!”

There were now two pairs of gloved hands yanking at the basket frame. He tried to shout but the groaning roar of the turbines and the whining sleet swallowed his screams.

“No! Wait!”

Another lurch; this time he saw it. The head of the dangling skipper rammed against a steel rail beneath the door frame.

“No!”

The basket was wobbling.

“No!”

Again the basket lurched. Again Bob Doyle heard the dull, sickening thud of Morley’s head against the fiberglass airframe. This time, Morley lifted his head.

He turned it a little to the left, then turned back and looked straight up and locked wild eyes with the bearded, screaming man in the basket above him.

His friend.

“No!”
the man, Bob Doyle, was shrieking.
“Oh please, Mark… don’t…”

And then Mark Morley allowed the wind to take him in any direction that it wished.

The altimeter on the central display unit read 103.

One hundred and three feet, Mike Fish was thinking. My God, that’s far for a man to fall.

The clunk of steel on the deck snapped Fish out of his thoughts. It was the rescue basket. Fred Kalt and Lee Honnold had finally pulled it in.

“Basket is in the door!” Kalt shouted. He was elated; they finally had a survivor in the helicopter. There was nothing that could go wrong now.

The man in the basket was hysterical, gesturing, blubbering. Honnold was trying to calm him down.

“What the hell’s wrong with this guy?” Honnold said. “He’s going frickin’ nuts.”

“Fred,” Fish said. He felt a sinking feeling going all through him. “Fred?”

Kalt didn’t hear him.

In all of the confusion, the ICS cord plugged into his helmet had come loose. He could not hear his crewmates. Fish got up and tapped him on the back and Kalt turned around. Fish pointed to his own helmet.

Kalt understood. He picked the cord up from the deck and plugged it back in to his helmet.

“What’s the matter?”

“There was someone hanging on the basket.”

“Are you sure?”

“He just fell.”

Kalt whirled around. “Where?”

“There. He was just there. He fell.”

Kalt just stood looking out the jump door, looking down at the seas.

Beside him, Honnold tilted the basket and the survivor rolled out. The man crawled to the back wall and leaned his head against it. Honnold pulled the man’s hood off.

“You all right?” he shouted over the drone of the rotors.

“The skipper,” the man shrieked. Tears streaked his reddened cheeks. “The skipper just fell. Oh, God, I let him go! I let him go!”

“Who?”

“It’s my fault! I let him fall! I couldn’t hold him!”

The man broke down, sobbing.

“Hey,” Honnold said, confused. He grabbed the man by the shoulders and head-butted him.

“Calm down!”

He head-butted the man again, and shouted: “Listen to me!”

The survivor stared almost fearfully at Honnold. He did not want another head butt.

“You are one lucky bastard!” Honnold yelled at him. “You know that? Do you? Now calm down. Calm down and tell me how many people were on board your boat.”

The man wiped his eyes. “Five.”

“Not four?”

“Five.”

“You say somebody fell? Who fell?”

“Mark Morley, our skipper.”

“Is there anyone else down there who’s alive?”

“Yeah,” the man said. His lips were trembling. Icicles twitched in his beard.

“How many are down there?”

“Two,” the man said. His voice was hoarse, heavy. “Plus the skipper.”

“Okay,” Honnold said, helping the man up. “Here, get in this seat. Easy now. I’m gonna strap you in.”

Tears ran down the man’s cheeks.

“Jesus,” Honnold said, “that’s some mess you got yourself into. It’s a real mess down there.”

The man wiped his eyes and looked at the smoke flares on the cabin deck. “You,” he stammered, “you—you guys need any help with that stuff?”

“No,” Honnold said. He was pulling a strap over the man and buckling him in. “Just take it easy.”

Mike Fish crawled over with a thermal-insulated sack. He was responsible now for checking the survivor for hypothermia and shock. He began to scrutinize the man’s flushed, drawn face, and then froze.

“Hey,” he stammered. “It’s… it’s…
Bob Doyle!”

Over the intercom, he heard Steve Torpey break in, “What?
Our
Bob Doyle?”

Fish reached over and touched Bob Doyle’s beard. “Yeah,” Fish said, and then to Doyle: “Bob, it is you, right?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“What the hell’s he doing out here in this?”

“Wait,” Fish said. “He’s… He’s saying something about the skipper falling … He says the boat’s skipper just fell… That’s the guy who just fell off the basket. Sir, he’s pretty upset.”

“Well,” Torpey said, “just tell him we’re going to do our best. Tell him we’ll get to him.”

“Roger.”

In the cockpit, Ted LeFeuvre was working the collective and watching their altitude on the radar altimeter. He could not keep from hearing their talk. But he had not taken his eyes off the console or the seas, not even when he heard the commotion over the fallen survivor. He wondered how it must be to fall through darkness and not to know when you would hit the water but that distracted him momentarily so he told himself to stop thinking about that. He was having a difficult time as it was concentrating on his inputs and keeping the aircraft in a hover. But when he heard Fish say over the ICS that the man they had rescued was Bob Doyle, he turned his head with a sort-of lunge, stared at the shadowy figure slumped against the back wall and turned back.

I can’t believe it, he thought. We saved Bob Doyle? The guy who caused me so much grief? Throw him back. No, no, no. That’s horrible. That’s bad. Lord, I’m sorry. Truly, I am. But, Lord, of all people—Bob Doyle?

Fish was checking his vital signs. “Mr. Doyle,” he said, “what are you doing out here?”

Bob Doyle thought it felt good to hear someone call him mister. “I’m just glad to be here,” he said, and he sighed. Then he smiled and shook Fish’s hand. “Thank you, Mike. Thank you.”

“That’s all right,” Fish said. He kept working on him. “Are you cold?”

“Very.”

“Do you want me to put you in the thermal bag?”

“No, no,” Bob Doyle told him. “I don’t need that. Save it for the other guys.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“All right,” Fish said. “You just relax, sit back and enjoy the flight.”