The Last Run (43 page)

“Just get the skipper.”

“We will.”

The basket was already going down again. It splashed in a trough between two enormous waves, ten yards from the survivors. Kalt was watching the cable saw back and forth on the grate of the Night Sun. That’s a hell of a sight, all right, Kalt thought. If that cable snaps or birdcages, it’s over.

Below them, riding up and down the crests of the waves, was a man in a survival suit. He was floating, spread-eagled and facedown, but neither his arms nor legs seemed to be moving. He did not know if the man was alive or not, but he certainly was not moving on his own.

A hundred yards off was the strobe light and a jumble of retrotape.

Better go for the ones who look like they’re conscious, Kalt said to himself. Get moving.

He conned Torpey to fly the helicopter far beyond the right of the strobe before putting the basket out. Then he instructed the pilots to move gradually back toward the left, dragging the basket through the water as they went. He and Torpey understood each other perfectly now. He only had to call two or three conning commands to establish a hover position over the strobe.

They were fifteen minutes into the hoist evolution when Ted LeFeuvre noticed the warning light flashing on the fuel gauge.

“Steve,” he said, “we’ve just exceeded our BINGO.”

“Oh.”

“We don’t have enough gas to get back to Sitka.”

Torpey did not answer him. He was banking the helicopter and fighting to hold a position.

“I’ll figure it out.”

He could sense that his brain was slowing down; to calculate a simple fuel-burn rate took Ted LeFeuvre more than a minute. As he figured how much gas they would need to reach shore, he was thinking: We can’t just leave these people here. I didn’t ask to be here. But we’ve gotten this far. If we stop now the rest of those fishermen are going to be fish food.

Since he needed both hands to work the collective, he used the foot switch to make a radio call to the C-130. The plane had arrived on scene just as the second helicopter was aborting mission and returning to Sitka. He had not yet spoken to the C-130; Fish had been working radios. But when Ted LeFeuvre heard the unperturbed voice of the radioman, he felt a renewed sense of calm come into him. Confidence, like fear, was contagious, and now the confidence he had before the first rogue wave had nearly finished them was back.

He identified himself and told the radioman that their flight ops were normal.

“Roger, 6011,”
the voice said.
“How are things down there?”

“Rough.”

“How bad are the seas?”

“Bad.”

“What can we do for you?”

“Listen,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “I’m pretty worn out and I wondered if you guys could confirm a fuel-burn rate for me. We’re looking to go to Yakutat. Now as I see it, that’s sixty miles north and east, so with a tailwind of seventy-five knots, I’m figuring it will take us fifteen minutes to get there.”

There was a silence.

“Is that what you get?”

“Hold on.”

He waited twenty seconds, each feeling like a full minute, and then heheard the radioman say:
“Seventeen minutes flight time is what we get from your present position, over.”

“Thanks,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “We’ll talk in fifteen minutes. Rescue 6011 out.”

He turned to Torpey.

“Listen, from here Yakutat is about fifteen minutes, which means we’ve got enough fuel to safely stay for another hour and forty minutes.”

“Are you sure?”

“I just double-checked my figures with the C-130. They came up with the same thing.”

“Captain,” Torpey said, pointing, “watch that wave there!”

Ted LeFeuvre hit the collective, heard the turbines whine and felt the sudden, hollowing-out thrusting jump of the helicopter in his stomach. A comber—eighty feet at least—swept beneath them. Torpey exhaled.

“Okay,” he said. “We stay longer.”

Below them, the wave buried the basket for almost a minute. But Kalt did not stop dragging it until it was within ten yards of the strobe light.

“Paying out slack,” he said.

Ted LeFeuvre tried to ease the helicopter a little lower, to eighty feet now, to give Kalt an extra twenty or thirty feet of slack cable. With a lot of slack, he figured, there was less pressure on the line, less chance of damaging the winch and the cable itself.

He was dropping their altitude when he heard Kalt shout:
“Survivor’s in the basket!”

Just then a gust buffeted the helicopter.

As he pulled lift power he heard the winch screech and the hoist cable lash the airframe. Honnold, Fish and Kalt were shouting. The hoist was screeching. Torpey was holding the cyclic to the dash and yelling something he could not hear. It would not have helped him if he had.

Kalt struggled to the winch, found it in the stop position. The cable was jerking and more than eighty feet of hoist cable were still out.

“I’m pulling it up,” he shouted to Honnold.

He shoved the hoist in gear and, with one hand on the grab rail, leaned halfway out the helicopter. The hoist was still spooling smoothly.

Then
wham—the
helicopter was over on one side and he was skidding on the deck.

He struggled to his knees, checked his helmet. He was all right. He stood up in a crouch. Lousy, bitching gusts, he said to himself. He looked down out at the raging sleet beneath the helicopter, the flakes long and white as chalk in the floods.

“Hey,” Kalt said. He sounded as though he could hardly believe what he was saying. “Someone’s still in the basket.”

“Move your ass!”

“I am.”

“I said move it!”

“I am moving!”

“You want me to leave you behind?”

“No!”

“Then
swim,
you fuck!”

Ahead now they could see the green glow of the chemical lights, appearing and vanishing behind the swells. Otherwise the spray and sleet were so thick they could hardly pick out the waves.

“Swim!” Gig Mork shouted.

“I can’t!”

“You lousy cunt! Swim! Swim!”

“I’m trying!”

“Harder!”

Mork was holding Mike DeCapua with one arm and flailing and swimming with the other, and it was as though they were moving uphill and downhill, not sideways, through the breakers. He looked up and the green box was coming closer and he thrashed and fought through the water, the spray clawing at his eyes, and he kept thrashing and swimming even though his lungs felt as though someone had thrust a hot poker through them, the pain from not breathing so great, and everything was turning black and his throat filling with ice water when he felt the hoist basket in his grip.

“Hold this!”

While DeCapua steadied the bobbing cage, Mork grabbed the crossbar and hoisted himself up into the basket.

“Get in!”

The basket slipped right out of DeCapua’s hands. He fell backward. The EPIRB was gone.

Mork had him by the legs.

“I got you!”

He pulled DeCapua on top of himself. With the extra weight and the cable slack, the basket sank.

“Get your leg out of my face!”

Just then a wave toppled down on them like a wall of bricks and the next thing Mork knew he was one leg out of the basket, one foot on the top of the cage, his hand barely holding the cable. The basket was twirling like a slowing top, scudding foam and spray as it twirled, and he knew he was going up. He was going up fast and all he knew was the flying ice and black and the cable, and all he could do was squeeze the cable with his death grip. Don’t let go of this thing. You do and you’re dead. Christ Almighty, speed this son of a bitch up.

The first thing he saw was the door and then he saw a huge man wearing a shiny, black helmet. He was beautiful. Then a big glove reached out and seized the cage and then a second glove was seizing him by the shoulder and he was inside the cabin.

He was lying on the deck alongside two black boots. He coughed out seawater and rolled over on his back. His knees and elbows hurt.

Only then did Gig Mork realize that he had come up in the basket alone.

T
he basket was going down again. The wind had nearly swept it into the tail rotor after Fred Kalt pitched it out the jump door and he was now hurrying to get it down to the third survivor. Suddenly he felt the line jerk.

He cut the power on the hoist motor and line stopped going out.

“Mr. Torpey,” Kalt said, “I think we’ve got a broken strand in the cable.”

“No.”

“Yeah.”

Throwing the winch in slow reverse, Kalt knelt down and let the cable slide across the palm of the thick, leather glove used for hoisting.

He frowned.

“What is it?” Lee Honnold asked him.

“We got a burr.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I thought I felt something right around here. How much more line we got out?”

“About forty feet.”

“Damn.”

Kalt kept feeling the line to find the nick. It was dark and hard to see. The pitching and jumping around did not help. The Coast Guard used three-sixteenth-inch cable for hoisting. It was 105 strands of stainless steel, tightly woven, and each cable had a breaking strength of eighteen hundred pounds. But once it had a kink or a burr, you were working on borrowed time.

It won’t take long now, Kalt was thinking. All it takes is one strand to go. Just one little kink. With the tension on it and the beating this thing is taking it’ll be nothing for the whole damned thing to start unraveling.

“You find it?”

“Not yet,” Kalt said.

You can do a quick splice, he was thinking. You’ll have to cut the cable where the strand broke, do a splice, resit the hook. There’s 200 feet of hoist cable. Okay, so if you cut off 40 feet, that’ll leave you 160 to hoist with. Is that enough? Not if we’re hoisting from a height between 100 and 140 feet. We won’t have much left for slack. You need that extra slack to keep the basket from moving around too much in the waves.

Steve Torpey’s voice crackled over the intercom. “How bad is it, Fred?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Kalt said. He was still looking for the kink in the cable. “I’m sure there’s a rough spot, sir. But I can’t find it. Do you want to continue?”

We can keep going for a while, he was thinking. But what if we get that third guy in the basket and start hauling and the line birdcages? Thenwhat? It’s going to be just like when a shoelace starts fraying and you try to pull a strand of it through a hole in your shoe and the rest of it bunches up on one side. The cable is going to bunch up in the guide chute to the drum. Then the reel is going to jam. And then we’re going to have a survivor swinging in the basket forty feet below the helicopter. Then what do we do? Pull him up by hand?

“Mr. Torpey?”

Torpey had been thinking hard. He was finding it more difficult now to concentrate. “Listen, Fred,” he said, after a long delay, “let’s just keep going. If we don’t do something, the man’s dead anyway.”

“Roger.”

Kalt threw the hoist in reverse again.

“Okay,” he said, “line is going out.” He looked down at the churning sea and saw a splash.

He said, “Basket’s in the water.”

Ted LeFeuvre was keeping a close eye on the gas gauge. They had less than forty minutes of fuel left. We’ve got enough for another four, perhaps five basket drops. No more. After that, there’ll be nothing to do but leave whoever is down there to the grace of God.

Down in the sea, Mike DeCapua was just about out of his head. He had not been able to feel anything in his hands and legs for quite some time, and his feet, as far as he could tell, were as good as gone.

He could hear the helicopter, the dull thudding of the rotors mostly, but he had lost sight of it. Some of the flares were still burning. He could see them when a big swell lifted him up above the other waves. But he knew that soon all of the flares would go dark and he remembered he no longer had the EPIRB. That was long gone. No EPIRB, no strobe, no way to find Mike, he thought. Then those flares are going to burn out. Then it’s game over.

I don’t want to give up, he thought, but what choice have I got? No hands, no legs, no feet. I must have the hypothermia. That’s what I got. Christ. If they were to pin me up against a wall and tell me the firing squad would let loose on me if I didn’t stay up on my feet, then I guess I’d just have to shut my eyes and wait for it. It’s a weird thing, this hypothermia. You don’t feel your nuts. But you can feel your body temperature dropping. I wonder how that is? Maybe it’s because you’ve stopped shivering, he thought. But that was a while ago. Still, maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s how you know. I wonder. Well, any way you cut it, it’s weird.

Everybody in Alaska knows about the hypothermia, he was thinking. One of the first things you learn. One of the first things you put out of your head. What is it they say? After you quit shivering you got no more calories to burn. Calories. That’s where you get your heat from. I guess fat people are pretty hot. That’s funny. That’s real funny. A fat, hot woman. Sure. Only in America. Do you suppose I lost my fuel supply? I guess so. My extremities have already shut down. I must be experiencing the numbness that happens when your body quits pumping blood to your extremities. That’s what I’m experiencing. It’s the natural thing, I guess. It’s the way nature must work.

Gee, you’re real smart, Mike. Real fucking smart. You always did have a good theory to explain things after the fact.

I’m tired, he said to himself. Whipped. I wonder if it would do any harm to sleep? Just sleep. That’s all I want to do now. It wouldn’t be that hard to do. It’s never hard to sleep once you’re beaten. Am I beaten? I’m beat. That much I am. I’ll bet if I closed my eyes I’d go right off. Ain’t nobody out here to tell me what to do. It’d be real easy, all right. Just close my eyes and slip right off the edge.

I wonder if this is what Hanlon was feeling when he went under? Or was he hot? They say some guys get real warm at the end. Nice and toasty. Shit. You think the hypothermia would make me feel toasty. How do you suppose he came out of that knot? I tied that cat’s-paw as good as it could be tied. And it’s a damned good knot. It don’t come undone by itself. If you back it up with a half-hitch, it won’t. But it’s an easy knot to break. What do you suppose he did? Maybe he panicked. Got himself in a panic and tried to breathe underwater. Or maybe he said fuck it and just swam off. I don’t know. I tied that buoy ball to him, too. Just like I tied this one to me. Right around my middle. Where is it now? Right around my leg. It must have slid down some. Great. Fucking buoy did me a shitload of good. Fucking buoy ball.