The Last Run (45 page)

At his feet sat the rescue basket. The light sticks attached to it still glowed a feeble green. Kalt stared at the sticks until the glow in them died out.

T
hey flew through the dark, keeping the wind at their tail. The sleet and rain had let up and only came occasionally in gusts. Once they made the shoreline they swung north and followed the coast toward Yakutat. They had hoped to see some sign of life below, a light, a ship, breakers on rocks, perhaps. But there was nothing. The ceiling had come up above fifteen hundred feet but it was very dark and the wind was blowing a gale. Steve Torpey turned up the high-frequency radio and started making calls in the blind. He told the world that they were about fifteen miles to the south of Yakutat and preparing their final approach for landing. He advised all aircraft in the vicinity to take note of their course. There was no response. Yakutat was not a tower-controlled field. It was nearly four o’clock in the morning. Nobody would be out there listening. He turned down the radio and sat quietly in his seat.

For several more minutes they saw no lights, nor did they see the shore, but they flew steadily in the dark riding the tailwind. It was quite rough. Ted LeFeuvre kept the same speed until he saw rocks rise up from below, the waves striking against them, rushing up, falling back. He throttled down the engines a bit and began making a slow turn into the wind. The helicopter shuddered when he did it. They were back out over the ocean. Then he lined them up with the airstrip. The Yakutat airstrip sat two miles inland and was short and straight, running west to east. Ted LeFeuvre wanted to land with the tailwind. The wind was still blowing strong.

“There it is,” he said.

Torpey clicked on the nose lamp and the belly floods and they could see the wind driving the spruce so that the tops shook and swayed and shed bows of white, looping snow. There was no moon but it seemed much lighter than it had been before, and they swooped in over the tops of the spruce jaggedly reaching and swaying, and dropping the helicopter on asteady angle now, lining up with the blacktop, Ted LeFeuvre pulled the nose up just a touch and the trees went slipping smoothly by and then there was the familiar, heart-tugging catch of the wheels on the asphalt and they were bumping quickly along the runway. He slowed the Jayhawk into a trot, finishing off his running landing, and then taxied them over to the hangar. He turned the aircraft so that the nose pointed into the wind and then he shut it down.

The rotor head slowed, then stopped. The blades were full of wind and flapped up and down and smacked the pavement. He sat back in his seat. He was very, very tired of flying. His arms and shoulders and back ached and his hands were stiff. He looked at the airspeed indicator. They were on the ground and the aircraft was stationary. Yet the indicator was still showing sixty knots. Ted LeFeuvre looked at the number for a moment and loosened his chinstrap.

“Nice landing,” Torpey told him. Ted LeFeuvre pulled off his helmet.

“Thanks.”

He tried the door. It felt heavy. He pushed harder and it opened a crack.

Finally he leaned his shoulder into it and this time the door opened and he stepped down on the wet pavement and was in Yakutat. The tarmac felt very pleasant under his boots. He walked around the nose of the helicopter. It was pleasant to walk on firm ground. There were a lot of people milling about. There was an ambulance and two police vans and some cars and a Dodge pickup truck. Someone must have telephoned the airport manager, Mike Hill, he thought. District 17 must have phoned ahead of their arrival. He stopped and shook hands with Hill, and then he saw Kip Fanning from the Yakutat Lodge and Les Hartley of Gulf Air airlines, and a few other people whose names he had forgotten and was too tired to remember, and he saw the cabin door open. Lee Honnold and Fred Kalt jumped out and patted each other on the chest and then gave each other a bear hug. Then a man in survival gear, short and bleary and shaky, stepped down from the aircraft. He shooed away the medics. He didn’t want their help. The man walked unsteadily, side to side but with a rough dignity, and then climbed up into the ambulance.

Then he saw Bob Doyle.

It was not the thick, scraggly beard, the long hair or the gray, drawn facethat made him watch. It was something else. The man was helping a medic with a stretcher. He was helping to carry the shivering survivor, whispering to him as they went, and then Bob Doyle lifted the sagging stretcher up and eased it into the ambulance before climbing in himself. He did not bother to look back. The doors shut and the ambulance pulled away.

Ted LeFeuvre stood watching it.

Torpey walked over and stopped beside Ted LeFeuvre. He followed the captain’s gaze. The ambulance was now turning out along a connector road.

“Unbelievable,” Torpey said. “Unbelievable.”

The big trees at the end of the runway were swaying far over in the wind. Torpey scratched his head.

“It’s just so hard to believe.”

Ted LeFeuvre did not hear him. He was watching the ambulance get smaller and smaller and thinking. After all he’s been through tonight, he said to himself, Bob Doyle had every right to lie down on a stretcher himself and do nothing but take a ride to the hospital. But instead, he thought first about his buddy. He helped his buddy into the ambulance first. It was just a little thing. But pretty noble. That was noble of him, all right.

He sighed.

“What’s that, Steve?”

“I said I just can’t believe it.”

“Yeah,” Ted LeFeuvre answered, “I can’t believe it myself, Steve. I mean, those were the worst conditions I have ever seen. Those waves and that wind—”

“No, no,” Torpey interrupted him. “I wasn’t talking about the weather.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

Torpey looked at him.

“Well, sir, for a whole year I looked high and low for Bob Doyle at the air station and could never find him at his desk. Not one time. Now I fly a hundred and fifty miles offshore at night, in the dead of winter, in a hurricane, and there he is, floating in the Pacific.”

He shook his head.

Ted LeFeuvre started laughing and could not stop.

At daybreak it was still blowing thirty-five knots, but the seas were down to forty feet and the sleet had softened to a cold rain that danced along the swells.

Two C-130 planes and an H-60 helicopter from Kodiak took off for the Fairweather Grounds while the cutters
Anacapa
and
Planetree
steamed out to assist in the search for the two missing crewmen. By 9:40 A.M., a data marker buoy had been dropped at the survivors’ last reported position, 58°22′ north, 138°42′ west; the radio float began drifting in the counterclockwise current of the gulf, and the search area shifted continuously north and westward at about two knots an hour.

The aircraft crisscrossed the grounds for hours, flying sector searches in an eight-nautical-mile radius, then in twenty-five-mile rectangular grids. But with the rough seas, fog and steady rain, they turned up nothing.

A little after one o’clock, the oil tanker
Arco Juneau
arrived on scene. It had been transiting south from Cordova Bay the previous night when its captain, Mike Devins, decided to veer north and west of the Fairweather Grounds and ride out the blow in deep water. Throughout the night, the tanker slugged its way south and east—120 miles—and, at 1:55 P.M., reported seeing an orange object riding the swells, which it later described as looking like somebody in an orange survival suit. The news was not encouraging. The survivor was floating on his back, arms and legs spread wide, and showed no signs of movement. Despite high, heaving seas, the
Arco Juneau
promised to keep the survivor in its lee.

Within thirty-six minutes, an H-60 sent the previous night from Kodiak to Yakutat was on scene and lowering a rescue swimmer in a lift basket.

It took four minutes to haul up a man in an orange survival suit.

With his suit full of seawater he weighed close to four hundred pounds. He needed a shave. His open eyes were bloodshot and shiny and almost seemed to hold a self-satisfied expression. His mouth was open a little, as they usually were, and showed big, strong teeth.

The flight mechanic gently laid the head on the deck, then slit the survival suit. He rummaged in the man’s pockets and found a wallet.

Stuck to the back of a clammy, wallet-size portrait of Jesus Christ was a photo of a young woman with wide-set, green eyes and a laughing mouth.

Cute, the flight mechanic thought. Too bad for her. Too bad for him, too. Less than a half hour later, a nurse and a medic wheeled Mark Morley through a corridor in the Yakutat Hospital and into the emergency room. Three fishermen, two of whom had just been released after treatment for hypothermia, were smoking in the lounge when the gurney was wheeled in. They watched the door swing shut.

A short while later the nurse came out.

“How is he?” Bob Doyle asked.

She shook her head.

“Oh.”

“He’s dead,” the nurse said. “If you want to go in now and see him, you can.”

Gig Mork said nothing. Some townsfolk had given them some clothes and donated sneakers. Mork just stood there in his new sneakers, biting his lower lip.

Mike DeCapua said, “No, not me, thanks.”

“I’d like to see him,” Bob Doyle said.

“In here,” the nurse said.

They walked into a white room where Mark Morley lay on a wheeled table, a sheet over his great body. The fluorescent light left no shadows. Under the harsh light his inflated face looked freshly shiny. The scalp was lacquered red around the gashes. The eyes had that glassy, flat look. Bob Doyle might as well have been looking at a couple of bottle tops.

His throat had swelled up so it was hard for him to talk.

“Take your time, Mr. Doyle,” the nurse said. She put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m very, very sorry.” Bob Doyle did not seem to hear her.

“Oh, Christ,” he said, and he began to cry. “I should have jumped in after you.”

They left the hospital that afternoon. Bob Doyle and Mork had suffered only mild cases of hypothermia. DeCapua, who looked pretty bad when he arrived at intensive care, recovered quickly. He hadn’t suffered any nerve damage or circulatory problems as a result of his hypothermia and he wouldn’t stop bumming cigarettes off the nurses, so the doctor released him that afternoon.

The three of them were flown down to Juneau that same night. ScottEchols, who had owned the
La Conte,
met them at the airport. He drove them straight to the Best Western hotel downtown and paid the bill. He ordered out a pizza and put a hundred-dollar check in each of their hands, along with a one-way plane ticket to Sitka.

“I’ll take care of you guys,” Echols was saying. “I’ll take good care of you. I owe you guys a lot.”

Bob Doyle looked at him.

“The important thing is that you’re alive,” Echols went on. “I want you to know that we’re going to keep in touch, and that if a job ever comes open on a boat of mine, for a fisherman, you guys will be on the top of my list. That’s a promise.”

They stared blankly at him.

“Don’t you worry about a thing,” Echols said.

“I’m
not,”
Bob Doyle said.

“Well, good.”

Mike DeCapua said to Echols, “Say, I got something I got to square with you.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s about the suit. The survival suit. That suit—the one Hanlon was in—see, I borrowed that suit from a buddy of mine off another boat, see. I got to give him back something.”

“Oh.”

“What I’m saying is, if you don’t mind, I’d like to keep my survival suit. The
La Conte
suit. The one I still got. To replace the one that Dave is wearing—was wearing.”

“All right.”

“I’m sorry. I know you already lost a bunch, with the boat and all. It’s just that, well, it wasn’t mine.”

“Sure,” Echols told him. “That’s okay, Mike. Go ahead. Take the suit.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not a problem. It’s just lost equipment. Don’t worry about it.”

Bob Doyle was watching him. Echols smiled. “You know, Bob, I had no idea. No idea at all. He should never have taken you guys out there.”

Bob Doyle looked at him.

“Look,” Echols told him. “I just want to help you guys out. I feel like I owe you guys.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Listen, Bob. Anything you need. Anything. You just let me know, now, all right?”

Within a month, Scott Echols had shut down World Seafood Producers, moved out of his duplex in Juneau and relocated with his wife to Guam.

I
t was close to six in the morning when Ted LeFeuvre heard the C-130 plane landing outside. He had been lying in a hard, wood bunk at the Yakutat Lodge with his eyes shut and his mind jumping around. He went to the window and looked out. It was still dark and a light rain was falling. There were glistening, moving patches that the landing lights made across the blacktop and he heard the drone of propellers and voices. He pulled on his flight suit and boots, brushed his teeth and combed his hair and walked down a long corridor to the dining hall.

He sat in one of the heavy wood chairs and waited for a server to come. No one came out so he went to the counter and got himself a menu and poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher and sat back down and glanced through the menu. After a while a woman with bleary eyes and a smudged apron came over and he asked for hot rolls and scrambled eggs and juice. She went out and he drank the water. He saw the water jump a little in the glass and noticed his hand was still a little shaky. He put the glass down and Lee Honnold, Fred Kalt and Mike Fish came in. They sat down.

“How did you sleep, Captain?” Kalt asked him. He had those dark bags under his eyes but he looked alert.

“Fine.”

“The C-130 is here.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Have they sent over any helos from Kodiak?”

“I think so.”

“Well, if they haven’t, they probably will in no time,” Honnold said.