The Last Run (47 page)

Along the main street everything looked new and changed. He had never seen the shops before. He had never seen the Sitka Hotel, or the bookshop, or the pelt store, or the pizza place, or the Columbia, or the cathedral. It was all strange and it was all different. It was like those days of late spring when he would walk home from school in Bellows Falls along a dusty track in the cool, moist shade of the pines, the distant sound of the cascading water of Little Egypt slobbering on the rocks, the scent of pine bark in his nostrils. He walked on, and it was as though his feet were not touching the ground. Everything was new. There was nothing to plan and nothing to think about. He could do all of that some other time. He did not have a thought in his head and he liked it that way.

It was like this walking past the Crescent Harbor. It was like this crossing Old Harbor Drive and it was like this passing Crescent Harbor and like this walking straight up the middle of Jeff Davis Street.

There was a light on in the kitchen. Georgia opened the door and gave him a big bear hug.

“Oh, God,” she said. “We heard what happened. Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Bob Doyle said.

“Oh, you,” she said. “Come in here, Bob. You probably want a shower, don’t you? You must be hungry. A sandwich. How about a nice big ham sandwich? The kind you like.”

“Sure.”

“With lots of lettuce and tomato. Right. Tonight you stay in Robert’s room. I’ve got clean sheets on the bed. Here, sit down. Sit down, yes, right here. You want a beer? Not yet? That’s okay. Come, now. Just one. Yes. That’s it. Let me get an opener for you. Now you tell us. Now you tell us everything.”

Two weeks later, Bernice Honnold was in her living room on Lifesaver Drive running the vacuum cleaner when the doorbell rang. She turned the machine off and listened. The bell rang again. She went to the door.

“Hello,” said a tall, lanky man with matted, red hair. He wore dirty jeans and a green cap. He had a nice, big smile. She had a feeling that she recognized him from somewhere. Behind him was another man, shorter, with a long black ponytail, a scar across his nose and blue eyes. He looked down whenever she looked his way.

“Yes?”

“Is Lee around?” the tall stranger said.

“No,” she said. The man kept smiling. She smiled back. “Do you know him?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I know him. I know him very well.” The man looked down and saw the head of a girl, poking out from behind her mother’s leg. “And who is this?”

“This is Hillary.”

“Oh, hi, Hillary,” said the man, and he crouched down to smile at her. “My name is Bob Doyle. And this here is Mike. Say, Hillary, did you know that your daddy is a hero, did you?”

“Yes,” the girl said, and she giggled.

The man smiled. “I’m sure you did, Hillary. I’m sure of that.” He cleared his throat, and then smiled again. “You know, you remind me a lot of somebody I know.” He stood up. “Mrs. Honnold,” he said, “when will Lee be home?”

“Oh, a little later.” Bernice Honnold noticed the other man was holdinga large sack in both arms. She wondered what was in the sack. “Maybe around four. He’s standing duty today.”

“Oh, that’s a shame,” said the man. “You see, we have something for him. And you, too.”

“Oh?”

“We caught some rockfish and black bass and some crab, too. It’s all fresh. All of it. We just caught it, you know. See, we’re fishermen. And Mike, here, well, he even wanted to fillet them for you.”

“Oh, my.”

“See,” said the man, “these are for you and your family. Would you mind if we left them in your kitchen?”

“I… uh,” she stammered. “No, no, I suppose not. Of course not. Come in, please.”

The quiet man with the long ponytail followed Bernice Honnold straight to the kitchen, pulled the fish out of the bag and laid them all out on the counter. He left the crabs in the sink. He began washing and cutting and separating out the bones.

“Those are some fish,” she said.

“Yeah,” the man said. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Of course not.”

“Thanks.” He rolled a cigarette and lit it.

The other man, the tall one with the red hair, said, “You know, I used to live here in Coast Guard housing, too.”

“Really?” Bernice Honnold said. Now she recognized the man. He looked different now. Older. Much older. “In which house?”

“Across the street.”

They chatted while the other man prepared the fish. He must be a cook, Bernice Honnold thought. But he doesn’t say much. Not everyone does. Just look at the size of those fish, though. Where am I going to keep it all?

The taller man kept right on chatting.

Had she ever been to Kodiak? No, she said, but her husband was thinking of asking for a transfer there. Well, he said, I’m thinking of going to Kodiak myself. My kids are going there with my ex-wife. She asked him how old his kids were, their names. He told her.

“I don’t want to be too far from them, you know.”

“Of course not.”

When the second man finished separating the two rockfish and big, black bass, he wrapped the fish in cellophane, stacked it neatly in the freezer, soaped and washed his hands and arms and toweled off quickly.

“This is really very nice of you,” Bernice Honnold said.

The man just nodded.

“Well,” the taller man said. “We’re going to have to get going. We’ve got other people we need to visit. But you’ll tell your husband we were here, won’t you, Mrs. Honnold?”

“Oh, of course!”

“You’ll tell Lee how grateful we are.” He shook her hand.

“I will. I’ll tell him.”

“You don’t know how grateful we are.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“You just can’t know.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t want to stay awhile and tell him yourselves? He won’t be but another hour or so.”

“No,” the man said. “We really ought to go. But you’ll tell him for us, won’t you?”

They were on the front stoop now. The second man, the quiet one, shook her hand.

He said, “Tell your husband thanks a bunch. He did a helluva job.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Great.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Honnold,” said the tall man. He shook her hand again, awkwardly. “Thank you again. Bye, Hillary! Bye, sweetheart! Bye!”

She watched them cross the lawn and turn on the sidewalk. She stood there in the doorway watching them. Then she felt a chill and closed the door softly.

T
he search for David Hanlon went full bore for ninety-four straight hours.

Seven H-60 helicopters from Sitka and Kodiak, three Kodiak C-130 jets and two cutters, the
Planetree
and the
Anacapa,
combed an area of ocean twice the size of the state of Rhode Island. The planes took off at first light and returned after dusk. The cutters put their lights on and searched nights, too.

At 10:05 A.M., on Sunday, February 1, 1998, the
Planetree
spotted a gray fish tote bobbing in the waves at 58°43.14′ north, 139°05.01′ west. Ten minutes later, it pulled up a four-foot-square, white piece of wood nearby, then an orange tarp. Finally, at 2:58 P.M., it plucked out a lone, white life ring with the words
LA
CONTE painted on it in black lettering.

But there was no sign of Hanlon.

After heavy fog and darkness set in, the
Planetree
picked up a 406-megahertz hit at 58°44.4′ north, 138°58′ west. It raced to the coordinates and retrieved an orange EPIRB, its ring switch set to ON and still transmitting weakly.

A check of the serial number confirmed that the beacon had come from the
La Conte.
Six hours later, the cutter recovered a second EPIRB, a 121.5-megahertz model.

During the next two days, with aircraft flying grid after grid northwest of the Triple Forties, helicopter crews sighted a white deck cover, part of a bare wood deck, two white marker floats, another fish tote and a two-by-two piece of plywood.

But no survivor, no body.

On Monday morning, February 2, a C-130 pilot spotted a three-foot-long orange object floating in the waves. But he lost sight of it and a series of subsequent helicopter sorties turned up nothing. The orange object was not seen again.

For the next day and a half, the
Planetree
crisscrossed the waters northand west of the Fairweather Grounds, using searchlights and infrared scanners. On Monday night the weather deteriorated; winds rose to thirty knots and seas to twenty feet, and visibility diminished considerably.

The search was finally called off at five in the afternoon on Tuesday, February 3, $678,545 after it had begun.

People reckoned it would not be more than a week before a crab boat spotted the missing fisherman or a seiner scooped up his remains in a net. But then a week went by, and another week, and then another. Then a month passed. Then six months.

For David Hanlon’s five sisters and two brothers, life began to drift.

Without a body, it was difficult to let him go.

There was a formal Coast Guard inquiry, of course.

Three days of public hearings were held in Juneau and in Sitka a week after the incident, and the Coast Guard appointed a special investigator, Lieutenant Commander David C. Stalfort, to head the probe. He took 523 pages of testimony from fourteen people, including the ship’s two previous owners, shipwrights, former crewmen familiar with the
La Conte
and the three survivors and thirteen airmen who took part in the rescue.

In the end, Stalfort concluded that a “catastrophic event occurred that allowed uncontrolled flooding into the hull,” but that the “cause or nature of this event is unknown.” His final report noted that the owner “did not maintain the vessel in a condition that provided adequate strength for conditions likely to be encountered offshore in the Gulf of Alaska in the winter.”

It said casualties “could have been prevented had the master, Mark Morley, heeded the weather warnings,” made sure to provide a life raft, a single sideband radio and personal marker lights for their survival suits and trained the crew to use all of the bilge pumps on board in case of an emergency.

“It is recommended that there be no further investigation of the owner, Scott Echols, for criminal negligence.”

He recommended that the investigation be closed and it was, without delay.

I
have always liked searching for pieces to a story. There is something revitalizing about discovering a piece of information that no one else has, or, what is more likely, finding a piece that others have discovered but not considered in quite the same way. I suppose this is why I spent four years researching and writing this book. The rush of discovery.

Then again, it might just have been my fascination with the men who appear in this book. They, of course, are the fishermen and Coast Guardsmen who survived the events of January 30, 1998, and who endured one-on-one interviews, phone calls and e-mails many months after that night. It is bad enough going through so horrific a tempest; having someone stir it up afresh through repeated questioning and prodding cannot be pleasant.

I didn’t expect any of them to remember so many details about that January night, and I certainly could not expect them to be so forthright about their pasts, their dreams, their demons, and yet they were. They shared some pretty personal stuff. To them, I can only offer my most sincere thanks.

Of course, there were others who helped me to collect and arrange the pieces of this story-puzzle, people who do not appear in the story but whose contributions were no less significant. They are numerous—so
numerous that, sadly, I cannot list all of their names. Some, however, deserve a special mention.

To start, there was my editor at The Associated Press, Bruce DeSilva, who agreed to send me to Alaska for six weeks in September 1998 even though I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was going to write about. Upon my return to New York, I told him and his assistant, Chris Sullivan, about the
La Conte
story, and I suggested writing it in the old-style, serialized format. The news cooperative, as far as anyone knew, had never run a serial on the news wire in the AP’s 150-year history. But these two men pushed to get the story on the wire in five installments, no small feat at an agency that prides itself on brevity.

I am also deeply indebted to Larry Mussara, a retired Coast Guard helicopter pilot who first told me about the
La Conte
case while we fished on his boat over Labor Day weekend in 1998. It was Larry who talked me into writing a newspaper story about the rescue, and it was he who got me started by introducing me to officers at the District 17 headquarters in Juneau.

Others who offered unstinting help were Kent Lind, a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Juneau, who kindly allowed me to occupy his abode on more than one occasion; Ray Massey, the Coast Guard’s spokesman at District 17 headquarters; George Bancroft, who explained the mechanics of the storm at the Marine Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Maryland; Ajay Mehta and Lieutenant Commander Paul Steward, who made clear the intricacies of emergency satellite beacons and the mainframe computer at Mission Control Center in Suitland, Maryland; Jim Jensen, director of the Yakutat police, who, along with Eli Hanlon and the Yakutat hospital staff, was invaluable in helping to reconstruct scenes at the end of the book; Dr. Michael T. Propst, John Bond, Alvin Ancheta, Walter MacFarlane, Dale Bivins, David Johnson and, in particular, David Hanson, all of the Alaska state crime lab in Anchorage, who made the opening chapters of the book possible. To all of you, my heartiest thanks.

In Kodiak, I had the pleasure of working with Sergeant Darlene Turner, chief of the station there, and two of her officers, Steve Hall and Tom Dunn. Without them, I would not have been able to re-create the book’s opening scene. Dunn flew with me to Shuyak Island in a tiny, chartered
plane through a blinding winter downpour and kept a keen (nervous, you could say) eye out for brownies while I walked around the forest, soaking up ambience.

In Sitka, I was fortunate to meet many gracious people who went beyond the normal bounds of courtesy. To name some: Glen Jones, Joe Miller, Stephen M. Wall, Tim Schwartz, Betty Jo Johns, Burgess Bowder, Carolyn Evans, Bonnie Richardson, Eric Calvin, Ron Bellows, Robert Kite, Alvin Rezek, Ingvald Ask, John Brooks, George Eliason and Paul A. McArthur. Lastly, and most particularly, I offer my most heartfelt gratitude to Lynne Chassin-Kelly, for her good humor and constant support during what was a difficult time in her life.