The Last Run (48 page)

I also received a warm welcome from the families and friends of the main characters of this book. There were the Doyles, the DeCapuas, the Hanlons, the Morks, the LeFeuvres, the Evanses, the Conners—and not least of all, Robert Carrs and Tamara Morley, who offered insights into the character of the
La Conte’s
skipper, Mark Morley. This is a book about people in a storm, not just a storm; without the help of these kind people, it most certainly would not have held together.

I’ve always respected the work of the U.S. Coast Guard, but today I say without reservation that I feel a special affection for the men and women who wear the uniform. Not once in four years of research did a Coastie snub me or treat me without the utmost respect. The Coasties I met were generous, accommodating, friendly and professional. I cannot thank them enough.

I owe much to my agent, Owen Laster, for his patience, advocacy and vision, and to Paul McCarthy and his wife, Chicquita, whose belief in the book and suggestions about its structure were vital. I also consider myself lucky to have been able to work with my editor at HarperCollins, Dan Conaway, and his assistant, Jill Schwartzman. Dan’s intuitiveness, his understanding of narrative, his line-by-line criticism and the reasons behind that criticism were invaluable.

Finally, to three of my dearest friends, Dolores Barclay, Michael Van Weegen and my mother, Anne: without your unflagging confidence, understanding and encouragement, I might not ever have completed this story-puzzle. With much love, I thank you all.

T
ODD
L
EWAN
joined the Associated Press as a correspondent in 1988. In 1996 he became an editor at the AP’s international desk, and later a national features writer. In 1998, he received several feature-writing prizes for this story.

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T
his is a work of nonfiction—unlike a novel, none of the characters, situations and places described in this book is imaginary. Dialogue was reconstructed as carefully and completely as possible, using official reports, court papers, personal letters, diaries and audiotapes, and by crosschecking the recollections of people who took part in the conversations. For clarity, consistency and tempo, a number of less significant places, people, observations and impressions have been left out. However, the author has attempted to write an absolutely true book; nothing beyond what was verifiable and documentable has been added.

“Grade: A. A spectacular maritime page-turner … obsessively reported, meticulously crafted, morally complex, and action-crammed,
The Last Run
is one perfect storm of a book.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“A gripping account [that] reads like a novel… Readers who got into Sebastian Junger’s
The Perfect Storm
would do well to check out Todd Lewan’s Arctic storm epic
The Last Run.”

—USA Today

“The Perfect Storm
transferred to Alaska, but with a much more heroic conclusion.”

—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Blockbuster.”

—New York
magazine

“For sheer reading thrills, you won’t find anything to match
The Last Run,
not this fishing season, and probably for many more…. More than anything else, Lewan makes the reader feel in his bones the terror of a stormy sea and a useless vessel.”

—New Orleans Times-Picayune

“[A] gripping sea rescue tale.”

—Anchorage Daily News

“The Last Run
is a powerful story reported and told with extraordinary skill…. Lewan’s mastery of a broad palette of narrative technique is unrivaled.
[The Last Run]
will keep you turning the pages at a furious rate.”

—Florida Sun-Sentinel

“Riveting…. A wintry tale that makes a perfect summer page-turner…. A saga of life and death, friendship and loss.”

—Associated Press

“The stuff of legends…. A tale of genuine heroism … that you won’t easily put down.”

—Decatur Daily

“Exhilarating … masterful … the action [is] real and terrifying…. Lewan steals your breath as he describes the fandango inside a helicopter slammed by gale-force winds… Immediate and terrifying, so edge-of-the-seat readers will have creases in their glutei maximi.”
—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review) “Nail-biting … new and immediate … [gives] readers a sense of why the five fishermen were willing to risk so much for potentially so little.”

—Publishers Weekly

“This riveting book has it all: ordinary guys facing the extraordinary, tales of the Alaska frontier, a suspenseful fight for survival, a dramatic rescue against seemingly impossible odds, and touchingly human and humorous moments. Do yourself a favor and let Todd Lewan take you on
The Last Run.”
      —James Bradley, author of
Flags of Our Fathers
and
Flyboys

“What a gripping book. By the time you finish this amazing true story of men struggling in the Alaska seas, and the helicopter rescue crews blown around like dandelion seeds, you’re likely to be suffering from double pneumonia. So bundle up well before you begin
The Last Run,
because once you start it, you won’t be able to put it down.”           —Len Deighton

“Todd Lewan’s
The Last Run
picks up where
The Perfect Storm
left off—the big brawling storm and epic Coast Guard rescue in the Gulf of Alaska is an utterly heart-pounding story, yet Lewan probes deeper, bringing to life in all their troubled glory the heroic, ill-fated crew of the
La Conte.
His reporting is so rich, so brave, and so damn fine it makes me wonder how the rest of us will ever do anything half as good.”

—Todd Balf, author of
The Darkest Jungle

“The Last Run
is both a harrowing real-life tale of rescue on the high seas and a moving love letter to the sort of restless traveler so often drawn to Alaska, and to the sea—a story whose roller-coaster drama is surpassed only by its compassion for the hard lives of the men at its center.”

—Peter Nichols, author of
Evolution’s Captain

“Todd Lewan raises the standard for nonfiction survival stories.
The Last Run
not only re-creates with hair-raising poignancy the ordeal that the men on the
La Conte
endured but also gives them unparalleled depth and dignity.”

—Jason Kersten, author of
Journal of the Dead

I
t was a quarter past six and the investigators’ office of the Alaska state crime lab was quiet except for the sound of a man in a corner cubicle pecking at the keyboard of a desktop computer. Everyone else had gone home. It was August 31, 1998, which happened to be David Hanson’s seventh wedding anniversary, and he was anxious to get home, too, to take his wife, Valery, out to dinner. But he had a report to finish. Nobody had actually told him to put a rush on it. It was just a missing persons file. But to him it was important, somehow, that he do it right away.

So he kept typing.

Three hours earlier, Walter MacFarlane had brought startling news: the fingerprint lab had matched a print from a fisherman named David Hanlon to another they had reproduced from a skin fragment found inside a bear-mauled survival suit on Shuyak Island. The word
match
had hit him like a stiff, electric jolt; after nineteen days trying to identify the remains, he, David Hanson, the rookie investigator, was going to stroll into his sergeant’s office and declare that he’d cracked his very first case.

He hadn’t strolled—he’d bounded, as a matter of fact, over to his boss’s door and rapped on it. Sergeant Mike Marrs, hunched over a stack of papers, looked up. It was a grumpy look.

“It’s him,” Hanson said.

“Who?”

“Hanlon.”

He held out the fingerprint card. Marrs, still eyeing him moodily, took it. He moved his dark eyes up and down the card, over the fingerprints rolled in black ink. Hanlon’s right index finger was circled in red. That was the finger that had been positively matched to the skin found in the neoprene mitten on Shuyak.

Marrs removed his thick glasses and flicked them on his desk. He looked Hanson straight in the eyes. The sergeant’s annoyed expression had melted away.

“Good work, young man,” Marrs said almost gently. Then he gave Hanson a small, approving smile.

“Thanks.”

“Now,” Marrs had said, “it’s time to go show the captain. You want to do the honors?”

Once they had notified all of the higher-ups, Hanson had telephoned the troopers’ station in Angoon and asked that an officer go in person to Hoonah to tell the Hanlons. That wasn’t something you did on the phone, he had said to himself. I’m sure there must be a relative that can break the news gently to that family. Well, at least they could grieve and start putting David’s death behind them. All of the Hanlons could rest.

So now all that was left was to finish typing up his final report on the case. At one point, he noticed a mistake in his narrative:

He hit the backspace key, deleted the word
Hanson,
retyped the name so that it correctly read
Hanlon
and went on.

He had completed another page when again he noticed, in another reference to the dead man, that he had typed:

He stared at his mistake.

Why do I keep doing that? I need to hit the L key, not the S key. Okay, erase that and type H-A-N-L-O-N. There you go. That’s better.

While Hanson was proofreading his report he noticed yet another sentence where his own name had been entered instead of the name Hanlon. And then it hit him.

David Hanlon. The mystery man I’ve been trying so hard to identify has a name that’s just
one
letter different from my own. We’re not all that far apart, are we, Mr. Hanlon?

He shuddered and hit the delete key.

O
n April 2, 1998, four of the aviators from the third helicopter rescue team—Ted LeFeuvre, Steve Torpey, Fred Kalt and Lee Honnold— received the Distinguished Flying Cross, the highest aviation honor given in the United States during peacetime. Mike Fish, the team’s rescue swimmer, was awarded the Coast Guard’s Air Medal.

Later, all five airmen received the National Association of Naval Aviation’s Outstanding Achievement in Helicopter Aviation, the Naval Helicopter Association’s national award for helicopter rescue, the Naval Helicopter Association’s Regional prize, the Aviation Week and Space Technology Hall of Fame Laureate and
Rotor and Wing
magazine’s award for heroism in helicopter aviation.

The crews of the other two rescue helicopters received Coast Guard commendation medals, achievement medals and letters of commendation for their efforts.

At the conclusion of his Sitka tour in June of 1998, Ted LeFeuvre became chief of the Search and Rescue Branch of the Seventh Coast Guard district in Miami, Florida. During the next two years he oversaw seventeen thousand search-and-rescue cases and helped develop a new Coast Guard aviation program that led to the seizure of seven tons of illegal drugs worth an estimated $120 million. For his efforts he received the Meritorious Service Medal in 2000 for exceptional leadership.

From 2000 to 2003, Ted LeFeuvre served as commander of Air Station Humboldt Bay in Eureka, California, where he commanded rescue operations of that state’s northernmost coastal region. In June 2003, he wasappointed the Coast Guard’s liaison officer to the Naval Education and Training Command in Pensacola, Florida.

In 1999, while attending a Sunday church service, he met a schoolteacher in Miami, Renee Browning. After dating for five months, the couple wed on April 1, 2000. They remain happily married. Michelle and Cam LeFeuvre now live in Atlanta. Cam is a mechanic in a Volkswagen dealership, and Michelle, who works at a law firm, has patched things up with her father. She and her younger brother frequently visit their father in Pensacola.

David Durham was transferred in May 2000 to San Diego, where he served as a deputy commander. In June of 2002, he was given his first command: Air Station Sitka. Today he works and lives in Sitka with his wife, Trish.

Steve Torpey was promoted to commander in the Coast Guard and is studying for a master’s degree in organizational management. After serving as a flight instructor at the Aviation Training Center in Mobile, Alabama, he was reassigned to Air Station Clearwater, where he flies H-60s and serves as an assistant operations officer. He and his wife, Kari, live in Trinity, Florida, with their five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter.

Russ Zullick was transferred to Kodiak, Alaska, in September 1999 and promoted to lieutenant commander. In Kodiak he earned his third, fourth and fifth Coast Guard Achievement Medals and a Distinguished Flying Cross for rescuing two survivors whose small aircraft crashed into the side of almost inaccessible mountain along the Alaska Peninsula. He lives in Kodiak with his wife, Deborah, and their three-year-old son.

Dan Molthen lives with his wife, Theresa, and their three children in Camden, North Carolina, and is a lieutenant commander at Air Station Elizabeth City. On December 17, 2000, the cruise ship
Sea Breeze
I began taking on water more than two hundred miles off the Carolina coast with thirty-four people on board. Molthen and his crew hoisted twenty-six survivors off the ship, crammed them into the Jayhawk’s six-and-a-half-by-eight-foot cabin and somehow made it safely back to base. The rescue set a new record for number of people flown in an H-60. A second rescue helicopter picked up the remaining eight survivors.

Bill Adickes left Alaska in 1998 with his wife, Carin, and their two sons and went to work as a C-130 pilot in Sacramento, California. After a four-yeartour, Adickes was reassigned to Hawaii and now flies fishery patrols in the Pacific, often between Guam and Midway. He has put in for a transfer back to Alaska; he says he misses the people of Sitka, the wilderness and the excitement of helicopter rescues.