Big Miracle (21 page)

As she climbed into bed, Cindy realized she did not have to reset her alarm clock. She got up at 6:30 every morning to train. Running marathons was one of her hobbies. Sunday morning, however, Cindy would get plenty of exercise racing to complete last-minute chores in time to catch the noon MarkAir flight to Barrow. Kevin had his own errands. He worried about what Cindy would eat in the remote whaling village, but for different reasons. He knew that if her culinary selection was limited to an assortment of marine mammals, Cindy would die of starvation.

Cindy liked to tell people she ate only health foods. Kevin knew that wasn't exactly true. She secretly craved preservatives, cholesterol, and lots of sugar. Kevin wanted to avoid another argument about Cindy's diet. Shortly after she left the house to buy a hat, gloves, and boots, he slipped out to quickly buy some foods she might eat. Fruits, vegetables, and high-energy peanut and raisin trail mix would be Kevin's final present to Cindy as he kissed her good-bye at the gate.

Like most MarkAir flights to Barrow that weekend, reporters filled Cindy's plane. And, like all MarkAir flights to Barrow, this one made an intermediate stop in Fairbanks. An hour by jet north of Anchorage, Alaska's second largest city marked the northern end of the state's limited road system and the completion of slightly less than a third of the journey to Barrow.

Walking around the world's most northerly modern airport terminal, Cindy figured she'd parlay the twenty-five-minute layover into her last meal before descending into the dreaded netherworld of Barrow. Seeing a Mexican food stand across the concourse, she briskly walked over, looked at the menu, and ordered a taco salad. Surely, she thought, this would be her last chance to indulge in her favorite cuisine.

While Cindy waited in Fairbanks for her flight to continue onto Barrow, Ben Odom and Pete Leathard were flying high above the Alaskan frontier in one of ARCO's executive jets. VECO's North Slope operation had been hard at work. En route to Prudhoe, Leathard talked regularly by phone with Marvin King, VECO's ground operations manager. King and his men had spent the whole night out in the minus thirty degrees temperatures. First, they had to determine whether the barge would even work. Then they tried to free the 185 tons of sunken barge from its frozen berth at ARCO's East Dock.

King told Leathard he could make the barge seaworthy, but he needed the one thing Leathard didn't have: time. He knew the boss was on his way and assured him he would keep the operation fully staffed until the job was done. Using chain saws, ice axes, and picks, King and his dozens of men worked feverish shifts in the bitter cold, chopping, sawing, and chipping away four years of impregnable Arctic ice that had built up around the barge's hull. These hardy men were specially trained to perform manual labor in the world's most hostile climate.

At up to $100,000 a year, they were among the highest paid laborers in the world.

Each man knew it was foolish to measure the tasks he performed in the Arctic by what he could accomplish under normal conditions. Here, the rules were different. Man and his vast powers were severely diminished. The Arctic was the last place on earth where nature defied his mastery. If a white man wanted to call the Arctic home, he either accepted the limits of his adopted habitat or he died. A man could endure such taxing elements only so long. The two VECO crews working in shifts in the brutal cold arrived at the same predetermined fate: quick and inexorable exhaustion. After only a few minutes, even the ablest could work no longer. The battered men took sanctuary in a prefabricated shed that was supposed to provide the wearied laborers with warmth and nourishment.

The doughnuts, coffee, and cigarettes were about as nourishing as the forty-degree temperatures were warm. Not unlike the creatures they were spending themselves to free, the men entered the shed bewildered by their own numbness and pain. Their lungs were singed by the bitter cold. They doubled over coughing, gasping for breath.

The shed's only sounds came from the footsteps and wheezes of the exhausted men. They didn't say a word. Their jaws felt frozen. Moving their frozen joints even slightly hurt. By the time their jaws thawed enough to allow recognizable speech, it was time to get back to work. On their way out, the mildly rejuvenated workers were met and replaced by the other beleaguered crew struggling to escape the cold. At great personal peril, VECO's Arctic construction workers toiled through the night to pry loose an ungainly device that would attempt to free three whales stranded 270 miles away.

By now, all four American television networks were either in Barrow or had crews on the way. Tens of millions of Americans who were already following the story were anxious for action. The whim of a few Outside news executives had transformed a routine gray whale stranding into a serious rescue campaign. Now, for the first time since they were discovered eight days before, a tangible step was finally being taken to free the three whales. But, ironically, none of the media that generated the interest to justify the rescue could find a way to get to Prudhoe Bay in time to cover the rescue's first real story. It would not be the last time the TV reporters missed the real story.

Don Oliver and his NBC crew were the first reporters on the scene. Frantic for a way to get there, producer Jerry Hansen rented the Arctic's only available helicopter at the going rate of six thousand dollars per day. But by the time they arrived, it was too late. Most of VECO's backbreaking work was already done. The first footage to appear on American television showed the hoverbarge seemingly free of ice. Since no one could compare that event against what the barge looked like frozen and buried, the American people would never know how much the VECO crews sacrificed and accomplished.

Billy Bob Allen appreciated his men's effort. “There is no substitute for it,” he preached. His men believed him because he never let them forget that he was one of them. At first, Allen told friends he wanted to help the whales because “it seemed like the right thing to do.” For the next two weeks, Bill Allen and the company he built concentrated on virtually nothing else. Pending business was shelved while anxious executives throughout the industry wondered why Allen and his people were so passionately committed to something that had nothing to do with helping clients pump oil. And besides, wasn't everyone in the oil business heartless and greedy?

Allen worked well into Saturday evening in his Anchorage office familiarizing himself with the operation's evolving details. The first crisis occurred when Marvin King called from the workers shed out at the East Dock. He told Allen that the ice removal was going better than planned but his men were exhausted.

“Rest 'em up,” Billy Bob answered. “We can't have none of them dropping dead on us.” King told Allen there were many things left to do before the barge would be ready, not the least of which included the removal of six hundred tons of ice entombing the vessel. The ice could only be cleared by hand. King didn't know what to do first. Colonel Carroll and his special National Guard unit were due to arrive in Prudhoe late the next morning. Allen told King to combine whatever tasks he could. Any tests that didn't require the barge to be ice free should be performed as soon as possible. It didn't take long for King to figure out his boss was right.

King had just started to put the engines through their paces, before he discovered his first problem. One of the turbochargers which gave the barge enough power to hover above the surface of the ice was dead. Allen thought finding a replacement would be damned near impossible. His hoverbarge was the only one like it in the world. Allen called the barge's Japanese manufacturer to see whether they might find a replacement. When he told them he needed it immediately to help save three stranded whales, they thought their cowboy client had lost his mind.

Two hours later, Allen had received no response. He lost his patience. It was early Sunday morning Tokyo time when he called the president of Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding Co. Fifteen minutes later, Mitsui's equipment network located a machine in Long Beach, California, that could be airlifted to Anchorage. The amorphous effort to save the whales was still a marginal operation. Any minor obstacle could have provided a perfect excuse for any party to back out, leaving the whales to their fate. Since the hoverbarge was the rescue's only option, the inability to find a turbocharger would have been sufficient grounds for VECO to abort the rescue.

Learning he would need to charter a special cargo aircraft to fly the turbocharger to Prudhoe, Allen pressed both his thumbs firmly against the side of his balding head in a fruitless attempt to ward off the headache he invariably got whenever he ran into major unexpected expenses. The smallest plane that could fit the huge engine was the C-130 transport, a military mainstay. If the Hercules, as the C-130 was known, could transport troops and tanks in and out of trouble spots around the world, Allen knew it could get his turbocharger safely to Prudhoe.

Five minutes had passed since the turbocharger crisis was resolved when King called Allen again with still another disaster. No one in Prudhoe knew how to operate the hoverbarge. Only one man at VECO had operated the ice crusher and now Allen had to try to find him. No one at VECO had heard a word from barge captain Brad Stocking since the billion-dollar exploratory well at Mukluk Island turned up dry in 1984. Using electronic databases listing the whereabouts of oil construction sites and their employees, Pete Leathard initiated a worldwide manhunt to locate the elusive captain. After three days of intensive search, VECO gave up. Brad Stocking was never found.

Bill Allen called around the state to find out what could pull a 185-ton craft from Prudhoe to Barrow. The answer he got most frequently was uniquely Alaskan: the “Cat train.”

Cat trains were Caterpillar tractors that resupplied remote inland villages during the nine months of winter, by using the surface of Alaska's frozen rivers as its roadway. In a state with no roads, the rivers were the resupply lifeline for settlements and homesteaders that otherwise could not be reached. Long snow sleds crammed with supplies and provisions were attached to heavy Caterpillar earth movers fitted with extra-wide tank treads to grip the ice and pull their cargo across the surface of frozen rivers.

But the size, weight, and destination of Bill Allen's icebreaking hoverbarge ruled out the Cat train almost as soon as it was mentioned. Even if there was a wide-enough river close by to pull it along, the barge was much too big and heavy to be towed by a Caterpillar. The nearest river leading toward Barrow was sixty-five miles west of Prudhoe and its mouth had not completely frozen. In the event Colonel Carroll and his CH-54 Skycrane helicopter could not do the job, Cindy Lowry would have to find some other way to save her whales.

Colonel Carroll had plans for that Saturday night and he was not going to cancel them just because he had to lead a mission to the Arctic early the next morning. The forty-year old was filled with boundless energy. He capered about Anchorage reveling in temperate R&R until well after 0300 hours. He waited to get home before indulging in his one noticeable vice: coffee. He drank the day's final cup, reached into his fastidiously kept closet, and pulled out a couple pairs of Army-issued long johns and other cold weather gear he figured he would need for the two-day trip “up to the Slope.” He neatly packed it all into a large green canvas duffel bag. Carroll quickly fell asleep.

When his alarm rang forty-five minutes later, the colonel woke up rejuvenated. He leapt out of bed and poured himself the day's “first cup” from the still fresh pot of coffee he made less than an hour earlier. He showered, shaved, and quickly cleaned up what little mess he made and left the house. He met up with his crew of six and boarded the Alaska National Guard's C-12 King Air executive turboprop for the five hour flight to Barrow. Before pulling the hatch closed behind him, Carroll ordered the two Skycranes moved out of their Elmendorf Air Force Base hangar to be readied for a quick sendoff.

After a short nap, Carroll contorted his athletic frame around in his front-row seat to pass back sweet rolls and coffee while briefing his men about Operation Breakout. Knowing he was about to enter the fray of a developing national news event, Carroll brought along Mike Haller, the National Guard's public affairs officer to “handle” the media. Colonel Carroll told Haller his mission's purpose was to keep a competitive press from interfering too much with the rescue.

The best way to do that, Carroll said, was to befriend the media. Haller planned to hold regularly scheduled press conferences so the media could feel like they were getting all their questions answered. Carroll warned Haller to avoid giving the press the idea they were being manipulated. The minute that happened, the coverage of the National Guard could turn nasty. They knew that everyone would immediately seek to get on the barge. They discussed setting up and coordinating press pools so only one television crew, still photographer, and print reporter would be allowed access at a time. Any footage, pictures, and quotes taken by the pool reporters would be made available to every news agency.

Carroll's pilot checked with Barrow air traffic control to see if he could get clearance to do a flyover above the whale site. The colonel wanted to inspect the ice conditions from the air. Not having seen a trace of man for over three hours, the colonel was incredulous when the pilot told him that the air space around the site was restricted due to heavy traffic. “Heavy traffic?” Carroll mused.

Flying westward, they descended rapidly from their cruising altitude over the frozen coast of Elson Lagoon. The aircraft banked steeply to the right, pinning Carroll and the crew deeper into their seats. In the split second it took the speeding plane to cross the narrow sandspit, they flew directly over the whales. From two thousand feet in the air, the dozen or so people huddled around the small breathing holes looked like misplaced ants against a uniform, motionless backdrop of snowy white.