Deadliest Sea (21 page)

But as the night wore on, the calls from the foundering ship became more and more desperate. The
Warrior
’s captain was already running his ship at full speed toward the sinking site when he got a frantic call. It was about 4:20
A.M
., and the
Ranger
had just lost power: “Hurry up! Hurry up! Get here as fast as you can. Now!”

Not long after, Scott heard the
Ranger
’s officers report that almost everyone was overboard—all but seven men. Some people hadn’t made it into the rafts. Exactly how many was unclear.

Everyone in the
Warrior
’s wheelhouse could listen in on the transmission between the sinking ship and the Coast Guard. They knew that additional help was on the way, but it wasn’t clear if it would come soon enough.

The
Warrior
was still an hour and a half away—fifteen or sixteen miles out—when Captain Scott spotted a blip on his radar screen.

Then, all of a sudden, the dot disappeared.

The
Ranger
was gone.

I
NSIDE THE NUMBER THREE LIFE RAFT
, everyone was quiet. Along with nine other men, David Hull was sitting in a shallow puddle of freezing water that had accumulated on the raft’s floor. The bottom part of his survival suit was flooded and he was cold. But his main concern had turned from his own life to the safety
of those who stayed longest on the sinking ship—especially Captain Pete. Pete was the first officer David had worked for when he signed up with the FCA several years before. He liked and respected the captain, who would often come down to the factory to help the greenhorns pack fish. David knew that, like the other officers, Captain Pete had considered it his duty to stay on the vessel until the very last minute.

There wasn’t much to say, and most of what the men were thinking didn’t seem worth saying out loud. On the other side of the raft from David, cook Eric Haynes was examining the rips in his gloves. They tore when he was trying to pull the raft back toward the ship on its painter line. He had rope burns on his hands and a bloodied thumb. Eric had to keep his fingers moving so they wouldn’t lock up from the cold. Every couple minutes, he pulled open his suit just below his chin and exhaled warm air inside. Outside, the seas seemed to be picking up. They know where we are, Eric thought. As long as we don’t flip over, the Coast Guard will be back for us.

The twelve people inside the
Ranger
’s number one life raft weren’t quite as lucky. Both rafts were the same make, designed for twenty people. Neither was overloaded. But the floor of the number one raft had filled with at least a foot of standing water. Though the people inside had tried, they couldn’t get the raft’s pump to work. One of the first men to reach the raft had ripped open the craft’s survival pack, and now the flares and other emergency tools were all soaked, most of them lost under the mass of limbs obscured in the murky water. No one had a radio, no one seemed to have a working light. Worst of all, many of the dozen people inside had succumbed to seasickness.

Among them was Gwen Rains. She had activated her personal locator beacon at least two hours before. Jay Vallee had set his off at the same time, and soon after, there’d been a SAT phone call
checking up on him. Gwen was in the wheelhouse the whole time, but there wasn’t a second phone call. If someone called for Jay’s beacon, Gwen wondered, why didn’t they call for hers? Had they not picked up her signal? Or did they assume they were together?

Gwen looked at the men on the other side of the raft. She didn’t know where Jay was now, but he certainly wasn’t here. After only four days on the
Ranger,
she barely knew the names of anyone in the raft with her. There was Rodney, the assistant engineer, and the ship’s steward. Most of the Japanese crew. The fish master wasn’t among them, though. The last she’d seen of him he was sitting in the wheelhouse with a cigarette in his mouth, his survival suit falling open around his waist.

Gwen studied her beacon. Had she activated it correctly? Was the green light supposed to be blinking or the red one? She tried to pry the hard plastic cover off, but she couldn’t get a good grip with her hands inside her suit’s neoprene gloves. Finally, she ripped the plastic off with her mouth—and took a chip out of her front tooth in the process.

And yet she still couldn’t tell if the PLB was working. One guy she didn’t know came over from the far side of the raft and tried to help her. He took the beacon and looked it over. Everyone else was ignoring her. No one was talking, and many of the men had their eyes closed. The raft was pitching and jolting in the swells. It was already floating so low with all the seawater inside. What if the raft capsizes, Gwen worried. She had lost her strobe light while abandoning ship. It was on and blinking when she was on the
Ranger
’s deck. But once she was in the water, it was gone. The beacon might save her life. It was the best signaling device they had besides the raft itself, which would be a small target in stormy conditions in the middle of the Bering Sea.

Gwen could feel all kinds of stuff sloshing against her in the water. She knew that the survival pack in the raft would have
had food rations and water, as well as a flashlight, an emergency blanket, and seasickness medication. There were plenty of people who could have used it. Gwen was violently seasick, and she wasn’t the only one. There was no choice but to throw up straight into the life raft’s standing water. It was humiliating, but she’d never felt so ill in her entire life. At one point, half the people in the raft were vomiting into the freezing, foot-deep water.

In the distance, Gwen could hear what sounded like the buzz of a helicopter. She guessed they’d focus on helping the men in the water first. Gwen just hoped they saw her raft as well.

I
NSIDE THE
W
ARRIOR
’
S WHEELHOUSE
, Scott Krey and Raymond Falante were working the radios. They’d been on with the Coast Guard cutter
Munro,
the Communications Station in Kodiak, and the pilot on board the helicopter that had taken off from St. Paul Island.

“Have you heard anything about my brother?” Ed Cook asked Captain Scott.

He hadn’t, Scott told his chief. All he knew was that some guys were in life rafts. Others weren’t.

Ed stared at the sea. It was so rough out, so cold. Danny’s out there somewhere, he thought. He’s out there in that pitch black night.

Ed was listening in as Captain Scott talked to one of the FCA’s port engineers on the SAT phone: “We got twenty people in the water,” Scott reported. “A few people are in the raft. The helicopter’s on scene right now.”

It’s damn good luck that bird was up in St. Paul for crab season, Ed thought. Just really good luck.

Scott was still on the phone when Jayhawk Aircraft Commander Brian McLaughlin broke in over the VHF right around 6:00
A.M
.

“
Warrior,
Coast Guard copter 6007. Can you give me your present position, sir?”

“Hang on, I gotta go,” Scott told the company engineer as he put down the phone and picked up the VHF.

“My position: 5, 3 degrees, 5, 3.7 north. 1, 6, 9 degrees, 4, 8.8 minutes west,” the captain relayed.

“Roger, Captain. Copy 5, 3, 5, 3.7. 1, 6, 9, 4, 8.8. Is that right?”

“That’s roger.”

There was a long pause, and then the 60 aircraft commander hailed the
Warrior
once again.

“
Alaska Warrior,
Rescue 6007.”

“
Alaska Warrior,
” Scott responded.

“All right Captain, we’re headed toward you,” McLaughlin said. “How’s your ship riding right now?”

“It’s riding pretty good, pretty good.”

“Okay, we’re gonna drop some people off. We’ve got, I believe, thirteen on board right now. We’re gonna have to get them off as quickly as possible,” McLaughlin told the captain.

In the twenty years that he’d been fishing in Alaska, Captain Scott had seen plenty of injured crewmen airlifted off fishing boats by the Coast Guard. This would be trickier, but if the pilot thought it would work, it was worth a try.

“I’m going to need your deckhands to help us out a lot,” McLaughlin told the
Warrior
’s captain. “A lot of these people are nonresponsive, and/or holding on to the basket when we get them in there. You may have to be a little rough with them, but we need you to get them out of the basket as quickly as possible, so we can get them out and get back to the people out here. Out, copy?”

“Roger,” Scott answered. “Copy.”

If the chopper was dropping guys on their deck, the crew
would need instructions, Ed knew. They would need to know that the basket had to touch the deck before they grabbed onto it. Otherwise, they could get a terrible shock from all the static buildup from the copter’s rotors.

“Captain, you want me to carry a message back for ya?” Ed asked.

“Tell them some of them are nonresponsive,” Scott said. “The basket drops, drag ’em up.
Drag ’em up
. Don’t worry about hurting them, get them out of there.”

From inside the
Warrior
’s wheelhouse, the men could hear the rotors approaching.

“There he is,” Ed said, just before McLaughlin’s voice broke through again on the VHF radio.

“
Alaska Warrior,
Coast Guard 6007. Do you think you’ll be able to run downswell? Would your ride be any better at that point?”

“Yes it would,” Scott said. “I can turn.”

“All right, if you could run it downswell that’d probably be better for us as well to get on top of you.”

The wind and waves were coming from the northeast. Now Captain Scott steered the
Warrior
toward the southwest.

“How about our speed?” the captain asked.

“Pretty much keep it at clutch speed. As long as you have steerage, as long as you have control, you can’t be too slow for us….”

I
T WAS
6:10
A.M
.
AS THE
J
AYHAWK
approached the
Warrior
’s port side. The clap of the rotors grew to a thunderous roar as the machine settled into a hover over the trawler’s stern. Outside, it was still spitting snow and blowing hard.

When the door to the helicopter slid open, the crew on the
Warrior
’s trawl deck could make out a mass of red inside. They watched as the metal basket dropped out of the cabin, and slowly descended toward them with Evan Holmes inside.

He was terrified.

The
Ranger
’s factory manager had been the last person the Jayhawk had lifted out of the water. The cabin was already so crowded that flight mechanic Rob DeBolt told Evan to stay right inside the basket. There was nowhere else for him to sit.

Evan had been shocked at how packed the chopper was; he didn’t know a helicopter could hold that many people. With all the noise, he couldn’t hear what was going on. But he knew he was the last one. He’d only been in the Jayhawk for a couple minutes when DeBolt leaned over and yelled in his ear: “Hey, we’re going to drop you to the
Warrior,
” the Coastie told him. “Stay in the basket. Hold on.”

“What?” Evan said. “No! Put somebody else first.” He turned, and yelled to one of his crewmates. “You go! Tell me how it works out,” he tried to joke.

But it was obvious to Evan that it wasn’t up to him. He was going first.

As he was lifted out of the cabin, Evan could see the
Warrior
’s huge trawl net strewn out over the deck. There were buoys everywhere. The gantry seemed way too close as the two-hundred-foot ship pitched and rolled in the waves. Even the crew on the ship’s deck looked like they were barely holding on. Evan could see a few of their faces. He knew some of the guys. There was a big Samoan dude he liked. Oh, man, I hope he catches me. I do not want to smack the boat, Evan thought.

Evan cowered inside as the basket swung like a pendulum above the icy deck. He hugged his arms around his legs, trying to keep fully within the metal box. Jesus Christ, I just had my
life saved, and now I’m gonna die getting banged against the goddamned
Warrior,
he thought.

The deck grew steadily closer. On the flight to the
Warrior,
some of the
Ranger
’s crew members felt good enough to joke around a little in the back of the helo. “They’ll probably make us work,” someone had said. Evan didn’t doubt it. He didn’t want to get on the
Warrior
. He was halfway down when all of a sudden the basket started rising again. They were bringing him back up, Evan realized with relief. They’d changed their minds.

Evan reached the cabin door, and DeBolt steadied the basket against the edge.

Then, horribly, he was going back down. They were trying again. Evan closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see it coming; there was so much rigging, so much gear. He could hit the ship, the wheelhouse, one of the boat’s sharp, pointy antennas. The basket was spinning; he was spinning. He was scared shitless. There was water coming from all directions. It was so windy, Evan couldn’t tell if it was raining or if water was just being blown up from the ocean or down from the helicopter. The rotor wash was so powerful he couldn’t look up.

I’m more likely to get killed right now than I was back in the water, Evan thought. This seemed like a bad idea.

Then, suddenly he was moving back toward the chopper. DeBolt steadied the basket just below the open door while the pilots repositioned the helo over the front of the ship. Evan saw the
Warrior
’s crew running toward the bow.

Evan looked up toward the pilots. Through the aircraft window, he could see that one of them was shaking his head and slicing his hand across his throat. Moments later, the basket was pulled back into the cabin.

“Don’t do that again!” Evan shouted to the flight mech as soon as he was inside.

“Don’t worry, man,” DeBolt yelled back. “It’s not going to work.”