Deadliest Sea (23 page)

We don’t have that much time, Schmitz thought.

In the back of the helo, Musgrave and Heller were thinking the same thing: the basket. With the metal rescue basket, they’d be able to raise the hypothermic fishermen in a seated position and minimize the risk of heart failure. The basket would also be faster because there were no straps to secure. With his dry gloves on, Heller knew he wouldn’t have much mobility in his fingers. It’d be tough to fiddle with the buckles on the straps and the clip on the hoist. With the basket, none of that would be a problem.

Heller had been on two long patrols since his arrival in Kodiak’s ALPAT shop two years before, but he’d never launched in conditions like this. Back on the ship, Aircraft Commander Schmitz had pulled the swimmer aside. This would be a “load
and go” mission. It was clear people were in the water. Hopefully most were in life rafts, and it was likely they’d be lifting people from rafts up to the helo. There’d almost certainly be more people than they could take in one trip.

“If it’s all right, I may want to leave you in a raft out there,” the veteran pilot had said to the twenty-three-year-old swimmer.

Heller was ready to do whatever was necessary. He went back to his rack and bundled up in everything he had. He knew that the more layers he wore under his dry suit, the less dexterity he’d have in the water. But it was cold, and there was a good chance he could be in the Bering for hours. The tradeoff was clear. His first layer was long underwear made of Nomex fleece, similar to Polar fleece, but with fire retardant built in. Over the long johns, the swimmer wore another pair of fleece pants, two more shirts, a fleece unitard—a “uni” the Coasties called it—and then a heavy coat and wool socks. Last, he layered on his orange dry suit and his neoprene and rubber boots. Depending on the situation, he might have chosen wet gloves. Those form-fitting gloves offer more dexterity—but less warmth. But this morning he couldn’t risk frozen fingers. He grabbed the dry gloves. Limited mobility would be better than none.

Like rescue swimmer O’Brien Starr-Hollow, Heller had landed in Kodiak on his first assignment as a rescue swimmer. Historically it was rare to end up in Kodiak for your first billet as a swimmer, and even rarer to end up in Alaska Patrol, the ALPAT shop. Heller figured maybe the guy doing the assigning that month didn’t know the guidelines. In any case, it’d worked out well for him. He liked Alaska. He’d grown up in Wyoming in a Navy family, graduated high school in 2003, and joined the Coast Guard the following December. All his life, Heller had been interested in aviation. His dad worked for the Wyoming Bureau of Land Management as a range conservationist. He
dealt a lot with helicopters, helping to manage the aviation side of wildland firefighting. Heller researched the Coast Guard’s three aviation rates, and Aviation Survival Technician—AST, or rescue swimmer—sounded like the most fun.

He went through boot camp, made it to A School a couple years in, and failed out two weeks later. It was the “rear release” test that got him. It’s a drill meant to prepare the swimmer for managing a panicking survivor. An instructor grabs hold of the swimmer from behind, and the swimmer has to take him underwater, wrestle him off, and come up with the instructor in tow.

Heller didn’t know why he failed. He’d done the rear release perfectly in training several times. But each time it counted, he couldn’t pull it off. He was one of the five of ten in his original class who didn’t make it through the course. If Heller had raised his hand and said “I quit,” there would’ve been no second chance. But if a student is injured or just has trouble with a specific skill, he or she may be permitted to try again.

Heller spent the rest of the fall of 2005 in the airman program in Elizabeth City. He prepared for two more months—more physical training (“PT” as the military calls exercise programs), more pool time. His next class started with nine students. Four months later, seven graduated, Heller among them. After A School, Heller spent three weeks at EMT school in Petaluma, California, and then went up to Kodiak. He’d been there since the spring of 2006 and had a little apartment in town. He’d made lots of friends and gotten in tons of snowboarding on Pyramid Mountain. He’d been involved in a couple of SAR cases.

His first was a medevac—a slip-and-fall victim off an 850-foot container ship. They flew out, Heller was hoisted down to the ship and put the injured crewman on a litter. They hoisted him up and flew him to Dutch Harbor. The whole mission took about an hour. A piece of cake. The next summer, Heller was
deployed to Cordova and ended up on another medevac. It was a four-wheeler accident on a remote beach. A kid was getting towed on a sled behind an ATV (all-terrain vehicle) and was tossed off. The Coasties airlifted the kid and brought him back to Cordova for medical treatment.

Heller had only been in the water on a real case one time. Schmitz had been one of the pilots on that case, too. It was a small fishing boat, just around thirty feet. The vessel got too close to shore, got caught in the breakers, and ended up capsizing. The helicopter crew found it at around midnight, lying on its side inside the surf zone, getting knocked around by the waves. The pilots landed the helo on the beach and Heller waded out to the boat. He swam around, looking, but there was no one there to save. The fisherman’s body eventually washed up on a nearby island. Investigators guessed he’d fallen off the boat before it even got caught up in the surf. The Coast Guard had been too late; there hadn’t even been a chance to help him.

S
CHMITZ AND HIS CREW WERE
about three miles out from the scene when they spotted the strobes. There were about ten of them, flashing on and off across almost a square mile of ocean. As they got closer, Gedemer saw that the two brightest lights came from the life rafts.

“Let’s concentrate on the people as far away from the others as we can,” Schmitz said.

He could see three lights to the northwest that were off on their own. Those are probably the people who’ve been in the water the longest, Schmitz thought. That’s where we’ll begin. The pilots brought the 65 into a hover over a single strobe while flight mechanic Al Musgrave attached the basket to the hoist’s talon hook, and motioned for Heller to climb in.

“Basket at the door,” Musgrave said as he contracted the cable to pull the basket from the floor of the aircraft up and out of the helo. “Basket going down.” Within seconds, the compartment hit the swells below. Heller climbed out and swam toward the fisherman alone in the ocean.

“How’re you doing?” Heller yelled as he grabbed on to the man.

“Cold as fuck!” the fisherman screamed back.

All right, Heller thought. This one was probably going to be okay.

The swimmer had a small green chemical light attached to his mask, similar to the glow sticks sold to kids at country fairs. In dark conditions, it was common to use the light in place of simple hand signals to indicate ready for pickup. Heller pulled the light off his mask and waved it above his head to signal to Musgrave to drop the basket. It took just a couple of minutes for Heller to load the fisherman in and to give Musgrave the thumbs-up to raise the compartment.

As the flight mech began the hoist, Heller hung on to the bottom of the metal basket, helping to steady it and center it under the aircraft as the lift began. Once he’d been pulled a few feet clear of the water, Heller dropped back to the sea and watched the basket rise another fifty feet to the open door. Musgrave pulled it inside and dumped it sideways so the fisherman could crawl out. Then he sent the basket back down for Heller.

The rescue swimmer climbed in, the flight mech raised him up, and they moved on to the next light with the basket steadied right outside the open helo door. It was just one hundred or so yards away. That pickup went smoothly, as did the next rescue, but already the helo’s cabin seemed packed.

“I think I have room for one more,” Musgrave reported to the pilots.

“You’re gonna have to stack ’em up,” Schmitz said. “We’re going to stay on scene until we run out of gas, and we have to go back.”

The first man who’d been pulled into the helo had inexplicably started stripping off his survival suit. The second survivor followed his lead but got stuck. He was kicking, motioning for Musgrave to help him pull the suit off the lower half of his body. The flight mech thought it would be better if the fishermen just left their suits on, but there was no time to argue. He grabbed a webbing cutter from inside the doorframe and pulled it right through the zipper of the man’s suit. Musgrave sliced from the fisherman’s chest all the way down one leg, like he was opening up a fish. Then he threw the guy a wool blanket and directed both him and his buddy to the back of the cabin, where the rescue basket is normally stored.

The nose of the helo suddenly jerked upward.

“Holy shit! What’s going on back there?” Schmitz asked through the ICS.

“The guys are climbing in the back,” Musgrave answered.

“All right, put the next guy behind Greg, against the door,” Schmitz replied.

The men’s movement had affected the helo’s center of gravity, but at least they’d made room for more survivors. Heller was still in the basket against the open aircraft door as Schmitz circled around to the south toward a clump of lights in the water. The rescuers saw four men locked arm-in-arm, like a human chain. The two on the ends were waving their free hands. They looked like they were in pretty good shape.

Then Schmitz saw another strobe about a hundred yards away.

“There’s another survivor off the nose. Let’s go get him first,” the pilot said.

They only had room for a couple more people in the helicopter. Better to get those who were off on their own, Schmitz thought.

When they got closer, though, the pilot could see that it was two men tangled up in a bunch of netting and buoys with one strobe light between them. Jim Madruga was waving his arms; Byron Carrillo was just floating.

They came into a hover beside the net, and Musgrave placed Heller a good hundred feet from the debris pile. As the flight mech drew the empty basket back to the aircraft, Heller swam up to the net. Byron was lying limp in the water with the webbing all around him, his strobe light flickering in the darkness

“Take him first,” Jim yelled. “He’s in really bad shape.”

Byron was reaching for Heller, but the rescuer swam around behind him to get a safe grip. Heller wanted to avoid any struggle with the fisherman; controlling him from behind was the best way to avoid any problem. He asked Byron how he was doing.

With the rotor noise and the fisherman’s delirium, Heller couldn’t make out what he was saying. But the fact that he was speaking meant something.

Byron had his hand jammed under the net, and Heller struggled to pry open his fingers.

“You gotta let go!” Jim yelled. “You’ve got to let go!”

Finally, Heller broke Byron free, and began to drag him back out of the debris to a safe hoisting location.

In A School, Heller had been drilled in a method to clear rope, netting, or any other refuse from a submerged survivor. The swimmers were taught to go underwater, put their hands on the survivor’s spine, and then walk their hands all the way down the victim’s body, looking and feeling for debris. The technique was called a “spinal highway.”

Byron was clear, but as Heller dragged him away from the
net, he could feel a piece of line snagged on his own fin. Heller used one hand to steady Byron as he reached down to clear off the debris. As the swimmer was working to free himself, a wave knocked the fisherman facedown in the water. Heller looked up to see that Byron wasn’t righting himself.

Crap, Heller thought. This guy is so far gone he’s not even capable of keeping his own face out of the water.

He grabbed onto Byron again, pulled him upright and swam with him away from the wreckage.

When Heller had the fisherman away from the debris field, he signaled for the basket, which was brought down in seconds.

At the sight of it, Byron seemed to snap to attention.

He knows what the basket is, Heller thought. The basket is life. He tried to maneuver Byron inside. He pushed him into the basket, but then Byron would change his position and end up crossways, with feet coming out one end, head coming out the other. Heller yanked him out and tried again. When he got Byron out of the basket, though, the fisherman wouldn’t let go of the metal bars. Heller was struggling to get the compartment upright again while Byron was pulling it sideways into the waves, flailing in a panic. Heller fought with the man for at least ten minutes.

Heller knew that a hypothermic person often becomes irrational and can have symptoms similar to being drunk—loss of bodily control, slurred words, inability to focus, or pay attention to instructions. It wasn’t the man’s fault, but it was still frustrating. Every second it took to wrestle this one person was a second the rescuers could have used to pull someone else out of the water.

Up in the cabin, Musgrave was watching Heller struggle with the fisherman. Since he’d dropped the swimmer into the water fifteen minutes earlier, the flight mech had lost sight of Heller
three times. It was called “losing target,” and it was something the aircrew never wanted to happen. Disorienting snow squalls were blowing through the area and the waves were big and irregular. The swells kept pushing the swimmer and fisherman underneath the helicopter, which meant that Musgrave would have to instruct Schmitz to reposition the helo just so he could see what was going on.

Musgrave could hear the pilots talking about fuel. They were getting low, burning through their gas faster than usual. Hovering used up fuel a lot faster than forward flight did, especially with a full cabin like the one they had now.

Musgrave didn’t want to let out too much slack on the cable. He couldn’t risk getting it wrapped around someone’s leg or neck. He let out what he thought was necessary, but still the basket was jerked out of the water a few times. They’d been at it for so long.

Finally, Musgrave looked down to see Heller and Byron centered between swells. The basket was plumb beneath the helo. It looked like if he pulled the basket out of the water, the fisherman would drop down to the basket floor where he needed to be. Musgrave began the hoist.