The Last Run (28 page)

Satellite imagery showed that on January 28, a huge low-pressure system centered south of the Aleutians had spun off several small storms. These storms had merged and formed one deep
bomb —a
tightly packed, cyclonic storm with powerful gusts at its edges. The bomb had tracked south and east and then, on the twenty-ninth, had swung north. Moving toward the gulf, it was fed by ocean winds and swells that had originated as far south as Oregon. Such a long fetch —the distance over which wind could blow to generate swells—was troubling; the swells had plenty of room to grow in, and time and space to energize the seas.

It was a tough call. Rutz had conflicting weather information, two equally possible EPIRB positions and no information on the vessel’s port of call, its crew or its owner. Screw it, he said to himself. I’m playing it safe.

At 7:13 P.M., he issued an Urgent Marine Information Broadcast.

Three minutes passed, then five, then ten. There was no response. Rutz reached for the phone and dialed Air Station Sitka, the emergency number.

R
ight as the kid hit the jumper and the crowd went bananas, his pager went off.

Betty Jo turned to him.

“Ted?”

“It’s all right,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “Just one of my pilots.” He read the message and the time it was sent: 7:41 P.M. “I’ll be right back.”

He made his way down the bleachers through the crowd and out to the hallway. Turning on his cell phone, he walked over to an outside door to get reception and dialed. He heard Dave Durham’s voice.

“It’s Captain LeFeuvre, Dave,” he said. “I just got your page. What’s going on?”

“Captain, the station got an unregistered 406 EPIRB alert about ten minutes ago.”

“Where?”

“We’re not sure yet, sir. It seems that mission control got a fifty-fifty split on the first satellite deposit. One of the solutions is eight hundred miles out, near the Aleutians. The other is a hundred and fifty miles northwest of here —the Fairweather Grounds. We figured we’d launch on the grounds, being that it’s closer.”

“Smart,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “Are there people in the water?”

“We don’t know.”

“Weather?”

“Well, not too bad. Observation tower here is saying thirty-knot winds and, I think, twenty-foot seas. Aviation weather is calling for lots of
snain.”

“Who’s flying?”

“Lieutenant Adickes and Lieutenant Molthen, sir. They’re taking a flight mechanic and a swimmer—Witherspoon and Sansone, I think.”

“How are the helicopters?”

“All three birds are in good shape. Adickes is going to use the 6018.”

“Good,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “Tell them to go ahead. You’re at home?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you going in?”

“Right now.”

There was something about the way Durham had said it that made the back of Ted LeFeuvre’s neck prickle. He sat down next to Betty Jo. There was a time-out on the court.

“What’s going on?” she asked him.

“We just got an EPIRB signal.”

“What’s that?”

“A distress call from a ship. We’re launching a helicopter right now to investigate.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“It’s probably nothing.”

The teams came back out on the court and play resumed. It was a close game. Betty Jo hollered and yelled when her son scored. The crowd was very loud. A big groan went up each time Sitka missed a shot and a thunder of applause when the home team scored. Ted almost didn’t hear his pager go off again. He looked at the message and the time, 8:02 P.M.

“I’ll be right back,” he told Betty Jo.

Out in the hallway he dialed the number for the ops center at the air station. He heard Dave Durham’s voice.

“Sorry to bother you again, Captain,” Durham said.

“Not at all. What’s the latest?”

“Well,” Durham said, “Bill Adickes launched ten minutes ago and he’s asking for cover.”

“Bill Adickes?”

“Yes, sir.”

Adickes wasn’t the kind of guy who asked for cover. Dan Molthen didn’t either. Together, those two guys had close to five thousand hours in the H-60. They didn’t rattle. Why would they want an escort plane?

“Well,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “let’s get them cover.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Call up Kodiak.”

Air Station Kodiak had C-130 turboprops on the ready. It would take roughly forty-five minutes to launch one, Ted LeFeuvre thought, and another two and a half hours for the plane to make the Fairweather Grounds.

“Actually, Captain,” Durham said, “we just got off the phone with Kodiak. They said they’re having a real bad snowstorm.”

“Great.”

“There was an avalanche and snow is blocking the road to the base. The ready crew is having a hard time getting in. The runway’s buried, too. They’re digging out but it’s hard to say when they’ll get a plane up.”

Ted LeFeuvre said, “Let’s launch our own, then. We can get there quicker. And anyway, it’s probably just going to be a false alarm.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll be back home before they ever get on scene.”

“I’m going to put together a crew,” Durham said. “We’ll just…”

The call was breaking up.

“Repeat that,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “Dave, say again?”

“… won’t take too…”

“Repeat that. Hello?
Hello?”

Durham’s voice returned. “Captain,” he said, “I was just saying that I’ll put together a crew and get airborne right away.”

“Negative,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “Assemble a crew but hold on deck and wait to see how things go. With the tailwind, you guys can get out there quick. If they still want cover later, then you’ll launch and give them cover.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep me posted.”

He hung up and went back in the gym. He climbed back up through the crowd. Betty Jo smiled at him.

“Everything okay?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Ted?”

Ted LeFeuvre was looking in the direction of the court but it was as though he wasn’t seeing it.

“Ted, if you need to leave —”

“No, no. Not yet.”

The game was very close. The lead changed hands over and over, and the crowd was screaming with every shot, every rebound. Ted LeFeuvre was only half aware. His eyes had a stony look. He stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m calling the station again.”

The ops phone rang once when Durham picked up. “Okay, Dave,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “what’s the latest?”

“I was just going to call you, Captain. Kodiak has been unable to launch. Our 6018 is en route. But, sir, on their last call they reported wind speeds greater than seventy knots.”

“Seventy
knots?”

“Yes, sir.”

Ted LeFeuvre felt like he’d been hit in the abdomen with a club.

“Oh.”

“You know, sir,” Durham said, “I’ve got Russ Zullick here to fly with me, and we’ve got a flight mech and a rescue swimmer ready to go. Rather than wait, I’d like to launch now.”

Seventy knots, Ted LeFeuvre was thinking. That meant the wind was blowing over 90 mph. Anything above 64 mph was considered hurricane force. What were those crewmen flying into?

“Captain?”

“Yes, yes. Go ahead, Dave. Get going.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“No, thank
you.”

Ted LeFeuvre hurried back inside the gym and pushed his way through the crowd and up into the bleachers.

“Listen,” he said to Betty Jo. “I need to go to the station. I could take you home now or you can get a ride with Angelina.” Angelina was Betty Jo’s daughter.

“What’s wrong?”

“We’re launching a second crew.”

“Oh,” she said. “We better go, then.”

Ted LeFeuvre dropped off Betty Jo and one of her friends and then drove straight to the air station. As he swung the Cherokee into the parking lot he noticed a tow tractor pulling an H-60 out of the near runway. The rotor blades were flapping up and down in the wind.

Throwing open the side-entrance door, he hustled up the stairway and down the hall to the operations and radio center. Behind the desk, a man in a flight suit sat hunched over, talking on the phone.

“Yogi?” Ted LeFeuvre said.

Guy Pearce, one of his pilots, hung up the phone and turned around. Sitting across from Pearce was a female storekeeper who normally worked the ops desk at night. She was on the high-frequency radio.

“Yogi,” Ted LeFeuvre repeated, “what are you doing here?”

“Mr. Durham called me in, sir,” Pearce said. “He asked me to handle the desk tonight.”

“Oh,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “What’s the latest?”

A second helicopter, the 6029, was preparing for takeoff. Dave Durham was in the pilot’s seat. Russ Zullick was copilot. Flight mechanic Chris Windnagle and rescue swimmer A. J. Thompson were going along for the ride. A half hour earlier, District 17 headquarters had confirmed that the distress signal was originating from the Fairweather Grounds, latitude 58°13.8’ north, longitude 138°19.4’ west. Sitka was reporting a two-thousand-foot cloud cover, twenty- to thirty-knot winds and visibility of six miles.

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Ted LeFeuvre said.

“No,” Pearce said. “But now listen to what the first helicopter crew said.”

Outside of Sitka Sound, Adickes had reported sustained winds of seventy-five knots. Visibility was a few hundred yards in blowing hail, snow and sleet. Over the ocean the cloud ceiling was 350 feet; the atmospheric freezing level was below 800 feet.

“Is that what he said?”

“That’s what he said.”

Nobody will be able to fly over the storm, Ted LeFeuvre thought. Helicopters couldn’t last long above the freezing level. The Jayhawk had a deicer, but it only worked on the windscreen and rotors. Any more than a few minutes above the freezing level and the Jayhawk would load up with ice and drop like a Popsicle from the sky.

“All right,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “When was the last time we heard from Adickes?”

Pearce paused.

“His 2045 radio guard.”

“What?”

“Eight forty-five, sir.”

“That’s an hour ago.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ted LeFeuvre could feel his voice rising. “Get Juneau on the phone.
Now.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want to know what’s going on out there.”

Coast Guard aircraft were required to keep a radio guard every fifteen minutes. That was one of the rescue swimmer’s in-flight jobs—to keep radio contact with the Rescue Coordination Center in Juneau. But they hadn’t. Why not? When an aircraft missed two consecutive guards, it was procedure for Juneau to alert the launch station. Why hadn’t Juneau done that?

Pearce hung up the phone.

“Captain?”

“Yes?”

“The last time Juneau heard from the 6018 was at 2045. The helicopter was weak transmitting. Kodiak was talking to them for a while but lost them.”

Ted LeFeuvre looked at the wall clock. It was almost ten minutes to ten.

“When did they take off?”

“Twenty hundred hours,” Pearce said.

“And we haven’t heard from them since…?”

“Twenty forty-five. That was the last report Juneau had from the 6018. They missed their nine o’clock guard, their nine-fifteen, their nine-thirty and their nine forty-five.”

Oh, my, Ted LeFeuvre said to himself. Then, to Pearce: “You launch Kodiak. You get Kodiak on the phone and tell them we want a plane overhead. I don’t care
how
long it takes them.”

“Yes, sir.”

All right. There it was. A bird was missing. It had lost comms an hour ago. It was flying through whiteout at night 150 miles offshore with a low ceiling and freezing level. In seventy-five-knot winds. Without comms. And I was watching kids throwing a basketball in a hoop.

“You get through yet?”

“I’m on hold, sir.”

It could be worse. Okay, one of your birds has lost comms near the Fairweather Grounds. Stay cool. Think. That area is notorious for poor HF radio transmission and reception. It has always sucked in radio waves. It’s known as a “dead spot.” Could they have gone down? Don’t you dare think that. That is one thing you better not think about. But this could be something bad. Like what happened last summer in Eureka when that H-60 flew straight into the water. Sank like a crab pot. When they pulled it up from two thousand feet of water, they found all four airmen still in their safety straps.

All right, what are you going to do now? Keep thinking ahead. You were always good at that. So do that. Our second helicopter is taking off right now. Good. Dave Durham is flying it. He’s one of the best pilots you’ve got. And Russ Zullick is a darned good one, too. Think about them. Think about your next move. How many pilots have you got left? Adickes, Molthen, Durham, Zullick are already flying. Taylor, Buchanan, Gebele and Bellatty are out of town. That’s eight pilots right there. What about Jack Newby? No, he and his wife had a dinner party and he’s been drinking. Let’s see. Guy Pearce is here. Who else have we got?

“Captain?”

“Yeah?”

“Kodiak says they still haven’t gotten a plane out yet. They got hit by a blizzard and an avalanche of snow—”

“I know all about that. Tell them to launch when they can.”

Turning, raising his voice as he spoke into the receiver, Pearce said:
“Launch when you can, then. Right.”

He hung up.

“Kodiak is working on it, Captain. They’ll launch as soon as a runway’s cleared.”

“They said that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “I guess that’s the best we can do.”

O
n the launchpad, wind speed was twenty-five knots. No sweat, Bill Adickes said to himself. This helicopter is a flying tank. She’ll handle twenty-five knots like a summer breeze. He noticed something on the dashboard.