Deadliest Sea (18 page)

J
ayhawk pilots Brian McLaughlin and Steve Bonn scanned the waves. It was almost 5:00
A.M
., but in Alaska in winter-time, 5:00
A.M
. still looks like the middle of the night. Attached to their flight helmets, the men wore night vision goggles, heavy metal optics that gave the entire ocean the neon green glow of an old-school video game.

Finally, the helicopter broke out from a snow squall, and there it was—a light. Then two, three…five. The men saw what looked like a poorly lit runway, a ragged string of strobes flashing on and off over a mile-long stretch of ocean. They scanned the seas for a ship. But there was no sign of the
Alaska Ranger
.

The scene was unlike anything the four Coast Guard rescuers had ever faced in the past. McLaughlin stared down at the ocean
one hundred feet below. To his left, to his right—everywhere he looked he saw more blinking strobes. There were at least two dozen individual lights spread about in the waves.

Oh my God, he thought. Where do we begin?

The men knew that the
Munro
was making its way toward the disaster site, racing on its turbine engines at close to 30 knots. Still, the ship was hours away. And given the sea conditions, McLaughlin thought the
Munro
most likely wouldn’t be able to launch its rescue helicopter.

His aircraft was it, the only hope for these people—at least for now. They just had to choose a spot and start getting people out of the water.

E
RIC
H
AYNES HAD BEEN INSIDE THE LIFE RAFT
for what seemed like an hour when he heard the rotors. The Coast Guard helicopter was overhead. Out the open flap of the life raft’s door, Eric noticed the full moon above. Thank God for that, Eric thought. It might help those guys in the water, and the Coasties here to save them.

The ten men in Eric’s raft had two handheld radios. Boatswain Chris Cossich had grabbed one of them right before he abandoned ship. Ever since he got situated in the raft, Chris had been repeating “Mayday, Mayday,” and waiting for a response. Now, he heard the Coast Guard calling over Channel 16.

“We see you,” McLaughlin told Chris. “Are you okay?”

“There’s ten of us,” Chris told the chopper pilot. “Some guys are cold, but we’re all right.”

“We’re going to start with the people in the water,” the Coastie said. “Bail out as much water as you can, stay close to each other, and try to stay warm. We’ll come back for you.”

B
ONN PULLED THE AIRCRAFT
over the first light the Jayhawk reached. It was one guy, alone, but alive. The whole crew could see him waving. The pilot flew a lap over the scene. There were people everywhere. Everyone they could see was in a survival suit, and no one looked obviously worse off than anyone else. Not that that was an easy judgment to make from the air.

The aircrew had the dewatering pump with them; many times in the past, a pump had been enough to solve a crisis at sea. But there was nothing left to save. DeBolt and Starr-Hollow pitched the pump out the aircraft door to make more room in the cabin. They had also brought along one of the Coast Guard’s mass casualty life rafts, which was made to hold twenty people, the same number as the
Alaska Ranger
’s. There was a long line attached; a sharp tug should activate a CO2 cylinder to inflate the raft. It was best to hold the line, kick the raft out the aircraft door, then yank the rope when the raft hit the water. DeBolt and Starr-Hollow punched the life raft out the door, but the line had a knot, and ripped out of Starr-Hollow’s hands before the raft hit the surface. They’d chosen to drop it in a spot where an inflated raft might float downwind to some of the survivors. But now they couldn’t see it; they had no idea if it had inflated or not. The raft was gone.

Bonn pointed the helicopter back toward the first guy they’d seen. He was the farthest downwind; he’d probably been in the water the longest, the pilots guessed. They’d get him first.

U
NTIL THIS WEEK AT
S
T
. P
AUL
, the men in the Jayhawk had never before flown together as a four-man team. Most had worked with each of the others at some point in the past, though. Just a couple months before, McLaughlin and Starr-Hollow were both on duty in Kodiak when they got a call from a fishing
boat that was taking on water with four people and a dog on board. When they got to the site in Shelikof Strait, on the far side of Kodiak Island from the air station, everyone had already abandoned ship into a life raft. Starr-Hollow descended into the water and brought them all up—the little dog, too. By the time everyone was safe inside the helicopter, the fishing boat had fully disappeared beneath the waves.

It had been daytime and the conditions were relatively calm, but it was still a big case. It’s rare to airlift so many people at once. McLaughlin had been grateful to have Starr-Hollow as his crew’s swimmer that day. All the rescue swimmers in Kodiak were in phenomenal shape, and obviously game for the job. If anything, McLaughlin had seen swimmers get pissed off when they flew on a case and then weren’t used. But even among an impressive crowd, Starr-Hollow’s intense calm and focus stood out. It was hard to imagine him running out of energy. If you were going to be out in the stink, O’Brien Starr-Hollow was the kind of guy you wanted to have out there with you.

The thirty-three-year-old rescue swimmer had requested Kodiak as his first assignment out of A School. He’d been there since 2003. He wasn’t the typical new swimmer. Most are in their early twenties, some as young as nineteen. Starr-Hollow didn’t join the Coast Guard until he was twenty-seven. He grew up in Helena, Montana, and was an alpine ski racer and soccer player in high school. After graduating in 1992, he enrolled at Oregon State University in Corvallis, where he rowed crew for all four years. He loved the total commitment and teamwork of being an oarsman. Starr-Hollow’s father had been a Navy SEAL, and early on, Starr-Hollow signed up for Navy ROTC. But the training conflicted with rowing, so he gave it up.

After college, Starr-Hollow worked as a ski coach and then started a geology grad program in Missoula. By the summer of
2000, he was in eastern Montana, working on water quality and riparian ecology research. There were a lot of wildfires that year and a lot of firemen around. It was backbreaking work they did, and Starr-Hollow found himself wishing he was doing something more like it. Though he was spending his days outside, there wasn’t much physical labor in his scientific work. He envied the camaraderie he saw among the firefighters and the pure physicality of their job. It was something he missed from his rowing days.

“The grass is always greener over the septic tank,” Starr-Hollow’s mom said when he told her he was thinking of joining the Coast Guard and becoming a rescue swimmer. It was one of her favorite expressions. Starr-Hollow figured he could always go back to science—he planned to, in fact. But at that point in his life he needed something different. In August 2001, Starr-Hollow showed up at boot camp in Cape May, New Jersey.

At twenty-seven, he was one of the oldest in his class. He was instructed in the basics of good seamanship, learned to march in formation—and was taught how to fold his socks. The method was to roll them up tightly and then flip the last little lip over so the ball had a smiley face in front. When socks were lined up the right way in a locker, there’d be a row of smiley faces. Starr-Hollow was given a map of how to organize his clothes. On the ships, in tight quarters, it was important to keep things neat and organized.

There wasn’t as much physical training in boot camp as he’d expected, although the discipline was intense. Starr-Hollow felt like he never got enough sleep or enough to eat. They were kept busy from six in the morning until ten at night. It was a trudge, but Starr-Hollow tried to make the best of it. He hadn’t played the saxophone since his sophomore year in high school, but he picked it up again to join the Coast Guard band. Some evenings
they performed at the bandstand in downtown Cape May—marching songs for the town residents. He started going to church, mostly to have some time away from the drill sergeants.

Starr-Hollow had heard of guys getting stuck in port for a year or just patrolling tiny, monotonous regions aboard the Coast Guard’s 378-foot cutters. “The white needle of death,” guys called those boats. Instead, Starr-Hollow requested the icebreakers; he figured they would definitely travel. He was right. His first assignment out of boot camp was on the 399-foot
Polar Star
. In the next six months he saw Hawaii; Sydney, Australia; and Hobart, Tasmania. The ship spent a month breaking a route into McMurdo Station in Antarctica, the main support facility for American researchers at the bottom of the world. On the way home, they made port calls in Chile, Peru, Mexico, and San Diego before returning back to Washington State.

A month later Starr-Hollow started his airman program in Port Angeles, essentially an internship in the job of Aviation Survival Technician (AST), the official title that encompasses the job of rescue swimmer. Flying as the deployable aircrewman was only a tiny part of an AST’s responsibility, Starr-Hollow quickly learned. Ninety-eight percent of the job was about equipment and preparation. The ASTs were responsible for keeping all the helicopters’ emergency gear in serviceable condition and for preparing themselves for the 2 percent of the job that mattered most—saving lives. Starr-Hollow trained with the swimmers in Port Angeles for four months before heading to sixteen weeks of A School in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

It’s an extremely competitive program. Almost half of the students who start rescue swimmer A School fail out. The physical standards are intense—and so are the psychological ones. For Starr-Hollow, the hardest part was the “bullpen.” The in
structors are all in the deep end of the pool, while the students stand blindfolded at the shallow end. One by one, the students are called down to the deep water. There, they are circled by the instructors, who each take a turn wrestling each student down to the bottom of the pool. The student has to break free of each instructor, and bring him back up to the surface in a controlled carry. The goal is to prepare the would-be swimmer to handle a panicked survivor, and the instructors play the part, kicking and swinging punches at the young students. The students who can handle it, who don’t freak out, will likely be able to remain calm in even the most chaotic real-life rescue.

Starr-Hollow graduated from A School and was sent straight to the shop in Kodiak. The work was satisfying—and so was the lifestyle. In Alaska, he could backcountry ski for a good part of the year, surf when the swells grew large in the winter, and get in a little mountain biking when the trails weren’t a torrent of mud. He met his wife there. She had a young daughter, and they soon had another little girl together. In the winter and spring, he would wake up early before the girls were out of bed and ski Pyramid Mountain. In two and a half hours he could hike up the peak, ski down, and drive back home, “gassed” but happy.

R
YAN FELT LIKE HE’D BEEN
in the water for days. But it was still dark; it couldn’t have been more than a few hours. He was still thinking about unzipping his suit. When should he do it, how long should he wait? Then he saw a light way off on the horizon. A ship! he thought. The
Warrior,
maybe. He knew how long it took between when you spotted another ship in the distance and when you actually passed it side to side. He figured the boat was more than an hour away. But the light was growing closer
quickly. No more than thirty seconds after seeing it, Ryan heard the rotors.

The chopper seemed to home in right on him. It approached like a missile, and stopped short just above him, maybe one hundred feet into the sky. A giant spotlight shone down. Ryan waved his arms. For a few seconds the orange machine hovered above him. Then it turned and flew away.

What the hell, Ryan thought, I know they saw me.

He kept his eyes on the helicopter as it made a giant lap over the ocean. Then thankfully, miraculously, it circled back and settled over him. The door swung open.

He was going to be saved.

A
S
B
ONN CAME INTO A HOVER
over Ryan Shuck, Starr-Hollow clipped his Triton harness into a talon hook on the end of a metal cable that ran into a hoist hard-mounted to the outside of the Jayhawk. At DeBolt’s signal, Starr-Hollow slid forward to sit with his legs dangling over the edge of the open aircraft door and unclipped from his gunner’s belt.

“Ready for direct deployment of rescue swimmer to survivor,” flight mechanic DeBolt announced through the ICS. “Swimmer is at the door.” And then, using a mechanical control just inside the aircraft door, DeBolt retracted the hoist cable, drawing Starr-Hollow smoothly up and out of the aircraft.

“Swimmer is outside of the cabin,” DeBolt reported. “Swimmer going down.”

From the pilot’s seat, Bonn couldn’t see much of what was going on behind him in the cabin, or in the waves beneath the aircraft. Through the ICS, a Coast Guard flight mechanic paints a verbal picture of the scene below, constantly updating the pilots with the information necessary to keep the helo posi
tioned safely above the swimmer and victims in the water. Standard procedure during a hoist operation is for the flying pilot to turn off his or her radio—about 7 percent of Coast Guard helicopter pilots are women—and to concentrate only on the flight operations and the instructions of the flight mech. Meanwhile, the copilot handles all communication with people outside the helicopter. As soon as the decision is made to lower a swimmer, the flight mechanic is running the show, feeding the rest of the crew a constant stream of commands.

The conversation is scripted, the language drilled into all aircrew members from the first days of their training. From the safety checklists that the crew collectively runs through every time the swimmer leaves the cabin, to the “conning”—or positioning—commands that keep the helo safely placed over breaking swells, the crews are speaking a custom-made language built on succinct, declarative sentences. In the middle of the night, in the Bering Sea, for even one member of a four-man helicopter crew to be confused about what’s happening is to put the entire crew in danger. Precision. Clarity. Those are the attributes, each Coast Guard rescuer had been taught, that allow even the most complicated or harrowing rescue to proceed smoothly and calmly.