The Last Run (29 page)

“Oh crap,” he said.

Dan Molthen, who was running through his instrument checklist in the pilot’s seat, looked over.

“What’s wrong?”

Adickes bit his lip. “Looks like the NDB is down.”

“No.”

The NDB was the aircraft’s nondirectional beacon. A tiny needle on the control panel, it homed in on the airport’s radio station and made navigating in and out of Sitka Sound, even in poor visibility, a snap. By setting a 2-0-0 bearing off the NDB signal and following a straight line, a pilot could fly between an opening in the mountains that surrounded the sound and head straight out to the Pacific.

“Let me check it again,” Adickes said.

Damn the luck, he said to himself. Of all the nights in four years of flying here for this thing
not
to be working. He was flipping through his flight manual now. Nine times out of ten this is a button-pushing error, he thought. This H-60 has got very complicated displays with multifunction buttons, and damned if I can remember half the time what all of them do. Maybe I accidentally disabled the NDB. No, it’s still on. Maybe I forgot to turn on the radio. No, that’s on, too.

He slapped shut the manual.

“It’s broken.”

“Shit.”

Adickes peered out the windscreen. A slanting rain like a swung curtain of silver beads was raking the runway. He couldn’t see the mountains. He couldn’t even see the end of the runway.

“Well,” Adickes said, “we’ve got radar. If we need it we can fly by the GPS. I say we go for it.”

“I’m game.”

Molthen clicked a button on the intercom so he could talk with the crew. “Crew report,” he said. “Ready for takeoff?”

Through the headset he heard the deep voice of his flight mechanic, Sean Witherspoon. “Crew’s ready.”

“Here we go,” Molthen said.

He pulled back on the collective, the control stick on the floor to his left that fed fuel to the main rotor head, and the Jayhawk lifted slowly up and hovered ten feet off the runway. Molthen and Adickes scanned the LED readouts, flight controls and tort, or power, gauges.

“Tort’s eighty percent, heading instruments and flight controls feel normal,” Molthen said. “Radar check?”

Adickes hit a switch and the radar screen lit up. “Radar’s looking good,” he said. He nodded at Molthen and flipped down his night-vision goggles.

“Okay,” Molthen said,
“I’m on the go!”

He dropped the nose five degrees, pulled power and they were off, sweeping along the runway and then fast-climbing up and away from the dimming airbase lights and into the pitch blackness above Sitka Sound.

“Okay, Dan,” Adickes said to Molthen, “let’s take her up to three hundred feet.”

“Taking her to three hundred,” Molthen said.

Just then a gust yanked the nose of the aircraft sideways. Molthen wrenched the cyclic, the floor stick that controlled the Jayhawk’s lateral movements, hard left.

“That wasn’t very nice,” he said.

“I don’t like it,” Adickes said.

“What?”

“The way these winds are coming over the mountains south and east of the sound. Look how they’re hitting the mouth of Silver Bay.”

He fed Molthen a radar heading that would give them a wide berth of Mount Edgecumbe, the highest, snow-topped volcano at the mouth of the sound.

“Keep an eye out for Edgecumbe,” Adickes said. “And stay on this heading.”

“Staying right on it,” Molthen said.

Climbing, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, they started feeling a heavy tremor in the joysticks. For two minutes in the air that’s a lot of wind, Adickes thought. And a lot of water. How much water can be sucked into the intake of an engine before it flames out?

“Goddammit,” he said. “I can’t see shit. You see Edgecumbe yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Christ,” said Adickes.

In the rear cabin, Rich Sansone, the rescue swimmer, was already on the radio. He turned the volume up on his HF headset to hear over the hail and wind. “Comms Center, Juneau,” he said. “Comms Center, Juneau. This is Rescue 6018.”

“Comms Center here.”

“How do you read me?”

“Loud and clear, Rescue 6018.”

Sansone said, “We have four people on board, repeat, oh-four P-O-B. Our destination is latitude 58 degrees 13.8 minutes north, longitude 138 degrees 19.4 minutes west. We have an ELT hit at that position. Our mission is search and rescue. We are airborne at this time and we are en route to that position. Request you take our radio guard.”

“Roger, 6018. Accept your radio guard at 0500 Zulu. Report flight ops and position every one-five minutes.”

“Roger,” Sansone said. “Readback correct. Rescue 6018 out.”

In clear skies with no wind and a NDB to set his outbound course by, a pilot might have leaned back leisurely and steered the aircraft by guiding the hydraulically powered cyclic and collective sticks with the tips of his fingers. With the helicopter ramming into oncoming gusts, Molthen’s hands were clamped to the cyclic and collective, his back arched as he leaned forward, his feet pumping, easing and pumping on the floor pedals, his eyes darting around the console.

There was nothing to see through the windscreen but black, so he focused on his panel instruments: the airspeed indicator, the vertical speed indicator, the altimeter and the attitude indicator, a big, blue gyro ball that told him how level the aircraft’s nose was. Molthen had to keep that gyro even. If the gyro floated up even a little, a wind would snag the aircraft by the beak and send it pitchpoling backward.

“See anything yet?” Adickes asked him.

Molthen flipped down his goggles and glanced out his side window. Through the goggles everything looked grainy green and black, like the screen of a TV with bad reception. He spotted a fuzzy line that made a conelike silhouette.

“There it is,” he said. “Mount Edgecumbe. Over there. See it?”

“No.”

“Well,” Molthen said, flipping up his goggles, “it’s there.”

“Okay, well, let’s get the hell around it and outside on the ocean,” Adickes told him.

“Roger.”

The nose jumped and swung, worse than it had after liftoff, and Molthen was wrestling the sticks now, pushing and pulling them forward and sideways, pulling and pushing, struggling to keep the helicopter level against the shifting, intensifying stream of wind. Again and again he corrected the heading. The aircraft kept twisting in a series of steady jerks, the cyclic and collective bucking in his hands.

The helicopter moved past the cape.

“We’re outside,” Molthen said.

“Good.”

Then the gust hit.

It was like being smacked by an enormous flyswatter. The Jayhawk went over hard and everyone went with it. Molthen was pinned to the side door. He tried to push off his shoulder but it did no good. He slammed his boots into the pedals and struck back hard on the cyclic.

“Good Christ!”

The Jayhawk was spinning, wobbling.

“Compensate! Compensate!”

“I got it!”

Molthen swung the H-60 back into the sledgehammer of air, then spun it back around so the winds would grab the stabilizer. They took off like a rocket.

“Whoa,” he said. “We’re moving now!”

“Aren’t we?”

It felt as though they were hurtling through a wind tunnel. Adickes pulled up the hover page on his main display. Until that moment, the anemometer had indicated twenty-five knots of wind speed. It was now showing thirty knots.

Then thirty-five.

Adickes’s eyes skipped over the other instruments, then stopped again at the wind-speed indicator.

It read forty.

And then forty-five…

He couldn’t take his eyes off the gauge.

… fifty, fifty-five, sixty…

…
Jesus…

…
sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five…

Seventy-five knots of wind? That can’t be, Adickes said to himself. That’s 110 mph of wind. And these are not gusts. The computer is measuring
average
sustained winds.

He checked their ground speed. Molthen was giving the helicopter enough gas to fly 150 knots an hour. But because of the tailwind, their true airspeed was 225 knots an hour —275 mph.

This is truly something, Adickes thought. Truly something. But what is this tailwind going to be two and a half hours from now? It’s going to a headwind. And it’s going to make us burn a lot of fuel trying to get back. So start using your head and be smart with your fuel. Calculate your fuel-burn rate. And get some help.

“Dan,” he said.

“What?”

“We need to ask for air cover. We need a C-130 out here with us.”

Molthen only nodded his head. He had already reached the stage of the fight where he needed to save his breath. He was harnessed to the controls. It looked as though he was strapped to a mechanical bull with control sticks and floor pedals. He did not stop moving.

“I’ll call for it,” Adickes said. “You fly. Watch the water. I’ll do the navigating.”

Adickes turned up his HF radio and raised Sitka. The transmission was scratchy. But he was able to report his position and flight conditions and make his request for C-130 air cover understood.

He signed off.

“Okay,” Adickes said. “I told them to ask Kodiak for a C-130. I hope they’re getting cover.”

Molthen nodded.

“Man, we really got a tailwind,” Adickes said. “We’re going to get there pretty quick.”

Molthen only nodded.

The Jayhawk came with a large, flat stabilator tail that normally helped smooth out turbulence. But wind shears were spiking that tail and making the rear of the helicopter slew about and bounce as though they were riding a slow-moving jackhammer.

“Say, Dan,” Adickes said, “how about trying to find some clearer air?”

“Okay.”

“Let’s go up to four hundred feet.”

They rose to four hundred, then five hundred, and on up to eight hundred feet. But it did no good.

“Hey,” Adickes said, “we’re getting ice on the frame. Better take us back down to two hundred and fifty feet. Maybe we can get a visual of the ocean from down there.”

“Down to two hundred and fifty,” Molthen said.

But they couldn’t see much, not even with the night-vision goggles. The goggles could only enhance existing illumination. Outside was pitch-black; there was no light to enhance.

They heard Sansone call out, “Who’s flying this plane?”

“What, Rich?”

“I said, what are you guys doing up there? We’re trying to get through our checklists. And we can’t. Not with you guys bouncing us around so much.”

“Hey, you know something, Rich?” Adickes said. “It’s going to be like this the whole way out.”

“Can’t you do something about it?”

“No, Rich, we can’t,” Adickes said. “It’s a bad, bad night, okay?”

“Are we flying out of trim?”

“Yes, Rich. We’re flying out of trim.” Nobody liked to fly in one direction with the nose of the aircraft angled slightly off. But Adickes knew what Molthen was doing. He was trying to save gas by allowing the tailwind to push them out to sea while at the same time keeping on course to the EPIRB position.

“I hate flying out of trim,” Sansone said.

He and Witherspoon were strapped in side by side along the back wall. Witherspoon kept his head back and his eyes shut. The vertigo had started as soon as they had rounded the cape. He was not sure what was up or down. Everything was moving too fast. Sansone heard his labored breathing.

“Sean, try to relax,” Sansone said.

“I’m okay,” Witherspoon said. “I’m okay.”

“Breathe slowly.”

“There can’t be anybody out there,” Witherspoon said.

“Slowly.”

“There can’t be anyone. Who’d be out in this shit?”

“Nobody’s out here. That ELT is nothing. Probably just a false alarm.”

“That’s it. Somebody knocked an EPIRB overboard. We’ll get on scene and it’ll be nothing.”

“Breathe slowly.”

Sansone checked his Luminox diver’s watch. It had been fifteen minutes since his first call to Juneau. He leaned forward and turned up the HF radio.

“Comms Center, Juneau,” he said. “This is Rescue 6018 on zero-five megs.”

He waited.

“Comms Center, Juneau, this is Rescue 6018 on zero-five megs, over?”

“Yes, Rescue 6018… this is Comms Center, Juneau… request flight ops and position…”

Sansone read off their latest GPS position and confirmed that flight operations were normal. The operator read back the position.

“Readback correct,” Sansone said. “6018 out.”

Bill Adickes had been listening to the chatter in the cabin and trying to calculate BINGO, the point at which the H-60 would not have enough fuel to return to base.

The EPIRB is 150 miles offshore, he thought, and we’re going to be there in fifteen minutes with this tailwind. How much fuel should I leave us to get back? How strong is the wind going to be? Sixty knots? Eighty knots? If this is a fast-moving hurricane the wind could swing around and present me with a whole different return scenario. Well, I better not cut it close on fuel. Not tonight. These winds are too unpredictable, coming at us from all angles. How is it that they’re doing that? Our approach into Sitka is going to be tricky. That crappy NDB. Why did it have to go kablooey tonight? And these damned computer keys. How am I supposed to punch these things in the dark in a shaking aircraft?

Adickes said into his mouth set, “Hey, Rich, how’s your boat doing?”

“Sir?”

“Your boat. You know. Weren’t you working on it or something?”

“Yeah, I am. I mean —I was. It’s fine now. Fine.”

“That’s good.”

There was a silence and then Sansone said, “How’s yours?”

“Good.”

“Well, that’s good. That’s good.”

Dan Molthen cleared his throat. “Hey, Sean,” he said. “I hear you just got married.”

In a croaking voice, Sean Witherspoon answered, “Last week.”

“Gee, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks.”

“How bad was it?”

Witherspoon smiled, opened his eyes, then closed them again. “Not as bad as people said it would be. But still pretty bad. How about yours?”

“Terrible. Still getting over it.”