Watchlist (23 page)
So when Louie rotated back onto the tower a week after the New Year as part of that skeleton crew, Frankie was standing there on the helipad waiting to take his survival suit. After he had climbed into it, Frankie shook Louie's hand and told him that it had been great knowing him and that he wasn't coming back. And Louie said, “You mean you guys have already finished the repairs?” and Frankie told him, “I mean I'm not coming back.”
Wilbur told Edna on the phone that he wasn't even supposed to still be there and that he'd been due to rotate out but that his replacement hadn't reported. He said that for the guys left behind the atmosphere was like homeroom in junior high on a winter morning: everyone just kept to themselves and those who didn't were surly. The weather was always winter morning, too, windy and dark and cold. Because they were shorthanded, he now worked as a plotter behind the radar-scope operator, which meant longer hours, which was probably good since no one could sleep anyhow.
Ellie said that Gordon had to get off there but he asked what he was supposed to do: he was the commanding officer. While she sat on the phone trying to think of what to offer in response he said that it had occurred to him that confidence was like a little air bubble that shrank every time something went wrong. He said he'd installed a plumb line in his cabin over his desk to check just how badly the tower was doing and that the plumb line now never stopped making this wild figure eight. He asked where Ellie had been when he'd called earlier and she said she'd been driving Larry around on his paper route. “Why? Should I stay near the phone?” she asked, and he said yes.
Roy when he'd seen the plumb line hadn't said anything but then had mentioned later that this back and forth was just like when you bent a wire back and forth and back and forth: sooner or later the wire was going to snap. It was a mess, all right, was all Gordon managed to say in response. Together they worked out the order of evacuation if it came down to just the lifeboats, though they both understood that in a storm trying to lower those boats would be suicide. If they were going to get off the tower they had to do it before any storm was even over the horizon. Gordon put himself in the last boat and Roy in the first, and Roy rewrote the list and put himself in the last boat as well. He could always tell when Gordon was making the best of a bad situation because whatever he was doing, he started humming.
Louie told Jeannette that now in any kind of wind or seas no one could sleep for the clanging and grinding coming from the legs. She asked hadn't they been checked and he told her that civilian contractors had come out any number of times and always said when they left that the new fix was the one that was going to work. Now whenever he talked to her she was crying. He told her he'd written a letter to the president-elect asking him to override the brass at Otis and get them off the tower. She asked what the president-elect was supposed to do and he reminded her that Kennedy was a Massachusetts guy like him. He said he'd written that he had to get off because his presence here was affecting his wife so much. That made her cry even harder. “Why did you even
report
when they told you to report?” she wanted to know, but he had to say good-bye because his time was up and all twenty-eight guys were calling home.
The weekend weather forecast for January 14 and 15 was not so good: sixty-knot winds and possibly more. The Air Force ordered Captain Mangual's AKL-17 to head for the tower, take on equipment, and stand by for a possible full evacuation. Saturday the fourteenth the sky stayed dark but the winds were manageable and the crane operators on the tower off-loaded twenty-two tons of radar equipment. And Louie traded cigarettes and some of Frankie's homemade hooch for a spot in the front of the line for the phone and called Jeannette back with the happy news that they were taking the equipment off and there'd be nothing left for him to guard and so he figured everyone would be off the tower by the next day. Late that afternoon Roy found Gordon at the edge of the platform staring off to the south at a black wall of clouds that lifted from the horizon to the top of the sky. Wilbur and Louie had pulled maintenance duty and were repainting the two lifeboats on the deck and stopped what they were doing to look as well.
“Maybe it's just a local depression,” Roy told him. They could already hear the wakes of the tower's legs in the increasing currents.
Captain Mangual on the AKL-17's bridge read his weather forecast from the merchant marine, and it was badâextreme weather conditions within twelve hoursâand radioed his friend Gordon it was time to get everyone off. And Gordon reported Captain Mangual's recommendation to his superiors at Otis, who reported back that the Air Force's forecast was not nearly so dire and that the storm was going to swing wide of them and that Captain Mangual had already been ordered back to port.
But Captain Mangual refused to leave. Gordon stayed up all night checking in with him on the radio and at 0400 went out onto the platform and looked out over the sea. It was blowing hard enough that he slopped some of the coffee he'd brought with him onto his wrist. The wind was already seventy knots and building fast. The seas were already thirty feet. The lights of the AKL-17 turtled along in the distance off in the blackness and the rain, disappearing behind the wave crests. Sometimes he couldn't even see the green light atop its radar mast. Farther out, the red lights of the Russian trawlers appeared here and there in the troughs. Because he couldn't think of anything else to do he spent an hour rigging safety lines over the upper platform so there'd be something to clip onto if they had to do some emergency troubleshooting or get to the boats.
The next morning the northeaster hit. He climbed up to the helipad deck and opened the hatch just enough to confirm that waves bigger than any he'd ever seen were concussing spray even onto the radomes. Everything was already sheathed in ice. He had to brace himself against the railing because the staircase was swaying.
In the mess near the phone the guys in line gave up their place to him and Ellie picked up on the first ring and asked if they were going to be evacuated. She said the weather was already awful where she was. He told her he kept requesting evacuation and that his requests had been denied. She told him
she'd
call instead and he told her to go ahead. She shouted that his tour was almost over and he told her he knew that and that she was going to wake Larry up, and that he'd never wanted to be out here in the first place. “Are you saying it's
my
fault?” she asked, and he said that as soon as the weather let up he'd be off this thing for good, and that the poor sap assigned to take over was already at Otis.
At seven thirty the line at the phone had progressed far enough for Wilbur to call Edna. He had to shout over the awful clanging of metal on metal. “That's outside,” he told her, as if to reassure her. She heard men screaming. “That's inside,” he told her.
At ten thirty a huge bang knocked everyone standing off his feet. “I think I shit my pants,” Wilbur told Louie once he'd gotten back up off the floor. Gordon and Roy climbed into their survival suits and humped a hundred feet of nylon rope back up the staircase to the main deck and Gordon tied a square knot around his waist and tied the other end with a clove hitch to the railing inside the hatch. They popped it open just as a wave exploded over the deck and stripped the crane box of its welding equipment. They clipped into the safety lines and crawled forward on their hands and knees. In the wind and spray it took ten minutes to get to the platform's edge and the safety netting. Their ropes whipped and spiraled behind them like they were hitched to furious animals. Roy belayed him and Gordon hung upside down over the safety netting and the gale blew him out to sea, but the knots held and after a minute or two Roy was able to haul him back in. They were both crying they were so scared. Once he got ahold of himself, Gordon lay out over the netting again to try to see what had happened below and the wind battered and spun and whirligigged him. Sleet whipped his face and while he tried to see down the waves erupted to meet him. The bigger ones propelled ice water into his suit and he could hear Roy shrieking along with him. Finally he signaled that they could go back and on the staircase they closed the hatch behind them and he gave Roy the bad news. Some of the X bracing had broken loose and was battering itself against the legs. The joints were failing and the braces buckling. Once the braces buckled the entire thing was standing on three spindly legs three hundred feet long.
Back in the mess the guys helped them out of their wet clothing and piled them with blankets and handed them hot coffees but they were both shaking so much they knocked the mugs off the tables where they were sitting. Roy lit a cigarette and it kept bobbing in his mouth. “What have you guys been up to?” Wilbur tried to joke. “Inspecting the X braces,” Roy finally managed to say. “Bad day for it,” Wilbur told them.
Once he'd warmed up, Roy kept radioing Otis for the weather updates. Whenever he got off, Gordon asked him if it was going to stay this bad and Roy said that it was going to get worse. Guys climbed into their berths and put blankets over their heads. They put their hands over their ears. The low-frequency beacon antenna blew away. The last wind-speed reading was 110 knots before the anemometer blew away. The ceiling on the upper floors bowed and the light fixtures popped loose and swung free. The outer walls flexed from the air pressure. The dome covering the windward radar collapsed and tore itself to pieces and blew away. Gordon recorded it in the log.
Captain Mangual radioed that the AKL-17 was now registering wind speeds of 130 knots and the seas were even uglier. He said the good news was that the wind was so hard it was blowing the tops off the waves.
Afterward Ellie and Betty and Edna and Jeannette, in the face of reporters' questions on the subject, could not themselves recall a moment when alone at their kitchen tables or back windows, in the best tradition of military wives, they refused to give up hope. But each of them remembered thinking some version of
What about me?
At 1:00 p.m. when Ellie got Gordon's next call he told her the tower was gyrating and she registered it as a word he'd never used before. She said she'd called and called the numbers at Otis but she couldn't get through to anybody. He said he wasn't surprised and that everyone's families were probably calling. She asked if the tower would float if it went over and he told her that it would go down fast and that no one could be saved. He told her that he was worried about Captain Mangual, whose ship was overloaded and getting swamped. He'd ordered him back to port but the guy had refused the order. He said the last time he'd looked he'd seen the ship's entire bow come out of the water with one wave. “How did everyone let things
get
to this point?” Ellie shouted at him, and he answered that he could barely understand her and that she had to try to calm down for Larry's sake. She asked if the people on the ship could help him. He said he doubted they could even help themselves.
When Louie called Jeannette there was no answer so he dialed again and again and then had to go all the way to the back of the line, and when he finally did get through he shouted at her about where she'd been, and she said “I'm
sorry
,” and he told her that he'd had to tie himself into his bunk, and that he'd listened to his buddies crying themselves to sleep, and that he wanted her to find someone good to take care of her. And she said, “I don't
want
to find someone else,” and he said that he had to get off because other guys needed the phone. She said, “You can't just
say
that and hang
up
,” but another guy had the phone by then and yelled for her to get off the line.
Betty's phone rang and she snatched it up and Roy told her that their relief ship was in and out of radio contact but was reporting that it was being lifted off the crests and thrown sideways into the troughs. The ship was just going to keep motoring to leeward and try to stay within range. He said that he and Captain Phelan had tried to go back out on the safety lines but between the whiteouts from the spray and the force of the water and wind they couldn't make it to the netting to see what was going on below. The deck's steel plates were vibrating. The lower storage areas were awash. But they were all hanging in there. “My one-man morale officer,” Betty told him, and they'd both been surprised by her rage. But she hadn't been able to make herself apologize. Otis had agreed to try for an evacuation at the earliest lull, which the forecasters were predicting for 0300, he told her. Copters were already on high alert and ready to go. The aircraft carrier
Wasp
and its entire battle group had been diverted to their location. They just had to hang on. “For
twelve more hours
,” Betty shouted. He told her that because the weather was a little better over New York, the coast guard had already dispatched the cutter
Agassiz
, so it was already on its way.
A half hour later Ellie's phone rang again and when she answered it Gordon told her that the tower was breaking up. She wailed and he told her that he'd never known he had so many religious men in his crew and that even the welders were praying. He said he kept thinking that maybe if this shitbox could last another hour the storm might blow itself out. He told her that to give everyone something to do he'd ordered them into their survival suits and all hands on deck to keep the helipad clear. He told her he had to get back up there because guys were skidding around into the nettings. He told her that she'd been the best thing that had ever happened to him. He told her to wish them all luck. She was still crying and he was helping Wilbur keep his feet an hour later when eighteen miles southeast of the tower the
Wasp
's captain reported having turned his bow just in time to negotiate a single and monstrously large rogue wave. The crest was sixty feet higher than the ship's bridge, so he estimated the wave at 120 feet high. The helicopters strapped to the deck had been smashed into one another but the ship had careened safely down the back end of the wave, which when he'd last seen it had been heading off in the direction of the tower.
