<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\nYELLOWFIN SOLE ARE SHITTY LITTLE FISH, ONCE THEY'RE DEAD, ANYWAY, AND THEIR HEADS ARE SLICED OFF AND THEIR GUTS SUCKED OUT and there are a few tons of them greasing up the decks. There's a toxin in their stink, a histamine that gets into the throat and lungs and makes it hard to breathe, made Kenny Smith gag and go all wobbly. He'd be belowdecks on the Alaska Ranger, in the tally room near the bow counting cases of yellowfin going into the freezers, and his chest would wheeze and he'd get so dizzy he'd worry he might pass out, just crumple into the fish slime and seawater pooling at his feet. If he didn't keep swallowing Comtrex, he'd probably puke all day, too.\n\nKenny had a shitty job on a shitty boat, shitty being the way Kenny tends to organize the world, into things that are shitty and aren't shitty. He was one of forty-seven captain and crew on the Ranger, a 200-foot tub that sailed out of Dutch Harbor, trawling for pollack and rock sole and mackerel and yellowfin. She was built in 1972, with a flat bottom designed for the warm, calm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, then retrofitted into a head-and-gut trawler and bought cheap at auction in the '90s by the Fishing Company of Alaska. She had a new factory, where the fish were processed, but the rest of her was old and decrepit, with seals painted over so many times that the doors wouldn't latch tight and a rusty shell that had been patched and rewelded over the years. That flat bottom gave her an unnatural, unnerving roll in the big swells of the Bering Sea, but she could stuff well over a million pounds of fish in her holds before she'd have to off-load at Dutch.\n\nKenny, like almost everyone else on the Ranger, worked twelve-hour shifts, ticking off how much of which kind of fish were gutted and frozen, and he did that for a week or ten days or twelve, until the holds were filled with 33,000 cases. He had thirty minutes to eat lunch and maybe catch a smoke if he ate fast enough, and six hours between shifts to shower and sleep and get warm. If the factory line slowed, he was supposed to bitch at everyone to move their asses, but Kenny wasn't much for hollering, and besides, everyone got paid by the case\u2014four cents per, for yellowfin\u2014so no one needed much prodding. He stood in water up to his ankles because the sumps in the bow were busted, and his feet would ache until they went numb or he poured hot water on his boots; and when he was done counting cases and had to run the tally sheet up to the wheelhouse, the air outside would sting his lungs, take his breath away. Kenny doesn't like the cold, and he was cold all season. The fishmaster, a Japanese national named Satoshi Konno, had had the Ranger up in the ice fields since late January, banging through the floes until he found a hole big enough to set net. It made an awful racket, big sheets of ice scraping against the hull, the whole boat shuddering and lurching when she hit them. Knocked Kenny off his feet a couple of times.\n\nBut Kenny was proud of his shitty job because it was the first one he'd ever had, unless he counted delivering the Tri-City Herald back in Pasco, a little city on the high plains of Washington State. He was 21 when he started fishing, in the summer of 2007, a high school dropout with a petty record who'd inked himself up with homemade tattoos. He's got a skull on his right forearm and outlaw on his left and, inside his wrist, the initials of his son, who was born when Kenny was 17 and died three months later from SIDS. On his right shoulder, a friend stabbed emortal, which was Kenny's chosen gangsta name, and below that, something that looks like a cartoon turkey. \"It's supposed to be a pot leaf,\" Kenny says, \"but my friend's an idiot.\"\n\nWhen he had started looking for work in the spring of 2007, he applied to the Fishing Company of Alaska, a Seattle-based outfit with a fleet of seven boats that advertised a group interview at the Red Lion Hotel. Kenny had never fished, had never been to Alaska\u2014he'd only once ever seen the ocean, from a beach in Carlsbad, California\u2014but the man from FCA told him he could make six grand in a season, and shit, it wasn't like he'd have to reel in a halibut or steer the boat or anything.\n\nHe worked as a sorter for that first summer season, at the other end of the factory, putting this fish in that pile and that fish in this one. A month in, he gaffed one of the frozen cases and fifty pounds of dead fish slid out of the freezer and crushed a knuckle on his right hand. His hand ballooned up bad, and he'll probably need surgery one of these days, but the boss gave him an ice pack and some ibuprofen and sent him back on deck to sort fish with his feet. He kicked fish for two weeks, until the end of the season, and he left Alaska with six grand in his pocket, just like the man promised.\n\nHe got a job cutting the bad spots off potatoes in a processing plant through the fall (which was even shittier than kicking fish), then went back to Alaska for the winter season. The Ranger would make five trips north out of Dutch Harbor between the end of January and the end of March. On the last one, the ocean was so clotted with ice that Konno had a hard time getting the nets in the water, and when he did, they were pulling up halibut, which the Ranger didn't have a permit to catch. So they returned to Dutch late on Friday the twenty-first and restocked overnight. On Saturday afternoon, the Ranger started steaming west toward the mackerel grounds off Atka. She'd be under way until midday Easter Sunday, maybe longer, no nets in the water, no fish in the factory. Kenny could get some rest.\n\nTHE NIGHT BEFORE Easter, the Coast Guard cutter Munro was puttering south of St. George Island at seven knots, patrolling north and a little west of the late-winter fishing grounds, which is where Captain Craig Lloyd liked to keep his boat that time of year. Lloyd has twenty-four years behind him in the Coast Guard, and he's on his third tour out of Kodiak. He knows the cycles of the Alaskan fishery, knows when the fleet will be out on the Hundred Fathom Curve and off Slime Bank and over the Mushroom Cap and Crystal Canyon, and he knows that bad weather typically blows into the Bering from Russia, big fronts moving in from the northwest. If a long-liner swamped or a fisherman cracked his skull and had to be medevaced out, Lloyd wanted his boat to be upwind from the trouble, wanted to ride a running sea rather than fight it. \"The Bering is vicious and cold,\" he'd say, \"and you don't have a lot of time to get the job done.\"\n\nLloyd had a young crew under his command, 171 guardsmen and -women with an average age of 23, more than 70 percent of whom were on their rookie tour. They'd been under way for more than a week, packed into a ship that, even at 378 feet, was cramped, and the patrol had been quiet. The opilio crab season was winding down, the fleet was thinning out, the weather had been decent; there'd been no distress bad enough to require the services of his cutter. By that Saturday night, the crew were busy keeping their spirits up. The morale president, a young petty officer named Erin Lopez, was planning to get up early Sunday morning and pass out brown bags of Easter candy she'd bought at Wal-Mart. Up in the galley, the cook had peeled the labels off institutional-size cans of pickles and garbanzo beans and apple-pie filling and lined them up on a table. The CO's Number Ten Can Challenge, they call it, number ten being the size of the cans. Teams of three each pick a can and open it, and the first to swallow the contents wins.\n\nAbram Heller's team drew the baked beans. Heller was 23, a long and loping kid from Wyoming, a rescue swimmer attached to one of the helicopter crews on the Munro, though he'd never actually rescued anyone. He'd winched a deckhand with a spinal injury off an 800-foot freighter once, and he'd peeked under a capsized boat for survivors or bodies. He supposed those sort of counted. At least he got out of the helicopter. Heller knew he was lucky to be on the Mun-ro at all. He's a retread, for one, had to go through swimmer school twice because he flunked out the first time, barely a week into it. Yet when he graduated in March 2006, the Coast Guard put him on the Dolphins in Alaska, slots that usually go to experienced swimmers, guys with at least one full tour behind them. A rookie on a Dolphin\u2014a retread rookie\u2014was unheard of.\n\nThe lids came off the number ten cans at seven thirty. The guys who drew the pickles had the worst lot, considering they had to drink the juice, too, but the ones shoveling in garbanzo beans ended up puking. Heller and his buddies did all right with their baked beans. They finished third, and none of them barfed. And then Heller, bloated and gassy, climbed into his rack and went to sleep.\n\nThe Ranger steamed into a headwind that gusted at thirty-three knots and frothed the ocean into white-tipped swells that lifted her bow and rolled her from port to starboard and back again. In the galley ovens, the pizzas Eric Haynes baked for the crew slid across the racks and slapped against the walls, leaving daubs of cheese and dough to burn on the sides.\n\nThe pitching and yawing didn't bother Eric much. He'd been the cook on the Ranger for the better part of thirteen years, and he knew her rhythms, the way she tumbled through the sea, especially in the winter and especially when her holds were empty. The crew called her Danger Ranger for the way she bounced around so bad, but no one really worried about it, not once they got used to it.\n\nThe new captain didn't like it, though. Peter Jacobsen had been fishing the Bering for twenty-three years, but he'd mostly skippered long-liners, boats that were built for those waters. The Ranger spooked him. \"This boat doesn't feel right,\" he'd muttered to some of the crew. \"It doesn't roll right.\"\n\nFor that matter, Captain Pete didn't like being captain. He'd come on at the beginning of the season as the mate, second in command to Steve Slotvig, who'd been captain for two years. Mate was a good role for Pete. He was 66, getting close to retirement; he didn't need the headache of being in charge. And the further down the chain of command he was, the less chance he'd have a problem with Konno, the fishmaster.\n\nThe fishmaster's job, officially, is to find fish, to tell the captain where he thinks the pollack or cod or perch are swimming. He does not, officially, yield any particular authority onboard, nor, officially, is he considered to be in control of the vessel, which, in the case of a foreign national such as Konno in American waters, would be illegal anyway. Unofficially, though, the Ranger was Konno's boat. If he wanted the boat to go north, she went north, and if he wanted her to go fast, she went fast, and if Captain Steve didn't like it, Captain Steve could go piss in the wind. He got into it with Konno, the two of them squared off in a passageway. \"It's my fucking boat,\" Captain Steve hollered at him. \"I drive my fucking boat.\" Konno spit on him\u2014no shit, spit on him\u2014and walked away. That happened more than once. Plus, he threw the microphone from the radio at Captain Steve's head, and he had a habit of calling him baka, Japanese for \"stupid.\" It wasn't good for morale, the fishmaster bullying the captain and the captain sniveling about it to the cook and the crew. (Nor did it help that Konno bullied the help, too.)\n\nAnyway, Captain Steve quit the Ranger after the third trip, in early March. Well, he said he quit, but no one believed him. Too many guys had heard the arguments, had seen Konno spit on him. And Konno told Eric he'd called FCA's owner, told her he was booking flights for himself and the four Japanese technicians he'd brought on board with him, told her he'd fly out of Dutch Harbor if Captain Steve wasn't canned. A week later, Captain Steve was put off on the dock, Captain Pete was promoted, and a new mate, Dave Silveira, was sent over from a long-liner.\n\nProbably for the best, Eric figured. Captain Pete was staying out of Konno's way. \"I don't want to make that man up there mad,\" he'd tell Eric, meaning Konno in the wheelhouse. They'd make their run for mackerel, grab as much as they could as fast as they could. Mackerel was a good fish, paid a better case rate and didn't make the crew sick. Morale would pick up.\n\nThere were still twenty-four hours of steam time to kill, too. A lot of the crew partied on the travel days, smoked some weed, had a few drinks. FCA has a zero-tolerance policy onboard, but it was wholly ignored. Konno always kept a stock of sake and Budweiser, and when the nets were out of the water, he was drinking. Eric could tell Konno was drunk when Konno started telling him how to cook. The assistant engineer, Rodney Lundy, was a drinker, too. He said he never drank on duty, but what did that matter? The assistant engineer is one of the guys who's always on call.\n\nWhat happens, Eric used to wonder, if we have an emergency and all these guys are drunk?\n\n The drinking and the drugs had chased Eric off the Ranger before. He was 45, built, a mid martial artist, and he'd been sober for more than twenty years. Being trapped in a floating can with a pack of drunks and crackheads got to him, so every couple of years he'd go back to Las Vegas. He's a trained chef, and he could usually get a job. But he'd had a tax debt to pay off and a mortgage on a new townhouse, and he made $80,000 working both the winter and summer seasons on the Ranger. So he kept going back. He figured he'd do two more years in Alaska, get his finances square.\n\nST. PAUL ISLAND is a desolate rock in the center of the Bering Sea, windswept and gray, a knob of land that sits on the northern edge of the winter season's opilio crabbing grounds. The Coast Guard keeps two air crews stationed there from the middle of January until most of the crabbers haul up their last pots, usually in April.\n\nThe air crews rotate in for two-week tours, and despite the isolation, it's not such bad duty. Lieutenant Steve Bonn never minded it. He flew every day, whirling up in a Jayhawk\u2014which is almost identical to the Black Hawks he flew in the Army, only without the weaponry\u2014tooling around the airport to keep his refles sharp or cruising out over the ocean to let the fishermen know he was close if things got ugly. Off duty, he could hunt caribou, put some meat in his freezer. He'd bagged one each of the past two winters.\n\nBonn had been to St. Paul once already that season, deploying with the first rotation in January. He returned five days before Easter with another pilot, Lieutenant Brian McLaughlin, a flight mechanic named Rob DeBolt, and a rescue swimmer, O'Brien Starr Hollow. On their shifts, twenty-four hours on, twenty-four off, they flew around the coast and practiced in-flight refueling, but their tour was quiet. \"Station vacation,\" Hollow called it. The crabbing fleet was thinning out, so there were fewer boats to get into trouble, and the weather was relatively calm. On Saturday afternoon, the other air crew flew a medevac mission down to Dutch Harbor, but they were back at St. Paul by early evening.\n\nBonn's shift started at five o'clock the next evening. The rest of his crew\u2014McLaughlin, DeBolt, and Hollow\u2014went to sleep by midnight, but Bonn got engrossed in Call of Duty 4 on the ox. He was still playing at 3 a.m.\n\nA SHORT BURST from the Ranger's alarm startled Ryan Shuck awake just past two thirty in the morning. A drill, he thought. Screw it. I'm not getting up. I've done drills.\n\nThen Ryan's roommate was standing in the doorway. \"Get up,\" he said.\n\n\"Fuck you.\"\n\n\"No, really, get up, man. The boat's on fire.\"\n\nRyan groaned and rolled out of bed. He wasn't worried. If anyone got hurt in a fire on board, it'd be one of the poor bastards on the emergency crew. Still, he had to get up. He pulled on a pair of wool socks, sweatpants, a white thermal undershirt with holes in the elbows, and a hoodie that had a pocket for his smokes. Then he wandered out to the galley. The phone was ringing, not in short, cadenced tones but one long, shrill sound. He picked it up. \"Galley, this is Ryan.\" He heard only static and tones, like a fax machine. He hung up and the ringing continued. \"Huh,\" he said to no one in particular. \"The phone's broken.\" He poured himself a cup of coffee, sat down at a table, and lit a cigarette. This was his second season on the Ranger, and he was already thinking about getting out. Sure, it was kind of glamorous, raised his status when he went back to Spokane between seasons and told people he was a fisherman in Alaska, but the shifts were exhausting, physically unsustainable beyond a couple of days. And FCA really was a lousy company. He'd sit in the bars in Dutch Harbor and guys from other boats would ask him why he worked for that outfit.\n\n\"Well, can I get on your boat?\" he'd answer.\n\nNo.\n\n\"That's why.\"\n\nIt was a trap: You get hired by a shitty company because it's the only one that'll take you, and then you can't get onto a better boat because you work for a shitty company. Ryan thought he might go to emergency school on FCA's dime, learn some skills he could parlay into a gig with another boat. Or maybe he'd stay home in Spokane. He'd called Kami, his fianc\u00E9e, from Dutch Harbor that morning, and she'd said he had a job waiting, cleaning out exhaust hoods in restaurants, said the man would make Ryan a foreman. Not bad work; same thing he did in Great Falls before he left for Alaska.\n\nHe heard footfalls behind him, two guys on the emergency crew running in from the stern. They didn't slow down on their way through the galley, but Ryan noticed that their pants were wet up to the knees.\n\nHuh, he thought. That's weird.\n\nJOEY GALBREATH was still awake when the first alarm sounded. Then it blared again, a long blast. He guessed Captain Pete had ordered a system test. But the damned thing didn't stop. How's a man supposed to sleep with that kind of racket?\n\nHe slipped on a pair of shower shoes and shuffled into the galley. There were a couple of crew there, Ryan smoking and drinking coffee, the phone droning on. And then someone\u2014he didn't catch the face\u2014ran through, saying, \"You gotta get up to the wheelhouse. You gotta get the suits on.\"\n\nJoey joined a scramble up to the wheelhouse, where the survival suits were stowed. Gumby suits, most people call them, because that's what they make you look like, except they're orange instead of green. Only the face is left exposed in a properly fitted suit, the whole body sealed tight against the sea.\n\nJoey grabbed a suit out of the stow. The bag that held it was black with mold and rot. He opened it, pulled out the Gumby. A jumbo. Joey's five seven, too small to fill out all that neoprene, too small to get a decent seal around his face. Would it really matter, though? He heard someone say the Ranger was taking on water, but so what? Two-hundred-foot boats don't sink. They're divided into compartments with watertight doors, so any breach can be contained. A ship like the Ranger, probably half of her could flood and she'd stay afloat. Joey guessed Captain Pete was just being cautious, overreacting to a minor leak.\n\nA voice in the wheelhouse said the Alaska Warrior, the Ranger's sister ship, was three hours out, steaming toward them at full speed. So that was the plan, Joey figured: transfer everyone to the Warrior, wait for the e-crew to pump out the Ranger, then get back on and hobble back to Dutch Harbor. He could deal with that.\n\nThe wheelhouse was a jumble of bodies, the crew fumbling with survival suits, barely room for anyone to move. Captain Pete pushed everyone out, ordered them to their assigned rafts on the bow deck. Joey kicked off his shower shoes and starting wrestling into his suit, the floppy feet sliding on the iced-over deck. He jammed his arms down the sleeves but couldn't get his fingers into the gloves\u2014they were pinched shut, as if soldered by the mold.\n\nJoey shivered. The air temperature was eight degrees, and when the wind gusted it felt like twenty-four below, slicing through his baggy suit and raking across his face. He was miserably cold already, and three hours was an eternity to wait for the Warrior.\n\nRYAN SHUCK was near the number three raft, on the starboard side close to the wheelhouse. He had his Gumby on, but he still wasn't worried. He'd heard the boat wasn't on fire like his roommate had told him. The chatter on deck was that the rudder had fallen off and water was coming in at the stern. That made more sense, would explain the guys with the wet pants he saw running through the galley. Come to think of it, Ryan had wandered into the rudder room that morning and seen water on the floor, maybe an inch. He assumed the engineers knew about it, and if they weren't concerned\u2026well, hell, Ryan wasn't an engineer. What did he know? He just hoped the e-crew would hurry up and plug the leak and pump her dry so he could go back to bed.\n\nHe was close enough to the wheelhouse to hear what was going on. He watched as Dave Silveira, the mate, picked up the radio, keyed the microphone.\n\n\"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,\" Dave said. \"This is the Alaska Ranger.\u2026\"\n\nThose were fearsome words. Waking everybody up, ordering the crew into the Gumbys and out onto the bow? Yeah, that could all be Captain Pete ercising an abundance of caution. But Mayday? Mayday meant things had gone to shit.\n\nRyan figured then would be a decent time to start worrying.\n\nTHE COAST GUARD Communication Station\u2014Commsta, for short\u2014in Kodiak consists of twenty-seven antennas scattered across the Buskin Valley and forty receivers out at Holiday Beach that, depending on the vagaries of the atmosphere, can pick up signals from Mississippi River tugboats and Filipino ferries. Those transmissions are routed to a small white building not far from the local airport. Inside that building, in the corner of the secure room where the Coast Guard's long-range communications are sent and received, there is a glass-walled booth where a specialist monitors just two frequencies: international distress, at 2182 kilohertz, and Alaska distress, at 4125.\n\nThose are both high-frequency channels, which means they can't be squelched, can't have the fuzz filtered out. Mostly they're static. The white noise is so constant that no one is posted to monitor them for more than four hours at a time, for fear they'll be lulled to sleep or driven insane.\n\nDave Seidl drew distress duty early on Easter Sunday. He was 26 years old and two years out of boot camp. His shift started at 1:30 a.m., and by a quarter to three he was sitting in the doorway, talking to the watch master and trying not to get sleepy. Monitoring static is crushingly dull but vital: For the four hours he was in the booth, Seidl was the only link between a ship in distress and most of the resources of the Coast Guard. True, a cutter like the Munro would likely hear any distress call, but it's a (relatively) slow-moving ship with short-range helicopters on deck. Commsta, on the other hand, can mobilize the bigger, faster Jayhawks and the C-130 airplanes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if David Seidl spaces out and blows a call, people can die.\n\nAt two fifty-two in the morning, there was a break in the static on 2182, a sound like a voice. Seidl rolled his chair back to the console.\n\n\"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is the Alaska Ranger.\u2026 Our position is five-three, five-three north, one-six-nine-five-eight west.\"\n\nSeidl made out half the numbers through the fuzz. He keyed his microphone. \"Communications calling from the United States Coast Guard, Kodiak, Alaska, communications station, over.\"\n\nOne hundred twenty miles west of Dutch Harbor, Dave Silveira answered, repeated the Ranger's position. \"We are, uh, flooding, taking on water in our rudder room, we are flooding by the stern, okay.\"\n\nSeidl scribbled the coordinates on a scrap of paper. \"Alaska Ranger, this is Kodiak. Roger, we have your position. I understand you are flooding, taking on water, are concerned. Question: Number of persons on board?\"\n\n\"Number of persons is forty-seven people.\"\n\n\"Understand forty-seven persons on board. Request a vessel description, over.\"\n\n\"We are, uh, we are a trawler.\"\n\nSeidl passed his notes to the watch commander, who called district headquarters in Juneau. Within minutes, Juneau would order the Jayhawk helicopters on St. Paul into the air.\n\nSTEVE BONN was still playing Call of Duty 4 when the phone rang on St. Paul Island. Lieutenant Commander Shawn Tripp, a pilot from the air crew that was already on duty, answered, jotted down the basics, then hung up and pointed at Bonn.\n\n\"I want you to go,\" he said.\n\nFair enough. Tripp had already flown almost five hours that shift, and he was hitting the witching hours, the predawn when fatigue begins to set in.\n\nBonn woke up his flight crew, starting with Lieutenant Brian McLaughlin.\n\n\"Are you fucking kidding me?\" McLaughlin said. \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\"\n\n\"I know. Let's go.\"\n\nO'Brien Starr Hollow, the rescue swimmer, and Rob DeBolt, the flight mechanic, rolled out next, groggy. They dressed but not with any particular urgency. The brief so far was they had a big boat taking on water, which typically wasn't a crisis. Hollow guessed they'd pile into the Jayhawk, fly south for a while, lower a pump, and fly back.\n\nBonn and his crew piled into two SUVs for the three-mile ride to the airport, ramming through snow drifts on the way. McLaughlin, who'd be commander of the flight, ordered a full load of fuel for the Jayhawk, enough to take them 300 miles out and back.\n\nOn the way to the hangar, word came that the captain of the Ranger was considering abandoning ship. When Hollow heard that, he figured some wires must've gotten crossed in the radio chatter. Abandon ship? In the middle of the Bering Sea? Because of a leak? On a 200-foot boat? The Bering was thirty-two degrees. Survival time in water that cold, in a well-maintained suit with tight seals, is measured in hours, at best; without a suit, the limbs are paralyzed in two minutes or less, and that's if the shock doesn't trigger a massive heart attack. Better to stay on the boat, no matter how badly she's swamped, just so long as she's afloat.\n\nTHE ALARM had just begun to sound when the assistant cook knocked on Eric Haynes's cabin door. \"I don't know how bad it is,\" he told Eric, \"but we're taking on water.\"\n\nEric got dressed, threw on an extra shirt, then headed toward the wheelhouse. Captain Pete was on the bridge, looking worried. Eric asked him what was happening.\n\n\"We're taking on water,\" Captain Pete said. \"And we're going down.\"\n\nDamn. Just like that. We're going down.\n\nEric didn't ask any more questions. He went back down the stairs, swept through the lower two decks. He found a few stragglers still in their bunks, told them to get moving, head toward the wheelhouse, but he didn't tell them why. No sense starting a panic.\n\nBy the time Eric got back up front, there was one survival suit left, a small. He's six one and muscled, thick through the shoulders and chest. He found some space belowdecks to wrestle into the Gumby, then climbed back to the wheelhouse. Dan Cook, the chief engineer, a diabetic with a bad heart who was fighting pneumonia, was in the captain's chair, telling Captain Pete that the boat couldn't be saved, that they had to abandon ship. Rodney Lundy, Cook's assistant, said no, the Ranger would be all right as long as the bulkhead doors held below. Captain Pete listened to Rodney, said they'd wait awhile longer.\n\nThe muster sheets, the list of who goes where in an emergency, were in a pouch taped to the wall. Eric ripped it open and went out on the deck to organize the crew. \"Nobody panic!\" he yelled over the wind. \"Panic kills.\"\n\nNo one was panicking. They were all oddly calm, leaning against the rail. Ryan Shuck was smoking a Kool someone had slipped in his mouth and lit for him, and then he'd dipped his head toward Kenny Smith to light Kenny's Kool with the tip of his own, and Kenny lit the next man, and on down the line. Like they were taking a smoke break before they could strip off their Gumbys and go back to bed.\n\nEric went back inside, got a cup of water from the sink at the rear of the wheelhouse. Nerves made his mouth dry. He looked out the window: The stern was buried under seawater now. In the bowels of the boat, he could hear the engines struggling, as if the pistons were drowning. That meant the engine room must have flooded. At least one door hadn't held.\n\nThe crew was still on the bow, huddled against the cold, trying not to slip on the icy deck. Eric was worried about them, afraid if one of them tumbled overboard he'd be too numb to save himself. Captain Pete told him he could shuttle them through the wheelhouse, five at a time, let them warm up, but no talking and no smoking.\n\nEric sneaked in seven, kept them there until they stopped shivering, sent them out, then ushered in a few more.\n\nTHE CUTTER Munro thrashed south at twenty-seven knots, a speed generated by the thrust of twin Pratt &amp;amp; Whitney turbines, 18,000 horsepower each. It's her best speed and her worst ride, pitching over the waves and rolling thirty degrees, steep enough to shake sailors from their racks and toss around anything that's not bolted down.\n\nThe rocking jolted Abe Heller awake at 2:55 a.m., three minutes after the Mun-ro picked up the Mayday from the Ranger. He clutched at the sides of his rack, held on, tried not to fall out. He stayed like that, in bed but not asleep, for a half hour, until one of the flight mechanics came to get him.\n\n\"Wake up. We got a case.\"\n\nHeller had expected as much, or knew, at least, that something bad had happened somewhere. He guessed he'd be flying a medevac, loading some sick or wounded sailor into the Dolphin. The speed was probably just to close the gap between the Munro and the target. The Dolphins have a shorter range than the land-based Jayhawks, and pilots don't like pushing their fuel gauge any lower than necessary.\n\n \"We got a boat sinking,\" the flight mech told him. \"There's forty-seven guys in the water.\"\n\nAt that point, Heller says, I crapped my pants.\n\nHe dressed in a hurry and scrambled to the command center. T. J. Schmitz, the Dolphin's commander and pilot, had already revised his flight plan once. At three o'clock, he had assumed, like everyone else, that his crew would ferry a pump to the Ranger. Schmitz wasn't going to take any risks with his men or his helicopter for a low-threat mission like that, so he decided they'd wait to launch until the Munro was sixty miles out, keep the flight short enough that he wouldn't have to worry about fuel. The Munro, even at flank speed, would need another four hours to get that close, but that was all right. A swamped boat can stay afloat for days.\n\nAt about three thirty, though, Schmitz received another broadcast from the Ranger. She'd lost all power except for her radio. The flooding was uncontrolled, water pouring in through the stern. The crew was preparing the life rafts.\n\nSchmitz needed a new plan. If sailors were abandoning ship, four hours was too long for them to drift in the frigid Bering, even assuming they all made it into rafts. He had to get the Dolphin to the sink site as soon as possible. He asked his copilot to figure out how much strain the helicopter could take, how much weight\u2014that is, how many bodies on top of a full fuel load\u2014it could carry. He recalculated the launch distance, decided the Dolphin could get airborne eighty miles out instead of sixty, which would get them over the survivors almost an hour sooner. Still, it would be a laborious process getting the Dolphin off the flight deck. At ninety miles from the sink site, the Munro would have to disengage the turbines and turn into the seas to minimize her pitch and roll so the ground crew could safely haul the helicopter out of the hangar and anchor it to the flight deck. Then it would have to turn again, resume flank speed to cover the next ten miles while Schmitz ran through his preflight checks. At eighty miles out, it would slow again and turn into the wind until Schmitz got the Dolphin off the deck.\n\nSchmitz assumed they'd be hoisting hypothermic fishermen in bloated, waterlogged Gumby suits. Getting survivors out of the basket was the flight mechanic's job, and he wanted the biggest, strongest man he could find at the rear door. He told Al Musgrave to get ready.\n\nRYAN SHUCK and Kenny Smith went into the wheelhouse with the third group. They saw Konno sitting in a chair and staring at the sonar, sipping water and smoking a cigarette. He had his suit only half on, his legs in and the rest of it falling loosely around his waist. He appeared calm, as if he understood the procedures and the protocols and how to survive a sinking ship. Or maybe he was simply resigned. Ryan thought he looked like a man who was waiting to die. Joey Galbreath saw him, too, thought about the Ranger banging through all that heavy ice, how she shook and rattled. He guessed Konno was thinking about it, too. It was like he knew, in his heart of hearts, this was all his fault.\n\nThey stayed in the wheelhouse for five minutes, give or take, and started out the door. Ryan had just stepped on deck when the Ranger lurched hard, jerked and twisted, toppled forty-five degrees to starboard, threw Ryan against the rail. He thought she'd right herself, like she always did, but she stayed over. And then he realized the Ranger was running backward, that the engines had switched into full reverse. The rightward list steered her into a fast, backward loop, and the speed drove her stern, already swamped, deeper into the waves.\n\nOn the bow, guys started yelling for the life rafts to be deployed. There were three rafts for forty-seven crew, one near the bow and two closer to the wheelhouse, one port and one starboard. The bosun said no, wait for the captain's order. \"Fuck the captain!\" guys screamed back. \"Deploy the fucking rafts.\"\n\nEric, back in the wheelhouse, was already asking Captain Pete if the crew should launch the rafts. He asked twice, made sure the captain meant it when he said yes. Then he scrambled to his assigned station, raft three, on the starboard side. Two guys from the e-crew were fumbling with the strap on the raft, trying to get it loose. Eric snapped at them, pushed them out of the way, reached for the clasp\u2026and his mind went blank. He'd forgotten how to release it. Captain Steve had stopped drilling the crew on raft deployment, saying that only he or the mate or the engineer would do it. The other guys on the Ranger used to joke that Captain Steve just wanted to make sure he got on one. Wasn't too funny now.\n\nFarther up the starboard side, two guys got raft one loosened, pulled the cords, and sent it out. It shot off the bow, its velocity even higher from the backward speed of the Ranger, and the strain snapped the painter line, the rope that keeps the raft tethered to the boat until the crew can climb in. It hit the water and kept going.\n\n\"Shit! We lost one,\" someone yelled.\n\nJoey Galbreath, shivering in his oversize suit, watched the raft zip away and disappear in a trough. Now he was scared. We, he thought, are pretty well fucked.\n\nBack at raft three, Eric and another crewman were still wrestling with the strap, finally got it undone, and sent the raft over the side; like the one lost off the bow, it was moving too fast. Eric grabbed the painter line, trying to slow the raft down, and the rope tore into his palms, ripped a gash through his Gumby suit. The line held, though. He could see the raft off the bow, skipping along the waves like an inner tube behind a speed boat.\n\nThe Ranger was listing more heavily now, too, water up to the gantry, heaving like she might roll all the way over. The crew was running out of time.\n\n\"Let's get going, guys,\" Eric yelled. \"You're going in one way or another.\"\n\nAnd then the crew, already numb and miserable, were calm again. Seemed that way to Eric, at least, watching them line up by the Jacob's ladder. Either you're gonna die, Kenny told himself, or you're not. Panic wouldn't change that simple fact.\n\nHe was at the rail by the ladder, holding a broken strobe light in his hand. The strobe was supposed to be clipped to his Gumby, was supposed to switch on when he hit the water, blinking bright white so rescuers could see him against the black of the sea. But when the Ranger first tipped hard to starboard, Kenny hit the rail, chest-high and hard, crushing his strobe. He turned to Ryan, standing at his shoulder. \"My light came off,\" he said.\n\nRyan knew that was bad. If Kenny didn't make it into a raft when he hit the water, he'd drift alone in the dark until he froze to death. Ryan told Kenny he'd follow him into the water, then tether the two of them together with the strap on his suit. Kenny nodded and climbed over the rail, the second man over. The ladder swung with the heaving of the Ranger, slamming Kenny against the hull. Ten feet above the waterline, he caught the side of the ship with his chin, the steel splitting it open. Dazed and bleeding, he let go, dropped into the ocean.\n\nFrom above, Ryan saw his friend slip from the ladder, saw him splash into the water and go under, a froth of white, then nothing. Kenny popped up a heartbeat later, probably in the same spot where he'd landed, but the Ranger was moving backward so fast that Kenny appeared to be racing toward the bow. Ryan watched him scrape along the hull, maybe reaching for a handhold, maybe just trying to keep his head above water. Kenny cleared the Ranger, sailed into open water a dozen yards left of the raft and then beyond, out into the endless Bering.\n\nHe's done. That's all Ryan thought. Not being callous, just practical. When a man is afraid for his own life, his mind doesn't make room for the already dead.\n\nHe went down the ladder next, jumped the last few feet to the waves. He went under, the water so cold it made his face feel brittle, as if it might shatter, then he surfaced and started swimming hard. He saw the raft coming toward him, and he centered himself in front of it, waited, his arms up, to catch the edge\u2026and it plowed into his face, lit a field of stars in his skull. Then he was under it, the raft riding over him, trapping him beneath.\n\nRyan started to panic, thrashing and flailing. One foot made contact with the bottom of the raft, and he kicked again, kept kicking until he bobbed up on the other side, choking on seawater. The raft was going away from him now, dragged by the Ranger. He swam after it, the Gumby suit stiff around his limbs, the swells forcing him to climb mountains of water. He couldn't keep pace, let alone close the distance. Exhausted, he gave up. When he caught his breath, he tried to inflate the air bladders around the collar of his Gumby, blow through the tubes at his shoulders, but his lips were so numb he couldn't form a seal around the air valve.\n\nAnd then he lay back in the water because there was nothing else he could do.\n\n\n\nAT THREE FIFTY, fifty-eight minutes after the initial Mayday, Steve Bonn whirled the Jayhawk off the tarmac on St. Paul, spun south, and started climbing to 6,000 feet. The Ranger's last reported position was 197 miles away, a gap they could close in less than two hours.\n\nBonn, who was 39 years old with short reddish hair and, depending on the light and his squint, a shadow of either Clint Eastwood or Opie Taylor, was at the flight\u00A0controls. He'd earned a reputation as an excellent pilot after nine years flying Black Hawks in the Army and another four flying Jayhawks, almost all of them in Alaskan skies. Brian McLaughlin, the flight commander, sat to his left. He was 30 and nine years out of the Coast Guard Academy, where he'd enrolled because only officers can fly helicopters and he'd wanted to fly since he was a boy.\n\nThe rescue swimmer, O'Brien Starr Hollow, was strapped into an aft seat. Hollow had earned a master's degree from the forestry department at the University of Montana at Missoula. He should've been researching water quality in the woods somewhere, but after graduation he wanted a physical job, one with action and drama. Bonn calls him \"one of those amazing nonstop cyborg guys.\" He could play himself in the movie.\n\nRob DeBolt, the flight mechanic, was near the rear door. He's a big dark-haired guy who joined the Guard the year after graduating high school in Walla Walla, Washington. On the ground, he can take a Jayhawk apart and put it back together again; in the air, he operates the hoist. After nine years, he had a half-dozen rescue missions under his belt.\n\nThe Jayhawk chopped through the night, Hollow keying the radio every fifteen minutes to give Commsta a position check. About fifty miles from the Ranger's position, clouds closed in, dropped the ceiling to 500 feet. Bonn descended, stayed below the clouds at 300 feet.\n\nThe radar in the nose was calibrated to twenty miles, so they were too far out to ping the ship. But the Jayhawk was close enough to pick up the VHF channel the Ranger and the Warrior, which was still two hours away, were using to communicate. All four men on the helicopter listened as the Warrior asked for a situation update.\n\n\"Not good,\" Captain Pete answered. \"We're at forty-five degrees starboard list, and we're probably gonna capsize soon.\"\n\nCaptain Pete said there were seven men left on board. Hollow did the quick arithmetic in his head: forty people in the water. He was going to have to get wet. What would he be swimming into? Were there nets in the water? He asked McLaughlin to ask, which he did.\n\nSilence. Dead air. Crap, DeBolt thought. Maybe they went down.\n\nThey kept flying, McLaughlin and Bonn with night-vision goggles strapped to their heads. A few miles out, McLaughlin spotted the first bright flash in the water. \"I got a strobe light at twelve o'clock,\" he said.\n\n\"Yeah, I see him,\" Bonn said. \"And I got another one\u2026\"\n\nFrom the back, Hollow heard one of them gasp, say, \"What the hell\u2026\" Then: \"Holy shit.\" Hollow saw all those lights, too, dozens of them, sparkling and scattered for more than a mile, hiding behind waves, then blinking back when the swells passed. There were too many to count. DeBolt thought it looked like a runway, a long line of lights undulating on the surface. And it scared him. Those lights were all people bobbing in very cold water. It was five after five in the morning, more than two hours since the Mayday. How fast could they pull them up? How many of them would be dead already?\n\nAnd the Ranger? She was gone. She'd never even blipped onto the radar screen. The water below her was 6,000 feet deep, and a ship her size will plane and slide and drift on its way to the bottom. She could've been miles away by then, and more than a mile down.\n\n\n\nKENNY, HIS CHIN bleeding and stinging, regained his senses, got his face out of the water, looked around. He saw the flash of the raft's strobe. How'd it get so far away? It had been forty feet off the bow when he'd hit the water. Now he guessed it was a football field away, though it was hard to gauge the distance the way the ocean kept rising and falling. He paddled down a swell, lost sight of the raft in the trough, then rose on the next swell and saw it again. It was farther away.\n\nMan, you're gonna die.\n\nHe quit swimming. Gave up, to be honest. No sense fighting if you're doomed to lose. He let the current take him, his Gumby suit buoyant, keeping his head out of the water. The seal around his face wasn't tight, though, and water seeped in, a million little needles stabbing his neck and chest. Shitty way to die.\n\nIn the distance, he saw the Ranger reared back on her stern, lights flickering. A swell came up in front of him, blocked his view, and when it passed under him, lifted him, he could see only her bow, nosing up toward the sky. The ocean rose and fell again, and then the Ranger was gone. All that was left were the blinks of strobes on bodies and rafts, dozens of them, twinkling like stars.\n\n\n\nBONN DESCENDED TO a hundred feet and flew toward the first strobe they'd seen. A raft. He circled to the right and saw a man waving, frantic, as if Bonn couldn't see him in the spotlight shining down. They called McLaughlin on the radio\u2014every raft has a radio\u2014and he asked them if they were all right, told them to hang tight, somebody would come for them. The first part of any rescue is triage, and men treading water take priority over those in a raft.\n\nBonn wheeled away and chopped to the next light, a single dot on the surface, downwind from all the other lights. That was fortunate. McLaughlin and Bonn thought it was better to start downwind, let the ocean push more survivors toward them while they're lifting men out instead of chasing after them. Bonn dropped to forty feet and turned the nose into the wind for stability. In the back, Hollow clipped the winch line to the harness on his dry suit.\n\nNo one on the aircraft can see everything at once. Bonn, working the controls in the cockpit, couldn't see what was below, so he relied on DeBolt, the flight mechanic at the rear door, to tell him how to maneuver\u2014back thirty, forward-left twenty\u2014to keep their target off the right side of the nose. DeBolt, meanwhile, was watching Hollow for signals, a spinning hand that says go lower or a chopping arm that means stop. But DeBolt couldn't see the waves rolling toward the swimmer, which was critical because he didn't want to dangle Hollow in front of a monster breaker. So McLaughlin, commanding the flight from the left seat, spotted for him, staring out the front through his night vision. Big swell in three, two, one\u2026 Two little ones\u2026 Another big one in three, two\u2026\n\nHollow swung out the door. This would be a direct deployment, meaning he'd stay on the hook, attached to the hoist, and if the guy in the water forty feet down was in good enough shape, he'd do a quick-strop, wrap a cord around him and give DeBolt the signal to haul them both up.\n\n\n\nWHITECAPS SLAPPED AT Ryan's face like driven sleet, and water sloshed through the leaky seal of his suit, swamping the Gumby. He turned his back to the waves, tried to keep the breakers behind him, and drifted, riding the ocean heaving and falling beneath him.\n\nFrom the top of a swell, he saw a cluster of strobes not too far away. He started swimming again. A full moon shone above, and Ryan kept it over his left shoulder, trying to swim a true line. The clouds closed in, but he kept swimming straight, thought he kept swimming straight, until he crested another wave and there was nothing in front of him but dark water.\n\nHe gave up again, rested, floated, let the sea carry him. His hands ached. The pain reminded him of ice fishing with his father when he was a boy in Montana. He'd have to pee behind a tree on the shore of some frozen lake, and his hands would hurt so bad from the cold that he couldn't button his pants. Ryan hated ice fishing.\n\nA flicker of white flapped above his head. A seagull, right over him, so close Ryan could almost touch it, tried to touch it, in fact, and even then it didn't fly away, stayed with him, just out of reach. Miles from nowhere, in the middle of the ocean, and a white-winged bird came to watch over him.\n\nThis fucking thing wants to eat me.\n\nIt was taunting him. He was sure of it. That seagull had flown all the way out there to wait for Ryan to die so it could peck out his eyeballs. He swiped at the gull again and it skittered a few inches higher. Ryan cursed it.\n\nHe'd been alone for more than an hour, he guessed. How much longer could he take it? He started to pray, wanted to pray, but he got belligerent instead. \"All right, God,\" he said. \"You've got one hour to come and get me, and then I'm just unzipping this suit and getting it over with, 'cause I can't take the pain of freezing to death.\" He glanced up. \"And I don't like this fucking bird.\"\n\nFifteen minutes later, he saw the lights of the Jayhawk. It was a quarter-mile away, hovering, then moving again, coming his way. It stopped near him, a couple dozen yards downwind, and Ryan watched a man winch down on a cable, hit the water, swim toward him.\n\n\"How you doing?\" O'Brien Hollow asked. His job was to stay calm, almost casual, which, in theory, keeps the survivors calm.\n\n\"I'm doing all right.\"\n\n\"Can you put your arms down at your sides?\"\n\n\"I can do anything you want me to do,\" Ryan said.\n\nLess than a minute later, he was strapped to Hollow. The winch cable tightened, lifted both men out of the water, up to DeBolt waiting in the door. Then Ryan was in the Jayhawk, the first man saved that night.\n\n\n\nKENNY SMITH FLOATED alone for\u2026hell, he doesn't know. Close to two hours, probably, but it's hard to track time when you're slowly freezing to death in a black sea under a black sky, and you're no more than a dark spot, invisible with no strobe to flash I'm here, goddammit, save me.\n\nChrist, it hurt. His suit kept filling with water, settling in the legs, pulling him down, and he'd been swallowing seawater and diesel fuel.\n\nYou're dead, dude. You're gonna die.\n\nHe crested another swell and two lights flashed at him from the side of the next wave. Two survivors. He was too tired to swim, but the current carried him closer, pushed him right next to Evan Holmes and another crewman. They grabbed him, and Kenny looked at Evan and told him, \"I'm not gonna make it, dude,\" and Kenny believed it, too.\n\nThe three of them clung together, Kenny fading in and out of consciousness. He saw a body float near, a small man, about Captain Pete's size, face down. Kenny reached for him, grabbed the suit, and shook. No response. A wave reared up, broke at the top, buried Kenny in seawater. He went under briefly, got his head back above the surface, and the body was gone.\n\n\"A dead guy just came by us,\" Kenny said.\n\n\"For real?\" Evan said.\n\n\"Yeah, man, he's dead.\"\n\nThen Kenny passed out again, drifted away from his friends. He wondered, in his stupor, if he was already dead, too. He thought he heard Evan crying.\n\nThe rest came in fragments. The white light of a helicopter hovering overhead. A green glow from the chem light on O'Brien's helmet. The inside of the Jayhawk, Ryan and two more survivors on the floor.\n\n\"I'm cold,\" Kenny said.\n\n\"Shut up,\" Ryan said. \"We're all cold.\"\n\n\n\nTHE WATER HADN'T been as bad as Joey Galbreath had feared it would be. He'd thought, freezing his nuts off on the Ranger while waiting his turn to climb down the Jacob's ladder, that the cold would slice through his Gumby, into his flesh. But he'd been out in the wind on the bow for so long that dropping into the water was almost a relief. At first, anyway.\n\nHe'd jumped, aiming for the raft, planning to grab the painter line and haul himself in, and maybe he could have if the fingers of his gloves hadn't been crudded shut, if he'd had working hands at the ends of his oversize sleeves instead of useless floppy rubber. He'd missed the raft, missed the line, and kept going, the Ranger pulling away in full reverse, Joey adrift and alone.\n\nAnd you know what? It was beautiful. At one point, the clouds broke and opened up a sky splattered with stars and a big bright moon, and on the sea, strobes blinked in and out with the rhythm of the swells. Under different circumstances\u2014if Joey had been on a cruise ship, say, or floating in warm seas with a girl\u2014he believed it would have been majestic. Yeah, he says that: majestic.\n\nBut the Bering got mean fast. The jumbo suit hung on him like loose skin, none of the seals holding, water leaking in. The first hour was painful, the second numb and painful. After three hours in the water, three hours in the frozen cold, three hours believing he might die because, really, he should have, so much water had flooded his suit that it was actually pulling him down and he was treading water, kicking his legs to keep his face above the surface. Waves broke over his head, clogging his ears. He couldn't hear, and he was puking up seawater and fuel, and he was going into shock.\n\nFuck. I'm dead.\n\nHe passed out. He came to, passed out again, and when his eyes opened there were other men around him, three of them, though Joey didn't know if they'd drifted to him or he to them. Jeramy Moores was there, and Mario Carrillo and Alex Alieras, and Alex was saying he couldn't swim, Tell me what to do, tell me what to do.\n\nA thwipping sound, near distance. Joey lifted his head, saw a helicopter flying low, and then nothing, no cold and no blackness and no pain, no sight or sound or feeling. Nothing. \n\nRob DeBolt tugged the basket into the cabin of the Jayhawk and gave Joey a nudge to get out.\n\nJoey didn't move. He was slouched back, knees drawn up, both hands wrapped tight around the frame of the basket. \"No, no, no,\" he screamed.\n\n\"Get out of the basket,\" DeBolt yelled over the rotors. He shoved him, but Joey wouldn't budge.\n\n\"No! No!\"\n\nDeBolt shoved harder, but Joey tightened his grip. He didn't know what he was doing. Hypothermic shock is intoxicating, slows the flow of blood to the brain, reduces people to paralytic stupor, and Joey had it bad: His core temperature had plunged to eighty-eight degrees. But DeBolt needed him out of the basket. Hollow was still down in the water, holding the last man from Joey's cluster in a bear hug, counting the seconds.\n\n\"You gotta get out. C'mon, man, get out.\" Nothing. DeBolt turned toward the front, yelled at McLaughlin. \"This guy won't get out of the basket.\"\n\n\"Hit him with the flashlight,\" McLaughlin said.\n\n\"Punch him in the jaw,\" Ryan shouted. \"Fuckin' punch him!\"\n\n\n\nROB DEBOLT pounded on his arms and heaved the basket on its end until Joey finally tumbled out. Then DeBolt slid the basket out the door, lowered it, and hauled up another man from the Ranger, then Hollow. In fifty minutes, Bonn and McLaughlin and DeBolt and Hollow had pulled a dozen men out of the ocean, which meant there were sixteen bodies jammed into the cabin, which is about the size of an average bathroom, except with a five-foot ceiling. There were still thirteen men in the water and no room for them in the Jayhawk.\n\nAnd the Dolphin was still on the deck of the Munro, which was steaming south and at least an hour out.\n\n\"Hey, man,\" Ryan said to the last guy in. \"You're sittin' on Joey.\"\n\n\"I don't care.\"\n\nRyan nudged some bodies around until he opened a hole through all the wet Gumbys so Joey could breathe. The man had survived three hours in the Bering; Ryan wasn't going to let him suffocate now that he was out.\n\n\n\nHEADQUARTERS WANTED the survivors flown to Dutch Harbor, 120 miles away from the sink site. The Jayhawk would need to refuel, too. Round-trip would be two and a half hours if they pushed it, probably three. And there were still men in the water. If they're in there another thirty minutes, Bonn thought, people are gonna start dying.\n\nBonn and McLaughlin could see the lights of the Warrior, the Ranger's sister ship, six miles off the Jayhawk's nose. They decided to fly there, lower the survivors to the deck of the boat, then rush back for the rest.\n\nBonn kept the Jayhawk a hundred feet off the ocean, swung around the Warrior to her stern deck, and turned into the wind. DeBolt got a volunteer seated in the basket, then eased it out the door and started playing out cable. The basket twirled in the wind as it descended, caught the gusts, swung in erratic arcs. Below, the Warrior wobbled on the sea, her cranes and towers swinging like off-beat metronomes. Her deck was glassy with ice and cluttered with gear.\n\nMcLaughlin and Bonn didn't like it. Too risky. DeBolt raised the basket while Bonn circled around to the bow, then lowered it a few feet. The front of the Warrior was no better. The pilot house was in the way, antennas poking up, too many things to catch the cable, tangle it. If the Jayhawk crew tried to put the survivors, already hobbled by varying degrees of hypothermia, down on the Warrior, they risked them tumbling out of the basket or being impaled on the rigging or, even if they made it to the ship, sliding off the deck and back into the sea.\n\nBut now what? Dutch Harbor was still too far, and they'd eaten up time and fuel hovering over the Warrior. Their only option was the Munro, only seventy-five miles out but still a long way away for the guys waiting in the water.\n\n\n\nT.J. SCHMITZ AND HIS crew were cycling through the final flight preparations in the Dolphin on the deck of the Munro. The cutter slowed for the second time. Coast Guard regulations say a helicopter can't lift off a deck if the ship is pitching more than five degrees or rolling more than seven. But the seas were heavier now, lifting and rocking the Munro. If she was within limits, it was only briefly and sporadically.\n\nSchmitz wasn't going to wait for the sea to settle. He'd flown Kiowas and Cobras for ten years in the Army, Dolphins for seven in the Coast Guard. He could get his bird off a jostling deck. He watched the pitch, and when the bow started rising, Schmitz throttled up, using the momentum of the deck as a catapult. At 5:55 a.m., three hours after the Mayday, the Dolphin slid over the port rail, nosed south, and started climbing.\n\nThey had a forty-minute flight to the sink site. Abe Heller, the rescue swimmer heading out on his first rescue, sat in the back, going over his gear, doing inventory. Okay, what'd I forget? he asked himself. I don't want to be the guy who goes out on this huge case and forgets one of his gloves. He watched out the window, saw the lights of the Jayhawk chopping north toward the Munro.\n\nSchmitz saw the strobes from three miles out, at least a dozen of them spread across the sea, the farthest almost a mile from the Ranger's last reported position. He dropped the Dolphin to sixty feet over a group of three strobes, each floating alone a few hundred yards from each other. Schmitz aimed the landing light on the one farthest to the right. Arms waved back at him. The guy was alive.\n\nIn the back, Heller climbed into the basket. He'd practiced this part more times than he could remember, had trained in the water, had done pretend rescues of pretend victims. Did any of that count? Now that it was real, now that men might live or die because of how well he did his job? He didn't know.\n\nAl Musgrave, the flight mechanic, began to lower the basket, and then Heller was hanging over the Bering, nothing but blackness all around him, the wind and the rotor wash howling, the basket spinning. His senses all functioned\u2014he could hear the helicopter and see the spotlight on the water and feel the frame of the basket\u2014but he couldn't get his bearings, couldn't get centered. That's when I got nervous. Am I up for this?\n\nThen he slipped into the water, and it calmed him, focused him. He swam toward the sailor in the beam of light, reached for him, asked how he was doing, tried to sound reassuring. The guy said something he couldn't understand and then started flailing, a symptom of hypothermia. Heller got behind him, put him in a chest hold to immobilize him, and swam him back to the basket. Musgrave hoisted the fisherman, lowered the basket for Heller, and hoisted again. Schmitz flew to his left, to the second strobe and then the third, and Heller went down and up and down and up. Snow squalled around the helicopter, and Schmitz had to kill his light every so often so vertigo wouldn't overwhelm his senses, but in nineteen minutes the Dolphin had rescued three men.\n\nSchmitz flew south toward a group of four men linked together, the two on the end waving their arms. They looked to be in decent shape, all things considered, so Schmitz figured they could wait a little longer. He turned toward a single strobe two hundred yards downwind.\n\nIn the landing light, Schmitz could see there were actually two men in a tangle of debris, one waving an arm and holding onto the other, who wasn't moving at all. Heller went down, and the guy who'd been waving\u2014Jim Madruga, the first assistant engineer\u2014said, \"Take him.\" He nodded toward Byron Carrillo, who was in bad shape, barely conscious, deep in shock. Byron's fingers were laced into a bundle of netting, locked stiff, and Heller had to pry them off, then get himself loose from the ropes that had wrapped around his own legs.\n\nFinally free, Heller swam Byron, limp and docile, to the basket. Heller started to ease him in, and Byron came alive, not so much struggling as blindly thrashing. Heller grappled with him for ten minutes, slipping behind him to get his arms around Byron's chest, immobilize him, Byron wriggling free again, Heller trying to get another solid hold. Forty feet above, the Dolphin was burning fuel. No one had time for a wrestling match. Heller finally stuffed Byron into the basket, and Musgrave started the hoist. Halfway up, Byron shifted, his legs dangling over the edge of the basket, but he seemed stable. Heller turned away, swimming back to Jim Madruga.\n\nThe basket leveled outside the door. Byron's hair, long and curly, hung like a wet mop over his face, but Musgrave could see his terrified eyes. He reached out to pull Byron into the cabin, but the Gumby was so full of water that Musgrave couldn't feel Byron's legs, only the squish of the suit. The weight was tugging Byron out of the basket, gravity pulling him toward the ocean, Byron clinging to the basket with his elbows. Musgrave reached for a knife to slash the suit, drain the water\u2014and then Byron slipped out of the basket. Musgrave sprang forward, grabbed him, held on for three, maybe four seconds, straining to keep 400 pounds of waterlogged fisherman from falling.\n\nAnd then he lost his grip. Byron dropped forty feet into the sea.\n\n\"He's gone! He's gone!\"\n\nSchmitz couldn't see what was happening behind him. \"Who's gone?\"\n\n\"The survivor. He's gone.\"\n\nSchmitz shifted the Dolphin back and to the left. He saw a body in the spotlight, face down in the waves. Schmitz swung the light toward Heller to get his attention, then swiveled it back onto Byron, but there was a swell between the two men. Heller couldn't see Byron, didn't understand what the sweeping light was all about. He kept swimming to the debris field.\n\nSchmitz hovered over Byron for a few minutes. \"C'mon,\" he muttered, \"turn over. C'mon, dammit, turn over.\" Nothing.\n\nMusgrave was silent in the rear of the Dolphin.\n\n\"We need to move on,\" Schmitz told him. \"We need to focus on the guys we can save.\" More silence. \"Are you ready to continue?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n\nBACK AT THE MUNRO, Bonn held the Jayhawk in a hover as DeBolt lowered fishermen to the flight deck. They were soaked and hypothermic, but most were able to walk on their own. Each was steadied by a pair of guardsmen who met them on deck and escorted them down to the galley, which had been prepped as a first-aid station and stocked with blankets warmed in the driers and ovens. Ryan was clear-headed enough to crack a joke when the crew, men and women, stripped off his Gumby and his soaking clothes. \"Usually it's bigger,\" he said, \"but my nuts are in my stomach.\"\n\nKenny and Joey were brought in on stretchers. Kenny seemed all right, conscious, sort of alert. But Joey. Damn. Ryan thought he was dead, alabaster white and not moving at all.\n\nJoey was still fading in and out. He'd been briefly conscious in the helicopter, had a cloudy memory of a guy in a white helmet giving him a chest noogie, rubbing his sternum hard, and Joey thought he'd managed a thumbs-up before blacking again. He remembered feeling his suit being torn off, followed by his clothes, and then a shock blanket\u2014a big, warm bag, basically\u2014being wrapped around him. Next was the shaking. He was waking up, and his whole body shook, violent and jerky and uncontrollable, like spasms. The muscles in his shoulders were so tight he believed his spine might snap under the pressure and the trembling. He wouldn't be able to walk properly for another thirty-six hours.\n\nOutside, Bonn slid the Jayhawk off to the port side, the helicopter attached to the cutter by a hose pumping fuel to send the crew back out for anyone left in the water. It was a tricky maneuver. Bonn had to keep the Jayhawk a precise distance away from the ship and slightly higher than the deck, which was rising and falling in heavy seas. They'd practiced an in-flight refuel only once, two days before, and Bonn hadn't been flying.\n\n\n\nABE HELLER WAS BACK in the water, swimming toward four fishermen huddled together. There were already four survivors on the Dolphin, which meant there was room for only one more\u2014if Heller gave up his seat. Schmitz had told him during the mission brief that he might be left behind if it meant saving another fisherman. Now it was going to happen.\n\nHeller approached the fishermen. \"How you guys doing?\" he asked. He knew they were all miserable, but he wanted to hear their voices, wanted to triage the one with the weakest response. The second guy from the end could barely gurgle. Heller took him and swam back toward the basket. A raft, a six-man survival unit, dropped from the Dolphin. Heller loaded the man in his arms into the basket, gave Musgrave the signal to haul him up, then started loading the remaining three into the raft. Two went in easy. The last, a big, hypothermic Samoan named Sam, was a struggle, two fishermen pulling from inside the raft, Heller underwater, pushing up on Sam with his helmet. Sam finally tumbled into the raft, and Heller climbed in after him, shaking him and shining a light in his eyes. \"Sam! You with me? Sam!\"\n\nSam raised one arm and waggled his fingers. He was still alive and would probably stay that way if another helicopter flew back quickly enough.\n\nAbove, Schmitz made a slow pass over the raft, made sure everyone was either in it or holding on, then peeled toward the Munro. It would take the Dolphin forty minutes of flying time, and Schmitz had fifty-six minutes until splash\u2014until he ran out of fuel and dropped into the ocean. He radioed that he was fuel critical and needed the Munro to wind up the turbines, start closing the gap. On the Jayhawk hovering off to the side, DeBolt disconnected the fuel line, his helicopter short about a thousand pounds of gas, but there was no other option. The Munro had to move.\n\nSchmitz flew low to get out of a headwind blowing at thirty-seven knots. From twenty-six miles out, Schmitz saw the lights of the cutter and radioed that he had the ship in sight. The Munro immediately heaved to starboard, turning into the seas and slowing hard, trying to steady the flight deck, get it within safe limits of pitch and roll for the Dolphin to land. She never came close, but Schmitz didn't have time to wait. He thunked the Dolphin down, dead center of the deck.\n\n\n\nSNOW WAS BLOWING in the Bering again, and waves broke over the raft. The four of them, Heller and three survivors, were sitting in three inches of freezing seawater, but at least it wasn't enough to drown in. Every few minutes, Heller shouted at Sam again, and Sam would waggle his fingers.\n\nHeller was nauseous in the raft, bouncing and jostling on top of the swells, so he slipped into the water, where he could at least float in sync with the sea. He was cold. Cold as fuck. He had been with the raft for barely more than an hour, certain a helicopter was coming for him, and he was frozen and sick. Those guys on the Ranger? They'd been in the water for hours in suits that didn't fit, and they'd spent most of that time not knowing when help was coming, if help was coming. Some of them, maybe most of them, should be dead already. Yet between the pain and the fear, they were, as a group, surprisingly calm.\n\nHe heard the chop of the Jayhawk in the distance, saw it coming over the horizon. The two guys in the raft helped him get Sam into the water, and Heller swam him toward the Jayhawk, DeBolt already lowering the basket. He loaded Sam, DeBolt hoisted him up, then they repeated the cycle for the last two. Heller, exhausted and freezing, went up last. He sat against a sidewall, watching out the left window as the Jayhawk searched for more survivors. And then he vomited up saltwater and diesel, and maybe some baked beans, too.\n\nThe Jayhawk crew found one more body, Dave Silveira, the mate. Officially, he was in critical condition\u2014there's a truism that a man is never dead until he's warm and dead, because something called the mammalian diving reflex allows the body to survive horrifying drops in body temperature\u2014but Dave was already gone. O'Brien Hollow hoisted down for the recovery and had to slit the legs of Dave's waterlogged suit to make him light enough to lift.\n\n\n\nAT NINE FORTY-ONE in the morning, almost seven hours after Dave Silveira broadcast the Mayday, the Munro had recovered twenty survivors and one body. The Alaska Warrior had gathered another twenty-two people from the two life rafts and three dead men: Byron Carrillo; Dan Cook, the engineer; and Captain Pete.\n\nEric Haynes, who'd been the first man hauled onto the Warrior, helped do CPR on the dead men. But he knew Captain Pete wasn't coming back. There was a gaping wound on one forearm, though Eric couldn't tell if it had been torn open when the boat went down or if it had been gaffed when he was pulled out of the water. Captain Pete's face was twisted, agonized. Eric feared he had died a terrible death.\n\nSatoshi Konno was never found. A lot of the crew suspect he went down with his ship, just like the captains in the movies, but a few survivors heard him shouting for help in the water. The Munro searched for his body for two days, then delivered the rest of the survivors to Dutch Harbor.\n\nThe Fishing Company of Alaska put everyone up in the Grand Aleutian Hotel and bought them fresh clothes and gave them cash and picked up their tabs at the Unisea bar. Then the company started making offers: $25,000 to the guys who made it into rafts, $50,000 or $75,000 to the ones who drifted for hours in their leaky Gumby suits. About half the crew took the money, but at least twenty-one others are suing. FCA is invoking a nineteenth-century maritime law as its defense, arguing that the survivors' claims are limited to the current value of the Ranger, which is under 6,000 feet of water and therefore worth precisely nothing.\n\n\n\nTHE COAST GUARD air crews all got medals, and Abe Heller was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for volunteering to stay behind, in the middle of an ocean that could kill him, so that another man might live.\n\n Eric Haynes went home to Las Vegas. He exercises at the gym and works as a chef, but the lady who cuts his hair tells him he looks sad, which he is. A shrink helps him with that.\n\nRyan Shuck returned to Spokane, where his fianc\u00E9e, Kami, bought him a T-shirt screened with a green-eyed Grim Reaper, because he beat the bastard. He has something the doctors call reflex sympathy dystrophy in his left foot and nerve damage in his thumb. When doctors put him through an MRI machine, the beeps and pings sounded like the alarm on the Ranger, and the hairs on his neck stood up and he started to panic. He's been hospitalized twice for panic attacks, had to be strapped down one time. Sometimes, when he sees gulls down by the Spokane River, he throws stones at them.\n\nJoey Galbreath moved to Spokane, too. He spent the month of April in a stupor, afraid to fall asleep because then he might fall in the water again, too. So he drank. His hands are still numb and tingly, and he shakes whenever he hears a helicopter overhead, but he's sober now. He and Ryan both quit drinking, and they say it's good to be in the same town, that they help each other. A lot of people, they'll tell Joey they understand what he's been through, and he wants to tell them to fuck off, they don't know, can't know, unless maybe if they'd been in Vietnam or something. And then those people will ask him if almost freezing to death in the Bering Sea changed his life, if he saw the light or some shit, and hell, Joey doesn't know, and maybe he never will.\n\nAnd Kenny Smith, he went home to Pasco. He lives with his fianc\u00E9e in a shitty room in a shitty hotel, but it's only $195 a week. FCA gives him $300 every two weeks, and unemployment pays him $124 a week. He's looked for a job, and on the line on the applications that asks \"Reason for leaving last employment,\" he scrawls, \"My boat sank.\" Truth is, though, Kenny's not ready to work, probably won't be for a long while. The doctors tell him it'll take at least six months, maybe eighteen, for the nerves in his fingers and toes to regenerate. He's taking Lexapro and Xanax and Ambien and seeing counselors and psychiatrists. But fishing boats don't sink in Pasco, and nobody floats in thirty-two-degree seas believing they're going to die, so Kenny suspects the shrinks don't have a lot of experience with guys like him.\n\nHe has nightmares, too, and he hyperventilates when the shower water runs down his neck, all those tiny droplets suddenly like salt spray. The shower in his shitty room ran cold once, and then it became a rising wave that broke over him and washed him out of the shower and onto the bathroom floor, except Kenny didn't feel the cool tiles and he didn't see the dingy white walls or the smudgy mirror above the sink. He saw only black, and bottomless water rose all around him, the Bering Sea flooding into Pasco, and Kenny Smith was drowning all over again.\n\nsean flynn is a gq correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/alaskan-ranger-bering-sea?currentPage=14>