A Gripping End to Drama of Death and Deliverance

Fred Kalt has that rugged, Steve McQueen look. Angular jaw, sharp nose, ice-blue eyes with not a trace of casualness.

Average height, average build, he speaks softly and slowly. His cool head, that sureness under pressure, would make him ideal for the role of a hero in a Hollywood blockbuster.

After high school in Tampa, Fla., he went straight into the Coast Guard at 18. There was never any doubt about his decision. “I wanted to experience a search and rescue,” he says. “To save a person, a life, in conditions no one else would want to risk themselves in.”

Twenty years later, he’s a flight engineer in Sitka, Alaska, husband of a woman named Barbara, father of two girls. It’s after midnight, Jan. 31, 1998, and he’s crouched in the darkness of a Jayhawk helicopter, ready to fly into a powerful storm in the Gulf of Alaska.

Next to him sit Michael Fish, a rescue swimmer, and Lee Honnold, on board as a backup flight mechanic. In the cockpit, Lt. Steven Torpey and his co-pilot, Cmdr. Theodore Le Feuvre, are firing up the engines.

This is the third helicopter sent to attempt a rescue of five men whose fishing vessel, the La Conte, sank in the Fairweather Grounds.

The first nearly crashed into the ocean and returned without any of the survivors. The second is on scene but losing fuel rapidly.

It’s almost a miracle the fishermen haven’t frozen to death. They’ve been floating in 38-degree water and mountainous seas for more than 5 hours. The longest anyone should expect to survive in water that cold--in calm seas--is roughly 4 1/2 hours.

Even by Coast Guard standards, this is classified as a high-risk mission, meaning the survivors are close to perishing and the rescuers are flying in life-threatening conditions.

It’s one of those missions that gets talked about for years in the remotest of air bases, in academy classrooms. It’s the test of Kalt’s life. He wouldn’t be anywhere else.

His team is better prepared than the first two. They’ve got an extra flight mechanic, chemical “glow sticks” so the survivors will see the rescue basket in the dark, 26 special flares that burn for 50 minutes, and 700 extra pounds of fuel.

Kalt’s going over this checklist in his mind when Le Feuvre’s voice crackles over the intercom.

“We’re launching, boys. Hang on.”

They are on the scene 49 minutes later, in complete darkness.

Torpey and Le Feuvre, as they will tell it later, are fighting headwinds, blurred dials and nausea as they try to keep the pitching aircraft out of the waves.

Kalt and Honnold crouch by the jump door, shouting altitudes above the roar of ice and snow. The helicopter is rising and falling like a roller coaster.

Through the sleet and snow rattling on his visor and helmet, Kalt spots strips of reflective tape on waving arms.

“Survivors!” he shouts.

Kalt drops nine flares. They hit water and shoot white light. Next, he lowers the rescue basket. It lands in a trough several hundred yards downwind of the men--too far for them to swim for it.

From his knees, Honnold shouts directions to the pilots. For 20 minutes, Kalt keeps hoisting and dropping the basket, trying to get it closer, but he can’t.

Fish, the 30-year-old rescue swimmer, offers to jump into the maelstrom to help the survivors into the basket.

“Appreciate the offer, Mike,” Torpey remembers shouting back, “but we don’t want to have to pull you out too.”

Kalt is tossing out more flares when a hammerhead clobbers them. The downdraft drives the Jayhawk backward a quarter mile and down into a trough.

Honnold, Kalt and Fish are screaming “Up! Up! Up!” Torpey and Le Feuvre are practically yanking the joystick out of the floor to give them lift power. If one wave hits us, Le Feuvre remembers thinking, we’re dead.

The radar altimeter reads 40 feet. Seconds pass. The altimeter is still at 40. This can’t be, Le Feuvre says to himself. I’m pulling this helicopter up at full power. We should be going straight up.

They are climbing, but below them, a wave is rising at the same speed.

“Well, Lord, I’m going to meet you,” Le Feuvre remembers thinking. “But do I have to go out being cold and wet?”

And then they’re clear. They’ve outraced the wave.

Ten minutes later, they’re back over the survivors. As Kalt lowers the basket, he notices that its winch cable is rubbing against the grating on the face of the searchlight on the helicopter’s belly.

The basket bounces wildly from crest to trough. After 20 minutes, Torpey manages to drag the basket closer and closer until it’s within 5 yards of the survivors.

Through his binoculars, Honnold sees one of the men break from the group, thrash across the water and claw his way into the basket.

He shouts: “Survivor in the basket!”

Kalt throws the hoist in gear. The basket is swinging and spinning, foam scudding from it. Kalt steadies the cable, and within 10 seconds it’s hanging in front of the jump door. He grabs the basket and hauls it in.

A man rolls out and curls up in a fetal position. Fish slides him back into a corner, slits off his survival suit and slips a thermal-insulated sack over him.

“What’s your name?”

“Mo-Mo-Mork,” he stutters. “William Mork.”

A Man’s Eyes Scream for Mercy

The basket is already going down again. It splashes into a trough 10 yards from the survivors. Once again, the cable is sawing against the searchlight. If it snaps, Kalt thinks, it’s over.

Kalt can’t see well through the ice and snow, but it looks as if someone is swimming toward the basket. He waits for a tug in the line.

A gust of wind buffets the chopper. The hoist cable shrieks and goes taut as a fiddle string, lashing the Jayhawk’s hull. Crewmen are shouting; the hoist is moaning. The pilots force down the helicopter’s nose to steady the aircraft.

Kalt struggles to the hoist control, finds it still operable. But the helicopter’s high-frequency antenna is gone. The hoist cable has ripped it off. Worse, the cable is frayed.

Below, the basket rises, bouncing like a yo-yo in the wind. It comes up, up, up until it is hanging just outside the jump door.

“Hey!” yells Kalt. “Someone’s still in the basket!”

He grabs the metal cage and pulls. It doesn’t budge. He pulls again. Stuck.

“Pull, Lee! Pull!” Kalt shouts. Both men lean back, pulling with all the strength in their cramping muscles.

Fish, who is tending to Mork on the floor of the cabin, looks up. Through an opening between Kalt’s right leg and the jump door, he can see why the basket won’t enter.

A man is dangling from it.

Each time Kalt and Honnold try to yank in the basket, the dangling man’s arms and head get rammed against the lip of the jump door.

“Fred!” Fish shouts. “Fred, someone’s hanging on the basket!”

“Where?” Kalt screams into the wind. “I can’t see him!”

The man is inches below Kalt’s boots, barely clinging to the bottom of the basket. He looks into the cabin and locks eyes with Fish.

For a second. Just one second.

Time enough for everything to pause in Fish’s mind, for the whining sleet and the groaning turbines to hush.

Time enough for one man’s eyes to scream for mercy, for another’s to scream in horror.

And then he’s gone.

The altimeter on the cabin wall reads 1-0-3. One hundred and three feet. My God, Fish remembers thinking, that’s far for a man to fall.

A Second Victim Rescued

The clunk of steel on the deck snaps Fish out of his thoughts. It’s the rescue basket. Kalt and flight mechanic Honnold have finally pulled it in.

Inside the basket is the second man they have managed to pull from the sea. His cheeks are the color of ice. Icicles twitch in his beard.

“Bob?” Fish whispers. “Bob Doyle?”

He knows this man. They once worked together at the Coast Guard’s air base in Sitka.

Fish strips off Doyle’s waterlogged suit and wraps him in a thermal bag. Doyle has survived more than 7 1/2 hours in 38-degree water.

“Bob,” Fish remembers asking, “how many men were on the ship?” He puts his ear next to Doyle’s blue lips.

“Five.”

“Not four?”

“Five.”

“Who just fell from the basket?”

“Mark Morley, our skipper.”

From the cockpit, Torpey sees one survivor at the strobe and another man floating 100 feet downwind. Where is the fifth man? Torpey checks his fuel: To make it back to Sitka base, they have to leave now.

Torpey thinks a moment, then gives everyone the plan.

They will save the man at the strobe. They will try to recover Morley. They will look for the unsighted fifth fisherman. Then, they’ll fly to the Yakutat air base, not Sitka station. Yakutat is 70 miles away--half as far as Sitka--and they can ride a tailwind, which will save fuel.

One Body Found, Another Missing

Kalt lowers the basket, but he’s worried about the cable. It is frayed badly now and could snap or jam in the hoist drum as it spools. For several minutes the basket bobs empty.

“What’s he waiting for?” Honnold remembers saying.

Finally, the survivor leaves the buoy and thrashes his way to the basket. Kalt throws the hoist gear in reverse, and 40 seconds later, Mike Decapua is in the helicopter.

“What took you so long?” Fish jokes.

“I couldn’t see it,” Decapua says. “I got long hair. It was in my eyes.”

Torpey banks into a hover above Morley. The basket touches down right next to him, but he doesn’t move. They bump him with the basket. Nothing. They try to scoop him up with the basket, but it doesn’t work.

After 20 minutes of this, Torpey and Le Feuvre call it quits. They’ve been in the air nearly 3 hours. The crew is dehydrated and dizzy with vertigo. The three rescued men are hypothermic. And fuel is dangerously low. Torpey takes them up to 300 feet, drops the nose and starts for Yakutat.

Kalt pulls off his helmet and visor. The muscles in his legs flutter and a queasiness rises in the pit of his stomach. He doesn’t feel much like a hero. He just feels exhausted.

At his feet sits the rescue basket. The light sticks inside it still glow a feeble green. Kalt stares at the sticks until they die out.

At daybreak the wind is blowing hard, but seas are down to 40 feet and the sleet has softened to a cold rain that dances along the water.

At first light, two Coast Guard C-130 planes from Kodiak and a helicopter from Sitka station begin crisscrossing the Fairweather Grounds. Shortly after 3:30 p.m., the helicopter plucks a body from the sea not 10 miles from where the La Conte sank. It is identified as that of Mark Morley. He will be buried six days later in his hometown, Plymouth, Mich.

But David Hanlon is still out there somewhere.

Young Hunters Make a Grim Discovery

An area twice the size of Rhode Island is combed before the search is called off at 5 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 4, 94 hours and $678,545 after it began.

People reckon it’ll be a week or so before a crabbing boat spots Hanlon’s body or his remains turn up in a fishing net.

But a week passes. Then a month. Then six months.

For Hanlon’s five sisters and two brothers, life drifts. Without a body, they can’t say goodbye.

Jesse Evans, 17, and his friend George Connors, 16, dropped anchor in Bear Cove on uninhabited Shuyak Island because the deer hunting there is good.

They were following a bear trail through a spruce forest when the red neoprene mitten appeared before them. Jesse was picking at it with his hunting knife when he felt the kick of George’s boot.

“I see something!” George shouted.

They bolted down the trail to a ring of spruce trees. Parting the branches, they stepped inside the bear den.

In the center was a fresh mound of dirt, a bear bed. Draped across it was the top half of a survival suit, severed at the waist, with a jagged rip down the back. The hood was missing.

The Story Ends in a Forensics Lab

Within an hour, a Coast Guard helicopter lowered state troopers Steve Hall and Tom Dunn to the beach so the boys could show them what they had found.

The troopers plucked bone chips, strands of hair and pieces of wetsuit from the dirt and dropped them into a plastic bag. They also took the fingers and bits of skin Jesse had plucked from the mitten.

Dunn wondered: Who is this person in my evidence bag? Where did he come from? How did he end up here?

The Alaska state crime laboratory needed 18 days to identify the remains.

The investigation started with the wetsuit, which had the word “Tomboy” stenciled on its back. Calls to skippers of boats named Tomboy led to a man who said someone had borrowed one of his survival suits to use on the La Conte.

Next, Walter McFarlane, an examiner at the Anchorage crime lab, checked the ridge patterns of the skin Jesse had plucked from the mitten. Comparing it to fingerprints state troopers kept on file, he announced, on Sept. 1, that he’d found a match.

The remains belonged to David Hanlon.

Somehow the counterclockwise current in the Gulf of Alaska had swept the body an incredible 650 miles, where it washed up on Shuyak. What condition it was in when it reached the shore, no one will ever know.

No one, that is, except the black bear that ambled to the beach one day and found the last crewman of a doomed ship.

Postscript: The five members of the last rescue team--Lt. Stephen Torpey, Lt. Cmdr. Theodore Le Feuvre, rescue swimmer Michael Fish, flight mechanic Harold Lee Honnold and flight engineer Fred Kalt--were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the highest aviation honor given in peacetime. The crews of the other two rescue helicopters received commendation medals.

Tamara Westcott, fiancee of the lost skipper, Mark Morley, gave birth to his son last summer. She named him Mark. The three surviving fishermen, William Mork, 39, Mike Decapua, 41, and Robert Doyle, 39, recovered from hypothermia and still fish the high seas.

Editor’s note: This story is based on interviews with 11 Coast Guard helicopter flight crew members involved in the rescue; three members of the ground crew; Coast Guard spokesmen in Juneau, Alaska, and Martinsburg, W.Va.; the surviving crew members of the La Conte; Jesse Evans, who found the remains on Shuyak Island; the two Alaska state troopers who recovered the remains; two forensics experts at the Alaska State Medical Examiner’s Office in Anchorage; and members of fisherman David Hanlon’s family. The story also draws from the 523-page record of the Coast Guard’s inquest into the sinking of the La Conte.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Story So Far

With barely enough fuel left to make it back to base, a Coast Guard helicopter gives up its rescue efforts, leaving five fishermen adrift in the frigid waters of the Gulf of Alaska. A second helicopter has arrived on the scene, but its crew, fighting powerful winds, has been unable to rescue the swimmers. Finally this helicopter, too, is forced to give up and return to base. The fishermen have been immersed in 38-degree water, bludgeoned by huge waves, for almost six hours. With every minute, their chances of survival diminish.