“Through the ceiling?” Leong said.
“Yes. From above the compartment just aft of the Wärt.” The rating used the nickname for the engine.
“And Mr. Duan?” Leong whispered.
“He . . . fell, sir.”
“Fell?” Leong gasped. “He is injured?”
“You do not understand,” the rating said. “The fire burned through the deck. Mr. Duan fell into the . . .” The man sniffed, obviously trying to compose himself. “Captain, the deck melted beneath his feet. He is gone.”
“Okay,” Leong said, trying to imagine the unimaginable scene. “Get out of there.”
“I cannot, Captain.” Another gasp turned into a frightened whimper. “The fire . . . it was very bright. I saw Mr. Duan fall, but I cannot see anything. The flames are close. I feel the heat. I will fall if I try to move.”
“Stay where you are,” the captain said. It was no wonder the man was terrified. “I will send someone to collect you.”
“Please . . . hur—”
The line filled with static, then went dead.
Leong’s head snapped up to look at Su. The first officer had pulled a thick binder labeled FIRE PROCEDURES from below the console and thumbed through it with trembling fingers.
“Wen!” the captain said, calling the addled man by his given name in an effort to steady him. “Put that away and go to Engineering. Remind everyone you see to put on their life vests. Some will forget in these moments of confusion.”
The first officer gave a curt nod, then, grabbing his own life jacket from a compartment under the navigation table, ducked his head and moved to the hatch leading to the aft deck.
Goos looked back and forth from the open hatch to the captain. “I will go with him,” he said, waiting for permission.
The captain nodded, picking up the radio phone.
“Goos!” he said as the young Balinese steward started down the stairs to the aft passageway. The boy turned, only his head above the deck. “A white flame means a metal fire. Make certain to use the dry Class D extinguishers only. Water will make it worse. And put on a life vest!”
The boy scrambled back up the stairs to retrieve a life jacket from the locker below the console.
A tremendous roar filled the night air. As if to lend credence to the captain’s fears, the shriek of rending metal carried in from the aft decks. A shower of white-hot sparks shot skyward out of the gaping hole. The body of a man dressed in flame-retardant coveralls followed, pushed upward on a geyser of steam and flames. Leong watched helplessly as the man fell straight back down, into the same fiery pit from which he’d come.
Now he believed in Hell.
He turned to Goos. The boy was paler now, his chin quivering. He’d seen the whole thing.
“Go,” Leong said, hoping the boy would understand the instructions given in Mandarin. “Keep your—”
Something heavy hit him in the head. He saw Goos’s terrified face, and then nothing.
Goos had watched in horror as the shard of metal from a ripped container whirred in like a sawblade and struck Captain Leong in the back of the head. Goos ducked instinctively, and when he looked up, the poor man was facedown in a pool of blood and shattered glass.
The boy found himself alone on the bridge. He grabbed the intercom to call for the first officer, but it was dead. The gale moaned outside, rain and wind whipping through the shattered windows.
The radio microphone hung from the console on a coiled cord, swaying with the heaving motion of the ship.
Goos had been on the bridge during man-overboard drills. He knew how to work the radio. And if there was ever a time to call for help, it was now. What he did not know was how to speak English.
He stayed low as he reached for the dangling mic, hiding behind the captain’s chair to keep from meeting the same fate.
Goos depressed the key on the side of the mic and said the only words he knew that would get help coming his way:
“Mayday, mayday . . . Man overboard . . .”
A female voice crackled over the radio a moment later. “U.S. Coast Guard Seattle Sector, ship calling mayday, please say your location.”
“Yes!” Goos said, happy to hear a voice. “Yes! Man overboard! Please to help us!”
A horrible clatter rose from the belly of the ship, as if a dragon had gotten loose in the engine room. A moment later, the clatter abated and the steady thrum of the Wärt fell silent. Powerless, Orion shuddered and began to turn broadside to the waves, at the mercy of the gale.
Out on the demolished deck, rain did little to beat back the wall of fire, now fanned by a wicked wind. Metal groaned and men screamed. The bow began to lift as the aft portion of the ship wallowed lower in the water, flooding compartment by mangled compartment.
Goos felt the ship rise under him and huddled among the glass and debris on the floor of the wheelhouse, clutching his knees to his chest and trying to focus on the female voice speaking on the radio. He didn’t understand her, but he prayed she was sending help.
3
The straits operator, Petty Officer 3rd Class Barb Pennington, leaned back in the swivel chair, scanning the dotted traffic lanes on the six color monitors above her workstation in the Seattle Vessel Traffic Services. It was late and she’d just taken a sip of coffee when a terrified voice crackled into her headset. She rocked forward immediately, as if getting nearer to her computer screens would help her hear better.
“Chinese container ship Orion reporting a man overboard, Chief,” Petty Officer Pennington said as her supervisor walked up beside her. “AIS shows him two miles west of Pillar Point. I spoke with the vessel captain at 0114 hours when he crossed the 124 line. It sounds like a different person making the report. I was able to get him to switch to channel 16, but he’s not responding to any other questions.”
The watch supervisor nodded. “Man overboard. Understood.” He passed the call to the command duty officer in the Joint Harbor Operations Center on the other side of the frosted glass wall.
The CDO, Chief Petty Officer George Rodriguez, assigned a JHOC operations specialist named Sally Fry to monitor the call through Rescue 21, an advanced maritime C4 (computing, command, control, and communications) program. Rescue 21 used a variety of fixed towers to vector the ship’s position each time it transmitted, superimposing a line of position on a digital chart. Best case scenario, the transmission hit multiple towers and took the “search” out of search and rescue, but even one tower would put the distressed vessel somewhere along that given line.
In a calm but authoritative voice belying her junior status and twenty-three years of age, Petty Officer Fry engaged the young man at the other end of the radio in a conversation during which he said little but “Man overboard” and “Please to help.”
Both the straits operator and the operations specialist were female, and the transfer went so smoothly that the person reporting the mayday never knew he’d been passed from Vessel Traffic Services to the rescue management side of the JHOC house.
A time clock began the moment the command duty officer became aware of the distress call.
Chief Rodriguez looked across his workstation and nodded at the Operations Unit specialist, who returned the nod, letting the chief know he was already building a case in Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System. Among many other nuanced factors, SAROPS accounted for pre-distress vessel movement, present wind speed, and water currents, generating an estimated location of the vessel when rescue assets arrived.
Next, Rodriguez picked up the phone and activated Air Station Port Angeles to spin up their B-Zero response crew and get the ready-helo flying toward Orion. Anyone watching the process might have thought the call happened simultaneously with his other actions—and they would not be far from wrong. As command duty officer, Chief Rodriguez had the authority to send assets before even notifying his boss, the sea
rch-and-rescue mission coordinator.
The SMC made it crystal clear. When it came to SAR, the initial response of the U.S. Coast Guard was to “go there.”
• • •
The junior duty officer at Coast Guard Air Station Port Angeles answered the phone on the first ring. CDO Rodriguez passed on the information to the JDO, who repeated it back, then hung up and pressed the extension for the senior duty officer, Lieutenant Commander Andrew Slaznik, pilot in command of the B-Zero response helicopter.
Each Coast Guard air station in the United States had at least one B-Zero response crew on duty at any given time. They slept next to the hangar and were ready to deploy inside a thirty-minute window. Each SDO had his or her own way of doing things, and this one liked to be called prior to the SAR launch alarm being activated.
The SDO answered quickly for so early in the morning. “This is Mr. Slaznik,” he said, his words thick with sleep. The pilots were accustomed to these middle-of-the-night calls. Lieutenant Commander Slaznik seemed to live for them.
The JDO relayed the scant information regarding Orion’s man-overboard report and the SDO repeated it back to assure the petty officer he was awake and moving.
“Let’s go ahead and wake up the crew,” he added, before hanging up.
The SAR alarm wailed a moment later, wresting his copilot, Lieutenant Becky Crumb, from a deep sleep in the adjacent room. Slaznik called her cell phone, just to make sure she heard the siren, and said in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, “Get to the choppa!”
The flight mechanic and rescue swimmer slept in a building closer to the hangar and nearer to the alarm.
Slaznik splashed cold water on his face and smoothed the bed head out of his dark hair. He sat on the edge of his rack while he pulled up local weather and any Notices to Airmen on the Electronic Flight Bag program on his iPad. Winds gusting to forty with heavy rain in the strait. He groaned. As a helicopter pilot, he didn’t mind the wind. In fact, wind helped him with his hover when the bird was heavy, but it wreaked havoc on the hoist cable and made the rescue swimmer’s job all the more difficult. And his swimmer on this crew was a newbie, fresh out of thirteen weeks’ training. They’d gone out earlier that day on a jumper from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but locals had fished the body out before they got there, so it wasn’t a real call-out. The kid had handled himself well, asked good questions during the CRM open conversation Slaznik encouraged during any mission. This was going to be different. The kid was going to get wet. The weather was skosh, but it was a good thing he was going to cut his teeth on a simple man-in-the-water operation.
Firsthand experience in cold water cajoled the SDO along in his routine. People who fell off ships rarely wore any sort of protective suit—and without any protection, the window for survival began to close at an extremely rapid rate.
Slaznik would check the weather again before he launched. Marginal weather at the station often sucked severely farther west in the strait. He pushed a speed-dial number on his cell and made his first call the OPS boss at home, holding the phone to his ear with a shoulder while he stepped into his Switlik dry suit.
It was a goofy thing and he didn’t admit it to anyone other than his wife, but he loved that orange suit. Wearing it along with the black SAR Warrior survival vest made him feel like a superhero.
He didn’t mind getting up in the middle of the night. Like his five-year-old son said, that’s when superheroes were needed the most.
• • •
Andy Slaznik had known he would someday become a pilot from the moment he saw his first crop duster growl overhead to drop a marker at the end of a row on four hundred acres of canola at his grandfather’s farm. He was nine years old, and his family had been visiting his mother’s parents in southern Alberta. The Piper Pawnee Brave had seemed low enough to reach up and touch.
Andy begged his granddad to make the hour drive to the Lethbridge city library, where he checked out as many books on aviation as he could fit in his scrawny arms—and then devoured them all in three days. His room back in Boise became a gallery of plastic models, and he bored his friends to tears with an intricate and ever-growing knowledge of each and every aircraft that hung from the spackled ceiling on bits of sewing thread.
An uncanny memory and a natural knack for math worked in concert to give Slaznik an SAT score of 1464. Midway through his junior year, he began the lengthy application process to both the United States Air Force Academy and the United States Military Academy at West Point. His GPA, superior SAT score, and a sub-two-minute 800-meter time on his high school track team got him accepted to weeklong programs at each school during the summer break before he was a senior.
The Air Force liaison from nearby Mountain Home AFB took one look at the boy’s stats and pushed him hard to keep his sights firmly fixed on the Wild Blue U. But a guidance counselor suggested he might consider the Coast Guard Academy. She told him that because of its smaller class size, the USCGA was considered more selective. She then said maybe he should forget it. It might be a great deal of work with such a slim chance of being accepted.
The challenge alone appealed to Andrew’s competitive nature. He liked to prove he could excel at the hard stuff. He knew that the Navy and the Coast Guard both had aircraft—and some hotshot pilots—but they also had boats, a lot of boats. Andrew didn’t want to do boats. He wanted to fly. And besides, the Air Force liaison kept reminding him that if he ever wanted to be an astronaut, he needed to go with the Zoomies.
In the end, it was the guidance counselor’s thrown gauntlet that found Andrew Slaznik sitting with a class of thirty-four other AIM summer-program cadet wannabes in New London, Connecticut, listening to various old-timers answer questions about their respective jobs. The discussion was informative enough, but there was far too much talk about boats. Andrew found his mind wandering, thinking about how cool it would be to tell his friends he was an astronaut.
And then a tall, gangly, redheaded MH-65 Dolphin helicopter pilot took the microphone. He’d been last on the program—and, looking back, Andrew understood why. None of the other pros wanted to follow this guy. The pilot regaled the eager young students with stories of killer winds and night flights over mountainous seas. To hear this guy tell it, he got into hairy situations every other day.
It was Andrew who asked the final question of the night, and even as he spoke, he felt his mind drift again, pondering what the guys at Colorado Springs had to offer him. Surely the Air Force had hundreds of pilots with swagger and stories like this guy.
Andrew stood to ask the question. “Sir,” he said. “How many people would you say you’ve saved over the course of your career?”
The redheaded chopper pilot was a lieutenant commander. Probably in his early thirties, still a few years away from making O-5, where he’d be forced into grad school and flying a desk more than his bird. He listened to the question, then leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a few seconds, moving his fingers over his thumb as if counting. After a moment, he looked up at Andrew and clarified.
“Do you mean pulled some retired granddad with a bad case of food poisoning off a cruise ship or literally plucked somebody from the jaws of a watery death?”
The cadet wannabes all chuckled.
“Let’s go with plucked from the jaws of death,” Andrew said, thinking maybe he’d hit a nerve.
The pilot gave a humble shrug. “Thirty-seven,” he said.
The room grew quiet as a church.
Andrew Slaznik returned to Boise, where, later that year, he received congressional nominations for both USAFA and West Point. He was formally accepted to each school. The Air Force Academy sent an early admission letter in an effort to preempt him from accepting another offer. But five weeks after he graduated high school, and to the chagrin of the Air Force liaison from Mountain Home, his parents dropped him in New London, Connecticut, for Reporting day
—colloquially called “R-day”—at the United States Coast Guard Academy.
Cadet Slaznik memorized every word of Reef Points—the pocket-sized cadet bible of Coast Guard general knowledge—gritted his teeth through the seven-week horror show of “Swab Summer,” and plowed through the rest of his freshman year. Four years later, after learning not to be such a self-important ass, he graduated third from the top of his class with a degree in mechanical engineering—and a tolerance for boats.
With a fresh set of ensign boards on his shoulders, Slaznik’s academic standing opened the door to flight school, and, after a battery of rigorous physical tests and an in-depth background where OPM investigators asked with complete sincerity if his mother’s family had ever urged him to spy for the Canadians, he was admitted to rotary wing training at Naval Air Station Pensacola. He finished up training in his Coast Guard air frame in Mobile, Alabama.
And even now, Lieutenant Commander Andrew Slaznik got chills every time he walked with a swagger out to the flight line and his own MH-65 Dolphin, because few weeks went by that he didn’t have an opportunity to pluck someone from the jaws of death.
4
Dressed in his orange dry suit, Lieutenant Commander Slaznik logged in to the Aviation Logistics Management Information System across from the watch captain’s desk to check maintenance records. The air station had three MH-65s, but it was a rare moment when at least one wasn’t undergoing some kind of maintenance. The Coast Guard seemed to operate under the “have three to make one” rule when it came to helicopters. In this case, two birds were operational, so Slaznik flipped a coin and signed out 6521. He made a second call to the OPS boss, who’d already touched bases with JHOC and been informed there was also a forty-seven-foot response boat out of Neah Bay near the mouth of the strait, responding to the mayday. Copilot Lieutenant Becky Crumb was already outside doing the preflight and starting the helo. She was quick and efficient, which was good, because now that he knew surface assets were on the way, Slaznik’s competitive nature kicked into high gear. He knew the boat crews in Neah Bay, and they were every bit as competitive. Not a bad thing, really. The guy in the water didn’t much care who got there first.