“Well, what do you think? Do you want to see the Imprimatur stamped on my chest?” Steve laughed.
“Some other time. Let’s get back to the house. You have to be up early tomorrow morning to say Mass.”
32
The Otter climbed swiftly up from the smooth blue sea in the crisp morning air. Steve marveled at the weather. The day was far more like an Arizona day than one in the Aleutian Islands. His eye traced blue sky in all directions out to the horizon. Not a cloud in sight. A perfect day for flying. As he reached cruise altitude, he throttled back to cruise speed and leveled off at 7,000 feet—an altitude that would allow him to easily clear the ring of snowcapped mountains. Far below he could see the town of Unalaska and its neighbor, the teaming seaport of Dutch Harbor, and the famous landmark—the Russian Church with its onion-shaped cupolas standing near the water’s edge.
He relaxed in the cockpit at the thought of a good flight to the outer islands. But a few minutes later, as he crossed the nearest mountains, the plane began pitching violently. Mountain updraft? Not likely, since he was well clear of the mountains. Clear air turbulence? Something wrong with the controls? He hadn’t flown the Otter more than a few times and perhaps there was some glitch he had overlooked in the control system. The plane began to roll. He struggled to keep the wings level and cut back on power to avoid descending into a spin. Damn that used car salesman—could he be pulling some kind of deception on rented airplanes? Had the Otter really been properly maintained? Suddenly he was socked in. A dark gray menacing turbulent cloud had come out of nowhere. In a moment he was on full instrument flight. Rain droplets pinged on the windshield. He bounced around in the cockpit. Airspeed 150, altitude 3,000 feet. Couldn’t be! He had dropped four thousand feet in a few seconds? What was wrong? Was the altimeter faulty or was this crate falling apart? Then the controls became heavy. He was in a dive. He struggled with all the strength in his arms to pull up. Leveling off, with airspeed dropping, he tried to apply power to keep from stalling but the throttle felt like lead. Everything was going haywire. He shouted ‘Mayday’ over the radio to the tower at Unalaska.
As he struggled to regain control of the airplane, Steve sensed in the near darkness of the cockpit that someone was seated in the copilot spot on his right. How could that be? Where in hell did the guy come from? Unnoticed and hidden in the back of the plane before he took off? He glanced over, it was Brother Michael. Where was Brother John? Right behind him in the cockpit, ready to clobber him? The plane went into another steep dive as Steve struggled to pull out. Brother Michael was fighting him at the controls. Every move Steve made was counteracted by the monk. Was that idiot trying to kill them? Steve felt an arm tighten around his neck. A glance over his shoulder told him it was Brother John choking him in an arm-lock from behind. The altimeter spun crazily down. The sea was a blue wall rushing towards the plane. Just before the boom, Steve had one passing wry thought: he would die but Brother Berard’s thugs were going to buy the farm too.
He felt himself slamming down against something hard. He hit the floor, bed clothes in a jumbled pile on top of him. A blanket wrapped tightly around his neck. There was a loud knock on the door. “Steve, are you all right?”
He got up stiffly and stumbled groggily to the door. His pajamas, soaking wet, were twisted around him; hair tousled; eyes half-open; mouth drooping. Opening the door, he saw Sergei, wide-eyed, obviously concerned. “Steve, what’s going on? This is the third time in the few weeks you’ve been here that I’ve wakened to hear you thrashing like you were in some kind of monumental struggle. Come down to the kitchen. Let me heat up some coffee. Maybe you should see a doctor, or at least, come down and let’s talk about it.”
In the kitchen, Steve peered out a window. It was dark outside. There was the Otter—barely visible in the light streaming from the house—floating silently at the dock. He was safe. His airplane was safe.
Sergei put down two cups of coffee. Steve munched on a cracker, still badly shaken by the dream.
“If you don’t want to tell me Steve, that’s OK, but I’m worried about you. About your health. Your mental health. I’m not talking about sins. This isn’t confession. We’ve become friends in the time you’ve been here and I’d just like to help if I can. I’m not a doctor, but I suspect you are suffering from depression, probably stemming from some bad past experiences. I can recommend a doctor here in town who can help you.”
“But what could he do—talk me into feeling better?” Steve replied with a smirk.
“He could,” Sergei said, “prescribe an anti-depressant. It could make a world of difference in your mental condition. It could dampen the impact of any bad experiences you may have had. And, by the way, you don’t have to, but it might help if you could tell me about what’s happened to you. Lips sealed, of course.”
As Steve slowly told the story, Sergei’s face fell. He stared down into his coffee cup. He had a feeling of immense sorrow for his new friend. He tried not to judge in a partisan religious sense, but he began to think the Roman Catholic Church was badly overreacting in its zeal to hunt down and stop this priest. He had seen Father Murphy devoutly saying Mass every morning; reading his breviary each day as he strolled through the church yard; praying at the grave of Saint Innocent; visiting the sick in the local dispensary; taking money out of his own pocket to help a family left destitute when the father was lost in a drowning accident on a crab boat at sea. There was no insurance in that line of work. A day’s wages for a hard and dangerous day of work at sea. Surely, this man sitting with him appeared to be every inch a priest. A devout priest.
In their earlier talks, Steve had told him of his years at the Vatican in Rome, his pastoral ministry back in Maryland. How he had constructed a new church. How he was at one point on the brink of being elevated to monsignor. An unfinished story. Now, in a kitchen on a barren island half-way out along the Aleutians, he told how it had all come crashing down.
As he sat listening to Steve, Sergei wondered: Where was God in all of this? Didn’t God care about this good person whose life was hanging in the balance? Sergei felt a chill creep through him when he realized they would both have to be on the lookout for Brothers Michael and John. He, Sergei, as a member of the Russian Church, had no obligation to alert Catholic authorities about one of their renegade priests. And even if he had, he knew he wouldn’t take action against a friend. Surely, the Catholic Church, if it decided against Steve being a valid priest, in its vast power and resources, could eventually find a way to stop him; but hell would freeze over before he, Sergei, would lend a hand.
*****
The skipper of the ninety-two foot trawler, the Alaska Lady, eighty miles out of Dutch Harbor, had been trying since late afternoon to get back to port. There were five men on board, one of whom had gone out reluctantly with a premonition that the cold, iron-gray overhead sky boded ill. The skipper, Jake Mackey, had earlier convinced the worried fisherman that the trip would be safe and without him, they couldn’t sail. The Alaska Lady, a crab boat, finally sailed out of Dutch Harbor early that morning, top-heavy with huge metal crab pots secured on deck. She was headed for an off-shore island and would crab in the waters close to the island.
By two o’clock in the afternoon, the wind had begun to howl and waves building to twenty feet were breaking over the bow. Wild salt spray and snow mixed with sleet blanketed the trawler. The wheelhouse, mast and topside crab pots were soon encased in a ghostly white coating of ice. As the afternoon wore on, Jake knew there was nowhere to put in on the small island. He had to get back to Dutch Harbor, but he found it impossible to make any real headway.
The struggle continued after darkness fell. By nine o’clock that night, after six hours at full engine power, the skipper was dismayed to realize that they had made so little headway. They were still sixty miles out of Dutch Harbor. Through it all, the Alaska Lady had buried her bow in one huge wave after another, but now she began an ominous roll that broke loose gear in the wheelhou
se and below decks. With each roll, the gear slid beamwise, alternately crashing into port and starboard bulkheads. The hull began to leak. All too soon, sloshing water filled the lower decks shorting out the two electric bilge pumps. Then the engine stalled. It was too wet to restart.
When a four-story-high rogue wave came out of the night and slammed into the boat, the Alaska Lady shuddered and rolled almost ninety degrees. With the tip of her mast almost touching the sea, Jake waited for her to roll back upright. But as the trawler lay limp in the water with no sign of recovering, he knew it was all over. Another big wave and the foundering trawler would go under. In the wheelhouse, lying on his side against a bulkhead that was now under him, he screamed a frantic Mayday call: “This is the Alaska Lady—she’s capsized and sinking. We’re going overboard.” He shouted his position. Thankfully, the Global Positioning System he had installed a few years before would give the precise location of his boat. But since his battery power was fading, he wasn’t sure if the message got through. Jake also activated his Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon that would send a radio signal to a satellite as soon as the boat was underwater. The problem with the EPIRB however, was that it would only give his position within a mile and in a rough sea at night, it could be difficult to pin down his exact location.
Jake and the crew began scrambling into their survival suits. With the cabin deck almost vertical, and gear beginning to float, the frantic struggle became chaotic. Finally, crawling along a side bulkhead, the men exited through the hatch. Outside, with arms locked together, they slid across the icy deck and half-jumped, half-fell into the black water. When their heads bobbed to the surface, sputtering and spitting out freezing salt water, the men watched in horror as the running lights on the Alaska Lady’s mast, still lit by backup battery power, sank down under the water. The water around the submerged lights gave off an eerie glow until the lights shorted out as the capsized boat began to sink. In the blackness, Jake couldn’t see it, but he knew by the suction pulling him towards the boat’s location that it had gone down.
The men were now alone in the dark, struggling to stay afloat as huge waves lifted them dizzily, only to hurl them down into the troughs as the waves passed through.
The Coast Guard station on Kodiak Island received the distress call from the Alaska Lady. The trawler was almost three hundred miles from Kodiak. But Kodiak was having problems of its own. Its C-130s were snowed in; besides, although the planes could help locate the boat, they were land planes and couldn’t rescue the crew. Kodiak’s rescue helicopters were off far to the east assisting the Coast Guard station at Seward in a rescue of the crew of a foundering freighter that had been caught in the storm. The Coast Guard, search and rescue coordinators for the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands, knew there was no point calling the Naval Air Station far out in the Aleutians at Adak. Although Adak was within range, it had been decommissioned several months before and the rescue helicopters were gone.
The Unalaska airport tower received the call for assistance from the Coast Guard operators at 10:15 PM. They had exhausted all other options and suggested that rescue boats be sent out. But tower personnel knew that by the time rescue boats from Dutch Harbor could reach the crew, some of the men could be dead from hypothermia in the cold water. The survival suits were probably good for four or five hours, but if any of them were torn or not fully zipped up, survival time would be a lot less. Tower operators decided there was one chance to reach the men alive. A call was placed to the Bishop’s House where Sergei rousted Steve from his room and asked him to come downstairs and talk to the tower on the phone.
“I’d like to lend a hand,” Steve said sleepily over the kitchen phone, “but if the trawler capsized, the sea must be rough and I could never land my plane.”
The tower operator tried to reassure the priest. “The sea was rough but it isn’t now. The storm was moving quickly and now has passed off to the east. The winds are down to Force 3, which means two to three foot waves. Yes, the water has been rough but it’s calming down. We’re in the eye of the storm.”
“How do you know the trawler capsized?” Steve asked.
“We received a coded beep from the trawler’s Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, we call it the EPIRB. It sends out a signal to a satellite when the boat is submerged in water. We know that this boat had crab pots on deck and had a buildup of topside ice due to heavy sleeting. Then, we suppose a rogue wave came out of nowhere.”
“Crab pots? How could they capsize a trawler? How many did they have forty or fifty? The crab pots in the Chesapeake Bay are pretty small and made of wood. In a rough sea they would just float, or float off the deck if they weren’t lashed down. They couldn’t capsize a boat.”
“Father, let me explain. This boat only had eight pots on deck. But this isn’t the Chesapeake Bay. The pots here are metal and as big as small houses. They weigh upwards of 700 to 800 pounds each, so the trawlers tend to be top-heavy. Father, we’re wasting time. I’ll send a copilot over if you will do it.”
“All right, I’ll do it,” Steve replied, still not convinced that the sea would be smooth enough for a seaplane landing.
A few minutes later, a young man knocked on the door. He said the tower had sent him over. Sergei introduced the young man to Steve.
“They tell me you’re quite experienced, Rob,” Steve said studying the young man. “How much experience do you have in seaplanes?”
“None, but I have several thousand hours in instrument flying and even in helos. You fly the plane and my job will be as navigator to locate the crew and fish the guys out of the water when we get on-scene.”
“Fair enough,” Steve said smiling. “I guess between us, we can pull it off.”
Then, as the pilots were getting ready to leave, Sergei handed them each a thermos of hot coffee. “God go with you,” he said.
*****
If there was one thing Steve abhorred it was taking off in the dark over water. No runway lights. No reference horizon. This flight would have to be on full instruments—all the way. As he taxied, gusts of wind came in alternately from several points of the compass. Barely able to see the heavy chop and the waves coming towards the beach with his landing lights, he struggled to get the plane up on the riser step of the floats. Once on the step, the drag due to the rear portion of the pontoons is decreased, allowing further acceleration for takeoff. At the point where he almost gave up because the pontoons were digging into the water and bouncing so hard he thought they would start to pop rivets, he could feel the Otter rise slightly on the step and accelerate. Then suddenly, they were up in the air. Aloft, it was calmer than Steve had expected. The Coast Guard was right. The storm had moved off. Rob directed Steve out to sea on a compass heading that would lead to the capsized trawler.
Since the position of the trawler was known by satellite GPS combined with the EPIRB signal, Steve would not have to perform a search, so he flew low, almost skimming the wave tops, pushing the Otter to max speed. Less than half-an-hour later, the Otter was circling the area where the capsized boat had gone down. They could see debris in the water. Rob’s powerful handheld light illuminated five men in the water. He directed Steve away from the scene so the plane wouldn’t hit anyone in the water on landing. As Steve brought the plane down, almost unnerved at attempting a landing in the open ocean at night, he was somewhat relieved to find only about two feet of chop and three to four foot waves. The tower guys, Steve thought, had been almost right but not completely because it looked to him more like Force Four rather than Three. Steve, heading into the waves, taxied slowly back to the crew. He saw that the men all had survival suits on, but if any were torn or not fully zipped up, hypothermia in the ice cold water could kill them in minutes.
Steve struggled to hold the plane in a position near one of the men. He throttled the engines back to idle and set the props in flat pitch. He didn’t shut the engines down because with salt spray flying everywhere, he was afraid he might not
get them started again. But he knew they didn’t have much time because salt ingestion might stall the turbines. Rob stood on one of the pontoons, holding onto a strut. But the wind caused the plane to drift away. After drifting about ten to fifteen yards from the man, Steve had to turn and try to slowly ease back. Finally, Rob was able to hoist one man onto a pontoon as several other men also tried to clamber up onto the pontoon. Concerned that the plane would tilt far to one side, Rob shouted at the men to stay in the water until he got the first man aboard. Finally, after a struggle that seemed never to end, Rob hoisted the men one-by-one onto a pontoon and then into the cabin. Disoriented, teeth chattering, unable to talk, faces turned blue, some of the men were in deep hypothermia. Rob helped them strip off their soaking wet suits and piled on blankets trying to warm them up. When one of the men became unconscious in cardiac arrest, Rob performed CPR to bring him around.
With all the men secured on board, Steve took off and began the climbout. After takeoff he circled the scene on the water with his landing lights on. There was no sign of the stricken trawler. There was nothing in the water but a few pieces of debris. Then, with no time to waste, he banked to a heading that would take them back to Dutch Harbor.
The return flight to Dutch Harbor was short. Approaching the bay by the Russian church, Steve was worried that the wind had picked up because he could feel the airplane lurching in response to the gusts. The wind was blowing the chop into a chaotic froth as the sea bounced against the land. Flying low over the water, the airplane landing lights caught glimpses of whitecaps. Rob signaled to Steve he thought it was no-go for a water landing. He jerked his thumb over in the direction of the Unalaska airport. Steve nodded OK, but felt a knot in his stomach when he realized the Otter was heavily loaded and he would be making his first landing on the wheels that hung out from the bottom of the pontoons. He had no idea how much load those wheels could take.