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EDITOR'S NOTE : This is the final installment of a five-part narrative serial produced by The Associated Press. Part 1 began in Sunday's paper. The story so far A mitten and five fingers found on an uninhabited island by two teenagers are the final clues to a 6-month-old mystery in the Gulf of Alaska. It all began when a fishing vessel, the La Conte, sank in a storm, throwing five crewmen into 38-degree water. Two Coast Guard helicopter crews failed to rescue the victims, and now a third is fighting downdrafts that have nearly driven them into the sea. One fisherman has been pulled from the water, and a second is in the rescue basket. Storm Gods & Heroes Part Five The search for bodies and a final mystery By TODD LEWAN The Associated Press IN THE GULF OF ALASKA -- Through driving sleet icing his visor, flight engineer Fred Kalt can barely make out the crouching figure inside the rescue basket hanging just outside the helicopter door. He reaches out and gives the basket another yank. Something's wrong. No matter how hard he tries, he can't pull the basket inside. "FRED!" shouts crew member Michael Fish. "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. The clunk of steel on the deck snaps Fish out of his thoughts. It's the rescue basket. Kalt and flight mechanic Harold Lee 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 airbase, not Sitka station. Yakutat is 70 miles away -- half as far as Sitka -- and they can ride a tailwind, which will save fuel. 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 forty 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 three 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. 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 their goodbyes. 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. 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 world "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. (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.) Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA