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Storm Gods: Part 3 Vicious storm thwarts rescue crews Editor's note : This is the third part of a five-part narrative serial produced by the Associated Press. It will appear daily this week, concluding on Christmas Eve. By TODD LEWAN The Associated Press IN THE GULF OF ALASKA -- Lt. Glen Jones is worried, and he should be. The Jayhawk helicopter he sent from Sitka station at 8 p.m. hasn't been heard from since it penetrated the southern edge of the storm. That was almost an hour ago. The watch captain knows he won't be getting any help soon from the C-130 search-and-rescue planes at Kodiak station, the Coast Guard's biggest, on the other side of the Gulf of Alaska. That air base is buried under an avalanche of snow. So he's called in a crew that has already worked a full day to fly another Jayhawk out to the Fairweather Grounds: Lt. Cmdr. David Durham, the pilot; co-pilot Lt. Russell Zullick; flight mechanic Chris Windnagle; and rescue swimmer A.J. Thompson. This group has a more difficult mission than the first. The signal from the ship in distress is more than two hours old now, and time is running out for any survivors struggling in the 38-degree water. And now they also have to look for a potentially downed helicopter and its four-man crew. At 9:35 p.m., the helicopter lifts away from the pad. No one inside says anything. One hundred and fifty miles away, over the Fairweather Grounds, the first rescue helicopter is barely airborne, hovering in a trough between mountains of landsliding water. But it's so dark and the sky is so dense with sleet and snow that Lt. William Adickes, the flight commander, doesn't see the massive swell looming over the Jayhawk or the survivors riding atop the crest. "Jesus, Bill!" shrieks Lt. Dan Molthen, his co-pilot, pointing frantically over his head through the windscreen's bubble. "Take us up!" Adickes' reflexes take over. He yanks the nose of the helicopter upward and leftward and hits the engines. The turbines moan, the rotors squeal, but the helicopter feels as if it's moving in slow motion. They hear the wave's crash just below them and see clouds of white spray. The Jayhawk wobbles upward. Adickes checks his instruments and decides he's reached his limit. They've been on scene for an hour and 20 minutes and his crew hasn't been able to get the rescue basket closer than 40 feet from the survivors, and they're too exhausted and afraid to swim to it. The flares his team tossed into the raging seas are sputtering out. The hoist cable that lowers the rescue basket is ruined, frayed by constant chafing against the side of the helicopter. Molthen is dizzy and retching from the aircraft's jackhammering. The flight mechanic, Sean Whitherspoon, is shaking from exhaustion and vertigo and is losing feeling in his left arm from hypothermia. They've lost communications, and the fuel gauge is dropping. Adickes is only minutes from "bingo," the point at which the helicopter doesn't have enough fuel to return to base. "It's time to go," he remembers whispering into the mike on his headset. No one responds. They are trained to save lives under conditions no one else dares to challenge. The Jayhawk labors skyward and, against vicious headwinds, turns for Sitka. Whitherspoon pulls the jump door closed, sits down on the floor and goes into convulsions. "Rich, man," says Whitherspoon, "I can't stop shaking." Richard Sansone, the rescue swimmer, starts Whitherspoon on water and saline and pulls a thermal bag over him to raise his body temperature. They huddle there in the indigo cabin light, trying not to think about the people they left behind. The second rescue helicopter is 15 minutes from arriving when a call comes over the high-frequency radio. The caller identifies himself as the captain of Alaska Airlines flight 196, a commercial jetliner en route from Anchorage to Seattle. "Coast Guard ... We've received a radio transmission from one of your sister helos ... H-60 Jayhawk ... Flight commander Adickes says they are aborting mission and returning to base ... They report four to five people are still in the water, over." Lt. David Durham rogers the message. The first helicopter is all right. Their job has just gotten easier. Still, Chris Windnagle, the 34-year-old flight mechanic, is sweating and thinking about his family. Ninety minutes ago he had a pizza in the oven and was watching a Disney movie with his wife, two boys and baby girl. Now he's in pitch darkness, getting hammered by the floor and ceiling of a Jayhawk as it hurtles into a powerful storm. He's never been on a high-seas rescue in six years of Coast Guard duty, never flown in zero visibility and killer wind shears. Durham's adrenaline is pumping. "Let's get there fast, people," he remembers saying. "This thing will probably be nothing." But it is something. Durham, 38, had been piloting helicopters since graduating from the Coast Guard academy in 1982. He'd flown in Alaska for more than three of those years and thought he'd seen ugly weather. Until now. He's cruising at 300 feet beneath a heavy cloud cover, backing winds are pushing the aircraft into a 200-knot sprint and rain bands are swinging across his path like slamming doors. When his direction finder hits on the EPIRB distress signal, indicating they've arrived at the scene, Durham swings the helicopter. But instead of heading back, it sails north as if skidding on ice. To fight off the headwinds, Durham will say later, he has to "crab" the helicopter, swinging the nose and tail back and forth like a scampering crustacean. It takes them 25 minutes to return a half mile. Durham and Lt. Russell Zullick, his co-pilot, take turns steering through a cloverleaf search pattern. For 45 minutes they find nothing. Then, from the jump door, flight mechanic Chris Windnagle sees something twinkle. It must be the strobe light from the EPIRB. The survivors are clustered around the strobe and what looks like a fish float. They're drifting so fast that Zullick has to reprogram his instruments every few minutes just to keep up. Windnagle shouts to his pilots to establish a hover. Durham tries to edge the helicopter down, but his altimeters are swinging 180 feet in a matter of seconds. "Hey, Russ," he hollers to his co-pilot, "are we going up or down?" Out go five flares. They hit water and burst to life a half mile upwind of the survivors. Windnagle pitches out the basket and it flies back to the rotor tail. He winches it back in, tries again and again to get it down to the water near the survivors. After seven tries, the closest he can drop it is about 30 feet from the strobe light. Later, he will say it was like "dropping a clothespin into a milk jug from a tall building." He's frustrated, delirious from vertigo. After 20 minutes, the smokes sputter out. Durham's not sure, but he figures they're close to not having enough fuel to return to base. "What do you think?" he asks his co-pilot. Zullick just nods. It's 12:49 a.m. -- five hours and 47 minutes since the La Conte sank. With each minute, the chances rise sharply of those men drowning or dying from hypothermia. Durham takes the Jayhawk up to 300 feet and veers back to base. Two hundred feet below, Robert Doyle and his exhausted crewmates watch their hopes clatter away. 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; and two forensics experts at the Alaska State Medical Examiner's Office in Anchorage. 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