The Perfect Storm

in-law, checked the boat over, and got spooked like Kosco had. He walked off. So Billy called David Sullivan and happened to catch him at home. Sully reluctantly agreed to go, and arrived at the State Fish Pier an hour later with his seabag over his shoulder. The Andrea Gail went to sea with six men, a full crew. Kosco doesn’t know this, though; all he knows is that a last-minute decision five weeks ago probably saved his life.

At about the same time that Kosco confesses his good luck to the Coast Guard, Adam Randall settles onto the couch in his home in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to watch the evening news. It’s a rain-lashed Halloween night, and Randall has just come back from taking his kids out trick-or-treating. His girlfriend, Christine Hansen, is with him. She’s a pretty, highly put-together blonde who drives a sports car and works for AT&T. The local news comes on, and Channel Five reports a boat named the Andrea Gail missing somewhere east of Sable Island. Randall sits up in his seat. That was my boat, honey, he says.

What?

That’s the boat I was supposed to go on. Remember when I went up to Gloucester? That’s the boat. The Andrea Gail.

MEANWHILE, the worst crisis in the history of the Air National Guard has been unfolding offshore. At 2:45 that afternoon—in the midst of the Satori rescue—District One Command Center in Boston receives a distress call from a Japanese sailor named Mikado Tomizawa, who is in a sailboat 250 miles off the Jersey coast and starting to go down. The Coast Guard dispatches a C-130 and then alerts the Air National Guard, which operates a rescue group out of Suffolk Airbase in Westhampton Beach, Long Island. The Air Guard covers everything beyond maritime rescue, which is roughly defined by the fuel range of a Coast Guard H-3 helicopter. Beyond that—and Tomizawa was well beyond that—an Air Guard H-60 has to be used, which can be refueled in midflight. The H-60 flies in tandem with a C-130 tanker plane, and every few hours the pilot comes up behind the tanker and nudges a probe into one of the hoses trailing off each wing. It’s a preposterously difficult maneuver in bad weather, but it allows an H-60 to stay airborne almost indefinitely.

The Air Guard dispatcher is on the intercom minutes after the mayday comes in, calling for a rescue crew to gather at “ODC,” the Operations Dispatch Center. Dave Ruvola, the helicopter pilot, meets his copilot and the C-130 pilots in an adjacent room and spreads an aeronautical chart of the East Coast on the table. They study the weather forecasts and decide they will execute four midair refuelings—one immediately off the coast, one before the rescue attempt, and two on the way back. While the pilots are plotting their refueling points, a rescue swimmer named John Spillane and another swimmer named Rick Smith jog down the hallway to Life Support to pick up their survival gear. A crewcut supply clerk hands them Mustang immersion suits, wetsuits, inflatable life vests, and mesh combat vests. The combat vests are worn by American airmen all over the world and contain the minimum amount of gear—radio, flare kit, knife, strobe, matches, compass—needed to survive in any environment. They put their gear in duffel bags and leave the building by a side door, where they meet the two pilots in a waiting truck. They get in, slam the doors shut, and speed off across the base.

A maintenance crew has already towed a helicopter out of the hanger and fueled it up, and flight engineer Jim Mioli is busy checking the records and inspecting the engine and rotors. It is a warm, windy day, the scrub pine twisting and dancing along the edge of the tarmac and sea birds sawing their way back and forth against a heavy sky. The pararescue jumpers load their gear in through the jump door and then take their seats in the rear of the aircraft, up against the fuel tanks. The pilots climb into their angled cockpit seats, go through the preflight checklist, and then fire the engines up. The rotors thud to life, losing the sag of their huge weight, and the helicopter shifts on its tires and is suddenly airborne, tilting nose-down across the scrub. Ruvola bears away to the southeast and within minutes has crossed over to open ocean. The crew, looking down out of their spotters’ windows, can see the surf thundering against Long Island. Up and down the coast, as far as they can see, the shore is bordered in white.

IN official terms the attempt to help Tomizawa was categorized as an “increased risk” mission, meaning the weather conditions were extreme and the survivor was in danger of perishing. The rescuers, therefore, were willing to accept a higher level of risk in order to save him. Among the actual crews these missions are referred to as “sporty,” as in, “Boy, it sure was sporty out there last night.” In general, sporty is good; it’s what rescue is all about. An Air National Guard pararescue jumper—the military equivalent of Coast Guard rescue swimmers—might get half a dozen sporty rescues in a lifetime. These rescues are talked about, studied, and sometimes envied for years.

Wartime, of course, is about as sporty as it gets, but it’s a rare and horrible circumstance that most pararescue jumpers don’t experience. (The Air National Guard is considered a state militia—meaning it’s state funded—but it’s also a branch of the Air Force. As such, Guard jumpers are interchangeable with Air Force jumpers.) Between wars the Air National Guard occupies itself rescuing civilians on the “high seas,” which means anything beyond the fuel range of a Coast Guard H-3 helicopter. That, depending on the weather, is around two hundred miles offshore. The wartime mission of the Air National Guard is “to save the life of an American fighting man,” which generally means jumping behind enemy lines to extract downed pilots. When the pilots go down at sea, the PJs, as they’re known, jump with scuba gear. When they go down on glaciers, they jump with crampons and ice axes. When they go down in the jungle, they jump with two hundred feet of tree-rappelling line. There is, literally, nowhere on earth a PJ can’t go. “I could climb Everest with the equipment in my locker,” one of them said.

All of the armed forces have some version of the pararescue jumper, but the Air National Guard jumpers— and their Air Force equivalents—are the only ones with an ongoing peacetime mission. Every time the space shuttle launches, an Air Guard C-130 from Westhampton Beach flies down to Florida to oversee the procedure. An Air Force rescue crew also flies to Africa to cover the rest of the shuttle’s trajectory. Whenever a ship—of any nationality— finds itself in distress off North America, the Air National Guard can be called out. A Greek crewman, say, on a Liberian-flagged freighter, who has just fallen into a cargo hold, could have Guard jumpers parachute in to help him seven hundred miles out at sea. An Air Guard base in Alaska that recovers a lot of Air Force trainees is permanently on alert—“fully cocked and ready to go”—and the two other bases, in California and on Long Island, are on standby. If a crisis develops offshore, a crew is put together from the men on-base and whoever can be rounded up by telephone; typically, a helicopter crew can be airborne in under an hour.

It takes eighteen months of full-time training to become a PJ, after which you owe the government four years of active service, which you’re strongly encouraged to extend. (There are about 350 PJs around the country, but developing them is such a lengthy and expensive process that the government is hard put to replace the ones who are lost every year.) During the first three months of training, candidates are weeded out through sheer, raw abuse. The dropout rate is often over ninety percent. In one drill, the team swims their normal 4,ooo-yard workout, and then the instructor tosses his whistle into the pool. Ten guys fight for it, and whoever manages to blow it at the surface gets to leave the pool. His workout is over for the day. The instructor throws the whistle in again, and the nine remaining guys fight for it. This goes on until there’s only one man left, and he’s kicked out of PJ school. In a variation called “water harassment,” two swimmers share a snorkel while instructors basically try to drown them. If either man breaks the surface and takes a breath, he’s out of school. “There were times we cried,” admits one PJ. But “they’ve got to thin the ranks somehow.”

After pretraining, as it’s called, the survivors enter a period known as “the pipeline”—scuba school, jump school, freefall school, dunker-training school, survival school. The PJs learn how to parachute, climb mountains, survive in deserts, resist enemy interrogation, evade pursuit, navigate underwater at night. The schools are ruthless in their quest to weed people out; in dunker training, for example, the candidates are strapped into a simulated helicopter and plunged underwater. If they manage to escape, they’re plunged in upside-down. If they still manage to escape, they’re plunged in upside-down and blindfolded. The guys who escape that get to be PJs; the rest are rescued by divers waiting by the sides of the pool.

These schools are for all branches of the military, and PJ candidates might find themselves training alongside Navy SEALs and Green Berets who are simply trying to add, say, water survival to their repertoire of skills. If the Navy SEAL fails one of the courses, he just goes back to being a Navy SEAL; if a PJ fails, he’s out of the entire program. For a period of three or four months, a PJ runs the risk, daily, of failing out of school. And if he manages to make it through the pipeline, he still has almost another full year ahead of him: paramedic training, hospital rotations, mountain climbing, desert survival, tree landings, more scuba school, tactical maneuvers, air operations.