While Stimpson drifts in and out of hallucinations, the H-3 pounds home through a seventy-knot headwind. It takes an hour and forty minutes to get back to base. Three miles off Martha's Vineyard the crew look down and see another Coast Guard helicopter settling onto a desolate scrap of land called Noman's Island. A Florida longliner named the Michelle Lane had run aground with a load of swordfish, and her crew had spent the night under an overturned life raft on the beach. An H-3 was dispatched from Air Station Cape Cod to take them off, and Hessel happens to fly by as they're landing.
Hessel touches down at 4:40 at Air Station Cape Cod, and the other H-3 comes in a few minutes later. (While landing at Noman's, as it turned out, the rotor wash flipped the raft over and knocked one of the fishermen unconscious. He was taken off in a Stokes litter.) It's almost dark; rain flashes down diagonally through the airfield floodlights and scrub pine stretches away darkly for miles in every direction. The six survivors are ushered past the television cameras and led into changing rooms upstairs. Stimpson and Bylander pull off their survival suits, and Bylander curls up on a couch while Stimpson goes back downstairs. The simple fact of being alive has her so wired she can hardly sit still. The Coast Guardsmen are gathered with the reporters in a small television room, and Stimpson wanders in and finds Leonard sitting miserably on the floor, back to the wall. He's not saying a word.
He didn't want to leave the boat, Stimpson explains to a local reporter. It was his home, and everything he owned was on it.
Dave Coolidge, the Falcon pilot that flew the previous night, walks up to Stimpson and shakes her hand. Camera bulbs flash. Boy, are we glad to see you two, he says. It was a long night, I was afraid you weren't going to make it. Stimpson says graciously, When we heard you on the radio we said, Yes, we're going to make it. We're not just going to perish out here without anyone knowing.
The reporters gradually drift off, and Leonard retires to an upstairs room. Stimpson stays and answers questions for the rescue crew, who are very interested in the relationship between Leonard and the two women. His reactions weren't quite what we expected, one of the Guardsmen admits. Stimpson explains that she and Bylander don't know Leonard very well, they met him through their boss.
Sue and I had been working several months without a break, she says. This trip was going to be our vacation.
While they're talking, the phone rings. One of the Falcon pilots goes to answer it. What time was that? the pilot says, and everyone in the room stops talking. How many were they? What location?
Without a word the Coast Guardsmen get up and leave, and a minute later Stimpson hears toilets flushing. When they come back, one of them asks the Falcon pilot where they went down.
South of Montauk, he says.
The Guardsmen zip up their flight suits and file out the door. A rescue helicopter has just ditched fifty miles offshore and now five National Guardsmen are in the water, swimming.
INTO THE ABYSS
The Lord bowed the heavens and came down, thick darkness under his feet. The channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare.
— SAMUEL 22
"I DIDN'T know there was a problem, I just knew the Andrea Gail was supposed to be in any day," says Chris Cotter, Bobby's Shatford's girlfriend. "I went to bed and just before dawn I had this dream. I'm on the boat and it's real grey and ugly out and it's rollin' and rockin' and I'm screaming, BOBBY! BOBBY! There's no answer so I walk around the boat and go down into the fishhole and start digging. There's all this slime and weeds and slimy shit and I'm hysterical and crazy and screaming for Bobby and finally I get down and there's one of his arms. I find that and grab him and I know he's gone. And then the wake-up comes."
It's the morning of October 30th; there's been no word from the Andrea Gail in over thirty-six hours. The storm is so tightly packed that few people in Gloucester—only a few hundred miles from the storm's center—have any idea what's out there. Chris lies in bed for a while, trying to shake off the dream, and finally gets up and shuffles into the kitchen. Her apartment looks out across Ipswich Bay, and Christine can see the water, itself cold and grey as granite, piling up against the granite shores of Cape Ann. The air is warm but an ill wind is backing around the compass, and Chris sits down at her kitchen table to watch it come. No one has said anything about a storm, there was nothing about it on the news. Chris smokes one cigarette after another, watching the weather come in off the sea, and she's still there when Susan Brown knocks on the door.
Susan is Bob Brown's wife. She issues the paychecks for the Seagale Corporation, as Brown's company is called, and the week before she'd given Christine the wrong check by mistake. She'd given her Murph's check, which was larger than Bobby Shatford's, and now she's come back to rectify the mistake. Chris invites her in and immediately senses that something is wrong. Susan seems uncomfortable, glancing around and refusing to look Chris in the eye.
Listen, Chris, Susan says finally, I've got some bad news. I'm not sure how to say this. We don't seem to be able to raise the Andrea Gail.