The ropes are difficult to catch, so the deck crew throw the cargo net over the side. Lieutenant Furtney again tries to ease his ship over to the swimmers, but the vessel is 1,600 tons and almost impossible to control. Finally, on the third attempt, they snag the net. Their muscles are cramping with cold and Jim Mioli is about to start a final slide into hypothermia. The men on deck give a terrific heave—they’re pulling up 600 pounds dead-weight—and at the same time a large wave drops out from underneath the swimmers. They’re exhausted and desperate and the net is wrenched out of their hands.
The next thing Spillane knows, he’s underwater. He fights his way to the surface just as the boat rolls inward toward them and he grabs the net again. This is it; if he can’t do it now, he dies. The deck crew heaves again, and Spillane feels himself getting pulled up the steel hull. He climbs up a little higher, feels hands grabbing him, and the next thing he knows he’s being pulled over the gunwale onto the deck. He’s in such pain he cannot stand. The men pin him against the bulkhead, cut off his survival suit, and then carry him inside, staggering with the roll of the ship. Spillane can’t see Ruvola and Mioli. They haven’t managed to get back onto the net.
The waves wash the two men down the hull toward the ship’s stern, where the twelve-foot screw is digging out a cauldron of boiling water. Furtney shuts the engines down and the two men get carried around the stern and then up the port side of the ship. Ruvola catches the net for the second time and gets one hand into the mesh. He clamps the other one around Mioli and screams into his face, You got to do this, Jim! There aren’t too many second chances in life! This is gonna take everything you got!
Mioli nods and wraps his hands into the mesh. Ruvola gets a foothold as well as a handhold and grips with all the strength in his cramping muscles. The two men get dragged upward, penduluming in and out with the roll of the ship, until the deck crew at the rail can reach them. They grab Ruvola and Mioli by the hair, the Mustang suit, the combat vest, anything they can get their hands on, and pull them over the steel rail. Like Spillane they’re retching seawater and can barely stand. Jim Mioli has been in sixty-degree water for over five hours and is severely hypothermic. His core temperature is 90.4, eight degrees below normal; another couple of hours and he’d be dead.
The two airmen are carried inside, their clothing is cut off, and they’re laid in bunks. Spillane is taken to the executive officer’s quarters and given an IV and catheter and examined by the ship’s paramedic. His blood pressure is 140/90, his pulse is a hundred, and he’s running a slight fever. Eyes PERLA, abdomen and chest tenderness, pain to quadricep, the paramedic radios SAR OPS [Search-and-Rescue Operations] Boston. Fractured wrist, possibly ribs, suspect internal injury. Taking Tylenol-3 and seasick patch. Boston relays the information to an Air National Guard flight surgeon, who says he’s worried about internal bleeding and tells them to watch the abdomen carefully. If it gets more and more tender to the touch, he’s bleeding inside and has to be evacuated by helicopter. Spillane thinks about dangling in a rescue litter over the ocean and says he’d rather not. At daybreak the executive officer comes in to shave and change his clothes, and Spillane apologizes for bleeding and vomiting all over his bed. Hey, whatever it takes, the officer says. He opens the porthole hatch, and Spillane looks out at the howling grey sky and the ravaged ocean. Ah, could you close that? he says. I can’t take it.
The crew, unshaven and exhausted after thirty-six hours on deck, are staggering around the ship like drunks. And the mission’s far from over: Rick Smith is still out there. He’s one of the most highly trained pararescue jumpers in the country, and there’s no question in anyone’s mind that he’s alive. They just have to find him. PJ wearing black 1/4” wetsuit, went out door with one-man life-raft and spray sheet, two 12-oz. cans of water, mirror, flare kit, granola bar, and whistle, the Coast Guard dispatcher in Boston records. Man is in great shape—can last quite a while, five to seven days.
A total of nine aircraft are slated for the search, including an E2 surveillance plane to coordinate the air traffic on-scene. Jim Dougherty, a PJ who went through training with Smith and Spillane, throws a tin of Skoal chewing tobacco in his gear to give Smith when they find him. This guy’s so good, Guardsmen are saying, he’s just gonna come through the front door at Suffolk Airbase wondering where the hell we all were.
THE DREAMS OF THE DEAD
All collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it had five thousand years ago.
BY the time word has spread throughout Gloucester that the fleet’s in trouble, the storm has retrograded to within 350 miles of Cape Cod and developed such a steep pressure gradient that an eye starts to form. Satellite photos show a cyclonic swirl two thousand miles wide off the East Coast; the southern edge reaches Jamaica and the northern edge reaches the coast of Labrador. In all, three quarters of a million square miles of ocean are experiencing gale-force conditions, and an area three or four times that is indirectly involved in the storm. On the satellite photos, moist air flowing into the low looks like a swirl of cream in a cup of black coffee. Thick strands of white cloud-cover and dark Arctic air circle one-and-a-half times around the low before making it into the center. The low grinds steadily toward the coast, intensifying as it goes, and by the morning of October 30th it has stalled two hundred miles south of Montauk, Long Island. The worst winds, in the northeast quadrant, are getting dragged straight across Gloucester Harbor and Massachusetts Bay.
So sudden and violent are the storm’s first caresses of the coast that a tinge of hysteria creeps into the local weather bulletins: UNCONFIRMED REPORTS OF TWO HOUSES COLLAPSING HAVE BEEN RECEIVED FROM THE GLOUCESTER AREA … OTHER MASSACHUSETTS LOCATIONS UNDER THE GUN … SEAS OF 25 TO 45 FEET HAVE OCCURRED TODAY FROM GEORGES BANK EAST … THE DANGEROUS STORM ASSOCIATED WITH HIGH SEAS IS MOVING CLOSER TO NEW ENGLAND.
The first coastal flood warnings are issued at 3:15 AM on the 29th, based mainly on reports from Nantucket of sustained winds up to forty-five knots. Predictions from the Weather Service’s computers are systematically exceeding almost all atmospheric models for the area, and high tides are predicted to be two to three feet above normal. (These predictions, as it turns out, will be way too low.) The warnings go out via satellite uplink along something called the NOAA Weather Wire, which feeds into local media and emergency services. By dawn, radio and television announcers are informing the public about the oncoming storm, and the state Emergency Management Agency is contacting local authorities along the coast to make sure they take precautions. The EMA is based in Framingham, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, and has direct lines to Governor Weld’s Office, the National Guard, the State Police barracks, and the National Weather Service. Any threat to the public health is routed through the EMA. If local communities don’t have the resources to cope, state agencies step in; if state agencies can’t handle it, the federal government gets called. The EMA is set up to handle everything from severe thunderstorms to nuclear war.