Into the Abyss (20 page)

The plane disappeared momentarily as it banked and circled back toward the opening. By the time it reappeared, Larry and Paul were
on their feet yelling and madly waving articles of Paul’s clothing in the air. The plane veered sharply right, radically changing course. This time it arced tightly back toward the opening and as it passed overhead just above the trees, the men saw the plane tipping its wings to wave to them. And as clear as the blue sky above them, they could see the face of the pilot looking down.

In the town of Slave Lake, Brian Dunham and the rest of the Chinook crew had raced back to the airport, arriving just as the second Hercules touched down. Two SAR Techs jumped off to join Dunham’s team on the Chinook. They were all aboard preparing for takeoff, when the pilot of the Twin Otter radioed to say he’d sighted the downed plane and four people around a blackened campfire. With the confirmation of survivors, search-and-rescue efforts ramped into high gear. By 9:12 a.m. the Chinook helicopter carrying Dunham, three other SAR Techs and a five-member medical team was aloft and rapidly closing in on the crash site.

On the northwest side of the high hill just below the survivors, a group of cold, exhausted RCMP officers and volunteers were clearing the final kilometre of bush separating them and the crash site, and reported seeing the Chinook roar through the nearby ravine. Over the two-way radio he’d been monitoring for nearly twelve hours, Hoppy could hear one of his men exclaim: “Jesus Christ! That chopper just flew
below
us.”

Inside the Chinook, Billy Burton peered intently down into the whitewash of solid cloud. It had been just after midnight when the rookie SAR Tech had dragged his weary body out of bed. Late the previous evening, Burton had returned to base after being away on a two-week training operation in British Columbia. Exhausted, he’d planned to sleep long into the next day. Instead, he’d been
awakened by a call saying he was needed on an urgent mission. He’d pulled on the same soiled orange flight suit he had stepped out of only two hours earlier, and headed in to work. When he got there, the 6′3″, 220-pound keener learned that he was to be deployed on a search-and-rescue mission responding to a major air disaster. It was Burton’s first big mission and he was excited to get a chance to do the job he’d trained for.

As the Chinook approached the crash site, Burton saw a small clearing appear as if a piece of the sky had suddenly punched a perfect hole through the unbroken cloud deck. Among search-and-rescue personnel, such openings are called
sucker holes
because they can draw an aircraft into an area of seemingly benign weather, only to have bad weather close around them. The pilot of the chopper quickly altered course and flew directly toward the open window of sky. Burton strained forward as the plane neared the hole, and soon he was peering down upon a white landscape slashed black with trees. Among their stark, leafless branches appeared to be a large blue canoe.

Burton’s first thought was:
That’s strange
. He was trying to figure out why on earth a canoe would be in the middle of the wilderness. Then it hit him: it was
not
a canoe, but the upturned fuselage of a small airplane. His heart thumped crazily in his chest.

Soon the chopper was hovering over the site, its massive twin rotors blowing a whitewash of snow from the surrounding trees. The pilot quickly realized that the dense brush and deadfall would make landing impossible and took up a stationary position a hundred metres away from where the survivors were huddled to avoid catching them in the Chinook’s fierce downwash. Team Leader Brian Dunham had already strapped on his harness and grabbed his snowshoes, a portable radio and a penetration kit in preparation to be lowered to the ground. Beside him, the other SAR Techs were following suit,
gathering snowshoes and oxygen and medical kits, and preparing the extraction kit for lowering so they’d be ready to face whatever they might find on the ground.

Dunham clipped the winch hook to his harness. He received his safety check, moved toward the open door at the front of the chopper, and took slack from the cable. Peering down, he scanned for hazards on the ground directly below—an area of operational risk known as the
death zone
. Ahead at ten o’clock, he could see the upturned plane, and beneath him, partially obscured by blowing snow, a gnarl of brush. It wasn’t much of a lowering site, but it would have to do.

With a Chinook flying as heavily loaded as this one, and hovering at a dangerously low altitude of 75 feet, he needed to be able to cut away quickly from the suspended cable when he hit the ground so he could rapidly put distance between himself and the helicopter. Dunham waited for the flight engineer to give him the thumbs-up and when he did, a crewman began lowering Dunham to the ground. As he neared it, he braced for a shock. The tips of a Chinook’s rotors move at supersonic speed, building up a tremendous amount of static electricity and, as the first man to touch down, Dunham knew that he was going to get whacked. What he didn’t realize was how severely. As he released from the cable and dropped to the snow a jolt blasted him a foot in the air. He came down hard on his back and for half a minute lay immobile, his limbs buzzing hot and unable to function. By the time he came to his senses and staggered to his feet, another SAR Tech was beside him and a third on the way down. They strapped on their snowshoes and approached the campfire, advancing with difficulty through the heavy brush and snow.

Seventy feet beyond the smashed fuselage, Dunham could clearly see the small campfire. He took in two men standing around the melted pit of snow and two more lying within it, their faces caked
with dried blood. A middle-aged olive-skinned man in an ill-fitting trench coat called out to him almost at once.

“Forget about us,” he said, indicating himself and the scruffy, younger man beside him. “
The guys on the ground need your help.”

Dunham was in triage mode and the man’s words sent him sailing straight to the most severely injured.

“
You don’t by any chance have a Thermos of coffee in your pack?” the scruffy man asked.

“Sorry, I don’t,” Dunham replied.

The SAR Techs assessed the survivors quickly, and then raced across the thigh-deep snow to the aircraft. As Dunham neared the wreckage he shook his head in disbelief that
anyone
had survived. The mass of metal before him was barely recognizable. It had no nose or wings, and the right front quadrant of the plane was completely mangled. Dunham entered the open hatch and sucked in his breath. Four passengers lay dead inside. He retreated, circled around to the forward part of the cabin, and crawled inside where he found two more deceased. The top of one passenger’s skull had been sheared away and another person had been impaled. Dunham took a minute to collect himself, then he was on the portable radio reporting his grim findings: 6 Black, 4 Red.

In search-and-rescue terms,
red
refers to survivors requiring immediate treatment and evacuation;
black
refers to the dead. As Dunham was relaying his information, civilian aircraft traffic overhead was becoming an issue. The Twin Otter pilot’s initial report sighting survivors on the ground had spread to others monitoring VHF channel 122.8, and soon several media outlets had planes circling the area in hopes of a getting a scoop. Deeming them a hazard to search-and-rescue efforts, the RCMP quickly had the large airspace around the crash site declared a no-fly zone. But as Dunham and his team prepared to hoist survivors aboard the Chinook, one important question
remained on the minds of everyone who had heard news of survivors on the ground: who were the lucky ones?

In her High Prairie home, Alma had retreated upstairs with her three youngest children to escape the throng of townspeople in her kitchen and living room, and the media assembling on the street beyond the driveway. She, too, had received word of four survivors at the crash site. It was almost 10:00 a.m. and her sons, Larry and James, and daughter Joan had just arrived from Edmonton. At daybreak, the Alberta government’s chief pilot, John Tenzer, had sent word that it was safe to leave for High Prairie and the kids, along with Bob Giffin and Hugh Planche, had boarded the government’s nine-seat King Air for the flight. The plane made it only as far as Slave Lake, High Prairie still being too weathered in to land. So Alma’s kids borrowed a car from a local automotive dealer and drove the remaining 100 kilometres home.

Giffin and Planche, meanwhile, remained at the Slave Lake airport anxiously awaiting the arrival of the four survivors who were going to be brought there for transfer to the waiting Hercules, which would fly them to Edmonton.

Around the same time the government plane left Edmonton, Sandra Notley was in the motel’s coffee shop when she was paged to answer an urgent phone call. One of her husband’s aides told her that Grant’s plane had crashed near High Prairie the night before. But there was reason to hope. The downed plane had been found and four people spotted alive on the ground.

“I remember thinking to myself that it would be a lot of upset having to go back and forth to the hospital because
I was just so sure Grant was one of the survivors,” Sandra recalled. “Then I thought maybe they
hadn’t even been hurt badly enough to need to stay in the hospital.” The local RCMP offered to drive Sandra to Fairview. When she arrived, her three children had already heard of their father’s death. Sandra’s twenty-year-old daughter, Rachel—now an NDP member of the Alberta Legislature—was the one to tell her mother the terrible news.

“
I think she suspected because the Mounties had turned off the radio,” Rachel said.

In the melee of the rescue scene, Paul stood with a space blanket draped over his shoulders, puffing furiously on a cigarette he’d bummed from one of his rescuers. Above, an enormous helicopter was kicking up one hell of a whiteout, and the deep
whop whop whop
of its two giant rotors rang in his ears. As he watched Erik being hoisted into the air, Paul wondered fleetingly if he’d be on the news and what his folks on the other side of the country would say if they saw their long-absent son on TV. He was fucking freezing and ready to get the hell out of here. As he waited impatiently for the rescuers to splint Scott before hoisting him to the chopper, Paul took out the pocketknife he’d found inside the plane and began to fidget. Seeing this, Scott called him over.

“
What are you doing with that knife? Get rid of it.”

Paul tossed the knife into the snow and noticed Scott’s briefcase. Grabbing it, he handed it to one of the rescuers.

“
He can’t forget this because his gun and handcuffs are inside.”

The rescuer gave Paul a puzzled look before taking the briefcase from him. Then Scott disappeared into a cloud of blowing snow.

Next, the medics bundled Larry into a casualty bag, zipping it up over his head. As he waited for the Chinook to lower the winch cable, Larry called out to Paul. “Can you open this up so I can see what’s happening?”

A smile cracked Paul’s bloodied face. The old guy hadn’t been able to see all night, so why should it matter now? Paul obliged him anyway.

The chopper had momentarily broken from its overhead hover, but moved in once more, its blades thrumming powerfully, generating another fierce downwash. A rescuer yelled to Paul to get down on his hands and knees and cover up. Paul grudgingly complied, but the hoist seemed to take forever and, frozen and fed up, he felt his patience snap. He stood up, threw off his blanket and was walking away from the blizzard of blowing snow when a rescuer hauled him back. The man strapped Paul into a harness and hooked them together onto the winch cable.

At 11:25 a.m., fifteen hours after the crash of Wapiti Aviation Flight 402, Paul Archambault, the final survivor, was lifted into the air. Above him the rotors throbbed with a deafening pulse and below him the crash site disappeared in a white uproar of swirling snow. Paul was cold, sore and hungry, but at that moment he couldn’t have cared less.

“
It was the greatest feeling in the world,” he would later write.