Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [110]
“I’m going to try to descend to two hundred feet,” Pentilla shouted.
The wind gusts were shifting us from side to side. It was as if we were riding at the tip of a nervous dog’s wagging tail. Pentilla fought to hold the helicopter in a straight line, but he couldn’t control the aircraft in the windstorm. He couldn’t descend farther. Suddenly a gust caught the helicopter and tossed us down to within fifty feet of the sea. Fear registered on Pentilla’s face.
The waves right below the helicopter’s runners were large. I couldn’t tell how high they were, but they were creating choppy air, and the helicopter wasn’t responding to Pentilla’s commands. Holding on tight, we watched Pentilla and felt the waves pulling us down. Suddenly, to our left, the wind lifted a cloud bank like a huge curtain, and there was Big Diomede—the Soviet Union, less than three miles away. I was too focused on what we were doing at that moment to be excited. Only the image registered—Oh, there’s the island. The clearer thought was, Are we going to make it down alive?
Pentilla shouted to us over the radio, “We’re going to try to land on that barge.”
The barge was a rusting old ship that had sunk during a storm. The upper section of the ship had been cut off and transformed into a landing ramp. From our position, the barge was the size of a postage stamp. But the island itself was composed of black rocks and boulders; there was no alternative place to land.
“Eric, will you be landing?” a man’s voice asked over the radio. “The wind’s from the southwest at forty to forty-five knots.” It seemed like the man strongly questioned Pentilla’s actions. But so far, all Pentilla had done was show us that he was an incredible pilot.
“Yes, that’s an affirmative,” he said.
The wind was bouncing us and shaking us radically. Pentilla dropped the nose slightly, and just as we reached the barge, eight feet above the landing area, a huge gust tossed us to the left, way off target. Quickly Pentilla added throttle; the helicopter teetered between flying and falling. Somehow we surged upward.
Pentilla made a second attempt, but the wind tossed us nearly sideways, into the island.
“I’ll try one more time. If we don’t get down this time, we’ll have to turn back. We don’t have enough fuel to make another attempt,” Pentilla said.
Our necks were snapping from side to side, and I wished I had gotten more out of Pentilla’s safety demonstration.
We circled around and descended again. To our right, we could see tiny, brightly painted houses on stilts built into the hillside of the extinct volcano. Below us were two men bent over against the wind, signaling Pentilla with flashlights. He dropped to ten feet above the barge and hovered, waiting for a moment to center the helicopter. Slammed sideways by a wind gust, we dangled over the water.
For a split second I hoped that Pentilla would abort the attempt; but he waited, felt the wind, held out for a pause, maneuvered the helicopter into position, crabbed sideways, and set us down.
We cheered and then sat there, unable to speak, while two villagers latched the helicopter’s runners to the dredge so it wouldn’t be blown into the sea. Then Pentilla let out a deep breath and grinned. We slapped him on the shoulder. He grinned again and admitted that the landing had been more difficult than he’d anticipated.
When I stepped out of the warm bubble, a blast of cold arctic air nearly blew me off the barge and into the water. Waves were crashing close by, over a small breakwater. One of the villagers, a young woman, grabbed my hand and guided me to a place where I could climb down onto the rocks and land.
Once there, I turned around and looked at the Bering Sea. I was horrified. It was rougher than any ocean I had ever seen. Rougher than the Strait of Magellan, rougher than the Cape of Good Hope, rougher than anything I had ever dreamed in my worst nightmares.