Slowly Gallen’s breathing started coming in short sharp chunks of air as he forced his chest to operate and made his legs and arms move. Finning behind Ford, the strange light filtering through the ice, he looked into the blackness beneath him and hoped this wasn’t going to be a deep dive. The lakes in this region were probably U-shaped glacial valleys and that could mean a steep side and a dive of a hundred feet.
The cold pressed on his temples like a vice, his breathing sounding like a saw, but Gallen kept paddling, trusting that the sooner they salvaged the radio, the sooner he’d be back in front of that stove breathing in warm air.
After forty seconds of finning, Gallen almost ran into the back of Ford, who trod water under the ice floe, the bubble of an air pocket visible between water surface and ice.
They were fifteen feet from the steep-sided shore and Ford pointed downwards. As Gallen followed him into the darkness, the flashlight came on, illuminating the maw of cold and black. The cold got worse, along with the pressure on his skull and chest, and Ford stopped again, pointing. Below them, in the yellowish light provided by the weak old batteries, was the Little Bird helo, upside down, its plexiglass cockpit embedded in lake mud, the deadly minigun sitting on top of the wreck like a suitcase handle.
His breathing rasped and bubbles flew upwards as Gallen leaned over and finned downwards after the Aussie to a point where there was no more natural light.
Handing Gallen the tool kit, Ford gestured for the bag to be opened. Looping his arm around one of the fuselage pillars, Gallen steadied himself and opened the diver’s mesh bag, his face now numb at the edges of his mask. He could see Ford’s hands in the spill of the flashlight beam, could see him moving them furiously to get blood into them, and then the Aussie dipped his hands into the toolkit and drew out a small crescent spanner and a rubber-handled Phillips screwdriver.
Taking the flashlight, Gallen aimed it into the cockpit, getting a fright as he saw the pilot hanging upside down in his harness.
Scanning the cockpit with the beam, Gallen picked up the flight deck and located the Harris radio, planted in a ceiling bracket in front of the pilot’s head.
Ford moved into the cockpit and, unhooking the pilot, sent the blond flier to float with the fishes. Moving closer to the cockpit, Gallen gave a full beam to the radio as an aluminium briefcase floated in the slipstream of the pilot’s exit.
Ford swam to the radio as Gallen reached for the briefcase, placing it in the tool bag before it could descend to the bottom. His hands were already frozen numb and the cold sat on his chest like a piano; Gallen had to fight the panic, making himself focus minutely on where the flashlight beam was pointed and how many times Mike Ford turned the spanner.
After two minutes, Gallen watched a screw from the radio bracket float to the bottom. When he looked back into the cockpit he realised that the flashlight was failing. Its weak yellow light had faded to a sepia tone and he could see Ford hurrying to get the job done while the beam held out.
Gallen was at the end of his endurance. He needed to be out of that water and he urged on the Aussie, cursing loudly to himself about the situations that his life had forced him into. For the last four days he’d felt constantly on the edge of disaster, unable to change a thing. He’d simply been hanging on, trying to inspire others to do the same, and he was exhausted.
Ford’s elbow came up and down and then the spanner was flying free, spinning into the darkness. Lunging at it, the Aussie tried to get his hand on the tool but it went out of his reach. As Ford pulled back into the cockpit, his rig snagged on a broken piece of the door frame and instantaneously the air started rushing out of the tubes into the water.
His eyes growing wide, Ford signalled he was going up. Gallen prepared to fin to the surface but Ford was already untying the main line to Kenny Winter on the cliff and pointing at the tool bag.
Before Gallen could argue, Ford was ascending and Gallen tied the main line around his own waist, cursing the lake gods as his flashlight faded to a mushroom-coloured smudge of light.
Moving to the cockpit, he looked in the tool bag and found another crescent spanner. His body wanted to shut down as he kneeled on the ceiling of the helo and concentrated the beam into the radio bracket. His hands were locked in place like a chicken’s claws and he could feel his body going into shock as it became painful to draw breath. The piano that had been sitting on his chest had changed to a church organ and he groaned into the mouthpiece, trying to make the oxygen flow. Even as he felt himself expiring, he had the strangest thought: that there was an entire specialty in the military that did this work, totally hidden from the sight of all but those involved in it. If he ever got out of this shit, he’d never again take a clearance diver for granted.
The second screw that held the radio in place was much smaller than the first one and he tried in vain to wheel the spanner to a smaller size, yelling in frustration as his thumb slipped on the wheel. His wrist ached, his fingers wouldn’t respond, his other hand couldn’t hold the spanner properly. He’d done these coordination exercises in special forces divers tanks and in the ocean waters of Okinawa in summer — but trying to make a spanner work in this cold was beyond a joke.
As tears of frustration formed in his eyes, the flashlight went dead and he reached up to the pilot’s seat and dragged the spanner wheel across the fabric. Pushing his gloved finger into the new gap, he sensed it had worked and he tried it on the radio screw. Still too big.
He banged the flashlight; it briefly sprang to life and Gallen rolled the spanner wheel along the pilot’s seat again, further reducing the spacing of the crescent.
His breath now coming in erratic jags, Gallen reached for the second screw, completely missing it. The cold had taken his coordination and he did what he’d been told: tried to focus totally on the job. Not the cold, not his breathing, not the darkness. Just the job.
He hooked the spanner onto the screw on the second try and it fitted. As he turned the spanner as slowly as he could, the flashlight died again, plunging him into primal blackness, a void that could send otherwise tough soldiers into wild, thrashing panic attacks. Gallen had seen it, seen what this environment could do to a man who wasn’t psychologically prepared for it.
Making himself breathe and focus, he lowered his free hand and tried to move it. When it finally did, he held the spanner on the screw and turned slowly, ensuring the spanner stayed on the head, not entirely sure what was moving through the thickness of the gloves and the intense cold. After a minute, the screw came free.
Pulling the Harris out of its bracket, Gallen saw for the first time the cables bolted into the back of it.
‘Shit,’ he said to himself, unsure how many of the cables had to be preserved.
Now breathing as shallowly as he had before the pleurisy made him pass out, Gallen reached behind the radio in the inky black and felt as best he could for the types of cable: one of them pulled away — a simple plug. Another wouldn’t budge and he could feel a spinning washer at its base — like a cable TV connector — which he tried the spanner on. He needed it slightly smaller and rolled the spanner wheel on the pilot’s seat for a third time, wondering when he was going to simply black out.
Bringing the spanner back to the rear of the Harris, Gallen found the washer turned easily; as he tried to rush it, though, the spanner fell out of his hand and into the dark.