Hoss, who’d been attending to Tim in the Humvee, approached DJ and took over for him. He put his finger up to Billy’s neck to check for a pulse but couldn’t find one. He purged Billy’s mask yet again.
At the same time, DJ climbed into the Humvee to get to the mine phone and call in the emergency. He found Tim sitting behind the wheel, his neck turned toward the breathing-system controls behind him, his head slumped over. Although DJ couldn’t be sure why Billy and Tim had gone down, he instantly knew, based on their positions, what they had been doing at the moment it happened. They must have been trying to switch the source of air that supplied the main system for all the divers, from mixed gas to HP air. Making that change required turning a valve near the roof rack of the Humvee and another on the manifold inside the cabin. After Hoss’s distress call had come through, Billy and Tim must have decided to do whatever it took to save the lives of their fellow divers eleven hundred feet away. Billy must have stepped outside the vehicle to turn on the HP air while Tim, with his right hand cradling the quarter-turn valve on the manifold, waited for the sign from him to make the switch.
If this scenario had become clear in DJ’s mind, his head throbbed with countless other questions that seemed unanswerable. If he and Riggs and Hoss had been relying on the same system for breathing air as Billy and Tim, why were they still alert while the Humvee divers were lying as lifeless as mannequins? Why would the guys who had what Billy called the “easy job”—sitting in the Humvee—be the ones knocked down, rather than the guys doing the exhausting work in the scariest stretch of the tunnel? And if Billy and Tim had been in real trouble, why hadn’t they blacked out earlier, when DJ and Riggs had gone down and Hoss had called to check in?
DJ picked up the receiver218 to the yellow mine phone and shouted to Harald, “We have two men down! Have medical assistance on standby.” Then he hung up, having no time to wait for a response. He glanced down at his watch. It was 1:45 p.m. He approached the roof rack, which held four cylinders of HP air. DJ, Riggs, and Hoss had been expecting to turn to that backup supply before their single—and fast-dwindling—bottle of HP on the boat ran out. DJ noticed that the regulator to the first HP tank on the roof was open, so he moved to open the second one. All four tanks on the roof rack were connected as part of the HP backup system. But when he opened the second tank, it emitted a loud cascading sound. As soon as Hoss heard that noise, he yelled, “Don’t plug into that219!” The rapid sizzle indicated that the air was being equalized between the first and second tank, suggesting that the first bottle hadn’t just been open but was now empty. This was a devastating discovery. There should have been four full bottles on the roof—Hoss had checked them himself before the day’s mission began. The fact that one HP bottle was already spent meant that the divers now could not be sure which system—HP or mixed gas—was responsible for the bad air that had flowed to their facemasks. The sequence of events was unclear.
Given all the earlier problems with the exotic mixed-gas breathing system, they naturally assumed that it had been responsible for knocking down Tim and Billy. After all, that had been the breathing supply they’d all been relying on when DJ and Riggs went down. But since they found Billy and Tim in the process of activating the HP backup supply, and since one of those HP bottles was already empty, what if, in fact, the real disaster had struck only after the Humvee crew had switched the main system from mixed gas to HP? The backup air couldn’t be trusted, and therefore it couldn’t be used. DJ thought to himself, We’re screwed.
While Hoss went back over to work on Tim, DJ returned to Billy, trying chest compressions again. He thought back to how, when Tap had asked him to change places with Billy earlier that morning, he’d said he was worried about Billy, not just because of his aching back but also because of his fatigue, and he’d asked DJ to look after him. On top of everything else, DJ now felt a surge of guilt. Not only had he failed to look after Billy, but he realized that if they hadn’t switched positions at the last minute, it would have been his limp body lying there. Although it was clear that the chest compressions and facemask purging were having no effect, DJ repeated the steps again and again, not wanting to stop and not knowing what else to do. Finally he realized he had to let go of his friend if he and the other guys had any hope of saving their own lives. He looked straight into those lifeless eyes and whispered, “Sorry, Billy.”
Distraught, DJ looked up at Riggs, who was behind him, pacing back and forth. Because Riggs was still forced to kink and unkink his hose for every breath, he was severely limited in how much he could help. DJ saw Riggs looking at the bodies and then looking down the long black tunnel to the shaft. He thought to himself: Riggs wants to leave now. He wants to run! He could understand that basic human instinct for self-preservation, because it was taking all he had not to give in to it himself. But he also knew that running would get them nowhere.
That’s when it dawned on DJ: they were so far from civilization that they might as well be on the moon. Two divers were already down, and they could very well be next. And nobody was coming in to rescue them.
As comfortable as he had become with Hoss and even Riggs, they were still basically strangers to him. The only guy on the team he knew well was now lying lifeless in his arms. DJ thought back to the mine rescue training they’d had in New Hampshire, when his buddy Ron Kozlowski had pulled him aside before walking off the job. DJ put a lot of stock in what Kozlowski had to say, considering that he’d been a diver for so long and had seen combat. Is this what Kozlowski had been talking about, when he warned DJ about how men can turn on each other in life-or-death situations? DJ had no boogie board, no.45. He thought to himself: Are these guys going to stick with me? If they didn’t, he knew they had no hope of making it out alive.
11. Trapped in Black
Riggs knew what it must have looked like to DJ, but he actually wasn’t looking to run. He just didn’t want them to delay confronting reality so long that it left them all dead. “We need to go!” he shouted through his facemask.
Billy was lying lifeless, pinned between the Humvee and the tunnel sidewall. Tim was slumped over behind the wheel. It had been more than half an hour since Hoss’s last communication with Tim, when he had frantically reported that the oxygen content in their breathing system was a consciousness-claiming 8.9 percent. Riggs assumed Tim and Billy had been felled by the blended gas from the MAP Mix 9000, the same air that had apparently caused DJ to black out and Riggs to go down after him. He and DJ had survived, thanks only to Hoss’s quick instincts. But he knew there was little cause for celebration. Their prospects for making it out of the tunnel alive were dwindling fast.
While DJ was working on Billy, and Hoss on Tim, Riggs had gone over to the trailer that held the main gas supply. He was startled to find the cylinder of liquid oxygen220 now as frozen and glistening as a Sno-Cone, with a thick layer of ice choking the regulator and coating most of the bottle. To him, it looked less like an oxygen tank than an ice sculpture of one. Though he couldn’t fully explain all that ice, it struck him as pretty powerful evidence that the mixed-gas system was the source of their problems. But because they couldn’t rule out the possibility that the bad air had come from the empty HP bottle strapped to the Humvee roof, they couldn’t trust any of that emergency supply either. The only air they could trust—the HP cylinder they had dragged back with them on the boat—was about to run out, hastened by Riggs’s free-flowing mask.
218 (Chapter 10, note 28)
DJ picked up the receiver: Harald Grob, topside log, July 21, 1999, 1:45 p.m.; also DJ Gillis, interviews with author.
219 (Chapter 10, note 29)
“Don’t plug into that!”: Hoss accident notes, 6; O’Leary, “Interview of Gillis,” 7.
220 (Chapter 11, note 1)
He was startled to find the cylinder of liquid oxygen: Trooper Mary McCauley, “Sudden Death/Deer Island, Winthrop/07/21/99,” Massachusetts State Police Suffolk County Detective Unit, January 14, 2000, 6-7.