Statistically speaking, however, she was an outlier. And as uncomfortably cold and wet as it was in the tunnel, even the optimistic Wilson knew it would have to be far colder for the reflex that saved the skier to do the same for these divers.
Heading west, back toward the shaft, Riggs, Hoss, and DJ passed the numbers spray-painted onto the sidewall, charting the tunnel’s descending ring numbers. On the drive out in the morning, they had stopped at every thousand to two thousand rings, wherever there was a mine phone hanging from the wall, and called in their updates to Harald. On the drive back, however, the divers had no interest in Harald’s protocol, no interest in wasting time on updates. Hoss told the others he was worried that if they stopped, the Hummer might conk out.
But as Riggs continued to guide the Humvee along, Hoss suddenly realized there was a problem with his nonstop, do-not-pass-go approach. If they didn’t pause to phone topside, he told Riggs and DJ, Harald might dispatch the standby crew, driving the pair of backup Humvees. That would create a dangerous logjam in the narrow tunnel. “It’s going to fuck us if we meet them head-on,” Hoss told the guys. “We don’t have time for that.”
So at 2:40 p.m., as the Humvee approached ring 6000—with about 5.75 miles left between them and the shaft—Hoss got out and picked up the receiver238.
“What’s going on?” Harald asked.
“Tim and Billy are gone,” Hoss said, curtly.
“How?”
Hoss was furious at Harald. Even after the divers had complained repeatedly in previous days about problems they were experiencing with the breathing system, Harald kept sending them back into the tunnel on the same system, reassuring them that they’d be fine. Hoss knew no good could come out of staying on the phone with Harald now.
“They’re dead and we’re at six thousand,” Hoss said, “and driving in with these two guys.” Then he hung up.
The Humvee resumed its slow westward chug to the shaft. After a few minutes, though, Hoss started yelling. My lungs are burning up! He thought he’d become numb to any more crises, but here, apparently, was a new one. And Hoss found himself freaking out.
DJ quickly figured out what was happening. The chemical reaction going on inside the rebreather made wearing one the equivalent of breathing air from a hair dryer. That’s why it needed the ice pack to cool it down. But Hoss must have grabbed the first rebreather, the one Riggs had set up without an ice pack before moving on to another task. From his position in the back seat, DJ reached into the rear of the Hummer to find the cooler and grab an ice pack. Then he pushed Hoss forward in the front passenger’s seat, pulled the back off his rebreather, and shoved the ice inside to cool him off.
Hoss calmed down. “Give me some cold water, DJ,” Hoss said.
After fumbling around in the back, DJ thrust a bottle between the two front seats and Hoss grabbed it. He lifted the facemask of his rebreather and poured the bottle onto his eyes. The stinging pain was instant. “My eyes are burning!” Hoss shouted.
DJ started chuckling, the first sound of laughter any of them had heard since the horror of finding Billy and Tim. “Relax,” DJ said soothingly. “Your eyes are fine. You just got some soda in them.” Hoss was confused until DJ explained that he thought Hoss had asked for the water because he was thirsty, not because he needed to clean out his fogged-up facemask. So when DJ couldn’t find any water, he’d grabbed a bottle of ginger ale from his own cooler, part of his private stash that had also included the peanut butter crackers he’d been snacking on the day before.
Sometime after passing ring 4000, as they approached the three-mile mark from the shaft, the VHF handheld radio lying in the back seat began to crackle. DJ immediately recognized Tap’s voice and picked up the radio to respond.
“What happened?” Tap asked.
“I don’t know what happened,” DJ said, “but everything went to hell in a handbasket down here, and we’re trying to get out.”
Tap explained that he had headed down the man cage as soon as he heard about the trouble, and had been standing at the base of the shaft ever since, waiting for the Humvee to get to within range of the radio. It soon became clear to DJ that Tap hadn’t been with Harald when Hoss had phoned in their last—and bluntest—report about Billy and Tim. DJ couldn’t muster the strength to tell Tap that the news was much worse than the initial report. He knew how close Tap and Billy had become ever since they’d all met working in Vermont. While DJ considered them both very good friends of his, he knew the bond between Billy and Tap was stronger. He sometimes thought Tap and Billy were like an old married couple, with that uncanny ability to anticipate each other’s thoughts and finish each other’s sentences. They’d even developed their own language when they were on a job talking to each other on walkie-talkies, converting the standard “Roger” reply to “Rog-oh.” No, DJ wasn’t about to deliver news this devastating over the radio.
During their slow trip back, DJ and Tap talked a couple more times on the handhelds. Each time, DJ shied away from telling Tap the crushing reality about Billy.
Given all that had befallen them already, DJ, Hoss, and Riggs took the precaution of continuing to wear their rebreathers, even after the ring counts spray-painted on the tunnel wall suggested they had reached areas where the ambient air was fine. But as the end drew nearer, they decided to remove the cumbersome contraptions, so DJ had taken off his facemask by the time Tap’s last radio call came through.
“How’s Billy?” Tap asked.
“Well,” DJ stammered. “Billy’s gone.”
“What do you mean Billy’s gone?” Tap asked in an agitated voice. “Where did he go?”
DJ was exhausted, physically and emotionally. He couldn’t continue with the dance any longer. “Tap, there’s no lefts or rights down here,” he said. “He’s gone. He’s expired. Billy’s dead. And so is Tim.” DJ asked him if he understood.
There was a long pause. Then Tap answered softly, “Rog-oh.”
Topside, shortly after Harald received the initial distress call from DJ, he called Roger Rouleau back at the Norwesco office in Spokane. “We’ve got a problem,” Harald told the company owner, breaking the news that two men were down at the end of the tunnel. Just days earlier, when Roger had been profiled in the Spokane business journal, he’d boasted about how challenging and wacky dive jobs like Deer Island were Norwesco’s stock-in-trade. Now he could do nothing but sit at his desk and wait for Harald’s follow-up call. When it finally came, with the shattering news that Tim and Billy were believed dead, Roger called his wife and asked her to pack a bag for him because he would be taking the first flight out to Boston.
238 (Chapter 11, note 19)
Hoss got out and picked up the receiver: Grob topside log, July 21, 1999, 2:40 p.m.