by Carol Shaben
“Fuck, man, I’m fucking freezing,” Paul said.
The others, shaken from their reveries, looked in his direction and saw that the young man—until now seemingly impervious to the cold—was shaking violently. His own deprivations suddenly forgotten, Larry stepped behind him and embraced Paul in a firm bear hug.
Paul’s first instinct was to pull away. He thought of his father, a man whose affections he’d longed for, but seldom received. His dad had always felt his oldest son was good for nothing and had told him so on several occasions. Even as a child, he had felt his dad’s constant disapproval. As Larry’s arms encircled him, it occurred to Paul that few people in his life had given him the degree of affection and unconditional understanding he was receiving in that moment from a near stranger.
After several minutes Paul stopped shivering and Larry let his arms drop.
“What time is it?” Paul asked.
Scott squinted at the face of his watch. “Half-past seven.”
“Shit! The ELT.”
Scott unfastened the strap of his watch and handed it to Paul, who took it without comment, knowing that the responsibility of toggling the ELT switch was now his alone. He dragged himself down the path toward the plane.
At the High Prairie airport, Luella Wood felt sick to her stomach as she left her trailer and made her way across the snowy parking lot to the terminal building. Throughout the night she’d returned every hour or two to check on William Whitehead. The slim, wiry First Nations man sat alone on a couch in the small, darkened lounge area, his back against the armrest, knees tucked into his chest and head bowed. As far as Luella could tell, he hadn’t moved a muscle in the ten hours since she’d delivered the news of the downed plane.
Never in her life had she seen such sorrow on a man’s face.
The previous evening Whitehead had driven one hundred kilometres south to the airport from the Whitefish First Nations Reserve to pick up his wife, Elaine Noskeye, who was due to arrive on Wapiti Flight 402. Two weeks earlier she’d been rushed by ambulance to the hospital in Edmonton to prematurely deliver the couple’s fourteenth child. The infant was in intensive care awaiting surgery, and though Elaine had not been scheduled for release until Monday, she’d missed her family terribly. So the thirty-nine-year-old woman had talked her doctor into letting her go home early to be with her husband and children. That evening marked the first time she had ever flown on an airplane.
Nearby, in High Prairie, a heavy shadow of dread also hung over the tiny, close-knit community. The phone at the RCMP detachment had been ringing off the hook with enquiries and offers of help from local townspeople: farmers, small business owners, concerned citizens and private pilots, all wanting to pitch in any way they could. The local Tags convenience store was delivering free sandwiches and coffee to the airport and police station, and several private pilots were standing by to join the air search as soon as daylight broke around 8:30 a.m.
Hoppy fretted about his officers and the civilian volunteers struggling in the bush. The dense trees, heavy snow and deadfall made the task of clearing a 20-kilometre trail through the wilderness to the crash site next to impossible. Though the men were bone cold and drop-dead tired, they had made progress over the past four hours advancing slowly with the help of the flares that guided them like orange lifelines from above.
In spite of the challenging conditions, however, Hoppy was beginning to think he’d rather be in the wilderness battling the elements than dealing with the shit that had recently started coming his way. He didn’t mind the calls of concern from the locals. But word on the crash—including the news that Grant Notley and Larry Shaben were aboard the plane—had leaked to the media and he had news hawks up the hoop. They’d been lighting up all five lines at the detachment and Hoppy had quickly lost patience trying to field their questions. He’d put up a wall, telling staff that he wasn’t talking to anybody other than search-and-rescue personnel.
In addition to communicating with his officers in the bush, Hoppy had been constantly on the phone with Dave Heggie at the High Prairie airport. Heggie had been keeping him apprised of the military’s search-and-rescue efforts and Hoppy knew that the aircraft circling the area weren’t having an easy time locating the downed plane. He was deep in discussion with Heggie when across the room he noticed one of his staff gesturing frantically for him to pick up another line. “Sarg …” she whispered urgently.
Hopkins held up a finger to silence her so he could hear the latest update on what the military was dealing with. The cloud ceiling at the airport had dropped to less than 50 feet and that ruled out any possibility of an air-rescue attempt until daylight or the weather broke. Now more than ever, Hoppy knew it was vitally important for his ground search crew to get in. He ended his call and looked over at his constable.
“It’s the prime minister!” she told him.
Hopkins took the call. Sure enough, it was Canada’s head of government, Brian Mulroney, on the line from Ottawa. He’d met Larry Shaben on at least one occasion and wanted confirmation that he, Notley and the other passengers on board were alive. Hopkins couldn’t give it to him.
Aboard the Hercules called in to replace its ailing predecessor, Major Hazen Codner was having a hell of a time. For an hour the second Herc had lumbered blindly through churning fists of grey above the crash site, yet the forty-two-year-old lead navigator had been unable to pick up a signal from the downed plane. Codner, who’d been briefed prior to the Herc’s hasty departure from Edmonton at 5:48 that morning, had expected conditions to be a challenge. Crew aboard the previous Hercules had reported that the ELT signal had been in turns intermittently weak and distorted. But Codner hadn’t expected it would be non-existent. He was voicing his frustration to the pilot, when the ELT signal inexplicably re-emerged.
Codner immediately got to work plotting a bearing. Though he’d been hurried and half-awake when pressed into action, he was grateful for one piece of good fortune: when he’d grabbed his navigation bag, it happened to contain a topographical map of the area. Now, each time the Hercules passed over the signal and the directional needle swung 180 degrees, Codner manually plotted the position on his map. He’d been at it thirty minutes when the ELT signal disappeared. Codner and the pilot began discussing a possible explanation. Had the battery for the ELT suddenly died? The topo map showed hilly terrain below, which might account for spotty transmission, but not the signal’s alternating reappearance and disappearance. The pilot circled the giant Herc once more.
After another half-hour spiralling the area, the ELT signal again reemerged. Codner realized with a jolt that someone below had to be alive and cycling the switch. The crew aboard the Hercules was accustomed to jumping into crash sites and finding only dead bodies. The prospect of survivors on the ground gave them a renewed sense of urgency, and Codner redoubled his efforts to pinpoint the crash location. Staring at the intersecting lines, he was 90 percent certain that the location of the plane was on a high hill west of Slave Lake. He shared his findings with the pilot and suggested he approach the crash site from the northeast, descending low over the wide lake where there were no terrain hazards. Though the cloud deck over Slave Lake was no more than a few hundred feet, dawn was beginning to silver the night and Codner knew that if they could get under the cloud, they might be able to get a visual on the crash site. The five-member crew aboard the Hercules understood the approach was risky. West of the lake, the terrain rose sharply and the pilot would have to ascend steeply to clear the 2,900-foot hill. It was a manoeuvre no by-the-book military pilot would ever attempt, but the crew of Squadron 435 decided to go for it.
Around the guttering fire, the survivors were increasingly desperate for heat. Somewhere far above, beyond the ashen cloud cover, they could hear once again the deep growl of an aircraft circling. Scott, who’d taken part in search-and-rescue operations, knew that when a small plane crashed in an area of dense wilderness like the one they were in, some trees bend and break; others spring b
ack to cover the crash path. Even in daylight, searchers would often see only a faint line of disturbed flora from overhead. The snow, falling heavily, would have rapidly concealed any path that might lead the rescuers to them. He realized that rescuers would eventually find the crash site, but would they arrive in time? Vivid in his mind were the images of corpses lying frozen and lifeless in the car wrecks he’d responded to during his time as an RCMP officer in northern Alberta.
“Think they see us?” Paul asked.
All night, Paul had been scheming about finding something, anything, he could use to attract the attention of the giant overflying plane. He’d desperately wanted to locate Scott’s black briefcase, knowing his gun was inside. Paul figured if he got his hands on it he could fire off a couple of shots and bring the planes circling back. Earlier, he’d even suggested making a roman candle out of one of the fuel-laden wings, but Erik, afraid that the fire might spread and gut the fuselage, had stopped him. Now Paul had not only run out of ideas on how to attract attention, but had given up on the campfire as well. To his left, Erik lay silent and unmoving. Paul reached over and grabbed his leg, giving it a shake.
“If we can’t see them, they can’t see us,” Erik mumbled.
Paul felt like screaming at the top of his lungs: We’re alive! We’re here! But he knew it was no use straining.
After a moment Erik spoke again. “My wallet. It’s still in the plane.”
The others couldn’t understand why Erik’s wallet should suddenly be so important. They didn’t know that, at that moment, he was contemplating his death. Without his ID, the pilot worried that authorities would not be able to identify his body.
Larry stood shivering, as cold as he could ever remember being. He was effectively blind, his ribs and tailbone fractured, his front teeth missing, and his right index finger broken. His hand was buried deep in the pocket of his suit pants. Gently, he closed it around his own wallet, a gold clip that held his ID cards and money. He pulled out the clip and removed the thick fold of bills. Slowly, he let them flutter down toward the smoldering coals. The money ignited into a small flame and Larry watched it flicker for a moment until it died, the corners of the bills curling black before floating away. He surveyed the inert forms of his fellow survivors lying at his feet.
“If you had one wish you could have fulfilled right now,” Larry asked, “what would you wish for?”
“I’d like a nice toke of good pot,” Paul replied.
Larry laughed. There were countless times during his children’s teenaged years when he’d counselled them on the evils of marijuana. He wondered what his kids would say if they could hear the conversation.
“I’d love a cold drink,” Erik said. That response surprised Larry until he recalled that the pilot had been complaining of thirst for much of the night, incessantly consuming handfuls of snow to slake it.
“Scott?” Larry asked.
Scott had been thinking of Mary, who’d been beckoning him to follow her into the warmth and comfort of a long tunnel.
“I’d tell my wife I’m sorry,” Scott said, “and that we can have a child and make this thing work.”
Larry let Scott’s words hang in the air a moment before he said, “I’d like a nice warm bath.”
The closer they all inched toward death, the simpler their needs had become, Larry thought.
After a moment, Scott spoke again. “I don’t think I can hang on much longer.”
Paul had been thinking the same thing—that he should just let himself go to sleep, to die where he lay. But admitting the thought made him mad as hell.
“Fuck this!” he said, clambering to his feet. “You’re not going to die,” he told Scott. “I’m walking out of this and you three are coming with me because we weren’t meant to die this way. When this is all over we’re going to get together and have a few drinks. C’mon,” he urged Larry, “there must be something else we can burn.”
The politician wearily followed Paul away from the firepit toward the wreckage. The sky had lightened a shade and for the first time, Larry could distinguish the blurry lines of the scene around him. As they trudged past the fuselage Larry spotted two dark forms against the snow.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Paul told him that it was the airplane seats he’d tossed out of the plane the night before. Scott had assured the men that the seats wouldn’t burn, but they decided to haul one back to the fire and try lighting it. When they did, the seat ignited like a torch and huge tongues of white-hot flame immediately shot into the air. Larry yelped as one of them singed his head. “I’ve burned my hair off.”
Paul looked at him quizzically and smiled. As far as he could see, Larry didn’t have much hair to burn.
“I’m burning up,” Scott yelled out. “It’s too hot!”
Paul rushed to his side, drawing Larry’s coat up over Scott’s head to shield him from the heat. Still Scott protested and Paul began dragging him away from the fire.
“Stop!” he cried out in pain. “Leave me where I am.”
Paul let him go. “Scott, do you know that you’re a sniveller? You’re either too hot or too cold.”
Scott ignored the jibe and lay back, waiting for the pain to subside. For fifteen minutes the seat burned brightly, infusing the survivors with welcome warmth. They agreed to save the second seat to make a signal fire, but were soon so cold that Paul shuffled back down the path for the other seat, stopping first at the plane to flip the ELT switch.
Two thousand feet above the men, the Hercules picked up the signal. By the time Paul was wearily hauling the second airplane seat back to the fire, the Hercules was circling back over Lesser Slave Lake’s 1,000-square-kilometre expanse, and heading in the direction of Codner’s high hill. Strapped in at the rear, Corporal Claude Castonguay, the loadmaster aboard the second Hercules, prepared to open its massive airdrop ramp. As the Herc closed the distance to the distress signal, the pilot slowed the plane’s airspeed to 170 knots. Snow and wind buffeted Castonguay as he leaned out, straining to see through the cloud. The pilot eased the yoke forward, steadily descending toward the lake. Finally, at the hair-raisingly low above-ground altitude of just under 200 feet, the Herc broke below the cloud deck, so close to the lake’s ebony surface that its crew could see the rugged ridges of wind-whipped water. The plane roared across it with Castonguay hanging suspended above the open ramp. Reaching the southwestern shore of the lake, the pilot began pulling up sharply to clear the approaching hill. The enormous aircraft strained to ascend, vibrating with exertion. Cloud, a thick grey robe above them, began to engulf the Hercules as it crested the hill. The nose of the plane had already disappeared into the murk and the rest was quickly being swallowed when Castonguay yelled out, “Campfire on the ground!”
A cheer erupted among the crew. It was echoed on the ground—at the forward command base in Slave Lake and the Rescue Coordination Centre in Edmonton, in the tiny trailer at the High Prairie airport where Dave Heggie sat monitoring the plane’s VHF transmission, and across several land and air radio receivers where others had been anxiously listening.
Within the close confines of Luella’s trailer, Heggie sagged with relief. When the Hercules had zeroed in on a high hill west of Lesser Slave Lake, he had feared the worst. If Wapiti’s plane had slammed into it nose-first, chances of anyone surviving would have been slim. Heggie was simultaneously astonished and overjoyed to hear news of the campfire. Over the radio, he could hear the crew aboard the Hercules requesting permission for jumpers to paradrop into the site. The forward base commander refused. Major Dewar knew the visibility was too poor and the terrain too dangerous for jumpers to safely get in.
Heggie picked up the phone to call Hopkins. For the past eight hours, he had delivered nothing but bad news about the military’s air search-and-rescue efforts. Now, as he told Hoppy about the campfire, Heggie’s voice was filled with optimism.
Hoppy, too, had reason to be optimistic. According to his men on the ground, the
search party was within several kilometres of the crash site. The survivors just had to hang on an hour or two more until they could get there.
RESCUE
In the early dawn gloom of Saturday, October 20, 1984, Paul Archambault stood inside the destroyed Piper Navajo airplane. Though he’d been longing for the light of day, he now wished that it was still dark. In daylight, he saw everything in gruesome detail.
Tentatively, he touched the arm of one of the dead passengers. It was cold and clammy and felt like snakeskin. The man’s eyes were half-open, his face swollen. An orb of ice the size of a racket ball hung from his mouth.
Paul reached into his pocket and pulled out Erik’s camera. He couldn’t say why, but somewhere deep in his subconscious, he knew he needed to record this event. He took a couple of pictures of the deceased and was backing out of the plane when something vaguely familiar caught his eye: his duffle bag. He opened it and riffled through his meagre belongings, pulling out the only things he cared about: a couple of photographs of his family and his wallet, which held his life savings: $66.35. He stuffed the wallet and photos into his pockets, threw the duffle bag over his shoulder, and was about to return to the fire when he saw a small, dark object half-hidden under the snow near the rear of the fuselage. Moving closer, he recognized it as Scott’s briefcase. Paul yanked the briefcase free and tried to open it, but it was locked. He shook it and could hear the clunk of the heavy gun inside. Clutching the briefcase, Paul made his way back to the firepit, where he distributed articles of his clothing to Erik and Larry.
Scott was only dimly aware of the fact that Paul had been gone for a long time when someone shook him. He opened his eyes to see Paul’s face leaning close.
