“Do you Yanks know how many times pilots, trappers, fishermen, and tourists have said they saw some”—ruddy face paused to choose his words—“shiny object?”
At the words “shiny object,” Geoff Barker took a deep, exasperated breath. They were the exact words the President had written in his letter to the command. We had rushed to pull together this small team, and Barker, in particular, had worked long hours to get the right climbing, diving, and camping gear ready for this operation. Now it seemed we were on a wild Canadian goose chase.
Trying to be positive, I defended our plan. “We have it on good authority that a large metallic item was spotted here,” I said, pointing to the laminated map.
“A shiny object, you mean.” Bearded man snickered, wiping the beer foam from his whiskers.
“Sonny, it’s been over two decades since anyone spotted that wreckage,” ruddy face said. “Even if a plane had crashed in those mountains, it would be buried under a hundred feet of snow and ice and you’d never be able to get to it.”
“And the snow never melts in these parts,” bearded man offered, tapping the map.
Bearded man was partly right. For almost the entire year the snow never melted in these mountains, except for two weeks in late September—and then only partially. If we had any chance of finding the plane, it would have to be in the next two weeks.
Suddenly, a large woman with massive cleavage grabbed my free hand and yanked me to the dance floor. “Let’s polka!” she shouted, spinning me around.
“I don’t dance,” I objected, stumbling across the wooden floor.
“We polka,” she said again in broken English.
Bearded man, ruddy face, and my four companions all began to clap loudly and yell encouragement. What the hell, I thought. The polka looked a lot like the Texas two-step.
Grabbing my large German fräulein by her plump hands, I began to move around the floor, bumping everyone in my path—much to the amusement of my fellow frogmen and the well-dressed band director, who kept yelling, “Everyone polka!”
As I looked over at the table, bearded man and ruddy face were laughing, but in the back of my mind, I knew their laughter had nothing to do with my dancing.
“Lower,” I yelled. “You’ve got to get me lower!”
The pilot of the small Bell helicopter acknowledged my request and brought the helo down another six feet. Precariously balanced on a large boulder, Barker and Ellis reached for the scuba tanks as I handed them out the side door of the helo.
Walker passed me the remainder of the equipment, took one final look inside the helo, and announced that all the gear was out. I nodded to him to get out of the bird, and with one smooth motion he slid across the deck of the helo, out the side door, and onto the boulder below.
Tapping the pilot on the shoulder, I shouted, “Thanks for the lift.”
Looking over the barren landscape, steep mountain peaks, and treacherous ice floes, he shouted back, “Be careful out here! If I don’t hear from you in four days, I will be back.”
I nodded thankfully, patted him on the back one final time, and slid out the side door into the waiting arms of big Geoff Barker.
We all watched as the helo banked slowly right and struggled to gain altitude. The blades were grasping at the thin air and the whine of the engines echoed loudly off the surrounding mountains.
Within minutes all was quiet. Dead quiet. With all of our gear heaped in a pile at our feet, the five of us stood precariously on the large rocks surveying our new surroundings. It was spectacular.
On three sides were peaks rising up to five thousand feet. Below us was an ice blue mountain lake that spilled off the open edge of the basin. How far the water dropped we couldn’t tell, but it appeared to fall endlessly into another valley below. While a few pine trees dotted the landscape, there was no sign of other life—just rock. Big rocks.
As predicted, all the snow was gone, with the exception of a long, narrow ice floe that extended several thousand feet from the top of the mountain on the far side to a place about three hundred yards up from the lake.
“Well,” Ellis announced. “We’re here. Now what?”
It was only 1500 hours, but the light was fading fast as the sun slowly sank behind the tall mountain peaks.
“Let’s set up camp for the night and we can begin our dives in the morning,” I said.
“I found a spot over here,” Barker said. “We can fit both tents on the same boulder and still have some room for a fire and a few camp stools.”
“Well, we won’t have to worry about bears or mountain lions,” Ellis said, surveying the mountainside through the scope on the .300 WinMag. “Nothing lives up here.”
“It’s gonna be dark soon,” Barker said. “Let’s get moving.”
Within an hour we had shifted all of our equipment to the only flat area inside the basin. Barker was right, though. The campsite worked nicely.
Barker and I shared one tent and Ellis, Carter, and Walker were in the other. By 1700 the sun was gone completely, but stars lit up the night sky. Comets dashed across the horizon just above the peaks, and the Big Dipper, normally the brightest stars in the sky, were consumed by the surrounding heavens. In all my years in the Teams, from the jungles of Panama to the mountains of Alaska to the middle of the South Pacific, I could not remember a night where the stars shined so very brightly.
Bundled in Gore-Tex jackets and wool pants, we sat around the fire trying to stay warm.
“Do you really think they’re down in that lake, XO?” Walker asked.
“I don’t know, Greg. Maybe we’ll find out tomorrow,” I said.
“Damn, that would be cool, wouldn’t it,” Ellis chimed in. “What if that plane is really still there, preserved in the icy waters, just waiting for us to find it?”
“As clear as that water is, it won’t take too many dives to determine if it’s there,” Barker said, adding another pallet to the fire. We had bundled all our gear on small wooden pallets and had enough firewood to keep us comfortable for several nights.
“Can you imagine what it must have been like?” Carter said. “I mean, these guys are on a routine flight, nothing to worry about, and then bang, something goes wrong: a bad engine, icing, something, and within a matter of minutes they are struggling for their lives trying to keep this big ol’ plane in the air.”
“My guess is the pilot saw the lake and thought it might be an open pasture,” I speculated.
“Yeah, must have really sucked when he got closer and realized it wasn’t grass, but water,” Barker said.
“Wait a minute, when did this accident occur?” Ellis asked.
“November 1948,” I answered.
“Wouldn’t the lake have been frozen in November?” Ellis continued.
We all looked at each other, surprised the question had never come up.
“Sure, sure it would’ve,” Carter said excitedly.
“So…” Barker said, hoping someone would finish the sentence.
“So…” I said, jumping in, “if he actually made the lake, but couldn’t stop, then the plane would have careened into the side of the mountain.”
“At about 120 miles per hour,” Ellis added.
“Yeah, but if that was the case, we would have seen remnants of the plane scattered all across the mountainside. And we saw nothing,” Barker said.
“Ah, we’re probably nowhere close to that crash,” Walker mumbled. “I say we give it a day, and if we don’t find anything we break out the radio and call the helo back.”
At Walker’s suggestion everyone went quiet. We were prepared to stay four days looking for the wreckage, but Walker was right. There was no plane anywhere in sight. If it wasn’t under the water—it wasn’t here.
“All right, guys, we have a big day ahead of us. Let’s turn in,” I said.
“Roger, sir,” Barker answered. “I’m going to throw one more pallet on the fire, just in case Bigfoot is out there.”
We all retired
to our tents, jumped in our sleeping bags, and within minutes all I could hear was the sound of the crackling fire and the snoring of tired men.
As I rolled over in the bag, I couldn’t help but wonder about the fate of those lost crewmen. I was hoping we would find some answers in the morning. But the morning was still a long ways off.
I was shaking uncontrollably. Pulling the fabric of the sleeping bag as close to my body as possible, I tried to get warm, but it just wasn’t happening. We had underestimated how much the temperature would drop at night, and my bag clearly wasn’t rated for this kind of weather.
As I rolled to my left, reaching for my spare jacket, I noticed something was missing.
Barker.
I opened my eyes and waited a minute until they adjusted. The shadow from the fire flickered against the tent and I could vaguely make out a silhouette by the flames.
Struggling out of my bag, I threw on my Gore-Tex jacket, unzipped the fly on the tent, and stepped outside into the bitterly cold night air.
Barker was sitting on a stool warming himself by the fire.
“You okay, Geoff?” I asked.
Without even looking in my direction he muttered, “I’m fine.”
I looked around to see if there was a whiskey flask that Barker might have smuggled into our campsite. He was a tough, proud man, but the bottle had always haunted him. A year earlier, after several minor incidents, he had gone cold turkey. Since then he hadn’t taken a sip of alcohol. Or so I thought.
I grabbed a camp stool and sidled up beside him, trying to see if I could get a whiff of booze.
“I’m not drinking. If that’s what you’re thinking, XO.”
I threw another pallet on the fire. “Then what the hell are you doing out here? It’s freezing.”
“I just couldn’t sleep. That’s all,” Barker said.
“You’re not very convincing, Geoff. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he snapped. “There’s nothing wrong!”
“All right,” I said. “I know you didn’t come out here to get warm, because it certainly isn’t any warmer outside the tent.” Even by the fire the air was thin and crisp, and a slight breeze brought the frigid air from off the snowbanks to settle right on top of our campsite.
“I’m fine,” he said again. “Just fine.”
I patted Barker on the back and got up. Sometimes you just have to let a man deal with his own demons. With one more surge of warmth from the fire, I ran back into my tent, diving into the bag as quickly as possible. The remainder of the night was spent fighting off the cold and a full bladder. It was three hours until sunrise, but as far as I was concerned, morning couldn’t come soon enough.
My watch said 0625, but I could tell the other guys were already up and stirring around. I dressed quickly and stepped outside. The scenery, and the altitude, took my breath away.
The sky was almost cloudless and the vibrant colors of nature drew a distinct line between the earth-toned mountains, the deep blue water, the blinding white snow, and the green treetops in the valley miles away.
Barker was just where I had left him several hours earlier. He had never returned to the tent. On the other side of the fire were Carter and Walker. Ellis was down checking out the lake. All three men seemed quietly preoccupied.
I reached down, grabbed the REI coffee pot, and filled up my canteen cup. “What’s for chow?” I asked, knowing that all we had were C-rations. No one even looked up from the fire.
Pulling up a camp stool, I grabbed a board from one of the pallets and stoked the fire. “We ready to do some diving?”
No one answered. “Geoff, is the gear ready to go?” I asked.
“Yes sir,” Barker answered, struggling to sound motivated.
“Okay,” I said, sipping my coffee. “What’s wrong with you guys?”
The three men all looked at each other, but no one spoke.
“Come on,” I prodded gently. “What’s going on here?”
I could see that neither Barker nor Walker were going to open up. But Carter was just waiting for an opportunity to say something.
“Chuck, tell me what’s going on.”
Carter looked at the other two men, glanced around the campsite as if to see if anyone else was listening, and then asked Barker and Walker, “Did you see it?”
“See what?” Barker said, raising his voice.
“I saw it,” Walker offered.
“Saw what? I asked.
Carter hesitated for a few seconds and I leaned across the fire as if to hear a schoolyard secret.
“Yes…?”
“There was someone outside our tent last night,” Carter said. “He walked around our campsite.”
I scanned the expression on each man’s face. There was no twinkle in their eyes, no sly smile around their lips, only a tense sense of bewilderment.
“It was Geoff,” I said, laughing. I looked over to get confirmation from Barker. But he remained stoic.
“It wasn’t me,” Barker said with a tinge in his voice.
“Of course it was,” I replied.
“No, it wasn’t,” Barker said quietly. “That’s why I got up and went outside. I saw a man walking around the tent. I thought it was Pat, but when I called out he didn’t answer.”
I looked at Walker and Carter. “None of us left the tent last night,” Carter said. Walker nodded.
“He was there, all right,” Carter added. “He must have been over six foot tall and heavyset. He circled our entire tent a couple of times, stopping occasionally like he was looking inside.”
Walker jumped in. “When he wouldn’t answer, I opened the flap of the tent and looked outside, but there was nobody there.”
“Geoff is about six foot tall and heavyset,” I countered.
“Yes sir, but not even Geoff can walk on thin air.”
“Thin air?” I asked.
Carter got up and motioned me to the side of their tent.
The boulder our campsite sat on was about twelve feet in diameter, and the tent that Ellis, Walker, and Carter shared was butted up against the edge of the rock. Off the back side of their tent was a sharp drop to the ground below, and there was no room between the edge of the tent and the end of the boulder.
“I told you he walked around the entire tent,” Carter said.
“Might be just a little hard for a man Geoff’s size to tiptoe around that,” Walker said, pointing to the base of their lean-to.
I edged over to see if I could walk the circumference of the tent, but clearly there was no room on the back side for anyone to maneuver safely.
“So what are you guys trying to tell me here? You saw a ghost. Is that it?”
“Look, XO,” Barker said. “I know this sounds crazy. When I was drinking a lot it would have made sense. When I drank I would see things that weren’t there, hear voices that weren’t there, believe things that weren’t true. But I wasn’t drinking last night and I know what I saw.”
Carter and Walker nodded in agreement.
“And there is something else,” Barker said.
“Something else?”
“That plane is here. In this crater,” Barker said. “It’s not in the lake.”
“Did the man walking around the tent tell you that?” I said, expecting to get a laugh.
Geoff didn’t laugh.
In my years in the Navy many unexplained events would affect my life. I learned to trust my instincts and oftentimes the feelings of others around me. It was clear to me that Barker, Walker, and Carter had seen something, heard something, felt something that in their hearts they believed to be true. While I hadn’t seen or heard or felt anything last night, that didn’t make the event unreal.
“All right, boys,” I said, looking at the ice floe high on the mountainside. “Grab the picks and ropes. Let’s go find ourselves an airplane.”
The large rocks covering the mountain made movement from our base camp to the ice floe slow going. Additionally, Barker, Ellis, Carter,
and I were weighted down with climbing rope, crampons, ice picks, and lights. After about forty-five minutes we arrived at the base of the ice. The foot of the floe was about fifty yards across and ended abruptly, without the gradual, sloping curvature normally found in these sorts of formations.
From our vantage point on the west side of the mountain we could see the entire basin. The waterfall off the lake into the valley below seemed even more dramatic. While it was difficult to tell the length of the drop, the volume of water spilling over the edge made me worry that any dive in the lake could be more dangerous than I envisioned. The current at that depth could sweep a man away quickly. I mentally made a note of the problem.
Above us the mountains rose steeply. There was no easy route to the top. Reaching the peak would require several hours, even for an experienced climber. With the gear we brought, we were not equipped to go much beyond the middle of the ice floe.
Barker tapped on the outside of the floe with his ice pick. It appeared solid, but with each strike of the pick, there was a change in the pitch.
“Almost sounds hollow,” Barker said, trying to peer into the ice.
“If it were hollow it seems the weight of the ice would collapse upon itself,” Ellis noted.
Barker took off his gloves to get a better grip and then began to swing the pick with his full force, focusing on a small spot at the end of the floe. Before long, we all joined in.
As each minute of digging passed, the color of the ice at our entry point began to change. It became darker, reflecting not only the outer sunlight, but the absence of light from within.
Suddenly Barker’s pick passed through a thin layer of ice.
“It is hollow,” he said, struggling to unwedge his axe.
Within thirty minutes we created an opening large enough to get a body through. Poking the flashlight into the hole, I could see that the floe had created an archway extending up for several yards, but it was difficult to see much else from outside the ice. Barker slipped on a climbing harness, attached the rope to his carabiner, grabbed a flashlight, and began to step into the hole.
Sea Stories Page 10
