Next, Rodriguez picked up the phone and activated Air Station Port Angeles to spin up their B-Zero response crew and get the ready-helo flying toward Orion. Anyone watching the process might have thought the call happened simultaneously with his other actions—and they would not be far from wrong. As command duty officer, Chief Rodriguez had the authority to send assets before even notifying his boss, the search-and-rescue mission coordinator.
The SMC made it crystal clear. When it came to SAR, the initial response of the U.S. Coast Guard was to “go there.”
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The junior duty officer at Coast Guard Air Station Port Angeles answered the phone on the first ring. CDO Rodriguez passed on the information to the JDO, who repeated it back, then hung up and pressed the extension for the senior duty officer, Lieutenant Commander Andrew Slaznik, pilot in command of the B-Zero response helicopter.
Each Coast Guard air station in the United States had at least one B-Zero response crew on duty at any given time. They slept next to the hangar and were ready to deploy inside a thirty-minute window. Each SDO had his or her own way of doing things, and this one liked to be called prior to the SAR launch alarm being activated.
The SDO answered quickly for so early in the morning. “This is Mr. Slaznik,” he said, his words thick with sleep. The pilots were accustomed to these middle-of-the-night calls. Lieutenant Commander Slaznik seemed to live for them.
The JDO relayed the scant information regarding Orion’s man-overboard report and the SDO repeated it back to assure the petty officer he was awake and moving.
“Let’s go ahead and wake up the crew,” he added, before hanging up.
The SAR alarm wailed a moment later, wresting his copilot, Lieutenant Becky Crumb, from a deep sleep in the adjacent room. Slaznik called her cell phone, just to make sure she heard the siren, and said in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, “Get to the choppa!”
The flight mechanic and rescue swimmer slept in a building closer to the hangar and nearer to the alarm.
Slaznik splashed cold water on his face and smoothed the bed head out of his dark hair. He sat on the edge of his rack while he pulled up local weather and any Notices to Airmen on the Electronic Flight Bag program on his iPad. Winds gusting to forty with heavy rain in the strait. He groaned. As a helicopter pilot, he didn’t mind the wind. In fact, wind helped him with his hover when the bird was heavy, but it wreaked havoc on the hoist cable and made the rescue swimmer’s job all the more difficult. And his swimmer on this crew was a newbie, fresh out of thirteen weeks’ training. They’d gone out earlier that day on a jumper from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but locals had fished the body out before they got there, so it wasn’t a real call-out. The kid had handled himself well, asked good questions during the CRM open conversation Slaznik encouraged during any mission. This was going to be different. The kid was going to get wet. The weather was skosh, but it was a good thing he was going to cut his teeth on a simple man-in-the-water operation.
Firsthand experience in cold water cajoled the SDO along in his routine. People who fell off ships rarely wore any sort of protective suit—and without any protection, the window for survival began to close at an extremely rapid rate.
Slaznik would check the weather again before he launched. Marginal weather at the station often sucked severely farther west in the strait. He pushed a speed-dial number on his cell and made his first call the OPS boss at home, holding the phone to his ear with a shoulder while he stepped into his Switlik dry suit.
It was a goofy thing and he didn’t admit it to anyone other than his wife, but he loved that orange suit. Wearing it along with the black SAR Warrior survival vest made him feel like a superhero.
He didn’t mind getting up in the middle of the night. Like his five-year-old son said, that’s when superheroes were needed the most.
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Andy Slaznik had known he would someday become a pilot from the moment he saw his first crop duster growl overhead to drop a marker at the end of a row on four hundred acres of canola at his grandfather’s farm. He was nine years old, and his family had been visiting his mother’s parents in southern Alberta. The Piper Pawnee Brave had seemed low enough to reach up and touch.
Andy begged his granddad to make the hour drive to the Lethbridge city library, where he checked out as many books on aviation as he could fit in his scrawny arms—and then devoured them all in three days. His room back in Boise became a gallery of plastic models, and he bored his friends to tears with an intricate and ever-growing knowledge of each and every aircraft that hung from the spackled ceiling on bits of sewing thread.
An uncanny memory and a natural knack for math worked in concert to give Slaznik an SAT score of 1464. Midway through his junior year, he began the lengthy application process to both the United States Air Force Academy and the United States Military Academy at West Point. His GPA, superior SAT score, and a sub-two-minute 800-meter time on his high school track team got him accepted to weeklong programs at each school during the summer break before he was a senior.
The Air Force liaison from nearby Mountain Home AFB took one look at the boy’s stats and pushed him hard to keep his sights firmly fixed on the Wild Blue U. But a guidance counselor suggested he might consider the Coast Guard Academy. She told him that because of its smaller class size, the USCGA was considered more selective. She then said maybe he should forget it. It might be a great deal of work with such a slim chance of being accepted.
The challenge alone appealed to Andrew’s competitive nature. He liked to prove he could excel at the hard stuff. He knew that the Navy and the Coast Guard both had aircraft—and some hotshot pilots—but they also had boats, a lot of boats. Andrew didn’t want to do boats. He wanted to fly. And besides, the Air Force liaison kept reminding him that if he ever wanted to be an astronaut, he needed to go with the Zoomies.
In the end, it was the guidance counselor’s thrown gauntlet that found Andrew Slaznik sitting with a class of thirty-four other AIM summer-program cadet wannabes in New London, Connecticut, listening to various old-timers answer questions about their respective jobs. The discussion was informative enough, but there was far too much talk about boats. Andrew found his mind wandering, thinking about how cool it would be to tell his friends he was an astronaut.
And then a tall, gangly, redheaded MH-65 Dolphin helicopter pilot took the microphone. He’d been last on the program—and, looking back, Andrew understood why. None of the other pros wanted to follow this guy. The pilot regaled the eager young students with stories of killer winds and night flights over mountainous seas. To hear this guy tell it, he got into hairy situations every other day.
It was Andrew who asked the final question of the night, and even as he spoke, he felt his mind drift again, pondering what the guys at Colorado Springs had to offer him. Surely the Air Force had hundreds of pilots with swagger and stories like this guy.