Chavez broke the surface in a spot between the patches of burning oil and debris. He fought the pressing urge to breathe until he was reasonably sure he wasn’t about to sear his lungs.
The flames looked worse from below than they did up top, with small patches of fuel and rafts of burning plastic bobbing between the waves. Midas had been right beside him, so Chavez scanned for him first, and found him immediately. He was helping Adara get a wounded Dom Caruso into a yellow rubber lifeboat with the aid of two Vietnamese roustabouts, one of whom looked badly burned himself. A strong swimmer, Chavez used adrenaline to help him battle the chop, and he reached the raft in seconds.
Caruso’s left leg was bent unnaturally at the knee. His eyes gleamed with pain, but he was conscious. Looking outbound while Midas and Adara got him into the boat, he was the first to see Chavez in the water. “I’m good,” he sputtered, wincing as he slithered over the side of the tube.
Midas patted Adara’s shoulder, then turned, almost colliding with Ding.
“Holy shit, you’re a sight for sore eyes.” Midas sputtered, wiping water away from his beard. “I was just coming back to find you.”
“I’m good to go,” Ding said, bobbing and clinging to a line on the side of the raft. “You and Adara?”
“Banged up but otherwise intact.”
Midas slipped over the side, and without another word, both men swam among the debris and began to drag survivors toward the bobbing rafts. They found their pilot first, alive, but one arm broken, the other burned, clinging to a piece of insulation foam. Injured on impact, the man’s first inclination had been to see to his passengers. Chavez and Midas returned the favor and got him back to the raft with Adara and Dom.
Twelve minutes post-explosion, there were nine survivors in Adara’s raft, and fifteen in a second that Chavez and Midas had lashed alongside the first. A third raft bobbed in the chop some two hundred meters away, and looked to contain at least a dozen men. The chopper pilot spoke Vietnamese well enough to learn that there had been fifty-six crewmen on the rig, which left over twenty still unaccounted for.
Chavez hauled himself into the raft, hoping the extra couple of feet in elevation above the chop would give him a better view. The water was warm, but exertion and the massive adrenaline dump of the explosion and crash left him and the others shaking violently, chilled to the core.
One of the Vietnamese drillers — with much younger eyes than Chavez’s — was first to see the choppers on the horizon.
“Probably Chinese,” the pilot said through chattering teeth.
Midas wallowed into a kneeling position on the rubber raft’s trampoline floor and shielded his eyes to get a better look.
“Nope,” he said. “Those are U.S. Navy birds.”
The Seahawks arrived first, circling to approach from the west, then hovering close to the surface of the ocean as they dropped two rescue swimmers. Backlit by a low sun, the clouds of mist driven up by the churning rotors threw dazzling rainbows of color into the air below each gunmetal-gray bird.
Adara gave Chavez a good-natured punch in the shoulder with a shaky hand. “Bet you Army boys are happy to see the Navy now…”
The Navy swimmer broke the surface a few feet from the raft. He wore a black neoprene shorty and red helmet outfitted with a flashing strobe so the pilots could keep an eye on him. A black dive mask covered his youthful face.
“Petty Officer Third Class Aaron Ward,” the swimmer said, as if he’d just sidled up to the bar instead of hanging on to the side of a raft with hurricane-force prop wash battering the ocean a few dozen yards away. “United States Navy. How you folks holding up?”
Petty Officer Ward’s demeanor was relaxed — because calm was contagious — but he worked fast to triage the injured in the raft while the choppers scoured the surface for other survivors.
The helicopter pilot had it the worst, and Petty Officer Ward saw to him first, radioing his chopper with a situation report that would be passed on to his ship. It wasn’t long before everyone on the rafts was wrapped in foil space blankets like so many shivering baked potatoes.
Inflatable runabouts deployed from
Chavez was last off the raft. He stayed out of the way as the coxswain ran the inflatable up the ramp of the
One of them stepped away from the others.
