He couldn’t imagine how they were going to do a medevac in seas like this. The dark gray waves tossed the Toledo around like a tiny bit of flotsam on a very big and rough ocean. There was no way he could put men out on the main deck for a normal transfer. The only way possible was the risky procedure of doing it from the top of the sail, assuming the chopper that was on the way could find them on a night like this.

Couldn’t call it off, though. Dennis Oshley lay down there on the deck just below the hatch in intense pain, clinging to life. The only thing they could do for him out here was to ease the pain a little with Doc’s painkillers. If he couldn’t pull off the rescue tonight, Oshley might not be around in the morning.

It was decision time for Joe Glass. He could risk the lives of several of his men and a helicopter crew, and put this vital mission in jeopardy, all for the medevac of a single sailor in this weather. Or he could call it off and hope to make it to Norway. He didn’t know if Oshley could hold out that long.

Glass grinned and shook his head inside the cover of the survival suit. That’s why they give me the command pay, to make the hard decisions, he thought.

Just then a Super Puma chopper dropped through the cloud bank a thousand yards off the port beam, its searchlight stabbing through the darkness, looking for them. O’Malley popped Glass on the shoulder, pointed excitedly, and hollered over the wind, “There it is, Skipper!” The bellowing blow snatched his words away but Glass knew what he was saying.

A wave, higher than most, rose up above the sail and broke over them, filling the cockpit with bitingly cold seawater. The two men stood there stoically while the swirling water drained away.

“Brisk,” Glass commented drily.

“Yep, damn brisk!” O’Malley shouted back, smiling.

The bridge-to-bridge portable radio crackled. The voice coming out had a distinct British accent.

“Alpha Sierra Six, this is Romeo Five Bravo. You ready to transfer, Yank?”

Glass grabbed the radio and crouched down into the protection of the cockpit, trying to find shelter from the bawling wind. He pressed the push-to-talk button and yelled, “Pretty rough weather down here! What do you think?”

“Bit of a blow,” the Brit pilot answered. “Best get on with it, don’t you think?”

Glass smiled. There was nothing like British understatement when the going got rough. He was right. No sense making the rendezvous out here in this storm if they weren’t going to go ahead and try to get their man to the help he needed.

“Roger that!” Glass yelled into the radio microphone. “Coming to course zero-one-five to head into the wind. Making five knots. Taking fifteen- to twenty-degree rolls.”