“Roger. Coming around now. I’ll hover fifty feet above you and lower the basket when you are ready.”

“Have them open the hatch and lift Oshley up here,” Glass yelled over to O’Malley. “We’ll only have a few seconds to get him hooked up.”

The engineer nodded and used the microphone to speak to the men below. The access hatch popped open and Wallich’s head poked through. He handed O’Malley the clear Plexiglas grounding rod. Shaped like a short shepherd’s crook but with a copper core, it was designed to pass the high-energy static electric charge that the whirling helicopter had built up. Anyone who grabbed the cable from the chopper without first grounding it could receive a very nasty, even crippling, shock.

The COB climbed through the hatch and leaned back down to help lift Oshley’s basket stretcher up into the cockpit. Doc Halliday stood a little farther down the ladder, easing the stretcher past him, all the time watching his patient. The quartermaster was mercifully unconscious, oblivious of the maelstrom happening around him. Even farther down the ladder, Bill Dooley pushed upward, lifting his friend up to safety and treatment.

Bill Edwards watched it all from the bottom of the ladder, coordinating the work in the access trunk with the team that was driving the ship. Because of the helicopter hovering overhead, the periscopes were housed. That meant that the people in the control room were flying blind. The XO stood there watching everything, doing all he could to make sure the transfer went smoothly from his end.

The Super Puma hovered over the pitching, tossing submarine. Glass saw the crew chief lean out the chopper’s side door and begin lowering the cable. O’Malley tried to catch it with his hook, but the wind whipped it about, making it seem to leap away each time he reached for it, jerking it just beyond his reach. It swung past once more and he tried another time. No go. Again and again he tried but failed to grab it. Desperately, he reached out one more time, and came within millimeters of falling over the side into the roiling sea.

Joe Glass grabbed a handful of survival suit and hung on. When O’Malley turned to Glass, there were tears in his eyes.

“Doug, it’s no use,” Glass yelled. “It’s just too rough, too much wind. You’ll never get hold of it in this.”

O’Malley started to insist that he continue trying, but the radio sizzled again.

“Yank, we’ll lend you a hand. Got a rope that’ll reach from the sail to the water?”

Glass grabbed the radio and answered, “Yes! It’ll take a couple of minutes to get it up here. Hold on.”

“No trouble,” the pilot answered. “Already missed happy hour at the officers’ mess, I’m afraid.”