Miracle in the Andes Page 6

  Back in the fuselage, Marcelo was working out some grim calculations in his head. We had crashed at three-thirty in the afternoon. He guessed it would be four o’clock before officials could confirm that the plane was missing. By the time they could organize a helicopter rescue, it would be five-thirty or six. The helicopters would not reach us until seven-thirty at the earliest, and since no pilot in his right mind would fly in the Andes at night, Marcelo knew no rescue would be launched until the following day. We would have to spend the night here. Daylight was already fading. The temperatures, which were already well below freezing when we crashed, were dropping fast. Marcelo knew we were not prepared to weather a subzero night in the Andes. We were dressed only in light summer clothing—some of us were wearing blazers or sports jackets, but most of us were in shirtsleeves. We had no warm coats, no blankets, nothing to protect us from the savage cold. Marcelo knew that unless we found a way to turn the fuselage into a decent shelter, none of us would last until morning, but the plane was so full of jumbled seats and loose debris that there wasn’t enough clear floor space for the injured to lie down, let alone provide sleeping room for dozens of uninjured survivors.

  Realizing that the clutter would have to be cleared from the fuselage, Marcelo set to work. First he gathered a crew of healthy survivors and gave them the task of removing the dead and injured from the fuselage. They began dragging the dead out into the open, using long nylon straps they’d found in the luggage compartment. The injured were carried out more gently, and once they were laid on the snow, Marcelo directed the survivors to clear as much floor space as they could. The workers labored valiantly to follow his orders, but the work was grueling and excruciatingly slow. They suffered from the frigid wind and gasped for breath in the thin air. By the time darkness fell, they had cleared just a small space near the gaping hole at the rear of the fuselage.

  At six o’clock, Marcelo directed the others to move the injured back into the fuselage, then the healthy survivors filed in and prepared for the long night ahead. Once everyone was settled, Marcelo began to build a makeshift wall to seal off the huge opening at the rear of the fuselage where the tail section had broken away. With Roy Harley’s help, he stacked suitcases, fragments of the aircraft, and loose seats in the opening, then he packed the gaps with snow. It was far from airtight, and the air temperature in the fuselage was still viciously frigid, but Marcelo hoped the wall would shield us from the worst of the subzero cold.

  When the wall was finished, the survivors settled in for the night. Forty-five passengers and crew members had been on board the Fairchild. There were five known dead at the crash site. Eight were unaccounted for, although the survivors felt certain that one of them, Carlos Valeta, was dead. Zerbino had seen Valeta’s seat fall from the plane, but, incredibly, he had survived his fall. In the moments just after the crash, a group of boys had spotted him staggering down the mountain slope a few hundred yards from the Fairchild. They called to him and he seemed to turn toward the crash site, but then he stumbled in the deep snow and tumbled down the slope and out of sight. This left thirty-two people alive at the crash site. Lagurara was still trapped in the cockpit. Some of the injured, along with Liliana Methol, the only uninjured woman survivor, were gathered in the shelter of the Fairchild’s luggage compartment, which was the warmest part of the plane. The rest packed into a cramped space on the litter-strewn floor of the fuselage that measured no more than eight by ten feet square.

  Because night had fallen so quickly, there hadn’t been time to remove all the bodies, and the survivors were forced to hunker down among the dead, shoving and prodding the corpses of friends for a few more inches of space. It was a scene from a nightmare, but the fear and physical suffering the survivors were enduring overshadowed their horror. The tight quarters were intensely uncomfortable, and despite Marcelo’s wall, the cold was unbearable. The survivors huddled together to share the warmth of their bodies. Some of them begged the boys near them to punch their arms and legs to keep the blood flowing in their veins.

  At some point, Roberto realized that the cloth coverings of the seats could easily be unzipped and removed and used as blankets. They were made of thin nylon and offered little protection against the cold, but Roberto understood the risks of hypothermia, and knew the survivors had to do everything they could to conserve as much body heat as possible. Even if the blankets would not prevent anyone from suffering in the cold, they might help them retain enough body heat to survive until morning.

  They laid me beside Susy and Panchito at the base of Marcelo’s wall. This was the coldest part of the cabin. Wind leaked through the makeshift wall, and the floor below us, which had been torn away in the crash, allowed cold air to stream up from below, but they placed us here because they had already given up hope that we would live very long, and they saved the warmer places for those who had a chance to survive. Susy and Panchito, who were still conscious, must have suffered terribly that first night, but I was still in a coma, and was spared that agony. In fact, the frigid air may have saved my life by reducing the swelling that would have destroyed my brain.

  As the night grew deeper, the cold bore down on the survivors, chilling them bone-deep and crushing their spirits. Each moment was an eternity, and as the last light faded, it was as if the mountain darkness were seeping into the survivors’ souls. All the purposeful work they had done in the aftermath of the crash had kept them from dwelling on their fears, and the physical activity had helped them keep warm. But now, as they lay helpless in the dark, there was nothing to protect them from the cold or, worse, from the despair. Survivors who had performed stoically in the daylight now wept and screamed in pain. There were savage bursts of anger as one boy shifted position in the cramped quarters and bumped the injured leg of another, or someone unintentionally kicked someone else as he tried to sleep. The moments crept by.

  At some point, Diego Storm—another medical student in our group—saw something in my face that made him think I might live, so he dragged me away from Marcelo’s wall to a warmer place in the fuselage, where the others kept me warm with their bodies. Some managed to sleep that night, but most simply endured, second by second, breath by breath, as sounds of suffering and delusion filled the darkness. In a thin voice, Panchito pleaded pathetically for help, and constantly muttered that he was freezing. Susy prayed, and called for our mother. Señora Mariani screamed and wailed in her agony. In the cockpit, the raving copilot begged for his gun, and insisted, over and over, “We passed Curicó, we passed Curicó …” “It was a nightmare, Nando,” Coche told me. “It was Dante’s Hell.”

  The survivors suffered through that first night, surrounded by chaos. The hours were endless, but at last morning came. Marcelo was the first on his feet. The others, still huddling on the floor of the fuselage to keep warm, were reluctant to rise, but Marcelo roused them. The night had shaken them deeply, but as they moved around in the daylight filtering into the cabin, their spirits began to rise. They had done the impossible—they had survived a frigid night in the Andes. Surely the rescue party would find them today. All through the terrible night, Marcelo had assured them that it would. Now they felt certain that they would be home soon, that the worst of their ordeal was over.

  As the others prepared themselves for the day, Canessa and Zerbino moved through the fuselage, checking on the injured. Panchito was lying still and stiff. He had died during the night. In the cockpit, they found Lagurara’s lifeless body. Señora Mariani was motionless, but when Canessa tried to move her, she screamed again in agony and he left her alone. When he returned to check on her again, she had died.

  The doctors did what they could for the injured survivors. They cleaned wounds, changed dressings, and led the boys with broken bones out onto the glacier, where they could ease their pain by laying their shattered limbs in the snow. They found Susy lying beneath Panchito’s body. She was conscious, but still delusional. Roberto rubbed her feet, which were black with frostbite, then he wiped the b
lood from her eyes. Susy was lucid enough to thank him for his kindness.

  While the doctors made their rounds, Marcelo and Roy Harley had knocked down part of the wall they’d built the night before, and the survivors began their second day on the mountain. All day long they searched the skies for signs of rescue. In late afternoon they heard a plane pass over, but the skies were overcast and they knew they hadn’t been seen. In the fast-fading twilight, the survivors gathered in the fuselage to face another long night. With more time to work, Marcelo built a better, more windproof wall. The last of the dead bodies had been removed from the fuselage, and that, along with the absence of the others who had died, provided more sleeping space on the fuselage floor, but still the night was long and their suffering was grim.

  In the afternoon of the third day, I finally woke from my coma, and as I slowly gathered my wits about me, I was staggered by the thought of the horrors my friends had already endured. The strain of what they had been through seemed to have aged them years. Their faces were drawn and pale from tension and lack of sleep. Physical exhaustion and the energy-sapping effects of the thin air made their movements slow and uncertain, so that many of them stooped and shuffled about the crash site as if they had grown decades older in the last thirty-six hours. There were twenty-nine survivors now, most of us young men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one, but some were as young as seventeen. The oldest survivor now was thirty-eight-year-old Javier Methol, but he suffered so badly from the nausea and fatigue caused by severe altitude sickness that he could barely stand. Both pilots and most of the crew were dead. The only crew member to survive was Carlos Roque, the plane’s mechanic, but the shock of the crash had rattled him so badly that all we could get from him was senseless raving. He couldn’t even tell us where emergency supplies like flares and blankets might be kept. There was no one to help us, no one with any knowledge of mountains or airplanes or the techniques of survival. We lived constantly on the verge of hysteria, but we did not panic. Leaders emerged, and we responded in the way we’d been taught by the Christian Brothers—as a team.

  Much of the credit for our survival in those critical early days must go to Marcelo Perez, whose decisive leadership saved many lives. From the very first moments of the ordeal, Marcelo responded to the staggering challenges before us with the same combination of courage, decisiveness, and foresight with which he had led us to so many victories on the rugby field. He instantly understood that the margin for error here was slim, and that the mountain would make us pay dearly for stupid mistakes. In a rugby match, hesitation, indecision, and confusion can cost you the game. Marcelo realized that in the Andes, these same mistakes would cost us our lives. His strong presence in the first hours after the crash prevented what could have been total panic. The rescue operation he quickly organized saved the lives of many people who were pulled from the tangled seats, and without the sheltering wall he built that first night, we all would have frozen to death by morning.

  Marcelo’s leadership was heroic. He slept at night in the coldest part of the fuselage, and he always asked all the other uninjured boys to do the same. He forced us to keep busy, when many among us simply wanted to huddle in the fuselage and wait to be saved. More than anything, he buoyed our spirits by convincing us that our suffering would be over soon. He was convinced that rescue was on its way, and he was very forceful in convincing others this was true. Still, he understood that surviving in the Andes, even for just a few days, would test us to our limits, and he made it his responsibility to take the measures that would give us the best chance of surviving that long. One of the first things he did was to gather everything edible that could be found in suitcases or scattered around the cabin. There wasn’t much—a few chocolate bars and other candies, some nuts and crackers, some dried fruit, several small jars of jam, three bottles of wine, some whiskey, and a few bottles of liqueur. Despite his conviction that rescue was only hours away, some natural instinct for survival told him to err on the side of caution, and on the second day of the ordeal, Marcelo began to carefully ration the food—each meal was nothing more than a small square of chocolate or a dab of jam, washed down with a sip of wine from the cap of an aerosol can. It was not enough to satisfy anyone’s hunger, but as a ritual, it gave us strength. Each time we gathered to receive our meager rations, we were making a statement, to each other and to ourselves, that we would do everything we could to survive.

  In those early days we all believed that rescue was our only chance of survival, and we clung to that hope with an almost religious zeal. We had to believe this. The alternatives were simply too horrible. Marcelo made sure our faith in rescue remained strong. Even as days passed, and no rescue arrived, he would not let us doubt the fact that we all would be saved. Whether he truly believed this for himself, or if it was just a courageous ploy to keep us from losing heart, I cannot say. He professed this belief so firmly I never doubted him, but I didn’t realize at the time the terrible burden he was carrying, and how deeply he blamed himself for taking us all on this doomed journey.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, a small prop-driven plane flew over the crash site, and several of the survivors who saw it were certain it had dipped its wings. This was taken as a signal that we had been sighted, and soon a sense of relief and jubilation spread through the group. We waited as the long shadows of late afternoon stretched down the mountains, but by nightfall no rescuers had arrived. Marcelo insisted that the pilots of the plane would send help soon, but others, wearied by the strain of waiting, were beginning to admit their doubts.

  “Why is it taking so long for them to find us?” someone asked.

  Marcelo answered this question in the same way he always did: perhaps helicopters cannot fly in the thin mountain air, he would say, so the rescue party might be coming on foot, and that will take time.

  “But if they know where we are, why haven’t they flown over to drop supplies?”

  Impossible, Marcelo would say. Anything dropped from a plane would simply sink into the snow and be lost. The pilots would know this. Most of the boys accepted the logic of Marcelo’s explanations. They also trusted heavily in the goodness of God. “God saved us from dying in the crash,” they’d say. “Why would He do that just to leave us here to die?”

  I listened to these discussions as I spent the long hours caring for Susy. I wanted so badly to trust in God as they did. But God had already taken my mother and Panchito and so many others. Why would He save us and not them? In the same way, I wanted to believe rescue was coming, but I could not chase away the gnawing sense that we were on our own. As I lay with Susy, I felt a terrible helplessness and sense of urgency. I knew she was dying, and that the only hope was to get her to a hospital soon. Each moment lost was an agony for me, and in every waking second I listened hard for the sound of rescuers approaching. I never stopped praying for their arrival, or for the intercession of God, but at the same time the cold-blooded voice that had urged me to save my tears was always whispering in the back of my mind: No one will find us. We will die here. We must make a plan. We must save ourselves. From my very first moments of consciousness, I was nagged by the sobering apprehension that we were on our own here, and it alarmed me that the others were placing so much trust in the hope that we would be saved. But soon I realized that others thought like me. The “realists,” as I thought of them, included Canessa and Zerbino, Fito Strauch, a former member of the Old Christians who had come on the trip at the invitation of his cousin Eduardo, and Carlitos Paez, whose father, Carlos Paez-Villaro, was a famous Uruguayan painter, adventurer, and friend of Picasso. For days this group had been discussing their plans to climb the mountain above us and see what lay beyond. We had reason to believe escape was possible. All of us knew the words our copilot had moaned as he lay dying: We passed Curicó, we passed Curicó … In the first few hours after the crash, someone had found sets of flight charts in the cockpit. Arturo Nogueira, whose shattered legs confined him to the fuselage, spent hours s
tudying the complex charts, searching for the town of Curicó. Finally he found it, situated inside the Chilean border, well beyond the western slopes of the Andes. None of us were experts at reading these charts, but it seemed clear that if we had, in fact, traveled as far west as Curicó, there was no doubt that we had flown across the entire breadth of the cordillera. That meant the crash site must be somewhere in the western foothills of the Andes. We were encouraged in this belief by the reading on the Fairchild’s altimeter, which showed our altitude to be seven thousand feet. If we were deep in the Andes, our altitude would be much higher than that. Surely we were in the foothills, and the tall ridges to our west were the last high peaks of the Andes range. We grew certain that beyond those western summits were the green fields of Chile. We would find a village there, or at least a shepherd’s hut. Someone would be there to help us. We would all be saved. Until now, we had felt like victims of a shipwreck, lost in an ocean with no sense of where the nearest shore might be. Now we felt a small sense of control. We knew one fact at least: To the west is Chile. This phrase quickly became a rallying call for us, and we used it to bolster our hopes throughout our ordeal.