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At 9 a.m., a Falcon jet scrambled from the Coast Guard Air Station on Cape Cod, its mission to find ships at sea and broadcast the word: Warnings had been boosted from gale to storm, one step from a hurricane.

As the jet soared into thickening skies, Coast Guard stations throughout New England were warning: "Indications are that this is a fast-moving storm, and could have a severe impact on the area."

The caution would prove tragically prophetic.

At 1:57 p.m., a man's voice crackled over marine radios: "Tug Scandia, ponn ponn, ponn ponn, ponn ponn."

The radio signal sounded strong inside the watch room of the Point Judith Coast Guard Station, where Petty Officer Raymond Holcombe was in charge.

That phrase, ponn ponn, commanded Holcombe's attention; mariners use it to signal that a ship is in "imminent distress."

The voice continued to crackle over the radio: "Off of number 2 buoy, Point Judith. We have a fire on board."

Five seconds later, the brassy, authoritative voice of Jolee Golphene, a Coast Guard radiowoman barked over the radio: "Vessel in distress, this is the United States Coast Guard, Woods Hole, Massachusetts Group, over."

Man (his voice still calm): "This is the Tug Scandia, we are off Point Judith. We have a fire on board."

Golphene: Tug Scandia, this is Woods Hole group. How many persons do you have on board, and also sir, is the fire under control? Over.

Man: Uh, no it's not, no it's not. We have six men on board.

Golphene: Tug Scandia, this is Woods Hole group, roger sir. Request to know if you have a latitude and longitude, over.

Man: Yes. We are at four-one, eighteen, four-seventy-eight. Zero seventy-one, thirty-two, O nine-eight.

Those coordinates placed the Scandia about 5 miles south of the Point Judith Coast Guard Station, a couple of miles beyond the No. 2 buoy. Holcombe punched the "SAR Alarm" -- an acronym for search and rescue -- and bells clanged throughout the 121-year-old Coast Guard station on the bluff. The eight men on duty ran to the command center for a mission that they'll never forget.

Golphene: Scandia, this is Woods Hole group. Request to know if you have a life raft, and what color. Over.

After 21 seconds of silence, the captain of the Huntress, a large Point Judith trawler, broke in: The Huntress was 8 or 9 miles South of the Scandia, heading straight for Point Judith and offered to assist.

Golphene acknowledged the Huntress, then tried again to summon the Scandia: "Tug Scandia, tug Scandia, tug Scandia, this is United States Coast Guard, Woods Hole, Massachusetts group, over."

Man (his voice breathless with urgency): This is a May Day! Scandia may day! We are abandoning. We are abandoning off of Point Judith, off of Point Judith. Last communication!

WHEN THE tug Scandia pulled out of Bayonne, N.J., at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 19, forecasters were calling for gale winds with heavy seas.

But the tug's owners, Eklof Marine, had a schedule to keep: Deliver the barge North Cape with a cargo of 4 million gallons of No. 2 fuel oil to Providence on Jan. 20. And Capt. Gregory Aitken decided to keep that schedule.

Jesse Lewis of Crisis Consultants, a public relations firm hired last weekend by Eklof Marine, explained the captain's decision to get under way:

"The dynamic is, once you have completed your loading and your crew is assembled and you have your charts and you have clearance from the harbormaster, you leave.

"There's no reason to wait, that's Monday-morning-quarterbacking," Lewis said. "The point is, vessels are designed to operate in a wide variety of weather. You don't wait for a clear day."

Under normal conditions, it's a 20-hour run from Bayonne to Providence, but as the weather worsened Thursday night into Friday, the Scandia slowed. At 1:30 p.m., when it was scheduled to be a half-hour from Providence, the Scandia was well south, still plowing through the fog and swells of Block Island Sound.

The Scandia, according to one of its former captains, is not a comfortable place in a high sea. It's a deep, top-heavy tug with a jinxed history: in 1983, when its name was the Helen McAllister, the tug was run over by one of its own barges, killing a crewmember and sinking the tug. The Helen McAllister was undersea for a week before salvage.

The Scandia's former captain, Steven D. Brown, said that skippering the tug, with its top-heavy build and checkered past, often made him uncomfortable: "It's always creepy to go out on a boat that has sunk," said Brown.

But Aitken, the Scandia's current captain, apparently was comfortable with the tug: As Scandia plowed through Block Island Sound at 1:30 p.m. Friday, Aitken was taking a nap.

While Aitken slept, Coast Guard investigators say, two crew members standing watch saw smoke "pouring out" of the engine room and the "fiddly space" above. The fiddly space, a deck separated from the engine room by a metal grill, held much of the tug's electronics.

The men on watch saw flames cloaked in smoke, but they couldn't pinpoint the source of the fire. Aitken's slumber was broken by the shouts of his crew, as they shot three fire extinguishers into the smoke.

Still the smoke thickened as somewhere a fire raged. Just two minutes and thirty-seven seconds elapsed from the time Aitken calmly broadcast: "We have a fire on board," until his frantic May Day call when he announced: "We are abandoning."

ROGER SMITH, captain of the 84-foot trawler Seafarer, was just outside his home port of Point Judith when he heard the Scandia's May Day.

Just miles from home, Smith asked the Coast Guard to repeat the latitude and longitude coordinates of the burning tug. Seafarer was less than 2 miles away from Scandia; Smith set a course for the burning ship.

The worst of the storm was forecast to blow through after 6 p.m., but already the weather was, in Smith's words, "real snotty" with dense fog and 30-knot winds kicking up 8-foot seas.

From the pilot house Smith could hear the weather -- the wind whistling through the rigging, the sea slapping against the sides of his boat, and spray drumming across the windshield.

Seafarer's radar cast a beam through the thick fog and sent back a ghostly green image on the radar screen: the shape of the 111-foot Scandia trailing the block-like shape of the 340-foot barge North Cape, freighted with oil.

When Seafarer drew up next to the tug, Smith was surprised to see the Scandia's crew clustered on the bow of the burning ship. He thought the crew had abandoned the tug, and he expected to find them bobbing in the swells. But there they were, dressed in orange survival suits, gesturing wildly for the Seafarer to pull alongside.

There was no way Smith was going to bring Seafarer within leaping distance of the burning barge, a decision that would later win praise from the Coast Guard. A clunky, deep-draft trawler like Seafarer has no business trying to pluck sailors from a ship in high seas.

Smith began running circles abreast of the tug.

From Woods Hole, Golphene asked, "Can you see six people?" Smith tried to count, but with the fog and the smoke and the jarring sea, it wasn't easy.

On the deck of the Seafarer, one of Smith's crew shouted above the wind: "Is everybody here?"

Then he reported up to Smith in the pilot house: "Everybody's up on the bow."

So far so good: the situation was bad, but nobody had yet been killed.

AT THE POINT Judith Coast Guard station, five men scambled for the boathouse in Galilee. They had a choice between taking a 41-foot utility boat or the 44-foot rescue boat. The 41-footer was faster and had a larger cabin for the crew, so they chose it.

As soon as they slipped outside the breakwater, Michael Underwood, the coxswain in charge of piloting the boat, knew that they'd made the wrong choice. The 41-footer was no match for the 15-foot swells smashing over the breakwater; Underwood turned around and took the bigger boat.

When the rescue boat arrived at 2:55 p.m. the Scandia's fire had been raging for more than an hour. Heat blistered the red paint coating the pilot house; acrid smoke billowed from the tug and mingled with the fog.

Underwoodgunned the boat -- blue lights flashing -- toward the smoldering tug, pulling up within an arm's length of it. The tug, more than three times as long as the cutter, climbed a 20-foot wave and started to "kind of roll down on top of me," Underwood recalled. "There was a metal-to-metal bang."

When the two boats touched, one of the men on the tug jumped, landing safely aboard the cutter.

Then the tug could no longer hold all of the heat trapped inside. The big windows in the Scandia's bridge blew out with a shattering explosion; dragon's tongues of flame shot 15 feet through every window. Underwood decided to back off, leaving five men on the Scandia's bow. Those five would have to put their lives in the hands of 22-year-old Adam Cravey, the cutter's "rescue swimmer."

Cravey volunteered for the role, slipping into a pair of flippers and a rescue harness.

Underwood backed away and took a "T approach," facing his bow directly at the tug. Then Underwood shouted to Cravey: "Go!"

Cravey leaped overboard into the gale. The waves were pitching 20 feet high, and as he fell from the peaks to the valleys of the waves, Cravey's heart felt like it was dropping into his stomach.

From the waterline, the tug looked massive as Cravey stared up at the five men on the bow. He shouted: "Jump!"

Three of the men linked arms and obeyed; but even with flames roaring at their backs, two hesitated, clearly afraid to plummet the 15 feet from the bow to the raging sea.

Cravey swam a circle around the three who had jumped, looping them all to one rope. Then the two men remaining aboard the barge plunged in and rode Cravey's back while the rescue boat crew pulled hand over hand, hauling in the six men from the sea.

WHEN EVERYONE was aboard, Aitken, the Scandia's captain, told Underwood that the barge was equipped with a sea anchor. As Underwood recalls, Aiken said, "I want to get back on the barge even if I have to swim over to the thing."

A quick medical check of Scandia's crew showed that, despite their ordeal, everyone was healthy; so Underwood headed for the oil-laden barge, which was more than a quarter-of-a-mile behind the tug, invisible through the fog.

As the cutter came up on the barge Underwood heard disturbing news: Cravey, the rescue swimmer, was showing "classic symptoms" of hypothermia. Cravey could not feel his hands nor his feet; he was sluggish and cold to the touch.

The cutter's crew slipped Cravey -- who's 6 feet 2 inches, 210 pounds -- into a "thermal capsule," essentially a heavy sleeping bag. They stuck thermal packs in his armpits, and crewmember Bill Bonnetti slipped into the capsule beside Cravey to supply some body heat.

Underwood swung the rescue boat around and headed for port, toward a waiting ambulance. "This was my sign that we couldn't go to the barge," Underwood recalled. "It was time to turn around and go back."

With the tug's crew rescued, Smith also pointed the Seafarer north for its delayed run toward port. Smith recalls thinking: Connecticut ought to be pretty worried because this thing is coming their way.

He never dreamed that the tug and its toxic cargo would come ashore right outside his own harbor.

THE COAST Guard's Marine Safety Office, Providence, is in an unlikely spot for a critical Coast Guard station. Despite its name, it's not even in Providence; it's in East Providence, in a low-slung, yellow building in an industrial park far from the water.

The station is responsible for all boat traffic from New Bedford to Watch Hill, and on the afternoon of Jan. 19, it suddenly became a tense and busy place.

Capt. Barney Turlo, the region's commanding officer, gathered a staff of about a dozen people in the MSO control room. Someone phoned out for a half-dozen pizzas as the command staff prepared for a long night.

"What do you think the worst-case scenario is," the captain asked.

Lt. Bruce Davies responded, "It (the barge) gets up on the rocks, the barge is destroyed, we lose 98,000 barrels of oil."

The back wall of the command center was lined with all of the relevant charts of the region, covered in Plexiglas. The staff began plotting the North Cape's position hour by hour, beginning with its initial coordinates about 5 miles south of Point Judith.

An easel stood on the other side of the room, holding a thick wad of cheap paper. With a brown Marks-A-Lot someone wrote: "Response Resources," followed by a list of the cavalry -- every tug that could possibly reach the North Cape.

The list showed:

Tug from Providence: Morton Bouchard, 4,700 horsepower. Estimated time of arrival: 18:30 (6:30 p.m.).

Dixie Avenger from New Haven; 4,200 horsepower; ETA: midnight.

Tug Catherine from New London: 3,000 horsepower; 26 nautical miles away; ETA: 20:20 (8:20 p.m.)

Tug Capt. Tom from Point Judith, 68 feet.

As fate had it, the closest tug to the scene, Capt. Tom, was by far the smallest. It packed about 1,000 horsepower, less than 30 percent of the 3,600 that Scandia was generating before it burned.

But like the Littlest Engine that thought it could, Capt. Tom and its skipper, Michael Gallup, headed out into the storm. Gallup's father, Kenneth, who owns the tug, said later that his intentions weren't solely altruistic: Gallup figured that if his tug could lasso the North Cape, he might be entitled to salvage rights of half the cargo.

But as soon as Mike Gallup reported back via radio, "It's wild here and we've got to get out," the elder Gallup told him to get home. There's no cargo that's worth a life, and the North Cape was certainly capable of taking many.

It's tough for laymen to grasp the scale of the world inhabited by tugs and barges. The Scandia, for example, stands more than 40 feet from hull-bottom to pilot house roof; it's basically a moving four-story building.

And at 340 feet, the North Cape is long enough to hold a game of football. One gallon of No. 2 oil weighs 8 pounds; 4 million gallons weighs 32 million pounds.

So when the North Cape lurched out of Bayonne behind its four-story tug, it held the weight of its own steel plus 32 million pounds plowing through rising seas in a dangerous dance of giants.

LT. COM. MICHAEL Scanlon is a curious combination of pragmatist and optimist. As pragmatist, he's a man who has taught physics at the Coast Guard Academy; as an optimist he's a man who refuses to give up hope even when the physics show that there is none.

At 4:45 p.m. word reached the command center that Capt. Tom was backing off, and the mood in headquarters was grim. But Scanlon clung to hope.

"In a sense it was getting the cavalry out," Scanlon said. "Will the cavalry arrive in time?"

By far the biggest horse in the "cavalry" was the Morton Bouchard, but it was also in the toughest position. The fierce south wind was howling up Narragansett Bay, pushing the swells toward Providence; but still the Morton Bouchard set out into the teeth of the gale.

An impromptu log scrawled in Marks-A-Lot on the command center's easel recounts the Bouchard's stormy ride: 15:59 (3:59 p.m.) TUG BOUCHARD AT POPPASQUASH POINT (in Bristol).

17:00 (5 p.m.) TUG BOUCHARD POSITION TWO MILES NORTH OF NEWPORT BRIDGE. STILL EN ROUTE.

The Bouchard had covered about 6 miles in an hour, good headway considering the seas. Assuming that it could continue that speed outside the relatively protected waters of the East Passage -- a questionable assumption -- the Bouchard was still about three hours away.

Each passing hour brought the North Cape 1 nautical mile nearer the shore, and at 5 p.m., it was little more than 1 nautical mile off the beach. You didn't need to have Scanlon's grasp of physics to know that the Bouchard was too far away.

Reports from the other horses in the tug boat cavalry were equally disheartening: Tug Catherine, 3,000 horsepower, departing New London at 3:51 p.m., was some 26 miles and four-plus hours distant.

At 4:10 p.m. Eklof Marine, the owner of the tug and barge, called off the Catherine, but Capt. Turlo overrode the recall. Turlo wanted to have every available resource moving, just in case.

At 4:16 p.m. Turlo activated the Coast Guard's Atlantic Strike Team, a crew of oil spill specialists on duty around the clock in Fort Dix, N.J. Within minutes, the team was firing up its five tractor-trailer trucks, sporting the bright orange insignia of the Coast Guard.

The trucks were chock full of oil spill gear: reels of oil absorbing booms; inflatable barges; a 32-foot boat; five submersible pumps; and a huge, cigar-shaped inflatable bladder designed to hold 290,000 gallons of fuel.

"We knew how fast the barge was drifting," recalled Lt. Ryan. "We knew the ETA of the tugs. It was just sitting there like a confrontation, as if you knew you had to go to the principal's office. You knew it was coming, and you just kind of sat there and waited. In a word it was distress."

Still, the Coast Guard refused to give up the ship. The log shows this optimistic entry: 15:55 (3:55 p.m.) COAST GUARD CUTTER POINT TURNER ETA 1 TO 2 HOURS -- INTENDS TO PUT CREWMEMBER ON BOARD TO ATTEMPT TO TRIP ANCHOR OF BARGE.

The Point Turner, an 82-foot cutter, is notorious amongst Guardsmen for its instability in high seas. Like the Scandia, it's short below the water line and tall above it -- a top-heavy build that gives a choppy ride in a good sea. It's a nice, fast boat for routine patrols, but as its crew set out from Newport, everyone knew they were in for one wild ride.

THE CREW at the Coast Guard's Point Judith station had hatched an idea similar to the plan that the Point Turner was trying. As the ambulance carrying Cravey wailed into the chill fog of Galilee, Underwood was assembling a new crew to drop two men onto the barge in an attempt to trip its anchor.

While he waited for his new crew, Underwood decided to slake his thirst. Streetlights bounced in the wind as he crossed Galilee's deserted main street and bought a Mountain Dew. Of the four men he brought with him on his first rescue mission, two were seasick, and one was in the hospital.

This time he'd again bring a crew of four: two Coast Guardsmen to help him on the rescue boat, and two members of the Scandia's crew to leap onto the runaway barge.

In the boathouse, the two Scandia crewmembers slipped into dry, thermal underwear, and thick fleece suits before stepping into their survival suits. The Coast guard gave them knives, axes, flares and a strobe light to set on the barge.

When the rescue boat slipped outside the breakwater, it was again hit with mountainous seas. As it motored toward the barge, the boat frequently dropped into the valleys between waves and its radar would "green out" -- the radar beam showed no features, merely walls of water on all sides.

The rescue boat drew abreast of the barge and when the decks of the two vessels were pretty much level, the two Scandia crewmen leaped into the night, landing on the barge with a clatter of gear.

At 4:57 p.m., word went out to headquarters: "Two tug crewmen on barge." The Scandia was about 1 mile off Moonstone Beach, with North Cape not far behind.

At headquarters, a sense of optimism began to inflate: two men were on the North Cape, trying to drop anchor in 37 feet of water. Perhaps the disaster had been narrowly avoided. Moonstone is part of a federal wildlife refuge with an environment so fragile that even people are banned for much of the summer, when it's set aside as a breeding ground for the endangered piping plover.

The Point Turner radioed in at 5:14 p.m.: The top-heavy cutter was making 4 knots across the sound in 20 to 30-foot seas. With two men already aboard the barge, the Point Turner was aborting its mission.

By 5:30 p.m. optimism at headquarters had ballooned to the point where the the log shows this hopeful entry: 2 POB (person on board) BARGE. DRIFT RATE 0 (mph) "ASSUME" ANCHOR DEPLOYED.

But off Moonstone, the scene was not good. The wind blew steadily at 35 mph with higher gusts, pushing the North Cape steadily to the north.

On the pitching deck of the North Cape, the two crewmen struggled to free the anchor while seas washed across the deck. Lt. Keith Ward, who's leading the Coast Guard investigation of the Scandia fire, recalled: "It was so bad out there, one guy was working on the anchor while the other guy was watching the waves, telling him when to hold on."

On a normal trip, the North Cape would have no use for an anchor; in fact, if the anchor accidentally dropped on a good day, the results would be disastrous; the steel cable connecting the barge to the tug might snap back on the tug, cutting the crew to pieces; or the tug might swamp stern first.

So someone, Ward said, had shackled the anchor and tied it down with rope and wire to ensure that that anchor would not drop. Working through the thick gloves of their survival suits with seas breaking over the deck, the task of unshackling the anchor became impossible.

UNDERWOOD CAST a wary eye on his depth sounder: as the barge drifted toward the shore the seas grew rougher, the soundings shallower.

The last depth that Underwood saw on his finder was 20 feet; North Cape draws 25. It was shortly before 5:30 p.m., and Scandia was within 1,000 feet of Moonstone.

"If you're in 30-foot seas, you run out of water in 20 feet," Underwood said. It was time to retrieve the Scandia's crew.

As Underwood nosed the rescue boat toward the barge, his boat slid down a 20-foot wave, skidding bow-first toward the barge; one of his crewmen actually saw the bottom of the barge before the cutter soared up again, ramming the barge as it rose.

"You ever seen a dog run to the end of its leash and sprattle all out `cause he's come to the end of the line?" Underwood said. "We were all like that. My officer in charge flew forward; I flew forward."

As the boat bumped and grinded its way up the side of the barge, one of the Scandia's crew waited; he pounced as the rescue boat drew level, leaving one man still aboard the North Cape.

Underwood backed off and reported via radio to Holcombe.

Headquarters couldn't hear the reports to Point Judith, but at 5:40 p.m., the log says, bad news reached the command center via telephone: WAS UNABLE TO DEPLOY ANCHOR.

Underwood made one last run at the barge, but he had to back off. He turned to the officer in charge, and said, "I gotta make the worst call. We have to leave now, we're out of water."

Underwood reported to Point Judith. "We can't get to him. It's a bad situation out here."

IN THE WATCH room of the Point Judith station Petty Officer Michael Lutjen turned to Capt. Aitken. "Is he safe on the barge," Lutken said.

Aitken, arms folded while he sat on a windowsill, said, "As long as it holds together, he is."

At 5:56 p.m. Underwood reported that the tug had grounded and the barge was about 600 yards behind.

Two minutes later, tug Bouchard, the biggest horse in the tugboat cavalry, reported it was aborting north of the Newport Bridge, due to high seas.

On shore, a state conservation officer patrolling Moonstone Beach smelled fuel and an acrid smoke in the fog; then he saw a strobe light flickering through the haze.

Headquarters broadcast the official word at 6:17 p.m.: Tug Scandia was hard aground in 18 feet of water off Moonstone Beach, a federal wildlife refuge. The tug's toxic cargo was not far behind.

NINE HOURS after it had launched a jet to warn mariners off the ocean, the Coast Guard Air Station on Cape Cod sent up a helicopter to pluck the last Scandia crewmember, John Shelton, off the North Cape.

Coast Guard Lt. Paul Dutille headed straight into the gale; the best headway he could make was 40 mph over land.

The chopper thundered over the North Cape shortly after 8 p.m., its searchlight beam probed the darkness like a slender finger from God.

The light showed white water breaking across the barge; and there at the bow stood Shelton, bracing himself against steel poles forming a pyramid.

"He was holding on for dear life," Dutille recalled.

Dutille dropped the helicopter to about 30 feet above the North Cape, trying to avoid a 25-foot-tall light pole on the barge. Petty Officer Thomas "Buck" Beaudry, a rescue swimmer clad in a dry suit, strapped himself into a rescue harness clipped to a cable.

Dutille dropped Beaudry directly onto the barge, where he quickly wrapped a rescue harness around Shelton and gave the thumbs up sign for retrieval. In less than five minutes, the rescue was over.

At 8:10 p.m., Dutille took a brief, aerial survey of the scene and reported: Oil in the water.

With reports from Staff Writers Tom Mooney, Jonathan Graney, C. Eugene Emery Jr., Elizabeth Abbott; and South County Regional Editor Gerald S. Goldstein.