One good thing was that right away he and the Coast Guard’s Pete Winters had connected with one another, mainly because Winters could “speak” Loran, the old Long Range Navigation system developed during World War II. Loran determines position by measuring the difference between two sets of signal pulses transmitted from two widely separated stations, and it expresses the measurement as the rate of the pulses’ duration in microseconds. Although Loran has been supplanted in the military by the far more precise GPS, the global positioning navigation system based on satellite measurements, it remains the staple of the commercial fishing community—“not a perfect system,” in Anthony’s phrase, but the system in which commercial fishermen have defined their lanes and set their gear, so still universally relevant in that community. It meant a lot that he and Winters shared the Loran vocabulary, and it meant even more that Winters knew the waters where Anthony and Johnny fished. Anthony could talk to the Coast Guard in his own terms, knowing he was understood.
If Anthony had a single aim that morning, it was to shrink the search area where both he and the Coast Guard were looking. Data was flowing into his brain at much the same rate at which it flowed into the Coast Guard’s computers, and that data was being weighed and measured by the instruments of Anthony’s own vast experience and natural savvy about the ocean, about fishermen, about Johnny. There were observations that seemed significant—the speed and direction of the swells, for example, which can vary depending on what piece of ocean real estate you occupy: at the piece of real estate Anthony occupied at the time, the ocean was drifting to the northwest, while the Coast Guard, which had dropped its marking buoys farther inshore, was basing its calculations on a northeast drift.
There were other facts or suppositions that had to be discarded, although not before he had thought them through. Pete Spong called him about items he pulled out of the flotsam and jetsam drifting not far from his gear—a bushel basket with orange twine, a blue rubber glove of the kind lobstermen use to haul their catch out of traps, a cardboard box. If they were from the Anna Mary, they might help pinpoint the location where Johnny had fallen in. And yes! Johnny and Anthony used baskets of that description to haul ice onto the boat—maybe Johnny had lowered one into the water to scoop up something, tripped, and fallen in. But without a precise count of the number of baskets they had on board, Anthony could not determine whether the floater was one of theirs, so that “clue” proved unreliable. The blue glove, as it turned out, was a different brand from the kind used on the Anna Mary, so toss that one, and the cardboard box was not the same kind as those used on the Anna Mary to haul bait. Toss that one as well.
But Anthony kept putting the pieces together as if he were working a jigsaw puzzle, testing each datum in the crucible of his knowledge and experience and discarding what didn’t work. Then, a little before 8:30 in the morning, his brain lit up with the answer.
The key was in something Pete Spong told him. Pete reported that he woke up the night before at around 4:00 a.m. on his boat, the Brooke C, drank some coffee, recognized the distinctive lights of the Anna Mary moving past in the distance—a boat’s lights can be its signature in the night—and at about 4:30 a.m. radioed over for a friendly chat. Pete remembers thinking that it was a little bit odd to see the Anna Mary going by at that time, but he figured that because it was pretty breezy out, Anthony and Johnny were waiting for morning to start hauling their traps. His radio call was not answered.
This told Anthony that Johnny absolutely was not in the wheelhouse at that time, 4:30 a.m., for he certainly would have answered Pete if he had been available and able to do so.
Because, according to Spong, the Brooke C had been at the Loran position of 43 565 at 4:30 a.m. and because Johnny hadn’t answered the call, there was no point searching south of that line. That meant that the bottom line of the search area, as earlier calculated, was too far south. The original calculation had put the bottom of the search area at the moment of Anthony’s first radio call to the Coast Guard, when he was in a state of stunned stupor—at the 420 line, the southernmost point considered as a search area boundary.
After a while Anthony also realized that of course Johnny would have stopped the Anna Mary as soon as it arrived at its projected first trawl, somewhere around the 515 line. He would have roused Anthony and Mike so they could all start hauling up traps. That was standard operating procedure, and because it hadn’t happened, Johnny was clearly already off the boat by the 515 line. The additional fact learned from Pete—that Johnny hadn’t been on the boat to answer the call from Pete at the 565 line—in essence narrowed the search track by another fifty microseconds.
The Anna Mary’s rate of travel was yet another confirming factor in the equation, for at its speed of just over six knots per hour, it would have taken just about an hour for the boat to travel those fifty microseconds of positional difference.
Add it all up: Pete’s 4:30 a.m. call, the Brooke C’s position at the time he made the call, Pete thinking it was odd that the Anna Mary passed by when it did, and another possible hour of travel, and the sum-total conclusion is that Johnny could easily have fallen off the boat north of the 565 line.
The conclusion effectively lopped five miles off the bottom boundary of the probable search location. It may not sound like much, but when you’re searching an area the size of about twenty-five Manhattan Islands, every microsecond counts.
Anthony was putting together other clues as well, sharpening his mental picture of what had happened. He remembered that when he and Mike Migliaccio had first gone out on deck to search for Johnny, in those frightening first moments when they confronted the idea of him being gone, Anthony had seen that both pumps were on—both the fill tank and the discharge tank pumps, that the discharge cap was on the starboard tank while the port tank was closed with no cap—meaning that it was discharging water, that the coolers weren’t where they were supposed to be, and that one of the cooler handles had broken off. His first thought was that Johnny had decided to fill the tanks early to weigh down the boat a little bit—there was a “lazy swell” in the ocean that night—part of that same weather condition Pete Spong had described as breezy. Filling the tanks could help steady the Anna Mary to make for a more comfortable ride.
But what if Johnny had stayed awake for some other reason? The reason Anthony had in mind now was that Johnny might have been carrying out the plan the two of them had agreed upon the day before. The plan was based on their understanding that their recently installed refrigeration system cooled the water at a rate of about four degrees an hour. So the two men had determined that the best time to fill the tanks and then start the cooling was two hours before they reached their traps at the 515 line—probably somewhere around 3:00 or 3:30 a.m. The navigational marker for that point in time was where the Anna Mary typically reached the forty-fathom curve—where the ocean depth reaches 240 feet—at the 600 line. So, in Anthony’s words, they would start filling tanks “no sooner than the 600 line so we give ourselves a good two hours to chill the water down.” What he now found himself speculating was that Johnny was getting ready to fill the tanks and got interrupted in midtask. Anthony even visualized—and was absolutely correct in his visualization—what had happened to cause the interruption. He stepped out on deck, zeroed in on the coolers, and noted the broken handle on the bottom one. The clarity was electric.
Anthony radioed Pete Winters at the Coast Guard command center and told him what he now felt certain he knew. “At this time,” he said to Winters, “I believe that John did fall over at somewhere in the vicinity of the 43 600 line.” As Winters understood at once, this was a point considerably farther south than originally thought and that, in turn, substantively narrowed the size of the probable search area.
“Looks like he slid the cooler back,” Anthony told the Coast Guard, “the handle broke off, and he went off the back of the boat. That’s what it appears at this time.”
“Roger. Good copy, captain,” came the reply from
New Haven.
Anthony had nailed it. Johnny hadn’t fallen over before 11:30 but some hours after that time—probably in the wee hours of the morning, at the top of forty fathoms of depth and somewhere in the 600s on Loran.
In the command center in New Haven, aided by Pete Winters’s fluency in “fisherman talk,” Jonathan Theel now ordered the watch to begin rerunning SAROPS, shifting the 60–40 north-south weighting exactly the other way, with the greater weight of assets now focusing on the southern end of the estimated trackline.
Meanwhile SAROPS had run what is called a survivability simulation—a key element in the planning process because it lets the SAR planners know how much time they may have to be planning for. Clothing can play a role in survivability, which is why Sean Davis had asked Anthony what Johnny had been wearing when he fell over, a question Anthony had been unable to answer.
The simulation spits out two models: functional time and survivable time. Functional time quantifies the extent to which a person lost in the ocean can use most of the body’s big muscles—it’s about the ability to swim. Survivable time means how long you can keep your head above water. The SAROPS calculation determined that the best-case survivability scenario for fit, five-foot-nine, 150-pound John Aldridge was that he could probably stay afloat for nineteen hours before succumbing to hypothermia and/or fatigue. The functional model—his ability to use his big arm and leg muscles and, therefore, to swim—was considerably shorter; it was also much more difficult to calculate without knowing more about Johnny Aldridge’s condition at the time he went overboard. The guessing, however, was that his functional survivability was more like five or six hours. Coast Guard planners also know well that an individual’s will to live can influence these simulation results, which are meant only to offer a quantifying framework for planning. The problem is that no one has yet come up with an algorithm that can either measure the will to live or predict how it will manifest itself.
In John Aldridge at that moment the will to live was manifesting itself as a determination to propel his body through the ocean toward the west-end buoy of Pete Spong’s line of lobster traps.
But Jonathan Theel had no way of knowing that when he turned to the next task at hand on the mission coordinator’s checklist: the very tough task of informing the Aldridge family that John was missing.
Chapter 7
“We’re in Big Trouble”
9:15 a.m.
John Aldridge II was working in the garage that morning, as he often did. He keeps a workshop there and fixes and tunes the equipment his son Anthony uses in his landscaping business. Aldridge is an incurable fixer-upper. His daughter, Cathy, complains lovingly that “nothing gets thrown out—he will fix everything.”
The ringing cell phone barely broke his stride. As is his habit, he looked at the number of the caller and, since he didn’t recognize it, did not interrupt his work to answer but let it go to voicemail. Fifteen minutes later, when he had finished what he was doing, he listened to the message and took down the number for the return call.
It was Commander Somebody-or-other from the Coast Guard. Aldridge has his own boat that is registered with the Coast Guard, and he assumed there was some problem with the renewal paperwork for the registration. When he got through to the Coast Guard he was told that “the commander would like to speak with you, please hold.” He hung on for a few minutes, reviewing in his mind the various registration forms and trying to determine which one he hadn’t filled out properly—there couldn’t be any other reason for the call—and then Jonathan Theel got on the phone.
Theel had substantial experience making calls of this nature. He reckons that in the space of a year he is called upon to inform families of things they don’t want to hear anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen times—“unfortunately,” as he puts it, “way too many times.” He prepares by learning what he can about the person he is calling and by gathering all the information available on the person he is reporting on. In this case the available information on the missing John Aldridge was minimal. Theel also rehearses in his head how he will begin—by introducing himself, explaining who he is, stating the facts, and outlining what the US Coast Guard is doing about the situation. It is never easy.
“I have some bad news for you,” Theel said after his preamble, and Aldridge felt his knees give way. “Your son John is missing at sea.”
The first picture that flashed across Aldridge’s mind was that of his son in the water and tangled in the propeller. He asked Theel: “How? Did he get caught in a line?”
“We don’t know,” the commander replied. “We only know he’s not on the boat. He went overboard sometime before sunup, but we don’t know when. We don’t know how long he’s been missing.” He added that Coast Guard assets were out looking for John—a crew launched out of Station Montauk and aircraft were en route from Cape Cod.
Theel asked whether Aldridge wanted to “have Mrs. Aldridge get on another extension,” but Aldridge said no. Instead, he walked upstairs with the phone still at his ear and Theel still on the line. He wanted to tell her himself, but he wanted Theel there as well.
Addie was in the kitchen.
“We’re in big trouble,” John said.
Her hand automatically covered her mouth. She thought, He’s been down in the garage—he cut himself on some machine.
“What?” she demanded. “What?”
“It is the Coast Guard calling about Johnny,” John said, and Addie began to crumble. John told her what he knew, repeated the information Theel again offered in his ear, and gathered himself sufficiently to thank Theel and to ask him to “please keep us informed.” Then he telephoned his other children.
Cathy Patterson was at home that morning with her husband, Tommy, who had worked the night shift at his job as a deputy sheriff in Suffolk County, and her son, Jake, four years old at the time. They were all upstairs in the colonial-style house. It was early morning in summertime, and as the song has it, the livin’ was easy. Tommy and Jake were in Jake’s room, Jake still in his pajamas, watching cartoons on TV from Jake’s bed. She could hear them laughing as she turned off the shower and stepped out of the tub. She threw on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts and was just about to blow dry her bright blond hair when the phone rang. She heard at once in her father’s voice that something was terribly wrong. He sounded “wrecked,” distraught.
“The Coast Guard called and said Johnny’s missing,” John Aldridge told his daughter. The blow nearly knocked her over.
“Missing? He’s missing?”
From his room just off the hallway her young son heard her end of the call. Jake knew what his uncle did for a living and sensed something terribly wrong. No surprise there: Johnny and Jake are two halves of a mutual adoration society and share a special kinship.
“Did Uncle Johnny fall in the water?” Jake now asked his mother. Tommy stood behind him, a hand on his son’s shoulder. He too was stunned.
Cathy nodded, Yes. It was all she could manage.
“Are there sharks in the water?”
She nodded again.
“Will the Coast Guard save him?”
“Yes,” Cathy said. “And I am going to go to Montauk to get him.”
She had to see to her parents first. Their house, where she and Johnny and their kid brother, Anthony, had grown up, was two minutes by car from her own home. People who grow up in Oakdale tend not to move far away. Her mother was seated and in tears. Her father was pacing. She suspected that in his mind his son was dead and buried.
Her brother Anthony and his wife, Jillian, walked in a few moments later. Anthony had been at work on his truck when his father called him, breaking the news to his youngest child as he had to his wife. “We have a problem,” he said to Anthony. “Your brother is missing, and it’s not good.” Anthony Aldridge, although the baby of the family, is a big, burly man, but he is also a man in whom emotions lie close to the surface. At his father’s words he broke apart. Like his father, he felt a sudd
en emptiness in the world. He had often fished with his brother; he knew this could happen in a heartbeat. Now he felt at once that Johnny was gone and saw the loss extending throughout his own lifetime. Too distraught to drive, he asked one of his workers to drive him home.
Only Cathy seemed to be holding it together. “I go into business mode,” she says of herself. She reminded herself that Jillian, by nature gentle and caring, was also a nurse who could bring professional expertise to bear to steady a stressful situation. Thank God, Cathy thought. She asked her father exactly what the Coast Guard commander had said. Just that there had been a “distress call from Anthony Sosinski, that he woke up and Johnny was gone.” Right now there was nothing more to learn.
“I have to go to the Coast Guard station in Montauk,” said Cathy. It was decided that Jillian would go with her. The relationship between the sisters-in-law is a tight one, as is that between Jillian and her brother-in-law. Johnny is the big brother she never had in the same way that she is the sister Cathy never had, and Jillian is also acutely aware of the important role Johnny plays in her husband’s life. The thought of him endlessly treading water, if he were still alive and uninjured, was painful. She also knew that Cathy, tough as she is, should not face whatever had to be faced on her own.
So Anthony would man the home front with his parents and would try to hold things together. The two women would simply install themselves at the Coast Guard station and not leave until Johnny was found—as no one wanted to say aloud—dead or alive.
A Speck in the Sea Page 9
