Twelve Mile Limit df-9

by Randy Wayne White

  Something else: Why the hell would they choose the Baja California as a meeting place? Wrecks attract divers and fishermen no matter how far offshore. There was no way they could have been certain that another boat wouldn’t have come along and surprised them out there. Any other GPS way point in international waters, beyond the twelve-mile limit, would have been a far more logical and likely choice.

  We’d also found one SCUBA tank filled with air. Amelia told us that they had carried eight, which a Marco Island dive shop confirmed by telephone. The salvage divers had already retrieved five tanks that were nearly full (or they would not have sunk), and the Coast Guard had recovered two air tanks drifting miles from the site. Air tanks that are empty, or nearly empty, float. All tanks accounted for. It supported Amelia’s story that only she and Janet had completed the dive.

  In my mind, the report that Tomlinson and I would submit jointly and simultaneously to the Coast Guard, as well as to several newspapers, was already taking shape. We had the credentials to be taken seriously, and we were assembling some compelling data.

  The day before we boarded Das Stasi and left Dinkin’s Bay, Tomlinson used my truck to drive to Fort Lonesome, an agricultural crossroads northeast of Sarasota where there was a small marine salvage yard. The salvage divers who’d refloated the Seminole Wind had done it without the permission of the missing Michael Sanford or his family. The group had been bitterly criticized in the press and by the public for what many saw as outright theft from a grieving family.

  Legally, though, the salvagers didn’t need the approval of Sanford’s relatives or anyone else. Since the Key West pirate days of the 1700s, marine salvage has been a controversial but legitimate enterprise in Florida. Success relies on the misfortune of others, and salvage captains don’t go into the business to make friends. Because a powerful animosity already existed, I worried about my old hippy pal venturing into Florida’s gun-rack and cattle country interior to investigate.

  But Tomlinson told me, “Rednecks, man. Except for some of their politics, amigo, I love their spirit; the music, the history, the whole social scene. Hank Williams? Garth Brooks? Those dudes both make me cry like an American baby, plus Garth plays baseball, just like you and me. The folks around Fort Lonesome are gonna greet me like a brother, so don’t you worry your little head.”

  Turned out that he was right, as usual. He returned with his own detailed assessment of the Seminole Wind- lots of precise measurements and numbers-including digitized video. Also, he’d stopped to see Dalton Dorsey at Coast Guard St. Pete and, after filing a handwritten Freedom of Information Act request, obtained the official report of the marine surveyor hired to inspect the Seminole Wind after her sinking.

  I was surprised when he told me, “You know what qualifications you need to have to be a marine surveyor in Florida? Nothing, nada, zero, zilch. Drive down here from Kansas, print up some business cards, pay for an operational license to run a business, and you, too, can be a so-called ‘licensed professional marine surveyor’ without ever touching your toes in salt water. What a scam. In some cases, anyway.

  “You need to tell your buddies at the Coast Guard that the woman who wrote this report, the so-called marine surveyor, needs to take a basic boating course or two. Or they need to start hiring people who actually know something about marine architecture. I think they’re going to be very interested in what my report has to say.”

  Tomlinson’s fervor for the mission had not waned. It was “our final gift to Janet,” as he said more than once.

  I still wanted to make a dive beneath the light tower where the helicopter had found Amelia (one especially absurd theory among local gossips was that drug runners or military-intelligence types had killed the other three and sunk their bodies but had spared Amelia for reasons unknown). I also wanted to interview a real expert on human physiology and tropical water hypothermia. It had been years since I’d read anything, and I wanted to confirm that what little I did know was still accepted fact.

  It was a much-discussed question that begged for a final answer: How long could the three have survived while adrift?

  Our work here on the Baja California, though, was nearly done.

  Now, on this, our final dive, Amelia and Tomlinson followed me down the line, taking it slow, giving each other plenty of time to clear their ears and adjust to the increasing water pressure. Water has weight; it squeezes the tissues, and, at a hundred feet, bubbles from a regulator change pitch, as if issued through strained vocal cords.

  An alien space has been breached. Your body knows it. Your ears know it. The change, the unfamiliarity, suggest an edgy potential.

  There is a transformation of light, too. It’s not just that there is less light in a hundred feet of seawater, though that is certainly true. The gradual change suggests a density of darkness and an intransigence of gray that is defining and permanent. This is a world separate from others-if other worlds actually do exist.

  Beneath ninety feet of water, the sunlight or “white light” that land dwellers know has been reduced in its radiant strength by 90 percent, and it has been leached of every spectral color but green. What remains is a primal green, a chemical and cellular green, as if one has been ingested by something massive, alive-some photosynthetic being. Human eyes become feeble collectors and undependable interpreters. Four atmospheres beneath the wind is no place for a primate to linger.

  With fingers interlaced, arms folded across my chest, I did a slow-motion flutter kick, the whip of old Rocket fins powering me over the rubble of the ruined steamship. There were cables, bent railings, barrel-sized storage tanks crushed, mangled-all still exhibiting the physics of Nazi percussion, and hosts to a thick, living skin of veined, jellied, clustered, and copper-gray benthic growth, hairy with broken fishing line and byssal thread.

  Ahead was a cloud of thread herring, glittering like coins. The cloud became a curtain, parting to let us pass, then closed again behind us, giving the illusion that we’d just swum into a trap and that the trap had been sprung.

  There was a school of forty-pound amberjacks moving as one body in perfect incremental spacings; a predatory tribe, each member the size of a pit bull, scouting, hunting, as, beneath them, gray snapper did nervous figure-eights. There were tropicals, too: clown fish, butterfly fish, and sergeant majors, all drab at this depth, and barracudas stacked at the edge of visibility like helium swords.

  The working freighter, Baja California, was long dead, killed by a German torpedo in a great war. The wreck of the Baja California was intensely, inexorably alive.

  We’d found most of the wreckage from the Seminole Wind just beyond the barnacled framework of some kind of World War II vehicle. Now I touched the vehicle’s steel fender, stopping myself, and I signaled Amelia and Tomlinson to assume our familiar search formation: Amelia in the middle, Tomlinson and me on either side, each of us about nine feet apart.

  We swam to the edge of the wreck, turned, respaced ourselves, then swam back over the wreck.

  It was Amelia who made our final discovery. Deep in a crevice hollowed out in the body of the ship, she spotted Michael Sanford’s black weight belt, and then, a few meters away and nearly on top of each other, there was Janet’s chartreuse weight belt and Amelia’s own orange weight belt.

  Grace Walker’s weight belt had already been retrieved by the salvage divers who refloated the Seminole Wind, so now they were all accounted for.

  It was just as Amelia had told us: When she and Janet resurfaced after completing their dive, they’d helped Sanford and Walker get into their BCDs, returned to the swamped boat, and dumped their weight belts together.

  They were side by side, exactly where they should have been.

  I looked into Amelia’s eyes when she first pointed to her discovery. Her face showed the kind of intense emotion seen in old silent films. Back at Dinkin’s Bay, one of the first questions I’d asked her was if their weight belts had been found. How those belts were distributed on the bottom would
say much about what really happened that tragic day.

  For Amelia, it was a vindication of sorts, at least as far as her relationship with me was concerned. Her jade eyes peered out through the lens of her face mask, into my eyes, and then she gave me a quick and unexpected hug.

  I checked my air gauge, checked my watch. I tied the weight belts onto a float bag, used my regulator to inflate it, and sent the belts to the surface.

  15

  That night, as we sledded and wallowed our way toward Sanibel at an unvarying twelve knots, Amelia and I sat on fly bridge captain’s chairs, high above the black sea, letting the autopilot steer the boat while we chatted and gazed at the star stream above.

  Tomlinson, Jeth, Dieter, and his secretary were below. It was late, nearly midnight, so they had probably drifted off to the fore or aft staterooms to bed. Or maybe they were still in the air-conditioned salon playing liar’s poker on the octagonal, teak dining room table. Or watching a video in the teak entertainment center. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, they were comfortable.

  Dieter’s forty-six-foot Grand Banks Classic was a model of useful luxury. Everything was inlaid, beautifully fitted, and multifunctional. The floors were teak parquet, the salon was surrounded by glass with the sides curtained, and there was a sea view forward. The U-shaped galley was on the port side, the steering station with instrument and circuit breaker panels on the starboard side next to the hinged deckhouse door. The staterooms were plush, the heads and shower stalls massive. The interior smelled of fine wood, lacquer, brass, and electronic circuitry. A very nice combination, indeed, if you are a yachting type.

  Even so, I preferred to be topside, in the wind, where I could see the stars and smell the open Gulf. The Gulf of Mexico has a more complex mix of odors than other ocean places, perhaps because it is more intimately adjoined to its landward influences.

  Even thirty miles offshore, the wind carried trace remnants of the Everglades. There were brief balloonings of denser, warmer air. A hint of mangrove sulphur. A touch of frangipani, sawgrass, and feral jasmine. Out there, beyond the horizon, were shell mound outposts-Chokoloskee, Everglades City, Dismal Key. The wood ash and citreous lime odor of those places clung to the occasional, abraded air molecule, touched the nose briefly, then was gone.

  I’d volunteered for the early morning watch. Had been up there alone for nearly an hour when, surprise, surprise, Amelia slid into the chair next to me, bringing two iced cans of Bud Light, a thoughtful gesture. Along with her floated new odors, the good, bedtime girl-odor of shampoo, toothpaste, soap.

  “Mind some company? I’m the night-owl type even when I’m home.”

  I told her that she was most welcome-very true-but I also sensed that there was something on her mind.

  There was. It was a possibility we had all thought about, even talked about briefly, but had never fully and openly discussed because the subject was too terrible.

  She began by saying, “I can’t get the image of that shark out of my mind. I’ve never seen a tiger shark, and nothing even close to that big. The way it came gliding in, like a big plane about to land. I know what you told me this afternoon, but you have to admit, that’s what could’ve happened to them. Sharks.”

  What I’d told her is what I’d told many people since Janet had disappeared: The possibility of a shark attacking one of the three divers was unlikely but not impossible. A fatal attack, however, was extremely unlikely. Sharks in the Gulf are very good at what they do, and what they do, aside from copulate and give birth, is eat fish. In very murky water, they will sometimes mistake a human hand or leg for something that should have scales, but that is rare. The probability of a shark or sharks attacking all three was so unlikely that it was statistically insignificant.

  I’d thrown in some data that I’d gathered in my own work with bull sharks. Worldwide, there are normally between fifty and eighty unprovoked attacks a year, according to the International Shark Attack File, and only a dozen or so of those attacks are fatal.

  When you consider the many millions of hours that humans spend in, on, and under salt water, that is a telling statistic.

  Records also show that nearly 80 percent of all attacks occurred in shallow water, while divers and snorklers account for only 18 percent of attack victims. Something I didn’t mention was that attacks do seem to be increasing slightly, and laws protecting sharks from certain types of fishing may be increasing their numbers while populations of fish upon which they feed decrease. Didn’t mention it out of pure and simple self-interest: I like sharks.

  Water depth was an issue, so I said, “It’s a generalization, but, in my experience, deep water tends to be clearer than shallow water. In shallow water, rain, wind-things like that-drainage, they have an immediate effect on turbidity. That’s not true offshore, so sharks are less likely to make a mistake in deep water. Once again, Gulf sharks are experts at finding and eating fish, not people.”

  She repeated herself. “But it could have happened.”

  I took a sip of beer, rocking back in my chair, and said, “Okay, it’s a possibility, sure. You’re asking me to shift from what is probable to what might have happened, which is something I try to avoid, frankly. You know that as an attorney… what’s the legal term you folks use? Speculation. Plus, I don’t see the point in a useless emotional exercises.”

  “I wish I could stop thinking about it. Maybe it’s because I was out there with them. Because it could have happened to me. Or maybe it’s like Tomlinson told me. We were up here last night talking, drinking some wine. He was telling me about you, what kind of person you are. You’ve got a lot of admirers, Doc. But one thing he said was that you find the sensitivity of others surprising because it’s a weakness that you refuse to recognize in yourself. Only he didn’t say weakness. He used another word. A… frailty, that was the word. A frailty that you refuse to recognize in yourself.”

  I smiled. “You’re insisting. Okay, sharks. Let me attempt to be sensitive then.”

  I said, “Let’s take your question and think it through aloud, though neither one of us is going to like it. Let’s see… three people adrift at night, their legs hanging down, kicking in a hundred feet of water, and one or more sharks head for the surface, drawn in by the vibrations.

  “No matter how big they are, sharks tend to be skittish, easily spooked. So they take their time. Maybe even do a couple of bump and runs. Finally, one shark makes a mistake, hits what it thinks is a fish. If that happened, the best-case scenario-and the most likely scenario-is that the attacking shark would immediately realize that it’d made a mistake and would bolt. The other sharks would have followed. That’s what usually happens when shark bites man. Remember a few years back, near Daytona, when they had all those minor injuries, sharks biting surfers? The numbers were way higher than normal, but no one was badly hurt. Same thing. One chomp and they were gone.”

  “And the worst-case scenario?”

  I’d been looking northward, through the darkness, at a distant, flashing halo of light that reflected off clouds. Probably Cook Key light near Marco Island-not long ago, I’d spent part of a terrible night there. Not a good memory to linger over. Now I turned and looked at Amelia. “Are you sure you want to hear?”

  She nodded. “Sorry, but yeah. Facts are about the only thing we attorneys allow ourselves to trust.”

  “All right. One shark makes a mistake, rolls, takes a bite of a foot or an arm, and the other sharks react. There’s blood in the water, then a blood trail forms. One by one, the sharks arch their backs in a feeding display, and the frenzy is on.

  “For Janet and your two friends, it would have been the horror of all horrors. Worse than any nightmare. One of them gets hit, screams and keeps screaming. The other two try to help, but there’s nothing they can do. They have to float along beside the victim and wait, knowing that something is beneath them, feeding.

  “If they were attacked by sharks, the trauma would have been to their legs, maybe their
arms. They would have bled to death, and probably pretty quickly. Massive blood loss, shock, then a sleepy unconsciousness. Thing is, their inflated BCDs would still be afloat, probably with their heads and torsos intact. There would have been plenty left for the Coast Guard to find. Or us. Or some random boater during the last month.”

  Amelia sat a little straighter. “Jesus Christ, Doc, no wonder you didn’t want to talk about it.” She made a shuddering, guttural sound. “What a terrible thing to imagine.”

  “I know, I know-but remember, what I just described almost certainly did not happen. You weren’t satisfied with the answer I gave you this afternoon, and you weren’t satisfied with the same answer a few minutes ago. It told me you either wanted to be reassured or that you genuinely wanted to explore the most extreme possibilities. I haven’t known you for long, but I know you well enough to respect your intellect and your character. So I told you the truth. An extreme and unlikely truth. My version of it, anyway.”

  “Character,” she said, with a hint of self-contempt. “Don’t be too sure about that one. Believe me, I don’t have any more character than the next person.”

  I remembered Tomlinson saying that what Amelia had told us was “mostly” true. I don’t believe that he’s a mind reader, but I have come to trust his judgment. Was she offering to share some secret with me, a detail yet to be confided?

  I said, “Anything else you want to discuss?” then waited several beats for her to answer before I added, “The first day we met, you asked if you could confide in me. I didn’t know you then. I do now. So the answer is yes. A blanket, unconditional yes. Whatever you want to tell me, any damn private thing you want to say.”

  Her reaction surprised me. She cupped her hand around my leg, then leaned and placed her head against my shoulder. “I can see why Janet loved you and all your crazy friends. What you’ve done for me, all the effort you’ve put in. I don’t deserve it, Doc. I really don’t.”