09-Twelve Mile Limit (21 page)

We watched the shark drift past, descending, and saw her vanish over the diatom horizon.

Observing Tomlinson, I had the distinct and accurate impression he wanted to go after her, to be a part of whatever life adventure the tiger shark was on. So I grabbed his elbow, holding him until she’d been gone for a couple of minutes. Then I touched Amelia and Tomlinson both, signaling.

We completed our dive.

Using Dieter’s Grand Banks trawler, Das Stasi, as a dive platform, we spent Tuesday and Wednesday, December 9 and 10, a day, a night, and part of this next day over the wreck, diving and assembling evidence that, piece by piece, did much to confirm Amelia’s story. Salvage divers had already refloated and towed the Seminole Wind. But what she dumped when she sank was still below, and that debris told a story.

Because the Baja California is in 110 to 120 feet of water, we kept careful track of our bottom time and made each and every safety decompression stop longer than it needed to be. We calculated data from our personal dive computers but did not log the data until our figures had been rechecked and confirmed by at least one other person.

I have spent much of my life in the water and on the water, yet I have never become so comfortable that I allow myself to be sloppy. When we were under, our second dive team, consisting of Dieter, Jeth, and Dieter’s nubile, Jamaican secretary Moffid Seemer, stayed attentive topside. We did the same when they were down.

I also insisted on one very simple safety precaution that would have saved the lives of Janet, Michael, and Grace, had only one of them done the same: I asked that each member of our team attach a little, plastic strobe light to his or her BCD vest. The strobes are cheap, they come with long-life batteries, and, when activated, they can be seen at night from at least three miles away. Anyone who travels over water in foreign lands, aboard foreign vessels, or who dives, should carry one. Few boat passengers or sport divers expect to be in the water after dusk. But all sunny days over a reef ultimately darken, and accidents are never planned. Which is why, each year, a surprising number of passengers and sport divers are set adrift and die. A strobe is the cheapest possible insurance against disaster.

So we did the dives methodically, safely. I kept a close eye on Amelia. So did Dieter, a psychiatric physician. It had to be a hell of an emotional experience to return to the scene of the tragedy, and only thirty-five days after she’d made that long midnight swim.

She had some quiet moments. There were periods when her vision seemed to glaze, and her attention wandered to some faraway place. Generally, though, she handled herself well. The more I was around the lean redhead, the better I liked her. She was a competent dive partner, and she did more than her share of the menial labor aboard Das Stasi. Under crowded conditions at sea, a person’s core personality asserts itself quickly So far, she’d contributed much to a successful, productive trip.

Mostly, we all focused on collecting the remains of the Seminole Wind, which now lay atop the remains of the much older Baja California.

Dieter, with his German obsession for precise information, had provided us with some interesting history. The Baja California, he told us, was a 214-foot freighter built in 1914, and sunk with a single torpedo on July 18, 1942 by one of his country’s Nazi submarines, U-boat 84. The Baja California was under way to South America with a general cargo of tobacco, baby bottles, mercury, and American military vehicles. Three crew members were killed.

Now this place was the site of a second wreck, and it was an eerie experience to dive through 110 feet of murky water, then come upon the colorful detritus of an event that led, most likely, to the loss of three more lives. The old freighter was a fissure of rubble, the stillness of which implied a furious animation halted long ago. It might have been the remnants of a rock slide. It might have been a graveyard. Atop the rubble, scattered all around, were items that had once been aboard the Seminole Wind.

The day before, we’d arrived early enough to make two dives. We’d found much, and catalogued those items carefully. Lying among the debris we’d found a big tackle box and two smaller tackle boxes. They contained several hundred dollars’ worth of equipage and lures, including some new lures still in cellophane.

One of the rumors being parroted around South Florida was that Sanford had intentionally sunk the Seminole Wind for the insurance. Why would a man who planned to sink his own boat invest money in new lures? We also found the new thermostat that Amelia had told us about, the one Michael purchased as a backup the morning of November 4, the day they headed offshore. The thermostat was still in its now-sodden box, lying near the chassis of a military vehicle. You don’t buy backup parts for an engine you plan to scuttle.

No, the sinking certainly had not been intentional.

Another rumor, and one of the most popular, was that the foursome had not traveled offshore to fish or dive but actually to finalize a drug deal. From the evidence we gathered, that seemed unlikely.

Near the tackle boxes, we found several fishing rods, rigged and ready. Two of the rods were light tackle spinning rods, and one was still rigged with a number 3 hook—commonly used for catching bait, nothing else. Amelia had told the Coast Guard and us that they’d stopped on the way out to catch bait. The rod added credence to her story and implied a more general truth: No one would have gone to the trouble to rig a rod specifically for catching bait if their real intention was to rendezvous with a drug boat. If they wanted to costume themselves as fishermen, rods with standard-sized hooks would have sufficed.

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.