09-Twelve Mile Limit (23 page)

Tomlinson and I wrote it as we would have written a scientific paper. There was a summary, an introduction, a description of methods, then the results of our investigation. We ended with conclusions and a few recommendations. Everything was footnoted with supporting materials listed in an appendix. It all went together quickly because we knew the material intimately, plus we’ve both authored and published many, many papers.

There were some key issues.

Well into the body of the text, I’d written: “The tower to which Amelia Gardner swam is a 160-foot tower, located in the large Naval Operation Training Area north of Key West and southwest of Marco Island. The tower is part of the U.S. Military’s Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation (ACMI) system. ACMI towers are equipped with strobe lights, electronic discs, and antennas, and they are maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense through private contractors. The towers are used by both the Air Force and the Navy as electronic way points for a variety of training exercises.

“The towers are shown on some but not all charts, but the waters in which they are located are not off-limits to civilian boaters, and clandestine military operations do not take place in the area. Indeed, there are seven other such towers in the Naval Operations Training area, and they are commonly described in popular sporting magazines as excellent places to fish and common destinations for boaters.

“Our investigative team searched the bottom beneath the tower where Ms. Gardner was found. We found no debris that could be associated with the Seminole Wind, nor with any of the vessel’s passengers.”

In notes Tomlinson took when he did his survey of the salvaged Seminole Wind, he’d written: “The boat was built and rigged five years ago by a small Miami manufacturer. It is twenty-five feet, two inches long with a beam of eight feet. Boats over twenty-two feet are not required by law to have flotation in the inner hull. The Seminole Wind did not have flotation.

“The boat’s back end, or transom, was cut very low to the water. Twin 225-horsepower Johnson engines, weighing 455 pounds each, were mounted on the transom. Abutting the transom were three deck hatches. Port and starboard hatches each contained 37-pound marine batteries. The center hatch was a bait well plumbed to hold approximately twenty gallons of water, but would hold thirty gallons if the overflow tube was plugged—an additional 160 to 240 pounds.

“Rigged the way she was, the Seminole Wind’s stern was weighed down by more than 1,200 pounds of water and hardware. Only eleven inches of freeboard plus a folding fiberglass spray curtain separated the cockpit from the open sea.

“There is a boarding ladder mounted aft. When Michael Sanford and Grace Walker reboarded the vessel after their aborted dive, they, plus their dive gear, could have added four hundred-plus pounds—nearly a ton of weight on the back of the boat.

“A well-designed offshore boat could have sustained this weight. But the Seminole Wind’s scuppers (holes on the rear deck through which water escapes) were not covered by flanged flaps, which means that water would flow freely into the boat if those scuppers dropped below sea level. Also, the port scupper gutter was not only a half inch off true, it was drilled a half inch lower on the transom than the starboard scupper. What this means is that there were several ways for water to come into the boat, but almost no way for water to flow out.

“There are several possible scenarios that could account for the sinking of the Seminole Wind: A dead fish plugged the bait well, yet the bait pump continued to pump, and gradually flooded the inner hull. If Sanford and Walker had climbed on to the stern at the same time, the additional weight could have swamped the hatches and shorted the batteries, thus inactivating the bilge pump. Maybe one of them pushed down the fiberglass curtain to get their equipment aboard. Because the vessel had no flotation, one or all of these factors could have easily caused the inner hull to fill and the boat to roll over.”

Tomlinson’s conclusions were uncharacteristically succinct: “The only thing surprising about the Seminole Wind’s sinking on November 4 was that she hadn’t already sunk long before. The vessel has several dangerous design flaws. It is no surprise that the company that built her has gone bankrupt. We found absolutely no evidence that the boat was intentionally scuttled.”

Our report’s most surprising—and painful—revelations were gathered by me the night before when I finally made telephone contact with Dr. Aaron Miller, retired rear admiral of the U.S. Coast Guard Health Service. For years, Dr. Miller served as the equivalent of the surgeon general for his beloved Coast Guard, and no one anywhere knows more about hypothermia than he.

I’d been trying to reach him for personal reasons. From what I’d remembered reading about tropical hypothermia, I’d convinced myself that, adrift, Janet and her friends couldn’t have survived, or suffered, for more than half a day, or twenty-four hours at most. That was what I badly wanted to believe.

I was so surprised by what Dr. Miller had to tell me that I decided to include it in the report as a reply to those who had criticized the Coast Guard for extending its hugely expensive search over six days.

Dr. Miller—Aaron, as he insists on being called—is a nice man with a dry and mawkish sense of humor. He’s fifty-six years old, still good at social sports, works out devotedly, and, because he is a scientist, he is apt to describe his current health and fitness level in terms not normally used by laymen.

“I’m still at twelve percent body fat, Doc,” he told me from his home in Washington state. “Cholesterol’s low, blood pressure perfect, so I’m not doing too bad for an old fart.”

We ping-ponged information about old friends, old acquaintances, before I finally told him why I was calling. His response was characteristically direct and clinical.

“Tropical hypothermia, yeah, that’s what we used to think before we started accumulating all the studies and building good computer models. A two-day limit, that was the rule of thumb.” I felt a trickling sense of dread as he added: “But that’s all changed. In fact, the Coast Guard will soon be issuing a whole new set of guidelines for SAR groups. You’ve been out of the business for a long time, Doc, and you’re way behind in your reading. That includes newspapers, apparently.”

I said, “Newspapers? What could newspapers have told me?”

“Same thing they told us—that the old tropical hypothermia theory was wrong. A couple of years back, you may have read the story about the Navy pilot off Jacksonville, Florida, who ejected into the Atlantic. He had no life vest, no wet suit, no flotation of any kind. This was in the fall—maybe even November. Water temp was in the low seventies.”

I almost hated to ask. “How long was he in the water before they found him?”

“More than sixty hours. Two and a half days. He was exhausted and dehydrated. He knew drown-proofing, which is how he stayed afloat. Other than being tired, he was in pretty good shape. Then there was the guy who went into the water and survived off the Oregon coast. He was a big Norwegian sailor, six foot eight, nearly three hundred pounds. Same thing: No wet suit, and the water temp was fifty degrees. According to the tables, he should have been dead within a few hours. But he was fine when they picked him up twenty-four hours later. It told us we needed to do some more research. Nationwide, we—the Coast Guard, I mean—we deal with close to a thousand boating-related fatalities a year, and hypothermia and drowning account for three-quarters of those deaths.”

Dr. Miller told me that the information they had now was far more accurate and that an excellent software program, Cold Exposure Survival Mode, had been created by Dr. Peter Pikuisis, a Canadian physician.

“I’ve got my laptop with me. Tell me about your friend who disappeared,” Dr. Miller said, “and I’ll plug in the numbers.”

First, he asked for the water temperature—seventy-eight degrees. Then he asked for Janet’s age, approximate height and weight. From that, the software program calculated her amount of body fat.

“Subcutaneous fat is the best-fitting wet suit in the world,” he explained. “A skinny person can have up to nine times the cooling rate as a fat person.”

He told me that at five foot four, and approximately 145 pounds, Janet probably had 25 percent body fat, or a quarter of her total body weight. He was a continent away, but I could hear the noise of his typing over the phone line, then I listened to him say, “You’re not going to like this, Doc. Just in terms of hypothermia, she could have lasted three or four days, possibly longer. Probably longer. Were the other two young and fairly fit?”

I told him yes.

“Then the same is probably true of them as well. There’s still some debate whether women survive longer than men because they typically have a greater percentage of body fat. That’s true, but women also have a smaller surface area relative to volume, so I don’t happen to accept that theory. How long the three would have lasted would’ve been fairly similar.”

I made a involuntary groaning sound. “I had no idea, Aaron. It had to be hell for them if they lasted that long. Four or five days? Do you really believe that’s likely?”

“Let’s review the facts, Doc. They were wearing shorty wet suits. That’s decent insulation, plus the suits would have added eight to ten pounds of buoyancy. They were also wearing BCD vests. More insulation and ten to fifteen more pounds of buoyancy. Staying afloat would’ve been no problem, plus they wouldn’t have had much trouble maintaining what we call ‘airway freeboard’—the distance between the water and a swimmer’s mouth.

“You might know this, but most people don’t: It requires a heck of a lot more energy to swim in cold water because cold water is denser, more viscous than warm water. Water that’s, say, forty degrees has a viscosity nearly 70 percent higher than water down there in palm tree country. So your friends had optimum conditions for staying afloat and staying alive.”

We discussed the possibilities for a while longer, before Miller swung the conversation back to hypothermia.

“The clinical definition of hypothermia is a core body temperature below ninety-five degrees. But you don’t really begin to see the effects of cold on the body until the classification mild hypothermia is reached, which is when the core temp drops into the high eighties. Even then, thermoregulatory mechanisms—shivering, I’m talking about—and all other bodily functions continue to operate, although there may be ataxia, some apathy, maybe even amnesia.”

When I asked, he told me ataxia was the medical term for “confusion.”

“The body’s ability to shiver is hugely important,” he added. “Body heat produced by shivering can reach levels five to six times our resting metabolic rate. If you’re cold and you stop shivering, that’s when you know you’re in trouble. With wet suits, in water that warm, it would have taken a long time for your friends to reach that stage. That’s why I doubt if it was hypothermia that killed them, Doc.”

I said, “They couldn’t have lasted out there indefinitely. In your opinion, for those three people, what would the end have been like?”

“I’m not going to insult you by lying. It would have been awful. It would’ve been a horrible survival experience. Mental toughness is difficult to predict, but it is the most important survival tool that a person has. Back in the old days, when we could still experiment on lab animals, some researchers used shaved and anesthetized dogs to learn about the effects of cold water on physiology. But the data weren’t much good. In survival situations, animals react consistently. People don’t. Maybe that’s one thing that separates us from animals. We react very differently. There may be a spiritual component—no one knows. How badly did your friends want to live? Some people fight with every fiber. Others get depressed and give up.”

I told him, “My friend, Janet, was one of the tough ones. She’d been through a lot in her life. She wasn’t the kind to give up without a hell of a fight.”

The sympathetic tone of his voice was a reply to the distress in my own voice. “Then I’m very sorry, my friend. It would not have been pleasant or easy. In the end, their fatigue would have been accentuated by dehydration. Fatigue, that’s probably what caused their deaths. Their neck muscles would have been so cramped and tired, they wouldn’t have been able to hold their heads up. One or two big waves in a row, they would have aspirated water, and that would have been it. Two days, three days, six. No way of knowing how hard they would have fought to stay alive.”

I hated it. Hated hearing it, despised writing it.

But I had to. Including Dr. Miller’s information in the report was unpleasant duty, but I saw it as a duty because Janet, Michael, and Grace would not be the last to be set adrift in the Gulf. Despite the cost to taxpayers, a six-day search by air and sea was not a futile exercise. One or all of them could have been found alive. Way down the road, on a similarly tragic day, maybe some stranger would benefit from the pain I knew the data would cause Janet’s friends around the islands and to the families of her lost dive companions.

I’m not prone to depression, but the conversation with Aaron Miller leached some of the spirit out of me. When horrible things happen to good people, you begin to ask the big questions, questions that do not lend themselves to comforting, clichéd answers. Ask those questions often enough, and the small, affected trappings of humanity can seem feeble, silly, meaningless.

That night, for the first time in a long time, I wrestled and sweated my way through a familiar nightmare: There came into my memory the iridescent faces of two men, as seen through a Starlite night-vision scope. The scope was attached to the weight and length of a Remington 700 sniper rifle.

Two Russian faces. The Mongolian angularity was distinctive. In this old nightmare, I watched as the faces turned slowly toward me, losing flesh in slow transition.

Like those dreams in which you try to run but your feet will not move, my right hand was frozen on the rifle’s trigger guard. My index finger refused to flex.

Then, suddenly, the faces were skulls, and their all-seeing black eye sockets peered deeply into my eyes, and they knew the evil that was in me, and the guilt, before there was a thunder-blast that echoed through a rain-forest darkness … then a second shot… and, just as suddenly, both faces were once again human, but only for an instant, as they were vaporized in a scarlet, slow-motion cloud that ascended like a nuclear mushroom, then fell to the earth as mist.