Twelve Mile Limit df-9

by Randy Wayne White

  Michael was so grateful to hear the confident, familiar tone, he actually shouted as he replied. “Damn right we are, Gracie! We’re kicking ass, baby, and I feel great!”

  “Yeah? Well, that’s something funny ’cause I’m feeling pretty good, too. Strong, that’s the way I feel. Maybe getting stronger.”

  “All of us! Lady, we’re all getting stronger. Know what? When we get back, I’ll do your laundry for a month to make this up to you. You can lay out by the pool, I’ll bring you drinks, whatever you want. We’re going to make it, sister!”

  For the first time that day, Janet smiled as Grace replied, “Sandman, when we get back, the only water I want to see is in a whiskey glass. Or a fucking shower. Don’t you be mentioning water to the Princess ’till we get this shit way behind us!”

  That rallied them. Kept them swimming hard for the next hour without a pause. The light was getting closer. Grace had said so. Little by little, stroke by stroke, they were fighting their way back to civilization, back into their understandable, orderly lives.

  Attached to his BCD vest, Michael Sanford had a small plastic board called a navigation slate. Built into the slate was an illuminated compass. When they finally did stop to rest, Michael lifted the little board in front of his face and sighted it like a rifle toward the flashing light. Twice before that evening, he’d checked their course heading using the same simple technique. On the first sighting, the light had been at 64 degrees, which was slightly east of north. On his second sighting, the light was at 62 degrees, which meant they had drifted slightly to the south but were still making progress. Now, as he sighted the compass, he looked, then paused. He tapped the compass with his fingers as if it were not working, then took another sighting.

  Janet was watching him and sensed that he was puzzled by something. She called over, “What’s wrong, Mikey?”

  Sanford said, “I think this compass has gone crazy,” and aimed the slate at the light tower a third time, studied it again before he adding, “We were drifting slightly south-the current, I’m talking about. Out here there’s always some kind of ocean current. But in the last hour or so, we’re suddenly way north. The tower’s almost due east, 45 degrees. I mean we are flying. ”

  “The tidal current is taking us, that’s what you’re saying?”

  “An ocean current, yeah. That’s what it’s gotta be. A really strong current.”

  Grace said, “Is that good? Sandman, you better be telling me that’s a good thing.”

  Michael paused too long, thinking about whether he should tell the truth, wondering if he even knew the truth, before he spoke. “It doesn’t matter either way. We still have to swim to the tower. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

  That was at a little after 10 P.M. For two more hours, they battered their way eastward, and each time Michael stopped to check his compass, the tower was farther to the south. Their rest stops became longer, the time they spent swimming became shorter and shorter. Hobbyist runners train for months to do a first 26.2-mile marathon, and many run the distance in between four to five hours. The three of them had now been swimming for more than five hours, their own terrible marathon of survival, and one by one, their bodies began to fail them.

  They were dehydrated, though did not yet feel the terrible thirst, and their muscles began to cramp. Because Janet was wearing fins, her calves and thighs began to cramp first. For Michael, it was his jaw and neck if he yawned with fatigue or nervousness, and then his legs began to cramp, too.

  It was Grace who finally said what they had all come to realize but not yet admitted. “Know what I think, ladies and gentleman? I think we’re better off saving our energy and just drifting ’til morning. Planes, boats, there’s gonna be all kinds of stuff out here tomorrow morning looking for us. Probably helicopters, too.” There was still strength in her voice, some confidence, as well, when she added, “Let the bastards come to us. What do we care if they find us in the water or on that damn light tower?”

  They were all chilled, and the black wind felt colder now, after midnight. Once again, they locked their bodies together to form a tiny human raft. Floating on his back, Michael spooned Grace into his arms, as Janet slid in behind Michael and held them both close to her breast.

  The three of them drifted. They dozed. Once, they even laughed when Grace told them, “I just peed in my own wet suit, and man, it feels warm. ” Their teeth started to chatter, and, finally, the slowest sunrise of their lives began to form on the eastern horizon: a radiant blackness over the Everglades, then a smear of gray, of white, of tangerine.

  They stared at the horizon, anticipating the gaseous bloom of light, anticipating its heat, when Michael jerked his head around abruptly to the south. “Jesus Christ!” he yelled. “Do you see it? My God, it’s a boat! You see the boat?”

  It was almost upon them, a ghostly figure of rust and steel, net booms swung high, rolling out of the morning sea spume, the heavy wind shielding the noise of its engines. Janet had spent enough time around marinas to recognize it as some kind of trawler-maybe a steel shrimper, but it had a foreign look and she wasn’t certain. Its hull was black, wrinkled with blistered paint, rust, grease. Some kind of workboat, filthy.

  The boat was already so close they could see that its high, beige wheelhouse was covered with people, that there were men and women, children, too, jammed tight and standing on the vessel’s long stern deck. Dozens of people, maybe a hundred, their faces sickly, African faces, brown faces, a confederation of misery bound by something terrible: seasickness, exhaustion, fear, or some other dark, nameless thing. Then the vessel was close enough that air molecules from the boat began to mix heavily with the wind, and the stench of the boat drifted down on them, a terrible odor, so inhuman that it could only be human, the stink of feces and vomit, of disease and dying, diesel fumes mixed in, the density of oil floating it all, causing it to linger above the sea.

  Janet whispered, “Am I dreaming this? Please don’t let me be dreaming this.”

  It was a bizarre vision: three desperate people now looking into a herd of desperate faces; faces that created a hundred dark, ocular vacancies staring back at them, a man and two women in the water adrift, shouting at the vessel to stop, screaming at the mirrored windows of the wheelhouse as dark faces began to yell back, the mass of them sprouting bony arms and hands that pointed at them in reply.

  Michael shouted, “They see us!” and Grace began to weep, saying, “Thank you, God. Oh thank you, dear God!” watching the vessel slow, then turn in the heavy seas, wallowing in the troughs of waves, hammering geysers of wake as its bow swung toward them.

  Janet, Michael, and Grace were all waving their arms wildly as the vessel came about, and they watched the door of the wheelhouse slide open. A huge, very fat brown man came through the door-a man so wide that he could only fit through the opening sideways. He was followed by a tall, cadaverous man who had a shockingly white face shaved smooth, his flour-pale skin covering sinew linked by bone. Draped over his head, as if to shield him from the heat, he wore a dirty-looking rectangular cloth that was folded diagonally and held in place with a headband.

  An albino person, Janet realized.

  Michael called up to them, “Drop a ladder down! Our boat sank and we’ve been adrift all night!”

  The albino and the fat man stood holding on to the steel railing, looking down at them, and they seemed to be conferring, talking back and forth.

  Michael shouted, “If you don’t have a ladder, throw us a rope. We can climb up!”

  Still, the two men did not react, continuing to talk among themselves-a disturbing hesitation. They seemed indifferent.

  “We need help! Please. We’ll pay you. We’ll pay you whatever you want!”

  Then Janet said, “What’s he doing? What’s he going to do with that?” as the albino ducked into the wheelhouse and came out holding a rifle.

  Because she’d been worrying about it all night but had not allowed herself to mention it, G
race now said what was in her mind. “Maybe we have sharks around us. Maybe that’s it. Probably got it to keep sharks away, don’t you think, Sandman?”

  Then all three watched, weary beyond shock, as the albino snugged the rifle against his cheek and shoulder, then swung the barrel seaward, taking aim at Michael Sandford.

  14

  We were dropping down, down through the diatom gloom of the Gulf of Mexico-Amelia, Tomlinson, and me-descending onto the wreck of the Baja California, when the shark materialized. A tiger shark, probably ten, maybe eleven, feet long.

  The short, pointed snout of a tiger is distinctive. So are the requiem shark’s unusual recurved teeth if you are lucky enough-or unlucky enough-to get close enough to see them.

  Tiger sharks are a tropical species, and the young have characteristic bars on their backs and upper sides, thus the name. The mature animals, though, lose the camouflage decoratives because they are not needed. A fully grown tiger shark has few enemies in the sea.

  This one was a mature female, probably weighed close to a thousand pounds: a half-ton illustration of adaptation and natural selection in battleship colors, gray on bronze.

  Amelia was above me; Tomlinson was above her, his long blond hair, normally scraggly, now undulating like seaweed in the current. We all stopped, holding on to the anchored descent line we’d dropped upon arrival. Our heads turned as one as we watched the shark cruise by.

  I did a quick survey of facial expressions. Through his face mask, Tomlinson’s eyes were childlike: He was delighted to see the big tiger. Amelia appeared worried, but she relaxed noticeably when I put thumb and index finger together and signaled, telling her everything was okay, nothing to worry about.

  With the exception of certain specifics of physiology concerning the bull shark, Carcharhinus leucas, I don’t consider myself a shark expert. I know too many real experts to indulge in that pretense. I am, however, a great admirer of these extraordinary animals.

  I have dived with great white sharks off South Africa and Tasmania and with bulls and tigers and hammerheads all around the world. One thing I have noticed is that the really big sharks always appear in the same surprising way.

  This large female tiger was no different. At first, on some primary level of perception, I was aware of motion in the distance where there had been no movement before. Then I noticed two unexpected black vacancies in the green murk, strange voids not instantly identified by my brain. The voids were horizontal, consistently spaced, swinging slowly back and forth, growing larger, vectoring.

  Strange. What trick of light was this?

  Then the black holes were skewered by a conical nose, beneath which was a grinning apparition. It was a fixed, fanatical grin, as meaningless as the grill of a car, yet it lent an impression of all that is mindless and unsympathetic and inevitable. A million years of energy were distilled right there in front of me: wind, water, light, current.

  The huge tiger glided toward us, then banked slightly, black eyes passing us without interest or expression. The impression given by her indifference was probably accurate: The animal knew all there was to know about us, and there was nothing to be known. We were meaningless; we were irrelevant because we were not prey. We were a gathering of protoplasm, healthy seals or fish or manatee. Perhaps something would occur to change that. We might be wounded, show distress, or the shark’s own precise feeding instincts would reclassify us because of hunger.

  It was an indifferent process. A biologist from Sanibel? An unreformed hipster who lived on a sailboat, who believed in God, who crossed his 7s, read his horoscope, and was a devotee of reincarnation?

  Such things did not exist. Water, light, tide: all else was delusion. We were wind in the void. We were matter without purpose. It made no difference who we were, what we had accomplished, who we loved. Our fast hearts had a silly, finite number of beats remaining. There was always other prey.

  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.