Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

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, cliched 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.

On that cool December night, with a Midwestern breeze blowing through the screen window above my cot, I sat upright, sweating, trembling, my heart pounding.

The running shorts I wore were soaked. So were the sheets.

I threw the sheets back, then stood on shaky legs.

It was impossible to sleep after a dream so terribly vivid, so I went outside and took a cold shower, using a double ration of rainwater from my wooden cistern. I dressed, slipped into my sandals, then I went to work in the lab, writing up our report.

It was long before first light, just after 4 A.M. Fish and octopi in their tanks were watching me. Outside, there were stars in a black sky, and familiar, back bay sounds: the distant tapping of a halyard, the sump and whine of bilge pumps, the cornfield rustle of wind through the mangroves.

I wrote all morning. The only breaks I took were to walk to the marina for coffee, as I do almost every morning, then I returned there again around noon to pick up mail. On this particular day, I decided to have lunch at the marina. So I was sitting in the shade near the bait tanks, eating one of Joyce’s excellent fried-conch sandwiches, when Mack stepped out of the office door and called to me, “Hey, Doc! There’s some bloke here says he’s got a package for you. Won’t let me sign, won’t leave it at the desk. It must be important because he says he’s got to put it directly into your hands.”

Which is how I happened to receive the reinforced box from Bernie Yaeger that I now opened.

Inside was a Styrofoam cover, which I removed, then a layer of bubble wrap. Beneath, fitted into another cradle of Styrofoam, was a small, silver video camera not much bigger than my hand. There was a brand name and model designation on the side-Sony DCR-TR-and a typewritten note taped to the camera.

It read: “Doc, these directions are so simple even a lug like you can’t mess it up. Notice the wall bracket. Mount it no more than ten feet from the area you want videotaped. The camera has an infrared component, and it operates just fine at 0 lux, otherwise known to you hermit types as total darkness. The timer has already been programmed, and the memory stick has been inserted. Don’t touch anything! After you have mounted the camera, plug in the 12-volt converter. In the event you have a power outage down there in Hurricane Land, there is a info lithium battery backup. Try to install this beautiful little camera without crushing it in your big paws or dropping the damn thing!”