by Rick Chesler
They lifted off into the L.A. skyline and headed towards the ocean, already visible as a shimmering band of silver to the west. As they passed over the Century Plaza Towers, Tara turned to Anastasia. “Have you had trouble with protestors before?”
“Not like today. There have been threats in the past, but never any violence.”
“What kind of threats?”
“That wacko group, Ocean Liberation Front, they want us to take the tag off the whale. We knew there’d be some protestors going into this, but I had no idea they were so extreme. These guys have members in prison for blowing up SUV dealerships and killing Japanese whalers.”
“Is it possible the woman in the video is an OLF activist who was killed in an attempt to remove the tag? Maybe they damaged it and that’s why the GPS stopped working?”
Anastasia shrugged. “It’s possible, but they haven’t claimed responsibility yet. They’re like terrorists that way, they crave publicity.”
Tara considered this as the pilot engaged in some technical chatter with a control tower. If the video was a botched tag-removal attempt by a radical environmental group, the tactics represented a significant departure from their known methods.
“I don’t understand why people get so upset over it, anyway,” Anastasia continued. “The technology empowers the animals; it doesn’t hurt them. It enables them to protect themselves by using information as a weapon. Who’s going to poach a whale or a tiger or an elephant, knowing they could be caught on video for the whole world to see?”
“The same type of people who rob banks, knowing they're full of security cameras, I guess. Desperate people. But the thing about these animal cams is that they do also give away the animal’s location to potential poachers. Is that why Ocean Liberation Front is so angry—because you plan to tag more animals with this technology?”
“We haven’t said as much, publicly, but we are in the permitting process for more whales and for some African predators, mostly big cats.”
As they flew over a beach dotted with city dwellers escaping the heat, water stretched before them to the horizon, interrupted briefly by the mountainous Channel Islands. Taking in the vast expanse with their objective in mind, Tara realized how daunting her task was. Maybe Dr. Reed is right after all. This whale might as well be the proverbial needle in a haystack. But she had to try. Bigger and better cases were waiting for her as soon as she exposed this silly goose chase for what it was.
“Rob,” Tara began, “are the whale’s last known GPS coordinates set?”
“That’s affirmative,” he replied as he banked the craft northwest.
“Couldn’t hope for better weather,” Anastasia said. Tara agreed with a nod. That was one small factor in her favor. The late summer afternoon sun blazed in a cloudless, blue sky and, far below them, the sea was calm as they hurtled out over the Pacific.
The wired whale was not alone.
Driven to the cooler, temperate waters off the California coast after enduring a long fall and winter in the nutrient-poor tropics, she gorged herself on fields of shrimp-like crustaceans known as krill. The paradox of the planet’s largest animals sustaining themselves by feeding on some of the smallest has long fascinated naturalists. The closer to the bottom of the food chain the organism is, the more efficient it is at meeting its energetic needs. Plants are at the bottom of this food chain and, in the ocean, microscopic plants called phytoplankton harvest energy directly from its ultimate source: the sun. These so-called “primary producers” are then consumed by microscopic animals termed zooplankton, which in turn are eaten by krill, which are themselves eaten by larger animals. Each step up this chain, or “trophic level,” represents a significant loss of energy efficiency. Because baleen whales (those that filter feed for krill and copepods as opposed to toothed whales, which eat meat) feed so low on the food chain, they are able to take advantage of high levels of available energy in order to fuel their enormous bodies. Blue whales must eat about three million calories per day, or about three to four tons of krill.
The wired “Blue” now found herself in an area where this requirement could be effortlessly exceeded. Nothing could distract the animal from this kind of bounty—not even the white seaplane that had landed nearby.
Héctor González brought his amphibious craft to an easy halt, bobbing atop large but orderly swells, as his two scuba divers tested their underwater communications gear. The divers exclaimed to one another in rapid, excited bursts how much larger the Blue was than the gray whales they had dived with at home, until Héctor told them to shut up. They protested that even if someone had managed to intercept their secure frequencies, the language barrier would likely keep them from being understood.
Behind his baseball cap and sunglasses, Héctor's face reddened as he looked back at his men. “Listen to me! Our language itself is an identifier. When using the communications units, you will speak only when absolutely necessary to coordinate your activities. Every second that passes puts us at greater risk.”
His men were excellent divers and all-around watermen, but were not accustomed to the precise, almost paramilitary tactics they were now forced to employ. The limited time he'd had for briefings back home would have to suffice, Héctor thought. He eyed the whale. In it, he saw his daughter's future and prayed inwardly that it would not dive.
Even when the two divers jumped from the aircraft and began swimming toward the Blue, she refused to interrupt her feeding.
But suddenly, the goliath registered a new presence.
Multiple contacts. Large. Fast.
Orca.
The pod racing towards her was unusual in that it consisted of so many members—about forty in all—representing every strata of killer whale society. Male and female hunters led the pursuit. Older adults guarded the calves near the rear of the pod. An Orca mother who had carried her stillborn calf in her mouth for the last twenty-four hours finally relinquished her lifeless offspring to the sea. Her own life had a new purpose now: the ultimate sustenance . . . an adult blue whale. A Blue was far too massive an animal for any one Orca to challenge, but for a coordinated team, even the largest creature ever to inhabit the planet was fair game.
The hunters split into several groups, two to six in each. They shadowed the Blue, their intent to surround her. The Blue dove. She needed to survey the area without remaining vulnerable on the surface. Three hundred feet down in near darkness she hung vertically. The sea filled with staccato bursts of echolocation as predators and prey each sought information about the other.
While the Blue could hold her breath three times longer than her adversaries—almost an hour—the killers were well aware she’d have to surface before long. Patience was second nature to Orca; they would not waste their energy diving. The Blue wanted to control when and where she surfaced. Otherwise she might find herself forced to come up to breathe in the middle of the marauders, gasping and weak while they ambushed her.
She sliced upward at an oblique angle, aiming for an open patch of water. Reaching the surface, she ignored the two scuba divers now swimming much closer. In a display of raw power that said leave me alone to humans and Orca alike, the whale raised her fluke, twenty-three feet across, and slammed it against the surface. The sound carried underwater for miles, chased the humans back, and gave the Orca pause.
But the Orca had numbers. The lead group, consisting of two twenty-six-foot-plus males, accelerated.
The fight for life was on.
WIRED KINGDOM TECH SUPPORT FACILITY
At his computer, Trevor Lane jumped in his chair at the explosive sound made by the whale’s fluke slap, knocking over his latest mug of coffee. Ignoring the spill as it dripped onto his jeans, he studied the whale’s feed on the monitor. A pair of six-foot, black dorsal fins porpoised across the screen. Seabirds dashed, making shallow test-dives, waiting for a probable meal.
Trevor hurried over to the server room to monitor the machines carefully, optimizing them for the onslaught of activity
he expected to hit the web site. Killer whales attacking the Blue live on the web. Here comes my bonus.
It was a different sound which drew his attention back to his desk.
A rhythmic thumping grew steadily louder.
33° 24’ 23.1” N AND 118° 04’ 86.3” W
Orca groups took flank positions around the Blue while six individuals cut off her forward flight. Panicking at the sharp bites along her pleated belly, the Blue charged. The lead Orca leapt from the sea, unable to stop its prey’s forward momentum, while other Orca inflicted nasty bites on her pectoral fins as she passed. With blood flowing freely, more Orca moved into position, cutting off the Blue again.
Over the next ten minutes the dance was repeated, the Blue showing visible signs of fatigue and stress. Circling warily on the surface, ragged breaths sputtering from her double blowhole, she again slapped her fluke, this time scattering far fewer of her adversaries.
Two adult males rushed at her head.
Neither predators nor prey noticed the two humans closing in from behind.
The Blue executed a series of shallow dives meant to break the attacker’s concentration, but the Orca regrouped each time she surfaced. The Blue kept her mouth shut, knowing the Orca would rip her tongue out if they could. Then the largest Orca, a weathered, twenty-seven-foot male, saw an opportunity. The Blue’s left side was exposed when she lunged at attackers to the right and front.
The killer barreled in, jaws bared to remove a lamb-sized portion of flesh from the whale’s left flank. Instead, it detected an unusual signal, electrical in nature, stronger than the familiar biological impulses. Cocking its head to one side, it pinged its prey’s dorsal fin, allowing the Blue the seconds she needed to defend herself.
In an agile feat of maneuverability, the 100-ton animal rolled to one side, thrust her head down and, in one motion, raised her great fluke nearly vertical out of the water. Then she smashed it down onto the attacking Orca’s melon. The concussive impact rendered the Orca unconscious. As its limp body began sinking into the depths, the trailing elders broke from the attack to prod their fallen comrade back to the surface. Frustrated, one of the lead hunters paused to assess the miniscule, clumsy mammals which still flitted about the Blue like oversized cleaner fish.
As they flew over the Blue’s last known coordinates, Tara realized this was her first look at the crime scene . . . if in fact it was a crime scene, she reminded herself. The featureless plane of open sea did not offer many clues. She was used to being able to at least walk around a crime scene and examine things; to collect fibers, shell casings, weapons, fingerprints; or extract DNA from hair samples or skin tissue. Peering down from the helicopter, all she saw was a barren, unforgiving environment.
“What’s the water temperature right now?” she asked Anastasia.
“Sixty-four, a little cooler than last summer.”
“How long could a person survive out here in sixty-four-degree water?”
“For most people you’re looking at about four hours max, maybe up to eight with a wetsuit. Any kind of flotation device increases the odds of survival, too.”
“And how deep is it?”
“About sixteen hundred feet.”
“Anything unusual about this area of ocean?”
“Not in a Bermuda Triangle sense if that’s what you mean. But the whales come here for a reason. Animal and plant life in the sea are not distributed randomly; they follow complex patterns. This area represents a boundary between cold northern currents and warmer southern currents.”
She was in the process of explaining the cycles of seasonal upwelling and krill blooms when they saw movement and splashing ahead. Anastasia grabbed a set of binoculars and focused on the activity. “Whale!” she called, still looking through the lenses. “It’s a Balaenoptera—a blue. Could be our girl, but she’s not alone.”
“What do you mean?” Tara asked, shifting to get a better view over Anastasia’s shoulder.
“Orca. Big pod, and they’re hunting her—wait,” she broke off, scanning the scene through binoculars as the pilot reduced altitude, “there’s a plane.”
“Let me see.” Tara grabbed the binoculars from Anastasia and trained them on a white speck near the commotion. “White seaplane,” she said to Rob, glancing at the radio.
Taking the radio transmitter, the pilot called for the aircraft to identify itself.
No response.
“Did you send out spotter planes?” Anastasia asked. Tara shook her head while continuing to peer through the lenses. She ignored the plane for the moment and zoomed in on the whale’s dorsal fin. She waited for the water lapping over the animal to subside, and then she saw it: a glint of metal.
“That’s it! That’s the whale. I can see the tag,” she said. She handed the binoculars back to Anastasia for confirmation.
“Yeah, there she is.”
If the Orca succeeded in killing the whale, its corpse would sink to the bottom and the device would be lost forever.
“They’re going to eat that whale?” Tara asked, incredulous. It didn’t seem possible for such a large animal to be eaten.
“They’re going to try, anyway. They’re not always successful, but this pod is unusually large. We don’t have much data on this—we’re extremely lucky to see it.”
“So are millions of web viewers,” the pilot pointed out.
Scanning the water close to the Blue, Tara spotted something alarming. “Is that a—a diver on the surface, surrounded by Orca,” she finished in her head. Why is he there?
He was a scary distance from his plane. The aircraft began a cautious taxi closer to the Blue. Tara had to do something to stop the diver from getting the whale’s tag . . . or being killed by Orca before she could question him.
She outlined a simple plan to Rob.
CHAPTER 7
WIRED KINGDOM TECH SUPPORT FACILITY
Glued to his monitor, Trevor could hear an engine nearing the whale. That alone was odd enough, but it was the image on screen that now commanded his attention. A human figure approached the tagged cetacean. The diver occupied more of the screen as he neared the camera. He was encased in black gear, including a full face mask with a tinted faceplate, making it impossible to see anything behind it. The diver’s gloved hand seemed to be reaching out to grab Trevor as it enveloped the camera, plunging the screen into darkness. What the hell? I didn’t hear anything about an expedition to get the tag back.
The gloved hand lifted and Trevor could see again. The blue undercarriage of a helicopter came into view and then disappeared as the whale rolled in a swirl of bubbles. When the water cleared, he saw the fingers of one gloved hand obscuring the left part of the screen.
The computer speakers shook with the rapid throb of the chopper.
Why are they so close?
The diver’s other hand appeared on screen, holding an object. Trevor leaned forward, squinting. A square piece of metal.
A magnet.
The computer whiz thought about what he’d gone through at Martin-Northstar in order to gain what he thought of as his inspiration for the tag’s design. Could these guys be from M-N?
The hand with the magnet grew larger on Trevor’s screen. The percussive beat of the helicopter’s blades chopping at the air came in uneven bursts as waves lapped over the hydrophone. Then the unmistakable black and white of an Orca, slicing across the field of view, hammered into the diver, cracking his faceplate and knocking the piece of metal free from the black glove.
The Blue moved off. The diver was nowhere to be seen.
Did he trigger the release?
Trevor kicked his chair out of the way and shifted to a second computer. He scanned its technical information, looking for the line of code that would tell him whether the tag’s release mechanism had been triggered. Please don’t say True.
He found the line:
STATUS.RELEASE(“ACTIVATION”) = FALSE
Trevor breathed a sigh of relief. The tag was still att
ached to the Blue.
Unnerved, he picked up a phone and got Anthony Silveras after a single ring. “Who’s trying to get the tag?” Trevor demanded without preamble.
“Don’t know. Anastasia took a chopper ride with the FBI agent to see if they could get a spot on the whale, but they didn’t mention anything to me about divers.”
“That tag is my technology, Anthony. If the show is trying to take it from me by pretending to have it stolen—”
“Hey, take it easy, Trevor. It’s not us. Try some decaf.”
Trevor made an effort to relax. “The release wasn’t triggered,” he managed.
“Doesn’t surprise me. Probably some weekend thrill-seekers with money to burn. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
Trevor wasn’t a diver, but he didn’t think the tinted facemasks he’d seen looked like typical sport-diving gear. “How much of the feed did you see?”
“None, I was in the editing room. I just heard about it.”
Trevor suspected as much, given Silveras’ casual tone. “I wouldn’t say they didn’t know what they were doing.”
“Why’s that?”
“Tell me this: have any of the shows ever talked about the release mechanism?”
“No, we agreed not cover the specifics on that.”
“It’s never been on the web site anywhere, either.”
“So?”
“So . . . how’d they know to bring a magnet?” He raised his voice at the end of the sentence, too loud to hear the cacophony of shouting and ringing phones on the other end of the receiver.
“They read up on wildlife tracking technology, big deal. Look, Trevor, I gotta take some of these calls. Make sure the web site’s ready for heavy traffic.”
Trevor returned his attention to the Blue’s feed. Something on screen wasn’t right. At the moment there was only the Blue’s back and water, but it didn’t look like normal water. Trevor checked the tint and contrast settings for his monitor. DEFAULT. Still, the water was too dark, too . . . red. Blood? Killers got the Blue. He imagined the tag sinking to the black depths of the sea on the remnants of the giant carcass, or even being swallowed whole by a ravenous Orca, broadcasting on its way down the beast’s gullet. . . .