by Rick Chesler
Then the perspective on screen changed, and Trevor could see all too clearly that the blood was not from the Blue.
33° 25’ 25.4” N AND 118° 03’ 87.7” W
“Hover. No, Lower. Bring it down.”
The helicopter bore down on the Blue’s dorsal fin. The seaplane was less than a football field away, bounding toward them on the surface like a skipped stone.
“Any lower than this, we’ll land on the whale’s back,” Rob shouted back to Tara. Rotor wash churned the sea to froth. They had hoped to scare the Blue into diving before the diver could get near the tag, but she’d stubbornly held her position on the surface, fending off Orca.
Tara watched in disbelief as the fully geared scuba diver was launched into the air, arms flailing. Unable to take down the Blue, the Orca batted this new victim around like a seal, dragging him under by an arm before resurfacing.
Tara yelled for Anastasia to switch seats with her. She removed her Glock .40 caliber from a shoulder harness worn under her suit jacket. Anastasia looked in shock at the gun and tore off her seatbelt. They scrambled around each other and Tara leaned out the window, taking aim.
The diver floated motionless, face down. An Orca nosed under him, ready to fling its new toy to the others. Breath held, Tara was about to fire warning shots near the Orca when the Blue exhaled beneath them, coating the aircraft in blinding respiratory mist. No longer able to see what she was aiming at and gagging on the rank smell filling her mouth and lungs, she lowered her weapon. As she did so, her eyes lit on the gym bag at her feet. At the same time, flying blind, Rob eyed the altimeter and yanked on the collective, putting more sky between them and the water. He flicked on the windscreen wipers and activated the defogging system once they had reached a safe altitude.
Eighty vertical feet and a few seconds later the windscreen cleared. They could see the Blue moving, her torpedo shape beginning to slide out of sight beneath the surface, and the seaplane drifting much closer, a diver struggling to pull himself aboard. The other diver floated listlessly among the pod of killers beneath the helicopter.
Tara yanked the tracking dart out of the bag. She handed it to Anastasia with the instruction, “Set it up and give it back to me.” Anastasia took the tagger while Tara looked down at the scene unfolding below. “Rob, look, there’s a second diver. Take us back down.”
Rob nodded and eased them to a mere ten feet over the swells.
“Ready to go,” Anastasia declared. She handed the tagging gun back to Tara. “Want me to take the shot?” Anastasia asked. “I presume you haven’t tagged a whale before?”
Tara thought fast as she considered this. The diver still floated there, the plane was still nearby, but the whale was leaving. Now. “No time to switch seats again.” Tara said as she opened the cockpit door. “How much recoil does it have compared to a regular gun?”
“I’ve never fired a regular gun,” Anastasia said. “But it does kick back a little.”
“What are you doing?” Rob shouted after Tara. Ignoring his protests, Tara stepped out onto the skid and, bracing herself on the doorframe with one hand, she pointed the big suction cup dart at the whale’s back. The old phrase about hitting the side of a barn ran through her head. She’d never fired anything like this before, but she was an expert markswoman with a variety of traditional weapons. From this distance, even in motion the Blue presented a can’t-miss target to Tara. The familiar sense of focus that aided her when target shooting came over the special agent as she held her breath. The whale’s back was arching into a diving maneuver almost directly under the helicopter. With Rob screaming at her to get back inside, Tara squeezed the trigger. She felt rather than heard the dart leave the firing mechanism.
Tara watched as the dart impacted with the Blue’s hide. The suction cup hit where she’d intended, on a patch of skin that appeared free of barnacles, and stuck there.
“It’s on. It’s on!” She handed the now dartless gun back to Anastasia.
They watched as the Blue submerged, positioning itself for a deep dive.
Seconds later, something appeared on the surface, bobbing in the swells.
The suction cup dart with its attached GPS transponder. It had come free of the whale.
Tara couldn’t hide her disappointment. Her eyes bored into the water but there was now no sign whatsoever of the Blue.
Anastasia put a hand on Tara’s shoulder. “The cup slid off when it submerged. Don’t feel bad, your shot was pretty good. Happens all the time.”
A black form below commanded Tara’s attention. The diver. Tara shifted her thoughts to how she would get the body aboard. The identification of the dead man could break open the case. Looking under the seat she found only a coil of thin, yellow polypropylene line.
“We got a harness or a grappling hook, something to haul the body in with?”
“Hell no!” Rob said. “This isn’t a search-and-rescue bird. Strictly survey. Don’t do anything stupid,” he said, casting a quick but concerned glance her way.
“Lifejackets?”
“Negative.”
She hesitated. He pressed his case. “Look, Agent Shores, this wasn’t part of the plan. I said we’d chase the whale off; that’s what we did. It’s gone. I didn’t agree to any tagging or body recovery. We are not equipped for that.”
A red indicator light started blinking in the dash, as if to agree. He pointed to it. “We go in now or we won’t have enough fuel to make it back,” he said, relieved to be saved by the bell. Nobody argued with the fuel light.
“Can’t you do something?” Tara argued.
“Yeah, I can bring us back in.”
“What about the reserve?” Tara asked, turning her attention to the poly line. She could tie it off to the aircraft and then fasten the other end to the diver’s body to keep it from drifting away while they pulled it aboard. But where to tie the line? This was not a utility helicopter with an abundance of straps and D-rings. Her eyes darted about the cabin. She saw only smooth upholstery.
“We need all the reserve as it is now,” Rob said.
Tara shook her head. “There must be something you can do.” She wrapped the free end of the poly line through a seatbelt clip and was fumbling with a crude knot when Anastasia put down the binoculars and grabbed the line.
“Let me do that,” she said. Tara let go and watched closely. Anastasia’s hands worked the line while Rob continued to argue with Tara.
“You can record the coordinates from my plotter, Shores; that’s what you can do. We’ll send back a search-and-rescue team.” Tara glared at him, testing his resolve. A veteran military pilot who had flown missions in the Gulf War, Rob was not used to passengers—even law enforcement professionals—questioning his judgment. “You have sixty seconds.”
“I’ll take it,” she said, giving Anastasia’s now completed knot a violent tug. It was remarkably solid for the few seconds she’d had to work on it, and she’d further reinforced it with a complex noose arrangement that spiraled up the strap. “Thanks,” Tara said.
Anastasia shrugged. “You won’t need it anyway. Those Orca are having too much fun with their new toy. They won’t be going anywhere.” Below, several killer whales had surfaced near the unresponsive diver. One of the younger ones nosed the lost suction cup tag along like a plaything.
“Trust me, they’ll be leaving,” Tara said, climbing back out onto the skid.
Taking aim in a one-handed grip with her Glock, she fired four rounds above the Orca, and the pod started to move away.
At a short distance, two Orca stopped to spyhop, assuming a vertical posture with their heads out of water, to assess the new threat. Tara placed two more warning shots well over their melons. She knew she’d be roasted alive by animal rights groups and the public in general if the Blue’s web-cam caught her shooting at the popular creatures. The Orca dove to escape the sharp pops and fled, leaving the motionless diver behind to mark the center of a spreading blood cloud.
The
floatplane taxied around, one diver safely back on board. Tara shouted to Rob through the open window, “Tell the plane to stop.”
Rob addressed the plane through the helicopter’s loudhailer: “White Cessna seaplane, this is the FBI. Turn off your engine now. Repeat, this is the FBI—turn off your engine.”
The plane turned tail and throttled up for takeoff. It would soon be gone. Tara looked down at the body floating beneath her. She’d been unable to place a working locator tag on the whale, and they’d never catch the plane, but the body would be almost as good. She squatted, still standing on the skid and, finding a lower handhold, leaned out to grab the man.
Rob was red-faced. “Agent Shores! I cannot allow—”
“Just bring me a little closer. I’ll pull in the body and we’re outta here.”
“There’s no time!”
Just focus on the body, she told herself. Focus . . . The water was so blue. So clear. She felt as though she could see all the way through the water column to the bottom thousands of feet below. The sunlight flashed off the topping swells and a brilliant rainbow rose in the mist surrounding the helicopter. An overwhelming sense of vertigo seized her, made her weak. She clutched the rim of the door tighter and forced herself to breathe. “Closer!”
Shaking his head and muttering something about a crazy bitch, something about putting this in his report, Rob nosed the helicopter closer to the diver.
Tara saw a glint from the diver’s cracked faceplate as he crested a swell. She inched the hand with the line out a little farther.
One more swell . . .
She eyed the diver’s weight belt, readying herself to snare it. Focus . . . The diver’s body began to lift with a rising swell. Rob’s expert piloting kept the craft positioned just over the surface. The wave reached Tara’s runner, washing over her feet. She stretched out and grabbed for the diver.
Then an Orca slammed into the chopper from the pilot’s side, the impact pitching Special Agent Tara Shores into the cool Pacific.
CHAPTER 8
Every one of Tara’s nerve endings protested the cold. After the cozy confines of the helicopter, the frigid water was shocking. Angry. Salt water stung her eyes, but she kept them open for fear of swimming down instead of up. She hadn’t felt this like this since . . .
Don’t think. Just swim.
The urge to breathe wrenched her back to reality. Her head broke the surface. She shrieked for breath, her ears assaulted with a cacophony of wind, waves and chopper wash. Then she remembered: Orca!
The realization that she was in close proximity to animals that had just killed a man only made things worse. Panic began to wash over her with the surrounding swells. Still dressed in business attire, Tara struggled to keep her head up. She kicked hard, feeling a shoe come loose. As she sputtered for breath between cresting waves, she saw the diver float innately over a swell. Using a crawl stroke that had been dubbed “ungainly and inefficient” by an FBI swim instructor during her academy days, she made her way toward the body. She recalled her instructor’s words: You’ve really got no business being in the water at all, you know, Shores. She agreed, but never thought it would matter.
A strident hissing came from the direction of the diver. Then she caught a glimpse of a severed regulator hose whipping about, spewing compressed air, before another swell slapped her in the face. Currents and wind narrowed the gap between her and the diver, and she saw what had really happened for the first time. A riot of shredded neoprene told its own horror story. Feeling her ability to reason abandoning her, she tried to flip the lifeless body over to see if she could establish a better hold, only to find that the right arm was missing.
A mouthful of water stifled her startled gasp. She choked and sputtered and coughed, and held on tight. The dead man lay face down. Tara felt the sickening warmth of his blood spilling out around her. Now feeling not only nausea but terror, she tried to scramble atop the fresh corpse, the buoyancy control vest still inflated with enough air to keep them both afloat. For now.
The helicopter hovered over Tara as she wrestled with the diver before falling back in the water.
“What is she doing?”
Rob shook his head. “I don’t know, but we need to pick her up and get out of here.”
Below, Tara continued to flail about ineffectively.
“I could swim out—” Anastasia started.
“No. You just sit right there.”
“She needs help!”
“I’ll bring us closer. She can swim over. You pull her in.” But to Anastasia it didn’t look like Tara was capable of swimming anywhere.
Rob maneuvered the aircraft so that the landing gear kissed the water’s surface, but the rotor wash pushed Tara and the body farther away. Rob pounded the dash in frustration. “What the hell is she doing?”
Anastasia grabbed the line tied to the seatbelt and hauled on it. Tara struggled to stay above water while she clung to the diver. The vest was losing air, and his heavy weight belt was dragging him—and Tara—underwater. Worse, the way blood issued from the corpse, it wouldn’t be long before sharks were drawn to the scene.
“Let go of the diver,” Rob called through the loud hailer. “You’ve got to get back in the chopper. I can’t maintain this position.”
But Tara’s dread was such that she could do nothing but grip the sinking body. She still clutched the poly line in one hand but could not concentrate enough to attach it to the diver.
Anastasia felt the sea spray on her face as she drew in the line hand over hand. The slack ran out and she pulled harder to overcome the resistance. Tara, white-knuckling the line in one hand, was pulled away from the diver. She tried to protest against losing her crucial evidence, but her words were cut short by another mouthful of bloody saltwater.
Anastasia continued to reel her in. As Tara reached the helicopter, a rolling swell caught the side of the craft. Water entered through the open door. Numerous splashes from unseen creatures peppered the surface around them as blood continued to disperse in a thousand microcurrents.
Anastasia sat on the helicopter’s skid and lugged the FBI agent onto the hovering skid.
“The body—help me get the body,” Tara called out.
Anastasia shook her head. “Are you crazy? Sharks! No more fuel! C’mon!”
Rob was hollering for both of them to get back in the helicopter as Anastasia pulled Tara up by her belt and made sure she was securely on the skid before they lifted off.
Anastasia pulled Tara inside the cockpit. Rob glared at the detective as she took a seat next to him. Tara examined the sea below as they rose above the surface. They looked on as the unidentified body slipped beneath the waves, its black-clad form dissolving into the watery gloom before their eyes.
The Blue was nowhere to be seen. The divers and their plane . . . gone. Empty ocean sprawled for miles in every direction. For all appearances, Tara thought, holding her feet out of the water sloshing around on the cabin floor, nothing had ever happened.
CHAPTER 9
SANTA MONICA MUNICIPAL AIRPORT
Two disheveled women stepped from the helicopter that had just touched down on the tarmac, one soaking wet. A crowd of waiting reporters shouted questions. “Is it true, Agent Shores, that you’re investigating the first ever murder broadcast live over the Internet?”
“No comment.” She pushed through the reporters, Anastasia close behind. The show host put an arm around Tara, falling into step with her. She spoke softly into the detective’s ear. “Why don’t we catch a taxi to my place and dry off. You look like you’re about my size; I’m sure I can come up with an outfit for you.”
Tara stopped walking and turned to Anastasia, conscious of the reporters. Anastasia traced her fingers lightly along Tara’s arm. Before Tara could answer, a black Town Car rolled to a stop a short distance away. Tara slipped away. “This is my ride. I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Chauffeured limo, cool. They stock champagne in there?”
Tara was surprised to see her boss, Special Agent in Charge Will Branson, step from the car. It wasn’t often that he visited the field. Wonder if he saw it on the web. Branson walked briskly toward her, shaking his head. Yep. He saw it.
“Agent Shores, are you hurt?” he asked. He threw a blanket over her while other FBI personnel escorted Anastasia away from the throng of reporters.
“No, sir. My outfit is done for,” she said, looking at her soaked and ripped pants, “but I'm in one piece.”
“Get in the car.” Before he shut the door behind her, he added, “Somebody sure as hell wants that video unit, Shores. Get it before they do. That’s an order.”
SANTA MONICA BEACH
Private Investigator Roger Carr checked his cell phone for the tenth time in as many minutes. Still on, ready to receive calls, though none came. He shifted his considerable bulk in the sand as his head turned to soak up the scenery. Beautiful day, he thought. The only thing preventing his full enjoyment of it was the no smoking signs. He chortled aloud at the absurdity of it. No smoking on the beach. Only in L.A.
The floral-print shirt, floppy hat and cheap sunglasses pegged him for a tourist, but in fact Mr. Carr was a longtime resident of the City of Angels. He was here in connection with his lone client, although the P.I. would be the first to admit that his current undertaking was a long shot more aimed at giving him time to indulge in some girl-watching than it was serious work. But one never knew, he thought, looking around. That fat cat television producer had told his bimbo to meet her here today. And that little stakeout had been rather rewarding, hadn't it, Roger mused to himself. Sure, the pay was good—better than he was used to—but the photo that it had produced was exceptional!