by Rick Chesler
His second problem was technical. In the rush to get out of the plane he had slipped while jumping from the door and hit the aircraft’s pontoon on his way into the water. He was unhurt, but his regulator mouthpiece had taken a hit. In the excitement of entering the water so close to their prize, he had been able to ignore it, but it now produced a steady burble of escaping air. And now, fifty yards and a few minutes of kicking later, his pressure gauge told him his air was being depleted too rapidly.
He pushed on. In his considerable experience, he’d faced far more dire circumstances—bull sharks, out-of-air situations in deep-lying shipwrecks, night diving in caves. This was practically a surface dive. He was not worried about air. Even so, he knew the risks he was taking. Finish this dive and the risk-taking is over for good. He would retire a gentleman farmer and raise a few head of cattle on his own ranch, with hired hands to do the real work associated with such an endeavor.
Problem number three was the whale itself. Where the hell was it? What was it doing? At first he had heard some low, mournful echolocations that seemed to come from everywhere at once, but now the sea was silent save for the rasp of his regulator.
He spoke into his communications unit: “¿Dónde está la ballena?” Replies of “No sé” were followed by a stream of technical chatter from the earpiece in his full facemask: his distance to where they last saw the whale from the plane, his compass heading, current and wind velocities, elapsed time since he left the plane—even his escalating breathing rate. He blocked it out and pushed on, mentally spending the extra reward Héctor had promised to the diver who handed him the tag.
It was then that the currents conspired for just a moment to wash a stream of cold, clear water over the seamount. It was as if someone had wiped away the condensation from a warm breath on a cold window to catch a glimpse of the scene outside before it fogged over again.
Barely fifteen feet away, the animal stretched in both directions like a semi truck. Several awestruck seconds passed before he even recognized the shape in front of him as that of a living thing rather than some uncharted rock formation. It was an endless, dark wall until the whale rolled, exposing her belly to the sky, brightening the sea above. The Blue was so vast, so massive, that he couldn’t be sure in which direction the creature’s head lay.
He saw at once why he was able to get so close to the animal. The enormous fluke—the powerhouse of propulsion for this sea-going giant—was entwined in thick webbing. Invisible in single strands, the mesh now appeared an iridescent blue as it wrapped layer upon layer around the massive appendage. Making matters worse, great sheets of loose netting danced around the Blue in the currents like macabre shawls worn by invisible dancers.
He backed away in fright upon seeing the expressionless eye of a five-foot yellowfin tuna. The once magnificent fish was plastered to the indiscriminate wall of death as it was dragged past the diver’s head. Carlos had time to notice that most of its fins, including the tail, had been amputated during the struggle to free itself. He tore his mind away from the grisly image. He had to find some open water. Should the whale roll into him, he would be crushed with the same force as if he had been hit by a car while walking down the street. The swaying mesh was also perilous. He would back off and get his bearings.
Then he saw it. As the whale shifted again, she all but disappeared as her dorsal side blended in too well with the shadowy chasm below. But the blinking red LED was unmistakable. He stopped moving and the currents instantly counteracted his progress, drawing him back to the cetacean.
He remembered the helmet light. Flipped it on. Almost worthless with the backscatter, the beam penetrated just enough to make out something altogether foreign on the Blue’s dorsal fin. Picturing the textbook illustrations he’d seen, Carlos felt more in control for being able to orient himself to the colossal beast in his mind’s eye.
The heated water circulating through his dry suit couldn’t suppress a chill when something brushed against his neoprene-clad leg. He swatted at it with a hand but felt nothing. He craned forward to see, but the density of krill and detritus wouldn’t allow it. He felt another downward tug on his ankle. Reaching, his gloved fingers felt a web of monofilament nylon snagged around the dive knife he wore inside his left calf. He tried to jerk his leg out of the netting, but it held fast. He was drifting in the current.
Where was the whale now?
Worried but not yet panicked, he undid the strap on his knife sheath. He removed the blade, careful not to drop it, and sliced through the monofilament strands until his leg was freed. Then he looked up in time to brace himself with a forearm as he slammed into the Blue.
Dazed from the impact but unhurt, Carlos saw that he was only feet from the tag. Breathing very quickly now, he took precious seconds to reach into his vest pocket for the magnet that would trigger the release of the tracking device from the whale’s body. His thick gloves afforded him warmth and protection, but not dexterity. Retrieving the oblong piece of metal was cumbersome. When at last he did, he was forced to grip the tag itself in order to stay with it.
Carlos started to swipe the magnet across the base of the tag in the manner he was shown by Héctor on a whiteboard diagram back in Cabo San Lucas—during the hasty pre-mission briefing, the procedure had seemed much simpler—when the whale lunged forward. The magnet slid out of its groove and was lost in the swirling murk. “¡Mierda!”
“What’s the problem, Carlos?”
“I—” He was about to say he’d lost the magnet, but caught himself. He knew that any mention of problems would bring his colleagues to his aid, reducing his chances of being the one to bring the tag in. “Nada. I’m fine. No problem. I’ve found the whale and am about to remove the tag.” He eyed the knife he still held in his hand. He considered the fragile-looking piece of electronic gear hanging from the Blue’s dorsal, and thought about moving his family into a real house in a neighborhood with paved roads. He made his decision.
Carlos plunged the four-inch blade into the Blue’s body just below the tag.
In the seaplane the standby divers alternated their gaze between the orange buoy that was tethered to the net trap and their boss, who occupied the pilot’s seat. Héctor was doing his best to pretend he had more important things to do than listen to their exchanges. But they demanded to know why their colleague who had not been killed by Orca earlier was not still with them.
“If you knew he was bent, why did you not take him to a chamber?” one of them asked him.
Héctor rubbed his brow in exasperation before answering. When he spoke it was in a slow and deliberate manner. “I told you I did not know for certain that he was bent. He said to me before going to sleep that he was in only minor discomfort. I gave him oxygen as a precaution, and we both agreed that if he got any worse by morning, I would take him to the nearest chamber. As I recall we even debated which was closest—the one in Santa Barbara or on Catalina Island. But when I woke up, he had . . . passed on.” He shook his head. More lies. What am I becoming?
“Perhaps. Or maybe you decided you wouldn’t risk taking my brother to an American medical facility because they would ask too many questions.”
Héctor sat bolt upright, shouting: “How dare you! I informed you and your brother of the risks this operation would pose. Get—”
At that moment the hefty orange buoy marker bobbing nearby was sucked abruptly beneath the surface, where it remained out of sight. The diver who had been watching the dive site whirled around.
“¡Cállense!” he shouted, pointing.
“What happened to the buoy?” the leader said, squinting at the sea outside.
“It was pulled under.”
“Are you sure it didn’t just break loose and drift away? It would take hundreds of pounds of thrust to—”
“I watched it disappear. The whale can do it.”
The leader grabbed the microphone for the underwater communications system. “Carlos, what is happening?”
No answer
came.
“Laptop . . . Get the satellite visual up on the laptop,” Héctor commanded. He continued trying to raise Carlos over the radio while one diver scrambled for the computer and the other eyeballed the water. Before the laptop was open, they heard Carlos on the radio. There was no attempt to disguise the panic in his voice.
“Help! Help me!”
“Carlos, what is happening?”
The response was rapid-fire. “Get down here! Get down here! Help me!”
The diver whose brother had died on the island shook his head and turned the laptop around so that the pilot could see it. Nothing distinctive was visible in the opaque stew on screen.
“Carlos?” The pilot tried to raise him without success. “Carlos!” He signaled his two standby divers. “Go.”
Seconds later the pair was swimming toward the spot where the buoy had been. Héctor, now alone in the aircraft, continued to monitor the laptop and radio. Neither gave him any clues as to what was unfolding below.
He asked for a status check from the two divers who had just left to make certain his radio was functioning properly. It was. He had resigned himself to sit and wait when he heard the rumble of a boat engine in the distance.
CHAPTER 19
ABOARD THE WIRED KINGDOM SCARAB
“Are you going to throw up?” Anastasia asked.
Hunched over a seat in the Scarab’s cabin, Tara nodded as she turned her ashen face upward. The seasickness had claimed her about ten minutes outside the marina. The swells weren’t big, but the boat’s incredible speed created a bone-jarring impact every time they slammed into another crest.
In her rush to meet Anastasia, Tara had forgotten her scopolamine patches.
“Can you make it outside?”
Tara shook her head no. Even if she could make it on deck, she didn’t need the embarrassment of vomiting in front of a bunch of TV camera guys. They’d probably use it for the show. At least down here she was alone, except for Anastasia.
The bile in her throat made another upward surge and Tara retched. She stared at the floor, her hair hanging around her face. Her stomach clenched into a knot, her saliva grew thinner and more copious, a metallic tinge to it. The world started to swim around her. If Branson could see me now, Tara thought, one hand clasping hard against the floor. She heard Anastasia’s voice, as if from far away.
“On the bright side, nobody’s ever died from seasickness. They might wish they had, but they don’t. Let me help.” Anastasia pulled Tara’s hair back, holding it away from her face.
A twinge of unease penetrated her nausea. Then Tara vomited again and was in no position to protest. And she was glad not to throw up in her hair.
While she knelt on the floor, hanging her head, she engaged Anastasia in conversation, to take her mind off of her embarrassment while she recovered. “I didn’t know you knew OLF’s leader personally.” She wiped a string of spittle onto her shirt sleeve.
“Unfortunately, yes, I know him. It’s something I try to forget,” Anastasia said, continuing to hold back Tara’s hair.
“We met while we were both junior marine biology majors at the University of California. He was a different person back then. We used to hang out. Study all night in the library. Drink a lot of coffee to get through midterms and finals. He’s a bright guy, I’ll give him that, but he never really applied himself. Always disillusioned with society and the government. He would get so angry during discussions about marine pollution and declining fish stocks, melting polar ice caps, stuff like that. He would berate the environmental studies majors for telling him to leave the lights off when he wasn't home. ‘That's your big solution?’ he would yell at them. ‘Use less? Just accept the crappy infrastructure that's been put in place for us by shortsighted politicians? How about finding different energy solutions in the first place? Did you idiots ever think of that? You think if everybody leaves the lights off more or lowers the AC a notch that it's going to reverse global warming, stop the oceans from devolving into a primal slime where jellyfish are the only food source left? Go back to school.’” Anastasia shook her head in response to the memory.
“I see you recall it pretty well,” Tara remarked.
“It's hard to forget when you hear him talk. He does have a gift for public speaking.”
“Shame he’s not putting it to use helping people.”
“Yeah, I know it's twisted, but the way he sees it, he is helping people. He truly believes he's saving them from ruining their environment. So I stuck with him until . . .” Anastasia paused, choking back a painful memory, “until our Antarctica trip with GreenAction. He started Ocean Liberation Front shortly after that, and it changed him completely. And he always had so many girls around him, these wannabe environmentalists who volunteered for his organization, canvassing, putting up flyers, updating his website. I went to his apartment one night to tell him how upset I was that he'd made the local news for allegedly sinking a fishing boat that was known to be used to kill seals, and I . . . I caught him in bed with another woman.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Is that . . .” Tara hesitated.
“Is that what?” Anastasia asked.
“Is that when you broke it off with him?”
“Definitely.”
Tara felt better to the point that she was no longer in danger of vomiting. She didn’t pull away from Anastasia, though, because she was learning more about Eric Stein, someone she considered a mild person of interest in the case. But when Anastasia started massaging her neck, Tara clamped a hand around her wrist and stood up. She was about to say something when the roar of the Scarab’s engines diminished, the boat fell lower in the water and they were pitched forward with the sudden decrease in velocity.
“Almost there,” a crewmember called down. Anastasia calmly removed her wrist from Tara’s grasp.
“Are we the first ones here?” Anastasia called up. There was a pause. Anastasia lifted an eyebrow before peeling her gaze from Tara. She looked up the stairs toward the deck. “Well?”
“We’re the first boat, yeah, but we’re not the first people here. You should get up here.”
33° 36’ 25.8” N AND 119° 69’ 78.4” W
The Blue had gone as deep as the nets would allow. At one hundred feet, her fluke swaddled in mesh, she could descend no further. Eighty feet above, divers Juan Garcia and Fernando Jiménez hovered in the water column, slowly spinning in a circle, looking for the whale.
Their communications system did not permit them to talk directly with Carlos. They relied instead on Héctor for information.
“Topside, this is Juan. Anything from Carlos?”
“Negative. Nothing on the computer, either,” Héctor replied.
“The marker buoy?”
“No time to look—there’s a boat approaching.”
Then they saw the line for the buoy slanting off into the darkness. But no buoy, just a big loop of braided yellow line. Juan grabbed it. He began to follow it down, signaling Fernando to follow. They heard the sound of the aircraft’s engine fire up as the world darkened around them. At forty feet the water clarity improved. Juan felt Fernando clutch his arm. He aimed his light in the direction Fernando pointed. A wall of mesh, made easier to see by the many dead and trapped fish it carried, drifted lazily toward them in the slow-moving current. Its size meant that there was no time to get around it. Juan removed his dive knife. Fernando did the same, and they started cutting as they collided with the amorphous wall.
They drifted while they cut, but kept their focus on getting through to the other side of the net. Were it to wrap around them from more than one direction, they could be immobilized. Minutes later, they had each hacked their way through. Fernando took pity on a large bonito fish struggling spasmodically in the mesh, and sacrificed precious seconds cutting it loose. Juan held his hands up in irritation. The fish squirmed free, gave a few tentative shakes of its tail, and was gone.
They pressed on, looking for the buoy line again.
They found it by accident. A fishing rod arced past them, disappeared, and then reappeared a few seconds later. Juan grabbed and held it. They guided themselves along its monofilament. Twenty feet later they joined the buoy line, where a fluorescent pink lure was snagged. Juan cut the rod free and they resumed their descent down the thick rope.
At seventy feet they crossed a thermocline and the water became both colder and clearer. There was a lot of loose netting flying about here, and the two divers were nervous, their heads on swivels while they tried to monitor their three-dimensional surroundings.
Suddenly they could no longer hear the whine of the seaplane motor. Juan called the pilot. “Topside, what is your status?”
“Juan, I am in the air to monitor approaching boats. Maintaining a holding pattern. Over.” Héctor made a low, tight circle over the dive site. From his vantage point he could see several boats en route to his divers’ location. The Scarab led the way.
Cursing the fishermen who had broadcast the site’s GPS coordinates, Héctor wasn’t surprised to hear a voice asking him to identify himself emit from his radio. He weighed his options. Plausible misinformation, rather than stubborn silence, would give them more time to operate. He picked up the transmitter.
“Copy that, Scarab. We are from the South Coast Marine Mammal Rescue Network. Some of our members heard the fishermen’s radio call. We thought we’d do a fly-by and see if there was anything we could do to help.”
“Roger that, seaplane. Always nice to have an eye in the sky. We’re from the television show Wired Kingdom. We’ve come to retrieve our equipment and will be filming our rescue of the whale.”
“Okay. Let us know if there’s anything we can do to assist.”