Wired Kingdom

by Rick Chesler

  “Just advise your people to stay out of the way and let our experts handle it.”

  “Copy that, Wired Kingdom. Be advised, I’ve got a bird’s eye view of a whole lot of boats coming this way, including a Coast Guard cutter.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up. We’ll get right to work.”

  “South Coast Marine Mammal Rescue Network? Never heard of it,” a diver suiting up on the Scarab’s deck said, looking at Anastasia.

  The marine scientist looked up from her own dive gear. “No, but it’s impossible to keep track of all those ‘we love cute marine mammals’ organizations. Some of them do legitimate work, but a lot are just amateurs who get in the way.”

  “I’ve never heard of them either,” a cameraman said, snapping an waterproof case shut on a video camera.

  “So what’s your plan?” Tara asked Anastasia.

  “The plan is to dive in and get an assessment of the whale’s condition, see what we can do about it and, if possible, to try and get the tag back.”

  “Two ships on the way,” a crewmember called out.

  “NOAA and the Coast Guard,” Anastasia said, squinting into the distance. “They’ll want us out of the water. If we’re going to dive, now’s the time.”

  What transpired after he stabbed the Blue was a blur to Carlos. Things had happened too fast to recall them in order. He didn’t remember blacking out, but here he was, strapped to the base of the Blue’s tail by the mesh, one hundred feet down.

  The alarming hiss of his regulator reminded him of the urgency of his situation. That, and the pain. His right arm was broken in two places, entwined in netting. Fire flared up in the limb with the whale’s every move. How much air had he consumed while unconscious with a free-flowing regulator? he wondered. He checked his gauge: enough gas to last about ten more minutes at this depth. He would need to decompress after ascending to avoid the bends, but right now that was the least of his worries. Carlos instinctively reached for his knife and then remembered plunging it into the whale.

  Recalling his communications link, he spoke into his mask. “Jefe, can you hear me?”

  From the seaplane, Héctor saw more boats bearing down on them with every pass he made. Soon the area would be a zoo. And now his comm unit made a weird hissing and crackling noise. The Coast Guard cutter would be on site within minutes. He had three divers down. When or if they could meet their objective was unclear.

  He pounded his fist on the instrument console as he made another circle. He picked up the transmitter for the underwater communications unit. “Juan, Fernando—do you copy? Over.”

  “Sí, señor. We have descended the buoy line. The whale—Carlos!”

  “What is happening?”

  “We see him. He is—”

  Another voice punched through a standard marine channel. “Cessna seaplane, this is the United States Coast Guard cutter Los Angeles. You are flying too low and too close to a marine mammal in distress. I repeat, you are flying too close to a marine mammal in distress. You will be cited if you do not leave the area immediately.”

  The pilot allowed the plane to drift even lower while concentrating on how to reply. First he picked up the underwater comm unit’s microphone. “He is what, Juan? He is what? The Coast Guard is ordering me out—can you get the tag and surface now?”

  “No!” This from Fernando. “We need more time. Carlos is in trouble—tangled with the whale in netting, low on air.

  “Does he have the tag?”

  “I—”

  The standard radio channel boomed, “Seaplane—U.S. Coast Guard—Acknowledge at once. Over!”

  The pilot switched over to the radio transmitter. “Copy that, Coast Guard. Will comply. I was passing by and thought I would mark the location for the rescue boats. Over.”

  “Roger that, seaplane, but we better see you leaving, now. We need to minimize all non-authorized rescue traffic—both air and sea. Over.”

  Looking off to his left, toward the coast, the pilot spotted the cutter plowing towards the site. A bright flash of light gleamed from it—perhaps a signal mirror—but no matter; they had made their point clear.

  Knuckles white from gripping the steering column, Héctor grappled with the agonizing decision he faced. To comply with the Coast Guard meant leaving his divers behind in the water. Would they betray him if caught? Of course. Maybe he should disobey the direct order long enough to pick up the divers with or without the tag.

  His arbitration was interrupted by the underwater comm unit. “I don’t know yet if he has the tag, señor. We are almost to him, but it will take some time.”

  Time? There is no time.

  The pilot broke his circular pattern and headed north away from the site. He was sure he would be forever haunted by the sound of Juan’s anxious breathing suddenly cut short as the plane exceeded the comm gear’s range.

  CHAPTER 20

  33° 36’ 25.8” N AND 119° 69’ 78.4” W

  “Topside. . . . Topside!” Juan shouted into his mask.

  “Why does he not respond?” Fernando asked.

  “Don’t know. Let’s finish the dive.”

  They had seen Carlos’ form strapped to the base of the Blue’s fluke, but now the water grew murky. The pair followed the buoy line, which, due to the currents, took them along a horizontal path toward the end of the dark torpedo. The Blue constantly pitched and rolled as she struggled to free herself. They had to keep a safe distance from the monstrous body, yet at the same time not allow themselves to separate from their target.

  The ghastly form of Carlos adorning the Blue’s tail took shape as the pair neared the gargantuan fluke. A fast-moving current threatened to railroad them into the mass of netting surrounding the tail. They kicked against it, consuming more precious air, and inched their way closer to Carlos until they could see his dive mask.

  His back was to the whale’s body. To Juan and Fernando, Carlos appeared to be in a veritable fortress of nets. Not only was his arm lashed to the base of the whale’s fluke, but at this close range they could see that the current had pushed a hornet’s nest of loose mesh over his entire body. The whites of Carlos’ eyes peered through black holes of fishing net like some bizarre aquatic mummy. Worse, they could see his lips moving, his pained facial expression, but could hear nothing.

  Juan spoke first. “Topside, can you hear Carlos? He is talking now.”

  Only the mechanical rasp of their breathing broke the silence that followed.

  “Topside, do you copy me? Over.”

  More breathing.

  Juan and Fernando looked at one another in disbelief. Their communications link had malfunctioned, they thought. It wasn’t unknown to happen.

  Carlos continued to talk to himself behind the layers of nets.

  Then the Blue attempted to harness the full power of her fluke. She felt a hunger for oxygen after being tethered by nets so long beneath the surface. The movement had the effect of thrusting the baleen whale only ten feet upward in the water column, when under normal circumstances the same exertion would have sent her gliding gracefully to her next sip of air.

  For Carlos, the whale’s unsuccessful attempt at forward motion had the same effect of a heavy bookcase toppling onto him. Fernando was astonished to hear Carlos’ guttural outburst travel unamplified through ten feet of water to his ears. It sounded pitifully small against the vastness of the ocean.

  Juan held up a white slate with a message he had written in grease pencil. He waved it in Carlos’ direction, then held it steady for him to read: USE YOUR KNIFE.

  Behind his shroud, Carlos shook his head.

  “If he could use his knife, he wouldn’t still be there,” Fernando said. “We have to cut him out.”

  Juan nodded his head in agreement.

  They waited for a gap in the netting to open up between them and Carlos. Then, sensing they had a window of opportunity, they power-kicked across the remaining distance until they clung to the monofilament sheet that threatened to bec
ome Carlos’ tomb.

  They could feel the Blue writhing beneath them, minor tremors portending a great eruption.

  Juan scrawled another message on his slate and held it out for Carlos to read: TAG?

  Again, Carlos shook his head. Fernando swayed in the currents, using the net to hold him in place. He saw Carlos’ air hose threaded between sheets of mesh, hopelessly snared. Fernando managed to glimpse the gauge’s face. Enough for maybe five minutes at their current depth. Fernando relayed the information to Juan, who was already sawing his way through the outer sheets of webbing.

  The Blue remained placid.

  Three minutes later the pair had managed to slice their way through the loose nets to where Carlos was lashed to the whale. The sight of him was far from encouraging. Thick ropes of snarled monofilament snaked through his gear. Carlos’ eyes had begun to glaze over as he descended into a state of shock they feared would claim his life.

  Suddenly Juan swam away, off to Fernando’s right. Toward the Blue’s dorsal.

  “Juan, what are you doing?”

  “Keep cutting, I will get the tag and be right back.”

  “No!” But he was already lost from sight along the leviathan’s side. Fernando turned back to Carlos, who was too busy attempting to extricate himself to notice that Juan was no longer there.

  Fernando remembered with a jolt that he had a second dive knife attached to his vest. He handed the small blade to Carlos. The tool gave the trapped man a sense of purpose, and together the two of them worked on cutting him free. The grinding of serrated metal on thick monofilament could be heard over their breathing, and they were rewarded with the occasional snap as thick bundles of line parted.

  Juan was having difficulty locating the dorsal. He maintained a five- to ten-foot distance from the mammoth body, but it all looked the same to him. When the wall he swam along became white, he knew he had meandered to the belly. Then he would correct his course, swimming vertically until he was over dark hide once again.

  Easy to miss in poor visibility, the Blue’s dorsal fin was nothing more than a brief hillock punctuating a vast plane. Such a small fin for so humongous a creature, Juan thought.

  The red LED gave the tag away. He swam to it. His eyes took in the knife embedded in the blubber just below the dorsal fin, but his mind saw only the piece of electronic gear.

  His for the taking.

  He would finish what Carlos had started.

  Juan darted in. Gripping the implanted knife handle to steady himself, he added his own blade to the whale’s flesh.

  And the Blue’s body heaved against the nets.

  Fernando allowed himself to hope for the first time since finding Carlos. He had just hacked through two of the worst snarls, giving Carlos more freedom to operate. The biggest problem now was Carlos’ lack of air. Their full facemasks were not designed for buddy-breathing, meaning that it was not possible for Fernando to share his mouthpiece with Carlos in the event that he ran completely out of air.

  Another sawing motion and more monofilament fell from Carlos’ body. As more of the netting came free, Fernando could see what was responsible for a great, spherical bulge adjacent to Carlos, also tethered to the whale. Fernando’s dive light revealed a bit of orange peaking through the webbing: the marker buoy. Somehow it had become entangled with the whale when she dove.

  Then the behemoth rolled away from Fernando, dragging Carlos with her. The netting holding the buoy strained with the movement before giving way. Fernando watched as the five-foot-diameter sphere broke free and rocketed toward the surface. Reeling in the net’s slack with hundreds of pounds of force, the buoy peeled Carlos off the Blue’s body upside down by one fin-clad foot. His broken arm was still viciously snagged on the whale. Fernando was scared that he would rocket all the way to the surface and suffer an air embolism—a rupture of the lungs caused by ascending too rapidly—but Carlos jerked to a stop about ten feet above him, dangling there in one horrifying moment as the sound of his joints dislocating popped in succession. His scream was only translated into a burst of bubbles from Carlos’ regulator.

  “Carlos!” Fernando cried, and lunged for him, knife in hand.

  Juan returned from his expedition to the dorsal in time to see Fernando shoot forward. “Fernando, where—” He cut himself short as he saw Carlos, suspended upside down, and kicked up to him, ever mindful of the Blue.

  They worked furiously to cut their colleague free of the whale, but Fernando could see Carlos’ eyes locked in a glassy stare. His free arm dangled without purpose. His air was on zero.

  ABOARD THE WIRED KINGDOM SCARAB

  “One of the most widespread and persistent dangers facing marine mammals today is that of debris such as abandoned commercial fishing gear,” Anastasia led off. She stood on the Scarab’s deck in a black wetsuit, long hair in a ponytail, dive mask around her neck. The ocean sparkled and moved behind her as the cameraman zoomed in for a close-up of the TV show’s host on location.

  “So-called ghost nets can drift for years, killing everything in their path. Today this problem has become personal to us and to you—our faithful viewers who first alerted us to the wired whale’s entanglement only a few hours ago. So now we’re here in the Pacific Ocean about fifty miles west of Los Angeles to do what we can to save this venerable blue whale who has taught us so much about our own planet.”

  A confused look took over the cameraman’s face, focused on a distant point somewhere behind her. He made a slashing motion with a finger across his throat and lowered his camera. Shouts of “Over there!” and “What’s that?” called Anastasia’s attention. She put on her best this-better-be-good expression and turned around in time to see three scuba divers surface about seventy-five yards from the Scarab.

  Bobbing on the surface, Fernando ripped off Carlos’ mask and then his own. He placed his ear to Carlos’ mouth, feeling for breath. Nothing.

  “Where’s the plane?” Juan asked, spinning in a circle while looking upward, forcing his mind to accept the fact that the sky was empty.

  “Help me lay him flat. Inflate his BC,” said Fernando.

  “OK, but where is Héctor?” Juan scanned the water for the aircraft but saw only a boat.

  “I don’t know, Juan! I wish I knew. Carlos needs CPR, right now.”

  “They see us—on the race boat.”

  “Different plane, but it’s the same people who were on the whale yesterday,” Tara said. It was the first time she’d spoken since being seasick. Crewmembers within earshot nodded in agreement. “Same gear, same modus operandi,” she continued. “Seaplane, no boats, two or three divers with rebreathers. Somehow they manage to get to the whale before anyone else does.”

  “Whatever they’re doing, I doubt it’s helping my whale. It’s been thirty minutes since her last breath,” Anastasia said, consulting her dive watch.

  “Bring us to the divers,” Tara said. Anastasia nodded to a bearded man behind the wheel.

  “Not too fast, we don’t want to hit anybody,” she said. Even at a slow crawl, the Scarab made short work of the remaining distance to the men in the water.

  CHAPTER 21

  33° 36’ 25.8” N AND 119° 69’ 78.4” W

  Fernando pinched Carlos’ nose closed and started breathing for him. “Hold him still, damn it.”

  “The boat is almost here,” Juan said, distracted from his task of supporting Carlos’ inert form in the water so that Fernando could administer mouth-to-mouth and CPR; difficult to perform in water, but not impossible. But the wake from the approaching Scarab was enough to push Carlos out of position.

  “Forget the boat, Juan. This is it for Carlos—his last chance. Help me!”

  Juan took one more look at the Scarab—sunlight glinted off a camera lens over its deck full of people—and turned back to Carlos. The unconscious diver’s lips were pale blue. Juan steadied the body while Fernando, his dive vest full to the bursting point for maximum buoyancy, alternated between improvised chest compres
sions and mouth-to-mouth.

  After another minute of CPR with no results, Juan lost his patience. He pulled Fernando from the body. “It’s over, Fernando. It’s over.”

  Fernando swung a left hook at Juan’s head, missing. He broke out of Juan’s grip and went back to Carlos, attempting a final breath. Juan shook him violently. “Listen to me! Listen.” Fernando looked up from the dead man’s face. “We need to weight his body down so that they cannot find him.” Juan jerked his head toward the Scarab, which had just cut its engine and was gliding up to them.

  “But he is not dead—”

  “Yes he is! He is dead, Fernando. And if you do not want to go to jail, we need to get rid of his body.”

  “He would want to be buried at home—”

  “A burial at sea is respectable. And he would want us to succeed.”

  The crew on the Scarab was calling them directly now, asking them if they were okay. They could see one man hoisting up a first aid kit, another an oxygen bottle. The TV people would offer medical help, but there was no doubt that they would also turn them over to authorities. The divers had entered United States waters illegally, and they had harassed a protected marine mammal, a mammal that harbored a video of a murdered woman. Two—and now three—of their divers had been killed.

  “Okay,” Fernando agreed, mentally numb from watching a man die in his arms. They ignored the outstretched hands of crewmembers on the Scarab.

  They hurriedly shoved some weights from their belts into his vest pockets, disregarding cries of “Hey, what’re you doing?” from the boat and pulled the dump valve to release the air from Carlos’ buoyancy control vest. Then they pushed Carlos’ body below the surface and kicked for the bottom, head first, as the Scarab pulled up alongside them. Crewmembers’ hands swiped at the water where their fins had been.

  To the Wired Kingdom crew it looked as though the two divers were deliberately drowning their partner, dragging him below without a mask or regulator in place. Cameras rolled as the mystery divers retreated into the cloudy water.