Wired Kingdom

by Rick Chesler

  CHAPTER 36

  33° 32’ 34.8” N AND 119° 60’ 56.4” W

  “I know Fernando’s voice when I hear it.”

  “I hope you are right,” Héctor said to one of his new divers, without taking his eyes off the schooner. “We will know soon enough.” Héctor was grateful his men had been rescued. But by whom? Had the authorities already been called? It bothered Héctor that he could not pigeonhole this nautical curiosity. Old yachts weren’t typically used by any kind of law enforcement. And they were much too far from shore for day sailors; long-distance cruisers, maybe, but the black ship didn’t look like something the yachtie set would be caught dead on. Well used, not pretty to look at . . . almost looks like a pirate ship. Héctor told himself to look on the bright side. Two more able-bodied men to work with now.

  The seaplane settled lower in the water as it cut power a few yards from Pandora’s Box. Héctor looked back at his men, fresh recruits from Mexico who were eager to earn the bonuses offered them. They were itching to get out of the hot plane and get to work.

  The two divers were both about twenty-five years of age. They wore military-style buzz cuts. One complained of seasickness. After so long in the air, slogging along on the water like a small boat was anything but smooth.

  “Silencio,” Héctor said as they taxied toward the schooner.

  “But señor,” one of the men said as he strained to look through the plane’s small windows at the schooner, “there is no room for two more people in here. What do we do if it is them?”

  “Sí,” his associate said, wincing as his head struck the crate in the converted cargo space behind him.

  The pilot cut the plane’s engines. They bobbed and rolled and seesawed through the swells until they drew alongside the wooden ship. “Say nothing. Let me talk. Be ready to defend us if we are attacked,” Héctor commanded.

  ABOARD PANDORA’S BOX

  Eric Stein watched as the pilot opened the seaplane door and waved to them. Stein could see that Juan and Fernando recognized their leader immediately. The two rescued divers shouted strings of hyper-fast Spanish toward the plane.

  Stein couldn’t make it out clearly. He could see, however, that the two passengers inside the plane made no move to show themselves. He warned Pineapple to be alert. Piracy was rare in American waters, but not unheard of; they were fifty miles from land with only sail power to rely on.

  If the divers they had rescued were planning on some kind of coordinated attack with those who had just arrived in the seaplane, they were good actors, Stein thought. Juan and Fernando had tears streaming down their cheeks as they bear-hugged one another. Stein thought he could make out, He came back for us!

  Héctor's eyes swept across the people lining the schooner’s deck. He looked at Juan and Fernando and made a questioning gesture. Which one’s in charge? Fernando pointed at Eric Stein. “El capitán,” he replied.

  Stein was inwardly pleased that the pilot—the leader of this potentially adversarial group—could not contain his surprise once he laid eyes on him. This shirtless, dread-locked gringo with blood-smeared skin and tattered shorts was the leader of the unusual vessel.

  “Captain, we request your permission to board,” Héctor said in English. Pineapple smiled at once. He knew it would please Stein to be formally asked in the traditional seafaring manner. It also put his mind a little more at ease, since most pirates did not ask permission to board, even as a ruse.

  Stein nodded to a pair of young men standing by the tender vessel. “Splash it,” he commanded.

  Minutes later Héctor González stood on the rear deck, embracing Juan and Fernando.

  “Amigos,” he began, “I am so sorry I had to leave you.” He spoke in Spanish but his words were roughly conveyed by Stein to the group who had gathered to witness this curious reunion. “I had no choice. The authorities . . . I was counting on the good deeds of fine sailors such as these men.” He swept an arm at the gathered crew of Ocean Liberation Front.

  Juan said, “I knew you would come back for us, jefe. I knew it all along.”

  Applause broke out on deck as the men reconciled with one another. Then the three Mexicans huddled and conversed in muted tones.

  Héctor, still wearing a John Deere ball cap with mirrored aviator sunglasses and a dirty T-shirt that proclaimed, “Does not play well with others,” pointed to his plane. “Captain Stein, I believe you and I have something in common.”

  “What’s that?” Stein replied, eyeballing the two shadowy figures still inside the floatplane.

  Before Héctor could answer, a deckhand emerged from the cabin with two more twelve-packs of Tecate beer and said, “Secret stash!” Cheers as the cans were passed around.

  After Héctor cracked his beverage, he addressed Stein, who had already sequestered a second beer. “La ballena, amigo. The whale.”

  “You’re looking for the wired whale?”

  “Sí, señor. For two days now.” Stein couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was all out in the open now.

  “So it was you who set the net trap that almost killed the whale today?”

  “We did not mean to harm the animal, only to get the tag it carries. But we will do what we must.”

  Pineapple, who’d been listening in over Stein’s shoulder, stepped forward. “Why do you want the tag so bad?”

  Héctor looked at his divers, then back at Stein. “This, my friends, I cannot say. But our goals are compatible. You want the tag removed from the whale, yes?”

  A roar from OLF’s crew confirmed a response in the affirmative.

  “So do we. The only difference is that—correct me if I am wrong—you would prefer for the whale to remain alive after the tag is retrieved.”

  “Of course!” one woman shouted.

  But Stein shrugged. “It would be better if it lives, but if one whale’s death is the price we have to pay to keep all other whales free, then that’s the way it has to be.”

  Murmurs of agreement trickled through the gathering.

  “So besides rescuing your divers, how is it that we can help you?” Pineapple asked.

  “If you allow us to load our equipment onto your vessel, our plane will be much lighter and able to fly farther. I can perform aerial searches for the whale and hopefully direct you—with my men and special equipment on board—right to it.”

  Pineapple looked at Stein as if to say, I told you so. Stein frowned. “You could have murdered the girl in the video, for all we know,” he said.

  “True, señor, although I assure you that we did not. But if you prefer, we can part ways at this time. We are forever in your debt as it is.” The two divers nodded solemnly toward the crew circled around them. Beyond the ship’s rails, a mild, almost imperceptible breeze started up, dimpling the water’s surface. “We would not blame you if that is your choice,” Héctor continued, “but if your goal is to locate the blue whale and remove its tag, then my men and I will be of invaluable assistance.” He looked at his watch. “But we must hurry.”

  Pineapple addressed the crew gathered around them. “What do you think?” There were a few shouts of “Yeah!” and “Why not?” But there was also a chorus of boos.

  “Dissension in the ranks,” Pineapple said to Stein. “So what’s it gonna be, Captain?”

  All eyes were on Stein. The creaking of rigging and slapping of wavelets against the ship’s hull were the only sounds until Stein spoke. “I remember I had this girlfriend once, and her Dad was like fifty-five years old,” he began.

  Héctor, unsure where Stein was going, wore a confused expression on his face, but he interpreted for Juan and Fernando. In the plane, the pair of newly arrived divers waited with diminishing patience. One stuck his head out a window, straining to hear what was happening on deck.

  “He worked as a cop for thirty years or something. Anyway, one time I was at his house, and he was asking me what I was going to do with my life, what my plans were. This was after I had dropped out of college but before
I started the Front. I told him I wasn’t sure yet what I wanted to do.

  “He didn’t much like that, and he started calling me a bum and a loser not fit to take care of his daughter. I kept my cool though—didn’t lose my temper with him or anything—and then he started talking about his morning routine to get ready for work and what a great sense of order it gave him.

  “He told us that there were exactly thirty-seven things he had to do each morning in order to get himself off to work. Ordinary little things, like turn on the shower, shampoo, rinse, turn off the shower, dry off, get dressed, put his watch on, feed the cat, lock the door on the way out, start his car . . . stuff like that. But he knew the precise order of all thirty-seven of them. Ticked ’em all off like they were imprinted on his freakin’ eyeballs or something.”

  “Some life,” one of Stein’s crew said.

  Stein nodded. “I always thought it was sad. The guy died a couple years later of a heart attack. I couldn’t help but think that somehow, those thirty-seven things were the most significant part of his life, and yet in the end they added up to nothing. I don’t want that to be me.”

  A few rumblings of “No way” and “Hell no” made their way around deck.

  Stein pressed on. “I want to do something that matters. If I die young, then so be it, but I want to leave this world knowing that I died trying. That was why I started OLF. To make a difference in how people perceive the importance of the environment—at any cost.”

  Héctor nodded at Stein, as if to confirm the veracity of his story, but he needed no lectures on what was most precious in life. For him, such significance took the form of his Rosa and her tenuous hold on existence that pervaded every moment of his being. The gringo was concerned only about himself, Héctor thought, and how important he was considered to be by others. It was a kind of selfishness that, for the pilot, had died along with the birth of his daughter.

  Héctor nodded at the short-haired diver who had eased up to the schooner in the launch boat. The new diver waved amicably. A large wooden crate towered above him in the launch. The other man still waited in the plane. Juan and Fernando helped their new associate to load the crate onto the schooner’s stern deck. Héctor caught a crowbar thrown by his man in the skiff and approached the crate.

  “You might just get your chance to make history, amigo,” he said to Stein, wrenching the lid off the unmarked crate. All eyes were on him now as crew and divers alike gathered to have a look.

  Next, Héctor pulled away some plastic sheeting from some kind of metal tower. Stein and Pineapple continued to stare at the strange-looking apparatus, walking around it in a slow circle, taking it in from every angle as the remaining sides of the crate were pulled away. They could see it was some kind of weapon. Almost six feet high and mounted on a swiveling turret, the cannon was painted a drab shade of olive.

  “What the hell is that?” someone inquired.

  “Anti-aircraft?”

  “A LAW—Light Anti-tank Weapon?”

  The seaplane pilot chuckled as his new recruits continued to fuss over their package.

  “Have you not been to other parts of the world where commercialized whaling is still legal?”

  Stein felt incapacitated just looking at the weapon as the Antarctic memories it triggered came flooding back. “It’s a harpoon gun,” he said, softly at first. He repeated it, louder. “Grenade-tipped, probably ninety-nine-pound grenades, right?”

  “I see you know this weapon, Capitán,” Héctor said, surprised. “You have used one before?”

  Stein shook his head. “No. Had them used against me. It’s a modern-day commercial whaling harpoon gun. Not easy to come by in the West. Japan uses them . . . Norway, Iceland, Russia. How did you get it?”

  “eBay,” the pilot said, cracking a smile.

  Stein raised his eyebrows.

  Héctor remained impassive, then pointed to the bow of Stein’s ship. “With your permission, Captain, I would like to mount it.”

  Stein nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  “Hey!” It was Stein’s girlfriend, the one he’d just caught in the bathroom with the long-haired guy. “Eric,” she began sternly, “we’ve always been about protecting whales. Now you want us to shoot them? What the hell?”

  “We’re only going to shoot one whale, and that only if we have to. But if we want to show the world that this invasive tracking technology is unacceptable, then this is the way to do it.”

  “It’s going too far,” someone else said. “People won’t understand why we had to kill an endangered species.”

  “Think about it,” Stein said. “Every part of our lives are on computers now. There is nothing governments or corporations don’t know about each and every one of you. Your online banking, credit history, taxes, shopping, web surfing, searches, e-mails—they know frickin’ everything there is to know about you. Even the companies who babble on about their privacy policies and how they never sell any data—sooner or later the government will subpoena them and make them turn the data over.”

  “So?” Stein’s girl asked.

  “So? So, the citizens of this country are being tracked, just like this whale is being tracked. A digital leash. Only difference is the whale doesn’t deserve it, and it’s still early enough in the game to do something about it. So we’re either going to set it free, or sacrifice it to prevent the enslavement of more innocent animals.”

  No one said anything.

  Héctor nodded and his men gathered around the harpoon gun.

  CHAPTER 37

  33° 20’ 40.0” N AND 118° 26’ 41.0” W

  The Blue stopped swimming for the first time in hours, coming to rest on a green sea surface. She was in different water now. Shallower and more devoid of life than the nutrient-rich deepwater channels she favored when not being chased about, it even tasted unusual. She heard the sound of boat engines more frequently now.

  After taking in several deep breaths, she swam again.

  DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES,

  USC

  The second the clock struck five, Tara followed Anastasia out of her office and into the main lab. There were two students working there, but Anastasia asked them to leave. Then she went to a computer terminal displaying an old DOS-style interface. A cursor blinked next to the green letters, MS ANASTASIA REED. The program’s namesake entered her login credentials.

  “This is my telemetry program. I had a big breakthrough with it when the journal article came out last year. It stands for Marine Science Animal Network—”

  “And Satellite Telemetry-ASsisted Information Archives of Real-time Environmental and Ecological Data,” Tara finished for her.

  “Wow. How did you know that?”

  “What else could it stand for?” Tara joked. “Trevor told me about it when I went to get a copy of the murder tape.”

  “Okay. Well, this is where I get the telemetry stream,” Anastasia explained. “If the GPS transponder is working, we’ll see the coordinates right . . .”—she tapped some keys—“here.” Anastasia stepped away from the display to give Tara a clear view and waited.

  “It’s working!” Anastasia said. “These coordinates are different. That should be where the Blue is right now.”

  Tara reached for her cell phone as her gaze fell upon the critical numbers on the screen: 33° 21’ 83.0” N and 118° 12’ 42.1” W.

  “Where is that?” Tara wondered aloud.

  “I’m looking,” Anastasia replied, already digging for a marine chart under the piles of notebooks and technical handbooks that swarmed the lab bench.

  “Got it.”

  She cleared a space on the bench and unfolded a chart, laying it out flat. A concerned look occupied her features. “Oh, geez. I thought those numbers looked familiar,” she exclaimed.

  “Why?”

  “This is not good,” she said, shaking her head.

  “What is not good?” Tara was itching to call Branson with the coordinates. Her thumb rested on her ph
one’s keypad.

  “Let me double-check this,” Anastasia said, going back to the chart. She turned back to the screen once more, refreshed the coordinates, then went back to the chart on the bench. “It’s right,” she muttered, almost to herself.

  “Dr. Reed, please tell me where the hell the whale is!”

  The scientist got up from the chart and turned to face Tara. “Sorry, I’m being a tease. It’s uncharacteristic for such a large rorqual during this time of year, but she’s not far from Avalon Harbor, Catalina Island.”

  Like everyone who lived in Southern California, Tara had heard of Catalina: the popular summer spot with a cute little town, though Tara had never been there herself.

  “That’s pretty far away from where we last saw her, isn’t it?”

  Anastasia refreshed the coordinates again. “That kind of daily travel distance is at the upper limit of what Balaenoptera musculus can do, but it’s not unheard of.”

  “Let’s hope she’ll be tired from all that swimming and the underwater team can get to her.”

  “Underwater team?”

  “Special FBI unit on standby waiting for the coordinates. Excuse me while I make a call.”

  Tara speed-dialed her cell. Branson answered immediately. “Talk to me, Agent Shores.” His booming voice was clearly audible in the room even though he wasn’t on speakerphone.

  “Sir, the whale’s GPS data is transmitting again.”

  “Excellent. What’s its location?”

  “The Avalon end of Catalina Island.”

  “Are you serious? Catalina?”

  “Yes, sir. How soon can the underwater unit be there? Are they ready?”

  Branson nearly snorted into the phone. “Trust me when I say they’re ready. They should be there within the hour. And Shores, you should see some of the equipment they’ve got—they’ve got one of those—” Tara heard a male voice interrupting. “Okay, it’s show time, Shores.”

  “Let me read you the coordinates.”