Wired Kingdom

by Rick Chesler

  The remaining diver leveled out at a depth of forty feet, taking stock of his situation. Where was the whale? The water clarity was not terrible, but not good, either. He was suspended in an empty blue void, the bottom being too far below him to discern while the surface—not actually visible—was just a haze of white light.

  He tried without success to raise his boss, the pilot, on his communications link. Not sure what to do, he checked his compass and kicked off to where he thought he last saw the Blue. He could hear the creature’s haunting moans, but they offered him little in the way of directional clues.

  A rigid-hull inflatable boat carrying six FBI divers parted the spectator craft, its loud-hailer booming for everyone to make way. As it approached the Blue, the drone boat moved aside, controlled by the FBI divers’ colleague in the Hercules.

  “Be advised, you have divers in the water,” came the word via radio from their eye in the sky. “One possibly injured in a collision with the drone.”

  The inflatable slowed as it neared the Blue. The enormous creature was entirely submerged now, but still visible a few feet below the surface. A body appeared on the waves, its boxy rebreather making it easy to see. The FBI boat pulled up to it, pistols drawn.

  The diver’s skull had been broken apart by the drone’s hull. Gobs of his brain drifted away in the currents, drawing schools of anchovies to congregate in a frenzied boil to pick at the gray matter. One of the FBI divers, experienced at recovering corpses from many different bodies of water, retched at the site of it.

  But their primary mission today was not body recovery.

  “We’ll keep an eye on the floater. Go for the asset,” came the word from above. The man piloting the rigid-hull boat was all too happy to turn away from the drifting corpse and head closer to the Blue.

  Out of habit, they scanned the surface for tell-tale bubbles, but they knew that the diver down, like his deceased partner, also wore a rebreather, which meant that there would be no visual trace of his presence below.

  Shouting came from the spectator boats. A few had satellite laptop connections and had been viewing the whale’s live feed. Earlier there had been some clowning around as people tried to show off their boats—and the swimsuit-clad people on them—for the whale’s camera, but the drone had put a stop to that.

  This was something different.

  The men in the Hercules also had a monitor on the whale’s web-cam, and they advised their divers in the boat. “The remaining diver is approaching the asset. Repeat, remaining diver is approaching the asset. Make your entry now. Over.”

  The divers entered one pair at a time. The first was dropped off on one side of the Blue, then the boat circled around the whale’s head. Once on the other side, the next two divers flipped backwards over the edge of the inflatable. Two men remained in the boat—one to drive it and the other to act as lookout and remain on standby.

  Underwater, the two pairs of FBI divers began to converge beneath the Blue. None of them had ever dived with an animal the size of a commuter jet before, and for a couple of minutes they all hung there, staring at the spectacular beast while assessing their safety related to its presence. Its entire length was not visible at any one time because they could see only about forty feet in the greenish murk.

  They were too close to the fluke. This became immediately apparent when the whale stirred and moved forward. Only a casual motion of its mighty tail, the Blue’s movement was enough to send the FBI men tumbling in the after-wash of the massive appendage.

  They regained their bearings, giving a wide berth to the tail. As the whale’s dorsal slid into view, the team spotted the figure of the Mexican diver, his silent but bulky rebreather visible while he faced the whale.

  Like his associate before him, this diver had given up on the notion of using the tag’s intended release mechanism. He possessed neither the time nor the patience for screwing around with precision electronics.

  The diver unsheathed a large knife. Guiding him to his mark was not only the tag itself, but two knives already protruding from the whale’s blubber—a memento of Juan’s and Carlos’ earlier attempts to cut the tracker free.

  The diver was about to make his incision when the whale surfaced for breath, abruptly leaving him in open water . . . face-to-face with two divers wearing stock yellow rebreathers. One of them had been facing the other direction when the whale ascended, and now his buddy urgently tapped his shoulder. He turned around, but not before the Mexican saw the dark blue lettering stenciled onto his rebreather: FBI.

  He looked up to make sure he was clear of the Blue. The beast rested on the surface a safe distance away. A wall of boats bobbed beyond that. He couldn’t see the drone that had killed his partner, but he knew it was up here somewhere. Time to move.

  He spun around. Two more FBI divers were only feet away. He hollered into his facemask mic, “Jefe, I am being chased by four FBI divers. Meet me on the surface by the whale, now!” The fleeing would-be thief bolted for the surface as he saw one of the FBI men aim a speargun at him.

  To get to the surface he had to work his way out from under the Blue. Once clear, he broke the surface and spun about wildly, looking for the seaplane. He didn’t see it, but between the water draining from his mask and the lack of time to look, he wasn’t alarmed.

  He put his face back in the water, one arm stretched out in the direction of the whale, as if he could stiff-arm the mega-ton beast away should it roll into him. But right now it was the humans who worried him most. Looking down he saw that the two pairs of divers had become a quartet. They came for him now in a tight-knit group, ascending purposefully.

  The Mexican repeated his desperate message into his mic. No reply was forthcoming. He didn’t wait for one. Glancing back down at the approaching feds, he removed his weight belt. Designed to counterbalance the positive buoyancy of his wetsuit and air tank, the belt was strewn with 5-pound squares of lead. He dangled the belt from a hand, held away from his body so it wouldn’t snag on his person on the way down. Then he let go of it.

  The lead missile sank so fast that the FBI divers had no time to avoid it. One of them looked up just in time to have his full facemask shatter on impact. Since his regulator was built into the mask and not a separate unit, he was now without an air source, his bloody face instantly encased in cold seawater.

  The injured diver shot to the surface, trailing a gushing burst of bubbles as his breathing gas emptied into the surrounding water. Essentially blind, he was followed closely by the FBI diver who had been paired with him. They reached the surface some distance away from the suspect, who now had only two professional divers to immediately contend with.

  Those two divers were armed, vengeful, and coming fast.

  He checked the sky. Where is the plane? The drone boat whined as it leaned into a turn at the farthest point of its elliptical trajectory.

  Suddenly the Blue slapped her gargantuan fluke against the water. The percussive explosion reminded everyone in the vicinity—especially the hunted diver—that they were dealing not merely with a set of GPS coordinates at sea, but with a wild animal that possessed a will of its own.

  The diver who had been hit with the weights was being rescue-towed by his buddy on the surface away from the whale. The Mexican knew they wouldn’t come for him.

  But the other two had also come up, and their spearguns were pointed his way. One of the aquatic feds pulled his mask off and demanded, “Diver, FBI—stay where you are!”

  CHAPTER 42

  ABOARD DEEP VIEW

  The paying passengers aboard Deep View clamored for their money back. It wasn’t that they didn’t get to see the wired whale. The vantage point from which they observed the animal was first rate, affording them a prime glimpse of one of nature’s supreme wonders that they would likely never experience again. But after forty-five minutes in a packed vessel that bordered on claustrophobic to begin with, even witnessing an incredible sight was not enough to stifle their mounting unease.<
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  The sub’s seating was designed such that there was a porthole viewing window for every one to two passengers. Normally this ensured that everyone had ample opportunity to see without craning their necks or not being able to see over someone’s head. Ernie had so packed the vessel, however, that people were standing in the narrow space between the benches on either side of the sub. Once in range of the “ginormous whale,” as one boy put it, window space was quickly occupied. A fight broke out after a man forcibly removed a twelve-year-old boy who had broken free from his parents to get a better look at the whale.

  Ernie tried to maintain order but it quickly became apparent that he lacked on-the-job experience. Passengers complained of the heat, and that it was becoming more difficult to breathe. Some demanded to speak with the captain himself.

  Walter, who was worried enough about 100 tons of whale accidentally slamming into his packed sub, became even more concerned after hearing a knock on the control room door. He had told Ernie not to disturb him while submerged unless it was an emergency.

  Walter consulted the sub’s instrument panel. Depth was okay. No alarm lights. He peered out of his bow-mounted viewing port. The Blue was on the surface. He could see her on sonar too, but preferred to keep the animal in visual contact. Satisfied things were under control for at least the next few seconds, Walter opened the door.

  “Hurry, close the door,” Ernie said, stumbling inside. An angry mob stormed behind him. Walter heard shouts of “Take us back” and “I want my money back.”

  “Ernie, what the hell is going on? There’s way too many people on board!” Walter exclaimed after seeing the overcrowded cabin for the first time.

  “Sorry, Cap’n.

  “You should be, Ernie. I’m going to bring us back. You know what a Coast Guard citation would mean for me?”

  “That’s fine. We can bring ’em back now. They saw the whale.”

  “Ernie, if they ask for their money back, we’ll have to give it to them. There’s twice as many people back there as there should be.”

  “Okay, well, hopefully they won’t all want their money back.”

  “Get out there and tell them we’re preparing to surface. And stay out there with them. You brought ’em aboard. Make them feel safe. The last thing I need is a mutiny on my hands, not to mention some kind of reckless endangerment lawsuit.”

  It was the Blue who gave the hired diver a chance to escape. As the two speargun-wielding FBI divers split up to approach him from either side, the whale executed a shallow dive, arching yards and yards of her broad back out of the water before slipping beneath the waves.

  She submerged beneath the humans and then glided gently back to the surface. The Mexican found that he now had the Blue’s vast bulk between him and the divers from the elite underwater unit. What’s more, he was damn near face-to-lens with the whale’s web-cam. Perhaps his people—wherever they were—would see that he was literally reaching for their reward and come to get him.

  He moved closer to the cam, dive knife in one hand. He took a last look around for his pursuers but couldn’t see them. He carried a diminutive snub-nosed speargun strapped to the inside of one calf, but it was no match for two well-trained divers carrying full-size shafts.

  The Blue exhaled a cloud of spray, lolling peaceably on the surface. The diver surveyed his threedimensional surroundings—underwater, sea-surface and air. His biggest threat was either the Blue itself or the swiftly approaching drone boat. The sea-going robot had broken from its elliptical path. It now made a beeline straight for him at a high rate of speed.

  The diver decided he had just enough time. He scissor-kicked toward the living wall, reaching out a gloved hand, and grasped the million-dollar piece of technology on the whale’s dorsal fin. Steadying himself, he prepared to commit the knife in his other hand when his eyes picked out the fresh scar leading away from the tag to one of the embedded knives. He could hear the drone bearing down on him. He could discern bits and pieces of English in a broadcasted message issuing from the ASV’s loudspeakers: “FBI . . . stop . . . whale!”

  He plunged his knife, more of an attempt to wedge the foreign device from the whale’s body than it was to slice it cleanly off. The whale executed a shallow dive as the knife entered the blubber at the base of its dorsal. The diver hung on, riding the beast as it submerged.

  Underwater, the Blue accelerated. The diver tightened his grip. Should he be torn from the whale, he could easily find himself in a position to be smashed by its fluke. If the whale dove too deep, however, he would have no choice but to let go.

  He was relieved when the ocean-dweller leveled out at a depth of only twenty feet. He tried to take away the tag as he was dragged along but the animal moved too fast. Were he to loosen his grip for but a moment he would be cast off the mammoth body.

  As he looked up from his botched cetacean surgical procedure, he spotted the FBI buddy team, ten feet above him and to his right. Their eyes were as wide as saucers as they reached for their spearguns, far too late. He flew past them attached to the massive creature like a remora on a shark.

  Then the Blue set herself in a near-vertical posture and rushed the water’s surface until she breached. Her entire body except for the fluke cleared the sea.

  Breaching was common behavior for medium-sized whales, such as the grays, which migrated up and down the Pacific Coast. But blues rarely breached, possibly due to their enormous bulk.

  The congregation of mariners was delighted by the spectacular performance, although not all of them could see the Blue’s hitchhiker. The diver hung on, still clinging to the tag and his embedded knife, sheets of water draining over him as the whale reached the apex of her jump. But as the Blue started to fall back into the water, she canted over backwards such that the diver was falling back first, his eyes to the sky.

  Then the laws of physics kicked in. The knife came loose under the diver’s increasing inertia, and as the diver separated from the whale, his knife dragged across the Blue’s hide in front of the dorsal, slicing it but finding no real purchase. Although he had no way of knowing it at the time, the wound his knife made ran perpendicularly through the existing incision left by Juan during his earlier attempt to net the leviathan. The resulting disfigurement was a perfect cross; a crucifix symbol hacked into the whale’s back.

  The diver fell from the whale. Viewers of the Blue’s live web-cam feed around the world saw the unreal view of blue sky with a cross carved into the image’s foreground. The Latino community immediately started talking. It was as if an image of the Virgin Mary had appeared on a tortilla in East Los Angeles or in the pattern of a jaguar’s coat in Costa Rica.

  For the diver, perhaps the cross represented his own miracle, for he was uninjured as he fell into the water and the hundred-ton body landed beside him rather than on top of him, missing him by mere feet.

  The Blue sounded, diving deep. She left the diver alone on the surface, cartwheeling in her backwash. The Mexican knew that it wouldn’t be long before the FBI divers realized he’d been shaken loose from the whale and came after him.

  To make matters worse, the drone was back, angling toward him, now flashing an array of strobe lights atop its unmanned bridge. If that weren’t enough, the Hercules cargo plane lumbered by overhead, a helmeted crewmen peering out of the open bay doors through a pair of high-powered field binoculars.

  The diver tried his comm unit. His string of urgent Spanish went unanswered.

  Then something unexpected happened.

  As he treaded water, calculating how long it would take him to swim into the mass of spectator boats where he might be able to lose himself among them, perhaps even board one and hide without being detected, a white flash appeared just beneath the surface. For a split second he thought it might be a large shark. He felt a stab of adrenaline jolt his system, and then his brain saw that whatever it was, it was much too big for a shark, even a great white.

  The alabaster form grew larger, rising. The diver k
icked back to avoid being directly over it. Then it materialized from the deep, and he could see that it was a man-made object: a submarine.

  Water cascaded from the sub’s rounded edges as it pushed its way to the surface. At first the diver assumed the underwater boat was coming for him, another weapon at the Americans’ disposal with which to hunt him down. But as he appraised the curious ship, he wasn’t so sure.

  The whole sub was white—not a very stealthy color. Sections of the outer decks were plastered with no-slip grip tape, and a stainless-steel railing ran around the entire perimeter of the vessel. It was the sub’s name, however, that really gave it away.

  A blue logo was airbrushed on the sail, or conning tower, and although the Mexican couldn’t understand the words Deep View, the swirling bubbles around the letters told him it was a tourist craft. In fact, he’d seen them before in Cabo San Lucas—not exactly the same as this one, but close enough.

  He put his face back in the water. The two FBI divers were looking up at him, maybe thirty feet away, swimming fast.

  He swam for the sub and kicked hard up over the slippery deck until he could grab the rail. He used precious seconds to rip off his fins and shed his rebreather. Then he stood up, holding the railing for balance.

  People on the boats had noticed the sub, and now they pointed at him. He could hear both the whiny, high-pitched buzz of the drone and the low rumble of the Hercules. He didn’t bother to look for them. He scanned the sub’s smooth, glistening surface. There was no opening of any kind except for the sail. He had almost gotten to it when a hatch flipped open at the top of the sail, and a cap-covered head appeared. The diver saw the metal rungs leading up to the man.

  He began climbing.

  “Wait a minute, pal, we’re not taking on passengers,” Ernie said. The Mexican continued up the ladder. When he was eye to eye with Ernie at the top of the sail he jabbed a finger downward. “We’ve got people who want to get out,” Ernie protested. Exasperated cries came from the passengers below.