by Rick Chesler
“Down,” the Mexican insisted. He looked over his shoulder. The FBI inflatable approached after having picked up the diver who had been injured by the dropped weight belt. The diver unsheathed his speargun and leveled it at Ernie’s face.
“Down now,” he intoned.
“Whoa, take it easy! Okay. Come down.” Ernie backed down the ladder. As he neared the bottom, some of the passengers became even more incensed.
“You’re blocking the air!” one said.
“Let us out!” shouted another.
“Sorry folks,” Ernie said, stepping off the bottom of the ladder into the main passenger cabin with his hands up. He wanted a drink. Just then the door to the control cabin swung open.
The captain appeared. “What’s going on, Ernie? Why aren’t they going topside?”
“Ask him,” Ernie said with a shrug. “He’s got the gun.”
The mercenary dropped from the ladder, spear at the ready. He swept the weapon around the main cabin, as if expecting someone to physically challenge him. No one did. Then he settled on Walter, who, in his starched white captain’s uniform, made for an easy target.
“Back!” the diver commanded. He stepped forward while Walter walked backwards into the control cabin, pushed back by the spear point a few feet away.
“What do you want? Who are you?” Walter demanded.
The diver gestured to the open hatch in the main cabin. “Close,” he said simply, followed by the more ominous, “Dive.”
Walter commanded Ernie to close the hatch.
The underwater pilot couldn’t believe it. He was being hijacked. Who in their right mind would hijack a tourist submarine?
The passengers were screaming now, hysterical.
“Dive now!” the diver said, his English perfectly comprehensible. He spun his speargun around to the passenger cabin, his other hand clenching a small dive knife guarding Walter’s direction.
Two passengers who had been creeping for the exit ladder stopped cold in their tracks. The sub had gone quiet at the sight of the weapon aimed at the passengers. The sound of Ernie clanging the hatch into place reverberated throughout the metal tube. It had a certain finality about it that pushed some of the passengers over a mental precipice.
Choked sobs emanated from somewhere near the stern.
“No, please—I can’t breathe,” a woman cried.
“Let’s rush him!” one man suggested. No one agreed with him.
“Close now. Dive!” the hijacker repeated.
Walter could hear Ernie banging the hatch door shut, but couldn’t see him. He hoped he wasn’t trying some kind of trick that would get somebody killed. “That’s it, Ernie, close the hatch. Just do it.” Walter watched as his woefully inadequate crew reappeared at the bottom of the ladder, having prepared them for what was shaping up to be a dive into Hell.
“It’s okay, people,” Walter said, “we’ve taken on some fresh air. You’ll be fine.”
The passengers’ collective response indicated they felt otherwise.
Walter stood nearly toe-to-toe with the armed stranger. “Where do you want to go?”
“Dive.”
“Dive where?”
“Mexico.”
In spite of the situation, Walter laughed. “The motors on this submarine are electric. Run on batteries. Not enough juice to get that far. Six hours running time, tops.”
If the hijacker understood the English being spoken, he was unmoved. He thrust the speargun at Walter’s neck in a menacing gesture. “Dive now. Then south.”
Eyes wide, Walter shuffled at spear-point back into the control cabin.
CHAPTER 43
OFF THE CATALINA ISLAND COAST
News of the commandeered sub burned across Catalina like a brushfire and replicated itself around the Internet like a virus. Media correspondents who were initially dispatched to Avalon to report live on the wired whale were now covering what they speculated—and later confirmed—to be the first-ever hijacking of a tourist submarine. To the rapidly converging journalists, it was an irresistible development, made even more so by the blue whale herself.
After sinking into a shallow dive, the Blue found herself next to the sixty-five-foot cigar-shaped machine. The whir of the sub’s electric motors was much quieter than that of the combustion engines on a typical boat. As the titanic rorqual glided past the underwater vehicle, a child, perhaps unaware of the danger he was in, plastered his face and hands against one of the sub’s many viewing ports, gazing at the whale outside. He became an instant Internet sensation, the undersea traveler’s expression being the perfect embodiment of humanity’s sheer wonder at the natural world.
The media were not the only ones interested in the hijacking. The FBI team quickly learned what had happened and were able to shadow the sub’s progress from the surface. Walter managed to get out a brief radio message that was punctuated with heavy impacts and forced grunts. The FBI could make out the words “Overpower . . . gun . . . southeast 159—” before the channel fell silent.
The FBI underwater unit shifted plans. Shepherding the wired whale was out; saving human lives in full view of the national media was in. The Hercules flew a search pattern, its spotters probing the depths for the sub’s tell-tale white glow while those in the cockpit monitored communications channels for more updates from the sub’s pilot. The cargo plane was trailed by the inflatable, once again carrying a full complement of FBI divers. Only the drone was left to circle the mighty Blue and her asset.
ABOARD KETCH ME IF YOU CAN
“Avalon, dead ahead.” Anastasia checked her compass heading and made a slight course correction. Catalina’s sprawling coastline loomed before them.
Tara pried herself from her FBI radio for the first time in ten minutes. She had learned from her assistant that the phone records search had turned up the victim’s last name: Wilkinson. She emerged from the protective shelter of the ketch’s cabin, doing her best to ignore the water rushing along the craft’s sides as she made her way topside and found Anastasia at the helm.
“Can this thing go any faster?”
Anastasia looked up from the wheel. “Not without a change in the wind, no, but we’re making good time. What’s the rush?”
“A tourist submarine has been hijacked outside of Avalon. The FBI team sent to deal with the whale has now been diverted to assist with the hijacking.”
“Is the Blue still there?”
“Yeah, but with only the drone boat to guard her now.”
“Why did somebody hijack a tourist sub?”
“Guess they wanted to play Captain Nemo for a day. Got me. But this means that once we get there, I’ll need to be more involved.”
“Shouldn’t be long now,” Anastasia declared, peering over her vessel’s bow.
Tara watched the scientist’s brow furrow with concern.
“What is it?”
Anastasia said nothing while she pulled a pair of binoculars from the console. She held them to her eyes and focused. “Damn it!”
“What?”
“OLF.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. Black schooner. And they’re flying the skull-and-crossbones now.”
Tara took a turn with the binoculars. As she focused in on the black ship, she could indeed make out the Jolly Roger fluttering atop the schooner’s highest mast.
The ketch continued to fly with the wind, and soon one of the island’s famous landmarks came into view. The Casino, an immense, white circular building with a red tile roof, built in the 1920s as a dance hall, continued to beckon visitors to Catalina to this day. Soon after sighting the Casino, the raft of whale-watching boats could be seen, like a floating city outside the harbor. Upon seeing the rag-tag flotilla, Tara was motivated to action.
“I need that laptop so we can see the Blue’s feed,” she told Anastasia. She recalled with a shudder Trevor Lane’s satellite-connected notebook—now on the bottom of the sea—from which she’d e-mailed the location of the
ir sinking boat.
“In the cabin. Should be on the galley table.”
Tara ducked back inside and found the machine. She lit the thing up and navigated to the wired whale’s webcast. Her breath sucked in sharply as she saw the cross carved into the whale’s hide. They’re getting close.
The Blue inhabited shallow water. Cascades of bubbles roiled across the creature’s camera; the light was intense. A cacophony of boat engines made her reach for the volume control. Still, the device transmitted, she thought. Her evidence was still intact.
Tara ran back outside and read off the Blue’s GPS coordinates to Anastasia, who adjusted the ship’s course accordingly.
ABOARD PANDORA’S BOX
“We have to get them off!” Pineapple said, lowering the tender into the water.
“We’re wasting time! We’ve got a fix on her, let’s go,” Eric countered.
Another crewmember, consulting a laptop, nodded in agreement. “Whale’s right over there,” he said, pointing off the bow. Other crewmembers, including the two Mexicans, gathered around the screen to watch.
Pineapple stood up from his job of lowering the tender and turned to Stein, exasperated. “Eric,” he began, “listen to me. What we’re about to do is highly dangerous. We didn’t know ourselves we’d be getting into this when we left the marina this morning. A lot of these people snuck aboard for a half-day party-cruise. We have to give them a chance to leave if they want to.”
“I suppose most of them would only be in the way,” Stein conceded. Pineapple nodded wholeheartedly.
“Okay people, listen up,” Pineapple said to the crew assembled on deck. “Things are about to get violent. We want to give everyone a chance to leave now who might get upset at what we’re about to do.”
“What are you about to do?” someone called out from the rear of the ship.
“We’re going to shoot the wired whale’s dorsal with the harpoon gun,” Stein declared. Immediately about a dozen people poured onto the tender, filling it to capacity. Stein was surprised to count the two Mexicans among them.
“¿Cuál es su problema?” Stein asked them. The divers told him to look at the whale’s video. The cross. A sign, they said. They wanted nothing to do with it. “So that’s it, you’re just going to leave? What about the reward money from your boss?”
“No reward is worth that,” one of them said. They both nodded and crossed themselves.
Stein snorted derisively. “It was your own divers who cut that cross into the whale!”
“There are some things we cannot fight,” Fernando said. “We leave you our equipment, as promised.”
Pineapple looked at Stein and shrugged. There was nothing they could do. Pineapple pointed the way to Avalon Harbor, and off the tender went, some of the other environmentalists in the small boat calling out, “You guys suck!” in their wake.
“We still have a rowboat if anyone else wants to get off,” Pineapple said. Six more people stepped forward. Stein felt a pang of jealousy at seeing his girlfriend make her escape with her new beau. She glared at Stein as she boarded. Pineapple shoved them off toward the harbor with instructions to give the whale a wide berth.
Stein looked around Pandora’s Box. Including himself and Pineapple, there were now six men to operate the ship and launch the attack. Should be nice and efficient, he thought, finding it hard to keep his mind from lighting on his girlfriend, now being rowed to Catalina where she would doubtless spend the night with that creep in some hotel. . . .
“The good news is that Juan and Fernando already got the harpoon ready,” one of the crew said. Stein looked away from the retreating runabouts. Let them go. The culmination of his life’s work was here and now.
Stein said, “Okay, good. Go up there and study it. Make sure you’ll be able to rig it again after the first shot is fired. Holler if you have any questions.” The young man skipped off toward the bow, and Pineapple stepped up to Stein.
“You ready for this?”
“Ready to let the world know that it’s not okay to enslave God’s creatures with technology for the benefit of a few already-spoiled rich jerk-offs?” Stein replied. “How many grenades do we have for the gun?”
“Six, but it’ll be hard to get that many off. It takes an experienced whaling crew sixty seconds to swap harpoons, but you can bet it’ll take us at least twice that.”
It was unfortunate for them that they’d lost the Mexicans, who had received special training on the use of the harpoon before leaving Baja. Although Stein and Pineapple had seen harpoon guns in action, they had always been on the receiving end of them, and had never actually fired one themselves.
“Not a huge problem. If we can score a hit anywhere near that tag, it ought to do the trick.”
“Right, but once the first one is fired, you can bet that the Coast Guard will be on us. Maybe even the pleasure boaters. We need to be effective with the first one or two. I don’t think we’ll get to fire more than that.”
“We’ll want to stay low and out of sight too, in case someone shoots at us,” Stein said grimly. Pineapple’s eyes widened somewhat but he said nothing, only nodded.
The ship was already moving, turning. Toward the Blue.
At the bow, the crewman Stein had assigned to the gun studied Juan and Fernando’s work. A neat coil of rope lay at the base of the weapon, and a grenade-tipped harpoon was loaded into the launcher. The explosives that would propel the deadly projectile were primed and ready.
A strangely empty-appearing Pandora’s Box approached the throng of boats. The Blue cavorted playfully on the surface, maybe a hundred yards from the prow. The whiny pitch of the drone made itself heard as the robotic sentry’s circular pattern brought it toward the approaching gunship.
“Any idea who that is?” Pineapple asked, peering out from the slit opening above the salon door.
Stein fixed binoculars on the approaching craft. “Looks pretty high-tech whatever it is.”
“I don’t see any people on it. They must all be below.” The drone continued to approach Pandora’s Box, breaking from its previous pattern.
“It’s coming right for us,” Pineapple observed.
“We could harpoon it,” Stein offered.
“Do you want to shoot the whale, or a boat?”
“Take it easy. I’m just kidding. Let’s see what they want.” That task was made unnecessary by the drone itself, which blasted a high-decibel message through its loudspeakers. “Attention watercraft: You are too close to the whale, which is now under the protection of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Move away from the whale. . . . Attention watercraft . . .”
A crewman appeared and knelt in front of the salon door, asking Stein what he wanted to do.
“Is the harpoon ready?” Stein asked.
“Looks ready to me,” the crewman responded.
“Is there a laptop visual on the Blue?” Stein asked Pineapple.
“Yeah. Continued surface activity, about a hundred yards dead ahead. Thick circle of boats around her.”
“Go ahead and turn us away as if we’re going to comply,” Stein commanded. “Then, after this FBI boat leaves, swing us back around and we’ll go in for the kill.”
The crewman was nodding and about to leave when Pineapple called out. “I found something,” he said, squinting his eyes at a message board on the Wired Kingdom web site. “People are saying here that the boat circling the Blue is an unmanned FBI drone,” Pineapple said, eyes widening. They could hear the drone bleating its message just outside. Apparently the robotic craft had idled up to the schooner and was not leaving.
A smile crossed Stein’s face. “See if you can get somebody to jump aboard that thing and disable it—rip off the antennae, the speakers, whatever damage can be done,” Stein finished. “Hurry up, it might not sit here for long. Hell, they might even have a microphone on that thing to hear what we say.”
“Aye aye, sir,” the crewmen said, grinning in return before running off.
“And kill that music,” Stein called out. The party tunes were silenced.
The schooner picked up speed toward the Blue.
CHAPTER 44
ABOARD PANDORA’S BOX
“Hey, you’re too close to the whale!”
“Get back!”
These cries were ignored by Stein and his crew, hidden as they were below decks, while Pandora’s Box plowed toward the wired whale.
Stein gave the command, “Fire!”
The first shot went high and right. The Blue didn’t even move as she basked in the surface sunlight. Neither did the twenty-six-foot cabin cruiser with the misfortune of drifting behind the Blue’s dorsal fin, in a direct path with that of the grenade-tipped harpoon. The projectile struck the cruiser astern, igniting a fireball which engulfed the rear half of the boat.
Screams of terror rent the air as two boaters jumped overboard trailing smoke and flames. A third made an attempt to quell the inferno with an extinguisher, but it was like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun. Soon that man, too, abandoned ship, leaving the burning craft unattended.
Other boaters hurled angry invectives and collided as they maneuvered to put distance between themselves and the ticking time bomb the burning boat had become.
Leaving Pineapple with the laptop at the helm, Stein half-crawled to his gunners on the bow. He was pleased to see them already at work loading another harpoon.
“Ready the gun,” he told them.
“Aye aye, Captain.”
Stein watched as one worked to load the harpoon into the launcher while the other primed the explosive. He was filled with pride at the sight of these two young men risking prison time to achieve his objective. He made a mental note that were they to survive, these harpoon gunners would be promoted through the ranks of OLF in a very tangible and visible way.