by Nina Mason
Cuan left the castle, doing his best to avoid notice. It wasn’t difficult, given that his fellows were all too deep in their cups to notice much of anything. Outside the cave, he surfaced. In the pale gray light of dawn, the water’s choppy surface resembled liquid slate. Effervescent foam, like floating lace, danced on the swells around Cuan. Soft white mist hung over everything like a bridal veil. How he longed to take a bride one day—an impossible dream given his clan’s attitudes about mixed sex couplings.
Pushing high on his tail, he spun in the surf as he scanned the coastline for any sign of oil. To his great relief, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. He sniffed the air, smelling nothing strange. He licked his lips, concentrating on the water’s flavor. He tasted the usual brine and that toxic undertone he detested, but nothing else of consequence.
In the distance, through the mist, a lighthouse beacon flashed intermittently, telling him he’d reached the span where the human ferry crossed from Skye to Lochmaddy.
The dream’s harrowing images returned to his mind. Entire schools of fish floated belly-up in the muddy surf while the bodies of seals, dolphins, and seabirds littered the rocky shore. He recognized the sloped, rocky shore and the solitary white cottage overlooking the loch—the only dwelling yet remaining on the unpopulated isle of Ronay.
As he scanned the landscape for any sign of oil, he thought about his father. Cuan had seen his death, too, in a dream the night before it happened. Had he known at the time it was more than a nightmare, he would have done something to warn his father.
Submerging, he swam on, instinctively steering toward the jagged coast where the tanker had run aground. Unbeknownst to the others, he’d gone there many times, stealing away when he was certain he would not be missed for long periods at a stretch.
Just as he was approaching the submerged cliffs of Skye, he sensed movement on his right. Looking to see what was there, he found a dolphin swimming alongside him. It was Delphine, a frequent playmate. He pulled up when he saw the fear swimming in her eyes.
Turn back, she said into his mind as they circled each other. Warn your clan. There is trouble ahead.
Her words tightened his chest. Is it oil?
Yes, and it’s spreading.
So, just as he’d feared, his dream had indeed been a glimpse into the future.
I must see it for myself. He could hardly sound the alarm at Tír fo Thuinn on the word of a dolphin, clever as they were.
Nay, Cuan. You mustn’t go there. It’s far too dangerous
I have no choice.
Leaving Delphine behind, he swam on toward Ronay. Before long, the water began to taste biting and rank. He also could feel the oil’s viscous slime coating his tongue and skin, seeping under the scales of his tail, and saturating his hair. He was starting to feel lightheaded, too. His gills were pumping hard, but bringing him little air. Realizing the oil was clogging his airways, he surfaced, gasping. As his lungs took over, he coughed up chunks of black goop. Reviled by the taste and texture, he spat into the water.
Soft pinks and blues streaked the morning sky. A ghostly sheen mirrored their reflection on the water, whose lacey white foam had turned a dingy shade of brown.
Mist shrouded the coastline, making the islands look as if they were floating on clouds. He briefly considered turning back before deciding to persist a wee while longer. He had little to report so far, after all, beyond traces of floating oil.
Sticking to the surface, he made his way toward one of the coastal lochs. Unused to swimming like this for long stretches, his muscles were already burning with the strain. He stopped to rest, treading as he surveyed the shore, still several meters away. Through the mists clinging to the bay, he could see Ketos, still held by the rocks, pitching on the waves. Oil now poured from the crack in the tanker’s hull. The sight both sickened and troubled him.
Waves swelled and broke around him in explosive bursts. He fought hard against the drag. A powerful undertow had him in its grip. Giving up the struggle, he let the current sweep him along. It swirled and churned, slamming him into jagged rocks that tore at his scales before dumping him on the beach.
He dragged himself out of the tumbling surf, fingers raking pebbles and wet sand, arms shaking with fatigue. Beside him were what he thought at first were dead seals. They turned out to be the bloated corpses of some of the crew—blackened by the grease, as he was. Their swollen skin, cracked in places, was oozing yellow puss. The smell was wretched. Flies buzzed all around. Fighting the urge to retch, he shimmied away only to slip down the slickened rocks. He tried to hold on, but found nowhere to grip. He landed hard on a grassy patch of sand—smack in the middle of a pile of dead fish. A whole school of dogfish coated in sludge.
The hum of an engine broke the silence. Some sort of small boat was approaching the island. As panic squeezed Cuan’s chest, he searched the misty horizon. Within seconds, a blue-and-yellow cruiser bounced into view. The side of the cabin bore a large English word: Coastguard.
His stomach tightened. If they spotted him, he’d have to kill them, which he would rather not do. Normally, killing humans bothered him little, but these men had done nothing to harm the ocean. In fact, they often stopped others of their race from committing crimes against the sea.
Frantically, Cuan looked about him for somewhere to hide. Then, he remembered the tidal cave he’d discovered on an earlier visit. He glanced toward the cliff in search of the curtain of bracken concealing its entrance. To his dismay, the cave was still at least a dozen meters away. Could he make it in time? He only knew he had to try his best.
Rolling onto his belly, he dug in and dragged himself toward the rise. It was hard going. Sand clung to the oil on his tail, weighing him down. He glanced again from the cave to the cruiser, now piloting toward the beach. His heart wrenched. If they landed now, he didn’t stand a chance of avoiding their notice. He looked up at the brightening sky. Perhaps he should try to summon a storm. Nothing too severe; just enough wind and rain to obscure their view of the island until he was safely hidden inside the cave.
As he prepared to call a storm, a new worry besieged him. What if the wind spread the oil, making the devastation worse? Abandoning the plan, he scrambled over the rocks toward the cliffs as fast as his arms could pull him along.
* * * *
Corey nearly jumped out of her skin when her cell started buzzing on the coffee table. Please, let it not be Peter and please, let the tanker not belong to Conch. Though she’d just completed her training to be the designated on-site spokesperson for such incidents, she felt utterly unprepared to handle the pressure. Heart in throat, she made a dash around the sofa and snatched up her cell.
“Hello?”
“We have a problem.” Peter’s typical blunt greeting was delivered in a Scottish accent softened by decades in the States.
“I’m watching the news right now.” Corey braced herself for the bomb about to drop on her head. “How bad is it?”
“A team from U.K. operations is heading over,” he replied. “We won’t really know what we’re dealing with until we have their report.”
Peter preferred the “Artful Dodger” approach to public relations, as Corey liked to call it—a classic strategy of deny, dupe, and delay. It was, in her opinion, the worst possible way to handle a crisis. She used to roll her eyes and ask herself if he’d learned nothing from the Valdez disaster. Then, wising up, she realized he’d learned a great deal.
In the immediate aftermath of the Alaskan spill, the news media described a coastline littered with dead animals, ruined vegetation, and a blanket of black stretching more than a thousand miles. Within a few months, however, the press reports coming out of Prince William Sound were practically love letters to Big Oil. Rather than criticize the carelessness that caused the wreck, reporters only praised Exxon’s preservation efforts—the fertile harvest of a well-sown spin campaign.
“Well…” Corey pushed the word through her tightening throat. “We need to tell the m
edia something…although I have no idea what that might be.”
“You’ll think of something,” Peter said off-handedly. “If you want to keep your job.”
Corey gulped to clear the thickness from her throat. Her head was spinning and her limbs suddenly felt like cement. “Will we be setting up a command center on the island?”
“That would be the plan.”
“Maybe with Ronay being so remote, the accident won’t draw as much attention as usual,” Corey offered, trying to sound positive. Not that she believed there was much cause for optimism.
“Sure thing, Pollyanna. Believe what you want.” Peter’s condescending tone set Corey’s teeth on edge. “But it’s also going to make the clean-up efforts all-the-more challenging. Rocky shores are the worst. That idiot captain couldn’t have picked a poorer place to run aground.”
“Is the captain still alive?”
“Yes, but he’s unconscious. He’s been air-lifted to a hospital in Inverness.”
Corey prayed he hadn’t been drinking like the skipper on the Valdez. Not that she really believed intoxication was the cause of what happened in Prince William Sound.
“How’d it happen, anyway?”
“With the only survivor still unconscious, nobody can say for certain,” Peter told her. “Some kind of freak storm, according to the coastguard. From the look of the damage, they believe the tanker might have been hit by one of those rogue waves.”
A shiver went through Corey. They’d said the same thing about the sinking in which her dad had drowned. She went into the kitchen, realizing only as she picked up her empty wineglass that her hands were shaking. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop her mind from calling up those awful images of the yacht her father had been aboard smashing against the rocks like a matchstick model.
“Does this kind of thing happen often in the Minch?”
“Often enough.”
His cavalier intonation made Corey’s blood boil. “Then why isn’t the strait better protected?”
“It’s what’s known as a political football,” Peter replied. “Apparently, the environmentalists over there have been petitioning for decades to get the Minch declared a Marine Protected Area.”
Corey looked back at the television. The image hadn’t changed. “I don’t get it. Protecting a diverse natural habitat like the Minch seems like a no-brainer.”
Peter laughed in that belittling way of his that always grated on Corey. Between derisive snorts, he said, “That’s because you don’t understand how things work—or, rather, don’t work—across the pond.”
On top of being indecisive, Peter could be a condescending know-it-all, which galled Corey to the marrow. “Then enlighten me.”
“While I’d love nothing more, we’ve got a plane to catch.”
Except for a slight wine buzz, Corey was ready to go. She kept a bag packed at all times, had no social life to put on hold, and owned no pets to drop at the kennel.
“When and where?”
“Long Beach. In just over an hour.”
Corey threw a glance at the digital display on the VDR. It was a few minutes after seven o’clock. Knowing Scotland was five hours ahead, she did a quick calculation. Now that the bomb had dropped, she was eager to get on top of things. “I’ll start working on a statement.”
“There’s something else you should know…” After an impossibly long pause, during which Corey dangled in suspense, Peter added, “Ketos is a single-hull Aframax.”
Corey took a moment to search her mental file cabinet on tankers. Aframax was the classification given to those with capacities under 120,000 metric tons deadweight. The name was based on the Average Freight Rate Assessment or AFRA. Aframax tankers were largely used in places where the harbors and canals were too small for very large crude carriers (FLCCs) and ultra-large crude carriers (ULCCs)—places like the Black Sea, North Sea, China Sea, Caribbean, and Mediterranean.
So, the fact that Ketos was in the North Sea didn’t seem all that unusual, though it did seem strange that the tanker was a single-hull carrier, since such models were all but obsolete, having been replaced for the most part by double-hull designs, which were less prone to leaks. Still, none of that explained the pregnant tone of Peter’s disclosure.
“Okay…but what’s your point?”
“My point,” Peter said with an edge to his voice, “is that, while the Minch has yet to be designated as an MPA, there are limits on the size of tankers allowed to pass through its waters. Nothing over ten-thousand tons of deadweight.”
An Aframax could carry more than ten times that amount. “How much was Ketos carrying?”
“That’s just it,” he said. “Nobody seems to know.”
This made no sense, as Conch kept careful track of its tankers and their activities. Corey’s insides squirmed with suspicion—and dread. “How could something like this happen?”
“Beats the hell out of me.” Peter sounded more unconcerned than seemed appropriate, given the severity of the situation. “A clerical error, maybe, or…”
Corey waited for him to go on. When he didn’t after an impossibly long pause, she prompted him. “Or what?”
“Well, that’s the jackpot question, isn’t it?” He expelled a heavy sigh into the receiver. “You’re going to need to come up with a damn good answer for it—before we land in Benbecula.”
Corey, buzzing with adrenaline, disengaged the call, hurried to her desk, and opened the bulging three-ring binder she’d brought home from the last training session. She would be the media point-person on the “away team”—the on-scene strike force of communications and technical specialists—and she intended to be as prepared as humanly possible. It would be her job to field calls and questions from reporters, prepare statements and news releases, and to take charge of the twice-daily press briefings.
The thought of bearing the mantle of so much responsibility made her stomach hurt. This wouldn’t be her first time in front of an angry mob of journalists armed with microphones and television cameras, but it would be her first time on the scene of an actual spill, and she was already feeling the pressure. Her temples were pounding and her gut felt like she’d swallowed a rock the size of her fist. What if she blew it? What if she lost her cool? What if she said the wrong thing? A bitter laugh escaped her stress-strangulated throat. Who was she kidding? She knew exactly what would happen if she screwed up.
Peter would kick her to the curb just as the bus was due.
Corey took a deep breath and returned her attention to her notes from the drill. The point of these bi-annual training exercises was to work out any kinks before an actual spill occurred—an inevitability given the fact that Conch transported more than a billion barrels of oil every day in the U.S. alone. The company’s North Sea operations were somewhat smaller, but still extensive.
Something struck her then like a boot to the gut: OPA90 required oil companies to file a response plan with the government for any tank vessel transporting product—meaning that, if Ketos was sailing without documentation, Conch was in violation.
She shook her head in dismay, heaved an exasperated sigh, and slammed the binder. How was she ever going to come up with an explanation for all of this that would satisfy the media?
Chapter Three
Inside the tidal cave, Cuan was curled on his side, a trembling, fevered study in misery. Everywhere the oil had touched him burned like acid. Blisters, boils, and ulcers covered his flesh, his lungs were inflamed and congested, and every few minutes, his intestines gripped and spasmed before expelling another searing burst of diarrhea. He had vomited so many times, his stomach was empty. Even so, he continued to heave, bringing up little more than watery black bile.
If he was going to die, he prayed it would be soon. He welcomed an end to this suffering. Yearned for it, in truth. Never in the whole of his life had he known such all-encompassing agony.
He’d been in this desperate condition for hours now. The oil had poisoned him, he was su
re. Nothing else could explain this sudden, violent assault on his system. He had eaten nothing since last night’s feast and, had he ingested a bit of bad fish or crab, it would surely have affected him long before this. It had to be the oil and, if it could plague him—a demi-god—to this extent, he could only imagine what affect it was having on the weaker creatures of the sea and their young.
Strange sounds were coming from the beach. He didn’t know what was happening, only that more boats had arrived. It sounded as if a mob had descended—and was making enough noise to rouse the gods. He shuddered to think what might happen if they found him. The cave’s entrance was hidden, though not invisible. Anyone determined enough could find it, especially if they caught a whiff of his sickness. He prayed no one would, pleaded with the gods to let him die in peace, and called upon the tide to carry his body back to the sea.
He dozed off for a time and the next time he opened his eyes, it was dark outside the cave. It was quieter, too. The only sound was the soft lapping of the sea against the shore. Had the men on the beach gone away?
The tide had come in, submerging him in a foot of seawater. Swirling around on all sides were brown muck and dead fish. The smell of the fish made him aware of his hunger. His stomach did a flip and began to growl. He wasn’t just peckish, he was ravenous. Sadly, everything edible within reach had been contaminated by oil. He tried to sit up, finding he was as weak as a newborn pup. His skin felt raw and fevered and his head throbbed something terrible.
He looked around the cave for clumps of lichen, but the water-etched walls were barren. He pulled himself through the tidewater toward the entrance, pleased to find it covered in moss. Tearing off a chunk, he stuffed it into his mouth. It tasted earthy and bitter, making him grimace as he chewed. Swallowing proved painful, but he ate as much of the spongy green fare as he could before looking around for something else. He cheered when he spotted a large patch of creathnach—a fringed red-brown lichen—growing just outside the cave’s entrance. With all due caution, he poked his head into the open; just far enough to see if anybody was about. Nobody was, thank the gods.