Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

  As Nic held the bubble-bow of his vessel face-to-face with the jellyfish – seemingly communicating on some alien level, the English business magnate focused his own thoughts and actions on the central tangle of tendril and cable. As delicately as a surgeon placing a stent in a blocked artery, he reached Neptune’s longest arm forward until the crab-claw clipper at the end of it could cut the mare’s nest of dead and living fibres apart. He extended a second arm equipped with pincers, and gently took hold of one end of the cable. Only when he had a firm grip did he start cutting the tangle of netting free.

  The huge jellyfish whirled into motion at the first touch. Like a fisherman at the end of a line, Richard seemed to feel the power of the creature’s reaction. Neptune’s head jerked down. The gripping pincers slid back along the cable as the jellyfish fought to escape. Like some kind of massive kite on the windiest of days, it heaved again and again. Richard’s concentration remained focused upon the Gordian knot of palp and plastic he was cutting. A third incision coincided with a fourth huge downward heave. The net tore free and the jellyfish was gone, its speed enhanced immeasurably by the fact that Neptune was now holding the putrid sea anchor which had been slowing it down so terribly.

  But even as it did so, Salacia’s warning systems kicked in. Neptune’s sonar started acting up, going haywire. As Richard looked at the monitors, trying to work out what on earth was going on now, Nic’s voice drawled through his headset: ‘Hey, Richard, looks like there’s something really big down there just below us. And it’s coming up towards us pretty damn fast. Far too fast for comfort, in fact . . .’

  Deep

  ‘It’s coming up!’

  ‘Can you see it? See what it is?’

  ‘Not yet. But I think it’s pretty big! Yes. I’m sure it’s big!’

  Sudden excitement at Poseidon’s stern filled the last moments before the eight bells sounded for the noon watch. Crewman Ironwrist Wan had managed to hook something at long last and now he was wrestling his fishing rod as though trying to land a whale. His mate, Fatfist Wu, was jumping in ungainly leaps around him, calculating whether Ironwrist would get his catch aboard before First Lieutenant Straightline Jiang called them on to duty, which he would do the instant the bell sounded or Captain Mongol Chang would be down on him like a ton of bricks. His nickname ‘Straightline’ referred to his preferred navigating technique. Her nickname, ‘Mongol’ referred to her leadership style – reminiscent of Genghis Khan’s on a bad day – rather than to her appearance or ethnicity, though she was notoriously ugly, in the opinion of her adoring crew.

  The thought of time running out prompted Ironwrist to depart from his much-vaunted artistry as the ship’s master angler and simply jerk his catch out of the littered sea. A sizeable tuna soared up out of the water and on to the deck where it landed with a considerable whack! to lie writhing in the last shade under the ship’s Changhe CA109 helicopter. The men gathered round it and Ironwrist shouldered his way through until he was crouching over it. He tried to get the hook out of its mouth but the fish seemed intent on biting off his fingers; so, aware of the speed with which noon was approaching, he whacked it over the head with the handle of his rod until it lay still. As soon as he was certain it was dead, he pulled out the gutting knife he had wheedled out of the ship’s cook on the promise of giving his catch over to be added to the pot for dinner.

  But somehow the fish didn’t look all that appetizing. It was well over a metre in length, and bore all the usual familiar markings of a Pacific Bluefin tuna. But where the body between head and tail should have been rounded, full-packed, almost like a shell for a twenty-five-millimetre gun, there were only lean flanks, dull grey sides, and a strangely distended grey-white belly.

  ‘That’s a sorry-looking specimen,’ said Staightline Jiang, arriving to stir up his watch before eight bells called them to their various duties.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Fatfist. ‘It looks like one of those pictures of starving African kids. All skin and bone and swollen belly.’

  Ironwrist just grunted and slit the fish open. Its stomach burst all over the deck, disgorging handfuls of brightly coloured plastic splinters. ‘Shit,’ said the ship’s master angler in disgust. ‘Would you look at that? This poor creature must have gorged itself to bursting on that crap. And the more it filled its belly, the more it starved to death!’ The others nodded silently in disgusted agreement. The sea heaved wearily. The ship rocked. The rubbish on the surface whispered against her sides. Eight bells tolled.

  ‘No wonder it was after your fingers, then!’ laughed Fatfist. ‘They’d have been its first square meal in ages.’

  ‘That’s enough. Get it over the side with the rest of the rubbish,’ ordered Straightline. ‘And get to your watch stations. Now!’

  ‘That’s the afternoon watch,’ said Richard as the bells rang through Poseidon. ‘It’s our signal to come up.’ Less than ten seconds had elapsed since Nic’s alarm warned of that massive, mysterious movement below and it was still sounding. Neptune was still holding the big square of netting cut from the Lion’s Mane jellyfish, but at least the sonar seemed to be settling down.

  ‘Good timing,’ observed Nic. ‘And weren’t we supposed to be testing the emergency surfacing routines?’

  Both men hit the switches designed to release compressed air into the variable buoyancy tanks forcing out the water which had allowed them to explore at this depth. Neptune and Salacia began to head for the surface, still side by side, like a couple of steel and crystal bubbles. As soon as they did so, Salacia’s alarm fell silent. Neptune’s sonar returned to normal. The tension eased. It had taken them three hours to get down – it would take them the better part of twenty minutes to return to the surface. Richard decided that clearing the deep of one more piece of dangerous rubbish was more important than winning Nic’s race, so he kept hold of the net and didn’t push for full buoyancy yet, though the submersible’s burden was slowing Neptune as effectively as it had slowed the jellyfish.

  Richard kept his eyes glued to the screens that showed what both of the vessels were experiencing as Salacia began to pull ahead. Neptune’s equipment was designed to look all around. Light, sonar – everything reached out in a sphere around the vessel, presenting as many facts as could be gleaned, warning of as many dangers. Salacia’s more advanced systems were designed to do the same, but were sensitive to a much higher degree.

  Nic’s systems might well be oversensitive, thought Richard hopefully, as fifteen minutes passed and everything on his monitors continued to read clear and safe while the two vessels raced on up towards the two-thousand-metre mark, the better part of ten metres apart now. Perhaps Salacia had misinterpreted a shoal of fish as one great entity. Or a deep-water current which had been given added weight by temperature, compression or salinity.

  To be fair, compression was unlikely, Richard allowed. Even at these depths and under this pressure, water compressed only fractionally. But an unexpected wall of dense, salty water might explain the disturbance to Neptune’s sonar too. Especially if the thoughts about escaping Arctic abyssal streams he had shared with Nic earlier were anywhere near the truth. Could the Oyashio Current, flowing south through the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska, be gaining enough force to push further south than ever, its water less salty than the Pacific Ocean’s, perhaps – but so much colder. Settling unsuspected into the lower depths, full of displaced Arctic life forms. Something must have brought that enormous Lion’s Mane jellyfish down here. The jellyfish and God alone knew what else . . .

  Which was precisely where Richard had reached in his thoughts when the giant sperm whale attacked.

  Richard’s first warning was that his sonar suddenly went wild again. His next was that Salacia’s warning system kicked in, flashing on to the monitors arranged above Neptune’s immediately in front of him. And his third was when the creature’s great square head came out of the shadows, heading across the video screens towards Nic’s vessel at breathtaking speed. At first, Ric
hard thought the two underwater research vessels were being attacked by a submarine. All he could see was a great square steely-grey shape heading in at flank speed. Then he registered a trail of silvery bubbles rising from the upper edge of the cliff-like bow. A long, narrow jaw that gaped, lined with tusklike teeth. And a tiny eye caught the light, glinting.

  Richard thought, My God! It’s Moby Dick! ‘Nic!’ he bellowed. ‘Look out!’

  The whale went for Salacia first, apparently because she was bigger, brighter and in the lead. But in fact Neptune was closer to the massive cetacean. Richard had only been holding the compressed-air controls at three-quarters. He jammed them both full open now, and watched Neptune gather speed and buoyancy in the readouts as she raced to the protection of her threatened sister.

  Providentially, Neptune still held the square of netting, and so the quick-thinking Richard was able to pull it across the whale’s face like a remote-controlled underwater toreador flirting his cape at a charging bull. The whale’s sonar – which, Richard realized, must have been interfering with his own – failed to read netting and the great square face charged straight into the bright strands which obligingly wrapped themselves around it, the lower end swinging into the gape of its mouth. Richard’s hands flew across the control console, making sure Neptune kept firm hold of the net while at the same time reversing the pressure so the vessel stopped rising and hung there, like a bright yellow bumblebee hovering beside a steel-grey locomotive.

  ‘Nic,’ ordered Richard, his deep voice regaining a matter-of-fact calm as his hands worked feverishly, ‘get up and out as fast as you can.’

  Even as he spoke, the door behind him opened and he felt rather than saw Captain Chang step into the control room. ‘I see this on bridge monitor,’ she snapped angrily, as though Richard and Nic were playing with the whale simply to irritate her. ‘I do not believe what I see. You catching a whale there, Captain Mariner? You mad?’

  Richard would have answered her, especially as he understood the unspoken message – you bring that monster near my command and there will be BIG trouble, gwailo! – but there was never any realistic chance.

  Because the instant the net tightened, Neptune was off on a wild ride. Richard watched the readouts unreeling with dizzying speed as Neptune rode the leviathan down, then he frowned and began to ease air back into the buoyancy tanks, playing the whale in a way that Poseidon’s master angler Ironwrist Wan might have done. But seeking to distract the monster, keep it in play until Salacia was safe with no real thought of actually landing the thing. He was no mad Captain Ahab, after all, seeking to revenge the loss of his leg. And he had no intention of pulling the net off the Lion’s Mane jellyfish simply to leave it wrapped around a sperm whale if he could help it.

  Within moments Richard had lost sight of Salacia and was only able to track his companion using Neptune’s GPS system. His cameras showed only darkness above and below. More darkness off to the right. And on the left, the heaving flank of the massive creature he was lashed to. There was a brownish-grey wall of flesh, beginning to fold into wrinkles like elephant’s skin. The creature’s right eye. Then the readouts were going haywire as the whale reversed its run at two-and-a-half-thousand metres and started heading for the surface. He glanced up at the timer. The mad ride had lasted five minutes so far. Salacia would be up in ten minutes. ‘You’d better get ready to retrieve Salacia,’ he said to Chang.

  ‘I stay,’ snapped captain Chang. ‘I make sure. Pessonarry!’ He might own the vessels, said her angry tone. But she was in command and responsible. And after years of working with her, he was more than happy with her decision.

  The two signatures on the GPS were moving well apart now. And Neptune’s signature was well clear of Poseidon’s position too. Which was just as well, because it looked from Neptune’s depth gauge as though the whale Neptune was attached to was heading full-speed for the surface. What the fearsome pressure changes were doing to the deep-sea vehicle’s more delicate elements as the pair of them hurled up through the water, he hesitated to guess. How that damage would be compounded by a short flight through the lower air, he didn’t even want to think about. But somewhere in the back of his mind he began to compose a very interesting letter to his insurers at Lloyd’s of London.

  Suddenly the cameras facing away from the massive grey flank were showing the deepest indigo colour. Ink-dark water was speckled with that blizzard of plastic, as though the whale were dragging Neptune through the heart of the Milky Way. The first sunbeams stabbed down like silvery blades, but still there were only blues – the blues of the sky at a frosty dawn – no reds or yellows yet. Richard switched off all the lights and the net went from orange to brown at once. But moments later, the first yellow wavelengths got through and the nearly indestructible plastic began to return to its accustomed colour.

  An instant later, the whale tore through the surface and Neptune was in flight. The huge square head jerked one way and then another. The momentum of the heavy little explorer simply tore the net free of that huge rocklike cliff face of dark grey flesh and, trailing the bright plastic after it, Neptune tumbled across the lower sky and plunged back into the water.

  As the silvery surface closed over Neptune once again, Salacia’s cameras showed the surface opening as she came up at more or less the same spot as Ironwrist’s tuna. Richard fought to regain control of his vessel, at the same time scanning the readouts for warning of the whale’s return. But all was calm and quiet. ‘Could you call Ironwrist down to relieve me?’ he asked Captain Chang. ‘He can bring Neptune home. I want to go up and see Salacia aboard.’

  Ten minutes later, Richard was up on the foredeck, watching as Salacia was winched up into her place. Then he stood beside the deckhand, whose duty was to loosen the bolts and open the vessel’s main hatch. He reached in and helped Nic step unsteadily out on to the deck. ‘Wild ride,’ he observed as he helped his friend down on to the stretcher that would carry him to the decompression chamber – just in case the atmosphere in the experimental bathyscaphe had varied enough to pump nitrogen into his blood.

  ‘From hell’s heart I stab at thee,’ answered Nic wearily but with a half grin as he lowered himself on to the stretcher. ‘For hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee . . .’

  ‘Is that Ahab from Moby Dick?’ asked Richard, walking across to the decompression chamber beside his friend at the heart of a group of scientists and physicians. ‘Or Khan from Star Trek?’

  ‘I’ll count my legs and get back to you,’ promised Nic as the door of the decompression chamber clanged shut behind him.

  Richard slapped the top of the metal canister with a laugh, then walked on down the length of the ship, past the bridge house and the Changhe helicopter, past the wet patch on the deck that was still littered with plastic from the tuna’s belly and down to the aft rail. He leaned against this, narrow-eyed, looking away west towards Japan, watching for the first sight of the returning Neptune.

  The high sun abruptly vanished behind a low overcast and a squally shower came whipping across the water towards him, carrying in its skirts a storm of decomposing bags and packets, setting the half-rotted bottles, cups, wrappers and plastic can-rings bobbing and dancing on the polluted water.

  ‘We have to do something about this,’ Richard said to himself. ‘Before it’s too late. If it isn’t too late already . . .’

  Bottle

  Richard Mariner was probably the tallest person standing on the south side pavement of the Route Fifty Road Bridge overlooking the Arakawa River to the north of Tokyo a year later. He was certainly the wettest. Even his wife, Robin, who stood by his side, was holding an umbrella – supplied by the Mandarin Oriental Hotel together with the Rolls-Royce waiting to whisk them back across town into the warmth and dryness of their suite when the ceremony was over. Everyone nearby held an umbrella. Even Dr Tanaka – who also held the big plastic bottle which had once contained a grape-flavoured Cheerio soft drink that he was proposing to throw into the foamin
g water. And the TV crews who were going to film him doing it.

  Only Richard refused to arm himself against the thunderous downpour, preferring to rely on the double cape of his Burberry trench coat and the collar that turned up as high as his steely blue eyes, almost hiding the white line along his cheekbone, which resembled a Prussian aristocrat’s duelling scar. A scar caused by the typhoon Straightline Jiang had taken Poseidon straight through some years earlier, brought into unusual prominence this evening by the cold, the blinding lights of the local representatives of the World’s press and the deafening, penetrating deluge.

  During the year since Richard had stood at Poseidon’s after-rail and decided to do something about the pollution in the north Pacific, it seemed never to have stopped raining. Everywhere around the Pacific rim had seen biblical deluges leading to catastrophic flooding. And yet the threatened rise in overall sea levels had not been so apparent; not even in Tuvalu, the tiny mid-Pacific island nation so famously at risk. In the mid-Pacific archipelagos, in fact, there had been falling water levels and fearsome drought instead. And to make things worse, it looked as though this year was going to be a particularly powerful La Nina year; with the threat of more torrential rainfall and further flooding in many of the already sodden areas, combined with drought and falling water levels in the islands.

  But Dr Tanaka had a theory to explain all of these things – one that he was going to test during the next few months. With the help of Heritage Mariner, Greenbaum International, Richard, Nic, Richard’s wife and business partner, Robin and Nic’s daughter, Liberty – and the big plastic Cheerio bottle. ‘As Greenbaum International Fellow of Sustainable Energy and Climate Change at Tokyo University, it has been my task to study what is currently happening to the climate of the Pacific Basin and to predict its likely results,’ Dr Tanaka was explaining to the earnest young woman from Nippon News, his voice carrying over the roaring of the waters above and below to the umbrella-sheltered teams from Kyodo News, Radio Japan NHK, CNN, NewsCorp and the BBC. ‘And as the first major test of the theory I have formulated, I propose to place this bottle in the river here.’