The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel

by David Poyer

  But someday, Sara thought, nursing a mug of reheated cocoa without cream or sugar, something would go bang, or someone would misjudge one of those racing mountains, and over she’d topple. End over end, snapping spreaders and sheets and the long bones of those within. Or perhaps simply cut into one of these gigantic waves at a deeper angle than usual, and never emerge.

  Her lids drifted closed. The boat lurched; she snapped awake as the overturned mug cascaded chocolate dark as blood over the tabletop, running first toward her, then hesitating, pausing, recoiling as the bow surged upward. She snatched a damp towel.

  Bodine, at the opening of the forepeak. Hanging by long arms, legless, brachiopoid. He stared with eyes like burned-out holes. “Lars up here?”

  “Haven’t seen him. Probably aft.” The Dane had taken Perrault’s cabin without comment, simply moved his sleeping bag in.

  “Mind getting him up? I’m picking up sonar.”

  “Sonar? Not radar?”

  “You heard what I said.” He turned his gaze away, still hanging there as the boat romped. Kimura peered sleepily out from behind blue cloth, gaze unfocused; then the curtain twitched closed again.

  She blinked and rubbed her face with the towel, wincing at the rancid mildew stink. Then reached her way aft, hunched to keep her center of gravity low.

  Madsen was snoring. She shook him awake and told him what Bodine wanted. He stared blinking, lids crusted with brown matter, blond beard stained dark. His look was sunk away, as if she stared down at him through many fathoms of seething brit. He unzipped the dirty flap of his sleeping bag and worked chilblained feet into sea boots. “Be right out,” he mumbled.

  When she followed him into the forepeak, only gradually could she make out the veteran in his accustomed seat. “What you got?” Madsen asked. Triggering a keep-silent, warding-off gesture as the bent figure glared down unblinking at the screen.

  Finally it straightened. “Sonar. Close-range, high-frequency pings. Some low subsonics, too,” he muttered.

  “What kind? What do you mean?”

  “The kind ice makes. That full-spectrum grinding. And a funny clicking … not really sure what that is.”

  Sara rubbed her face, remembering the colliding chaos that had all but swallowed Anemone; that even yet held their captain’s body. If the creatures of sea and sky had not yet picked his skeleton clean. Bodine oozed a knob around, spiraling in on a flickering spoke that danced, danced, slowly solidifying. “Can’t be far off. Not getting it this loud.”

  “How far? How many?”

  “All I can say is, more than one. We’ll see them today, we hold this speed. So best get ready, figure out what we’re going to do.”

  Madsen nodded slowly.

  * * *

  Preparations took several hours, including a long time just trying to get the engines running. They started, but shut down after two or three minutes. Finally, crawling and worming through the engine room, she and Bodine discovered why. The strainers that filtered their cooling water were frozen into bronze-jacketed popsicles. As he chipped at them, and she carried boiling water from the galley, Madsen was supervising preparations on deck.

  They heard the detonations from far off in the fog. Low-pitched booms, spaced minutes apart. By then they were on deck, the sail reefed hard as they slid between spaced swells. Sara balanced gripping the forestay as Anemone dipped and rose, scanning the sea as it emerged like rippled lavender silk from low-hanging fog. Madsen had rigged a black wire along the stay’s leading edge, running all the way to the masthead. He’d cautioned them to keep their hands away from it.

  “Ice,” she shouted, and threw a glance back to make sure Lars, at the wheel now, heard. He lifted a hand. They hissed past a corroded, slowly rolling wedge of seamed malachite and ultramarine as it heaved, surrounded by a mass of greenish foam and smaller bobbing bits. A thin transparent slick rolled to and fro beneath her boots, mixed with ice fallen from the rigging. Her heart hammered in her throat. Her fingers clutched and loosened on the icy stay as another detonation boomed out, closer, though she could see nothing.

  The fog thinned. They slid past another slowly heaving raft of ice to emerge into air not clear, yet not completely impenetrable.

  The fog seemed to rise, to stream upward, revealing like an ascending stage curtain a scene miles across, littered with floating bergies, backdropped with the icy rampart of a great flat-topped floe. It shone like pink quartz in the reddish radiance of a low-burning sun layered with thin strips of cloud like wrappings on an infected wound. In the foreground, dozens of dark shapes huddled low in the water, herded together and facing outward, as around and among them sliced the swift hulls of the kill craft. Far off to the south, a ghostly castle rose above the fog that hung close to the sea in that quarter: the many-storied upperworks of a much larger ship than any they’d seen thus far.

  “Oh my God,” Tehiyah said, from a few feet aft. Sara gazed without speaking, frozen to the stay. As they watched a thing darted from the bow of one of the killers, and a thin instantaneous line drew itself across air and sea. The boom echoed away into the fog. The speedily extended line arrested with a second, muted detonation, piercing a shining-black mass that instantly recoiled, flukes and tail lashing dark water into a welter that within seconds was tinged pink. Behind and beyond it a second killer rotated in swift tight circles, fastened by a second line to something beneath. That line vibrated, churning white where it met black sea, yet showing nothing of that which fought for its life below.

  “Get set,” Madsen called from aft. Both women flinched and half turned. Sara wanted to look away, but couldn’t.

  Half a mile distant the flurry where the line led down turned saffron, then bloody. The minke emerged, its slim sharp shape queerly small to the eye after the more massive rights and humpbacks. Still fighting, but obviously weakening. The ship ranged up to it, towering above it. A tiny figure bent over the gunwale, aiming down. The distant pop of a rifle, negligible, almost comic after the deeper detonation of the harpoon gun, snapped over the water. Then another.

  She let go a shuddering breath and took another, deep, trying to steady herself as with a rustling clatter the main shook out its reefings and the deck beneath her heeled, picking up speed. Across the nearly flat water, lee’d by the masses of ice that half ringed it, were scattered smaller bits that were nonetheless large enough to punch through Anemone’s hull.

  Behind her the remaining crew were taking their positions. They wore hard hats and flotation vests, exposure suits and safety harnesses. Eddi snapped a carabiner to lash herself to the mast, cameras dangling like cavalry pistols on fluorescent lanyards. Hy and Tehiyah were laying out hanks of mooring line. In the forward hatch Bodine weighed tear gas grenades, one in each hand. Their gazes met. He called, “Maru Number 1, off to port. Another killer to starboard. Can’t see who yet. That big one off by the berg, that’s the factory ship. Ishinomaki Maru.” He hefted one of the gray canisters. “Know how to use these?”

  “No.”

  “Pull this pin and throw. Fast and hard. Get it up on their deck, as close to the pilothouse as you can.”

  “You throw, Mick. I have to watch for ice.”

  “Hold on, we’re coming around,” Eddi called, apparently relaying word from aft. Sara braced her boots. Anemone heeled. With a hoarse cough the engines began to hum, and she accelerated in earnest. Sara sank to her knees, clutching the rail of the bow pulpit, bracing her knees against the deck as it tilted farther and farther, trying to cant her off into the greenblack sea that rushed past faster and faster only a few feet below. She scrabbled and only barely caught herself before she slid over.

  When she looked up again the whale was almost on them. Dead, or perhaps still dying; rolling, with the sea breaking over its bloody, blown-open back. The harpoon had penetrated only shallowly before exploding, scooping a hole the size of a wheelbarrow. Blubber and flesh was peeled back, layers beneath layers, raw red and yellow beneath graphite, revealing deep with
in the pumping bellows of blue-veined lungs. A spring of blood welled up in pulses and lapped like a pool and ran down its sides, turning the water around the dying creature a dull red through which sinuous shapes maneuvered and twisted, bathing in scarlet slantwise prisms of sunlight that searched the green depths. Half turned on its side, pointed head parallel to the boat’s course, the animal’s tiny eye blinked up as Anemone rippled past, pressed by a cloud of blue and bronze and white. When she looked back Eddi had the camera on it. “You’ll be the last one to die,” Madsen yelled as they left it in their wake.

  Ahead, other minkes cut from right to left, breaching to breathe in quick snorts that left puffs of vapor shredding into the mist. She caught their scent, heavy, fishy, with something else all of itself, a rich smell like fresh-turned earth that once sensed could never be forgotten.

  Behind and above her the main refilled with a shuddering snap and Anemone leaned in the opposite direction. The engines were whining now. Another detonation rolled across the uneasy sea, and she lifted her eyes to see one of the kill ships lined fast to yet another writhing victim. Its grayblue hull and white pilothouse and black stack jarred into recognition with a physical shock that quivered in her stomach like nausea. She called back, “Is that Number 3?”

  Eddi yelled from the mast, “They’re just killing them and leaving them to float. One after the other…” Glancing back, Sara saw tears were freezing on her cheeks, the camera shaking as she tried to focus on a struggling animal. It was biting at the line as other whales surged alongside, nuzzling at it as if trying to help dislodge the cruel needle lodged in its flesh. Then Madsen yelled something incoherent, or maybe the words were just blown away by the wind and the thunder of the sail and the whine of the turbochargers. Auer yelled, passing it on, “Sara! Lars wants you back aft. He’s going in.”

  She bent and scrambled along the lifeline, past Bodine in the open hatch, past Eddi, past the coach house and the winch heads like miniature castle keeps protruding from caked snow-ice, and tumbled into the cockpit with a whoof as she slammed into the lid of an open locker. She crouched, catching her breath and sorting out impressions coming almost too fast to process. Then they snapped into a coherent whole.

  Madsen was steering for the line that stretched between the newly harpooned minke and Siryu Maru Number 3. The whale, which was streaming a red trail but did not seem to yet be mortally injured, and the kill ship were at full speed, tossing up foam as they plowed together over the furrowed surface. Anemone, on a broad reach with the main drawing hard and engines whining at full power, was planing like a skipping stone, rapidly overtaking. Madsen stood at the wheel, tongue between his teeth, staring fixedly at the rapidly growing ship, which reeled as it powered through the sea. The whooshing howl of its machinery grew. A smoky braid twined itself into the clear Antarctic air. Men were gathering on the upper deck, clustering in yellow slickers along the rail.

  And now, looking up, Sara understood the reason for the thick, strangely rough strand of dark wire at the leading edge of the forward shroud. That Madsen had warned her to keep her hands away from. She caught her breath at the audacity of the plan. And the danger.

  The steel hull rose high above Anemone’s deck. The huge roaring bow wave that swept out from it pitched them as they cut through. But Madsen kept the throttles slammed forward, turbines howling. She crouched, gripping the winch as the slanting stay crept up on the taut harpoon line, drawn ruler-straight from the squat gun to the flurrying, speeding whale.

  But just as the cutter was about to touch it, the fleeing whale surged, breaking the surface to the left. The line slacked, drooping into a catenary. Anemone rose, then plunged downward.

  She shook along her whole length, quivering as the forward stay, the main bracing of the mast, bent inward, tensioning the mast like a drawn bow.

  Then, quite suddenly, the stay snapped. It parted in a flurry of singing wire-ends, aluminum tubing, and suddenly released Kevlar as the whole jib- and jib-furling assembly exploded. The mast sprang back upright with a note like a plucked string, but octaves deeper, shaking the boat from stem to stern and whipping Eddi’s head forward and back as she struggled to unstrap herself. Looking up, Madsen flung up an arm as the mast tottered. “Look out!” Dorée screamed, ducking for the companionway. Sara too crouched, unable to move as the mast vibrated above them, hesitated, then began to topple.

  But not completely. It snagged, quivering, as if caught by some invisible force. In fact, she couldn’t quite see why it hadn’t kept toppling backward, to crash down on their heads.

  Then she understood, just as Madsen cut the throttles and reached for the mainsail halyard. Before he could trip it she was on him. “No! That’s all that’s holding it up! The mainsail, pushing forward!”

  “Oh, shit—you’re right.” His face bleached as he realized what he’d almost done. He shoved her out of the cockpit. “Get forward. Do something!”

  Not a very specific order, but she grabbed Eddi as the videographer finally freed herself. They slipped and scrabbled on all fours along the rocking deck as the jib raved and thundered above their bent backs. The clew caught her a slam on the head that if not for the helmet would have knocked her silly. At the same moment a jet of water crashed down, searching the forecastle, then steadying on Eddi. It slammed her to her belly and skidded her into the chainplates, where she clung helplessly as the fire hose battered her.

  The jet lifted, swept forward. Sara dropped prone and got a grip on her shipmate’s plait and hauled her bodily inboard as Anemone staggered back into the creaming wake of the kill ship. She stared down for an infinite second into light pearl varied with green and darker green, and a pure white where it clashed with itself and surfaced, like boiling, liquid glass. But where it roiled and foamed to the left of the wake, behind the fleeing whale, that froth was tinged crimson. Above them sailors shook their fists and called imprecations in Japanese. One reared back and pitched, and a small object left his fist and turned end over end, suddenly exploding with a loud crack and flash and a puff of smoke.

  “We have to drop the jib,” Eddi panted, lying full length beside her. “Drop it and use the halyard. Tie it to something.” Sara, looking up, saw she was right. The whole immense jib was flailing and beating with superhuman power as Anemone slowed, turning her rump to the wind.

  As she reached up and grabbed one of the darting, shaking sheets her shoulder was nearly yanked out of its socket, but she held on and Eddi grabbed it too, and they worked their way forward, dragging and gathering the flailing fabric down to the deck inch by inch, then yard by yard.

  The engines whined again, and spray burst over the cockpit. Lars was backing down, bulldozing Anemone’s flat chisel of a stern into the oncoming seas, putting just that much more wind pressure on the tottering mast. Then they were on their feet, hauling the slick sodden sail to their breasts. They stuffed it into the open hatch, where Mick gathered folds in as fast as they could shove them.

  The heavy stainless halyard shackle came down at last into Sara’s hands. She pulled the lanyarded pin to snap it open, fought it up to the bow, and snapped it into the bullnose just before her hands gave out and she slid back gasping, numb, beaten, bruised. Her fingers left bloody smears on the thick braided line, the icy white deck. Tehiyah and Hideyashi were still hauling, the winch clattering through the wind and the crash of the seas. The halyard drew taut between masthead and bow, and Sara sobbed, wheezing, as the mast ceased its drunken sway and stiffened once more into its wonted vertical.

  “Sara, good work.” Hideyashi gave her an admiring smile. Madsen slapped her shoulder, and she winced. He ruddered the bow around into the wind. Anemone coasted to a halt, idling, rolling as she picked up the chop.

  “You were wonderful,” Dorée said, teeth gleaming. Then those thick glorious eyebrows gathered into a frown. “Oh—you’re bleeding!”

  “Yes, my hands—”

  “No. Your leg. Wait—let me unzip this.”

  Sara looked
down to see a jagged cut welling bright blood from her upper thigh. Dorée hooked a finger through a tear in her suit. “What in the world did this?”

  “I don’t remember. Everything was so confused—”

  “They threw a firecracker,” Eddi said.

  “Not a firecracker,” Lars said, face hard. “Some kind of grenade.”

  Tehiyah glared at the ships. “We didn’t hurt them. We were—we were nonviolent.”

  “Sometimes that only gets you so far,” the new captain muttered.

  Sara bent for a closer look. It stung, but didn’t look like anything a Band-Aid wouldn’t cover. “I’m all right. Really. Let’s—we need to stop them. They’re still—”

  “Still killing,” Eddi finished for her, and stood. “She’s right, Lars. We’ve got to fuck up this murdering shit. Or die trying.”

  Madsen glanced aloft, then across the water to where Number 3 had slowed, winching in the line. The minke, exhausted, wallowed at its end. Once more the puny crack of rifle shots echoed from the distant bergs. “All right,” he said, and pushed the throttles forward again.

  As Anemone surged once more Sara caught an undulation on the water some distance away. It was difficult to make out and she shielded her gaze. Close together rolled several brownish, irregular, lumpy shapes, like immense, half-awash driftlogs. The seas seethed about one end, which rose and then fell, rose and fell. Then from the midst of it jutted a queerly sideways jet that flamed in the dusklight like red fire.

  “Sperm whale,” Hideyashi said, lowering binoculars. “He’s been there awhile. Just lying off.” He made as if to pass them to her, but she waved them away.

  “I should bandage that,” Auer said, looking at Sara’s thigh.

  “Let it bleed, Eddi. It’ll clot soon enough.” She followed Madsen’s anxious eye aloft again. “Will it hold, Lars?”

  “I don’t know. We ought to get another line on it.”

  “Then let’s do it,” she snapped. “Hy, give me a hand? We’ll take the other halyard forward too. That’ll give us two lines bracing it. Will that be enough, Lars?”