The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel

by David Poyer

  “We might need more,” he said, still looking aloft. Then pulled her toward the wheel. “But you’ve done enough hard labor. Steer; I’ll go up. Aim for the factory ship. If we can get ahead of them and toss some tear gas aboard, we might still do some damage.”

  When she stepped into his place and looked over the bow she saw that indeed the factory ship was closing. Still a couple of miles distant, but it was bow-on and a white mustache showed at its stem. Sara did a careful check all around the compass and advanced the throttle. Then a little more, aiming midway between where the larger ship was coming on, and where the still-hove-to Maru Number 3 was winching the bloody minke from the sea. Tiny men bustled about, lashing its tail to the rail with rust-colored canvas straps as the kill ship leaned to its weight.

  “We need to escalate,” Dorée said, beside her.

  “Escalate to what?”

  “I don’t know. But they’re throwing grenades—we’ve got to push back. Not let them drive us off. If we had something like a laser, to blind them—”

  “Blinding people, Tehiyah—?”

  “Oh, not permanently! Just to dazzle them for a few minutes. So they couldn’t see to aim the harpoons.”

  Sara was about to ask but then what will they escalate to when a Jacuzzi-burst of lime and cream foamed from Siryu’s screws. It began to move ahead, dragging the dead minke. The power of the kill ship’s engines must be immense; it was many times the mass and height of Anemone, of steel, not composite, but it was faster and just as maneuverable.

  Then she looked ahead, and her fingers tightened on the smooth stainless wheel. “Lars—look.”

  “No,” Eddi murmured, beside her.

  Some quarter mile ahead of the swiftly accelerating, queerly pointed bow, two fins sickled the disturbed sea. Two spouts leaped shredding into iridescent mist. One was larger; the other, smaller, so close beside the first as nearly to be touching. They vanished for seconds, then reemerged a hundred yards farther on, fleeing the oncoming hunter. But that vessel was moving ever more rapidly. Sara cursed as she saw it was overtaking the creatures that fled, surfacing and submerging, but with ever shorter periods between disappearances. “Lars! I need to speed up—”

  “Not now,” he shouted back. He and Kimura were precariously counterbalanced ten feet up the mast, wrestling a wire rope toward the crosstrees. “Keep her steady. No faster than this.”

  When she looked forward again she nearly wrenched the wheel over. Something heaved and rolled just beneath the surface a hundred yards ahead. Then it spouted, and that crooked, single, leaned-over blow told her what it was.

  An immense, squared-off bulk, far larger than the more streamlined minkes, was heading across her bow, toward the kill ship and the mother-calf pair it was pursuing. She clung to the wheel, disbelieving. “Eddi?” she croaked, and turned to see the videographer already zooming in, the camera lens flashing as it pointed nearly into the low ruddy sun. “Hideyashi! Do you see that?” But the Japanese was trying to toss the heavy shackled end of the wire rope over the crosstrees above his head.

  “Turn away from the wind,” Madsen shouted, shading his eyes up at Hy’s struggle. “Put your stern to the seas.” She put the helm over obediently, but kept glancing back to where the whale had lifted its tail, then slid under in a swirling vortex. Only then did she put its creamy yellowish hue together with the one they’d seen earlier.

  But no. That had been days ago, hundreds of miles away. This couldn’t be the same individual.

  “Isn’t that the same one we saw before?” Eddi asked around the camera. “The first time we saw whales? The one I named Cappuccino?”

  Sara shook her head. “I don’t see how, Eddi—”

  “That was a loner too. A fucking big ’un. With sort of a shredded-looking tail, too. Just like that.”

  She didn’t answer. She hadn’t noticed any shredded tail, either on the previous whale or this one. Though as it had raised its flukes to dive, one might have seemed slightly ragged.

  A chorus of yells. The wire had circled the mast above the spreaders and the men were running the bitter end forward. She brought the bow back to where she thought it ought to be, but the gray-and-black bulk of the factory vessel was nearer, a looming presence against the shining lavender and blue shadows of the berg. Heavy smoke jutted from its stacks, and an industrial clanking rang across the water.

  When she looked back at the kill ship she blinked. Something huge ranged alongside it, bulging the water. It traveled at incredible speed, straight for the queerly curved prow. “Lars!” she yelled. “Hy! Look at Number 3!”

  “It’s turning away,” Auer breathed, beside her. Sara saw this was so; as she watched, the recurved prow wavered and began to foreshorten as the ship refused the imminent impact of that onrushing mass. A spout erupted near the kill ship; the sea burst apart as the whale lifted a blunt monolithic head, then plunged again.

  “Oh no,” the videographer breathed. “It’s not going to—”

  “Ram them?” She could hardly breathe, standing on tiptoes at the wheel. “I don’t—I don’t think so—”

  A puff of smoke, and a detonation rolled across the roiling sea. A black line drew straight against sky and ice, and ended at the onrushing tons.

  Eddi screamed. The camera jerked, but came back on target. Sara went rigid, unable to comprehend. Then found it all too easy. Protected or not, a sperm whale represented enormous profit. So much bigger than the minkes. So many more tons of meat, plus sperm oil, precious lubricants. Yes, they were witnesses. Could testify, but in what court? The whalers had shown how well they’d insulated themselves, in layers of public apathy, political connection, national self-interest.

  “Get up on step, Sara. Head over. We’ll get footage, anyway.” Madsen came aft, wiping grease off on his suit. He looked as shaken as she felt, even more bitterly, helplessly angry.

  Then Tehiyah said, clinging to a shroud and pointing ahead, “What are they doing?”

  Sara snatched the binoculars as she pushed both throttles to full power. The turbines wound up as she searched. “What? What?”

  Auer said, “I saw its tail come up. So big … then it toppled over, over the line.… It went taut … then it snapped. Just—snapped.”

  The circle of the glasses steadied for a second, and Sara glimpsed men gathered around a line that hung limp, its frayed, ragged end swinging free a fathom above the sea. Cheers rang out from the accelerating sailboat, but immediately quenched as the kill ship swung back to its original course, picking up speed once again after the fleeing mother and calf.

  Lars told her to forget Number 3, to steer for the oncoming factory. It looked immense now, and she swung the wheel over with real trepidation. These people were ready to harpoon sperm whales in the presence of witnesses. Might it not be convenient for those witnesses to disappear, ground under by “accident” beneath the overhanging bows of the oncoming ship? But Anemone rode smoothly as a speedboat now, curving sinuously as any water snake as Sara maneuvered to avoid a rocking floe. The men and Tehiyah busied themselves on the starboard side, flemishing out the mooring lines. “We’ll get gas on her forecastle, blind the pilothouse crew,” Bodine yelled back. “Then fuck up her props. Cripple her, and she can’t follow the killers to process the meat. Get in close!”

  The factory ship grew rapidly, but Sara saw she’d misjudged its speed; it was drawing ahead; she was coming in on its quarter, not its bow. A low-hanging curtain of wet-smelling fog blew over them. When they emerged it was much closer. She came left to follow it, and a massive, sloped ramp, like something down which one would drive a tractor-trailer, came into view. It gleamed with what she realized after a moment was blood. Its metallic stink rode the wind. A minke was being winched up into the cavernous maw. From above the slowly inching carcass scuppers vomited pure red back into the sea.

  They all fell silent. Except for Eddi, who sobbed as she filmed. Even Dorée was speechless, staring up at black ramparts like an evil keep they h
ad no hope of breaching. The very wake behind the thing tumbled carmine, and the ship emanated a terrible miasma of decay and rotten meat and feces steeped and layer-caked into a dreadful dense effluvium. The old slavers must have trailed such a stench, so honest sailors could smell them miles downwind.

  Tehiyah turned away, choking into the sleeve of her mustang suit. “It’s horrible … you can smell the death. If only we could record this smell for you too. It hangs over the ocean, so thick it seems nothing can live that breathes it for long.”

  “Along the port side,” Madsen snapped at Sara from where he rove their mooring lines into one of the blue fenders she’d last seen hanging off Anemone’s side at Ushuaia. “Get a hundred yards ahead. Then come hard right and cut ’cross her bow.”

  “That’ll be dangerous, Lars. Do we have to—”

  “They’ll turn to avoid. We’ve got to drop it right under her forefoot. If you can’t do it—”

  “I’ll do it,” she snapped, and bumped the throttles to make sure they were all the way forward. The unaltered keen of the turbines told her they were.

  Forward, under the massive bulwarks less than a hundred yards away. “Closer!” Madsen yelled. She bit her lip and edged the rudder over. Eighty yards. Seventy.

  Fifty. Then even closer, until the roar of the bow wave was deafening. As was the hum and roar of the massive structure rushing alongside them, towering over them. From far above the white plumes of fire hoses probed out and down. She cringed, anticipating the blow, until she saw that, this close, the nozzles could not angle down far enough to bear. She laughed aloud. Her self seemed to inhabit another realm now, or to float detached from this world by one of the tiny curled dimensions string theory posited.

  “Close enough. Watch for the suck,” Madsen yelled. She felt it, like gravity from a heavy star, a yearning between the rushing hulls that fought her for control of the wheel.

  From behind her, Dorée screamed.

  When Sara looked around a massive bluegray scimitar was lifted above her head. For a moment she froze, unable to grasp what it was, or what the seething roar of white at its base meant. Then she knew.

  It was the massive curved bow of the kill ship, cutting in at top speed behind them and the much larger factory vessel. For an instant she tried to believe it would pass between them. But the killer was coming directly up Anemone’s wake. It would be on them in seconds. That thirty-foot-high mass of rust-streaked steel would power over the spot where she stood. Angled metal would trample, tear apart the fragile fabric of the sailboat’s stern. Her throat closed. Her breath went solid.

  “Sheer away,” Madsen screamed, from where he stood clinging to the stay, looking back and up at the same imminent doom. “Sheer off!” But her own terrified brain had already come to the same conclusion, and she spun the wheel hard. The boat careened violently as the stern skated around. For endless seconds permeated with the consciousness of impending death she watched it approach the rushing black hull of the factory ship, regretting too late that when you turned the wheel on a boat—unlike a car, where the front wheels pivoted and the trunk followed—the stern pivoted around the bow, and only then pushed it onto the new course.

  Which meant they were now broadside to the oncoming blade. The sea roared as the bow tore it apart, boiled it white, and creamed it out to either side. From above men aimed what she only belatedly realized were rifles down at them. But this hardly mattered. The inexorably advancing stem was going to split them apart exactly where she stood.

  The Dane seized the wheel around her cramped-solid hands and pushed it over still further. Just as that massive blade met the racing boat’s hull, sliding like a huge blunt chisel along their port side, flexing it inward, some invisible pressure wave just ahead of the oncoming stem seemed to lift and shove her off. The Dewoitine seemed to twist herself almost consciously away from oncoming destruction, her stern rising, throwing them all forward, then slewing hard around as the rusty steel rushed past, loud as a locomotive.

  When Sara lifted her gaze from death passing just feet away, it locked with the sardonic gaze of the same blunt-faced, grizzled Japanese she’d glimpsed there before. He gazed down from the bridge wing like some Olympian god, and as she stared, raised a single finger.

  Before she could react Captain Crunch was past. Rocking, heading in the opposite direction now, Anemone rolled free. From the port bow Hideyashi, back arched to look upward, shouted something at the impassive men who lined the lifelines. For a moment her ear struggled to wring sense from the syllables; but it was not in English. The crewmen recoiled as if scalded. An older man spat and turned his back; a younger one, cheeks scarlet, shook a fist at Kimura as the killer rapidly receded, shadowing the much larger factory, which had not altered its course at all during the entire incident.

  “What’d you say to them?” Bodine yelled. “Boy, that sure pulled their chain.”

  “A haiku. By Soseki Natsume. We all must learn it in school.”

  “A haiku?” Eddi gaped. “You mean—”

  “A short poem, about honoring nature. This one”—he paused, hanging off the lifeline as the boat rocked uneasily in the departing wakes, then translated,

  “Over the wintry

  forest, winds howl in rage

  with no leaves to blow.”

  Bodine blew a raspberry. “Poetry ain’t going to stop these assholes.” But his tone held grudging admiration.

  Lars stepped back from the wheel as Sara’s throat finally unlocked. She gagged out an acid mouthful straight from her stomach. She spat it drooling over the side, then turned on him. “You idiot. They almost killed us!”

  He didn’t answer. Just looked past her to where Bodine had vanished, ducking down into the forepeak. He jerked around fast, though, when she grabbed his earlobe and pinched. Blue eyes blazed; he struck her hand away. “What are you doing? That hurt.”

  “As much as if we were Cuisinarted under that ship? These people are serious, Lars. They’d be perfectly happy to kill us.” She coughed up another burning mouthful of reflux and spat it between her boots as she wrestled the wheel, trying to keep the mast from whipping as they rolled on the surge. “I saw Nakame again as they passed. He gave us the finger, like ‘you fools.’”

  “So what. We’re as determined as they are.”

  “They’re not backing down. Not from anything the few of us can bring to bear.”

  “That may not be so,” he muttered, looking after the ships that were still steadily moving away. Then reached over her. “Give me the wheel.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “I said, give me the wheel.” He hip-blocked her abruptly. Their bulky suits cushioned the impact, but the blow was still so unexpected she half fell across the cockpit locker. He bent, cranking the wheel left until the bow pointed again along the emerald-and-cream highway that roiled and steamed where the ships had pressed it down, and shoved the throttles forward again.

  She started to get up, then sagged back as the companionway hatch slammed open from below.

  A blunt sausage covered in rough green fabric pushed out like some obscene turd. It thumped down onto the cockpit sole, followed by a legless Bodine. The ex-soldier maneuvered with his arms more swiftly and gracefully than he could have dragging the metal-and-plastic encumbrances of artificial limbs. He positioned himself on the opposite seat, unsnapped the duffel, and began hauling things out. Sara drew a shocked breath.

  “Oh no,” Eddi said, from up where she had been filming.

  “Set up to port,” Madsen said urgently, nudging the throttle to make sure it was at full ahead. From the storm of the engines, the white jet of water from beneath the stern, they were all out already. “I’ll go up the starboard side.”

  “The killer? Or the factory?” Bodine was fitting parts together, assembling a drab green tube a little larger than something one would mail a poster in. As Sara watched, braced against the turtleback, speechless, he telescoped it apart. Then lay forward over the cockpit coamin
g and settled it over his right shoulder. With his right hand he pulled down a short handle; a spring-loaded sight flipped out.

  “What is that thing?”

  “Move back, Sara. Eddi, stay up there. You don’t want to be behind him when this goes off.”

  “But what is it?” She felt like the ball in a pachinko machine, ricocheted from emotion to emotion too rapidly to register them, still less respond. “Some kind of weapon? You didn’t tell us about this. Mick—what the fuck are you doing?”

  “Two hundred,” Bodine murmured around the tube. “We’ll need to be a lot closer for a right-angle impact.”

  “I’m all out. We’re gaining.”

  She clung tight, caught between outrage and terror. Anemone hit another wave system from one of the ships, maybe even an old one from the second killer, now a mile off and dimly outlined in the fading light, wheeling back to rejoin the others. Who were still steaming at full speed, still drawn close together, though as she watched the smaller ship began to drop back slightly.

  A smoky haze rolled over them, and she coughed. Not just engine smoke, but something evil. Freighted with death and congealed blood, rot and corruption; like, she imagined, what a death camp must have smelled like.

  On the ramp of the factory ship, three crewmen were working their way down toward where the wake burbled. They were pushing what she first thought were thick glistening red rubber mats that undulated obscenely as they tumbled over one another. With a final flourish the workers shoveled them into the sea. Then they were passing down Anemone’s side: scarlet and purple coils of intestines, veined with bright yellow fat; distended purple and blue organs. Already foot-long silver fish were darting in through curling tendrils of blood to nip and tear, every fin and scale and greedy onyx eye perfectly distinct in the clear green.

  She gagged. Life from death, death from life. For a moment that seemed longer than it probably was she wondered at them. Wriggling and tearing, jerking at the unexpected banquet with the force of their whole bodies, they bolted down ragged chunks with a shaking, ravenous, oblivious hunger that fascinated even as it disgusted.