by Hunter Shea
“Are you dressed?” Ivan said.
Chet’s eyes felt as if they had been peppered with sand. He didn’t know if it was from exhaustion or his forgetting to blink while he watched the spectacle on the television.
“Yeah,” he said. “We actually just got in.”
“Good. Meet me in the lobby.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re going to the oil rig. Whether we get there in time to witness the orcas or are there for the aftermath is up to the orcas.”
An extreme close-up showed an orca hitting the rig so hard, there was a visible crack in its skull.
Rosario sniffled. Chet saw the tears on her face.
“Wait, you said we’re going to the rig?”
“I got a call from the head of the oil company. Since we faced something similar, he’s paying for us to go there and figure out what the hell is going on.”
Chet was lightheaded. He hoped it was simply because he’d prevented himself from eating.
“When will you get here?” he said, too numb to fully take in everything that was happening around him.
“I just pulled up to the hotel. Hurry up. Our plane leaves within the hour.”
Chapter Eleven
A private jet awaited them at Barcelona Airport, courtesy of the CEO of AOI, also known as American Oil Industries. Chet and Rosario followed Ivan onto the sleek jet in a daze.
Were they really heading to Portugal in the dead of night to witness a mass orca suicide?
They continued to watch the live news coverage on the flight over the gold plated laptop provided by the flight attendant. There was no official representative of AOI on the flight, though they were told someone would be there to meet them in the morning.
The short flight ended in Faro Airport, where they were then whisked into a waiting helicopter by a harried looking man in a suit who said he worked for AOI.
“Aren’t you coming with us?” Chet asked as the doors were being shut.
The man just shook his head as he walked away, the wash from the spinning blades making his hair look like Medusa’s snakes.
“He was a real pleasant fucking chap,” Ivan said. “You’d think with all these extravagant toys, they could afford to give us some top shelf liquor.”
Back on the jet, they had been offered a drink. Chet and Rosario asked for water. Ivan had a rum and coke.
“I don’t think they want us drunk,” Rosario said, standing tall under Ivan’s icy glare.
“That’s because they don’t know what the hell they’re sending us into. When this is done, we’ll all need to drink until we black out.”
Chet checked his pulse a few times, making sure Rosario couldn’t see what he was doing. His heart rate was higher than normal, but then again, he was exhausted and on a private jet, racing toward another possible horror show. He was sweating, but again, it had to be from stress, not a fever. His muscles didn’t have that dull ache that came from an elevated temperature.
The possibility of some kind of cross species virus transmission was too astronomical for Chet to even consider. Whatever was affecting the orcas was, so far, a strictly orca phenomenon. What he should worry about was it bouncing over to dolphins.
Stop making yourself nuts!
If exposure to the orcas was the catalyst, all three of them should be showing some kind of symptoms by now. Chet’s exhausted mind had become his worst enemy. He knew it deep down in his heart and this had to stop. He went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face and settled down.
“You are not sick. You…are not…sick.”
Only once he felt more in control of himself did he go back into the cabin. Rosario and Ivan were asleep. He joined them, getting in forty restless minutes.
It was just an hour before daybreak when they circled the oil rig. They leaned to the left of the helicopter to see the madness below.
“Dear God,” Rosario whispered.
If they didn’t know better, they’d swear that the rig was caught in the middle of a terrific storm, the seas kicked up to a heady froth.
“How many can there be?” Chet said, watching a seemingly endless stream of orcas batter every support holding the rig up.
Ivan’s breath was foul as it wafted over Chet’s shoulder. “It looks like every goddamn orca in the Atlantic.”
The helicopter touched down on the landing pad. Chet wasn’t sure he wanted to get off.
As his foot reached solid ground, he could feel the steady reverberations of the orca bodies slamming into the rig. It felt like the whole thing was going to collapse at any second.
He looked back at the helicopter with a wistful gaze. Before he could change his mind, grab Rosario and jump back inside, it took off.
“Why do I feel like we’ve been left to die?” he said.
Rosario clutched his arm as the solid steel of the rig made noises that did little to instill confidence in its structural integrity.
Tough looking men and women lined the sides of the platform, staring down. With very few exceptions, the word ashen best described their faces.
A heavyset man with a sharp crew cut and squinty eyes speed walked to them.
“You the fella from the aquarium?” he asked, extending his hand.
Chet saw Ivan’s jaw muscles flex, but he bit his tongue. The man hated when people called Marine Paradise an aquarium. “Ivan Padron. This is Chet Clarke and Rosario Benitez. They were present when we had our…issue.”
Handshakes went all around. “I’m John Rafferty. I don’t know if you’re just in time or too late.”
“Meaning what?” Ivan said.
“Come with me.”
The rig was lit up so it was bright as day, long shadows stretching out before them as they stayed close to Rafferty. He stopped at the east corner of the rig. A dozen men were gathered at the rail.
And they were holding guns.
“What the hell do they think they’re doing?” Chet exclaimed.
“Saving our lives,” Rafferty said, his small eyes boring into Chet’s.
“Tell them to back off,” Ivan said.
The rig shuddered as if it had been body slammed by a ninety-foot blue whale.
“We don’t have time,” Rafferty said.
Ivan turned on him with fire in his eyes. “I didn’t come here to watch a bunch of roughnecks slaughter orcas. Tell them to hold their fire and back the hell away!”
Rafferty was stunned, obviously not at all used to being spoken to like that. He sneered at Ivan who sneered right back. After a tense minute, Rafferty exhaled and barked at his men to step back…for the moment.
Chet, Rosario and Ivan hustled through the crush of beefy bodies. None of the men looked pleased to have their game of shooting fish in a barrel called off.
The rig shook and Chet nearly lost his footing. His chest hit hard into the railing.
Now he knew why the men were at this corner.
The rig was being attacked on all sides. The largest concentration of orcas was right below their feet. It was as if they sensed a weakening of the support and were tripling their efforts to exploit it.
“Is it getting tired to keep saying this is impossible?” Chet said.
“It’s not, because this is,” Rosario said.
There had to be hundreds of orcas at this section of the rig alone. Chet had never even imagined a pod this large. Nor had he ever conceived of so many focused on the destruction of a solitary object. These orcas were not at play. They hammered the rig over and over again, regardless of the harm they were inflicting on themselves. Several spotlights had been concentrated on this side. Under their brutal glare, he saw with revulsion that the water was a deep, dark crimson.
A heavy groan thrummed in the air, the vibration hitting him in the pit of his gut.
“What was that?” Rosario said.
Rafferty shouted above the wounded steel, “That’s the sound of your funeral if you don’t let my men clear those killer whales out of here.”
“Better that than watch this whole operation and everyone on it sink into the ocean. You know what will happen, sister? First, the whole thing will go up in a ball of flame that will fry you to a crisp in seconds. If you somehow survive that, the fall will kill you. If you get through that, you have to hope the wreckage doesn’t break you in half. And if you said all your hail Mary’s and our fathers and somehow survived, I can guarantee you those killer whales will finish what they started. When getting eaten alive is the best you can hope for, you can’t just sit with your fingers up your ass.”
Rosario lunged at the man. “I’m not your sister, you tub of shit!”
Chet pulled his eyes away from the terrifying spectacle below and restrained her.
Rafferty looked to Ivan. “You got any other ideas?”
Ivan didn’t turn to look at him. He stared at the frenzy of orcas with wide eyes. “Why are they here?”
“What did you say?” Rafferty said. His men had started to close in, rifles held close to their barrel chests.
Now Ivan whirled on him. “I can’t understand why they’re all here. Are you doing something other than drilling for oil? There has to be a goddamn reason.”
The oil man spat between his feet. “Are you outta your mind? No, we’re not doing anything we haven’t done for the past seven years. Were you doing anything strange when your killer whales went ape shit in your little aquarium?”
Chet was sure he’d have to find a way to hold both Ivan and Rosario back from hitting the man. He knew the moment they did, Rafferty’s men would be all over them. With tensions running so high, they couldn’t expect cooler heads to prevail. These men were toting guns. Things would end badly for the three of them if it got out of hand.
“You can’t just kill them,” Rosario said, her body like coiled steel in Chet’s hands. “They can’t control what’s happening to them. They’re innocent.”
“Tell that to the people who died while you watched. I’m sure as shit not going to let that happen here.”
Chet finally spoke up. “Or is it more important to make sure AOI’s six-hundred-million dollar investment doesn’t end up in the bottom of the sea?”
Rafferty signaled for his men to retake their positions. They knocked into Chet and Rosario, steering clear of Ivan.
“Six of one, half a dozen of the other,” Rafferty said. “The way I see it, if we get these whales to realize the error of their ways, it’s what you call a win-win situation.”
Would it matter if he told them there were baby and adolescent orcas down there?
During kills, sometimes, the adults would watch the younger orcas attack their prey, stepping in when needed to give them pointers. They learned first by watching, then by doing. It was utterly amazing how orca pods established training sessions for the next generation. Some would say the ability to teach was human, but in orcas, Chet always felt it was degrading to them to compare them to hairless apes. In so many regards, they were super human.
What was going on below them was no training session. Every orca was involved in the task of destroying the rig.
No, Chet decided, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference to Rafferty that so many young orcas were in the frenzy. The man’s mind was made up and he had the backing of his entire crew.
In a way, he couldn’t blame them. It really felt as if the entire oil rig was about to collapse like a stack of Jenga blocks. Several times, he’d had to find a handhold to keep upright.
“Don’t! Don’t!” Rosario wailed. Before she could grab the back of a man’s collar, Chet pulled her away. He worried, for good reason, that he would turn around and shoot her for trying to stop him. The smell of bloodlust and fear wrapped everyone on the deck in its tangy embrace.
Ivan stood to the side, watching the orcas, a burly man in a wool cap leaning on the rail next to him, his rifle pointed toward the roiling ocean.
“How can you just watch it?” Chet asked.
Ivan’s red-rimmed eyes told Chet he hated this as much as them. “Because I have to see how they react. We’re not here to look away.”
“And we’re not here to watch innocent animals get slaughtered,” Rosario countered. Ivan cast his eyes back to the violent ocean, visibly ashamed, but in his own way, duty bound.
The sun was just peeking over the horizon when the first shot rang out. It was immediately followed by a cascade of sharp cracks. Everyone on the rig’s platform had formed a wall behind Chet. Even if he wanted to get the hell away from the mass murder, he couldn’t.
The men kept on firing, some having to pause to reload.
Ivan looked on, unblinking despite the steady thunder from the rifles.
A distant rumbling overhead had Chet looking for storm clouds, but there were none to be seen. He assumed it was his own heartbeat thrumming in his ears.
Chet found he couldn’t just stand in the background. He had to see. Squeezing Rosario’s hand, he angled around the throng of spectators until they could safely look over the edge.
He looked down, and felt his knees buckle.
Chapter Twelve
The height of the oil rig’s platform worked against the efficacy of the rifles. By the time the bullets reached the adult orcas, the damage they inflicted was less than what they had been doing to themselves.
However, the younger orcas didn’t have the same protective mass.
By the time the last shot rang out, twenty-three orcas were dead – all of them babies. The pods ceased their attack, the high-pitched cries of their lament giving rise to goosebumps on every single person on the rig. The collective mournful wail of hundreds of orcas would follow everyone who heard it to their graves.
Because of the extreme action taken by Rafferty’s men, they would not be heading to those graves today.
Chet and Rosario watched as the pods swam away from the rig, seemingly into the sun itself. The spray from their spouts rained a fine mist on the ocean’s surface.
The workers had walked away, gathering in a tight circle around Rafferty. They were too far for Chet to hear what was being said.
“The guns didn’t stop them,” Ivan said, coming up behind them.
“It sure looked like they did to me,” Chet said, massaging his temples.
Ivan looked like he was half with them, half somewhere deep inside his own head. “No. I saw. The orcas weren’t slowing down, no matter how many bullets were coming down on them. With the way they were hurting themselves, I’m not sure they could have even noticed they were being shot.”
“You forget I saw it, too,” Rosario said. “Once they realized their babies were being killed, they pulled back.” She looked like she wanted to run over and rip Rafferty’s throat out with her teeth. Chet was feeling pretty much the same.
“I’m telling you, that wasn’t it. We won’t know if the bullets even killed them. I’ll bet most of them died from self-inflicted wounds. They could have been dead all along, but we couldn’t see them through the scrum. I don’t think we’re going to get any assistance to save a few for a field autopsy.” Ivan kicked at the rail. “It was something else. One second they were working in tandem to destroy the rig, the next,” he snapped his fingers, “they stop and swim away. No, it wasn’t Rafferty’s men. It was something else.”
Chet sighed. “That’s all well and good, but it means nothing if we can’t figure out what that something else was. And they damn well better help us save some of those bodies. Why else would we even be here?”
His anger and adrenaline were bleeding away fast, making way for bone crushing fatigue to come crawling back.
“No one’s going in that water,” Rosario said. “At least not until we know for sure the orcas are truly gone. I don’t want them to get hurt, but I can’t trust them either.”
Many of the bodies were already sinking, carried by the tide and out of sight. So much valuable data, lost.
Chet turned his back to the railing and s
ank down onto his ass, staring at the men around Rafferty. There were no cheers that they had saved the oil rig. Chet saw the horror on their faces once they stopped shooting, the baby orcas bleeding out and turning onto their sides, filling their lungs with water.
Could Ivan be right?
Chet didn’t watch the entire time, but he did see that the bullets weren’t slowing the orcas down one iota. It was as if a switch had been flipped. As a single unit, they stopped thrashing around, turning to join the pods clustered around the other supports as they headed out to sea.
What in heaven’s name could get several hundred orcas to do such a thing? Yes, they had a complex language, but each pod possessed its own dialect. To think that all these different pods speaking variations of the same language could communicate so quickly, so succinctly that not a single one missed the message to cease was unfathomable.
The rhythmic thrumming of a chopper approaching the platform got Chet’s attention. Rafferty’s huddle broke up, a few people walking with him to the helipad.
“Looks like the big cheese is here,” Ivan said.
“Maybe he’ll give us the resources to save at least one orca body,” Chet said, too tired to stand. Rosario stood next to him, arms folded across her chest.
“Just let him know that there are thousands of orcas in the Atlantic to his dozens of offshore oil rigs,” Ivan said. “I’m sure he’ll give us whatever we want.”
When the news broke about Portugal, Jamel was watching an old episode of All in the Family, fighting insomnia. After a lifetime of sleep issues, he wasn’t the least bit fazed by a sleepless night. That just meant more caffeine to get through the day. Until his first cup of coffee, he was happy to sit in his ratty chair, riding the wave of a semi-daze.
The station’s programming of seventies sitcoms in need of a remastering gave way to the early edition of the local news. The story about a horde of killer whales attacking an AOI oil rig along the southern coast of Portugal snapped Jamel to full attention. He pushed the blanket off, bending forward so he was closer to the TV, as if it made any difference.