White Water td-106

by Warren Murphy

  White Water

  ( The Destroyer - 106 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  When fish begin to disappear from the coastal United States, the source of the problem is discovered in Canada and threatens relations between the neighboring countries, until the Destroyer starts trawling for answers.

  Destroyer 106: White Water

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  PROLOGUE

  Since Man first stepped out of the seas to breathe open air and walk on mud, he has reached back into die cold soup that spawned him for sustenance, first with his naked hands, then with rude clubs, baskets, baited hooks and netting, as many species of fish as there were to tempt him with their cold, delicate meat. Man discovered even more ways to capture them. The more he fished, the farther from the safe shores of his dry new habitat he needed to venture to fill his eternally hungry belly. Logs became rafts, and rafts acquired sails. Sails gave way to gigantic floating factories that caught, gutted and processed the multitudinous fish into fillets and steaks to feed the upright multitudes.

  Soon no edible denizen of the deep, from the lowliest urchin to the mightiest whale, from the most delicious finfish to the most repellent scavenger, was safe from the species that had claimed the apex of the food chain for its own.

  For centuries Man thought the oceans he plundered of bounty to be inexhaustible reservoirs of protein. And so he fished farther and farther away from his safe shores and home ports, on greater and more-efficient sailing craft. Even when the mighty whales became scarce, he paid no heed and continued his unrelenting pursuit of the cod and tuna, the lobster and the mackerel, until their vast numbers began to dwindle. Even when the warning signs became alarm bells, Man's response was to redouble his efforts. For by this time Man was no longer a small, sustainable population, but six billion strong. Six billion mouths clamoring for food. Six billion perpetually hungry bellies of a species who possessed the skills and technology to consume all other species with whom they shared the Earth.

  Man, having climbed to the top of the food chain, found himself a prisoner of his adaptive success. Like the sharks he now consumed in greater numbers than had consumed him in the past, Man had to keep moving to eat, keep hunting the lesser species if he was not to sink back into the cold soup that gave rise to him.

  But the more fish he caught, the fewer fish remained for his next meal.

  Chapter 1

  It was supposed to be the last haul.

  One last tow. It was all Roberto Rezendez desired. One last good landing before he let the federal government buy his boat, the Santo Fado, out of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, and he took up cabinet making, turning his back of the livelihood that had fed seven generations of Rezendez going back to the days when Innsmouth was the whaling capital of the New World.

  The morning sky was the color of oyster shells lying discarded on the beach. The heaving swells were masked by sea smoke generated by the midwinter cold. That the waters of the Atlantic were choppy and heaving Rezendez knew from the way his bow pounded through them, making a relentless thudding that was like a drumbeat to the forlorn melody of his rust-colored trawler engine's noisy ta-poketa ta-poketa stuttering.

  In more plentiful times, the Rezendez family hauled active nets brimming with kicking cod and halibut and haddock from Georges Bank, 125 miles cut from Cape Cod. It was the cod that was best. King cod, the fish that had sustained the Pilgrims. That had been long before the first Rezendez left Portugal for a new life doing what Portuguese men had done for centuries to sustain life: fish from boats.

  From his grandfather, Jorge, Roberto had heard how Georges Bank had teemed with cod in those days of wonder. How in 1895 the Patriarch cod, six feet long and weighing 211 pounds, had been pulled up from the deep. No fisherman had landed a Patriarch cod since those days of plenty. Cod did not live so long in the new century. And as the new century began to dwindle, the cod had dwindled, too.

  Now that the new century was old and almost done with, the trawler nets brought up plenty of trawler trash-starfish and sea stars, skate and rusty beer cans-but few of the white-bellied cod. So damn few that even the men who lived off them had begun to understand they had dredged up almost all there were left.

  Men like Roberto Rezendez had been barred from taking cod from Georges Bank. The yellowtail and the haddock were also scarce. If men of the seas respected the bans, the Commerce Department promised, the depleted groundfish stocks would replenish themselves. In ten years, they said. Some species in five. But what was a fisherman to do with himself during those five years?

  Other draggers turned to scallops, but the scallop beds were being taxed by the new boats. And it cost money to refit a boat for scalloping. Some Innsmouth men went after lobster, but it was too labor-intensive. Lobstermen still caught lobster the way lobster was caught a century ago, in traps and pots that had to be laid down in the morning and taken up at night. Poachers were a problem for the lobstermen. Roberto Rezendez would have nothing to do with lobsters, which his great grandfather would grind up for fertilizer, he thought so little of the rust red ocean crawlers.

  So he fished on, farther and farther out, taking as his primary catch the junk fish he used to toss back into the water dead. Instead of tender cod or delicate flounder, he harvested chewy pout, or cusk or butterfish or froglike monkfish and lumpfish. People ate them now. They cost as much per pound today as had cod or yellowtail two decades ago.

  But it was a living. And as the Santo Fado muttered around the protected areas of Georges Bank, Roberto engaged the sonar scope that made finding fish such a pleasure.

  His two older sons took tricks and the wheel while Roberto, now forty-nine and bent of back if not of spirit, hovered over the greenish fish-finder scope as it pinged and pinged forlornly.

  They were cruising at a mere dozen knots now. Salt spray, whipped by the steady wind, deposited a rime of ice on the radar mast and gallows and netdrum reels. From time to time Roberto knocked it off with a boat hook. Too much ice could capsize a trawler like the Santo Fado if allowed to build up.

  It was while seeing to the ice encrusting one of the matched cable-drum reels that Roberto heard the sonar scope begin pinging wildly. Giving the huge steel drum a final ringing crack, Roberto rushed to the scope, boat hook in hand.

  "Madre!" he muttered, reverting to the traditional curse of his ancestors.

  "What is it, Father?" asked Carlos, the eldest.

  "Come look. Come look at what your forefathers lived for, but never saw with their own eyes."

  Carlos bustled back while Manuel remained at the wheel. He was a good boy, was Manuel. Steady. Light on his feet on the pitching deck. He had fishing in his blood. His blood was fated to be thwarted, Roberto knew. He would not fish past his thirtieth birthday. That was how sad the state of the family-operated fishing enterprise had become.

  The screen showed a vast mass shaped like a saucer. Over a mile long, it was composed of closepacked synchronized blips.

  Roberto lay a finger against the screen and whispered, "Cod."

  "So many?"

  Roberto nodded fervently. His finger shifted. "See these large blips forward? These are the mature ones, the scouts. The others maintain a constant body width between them. This way they are always in sight of one another, should danger threaten."

  "Amazing." There was respect in the boy's voice. Then he asked a question. "What do we do?"

  "We will follow them. Perhaps they will lead us to a place where they can be legally taken."

  "Is there such a place?"

  "This is to be our last haul. There are places that are legal and there are places that are not so legal. Perhaps Our Lady of Fatima wil
l smile upon us, on this our last haul."

  They followed the bottom-swimming school, using only their sonar. From time to time, columns of cod would make for the surface to spawn. As the day lengthened and the cool sun burned off the sea smoke, they could see the cod break the surface all around them. It was a vision.

  "I wish Esteban could be here to see this," Roberto lamented.

  Esteban was his youngest boy. Just in junior high, he would probably never fish, never own a boat except a pleasure craft. He played shortstop for the Innsmouth Crustaceans and often spoke of baseball as a career. But that was a young boy's dream, nothing more.

  Roberto was back attacking the ice when Manny-now taking his turn at the sonar scope-called out, "Father, something is happening down there."

  Back at the scope, Roberto saw that the school of cod was spreading out. He nodded.

  "They are beating the sea floor for prey. Probably capelin." He called up to the pilot house, "Carlos, where are we?"

  Carlos consulted a marine chart. "We are approaching the Nose."

  Roberto frowned, his sun-weathered face a mask of beef jerkey. The Nose was the easternmost portion of the Grand Banks fishery that Canada lay claim to. Technically the Nose was beyond the two-hundred-nautical-mile limit claimed by Canada. But the Canadians had chased the Spanish, and before them the French, from these waters as if the Nose legally belonged to them. They said the free-ranging cod were Canadian. As if any fish could possess a nationality. They existed to be taken. Nothing more.

  Taking up his binoculars, Roberto scanned the skies for Canadian Coast Guard aircraft. These skies were empty of all that and of all promise.

  "Stay the course," Roberto said, throwing his luck in with the cod as his ancestors had.

  The trawler muttered on, its ice-encrusted bow smashing the ten-foot swells like a stubborn bulldog with a foamy bone in its teeth.

  The school did not swim in a straight line, of course. It veered this way and that. With every veer, Roberto signaled the Santo Fado to veer.

  Inexorably the cod were taking them into the Nose.

  "I don't like this," said Carlos.

  "Slow," said Roberto, who did not like it either.

  They were not in legal waters. There could be a fine just for suspicion of the intent to take fish from these waters if they crossed the invisible two-hundred-mile limit into Canadian waters.

  Still, the temptation was very great. This was their last haul, and the teeming cod moving beneath their aging hull were oh so very tempting.

  The trawler reduced speed. The waist of the great saucer of cod, like a gigantic living thing composed of green spots of light, moved on. The trailing edge came into view.

  Carlos made a noise of surprise in his throat.

  "What is it?" Roberto demanded.

  In answer, Carlos laid his finger against the large, elongated blip swimming directly behind the school.

  Roberto stared at it in disbelief.

  "I have never seen this," he breathed.

  "What is it, Father?" Manuel called from the faded white pilothouse.

  "It cannot be a codfish. It is too long."

  "How long would you say?" asked Manuel.

  "As long as a man," Roberto said. "Weighing as much as a man." And his voice trailed off. "A Patriarch," he said under his breath, not daring to believe it himself.

  "What?"

  Roberto's deep voice shook with a growing excitement. "It swims with the cod. It must be a cod. But it is not a scout. Yet it is larger than the scouts."

  "A porpoise?"

  "No, a Patriarch cod. A fish not seen in over one hundred years." Drawing a breath that burned with sea cold, Roberto Rezendez spoke the words that doomed himself, his sons, and sealed the fates of many fishermen in the days to come.

  "I must have it. I must. This is the dream of my forefathers to catch that magnificent monster. We will bring it back living, as proof that the cod stocks are rebounding. The industry may yet be saved."

  Rushing to the wheel, Roberto ordered Carlos back to the sonar scope.

  "Both of you guide me. We will follow until the cod stop to feed. Then we will lower our net."

  "Where are we?" Carlos asked.

  "It does not matter. This is a miracle. It is bigger than one boat or one family or even which nations lay claim to what patch of cold, gray water."

  They followed the school deep into the Nose. Here cod fishermen from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland were forbidden to practice their livelihoods while boats from other waters were not constrained. Over forty thousand men had been thrown out of work by the edicts of the Canadian Department of Fisheries. Men who watched their nets dry on their docks while other men took what they could not. Roberto knew them to be honest, hardworking men. He understood their plight. He had suffered since the closing of Georges Bank. It was sad.

  Until they lowered their net, it would only be a fine. Perhaps not even that. And if the seas were clear when the cod struck their prey, there would be time enough to drag the net twice. And with luck, the great cod would be hauled up from the deep. That one, Roberto and his family would personally consume once the authorities laid their incredulous eyes upon it.

  Deep in the Nose, the cod struck a school of capelin. The capelin were lurking on the bottom. Sensing the approaching school, the smeltlike little fish came off the ocean floor like a rising cloud. Predatory arrows, the cod fell upon them, and the gray-green water churned.

  "Slow the engines. Drop the net!" Roberto shouted.

  They fell to the netting with a grim will. The square-meshed orange otter net-required by the new regulations so they would not catch immature fishes-went over the stern and into the cold water below. They took up the five-hundred-pound steel-framed oak doors and affixed them to the great U-shaped stanchions called gallows. These were dropped into the water, where they sank.

  "Full throttle!" Roberto called.

  The boat shook and rumbled along.

  The great reels paid out cable as the forward motion of the dragger caused the net to bell and open like a great, all-catching spiderweb. The huge net vanished from sight.

  Down below, the doors would be forced part, keeping the net wide for the unsuspecting fish.

  Ahead a little blood was already rising. And fish flecks. Soon the sea would be alive with churning and consuming. It was the law of the sea. The big fish ate the little fish. And mankind ate the big fish and the little fish both.

  Like a meshy mouth, the net was approaching the school when, out of nowhere, a great factory ship appeared.

  It was gray. Against the soupy gray of the sea and the dull gray of the sky, it had lain there like stealthy winter's ghost.

  A foghorn blew, bringing Roberto's head jerking ahead.

  "Madre!" he whispered. Grabbing up his binoculars, he spied the name on the bow.

  "Hareng Saur."

  "Quebecers!" he muttered. They were not much for high-seas fishing, preferring to crab the familiar waters of the St. Lawrence River. And they were at odds with Ottawa. Perhaps they would leave well enough alone.

  But soon the ship-to-shore UHF radio was crackling with an urgent voice.

  The call was in French. Only French. The only part Roberto understood was the name of his own boat, which they mispronounced atrociously.

  Nervously Roberto grabbed up the mike and said, "Hareng Saur, I do not speak French. Do any of you speak English?"

  More excited French garbled out of the radio speaker.

  "I repeat, Hareng Saur, I do not speak French. Who among you speaks English?"

  It seemed no one did.

  The big factory ship came bearing down upon them.

  Leaping to the stern, Roberto rejoined his sons.

  "Do we cut the net cables?" asked Manny.

  Roberto hesitated. This was to be the last haul. But otter nets were expensive. And he was loath to relinquish the Patriarch.

  "Wait. There is still time." He rushed back to the sonar scope. Hovering
over it, he scanned the blips.

  The fish were feeding ferociously. The screen was a frenzy of greenish blips. It was impossible to distinguish cod from capelin. But there was no doubt who were the predators and who the prey.

  The big otter bag was slowly sweeping them before it, the cod end filling up with living cod and capelin both. As it should be.

  Roberto scanned the area for the Patriarch cod. He did not see it at first, increasing his hope that it had already been swept up by the net.

  Then it darted into view. There was no mistaking the blip. Curiously it was moving through the frenzy of fish with a detached purpose. Was it not hungry? It struck out on an undeviating line through the school, and zoomed off the screen.

  Roberto looked up. The unerring direction would take it toward the big factory ship. But, of course, cod do not swim unerringly, except after prey.

  With a sigh, he realized he had lost the opportunity of a lifetime.

  "Cut the net!" The words choked in his thickening throat.

  His two sons threw themselves on the brake levers controlling the matched cable reels. They jerked them hard, angrily. The reels let go. Cable whizzed out and spilled off the stern.

  And as the last strands dropped into the cold, inhospitable Atlantic, a great sadness overcame Roberto Rezendez. This was how the final haul of the Santo Fado was to end. Ignominiously.

  AFTER THAT, things happened with bewildering rapidity.

  The factory boat lowered two dull gray dories. They beat toward the Santo Fado. It was possible to escape, but Roberto decided it would be unwise to attempt to flee. There was no proof any of wrongdoing. Suspicion, yes. But no proof. Not with his otter net lying on the ocean floor.

  As the dories drew closer, they could spy the faces of the approaching ones. They were strangely white. And there were weird blue vertical spotches covering the faces centered on their noses.

  Roberto recalled that the fisherman of Nova Scotia were known as "bluenoses" because the dye of their blue mittens came off when they rubbed their cold noses. But Nova Scotia dory men did not paint their faces white or call their ships by French names.