Killer Whale

by Justin D'Ath

  22

  GAME ON

  We left the Japanese to their grisly task. One whale was dead, but the rest of the pod were still alive. We wanted them to stay that way. So we provided the whales with a pirate escort. The Black pimpernel chugged along at the rear of the pod like a big, scruffy watchdog. Frøya and I were its eyes, scanning the ocean in all directions for signs of danger. But mostly we looked behind us, where the two whaling ships sat motionless on the horizon, growing steadily smaller as we sailed away from them. I knew the pod was safe until the Japanese had loaded the dead whale onto the Nisshin Maru. Then it would be game on once more.

  Except it wasn’t a game. More whales were going to die if the killer ship got past us.

  Somehow we had to stop it.

  ‘Here they come,’ Frøya said.

  Both ships had turned in our direction. We had a head start of roughly five kilometres, but it wasn’t enough. The whales were swimming at only three or four knots. Much too slow. I’d seen how fast the killer ship could go.

  The orange helicopter was the first to arrive. It flew right overhead and circled the whales. I knew the pilot would be in radio contact with the hunters, letting them know the pod’s position.

  ‘How far behind are the ships?’ I asked, nudging the Black pimpernel right in behind the whales in an effort to make them swim faster.

  Frøya had the binoculars. ‘About two kilometres.’

  ‘Get a move on, whales!’ I muttered under my breath.

  But the pod would only swim as fast as the mothers and their calves. And even if they left the young ones behind – which no whale would ever do – they could never outrun the killer ship.

  It was time to do something.

  ‘Frøya, can you take the helm?’

  ‘For sure,’ she said, hopping over to the wheel on one foot. ‘What is it you are doing?’

  ‘I’ll try to let out the prop foulers.’

  She touched my arm. ‘Be careful, Sam.’

  I raced down to the stern. This time I didn’t even notice the cold. There were more important things on my mind. Like not going backside-down on the slippery deck again and sliding over the side. Like how quickly the killer ship was catching up. Like how to let out the prop foulers without being dragged overboard.

  The prop foulers were huge coils of rope, steel cable and plastic floats that had to be unwound and fed carefully over the stern so they didn’t tangle. I’d seen the prop-fouler crew doing it a few hours earlier, but there were three of them. Three grown men. There was only one of me, and I was feeling weak from lack of food and from the seasickness that had put me out of action for half our sea journey.

  Stop feeling sorry for yourself, said a little voice in my head. Just get on with it! More whales are going to die if you don’t stop the killer ship.

  I found the end of one of the coils. There was rope to begin with, then steel cable – with floats attached at intervals to keep it from sinking. The heavy black rope was sodden with sea water. It felt icy through my gloves. I started dragging it towards the stern. There was a gap to slide it through. Just wide enough for the floats, too narrow for a man. But not too narrow for a fourteen-year-old boy. I would have to be very careful, or the line might drag me overboard. But first I had to get it overboard. It was snagged.

  I scrambled back to see what the problem was. Two of the floats were tangled. As I bent to untwist them, I glanced over my shoulder. The killer ship was less than two hundred metres away. Water foamed beneath its bow as the sleek, grey vessel ate up the distance between it and the Black pimpernel. It was going to pass us on the left.

  What was Frøya doing ? We had to be in front of the killer ship for the prop foulers to work.

  Suddenly the deck tilted sharply as Frøya spun the helm. I should never have doubted her. She’d timed it perfectly. The Black pimpernel turned across the bow of the oncoming ship. It caught the Japanese captain napping. I went skating back to the stern and began feeding the long strand of rope, cable and floats through the gap. It was hard work and my hands were numb with cold, but I didn’t stop until the last float splashed into the churning sea below me. Then I stood up and steadied myself against one of the water cannons, waiting to see what would happen. My heart thudded with excitement. The floats went bobbing away astern of the Black pimpernel in a long, curved line. Directly across the path of the killer ship.

  If all went to plan, the cable would pass under its hull and tangle in its propellers, putting it out of action.

  It didn’t work. The Japanese ship was state-of-the-art. It was designed to chase whales, so it had to be super manoeuvrable. As soon as its captain saw the trap we’d laid for him, he turned hard to starboard. The killer ship veered around the line of floats like a giant speedboat, then swung back onto its former course.

  Not only had it avoided the prop fouler, it had got around the Black pimpernel as well. We were behind the killer ship now. And the whales were in front.

  I raced back up to the bridge. At the top of the stairs, I stopped dead. Frøya was back in the captain’s chair. Captain Dan stood at the helm.

  ‘What are you staring at, mister?’ he said gruffly. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  He did look like a ghost – his face was the right colour – but I didn’t dare say that.

  ‘Are you better?’ I asked.

  ‘Not much better,’ Captain Dan rumbled. There was a bucket on the floor beside him. ‘But well enough to get back up here where I belong. You and Frøya did a good job, by the way.’

  I looked out the window. The killer ship had almost caught up with the pod. ‘But not good enough,’ I said.

  All we could do was watch as the Japanese hunters moved in on the whales. My teeth were clenched, my hands made fists inside their gloves. At any moment there would be a puff of smoke, then the splash of a huge fin or a tail as another whale went into its death throes.

  It didn’t happen.

  Incredibly, the killer ship broke off its pursuit at the last moment. It turned almost ninety degrees and began speeding off to the left.

  ‘Look!’ Frøya pointed.

  Nobody had been watching the helicopter. It had left the pod, too, and was hovering over the sea about a kilometre away.

  ‘Take the helm, bud,’ Captain Dan said to me.

  He walked to the window and peered through the binoculars in the direction of the helicopter. For a few seconds he didn’t move, then I saw his back stiffen.

  ‘Turn hard aport,’ he barked over his shoulder. ‘Steer straight towards the helicopter.’

  ‘What is it?’ Frøya asked.

  ‘Fin whales,’ said Captain Dan. ‘At least two of them. Get us over there, mister, and don’t spare the horses.’

  I pushed the throttle lever, but it was already set at full speed. ‘We can’t go any faster, Captain.’

  His shoulders slumped. The killer ship was far ahead of us, halfway to the helicopter already. ‘I need a faster ship,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘We’re no match for the Japanese in this old rust bucket.’

  ‘For sure, a Zodiac is more fast,’ Frøya said.

  ‘I can’t leave my ship,’ said Captain Dan.

  ‘Sam and I will go.’

  ‘You can’t walk.’

  ‘It is hands not feet to drive a Zodiac,’ said Frøya. ‘Sam will help me down the stairs.’

  The captain frowned. ‘It takes four strong men to launch a Zodiac.’

  ‘There’s one already launched,’ I said, remembering the one I’d nearly fallen into. ‘It’s tied to the side of the ship.’

  Captain Dan looked at Frøya, then at me.

  ‘Go for it,’ he said.

  23

  GREYHOUNDS OF THE SEA

  I piggybacked Frøya down the stairs, then helped her to the rear deck and over the side into the bouncing Zodiac. A coiled prop fouler took up most of the floor. I was about to jump down next to her when I had a thought.

  ‘Won’t be lon
g,’ I shouted, and raced back across the deck.

  A minute later I returned with a bulky cardboard carton and dropped it on top of the prop fouler. Then I clambered down after it. Frøya already had the outboard motor running.

  ‘Cast off,’ she said, and we were away.

  I had been in a Zodiac once before – back on the Great Barrier Reef when some smugglers were after me. That time I’d been running for my life. Now I was involved in another life-and-death race, except this time I was doing the chasing. And it wasn’t my life that was on the line, it was the lives of some fin whales.

  Fin whales can weigh up to seventy tonnes. That’s a lot of meat for the Japanese fish markets. No wonder the killer ship had abandoned its pursuit of the minkes to go after them.

  It had a big head start – at least half a kilometre – but Frøya had our Zodiac cranked up and we were really moving. Captain Dan couldn’t afford to get a new ship, but he hadn’t spared the dollars when buying outboard motors for his Zodiacs. It was big, it was powerful, it was fast.

  Fin whales are fast, too. They are sometimes called ‘greyhounds of the sea’ because they are the fastest of the baleen whales. These ones were in a hurry. We could gauge their speed from the helicopter keeping track of them. They were swimming away from the killer ship at about twenty knots. The killer ship was having trouble catching up.

  Which gave us more time to catch up with the killer ship.

  We drew level with it after ten or twelve minutes. I don’t know how fast we were going, but we’d left the Black pimpernel far behind. The Nisshin Maru was further back still. Frøya steered the Zodiac wide of the killer ship. Its captain veered in our direction, trying to cut us off. His crew fired water cannons at us, but we were out of range and the white jets of water fell harmlessly into the sea. We bounced over their bow wave and sped away.

  I could see one of the whales now. It was about a hundred metres ahead. Every few seconds a wide, bluish-grey mound would rise half a metre out of the sea. There would be a spurt of vapour, a flash of dorsal fin, then the huge creature would disappear below the steely-grey waves.

  Frøya and I were so intent on what was ahead of us that we didn’t notice what was under us.

  Suddenly there was big bump and the Zodiac rocked sideways.

  Holy guacamole!

  A second fin whale rose right beside us. It was humungous – easily thirty metres long. And as wide as a train. Frøya swerved away from it.

  Bump!

  A third fin whale rose on the other side of us!

  The fin whale on our left was only a quarter of the size of the one on our right. They must have been mother and calf. And we were between them. Not a good place to be.

  ‘Look out! ' I yelled.

  Frøya was looking the wrong way – at the calf, not the mother – so she didn’t see the danger. A tail fluke the size of a Cessna’s wing rose out of the water on our right and slapped the outboard motor, spinning us one hundred and eighty degrees.

  Suddenly we were heading back the way we’d come.

  Back towards the killer ship. On a collision course!

  We were going flat out, the killer ship was going flat out. And the gap was only fifty metres … forty-five metres … forty …

  ‘TURN!’ I yelled.

  Frøya had been knocked off her seat by the whale. She lay in the bottom of the Zodiac, looking dazed and clutching her ankle. The throttle was stuck on maximum revs.

  Twenty-five metres … twenty metres … fifteen …

  I threw myself across the coiled prop fouler and hit the tiller sideways. The Zodiac swerved, tipped, then reared upwards. For a second I thought we’d run into the killer ship and were rolling under its hull, but the only thing we’d run into was her bow wave. It sent us high into the air. I held my breath.

  We hit the water with a spine-jarring thump and went speeding away from the Japanese vessel at right angles.

  I looked back. The killer ship had turned to avoid us, too, but only by a few degrees. Now it was back on course, and much closer to the whales than we were. I brought the Zodiac around in a big semicircle. I couldn’t see the whales, but the helicopter marked their position. It was a hundred metres ahead of the Japanese ship, and the killers were closing in. The harpoon gunner stood ready on the bow.

  ‘They’re going to kill the mother!’ Frøya cried. She was sitting up now, watching with a stunned expression as the killer ship powered towards the whales.

  ‘Can you steer?’ I asked.

  Frøya nodded and took over the controls.

  ‘Get in front of the killer ship,’ I cried. ‘Between it and the whales.’

  I scrambled into the bow of the Zodiac and ripped open the cardboard carton. Until now I hadn’t noticed the cold – so much had been going on – but my hands felt like blocks of ice as I fumbled to pull out a smoke-bomb. There was no feeling in my fingers at all. I couldn’t grip the little plastic loop. In desperation, I clamped it between my teeth and jerked my head back. Pop!

  I dropped the hissing smokebomb into the bottom of the Zodiac and pulled another one from the carton.

  We got there just in time. The harpoon gunner was taking aim at the mother fin whale when Frøya steered the Zodiac across the killer ship’s bow, trailing a wall of orange smoke behind us. I activated another smokebomb and dropped it on the floor plate, near my feet. Now there were four activated smokebombs hissing away in the bottom of the Zodiac. We were a floating smokescreen.

  Frøya zigzagged in front of the killer ship so the hunters couldn’t see the whales. But I could see them. The mother and her calf were just ahead of us, barely a whale’s length away. We were getting closer every moment.

  ‘Slow down!’ I said to Frøya.

  She was at the back of the Zodiac, completely enveloped in orange smoke. I hoped it wasn’t poisonous.

  Frøya eased back on the throttle. But she was driving blind and slowed down too much. Suddenly a huge grey shape darkened the orange cloud behind us – the killer ship’s bow.

  A man’s head and shoulders emerged over the top of the smoke. Then the point of a harpoon.

  I watched in horror as the harpoon gunner squinted one eye closed and took aim. He could see over the smoke cloud. He had a clear shot at the whales. He was going to shoot over our heads.

  I thought of the mother whale swimming just ahead of us. How in a few seconds time a steel harpoon the size of a heat-seeking missile would punch through her skin and penetrate several metres into her huge, soft body. Then explode. I thought of the calf swimming beside her. The calf that was about to be orphaned. Was it old enough to fend for itself, or would it suffer a long, slow, miserable death by starvation?

  A little voice in my head repeated Captain Dan’s words: A fair exchange, don’t you think?

  I stood up.

  24

  ORCA

  The Japanese whale hunter and I were eye to eye. Only twenty metres separated us. We looked at each other across the sights of his harpoon gun. I had a whale’s eye view. The point of the explosive harpoon was aimed right at me.

  He waved at me to get out of the way, but I shook my head. I knew he wouldn’t shoot. They killed whales, not humans. But if I ducked my head or fell over, he would have a clear shot at the whales.

  It was hard to balance. I had one shin braced against the side of the Zodiac, the other against the half-empty carton of smokebombs. But I didn’t know how long I could stay upright. The Zodiac was lurching and bumping across the heaving seas as Frøya tried to keep us halfway between the killer ship and the whales. She could see now. One by one the smokebombs were running out of puff. Our smokescreen had all but disappeared.

  The killer ship edged closer. Frøya increased our speed slightly and I nearly fell over. I heard the whoosh and gurgle of a whale’s breath just ahead of the Zodiac.

  The whale hunter shifted his aim to the left. He was going to shoot the baby! I leaned the same way as the harpoon gun. He shook a fist at me in frustrati
on.

  I wondered how long Frøya and I could stay between him and the whales. With every second that passed, the killer ship came closer.

  We rolled over a particularly large wave and for a second I lost my balance. I bent my knees and steadied myself against the carton, then quickly bobbed up again.

  The whale hunter shouted angrily in Japanese and again waved at me to get out of the way.

  I took no notice. There was a smokebomb in my hand. I’d grabbed it out of the carton when I nearly fell over. Without taking my eyes off the whale hunter, I lifted it to my mouth, gripped the ring in my teeth, and jerked my head back.

  pop!

  I tossed the hissing smokebomb in a big, high arc. It sailed over Frøya’s head, across the five metres of water between the Zodiac and the jutting prow of the killer ship, and landed on the deck just in front of the harpoon gun.

  Immediately both the whale hunter and his gun disappeared in a cloud of orange smoke.

  ‘Slow down a bit,’ I said to Frøya, as I dropped to my hands and knees and scrambled back towards her. ‘Take us as close to the bow as you can.’

  She nodded and slowed down. She knew without having to be told what I was planning to do. Because of the smokebomb in the bow, the captain couldn’t see us from the bridge. And the harpoon gunner couldn’t warn him because he couldn’t see anything.

  I grabbed the prop fouler and started dragging it towards the rear of the Zodiac. Frøya leaned sideways to make room for me. But she didn’t take her eyes off the towering, knife-like prow of the Japanese ship. We were right underneath it, surfing along on its bow wave. It was a crazy manoeuvre. A moment’s lapse in concentration, and the ship would run us down. But Frøya held us in position. She was the daughter of a sea captain and obviously knew all about boats.

  My arms quivered as I hauled the end of the prop fouler over the wooden transom next to the outboard motor. I felt weak. Lack of food and the icy conditions had drained nearly all the strength from my muscles. I lowered the first plastic float into the water, then pulled at the heavy coils of rope and cable behind me. They hardly moved.