Authors: Douglas Carlton Abrams
Jake looked down and saw that an enormous crowd had gathered to watch the images of the whales and whaling. He smiled. The first part of their mission had succeeded.
The cold winter wind blew around them, but it was a welcome relief as it cooled Jake’s head and neck. They ripped off their jackets as the police officers shouted at them to stand still. Each of them wore what looked like a backpack but was actually an ultra-low-profile BASE-jumping parachute connected to a body harness.
“Ready?” Jake shouted.
Tano didn’t answer. His hands were trembling. On a building this low, it was go and throw, and there would be no margin for error.
“It’s no different from what we practiced—just pull the cord! Three, two, one, JUMP!”
Jake watched Tano throw his small round pilot chute a moment before he did.
As Jake left the ledge, all fear dissipated, and each second expanded into a timeless moment of focused and deliberate action, like that of a samurai wielding his sword. Jake kept his head up, arching his stiff back, his knees and arms bent. He must have looked like a frog from below. And then his chute snapped open. The sound was like the crack of a giant towel. His feet kicked out as his body was jerked back from the downward pull of gravity. Above him, the chute opened into a large rectangular black flag with the words
SAVE APOLLO! SAVE THE WHALES!
spray-painted across it in white.
Oh Christ!
His chute had opened backward. He knew instantly that he had a 180 as the spreading force of the lines turned him around to face the building. He was too close to turn. Terror flooded his body as he headed toward its glass face, blinded by the bright light of the LCD screens.
Jake grabbed both rear risers and pulled his knees up to his chest as he slammed against the building, the soles of his boots
cushioning the blow. The chances of entanglement and a straight drop were enormous. His stomach muscles clenched tight as a fist. He was at the mercy of physics, but now every cell in Jake screamed to survive.
He hung on the rear risers as he swung backward, dropping fast. When he saw there were ten feet between him and the building, he let go of his left riser and hung on the right as his chute pivoted, turning him away from the building. He grabbed his yellow toggles to release the control lines.
The flight was only a few seconds. He was coming in fast. At last he pulled down on the toggles, flattening out his angle of descent. Landing hard, he rolled on the side of his leg, his black parachute trailing behind him. He stood quickly if unsteadily: he was not hurt. As he pulled on the cutaway handle to release his parachute, he looked around for Tano. Had he made it to the car? They would laugh over a Sapporo tonight about his brush with death.
Then Jake saw a crowd of onlookers surrounding Tano’s body. He gasped in disbelief. “Tano!” he shouted, pushing through the crowd, and then crouched beside his friend. Tano’s face stared up blankly, life gone from his eyes. What the hell had happened?
Jake knew a 180 was often caused by wind or body position and that he was lucky to be alive, but he couldn’t begin to understand what had caused Tano’s mishap. He scanned Tano’s body for some explanation. Then his stomach lurched as he saw it—the one-inch piece of flat webbing that attached the bridle of the pilot chute to the harness had been threaded through Tano’s leg strap by mistake. His parachute had not even opened.
Jake heard sirens. He looked up at the advancing police.
FORTY-SIX
10:45
A.M.
Next day
Tuesday
Ten miles from Liberty Slough
E
LIZABETH SAT
in the passenger seat of Connie’s car, wishing her friend would pay more attention to the road and less to the radio. Perhaps it was the fact that she was pregnant, but she suddenly felt more cautious. Connie had been kind enough to pick her up from the hospital and take her to Apollo, so she did not want to complain.
“Can I help you?” Elizabeth finally said.
“No, I’ve got it.” Connie was switching between the AM and FM news radio stations that she had programmed into her car stereo. There were no music stations. She seemed anxious and upset, as if she hadn’t slept all night.
“Are you okay?” Elizabeth asked.
“I’m fine,” Connie said, but she didn’t sound it. Her tone was harsh. She was driving fast, and the flat country roads were narrow, with steep drainage ditches on either side.
Elizabeth heard the siren and saw the flashing lights in her side-view mirror.
“Damn,” Connie said as she panicked and stepped on the gas.
“Connie, what are you doing? Pull over.”
Connie came to her senses and pulled over. “Sorry, I’m not myself…”
The black Crown Victoria sedan must have been an undercover police car. The dash-mounted siren flashed blue lights like a law enforcement discotheque. The officer who walked toward them was dressed in a navy blue uniform and wore mirrored aviator sunglasses.
Connie lowered the window.
“Let’s see some ID from both of you.”
“Both of us?” Connie asked. “I was the one driving.”
“I’m going to have to check for warrants.” Perhaps Connie’s little sprint from the long arm of the law had made him suspect that they were fugitives or criminals or had something else to hide.
Elizabeth handed over her driver’s license. Connie was still looking in her bag, but she didn’t seem in any particular hurry to find her license.
“Elizabeth McKay,” the officer said with a smile, and she wondered if he, too, had seen her on Apollo’s belly. Had anyone not seen her? “Ms. McKay, please step out of the car.” That seemed strange to Elizabeth, but she did as she was told. The space was quite narrow between the car and where the road sloped down to the irrigation ditch. “Turn around. I’m going to need to check you for weapons.”
“Are you with the sheriff’s department?” Connie asked. She must have thought this seemed strange, too.
The officer held up his hand to shut Connie down. “I’ll be with you in a minute, ma’am.” Elizabeth wished Connie would be a little less confrontational.
Elizabeth turned around and faced the car. The officer tapped Elizabeth’s legs to get her to spread them apart and then began to pat her down, starting with her shoulders and torso. As he touched her, he said, “I’m not sure you ladies realize what can happen to you out here.” The officer patted the outside of her legs. “There are a lot of dangerous people around here. Meth heads, poachers, car thieves…” The officer touched Elizabeth on her inner thigh and lingered there.
Elizabeth’s heart was pounding with fear. Something was wrong. Police officers didn’t do this, and if they did, it was wrong. As she felt him grope her, she slapped his hand away.
Connie was out of the car now. “What the hell are you doing? What’s your badge number, Officer? What’s your name?”
The officer was already walking back to his car. “You ladies have a nice day, and remember what I said.”
“That was harassment!
What is your badge number?
” Connie was shouting and pursuing the officer, who was getting in his car.
“Forget it,” Elizabeth said as she grabbed Connie’s arm. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
The black sedan sped off ahead of them.
“Who was that?” Elizabeth asked.
Connie’s face was twisted in rage as she stomped on the gas and headed toward the slough. “Some fake cop.”
“Maybe a pervert?” Elizabeth guessed.
“More likely a messenger,” Connie replied.
FORTY-SEVEN
11:10
A.M.
Liberty Slough
C
ONNIE DROVE
into the field that had become the slough parking lot, still listening anxiously to the radio. It looked to Elizabeth as though Connie’s hand was trembling. The incident with the fake officer had clearly affected Connie as much as it had her. Elizabeth was still feeling nervous and a little paranoid. As they drove toward a parking spot, Connie found the news she was looking for.
“In Tokyo, Japan, two eco-terrorists—”
“They’re eco-
activists!
” Connie shouted at the radio.
“—broke into a building in downtown Tokyo and hijacked an electronic billboard to display footage of swimming humpback whales and Japanese whaling practices. When the police arrived, the two men BASE-jumped from the building. One of the parachutes had
SAVE APOLLO! SAVE THE WHALES!
written on it. The other parachute reportedly did not open. A Japanese national, identified as Tano Ito, died on impact—”
Connie slammed on the brakes. “Tano…” she whispered.
“The other eco-terrorist was arrested.”
“Jake…”
“An organization called the Ocean Warriors has claimed responsibility.”
“Your Jake and Tano?” Elizabeth said, horrified. “Did you know they—”
“Yes,” Connie said, clenching the wheel and staring straight ahead.
“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said softly.
“People die,” Connie said, her voice cracking. Tears streaked down her face as she stepped on the gas and pulled between two parked cars.
“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth repeated. She wanted to say something more, but before she could, there was a rap on the window. She rolled it down as Connie looked away.
“Where have you been?” Lieutenant James asked. “Everyone is telling me to euthanize this whale—somehow even the lieutenant governor has decided it might be the most humane thing to do—and you just disappeared.”
“I’m sorry. I was at the hospital.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Good, because we’re running out of time. They could take this out of my hands at any moment.”
“I’ll come up with something.”
“I don’t want something. I want a way to get this whale out alive. I’m risking my career, buying you time. Don’t let me and everyone else down, Professor.”
Lieutenant James walked off to talk to some man in a suit. Elizabeth recognized him as a representative from the Office of Emergency Services, which no doubt reported back to the lieutenant governor.
Connie was still crying silently.
“Can I do—”
“Go save that goddamn whale. That’s what you can do. Tano died for the whales. You can make his death mean something.”
“I’ll try,” Elizabeth said, but as she got out of the car and walked to the portable, she knew it was impossible. What had her mother’s death meant? She understood the desire to see life and death as part of some grand drama, to give them some greater meaning, but it was a lie. Life was just life, and death was just death. She looked down at her belly and felt a tingling in her abdomen. She was surprised by a new desire to reconsider this biologist’s creed.
FORTY-EIGHT
11:35
A.M.
T
HERE WERE
no enforcement people in the portable. Elizabeth glanced around the three narrow rooms that served as Incident Command. On one end was the command room, which was filled with communication equipment, and on the other was the meeting room. In the middle was the cramped office space, with a few desks, a radio, and a phone. Elizabeth was grateful for the privacy as she sat at one of the desks and turned on her laptop. Thank God the department hadn’t confiscated it, too. Dr. Skilling was right that the data technically belonged to the grant, but she had collected it. Skilling always had discouraged her from posting her data to the web, telling her to guard it jealously. Maddings, however, had believed that true intelligence was always distributed and collaborative. Fortunately, she had listened to Maddings.
Elizabeth went to the WhaleNet site. To her amazement, on the discussion board there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of postings from people all over the world. These had links to websites that people had put up with pictures of Elizabeth and Apollo. She was flabbergasted. She had no idea that her work with Apollo had awakened such concern.
Elizabeth felt strengthened by this support and was all the more determined not to let people down. She went to the site’s archives, much of which she and Maddings had contributed. She clicked on the sound files from both the slough and Bequia and listened as the
spectrogram scrolled across the screen. Something still did not make sense to her, and she knew it was important. What was the meaning of the difference between the two distress calls? Why had the mother used the shorter and more urgent distress call after her baby had died? And why had Echo fled on hearing it?
Elizabeth remembered a video file Professor Maddings had posted a few years earlier that included a baby contact call and this shorter, more urgent distress call. She searched through the archive, found the video, and opened it. On her screen, a small window displayed a bull shark swimming toward a baby humpback that was with its mother and another female, perhaps a midwife whale. The hair on her neck stood on end and goose bumps covered her arms as she remembered her own encounter with the tiger shark in Bequia. She breathed in hard and exhaled slowly, trying to focus on the sounds.
Listen. Listen.
First she heard the sound for “baby.” Then she heard the distress call—the short, urgent one. The sound fell abruptly at the end. The mother humpback was facing away from the shark, resting near the bottom, as tired mother whales often do. In the video, her body was like a gray cloud. The midwife whale seemed to see the shark first and must have tried warning the sleeping mother, who turned to face her baby immediately after hearing the call.
As Elizabeth replayed the video, she was able to see the sound visually portrayed on the spectrograph. First she saw the soft and fluid mother-baby call—
w-OP.
It looked like an Arabic word sweeping upward as it scrolled across the screen. Then she saw the dramatic, wider-frequency distress call,
EEh-EEh-EEh,
like three sharp downward slopes.
One of the overnight security officers had walked in for his coffee break. The man’s slurping, sniffling, and shifting in his chair was distracting Elizabeth. She needed some music to help her focus, so she chose a piece that reminded her of Maddings and his encouragement.