The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (31 page)

Eddi yelled from the mast, “They’re just killing them and leaving them to float. One after the other…” Glancing back, Sara saw tears were freezing on her cheeks, the camera shaking as she tried to focus on a struggling animal. It was biting at the line as other whales surged alongside, nuzzling at it as if trying to help dislodge the cruel needle lodged in its flesh. Then Madsen yelled something incoherent, or maybe the words were just blown away by the wind and the thunder of the sail and the whine of the turbochargers. Auer yelled, passing it on, “Sara! Lars wants you back aft. He’s going in.”

She bent and scrambled along the lifeline, past Bodine in the open hatch, past Eddi, past the coach house and the winch heads like miniature castle keeps protruding from caked snow-ice, and tumbled into the cockpit with a
whoof
as she slammed into the lid of an open locker. She crouched, catching her breath and sorting out impressions coming almost too fast to process. Then they snapped into a coherent whole.

Madsen was steering for the line that stretched between the newly harpooned minke and
Siryu Maru Number 3
. The whale, which was streaming a red trail but did not seem to yet be mortally injured, and the kill ship were at full speed, tossing up foam as they plowed together over the furrowed surface.
Anemone
, on a broad reach with the main drawing hard and engines whining at full power, was planing like a skipping stone, rapidly overtaking. Madsen stood at the wheel, tongue between his teeth, staring fixedly at the rapidly growing ship, which reeled as it powered through the sea. The whooshing howl of its machinery grew. A smoky braid twined itself into the clear Antarctic air. Men were gathering on the upper deck, clustering in yellow slickers along the rail.

And now, looking up, Sara understood the reason for the thick, strangely rough strand of dark wire at the leading edge of the forward shroud. That Madsen had warned her to keep her hands away from. She caught her breath at the audacity of the plan. And the danger.

The steel hull rose high above
Anemone
’s deck. The huge roaring bow wave that swept out from it pitched them as they cut through. But Madsen kept the throttles slammed forward, turbines howling. She crouched, gripping the winch as the slanting stay crept up on the taut harpoon line, drawn ruler-straight from the squat gun to the flurrying, speeding whale.

But just as the cutter was about to touch it, the fleeing whale surged, breaking the surface to the left. The line slacked, drooping into a catenary.
Anemone
rose, then plunged downward.

She shook along her whole length, quivering as the forward stay, the main bracing of the mast, bent inward, tensioning the mast like a drawn bow.

Then, quite suddenly, the stay snapped. It parted in a flurry of singing wire-ends, aluminum tubing, and suddenly released Kevlar as the whole jib- and jib-furling assembly exploded. The mast sprang back upright with a note like a plucked string, but octaves deeper, shaking the boat from stem to stern and whipping Eddi’s head forward and back as she struggled to unstrap herself. Looking up, Madsen flung up an arm as the mast tottered. “Look out!” Dorée screamed, ducking for the companionway. Sara too crouched, unable to move as the mast vibrated above them, hesitated, then began to topple.

But not completely. It snagged, quivering, as if caught by some invisible force. In fact, she couldn’t quite see why it hadn’t kept toppling backward, to crash down on their heads.

Then she understood, just as Madsen cut the throttles and reached for the mainsail halyard. Before he could trip it she was on him. “No! That’s all that’s holding it up! The mainsail, pushing forward!”

“Oh, shit—you’re right.” His face bleached as he realized what he’d almost done. He shoved her out of the cockpit. “Get forward. Do something!”

Not a very specific order, but she grabbed Eddi as the videographer finally freed herself. They slipped and scrabbled on all fours along the rocking deck as the jib raved and thundered above their bent backs. The clew caught her a slam on the head that if not for the helmet would have knocked her silly. At the same moment a jet of water crashed down, searching the forecastle, then steadying on Eddi. It slammed her to her belly and skidded her into the chainplates, where she clung helplessly as the fire hose battered her.

The jet lifted, swept forward. Sara dropped prone and got a grip on her shipmate’s plait and hauled her bodily inboard as
Anemone
staggered back into the creaming wake of the kill ship. She stared down for an infinite second into light pearl varied with green and darker green, and a pure white where it clashed with itself and surfaced, like boiling, liquid glass. But where it roiled and foamed to the left of the wake, behind the fleeing whale, that froth was tinged crimson. Above them sailors shook their fists and called imprecations in Japanese. One reared back and pitched, and a small object left his fist and turned end over end, suddenly exploding with a loud crack and flash and a puff of smoke.

“We have to drop the jib,” Eddi panted, lying full length beside her. “Drop it and use the halyard. Tie it to something.” Sara, looking up, saw she was right. The whole immense jib was flailing and beating with superhuman power as
Anemone
slowed, turning her rump to the wind.

As she reached up and grabbed one of the darting, shaking sheets her shoulder was nearly yanked out of its socket, but she held on and Eddi grabbed it too, and they worked their way forward, dragging and gathering the flailing fabric down to the deck inch by inch, then yard by yard.

The engines whined again, and spray burst over the cockpit. Lars was backing down, bulldozing
Anemone
’s flat chisel of a stern into the oncoming seas, putting just that much more wind pressure on the tottering mast. Then they were on their feet, hauling the slick sodden sail to their breasts. They stuffed it into the open hatch, where Mick gathered folds in as fast as they could shove them.

The heavy stainless halyard shackle came down at last into Sara’s hands. She pulled the lanyarded pin to snap it open, fought it up to the bow, and snapped it into the bullnose just before her hands gave out and she slid back gasping, numb, beaten, bruised. Her fingers left bloody smears on the thick braided line, the icy white deck. Tehiyah and Hideyashi were still hauling, the winch clattering through the wind and the crash of the seas. The halyard drew taut between masthead and bow, and Sara sobbed, wheezing, as the mast ceased its drunken sway and stiffened once more into its wonted vertical.

“Sara, good work.” Hideyashi gave her an admiring smile. Madsen slapped her shoulder, and she winced. He ruddered the bow around into the wind.
Anemone
coasted to a halt, idling, rolling as she picked up the chop.

“You were wonderful,” Dorée said, teeth gleaming. Then those thick glorious eyebrows gathered into a frown. “Oh—you’re bleeding!”

“Yes, my hands—”

“No. Your leg. Wait—let me unzip this.”

Sara looked down to see a jagged cut welling bright blood from her upper thigh. Dorée hooked a finger through a tear in her suit. “What in the world did this?”

“I don’t remember. Everything was so confused—”

“They threw a firecracker,” Eddi said.

“Not a firecracker,” Lars said, face hard. “Some kind of grenade.”

Tehiyah glared at the ships. “We didn’t hurt them. We were—we were nonviolent.”

“Sometimes that only gets you so far,” the new captain muttered.

Sara bent for a closer look. It stung, but didn’t look like anything a Band-Aid wouldn’t cover. “I’m all right. Really. Let’s—we need to stop them. They’re still—”

“Still killing,” Eddi finished for her, and stood. “She’s right, Lars. We’ve got to fuck up this murdering shit. Or die trying.”

Madsen glanced aloft, then across the water to where
Number 3
had slowed, winching in the line. The minke, exhausted, wallowed at its end. Once more the puny crack of rifle shots echoed from the distant bergs. “All right,” he said, and pushed the throttles forward again.

As
Anemone
surged once more Sara caught an undulation on the water some distance away. It was difficult to make out and she shielded her gaze. Close together rolled several brownish, irregular, lumpy shapes, like immense, half-awash driftlogs. The seas seethed about one end, which rose and then fell, rose and fell. Then from the midst of it jutted a queerly sideways jet that flamed in the dusklight like red fire.

“Sperm whale,” Hideyashi said, lowering binoculars. “He’s been there awhile. Just lying off.” He made as if to pass them to her, but she waved them away.

“I should bandage that,” Auer said, looking at Sara’s thigh.

“Let it bleed, Eddi. It’ll clot soon enough.” She followed Madsen’s anxious eye aloft again. “Will it hold, Lars?”

“I don’t know. We ought to get another line on it.”

“Then let’s do it,” she snapped. “Hy, give me a hand? We’ll take the other halyard forward too. That’ll give us two lines bracing it. Will that be enough, Lars?”

“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.