What Lurks Beneath (9 page)

T
hey'd lost another hydrophone.

Several of the seafloor devices in the grid had failed lately. One had even been destroyed by something. This was practically becoming routine.

Lieutenant Commander Tom Rabinowitz sat in a darkened room, in a row alongside several other naval personnel. All wore matching service khakis and audio headsets. A few of his colleagues spoke quietly into their mouthpieces, but otherwise the room was silent.

In front of them was a wall covered in monitors, with images ranging from cloud-swept satellite views of the Bahamas to black-and-white feeds from undersea cameras to updating screens of radar sweeping the ocean surface. He glanced at one black-and-white monitor—a feed from an ROV-mounted camera. The vehicle had been deployed to gather data on the most recently failed seafloor hydrophone. One located near an old naval shipwreck, more than 3,000 feet down.

Rabinowitz's duties at the Navy's Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center, located on Andros Island's east coast, were relatively benign—and usually very boring. He was charged with tracking all in-water observational data and writing up daily summary reports for the higher brass. Vessels of interest, deepwater weapons testing, research-oriented video feeds, weather anomalies. He tracked it all. And if anything ever merited an immediate inquiry, which was rare, he had to run it up the flagpole. That was it.

When he joined the Navy, he'd briefly travelled the world on a ship, trying to tag along with crewmates like Will Sturman and Joe Montoya as they raised hell. But he'd quickly been placed on a techy path. For more than a decade now, he was usually cooped up in a windowless room staring at computers. Now that he had a family, it was kind of nice to work something more like a nine-to-five. But it was usually dull—except for rare events.

Like finding your hydrophones, thousands of feet underwater, destroyed by an unknown culprit.

It used to be the cookiecutter sharks. The little bastards would latch on to anything soft on the devices—neoprene covers, rubber cable sheathings—and gouge out hunks with their serrated teeth. But after the Navy figured out the culprit, they'd added fiberglass or other protective covers to vulnerable areas. He thought of the last failed hydrophone in the grid. That damage wasn't from any small cookiecutter shark.

He was part of an important project involving the use of a massive hydrophone array in TOTO—naval slang for the Tongue of the Ocean. The Navy had been doing very interesting things in TOTO for decades.

He thought about the beaked whales that had most recently washed ashore, a few weeks back. Within days of their last test run. But even the biologists who were supposed to be kept apprised of all sonar testing, ever since the Navy had admitted involvement in the first whale strandings many years ago, were not aware of this latest research.

The government would deny involvement, like it usually did, if anything bad happened. It would continue to do so, until there was too much evidence to dodge the bullet.

But he knew there was no coincidence here. He knew the whales were dead because of whatever the Navy was now testing here. And he wondered what other effects the novel sonar frequencies were having on ocean life in the Bahamas.

He again looked at the black-and-white ROV feed. Lieutenant Menendez sat next to him, focused intently on the screen. She usually piloted the unmanned crafts, which involved mostly looking at nothing, and guiding them more from GPS coordinates than video feed. Rarely did they see any life on the cameras when the vehicles went down to make repairs, because so little could survive in the cold, crushing pressure at the bottom of the trench. They usually just saw water, and a largely featureless ocean floor.

But some things did live down there.

Just before the last hydrophone failed, it had captured an unidentified sound, thought to be natural in origin, before something made contact with the device itself and disabled it. When an unmanned submersible had been sent down to assess the hydrophone—one of many in the network that formed a grid on the bottom of the mile-deep trench—its camera had again captured something unusual. On its way in, just before it arrived at the hydrophone. Not a juvenile-delinquent whale, or a Chinese spy submarine, but in the soft sediments thousands of feet down, there had been what appeared to be some sort of broad, faint trail on the bottom. He'd seen one in their footage before. Thick skid lines, with small dots on either side. As though some sort of lightweight, incredibly broad sled had been dragged through the soft snow of sediment by a pair of giant children. But they didn't know what it was.

And the hydrophone had been pulverized. As if
crushed
.

When the ROV had gone back several days later to install a replacement hydrophone, the wide trail had already faded significantly in the turbidity current of the trench. The current had deposited fine sediments in the depressions, covering most of the track. If the obvious skid line filled in that quickly, it meant something had made it very recently—most likely when the hydrophone had been disabled. And if it was something the Navy owned, nobody was telling him.

Based on GPS data, the ROV would be arriving at the failed hydrophone at any moment.

“Check this out, Wits,” Menendez said. “There's that track again.”

She was right. It was less discernable than the last time, but on the screen was a recently dredged, broad trench in the soft sediments. With similar depressions dotting the bottom on either side. The trench dropped off the screen as the ROV nosed up and headed for the hydrophone.

“How big is it?” he asked.

“Pretty big. Those marks on the sides? They range in size, but some are maybe a meter or more across.”

“What the hell do you think made that?”

She shook her head. “I don't know. But I'm sure it was whatever did this.”

Something came into view on the screen. The motionless object looked like a small car that had been in a very bad accident—the sort that no longer even looks like a car after a horrific collision—before sinking to the ocean floor.

Like the last one, the hydrophone housing on the screen was demolished.

G
entle waves lapped the sugary-white beach beneath the coconut palms. Offshore, above the distant horizon, the orange rays of the morning sun backlit a long cloud bearing a flat bottom and jagged top, a heavenly, upside-down saw blade cleaving sea from sky. Even the air smelled clean.

It would have been a beautiful scene, if not for the dying whales.

Over the past week, Val had been diving under her uncle's tutelage, mainly in a single, well-explored, shallower blue hole. While Eric tinkered with his ROV and practiced piloting it out of their way, Mack was showing her the ins and outs of cave diving—how to dive with a lot of extra equipment and multiple tanks, how to maneuver without stirring up sediment in caverns, how to feel your route, how to manage lines.

Safety lines were critical in cave diving. She had learned to lay and follow a spooled nylon line, to use secondary lines whenever leaving the main line, and to retrace those lines back to the thicker main if needing to turn around. And they worked on proper line laying, to avoid entanglement, and what to do if you did snag one. Even for Val, a highly experienced scuba diver by anyone's standards, it was all very new, very different, and even very intimidating. The added gear alone, from tanks to spools to lights, highlighted the risk.

Mack had blindfolded her yesterday, and made her find her way to a main line using a series of short excursions in different directions, until she found the main line and followed it out safely by feel alone, using plastic arrows affixed to it that pointed in the right direction. The drill was designed to mimic the conditions in a cave if all lights were lost or so much sediment was stirred up that visibility became nil. After that drill, she decided to take a day off. She'd risen early and gone running, and after just the first mile ran into the commotion on the beach.

Still trying to catch her breath, Val knelt by one of the smallest ones in the pod, likely a calf. Next to Val were several others who had joined in to help, including a young woman who, like her, appeared to be out for an early morning run.

The group had gravitated to this particular whale for its small size—and the fact that it was still visibly alive. Each time a wave had climbed up the beach to meet it, they had tried to roll it back into the water. Without success. And the tide was going out.

Time was running out.

Four larger whales, small by whale standards but each probably fifteen feet long and weighing a ton or more, dotted the beach nearby, where they had apparently stranded themselves overnight. Groups were gathered around a few of those animals as well. They appeared to be having no better luck moving them back into the sea.

“Heads-up, everyone!” the other runner shouted. She was an attractive Bahamian, tall with an athletic build. She seemed to know what she was doing, and Val had allowed her to take charge. She seemed to know some of the others in the water with them. Even an older man with gray-speckled hair who looked like he might be a banker followed her lead, as did a plump woman who panted beside him.

“Ready, everyone . . .” the runner said.

A long wave rolled up the beach, washing around the ten-foot whale and splashing Val's bare legs below her running shorts.

“Now!” the woman shouted. They heaved against the animal's smooth body.

It moved.

The calf inched down the beach, following the wave back toward the sea, before settling into the sand.

As the next wave hit, Val leaned her shoulder against the whale, soaking her tank top and shorts, hoping the momentum they generated wouldn't stop this time. These were the biggest waves they'd seen in ten minutes, but she knew how hard it was to try to free even a beached dolphin. With the others pushing beside her, the semi-buoyant, thousand-pound animal began to lift off the sand in the slightly deeper water. The group splashed behind it as they managed to float it out past the shore break. Cheers began to erupt from other people on the beach.

Val was up to her waist in the water now, her drenched white top flattened against her chest. She whipped the wet tip of her long ponytail out of her face and helped the others turn the whale's body, directing its head out toward the sea. And then they stepped back and waited.

The whale began to roll over onto its back.

The Bahamian runner lunged forward, Val behind her, and they tried to grip its smooth skin, to prevent its body from rotating.

“We can't let this girl roll over,” the woman said. “Her breathing hole needs to stay above the water.”

“I know,” Val said.

Near her face the whale's small, cow-like eye met hers. It hardly appeared to be seeing her. Only she and the other runner were still struggling with the whale. She glanced behind her. The others simply stood back, resigned to the whale's fate as the two women struggled against the slow turn of the calf's body. They didn't understand the situation, or didn't care enough.

“Help us, Jeffrey! Please!” the runner shouted at the older man and a woman who might have been his wife.

The others slowly stepped in again beside them, starting with the older couple. Together, they all managed to keep the small whale's blowhole above water for a few minutes. But it didn't respond. The animal simply refused to move. To fight for its life.

One by one, the people began to step away.

 

 

They stood in the shallow water, panting, too exhausted to continue. The calf remained rolled onto its back. The waves were pushing it back toward the beach. Only the tall Bahamian woman remained by its side, trying to roll it upright with each wave.

Val finally placed a hand on the woman's shoulder. “It's too late for this one,” she said.

The runner shrugged off Val's hand, then glared at the others. “Don't you all understand? If we don't help her, she's going to die!”

Val squatted beside her. “Look. What you're doing is admirable. But I know what I'm talking about. There's nothing we can do now.”

The runner turned away, moved her hand soothingly over the whale. After a few moments, she stood, and Val followed. They stepped back, watching as a wave carried the animal gently back toward the beach.

Val knew what was going to happen. She had seen this before. But she didn't want to watch it die on the sand. It, and its family.

She looked out past the whales, over the ocean. Under the saw-blade cloud, dark splotches of sea grass growing on the shallow bottom broke up the shimmering expanse of aquamarine water, which farther out yielded to the deep ocean beneath. There, visible from shore where the water turned a profound blue, the Great Bahama Bank abruptly ended and deep water began.

“The Tongue of the Ocean,” the runner said, as if reading her thoughts. “That's where a lot of these whales live.”

“Yes. I've read about it,” Val said.

The undersea feature—a mile-deep trench off the east coast of Andros Island and wedged between the shallow banks of the Bahamas islands—was like nothing else on earth. Its beautiful, protected waters offered unique and magnificent sea life, like these beaked whales, and drew the scuba divers and other tourists here that fueled the economy.

“It's their undoing,” the runner said.

“What do you mean?”

“The trench. These whales wouldn't be here without it. But it serves other interests, you know. Interests that are bad for the whales.”

“You mean the Navy? Its sonar research?”

The woman nodded.

“I thought they had stopped all that, though,” Val said. “After all the bad publicity. You think it may have affected these whales?”

“I know it did.” The runner looked down at her. “How do you know about the naval research here?”

Val smiled. “I read a lot.”

For decades, US Navy warships and research vessels had apparently plied the waters over the Tongue of the Ocean, stationed out of the base at Fresh Creek, farther up the coast. It wasn't those ships themselves that were of concern, although Val knew all about shipping vessels ramming into and killing full-grown whales in other parts of the world. It wasn't the Navy's weaponry either. It was something else. Something you couldn't see.

Sonar.

The Tongue of the Ocean concealed a broad, U-shaped undersea depression 150 miles long and almost completely protected from the open ocean. Hundreds of islands and reefs, and the banks that provided a platform for them, apparently sheltered it from background noises carried across the Atlantic that could complicate undersea testing. And the submarines and listening devices of other governments would not be able to easily detect the sound waves generated by the Navy's own research activities.

The woman said, “The first time the whales washed up dead was the fall of 2000. I was just a young girl.” Her accent had faded now, and she spoke in very American English.

“Beaked whales, right?”

“A lotta people speculated about the cause, but it was years before the Navy finally admitted its testing probably disrupted the whales' behavior. But we too thought they'd stopped.”

“Don't they have to disclose any testing now?”

The runner shook her head. “When I was a teenager, they started allowing researchers to come to the base in Fresh Creek. They said the goal was to learn more about the effects of sonar on Blainville's whales, like these. The Navy still says they let them offer input, to prevent more accidents. And they've promised to stop using whatever caused the other strandings. But there have been more dead whales.”

“Maybe it's something else,” Val said.

“Maybe.” The woman smiled at Val. “I'm sorry I was rude before. It's just that—”

“No need to apologize.”

“No, really. I just get passionate about this. It's happened before.” She reached out her hand. “I'm Ashley. Ashley Campbell.”

“Valerie Martell.”

“You here on vacation?”

“Not really. I'm here for work.”

“How do you know so much about Andros? About these whales?”

“It's related to my own work. I'm a marine scientist. Do you want to grab a cup of coffee? I'll fill you in, and maybe you can help me out too.”

Ashley glanced at her watch. “Maybe if we hurry. I have to be at Oceanus by nine. I work there. Are you staying with us?”

“No. A guesthouse called the Twin Palms.”

Ashley nodded. “You're a diver, then.”

“Yes. I do research.”

The cloud offshore, which now resembled a long battleship, hovered indifferently over the ocean. Ashley turned away from the water and the whales, and smiled at Valerie.

“Let's go get that coffee,” Ashley said “So we can get warm. And you can tell me about what you're doing here.”

The women turned and walked back toward the road. They didn't look back at the whales.