Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

Chapter 17~18

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jonathan Livingston Reaper

Amy wore an oversized, tattered "I'M WITH STUPID" nightshirt and Local Motion flip-flops. Her hair was completely flat on one side and splayed out into an improbable sunburst of spikes on the other, making it appear that she was getting hit in the side of the head by a tiny hurricane, which she wasn't. She was, however, performing the longest sustained yawn Clay had ever seen.

"Ooo ahe-e, I aya oa a," she said in yawnspeak, a language  -  not unlike Hawaiian  -  known for its paucity of consonants. (You go ahead, I'm okay, she was saying.) She gestured for Clay to continue.

Clay cued the tape and fiddled with the audio. A whale tail in a field of blue passed by on the monitor.

"There's someone outside, Captain."

"Does he have my sandwich with him?"

Amy stopped yawning and scooted forward on the stool she was perched upon behind Clay. When the whale tail came down, Clay stopped the tape and looked back at her.

"Well?"

"Play it again."

He did. "Can we get a feeling for direction?" Amy asked. "That housing has stereo microphones, right? What if we move the speakers far apart  -  can we get a sense where it's coming from?"

Clay shook his head. "The mikes are right next to each other. You have to separate them by at least a meter to get any spatial information. All I can tell you is that it's in the water and it's not particularly loud. In fact, if I hadn't been using the rebreather, I'd never have heard it. You're the audio person. What can you tell me?" He ran it back and played it again.

"It's human speech."

Clay looked at her as if to say, Uh-huh, I woke you up because I needed the obvious pointed out.

"And it's military."

"Why do you think it's military?"

Now Amy gave Clay the same look that he had just finished giving her." 'Captain'?"

"Oh, right," said Clay. "Speaker in the water? Divers with underwater communications? What do you think?"

"Didn't sound like it. Did it sound like it was coming from small speakers to you?"

"Nope." Clay played it again. "Sandwich?" he said.

"Sandwich?"

"The Old Broad said that someone called her claiming to be a whale and asked her to tell Nate to bring him a sandwich."

Amy squeezed Clay's shoulder. "He's gone, Clay. I know you don't believe what I saw happened, but it certainly wasn't about a sandwich conspiracy."

"I'm not saying that, Amy. Damn it. I'm not saying this had anything to do with Nate's"  -  he was going to say drowning and stopped himself  -  "accident. But it might have to do with the lab getting wrecked, the tapes getting stolen, and someone trying to mess with the Old Broad. Someone is fucking with us, Amy, and it might be whoever is recorded on this tape."

"And there's no way the camera could have pulled a signal out of the air, something on the same frequency or something? A mobile phone or something?"

"Through a half-inch of powder-coated aluminum housing and a hundred feet of water? No, that signal came in through the mike. That I'm sure of."

Amy nodded and looked at the paused picture on the screen. "So you're looking for two things: someone military and someone who has an interest in Nate's work."

"No one  -  " Clay stopped himself again, remembering what he'd said to Nate when the lab had been wrecked. That no one cared about their work. But obviously someone did. "Tarwater?"

Amy shrugged. "He's military. Maybe. Leave the tape out. I'll run a spectrograph on the audio in the morning, see if I can tell if it's coming through some kind of amplifier. I've got nothing left tonight  -  I'm beat."

"Thanks," Clay said. "You get some rest, kiddo. I'm going to hit it, too. I'll be heading down to the harbor first thing."

" 'Kay."

"Oh, and hey, the 'kiddo' thing, I didn't mean  - »

Amy threw her arms around him and kissed the top of his head. "You big mook. Don't worry, we'll get through this." She turned and started out the door.

"Amy?"

She paused in the doorway. "Yeah?"

"Can I ask you a... personal question, kinda?"

"Shoot."

"The shirt  -  who's stupid?"

She looked down at her shirt, then back at him and grinned. "Always seems to apply, Clay. No matter where I am or who I'm with, the smoke clears and the shirt is true. You gotta hang on to truth when you find it."

"I like truth," Clay said.

"Night, Clay."

"Night, kiddo."

The next day the weather was blown out, with whitecaps frosting the entire channel across to Lanai and the coconut palms whipping overhead like epileptic dust mops. Clay drove by the harbor in his truck, noting that the cabin cruiser that Cliff Hyland's group had been using was parked in its slip. Then he turned around and caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye as he drove past the hundred-year-old Pioneer Inn  -  Captain Tarwater's navy whites standing out against the green shiplap. He parked his truck by the giant banyan tree next door and humped it over to the restaurant.

When Clay came up to the table, the hostess was just seating Cliff Hyland, Tarwater, and one of their grad students, a young blond woman with a raccoon sunburn and straw-dry hair.

"Hey, Cliff," Clay said. "You got a minute?"

"Clay, how you doing?" Hyland took off his sunglasses and stood to shake hands. "Please, join us."

Clay looked at Tarwater, and the naval officer nodded. "Sorry to hear about your partner," he said. Then he looked back down at his menu. The young woman sitting with them was watching the dynamic between the three men as if she might write a paper on it.

"Just a second," Clay said. "If I could talk to you outside."

Now Tarwater glanced up and gave Cliff Hyland an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

"Sure, Clay," Cliff said, "let's walk." He looked to the junior researcher. "When she comes, coffee, Portuguese sausage, eggs over easy, whole wheat."

The girl nodded. Hyland followed Clay out to the front of the hotel, which overlooked the harbor fueling station and the Carthaginian, a steel-hulled replica of a whaling brig, now used as a floating museum. They stood side by side, watching the harbor, each with a foot propped on the seawall.

"What's up, Clay?"

"What are you guys working on, Cliff?"

"You know I can't talk about that. I signed a nondisclosure thing."

"You got divers in the water, people with underwater coms?"

"Don't be silly, Clay. You've seen my crew. Except for Tarwater, they're just kids. What's this about?"

"Somebody's fucking with us, Cliff. They sank my boat, tore up the office, took Nate's papers and tapes. They're even messing with one of our benefactors. I'm not even sure they don't have something to do with Nate's  - »

"And you think it's me?" Hyland took his foot off the seawall and turned to Clay. "Nate was my friend, too. I've known you guys, what? Twenty-two, twenty-three years? You can't think I'd do anything like that."

"I'm not saying you personally. What are you and Tarwater working on, Cliff? What would Nate know that would interfere with what you're doing?"

Hyland stared at his feet. Scratched his beard. "I don't know."

"You don't know? You know what we're doing  -  figure it out. Listen, I know you guys are using a big towable sonar rig, right? What's Tarwater looking at? Some new kind of active sonar? If it didn't have a hinky element, he wouldn't be here on site. Mines?"

"Damn it, Clay, I can't tell you! I can tell you that if I thought it was going to hurt the animals, or anyone in the field for that matter, I wouldn't be doing the work."

"Remember the navy's Pacific Biological Ocean Science Program? Were you in on that?"

"No. Birds, wasn't it?"

"Yeah, seabirds. The navy came to a bunch of field biologists with a ton of money  -  wanted seabirds tagged and tracked, behavior recorded, population information, habitat, everything. Everyone thought the heavens had opened up and started raining money. Thought the navy was doing some sort of secret impact study to preserve the birds. Do you know what the study was actually for?"

"No, that was before my time, Clay."

"They wanted to use the birds as delivery systems for biological weapons. Wanted to make sure they could predict that they'd fly to the enemy. Probably fifty scientists helped in that study."

"But it didn't happen, Clay, did it? I mean, the data was valuable scientifically, but the weapons project didn't pan out."

"As far as we know. That's the point. How would we know, until a seagull drops fucking anthrax on us?"

Cliff Hyland had aged a couple of years in the few minutes they'd been standing there. "I promise, Clay, if there's any indication that Tarwater or the navy or any of the spooky guys that come around from time to time are involved with trying to sabotage you guys, I'll call you in an instant. I promise you. But I can't tell you what I'm working on, or why. I don't exactly have funding coming out my ears. If I lose this, I'm teaching freshmen about dolphin jaws. I'm not ready for that. I need to be in the field."

Clay looked at him sideways and saw that there was real concern, maybe even a spark of desperation in Hyland's eyes. "You know, your funding might be a little easier to come by if you weren't based in Iowa. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's no ocean in Iowa."

Hyland smiled at the old dig. "Thanks for pointing that out, Clay."

Clay extended his hand. "You promise you'll let me know?"

"Absolutely."

Clay left feeling totally spent. The great head of steam he'd built up through a night of fitful sleep had wilted into exhaustion and confusion. He got in his truck and sat while sweat rolled down his neck. He watched tourists in aloha wear mill around under the great banyan tree like gift-wrapped zombies.

Cliff Hyland's eggs were still steaming when he returned to the table.

Tarwater looked up from his own breakfast and moved his snow-white hat away from Hyland's plate, as if the rumpled scientist might splash yolk over the gold anchors in a fit of disorganized eating. "Everything all right?"

The young woman at the table fidgeted and tried to look invisible.

"Clay's still a little shaken up. Understandably. He and Nathan Quinn have been working together a long time."

"Lucky they made it this long without self-destructing," Tarwater said. "Slipshod as they run that operation. You see that kid that works for them? Not worth grinding up for chum."

Cliff Hyland dropped his fork in his plate. "Nathan Quinn was one of the most intuitively brilliant biologists in the field. And Clay Demodocus may very well be the best underwater photographer in the world, certainly when it comes to cetaceans. You have no right."

"The world turns, Doc. Yesterday's alphas are today's betas. Losers lose. Isn't that what you biologists teach?"

Cliff Hyland came very close to burying a fork in Tarwater's tanned forehead, but instead he slowly climbed to his feet. "I need to use the restroom. Excuse me."

As he walked away, Hyland could hear Tarwater lecturing the junior researcher on how the strong survive. Cliff dug his mobile phone out of the pocket of his safari shirt and began scrolling through the numbers.

Clay was just dozing off in the driver's seat when his mobile trilled. Without looking at the display, he figured it was Clair checking up on him. "Go, baby."

"Clay, it's Cliff Hyland."

"Cliff? What's up?"

"You've got to keep this under your hat, Clay. It's my ass."

"I got you. What is it, Cliff?"

"It's a torpedo range. We're doing site studies for a torpedo test range."

"Not in the sanctuary?"

"Right in the middle of the sanctuary."

"Jeepers, Cliff, that's terrible. I don't know if my hat is big enough to hold that."

"You gave me your word, Clay. What's with 'jeepers'? Who says 'jeepers'?"

"Amy does. She's a little eccentric. Tell me more. Does the navy have divers in the water?"

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Heinous Fuckery Most Foul

"Jeepers," said Amy. She was at Quinn's computer. Streamers of digital videotape were festooned across her lap and over the desk.

"Oh, that's heinous fuckery most foul," said Kona. He was perched on the high stool behind Amy and actually appeared to be trying to learn something when Clay came in.

"They've been simulating explosions on the lee of Kahoolawe with a big towable array of underwater speakers, measuring the levels. The speaker array is what's in that big case we've seen on their boat."

"We have a couple of explosions on the singer tapes, but distant," Amy said. "Nate thought it might be naval exercises out at sea."

"Speaking of tapes?" Clay picked up a strand of tape. "This isn't my rebreather footage, is it?"

"I'm sorry, Clay. I didn't get the video, but I pulled the audio off before this happened. Want to see the spectrograph?"

Kona asked, "You think those voices in the water be navy divers?"

Clay looked at Amy, raised an eyebrow.

"He wanted to learn."

"Cliff says there're no divers in the water, that his operation is it, militarily, in the sanctuary anyway. But he might not even know."

Amy wadded up the videotape and chucked the resulting bird's nest into the wastebasket. "How can they do that, Clay? How can they put a torpedo range in the middle of the humpback sanctuary? It's not like people won't notice."

"Yeah, she's a big ocean. Why here?" Kona said.

"I have no idea. Maybe they don't want there to be any mistake about whose waters they're blowing up ordnance in. If they blow them up in between a bunch of American islands, maybe there can't be any misinterpretation about what they're doing."

"Lost now," Kona said. "Does not compute. Danger. Danger. Control room needs herb." The Rastafarian had affected an accent that seemed an excellent approximation of how a stoned robot might sound.

"Submarine warfare is all about hide and seek with other submarines," Clay said. "The crews are autonomous when they're underwater. They make decisions on whether they're being attacked and whether to defend. Maybe if the navy just shot torpedoes off in the middle of the open sea, someone might misinterpret the action as an attack. It's damn unlikely that a Russian sub is going to be cruising up to Wailea for brunch and misinterpret an attack."

"They can't do that," Amy said. "They can't let them set off high explosives around the mothers and calves. It's just insane."

"They'll go deep and say it doesn't bother them. The navy will guarantee they won't blow up anything shallower than, say, four hundred feet. The humpbacks don't dive that deep in this channel."

"Yes they do," Amy said.

"No they don't," Clay said.

"Yes they do."

"There's no data on that, Amy. That's specifically what Cliff Hyland asked me about. He wanted to know if we were doing any research on the depth of humpback dives. Said that it would be the only thing the navy would care about."

Amy stood up and shoved the wheeled desk chair away. It bounced off Kona's shins, causing him to wince. "Ease on up, sistah."

"Amy, this wasn't my idea," Clay said. "I'm just telling you what Hyland told me."

"Fine," Amy said. She pushed her way past Clay and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?"

"Somewhere else." She let the screen door slam behind her.

Clay turned to Kona, who appeared to be studying the ceiling with great concentration. "What?"

"You makin' up that submarine war story?"

"Kind of. I read a Tom Clancy book once. Look, Kona, I'm not supposed to know stuff. Nate knew stuff. I just take the pictures."

"You think the navy sink your boat? Maybe make something bad happen to Nate?"

"The boat, maybe. I don't think they could have had anything to do with Nate. That was just bad luck."

"The Snowy Biscuit  -  all this getting under her skin."

"Mine, too."

"I'll go put the calm on her."

"Thanks," Clay said. He walked to the other side of the office, slumped in his chair, and pulled his editing tools up on the giant monitor.

A half hour later he heard a tiny voice coming through the screen door. "Sorry," Amy said.

"It's okay."

She stepped into the room and stood there, not looking as glazed as he would have expected if Kona had put the calm on her in an herbal way. "Sorry about your tape, too. The camera was making crunching noises on playback, so I sort of rushed taking it out."

"Not a problem. It was your big rescue scene. It just made me look like an amateur. I got most of it on the hard drive, I think."

"You did?" She stepped over to the monitor. "That it?" Frame stopped, the whale tail from the edge, black marks barely visible.

"Just going through it to see if there's anything else the audio picked up. The camera was running the whole time you were saving my bacon."

"Why don't you let it rest and let me take you out to lunch."

"It's ten-thirty."

"What, you're Mr. Rigid Schedule all of a sudden? Come out to lunch with me. I feel bad."

"Don't feel bad, Amy. It's a huge loss. I... I'm not dealing well myself. You know, to keep this work going, we'll be needing some academic juice."

Amy just stared at the frozen image of the whale tail, and then she caught herself. "What? Oh, you'll get someone. You put the word out, you'll have Ph.D.'s knocking the door down to work with you."

"I was thinking about you."

"Me? I'm crap. I don't even have a bona fide hair color. Ink on my master's isn't even dry. You read my resume."

"Actually, I didn't."

"You didn't?"

"You seemed intelligent. You were willing to work for nothing."

"Nate read it, though, right?"

"I told him you were good. And if it's any consolation, he thought the world of you."

"That's how you hire? I'm smart and I'm cheap  -  that's it? What kind of standards do you guys have?"

"Have you met Kona?"

She looked back at the monitor, then at Clay again. "I feel so used. Honored, but used. Look, I'm thrilled you want to keep me on, but I'm not going to bring you funding or legitimacy."

"I'll worry about that."

"Worry about it after lunch. Come on, I'll buy."

"You're poor. Besides, I'm meeting Clair for lunch at one."

"Okay. Can I borrow Nate's  -  uh, the green truck?"

"Keys are on the counter." Clay waved over his shoulder toward the kitchen.

Amy took the keys, then started out the door, caught herself, then ran back, and threw her arms around the photographer. "I really appreciate your asking me to stay."

"Go. Take Kona with you. Feed him. Hose him off."

"Nope, if you're not coming, I'm going solo. Tell Clair hi for me."

"Go."

He looked back at the computer, looked past the window at the brilliant Maui sun, then shut the computer down, feeling very much as if nothing he did mattered or would ever matter again.

***