Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (8 page)

"Constantly Baffled,
hold there, we are coming to you."

"Don't come to me. I'm not going anywhere. Go to the other boat. Repeat, they have an emergency situation and are not responding to marine radio."

The Conservation Enforcement boat lifted up in the water under the power of two 125-horse Honda outboards and beelined toward them.

"Fuck!"

Nate dropped the mike and started to shake, a shiver born not of temperature, as it was eighty degrees on the channel, but out of frustration and fear. What had happened to Clay to prompt Amy to go to his rescue? Maybe she had misjudged the situation and gone down needlessly. She didn't have much experience in the water, or at least he didn't think she had. But if things were okay, then why weren't they up…?

"Kona, did Clair say whether she could see Amy and Clay?

"No, boss, she just wanted to know about the regulator." Kona sat down in the bottom of the boat and hung his head between his knees. "I'm sorry, boss. I thought if it was yellow, it could go in the water. I didn't know. It slipped."

Nate wanted to tell the kid it was all right, but he didn't like lying to people. "Clay put you on the research permit, right, Kona? You remember signing a paper with a lot of names on it?"

"No, mon. That five-oh coming up now?"

"Yeah, whale cops. And if Clay didn't put you on the permit, you're going to be going home with them."

The depth gauge read two hundred feet by the time Amy finally snagged the top of Clay's rebreather and pulled herself down to where she was looking into his mask. If it weren't for a small trail of blood streaming from his scalp, making him look like he was leaking black motor oil into the blue, he might have been sleeping, and she smiled in spite of herself.
The sea dog survives.
Somehow — maybe through years of conditioning his reflexes to keep his mouth shut — Clay had bitten down on the mouthpiece of the rebreather. He was breathing steadily. She could hear the hiss of the apparatus.

She wasn't sure that Clay's mouthpiece would stay in all the way to the surface, and, if it came out, the photographer would surely drown, even if she replaced it quickly. Unlike a normal scuba regulator, which was frightfully easy to purge, you couldn't let water get into a rebreather or it could foul the carbon-dioxide scrubbers and render the device useless. And she'd need both her hands for the swim up. One to hold on to Clay and one to vent air from his buoyancy-control vest, which would fill with air as they rose, causing them both to shoot to the surface and get the bends. (Amy wasn't wearing a BC vest or a wet suit; she wasn't supposed to have needed them.) After wasting a precious thirty seconds of air to consider the problem, she took off her bikini top and wrapped it around Clay's head to secure his mouthpiece. Then she hooked her hand into his buoyancy vest and started the slow kick to the surface.

At a hundred and fifty feet she made the mistake of looking up. The surface might have been a mile away. Then she checked her watch and pulled up Clay's arm so she could see the dive computer on his wrist. Already the liquid-crystal readout was blinking, telling her that Clay needed two decompression stops on the way up. One at fifty feet and one at twenty, from ten to fifteen minutes each. With his rebreather he'd have plenty of air. Amy wasn't wearing a dive computer, but by ball-parking it from her pressure gauge, she figured she had between five and ten minutes of air left. She was about half an hour short.

Well, this is going to be awkward,
she thought.

The whale cops wore light blue uniform shirts with shorts and aviator-style mirrored sunglasses that looked as if they'd been surgically set into their faces. They were both in their thirties and had spent some time in the gym, although one was heavier and had rolled up his short sleeves to let his grapefruit biceps breathe. The other was thin and wiry. They brought their boat alongside Nate's and threw over a bumper to keep the boats from rubbing together in the waves.

"Howzit, bruddahs!" Kona said.

"Not now," Nate whispered.

"I need to see your permit," said the heavier cop.

Nate had pulled a plastic envelope out from under the console as they approached. They went through this several times a year. He handed it over to the cop, who took out the document and unfolded it.

"I'll need both of your IDs."

"Come on," Nate said, handing over his driver's license. "You guys know me. Look, we've sheared a pin and there's a diver emergency on our other boat."

"You want us to call the Coast Guard?"

"No, I want you to take us over there."

"That's not what we do, Dr. Quinn," said the thin cop, looking up from the permit. "The Coast Guard is equipped for emergencies. We are not."

"Dis haole, lolo pela, him," said Kona. (Meaning, he's just a dumb white guy.)

"Don't talk that shit to me," said the heavier cop. "You want to speak Hawaiian, I'll talk to you in Hawaiian, but don't talk that pidgin shit to me. Now, where's your ID?"

"Back at my cabin."

"Dr. Quinn, your people need to have ID at all times on a research vessel, you know that."

"He's new."

"What's your name, kid?"

"Pelekekona Keohokalole," said Kona.

The cop took off his sunglasses — for the first time ever, Nate thought. He looked at Kona.

"You're not on the permit."

"Try Preston Applebaum," said Kona.

"Are you trying to fuck with me?"

"He is," said Nate. "Just take him in, and on the way take me to our other boat."

"I think we'll tow both of you in and deal with the permit issues when we get into harbor."

Suddenly, amid the static of the marine radio on in the background, Clair's voice: "Nate, are you there? I lost Amy's bubbles. I can't see her bubbles. I need help here! Nate! Anyone!"

Nate looked at the whale cop, who looked at his partner, who looked away.

Kona jumped up on the gunwale of the police boat and leaned into the wiry cop's face. "Can we do the territorial macho power trip after we get our divers out of the water, or do you have to kill two people to show us how big your fucking dicks are?"

Clair ran around the boat searching for Amy's bubble trail, hoping she was just missing it, had lost it in the waves — hoping that it was still there. She looked at the hang tank sitting in the floor of the boat, still unattached to the regulator, then ran back to the radios, keying both the marine radio and the cell-phone radio and trying not to scream.

"SOS here. Please, I'm a couple of miles off the dump, I have divers down, in trouble."

The harbormaster at Lahaina came back, said he'd send someone, and then a dive boat who was out at the lava cathedrals at Lanai said they had to get their divers out of the water but could be there in thirty minutes. Then Nathan Quinn came back.

"Clair, this is Nate. I'm on the way. How long ago did the bubbles stop?"

"Clair checked her watch. Four, five minutes ago."

"Can you see them?"

"No, nothing. Amy went deep, Nate. I watched her go down until she disappeared."

"Do you have hang tanks in the water?"

"No, I can't get the damn regulators on. Clay always did it."

"Just tie off the tanks and tie the regulators to the tanks and get them over the side. Amy and Clay can hook them up if they get to them."

"How deep? I have three tanks."

"Ninety, sixty, and thirty. Just get them in the water, Clair. We'll worry about exact depth when I get there. Just hang them so they can find them. Tie glow sticks on them if you have any. Should be there in five minutes. We can see you."

Clair started tying the plastic line around the necks of the heavy scuba tanks. Every few seconds she scanned the waves for signs of Amy's bubbles, but there weren't any. Nate had said "
If
they get to them." She blinked away tears and concentrated on her knots.
If?
Well
if
Clay made it
back — when
he made it back — he could damn sure get himself a safer job. Her man wasn't going to drown hundreds of feet under the ocean, because from now on he was going to be taking pictures of weddings or bar mitzvahs or kids at JC Penney's or some goddamn thing on dry land.

Across the channel, near the shore of Kahoolawe, the target island, Libby Quinn had been following the exchange between Clair and Nate over the marine radio. Without being asked, her partner, Margaret, said, "We don't have any diving equipment on board. That deep, there's not much we could do."

"Clay's immortal anyway," said Libby, trying to sound more blasé than she felt. "He'll come up yammering about what great footage he got."

"Call them, offer our help," the older woman said. "If we deny our instincts as caretakers, we deny ourselves as women."

"Oh, fuck off, Margaret! I'm calling to offer our help because it's the right thing to do."

Meanwhile, on the ocean side of Kahoolawe, Cliff Hyland was sitting in the makeshift lab belowdecks in the cabin cruiser, headphones on, watching an oscilloscope readout, when one of his grad students came into the cabin and grabbed him by the shoulder.

"Sounds like Nathan Quinn's group is in trouble," said the girl, a sun-baked brunette wearing zinc-oxide war paint on her nose and cheeks and a hat the size of a garbage-can lid.

Hyland pulled up the headphones. "What? Who? Fire? Sinking? What?"

"They've lost two divers. That photographer guy Clay and that pale girl."

"Where are they?"

"About two miles off the dump. They're not asking for help. I just thought you should know."

"That's a ways. Start reeling in the array. We can be there in a half hour maybe."

Just then Captain Tarwater came down the steps into the cabin. "Stay that order, grommet. Stay on mission. We have a survey to finish today — and a charge to record."

"Those guys are friends of mine," Hyland said.

"I've been monitoring the situation, Dr. Hyland. Our presence has not been requested, and, frankly, there is nothing this vessel could do to help. It sounds like they've lost some divers. It happens."

"This isn't war, Tarwater. We don't just
lose
people."

"Stay on mission. Any setback in Quinn's operation can only benefit this project."

"You asshole," Hyland said.

Back in the channel, the Count stood in the bow of the big Zodiac and watched as the Conservation and Resources Enforcement boat towed away the
Constantly Baffled.
He turned to his three researchers, who were trying to look busy in back of the boat. "Let that be a lesson to you all. The key to good science is making sure all the paperwork is in order. Now you can see why I'm such a stickler for you people having your IDs with you every morning."

"Yeah, in case some other researcher rats us out to the Conservation and Resources cops," one woman said.

"Science is a competitive sport, Ms. Wextler. If you're not willing to compete, you're welcome to take your undergrad degree and go baby-sit seasick tourists on a whale-watching boat. Nathan Quinn has attacked the credibility of this organization in the past. It's only fair play that I point out when he is not working within the rules of the sanctuary."

The ocean breeze carried the junior researchers' under-the-breath whispers of «asshole» away from the ears of Gilbert Box, over the channel to wash against the cliffs of Molokai.

Nate wrapped his arms around Clair and held her as she sobbed. As the downtime passed the first half hour, Nate felt a ball of fear, dread, and nausea forming in his own stomach. Only by trying to stay busy looking for signs of Clay and Amy was he able to keep from being ill. When Amy's downtime passed forty-five minutes, Clair started to sob. Clay might have been able to stay down that long with the re-breather, but with only the tiny rescue tank, there was no way Amy could still be breathing. Two divemasters from a nearby tour boat had already used up a full tank each searching. The problem was, in blue water it was a three-dimensional search. Rescue searches were usually done on the bottom, but not when it was six hundred feet down. With the currents in the channel… well, the search was little more than a gesture anyway.

Being a scientist, Nate liked true things, so after an hour he stopped telling Clair that everything was going to be all right. He didn't believe it, and grief was already descending on him like a flight of black arrows. In the past, when he had experienced loss or trauma or heartbreak, some survival mechanism had kicked in and allowed him to function for months before he'd actually begin feeling the pain, but this time it was immediate and deep and devastating. His best friend was dead. The woman that he — Well, he wasn't exactly sure what he'd felt about Amy, but even when he looked past the sexuality, the differences in their ages and positions, he liked her. He liked her a lot, and he'd become used to her presence after only a few weeks.

One of the divers came up near the boat and spit out his regulator. "There's nowhere to look. It's just blue to fucking infinity."

"Yeah," Nate said. "I know."

Clay saw blue-green breasts gently bobbing before his face and was convinced that he had, indeed, drowned. He felt himself being pulled upward and so closed his eyes and surrendered.

"No, no, no, son," said Papa. "You're not in heaven. The tits are not blue in heaven. You are still alive."

Papa's face was very much smashed against the glass of his helmet, wearing the sort of expression he might have had if he'd run full speed into a bulletproof window and someone had snapped a picture at maximum mash, yet Clay could see that his eyes were smiling.

"My little Cleandros, you know it is not time for you to join me?"

Clay nodded.

"And when it comes time for you to join me, it should be because you are old and tired and ready to go, not because the sea is wanting to crush you."

Clay nodded again, then opened his eyes. This time there was a stabbing pain in his head, but he squinted through it to see Amy's face through her dive mask. She held his regulator in his mouth and was gripping the back of his head to make him look at her. When she was sure that he was conscious and knew where he was, she gave him the okay signal and waited until he returned it. Amy then let go of Clay's regulator, and they swam slowly upward, to surface four hundred yards from where they'd first submerged.

Clay immediately looked around for the boat and found nothing where he expected it, the closest vessels being a group of boats too far away to be the
Always Confused.
He checked his dive computer. He'd been down for an hour and fifteen minutes. That couldn't be right.

"That's them," Amy said. She looked down into the water. "Oops. Let me get my top off of your face."

"Okay," Clay mumbled into the rebreather.

Kona was in tears, wailing like Bob Marley in a bear trap — inconsolable. "Clay gone. The Snowy Biscuit gone. And I was going to poke squid with her, too."

"You were not," said Nate.

But the artificial Hawaiian didn't hear. "There!" Kona shouted as he leaped onto the shoulders of the stocky whale cop to get a better view. "It's the white wahine! Praise to Jah! Thanks be to His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie. Go there, Sheriff. A saving be needed."