Island 731 (3 page)

His lungs burned with a longing for air, and he’d soon instinctively open his mouth to draw a breath, but he couldn’t let the turtle go, not after nearly dying for it. Joliet greeted him just beneath the thickest layer of plastic refuse. She held a thick metal carabiner at the end of a metal wire in her hands. He knew the wire had been lowered by the crane in order to pluck them from the water, but it would easily handle the turtle, too.

As Hawkins took the line and moved it around the turtle’s torso, he realized the creature was perfectly designed for what he had in mind. The cable wrapped around the shell and slipped into the foot-deep groove where the turtle’s body had been abnormally constricted. He secured the carabiner and shoved himself up to the surface.

The layer of trash fought to keep him submerged, but Hawkins pulled himself up the cable until he cleared the surface and took a long, deep breath. He tried to speak, but couldn’t. His body craved oxygen and each breath sounded more like a gasp.

The pale, blue hull of the
Magellan
rose up out of the water some twenty feet away, though the end of the crane hovered directly overhead—nearly three stories overhead. Most of the small crew stood at the rail, shouting to them and watching the scene play out. None of them knew that a hungry shark circled below.

With a frantic spin of his hand, Hawkins motioned for the crane operator to pull them up. But no one seemed to be in a rush. Thankfully, Joliet, who’d been up for a breath once already, found her voice before he did.

“Shark!” she shouted. “Pull us up! There’s a shark!”

Her plea was instantly repeated by everyone on deck and the crane operator quickly received the message. The cable went taut as it was drawn up through the crane’s arm and rolled tightly around a winch attached to the
Magellan
’s aft deck.

As his torso slid free of the water, Hawkins began to feel relief, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of impending doom. “Higher,” he said to Joliet, who clung to the cable just above him. “Climb higher!”

She managed to pull herself up one arm’s length, but then slipped and nearly fell. The metal cable hadn’t been designed for climbing. “I can’t go any higher!” she shouted.

But the effort was enough. He hoisted himself up and pulled his legs out of the water. The turtle followed next, dripping water and clumps of plastic as it tore a hole in the layer of trash. The giant loggerhead on the end of the line drew a sting of gasps from the deck crew. Joliet had apparently failed to tell a single person about what she saw before leaping to the dead creature’s “rescue.”

And people think
I’m
impulsive,
he thought.

A high-pitched shriek from above drew his eyes up just in time to see Joliet’s backside falling toward him. He leaned back and let go of the cable to avoid being knocked off the line. Joliet landed in his lap and together they slipped down the line, only stopping when they reached the turtle’s shell, just two feet above the surface of the water.

“Sorry!” Joliet said. “I slipped.”

“It’s okay,” Hawkins said, glancing down at the water.

But it was decidedly
not
okay, because just beneath the water, he saw a pair of black eyes roll white and the gleam of the noonday sun on countless rows of razor-sharp teeth. The hole punched in the surface layer by the turtle had provided the great white with a clear path toward its dangling meal.

The behemoth rose from the surface and was greeted by the shocked shouts of the crew on deck. With its nictitating membrane—a white, third eyelid—protecting its eyes, the shark could no longer see its prey, but it didn’t have to. The open jaws would find something to close down upon.

A string of curses rose in Hawkins’s throat, but he never let them loose. Instead, he swallowed his fear and tried something stupid. An act of desperation. He wrapped his arms around Joliet and clutched the wire. “Hold on tight!” Then, he leaned back, tilting the turtle sideways and offered the shark one last sacrifice. As soon as the loggerhead’s remaining flipper struck the shark’s lower jaw, the trap sprang shut. The shark descended into the abyss with the still-attached appendage. It gave a single vicious shake of its head and tore the limb free.

Hawkins, Joliet, and the one-finned turtle were propelled like a kid clinging to a lakeside rope swing. They careened around in a wide arc. Their momentum came to an abrupt and painful stop against the metal hull of the
Magellan
. The impact nearly knocked them free. If not for his steadfast grip and the turtle attached beneath them like a tire swing, Hawkins had no doubt they would have been knocked free.

As the line swung back out over the open sea, Hawkins found his voice and directed it at Peter Blok, the first mate and crane operator. “Get us out of here or I swear to God, I will climb up this cable and throw you in!”

The winch whined as it sped up, pulling the still-swinging trio up out of the shark’s reach. The crane soon deposited them gently upon the presently empty aft deck. Hawkins loosened his grip on the cable and leaned his head around Joliet’s wet hair. “Are you okay?” he whispered.

“I owe you a beer,” she said.

“You owe me a lot more than that,” he replied.

She glanced at him with a cut-the-bullshit expression, and he grinned. “I’d say that was at least worth a twelve-pack. Microbrew. Not the cheap stuff.”

“I can do that,” she said.

“And if you share it with me, I won’t tell anyone about how you screamed like a girl.”

Joliet smiled and visibly relaxed. She stood, turned, and slugged him in the shoulder. “I
am
a girl.”

Hawkins stood, rubbing his shoulder, and said, “Don’t hit like a girl.”

“That was damn near the craziest thing I’ve ever seen at sea,” came the rough voice of Harold Jones, the ship’s engineer. The man’s wide eyes looked bright white next to his dark skin. He rubbed a hand over his close-cut gray hair. “And I’ve seen some things.”

Jones had two junior engineers on his team, Phil Bennett, who was something of a whiz kid with engines, and Jackie DeWinter, his daughter from a woman he’d never married, who’d been apprenticing with him for nearly three years. Despite being a self-proclaimed grease monkey, DeWinter always looked put together with long, styled hair and longer legs. In short, she was Joliet’s opposite in style, though both women had striking faces.

DeWinter stepped around her father wearing an expression that cycled between happy, terrified, and relief. “Oh my God, are you two okay? What were you thinking? That was awesome!”

“Fine,” Joliet said. “Better than fine. Look what we found.” She stepped aside, allowing the father-daughter team to see the dead, nearly limbless turtle.

DeWinter winced, then saw the pinched shell and gasped. “What is it?”

Hawkins was about to tease her, but the single fin and a severely deformed shell made it look like something alien. “Once upon a time, it was a loggerhead turtle.”

Jones leaned over the specimen, looking at it from all angles. “What happened to it?”

“Aside from becoming a meal for Jaws,” Hawkins said, “that’s what we need to find out.”

“Looks like it got into something,” Jones said, pointing to a band of red where the turtle’s constricted midsection came together.

“Nasty,” DeWinter said. “But this is actually a good thing, right? We’re here to find things like this.”

He felt horrible for it, but Hawkins agreed. Finding this deformed turtle was a very good thing, but as he looked down at the ruined creature, it certainly didn’t
feel
good. “Yeah, this is why we’re here. But I wish we weren’t.”

That wasn’t entirely true. He looked at Joliet. She met his eyes. They both smiled.

Silence lingered for a moment longer than Jones could bear. He cleared his throat. “I’ll go get a stretcher so we can move her.”

Hawkins turned toward him and saw DeWinter smiling like she knew something he didn’t.
Does she?
Joliet did spend a good amount of off-time with DeWinter. They were the only two women on board. Before Hawkins could dwell on the idea, a sea of frantic voices that sounded something like a gobble of frightened turkeys drowned out his thoughts. The rest of the crew had arrived, all asking questions and retelling their version of the story at once.

Hawkins heard Phil Bennett, the youngest crewmember on board, ask, “Should we try to kill that shark?”

It was a stupid question. The
Magellan
had been sent to research the Garbage Patch to help preserve the environment for creatures like the shark. That someone on board, even if he was a mechanic and not a conservationist, would ask that question revealed what an uphill battle cleaning up the Garbage Patch would be. The idea of killing a shark simply because it tried to eat someone made little sense to Hawkins, but he knew it made perfect sense to many people. The problem was, people were still terrified of the unknown, which included most everything in the ocean, and reacted to dangerous animals with violence. Humanity liked to think they were at the top of the food chain, but without modern weapons, people weren’t top dog, and being eaten was, and always had been, part of the gig. Animals ate people. People ate animals. A shark eating a human being was as natural as a twenty-piece serving of chicken nuggets, perhaps more so.

That was his take on the situation. He’d like to believe there was some kind of natural law that said sharks wouldn’t try to eat people, but he knew better. Even
people
ate other people when tradition, or desperation, required it. And those people weren’t hunted down and shot like crazed beasts. Sometimes they got movie deals.

Hawkins decided to ignore the question. Bennett was young and allowed to be stupid. The man who spoke next would have to cut the conversation short, either way.

“What in the name of St. Peter were you two thinking?” shouted a voice that parted the crew. Captain Jonathan Drake, a sixty-year-old man with the body of a forty-year-old professional wrestler stepped up to Hawkins. The crew encircling them stepped back when Drake crossed his arms over his chest, as though the man’s muscles produced some kind of invisible force field.

Hawkins and Joliet knew better than to reply right away. Engaging the captain when his hackles were raised never worked out well for his verbal sparring partner. Best to wait it out and offer an explanation when Drake’s face lost a few shades of red.

What Hawkins did do was take a single step to the side, revealing the deformed loggerhead turtle on the deck. Drake saw it immediately, but made no comment. He rubbed his square chin, scratching at the neatly trimmed white hair that framed his face and head. Drake wasn’t just the captain of the
Magellan,
he also believed in its mandate—to study the harmful effects humanity has on the planet’s oceans and try to affect change. The ramifications of the turtle’s state wouldn’t be lost on the man.

Joliet opened her mouth to speak, but Hawkins knew it was too soon. He placed his hand against hers. Her voice caught in her throat, but when he glanced at her she appeared more confused than angry, which is what he expected. They’d become friends over the past month at sea, but Joliet couldn’t stand to be told what to do. Only Drake got away with it, and sometimes not without a fight.

Drake turned to the bystanders and pointed to the four standing nearest the turtle. “You four. Take Stumpy here to the biolab.”

The four grumbled, but immediately began working out how to transport the creature. The biolab was on the main deck, so they wouldn’t need to go up or down any stairs, but the several-hundred-pound dead weight still wouldn’t be easy to move.

Drake turned his attention back to Hawkins and Joliet. He looked each of them in the eyes and said, “You two, wash up and come see me on the bridge in thirty. We need to talk.”

With that, Drake spun on his heels and stormed away. The man had let them off the hook without a public verbal beatdown, but Hawkins couldn’t help but feel he might have been better off staying in the water with the shark.

3.

Hawkins washed himself clean in just over a minute. Showers were supposed to be brief while at sea, so he used the rest of his allocated five minutes to languish under the hot streams of water. The close encounter with the great white had bunched up the muscles on his back and the heat helped relieve the tension. As steam billowed around him in the small shower stall, he took a moment to reflect.

Today marked the third time in his life that he’d looked down the throat of an animal intent on sinking its teeth into him. The first had been as a child when he was attacked by a rabid raccoon. He’d been standing in his driveway, trying desperately to sink a basketball shot, but his seven-year-old arms weren’t up to the task. He first noticed the scrawny raccoon as it walked past him, in broad daylight, carrying a bagel pilfered from a neighbor’s trashcan. If not for a missed shot, the raccoon may have continued on its way, oblivious to Hawkins’s presence, but the ball landed just a few feet from the animal’s side.

The sharp
thunk
of the ball hitting the pavement had the same effect a hand grenade might have. The raccoon launched itself into the air, arms splayed, bagel twirling away. At some point during its twisting flight, the raccoon must have seen Hawkins because upon landing, it shrieked and launched toward him. If not for his father’s nearby minivan and Hawkins’s monkeylike climbing skills, the coon might have enjoyed a much fresher snack. But thanks to his father, armed with a broom and trashcan cover, Hawkins escaped unscathed. In some ways it was a good memory, since it was one of the few nice things his father did before deciding not to be his father anymore.

He wasn’t so lucky during his second confrontation with a hungry mammal. Hawkins ran his fingers over his bare chest. The four long scars had healed long ago, but still stung under his touch. Not from any physical pain. It had been five years since that dark day in the woods of Colorado, but the memory of that confrontation still felt fresh.