Dead Sea (3 page)

Which was precisely where Richard had reached in his thoughts when the giant sperm whale attacked.

Richard's first warning was that his sonar suddenly went wild again. His next was that
Salacia
's warning system kicked in, flashing on to the monitors arranged above
Neptune
's immediately in front of him. And his third was when the creature's great square head came out of the shadows, heading across the video screens towards Nic's vessel at breathtaking speed. At first, Richard thought the two underwater research vessels were being attacked by a submarine. All he could see was a great square steely-grey shape heading in at flank speed. Then he registered a trail of silvery bubbles rising from the upper edge of the cliff-like bow. A long, narrow jaw that gaped, lined with tusklike teeth. And a tiny eye caught the light, glinting.

Richard thought,
My God! It's Moby Dick!
‘Nic!' he bellowed. ‘Look out!'

The whale went for
Salacia
first, apparently because she was bigger, brighter and in the lead. But in fact
Neptune
was closer to the massive cetacean. Richard had only been holding the compressed-air controls at three-quarters. He jammed them both full open now, and watched
Neptune
gather speed and buoyancy in the readouts as she raced to the protection of her threatened sister.

Providentially,
Neptune
still held the square of netting, and so the quick-thinking Richard was able to pull it across the whale's face like a remote-controlled underwater toreador flirting his cape at a charging bull. The whale's sonar – which, Richard realized, must have been interfering with his own – failed to read netting and the great square face charged straight into the bright strands which obligingly wrapped themselves around it, the lower end swinging into the gape of its mouth. Richard's hands flew across the control console, making sure
Neptune
kept firm hold of the net while at the same time reversing the pressure so the vessel stopped rising and hung there, like a bright yellow bumblebee hovering beside a steel-grey locomotive.

‘Nic,' ordered Richard, his deep voice regaining a matter-of-fact calm as his hands worked feverishly, ‘get up and out as fast as you can.'

Even as he spoke, the door behind him opened and he felt rather than saw Captain Chang step into the control room. ‘I see this on bridge monitor,' she snapped angrily, as though Richard and Nic were playing with the whale simply to irritate her. ‘I do not believe what I see. You catching a
whale
there, Captain Mariner? You mad?'

Richard would have answered her, especially as he understood the unspoken message –
you bring that monster near my command and there will be BIG trouble, gwailo!
– but there was never any realistic chance.

Because the instant the net tightened,
Neptune
was off on a wild ride. Richard watched the readouts unreeling with dizzying speed as
Neptune
rode the leviathan down, then he frowned and began to ease air back into the buoyancy tanks, playing the whale in a way that
Poseidon
's master angler Ironwrist Wan might have done. But seeking to distract the monster, keep it in play until
Salacia
was safe with no real thought of actually landing the thing. He was no mad Captain Ahab, after all, seeking to revenge the loss of his leg. And he had no intention of pulling the net off the Lion's Mane jellyfish simply to leave it wrapped around a sperm whale if he could help it.

Within moments Richard had lost sight of
Salacia
and was only able to track his companion using
Neptune
's GPS system. His cameras showed only darkness above and below. More darkness off to the right. And on the left, the heaving flank of the massive creature he was lashed to. There was a brownish-grey wall of flesh, beginning to fold into wrinkles like elephant's skin. The creature's right eye. Then the readouts were going haywire as the whale reversed its run at two-and-a-half-thousand metres and started heading for the surface. He glanced up at the timer. The mad ride had lasted five minutes so far.
Salacia
would be up in ten minutes. ‘You'd better get ready to retrieve
Salacia
,' he said to Chang.

‘I stay,' snapped captain Chang. ‘I make sure.
Pessonarry!
' He might own the vessels, said her angry tone. But she was in command and responsible. And after years of working with her, he was more than happy with her decision.

The two signatures on the GPS were moving well apart now. And
Neptune
's signature was well clear of
Poseidon
's position too. Which was just as well, because it looked from
Neptune
's depth gauge as though the whale
Neptune
was attached to was heading full-speed for the surface. What the fearsome pressure changes were doing to the deep-sea vehicle's more delicate elements as the pair of them hurled up through the water, he hesitated to guess. How that damage would be compounded by a short flight through the lower air, he didn't even want to think about. But somewhere in the back of his mind he began to compose a very interesting letter to his insurers at Lloyd's of London.

Suddenly the cameras facing away from the massive grey flank were showing the deepest indigo colour. Ink-dark water was speckled with that blizzard of plastic, as though the whale were dragging
Neptune
through the heart of the Milky Way. The first sunbeams stabbed down like silvery blades, but still there were only blues – the blues of the sky at a frosty dawn – no reds or yellows yet. Richard switched off all the lights and the net went from orange to brown at once. But moments later, the first yellow wavelengths got through and the nearly indestructible plastic began to return to its accustomed colour.

An instant later, the whale tore through the surface and
Neptun
e was in flight. The huge square head jerked one way and then another. The momentum of the heavy little explorer simply tore the net free of that huge rocklike cliff face of dark grey flesh and, trailing the bright plastic after it,
Neptune
tumbled across the lower sky and plunged back into the water.

As the silvery surface closed over
Neptune
once again,
Salacia
's cameras showed the surface opening as she came up at more or less the same spot as Ironwrist's tuna. Richard fought to regain control of his vessel, at the same time scanning the readouts for warning of the whale's return. But all was calm and quiet. ‘Could you call Ironwrist down to relieve me?' he asked Captain Chang. ‘He can bring
Neptune
home. I want to go up and see
Salacia
aboard.'

Ten minutes later, Richard was up on the foredeck, watching as
Salacia
was winched up into her place. Then he stood beside the deckhand, whose duty was to loosen the bolts and open the vessel's main hatch. He reached in and helped Nic step unsteadily out on to the deck. ‘Wild ride,' he observed as he helped his friend down on to the stretcher that would carry him to the decompression chamber – just in case the atmosphere in the experimental bathyscaphe had varied enough to pump nitrogen into his blood.

‘
From hell's heart I stab at thee
,' answered Nic wearily but with a half grin as he lowered himself on to the stretcher. ‘
For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee . . .
'

‘Is that Ahab from
Moby Dick
?' asked Richard, walking across to the decompression chamber beside his friend at the heart of a group of scientists and physicians. ‘Or Khan from
Star Trek
?'

‘I'll count my legs and get back to you,' promised Nic as the door of the decompression chamber clanged shut behind him.

Richard slapped the top of the metal canister with a laugh, then walked on down the length of the ship, past the bridge house and the Changhe helicopter, past the wet patch on the deck that was still littered with plastic from the tuna's belly and down to the aft rail. He leaned against this, narrow-eyed, looking away west towards Japan, watching for the first sight of the returning
Neptune
.

The high sun abruptly vanished behind a low overcast and a squally shower came whipping across the water towards him, carrying in its skirts a storm of decomposing bags and packets, setting the half-rotted bottles, cups, wrappers and plastic can-rings bobbing and dancing on the polluted water.

‘We have to do something about this,' Richard said to himself. ‘Before it's too late. If it isn't too late already . . .'

R
ichard Mariner was probably the tallest person standing on the south side pavement of the Route Fifty Road Bridge overlooking the Arakawa River to the north of Tokyo a year later. He was certainly the wettest. Even his wife, Robin, who stood by his side, was holding an umbrella – supplied by the Mandarin Oriental Hotel together with the Rolls-Royce waiting to whisk them back across town into the warmth and dryness of their suite when the ceremony was over. Everyone nearby held an umbrella. Even Dr Tanaka – who also held the big plastic bottle which had once contained a grape-flavoured Cheerio soft drink that he was proposing to throw into the foaming water. And the TV crews who were going to film him doing it.

Only Richard refused to arm himself against the thunderous downpour, preferring to rely on the double cape of his Burberry trench coat and the collar that turned up as high as his steely blue eyes, almost hiding the white line along his cheekbone, which resembled a Prussian aristocrat's duelling scar. A scar caused by the typhoon Straightline Jiang had taken
Poseidon
straight through some years earlier, brought into unusual prominence this evening by the cold, the blinding lights of the local representatives of the World's press and the deafening, penetrating deluge.

During the year since Richard had stood at
Poseidon
's after-rail and decided to do something about the pollution in the north Pacific, it seemed never to have stopped raining. Everywhere around the Pacific rim had seen biblical deluges leading to catastrophic flooding. And yet the threatened rise in overall sea levels had not been so apparent; not even in Tuvalu, the tiny mid-Pacific island nation so famously at risk. In the mid-Pacific archipelagos, in fact, there had been falling water levels and fearsome drought instead. And to make things worse, it looked as though this year was going to be a particularly powerful La Nina year; with the threat of more torrential rainfall and further flooding in many of the already sodden areas, combined with drought and falling water levels in the islands.

But Dr Tanaka had a theory to explain all of these things – one that he was going to test during the next few months. With the help of Heritage Mariner, Greenbaum International, Richard, Nic, Richard's wife and business partner, Robin and Nic's daughter, Liberty – and the big plastic Cheerio bottle. ‘As Greenbaum International Fellow of Sustainable Energy and Climate Change at Tokyo University, it has been my task to study what is currently happening to the climate of the Pacific Basin and to predict its likely results,' Dr Tanaka was explaining to the earnest young woman from Nippon News, his voice carrying over the roaring of the waters above and below to the umbrella-sheltered teams from Kyodo News, Radio Japan NHK, CNN, NewsCorp and the BBC. ‘And as the first major test of the theory I have formulated, I propose to place this bottle in the river here.'

‘What is the point of adding more rubbish to an already littered waterway?' wondered the Nippon News reporter. Her cameraman swung round to point his lens at the foaming torrent of the Arakawa's surface just beneath the trembling bridge. The river's slick brown back was littered with a range of flotsam whirling down towards Tokyo Bay at a dizzying velocity.

‘You will be aware, I am sure, that trash such as this, especially plastic trash, has been sucked out of rivers and off coastal landfills by a combination of wind and rain all around the Pacific Rim during the last decade and more – then swirled away into what has become known as the Great North Pacific Garbage Patch, where it has broken down into small pieces some of which have entered the food chain, with extremely disturbing results.'

‘That's not new,' persisted the young woman. ‘Everyone knows about the garbage patch twice the size of Texas . . .'

‘But you can't see it,' explained Tanaka. ‘It's there, but it's not visible on Google Earth . . . Perhaps, Captain Mariner, you would explain. You have been closer to the actuality of it than anyone else here . . .'

Richard looked down into the camera and started to explain. ‘The length of time the plastic takes to get from all round the North Pacific Rim into the middle of the ocean means that a combination of sun and saltwater can break down its structure. By the time the plastic reaches the relatively slow-moving circular swirl at the centre of the currents, beneath the light winds at the heart of the ocean, only a small percentage of it is recognizable as bottles, can-rings, bags and so forth. The rest has half dissolved into the water. It's a weird kind of inedible soup – deadly to the creatures that try to eat it, and yet not thick enough to constitute a hazard to shipping. Not that there's much shipping out there, in any case. My work with Mr Greenbaum aboard our co-funded deep-water explorer
Poseidon
has established that all the pollution is under the surface except for some particularly hard-wearing bottles, bags and crisp packets. Or has been until very recently.'

Richard's ice-blue eyes narrowed as he stared unflinchingly down into the lens of the camera behind the young reporter's shoulder. ‘Until the last few months at least, it hasn't been visible from space at all – unlike the wreckage from the terrible tsunami of March 2011, for instance, that's still apparently drifting across the Pacific from Japan to British Columbia in a kind of floating island. That is quite astonishing given the simple size of the area affected – some estimates suggest half a million square miles.' His long, lean face folded into a frown. ‘But Doctor Tanaka's work has proved that things are beginning to change. And not for the better.'