Hungry as the Sea (38 page)

She touched the other tubes. “Arsenic, old-fashioned Agatha Christie vintage poison. And then here is the real living and breathing bastard daddy of them all – this is cadmium; as a sulphide so it’s easily absorbed. In 100 parts to the million it’s as lethal as a neutron bomb.” While he watched, she carried the tray of tubes across to the tanks and set the ECG monitors running. Each began to record the normal double-peaked heart-beat of a healthy clam.

“Now,” she said, “watch this.” Under controlled conditions, she began to drip the weak poisoned solutions into the reticulated water systems, a different solution to each of the tanks. “These concentrations are so low that the animals will not even be aware of trauma, they will continue to feed and breed without any but long-term indications of systemic poisoning.” Samantha was a different person, a cool quick-thinking professional. Even the white dust-coat that she had slipped over her tee-shirt altered her image and she had aged twenty years in poise and authority as she passed back and forth along the row of tanks.

“There,” she said, with grim satisfaction as the stylus on one recording drum made a slightly double beat at its peak and then just delectably flattened the second peak. “Typical aromatic carbon reaction.” The distorted heart-beat was repeated endlessly on the slowly turning drum, and she passed on to the next tank.

“See the pulse in the trough, see the fractional speeding up of the heart spasm? That’s cadmium in ten parts to the million, at 100 parts it will kill all sea life, at five hundred it will kill man slowly, at seven hundred parts in air or solution it will kill him very quickly indeed.”

Nicholas’ interest became total fascination, as he helped Samantha record the experiments and control the flow and concentration in the tanks. Slowly they the dosage of each substance and the moving stylus dispassionately recorded the increasing distress and the final convulsions and spasmodic throes that preceded death.

Nicholas voiced the tickle of horror and revulsion he felt at watching the process of degeneration. “It’s macabre.”

“Yes.” She stood back from the tanks. “Death always is. But these organisms have such rudimentary nervous systems that they don’t experience pain as we know it.” She shuddered slightly herself and went on. “But imagine an entire ocean poisoned like one of these tanks, imagine the incredible agonies of tens of millions of sea birds, of the mammals, seals and porpoises and whales. Then think of what would happen to man himself –” Samantha shrugged off her white dust-coat.

“Now I’m hungry,” she announced, and then looking up at the fibreglass panels in the roof, “No wonder! It’s dark already!”

While they cleaned and tidied the laboratory, and made a last check of the pumps and running equipment, Samantha told him, “In five hours we have tested over a hundred and fifty samples of contaminated water and got accurate indications of nearly fifty dangerous substances – at a probable cost of fifty cents a sample.” She switched out the lights. “To do the same with a gas spectroscope would have cost almost ten thousand dollars and taken a highly specialized team two weeks of hard work.”

“It’s a hell of a trick,” Nicholas told her. “You’re a clever lady – I’m impressed, I really am.” At the psychedelic Chevy van she stopped him, and in the light of the street lamp looked up at him guiltily.

“Do you mind if I show you off, Nicholas?”

“What does that mean?” he asked suspiciously.

The gang are eating shrimps tonight, Then they’ll sleep over on the boat and have the first shot at fish tagging tomorrow – but we don’t have to go. We could just get some more steaks and another jug of wine.” But he could see she really wanted to go.

She was fifty-five foot, an old purse-seiner with the ungainly wheelhouse forward looking like a sentry box or an old-fashioned pit latrine. Even with her coat of new paint, she had an old-fashioned look. She was tied up at the end of the University jetty, and as they walked out to her, so they could hear the voices and the laughter coming up from below decks.

“Tricky Dicky,” Nicholas read her name on the high ugly rounded stern.

“But we love her,” Samantha said, and led him across the narrow, rickety gangplank. “She belongs to the University. She’s only one of our four research vessels. The others are all fancy modern ships, two-hundred-footers, but the Dicky is our boat for short field trips to the gulf or down the Keys, and she’s also the faculty clubhouse.”

The main cabin was monastically furnished, bare planking and hard benches, a single long table, but it was as crowded as a fashionable discotheque, packed solid with sunburned young people, girls and boys all in faded jeans and tee-shirts, impossible to judge sexes by clothing or by the length of their sun-tortured and wind-tangled hair.

The air was thick with the rich smell of broiling gulf shrimps and molten butter, and there were gallon jugs of California wine on the table.

“Hey!” Samantha shouted above the uproar of voices raised in heated dispute and jovial repartee. “This is Nicholas.” A comparative silence descended on the gathering, and they looked him over with the curious veiled group hostility of any tribe for an interloper, an intruder in a closed and carefully guarded group. Nick returned the scrutiny calmly, met each pair of eyes, while realizing that despite the affected informality of their dress and some of the wildly unkempt hairstyles and the impressive profusion of beards, they were an elite group. There was not a face that was not intelligent, not a pair of eyes that was not alert and quick, and there was that special feeling of pride and self confidence in all of them.

At the head of the table sat a big impressive figure, the oldest man in the cabin, perhaps Nick’s age or a little older, for there were silver strands in his beard and his face was lined and beaten by sun and wind and time.

“Hi, Nick,” he boomed. “I won’t pretend we’ve never heard of you. Sam has given us all cauliflower ears.

“You cut that out, Tom Parker.” Samantha stopped him sharply, and there was a ripple of laughter, a relaxation of tension and a casual round of greetings.

“Hi, Nick, I’m Sally-Anne.” A pretty girl with china-blue eyes behind wire-framed spectacles put a heavy tumbler of wine into his hand. “We are short of glasses, guess you and Sam will have to share.” She slid up along the bench and gave them a few inches of space and Samantha perched in Nicholas lap. The wine was a rough fighting red, and it galloped, booted and spurred across his palate but Samantha sipped her share with the same relish as if it had been a 83 Chateau Lafitte, and she nuzzled Nicholas ear and whispered: “Tom is prof of the Biology department, he’s a honey. After you – he’s my most favourite man in the world.”

A woman came through from the galley, carrying a huge platter piled high with bright pink shrimps and a bowl of molten butter. There was a roar of applause for her as she placed the dishes in the centre of the table, and they fell upon the food with unashamed gusto, The woman was tall with dark hair in braids and a strong capable face, lean and supple in tight breeches, but she was older than the other women and she paused beside tom Parker and draped one arm across his shoulders in a comfortable gesture of long-established affection.

“That’s Antoinette, his wife.” The woman heard her name and smiled across at them, and with dark gentle eyes she studied Nicholas and then nodded and made the continental O of thumb and forefinger at Samantha, before slipping back into the galley.

The food did not inhibit the talk, the lively contentious flow of discussion that swung swiftly from banter to deadly back again, bright trained informed minds seriousness and clicking and cannoning off each other with the crispness of ivory billiard balls, while at the same time buttery fingers ripped the whiskered heads off the shrimps, delving for the crescent of sweet white flesh, then leaving greasy fingerprints on the wine tumblers.

As each of them spoke, Samantha whispered their names and credentials.

“Hank Petersen, he’s doing a PhD on the blue-fill tuna – spawning and a trace of its migratory routes. He’s the one running the tagging tomorrow.”

“That’s Michelle Rand, she’s on loan from UCLA, and she’s porpoises and whales.”

Then suddenly they were all discussing indignantly a rogue tanker captain who the week before had scrubbed his tanks in the middle of the Florida straits and left a thirty-mile slick down the Gulf stream, He had done it under cover of night, and changed course as soon as he was into the Atlantic proper.

“We finger-printed him,” Tom Parker like an angry bear, “we had him made, dead in the cross hairs.” Nick knew he was talking of the finger-printing of oil residues, the breakdown of samples of the slick under gas spectroscopy which could match them exactly to the samples taken by the Coast Guard from the offender’s tanks. The identification was good enough to bear up in an international court of law. “But the trick is getting the son-of-a-bitch into court.” Tom Parker went on. “He was fifty miles outside our territorial waters by the time the Coast guard got to him, and he’s registered in Liberia. We tried to cover cases like that in the set of proposals I put up to the last maritime conference.” Nick joined the conversation for the first time. He told them of the difficulties of legislating on an international scale, of policing and bringing to justice the blatant transgressors; then he listed for them what had been done so far, what was in process and finally what he believed still should be done to protect the seas.

He spoke quietly, succinctly, and Samantha noticed again, with a swell of pride, how all men listened when Nicholas Berg talked. The moment he paused, they came at him from every direction, using their bright young minds like scalpels, tearing into him with sharp lancing questions. He answered them in the same fashion, sharp and hard, armed with total knowledge of his subject, and he saw the shift in the group attitude, the blooming of respect, the subtle opening of ranks to admit him, for he had spoken the correct passwords and they recognized him as one of their own number, as one of the elite.

At the head of the table, Tom Parker sat and listened, nodding and frowning, sitting in judgement with his arm around Antoinette’s slim waist and she stood beside him and played idly with a curl of thick wiry hair on the top of his head.

Chapter 25

Tom Parker found fish forty miles offshore where the Gulf Stream was setting blue and warm and fast into the north.

The birds were working, falling on folded wings down the backdrop of cumulo-nimbus storm clouds that bruised the horizon. The birds were bright, white pinpoints of light as they fell, and they struck the dark blue water with tiny explosions of white spray, and went deep. Seconds later they popped to the surface, stretching their necks to force down another morsel into their distended crops, before launching into flight again, climbing in steep circles against the sky to join the hunt again.

There were hundreds of them and they swirled and fell like snowflakes.

“Anchovy,” grunted Tom Parker, and they could see the agitated surface of the water under the bird flock where the frenzied bait-fish churned. “Could be bonito working under them.”

“No,” said Nick. “They are blues.”

“You sure?” Tom grinned a challenge.

“The way they are bunching and holding the bait-fish, it’s tuna,” Nick repeated.

“Five bucks?” Tom asked, as he swung the wheel over, and Tricky Dicky’s big diesel engine boomed as she went on to the top of her speed.

“You’re on,” Nick grinned back at him, and at that moment, they both saw a fish jump clear. It was a brilliant shimmering torpedo, as long as a man’s arm. It went six feet into the air, turned in flight and hit the water again with a smack they heard clearly above the diesel. “Blues,” said Nick flatly. “Shoal blues - they’ll go twenty pounds each.”

“Five bucks,” Tom grunted with disgust. “Son of a gun, I don’t think I can afford you, man,” and he delivered a playful punch to the shoulder which rattled Nick’s teeth, then he turned to the open window of the wheelhouse and bellowed out on to the deck, “Okay, kids, they are blues.” There was a scramble and chatter of excitement as they rushed for lines and tagging poles. It was Hank’s show, he was the blue-fill tunny expert, he knew as much about their sex habits, their migratory routes and food chains as any man living but when it came to catching them, Nick observed drily, he could probably do a better job as a blacksmith.

Tom Parker was no fisherman either. He ran down the shoal, charging Tricky Dicky through the centre of it, scattering birds and fish in panic – but by sheer chance one of the gang in the stern hooked in, and after a great deal of heaving and huffing and shouted encouragement from his peers, dragged a single luckless baby blue-fill tuna over the rail.

It skittered and jumped around the deck, its tail hammering against the planking, pursued by a shrieking band of scientists who slid and slipped in the fish slime, knocked each other down and finally cornered the fish against the rail. The first three attempts to affix the plastic tag were unsuccessful, Hank’s lunges with the dart pole becoming wilder as his frustration mounted. He almost succeeded in tagging Samantha’s raised backside as she knelt on the deck trying to cradle the fish in both arms.

“You do this often?” Nicholas asked mildly.

“First time with this gang,” Tom Parker admitted sheepishly. “Thought you’d never guess.”

By now the triumphant band was solicitously returning the fish to the sea, the barbed dart of the plastic tag embedded dangerously near its vitals; and if that didn’t eventually kill it, the rough handling probably would. It had pounded its head on the deck so heavily that blood oozed from the gill covers, It floated away, belly up on the stream oblivious of Samantha’s anguished cries of: “Swim, fish, get in there and swim!”

“Mind if we try it my way?” Nick asked, and Tom relinquished command without a struggle.

Nicholas picked the four strongest and best coordinated of the young men, and gave them a quick demonstration and lecture on how to handle the heavy handlines with the Japanese feather lures, showing them how to throw the bait, and the recovery with an underhand flick that recoiled the line between the feet. Then he gave each a station along the starboard rail, with the second remember of each team ready with a tagging pole and Hank Petersen on the roof of the wheel-house to record the fish taken and the numbers of the tags.