Ocean: The Sea Warriors (15 page)

He continued on, noting the locations of a number of candidates that he intended to check later.

As Jeff landed the ‘copter back at the ranch, he saw his grandfather awaiting him, along with two men in dark blue jackets—garments that he realized were emblazoned with “DEA” on the backs when one of them went to a vehicle and returned with a German Shepherd dog.

With his heart hammering in his chest, Jeff stepped down onto the pavement, and ducked to pass under the moving main rotor, as it wound slowly to a stop. He wore white trousers and a Hawaiian shirt, with the shirt tails out in typical fashion. He had stopped wearing his gold jewelry, not wanting to call attention to himself any more than necessary.

One of the federal men stepped forward, flashed an identity card and introduced himself as Agent Walker, and the man with the dog as Agent Jackson. Both were young, and Walker, a short man with a butch haircut, had small almond-shaped eyes that glared intently as he said, “Mister Ellsworth, it has been reported to us that someone has been operating an illegal drug operation in the islands, using helicopters to transport cocaine and other banned substances.”

“I don’t know anything about it, sir.”

“Perhaps that is true, but we’re checking on every helicopter tour business in Hawaii, and there are a lot of them, as you know. We have a search warrant, which we have given to your grandfather.” The man with the drug-sniffing dog circled the helicopter, then opened the cockpit door and let the dog poke its nose inside.

Presently, he shook his head, and Jeff said, “I’m sure you’re just doing your job, sir. Of course, I will cooperate in any way possible, but I don’t know anything about an illegal drug operation.”

“We understand you crashed your other helicopter.”

“That’s true. The insurance company has a full report on what happened, and it’s my understanding that they sent a diver down to inspect it.”

“We have their report, and photos. The cockpit was empty, didn’t even have any of your personal articles.”

“Are you suggesting that I ditched it intentionally, to hide evidence? If that’s what you’re saying, I see no reason to continue this conversation, and I’ll contact my attorney.”

Agent Walker smiled reassuringly, “Hold on, young man. I don’t mean to give you the wrong impression. We know you’re a decorated war hero, from a fine family. We don’t suspect you of anything. It’s just that we have to go through the motions, ask all the questions, and fill out the proper forms. Your personal articles were probably washed away in underwater currents, and any snacks you might have had aboard—as you told the insurance adjuster—were undoubtedly carried off by sea creatures.”

Jeff took a deep breath, felt his pulse go down. “All right, I understand you’re just doing your job.”

“It’s just that with the ‘copter underwater for several days, it wouldn’t have any odor of drugs inside.” He smiled, petted the head of the dog, which had come over to his side. “This fellow doesn’t do any drug-sniffing dives.”

“There was nothing to smell even before I lost the ‘copter,” Jeff said.

The agent nodded. He only asked a few more questions, about where Jeff had been today. In response Jeff lied, told him that he had intended to drop in unannounced on one of his girlfriends and take her for a surprise ride to impress her, but had changed his mind. It was plausible, because the girlfriend, Stephanie Bickel, lived near where he had flown today. Jeff had only been on a few dates with her, he told the agent, and she’d always seemed a little reserved to him—both truthful statements. He said he had hoped to improve their relationship with the helicopter ride.

The agents seemed to be satisfied with Jeff’s answers and demeanor, and after a torturous hour that seemed more like a week, they drove away.

***

Chapter 18

Kimo Pohaku stood on the south shore of Oahu, gazing out on the cordon of living sea creatures that encircled the island, knowing that every other major island in the Hawaiian chain was barricaded as well. Most of his Sea Warriors were in the water now engaged in training exercises, and on missions to investigate any possible changes in the behavior of the large-bodied creatures at the entrance to Pearl Harbor, whose numbers continued to increase by the hour. He had noticed (and it had been reported to him) that the animals had their own rotation system, in which whales, dugong sea cows, sunfish, and other creatures in the sea barrier left regularly for their own purposes, sometimes to feed, but not before they were replaced by other animals. It appeared to be a fine-tuned operation, but a perplexing one.

The military attacks against the cordon outside Pearl Harbor had ceased for the moment, but all morning long the Navy had been using large helicopters to airlift seamen off the three stranded warships—an obvious rejection of the Sea Warriors’ offer to rescue them with a system of escorted dives. Kimo worried what would happen after the ships were cleared of people, if the bloody assaults would resume. It seemed likely, because the military force was doing whatever it wanted to do, without conferring with Kimo’s leadership team.

Now it was midday, with the sun so bright overhead that it forced him to squint, which he usually didn’t need to do. Earlier that morning he and Dirk had taken a second wave of Sea Warrior recruiting candidates—one hundred ninety-eight of them—down to see Moanna , locating her further to the west in the same deep ocean trench she’d been in before. Her ruby-red glow was still much dimmer than usual, not brightening when the two swimmers neared her, and she’d said very little. The water had been cold around her, and he remained very concerned.

Still, Moanna had cast her weakened red glow over the would-be recruits, and had transformed all but one of them into human-fish hybrids.

“You have an impostor in your midst,” Moanna had finally said to Kimo in her murmuring, faded voice, “not the actual person named on the list.” The red darkness of her realm was hazy, from the faintness of her glowing orb.

“An impostor?” Kimo had said, noticing that the Sea Goddess had left one of the recruits inside the bubble tube that took all them down to her. The man stood inside the oxygen-rich enclosure peering out through the clear membrane formed by the bubblefish, looking angry.

“The U.S. Navy sent him.”

To Kimo, he didn’t look anything like a military man, with long blond hair and a scraggly mustache—but that must have been an intentional makeover, to throw people off. Deeply concerned about why the Navy wanted to infiltrate his group, Kimo had called Dirk over and instructed him to interrogate the man when they got back to the surface. Kimo needed to remain behind, to speak further with Moanna.

Moments later, the bubble tube had begun to rise to the surface, with Dirk Avondale swimming upward beside it, taking the new recruits with him, who were all gill and swim-bladder-equipped members now, along with other bodily enhancements for surviving in the ocean. There were a total of four hundred three members now, including Kimo and Alicia.

But Kimo learned later that the interrogation never took place, as Dirk would inform him that several hundred feet beneath the surface, the bubblefish had inexplicably separated from one another, breaking open the membrane and leaving the man in the water without the oxygen he needed to breathe. Dirk had attempted to breathe air into the man’s lungs (like a buddy-breathing system used by divers in emergencies) but the underwater breathing system of a hybrid with gills was not compatible with that of an ordinary human, and the attempt had not worked. In a panic, the man had clutched onto Dirk, and died….

Not knowing about that yet, Kimo had been alone with Moanna in the misty red darkness. He had taken that opportunity to describe in some detail the strange, independent behavior of the large marine animals, and he’d asked her why they seemed to be of one collective mind, and if she knew why they were refusing to disperse.

“I know you told me that the Sea Warriors have to solve this problem,” Kimo had added, “but it’s gone beyond anything we can possibly handle. And I fear it’s going to get far worse.”

She had only glowed dimly, as before, and he still worried about her. But her whispering, murmuring voice had grown a little stronger today, and she’d said a lot more than he expected. “I do not know why the whales and their companions are acting this way. Even with molecular communication through the particles of ocean water, I do not know. It is as if –“ She had then paused for a long moment, during which her amorphous, ruby-red glow pulsed in apparent agitation, before growing smoother. “It is as if the animals have their own free will on a scale that I never anticipated, and it is of a collective nature. They are moving in concert, like the morphic fields that shape formations of birds, and I have been unable to detect the force that guides them now—or intervene with it, though I have tried. Like you, I am extremely concerned. Their behavior is … is most unexpected, and quite worrisome.”

“Alicia told me she is concerned that it might be a mass suicide of the largest species on the planet. She mentioned past incidents of dolphins, whales, and other creatures beaching themselves by the hundreds, and occasionally in larger numbers, and dying. But this is a bigger event, Moanna—much, much bigger, and horrifying. Alicia fears that the large animals are killing themselves by defying the most powerful military force in the world—hastening the process of their own extinction that mankind has already set in motion, making the inevitable happen sooner.”

“Yes, that is a disturbing possibility, a most disturbing one.”

“And under that theory, the large-bodied sea creatures have used Gwyneth McDevitt as a catalyst, in which she galvanized multiple species into collective action, and once that was set in motion, the animals themselves took it to another level—led by the most intelligent among them, probably the whales.”

“I fear Alicia is right. A sense of deep despondency in the core of my being tells me that if this continues, there could be a snowball effect in which billions of creatures of the sea kill themselves. A terrible mass suicide in which almost all ocean life ends in the upper food chain. And regardless of whether or not that occurs, there is a troublesome trend in the ocean in which large dead zones are appearing that have no oxygen, so that marine microbes and most marine animals cannot live there, nor can plants. In a matter of only two centuries, the seas of this planet could be entirely devoid of oxygen and dead—leaving them suitable only for jellyfish and certain chemical life forms that do not depend on oxygen for their survival. The death of the ocean, of course, would eliminate more than half of the oxygen production on the planet, and both animal and plant species on the land would die off catastrophically. Some land species are likely to survive, even on limited oxygen. Humans, being highly adaptable, are likely to survive, though in greatly diminished numbers.”

“What would become of you?” Kimo had asked, feeling dismal.

“I would vanish, of course. As the seas live and breathe, I live and breathe, for I am Ocean.”

Deep in thought, Kimo had said, “Gwyneth started the process of mobilizing the whales and other large creatures. Doesn’t it make sense that she could also be the key to reversing it? Do you think she is lying when she says she can’t get the animals to disperse?”

“She is not lying. Of that I am as confident as I can possibly be, from my own special knowledge of her. However, she may very well be the key to reversing the process. You could be right about that. The problem is, we don’t know how to use that key.”

“Maybe she knows,” Kimo suggested. “Maybe somewhere deep in her soul she knows. Can you work with her?”

A long period of silence ensued. Then: “As difficult as this is for me to say, and as difficult as it must be for you, I must counsel you to give her as much free reign as possible. Other than myself, she has more information about the ocean than anyone, because she has been a repository of data that has flowed from me through you, into her.”

“I dreamed that, but I didn’t think it was real.”

“Why not? The names that appeared in your dreams turned out to be real.”

“I was not in the water when you passed information to us, and neither was Gwyneth. How then did you –“

“You are not prepared to know the reason for that, Kimo.”

He felt as if his mother had spanked him. “So, Gwyneth is a very special repository of information about the ocean.”

“Yet, she is no more special than you or Alicia, because all three of you are essential parts of what I want to see happen-which is the complete reversal of bad human behavior when it comes to the ocean. In Gwyneth’s case, she has the most raw data, that is true—but she is not always able to access it. Think of your own mind, or that of any other human. Large amounts of information are in storage, and not always retrievable. It is like that with Gwyneth as well, but on a much larger scale. Her mind is a huge repository of facts—and the answer to our problem may be somewhere in her custody.”

“But not in yours, too?”

“She has her own extremely special connection with whales, and through them with other ocean animals, her own unique linkage that even I do not have. She knows things I do not. Remember, too, that she is a creature of the land
and
of the sea, while I am solely of the sea—and keep in mind, too, that whales are mammals whose ancestors walked on the land eons ago, before going to live entirely in the ocean. Beyond her very special nature, and those of you and your other Sea Warriors, I have sought assistance from human beings because humans have damaged the seas terribly, and it is only right that humans should restore them as well. Considering everything, I must step back far enough to allow Gwyneth, and all of you, to exercise your
good
human qualities to aid the ocean.”

“So, Gwyneth is the brain of the Sea Warriors, while Alicia and I perform other functions.”

The murmuring voice weakened, but Moanna continued to speak. “It’s not quite that simple. Think of it this way. You are intelligent in different ways than Gwyneth is, and you must use your own intellect, instincts, and leadership skills to bring certain aspects of hers out, to encourage and counsel her to make the best possible use of her talents, while giving her as much free reign as possible. She is very troubled now because of what has happened with the floating barricades, very uncertain of herself. And this makes her hesitant to act, hesitant to explore the tributaries of her mind where the answers could very well lie, because the sea barriers she envisioned have gone farther than she expected—they have become unmovable.”

Kimo thought about these things for a long moment, and found himself so stunned by the extent of the problem that he was unable to think of anything to say.

Moanna then filled his mind with even more. “I, too, have a hesitancy that is affecting my decisions and my actions. In the past, I exercised too much power, generating huge storms at sea and immense walls of water that flooded much of the planet. In different human cultures there are parallel legends of ancient floods. Those stories all have a basis in fact, and I caused many of the ocean-related ‘natural’ disasters, to my eternal regret. The biblical forty days and forty nights of rain were also of my making. You must realize, however, that there are other supernatural powers at work on this world, other ‘gods” and “goddesses,” as humans like to think of them—and I caused the rain and flooding at the request of another deity. These entities, including myself, sometimes work in concert, and sometimes we work separately, and even at cross purposes. I also parted the Red Sea, much to the awe of human beings.”

“I had no idea you did all that.”

“I did. And like you I have emotions. In what you call ancient times I lost my patience with mankind for a variety of reasons—precipitating disasters that almost wiped out all life on the land—failing to see that the planet needs a balance between the land, the sea, and the sky. I went too far, because even I have never been perfect. Now I seek a new equilibrium, because that is what life is all about—both on the micro and macro scale. It is about balance.”

“But now you are dissatisfied with humans again.”

“Yes, but this time I am in a much weakened state, and even so, I have the wisdom to see that there are exceptions in the ranks of mankind, good people such as yourself, Alicia, Gwyneth, and other Sea Warriors. Good people such as your adoptive parents, as well as the ocean scientists and environmentalists who want to join the ranks of the organization as associates. What I would like to see now is for you to assemble the good humans into a formidable force that will not only lead sea creatures, but will also alter human behavior, to make the planet a better place for all species of animals and plants—a utopia for life forms of all kind.”

“Moanna, this is more than you’ve ever told me at one time before. I always sensed you had something special in mind for me, but I had no comprehension of the sheer immensity of it, the scale of it. I thank you for allowing me to be the first human to be transformed. I will do my best to not disappoint you—to not disappoint the planet Earth.”