White Shark (7 page)

They had been tracking her for two days,
recording data on her speed, direction, depth, body temperature — eager for any
information about this rarest of the great ocean predators — without seeing
anything of her but a white blip on a green screen.
 
He wanted them to see her again so that Max
could enjoy the perfection of her, the beauty of her, but also to make sure the
shark was all right, had not developed an infection or an ulcer from the
tagging dart that contained the electronic signaling device.
 
It had been perfectly placed in the tough
skin behind the dorsal fin, but these animals had become so scarce that he
worried about even the remote possibility of causing her harm.

They had found her almost by accident, and
just in time to save her from becoming a trophy on a barroom wall.

Chase maintained good relations with the
local commercial fishermen, carefully staying out of the increasingly bitter
controversy over limiting catches because of depleted stocks.
 
Since he couldn't be everywhere at once, he
needed the fishermen to be his eyes and ears on the ocean, to alert him to
anomalies natural and man-made, like massive fish kills, sudden algae blooms
and oil spills.

His assiduous neutrality had paid off on
Thursday night, when a bluefisherman had phoned the Institute (he'd had sense
enough not to use his radio, which could be monitored by every boat in three
states).
 
On his way home, he told Chase,
he had seen a dead whale floating between
Block Island
and Watch Hill.
 
Sharks were already
feeding on the carcass, but they were school sharks, mostly blues.
 
The rare and solitary whites had not yet
picked up the spoor.

But they would, those few that still
patrolled the bight between Montauk and Point Judith.
 
And soon.

The word would reach the charter-fishing
boats, whose captains would call their favored customers and promise them, for
fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars a day, a shot at one of the most
sought-after trophies in the sea — the apex predator, the biggest carnivorous
fish in the world, the man-eater:
 
the great
white shark.
 
They would find the whale
quickly, for its corpse would show up on radar, and they would circle it while
their
customers
camcorded the awesome spectacle of the
rolling eyeballs and the motile jaws tearing away fifty-pound chunks of whale.
 
And then, drunk with the dream of selling the
jaw for five thousand or ten thousand dollars and blinded to the fact that they
could make more money if they left the shark alone and charged customers for
the privilege of filming it, they would harpoon the animal to death... because,
they would say to themselves, if we don't do it, someone else will.

The would
call it sport.
 
To Chase, it was no more sport than shooting a dog at its dinner.

He and scientists from
Massachusetts
to
Florida
to
California
had been lobbying for years to have great white sharks officially declared
endangered, as they had been in parts of
Australia
and
South Africa
.
 
But white sharks were not mammals, were not
cute, did not appear to smile at children, did not ‘sing’ or make endearing
clicking noises to one another or jump through hoops for paying customers.
 
The were omnivorous fish that once in a while
— but rarely, much more rarely than did bees or snakes or tigers or lightning —
killed human beings.

Everyone agreed that white sharks were
marvels of evolution that had survived almost unchanged for scores of millions
of years; that they were biologically wonderful and medically fascinating; that
they performed a critical function in maintaining the balance in the marine
food chain.
 
But in an age of tight
budgets and conflicting priorities, there was little public pressure to protect
an animal perceived as nothing more than a fish that ate people.

Before long, Chase was sure, perhaps
before the turn of the millennium, they would all be gone.
 
Children would see white-shark heads mounted
on walls, and filmed records of them on the Discovery Channel, but within a
generation they wouldn't even be a memory; they would be no more real than the
dinosaurs.

His first impulse after talking to the
bluefisherman was to collect some explosives, find the whale and blow it to
pieces.
 
It was the best solution, the
quickest and most efficient:
 
the whale
would disappear from the charter fishermen's radar, the sharks would
disperse.
 
But it was also the most
dangerous, for destroying a whale carcass was a federal crime.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act was a
masterwork of contradictions.
 
No one —
scientists, laymen, filmmakers or
fishermen — was
allowed to get near a whale, dead or alive.
 
No matter that the entire save-the-whales movement (including the act
itself) had been born of the excellent films made by dedicated
professionals.
 
No matter that a whale
carcass could become an environmental catastrophe.
 
If you messed with a whale, you were a criminal.

Chase's days as an environmental firebrand
were over.
 
Five years ago, he had made a
decision to work within the system rather than from outside it.
 
He had swallowed his anger and kissed some
ass and wangled scholarships to graduate school, and had returned to Waterboro,
with no specific idea about what he wanted to do.
 
He could teach, or continue to study, but he
was impatient to be free of the classroom and the laboratory; he longed to
learn by
doing
.
 
He could apply for a job at Woods Hole or Scripps
or any of the other marine institutes around the country, but he was still a
dissertation shy of his doctorate, and he had no confidence that anyone would
hire him to be anything more than a drone.

The one certainty in Chase's life was that
he would spend his life in, on, around and under the sea.

He had loved it from first memory, when
his father had taken him aboard the
Miss
Edna
on balmy days and let him savor the feel and the sounds and the smells
of the sea.
 
He had learned affection and
respect, not only for the sea itself but for the creatures that lived in it and
the men who harvested them.

He had become particularly (perversely,
his father thought) fascinated by sharks.
 
Sharks seemed to be everywhere in those days — basking on the surface in
the sun, assaulting the nets balled full of thrashing fish, following the
boat's bloody wake as fish were cleaned and their guts tossed overboard.
 
At first, Simon had been enthralled mostly by
their appearance of relentless menace, but then, as he read more and more about
them, he came to see them as a wonderful representation of natural
continuity:
 
unchanged for millions of
years, efficient, immune to almost all diseases that affected other animals.
 
It was as if nature had created them and
thought,
Well
done.

He still loved sharks, and though he no
longer feared them, now he feared
for
them.
 
Around the world, they were being
slaughtered recklessly, wastefully and ignorantly — some for their fins, which
were sold for soup; some for their meat; some simply because they were
perceived as a nuisance.

By coincidence, Chase had returned to
Waterboro at precisely the time a small island between Block Island and
Fisher's
Island
had come on the market.
 
The state of
Connecticut
had taken the island from a
troubled bank and was auctioning it off to collect tax liens.
 
The thirty-five-acre tract of scrub and ledge
rock was too remote and too unattractive for commercial development and,
because it had no access to municipal services, impractical for subdivision into
private homesites.

Chase, however, saw tiny
Osprey
Island
as the perfect spot for
oceanographic research.
 
Armed with the proceeds from the sale of his
parents' house and fishing boat, he put a down payment on the island, financed
the balance and established the Osprey Island Marine Institute.

He had no trouble finding projects worthy
of study:
 
dwindling fish stocks,
vanishing marine species, pollution — all demanded attention.
 
Other groups and institutes were doing
similar work, of course, and Chase tried to complement their work with his,
while always reserving time and what money he could muster for his
specialty:
 
sharks.

So now, much as he hated to admit it, at
thirty-four and as director of the Institute, he was a card-carrying member of
the Establishment.
 
He was attaining a
respectable reputation in the scientific community for his research on sharks;
his papers on their immune systems had been accepted by leading journals and
were received as interesting, if somewhat eccentric.
 
And he himself was regarded as a scientist
worth watching:
 
a comer.

If he were to be caught blowing up a
whale, however, he knew he would be instantly discredited, as well as fined and
probably jailed.

And so he had opted for compromise.
 
He had faxed the Environmental Protection
Agency in
Washington
and the state Department
of Environmental Protection in
Hartford
,
requesting emergency permission not to destroy the whale but to move it before
it could wash up on a public beach.
 
He
had no idea what direction the carcass was moving in, but he knew that the
threat would be persuasive:
 
no
government — federal, state or local — wanted to be stuck with the cost,
possibly as much as a hundred thousand dollars, of removing fifty tons of putrefying
whale from a beach.
 
He gave inaccurate
coordinates for the whale's current position, placing it where he wanted to two
it, so that if he was denied permission he could claim that he hadn't moved it,
and if permission was granted, he could two it even farther away, into
deep ocean
where no sportsfishermen would be likely to come
upon it.

He hadn't waited for a reply from either
agency.
 
He and Tall Man had loaded
grappling hooks and a barrel of rope into the Institute's boat and gone looking
for the whale.
 
They had found it right
away, and, at around midnight, in the glow of the moon, they had sunk the hooks
into the rotting meat and begun to tow the carcass out into the Atlantic beyond
Block Island
.
 
The vile stench of decay followed them, and the horrid grunting sounds
of sharks leaping out of the water to rip at the fatty flesh.

The whale was a young humpback, and at
first light they saw what had killed it.
 
Fishing nets floated like shrouds around its mouth and head.
 
It had blundered into huge commercial nets,
had ensnared itself further by thrashing in its struggle to escape and had
strangled to death.

The white shark had arrived just after
dawn.
 
She was a big mature female,
probably fifteen or twenty years old, of prime breeding age.
 
And she was pregnant, which Chase had discovered
when the shark rolled on her back as she plunged her massive head deep into the
pink meat of the whale's flanks, exposing her swollen belly and genital slit.

No one knew for sure how long great whites
lived or when they first began to breed, but current theory favored a maximum
age of eighty to a hundred years and a breeding cycle that began at about age
ten and produced one or two pups every second year.

So, to kill her, to hang her head on the
wall and sell her teeth for jewelry, would not be to kill a single great white
shark.
 
It would be to wipe out perhaps
as many as twenty generations of sharks.

They had inserted the transmitter dart
quickly and easily.
 
The shark had never
felt the barb, had not interrupted her feeding.
 
The had
watched her for a few minutes, and
Chase had taken pictures.
 
Then, as they
prepared to leave, Tall Man had turned on the radio and heard charter fishermen
talking back and forth about the whale.
 
Clearly, the bluefisherman had gone to a bar and, feeling that he had
done his duty by phoning the Institute first, had been unable to resist making
points with his mates by talking about the whale.

Where had it gone
? the
fishermen would have wondered.
 
Who took
it?
 
The goddamn
government?
 
Those
bleeding hearts from the Institute?
 
East.
 
They had to have taken it East of Block.