Blindfold Game

JANUARY

ON BOARD THE SUNRISE WARRIOR

ARE WE THERE YET?“ Vivienne Kincaid said. Dylan Doyle grabbed for a handhold when the Sunrise Warrior heeled to port as they ascended the weather side of the swell. ”We are there, Vivienne,“ he said with a faint hint of County Cork in his accent, ”but be damned if I know where there is.“

“Do my ears deceive me? You’ve finally found a stretch of water that has the North Sea beat?”

Doyle gave a snort of laughter. “It might be that I’m wishing I was on my way to Foinaven.” The ship rolled over to starboard and skidded down the opposite side of the swell into the trough. Heaving green seas gave way only to dense ice fog in every direction. Vivienne was hovering over the radar, attention fixed on targets.

“They’re icebergs,” a new voice said at her shoulder.

She looked around to see that Kevin had arrived on the bridge.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“It’s ice, and we’re drifting into it.”

“There are two echoes with the same course and doing the same eleven knots. Of course they are ships. Not to mention which, the last reports have the ice pack stuck at fifty-nine degrees.”

Kevin’s lips tightened. Doyle grinned at him, which didn’t help.

Footsteps sounded and Ernie Hart and Darryl Hickey tumbled into the room. Jack Lestenkof, Concetta Dalilak, and Evelyn Caudle were right behind them. They were dressed in orange jumpsuits, hard hats, and their Deep Sea Defender vests. “We got ‘em?” Jack said. “Vivienne? We got ’em?”

Vivienne looked at Doyle. “Full steam ahead.”

Everyone whooped except Kevin, although he looked less sullen than he had a moment before. Doyle worked the controls, and the engines responded with an eager roar. They closed to within half a mile of the closest echo, and the outline of another ship materialized out of the fog.

“And what to our wondering eyes should appear,” Vivienne said. She was tempted to stick her tongue out at Kevin, but resisted.

“Hello, Marinochka,” Doyle said.

“Oh, shit,” someone else said.

In one of those rapid Arctic shifts the weather had decided enough with the fog and the snow and the ceiling was rising rapidly, all the better to see the scene before them. Everything was still green and gray, sky, water, everything except for the rich red of the blood draining from the carcass of the little narwhal tangled in the long net the catcher-processor was at present winching in.

“Son of a bitch.”

Vivienne reached for the mike and said in Russian, “Fishing vessel Marinochka, fishing vessel Marinochka, this is the MV Sunrise Warrior. campaign vessel of the environmental organization Greenpeace. We r here to protest your taking of illegal bycatch in protected waters. P‘ haul in your gear and leave this area immediately.”

They got a lot of static in reply.

“Gee, maybe they don’t want to talk to us.”

“Ya think?”

Into the mike Vivienne repeated, “Fishing vessel Marinochka, fishing vessel Marinochka, this is the MV Sunrise Warrior, campaign vessel for the environmental organization Greenpeace. Please leave this sanctuary immediately. If you leave now, we will leave with you. If you choose to continue your activities, we will use any and all means to prevent you from continuing to fish. We are a nonviolent organization and we will do nothing to put your crews and vessels at risk. I repeat, we are a nonviolent organization, but we will use all peaceful means at our disposal to prevent you from taking any more illegal bycatch.”

They waited for a reply and didn’t get one.

“Vivienne?” Jack Nuyalan said tensely.

“Launch,” Vivienne said, and Jack was out of the bridge before the word was all the way out of Vivienne’s mouth.

“Vivienne?” Ernie said.

“Launch, launch, launch!” Vivienne said, watching the stern of the catcher. Sure enough, water boiled up as the catcher kicked it in gear.

Vivienne couldn’t stand it. She headed for the door.

“Wait a minute, where are you going?” Kevin shouted.

Doyle laughed. Vivienne followed Ernie’s crew to the starboard boat deck where they were scampering down a rope ladder to the inflatable, heaving and tossing on the waves below. Vivienne tumbled in after them and Ernie gunned the engine. He yanked hard on the wheel, jerking the bow around in an eyeballer of a course heading that would have them crossing the catcher-processor’s bow with maybe an inch and a quarter to spare.

The dead whale was half up the chute, but Jack’s crew didn’t let that stop them. As they approached, the Marinochka’s crew opened up with water hoses. Concetta and Evelyn responded by holding up clear Plexiglas riot shields, one on either side of Jack. The force of the water from the hoses caused the shields to waver but Jack held grimly to his course.

“Those riot shields were a good idea!” Ernie shouted.

“Yeah!” Vivienne shouted back, and then they were on the Marinochka and Vivienne lost sight of the other inflatable.

“Oh man oh man oh man,” Evelyn said, eye to the shutter of his camera. Evelyn was British and notoriously hard to impress, but not today. “This is beautiful,” he breathed as the shutter clicked rapidly through a roll of film.

Vivienne knew that Neil was on the bridge wing getting it all on videotape as well. “Hoo-yah!” Concetta, the ex-marine, shouted, and then immediately cursed when the inflatable came into range of the water hoses. Vivienne and Concetta got their shields up but not before the water had knocked Evelyn to his knees, and they were all soaked through.

“Is your camera all right?” Vivienne shouted.

He looked at her, dazed and still on his ass in the bottom of the boat. She hauled him up and grabbed the camera. The shutter didn’t respond when she pressed the button.

“It’s okay!” he shouted. “It’s waterproof!” He tucked it inside his coat and pulled out another. No wonder he looked so lumpy.

Ernie, in an attempt to avoid the water hoses, took the inflatable beneath the bow of the Marinochka with inches to spare, and an unexpectedly large swell raised it nose to nose with one of the men handling the hoses. He gaped at them. Vivienne smiled and extended a hand. “Hey,” she said in her best Joey Tribbiani imitation, “how you doing?”

He stared at the hand, openmouthed, and then the swell dropped them down again, and Ernie hit the throttles, laughing out loud.

Jack’s crew managed to hook his craft on the line that was pulling in the gear and his inflatable was hauled up the slipway right along with the net. They were hit with all four water hoses at once. Even the riot shields were no use, and Jack let go and they slid back into the water.

It went on like that for the next two and a half hours, until it started to get dark. “Let’s pack it in,” Vivienne said, and they returned to the Sunrise Warrior and a hero’s welcome.

A hot shower and dry clothes later, Vivienne was on the phone to Amsterdam. “Well done,” Benjamin Cavo told her.

“Thanks. We got some terrific film. Neil is editing it right now. We’ll upload it and get it out to you pronto.”

“Good. We’ve got an interview set up for you on CNN.”

“CNN? They’re actually paying attention?”

“Looks like.”

“Let’s hope no one takes a shot at the president today.”

“Yeah, that would cut into our airtime,” Ben said.

There was a knock at the door, and at her call Doyle stepped inside. “What’s up?”

Vivienne said goodbye and hung up. “Ben’s pleased.”

“He’ll be even happier when he sees the video.”

Vivienne’s grin was tired but satisfied. “Neil get it all?”

“Oh yeah,” he said with a matching grin. “Miles of it, on the main camera and the backup. He’s already started editing it into spots.”

In spite of his protestations of devotion to the seas east of Iceland, Doyle was loving every minute of this. Since signing on board a tramp steamer as a common seaman when he was seventeen, he had worked his way up to a master mariner’s license and had captained containerships, LNG carriers, and cruise ships over the navigable waters of all the seven seas. He’d been studying for his marine pilot’s license for south-central Alaska when the Exxon Valdez went hard aground on Bligh Reef.

It wasn’t that he’d never seen an oil spill before, he’d told Vivienne. In 1978, his fourteenth year at sea, he’d been a mate on a freighter carrying Seville oranges to Portsmouth when the steering mechanism failed on the Amoco Cadiz in stormy weather and she ran onto the Portsall Rocks. Sixty-eight point seven million gallons of Arabian light and Iranian light crude oil spilled across two hundred miles of coastline, fouling the beaches of seventy-six Breton communities. The sight had sickened him.

By contrast, the Exxon Valdez had spilled a mere eleven million gallons, but it had spread four times as far, across much of what had previously been a pristine marine wildlife habitat. And after thirty years at sea, maybe he’d just had enough of slipshod seamanship, lousy ship management, and an international maritime attitude of “out of sight, out of mind.” He’d left the marine pilot’s program and flown to Amsterdam, where he offered his services to Greenpeace. Now sixty-three, he’d been master on a dozen campaigns, including a protest to disrupt the arrival of construction barges at Prudhoe Bay and prior visits to the fishing grounds on the Bering Sea. He had more sea sense that any other ten sailors Vivienne knew. Grudgingly, Ben Cavo had gone along with her insistence that Doyle be master on this campaign, not without some serious hinting in the way of payback, the form of which could be left to her imagination. Vivienne hinted back a convincing enthusiasm for the idea without being so rash as to make any specific promises, and Doyle had been on the bridge to greet her when she flew out to join the ship in San Diego.

“Food?” Doyle said now.

“Deal,” she said, and followed him to the galley a deck down. Two long tables with matching benches were bolted to the floor at one end of the room. At the other end was a serving line of steam tables with a mini salad bar at the end. Today lunch was kielbasa and sauerkraut. Feet braced against the pitch and roll of the ship, Vivienne loaded her plate. Doyle assembled a salad of massive proportions and followed her to the table.

He looked around at the otherwise empty galley. “Is everyone else seasick?”

Vivienne was watching the cook, Nils Johnson, a young redheaded man whose face was so pale she could count his individual freckles. He gave a stifled moan, staggered over to a trash can, dropped to his knees, puked, puked again, got up, blew his nose on a paper towel, washed his hands in the galley sink, and went back to work. “I think so.” She turned back to her meal and tucked in with an enjoyment that was not lacking an element of smugness. “You ever get seasick?”

“Not yet.”

She smiled. “After, what, forty-six years at sea, chances are you won’t.”

He waved a loaded fork at her. “Don’t tempt the fates, Vivienne. There’s a sea out there with everyone’s name on it.”

When they were done, she carried the dirty dishes to the pass-through to hand to Nils, who was still pale but no longer sweating. The first fifteen minutes after you threw up were a grace period between bouts of nausea. She knew, which was one of the reasons she was smug about not being seasick now. She brought back two cups of coffee, heavy on the cream for her and heavy on the sugar for him, and they wedged themselves between table and bulkhead so they wouldn’t keep sliding up and down the benches.

“CNN?” Doyle said.

“Ben says they’re interested. It’s about time. The Bering Sea fishery makes up half of the United States’ fish production, mostly pollock. There are smaller fisheries, including pacific cod and snow crab. The industry is worth over a billion dollars annually.”

Doyle grunted into his coffee cup. “What’s the bad news?”

“Everything is down, species across the board, pollock, fur seals, sea lions, sea otters. King crab used to be big but the stocks crashed in the early eighties and they have yet to come back.”

“There was king crab on the menu in that restaurant in Seattle.”

Vivienne gave him a look. “Just because there are hardly any left doesn’t mean they don’t let the fishermen go after what little there are. Ever hear of the North Atlantic cod?”

“What North Atlantic cod?”

“Exactly. The Bering has an abbreviated king crab season in January, about two weeks, I think, limited to area 517 only, and limited to a catch of a few hundred thousand pounds.”

“Still too much, if the species is that close to the edge.”

“No argument here. If I had my druthers, the government would buy out all the fishermen and close the area to fishing for the next hundred years, give it time to recover.”

“Like they did with the cod fishery?”

“Yeah, but there they waited until it was too late, until the Atlantic cod was gone before they did anything about it.” She could hear her voice rising. “Sorry.”

“Never liked anybody the less for their having a temper, Vivienne.” He winked. “Been known to beller a bit myself, now. Might be why I’m here, same as you. What else?”

“Bristol Bay, on the eastern edge of the Bering, used to be the world’s largest salmon fishery.”

“And now?”

“It started failing in the mid-nineties.”

“Not a lot of good news in the Bering Sea. What do the scientists say?”

She shrugged. “They say what they always say. They use the annual catch numbers to refute charges of overfishing. They say it’s too early to attribute any of these changes to global warming. They don’t know which trends are cyclic and which are long-term. They don’t have enough data to separate and quantify the human effects from what may be natural variability.”

“They don’t know a hell of a lot,” Doyle said, and shook his head. “In 1900 there were around a billion, a billion and a half people on the planet. Today, there’s over six billion. All of us wearing clothes, driving cars, eating our heads off. Seems pretty cause and effect to me, but then that’s just this poor ignorant sailor talking.” He brooded for a moment. “I sailed up around the coast of Norway one summer, all the way from Oslo to Murmansk. It was a beautiful sail, great weather, gorgeous scenery.” His grin flashed. “A lovely young bit of a thing for deck crew. Wasn’t old enough to call the Beatles by name, but could she cook.” His grin faded. “We didn’t see a single whale. Or a seal, or a sea lion. Damn few fish. We did see a cow about a week into the trip, who had slipped her leash to browse on seaweed on the shore. A few seagulls.” He shook his head. “It was eerie.”

“We’ve already lost so much,” she said, and sighed. “They’re ripping up the bottom of the North Pacific Ocean, Doyle. Sometimes I think…”

“What?”

She spread her hands. “That we’re bailing with a sieve.”

He pretended shock. “Heresy. Calumny. Sacrilege!”

She smiled, but it was a tired smile.“ ‘O Lord, your sea is so vast, and my boat is so small.”“

“Quit stealing my lines. How many ships up here on their side of the line nowadays?”

“Last report I got said sixteen.”

“How long do they stay?”

“Until they break down and have to go into port for repairs. Supply boats bring in food and water and change out crews.”

He looked at the porthole, through which they could currently see a lot of frothing dark green water. A moment later the ship heeled in the opposite direction and the porthole was dark again. “I’m not seeing a calming in the weather anytime soon, Vivienne.”

She knew he was thinking about the inflatables out on those seas. He was the master of the vessel. He was responsible for all the people on board. Campaign or no, they wouldn’t get into the water unless or until he said they could. “The more we’re in their face, the more time they waste dealing with us. The more time they waste on us, the less time they spend fishing. The less time they spend fishing, it’s just that much less sea bottom they’re ripping up.”

“And it goes without saying that heavy seas make for good film at eleven.”

He was just snide enough to make her smile. “That it does.”

“So what’s our next target?”

She pulled a list from her shirt pocket and consulted it. “The Agafia. Panamanian-owned, Niue-flagged, Russian-leased. A killing machine. A three-hundred-and-forty-foot killing machine.”