The Seventh Carrier (Seventh Carrier Series Book 1) by Peter Albano

Author:Peter Albano
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2016-05-03T23:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

5 December 1983

The smaller members of the marine mammals known as cetacea are called dolphins or porpoises. Larger members of the order are called whales. Unfortunately for the order, the larger members are of commercial value to man, producing meat for both men and animals, oil for industrial lubrication and conversion into soaps, cosmetics and detergents. Even the bones are useful, ground up and processed for use as fertilizer and glue.

The blue whale is the largest animal ever to inhabit the Earth, some measuring over 100 feet in length and weighing more than 140 tons. The blue feeds in the Antarctic, north Atlantic, and north Pacific. Migration routes take the blue north to the Arctic seas where it gains weight with incredible rapidity as it feeds on huge swarms of polar krill.

Aleuts have killed whales for centuries. In times gone by, without line or float, these daring whalers used only a harpoon coated with poison. Using two man kayaks, the whales were approached stealthily. After the harpoon was driven home, the canoe was paddled hurriedly back to shore and safety. With any luck, the whale would die in a day or two and its carcass, swollen with gases of decomposition, would float to the surface where the owner of the harpoon would claim it and tow it to shore. This method was highly inefficient. The Russians have made vast improvements.

One of the most efficient Russians was Capt. Boris Sinilov, who enjoyed whaling, even in the rough, cold north Pacific. Fifty-nine years old, tall and broad, with icy gray eyes and iron hair to match, he was an ex-infantryman who turned to the sea as a catharsis after the blood, mud, and slaughter of Stalingrad, Kharkov, and Smolensk where an eighty-eight’s shrapnel took him out of the war until 1945. Then, assigned to Mongolia, he burst across the Manchurian border on eight August 1945 with one-and-one-half million other Russians and destroyed the Kwangtung Army in twenty-five days. He returned home to find himself alone, his mother, father, and two sisters shot and thrown into Babi Yar — a ravine outside of Kiev that the Germans filled with over thirty-three thousand corpses of subhuman Jews, Slavs and Gypsies.

But now he was a captain, breathing clean sea air on the bridge of the forty-meter catcher boat Kalmykovo. The morning of five December found him on the vessel’s bridge — a tiny, square compartment, exposed and cold — hands gripping the gyrorepeater, swaying with bent knees to the jerky motions of the small ship.

Sinilov’s eyes were not on the repeater. Instead, he stared impatiently at the bow where gunner Fyodor Kovpak had finally settled behind the seventy-six-millimeter harpoon gun. Despite the gyrations of the gun platform which projected over the bow, he could see Fyodor check first the harpoon, then the time fuse on the bomb which would explode six seconds after it entered the whale, and finally the nylon rope secured to the end of the weapon.

As captain, Boris had personally inspected the thick manila line attached to the nylon rope.

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