The Whale Warriors by Peter Heller

Author:Peter Heller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

We were now in a land of ice. Where the Japanese were, where we moved, depended much on what the ice would allow.

After breakfast, just at 0900, we heard the wave-washed silence of the Farley ’s engines shutting down. We drifted. We were a few hundred yards off a flat-topped iceberg the size of an aircraft carrier. The threatening winds of the night had died down, and the sea was calm, rolling easily, wrinkled with a light breeze that blew snowflakes around. The sky was overcast but bright, luminous; and a darker storm front was moving in.

It was time to get the chopper up while we could. We were still about 150 miles from the Balleny Islands, off to the southeast, and Watson wanted Aultman to scout ahead as far as he could and find an opening if there was one.

Watson said, “I’m quite confident that if we go all the way to 175 degrees that way [east], and then come back this way we’ll run into them. Last time there were only three legal Patagonia toothfish boats in Antarctica and we ran into two of them.”

But the last time he was here, in 2002, he had completely missed the six large ships of the whaling fleet.

With the engines off, it was easy to hear all the other activity on the Farley. She hummed with a renewed vigor. In the bosun’s locker the grinder whined and smoked. DMZ Steve was at the vise hacksawing a piece of four-foot angle iron for a prop fouler.

He stopped and lifted a smudged sheet of paper off the workbench—a diagram of a pointed cross with the scrawled words “killer steel.”

Some Twisted Sister hard rock blasted next door in the coring lab, another workshop next to the bosun’s locker—“ I’m not going to take it! ”—where Luke was cutting more angle iron, Justin wrapped a steel cable splice with electric tape, and Jeff was bent over a tangle of cables in the corner.

From all over the boat, loud music, hammering steel, grinding, drilling, tapping.

Trevor and Willie were out at the forward end of the main deck, starboard side, helping Marc lower the can opener into position on the outside of the hull. Marc had on a harness and was roped up. Willie belayed him. Trevor worked the knuckle boom crane that lowered the blade slowly. Once in place, Marc dangled and began to weld.

I went up to the bridge. A very serious folksinger was vibrating the woofers of the bridge stereo with her feelings.

“And what in God’s name is this?” I called to Geert, who was drawing at the chart table two feet away.

“What music is this?” Geert repeated loudly to the bridge. He turned and raised an eyebrow. “Shit music.”

“It’s the captain’s,” Alex said through the doorway. “I don’t know. Let’s keep it that way.”

I found the jewel case—Connie Dover, Celtic.

I looked at the GPS over the charts. We were at 65°41’S, 155°55’E, eighty-five miles east of the Virik Bank and about fifty miles north of the Antarctic Circle.

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