Hunting the Dragon Read online

  “Shut up and keep paddling,” Billy threatened.

  Another black form appeared and slowed beside Billy. He heard a of rush of air and felt warm moisture drift down on him. Then came a burst of rapid click-ticks, followed by a highpitched whistling. He peered into the darkness and drew back as a rounded beak emerged from the water next to his leg. Behind the snout was a bulbous head and Billy cried out, “Hey, guys. We lucked out. They’re dolphins! We don’t have to worry about sharks now.”

  The shadowy cetaceans took up positions forward of the group. Billy imagined they were pointing the way back to the island and told the surfers to follow them. They paddled another five minutes, refreshed by their convoy of spouting escorts. Suddenly, the dolphins vanished. He sensed their disappearance was for a reason. He called for a rest, and told everyone to be silent. Three minutes passed. His dread came boiling up again. Then he heard the familiar sound of an idling Yamaha outboard. Billy whistled louder than he had ever whistled before. A handheld searchlight probed through the darkness. Then a voice boomed across the water, “Hey, Billy! We’re coming!”

  He recognized Druku’s deep baritone and thanked the Fijian gods of old for placing this good-natured, smiling personification of the bula spirit of hospitality aboard the rescue boat. Nobody but Druku could have found them in the darkness.

  “What are you doing paddling back, Billy?” Druku asked as he helped him aboard the launch.

  “You know me. I went surfin’ when I should have stayed in the boat. The waves took it.”

  “Figures, bro.”

  “How’d you find us in the dark?”

  “The dolphins…”

  Billy offered a silent prayer of thanks and asked, “Do you think they really led you to us?”

  “No doubt about it, Billy. They’re sea children, like us.”

  In the surf camp’s palm-thatched lodge, the surfers who Billy had saved were drinking beer and were bragging about the biggest bitchin’ waves ever, and telling stories about the giant surf that almost drowned them. Billy sat off to the side with the young, out-of-shape surfer, who still had that haunted look of fear in his eyes. He smiled ruefully at Billy and said, “You know, nobody ever did anything like what you did for me. I wouldn’t have made it without you, Billy.”

  He gave the surfer a modest grin. “I guess we’ll both remember today for a long, long time.”

  Later, after the exhausted surfers stumbled into the night, the owner of the surfing camp took Billy aside and said in a low, regretful voice, “You screwed up, Billy. If Druku hadn’t found you…”

  “I’ll stay in the boat from now on, okay?”

  “What boat? You knew not to surf with the guests when you were the only guide on the reef. You broke that rule and almost drowned those guys. You’re a good boatman, Billy, but I can’t take another chance on you. You’re fired.”

  “Hey, but I got ’em back—”

  “You’re out of here on Tuesday’s boat to Suva.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The aging leader of the pod pointed his grayish, bone-hard beak eastward, guiding the dolphins for the west coast of Central America. The old dolphin was incredibly swift and strong, even after thirty-seven seasons of migrating across the Pacific. He and his pod of two hundred and seventy-three spinners were shepherding a hundred and fifty times their number of yellowfin tuna. When he had first made the cross-ocean journey at his mother’s side, the pod had been larger, much larger; but that was before the nets.

  The dolphins were swimming fast, navigating by instinct, toward the eastern tropical Pacific off the shore of Central America. Near the coast they would find massed schools of anchovies and other small fish that the dolphins and the tuna would feed on. Though the dolphins had a dependable source of rich, oily protein close at hand.

  The old spinner was flanked by his captains and sergeants—younger males waiting their turn to lead—followed by uncles and cousins who patrolled the flanks and brought up the rear of the vast, fast-moving, leaping and diving throng. It was this alliance between dolphins and tuna—this evolutionary partnership—that was rapidly bringing about the extinction of the dolphins.

  Out here, in the vast open ocean between Fiji and the Americas, where the sleek, air-breathing dolphins surged eastward, little life quivered or swam. So, the old spinner, his hungry pod, and the tuna they accompanied, hurried for their ancestral feeding grounds—and the mile-long red nylon nets of the fishermen anticipating their arrival.

  Yellowfin tuna and their dolphin escorts migrated across the central Pacific long before prehumans wandered the plains of East Africa’s Serengeti, and even before the mastodons of the Ice Age lay down to freeze on Canadian tundra. The spinners, and sometimes spotted and common dolphins, evolved a symbiotic life-and-death partnership with the yellowfin, and each species depends on the other to survive. It is a simple arrangement involving food.

  Dolphins and tuna are highly efficient carnivores. They subsist on smaller, schooling fish that usually swim in tight-knit groups for survival. Tuna feed off the trailing edge of these dense balls of small fish, and the laggards who leave the group. Not enough of the small-fry abandon the biomass to satisfy the hunger of these huge schools—of three, to five, and even ten thousand yellowfin.

  Enter the exuberant dolphins, who seem to take great joy in ramming their bony beaks through the balled bait fish, exploding the dense pack, and crushing them into swallowable size with their powerful toothed jaws. Then the tuna feast on the scattered, terrorized school. Over the millennia both species have cooperated in the hunt to ease their ravenous hunger, and their migrations continue today.

  Dolphins, with their smiling faces, are boisterous, joyous animals. They suckle their young, surface to breathe, then spout their watery vapor skyward. Often they leap from the sea, sometimes very high, sometimes twisting, then plunge back to glide underwater until the want of air drives them into the sunlight once again.

  Mothers teach their young with firm loving nudges of their beaks. Fathers sense predatory sharks rocketing for the pups and elderly, and charge to drive them off. Courtship continues day and night with touching and poking, and sometimes bites. Gangs of curious juveniles coming of age race each other, butting and ramming, testing their prowess. Their journey of life is a marvel only surpassed by the question of how the stars found their places in the heavens.

  The old leader, his echolocating clicks ranging far forward of the pod, picked up a signal bounced off a small school of bait fish. That was unusual here in the open sea of the central Pacific. His biological sonar pinged louder and detected other shapes. Food was ahead, but there was something else. He swam faster and echolocated again.

  Two images entered the fantastic neural array of his melon-like forehead. They were floating on the surface of the water and had air spaces inside their body cavities like his kind. There was another form, inert and wooden, bigger than the biggest blue whale, that lay motionless beside the two unknown living forms. The lifeless, drifting bulk didn’t concern the leader. There was no fearful, entangling mesh webbing spilling off the stern to trap them.

  Closer now, he sent out another burst of energy from his brain’s transponder. The returns from his pinging now gave the old spinner a detailed impression. They were mammals like himself, with lungs, stomachs, and bony skeletons. He sensed no danger and felt only a curiosity to know more. With a strong beat of his wide fluke, the old spinner charged ahead, homing on the fish and the unfamiliar mammalian figures beside the long whalelike object that drifted on the calm surface of the central Pacific.

  Floating on the warm undulating sea, the young woman could see nothing but long streaks of wavering blue that angled downward into the abyss. She peered through the cyclops eye of her diver’s mask and watched the blueness change to gray, then fade to darkness where no light penetrated.

  The fact that the bottom was twenty-three thousand feet below was decidedly unsettling. Sarah imagined she was sinking, like the ballpoint pen
she had accidentally dropped overboard yesterday. The image of the pen descending down, down, down into nothingness unnerved her.

  Her companion suddenly lowered his broad, muscular shoulders, bent at the waist, and dove. With powerful beats of his swim fins he kicked downward. She watched him descend rapidly into the dimness, so deep that she feared he might vanish altogether. Sarah guessed he reached seventy feet before he stopped to hover, but the underwater visibility was so fantastic she couldn’t really judge his depth. She realized there was no need to fear for Benny. He was in his element, at one with the sea. She admired this burly man. No, she told herself, it was more than admiration. Benny Seeger had been her girlhood hero, her activist icon. His commitment to saving whales and dolphins, his deeds of moral and physical courage, had drawn her to him. Sarah wondered if she might be infatuated with Benny. She told herself that that was crazy. She was only eighteen. Then she wondered what it would be like to fall in love with a man certainly old enough to be her father. She knew that the other young women who had volunteered to sail aboard Salvador were mad for him. Why shouldn’t I find him attractive? she thought.

  He turned and kicked slowly for the surface, lazily twisting and turning as if simulating a giant, barrel-shaped grouper. She was envious of Benny and his relaxed togetherness with the sea. He was a water person. She was not. Being afloat on all that profound vastness made her decidedly uncomfortable.

  Benny glanced upward, not wanting to smack into the barnacle-encrusted bottom of the old Salvador. He made a mental note to have her wooden hull scraped when they docked in Fiji to refit and refuel. In the hunt to come he would need every knot of speed the surplus ex–Canadian Navy minesweeper could produce from her well-worn engines.

  As his need for air grew stronger he kicked harder. His gaze shifted from the ship’s hull to Sarah’s pleasing, backlit outline. He liked what he saw, and the way her long blond hair caught the light as it waved in the gentle swells.

  Better yet, Benny thought, she was smart and dedicated. And she and her father had worked like hell to raise all that money for this crazy voyage.

  Now desperate for oxygen, he surfaced beside Sarah, spit out his snorkel, and sucked in air. With a grin he said happily, “God, I love it out here!”

  She didn’t share his good feeling about the ocean and replied, “It’s so hypnotic, it seems to draw you to the bottom.”

  “Yeah, right. But I love it! I wish I could hold my breath for an hour.”

  “You would.”

  “Say again,” he asked, turning his good ear toward her.

  “It’s nothing,” Sarah answered, remembering he had blown his left eardrum twice by diving too deep. She wondered why he didn’t give it up.

  During the long weeks of their voyage, Sarah and Captain Seeger had developed a close big brother–little sister friendship. They were at ease with each other, and despite his responsibility of command, Benny never put up emotional barriers between himself and his crew. They loved and respected their captain. When Benny gave an order, the twenty-three young men and women who had joined him on his quest responded willingly.

  Suddenly, the old dolphin’s burst of echolocating, click-ticking energy sounded in their ears. Then the pod all echolocated at once on the two swimmers treading water beside the wood-hulled ship. The massed concentration of sound physically bombarded their bodies and the man and young woman peered underwater seeking the source.

  Sarah saw nothing and spun to grab Benny. “What’s that?” she demanded.

  “What we’ve been busting our butts looking for. Stay cool. They’ll be here any minute.”

  As the pinging grew more intense, Sarah panicked and sprinted for Salvador. She reached the slippery wooden step of the diver’s ladder and hung on. Keeping her mask underwater, Sarah watched the ship’s captain floating serenely off the stern.

  Benny let out half a breath and slowly sank beneath the surface to meet them. He hovered twenty feet down and noticed that his usually loose body had become tense. They were coming, and though there was no physical danger, their swift appearance always startled him.

  Click, tick, squeak, click, ping—the dolphins were racing closer. The energy of their sonar beat on Benny and he thought, Can you read the inscription on my class ring, or the scars on my head, or that damn plantar wart on the sole of my foot? I bet you can, my beauties. Come on, guys, where are you…?

  Seconds later he saw the faint shape of the old leader. Other gray forms with white-dotted flanks appeared in his tunneled underwater vision. They charged for him like living torpedoes. Astonished by their boldness, Benny flinched and drew back.

  Only the old leader and three of the larger males paused to stare at the human floating before them. The others went after the bait fish gathered under Salvador’s 112-foot wooden hull. Seconds later the small school was no more. Only bits of scale and drifting offal remained, already sinking slowly downward to contribute to the seafloor’s ooze. Then the old dolphin turned away and raced on with his pod, and Benny rocked in the swirling vortex of their passing.

  He watched the dolphins vanish to the east and imagined traveling with them. He would take the lead and guide them past the huge nets set to entrap the tuna—and usually the dolphins that accompanied them. Benny knew he was fantasizing. He vowed that this time he would use his considerable skills and all the limited power under his command to stop the killing of these majestic creatures for the sake of dollar-a-can tuna.

  Benny surfaced and swam for the ship, thinking, Yeah, this time, my beauties, I’m going to sink one of those pirate tuna clippers.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The rusting 268-foot tuna clipper Lucky Dragon eased her black steel hull against a Suva, Fiji, wharf. Deckhands tossed mooring lines to waiting dockworkers who gaped at the weathered ship, appreciating her sleek nautical design. She was modern, though sea-scoured, and only seven years out of San Diego’s Campbell Shipyards. The clipper was originally named Stella Maria and had once belonged to the Valeria Brothers. Restrictive legislation, designed to reduce the killing of dolphins in tuna nets, hurt profits and the Valeria family sold the ship to a Mexican syndicate. Fishermen across the border were not bound by the United State’s Marine Mammal Protection Act. They could kill any and all dolphins trapped in their nets without observers looking on, or having to pay stiff fines to the U.S. government for violations.

  The Mexican businessmen who bought the Stella Maria hired a captain with uncertain navigational skills. On his first voyage the skipper misread a SAT/NAV plot and put the tuna boat on the rocks off Clipperton Island. The pride of the Valeria Brothers appeared a total loss. The syndicate sold the hulk to the clipper’s first mate—Louis Gandara, formally of colonial Portuguese Mozambique, Southern Africa—for a half million dollars. Gandara really knew electronic navigation. He had secretly reprogrammed the SAT/NAV computer to strand the Stella Maria on the reef without damaging her keel.

  For another eight hundred thousand dollars spent on salvage tugs and repairs, Gandara, an ex–Portuguese Navy lieutenant and patrol boat commander, became owner/captain of a seventeen-million-dollar vessel. How he actually acquired the money to finance his dream remains a mystery to this day. Rumors coming out of Mozambique hinted that Gandara and his gunboat crew had robbed the Bank of Lourenco Marques, fled Portuguese East Africa, and vanished into the Indian Ocean.

  All these events, the rumors say, had occurred on the eventful day that FRELIMO revolutionary troops entered Mozambique’s capital to end Portugual’s 475-year colonial rule. Neither Gandara, the crew, nor the gunboat, were ever seen again in African waters.

  Locked in Captain Gandara’s spacious cabin were the clipper’s forged registration certificates declaring Lucky Dragon’s nationality of convenience to be Panamanian, Costa Rican, or Liberian. Louis Gandara would present them to suspicious customs officials, port captains, and government agents demanding ship’s papers. Also secured in the cabin were flags of the various nations that Lucky Dragon flew w
hen Gandara needed to change the ship’s identity.

  The rest of the clipper was the same hodgepodge of international convenience and humanity—a German MAN diesel of 4,750 horsepower; Japanese Furuno radar; Dutch pilot radios; a Hughes 300 helicopter from Culver City, California; British Lister generators and air compressors; waxed mahogany paneling from Honduras lining the walls of Gandara’s quarters; crockery from China; and ten Belgian FM .308 NATO automatic assault rifles with 5,000 rounds of ammunition filling the arms cabinet.

  The first mate was Brazilian, the chief engineer Australian, an ex-army pilot from Fort Dodge, Iowa, flew the spotting helicopter, and the remainder of the thirty-seven crewmen were from various third-world ports they could never return to without fear of arrest. In the ship’s hold, frozen solid amid tons of board-stiff tuna, lay the shark-mangled remains of a Fijian boatman.

  Gandara peered down from the wide bridge, checking that the dock lines were secure. All was in order and he spoke to his first mate. “Mr. Santos, take a detail below and chip that man out of the ice.”

  “Às suas ordens,” the mate replied in his native Brazilian Portuguese, so slurred from growing up in a Rio slum that Gandara winced. His own Portuguese had the cultivated accent of a Lisbon aristocrat.

  The captain picked up the bridge phone and ordered the engine stopped. He spoke fluent English, laced with a slight Zulu accent that was a reflection of his African birth and the influence of his nanny. English was the language of convenience aboard Lucky Dragon because Gandara usually sold his catch to multinational tuna packers managed or owned by Americans, and accepted payment only in U.S. dollars, euros, or gold.

  Gandara scanned the docks and saw nothing unusual except a hearse waiting to take away the body for burial in the man’s homeland. He relaxed and let the tension drain from his wide shoulders. He remembered he was short one boatman and called down to Santos, who was on the main deck assembling a detail to remove the hatch covering the refrigerated fish hold. “Mr. Santos, let the third mate handle that. I want you to find a replacement for that Fijian…someone who can work the seine skiff without falling overboard.”