Hunting the Dragon (2 page)

“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.”

T
he 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.

T
he 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 when 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.”

The captain believed that men obey for two reasons: fear and respect for their leaders. He used both to ensure his orders were carried out swiftly and without question. He needed Santos’s loyalty and brutality to rule the crew. With the mate as an extension of his will, he could distance himself from the uneducated men he both detested and relied on.

Billy sat on the Suva Harbor seawall sketching a small, 32-foot-long Westsail sloop. For Billy, Suva Harbor, where the Bombora Surf Camp launch had left him a week ago, was a jumping-off spot to other islands where waves broke big and clean over remote tropic reefs.

Since he had first spotted the Westsail, he was drawn to portray her in bold, bright watercolors. The sloop’s seaworthy hull, simple rigging, and cozy cabin cried out adventure. Knowing that the boat was for sale, and he couldn’t buy her, was maddening.

Billy had a bigger problem. The price of passage to the out islands was more than what remained in his wallet. All the cash he had left, after a week in a boardinghouse plus meals, was 255 Fijian, about 140 U.S. dollars, enough to survive another week—if he gave up lunch. For the past five days Billy had been prowling the docks looking for work as a deckhand on an interisland freighter bound anywhere there might be waves. He had no other resources. He had no mother and father in the States to wire him money for a ticket home. His parents had split some years back, and then when he was ten his father died. A good-hearted aunt took him in when his mother remarried and moved away with her new husband. He wasn’t sure where to find Mom now. His aunt had helped him so much over the years, his pride wouldn’t allow him to ask for more.

Right now, on the Suva dock, Billy was as much an orphan as the sick little sea lion pups that sometimes washed up in front of his Venice Beach, Southern California, lifeguard tower. In his memory he could still see a gang of vicious beach kids poking sticks at one of the emaciated creatures. When they refused to stop tormenting the pup his anger overcame his better judgment and he hurled the whole group into the surf. A parent had complained to the chief lifeguard and Billy almost lost his first real job.

Billy’s attention returned to his brush and watercolor pad. He wondered if he should add the for sale sign in the cabin window. He had met the sloop’s owner and his pregnant wife. She wanted to fly home and have the baby in a hospital. He was for sailing on, delivering the child himself. She won, and her mom had sent the money for the couple to return to the States. Like Billy, they were broke, and the stubby little sailboat of their dreams, and his, would someday find a new owner.

He dabbed the tip of his brush in a water jar and worked on. Billy liked the way the quick-drying pigments forced him to paint swiftly. He also liked the sturdy, almost pea-pod shape of the sloop’s deep-keeled hull. As he applied an aqua blue wash over the lower edge of the paper, Billy saw himself at the tiller of the Westsail. His surfboard was lashed to the cabin top. He was sailing downwind through a narrow channel, flanked by peeling waves and leaping dolphins, that led into a wide tropical lagoon. On the beach were island girls strumming ukuleles and dancing the tamarae….

“That’s fantastic. Do you sell your paintings?” asked a woman’s voice with a Southern California accent.

Billy snapped out of his daydreams and looked up at a young couple he judged to be well-financed honeymooners. They were wearing shorts, expensive reverse-print Hawaiian aloha shirts, and slaps. The man had his attention on the surfboard. Her eyes were fixed on the watercolor.

Fighting to keep his cool, Billy smiled and said, “Yeah, sometimes.”

“Would you sell that one of the little boat?”

He held the grin and lied, “I usually send them back to the gallery in New York.”

He could see she was impressed, but her husband looked skeptical.

“If you were to sell that one, how much would you charge?” she asked.

“Since I won’t have to wrap and ship it—air freight’s expensive down here—two hundred and fifty U.S. dollars, if I knew it would have a good home.”

The husband switched his gaze from the surfboard and said impatiently, “We’ve got white walls and a view of the ocean. Is that good enough? How about a hundred in cash, right now?”

“Make it hundred and fifty and you’re the owners of a Billy Crawford original.”

She looked pleadingly at her guy. He pulled out a fat wallet and began peeling off bills. As Billy opened his Swiss Army knife and sliced the painting off the watercolor block, the husband said, “Nice board. Want to sell it?”

“No way. Where I go, so does my board.”

“Searching for the perfect wave, right?”

He didn’t like the man’s probing and turned his back to pick up a pencil. He signed and dated the watercolor. When they walked off Billy stuffed the money in his wallet and let out a breath.
My first sale. How about that? I’m really an artist now. And thank you, Miss Graham.

He thought about Miss Graham, his high school art instructor. Without her help and encouragement he probably would have dropped out of high school.
You really made art fun. Hey, I’d better paint another.

He looked for inspiration and his gaze held on the black-hulled tuna clipper’s graceful lines. “She’s too industrial for a watercolor, but maybe some crewman would buy a sketch.”

He carefully packed the tubes of pigments, his expensive sable brushes that were a gift from his aunt, and a liter bottle of distilled water in his “getaway” bag. Since the near disaster off Bombora, Billy had bought a small waterproof duffel with shoulder straps. He filled it with survival gear and his artist’s tools, sketch pad, and watercolor paper. His eyes made a quick inventory of the contents—compass; Swiss Army knife; signal mirror; sunscreen; Mini Maglite with extra batteries; ten granola bars in silver foil wrap; fishing line, lures, and hooks; swim fins; mask and snorkel; and a pair of surfing booties in case he had to walk over a coral reef to reach shore. His prudent organization gave Billy a sense of security. After a long look at the ship he pulled out a number-two pencil and sketch pad to begin drawing the tuna clipper.

The ship’s tall knife-edged bow reminded him of a navy destroyer. His sense of form was offended by the wasplike helicopter sitting atop the bridge. He’d leave it out of the sketch, along with the black panel truck parked near the gangplank. The huge mountain of red nylon net on the aft deck seemed appropriate, as did the tall crane that drew in the net. At the very stern perched a broad-beamed, battleship-gray, twenty-four-foot-long skiff used to pull out the net that would encircle the tuna. He would include the skiff as well.

He decided to pencil in as much detail as possible without sacrificing the clipper’s graceful lines. Any fisherman interested in buying a drawing would want to recognize the ship he sailed on. “Later,” he murmured, “I’ll color it with a wash to make it look like a painting, even though that’s kind of cheating.”

After finishing a draftsmanlike outline he added some shading. He felt stiff from sitting so long. Billy stood, packed his gear, and walked closer to pick up some more details.

He slipped the bag’s straps over his shoulders and ambled for the clipper until he found himself in
Lucky Dragon
’s shadow. He paused to look at the truck parked by the clipper’s gangplank and saw it was actually a hearse. The boxy truck was a gleaming black Australian Holden, given a touch of color by a pair of silver flower vases attached to the doors, which spouted bouquets of pale red roses.

Billy paused beside the Holden and thought that someone must have died on the ship, and about how near death he and the surfers had been on the paddle back to Bombora. His eyes shifted between the huge clipper and the two sweating Fijian attendants in dark suits waiting beside the open rear doors of the van. He wondered if anyone would have found their bodies if the dolphins hadn’t led Druku to them. Billy’s musing was interrupted by the large man hovering over him.

“You a boatman?”

Billy turned to look up at the first mate’s hairless, blunt head and the scars that crisscrossed his shining skull. He was impressed by the man’s larded, muscled body, which would have cause middle-aged wrestling fans in the States to scream with joy.

“Something bothering you,
niño
?” the mate demanded.

Billy composed his response, not wanting to anger the huge tough guy.

“I asked you a question.”

“Yeah, I’ve been around boats a lot. My aunt and uncle—they raised me—owned a boatyard so I grew up with boats. I crewed on a sport fisher and dive boat, ran a surfers’ taxi, and worked as deckhand on a lifeguard rescue launch. Yeah, I know boats and outboards, and I can keep ’em running. Why you asking?”

The mate glanced at the clipper and said evenly, “We’re short a boatman. Want a job?”

“How long do I have to sign on for?”

“Six months, or until we unload and pay off. Whichever comes first.”

“What’s the pay?”

“Fifteen hundred a month and a small share of the profits. With our skipper, you’ll walk away with three, four thousand extra…if you work hard and keep your mouth shut.”

“I’ll take it. When do I report aboard?”

Before the mate could answer, two crewmen carrying a heavily loaded stretcher struggled down the steep gangplank cursing their heavy burden. Five steps from the bottom, the fisherman gripping the lower end lost his footing and slipped. The thawing body under the blue plastic tarp rolled off the gangplank and hit the dock with a sodden thump.