Rogue Justice (35 page)

Cassidy jumped in between Lapenda and Zora. There were now three pairs of gloved hands pulling on the hoist cable.

Another violent lurch.

Zora stiffened, grabbed hold of the railing. She could feel the heat from the cable, smell it.

The winch screeched as the whale dipped to a dangerous angle, its rostrum now angled down toward the sea. McCabe tied off the skiff and helped Houdini back on board.

Two more sets of hands.

"You okay?" Zora shouted.

"Yeah," Houdini said, shaking the water out of his hair. "What can I do?"

"Grab the... wait!" she yelled, as the cable suddenly jerked. "Rico, hold on a minute."

Lapenda jammed the winch into the stop position. For a long moment the whale hung there suspended in its sling, swinging slowly back and forth, five tons of raw power perilously close to breaking free.

Zora checked the line, noticed a burr. There wasn't much time. If one strand snapped the whole thing would unravel. "Go!" she shouted.

Again, Lapenda shoved the hoist in gear.

Again, the whale began to rise.

The winch screeched louder, the leather straps popping like fire crackers as they pulled tighter around the whale's massive body. But the cables held. Cassidy and McCabe then climbed down into the hold, hauled up a thick foam rubber mattress, and positioned it on the aft deck.

Several tense moments later the animal was lowered onto it.

The boat lurched and rolled under the shifting weight.

A loud scream!

McCabe was stretched out on the deck, clutching his left wrist and writhing in pain. The whale's thrashing fluke had sent him reeling against the capstan. Houdini crawled past the power block and over to the injured man.

"How bad is it?"

"It's crushed, man," McCabe shrieked. "Fucking burns like hell."

"You hurt anywhere else?"

"I'm not sure. C'mon let's get the hell out of here."

Houdini helped McCabe to his knees. They crab walked arm-in-arm toward the cabin, barely squeezing past the angry whale, now thrashing wildly on the deck.

"Shit," Zora screamed. "He's going to destroy the goddamn boat."

Houdini shouted back, "No, he's not. I'll talk to him."

She threw him a look, "Are you crazy?"

"No, trust me on this, Zora." Houdini took baby steps toward the big orca, softly chanting the sacred song he'd sung earlier. The thrashing subsided almost immediately, picked up for several seconds then stopped altogether. Looking into the whale's upturned eye Houdini was overcome with awe and a deep sense of sadness. Moving nearer to its rostrum he realized this was the same creature he had just encountered at sea, the first one to surface.

This time, however, there was no malice... only acceptance.

Houdini shifted slightly to his left, motioned for Zora to join him. She hesitated at first, then inched her way closer until she was standing an arm's length from the whale. She stroked him gently, tentatively, looked into its eye for a long moment, and turned back to Houdini. "I'll be damned. If I hadn't seen this myself, I wouldn't believe it."

Houdini nodded and smiled. Speaking in whispers, he said, "Thank you, mighty orca. We are honored by your sacrifice. And I vow before my ancient ancestors that I will stop at nothing to set you free." He then turned back to Zora. "Please, captain, do him the honor of repeating this sacred pledge."

Zora did, word for word.

The rest of the crew looked on in silence. They too seemed dumbfounded by what they'd just witnessed. For the next several minutes, Houdini didn't move. He barely breathed. Finally, he said to Lapenda. "Okay, let's get the blankets. We've got to keep him cool and wet."

A dozen heavy wool blankets had been stored on ice in the hold. The three men dragged them on deck while Zora helped McCabe into the wheelhouse. In the time it took her to splint his shattered wrist, most of the whale had been covered. Houdini then pulled the washdown hose through the access hole in the forward bulkhead and began pumping salt water over its body.

Thirty minutes later—after hauling Houdini's overturned kayak on board—the
Northern Star
was steaming her way south at nine knots through the swirling curtain of fog. The crew, tired to the point of delirium, knew they still had a long night ahead of them.

What they didn't know was that they had company.

Chapter 37

4 April, 4:20 AM PDT

Seattle, Washington

Colby Freeman had left the office and gone home, soon after his meeting with Mitchell Chandler and Leanne Bucaro had ended the previous evening. He'd tried napping, but he was a bundle of nerves and sleep would not come. Then, around 2:00 a.m., Freeman had received a call from Preston Tradd, with the words he'd been waiting to hear. "The package will arrive in a couple of hours."

Returning to the office, Freeman decided to catch up on some work. Before his life had gone careening off the rails, he'd been developing several new marketing initiatives, most notably, one that would lengthen the average stay of each KOS visitor from six point two hours to nearly seven hours. The logic was simple: first and foremost, this was a place where people spent money, and more time in the park translated directly into increased spending, higher profits, and a bigger bonus.

Yes,
he thought,
keeping the guests around longer was a very good thing.

But try as he may, he found it impossible to concentrate. He felt like a punch-drunk fighter struggling to survive the final round, the burning sense of guilt over Katrina Kincaid's death and the thoroughly disagreeable business with the whales eating away at him like a cancer. He took a deep breath, stood up, and stretched. The muscles in his aching back were now screaming for relief that only sleep could bring. The loud jingle of his cell phone caused him to jump.

He picked up.

It was Preston Tradd calling again, this time from dockside.

The captured orca was just minutes away.

Freeman grabbed his coat, slipped out a side door, and walked around the back of Samson Stadium. The large arena sat high on a hill, providing a spectacular vantage point from which to view the entire park, an all-encompassing vision of marine nature at its best. He felt proud to be part of a safe, clean, family-oriented environment that placed science, conservation, and education above even the animal shows. Except, of course, for the star performer.

The thought of losing all this made him physically ill.

Freeman turned up his collar, unlocked a metal gate marked "Authorized Personnel Only," and followed a gravel path along the backside of the hill. There was a heavy mist in the air. It began to sprinkle rain. He then headed down the curved, graded slope.

The maintenance building that had temporarily housed Samson's body was on his left, the man-made channel off to his right. The sea-pen had been sliced out of a valuable spit of land that ran along Puget Sound adjacent to the park. The pen was covered by a domed, three-story clear-span structure made of stainless steel and heavy canvas. The pool itself was one hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and sixteen feet deep with concrete walls. A hinged sluice gate on the west end of the pen controlled the flow of water in and out of the Sound.

Tradd was standing beside a truck-mounted crane that idled nearby, its stabilizing outriggers firmly planted on a patch of gravel road. The driver, a hulking former pro wrestler everybody called Rhino, had worked at the park since day one, his loyalty never in question. He'd successfully moved Samson under the cloak of darkness soon after the whale's death. And now he was being called into action again.

Freeman stopped, nodded toward the big crane, then said to a waiting Tradd, "Where's the boat?"

"She just called," Tradd replied. "Be here in a jiffy."

Straining to see through the thick soup, Freeman thought about how all this would play out. So many things could go wrong he'd lost count, yet the crazy scheme seemed to be working. Now came the really dicey part, transferring a wild, perfectly healthy killer whale to the same sea-pen Samson had recently vacated. As he juggled these things in his mind, the
Northern Star
steamed into view and dropped anchor in choppy waters about twenty-five yards offshore. Freeman could see the captured orca breathing laboriously on the aft of the vessel, yet the heavy layer of fog offered ample cover. No one aboard that boat could possibly identify him—God forbid it ever came to that.

The crew then removed the heavy, water-soaked blankets and made preparations for the transfer.

Zora stepped slowly out of the wheelhouse, closed the door, and leaned over the rail.

Inching closer to water's edge, Tradd shouted, "I see the trip was a resounding success, captain."

"We've got your whale if that's what you mean."

"How big is he?"

"Big enough," Zora snapped. "Now I need to get him off here before somebody gets killed."

Freeman signaled the crane operator, and the big engine roared to life. He maneuvered the telescopic boom out over the sound until it hovered about six feet above the deck. Lapenda and Cassidy connected the slings to a hoisting hook, and moments later the whale was airborne. The huge animal began swaying pendulously back and forth, its blunt face poking out one end, its tail flukes the other. Several anxious minutes later, he was lowered through an opening in the roof of the massive steel and canvas enclosure. There was a collective sigh of relief when the sling went slack and Rhino flashed the thumbs up sign.

Tradd turned back to the boat. "Nice doing business with you, captain."

Zora said nothing, disappeared back inside the wheelhouse.

Freeman winced at the sound of the door slamming, then he and Tradd watched the
Northern Star
steam out of the narrow channel, turn north into Puget Sound, and disappear again into the swirling mist. In that same moment, the wind picked up, the rain stopped, and the sky began to lighten with the first hint of dawn.

"So far, so good," Freeman said, his body beginning to relax a little. "C'mon, Tradd, there's a viewing window on the far side of the enclosure. Let's go have a look."

They moved cautiously along a wooden walkway that circled the perimeter of the sea-pen, and soon were peering through a small plastic window that had been cut into the heavy fabric. The orca was circling at a slow, relentless pace, its dorsal fin creating a smooth rolling swell.

Tradd leaned in. "Holy shit! I've never been this close to one of these damn things before. It's
huge
."

"Yeah, looks to be all of five tons," Freeman noted. "We'll give him a day or two to get acclimated to his new surroundings, then begin the training regimen. He'll adjust soon enough. There are social and biological issues that need to be addressed, but they aren't insurmountable."

"So, how long before you move him to the main stage?" Tradd asked.

"Three weeks, maybe a little less if all goes well."

"Wow! That fast, huh?"

Freeman sighed, a bone-weary look on his face. "I hope so. Look, I'm bushed. Why don't we call it a night?"

"Sure thing," Tradd replied. "I think I'll hang around for a few minutes, though, if that's all right with you. Maybe one day I can tell my two kids about all this."

Freeman thought about his own girls. "Okay, knock yourself out, Tradd."

"Thanks. I'll see you before I leave for the airport."

Freeman nodded and then walked off, retracing his steps along the dock and back up the path. The wind had shifted again, bringing with it more heavy fog. He shook off a cold shiver, yawned, and glanced at his watch. Going home to grab some shut-eye made no sense. He had a meeting scheduled with Leanne in less than three hours. The couch in his office would have to do.

As Freeman approached the top of the hill, a terrifying sound stopped him cold. It was followed by an earsplitting scream and hysterical cries, "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!" He spun around in time to see a mountainous wave sweep over Tradd, catapulting him against the canvas enclosure. He bounced off the shell like a circus performer shot from a cannon, his forward momentum launching him into the icy waters of the Sound.