The Sentinel (2 page)

“Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s no more acidic than orange juice. It’s essentially rotten butter. Slippery as hell and smells worse than a point blank blast from a skunk’s ass. Worst thing you could ever smell.”

Chase’s nose must not work, because the people on board this ship are the worst thing I’ve ever smelled. I look to the
Bliksem
and see the wheelhouse crew stumbling and slipping out of the cabin. The tall Viking man with the camera catches an older, chubbier version of himself wearing a captain’s cap, and helps the man down the stairs leading toward the main deck. I’m thankful that the man is no longer recording, but my relief is short-lived. The old man I suspect is the captain of the
Bliksem
collapses at the bottom of the stairs.

The cheers around me grow louder still and I feel sick to my stomach. Opposing the killing of whales does not justify harming people. It’s just not the same. That’s an opinion that could get me thrown off this ship, but the man could be having a heart-attack. And it could be my fault! What if the jar hit him? What if he got a dose of the vile smelling acid in his face? As panic grips me, I fear that Chase will ask me to throw more bottles. I feel so weak with worry I doubt I could do it. Thankfully, the captain’s voice booms from the wheelhouse window before more bottles can be thrown.

“Time to send the message home!” Captain McAfee shouts. The man is tall and skinny, but has the voice of a baritone. He’s all contradictions. Sixty-five, but full of energy. A full head of hair that’s stark white. Went through knee surgery after an accident, but walks like a middle-aged mom trying to regain her figure. Preaches love for the Earth’s creatures, unless you include humans. “Get away from the rail and hold on tight!”

The crew around me jump away from the rail like it’s been electrified. But I stand dumbly in place.

“Harper!” Chase shouts. “Get away from the rail!”

“Why? I don’t—” But then I see it. We’ve changed course and are closing the distance to the
Bliksem
at a sharp angle. The
Sentinel
was an ice breaking whaling ship before it was bought and outfitted for anti-whaling missions. It sports multiple hulls and its bow is strong enough to slice through icebergs. I imagine ship hulls aren’t too dissimilar.

“McAfee’s going to ram them?” I ask no one in particular.

But Chase has heard me and shouts, “Yes! Now get down here!” He takes hold of my jacket and yanks me back. I fall to the black deck and am pinned down by the malodorous Chase. A moment later, an impact shakes the ship. The groan of metal on metal drowns out the shouting voices of both crews and lingers for what feels like minutes.

When it ends, I’m pulled to my feet. The deck crew rushes back to the rail and lets out a cheer. I stumble up behind them and catch site of the
Bliksem
. Its port side hull has a long dent that isn’t nearly as bad as I expected, but that’s probably only because it’s also designed to take on icebergs. A lesser ship would have no doubt been sunk.

I marvel that the
Bliksem’s
crew hasn’t taken aim with their harpoon or tried to ram us in return. At first I think they’re incredibly patient people, but then I remember the captain. It’s possible they’re preoccupied with saving the man’s life. In fact, as the
Bliksem
languishes behind, I wonder if anyone remains in the wheelhouse. The Arctic is a bad place to be on a boat without a pilot. But then I see the Viking man with a bandana wrapped around his face. He climbs the stairs to the wheelhouse and pauses at the top to look at us—at me. The
Sentinel
’s crew shouts obscenities at the man until he enters the wheelhouse.

As the voices fade and calm returns to the Arctic sea, I let slip my true feelings, “He’s fucking insane.”

It’s just a whisper, but Chase hears me. He spins around, eyes ablaze, and says, “I know. He’s amazing.”

The fact that “fucking insane” is taken as a compliment is nearly the last straw, but I manage to swallow my revolt and say, “So what next? Is that it? Mission accomplished?”

“No, no, no,” he says, licking his lips like a hungry dog. “We’ve only just begun.”

2

I lie in my cot, hands clasped behind my head, and stare at the ceiling. I’m exhausted and emotionally drained from the day’s excitement, but sleep is something I can only daydream about at the moment. The crew is having a party. It’s not supposed to happen. Captain McAfee runs a dry ship. But the Neo-Hippie crew brews a tea that I think must be laced with something. Because after drinking it, the party starts, inhibitions go out the window and the thump, thump, thump of drug enhanced sex echoes through the ship.

The guys grunt, like they’re baboons with bright blue asses, each trying to upstage the other.

The girls put on an audio show worthy of any porno, filled with “Yes, yes!” and “Harder!” and squeaked out “Oh my gods.”

And all I can do is lie back and listen to a chorus of dry humping. Seriously, I doubt many of them are doing the deed. Maybe at first, but now, with so few opportunities to get clean?
The smell
—I laugh, thinking about it. I snuck a package of one hundred baby wipes on board. If it were discovered, I’m sure they’d be stolen or borrowed into extinction within a few days. I sneak a single wipe into the bathroom with me and wipe myself down twice a day in an effort to stay odor free. The evidence gets flushed. My black hair is cut short, so it’s easy to manage, and I keep it messy and spiky to help fit in.

But I’m also clean because I keep my pants on. Not that I’ve been tempted to do the nasty while on this trip. No one here, male or female, even closely resembles the kind of man I’d be interested in. Some of the guys are lookers, sure, and that’s fine if you can get past the smell, but the true measure of a man is his heart, not his cock. That’s what my father said. Lovely thing to teach a daughter, but the Colonel didn’t censor himself for anyone. I swear he’d have been a general if he could’ve controlled that yap of his.

It also helps that no one has even approached me. A number of girls on board are pretty, but the guys seem to favor good humor over pretty eyes. In that category, Jenny Gillespie is Queen, despite being a bit chubby. She’s got a figure like some ancient revered fertility goddess. Apparently, chunky women were hard to find a thousand years ago before Walmart gave them a place to congregate.

I like to think that I haven’t been approached yet because they see the toughness in my eyes—a genetic trait inherited from my father—but that can’t be it. If their hippie brew is enough to overcome their stench, it’s certainly potent enough to blot out any fear of me.

Am I scorned
? I wonder.
Am I a woman scorned
? Someone, somewhere climaxes loudly and I burst out laughing.

A knock at the door silences me.

This is new.

The handle turns before I can respond. Light fills the room, forcing me to squint. “That you, Peach?”

Peach is my roommate—I have no idea what her actual name is. She’s got long dreads, a short body and a flat chest. Most of the guys here would pass her up if she wasn’t such a slut. When I see the silhouette of my visitor standing more than a foot taller than Peach, I know I’ve got my first caller. Must have made the brew extra potent tonight, because the only pheromone I’m putting off is unscented Seventh Generation baby wipes mixed with a strong dose of “get the fuck out.”

“You awake, Harper?”

The voice is clear and unhindered by any mind-altering substances. As a result, my visitor is easy to identify.

Greg Chase.

“You’d have to be dead to sleep through this noise,” I say.

“I witnessed a seal hunt once. Mothers and babies. None were spared the club.”

Well, this is morbid
, I think.

A rapid fire banging issues from a neighboring cabin.

“This sounds worse.”

His quick turnabout makes me laugh despite myself. “That’s awful,” I say.

“Mind if I turn on the light?” he asks.

“Go for it,” I say, but then I’m filled with a fear that he’ll be buck naked.

Yellow light blooms from a small desk lamp, lighting the small cabin in a gentle glow. I’m happy he didn’t use the florescent overhead light. Those things make me wish I was blind. I’m even happier that he’s dressed in shorts and a short sleeve shirt. It’s summer here in the Arctic, so the temperature bounces back and forth between forty and fifty degrees—warm enough to melt a crap load of ice—but not really warm enough for beach attire.

He notes my attention to his clothing. “I don’t mind a little chill. Helps me think.”

I sit up a little, mindful to keep my blankets pulled up over my chest. I too, don’t mind a little chill. Helps me sleep. But my tank top could be misconstrued as suggestive, so I keep the comforter hiked up like a chastity cloak. He hasn’t said anything else, so I break the silence with a simple, “What’s up?”

He sits in the desk chair, which is free of Peach’s mess mainly because I actually use the desk and clear it off on a daily basis. The rest of the room is pretty much a pile of worn clothes, odd supplies, anti-whaling literature and rotting food.

I try to breathe through my mouth.

“You stepped up today,” he says, looking down at me with what I think are kind eyes, but his glasses have made them small, like some kind of burrowing mammal, so I’m not entirely sure. “You know, I wasn’t sure about you at first.”

Uh oh. “Why’s that?” I ask.

“To be honest, you’re not our typical volunteer.”

I do my best to wave him off. “I’m not different from the—”

“Yes,” he says, “you are. You’re intelligent.”

“There’re a lot of smart people on board,” I say, despite the words tasting like bullshit.

“Smart, yes,” he says. “Intelligent, no. There’s a difference.” He motions to the messy cot behind him. “Peach is smart.” He picks up an anti-whaling pamphlet with a Greenpeace logo on it. “She can absorb almost any subject and regurgitate the information in her own words. She’s contributed a lot of great articles to Sea Sentinel’s website.”

I look at all the reading material strewn around the room. I’d never really noticed Peach reading it, but I suppose that’s why it’s there.

“But,” he says, tossing the pamphlet away, “she can’t think for herself. She can’t plot, can’t strategize, can’t predict.”

“And I can?” I ask.

“I suspect so.”

“Why?”

“For starters, you’re one of four people who won’t leave this ship with an STD.”

I laugh again, but stop when I see that he’s serious. I quickly identify the other three disease free crewmembers—McAfee, who seems to have no interest in anything but whales, Mr. Jackson, whose obsession with order and cleanliness repels the ship’s females like a force field, and Chase, who values clear thinking, is very responsible and I now suspect is the mind behind McAfee’s madness.

“Okay, busted, I’m smart
and
have opposable thumbs,” I admit, but I need to end this conversation before he starts asking questions. I’ve got a cover story, but the WSPA isn’t the CIA. I don’t have fake IDs or the documents to back me up. A few calls from the ship’s satellite phone and I’d be revealed. “But it’s late and I really should try to sleep despite the noise, so if this is going to be a ‘way to go, champ,’ speech, let’s skip to the end.”

I flash a smile that says I was joking, but no one ever says something like that without at least being half serious.

He grins and stands. “Fair enough. But that wasn’t the only reason for my visit. Our cause needs more people like you. Like me. Committed people. I think we make a great team.”

I’m tempted to say, “Me Tarzan, you Jane,” which would be ironic because my first name
is
actually Jane, and it would be insulting because between the two of us, I’m clearly Tarzan and there is no doubt that he is Jane. I keep my mouth shut, but a moment later wish I’d said something, because he finishes with:

“Maybe more.”

He looks at me with the same blazing eyes I saw staring down the
Bliksem
, gives a wink and heads for the door. “We’ll talk more in the morning.” He stops in the doorway and looks back at me. With a grin, he sings, “The lookout in the crosstrees stood, with his spyglass in his hand. ‘There's a whale, there's a whale, there's a whalefish,’ he cried, and she blows at every span, brave boys, and she blows at every span."

He closes the door behind him, leaving me stunned and unsettled. I now know why none of the guys have made a pass at me. They’ve been forbidden. I’m off limits, care of the first mate. And while I appreciate the fact that I haven’t had to deal with sexual advances, having to turn down a horny sailor or ten is far less creepy than being claimed by the Dungeon Master. Even worse, he’s just quoted an old sea shanty about whalers spotting a whale to hunt, but I got the clear impression that he is the whaler in the song, and I am the whale.

So much for ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’
.
No
, I tell myself,
you Ahab, me Moby Dick, and if you hunt me, I’ll kill your crew, sink the ship and then pull you under. Dad would be proud.

Before I can smile, my thoughts are interrupted by a loud warning klaxon and the sound of shrieking voices—the kind that say, “Someone’s just been murdered.”

3

After throwing on a pair of jeans, I dash up the stairs, taking them two at a time, toward the main deck. I’m pulling my sweater over my head when the ship turns hard to port. I tip to the side, slam into the stairwell wall, and fall. My head pops out of the top of the sweater, and I let out a shrill cry. I’m instantly embarrassed despite the fact that I might break my neck, but I know I look and sound like the Muppet, Beaker, so there’s that. But luckily the Swedish Chef is there to catch me.

Two strong arms embrace my falling body and I jolt to a stop against a cushiony body.

“You okay?” Jenny Gillespie asks.