Prologue
I carefully drag our keep nets closer to the shore, hook them over the spikes, crawl out of the sea and drop onto the warm shingle beside my laptop.
‘No more fish in the sea, no more us, no more you,’ Calypso insists.
Here I am in a sheltered cove on an uninhabited island with the turquoise Mediterranean lapping at my feet, chatting with two bottlenose dolphins.
How cool is that? Glad you asked. It’s not cool, it’s a pain in the butt.
One dolphin is as sociable as a shark with toothache and the other assumes she knows more than I do about everything.
‘We can’t save all the fish in the Mediterranean. There’s only five of us.’ I am using sign language, the same as I use with my brother Fred who is deaf.
‘Fine. Don’t come then,’ Steve retorts, his dorsal fin slicing through the waves, his whistles and clicks picked up by the hydrophone in the water and translated on the laptop in front of me. His head pops up next to Calypso’s.
‘Do you even know the meaning of the word plan?’ I sign.
‘Shh, Sam. They’re coming,’ Calypso shuts us both up. ‘I hear the boat.’
‘Forget it,’ Steve says, slapping his flukes on the water. ‘Humans don’t care about the sea.’
‘Unfair,’ I lose my temper. ‘You do what you want, all I’m saying is that I am not going on any more mad night-time commando raids on the Mafia’s illegal fish pens. It’s dangerous and it’s pointless. Finished.’
1
Ten metres above our heads the sun has all but set. The last reds and oranges ripple and fade in a criss-crossing geometry of liquid light that skates the surface of a heaving mountain of water.
Calypso and Steve have disappeared ahead. Darkness doesn’t bother them, they use echolocation to see in this light. Which is nice.
For them.
Yes I know, I said I wasn’t doing this again. It was four against one. I could either stay alone on the boat to wait an hour to see if any of them returned, or I could join them.
Choices, choices.
Rafael pulls my sleeve. I follow his gaze. A huge, steel coloured cylinder hangs in the sea, thirty metres deep and twenty across. The cylinder is revolving at high speed and it’s alive. Thirty tonnes or more of bluefin tuna, the fastest muscle in the sea, powering round like motorbikes on the wall of death in a fairground.
Now I see Calypso and Steve. The dolphins are way below, smudges surging like velvet bullets from the depths.
Dad points down. ‘Remember, we have only twenty five minutes.’ He signs.
We drop until we are level with the bottom of the net. Slashing through the mesh, hand over hand, we cut a wide circle some three metres across. As soon as we have completed our job, Calypso and Steve swim through the hole and disappear into the mass of tuna.
Rafael and I hold open the hole, preventing it from collapsing while Dad secures the net against itself with plastic clips. The fish stream out in a burnished pewter blur, driven by the dolphins. Bluefin tuna can grow over one and a half metres long. Their speed is terrifying, if one misses its line and swims into us it will be like being smacked by a speeding train.
Above us is the faintest outline of the buoys and pipes that hold the top of the net in a circle on the surface. Beneath the buoys are the swirling tuna and an occasional darting dolphin silhouette. The flow of fish thins as the net empties. Dad and Rafael exchange thumbs up signs. The dolphins flash past us, clicking loudly. What will that look like on the flippercams the dolphins are both carrying?
The second net goes as smoothly as the first. How many tuna are we saving from the illegal smuggling operation that is emptying the Mediterranean in order to provide Japan with sushi? Hundreds? Tens of thousands?
Rafael points towards a third net, some twenty metres away.
‘Seven minutes,’ I sign, checking my dive computer. ‘You promised.’
‘One more net,’ Dad signs.
Like now is all that matters. Like tomorrow’s Big Event doesn’t exist. I swear, if I could throw a punch underwater, I would.
Calypso returns towards us and Dad signs to her. I notice the way she positions herself in the water, left flipper down, head at an angle, as she emits a stream of clicks.
‘Understood,’ Dad signs back.
We follow the dolphins towards the third spinning column, barely visible now in the enveloping indigo gloom. This is like drowning in ink. Pretty soon we won’t even know which way is up, except by following the direction of our bubbles. Or something else’s bubbles.
Steve passes close by, the pressure of his movement through the water pushing me back into the net before I see it. Dad grabs my shoulders and looks into my face. ‘OK?’ he signs.
I nod. ‘I lost my balance. I’m OK.’
‘The last net. I promise.’
Our serrated blades rip the mesh of the net. I glance at Rafael. Focused, face taut, body tense. Beneath him the tips of his flippers warp back and forth.
The net falls open. Once again the dolphins brush past us into the mass of swirling tuna. Secure the hole and we’ve finished, I tell myself, grabbing the clips from my belt and passing them through the mesh and tying back. The net jerks violently in my hands and the clip I am holding falls from my grasp, disappearing into the gloom beneath me.
Another spasm of the mesh.
I look up. Everything is shades of blue but I can make out a dolphin silhouette thrashing back and forth above me. One of the dolphins is caught in the net. Without thinking, I dive through the hole and swim upwards, somehow avoiding the steady stream of tuna coming in the opposite direction. Five metres up I reach Calypso. A metal rod half a metre long has passed through her flukes and pinned her to the mesh. Seeing me approach she fires off a torrent of whistles and clicks. I cannot understand her.
‘It’s an arrow,’ I explain. (What is the sign for harpoon?) ‘The tip is serrated so I cannot pull it out. I am going to push it through.’
Has she understood? She waits patiently as I force the harpoon down through her flukes. All is going well until it jams; the last two centimetres of the harpoon are fatter than the shaft.
Beneath us Dad and Rafael are holding the net open as the escaping tuna flow out. Above us a wedge-shaped shadow is moving on the surface. A small boat.
Grabbing the harpoon from below I yank at it to pull it through. It won’t budge. I have no choice. I pull my dive knife from its sheath and, muttering a silent apology, I plunge the tip of the blade into Calypso’s flukes, next to the embedded harpoon. She flinches. A cloud of blood forms in the water. I sheathe the knife. The cut has made the difference. This time the end of the harpoon passes through and Calypso’s flukes are free. As she swims away towards the hole, a blur of movement catches my eye. Another harpoon? I head down towards the others.
Coming out into the open sea, I see Dad has a harpoon buried in his leg. Shocked, I stop too close to the hole in the net. A third harpoon spears a huge tuna coming out behind me, throwing it off balance. Another dark cloud blossoms. A large cold eye fixes on me momentarily. The thrashing tail smacks against my chest then the tuna has gone, tumbling into the darkness below.
‘Go Sam. Go now,’ Dad is signing.
Concussed, I turn to Rafael, who grabs me and pulls me back. Away from the net. Away from Dad. Suddenly a column light beams down from above us. A searchlight? A flare? Within the net the remaining trapped fish are a frenzy in silhouette. Like an exploding nail bomb.
‘Where is Steve?’ I sign.
‘Leave, Sam. Now,’ Dad orders. ‘I follow you.’
No, I’ve lost you once before. Not again.
Rafael pulls me back and points to his watch.
He is right, with all the extra energy I have expended my tanks must be almost empty. We leave. The adrenalin is really pumping. We are swimming fast. We can no longer see the net, but we can still see the glow of the lights shining down. I check my underwater compass, heading west. I want to go up, to escape this liquid prison and breathe fresh air. Rafael holds me down.
It’s my Dad back there, dying with a harpoon in his leg I sign furiously. Rafael doesn’t understand sign language. I push him in the chest and swim away. Almost immediately my arms and legs snarl up in something I cannot see. I flail about like a fly in a web.
Desperate but dumb, says the little voice in my head. But little voices are there to be ignored, aren’t they?
In seconds I am completely snared and unable to move. I close my eyes. When I open them again I am looking straight at Rafael’s facemask.
He removes the regulator from his mouth. ‘Den,’ he seems to say.
My face betrays total incomprehension. After taking a breath of oxygen from his regulator Rafael tries again.
‘Lead. Lead.’
I still don’t get it. He ducks out of view and reappears holding something up to my face. Got it. Net. I nod and relax my body while Rafael hacks at the mesh. A dark silhouette glides overhead. Please don’t let them switch on their searchlight. Where are the others?
One arm comes free. I grab Rafael’s wrist. He pulls his hand away to continue cutting. In the distance, back the way we have come there is a flash of light. A few moments later we feel a shock wave buffet us.
An explosion? Where’s Dad?
I am free of the net. We move up to a couple of meters below the waves and keep swimming away from the nets. You use less oxygen closer to the surface.
One second I’m breathing, the next there is nothing left in my tanks. Head spinning, I power upwards. My head breaks the surface. I rip out my regulator and gasp huge lungfuls of air. Rafael appears beside me.
‘Look, there is the rock. Over there,’ he says, pointing.
We have swum too far south. The headland is maybe a hundred metres to our right. Behind it I can make out the prow of our boat.
We swim in silence. Looking back we catch glimpses of three large boats, appearing then disappearing in the swell some three hundred meters away.
Reaching our boat, La Vita Nuova, we are both too tired to haul ourselves up out of the water. We cling to her anchor rope, catching our breath.
‘Hey,’ shouts a voice above us.
The silhouetted figure of a diver is pointing a gun at my face.
2
Vicki Gutner makes a show of tidying her desk. Not that there is anything much to tidy. No photos of loved ones; there are no loved ones, unless you include her extravagantly expensive Scappa mountain bike, with its bespoke made-to-measure carbon fibre frame, or her lime green Porsche 911, or her Aster Cucine kitchen with its lacquered walnut cabinets. Gutner loves things not people. Photos of things are not what you put on your office desk, and her things are nobody else’s business. She has no pens or paper to stash away other than the dossier she has just printed, which she slides into her briefcase. She writes everything on the writing tablet she carries with her at all times; Gutner has learned the hard way never to put waste paper in a litterbin.
The organisation’s motto is Trust no-one. New recruits take this to refer to 3-TEC’s many enemies: terrorists, nosy governments, old clients, peaceniks, international courts, and so on. The motto does refer to them but, most of all, it is a reminder that even within the organisation you are on your own.
She drops her lukewarm black coffee and the plastic sushi box in the bin. As she reaches the door she checks her watch. Ten minutes early.
Standing in the descending lift, clutching her briefcase, Gutner reflects on the dullness of the building. An air-conditioned void that smells of nothing and belongs nowhere. Her blurred reflection in the lift wall sums everything up perfectly, a soft-focused shadowy and anonymous functionary dressed in blue, entombed in a grey polished metalled surface.
Gutner steps out into basement level 5 and takes a seat facing the twin doors. The receptionist glances up then returns to filing her nails until the buzzer sounds.
‘They are ready for you now.’
Gutner pushes the double doors and crosses the threshold.
Ten of the other eleven chairs are occupied by the intelligence committee which includes three other members of her department: Watson, Kovacs, and Messi. Gutner sits down and pulls the report from her briefcase.
The table and all the chairs are made from transparent plastic; there are no hidden surfaces to conceal bugs or listening devices. There is no other furniture in the room. The sound of waves washing onto a beach emerges from speakers buried in the walls, producing a blanket of white noise that cloaks any conversation and renders any covert listening or recording device, whether hidden about someone’s person or in a briefcase, useless. Conversations in this room stay in this room.
In the twelfth chair, at the far end of the table, sits the Head of Operations, Major Tenebris. A night photograph of the organisation’s headquarters projected onto the wall behind his chair leaves him in silhouette except for the top of his bald head which glows the same colour as the screen. A thin laser light set in the ceiling points down at his notes. The light reflecting back from the paper lights his face from below, lending his face a ghoul-like appearance.
Aside from the second focussed beam of laser light that hits the surface of the table just in front of her, and into which Gutner pushes her report, the rest of the room is lit only by the giant screen, leaving all of the faces around the table largely in shadow.
‘The short version, thank you,’ says the figure at the other end of the table.
‘Yes, Sir.’ Gutner glances at her notes. ‘It is now twelve days since the Dauntless was sunk in a harbour on the island of Lipari, with the loss of thirteen lives. These included Major Richards, Ruth Winters, and the vessel’s crew and technicians. The incident happened roughly ten hours after the capture of Michel Blanchard, his daughter Sam, and one of the assets stolen by Blanchard several weeks previously. The explosion on the Dauntless originated in the chamber housing the moon pool where, it is believed, Blanchard and daughter were being interrogated and where the asset was situated. Forensic examination has confirmed the deaths of Richards and Winters …’
‘Their bodies have been identified?’
‘Small fragments of flesh were found on the sea bed and …’
‘Understood, thank you.’
‘We believe that Richards and Winters were killed by sharks rather than …’
‘Carry on.’
‘The rest of the crew died in the explosion.’
‘Blanchard, the daughter, and the dolphins?’
‘One dolphin, Sir. They only captured …’
‘Were their remains identified?’
‘No, Sir. The explosion itself and the sea compromised the scene. Several crew members have not been formally identified either. ’
‘So you abandoned the search?’
‘No, Sir. I checked the listings of all passengers on the ferries leaving the island of Lipari and …’
‘What if they didn’t leave by ferry?’ Tenebris cuts her off.
‘I raised the same issue,’ Gutner counters.
She glances at Major Watson. What she can see of his thin-lipped smile is like a ragged tear in a sheet of paper; he has been itching to see her fail from the moment she arrived in Sicily. Beside him is Paolo Messi, a jowly-faced specialist in disinformation, who sports a thin moustache like a caterpillar on his upper lip. They have set her up. Messi’s face is expressionless. Cowards. Apparently Watson isn’t intelligent enough to realise that, as her line manager, any failure on her part will also be his.
‘The island has no viable airport,’ Gutner continues. ‘All visitors and the locals travel by sea. Since Blanchard and his daughter, if they survived the explosion, were fugitives with no transport of their own they would have …’
‘Stolen a boat perhaps?’
‘There were no thefts reported,’ she says. ‘All boats sold or hired have been accounted for.’
‘How many other boats went down in the explosion that night?’
‘Three. All small fishing vessels moored close to the Dauntless. The owners reported the losses.’
‘And you investigated?’
‘Debris floating in the harbour. Satellite imagery before and after the explosion. Both confirmed that three boats were missing.’
‘On the seabed.’
‘Sir?’
‘You checked the seabed?’
He senses her hesitation. Behind him, the screen changes to show an ugly harbour, an abandoned pumice mine scarring the hill behind an old factory, its glassless windows staring blindly out to sea like the empty sockets in a skull. A long rusting jetty juts out into the grey winter sea like a broken tibia, offering partial shelter to a cluster of cowering fishing boats.
‘You identified the wreckage of four vessels on the seabed here at Porticello; the Dauntless and three other boats? You didn’t assume that the owners were telling the truth. Insurance claims by opportunistic fishermen don’t slip past you, do they?’
As Tenebris moves his head to glance at the screen, Gutner catches sight of the long scar that runs down the left hand side of his face from the top of his head to the corner of his mouth.
‘The satellite imagery clearly showed that three boats, plus the Dauntless, were missing the morning after the explosion,’ she says. ‘As I explained the evidence was compromised by …’
Tenebris lifts his hand to silence her. ‘Within the next twelve hours I want to know which of those other boats moored near her did not sink. I want photographs, owners’ names, length, draft and beam, paint colour. Everything, including how many forks there are in the cutlery drawer in the galley. Do I make myself clear?’
Across the table Watson parades his thin smile.
‘Yes, Sir,’ Gutner replies.
‘And when we have that information, I want the missing vessel found and destroyed, along with its occupants.’
The screen behind Tenebris changes again, to show close up photos of Michel Blanchard and his daughter, Sam, on board the Dauntless. Gutner stands and opens her briefcase.
‘Before you go.’ Tenebris turns to the others in the room. ‘These dolphins carry implanted GPS tracking devices, do they not?’
Glances are exchanged between several members of the committee.
‘So why haven’t we found them?’ Tenebris shouts at the top of his voice.
Several faces flinch involuntarily.
‘It is my understanding,’ Gutner says, ‘that both tracking devices are currently situated off the coast of Libya and have not moved for seven weeks. We must conclude that either both animals have died and that the dolphin captured two weeks ago was a different animal, or we must assume that the implants have been physically removed and abandoned on the seabed.’
‘Why wasn’t I told about this?’
Gutner doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to. She pushes the report back into her briefcase and stares at Watson, who is pulling uncomfortably at the collar of his shirt, the smile having vanished from his lips. Through the transparent table she can see his knees are fidgeting up and down.
Copyright © 2016 Christian Vassie / Injini Press