Eye of the Whale (37 page)

“Hold your fire,” the Coast Guard pilot’s voice shouted through the helicopter loudspeakers.

The helicopter lowered Elizabeth onto the bank in a cage. She climbed out and ran to the bridge, pushing aside the security guards who stood staring at her.

Frank drove right onto the bridge as the security cars chasing him stopped. His mouth hung open. She must have looked like hell, but there was no time to explain what had happened. He gave Elizabeth the CD.

“Play this!” Elizabeth shouted down to Lieutenant James, whose boat was still floating near the bridge.

She threw down the CD, which Lieutenant James caught in both hands, like a starving man receiving a morsel of bread.

Lieutenant James checked his watch. Elizabeth glanced at hers. It was already past six o’clock. Would Lieutenant James go against his orders? Elizabeth’s heart stopped as she waited.

Lieutenant James tapped the CD case against his fingers.

“Please, just one more time,” she said.

He looked up at her and slowly raised his right arm. He was holding up his pointer finger. He would give it one more try.

The crewmen lowered the speaker and tied it off to the side of the boat. After a few moments of silence, over the loudspeakers came the haunting sound of the whale song, which was also being broadcast through the water. Elizabeth heard creaks and moans and then the social sounds:

w-OP w-OP

EEh-EEh-EEh

w-OP w-OP

EEh-EEh-EEh

Would the song, recorded from Echo in Bequia, communicate to Apollo that his song had been heard and he could leave?

The song ended.

Silence.

Nothing.

The song echoed again through the slough.

On the banks, people stood silently. Even the wind had died down.

There was a slight swirl in the water.

What did she expect to see? A tail? A flipper? Apollo was not going to wave goodbye.

A
POLLO HID
at the bottom of the slough
—

He heard the sounds from above—

His eyes bulged in the dark water as he listened—

He sloped his tail upward and hung like a floating dark cloud in the posture of the singer—

E
LIZABETH’S HANDS RESTED
on the railing of the bridge. Her shoulders fell as she witnessed her plan—the whale’s last hope—failing. Her hands were trembling. Her eyes were tearing up. She exhaled in defeat.

It wasn’t her
hands
that were trembling. It was the
bridge.
She looked for cars, but no one was moving.

She turned to Frank. “He’s singing! Apollo’s singing!” After a few moments, Apollo’s song stopped.

A
POLLO SHIFTED
his great weight—thrusting his tail—twisting his body—

Ahead was the narrow passage—

I
N THE GATHERING LIGHT,
Elizabeth saw Apollo’s dorsal fin above the water. He was swimming toward the bridge. “He’s going!” she shouted as a wave of excitement flooded her body, quickly followed by dread. The tide was much lower than when Apollo swam under the bridge into the slough. Below, Elizabeth could see wooden pilings, the remains of a former bridge, jutting out of the water.

A
POLLO DOVE DOWN
—

Propelled forward by his powerful tail—

His skin scraping against the old wood—

He thrashed his tail—

But he could not move—

His flippers pinned to his sides
—

“O
H MY
G
OD,
he’s stuck!” Elizabeth shouted.

“He’s a whale,” Frank said, trying to comfort her.

“If he can’t surface, he’ll drown.”

“We’ve got to move those wooden pilings,” Frank said, pointing at where they stuck out above the water. “We need a rope.”

Elizabeth echoed the request to Lieutenant James, who saw what was happening. Frank pulled off his shoes and jacket, climbed over the railing, and jumped into the water.

“Let me go,” Teo was saying, holding up his handcuffed wrists and pointing to the water.

“He’s a whaler,” Elizabeth shouted.

“A whaler?” Lieutenant James said. He shook his head with disbelief but decided to follow Elizabeth’s directions, which were working so far. “Okay. Let him go.” Teo went overboard, dragging a thick line of rope attached to the boat.

Frank and Teo dove below the water, trying to tie the rope as low as possible on the piling. When they surfaced, Lieutenant James gave the order.

“Pull!”

Elizabeth heard the ferocious roar of the two Honda 225s as they raced away from Apollo. The rope’s slack was quickly taken up. She heard the revving and straining of the engine tethered to the old piling.

After an endless minute, the piling started to move, first inches and then several feet. Apollo was able to surface with a great exhalation that rose twenty feet or more. Everyone cheered, even the security guards.

But Apollo still had to push his massive body over the piling and to the other side.

“He still can’t get through,” Frank shouted from where he was treading water below the bridge. He and Teo swam into the open water. They did not want to be near the whale when he breached.

A
POLLO WHIPPED HIS TAIL
in a downward power stroke and convulsed every muscle—

He propelled the front half of his body up and forward—

His skin scraped against the barriers—

He twisted his body and raised one winglike flipper out of the water—seeing the creature above him—

E
LIZABETH HUNG OVER
the railing and saw Apollo’s eye looking up at her, glimmering in the morning light. She recognized once again that great and unknown intelligence.

Apollo’s fin fell away as his giant body returned to the water, and a huge splash erupted in all directions. He had made it over the piling and was free of the bridge. The crowd cheered all around her.

Apollo “spy-hopped,” raising his head vertically out of the water, and then began swimming back down the river with the Coast Guard boat trailing behind as an escort.

The black storm clouds hanging over the slough at last released their heavy load. The rain poured down on Elizabeth, a purifying stream. She shivered as she watched the water begin running into the holes in the bridge and down into the slough and back to the sea.

EIGHTY-SEVEN

Six months later
September 5
Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C.

E
LIZABETH LOOKED
at her very pregnant belly. Through everything she had endured at the hands of Skilling and in the freezing ocean with the shark, her baby had been well protected in its own watery world. Now, at thirty-six weeks, the only place that Elizabeth wanted to be was in a warm bath where her body was buoyed up from the unrelenting weight of gravity.

How did I let Connie talk me into this?
she wondered as she glanced up at the dark wood-paneled walls of the congressional hearing room. Frank was being surprisingly supportive and had even agreed to accompany her. He’d said he could deliver the baby on the plane if necessary. Elizabeth rocked from side to side in the hard wooden chair, trying to get comfortable, knowing that the ligaments of her pelvis were opening and the bones were softening for the approaching birth.

Although they were in the largest hearing room in the Russell Building, it was already full, and a crowd of people spilled out the door into the hall. The wooden table reserved for press was full, and a bank of television cameras was arrayed in the back. Connie had told her that many would be there for her, insisting that she brought some supposed celebrity status, but Elizabeth knew that environmental issues were generating their own interest.

Professor Ginsburg must have seen the nervousness on her face, because she patted Elizabeth on the arm and smiled warmly. Elizabeth wondered whether she should really say it the way she had planned. It was provocative, but it would get the senators’ attention. Half a dozen gray-haired men were taking their seats around the long U-shaped wooden table. In the middle was the sole female senator. As the chair of the committee, she exuded confidence and professionalism. She looked over her reading glasses at Elizabeth and smiled. The senator was from California and had invited her to testify after the whale rescue. She was also a mother of two and was perhaps empathizing with Elizabeth’s near-term discomfort.

To Elizabeth’s side was a large screen on which she would show graphs of the rise in birth defects and childhood cancer, as well as the precipitous decline in fertility among men and women. The chairwoman called the meeting to order and invited Elizabeth to address the committee.

Elizabeth spoke into the microphone to make sure everyone could hear her as she began her testimony. “Every man in this room is half the man his grandfather was.” There was a murmur of surprise and shock. “As you can see on this chart, sperm counts of men in the United States and twenty other countries have fallen over the last half century—by as much as 50 percent.” Elizabeth turned to the chairwoman. “Senator, as women, we are equally if not more affected by environmental pollution. As just one example, no matter what we eat or where we live, our breast milk will pass on to our children a frightening array of toxins.” Elizabeth presented a number of the facts that she had discovered, but celebrity status or not, she was eager to turn the microphone over to Dr. Ginsburg. “I’d like—”

“Isn’t some level of environmental pollution,” one of the senators asked, “an inevitable part of progress? It could take generations to know if there are lasting effects.”

“We don’t have generations to wait, Senator. Humans run the
risk of becoming the newest species on the endangered animals list.”

“Are you saying this is about extinction?”

“Like the dinosaur…and the dodo bird,” Elizabeth said as a chuckle fluttered around the room. “In truth, Senator, this is about more than extinction. This is about species extermination, including our own. To explain these threats more fully, I’d like to introduce Dr. Gladys Ginsburg.” Elizabeth began to get up.

“One more thing, Dr. McKay, before we let you go.” It was the female senator from California again. “I’d like to know if you really think that you were able to communicate with the whale—with Apollo?”

Elizabeth took a deep breath. The room was very quiet as everyone eagerly awaited her answer. “I wish I knew, Senator. As a scientist, I must say that any hypothesis about the cause of the whale’s entrapment and its decision to swim back out to sea would be purely speculative.”

“Do you believe that the whale was truly telling us that our children are in danger?”

“Whether we hear the warning from Apollo or from Dr. Ginsburg, Senator, the dangers we face are the same.”

“Thank you, Dr. McKay.”

Elizabeth decided not to mention that she was still not yet a Ph.D. She got up, using both arms of the chair to assist her.

Professor Ginsburg began by saying, “I would like to publicly thank Elizabeth McKay. We might never have gotten this hearing if it hadn’t been for her and that charismatic whale.”

“Dr. Ginsburg, what is it that you most want the committee to know?” asked the chairwoman.

“I want to begin with the good news, Senator. So many of the diseases that plague our world and that we thought were inevitable are actually environmental illnesses that are in fact preventable. To
day’s epidemics include hormone-related cancers such as breast and prostate cancer, autoimmune disorders, learning disabilities, autism, degenerative diseases, preterm birth, obesity and diabetes, asthma, and infertility. As we stop putting these endocrine disruptors and other toxins into our environment, we will be able to save millions of men, women, and children from untold amounts of suffering.”

As Professor Ginsburg continued her testimony, Elizabeth saw Professor Maddings by the door. He had come to be there for her and was beaming like a proud parent. She made her way toward him through the crowd, and together they slipped out of the hearing room.

“Brilliant, my dear,” he said. “You were absolutely brilliant. And look at you.” He gestured toward her full belly.

Elizabeth smiled. “I’m so glad you came.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for all the blue whales in the world. I’m just glad to see you in one piece after what you’ve been through. Now, tell me, what I don’t understand is why the whalers and that environmental consortium were working together.”

“They weren’t. Their interests just aligned, and both were willing to pay Skilling for his help. He had friends in all the wrong places.”

“Well, that Skilling got his just deserts,” Maddings said with satisfaction.

Skilling was not the only one who had. Elizabeth knew that the Japanese government was launching a formal investigation into the toxicity of whale meat and those who might have attempted to cover it up. The Environmental Stewardship Consortium had been disbanded, but Bruce Wood’s article had helped launch a class-action lawsuit against the companies responsible for setting it up, and their collective stock value had been cut in half by negative press. One of Frank’s patients, a former chemical company executive, was the star witness for the prosecution.

“And that white shark,” Maddings continued, “must have been
quite a monster.”

Mother’s breach attack flashed to mind—the power, the violence, and the grace. “No, not a monster,” she corrected. “Really, just another hungry mother.”

Frank opened the hearing room door, having managed to elbow his way through the thick crowd. He hugged Elizabeth over her big waist and kissed her on the lips. Frank shook Maddings’s hand warmly.