He couldn’t take the chance, had to do emergency damage control to try and mitigate the risks.That sheet needed to be recovered, and the cache needed to be moved immediately.
He dialed one of his members.“Get a couple of guys ready to meet me at the rally point.Someone discovered one of the caches.We need to move it within the next couple of hours.In the meantime, I’m sending you on a recovery mission.Someone took something belonging to us, and I need it back A-fucking-SAP.”
TWENTY-ONE
“T
here!”Beside him near the front of the deck, Willow shot out of her seat and pointed over the starboard bow.
Tripp and everyone else on board looked over in time to see a tall column of water vapor rise above the surface of the water.A second later, a small dorsal fin appeared.
“There she blows,” Xanthe said into a mic from behind them.“Behold, the majestic Northern Pacific humpback whale.”
Finally.They’d been looking for this humpback for almost an hour, and the excitement on board at finally seeing it was palpable.The slope of the huge animal’s back appeared for a moment, then sank beneath the waves.
“Keep watching,” Xanthe added.“He or she is just under the surface and will come back up for another breath or two before sounding.”
Sure enough, another blow spouted moments later off the port bow.The small dorsal fin and slope of the back appeared again, gleaming wetly in the sunshine.
“There’s the peduncle,” Xanthe said, “the muscular part of the tail that attaches to the fluke.See how it’s curving like that?That means get your cameras ready, folks...”
The whale’s wide tail lifted completely out of the water, the underside of it almost completely white.Everyone was busy taking video and pictures.
“There’s abeautifulfluke shot!”
The huge fluke rose straight up in the air.A series of delighted oohs and ahs came from the passengers, then the whale dove down, and the fluke disappeared beneath the emerald-green water.
“You won’t see a better fluke up dive than that,” Xanthe said.“Our friend will be down for probably another ten to fifteen minutes now, but if you got a good shot at the underside of that fluke, you can upload it on Happy Whale Dot Com to get a name and biography on the whale.Each humpback has a unique pattern on their fluke, like a fingerprint.Scientists use them to identify and track individuals.”
Seeing the whale was great.But Tripp was way more interested in Willow.
“These beautiful animals were once hunted to the brink of extinction,” Xanthe continued, “but thankfully a moratorium was placed on commercial whaling in 1985.Our local humpback population has now recovered enough that they are no longer considered at risk.Although they still face threats from entanglement and ship strikes to climate change, they have officially been removed from the endangered species list.”
A cheer went up from the passengers.
Willow turned to him, a wide grin on her face.“Wow, that wasamazing.I’ve never seen one up close before.Did you get any pictures?”
