“Um, right. It’s not just the whales, either. It’s things like what we’re going to hopefully see today, provided our rival doesn’t reach it first.”
“Sounds like a segue if I ever heard one. Explain to me exactly where we’re going.”
Maria didn’t need to hear any more. Kevin was handling himself fine, if a little dorky, and he didn’t need her hovering around. Instead, as he explained today’s trip to El Bajo, Maria pulled Murphy away from where he had still been trying to appear in the background and ordered him to go help Gutierrez with any final preparations before launch. Then she went below to do a final inventory of the labs.
Not that she wouldn’t have liked to listen to Kevin talk more about El Bajo. The place had suddenly become a marine mystery that piqued the curiosity of every marine biologist in the world. They were simply the ones who were living practically on top of it, and that made it their mystery to attempt to solve. She didn’t exactly expect them to have all the answers before anyone else showed up, but she was excited to know they would probably have some.
From the surface, El Bajo looked like nothing other than more sea, completely indistinguishable from anywhere else on the Sea of Cortez. Below the surface, however, El Bajo was a large undersea mount. It was somewhat impressive, if not too much different than other underwater geological formations. What had made El Bajo special in the past wasn’t what it was but what called those waters home. Back in the seventies and eighties, before Maria had even been born, El Bajo had been one of the largest known breeding grounds of hammerhead sharks. Scientists had come from all over the world to study them during breeding season, and Kevin told Maria it was a spectacular sight, hundreds of hammerheads circling the mount in an intricate mating pattern that suggested a far more complex social structure than marine biologists had thought possible.
By the time Maria had first joined Kevin down here those days were long gone. Commercial fishing had destroyed the shark population, not just in the Sea of Cortez but throughout the world. Maria had dived down to El Bajo on several occasions last year when she and Kevin had been assisting one of Kevin’s colleagues with an experiment to test the long-believed yet never conclusively proved theory that many species of sharks, including hammerheads, navigated by sensing the magnetic fields of the Earth itself. She hadn’t seen any hammerheads at all and only a few species of sharks too small to have caught the interest of fishing boats. With every year that passed, it was beginning to look like hammerhead sharks were locally extinct.
Until one week ago.
Maria had nearly finished with the inventory when Gutierrez ran up to her and explained what he had just heard over the short wave radio. A couple of tour boat guides Kevin had paid to keep an eye out for marine traffic a couple miles off the tip of the peninsula had reported in. The ship they had suspected was coming had been sighted ten minutes ago. According to all the chatter Maria and Kevin had been monitoring for the last couple days, the Tetsuo Maru shouldn’t have reached that point for another hour or so. The Japanese ship was early, which meant the Cameron was late.
She rushed back up to the deck to find Kevin and Vandergraf still going through the finer points of shark tracking for the interview. As important as she knew these details might be for the reality show pitch, they were still something that absolutely could wait.
“Kevin, we’ve got to move now,” Maria said. “The Tetsuo Maru already passed our checkpoint.”
The cameraman apparently sensed the urgency in her voice and immediately started to pack up to get on the trimaran. Kevin also went into a flurry of motion, making sure there wasn’t anything they had forgotten, but Vandergraf just looked on at all this with a puzzled expression.
“Tetsuo Maru?” he asked. “Is that…”
“You wanted good television,” Kevin said. “That’ll require an adversary. And you’re about to meet them.”
3
Maria rejoined Kevin, Vandergraf, and the cameraman on deck once the Cameron was launched and speeding its way to El Bajo. The cameraman had taken out his camera again and was ready to roll once more. Kevin invited her to sit beside him as Vandergraf resumed his questions.
“Okay, so tell me about the villains of this story that we’re about to encounter.”
Maria interjected before Kevin could open his mouth. “They’re not villains. Saying it like that makes it sound like they’re mustache-twirling masterminds out to enact some plan to cause global extinction or some shit like that.”
Kevin somehow managed to keep smiling, although Maria knew full well how much her opinions on this subject exasperated him. “Now’s really not the time for this.”
Vandergraf, however, had scented blood in the water and veered right for it. “But Dr. Hoyt just said they’re your adversaries, did he not?”
“Which is not the same as villains.”
Kevin sighed. “Maria and I agree on a great many things. This is one of the few in which we don’t.”
“Please explain,” Vandergraf said.
Kevin gave Maria a glance as if daring her to answer, but she shrugged and motioned for him to do it.
“It’s all because of soup,” Kevin said.
“Soup?” Vandergraf asked. The way he said it made it sound like that was the single most improbable thing they could have said. The average person on the street didn’t understand just how many mainstream things revolved around the politics of the oceans.
“Specifically shark’s fin soup,” Kevin said.
“Which I’m assuming is, uh, exactly what it says on the tin?”
“Yep,” Maria said. “As Americans we might not understand the big idea, but to the Japanese this is serious business.”
“It’s not just a delicacy, you see,” Kevin said. “It’s a wedding tradition. A big one.”
“Wait, so these shark hunters only want the fin?”
“Mostly,” Kevin said. “They cut off the fin and then dump the shark back into the water. Sort of like poachers in Africa who kill elephants for their ivory or rhinos for their horns. Without their dorsal fin and bleeding profusely, the shark almost always dies.”
“That sounds pretty cut and dry terrible to me,” Vandergraf said. “How can that be something you two disagree on?” He looked at Maria. “You actually think hunting a species to endangerment just for a tiny part of their body is okay?”
“Hey now, don’t go putting words in my mouth,” Maria said. “I just don’t think it’s as straight up black and white as Kevin does. There are many more shades of gray involved.”
She tried to ignore him as he rolled his eyes.
“Explain,” Vandergraf said. He leaned forward on his knees and had a gleam in his eye like he thought this would make for some great drama with the right editing. Maria suddenly began to wonder if she’d made the right call convincing Kevin to do this.
Maria sighed, then looked as his left hand. “You’re married, Mr. Vandergraf?”
He looked down at the gold band on his finger. “Three years.”
“Was it a big wedding?”
“Well, I suppose it wasn’t small. What does that have to do with—”
“Was that size your idea or your wife’s?”
“It was mutual, I guess.”
“And was it pretty traditional?”
He sat up straight again, looking like he was maybe beginning to get the point. “There were lots of traditional parts, yes.”
“Now imagine something for a second. Imagine, oh, some tiny country in Europe imposing international sanctions on white wedding dresses. How do you and your wife think you would have reacted to that?”
Vandergraf laughed. “We would have told them to go to hell and done it anyway. But there’s a problem with your analogy. A white wedding dress doesn’t hurt anybody.”
“Did you give your wife an engagement ring?”
“Yes…”
“Did it have a big old diamond in it?”
“I sure as hell didn’t give my wife
a blood diamond, if that’s what you’re saying. It was entirely ethical.”
“Are you absolutely one hundred percent positive on that?”
“I… yes.” But he didn’t sound sure at all.
“Did you ever really consider that the diamond in your wife’s ring might have come at the price of dead people?”
“Maria, for God’s sake!” Kevin said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to come out like I was accusing you of anything,” Maria said. “I’m sure there was nothing untoward about where the diamond came from. But you probably didn’t think about it, did you?”
“No, not really.”
“How many diamonds are sold across the U.S. in a year? I don’t know the number, but I’m sure it’s huge. That’s because culturally, to us, it means love. When a couple decides to get married, only a small number go for something other than a diamond. It’s important to us. It’s tradition. Now imagine that small country again. They don’t know what that diamond means to us, and they don’t care. They just know that some diamonds are in fact blood diamonds, and that’s enough that they want to put a stop to the whole trade.” She paused and thought for a second. “Were you born in the U.S., Mr. Vandergraf?”
“Yes.”
“And your parents? Your grandparents?”
“Yes to both.”
“And so the only culture you were probably ever exposed to was your own. At least in your formative years, right?”
“Well, I don’t know about that…”
“My mother was born in Mexico. My father was born in California, but his parents also immigrated. So we weren’t, well, I guess you would say ‘integrated’ like people whose families have lived there for a couple generations. We had our ways and our customs that weren’t generally looked on with a kind eye in our middle class neighborhood where we were the only brown people. We spoke Spanish in private, and occasionally in public. And there would be a person every so often, usually a man, who would see us as we minded our own business, come up to us, and demand that we speak English because ‘this was America, fer Chris’sake.’ As if us having our own culture was somehow an insult to his own.”
Maria leaned back on her seat. “Where we’re going today, the area around El Bajo, has recently been designated by the Mexican government as a Marine Protected Area. A preserve, no fishing allowed in an effort to help rebuild the population of a protected shark species which, quite frankly, isn’t a danger to anyone who leaves them alone but is locally endangered. So for that reason, I have no problem whatsoever stopping a Japanese fishing vessel that seems determined to break the law. But as far as calling them evil, judging their culture, I think I owe it to them to at least take a step back and consider things might be a little simpler than just right and wrong.”
Vandergraf continued to stare at her, completely rapt, for several more seconds before he realized she was finished. “Wow, okay.” He turned to the cameraman and whispered something. The cameraman nodded back and Vandergraf looked very pleased indeed. Maria tried not to outwardly sigh. She was pretty sure that entire rant would be part of his pitch to the network.
“Okay then. So this fishing vessel we’re going to be chasing, that’s the Tetsuo Maru?”
“Yes,” Kevin said, sounding distinctly relieved that the conversation was going back in a direction he found safe. “Captained by a man named Koji Ito. He’s an old veteran at this, one we’ve run into many times and is more than a little resentful that Americans are telling him where he can fish and what he’s allowed to take. Hammerheads are protected anyway and he shouldn’t be after them, but even more so at El Bajo, considering the new MPA. According to a source we have on another fishing ship, Ito has been planning to do this just to spite everyone ever since he heard about… well, what’s going on.”
Vandergraf pulled a smart phone out of his shirt pocket. It wouldn’t get a signal this far out on the open water, but he seemed to have notes on it. “What’s going on would refer to the incident last week, you mean?”
“That, and everything that has been observed since.”
“Could you please explain it all for the camera?”
Kevin hesitated. He’d been debating with Maria whether or not to talk about this where it might get out. Maria had reminded him that in the modern wired world it was already out there, and anything Kevin said would more or less be damage control.
“Look, the first thing you need to understand is that the public perception of sharks is mostly wrong. Most of the species aren’t going to look at a human and see a meal. There are a few, yes, and those will attack, but otherwise that’s a completely wrong view perpetuated by Jaws and… am I allowed to say the name of the network that does the shark event every year?”
Vandergraf laughed. “They’re competitors of the network we’re working for, so don’t say their name but feel free to smack talk them all you want. I know a few executives who will get a kick out of it.”
“Um, yes, well, hammerheads are just one of the many species of shark that would rather mind their own business than attack a human, as long as the human isn’t being threatening or there’s blood in the water. I’ve seen one or two people just swim up to one and pet it. Although that wasn’t here, though. There weren’t enough sharks here to do that anymore, the way they’d been overfished. I was afraid for a long time that designating El Bajo as protected was a gesture that came too late.”
“You seem to be talking in the past tense,” Vandergraf said.
“That’s because one week ago, uh, the sharks came back.”
Vandergraf paused as though he hadn’t heard that correctly. “They… came back? I knew there was an attack, but when you say they came back…”
“They came back. All of them. As in, one day hammerheads at El Bajo are a thing of the past, the next day there’s hundreds of them.”
“Wait, hundreds?”
“It’s as if no one had ever hunted them,” Maria said.
“Is that supposed to happen?” Vandergraf asked.
“If this were earlier in the year, I might almost say yes,” Kevin said. “At their peak, it wasn’t uncommon for the hammerheads to migrate spectacular distances and then return here to mate. But this is the wrong season. Their sudden appearance completely defies everything we thought we knew about their patterns.”
“And that’s not the only thing they’re doing differently, am I right?” Vandergraf asked. “According to the news report…”
Kevin sighed. “Yes, the first two people who discovered the hammerheads had returned were attacked.”
“Pretty viciously, too, if the reports in the media are to be believed.”
“Come on, you’re a reality show producer,” Maria said. “You should know better than most how easy it is to manipulate a narrative.” Vandergraf raised an eyebrow at her while Kevin shot her a look that clearly said What the hell are you doing? Maria winced and resolved to keep her mouth shut. She was the one who had convinced Kevin this whole thing was a good idea, after all. It probably wouldn’t do to look antagonistic in front of the producer.
“What she means is the story got exaggerated and blown out of proportion,” Kevin said. To Maria’s ears, it sounded like a blatant lie that anyone would see through, but she might have just thought that because she was fully aware that it really was. Two local men had been out in a boat at twilight scouting for what they hoped would be a thriving marine tourist business now that El Bajo was protected. One had been in the boat while the other had been snorkeling. According to their reports, the water had been calm and empty. Then the snorkeler had come to the surface, screaming and bloody and desperate to get back in the boat. When the other man had pulled him in, he’d discovered bite wounds on both the snorkeler’s torso and leg. Only seconds later, with blood swirling in the water, the surface was suddenly penetrated by, according to him, over twenty dorsal fins. That number had seemed unlikely until Maria had gone out to do a quick, unofficial survey and found that the initial
reports were low. She counted nearly fifty hammerhead sharks close enough to the surface for her to see them unaided. There was no telling how many more were below swimming around El Bajo, and all alone in her Zodiac raft she hadn’t dared don her scuba gear and check.
The snorkeler who had been attacked died from his wounds at the hospital. His partner had been telling the story to anyone who would listen ever since.
“So this is what we’re going to be doing today? Stopping this captain and swimming with the sharks?” Vandergraf asked.
“Oh, there’s not going to be any swimming involved,” Kevin said.
“But I saw your volunteers loading wetsuits and scuba tanks.”
“Standard equipment on the Cameron in case of emergencies,” Kevin said. “All we’re going to do is block the Tetsuo Maru’s way. Hopefully you can get something good you can use for the pitch reel, and if we have enough time left in the day we might even be able to tag a few hammerheads for our preliminary studies. It shouldn’t be too eventful.”
“So no piracy of the Tetsuo Maru?” Vandergraf asked with a wry smile.
Kevin shook his head. “Nothing so dramatic. It shouldn’t be that big of a day.”
Maria frowned at him but said nothing. He’d seen enough movies that he should have known better than to say that.
4
As Gutierrez continued to pilot the Cameron to El Bajo and their inevitable meeting with the Tetsuo Maru, Kevin took Vandergraf and the cameraman to get some footage of their research space below deck. Maria, in the meantime, called up all the One Planet volunteers to the deck and explained to them exactly what should happen at El Bajo and what they would be expected to do. As an organization, One Planet could be nebulous and flexible so she wanted to make sure there was no confusion about how to handle themselves. Founded by one of Kevin’s colleagues about fifteen years ago, the idea was to create a sort of halfway point between citizen scientists and environmental activists. Kevin liked to use some of them from time to time when he needed extra hands that didn’t need too much special training. There were actually many environmental groups that would have jumped at the chance to work with him, but Kevin had been dissatisfied and upset with the direction some of them had been going in recent years. Despite working with them earlier in his career, Kevin had even cut ties with Greenpeace entirely after they’d pulled a stunt at the Nazca Lines that had permanently damaged them. While Maria herself didn’t have that same prejudice against Greenpeace, she was perfectly happy with working with One Planet instead. She’d started off as one of them, after all, and she felt they had the perfect combination of idealism and practicality.
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