The Last Season at Cheynes Beach

• Chapter 1 The Iron Flenser
• Chapter 2 Southern Ocean Swell
• Chapter 3 The Whale Watcher
• Chapter 4 Sight Through the Crosshairs
• Chapter 5 zodiac in the Wake
• Chapter 6 King George Sound
• Chapter 7 Blood and Ambergris
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the Pub
• Chapter 9 The Point of the Harpoon
• Chapter 10 Rubber Against Steel
• Chapter 11 Oil and Bone
• Chapter 12 Ghost in the Fog
• Chapter 13 The Line Between
• Chapter 14 Rising Tides
• Chapter 15 A Shot Across the Bow
• Chapter 16 Echoes of the Deep
• Chapter 17 Factory Floor
• Chapter 18 Cold Wind off Torndirrup
• Chapter 19 Breach and Fall
• Chapter 20 Under the Slipway
• Chapter 21 The Storm of '78
• Chapter 22 Red Water, Gray Sky
• Chapter 23 The Final Chaser
• Chapter 24 The Gunner's Choice
• Chapter 25 Silence on the Flensing Deck
• Chapter 26 The Bay Turns Quiet

The steam whistle at Frenchman Bay did not so much blow as tear through the morning air, flat and heavy with the smell of boiled blubber and woodsmoke. It was five o’clock in the morning, late February of 1978, and the frost on the iron rails of the slipway had already begun to turn into a slick, grease-tinted dew.

Axel Lindholm did not need the whistle. He had been awake since four, sitting at the kitchen table of his fibro cottage in Goode Beach with a mug of black tea so strong it left a tan line on the enamel. Through the thin curtains, the granite boulders of Mount Gardner were still charcoal humps against a sky that looked like wet slate. Across the sound, past the shelter of Breaksea and Michaelmas Islands, thirty thousand miles of uninterrupted water stretched south to the ice pack, rolling and heaving in a perpetual long gray chop. Axel knew the water the way a carpenter knows the grain of seasoned jarrah. He had twenty-four years of its salt cured into the creases around his eyes.

He pulled on his woollen socks, stiff from line-drying in the coastal damp, and stepped into his work boots. They were heavy, blunt-toed things, the leather soaked through with sperm oil until they were waterproof and almost black. You couldn’t wash that oil out. It got into the welt, into the stitches, into the skin of your heels until your bedsheets smelled like a rendered rendering cooker. His late wife, Margaret, used to say she could tell which direction the wind was blowing from before she opened her eyes just by sniffing Axel’s collar. If the wind was out of the east, he smelled like Frenchman Bay; if it came from the south, he smelled like cold salt and tobacco; if it blew from town, he smelled like damp pine and the dregs of the White Star Hotel.

Outside, the air was sharp enough to bite through his flannel shirt. He walked the half-mile down the track to the station, his boots crunching on the pea gravel. Below him, nestled between the steep granite slopes of the Torndirrup peninsula, the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company was already clattering into gear. It looked less like an industrial plant and more like a rusty iron settlement bolted directly onto the rock, kept from sliding into the ocean only by sheer weight. Galvanized iron sheds, towering cylindrical oil tanks painted silver and streaked with rust, a tangle of steam pipes hissing like angry geese, and the long, sloping timber slipway that ran from the deep water of the cove straight up onto the flensing deck.

Down by the jetty, the Cheynes IV was tied up, her blunt bow bumping against the pilings with each swell that pushed around the headland. She was a converted corvette, narrow in the beam, painted black with a cream wheelhouse that looked entirely too small for her hull. High above the foredeck, connected to the bridge by an open catwalk called the flying bridge, sat the gun platform. Bolted to it was the 90-millimeter Kongsberg harpoon cannon, its heavy iron barrel swathed in canvas against the salt spray.

Axel didn’t walk down to the boat. Not today. The chaser wasn’t running until the noon tide, waiting on word from the spotter plane out of Albany airport. Instead, he turned left toward the mess hut, where the flensing crew was hunched over chipped mugs of instant coffee and plates of fried toast.

"Morning, Axel," called out Bluey Evans, a man whose skin was the color of boiled ham from forty years under the Southern Ocean sun. Bluey was dragging a round oilstone over the curved edge of a flensing knife, the long wooden handle tucked under his armpit while the steel whistled a high, dry tune. Squeak-shink, squeak-shink.

"Bluey," Axel said, nodding. He reached into his pocket, took out a pouch of Drum, and began rolling a thin cigarette with one hand, a trick he’d picked up from a Norwegian gunner back in forty-nine. "What’s the Cessna say?"

"Found a pod forty mile south-southwest of Eclipse," Bluey said without breaking his rhythm. "Three bulls, maybe four. Big bastards, he reckoned. Sixty barrels a head if they’re an inch. Old man says we take two if the sea stays flat enough to get a line on 'em."

"Sea won’t stay flat," Axel said, striking a red-tipped match against the rough underside of the timber bench. "Barometer was dropping when I left the house. Glass is down two points since midnight. We’ll get a westerly by three, and it’ll push the swell straight into the gut."

"Then we cut 'em fast," Bluey muttered, testing the edge with a thumb calloused so thick it didn't even leave a white mark. "Before the sharks show up. Yesterday’s carcass had three white pointers round the tail before we even got the chain on the winch. Swallowed forty fathom of blubber between the cove and the deck."

Axel blew smoke toward the corrugated ceiling, where the condensation hung in greasy droplets. "Sharks have got to eat too, Bluey."

"Not off my bonus, they don't."

The station was running on time and numbers now. Everyone knew it, even if nobody talked about it while the cook was slopping stew onto tin plates. The quota was down again—set by some commission sitting in a warm hotel room in London or Tokyo, men who wouldn't know a spermaceti organ from a mutton chop. The Cheynes Beach outfit was the last one standing in the country, the last one in the whole bloody hemisphere that still flew the Red Ensign, but you could feel the slackening of the line. The spares were harder to get. When a winch broke down, they didn't order a new cast-iron gear from Newcastle; they took a blowtorch and a welder to the old one and prayed it held through the shift.

A young deckhand named Terry walked in, his gumboots squeaking on the linoleum. He was nineteen, born and bred in Spencer Park, and this was his first season on the deck. He looked pale, even in the warm light of the kerosene heater.

"There's blokes at the gate," Terry said, leaning against the doorframe.

Axel didn't look up from his smoke. "Trucks from the cannery?"

"No," Terry said. He took off his knit cap and rolled it between his fingers. "Down from Perth, looks like. Two station wagons. Parked right across the dirt by the cattle grid. Got signs painted on cardboard."

Bluey stopped his stone. The knife hung in the air, catching the light like a curved silver moon. "What kind of signs?"

"Save the Whales, it says," Terry replied, his voice small. "One of 'em had a picture of a humpback with a cross through a harpoon. Big yellow thing. A girl was holding it. She wasn't wearing boots, either. Just sandshoes. In this mud."

A quiet fell over the mess hut, broken only by the bubbling of the water urn in the corner. Men who had been talking about football scores and carburettors drifted toward the greasy windows facing the road.

"Bloody ratbags," Bluey spat, though he didn't raise his voice. "University trash. Never done a day's graft in their lives. Come down here on the diesel bus burning oil we refined, telling us how to make an honest quid."

Axel finished his smoke, pinched the burning coal out with his fingers, and dropped the butt into an empty grease tin. "They got a right to stand on the public road, Bluey."

"Not if they're blocking the tankers, they don't. Old man'll have the sergeant out from Albany before breakfast."

"Sergeant's brother drives the bone-meal truck," someone down the bench chuckled. "He won't be rushing."

Axel walked past them, out through the double swing doors onto the flensing deck. The deck was sixty feet wide and a hundred feet long, built of heavy jarrah planks bolted down to the bedrock and worn smooth as glass by decades of blood, oil, and iron chains. At the top of the ramp stood the great twin winches, massive cast-iron beasts wound with two-inch wire rope that could drag sixty tons of meat out of the sea without missing a beat.

He stood at the rail overlooking the water. The bay was dead calm in the lee of the headland, the color of jade, but further out, beyond the outer markers of King George Sound, the Southern Ocean was already showing white teeth. Long, rhythmic lines of swell were wrapping around the granite bluffs of Torndirrup, breaking against the foot of the Gap with a dull whump that shook the air like distant artillery.

Axel looked down at his hands. The skin across the knuckles was scarred with dozens of pale white lines—slips of the knife, pinches from wire cables, frost splits that had healed over forty winters. He had started out on the deck in fifty-four, eighteen years old and full of vinegar, thinking the station was as permanent as the hills behind it. In those days, three chasers would come in before dark, four whales each, ties on the stern and the water red from the mouth of the bay right up to the slip. You couldn't sleep for the noise of the bone saws screaming through jaws and the boilers roaring through the night. They turned the whole world into oil: oil for British jet engines, oil for automatic gearboxes, oil for Swiss watches, oil to soften leather saddles in Queensland.

Now, there were days when the chasers cruised all the way to the continental shelf and found nothing but the gray empty troughs and the petrels skimming the spray. The whales were still out there—sperm whales, mostly, deep divers that hunted squid in the black canyons two miles down—but they were wilder, sparser. And now there were people with cardboard signs standing in the gravel where the timber trucks used to turn.

He heard a step behind him on the boards. It was Jock Henderson, the station manager. Jock was a short, barrel-chested Scot who had spent half his life in South Georgia before the ice and the unions ran him out to Western Australia. He smelled permanently of carbolic soap and peppermint lozenges.

"Axel," Jock said, looking down into the water where a school of small herring was darting through the oil sheen.

"Jock."

"The plane's confirmed two. Five miles past the shelf, heading west into the wind. We're casting off at seven instead of noon. Wind's coming up quicker than the bureau said."

"I saw the glass," Axel said.

"Aye. If we don't get them on the line by three, we won't get them up the slip tonight. The swell's going to build on the bank." Jock hesitated, his jaw working on a lozenge. "You seen the front gate?"

"Terry told us."

"There's seven of them now. One of them's got a camera with a lens like an artillery piece. Took a photograph of the night watchman when he went to shut the chain." Jock spat into the water. "One of the Perth reporters rang the office at six. Asked if we were ashamed of ourselves."

"What did you tell him?"

"Told him to go to hell, then told him to buy an Australian-made car that didn't use whale tallow in the transmission, then I hung up." Jock rubbed the back of his neck with a hand that had lost two fingertips to a flensing wire in nineteen-sixty. "We've got the permits, Axel. Signed by the Commonwealth government. Signed by the Minister. We're within the law."

"I know the law, Jock."

"Aye, well, they don't seem to care much about the law. They've got a boat coming down from Fremantle on a trailer. Some rubber thing with an outboard."

Axel turned around to face him. "A Zodiac?"

"That's what the copper said. Said they brought it down on the back of a Holden ute. They're fixing to put it in at the town jetty."

Axel looked out toward the entrance of the sound. The thought of an inflatable rubber boat out past Breaksea Island in a freshening westerly made his stomach tighten, not with anger, but with the cold, instinctive dread of any seaman who knew the coast.

"They'll drown," Axel said simply. "If they get out beyond the shoals in a rubber duck, they won't make it back past the Michaelmas reefs. The chop will flip them inside ten minutes."

"Then their blood's on their own heads," Jock said, though his voice lacked conviction. He looked tired. His hair, once thick and red, was thin and peppered with gray, blowing wild in the gusting breeze. "Just get your gear aboard the four-boat. Make sure the gun is greased. If we bring two in by tea-time, we hit the monthly tally, and the boys get their share. That's all that matters. What happens in town is town business."

Jock turned and walked back toward the office, his heels clicking sharply on the iron steps.

Axel stayed by the rail for another five minutes. Down below, the engine of the Cheynes IV coughed, spat a plume of blue-gray diesel smoke into the clean salt air, and settled into a deep, rhythmic thrum that vibrated through the timber deck beneath his feet. The noise was familiar, as steady and certain as his own pulse, but for the first time in twenty-four years, it sounded thin to him. It sounded like an engine running in an empty room.

He walked down the stairs to the workshop behind the boilers. In the corner, racked against the wall like long iron spears, were the harpoons. Each one was six feet long, made of soft Swedish iron that would bend under the thrashing of a whale rather than snap, tipped with a hollow grenade point that held a pound of black powder. The heads were painted with gray primer, dull and lethal.

Axel took a rag and a tin of mineral grease from the bench. He began to wipe down the shank of the front-runner, checking the forged eye where the nylon forerunner—the whale line—would be spliced. The iron was cold, so cold it made the grease stiff, but he worked it with his bare palms until it was slick and protected against the brine.

Through the high, glassless windows of the workshop, he could see the dirt road winding up the hill toward the highway. Past the boundary fence, where the white post-and-wire met the scrubby coastal banksia, two small figures were standing by the roadside. From this distance, they were just colored specks against the gray-green bush—one in a yellow oilskin, one in blue. They weren't moving. They were just watching the smoke rise from the chaser's stack, waiting for the iron to meet the water.

The bow of the Cheynes IV took the first genuine green sea two miles east-southeast of Michaelmas Island, right where the continental ledge began its long, invisible slide into the abyss. It came over the snout of the vessel in a solid, uncrested slab, thirty tons of Antarctic gray striking the steel plating with a sound like a wet mattress hitting a concrete floor. The spray whipped aft through the rigging, rattlesnake-fast, coating the brass binnacle on the open flying bridge in an instantaneous frosting of fine white salt.

Up in the wheelhouse, Skipper Arne Thomassen didn’t blink. He was seventy years old, shaped like an old wooden bollard that had absorbed too much bilge water, and he steered with his elbows tucked against his ribs, rolling his shoulders half a second before the deck tilted beneath his carpet slippers. Arne had been hunting whales since the Germans were sinking convoys off the Lofoten Islands. To him, the roll of a light-hulled chaser in a five-meter swell was no more remarkable than the swing of a porch glider on a Sunday afternoon.

"Axel," Arne barked through the brass speaking tube that connected the wheelhouse to the lower chartroom. "You got that blasted iron tied down tight? Spotter says the wind's picked up three knots since we cleared the spit. We're going to get our noses washed today, my boy."

Down on the narrow catwalk that stretched forward over the winches toward the harpoon platform, Axel Lindholm pulled his oilskin hood lower over his brow. He didn’t bother answering through the tube. He simply reached out a thick woollen-mitted hand, gripped the heavy canvas lashing that held the Kongsberg’s breech block locked against its travel cradle, and heaved. The hemp creaked, stiff with brine, but it held firm. The gun was secure. It sat on its conical pedestal like an unblinking iron eye, staring out past the bobbing bowsprit toward the empty horizon where the gray sky met the grayer sea.

Behind him, the twin funnels of the chaser puffed a smear of greasy brown soot that flattened out instantly against the water. The Cheynes IV was burning heavy bunker diesel, her reciprocating engines thumping away deep in her guts with a hollow, rhythmic shudder: clack-hiss, clack-hiss, clack-hiss. It wasn’t the swift, urgent hum of modern steel craft; it was the slow, mechanical wheeze of the mid-century, an iron heart that had already outlived two wars and three flags.

Down in the galley, huddled against the cast-iron fiddles of the diesel stove to keep from sliding onto the scuppers, Terry was attempting to brew tea without scalding his forearms off. The kettle was leaping an inch off the hotplate with every drop into the trough.

"How far out?" Terry asked, bracing his boots against the galley locker as Axel ducked through the heavy steel storm door, shaking cold droplets from his shoulders. Terry’s face had gone the peculiar shade of damp tallow that usually preceded twenty-four hours of dry heaves over the leeward rail.

"Past the shelf," Axel said, unbuttoning his outer yellow coat and hanging it from a brass hook that had been worn silver by decades of wet clothes. "Twenty miles yet. We won't see spouts till we get out into the blue water. Take a dry biscuit, Terry. Chew on the edge of it. Don't let your belly sit empty, or the bilge water'll start tasting like mint sauce to you."

The boy took an arrowroot biscuit from a battered tin and gnawed on it with no enthusiasm whatsoever. "Skipper's in a rare temper. He was cursing the harbor master all the way through the heads."

"Arne's always cursing someone," Axel said mildly. He poured himself half a mug of warm, bitter chicory coffee from the pot that lived permanently on the back burner. "If it's not the harbor master, it's the Japanese buyers. If it's not the Japanese, it's the gulls stealing his salt pork. It keeps his blood hot. A Norwegian gets cold if he doesn't have an argument to chew on."

"He said those greenies in town were going to bring a curse on the ship," Terry muttered, watching a yellow drop of tea crawl across the linoleum table. "Said he seen people like that in British Columbia back in the sixties. Claimed they put sugar in the fuel tanks and chopped the lines with axes."

Axel sat down on the bolted wooden bench, cradling the hot mug between his calloused palms. He smiled a little, though his eyes remained watchful. "Arne talks to hear the whistle in his own teeth. There's no sugar in the tanks. Chief Engineer Murdoch would shoot his own mother before he let an outsider within twenty yards of the bunkering manifold. Those kids don't want our diesel, Terry. They just want us to stop shooting."

"Well, why don't they go and bother the Russians?" the boy asked, a sudden spark of local indignation cutting through his seasickness. "The bloody Slava fleet takes ten times what we take. They got floating factory ships as big as the hospital up on Mount Clarence. We're just three boats and a slipway."

"Because the Russians carry machine guns on the bridge," Axel said, taking a sip of the bitter brew. "And because Moscow isn't four hours up the bitumen in an old station wagon with a broken muffler. People protest where the roads are sealed, boy. It’s easier on the tires."

The boat gave a sudden, sickening corkscrew lurch as she climbed the face of an unusually steep ridge of water, hung suspended for a long, weightless second where the propeller could be heard cavitating in the thin air with a violent thrum-thrum-thrum, and then crashed down into the belly of the next trough. A shower of spray hammered against the thick glass of the scuttles like gravel thrown against a wall. From overhead came the muffled thump of Arne’s sea boots stomping on the wheelhouse planking, the universal signal for all hands to look alive.

Axel drained his cup, set it in the sink, and slipped back into his wet oilskins. His joints were stiff, complaining of the damp that always crept through the seams after twenty minutes off the deck, but his movements were smooth and economical. When you lived on a ship that rolled thirty-five degrees each way, you didn't make unnecessary gestures. You held the rail with three fingers, kept your knees loose, and let the ship do the work of carrying your weight.

He stepped back onto the main deck. The air was clean, cold, and shockingly loud after the stuffy warmth of the galley. The wind had backed around into the southwest, hauling straight up out of the ice fields six hundred miles below Tasmania, bringing with it that unmistakable, high-latitude smell: pure water, crushed kelp, and the faint, sweet greasy tang of living sea beasts.

Halfway up the mast, enclosed in a barrel-shaped canvas crow's nest that swung through sixty degrees of arc against the scudding clouds, Billy Mac was already scanning the horizon through a pair of seven-by-fifty binoculars wrapped in greasy wool. Billy was a half-caste lad from the mission down at Marribank who had eyes like a sea eagle; he could spot the faint, vaporous puff of a sperm whale’s forward-angled blow three miles away in a white-capping gale before the spotter plane even picked up the slick.

Axel climbed the flying bridge ladder, his boots finding the notched rungs without him having to look down. Arne was standing by the helm, a half-burned cheroot clamped between his few remaining yellow teeth, staring through the salt-crusted windscreen. The radio on the bulkhead crackled with the tinny, nasal whine of the spotter plane’s pilot, bank-and-turning in the empty air three thousand feet above the chop.

"...looks like the bull's turned south, Arne," the speaker spat through a haze of static. "He's sixty-eight feet if he's an inch. Moving slow. Got three cows with him, but they're undersized. Don't touch the little ones, the inspectors are crawling all over the wharf today like ants on a dead sheep."

Arne reached up and mashed the transmit button with his thumb. "We see him, Johnnie. We see the water changing. Where's the other mob?"

"Lost 'em in the whitecaps two mile back," the pilot replied. "Sun’s glaring off the chop. But this old fellow is cruising like a barge. You run on two-one-zero for another twenty minutes and you'll run his tail down."

"Two-one-zero," Arne grunted. He let go of the button and glanced at Axel out of the corner of a bloodshot blue eye. "You ready, Lindholm? The powder dry in that snout?"

"Dry enough," Axel said. "The cap's sealed with grease."

"Good. We take this one clean. No belly shots today. The meat packers in town are complaining about the bruising on the flank cuts again. They want the heart or the neck, nothing behind the dorsal."

"I hit where the water lets me hit, Arne," Axel said evenly. "You hold her head into the trough when he comes up, and I'll put it where it belongs. If you slide her off the swell like you did on Tuesday, you'll get what you get."

The old skipper let out a dry, rattling wheeze that might have been a laugh. "Tuesday was the current, not me. That rip off Eclipse would spin a destroyer." He gestured toward the open catwalk. "Get on up there. Billy's already got his arm pointed."

Axel nodded and turned back out onto the iron bridge. The catwalk that led from the wheelhouse to the foredeck was four feet wide, framed with two-inch galvanized pipe that vibrated constantly from the thrashing of the sea against the hull below. As he walked forward, his boots ringing on the steel grating, the wind caught the skirt of his coat and tried to rip it open, but he leaned his weight against the gale, moving with the practiced, heavy-footed swagger of a man who had walked this particular plank ten thousand times.

At the bow, the world was larger, emptier, and much colder. The harpoon platform was a circular iron plate bolted directly over the stem, raised three feet above the deck so that the gunner could look straight down into the water ahead of the ship. Standing there, with nothing between him and the grey Southern Ocean except the waist-high steel rail and the heavy black barrel of the cannon, Axel felt the familiar shift in his chest.

On shore, in the pub or in the fibro house with Margaret's empty wardrobe and the ticking kitchen clock, everything was messy, slow, and full of small arguments about money and politics. Here, thirty miles out in the long blue rollers, the world was reduced to four things: the speed of the hull, the line of the swell, the range of the iron, and the gray, glossy back of the animal when it broke the surface to clear its lungs.

He reached down to the breech of the gun. The 90mm was an old friend. Built in Kongsberg, Norway, in 1952, it had killed more than four thousand whales in its time. The action was simple: a massive sliding wedge breech block, a heavy spring-loaded firing pin, and a trigger mechanism linked to a pistol grip at the rear. The barrel was six feet long, bored from solid high-tensile steel to withstand the tremendous pressure of the cordite charge that kicked the hundred-and-fifty-pound iron projectile out over the bow.

Axel slipped the safety lever off, felt the click through the thick leather of his mitt, and took the canvas hood off the gun's muzzle. Inside the bore, the four folded barbs of the harpoon head were clearly visible, nested tight around the threaded nose where the cast-iron grenade was screwed on. Attached to the shank was the forerunner—a seventy-fathom length of four-inch white nylon line that lay coiled in intricate, salt-stiffened flakes on a wooden tray directly beneath the platform. When the gun fired, the line would trail the harpoon through the air like a white streak of lightning, whistling with a pitch that could split your eardrums if you didn't have your mouth open to balance the pressure.

"Blow!"

The shout came down from the crow's nest, half-strangled by the wind. Billy Mac was leaning over the canvas rim of the barrel, his right arm outstretched toward the three-o'clock position.

"Two points off the starboard bow! Mile and a half! Big bull, Axel! Look at the feather on him!"

Axel raised his head, squinting through the stinging spray. There, against the dark slate line of the horizon, a low, bushy white plume rose at an angle of forty-five degrees, hanging in the cold air for three seconds before the gale shredded it into white smoke. A second later, another plume appeared fifty yards behind the first, then a third.

The bull was cruising. He wasn’t alarmed yet; he was traveling in the long, rhythmic manner of an old male sperm whale that had swum ten thousand leagues of open water without ever meeting an enemy he couldn't crush with his lower jaw. He was forty tons of muscle, blubber, and ancient, oil-filled skull, riding the crest of the swell with the easy indifference of a mountain.

Arne saw it from the bridge. The telegraph bell rang twice in the engine room—a sharp, brassy ting-ting that Axel felt through the soles of his boots rather than heard. The vibration of the engines changed, deepening from a steady chug into a high, straining roar as the engineer threw the fuel rack wide open. Black smoke boiled out of the chaser's stack, tearing down onto the water as the bow rose and smashed forward, cutting through the swells at thirteen knots.

The hunt was on.

It was never a fast thing, not like chasing dolphins or porpoises. It was a contest of mass and fuel. The whale could make twelve knots in short bursts if he took fright, but he couldn't keep it up; his huge, blunt head was built for diving into the black cold of the Perth Canyon, three thousand feet straight down, where the water pressure was enough to crack an oak barrel like a walnut. At the surface, he was heavy, slow-turning, and bound by the iron necessity of breath. Every four or five minutes, he had to bring that single, left-sided blowhole into the air, clearing the stale nitrogen from his lungs with a wet, roaring gasp that sounded like a steam locomotive clearing its cylinders.

Axel took his stance behind the Kongsberg, unlocking the traverse lever. The heavy cannon swung easily on its greased ball bearings, moving with the touch of his hip against the steel rest. He reached down and checked the firing lanyard—a thin, tarred cord that ran from the trigger down to an iron ring he held in his right hand.

"Steady, Arne," Axel muttered under his breath, his eyes fixed on the gray shape five hundred yards ahead. "Don't rush him. Give him room to turn."

The chaser was closing the distance now, shipping green water over the waist as she drove into the chop. Spray was flying higher than the bridge, drenching the catwalk, but Axel stood square in the open, his face dripping, his grey eyebrows matted with salt. His eyes never left the spot where the whale had vanished beneath a slick of smooth, green-tinted grease—the "footprint" left by the beat of the great flukes.

The spotter plane drifted overhead like a yellow gnat, its engine a faint buzz against the roar of the sea.

"He's under the hull, Arne!" the pilot screamed through the bridge speaker, the voice leaking out onto the catwalk. "He's angled across your keel! Half-speed, turn to port! Turn to port or you'll run him down!"

Axel felt the ship heel sharply to the left as Arne threw the wooden wheel over. The iron bow groaned, sliding across the side of a swell, and for a second the horizon tilted until the gray foam seemed to be pouring right into the galley doorway.

Then, twenty yards ahead of the stem, the water bulged.

It didn't break; it simply rose up in a vast, smooth mound of dark purple-gray, sleek as wet vulcanite, stretching forty, fifty, sixty feet along the side of the hull. Axel could see the pale, wrinkled skin around the blowhole, the row of low humps along the spine where the dorsal fin should have been, and the great, blunt snout pushing a white bow wave that rivaled the ship's own. It was so close he could smell it—a thick, prehistoric reek of half-digested squid, ambergris, and the musky grease of the deep sea, an odor that caught in the back of the throat like warm mutton fat.

The bull didn't look at the ship. His small, dark eye was set six feet back from his snout, down near the angle of the jaw, blind to everything directly ahead or behind. He simply blew once more, a violent, whistling fountain of vapor that drifted back over the platform, wetting Axel’s face with warm, foul moisture.

Axel didn't hesitate. In forty years on the coast, he had never learned to hate the whales, nor had he ever learned to love them the way the people from the universities claimed they did. To him, the bull was simply an enormous, dangerous fact—like a timber fall in the jarrah forests or a flash flood in the Gascoyne. You treated it with respect, you kept your fingers clear of the ropes, and you did your work before the water killed you both.

He leaned his weight against the traverse, swinging the blunt muzzle of the 90mm down until the sights—two crude notches of rusted iron—lined up with the dark gray rise of flesh just behind the flipper.

The chaser rose on the back of a swell, the platform climbing toward the sky.

Wait for the drop, Axel told himself, the old rule drumming in his blood. Never shoot on the rise. If the bow jumps, the shot goes into the clouds. Shoot on the fall, when the iron is coming down to meet the meat.

The bow hung at the apex, shuddering.

The whale began to round his back, the massive flukes—ten feet across, scarred with the white circles of giant squid suckers—starting to tilt upward for the sounding dive. If he got his flukes out of the water, he would be down five hundred fathoms before the chaser could reverse her engines, lost in the black water until dusk.

The bow tipped down.

Axel jerked the lanyard.

The world vanished in a tremendous, blinding flash of yellow flame and an ear-splitting CRACK that knocked the breath out of his throat. A cloud of acrid, yellow cordite smoke rolled back over the platform, smelling of sulfur and burnt iron.

Through the smoke, the four-inch white nylon line whipped off the tray with a high, mechanical shriek that sounded like an electric circular saw biting into green hardwood. Whir-whir-whir-whir-CLACK. The flakes vanished so fast they were just a blur of white light dancing over the iron fairleads.

Axel gripped the rail, blinking through the stinging chemical haze.

Fifty feet out, the sea was already boiling white. The harpoon had taken the bull square behind the left shoulder, sinking deep into the blubber until only the forged eye projected from the skin. For one endless, frozen second, nothing happened; the whale simply lay on the surface, stunned by the impact of ninety pounds of Swedish iron traveling at three hundred feet per second.

Then the grenade went off.

Deep inside the animal's ribcage, the time-fuse reached the three-second mark. A muffled, hollow THUD resonated through the water, so heavy and deep that Axel felt it strike the steel hull between his feet like an iron sledge. The sea around the bull’s flank jumped two feet into the air, tinted instantly with a thick, crimson spray that turned the white foam to strawberry froth.

The whale didn't sound. He didn't have the breath left in him. He gave one great, convulsive shudder that sent a shudder through the chaser’s bowline, rolled half onto his side, and opened his narrow, ivory-pegged lower jaw toward the empty sky. A long, groaning sigh—the sound of forty tons of life escaping through a shattered windpipe—drifted back against the wind, louder even than the diesel engines.

"Fast fish!" Billy Mac yelled from the crow's nest, his hat waving in his hand. "Fast fish, Axel! Dead on the shot!"

Down on the main deck, the massive steam winch kicked into gear with a hiss and a groan. The two-inch steel cable attached to the nylon forerunner began to take the strain, winding onto the greasy drum with a heavy, steady thump-thump-thump. The dead bull was drawn in toward the starboard side, his massive head bumping against the hull plates with a slow, dull rhythm that shook the whole vessel.

Terry stumbled out of the galley door, his face pale, holding a long wooden pole tipped with a hollow lance that was connected to a low-pressure air hose from the engine room.

"Get the air in him, Terry!" Arne bellowed from the flying bridge, leaning over the wing with his face purple from the wind. "Pump him up before he sinks on the line! Murdoch, give the lad some steam!"

The boy leaned out over the bulwark, his boots braced against the scuppers, and drove the lance deep into the thick, rubbery skin of the whale's belly. With a hiss of compressed air, the carcass began to swell, bloating like an enormous black balloon until it floated high in the water, safe from the downward drag of forty tons of bone and blood.

Axel didn't watch the pumping. He had seen it four thousand times. He walked back to the breech of the gun, opened the smoking block with an iron wrench, and used a brass scraper to clear away the burnt residue of the powder charge. The smell of the cordite was strong, bitter, and clean—cleaner, at least, than the sweet, greasy reek of the blubber that was already beginning to wash along the waterline.

He looked over the side. The sea was red for fifty yards around the chaser, a long, greasy slick of oil and blood smoothing out the chop like a smear of lard on a table. Already, three black-browed albatrosses were circling down from the gray clouds, their long, stiff wings skimming within inches of the foam as they dipped their beaks into the greasy froth.

Further out, beyond the slick, Axel saw something else.

He stopped his scraper, his eyes narrowing against the glare.

Two miles to the north, heading straight out from the shelter of the islands into the teeth of the building five-meter swell, a small speck of bright, unnatural color was bobbing on the crests. It wasn't the dull gray of the naval boats or the black of the chasers. It was a sharp, insolent dot of safety-orange, bouncing like an empty oil drum in the trough.

Axel wiped his brow with the greasy back of his glove.

"Arne," he called out, his voice flat and hard against the wind.

The skipper looked down from the wing. "What's the matter? We got to get the tail strap on this fish before the sharks turn up."

"Look off the port quarter," Axel said, pointing with the iron scraper. "Past the shoals."

Arne raised his heavy brass glasses, held them to his eyes for five long seconds, and then let out a curse so foul it made Terry pause with the air lance.

"The fools," the old man whispered, his knuckles white on the brass tube. "The bloody, brainless fools. They're coming out in the rubber."