Night of Whales
by Michael Barley
part 1
The sonar shows masses of fuzzy blips, each an entire school of fish. It looks like a haze of locusts drifting across the screen. The radar is almost the same, only it’s birds. Thousands and thousands of birds.
They’re starting to thin out a little now, though it’s been going on for hours, and we’ve wondered how there can be that many fish in the sea or fowl in the air.
Terns and gulls continue to plummet across our small section of sky, all headed in the same direction: south. The clouds, what few there are, race to keep time with each other and with the birds. Sometimes it’s impossible to distinguish one from the other.
And under a half moon, on a black mirror of sea that rolls smooth and vaguely phosphorescent, the whales have appeared again, this time dozens of them. They run from some cataclysm that they have sensed and we have not.
“Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted?”
“To drown in a tsunami?”
“No, to have me all to yourself in a single bunk!”
“That’s definitely an alternative.”
“Well, here we are, sailor boy.”
“If we can just keep the boat on course—”
“For heaven’s sake, quit worrying about the boat! We’ll make it through. Trust me.”
“But it’ll be a hundred feet high!”
“Maybe two or three hundred, counting the trough—”
“We’ll either flip or nose-dive and sink like a lead weight.”
“My God! You’re such a pessimist!”
“A realist.”
“This hull will ride it like a surfboard. The trick will be keeping it steady and getting over the top.”
“Over the top?”
“If we stay out here where it’s deep, there won’t be such a high crest. Just a wide swell. In fact it should be much lower here than closer to the islands. So we’ll just keep bearing right into the wave and ride over the top of it.”
“You must be crazy.”
“Yeah, crazy... And if you don’t come here, I’m going up on deck to find myself a real sailor.”
“The others have left, remember?”
“They did, didn’t they? I’m surprised at Madison. Thought he’d stick with us.”
“He jumped into the launch at the last minute. They’re probably halfway to Whitlock by now.”
“I hope they make it.”
“They had to try.”
“So, why did you stay?” she asked me, the faintest of smiles crinkling her cheeks.
“If I’m gonna drown anyway, I’d rather it was here. With you.”
“Admit it: you’d die for my body.”
“All I’ll admit is that I hope you’re right about this hull.”
“She’s a tough little ship. I was there when they put her together. Watched them weld every seam and seal every bulkhead.”
“If you say so.”
“And a half-share is better than a fifth?”
“You’d cut the others out?”
“Technically, they abandoned ship. Read your contract.”
“You’re not that callous. I know you better.”
“I offered them a bundle for this trip. They cop out on me, and that’s it as far as I’m concerned.”
“So you’re angry?”
“Aren’t you? This is your run, too! With no crew, how do we fill the hold?”
“An Act of God notwithstanding?”
“It pisses me off me when people are so fickle.”
“Poor buggers’ll most likely drown in a few hours.”
“That leaves just you and me.”
“Right you are, Cap’n.”
“Sir.”
“Cap’n, sir.”
“That’s better. Now, if you don’t mind—”
“You don’t feel much like a ‘sir,’ sir.”
“Quit yapping. There’s this big wave headed our way and I’m going to need you to steer the ship.”
“For the moment, she’s steering herself pretty well.”
“Only for the moment.”
“So here we are in your bunk.”
“Any complaints, sailor?”
“While everything in the ocean is going south except us?”
“Are you going to make love to me or not?”
“Right away, sir. Could you move your leg a bit to starboard? I’m a little cramped.”
There is a silent roar from a thousand miles away. A shudder runs through the ocean as a wave is thrown from its womb of shallows beneath ancient ice, still too far inside the reaches of the Arctic to be seen or felt.
It won’t be arriving for a long time. Tonight at the earliest. Meanwhile, we have each other. And the whales.
“You want another coffee?” I ask in the half-light.
“No. I’m fine.”
“We gonna move this boat?”
“Where would we move it?”
“Farther south?”
“What would be the point?”
“We can’t just stay here.”
“Yes, we can.”
“You put it so matter-of-factly, as if this is nothing out of the ordinary, nothing life-threatening. This is bizarre. You know that, don’t you?”
“We’ll make it, Karl.”
* * *
At first we had no idea what was going on.
Two whales had cruised past our port bow as if we weren’t even there. Then we saw three more on the starboard side, two big ones and a calf, all going north, which was more or less what they should have been doing after their long trek from the birthing waters of the South Pacific. And that was fine, except that at about thirteen hundred hours they all stopped dead in the water.
I’d never seen anything like it, neither had Madison or Walsh. Deering said he’d seen the same sort of thing off the coast of Japan once, just before an earthquake. He told us of porpoises that had been following their ship, suddenly stopping just like these whales, then going crazy and swimming off in all directions. And then a message had come over their short wave that a six-point-five tremor had hit the eastern coast of the main island and there was danger of tidal waves moving in their direction.
The crazy thing was that those porpoises had seemed to know about it at least an hour before it happened.
Our captain wasn’t so sure.
She said she’d been in the same situation herself once in the Philippines, but nothing had ever come of it. No tsunami, no major disaster. That had been a quake below the seabed.
There were other stories, lots of them. We threw them back and forth between us while we watched the whales just floating out there, spraying plumes of water from their blowholes. But they weren’t at play; they screeched and called to each other, sounding as though they, too, were afraid.
At a little after fifteen hundred hours, there was a strange sort of silence and a deadening of the light. It was as if the clouds had suddenly dropped a thousand feet and pushed the air pressure up a notch or two in a matter of seconds. The whales just turned and headed south without much more than a wallop of their flukes. There was an eeriness about it that each of us felt in the pits of our stomachs.
Then it was birds, hundreds of them, and soon thousands, more birds than any of us had ever seen before in any single part of the ocean. And more whales, as well as their cousins the dolphins, and fish of all shapes and sizes flashing past in a blaze of glistening, churning surf.
The instruments went wild. If we’d had our nets out, we’d have made the biggest haul in the Rommek II’s history, and Captain Sheila Ellis could have finished the season with just the one catch. She might even have paid off the mortgage on her ship.
But something was very wrong, and the wild creatures knew it. So we sat out here, riding the long, black swells, watching the sea chop and churn as everything in it and above it rushed southward.
The clouds closed in as a grey afternoon gradually turned into a greyer evening. The wind was rising from the northeast carrying with it a steady cold spray that dripped off railings and ran in streams across our decks. I didn’t think it would rain, but it was hard to tell with the barometer going up and down almost as fast as the ship herself.
There wasn’t much on the radio. No one had noticed anything unusual along the coast or near the Aleutians, the chain of islands strung across the horizon eighty knots to our north.
We were getting reports from a few other ships in the area. They were all saying pretty much the same thing; something had happened in the sea, somewhere to the north by the look of things. But no one seemed to know what it was.
Then a lone pilot came on the short wave. He was out over the Bering Sea, some sort of naval recon, we presumed, since it was unlikely that anyone else would be flying out there without very good reason. He was shouting at the top of his voice about a mountain of water almost two hundred feet high. It was racing south in an ever-increasing arc that would have it smashing into the Aleutians in three or four hours.
His radio went off the air in mid-sentence with a blur of static that sounded like the end of an old phonograph record being ravaged by a broken needle. I had visions of his plane, probably a converted prop-driven sub-hunter flying close to the surface and not able to pull up fast enough when suddenly confronted with that monstrous wall of water.
We might have made it into Whitlock, but Sheila wasn’t convinced it was necessary to run for port. After hearing about the wave, Walsh decided it was, indeed, time to run. Deering agreed with him.
There was nothing we could have done to stop them; if Ellis or I had tried, there would most likely have been a fight. They were afraid of something they couldn’t comprehend. It’s sometimes like that; the sea can be frightening, and it’s easy to panic when there aren’t any solid reference points. When I elected to stay on board with our captain, the three others opted for lowering the launch over the stern.
I have to admit I was thinking of that half-share; we’d had a good run and there was an almost full catch lying frozen in the hold. It would have meant abandoning that, to say nothing of the Rommek, a half-million dollar trawler.
I suppose I wasn’t really convinced then that the wave would do us any real harm, hoping its impact might be reduced, particularly if it hit the chain of islands that lay across our bow. But the fish kept right on passing us by, all heading in the opposite direction, and neither Sheila nor I had any idea of what was happening out there.
Whatever it was, Deering and Walsh were abandoning ship, heading for what they thought would be dry land. When he realized we weren’t going to change our minds, Madison jumped into the launch at the last possible moment. I couldn’t have convinced any of them to stay on board even though their chances in the small boat were next to nil in the face of a large wave.
They might have made it all the way to Whitlock in four hours. The launch was certainly fast enough. It was what they would have found when they got there that concerned Sheila and myself. There wasn’t a hill on that little island that reached much more than two-hundred and eighty feet above mean sea level, and the old Whitlock Station and its World War II harbor would offer no protection at all.
So the Captain and her First Mate were left aboard sixty-five feet of floating aluminum and fiberglass.
Half an hour after the others had deserted, Sheila suggested we spend some time together in her cabin. She was suddenly worried and, I suspected, more than a little in need of comfort.
I set the auto-compass and locked the ship’s controls into a slow forward cruise, more or less directly into the wind. The sea was relatively calm. There was no immediate storm threat.
“Bring us some fresh coffee, Karl.”
“You got it, Cap’n.”
Something hit the Rommek with a blow that almost threw us out of her narrow bunk.
“Put your suit on. I think it’s time.” The old Sheila was back, quickly resuming command.
Normally, we might have squeezed into the on-board shower, a luxury that would have been appreciated had anyone been standing close to us. Instead, we helped each other struggle into thermal gear, sweat and all. When I climbed the narrow inside companionway to the aft deck, I was in time to see a great, dark shape sliding past the port side, its massive tail no more than twenty feet away.
“One of them must have side-swiped the hull!”
As the boat rose and fell, we got a close look at an enormous tail, its streaks and markings an intricate lacework of black and grey.
“Their markings are like human fingerprints. There’s no two identical.”
“Think they’re trying to warn us?”
“Nice thought, but I doubt it. They’re panicked. Just plowing straight ahead, ignoring obstacles, even if they do sideswipe us.”
Sheila was right above me, inside the enclosed bridge, talking through the intercom. There was no way she was getting herself colder or wetter than she had to. Her voice came from a speaker right behind my head.
“Something to port, off the stern, Karl. Coming from the northeast. At least two somethings. Pretty big by the look of the screen. Maybe a couple of humpbacks.”
“Can’t see a bloody thing out there,” I yelled back. She either didn’t hear or just chose to ignore me. But then I did see them, their great curved backs sliding between the waves. They could have been submarines running just below the surface; I thought how lucky they were to be able dive into the calm water below if they chose to.
The wind whiplashed spirals of foam along black wave crests. A cold mist drove across our bow, numbing my face, denying me more than a few yards of visibility across the oncoming swells. My arms and legs began to feel like little more than metal stanchions extending from the cold metal of the deck. The night seeped relentlessly into my high-tech body suit.
Then, once more, the sky cleared and, in one of those strangely unpredictable holes in the weather, stars glimmered briefly above a gently rolling sea. A half-moon mocked us while we quietly waited for the unseen wave to burst across our horizon.
“Not so bad after all, is it?” Sheila asked.
I could see her head and shoulders up in the bridge, silhouetted in the dim light of a map lamp.
“When’s it coming?” I called into the speaker.
“Maybe an hour? Can’t really tell.”
“Any more reports?”
“Something in the Arctic. The Coast Guard is flying in to have a look. All their bases are silent. Can’t raise anyone.”
“That smells... rotten.”
“You’d better believe it.”
“Maybe someone dropped a bomb on the north pole?”
“No way. Though if they had, it would explain why no one is saying anything. Security or some such crap. Never trust the government.”
“Someone must know. C.B’s? Shortwave? What about that plane?”
“Sounded like he went down, didn’t it? And there’s nothing I can pick up. Been trying right across the bands.”
“Christ! And the wave?”
“No other fishermen that far north. Wish I could speak Japanese or Russian. There’s a lot of chatter going back and forth between a whaler and a couple of trawlers about a hundred knots west of here.”
Copyright © 2025 by Michael Barley
