Page 5 of Clive Cussler Desolation Code

“How many whales?”

“One very large and the others smaller,” Lacourt said. “I must tell you, this doesn’t happen here. We have sharks. We have whale watching. But we’ve never had a mass beaching of these magnificent creatures. We’re not equipped to deal with such a thing or even certain how to handle it. We’re hoping you can help.”

Nothing more was needed. While Joe wolfed down the last part of the sandwich, Kurt grabbed his backpack off the seat and nodded toward the exit. The flight back would have to wait.

“Let’s go,” he said. “We’ll make plans along the way.”

Chapter 2

It took fifteen minutes with a police escort to get from the airport to the beach. Along the way, Kurt gave Lacourt instructions and detailed a list of equipment that would be helpful. “We’ll need excavators that can get down to the water. Fifty-five-gallon drums, Sheetrock or metal panels we can use to line a trench, and plastic highway barriers, empty and easy to move around. We passed a truckload on the way to the airport earlier.”

Lacourt looked surprised by the list of requirements, but he didn’t question it. “Anything else?”

“Fire trucks that can tap into the main water line.”

Lacourt listened closely and wrote everything down on a small pad, then pulled out his smartphone and began to send out texts to those who were waiting on instructions. By the time the police convoy weaved through the gathering crowd, help was on the way from multiple sources.

Kurt stepped out of the car as it pulled to a stop. One look told him they were going to need all the help they could get. Standing on the coastal road, thirty feet above the beach, he could see dozens of stranded whales, with one full-grown sperm whale right in the middle.

Out beyond the waves, the bay was teeming with sea life, the waterchurned white and foamy as the animals thrashed around in a panic, colliding with each other and darting off in different directions. Despite the wide opening to the bay, none of the animals seemed interested in swimming away.

Kurt had never seen anything like it.

Joe was just as baffled. “Are they trapped?” he asked Lacourt. “Is there a reef or a sandbar out there?”

“No,” the man in the white suit insisted. “No coral on this side, just a steady drop to deeper waters.”

“Maybe they’re trying to get to their leader,” Joe suggested. “Whale strandings often involve a pod of whales traveling in a group. A large family. If the leader gets confused and becomes stranded, the others may try to rescue it, or follow to their doom. Pilot whales are notorious for it, unfortunately.”

Kurt had been thinking the same thing, but as he studied the animals on the beach he noticed they weren’t the same species. The sperm whale was a solitary traveler. A pair of juvenile humpbacks farther down might have been traveling together, and there were several pilot whales and several porpoises, but even they were a mixed bag of different species, including a spectacled porpoise with a black-and-white color scheme that resembled a killer whale’s.

“They are not one family,” Kurt said.

Joe nodded. They weren’t marine biologists, but they knew enough to understand this was not a normal beaching.

Normal or not, they still had to get the animals off the beach and find a way to keep those in the shallows from joining them.

Kurt started down toward the beach. The group followed. “Which animal came in first?”

“The big one in the middle,” one of the policemen replied. “He was spotted an hour ago in the shallows.”

The sperm whale was on its side, its mouth open at an odd angle,its great weight deforming its normally majestic shape. Volunteers were throwing buckets of water on it, but beyond that, the crowd could only stand and stare.

“We need to move that one first,” Kurt said.

“You sure you don’t want to start with the smaller ones?” Lacourt asked.

Kurt was playing a hunch. “For reasons I can’t fathom, the others may have followed the first one in. If we get it back into the open water, those in the bay might leave and we can work on saving the smaller ones.” He turned to Joe. “What’s happening with the tide?”

Joe had been checking the tide and wave conditions on the way over. “High tide in forty minutes.”

“That’s not a lot of time,” the policeman said.

“It’s all we have,” Kurt replied. “Either that whale is off the beach in forty minutes or it’s never going back to sea.”

They arrived at the damp part of the beach a few yards from the whale’s nose. Kurt looked into the animal’s eye and sensed it wanted their help. It was probably his imagination, but it didn’t hurt to think that one mammal could sense the calming presence of another.

Stepping away from the whale, Kurt gathered a group of volunteers around him. They included a member of the fire brigade and a construction foreman, who’d arrived with one excavator and insisted another was on the way.

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