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“Then, what do we do? We won’t even have the fog to conceal us.”
It had been five hours since the devastating sea battle, and the fog was beginning to lift.
They hunched over the map of the area. Jefferson traced several routes through the islands, but they all led back to two exits into the Pacific, one to the north and the other to the south. It would take them hours to get out, and the Portland could be waiting between them at either choke point.
“Why don’t we wait here until the Chilean authorities arrive?” Vargas suggested.
“You saw the Portland’s armament,” Jefferson said. “A Coast Guard vessel would be cut to shreds by the Portland, and it might take two days for Chile’s Navy ship to get here. It doesn’t matter anyway. Our radios and satellite transmitter are toast.”
“I thought your chief scientist said they’re still getting data from the sonobuoys and the webcams.”
“We are. That’s why I could warn the Oregon about the torpedoes. The data is coming in, but we can’t send anything out to the Oregon except by short-range radio.”
“From what their captain told us about Oregon’s own damage,” Vargas said, “I don’t think they’ll be much help, either.”
“Then we need to sit tight here until we can make headway.”
The mission’s chief scientist, Mary Harper, burst onto the bridge. The sl
ender woman, in her fifties, was breathless from running.
“Mary, what’s going on?” Jefferson asked.
Harper planted a laptop on the console. She clicked, and it brought up a waveform from one of the sonobuoys. Jefferson recognized it as the signature of the song of the humpback whale.
“We just heard this from Sonobuoy Two,” Harper said.
She played the audio clip. It was the familiar hoots, rumbles, and whistles of a humpback whale communicating with its pod.
“What’s so unusual about that?” Vargas asked, confused as to Harper’s sense of urgency. “We hear whale songs all the time in the waters around here.”
Harper shook her head. “No, this is what you hear.”
She played a second audio clip. To Jefferson, it sounded similar to the first one.
“Isn’t that the same thing?” Vargas asked, even more puzzled now.
“Not at all,” Harper said. “The second one you heard is the song of the southern ocean humpback whale. The first one you heard—the one detected by our hydrophone—is the song of the northern Pacific humpback whale.”
Now Jefferson was just as bewildered as Vargas. “What are you saying?”
“Humpbacks learn songs from each other,” Harper said. “The songs are very distinctive to each community of whales. The whales from the northern Pacific never interact with the ones in the Southern Hemisphere. They each have their own language, so to speak.”
“So we shouldn’t be hearing this song in Chile?” Vargas asked.
“It would be unprecedented for a northern Pacific humpback to travel this far south. They usually only leave the Arctic to breed in Hawaii or Mexico and never come below those latitudes.”
Jefferson was getting exasperated with the discussion.
“Dr. Harper, I applaud your scientific enthusiasm, but, if you didn’t notice, we’re a little busy with trying to stay alive right now.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” Harper said. “But there is a point to this. When I heard the song repeat, I compared it to the previous version. It was exactly the same. And I do mean exactly. That just doesn’t happen.”
Vargas raised a quizzical eyebrow at Jefferson. “She said she has a point, but I don’t get it. Is this a critical whale thing that I don’t understand?”
“Dr. Harper has a Ph.D. in marine biology,” Jefferson said. “I’m sure she wouldn’t be wasting our time if this weren’t important.”
“Thank you, Captain Jefferson,” Harper said, annoyed but plowing ahead. “I wasn’t finished. When I heard the repetition, I turned up the sensitivity of the hydrophone and canceled out the waveform of the whale song. When I did that, I heard this coming from the same direction as the humpback signal.”
