Dana Stabenow - Blindfold Game

“Son of a bitch.”

Vivienne reached for the mike and said in Russian, “Fishing vessel Marinochka, fishing vessel Marinochka, this is the MV Sunrise Warrior. campaign vessel of the environmental organization Greenpeace. We r here to protest your taking of illegal bycatch in protected waters. P‘ haul in your gear and leave this area immediately.”

They got a lot of static in reply.

“Gee, maybe they don’t want to talk to us.”

“Ya think?”

Into the mike Vivienne repeated, “Fishing vessel Marinochka, fishing vessel Marinochka, this is the MV Sunrise Warrior, campaign vessel for the environmental organization Greenpeace. Please leave this sanctuary immediately. If you leave now, we will leave with you. If you choose to continue your activities, we will use any and all means to prevent you from continuing to fish. We are a nonviolent organization and we will do nothing to put your crews and vessels at risk. I repeat, we are a nonviolent organization, but we will use all peaceful means at our disposal to prevent you from taking any more illegal bycatch.”

They waited for a reply and didn’t get one.

“Vivienne?” Jack Nuyalan said tensely.

“Launch,” Vivienne said, and Jack was out of the bridge before the word was all the way out of Vivienne’s mouth.

“Vivienne?” Ernie said.

“Launch, launch, launch!” Vivienne said, watching the stern of the catcher. Sure enough, water boiled up as the catcher kicked it in gear.

Vivienne couldn’t stand it. She headed for the door.

“Wait a minute, where are you going?” Kevin shouted.

Doyle laughed. Vivienne followed Ernie’s crew to the starboard boat deck where they were scampering down a rope ladder to the inflatable, heaving and tossing on the waves below. Vivienne tumbled in after them and Ernie gunned the engine. He yanked hard on the wheel, jerking the bow around in an eyeballer of a course heading that would have them crossing the catcher-processor’s bow with maybe an inch and a quarter to spare.

The dead whale was half up the chute, but Jack’s crew didn’t let that stop them. As they approached, the Marinochka’s crew opened up with water hoses. Concetta and Evelyn responded by holding up clear Plexiglas riot shields, one on either side of Jack. The force of the water from the hoses caused the shields to waver but Jack held grimly to his course.

“Those riot shields were a good idea!” Ernie shouted.

“Yeah!” Vivienne shouted back, and then they were on the Marinochka and Vivienne lost sight of the other inflatable.

“Oh man oh man oh man,” Evelyn said, eye to the shutter of his camera. Evelyn was British and notoriously hard to impress, but not today. “This is beautiful,” he breathed as the shutter clicked rapidly through a roll of film.

Vivienne knew that Neil was on the bridge wing getting it all on videotape as well. “Hoo-yah!” Concetta, the ex-marine, shouted, and then immediately cursed when the inflatable came into range of the water hoses. Vivienne and Concetta got their shields up but not before the water had knocked Evelyn to his knees, and they were all soaked through.

“Is your camera all right?” Vivienne shouted.

He looked at her, dazed and still on his ass in the bottom of the boat. She hauled him up and grabbed the camera. The shutter didn’t respond when she pressed the button.

“It’s okay!” he shouted. “It’s waterproof!” He tucked it inside his coat and pulled out another. No wonder he looked so lumpy.

Ernie, in an attempt to avoid the water hoses, took the inflatable beneath the bow of the Marinochka with inches to spare, and an unexpectedly large swell raised it nose to nose with one of the men handling the hoses. He gaped at them. Vivienne smiled and extended a hand. “Hey,” she said in her best Joey Tribbiani imitation, “how you doing?”

He stared at the hand, openmouthed, and then the swell dropped them down again, and Ernie hit the throttles, laughing out loud.

Jack’s crew managed to hook his craft on the line that was pulling in the gear and his inflatable was hauled up the slipway right along with the net. They were hit with all four water hoses at once. Even the riot shields were no use, and Jack let go and they slid back into the water.

It went on like that for the next two and a half hours, until it started to get dark. “Let’s pack it in,” Vivienne said, and they returned to the Sunrise Warrior and a hero’s welcome.

A hot shower and dry clothes later, Vivienne was on the phone to Amsterdam. “Well done,” Benjamin Cavo told her.

“Thanks. We got some terrific film. Neil is editing it right now. We’ll upload it and get it out to you pronto.”

“Good. We’ve got an interview set up for you on CNN.”

“CNN? They’re actually paying attention?”

“Looks like.”

“Let’s hope no one takes a shot at the president today.”

“Yeah, that would cut into our airtime,” Ben said.

There was a knock at the door, and at her call Doyle stepped inside. “What’s up?”

Vivienne said goodbye and hung up. “Ben’s pleased.”

“He’ll be even happier when he sees the video.”

Vivienne’s grin was tired but satisfied. “Neil get it all?”

“Oh yeah,” he said with a matching grin. “Miles of it, on the main camera and the backup. He’s already started editing it into spots.”

In spite of his protestations of devotion to the seas east of Iceland, Doyle was loving every minute of this. Since signing on board a tramp steamer as a common seaman when he was seventeen, he had worked his way up to a master mariner’s license and had captained containerships, LNG carriers, and cruise ships over the navigable waters of all the seven seas. He’d been studying for his marine pilot’s license for south-central Alaska when the Exxon Valdez went hard aground on Bligh Reef.

It wasn’t that he’d never seen an oil spill before, he’d told Vivienne. In 1978, his fourteenth year at sea, he’d been a mate on a freighter carrying Seville oranges to Portsmouth when the steering mechanism failed on the Amoco Cadiz in stormy weather and she ran onto the Portsall Rocks. Sixty-eight point seven million gallons of Arabian light and Iranian light crude oil spilled across two hundred miles of coastline, fouling the beaches of seventy-six Breton communities. The sight had sickened him.

By contrast, the Exxon Valdez had spilled a mere eleven million gallons, but it had spread four times as far, across much of what had previously been a pristine marine wildlife habitat. And after thirty years at sea, maybe he’d just had enough of slipshod seamanship, lousy ship management, and an international maritime attitude of “out of sight, out of mind.” He’d left the marine pilot’s program and flown to Amsterdam, where he offered his services to Greenpeace. Now sixty-three, he’d been master on a dozen campaigns, including a protest to disrupt the arrival of construction barges at Prudhoe Bay and prior visits to the fishing grounds on the Bering Sea. He had more sea sense that any other ten sailors Vivienne knew. Grudgingly, Ben Cavo had gone along with her insistence that Doyle be master on this campaign, not without some serious hinting in the way of payback, the form of which could be left to her imagination. Vivienne hinted back a convincing enthusiasm for the idea without being so rash as to make any specific promises, and Doyle had been on the bridge to greet her when she flew out to join the ship in San Diego.

“Food?” Doyle said now.

“Deal,” she said, and followed him to the galley a deck down. Two long tables with matching benches were bolted to the floor at one end of the room. At the other end was a serving line of steam tables with a mini salad bar at the end. Today lunch was kielbasa and sauerkraut. Feet braced against the pitch and roll of the ship, Vivienne loaded her plate. Doyle assembled a salad of massive proportions and followed her to the table.