Ocean's Hammer Read online

  Ocean’s Hammer

  A Quintero and Hoyt Adventure

  D. J. Goodman

  © 2015 Derek Goodman

  1

  True to the weather reports, the sky was nearly cloudless. The temperature was in the high eighties, right in that sweet spot between too cold for their required attire and hot enough to bake their group on the deck of their boat. There was a stiff wind blowing in the odor of brine off the ocean but otherwise the weather was great. What a perfect day for a little piracy, Maria Quintero thought.

  She chided herself for thinking of it in such melodramatic terms. Everything they were planning to do today was legal, at least in the most technical terms. At the very least there wouldn’t be any court that would prosecute them. But piracy was the more exciting term and she embraced it, at least for now.

  Down by the beach, Maria could see the rest of the One Planet volunteers gathering at the dock where they waited for her and Kevin to join them. According to their intel, they only had a limited opportunity to reach their target so they were supposed to be on a tight schedule. It looked like everyone was conforming to that schedule except Kevin himself.

  Maria waved at the others to signal they would be down shortly, then came in off the deck to Kevin’s living room. Kevin Hoyt’s home was modest compared to some of the other homes in this particular stretch of the Baja Peninsula but that didn’t mean it was cheap. Few other marine biologists would be able to afford a home like this, but then few other marine biologists had turned their adventures into world-wide bestselling memoirs.

  “Kevin, honey?” she called as she approached his office. “It looks like everyone else is here. We need to get moving with the supplies if we’re going to be on time.”

  The door of his office was partially closed, which in itself was odd. He was a very open person by nature and in the year that the two of them had been dating, she’d never seen him close any doors against her, not even when he was going to the bathroom. “Kevin?” she asked as she gently knocked on the door.

  “Are you sure?” Kevin asked. Maria was pretty sure that wasn’t intended for her, so she quietly pushed the door open. He was at his desk with a phone cradled between his ear and his shoulder. All three of his computer monitors were on and he was typing furiously, but from this angle Maria couldn’t see the screens. “How many species reported so far?” He turned to the door enough to see Maria and gestured for her to come in but she was obviously the furthest thing from his mind at the moment.

  Maria plopped in an overstuffed chair in the corner of his office and stared at him in confusion. Dr. Kevin Hoyt was in his early fifties, over twice Maria’s age, so the two of them made an extremely strange couple. Maria came from a comfortably middle-class family in San Francisco where she hadn’t wanted for much but had still felt like she owed the world for how lucky she’d been. Kevin, on the other hand, had come from a poor family in the Midwest. He’d never even seen the ocean until he was twenty-nine, which made his meteoric rise to being known as the next Jacques Cousteau all the more startling. Physically, he was an impressive specimen with a body obviously shaped by getting his hands dirty on his many ocean expeditions. His red goatee probably looked scraggly and unkempt to anyone else, although Maria knew he spent lots of time in front of the mirror cultivating that look. His beard was a point of pride with him. Privately, he had admitted to her that was because he hadn’t been able to physically grow one before he was thirty five, back when he’d still be known as Julie, and he’d started to transition from female to male. While Maria had been unsure how comfortable she was at first with having a relationship with a much older transgender man, she had quickly realized that how she felt about him had nothing to do with what he might or might not have between his legs. The age difference was still strange, though.

  “Look, I really can’t,” Kevin said into the phone with a genuine note of regret. “I’m supposed to be heading out shortly anyway and…” He paused. “I get that. Of course I get that. Everything you’re saying makes this seem comparable to the mass beaching in the Bahamas in 2000. But remember that producer guy I was telling you about?”

  Maria made sure to pay close attention to his face as he mentioned the producer. This had been a source of tension for them both for the last week. As much as Kevin’s fame had come to pay for his research and give him free reign over his own projects, he still occasionally had to ask for grants and loans to keep the Cameron afloat. If the producer and his cameraman liked what they saw today and thought it was compelling enough television to turn into a reality show, then he wouldn’t even have to worry about those extra expenses anymore. Or at least that was what Maria kept telling him. She was a lot more comfortable with the idea of a camera following them around than he was.

  “Yep, today,” Kevin said. “No, I don’t think so… an illegal shark fishing ship from Japan… yeah, that’s him. Up to his old shit yet again.”

  There was a much longer pause as whoever was on the other end of the phone spoke excitedly and loudly enough that Maria could almost, yet not quite, make out what he was saying. And it was definitely a he, so that narrowed down the possibilities a little bit. When Maria had first decided to take a break from school to come down here and join Kevin’s grand adventures on a more permanent basis, she’d had trouble keeping track of all his colleagues and contacts. Now she pretty much knew them all, even counted one or two as her friends. Most of the others she found a tad insufferable. She’d felt the same way about Kevin at first until she had gotten to know him. Still, it was difficult for her socially here when most of the other people she had contact with were not even close to the same age. It was even worse sometimes considering how many of his friends she suspected thought she was sharing Kevin’s bed just to get a touch of his fame.

  “Well look, this shouldn’t take more than a day. Ito knows he’s not supposed to be there. It won’t take much to get him out of the MPA. Tomorrow I can have some of the OP volunteers going up and down the shorelines with a couple of Zodiacs and I’ll personally supervise the removal of any heads we find.”

  Maria smiled. There would have been a time not too long ago where that phrase would have startled her and made her question what kind of psychopath she was in a relationship with. Now she understood that he was referring to the heads of beached whales and dolphins. If there was a large number beaching themselves then one of Kevin’s fellow marine biologists would need them for autopsies.

  “Yeah, sure, I’ll keep an eye out but we’re not going to be that close to the shore for most of the day… All right. I’ll have the radio on the Cameron if you truly find something you think I need to know… Yeah. You too.”

  He ended the call before finally acknowledging Maria. “Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Sounded important. Mass beaching?”

  “Uh-huh. One or two on the other side of the Sea of Cortez, but mostly here on the Baja side. Multi-species. So far Laguna’s confirmed a couple species of dolphins and at least three of whales. Most are pygmy beaked whales, one of which apparently came up on shore right in front of a bunch of tourists in La Paz. None of them knew enough to try to get it back into the water so they just took pictures of it as it died.”

  Maria was finally at the point in their relationship where she thought she could detect dueling emotions in his voice. On the one hand, he would be upset about the casual disregard for the whale’s life. On the other hand, there was the scientist side of him. That was the one that would be excited about so much documentation of such a fresh specimen, especially since the local pygmy beaked whales were such an under-studied population.

  “There was even a minke whale, but thankfully that one wasn’t anywhere near a population center.”

 
Maria racked her brain. She was getting there when it came to her own studies in marine biology, but she still had a long way to go before she had Kevin’s encyclopedic knowledge. Minke whales weren’t as common in this area as some of the other species she’d been studying with him. “Why thankfully?”

  “Too big. Trying to move it would be too hard without a full team, and it’s going to stink to high heaven after it sits for too long.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this not the right time of year for some of those species to even be here?”

  “It is unusual, yeah.” He frowned and stared at what he had been typing on his screen. “Very unusual. Some of them should have migrated north by now. There’s no logical reason for them to have stayed.” He turned around and looked at a map of the Baja Peninsula and its surrounding waters that he kept tacked to a cork board on his wall. As he stood up from his chair, he took a few pins from a jar near his computer and poked them in, presumably marking the locations of the known beachings. With the exception of the one in La Paz, all of them were north of their current location.

  “Is there any idea what caused this yet? Like…” She paused and thought back to some of the reading she had been doing right here in the office. “Like what you were saying about what happened in 2000 in the Bahamas? That Navy sonar thing?”

  Kevin stared thoughtfully at the map. US Navy sound experiments in the ocean, used to search for enemy submarines, had been responsible for one of the worst marine mammal beachings in known history. The acoustics played havoc with whales’ natural navigation systems, damaging their ability to sense depth and leaving them unable to tell they were going straight for land. After a moment, though, Kevin shook his head.

  “That was one of the first things I asked. But that wouldn’t make sense. The US Navy doesn’t have jurisdiction in these waters, so unless someone else is trying out the same thing then that can’t be it.” However, he didn’t look terribly convinced by his own argument. Turning back to the map, he ran his fingers over a rough black circle he had drawn in the Sea of Cortez not far from their current location.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Maria said.

  “Do you?” He turned back to her and raised an eyebrow.

  “You’re thinking that whatever caused the beaching is somehow related to whatever the hell’s going on at El Bajo.”

  He nodded but said, “I don’t see how it could be. The two events don’t seem to have any relation. Just because two unexplained marine events happen in the same region shouldn’t mean anything.” Yet as he placed more pins in the board Maria couldn’t help but notice that, in that whole long sliver of sea, none of the pins were south of that circle.

  As fascinating as Maria honestly thought this was, she had to remind herself that they were on a time table. “You can keep working on that later,” she said as she stood up. “If you’ve still got the energy for it then.”

  He put down the rest of his pins and went over to her for a flirty embrace. “Well I certainly intend to enough energy for more than just that.”

  She gave him a quick peck on the lips before backing away. “Down boy. I don’t care how virile you still are. This is going to be exhausting. It’s not every day we get to be pirates.”

  He frowned in such a way that still somehow managed to be cheerful. “I wish you would stop calling it that. It gives people the wrong idea.”

  “It’s not that wrong of an idea. They’re similar.”

  He made a comical show out of his long-suffering sigh. “Just whatever you do, don’t say that in front of the big-shot TV producer.”

  2

  “Yeah, we’re basically gonna be pirates,” one of the volunteers said directly into the camera. Maria hung back at the beginning of the dock, desperately trying not to laugh as Kevin briskly walked down the dock to stop him before he said anything else. The volunteer in question, a very new addition to the One Planet organization named Kirk Murphy, stood in front of the camera in what was very obviously a rehearsed pose. He was the kind of spiky blond-haired, chiseled physique college boy that just naturally assumed everyone wanted to see his smiling mug all over the TV screen. It hadn’t escaped Maria that he just so happened to volunteer for the One Planet Sea Brigade right around the same time the internet had started buzzing about a reality show following the famous Kevin Hoyt and his intrepid crew on the Cameron.

  “Doug, hi. Glad you could make it,” Kevin said, holding his hand out to the short man standing next to the cameraman. Despite his attempts to block Murphy from view, the kid still managed to stay in the middle of the shot.

  “Dr. Hoyt, I’m so happy we could finally meet in person,” Doug Vandergraf said. While hardly a household name, Maria had been familiar with his work well before he had contacted Kevin about today. He’d produced a number of reality shows on the higher cable channels that, while trashy, Maria still had to admit were somewhat entertaining when there was nothing else to watch. Today was merely intended to be a test of sorts. Maria’s understanding was that any interviews or footage Vandergraf got today would be used to create some kind of pitch reel, although she forgot which channel exactly was interested. She wanted to be excited about this, but Kevin was still very much on the fence about the idea. As the star he would have the final say, but at least he was willing to explore the idea.

  While this was going on, four other volunteers busied themselves prepping the Cameron for departure. The Cameron was a heavily modified trimaran superyacht that had begun its life intended for millionaires with way too much time on their hands. Now the deck near the back, previously outfitted with a bar, was instead covered in a complex system of pulleys and winches for a robotic submersible. Below decks the various amenities had been replaced with labs and specimen preservation tanks and freezers. The overall result was cramped but state of the art, the sort of thing Kevin had never been able to afford early in his career. Although she’d felt claustrophobic on it at first, Maria now considered it her home even more so than Kevin’s house. If she hadn’t been fully dedicated to marine biology before she’d joined him then the Cameron had cemented her passion with many nights of beautiful sunsets out on the seas.

  Maria knew most of the volunteers well enough. She herself had started out as one, after all. One Planet as an organization was small but respected and Maria had wanted it on her resume. She’d come to spend a couple months studying the impact of overfishing in the Sea of Cortez and stayed when her relationship with Kevin had gone from cordial to flirty to something a lot more intimate. She was on the payroll now officially as volunteer coordinator, even if her actual duties were varied and eclectic. Paulo Gutierrez, the pilot, was the only other paid person on the Cameron. Two of the volunteers, Simon and Cindy Gutsdorf, did most of the other boat-related tasks while Monica Boleau assisted in a more science related capacity. The remaining volunteer, Diane Mercer, was helping load equipment and supplies despite her small frame struggling with the weight. Of all the volunteers, she was the one Maria knew the least about. She had joined on with Murphy and, while apparently excited about various ecological issues, didn’t appear to know much about what she was doing when it came to boats or biology. Honestly, Maria suspected Murphy had only brought her down with him as a bed warmer. Yet another reason why she was hardly Murphy’s biggest fan, but he supposedly came from a wealthy family and, even with all of Kevin’s fame, there were still those times when their research needed extra funding. They couldn’t afford to turn him away.

  While this was going on, Vandergraf and his cameraman conferred with each other. Maria walked up to Kevin and took his hand.

  “You look nervous,” she said as she picked off a piece of lint from his plain gray t-shirt. She’d met a number of other marine biologists with a penchant for aloha shirts yet Kevin would never wear anything that colorful, even knowing full well what would be going on today.

  “I hate being on camera,” he said. “Remind me again why we’re doing this.”

 
“Just keep reminding yourself that this is all about raising awareness.”

  “Seems to me I’ve raised plenty of awareness from behind a word processor.”

  “Don’t be such a grumpy old man. You’ve got the name recognition, but if the network picks this up you’ll reach a whole new audience.”

  He made a mock expression of indignation. “Why Maria Quintero, I am positively offended. You certainly weren’t saying I was old yesterday when we…”

  “Oh please for the love of God don’t finish that statement.”

  “Why? Suddenly deciding to become a prude with a camera so close by?”

  “No, it’s clichéd. Come up with something more original in the future if you ever want me in your bed again.”

  “Har har,” he said. Maria saw that the conversation had loosened him up and smiled. She gave him a playful pat on the butt before going to look at the supplies one last time and make sure they had everything. As she did, Vandergraf and the cameraman approached Kevin.

  “Why don’t we just do a brief introductory clip to explain what we’re doing today?” Vandergraf said.

  “Sure. Where do you want to start?”

  “Well, you don’t really need to introduce yourself, I think. Maybe you should start with why you’re here? Why the Baja Peninsula and the Sea of Cortez, out of all the places in the world where you could make your home base?”

  “Why not? It’s beautiful. And even more important to me, it’s rich with biodiversity in a relatively small area. Whales especially…” Maria heard him pause. She looked up from her clipboard, wondering if he would mention the mysterious beaching. Instead, he continued on script. “Many species come down here during mating season. You can stand on the shore and without even going under the water see the unimaginable bounty of… uh, sorry. I’m probably getting a little carried away.”

  “Carry away all you want. It makes good television.”