Page 23 of Clive Cussler Desolation Code (The NUMA Files #21)

Paul, Gamay, and Chantel left the science bay and went forward. Due to the odd way the ship had been retrofitted, there was no internal way to reach the bridge from the science bay. It required a trip outside along the deck and then up a steep ladder to the forward part of the superstructure.

Finishing the climb, they entered the bridge to find everyone staring through the windows at a gray blur stretching across the horizon.

Gamay squinted. It looked like a cloud, but didn’t move like one.

The captain offered her a set of binoculars. “Tell me what you make of that.”

Gamay raised the binoculars and adjusted the focus. Despite the top-grade optics and her own twenty-twenty vision, she couldn’t tell what she was looking at. She fiddled with the fine adjustment, blurring things one way and then the other. She found no way to sharpen the image. “Is it smoke?…It seems to be changing shape. Could it be a dust storm?”

“At sea?”

“We’re not that far from Africa,” she said. “Sandstorms and dust clouds have been known to blow across the Sahara and travel hundreds of miles out to sea. Geologically speaking, you can find Saharan sand all over North America and Europe.”

“Yes,” the captain said. “But in this case the wind is at our back, so unless it came from Australia, it’s not dust.”

Gamay listened without looking away. The cloud seemed to be thinning as she watched. By the time she handed the binoculars to Paul, it seemed to be dissipating and moving farther off. The captain confirmed it had been thicker and closer when it had first been spotted.

A quick look was enough for Paul. He didn’t know what to make of it, either.

Chantel took a turn and then asked, “Does it show up on radar?”

“We got a brief return off the weather radar,” the captain said. “The computer classified it as heavy rain. Doppler indicated it was retreating from us at thirty knots, but the wind speed is steady around eight. And there is very little in the way of clouds.”

“Self-propelled,” Gamay noted. “Has to be a flock of birds.”

“It would need to be a very large flock,” the captain said suspiciously.

A shout from one of the lookouts broke the chain of conversation. “Object in the water,” the lookout announced. “Two hundred yards. Dead ahead.”

“Hard to port,” the captain ordered.

“Additional debris on the port side,” another crewman called out.

“All stop,” the captain ordered.

The Isabella had been traveling at a leisurely pace and slowed rapidly, but it wasn’t fast enough to keep them from overrunning the initial target.

The sharp turn of the rudder allowed them to avoid hitting it head-on, but whatever it was bumped alongside and scraped down the edge of the hull. The impact was muted and soft. It certainly didn’t feel like the type of blow to cause much damage. Another impact on the other side was even softer, though it was followed by a deeper thud as they hit something else head-on.

Traveling on momentum only, they coasted through a section of water filled with obstructions floating just beneath the surface.

Gamay left the bridge, rushing down to the main deck to get a closer look. As she reached the rail, a gray conglomeration of sludge drifted by. It was soft-edged, bulky, and organic in appearance. A similar-looking glob slid in behind it, this one with a skeletonized fin sticking out of it. She recognized the bones stretching forth like fingers in a ghostly, elongated hand.

As the Isabella nudged the mass of organic matter, it rolled over, revealing itself to be the carcass of a whale. Its skin was bulging and distended like the flesh of the shark they’d seen below.

The ship came to a stop beside it, but as Gamay looked ahead she spied other dead whales, along with dead seabirds floating in piles of shredded feathers, upended fish heads, and other things so badly decomposed she couldn’t guess what they once had been.

The lazy swells moved the dead creatures up, down, and around in a macabre dance. The sea between them was a jaundiced yellow color that looked more like pollution or pus than seawater.

Looking around, Gamay counted the remnants of nearly thirty humpback whales, along with dozens of sharks and hundreds of fish and birds that had come to scavenge on the dead animals. It was only a guess, but she imagined the massacre had begun with the whales and then extended to the creatures that came to feed on them, which left them trapped in the same web of death. A web the Isabella had now sailed into the middle of.

—

Gamay returned to the bridge, sobered by what she’d seen. Mass deaths in nature usually meant toxins, poisons, or released clouds of gas. “We need to back away from here,” she said calmly.

“You’ll get no argument from me,” the captain said.

“Do it slowly,” she suggested. “Try not to stir anything up.”

The captain ordered the engines back one-quarter, and after a brief hesitation, as if stuck in the mud, the Isabella began retreating from the aquatic graveyard.

A mile upwind of the site, the captain looked at Gamay. “Far enough?”

“I would think so,” she said.

The captain ordered the helmsmen to stop the retreat and hold their position. “Now what?”

“Now,” Gamay said with some trepidation in her voice, “we get in the water, take some samples, and try to figure out what happened here.”