The Dying Sea
Frank Riley
Copyright © 2012 Frank Riley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 10: 1478128534
ISBN-13 978-1478128533:
For Sophie - as always; and those who fear for the innocents of this world: the animals, in all their forms.
Other books by Frank Riley
Novels
Bell's Lot
The last Dance
The Life of Riley
A tongue-in-cheek autobiography
Travel Stories
The Reluctant Tourist
PROLOGUE
IT was midday on a calm sea; a sea so calm, so very much like an endless stretch of silk, undulating almost sensuously with a smoothness of the surface rarely experienced in these latitudes. This was a pelagic vista that was to give lie to the phrase: 'the savage seas.' There was no more savagery in this vast throbbing, pulsating disc than in the touch of a swan's down on the back of a fair maiden's hand. To a casual observer these balmy waters would hardly suggest anything but a dreamy tranquillity beneath a benevolent sun, now high in the noon sky.
Yet, the very same observer would be aghast, were he or she to be made aware of the slaughter that was to erupt just a sea mile or so beyond the horizon. For this was the Southern Atlantic Ocean and it was the season of the whale hunt; a time when Japanese seamen did the ugly, some might say despicable, bidding of their masters sitting in Shogun comfort in their plush offices back home in Tokyo. These old-time would-be warrior lords whose dreams of unquestioned power were still evident today, not in dress so much, but in their demeanour and in the power they wielded in fiscal matters, rather than military ones.
It was this puerile, ageless Nipponese masculine proclivity - at least of the older generation, to be seen as the epitome, the very model, of what a man was supposed to be, even if he were without the essential wherewithal of the necessary equipment to sustain the illusion - that had drawn Jack Lansing to the determination to bring down these phoney demi-gods, no matter what the cost.
He was here now, about to shatter the ultra-calm surface of the ocean as he rode in the bows of his Zodiac, with a fellow protester at the tiller, racing madcap towards the object of their hatred not so far ahead; indeed just beyond the visible line of the horizon. Their Mother ship, the Ocean Warrior Pelagica, hove into view well astern of the Zodiac, with very much like a human mother's instinctive fretting for its offspring. The Ocean Warrior Organisation was sometimes confused with the likes of Greenpeace and often linked willy-nilly in the newspapers with their activities. Perhaps their aims were somewhat similar, but their methods were a little too robust for their better-known counterparts.
Now, as the Zodiac raced ahead, the first of the enemy, the whaling fleet, came into view as its ugly, threatening, unmistakeable shape rose above the horizon. Another battle, the first of many that would come this season, loomed between those who would willingly slaughter the giants of the deep and those who would die, if need be, to save them.
A helicopter whicka-whickaed overhead, with a news cameraman hanging out of its door, snapping video clips of the two men in the Zodiac. It then thundered away in the direction of the whaling fleet, presumably to get 'reaction shots' to mix in with the News at various prime times tonight in numerous television studios around the globe.
