Carol’s marriage, on the other hand, seemed like the least natural thing in the world. The eventual divorce left her deflated and without much professional motivation for the first time in her career.
Eventually, she left her comfortable technician ship in California and went back to the intellectual womb of academe, this time for a doctorate at the University of Hawaii. Her work with humpback whales off the coast of Maui a database of the complexities of whale vocalizations that she hoped to translate into a system of whale-to-human communication was described as revolutionary and had earned her international recognition. For a brief time, it seemed as though everything in the Harmon family had found a balanced keel.
Now, more than a decade after leaving Stanford, Carol Harmon had tracked whales through every ocean and off the shores of every continent. She was doing an environmental-impact assessment in Prince William Sound, Alaska, when she met her second husband. Bob Nolan.
Nolan was an environmental lawyer by training, with remarkable drive and business acumen that had helped him to develop a multimillion-dollar consortium of consulting agencies collectively known as the Nolan Group. Nolan was motivated by banner headlines, not quality which generally used up more resources and held a lower profit margin and he showed no remorse for that pursuit. In hindsight, Carol realized that she had known these things from the first time she met Nolan, but something had made her overlook them. Perhaps, as she foolishly blamed herself for the world’s deficiencies, she had been unable to face “abandoning” another marriage. She chose instead to let her research consume her.
Then, like some divine punishment for ignoring her family and her personal life, Carol had lost both her stepbrother and her husband within a matter of weeks. It was tragically ironic that Mark had died as a result of exposure to a highly toxic marine organism discovered less than a mile from their father’s retirement home. Soon after, her husband. Bob, had been killed by the same menace. Charles Harmon had never liked either of his daughter’s husbands, so his attitude toward Bob’s death was unsurprising, but he had remained so clinical and dispassionate following her stepbrother’s death that he might as well have been mourning a complete stranger. That had been not quite three years ago, and Carol still found it difficult to resolve the resentment she held toward her father.
Following Bob’s death, the Nolan Group’s board of directors had voted, surprisingly and unanimously, to install Carol as their CEO. In hindsight, she realized that their strategy had probably been to let her inexperience drive the company into a nosedive, from which it would be easier to auction off its various constituents. But Carol proved them wrong. She had managed to retain most of the contracts and investors who had doubted the Group’s ability to function without Bob Nolan. In the current fiscal year she had even been able to generate an increase in the company’s earnings per share. Even so, she rarely made it to her well-appointed office at the Group’s headquarters in Seattle, preferring to delegate operational matters to her cadre of buttoned-down vice presidents and financial advisors. She kept herself abreast of the Group’s activities, offered opinions, and provided signatures when required, but remained heavily involved in her fieldwork for most of the year.
The Phoenix’s principal assigned task was to track and monitor the belugas, bow heads orcas, narwhals, and gray whales of the Canadian Arctic. The team would also use Carol’s vocalization program to determine what effect shipping traffic had on the larger animals.
Underwater, the noise from a single oil tanker’s engines could travel fifty miles on either side of the cruise track to say nothing of the noise generated by the fracturing ice itself. The combined effect of this disturbance was believed to be disruptive to whale migration, breeding, and communication, a speculation that the Nolan Group had now been contracted to quantify.
Though Balaenoptera had been added to the endangered species list and were protected by international treaties, their numbers continued to dwindle under the influence of poaching and black-market whaling. What commercial fishing hadn’t culled, global development did. Around the world, marine mammals were washing up on beaches in unprecedented numbers, killed by viruses, distemper, or a dozen other inexplicable causes. The tissues of beluga and other arctic whales routinely showed cancerous tumors, ulcers in the digestive tract, respiratory infections, and alarmingly high levels of mercury and PCBS. Then there was noise pollution. Before the onset of the industrial age, Balaenoptera could send their vocalizations across entire oceans. Now the cacophony of thousands of ships was slowly diminishing their watery playground.
And if not whalers, if not pathogens or noise, the ubiquitous but wholly natural threat of ice could still kill them.
Carol pressed the needle into the whale’s thick hide once more. Twice her disposable needles had been bent closed by the thick, muscular flesh at the base of the tail, where the animal’s blood vessels were closest to the surface. The third time the penetration was clean, and as she drew back the plunger of the syringe, the chamber filled with dark red blood. Carol carefully twisted the sample from the base of the needle, labeled it, and placed it on ice in a small box containing a dozen others. Though blood sampling was technically outside the team’s investigation, the serum would provide an insight into the animal’s health. She could think of two or three other researchers who would give anything for a sample of “blue blood.”
“Easy,” she murmured to the whale, patting its skin as she filled another syringe, then withdrew the needle.
“All done, girl… or boy.”
Carol heard snow crunching behind her and turned to see a figure in a bright orange parka suit approaching her. Jeff Dexter, her senior technician, flashed her a broad smile from behind his thick, frost tinged beard.
“What’s this I hear?” he asked. “The infamous Dr. Harmon can’t even sex a whale?”
“Not without a better look,” she said.
“I guess if all we can see are the blowhole and the dorsal fin, we’re a little like the blind men in a herd of elephants,” Dexter said. He kneeled down beside her, brushed back her hair, and gave her a warm kiss.
“I’ve heard of elephants too,” she said, playing into the old comedy routine.
“No, no, an elephant herd,” Dexter said. The warmth of his breath against her face was soothing and arousing all at once.
“What do I care what an elephant heard?” Carol whispered. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Then why are we whispering?”
“Because I think this is the single most exciting discovery of my life,” she said. Dexter could admit the same thing, and their shared excitement left both of them yearning for a more private location in which to celebrate. But for now, duty called.
“I’ve got Ramsey propping some scuba tanks and dry suits.” A mischievous twinkle lit his eyes. “We’re going swimming.”
“You’re serious?”
“You bet,” Dexter grinned again. “We’re going to drill another ice hole between this whale and the next one over and do a dive around two of them, at least.”