Their parkas were powder blue. The boat was white. Whynot manned the steering console. To hell with the drone, he thought.
Despite the speck growing closer in the sky, Whynot felt a surge of excitement. Hunting!
The drone — it looked like a big model plane — came closer and began circling as they reached an area of slush, and began powering through, rocking as the hull made contact with more solid area. The drone flew about a hundred feet up. Whynot pushed the throttle forward. The boat surged ahead. The drone fell back but sped up. The boat — now more than a mile out — hit a completely ice-free area and reached more turbulent waters where the Chukchi Sea met the Beaufort. The drone stayed with them, like a prison searchlight tracking an escape.
Whynot moved the steering wheel left to right, left and right, zigzagging to see what the little drone did.
It adjusted.
“I don’t like that thing,” Edward said.
“Do you think it is armed?” asked Aqpayuk.
The seas grew calmer as they left the junction of currents. Glass. Perfect for hunting. The whales, if they were out, could come up at any time. They could be five miles from shore or thirty. The men started to see solid ice bits. Suddenly a message came over channel six, the international channel. They’d passed beyond the area being jammed.
“This is the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Wilmington to the boat which has just left Barrow. Please turn around.”
“Well, it was a good try. Let’s go home,” said Edward.
Walter snorted. Lewis asked, from the prow, “How long can that thing stay in the air anyway?”
“I’ll shoot it,” said Walter, hefting his rifle.
Whynot told him to put the rifle down. Destroying property was not something he wished to do. “It will go away,” he said, although he was starting to doubt this.
The radio started up again. “This is the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Wilmington to the boat which has just left Barrow. You are violating quarantine. You are ordered to turn back. Please acknowledge.”
Whynot mimicked the tone. “‘Please acknowledge.’”
They rode along like this for a while, the drone sometimes dipping, sometimes making a wrong move but adjusting, sometimes disappearing into low mist but reemerging. The ice bits became more numerous. The whole sea was starting to freeze. Edward ducked his head, as if that would make him invisible. Whynot eyed the thing. Walter gave it the finger. Aqpayuk said that back in Barrow, probably lots of people knew they had gone out. They’d be on landline phones. “Hey! Did you hear! Whynot’s crew went out!!!!”
This gave Whynot more resolution. Iñupiat means “the real people” and the people were with him, urging him on.
Edward groaned. “Look! Here comes the helicopter.”
This time the thing in the sky was bigger, red, coming fast, a swiftly moving bubble.
Edward said, “You think there’s a sniper on board?”
Walter scoffed, “What are they going to do, shoot us?”
“I heard those snipers are trained to shoot out engines on boats. I read it in Parade magazine. They clip on a harness, hang out the door. They shoot up drug boats.”
“Drug boats?”
“Yeah, those fast-moving ones — faster than us — that come up from Colombia, heading for Mexico, with cocaine.”
Whynot was outraged. “You’re comparing us to a cocaine boat?”
“I’m just saying the snipers are good.”
Whynot barked, “You’re saying that whaling — our families have been whaling for a thousand years — is like selling cocaine!?”
“You know that’s not what I’m saying,” said Edward as the little drone veered off, made a wide U-turn, summoned back toward its launch point. It passed the incoming chopper. One craft grew smaller, the other larger.
So Whynot increased the zigzagging. His anger was cresting. That these people would barricade his town! That they’d treat citizens like prisoners! That they’d send a sniper to try to stop him from whaling! That they did not even send vaccine to cure people of a disease they claimed was fatal!
“We should give up,” counseled Edward.
Walter and Aqpayuk didn’t say it, but Whynot could see from their bland expressions that they now agreed. And his own more logical side said that perhaps it was time to give up. But his fury grew. He did not want to back down. Perhaps if he pushed this confrontation a bit longer that red helicopter would turn around.
Except it wasn’t turning. It was getting lower, and now, looking up, Whynot saw the door was open and someone was harnessed to the side, one boot on the runner, and the person was positioning a rifle of some sort, aiming at the boat.
“It’s a girl,” Aqpayuk said in wonder.
“A girl!”
Those who would survive today would learn later that the sniper had been trained at the Guard’s facility in Jacksonville, Florida. Her name was Gail Mullen. She was twenty-five years old. She’d proved her marksmanship several times over during Coast Guard drug interdiction patrols off Panama. There, during 2 A.M. chases in the Pacific, against boats moving twice as fast as Whynot’s, she’d brought her .50-caliber rifle to bear on an engine, and, after drug runners ignored warnings, put a round into that engine, made the boats stop, the crews give up. She’d trained to shoot out engines, not to hurt people.
She was a little nervous this time, though, because she knew that the people below were not drug smugglers, but just whalers. These men had not been confined to town because they were evil, but because they might be ill. Gail Mullen hated her job at that moment. The boat below cut right, and left. The figures in baby-blue parkas looking up at her. No drug bales aboard. Just five guys.
Gail heard her pilot over the loud-hailer, urging the whaling crew to change course, using information he’d been supplied with from town. “Captain Whynot Francis, please turn around.”
Below, Whynot grew furious at the mention of his name! The government knew everything about everybody! The use of his name was supposed to make him feel small against their hugeness, make him back down because just by saying his name they were telling him that they knew who his family was, where he lived, they knew his history. He’d learned in college that in some parts of the world, primitive people never reveal their real names to outsiders. They believe that if you know someone’s name, you have power over them.
Whynot saw that this was true. He was an unimportant asterisk to those in that chopper. Those who wanted to stop a four-thousand-year-old hunt.
He told himself to stop, turn around, Edward was right.
He pushed the throttle ahead.
At that moment two things happened. The first was that the copter hit an air pocket and dipped as Gail Mullen pulled the trigger. The second was that Whynot swung the wheel left. In a fraction of a millisecond, the object in the rifle sight stopped being an outboard engine, and became a man.