Big Miracle Read Free

shadowy forms on the crew hovering ominously above it? Malik did not know. All he could do was prepare his harpoon. But for the puttering idle of the Johnson outboard, the crew was silent, consumed by their anticipation of the instant when the silence and stillness would be shattered.
    Anxiety mounted as the whale submerged longer and deeper than at any point since it was first spotted. Before its last dive, Malik and his crew were close enough to actually see that the whale’s blowholes did not open wide enough to signal a longer or deeper dive, yet longer and deeper it was. But it couldn’t go on. The whale would have to surface. And when it did, Malik would be sure to be ready.
    He grasped the harpoon firmly in his left hand, undulating comfortably to the rhythms of the churning sea. No one needed to be told where to look for the whale to next emerge. These were whalers, born of and for this moment. Nor did Roy, the rudderman, need to be told where or how to shuttle his craft into Malik’s desired position. The two men did not need to communicate. They worked as integral parts of a whole.
    At that instant the whale’s shimmering black skin effortlessly glided upward through the surface of the roiling waters of Chukchi Sea at the precise point where every eye on Malik’s crew was trained. Malik cocked his arms behind his round, thinly thatched head. His triceps tightened as he raised his hollow graphite harpoon. He knew the whale was at its most vulnerable immediately before starting its exhale. Harpoon in hand, a strong impulse ran through Malik’s wiry frame lunging him forward toward his target. Carefully but forcefully shifting his weight from his back foot forward, Malik’s throwing mechanics generated enough linear momentum to pull his shoulders around to create the rotational momentum needed to properly launch the harpoon. The force of such an explosion would have tossed nearly anyone else into the swirling waters below. But Malik emerged from his harpoon release as firmly planted in the bow of his boat as any baseball pitcher’s feet would be at the base of the mound.
    The razor-sharp tip pierced the lustrous black skin of the graceful giant. A primer charge planted at the end of the harpoon detonated as it lodged inside the whale. Recoiling from the shock of a bomb literally exploding inside it, the whale roared in confusion and terror as it plunged below the waterline in a hopeless attempt to escape its fate. The next blast came seconds later. This bomb, on a five-second fuse, detonated even deeper inside the whale and tore apart its pulmonary cavity.
    Roy waited patiently for the sound of that second blast, which was his signal to raise his forty-pound brass shoulder gun to land still more exploding shells at or near the whale’s head, a target so huge he could hardly miss. The whale surfaced, exhaling a geyser of blood, at which point Roy jerked the trigger of the lumbering weapon back toward him. The charge misfired. Instead of detonating only after it had lodged inside the whale, it instead exploded on contact. Chunks of charred blubber spewed in all directions. The whale fell back into the sea, leaving a storm of crimson hail in its wake.
    Roy reloaded and fired twice more. The whale violently writhed in a frantic but powerful attempt to unshackle the inflated sealskin floats tied to the harpoon securely lodged inside it. The whale spun circles as the red water foamed in its wake.
    After Roy scored his third shot securely in the whale’s arched back, Malik motioned the helmsman to steer him still closer to the crippled and disoriented whale. As wounded as it was, the whale was still capable of escaping the crew, if not its fate, by plunging deep beneath the surface. If Malik could hit the whale with another wire-guided harpoon, the harpoon’s floats might slow down the whale just enough to kill it. Malik readied and fired again. The sudden bloat of the whale’s