Note: I updated this chapter on the 26-Feb – just slight edits - no major plot changes. If you've already read it there is no need to do so again.
Chapter 5
The following day, Gordon landed at Brisbane Airport. A quick check of the TV news headlines in the airport lounge gave him all the information he needed. He hired a car and started the long drive north to Hervey Bay. Somewhere off its coastline marine biologists, accompanied by the media and various sightseers and animal lovers, were searching for Migaloo4.
He arrived mid-afternoon only to find every hotel, motel, and camping ground booked out, the streets of the popular tourist town choked with cars and media vans.
He gave up looking for a room, and went to the docks to hire a boat. Unfortunately, everything from luxury yacht to one-man canoe had been hired, and most were already out at sea.
He spent an hour asking the few remaining boats if they'd be willing to take on an extra passenger but none could. Just as he was getting desperate, a local, sitting on a bench watching all the goings-on, called him over and gave him a name. Someone called Danno who had a trawler called Chuckles was a crewman short.
Gordon wandered the docks asking after the Chuckles, which made some of the other skippers chuckle knowingly. Gordon didn't ask why. Soon he found her on his own.
Danno was a man of great height, and almost matching breadth, with a red sparse beard and a jolly, if slightly fake, laugh.
Danno looked Gordon up and down and announced that he was a fit sort, especially for an American. His regular deckhand was sick after a heavy night of drinking and he needed a fill-in crew member.
'You'll do,' Danno said, adding, 'no charge.'
Gordon was unsure that getting a free ride was a good thing. He might have more say where they'd go if he paid. But Danno was adamant that he'd take no money.
'When do we leave,' Gordon asked, looking over the ramshackle trawler.
'Now,' Danno said with a laugh.
Gordon lay on some coiled ropes in the back of the trawler, looking up at the stars. He held a three-quarter empty bottle of Johnny Walker Scotch in his hand. He took a swig, even as the still working part of his rational brain told him that getting drunk at sea was not a good idea and he would regret it in the morning.
Inga, the female part of a Swedish couple Danno had let pay him to come onboard, stumbled over to him and reached for the bottle. She smiled flirtatiously at him, which he didn't mind at all because she was as pretty and as scantily clad as Swedish tourists always seemed to be. Her boyfriend, whose name Gordon hadn't quite caught, was talking to Danno and his deckhand Carl in stumbling English. Carl hadn't lifted a finger since they'd left port. He was related to Danno somehow and now Gordon understood why Danno needed a second deckhand – to do the actual work.
The boyfriend turned and smiled at Gordon as Inga waved the bottle around to show everyone she had retrieved it. Gordon couldn't decide which of the couple flirted with him more, and their strange triangular relationship sent his mind back to the conversation he'd had with Paul only yesterday.
What had Paul meant when he'd said Gordon was cutting in on his girl?
Inga carried the bottle off to share with the other men. Gordon smiled at no-one in particular and lay back. The night was clear but slightly chilled.
In less than a minute he was asleep.
He groaned as he sat up. The sun had been up for a couple of hours. The alcohol-fueled headache hurt his head only slightly more than the bruises the coiled ropes had imprinted on his back.
He staggered to the cabin where Danno was steering while searching the horizon.
'How ya feeling?' he laughed as he passed Gordon a bottle of water. The water tasted of rust, but Gordon knew that was more to do with the state of his ashy mouth than the quality of the water.
The radio chatter from other boats suggested that the whale was somewhere south-east, but Danno doubted it.
'There's a little island south of here that whales sometimes hang around to hide from the tourists,' he said.
Gordon felt deflated. It was dawning on him that he'd been stupid to think that he would find Migaloo4 personally, as if the Universe owed him that much. He couldn't quite say what he would do if he found the whale, other than radio the authorities to send out a marine biologist. A sudden image of him diving into the sea with a needle and thread clamped between his lips, ready to sew up the whale's wounds, made him blush.
They spent the next few hours heading for the island. Although he felt awful, Gordon busied himself in helping Danno keep the boat moving. Carl was in his bunk sleeping off his hangover, while Inga and her boyfriend lazed on deck getting a tan.
Just before midday, Lady Luck smiled on them. Danno spotted whales and swung the boat toward them.
Gordon dashed to the bow with the binoculars.
'Yeah, it's whales alright,' he shouted out, watching whale backs breaking the waterline – and then a white tail!
'Migaloo!' Gordon shouted out and actually jumped up and down like an excited kid. Inga and her boyfriend cheered.
'We'll get closer and then I'll get on the radio to call it in,' Danno said. 'We'll tell the media – they'll get out here faster than the authorities.'
Gordon nodded, suddenly serious. That was all they could do.
As they got closer they saw there were two other whales with Migaloo4.
Gordon heard Danno trying to raise someone on the radio while he looked through the binoculars trying to see the white whale's injuries. Danno's voice grew more and more frustrated.
'Er, I think the radio is broke,' Danno said sheepishly as Gordon came into the cabin to see what was up. 'We can receive but we can't send.'
What Lady Luck gives with one hand, the Universe takes away with the other, Gordon thought.
It was mid-afternoon. Danno was still tracking the whales, anxiously watching the sky for planes and helicopters. He was worried that a good-for-nothing journalist would spot the whales and thereby steal his thunder, not to mention the fame and any money he could make from interviews about how he found the whale first.
Gordon had the radio in bits on the cabin floor. It was easily fixed except that there were no spare parts onboard and the radio was so old that some of the corroded wires had broken apart as soon as he'd touched them.
'It worked the last time I used it,' Danno muttered.
Gordon didn't bother asking when that had actually been. He picked up a screwdriver to make one last attempt.
The trawler came to a sudden unnatural stop, throwing Gordon into the bulkhead.
'What the hell!' Danno cursed. Gordon picked himself up, blinking.
The boat groaned and rattled as if it was falling to bits. Danno shut off the engines and silence fell.
'Er,' said Danno. 'We hit something.'
Gordon immediately thought of Migaloo4. This was not going to work for him – hitting the whale twice!
Carl appeared rubbing his arm which he'd hurt when he was tossed from his bunk. Inga and her boyfriend yelled from where they had picked themselves up from the deck.
The three men looked out of the cabin window at the bow.
It was buckled in places, the wood splintered badly.
'Er…we're taking on water,' said Danno, stating the obvious since all of them could see Inga and her boyfriend frantically pointing at the water that was spilling across the deck.
Gordon knew enough about the hazards of the sea to guess what they'd hit, and it wasn't a whale.
It had taken twenty minutes for the boat to sink after it had hit the submerged rocks.
This gave Carl enough time to gather water, flares and the two life-vests while Gordon and Danno studied the out-of-date map. Since the sea doesn't change much from one decade to the next, Gordon was pretty sure the map was still accurate.
The closest landmass was a tiny islet that lay nearly half a nautical mile to the west. The Australian coastline lay a further two nautical miles beyond that.
On the map the islet looked tiny but Gordon pushed that worry to the back of his mind.
He insisted that Inga and her boyfriend be given the life-vests. Gordon was a great swimmer and Danno clearly was too big for a vest to fit. Carl could fend for himself as far as Gordon was concerned.
As they swam in the general direction of the islet, Danno worried about sharks until he got tired and then he concentrated on just breathing in and out. The floating Swedes were used by the others as resting points. Gordon used the compass built into his watch to keep them on track, but it was hard to read in the bright glare and the salty water made his vision blur.
At last he saw waves breaking mid-sea. Silently thanking the Powers That Be that the current was working with them, Gordon pulled Inga along towards it telling her to kick. Danno clung to her boyfriend and kicked like a mule in a last effort to get to safety.
About thirty minutes after they'd abandoned ship, they climbed onto the rocky beach of the islet.
After taking a few minutes to recover, Gordon stood up and realised that the islet was nothing but a rocky beach. At about seventy metres long and twelve metres wide it offered nothing but an uncomfortable place to sit.
Gordon turned to the others. Danno was still gasping for breath like a beached whale. The Swedes were hugging each other but quiet. The deckhand was sitting with his head in his hands coughing up water. Either that or he was sobbing, Gordon couldn't tell.
'We're in real trouble,' Danno said when Gordon leaned over him to check how he was. 'Carl dropped the flares and the water I told him to bring.'
Gordon nodded and turned and looked out over the water to the west. He thought he could see the coastline as he squinted into the low sun but it might just have been an optical illusion. He was too exhausted and dehydrated too even think about attempting to swim it.
Gordon played with a button on his wristwatch.
'Do you think this islet goes under with the high tide, Danno?'
'Dunno. Probably…maybe…just a foot or so.'
Gordon grimaced. Even if high tide didn't put some of it under water during the night, all that was needed was a brisk wind to push waves over the low lying islet to endanger them. That's if dehydration didn't get them first.
Gordon checked how much water they had. The Swedes had stuck one bottle each into their life-vests. Gordon hadn't carried anything given that he was pulling the others along and using the compass. Two bottles wouldn't do the four of them much good for long. He could've drunk both of them right then and still been thirsty.
He had no choice.
'How's Carl?' he asked Danno. Danno shifted over to Carl and patted him on the head in an attempt to calm him. With the skipper distracted, Gordon turned his back on the group and picked his way through the rocks to stand a little distance off. He heard someone start sobbing and he didn't want to look in case it was someone other than Inga.
He pressed the button to contact Thunderbird 5.
'Gordon to Thunderbird 5. Come in Thunderbird 5.'
'Thunderbird 5 receiving. Hey, Gordon, what's up? Where are you calling from? My monitor puts you off the coastline of…'
'Shutup, John, and listen,' he whispered.
He could barely make out John's face in the watchcom because of the slanting sunlight.
'Why are you whispering? I can hardly hear…'
'Shutup!' Gordon said louder than he'd wanted. The sobbing behind him had stopped. He looked around at the others. Danno and Inga were watching him.
Danno turned to look at the top of Carl's head.
'Yeah,' Danno said, 'crying won't help us, mate.' Danno then started talking to the others in reassuring tones.
Relieved that the others thought he was telling Carl to shutup, Gordon turned and looked back down into his watch.
'John, listen. Don't interrupt. I'm currently sitting on a lump of rock with four other people. We can't swim anywhere and it may end up under water by nightfall. I want you to contact the Australian coast guard and tell them where we are so they can pick us up…'
'But they'll know that one of you is with International Rescue…' John protested.
Gordon grit his teeth.
'Listen to me, John. Just do as I say. Tell them you picked up our radio calls or something. Make something up - be imaginative!'
'I'll contact Dad…'
'Don't you dare! Just call the coast guard. They're closer.'
'Well, I can't not tell Dad.
'Yes, you can.'
'I don't think you understand the position you…'
'Yes, I do, but I can't call the coast guard myself, otherwise I would. And there's no point in sending a 'bird all this way when all I need is a helicopter, and hell, there are hundreds of them flying around looking for this damn whale…all I need is someone to tell one of them to divert this way. And that someone…the only someone right now…is you. So don't think, just do…'
'But…'
'John, stop being such an old woman!' Gordon hissed.
'Right,' said John decisively. 'I have your coordinates…'
Gordon snapped off the comlink. He didn't want to have a three hour conversation over something this simple.