Blood in the Water Read online

  To my mother, who is probably part fish.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  01: FLYING FISH

  02: DOLPHINS, SAILORS, AND SEALS

  03: TRAINING DAY

  04: IN THE WATER

  05: THE MISSION

  06: GO FISH

  07: NIGHT FISHING

  08: SHIPS PASSING

  09: AFTERMATH

  10: WILD DOLPHINS

  11: DON’T GET CAPTURED

  12: OCEAN COWBOYS

  13: ONE OF US

  14: DIVE-BOMBER

  15: THE MOUNTAIN BENEATH THE WAVES

  16: A SCHOOL VISIT

  17: THE INDIFFERENT OCEAN

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  TEASER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY C. ALEXANDER LONDON

  COPYRIGHT

  THE surfers called it dawn patrol, and it was Cory’s favorite time to surf with his little brother. The ocean sparkled gold in the first light of morning. The city behind the beach was just waking up, and the water was smooth as glass out beyond the breakers. The surf wasn’t crowded like it would be a few hours from now.

  Cory sat astride his surfboard, dangling his feet in the water, while Aaron lay on his back, an arm draped over his eyes. They bobbed gently as the swells off the Pacific rushed toward shore. Cory watched the sunrise. Aaron was twelve and had no interest in sunrises. If he wasn’t riding a wave or looking for the next one, he wanted to be sleeping.

  Cory thought of his younger brother like some kind of surfing sea creature. All Aaron did was sleep and eat and surf and sleep some more.

  Cory was envious. He hadn’t been sleeping well at all lately. He had a full week off at home, but he wasn’t finding it restful. He wasn’t even supposed to be home right now, surfing with his little brother. The United States Navy had sent him home after the most humiliating day of his life: the day he quit training to become a part of the navy’s Sea, Air, and Land teams, better known as the Navy SEALs. They were the toughest, most elite special forces operators in the world, and their training was the most difficult military training anyone had ever created.

  He’d failed it.

  Cory had made it through a month of the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, a series of grueling physical and mental tests. BUD/S trainees barely sleep, barely eat, and hardly ever get to clean themselves. They spend most of their time cold and wet and in pain.

  He had been doing fine being miserable until the fourth week of training, the week they called Hell Week. That was when Cory reached his breaking point.

  After twenty-hour days of being shouted at by instructors, running countless wet and sandy miles, and never sleeping more than four hours in a row, he knew he couldn’t handle another week of the training, let alone another five months. And he’d been told that after the training, the life of a Navy SEAL was even harder. Could he really commit to spending his entire career feeling this horrible all the time?

  At the end of Hell Week, he took his helmet liner to the little green sign with the bell next to it, set it down, and rang the bell three times. That was the signal that he had quit.

  No one was looking at him when he did it, but he felt like all the eyes of everyone he’d ever known were on him, judging him, seeing that he was a failure. Cory wasn’t the first to drop out and he knew he wouldn’t be the last — eighty out of every hundred guys in BUD/S training drop out before it’s over — but knowing that did nothing to lessen his shame.

  He went home for a few days to recover, to collect himself and tell his friends and family he would not be a Navy SEAL.

  He didn’t know yet where the navy would assign him next, but he was pretty sure it would be a job that no one else wanted. He would receive his new assignment any day now. He wasn’t so sure he would accept it. He thought about quitting the navy altogether.

  “You ready to go in and get some breakfast?” Cory asked Aaron as they floated on the ocean.

  His little brother didn’t even turn his head. “You tired already, old man?”

  Cory wasn’t tired, he just didn’t feel like having fun. It was too much work to enjoy himself when all he wanted to do was wallow in self-pity.

  He made up an excuse. “I’m sick of choppy swells,” he said. “There are nothing but bad breaks this morning.”

  Aaron sat up, paddled himself right next to his brother, and looked at him gravely. “There are no bad waves, Cory,” Aaron told him. “Just bad surfers.”

  Cory sighed, then leaned over and shoved his younger brother right off his board.

  “Bwah!” Aaron laughed, falling with a splash, and surfaced right beside Cory again. He shook his mess of blond curls out like a wet dog. Cory rubbed his own crew cut.

  Aaron may still have had his hair, and he may have been twice the surfer that Cory was, but Cory’s brief time in SEAL training had given him one advantage: He’d only been home a few days and his muscles were still ripped. What good was having a little brother if you couldn’t show him who was boss from time to time?

  He shoved Aaron under with one arm, counting to five before letting him go.

  Aaron popped up, gasping. He looked up at Cory. “If the navy deploys you to the other side of the world, I’m totally taking your room.”

  Cory moved to shove him under again. Aaron flinched. Cory smiled and helped Aaron back onto his board. He didn’t mention that he probably wasn’t going anywhere, that he was probably quitting the navy.

  “You know,” Aaron said, looking away from his brother, like he did whenever he said anything important to him. “Most guys wouldn’t survive a day in SEAL training.”

  Cory didn’t know what to say to that. He just shrugged. Then he actually felt himself tearing up with regret.

  One day or four weeks. There was no difference if you quit before you finished. You weren’t good enough to be a Navy SEAL.

  Without another word about it, Aaron flipped around on his board and paddled into the surf. He called back over his shoulder: “Try to keep up, sailor!”

  Cory was grateful. He didn’t want to cry in front of his little brother.

  He lay down on his board and swam after Aaron. With a few sweeping strokes, he was paddling alongside.

  A big swell rose behind them and Cory felt that rush as it pushed them forward, raising the tail of their boards, speeding them up. Aaron glanced over his shoulder at Cory, gave him a nod, and together, like there was a string connecting them, they popped up to their feet, driving the back of their boards down into the wave as it crested, and cruising along its face.

  Cory was just behind Aaron. He felt the beautiful pressure of the wave, the air across his shaved head, the splash of the salt water against his face. He watched the muscles on Aaron’s back to see when his brother was going to turn up into the wave, to cut back, to drop to the bottom of the trough and zip up it again, to jump and grab the board in the air.

  Cory tried to keep up, but Aaron could do tricks Cory couldn’t even think of. The best he could do was to keep his eyes fixed on his little brother and try not to crash into him.

  He was so focused on not wiping out that he didn’t see the shark’s fin slicing the wave beside Aaron until it was too late.

  Time slowed down.

  As Aaron turned to pull another trick, the shark’s jaws rose from the foaming ocean and clamped around his leg. The large gray body twisted like a corkscrew and snatched Aaron from the board, dragging him into the water. Aaron’s surfboard snapped free of its tether and spun away on the wave, empty.

  Time sped up again as the wave smashed over Cory, knocking him from his board. He was upside down. The surf r
oared in his ears like screaming, or maybe it was screaming, his own screaming or his brother’s screaming.

  Bubbles and foam all around him. He struggled to tell which way was up.

  Follow the bubbles, he thought. Bubbles rise.

  He clawed for the surface, broke into the light with a gasp of air, and shouted, “Aaron! Aaron!”

  He couldn’t see anything through the foam and the rolling waves. Another wave came down on him, knocked him under again. He popped up, spitting and coughing.

  He looked right, to the beach, where he saw people shouting and pointing. He spun to his left, dove forward, and came up past the breaking waves, where he saw Aaron, thrashing in a cloud of red water.

  Cory swam toward them as fast as he could, his brain running on autopilot, the rush of adrenaline overtaking him.

  Aaron was frantically punching the shark’s nose, but it wasn’t letting go. Its jaws gripped Aaron around the waist now and the giant fish shook from side to side, tossing the boy back and forth like a rag doll. His face was pale and the ocean around him was red.

  Aaron’s blood in the water was like a ringing dinner bell for any other sharks in the area. A shark can smell one drop in over a million drops of seawater. If more showed up, if a feeding frenzy began, there’d be little hope of getting out of the water alive.

  When Cory reached the shark, he threw himself onto the great white’s side, hugging the beast and trying to pull it upright with all his strength. If the shark’s gills were turned in the wrong direction, the shark wouldn’t be able to breathe and, with any luck, it would let go of Aaron.

  What would happen after the shark let go, Cory hadn’t considered.

  The shark did let go, but it thrashed wildly as it did, and its tail smacked Cory across the face, twisting him around. He saw the red-blue sky above, still colored with dawn, and then he plunged down into the red-blue water below. The wind was knocked out of him.

  Cory watched as, with one more flick of its powerful tail, the shark vanished into the dark below. He looked up and saw the waves overhead. He saw Aaron, floating sideways in a sea of red, his head limp in the water, blond hair floating out around him, lit by the sun above so it looked like a halo.

  Cory felt so tired; too tired to swim. The surface was just so far away. He needed to rest. He’d rest and then … then he’d find out if Aaron was okay. Someone would tell him. Surely someone would tell him….

  His vision faded and he knew he was drowning, knew his mind was shutting down beneath the waves, and he didn’t even have the strength to panic. In the deep beyond he could swear he saw the eyes of a thousand sharks fixed on him, racing up, slicing through the water to get to him, but he also heard loud, sharp whistles and clicks, strange sounds from the deep, and they were coming closer.

  Something bumped him from below. Something powerful. It pushed him up, shoving him toward the surface.

  Just before his vision went black, in the dimness of the bloody ocean, Cory tried to make out the creature. All he could see were two big black eyes, a pointed snout, and what, in the chaos of his half-drowned mind, looked like a giant smile. And all around him, a chorus of whistling, the most beautiful song Cory had ever heard.

  CORY woke with a start.

  His shirt was soaked. He tasted salt water on his lips.

  He’d been having that nightmare again, clear as the day it had happened, when he and Aaron had barely survived a shark attack in the early morning surf. The day his life had been saved by a pod of wild dolphins.

  Cory had cried out in his sleep, but no one else on board the giant C-130 cargo plane seemed to have noticed. The veterinarian and the technicians were asleep in their seats. The technical representative, who was a civilian dolphin trainer from the university, slept in a cot near the cockpit, and all the other petty officers and seamen had sprawled about the cabin wherever there was room.

  The rest of the plane was filled with supplies — rigid-hull inflatable boats, medical equipment, freezers full of fish, floating pontoons, inflatable pools, and directly across from Cory, the mobile transport pen: a rectangular water tank with a harness suspended inside it. Inside that harness was an eight-foot-long, six-hundred-pound Atlantic bottlenose dolphin named Kaj.

  Suddenly, salt water splashed across Cory’s face and he heard the dolphin’s repeated click click click, just like in his dream.

  “Thanks, Kaj,” Cory said, wiping his face off on a dry corner of his drab olive T-shirt. The dolphin clicked at him, amused.

  Kaj was one of the thirty-five Atlantic bottlenose dolphins in the United States Navy’s Marine Mammal Program. He was assigned to the program’s MK 6 Fleet System, or Mark 6, as they called it. Mark 6 was a specialized unit of dolphins, sea lions, and human handlers, trainers, and support staff, who could deploy anywhere in the world within seventy-two hours to guard ships in port, search for underwater explosives, and stop swimmers from staging attacks from the sea. The dolphins were like the police dogs of the ocean.

  Cory was Kaj’s handler and Kaj was Cory’s partner. They knew each other as well as a human and a dolphin could.

  The navy took the well-being of its dolphins very seriously, which was why there were over twenty people on board this cargo plane to look after just one dolphin. There were cameras pointing at Kaj’s tank, and there were all kinds of equipment in the water to record every sound the dolphin made. There were also buckets of fish in coolers and even more fish in the freezers they were hauling to the other side of the world.

  While enlisted humans ate whatever tasteless, mass-produced military chow the navy decided to serve in the mess deck, Kaj got to eat the highest quality mackerel, smelt, and herring that money could buy, and he ate twenty pounds of it every day.

  Cory stood up to feed Kaj a piece now, which Kaj ate cheerfully. Sometimes it seemed like Cory’s main job was chopping fish for Kaj. He often felt more like a seafood chef than a soldier.

  “Thanks for waking me up,” Cory said. Even though he knew dolphins didn’t really understand English, Cory never forgot to thank the dolphin.

  He gave Kaj another chunk of fish, and then wrote the two pieces down on a chart by the tank. As Kaj’s handler, he had to keep track of everything. When he wasn’t actually working with the dolphin, he was doing paperwork about the dolphin.

  Kaj made a clicking noise to get Cory’s attention again. He and Kaj had their own ways of communicating — hand gestures and commands, rewards of toys or fish, clicks and whistles and fin movements. Cory had even taught Kaj how to high-five. Now Kaj opened his mouth wide, revealing his long row of razor-sharp teeth and his big pink tongue. Cory knew what that meant.

  “Oh, is that why you woke me up?” Cory said. “And here I thought you were just worried about me.”

  Kaj slapped his flukes — the fins at the back of his tail — on the water, which Cory had learned was his way of making a request. Cory laughed, but did what Kaj wanted him to do.

  He reached into the dolphin’s mouth and scratched his tongue.

  Kaj rocked back and forth, left to right, enjoying the tongue scratching immensely. Scratching Kaj’s tongue was just like scratching a dog behind its ears, except a lot wetter … and with a lot more teeth.

  Sometimes Cory wondered who was the handler and who was being handled. He fed Kaj by hand, after all, not the other way around. He responded to Kaj’s wants and needs as best he could, and Kaj did his best to make his wants and needs known. He supposed Kaj had trained him as much as he had trained Kaj.

  Not everyone could so easily reach into the mouth of a six-hundred-pound ocean mammal to scratch its tongue, but Cory wasn’t afraid of his dolphin. Kaj’s face showed what to all the world looked like a giant grin. The famous dolphin smile.

  The smile was an illusion. It was just the way a dolphin’s jaw was shaped, but it was the memory of that smile that had led him here, to the night watch over Kaj on this cargo plane above the Pacific Ocean.

  It was the memory of that smile that had m
ade Cory want to be a dolphin handler. Cory had learned that a pod of wild dolphins had scared off the great white shark that morning in the surf with his brother, one year ago.

  After the attack, Cory had lost consciousness underwater, but a wild dolphin had pushed him up to the surface with its nose and shoved him toward shore. Another had dragged Aaron to safety. A lifeguard then hauled both brothers to the beach and gave Cory CPR.

  When Cory came to on the beach, he saw red marks in the sand where Aaron had been carried ashore. His brother had lost a lot of blood before being loaded onto an ambulance. Cory had to go to the hospital, too, to get stitches on his head where the shark’s tail had smacked him, but he was back on his feet by that same afternoon.

  Aaron, on the other hand, spent three days in a coma. No one knew if he would pull through or not. He had a huge bandage on his right side, where the great white had taken a chunk out of him. He’d been skinny to begin with. He didn’t have a lot of flesh to lose.

  Cory and his parents never left Aaron’s side at the hospital, and when he came out of the coma, the first thing Aaron did was ask if Cory was okay.

  “I’m right here,” Cory said.

  “You saved me,” Aaron told him, his voice barely a whisper.

  “I’m your big brother,” Cory said. “It’s my job.”

  Aaron grabbed his hand. “You fought off a shark.”

  Cory shrugged. “I had some help. A pod of dolphins.”

  “Dolphins?” Aaron asked.

  “Dolphins,” Cory said.

  “Cool,” Aaron said with a weak smile.

  His mother cried, and both boys blushed. Aaron rolled his eyes so Cory could see, like he was saying, Jeez, Mom, it was just a great white shark attack. Chill out.

  When Cory returned to the naval base in San Diego to report for duty, he requested a transfer to the Marine Mammal Program. If he was going to stay in the navy, he wanted to work with dolphins.

  Only a few weeks later, his transfer orders came through, and Cory began his new job in the navy. For the next year, he spent his mornings chopping fish and cleaning tanks, and his afternoons studying dolphin behavior and biology. He spent his nights running and working out, staying fit.