The Swarm: A Novel Read online

  He rummaged through his suitcase, pulled out a zip-neck sweater and put it on, then struggled to force his suit jacket over the top. He wrapped a scarf round his neck. He didn’t look well dressed, but that was how he liked it. He cultivated a scruffy look. It took him longer to achieve his dishevelled hairstyle than most people would spend on a respectable coiffure.

  He flashed himself a smile in the mirror, left the hotel, and took a taxi to the restaurant.

  Bohrmann was waiting for him. They had a few glasses of wine with their dinner, but eventually the conversation drifted back to the ocean. Over desert Bohrmann asked casually, ‘How much do you know about Statoil’s plans?’

  ‘Only the basic details,’ said Johanson. ‘I’m not especially well informed about oil.’

  ‘What are they planning? It can’t be a platform - it’s too far out to sea.’

  ‘It’s not a platform.’

  ‘I don’t want to pressure you and I’ve no idea how confidential these things are…’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry about that. If I’ve been told, it can’t be very secret.’

  Bohrmann laughed. ‘So, what are they building out there?’

  ‘They’ve got plans for a subsea plant. A fully automated one.’

  ‘Like SUBSIS?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Subsea Separation and Injection System - a unit off the coast of Norway in the Troll field. It’s been active for a number of years now.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘You should ask the guys who sent you here. SUBSIS is a processing plant that operates three hundred and fifty metres down. It separates the water from the oil and gas at seabed level. In conventional plants, the process takes place on the platforms and the water is discharged into the sea.’

  ‘Oh, I remember!’ Lund had said something about it. ‘The water makes fish infertile.’

  ‘SUBSIS can get round that. The water is injected back into the reservoir, pushing the oil upwards, so more oil pumps out. In the meantime, the water is removed, re-injected, and so it goes on. The oil and gas are carried through pipelines to the coast. It’s pretty neat, as far as it goes.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I’m not sure there is a but. SUBSIS is supposed to work perfectly in depths of up to fifteen hundred metres. Its manufacturer thinks it can do two thousand, and the oil companies are aiming for five thousand.’

  ‘Is that feasible?’

  ‘In the not too distant future, yes. Anything that works on a small scale will probably work on a larger one, and the advantages are obvious. It won’t be long before remote-controlled plants replace all of the platforms.’

  ‘You don’t sound enthusiastic,’ said Johanson.

  There was a pause. Bohrmann seemed unsure how to respond. ‘What bothers me isn’t the subsea plant as such. It’s the naivety of it all.’

  ‘It’s a remote-controlled unit?’

  ‘Fully automated. It’s operated from the shore.’

  ‘Which means repairs and maintenance work are carried out by robots.’

  Bohrmann nodded.

  ‘I see,’ said Johanson.

  ‘There are pros and cons,’ said Bohrmann. ‘It’s always risky when you enter unknown territory. And, let’s face it, the slopes are certainly that so it makes sense to automate the system. There’s nothing wrong with sending down a robot to do a bit of monitoring or to take a few samples. But a subsea station is a different proposition. Suppose oil spurts out of a well five thousand metres down. How are you going to fix it? You don’t know the terrain. All you’ve got is piles of data. We’re as good as blind down there. OK, we can use satellites, digital sonar and seismic profiling to create a map of seabed morphology that’s accurate to within half a metre. OK, we’ve got bottom-simulating reflectors to detect oil and gas deposits, so we can tell where we should drill, where we’ll find oil, where the hydrates are stored, and where best to avoid…But as for what’s down there, no one really knows.’

  ‘That’s my refrain,’ murmured Johanson.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against fossil fuels per se, but I object to making the same mistake twice. When the oil industry took off, we erected our junk in the sea, without anyone thinking about how we could dispose of it. We emptied wastewater and chemicals into rivers and seas, as though they’d simply disperse. Radioactive material was dumped in the oceans. Natural resources and life-forms were exploited and destroyed. No one stopped to consider how complex the connections might be.’

  ‘But subsea plants are here to stay?’

  ‘Almost certainly. They’re more economic, and they can tap oil reserves that humans can’t reach. After that, the stampede will start for methane. It burns more cleanly than fossil fuels and it will slow down the greenhouse effect. All the arguments in favour are perfectly valid -providing everything goes to plan. People in these companies often confuse what should happen in an ideal scenario with what could happen in reality. It makes their lives easier. Whenever they’re presented with a range of possible outcomes, they pick the most favourable so they can start work straight away - even if they know nothing about the world they’re intruding on.’

  ‘But how will they exploit the methane?’ asked Johanson. ‘Won’t the hydrates dissociate on the way to the surface?’

  ‘That’s where remote-controlled processors enter the equation. If you get the hydrates to dissociate while they’re down there, by heating them, for example, all you’ve got to do is trap the gas and channel it to the surface. It sounds great, but who’s to say that an operation like that won’t start a chain reaction and trigger a heatwave like the one in the Paleocene?’

  ‘Do you think that’s possible?’

  Bohrmann spread his hands. ‘Every time we tamper with our environment without knowing what we’re doing, we’re dicing with death. But it’s started already. The gas hydrate programmes in India, Japan and China are already quite advanced.’ He gave a bleak smile. ‘But they don’t know what’s down there either.’

  ‘Worms,’ murmured Johanson. He thought of the video images that Victor had taken of the seething mass on the seabed. And of the ominous creature that had disappeared into the dark.

  Worms. Monsters. Methane. Natural disasters.

  It was time for a drink.

  11 April

  Vancouver Island and Clayoquot Sound, Canada

  The sight of it made Anawak angry. From head to fluke it measured over ten metres, an enormous male orca, one of the biggest transients he had ever seen. Its half-open jaws revealed tightly packed rows of glistening conical teeth. The whale was past its prime, but still immensely powerful. It wasn’t until Anawak examined it more closely that he noticed the dull, worn patches that flecked its shiny black skin. One of its eyes was closed and the other was hidden from view.

  Anawak had recognised it straight away. On the database it was listed as J-19, but its distinctive dorsal fin, curved in the shape of a scimitar, had earned it its nickname: Genghis. He walked to the other side of the body and spotted John Ford, director of Vancouver Aquarium’s marine-mammal research programme, talking to Sue Oliviera, head of the lab in Nanaimo, and another man. They were gathered under the line of trees that fringed the beach. Ford beckoned Anawak over. ‘Dr Ray Fenwick from the Canadian Institute of Ocean Sciences and Fisheries,’ he said.

  Fenwick was there for the autopsy. As soon as they’d heard that Genghis was dead, Ford had suggested that the dissection should be conducted on the beach, where the carcass had been found, rather than behind closed doors. He wanted to drum up a large group of students and journalists and give them an insight into the orca’s anatomy. ‘Besides,’ he’d said, ‘the autopsy will look different in the open - less clinical and distant. We’ll be staring at the corpse of an orca close to the sea - in its own world. People will be more involved, more compassionate. It’s a gimmick, of course, but it’ll work.’

  They’d thrashed it out between them: Ford, Fenwick, Anawak and Rod Palm, a
naturalist from the marine research station on Strawberry Isle, off the coast of Tofino. Palm and the Strawberry Isle team monitored the ecosystem in Clayoquot Sound, and Palm had made a name for himself by studying the orcas there.

  ‘The external evidence suggests that it succumbed to a bacteriological infection,’ said Fenwick, when Anawak pressed him, ‘but I don’t want to rush to any hasty conclusions.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ said Anawak grimly. ‘Remember 1999? Seven dead orcas, and all of them infected.’

  ‘“The Torture Never Stops”,’ murmured Oliviera, recalling an old Frank Zappa song. She nodded conspiratorially at Anawak. ‘Come with me a second.’

  Anawak followed her over to the carcass. Two large metallic cases and a container had been placed beside it, full of tools for the autopsy. Dissecting an orca was a different matter from dissecting a human. It meant hard work, vast quantities of blood and one hell of a stench.

  ‘The press will be here in a moment, with the students,’ she said, glancing at her watch, ‘but since we’re together, we should have a word about those samples.’

  ‘Made any headway?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘And you’re keeping Inglewood in the picture?’

  ‘I thought you and I should talk first.’

  ‘Sounds like you haven’t reached any firm conclusions.’

  ‘Put it this way, we’re amazed on one count and stumped on the other,’ said Oliviera. ‘For one thing, the mussels aren’t described in any of the existing research.’

  ‘I could have sworn they were zebras.’

  ‘On the one hand, yes, but on the other, no.’

  ‘Fill me in.’

  ‘There are two ways of looking at it. We’re either dealing with a species related to the zebra mussel or with a mutation. They look like zebra mussels and they form colonies like zebra mussels, but there’s something odd about the byssus. The fibres extending from the foot are unusually thick and long. We’ve nicknamed them “jet mussels”.’ She pulled a face. ‘We couldn’t come up with anything better. We’ve observed a number of living specimens, and they’re able to…Well, they don’t just drift like normal zebra mussels. They set their course by sucking in water and expelling it. The force drives them forwards, and they use their fibres to steer. Does that remind you of something?’

  ‘Squid use jet propulsion.’

  ‘Well, some species do, but there’s something else. I was thinking of dinoflagellates, unicellular organisms. In certain species, the cells have a pair of flagella extending outwards from the cell wall. They use one flagellum to steer, while the other rotates, moving them forward.’

  ‘But apart from that they’ve got nothing in common.’

  ‘I’m treating it as convergent evolution in a very broad sense. At this stage, I need every lead I can get. As far as I know, no other species of mussel moves around like that. These swim like shoaling fish, and they can keep up their momentum, in spite of the weight of their shells.’

  ‘Well, that would explain how they settled on the Barrier Queen’s hull in the middle of the ocean,’ mused Anawak. ‘Is that the amazing part?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What’s stumped you?’

  Oliviera stepped closer to the dead whale and stroked its skin. ‘The fragments of tissue you found down there. We don’t know what to do with them - and there’s not much we can do. For the most part it had already decomposed. The small amount that we were able to analyse seemed to indicate that the substance on the propeller and the substance on your knife were identical. Apart from that, it bore no resemblance to anything we’ve ever come across before. The tissue is unusually well developed in terms of its contractibility. It’s incredibly strong, but also extremely elastic. We don’t know what it is.’

  ‘Could that be an indication of bioluminescence?’

  ‘Possibly. Why?’

  ‘Because it flashed at me.’

  ‘You’re talking about the thing that knocked you over?’

  ‘Yeah. It shot out while I was poking around in the mussel bed.’

  ‘Maybe because you’d cut a lump out of it. Although I can’t believe this tissue contains nerve fibres or anything else that might make it feel pain. It’s really just…cell mass.’

  They heard voices approaching. Across the sand, a group of people were heading towards them, some with cameras, others with notepads.

  ‘We’re on,’ said Anawak.

  ‘OK.’ Oliviera looked at him helplessly. ‘But what do you want me to do? Should I forward the results to Inglewood? I can’t imagine they’ll be of any use. I’d rather look at a few more samples - especially of that tissue.’

  ‘I’ll get in touch with Roberts.’ Anawak stared at the orca, depressed. First the whales had disappeared for weeks, and now there was another corpse. ‘Why did this have to happen? It’s such a mess.’

  Oliviera shrugged. ‘Save your lamentations for the press,’ she said.

  The autopsy took more than an hour, during which Fenwick, assisted by Ford, cut open the whale and explained its anatomical structure, exposing its intestines, heart, liver and lungs. Its stomach revealed a half-digested seal. Unlike the resident orcas, transient and offshore orcas ate sealions, porpoises and dolphins - even baleen whales could fall prey to a pod of orcas.

  Specialist science journalists were in the minority among the spectators, but reporters from the broadsheets, magazines and TV networks were out in force - exactly the sort of people the team had hoped to attract.

  Fenwick started by explaining the distinguishing features of an orca’s anatomy. ‘As you can see, its shape resembles that of a fish, but that’s because nature adopted this body form for sea creatures that have evolved from land animals. It happens a lot. We call it convergent evolution: in order to cope with similar environmental pressures, two totally different species develop convergent structures - that is, structures designed to solve the same problem.’

  He removed sections of the thick outer skin to expose the layer of fat. Fish, amphibians and reptiles are ectotherms, which means they’re cold-blooded, so their body temperature corresponds to that of their surroundings. Mackerel, for example, are present in the Arctic Ocean and in the Mediterranean. In the Arctic their body temperature is four degrees Celsius, but in the Med it’s twenty-four. The same doesn’t apply to whales: they’re warm-blooded, like us.’

  Fenwick had uttered two little words that never failed to hit their mark. As soon as the spectators heard them, they sat up and paid attention.

  Fenwick continued, ‘They could be swimming in the Arctic or in the Baja California, it makes no difference. Wherever they are, whales have a constant body temperature of thirty-seven degrees, and to maintain it they accumulate the layer of fat we call blubber. See this white, fatty mass? Water normally draws heat away from the body, but this layer of fat prevents it happening.’

  His gloves were red and slimy with the orca’s blood and fat.

  ‘But blubber can also be fatal to a whale. The reason they die when they get stranded is because of their weight, due in part to their magnificent fat layers. A blue whale measuring thirty-three metres and weighing a hundred and thirty tonnes is four times heavier then the biggest dinosaur that ever walked the Earth. Even an orca can weigh up to nine tonnes. Creatures of that size can only survive in water. It all comes down to Archimedes’ principle, which states that the weight of a body immersed in fluid will decrease by an amount equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces. On land, whales are crushed to death by the pressure of their own weight - if they haven’t already been killed by the insulating effect of their blubber, which absorbs the heat of the environment. Beached whales often die of overheating.’

  ‘Is that what happened to this one?’ asked a journalist.

  ‘No. Over the past few years we’ve come across an increasing number of whales whose immune systems have collapsed. They all died of bacterial infections. J-19 was twenty-two, not exactly a youngster but
most healthy orcas live to thirty. So, he died early and there are no external signs of a struggle. My guess is that an infection killed him.’

  Anawak took a step forward. ‘We can tell you why that happens, if you’re interested,’ he said, in as neutral a tone as he could muster. ‘There’s been extensive toxicological research into the problem, and the results show that the orcas off the coast of British Columbia are badly contaminated with PCBs and other environmental pollutants. This year we’ve found orcas with PCB levels of a hundred and fifty parts per million: A human immune system wouldn’t stand a chance against that level of toxin.’

  He saw a mixture of compassion and excitement in the listeners’ upturned faces. The journalists had their story.

  ‘The worst thing about toxins,’ he continued, ‘is that they’re fat-soluble, which means they’re passed to the calves in the mothers’ milk. When human babies come into the world with AIDS, it’s all over the media and everyone is appalled. Write about what you’ve seen here and make people angry about this. Hardly any other species on the planet is as packed with toxins as the orcas.’

  ‘Dr Anawak.’ The journalist cleared his throat. ‘What happens when humans eat the flesh of these whales?’

  ‘They absorb some of the toxin.’

  ‘Does it kill them?’

  ‘It might in the long-term.’

  ‘In that case, aren’t businesses that dump their chemicals in the water - like the timber industry - indirectly responsible for death and disease among humans?’

  Anawak hesitated. The reporter was right, of course, but Vancouver Aquarium was keen to avoid direct confrontations with local businesses, preferring to try for a diplomatic solution. Painting British Columbia’s economic and political élite as a bunch of near-murderers would increase the existing tensions. ‘There’s no doubt that eating contaminated meat would pose a risk to human health,’ he said evasively.