“I think Kam is asking the right thing. Who would have done this to an endangered species? Or really any species?” Joliet asked. “And why?”
“I think I know,” Hawkins said. With all eyes, and the camera, on him, he picked up the red plastic band. “Whoever put the tracker in the turtle wanted to be able find it again. For some reason, the tracker failed and the loggerhead grew to adulthood. But look at the size of the band around its waist. It’s small. And the turtle would have been small when it first got stuck in the band. The tracker wouldn’t have fit in its stomach at the time, let alone down its throat. I think the turtle was kept in captivity until it was large enough for someone to shove that tracker down its throat and attach it to the stomach lining. The turtle might have been killed by the plastic it ate, but the deformation was done on purpose.” He looked Joliet in the eyes. “This turtle was an experiment.”
5.
The storm arrived sooner than expected. After hastily bagging and tagging the loggerhead’s internal organs and putting the disassembled creature on ice, Hawkins returned to his quarters with Bray. Not because he wanted to, but because Drake had ordered all nonessential crew to “weather out the weather”—his words—in their berths with close access to the head. In other words, he didn’t want any of them puking on his ship. Of course, confining the crew to their quarters, which were located at the bow of the ship, almost guaranteed seasickness.
The room canted at a sharp angle.
“Oh, good God,” Bray said, clutching the mattress of his lower bunk.
Hawkins typically slept on the upper bunk, but he didn’t feel like being catapulted if a wave struck the ship’s side. He stood across the small room, holding on to the wall-mounted desk for support. As the ship angled up a wave, Hawkins bent his right knee and leaned into it, keeping himself more or less upright. “You’d feel it less if you stood up. Let your inner ear adjust to the tilt.”
“You going to do that all night?” Bray asked.
Hawkins grinned. He’d spent a lot of time on the ocean as a boy. Even these strong waves wouldn’t make him seasick. Bray, on the other hand, had been on a few whale watches in his lifetime and not all of them had turned out well. His first few days aboard the Magellan had been … messy, but he’d gotten his sea legs. Until now. “You think you’re going to sleep?”
Bray clutched his eyes shut. “I just need to get used to the motion, that’s all.”
“C’mon, it’s not that bad,” Hawkins said as the bow began to lower. He shifted his weight in toward the ship’s aft. The Magellan crested the wave and dropped so fast that even Hawkins felt his stomach twist.
Bray groaned.
“I was thinking about going to get some raw clams,” Hawkins said. “Want some?”
“I hate you,” Bray said, but he couldn’t hide his grin.
As the ship entered the trough between waves, Hawkins’s mind returned to the loggerhead dissection. That the stomach showed evidence of environmental damage was horrible, but fantastic for their cause. But the plastic band constricting the turtle’s midsection being part of some kind of experiment took the wind out of their sails. It would have made a powerful image. And sure, they could still use it, but it wasn’t quite ethical. But if it helped save the environment, and through its protection, human lives, perhaps omitting the existence of the tracking device was defendable, if not noble. Then again, someone had performed a horrible experiment on an endangered species. The park ranger in him couldn’t let that slide. Someone had to be brought to justice.
“You’re not even here, are you?” Bray asked.
Hawkins realized they’d gone over another wave. “Just thinking. About the loggerhead. About the radio tracker. Have you ever heard of anything like that?”
“Outside of the low-IQ kids throwing frogs at chain-link fences, no. And they have stupidity as an excuse.”
Hawkins gave a nod. “The plastic band and tracker had to have been done by the same person. It was intentional. The question is, why?”
“People have done a lot of screwy things in the pursuit of knowledge,” Bray said. “And I’m not just talking animals. I’ll just focus on my neck of the woods. Did you know that the Atomic Energy Commission and Quaker Frickin’ Oats gave the residents of Fernald, Mass—my hometown—breakfast cereal with radioactive tracers?”
Hawkins didn’t. It sounded unbelievable.