Amazon savethewhalesplease Amazon barnes & noble Category:  Action/Thriller Publisher: Kunati ISBN-10:  1601641656 Type: Fiction Pages: 432 Copyright: August 15, 2008 ISBN-13: 9781601641656 A firebrand first lady. A notorious whaling pirate. Their unthinkable partnership launches an epic rescue: a whale drive from the Arctic to the Antarctic.  Ballsy, firebrand, in your face—Dr. Jan Everett is also America’s first lady. Her militancy clashes with the President’s driving ambition. Their teetering marriage slams the rocks when she uncovers his backroom deal with Japan to jumpstart his stumbling re-election campaign. He permits the Japanese to secretly kill 1872 blue whales stranded in the Bering Sea—a hunt that will yield meat worth $1.5 billion, or 50 years supply. Enraged, Jan hijacks the ship and services of Arlov Vesprhein, a notorious whaling pirate for an epic high tech rescue on the high seas: a whale drive from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Shadowing the drive is the Japanese armada of killer boats led by Captain Yamamura, a legend, whose tenacity equals his hatred for the first lady. Stampeding leviathans, a failing marriage, Jan’s own growing attraction for Vesprhein, the lurking menace of mutiny, a bounty within the White House to assassinate her, a nailbiting Presidential campaign, a looming financial meltdown to transfer power from America to Asia—all dovetail into a political, financial and ecological hurricane that is at once exciting, tragic, shocking, and real! Save The Whales Please is not for the faint of heart. Whaling is big business and a pressure point in global politics and finance. Fact intersects fiction for an eye-opening journey into a pitiless world of unnecessary savagery. Excerpt The stench of death struck her like a backhanded slap. Dr. Jan Everett recoiled violently. The pungent odor wrenched tears from her eyes. Bile rose in her throat. Her legs weakened. Hundreds of carcasses of minke whales floated in the choppy waves. A red triangular flag was staked into each kill. The flags stretched like an undulating sea of headstones. Red LEDs flickered across this vast cemetery on water. Each light was a radio beacon on a whale that beeped and flashed to help the killers keep track if any drifted off. Jan was no stranger to the slaughter and abuse of wildlife, having eye witnessed the clubbing of seals, massacre of wolves, skinning of foxes, shooting of grizzlies and other vile acts of cruelty and carnage, yet once again she felt unprepared. “Jesus,” breathed Dr. Raquel Ruppert, the black woman in braids and nose ring, who stepped up to the helm beside Jan. “Are you okay?” Jan nodded wordlessly. As best friends who could practically read each other’s thoughts, Jan knew Raquel anticipated a profanity-laced soliloquy. She also knew Raquel understood why Jan just locked her knees and held in her rage. They stood at the tip of the arrow-shaped prow of their Zodiac, a 14x14, outboard powered inflatable flying the insignia of the world’s leading environmental watchdog: GreenPlanet. With a sputter of dying engines, two more Zodiacs drifted up on either side, carrying a pair of men each, David Boycott and Patrick Knight, GreenPlanet’s videographer and reporter respectively in one, a couple of ecologists from the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission in the other. Blood-streaked crests smashed up and over into the inflatables. With sunlight trapped behind the mile-thick stack of nimbus rain-bearers, the utter gloom and early morning chill deepened the pall. “Start counting,” Jan said, breaking her silence. The two women and four men lifted scarves over their nostrils and breathed through their mouths as they steered their Zodiacs ponderously between the mammoth corpses bloated with air. The heat from the dead whales released tiny red geysers of blood. More oozed from the open harpoon wounds. Still more flooded from their bellies laid open by grenades. The rich, wet, fatty stench wafted up in a visible, nauseating pink mist. Jan stopped alongside the loosely flapping jaw of a cow. Her small teats dragged in a dense red sea. The explosion from a grenade-tipped harpoon had ripped a tunnel through her blubber, flesh and organs, all the way to an unborn calf. The fetus was horribly burned and the cow’s long vagina oozed a river of blood. Norway owned the dubious distinction of pioneering almost all the most brutal methods of killing whales. Earliest records documented them employing ‘drive fishing’ to herd whales and dolphins into fjords, then draw nets across and either spear the leviathans to death or hammer wooden pegs into their nostrils to suffocate them. With the advent of guns, they pumped bullets into the trapped giants. In the nineteenth century, following the discovery of vast Antarctic herds, a British engineer was commissioned to invent a means of electrocuting whales to hasten the slaughter. “Two sixty,” said Jan totaling the counts from each Zodiac. Norway had been granted a permit by the International Whaling Commission to kill 212 minkes. “But we don’t know how many were towed before we got here,” cautioned Raquel. Norway processed the harvest in whaling stations located along the shore. They may have arrived between tugboat trips. “Looks like they are by no means done,” said Boycott, peering at the horizon through his video camera. “What do you mean?” reacted Jan sharply. “They are already over the limit.” “Yeah, and they are conscientiously counting,” said Boycott with his usual sarcasm. The IWC trusted its member nations to embrace the honor system and monitor hunts. “Ten o’clock.” Everyone lifted the binoculars slung around their necks. “A catcher.” Jan noted the trademark catwalk from bridge to bow that allowed the gunner to rush directly to his harpoon when the crow’s nest spotted the quarry. “Appropriately called Svend Foyn,” informed Boycott, zooming his long lens in on the writing along the front of the hull. Svend Foyn became the godfather of modern day whaling when he invented the grenade-tipped harpoon in 1867, the single most devastating weapon that destroyed over three million whales and counting. The catcher bearing his name fit his bloody legacy. Giant red droplets from the slaughter smeared most of the white, seventy-five-foot hull. Jan’s patience snapped. “That’s it. Let’s go.” “We have evidence of violation,” said one of the IWC ecologists. “We’ll take it up at the next session.” “And allow this slaughter to continue?” retorted Jan. “Like hell we will.” Ever since the creation of Cetacean Bay last year, the Antarctic whale sanctuary that now extended from the fortieth parallel below the equator all the way to the South Pole, discontent had been brewing within the IWC. Iceland quit. Japan was sly, staying in and launching a clandestine hunt in the protected waters for severely endangered fins and humpbacks. Word leaked out. The international backlash was swift and severe. Australia threatened to dispatch her navy and New Zealand considered suing. Fleets of eco-warriors confronted the secret fleet. Embarrassed and humiliated, Tokyo backed off but did not back down. They resumed hunting using a loophole called “whaling for scientific research,” taking almost a thousand whales. At the last IWC meeting, Jan had successfully closed the loophole. Fearing collapse, the IWC allowed whaling nations to each kill 212 minkes under the clause of ‘coastal and aboriginal whaling,’ which the US supported to appease Native Americans, a powerful lobby and voting bloc in the Northeast and Alaska. The move left Cetacean Bay untouched, placating the anti-whaling lobby, whose nations had strength in numbers, but apart from America, lacked the global, economic and political clout that drove all policy making in the IWC. A week ago, GreenPlanet received an anonymous tip that Norway planned to ignore the quota even though she did not depend on whaling to sustain her economy anymore. In 1959, a huge gas field was discovered in the North Sea. Today, Norway controlled 35 percent of known oil reserves in Western Europe and 50 percent of all natural gas. But fish remained the staple diet and Norwegians fervently believed that whales were big fish. Conservation came second to misplaced tradition. Jan took the anonymous tip to the US Department of Commerce, demanding the threat of an embargo on Norwegian imports if the quota was violated. But the president balked because of Norway’s strategic importance to NATO. Jan broke her promise to stay away from controversy, gathered her eco-warriors, practically kidnapped the two ecologists and crossed the Atlantic. Patrick Knight, the gangly reporter, gained access to the records of Norway’s Bureau of International Whaling Statistics in Sandefjord, where the nation’s whaling records had been maintained since 1938, including the approximate location of the current hunt. They sailed up the coast all night, pinpointing the hunting coordinates this morning by monitoring the whalers’ radio. Raquel stepped across and started the motor with a toothy, exuberant smile. “So, we are going to do it?” “I want the next news cycle to lead with us,” said Jan vengefully. Everyone around her looked at each other, then Boycott expressed their sentiment, “Welcome back! Woo-hoo!’” He looked at Knight, “You owe me twenty.” Back to Jan, “He bet me that you’d be lying low till November. I told him, no way. You can’t cage the tiger.” Jan unleashed a steely smile. “Let’s make headlines.” Raquel hurried aft, squatted down and plunged the control stick, kicking the Zodiac forward. Knight anxiously unwound an arm toward the throttle. The ecologists followed a distant third. The three inflatables leapt over the wave crests, their bounce evoking a sense of energy, spunk and rebellion. Jan straightened in the blinding orange wetsuit that fit like a second skin over her lean five foot six frame. She planted her feet in a defiant wide-legged stance and grasped the flagpole. Rage blushed on her cheeks and glinted in her eyes. In that moment, she duplicated the signature image of her etched in the minds of millions—that of a firebrand animal rights militant who also happened to be the most famous woman on the planet. BoomBoomBoomBoom! Grenade intensity explosions shot across the sky. Jan snapped her head up, startled by the close proximity of the thunder pursuing blue-white flashes of lightning. The Norwegian Sea stretched between unforgiving latitudes that rarely enjoyed fair weather, even in summer. This morning was no exception. The outward fringe of a storm system swept down from the Arctic and streamed off Norway’s precipitous fjords. For the first time, Jan noticed the dark clouds were running really low. Wisps skimmed the water. She gritted her teeth to fight off the chill that stung her pinched skin with the sharpness of a thousand needles. The women closed the gap with the Svend Foyn quickly. Too quickly. The catcher had deliberately slowed down. When the Zodiac entered the tail-stream, Jan knew why. “Hold on!” she yelled, not a moment too soon. The Svend Foyn’s screws engaged suddenly, churned up a fierce current and hurled it at the Zodiac. Jan saw a man she presumed to be the skipper appear behind the aft bridgescreen. He was unshaven and seemed like a ragged veteran of the sea. “Don’t let up!” Jan hollered to Raquel. Both women pressed their feet into the wooden deck plate and hung on as the Zodiac skittered like a runaway car on ice. It took all of Raquel’s strength to keep on top of the throttle and rudder. The Zodiac slipped out of the powerful wake and inched up alongside the Svend Foyn, which ran steady, its bow plowing in and out of the water with effortless rhythm. Jan looked up when the skipper emerged from the bridge and leaned over the side. He drew his lips back in a menacing grin. She was close enough to notice his teeth were edged all around with black tartar, which only enhanced the spite. He yelled down, “Fokoff!” In her twenty-three years of fighting for animal rights, Jan had heard worse. More sailors appeared and sneered with an encore of “Fokoffs!” The skipper circled his arms, signaling the bridge to helm closer. Instead of being daunted by the giant vessel bearing down, Jan grinned up at the skipper and pointed a finger forward with a flourish. “Show time!” shouted Jan. Raquel plunged the throttle home. The Zodiac leapt, streaked past the catcher and sprinted to a quick lead. Jan looked over her shoulder. The catcher’s aging engine could not gain on the souped-up little craft. In fact, the Svend Foyn fell further and further behind. The skipper raced out onto the catwalk in front of the bridge. He was screaming. Jan and Raquel laughed. They could imagine why he was so angry. He came from one of the oldest testosterone driven societies, where men were men and women peeled fish. Chunks of ice, frozen overnight, disintegrated under the racing Zodiac with the sharp staccato of machinegun fire. Overhead, the bottom threatened to fall out of the sky. The Svend Foyn trailed by more than three hundred yards now. “Whales!” shouted Jan, looking ahead. A pod of at least thirty minkes sunned themselves, blowing, leaping out of the water and re-entering head first in what was easily the most graceful arc to behold. Named after a German whaler called Meinecke, who mistook them for diminutive blues, hunters had ignored them. They weighed only five tons and were called lesser rorquals. The Schedule, an IWC document that laid down the ‘rules’ of whaling, did not even include them until 1975, when larger whales had been all but destroyed. The hunt for the minke had been on ever since. Jan circled a finger over her head. Raquel wheeled the Zodiac around about fifty yards from the minkes and cut the outboard to place themselves between the Svend Foyn and the hunt. A teen loped along the catwalk to the gun mounted on the bow. He saw Jan and Raquel dead ahead. His stride faltered. He looked back quickly. The skipper hadn’t moved from the catwalk in front of the bridge. Jan was counting on his ego to get the better of him. And it did. Instead of steering away from the women and continuing the hunt, the skipper drew his finger across his throat. Jan wondered if he saw Boycott’s camera recording the hunters’ every move. Knight never overtook catcher. Everyone knew their place and purpose on this team. Jan was the star and Raquel her sidekick. Boycott and Knight played the historians. As such, they stayed clear of the action. The teen jumped on the gun platform at the forwardmost tip of the catcher. He strapped himself quickly and ripped off the tarp to expose an ugly, rusted, 90mm launcher. Lifting the heavy missile from a rack of others, he loaded it into the cannon’s maw. When he swung it toward the two women with a grin, the catcher pulled to within two hundred yards. PhatPhatPhat! Jan’s heart pounded synchronously with the GreenPlanet flag whipping above her head. A thrill coiled around her body. She looked over to Raquel, who appeared just as tense with nervous excitement. They leaned down together and lifted a sign that read: “SAVE THE WHALES! PLEASE!” The stormy sky chose that moment to blaze alive. Lightning raged down, trapping Jan, Raquel and the Svend Foyn in a cage of electricity. Thunder blasted across. Nature’s light and sound show escalated. The bedlam in the skies transferred to the water. Giant swells climbed out of the sea like hooded snakes. Jan hoped the standoff looked like an epic mismatch in Boycott’s camera: two women in a tiny rubber raft holding up a placard for mercy against a large, armed vessel climbing higher and higher on a gargantuan wave. Thirty feet above the women, its scaly keel fully exposed, the Svend Foyn poised for what seemed like an eternity atop the foaming crest not yet ready to collapse. “Fokoff!” shouted the teen at the top of his voice. He angled the barrel of his gun down and fired. With a report that surpassed the roar of sky and sea, a four-foot long grenade-tipped harpoon sizzled toward Jan and Raquel. Simultaneously, the underbelly of clouds opened with a cyclonic swirl! WhopWhopWhop! An unnatural, behemoth growl grew so loud so fast no one had time to react. A black monster descended through the gaping vortex. BangBangBang! Starbursts bombarded down from it. A US Navy Blackhawk dropped, firing. The laser-guided shots met and detonated the grenade-tipped harpoon in midair. Tentacles of flame streaked away with an ear-rending blast. The minkes submerged as one. The danger, far from over, was only beginning. The giant wave disintegrated, hurling the Svend Foyn at the Zodiac. Jan and Raquel emptied their lungs in a scream. But they could have been miming, such was the noise of the weather, water, catcher screws and rotors. In that second of terror, when death seemed inevitable, Jan glimpsed a thread of hope. A rope ladder unfurled from the helicopter. “Grab it!” she shrieked to Raquel. Neither woman was sure if it would matter. The Svend Foyn crashed much too quickly toward them. The teen gunner clung to the barrel, twisting in front of the muzzle, still attached to the platform by the harnesses hooked into his belt. The women blindly reached up for the ladder that twisted toward them wildly like an attacking serpent. Jan closed her fingers the instant she felt the high tensile weave of a rung. But could they escape the Svend Foyn’s bow tip? It came down like the hatchet of God. Pop! Jan felt the ball-and-socket joint in her shoulder snap. Her arm straightened faster than a thought. The Blackhawk rose vertically, lifting the two women a heartbeat before the catcher plunged below their feet and obliterated the Zodiac. Tendrils of burning diesel from the smokestack passing underneath enveloped, singed and blinded them. In the ensuing whirlwind of shrapnel, Jan saw the whites of the gunner’s eyes rise a foot from her. Then his teeth ascended—behind lips stretched wide open in a grimace of fear, his scream inaudible above the deafening mayhem. He must have somehow unhooked the harness before the bow struck the Zodiac, the impact catapulting him upward. Luckily, when he reached the zenith of his flight, he was level with Jan. She reached out her free hand and grabbed him in that moment of weightless suspension before the hungry jaws of gravity snatched him back down. Her fingers curled into his hood and found the stitches where it attached to his oilskins. Jan assumed the load of his entire weight with one arm, which snapped straight down. Cut like an athlete, her muscles tightened and rippled through the wetsuit. The trio swung to safety. Jan looked down. The Svend Foyn wasn’t so lucky. A cross current buffeted it before it could flatten to even keel. The catcher flipped over. The skipper ejected into the water. Like all the sailors on board, he wore a life vest and floated to the surface. More heads appeared. Aboard the Blackhawk, men in dark combat gear reeled up the rope ladder and pulled Jan, Raquel and the teen inside. The instant Jan straightened, the officer amongst them saluted Jan smartly. “Lieutenant Hendrix, ma’am. United States Navy. Sorry about the close call. We were right over you all the time, but we did not expect them to actually make an attempt on your life.” “Don’t sweat it,” smiled Jan. “Neither did I. Rescue the others.” “Yes, ma’am.” The helicopter circled back over the capsized catcher and picked up the sailors. The count, when everyone climbed aboard, indicated no one was lost. “Sure is nice to have your own personal eye in the sky,” said Raquel. Jan winked. “One of the better perks of being the first lady.”

ForeWord
Save the Whales Please

Konrad Karl Gatien and Sreescanda

Künati

Hardcover $24.95 (432 pp) 978-1-60164-165-6

HIGHLIGHT QUOTE: He’s surrounded by a chief of staff and advisors that make Dick Cheney and officials of the former administration look like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys.

REVIEW: Written by two men who hold Master’s degrees from the University of Southern California film school, Save the Whales Please is a movie between book covers with short scenes that end where the director—Quentin Tarantino?—might say, “Cut.” It’s a political action thriller in which Uma Thurman or Angelina Jolie might star as Jan Everett, the drop-dead gorgeous first lady of the United States and committed environmental activist whose passion is saving whales. Her husband, Carston Everett, is running for reelection for his second term. He’s an independent, and his poll numbers, like the poll numbers of his Democratic and Republican rivals, are all under thirty percent. Everett is young, glamorous, and ambitious. But a Jeb Bartlett he’s not. In fact, he’s surrounded by a chief of staff and advisors that make Dick Cheney and officials of the former administration look like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Early on, George Pleasance, Everett’s chief of staff, sees a reflection of himself with the president and another advisor in a mirror in the Oval Office. He “felt a chill. In that moment, they could’ve been the White House of Nixon, Haldeman and Ehrlichman at the height of their power, pre-Watergate.”

It’s an action-adventure story of dirty politics all around the world. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) allows Japan to kill whales “for scientific study,” which really means for public consumption. Pirates slaughter whales and sell them to Japan. When Jan Everett and her team, which includes a videographer and a submarine captain, capture both a notorious pirate and a ship owned by a Japanese family with enormous political influence, Japan threatens the U.S. with a trade war. At the same time, nearly two thousand blue whales have somehow been trapped between the Arctic ice and the U.S. Navy’s sonar experiments. If the whales remain trapped, they’ll all die and the species is likely to become extinct. The White House has offered these whales to Japan to forestall the threatened trade war. Jan Everett and her cohort take over the captured pirate ship and set out to save the whales.

The authors, one of whom is an entertainment lawyer, have created amazingly realistic politics and technology. Well … either they’re making it up, or it’s nonfiction that will inspire both green fanatics and conspiracy theorists to take action. Either way, it’s an exciting read. (April) Barbara Ardinger