JOHN FORD STOOD aft on the Whistler, shielding his eyes with his hand. He saw the DHC-2 approaching at speed. A few seconds later the plane swooped over the boat and swung round in a gentle curve.

He held his radio to his mouth and called Anawak on a tap-proof frequency. A host of channels was reserved for military and scientific purposes. 'Leon? Everything OK?'

'Receiving you, John. Where did you see them?'

'To the north-west, less than two hundred metres from the ship. Five minutes ago we had a cluster of sightings, but they're keeping their distance. There must be eight or ten. We identified two. One was involved in the attack on the Lady Wexham; the other sank a fishing-trawler last week in Ucluelet.'

'They haven't tried to attack?'

'We're too big for them.'

'How are they behaving as a group?'

'No signs of aggression.'

'Good. They're probably one big gang, but let's stick to the whales we've identified.'

Ford watched as the DHC-2 disappeared into the distance, then banked and flew back in a loop. His gaze shifted to the Whistler's bridge. The deep-sea rescue tug was sixty-three metres long, fifteen metres wide and belonged to a private company in Vancouver. With a bollard pull of 160 tonnes, she was one of the strongest tugs in the world, and far too heavy to be threatened by a whale. Ford guessed that a breaching humpback would cause the ship to rock but no more.

He still felt uneasy, though. At first the whales had attacked anything that floated, but now they seemed to know what they could and couldn't harm. Boats had been attacked by fin and sperm whales, as well as the omnipresent orcas, greys and humpbacks. And there had been a marked refinement in technique. Ford was certain that they wouldn't attack the tug – and that was what disturbed him. The idea that the whales were suffering from a rabies-like illness didn't fit with their growing ability to size up their targets. There was intelligence in their behaviour, and he wasn't sure how they'd react to the robot.

He radioed the bridge. 'We're off,' he said.

The DHC-2 circled overhead.

They'd started looking actively for the whales as soon as they'd identified some of the aggressors on the camcorder footage. For three days the tug had cruised up and down the coast and that morning they'd finally struck lucky. Among a pack of greys they'd seen two flukes they recognised from the pictures.

Ford wasn't sure if they stood any chance of getting to the truth in time. He shuddered when he thought of the increasingly militant calls from fishing unions and shipping lines who didn't like the scientists' non-aggression policy. They wanted military action – a few dead whales to show the herds what was what and to scare them into staying away from humans. The scheme was as dangerous as it was naive, but it had found plenty of supporters. The whales were doing an excellent job of gambling away all the credit that environmentalists and animal-rights groups had worked so hard to raise for them. For the time being, the emergency committee was still taking the line that killing the whales wouldn't resolve anything since no one knew what was causing their behaviour. The only option was to fight the symptoms, or so they'd said. Ford didn't know what the government was planning in the long-run. Either way, there were clear indications that individual fishermen and rogue whalers were preparing to take matters into their own hands. While no one could offer a solution to the problem, everyone was certain that the others were wrong. It was fertile ground for mavericks.

Ford glanced at the robot in the stern. He was curious to see what it could do. They'd got it from Japan remarkably quickly and with almost no red tape. The technology was only a few years old. According to the Japanese, it was designed for research, not whaling, but few were convinced. Western environmentalists saw the three-metre-long cylindrical device, studded with sensors and highly sensitive cameras, as an invention from hell, intended to hunt down entire herds of whales as soon as the moratorium on whaling was rescinded. After the URA had tracked and followed humpbacks among the Japanese Kerama Islands, it had found favour at an international symposium for marine mammals in Vancouver. But the distrust remained. It was no secret that Japan had systematically bought the support of poorer countries with the aim of putting an end to the 1986 whaling moratorium: the government had called its machinations and horse-trading 'legitimate diplomacy', while providing the bulk of the funding to the University of Tokyo, to which the inventors of the robot, Tamaki Ura and his Underwater Robotics and Application Laboratory team, belonged.

'Maybe today you'll do something worthwhile,' said Ford, softly, to the robot. 'Salvage your reputation.'

The URA glinted in the sun. Ford went over to the rails and gazed out at the ocean. Finding the whales was easier from the plane, but identification had to be done from the ship. After a while a group of greys appeared, surfacing one after another and ploughing through the waves.

The voice of the lookout sounded through the radio. 'Look back and to the right. There's Lucy.'

Ford spun and raised his binoculars in time to see a ragged, slate-grey fluke disappear beneath the water.

Lucy was one of the two whales they'd identified. A fine specimen of a grey, measuring a full fourteen metres, she'd hurled herself against the Lady Wexham. For all he knew, she might have been responsible for splitting the vessel's thin hull.

'ID authenticated,' said Ford. 'Leon?' He squinted up at the sun and saw the plane dip towards the place where the flukes had been seen. 'Well, I guess this is it,' he said to himself! 'Happy hunting.'

FROM THEIR VANTAGE-POINT a hundred metres above the water, even the enormous tug looked like a toy, though the whales seemed to grow by comparison. Anawak watched a pod of greys swimming just under the surface, moving leisurely and peacefully. Refracted rays of sunlight danced on their colossal backs. The full length of each whale was visible through the water. They were only a quarter the size of the Whistler, but they still seemed absurdly large. 'We need to get closer,' he said.

The DHC-2 descended. They flew over the pod towards the spot where Lucy had dived. Anawak hoped to God that she hadn't gone in search of food, since that would mean a lengthy wait. With any luck the water would be too deep for her here. Greys, like humpbacks, had their own feeding technique: they dived to the seabed and grazed on the sediment, rolling on to their sides and vacuuming up the bottom-dwelling organisms, such as small crustaceans, plankton and, their favourites, tube worms. The seabed near Vancouver Island was furrowed with trenches from their feeding orgies, but the giant greys seldom ventured into deeper water.

'OK, folks, prepare for the breeze,' said the pilot. 'Danny?'

The marksman grinned at them, opened the side door and pushed it back. A wave of cold air rushed into the cabin and swept through their hair. Delaware reached back and passed Danny his crossbow.

'You won't have much time,' shouted Anawak, above the roar of the wind and the engine. 'Once Lucy surfaces, there'll be just seconds to get the tag in place.'

'No sweat,' said Danny. Holding the crossbow in his right hand, he pushed himself out of his seat until he was practically sitting in the linkage under the wing. 'You gotta get me nice and close.'

Delaware shook her head. 'I can't watch.'

'Why not?' said Anawak.

'It's never going to work. He'll end up in the water – I just know it.'

'Don't you fret,' laughed the pilot. 'These boys can do anything.'

The plane shot forwards, low to the water, on a level with the Whistler's bridge. They flashed past the spot where Lucy had been seen. Nothing.