Ocean: War of Independence Read Online Free PDF Page B

hardened and sealed the hole permanently.
    Keeping the oil derrick afloat, Gwyneth and J.D.—both on blue whales—pushed it toward a beach on the coast. At the shoreline, the animals gave the rig a final hard push, and shoved it all the way to a highway that ran along the coast.
    “That should get their attention,” J.D. Watts said to her, from his perch on the other whale.
    “Now let’s do a little cleanup,” she said. “When we were on the sea bottom, I saw a lot of junk, including what looks like an old fishing boat with barnacles all over it. I think we should raise the wreck and send it ashore, along with the other garbage down there.”
    J.D. smiled. “I like the way you think.”
    He encircled the sunken boat with bubblefish, and they created a membrane around it, which they then filled with air—thus raising the wreck to the surface of the sea. A pod of mottled gray and white orca whales (unusual in their coloration) pushed the hulk ashore and rammed it up on the beach. Gwyneth and her companions followed that up with a pile of tangled fishing nets, lines, and gear, along with a bent shark cage, a block and tackle (connected to a bent davit), a rusted old automobile motor, anchors and anchor chains, a refrigerator, hunks of concrete, truck tires, and a pile of broken tombstones—dumping all of it on the shore.
    “The ocean is not a garbage dump,” Gwyneth said. And she transmitted this message to Kimo, along with a report on the oil derrick.…

    By the following morning, Kimo had received the satisfying message from Gwyneth, reporting on what she had done, and telling him she was standing by for further instructions. He had already heard another version of her activities reported back to him by one of the Sea Warriors, who had gone ashore on the Big Island of Hawaii, and seen it on a television news program.
    Kimo liked the idea she’d come up with, of cleaning garbage off the seabed and tossing it ashore. He liked the concept so much, in fact, that he thought he might expand it in the Hawaiian Islands and elsewhere.
    But first, he had something else in mind, something bigger he wanted to clean up first—and it was like a pustule on the surface of the sea. He recalled hearing about a huge mass of floating plastic and other garbage circling in the North Pacific Ocean, covering more than five thousand square kilometers of ocean surface. It was known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
    He dispatched Dirk Avondale to take as many dolphins to the region as he could round up, to see if he could push the floating junk toward the mainland of the United States, and spread it on the beaches there.
    Dirk left immediately, expressing his eagerness to complete the task.

    After slamming an eight-foot, mini-tidal wave into the cliff of the uninhabited island, Alicia continued to practice with this type of wave and with others that she could generate. Kimo was with her now, watching intently as she raised an even higher wall of water, this one at least twelve feet tall. It was wider than the previous one as well, too, at least fifty feet instead of twenty-five.
    With her eyes open she visualized the wave in motion, and saw it picking up speed, rushing away from her toward the cliff, slamming harder into it than before—with more velocity and mass. This time the entire cliff-face, at least seventy feet in height, cracked, a jagged line that ran from the top to the bottom, and a large section of the whole thing crumbled and fell, like the edge of an iceberg falling off. At the base of the cliff, the water dissipated around the rubble of dirt and rock.
    “Your waves can create a lot of damage on the shore,” Kimo said, “and might even seem like a rogue wave when it strikes ships and oil derricks.”
    “It’s still not a full-fledged tidal wave,” Alicia said, “but I feel like I can improve on it. Maybe we’ll have one soon.”
    “It’s already big enough for us to add to our repertoire of weapons and