A liquefied natural-gas tanker painted parakeet green moves at a glacier’s pace, giving the flashing fireboat a wide berth, and Labella steers us closer and cuts the engines to idle as I recognize the marine biologist from the photograph Marino showed me. Pamela Quick and half a dozen marine animal rescuers crowd the lower deck and the dive platform, attending to what looks like a primitive cross between a reptile and a bird, some evolutionary manifestation from the dinosaur age, when life as we know it began to exist on earth.
The leatherback is at least nine, possibly ten, feet in length, his throat puffing out unhappily, his powerful front flippers pinned to his black leathery sides with a yellow harness that crisscrosses his carapace like a straitjacket. Lashed to the back of the platform and rocking on the water is an inflated float bag with a wooden ramp on top that I assume was used to pull the monstrous creature on board.
“This is insane.” Marino stares in disbelief. “Holy fucking shit!” he exclaims, as I get out of my seat.
eight
ENGINES THROB IN IDLE AS WE EXIT THE CABIN TO THE deafening thud-thud of a helicopter so low overhead I can easily make out the TV station’s tail number and the pilot in the right seat. Sunlight is bright on the water, the sky perfectly clear, but off to the northeast cumulus clouds roll in like a vast herd of sheep and I feel the dropping barometric pressure and the wind blowing harder. Later today it will be much cooler and rain.
“Fifteen feet! Ten feet!” Sullivan and Kletty tie off fenders to handrails, yelling distances to Labella as he uses the wind to ease in portside, and we tie off.
“Let me get on first, and you guys hand stuff over,” Marino says, and he climbs aboard the fireboat, reaching back for the scene cases.
Labella places the flat of his hand protectively against my back and tells me to watch my fingers so they don’t get crushed between fenders or rails and to be careful where I step. The space between the two boats yawns wider and narrows as he steadies me over one rail, then the next, and I walk across the fireboat’s swaying bow, where a heavy steel anchor chain feeds from a storage locker on the nonskid gray deck, running between two red fire guns in the front of the boat and dropping straight down into the ruffled blue water.
Marino sets the cases near an aluminum ladder leading up to the wheelhouse, and from its deck Lieutenant Bud Klemens waves and seems happy to see me. He motions for me to climb up as spectators circle the fireboat like shorebirds, and Marino scowls at the helicopter hovering not even five hundred feet directly over us.
“Asshole!” He rudely flaps his arms as if he has the power to direct air traffic. “Hey!” he yells to the Coast Guard boat, to Kletty, who is stacking drysuits and other equipment inside a Stokes basket. “Can’t you radio them or something? Make their asses get the hell out of here?”