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“Sure it matters.”

  Talley came up to the bridge and stood to one side. He looked edgy, excited.

  “Spend much time at sea, Doc?” Darling asked.

  “Some, years ago, collecting octopus. But nothing like this. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this, for the chance to find a giant squid. It’s my dragon.”

  “It’s a dragon now, is it?”

  “I think of it that way. That’s why I called my book The Last Dragon. Man needs dragons, he always has, to explain the unknown. You’ve seen the old maps. When they drew unknown lands, they’d write ‘Here be dragons,’ and that said it all. I’ve spent my life reading and writing books about the dragon. Do you know what a privilege it is to finally get close to one?”

  “Seems to me, Doc,” Darling said, “there are some dragons better left alone.”

  “Not to scientists.” Talley suddenly pointed and shouted, “Look!”

  Half a dozen flying fish scattered away from the bow of the boat, skimming over the water for fifty yards or more before splashing down again. Talley’s face lit up with wonder.

  They came upon a trail of sargasso weed, floating patches of yellow vegetation, unconnected and yet apparently following one another, like ants, toward the horizon.

  “Does it always make a straight line?” Talley asked.

  “Seems to. It’s a mystery, like that spawn we saw. I can’t figure out what that thing is, where it comes from or where it goes.”

  “What thing? What does it look like?”

  Darling described the huge gelatinous oblongs, with the holes in the center, and told him about how they appeared to be rotating, as if to expose all their parts to the sunlight.

  Talley asked questions, pressed Darling for details, and with every answer he seemed to grow more excited. “It’s an egg sac,” he said finally. “Nobody’s ever seen one before, at least not in a hundred years. Do you think you can find another one?”

  “Never know. I’d never seen any till the other day. Now I’ve seen two. We tried to collect one, but it fell apart.”

  “It would. And once its matrix broke, its cocoon, the animals inside would die.”

  “What kind of critters live in a sac like that?” Talley looked out over the sea, then slowly turned to look at Darling. “What do you think, Captain?”

  How should I… ?” Then Darling paused, and said, “Jesus Christ! Little baby beasts? In that jelly thing?”

  “Hundreds,” Talley said. “Maybe thousands.”

  “But they’ll die, right?” Sharp said.

  “Normally, yes. Most of them.”

  Darling said, “Something’ll eat them.”

  “Yes,” Talley said. “That is, if there’s anything left down there to do that.”

  44

  HAVE YOU EVER read Homer?” Talley asked as he reached into one of his cases and passed Darling a six-inch stainless-steel hook. “Homer of the wine-dark sea.”

  “Can’t say as I have,” Darling said. He fed the barb of the hook through a mackerel, and tossed the fish onto a pile of others.

  “You know, the guy who wrote the Iliad,” Sharp said. He was attaching swivels to the eyes of the hooks, then tying six-foot titanium wire leaders to each swivel.

  “The same,” Talley said. “There are those who believe, and I’m one, that Homer talked about giant squid three thousand years ago. He called it Scylla, and this is how he described it: ‘She has twelve splay feet and six lank scrawny necks. Each neck bears an obscene head, toothy with three rows of thick-set crowded fangs blackly charged with death… . Particularly she battens on humankind, never failing to snatch up a man with each of her heads from every dark-prowed ship that comes.’ ” Talley smiled. “Vivid, don’t you think?”

  “Sounds to me,” Darling said as he snapped wire leaders onto one of Talley’s folding umbrella rigs, “like your Homer had himself a twelve-volt imagination.” He dragged the umbrella rig across the deck and placed it beside two others.

  “Not at all,” said Talley. “Imagine being a sailor back then, when dragons and monsters were the answer to everything. Suppose you saw Architeuthis. How would you describe it to the people back home? Or even in modern times, suppose you were on a troop transport during World War Two and one attacked your ship. How would you describe a great monster that rose out of nowhere and tried to tear the rudder post off your ship?”

  “They did that?” Darling snapped the cap ring on one of the umbrella rigs to a length of cable attached to the nylon rope.

  “Several times, off Hawaii.”

  “Why would a giant squid want to attack a ship?”

  “Nobody knows,” Talley said. “That’s the wonderful thing about—”

  Gunfire exploded beside them, thirty shots so fast that the sound was like fabric tearing. They spun and saw Manning standing on the stern, holding his assault rifle. Behind the boat, feathers drifted down among bloody bits of shattered petrel.

  “What was that for?” Talley demanded.

  “A little practice, Herbert,” Manning said, and he popped the empty clip from the rifle and inserted a new one.

  *

  It took them an hour to lower the gear, what Talley referred to as Phase One of his operation. From three thousand feet of half-inch rope, six umbrella rigs fanned out at intervals on different levels, each with ten baits on titanium leaders. The wire was unbreakable, the hooks unbendable and four inches across at the base—so big that the only other animal that might be tempted to take one would be a shark. If a shark did get hooked, they reasoned, its struggle would send out distress signals that would add to the lure. And if Architeuthis should take one of the baits, it would flail with its many arms and (or so Talley theorized) foul itself onto many more of the hooks until, finally, it would be immobilized.

  “How much is the beast likely to weigh?” Darling had asked when Talley had outlined his plan.

  “There’s no telling. I’ve weighed the flesh of dead ones; it’s almost exactly the weight of water. So it’s possible that a truly big squid could weigh as much as five or ten tons.”

  “Ten tons! I couldn’t put ten tons of dead meat in this boat, and that thing isn’t likely to be dead. I might be able to tow ten tons, but—”

  “Nobody’s asking you to. We’ll winch it up, and when Osborn has killed it, I’ll cut specimen samples from it.”

  “With what, your penknife?”

  “I saw you have a chain saw below. Does it work?”

  “You’re ambitious, Doc, I’ll give you that,” Darling had said. “But suppose the critter doesn’t want to play by your rules?”

  “It’s an animal, Captain,” Talley had replied. “Just an animal. Never forget that.”

  When the rope was down, Darling and Sharp tied three four-foot pink plastic mooring buoys in a line, snapped them to the end of the rope and tossed them overboard.

  “What now?” Sharp asked.

  “No point in pulling it for a couple of hours,” said Darling. “Let’s eat.”

  After lunch, Talley unpacked some of his cases and set up a video monitor and tested two of his cameras, while Manning sat on one of the bunks and read a magazine. Darling beckoned Sharp to follow him outside. The boat had been drifting with the buoys, but slightly faster, so by now the buoys had fallen a hundred yards astern.

  “Doc’s right about one thing,” Darling said as he watched the buoys from the stern of the boat. “Anything tangles with that rigmarole, it’ll know it’s hooked.”

  “I don’t think Talley wants to kill it.”

  “No, the silly bugger just wants to see the damn thing, learn about it. That’s the trouble with scientists, they never know when to leave Nature the hell alone.”

  “Maybe it’ll beat itself to death on the line.”

  “Sure, Marcus,” Darling said with a smile. “But just in case the beast has other ideas, let’s be ready. Get me the boat hook.”

  “What for?”

  “We’re gonna make ourselves a little i
nsurance.” Darling climbed down the ladder through the after hatch and disappeared into the hold.

  By the time Sharp had found the boat hook on the bow and brought it aft, Darling was standing beside the midships hatch cover and opening a cardboard carton about twice the size of a shoebox. Stenciled on the side of the carton was a single word in a foreign alphabet.

  “What’s that?” Sharp asked.

  Darling reached into the carton and pulled out what looked like a six-inch-long salami, roughly three inches in diameter, covered with a dark red skin of plastic. He held it up to Sharp and smiled. “Semtex,” he said.

  “Semtex!” said Sharp. “Jesus, Whip, that’s terrorist stuff.” He had heard of Semtex but never seen any. Manufactured in Czechoslovakia, it was the current explosive-of-choice of the world’s most sophisticated terrorists, for it was extremely powerful, malleable and, best of all, stable. It would take a stupid man, and clumsy as well, to set it off by mistake. The cassette player that had blown up Pan Am 103 had been packed with Semtex. “Where did you get it?”

  “If people knew what was flying around the world with them, Marcus, they’d never leave home. It came with a shipment of compressor parts I’d ordered from Germany; it must have just been an accident in packing. Lord knows where it was supposed to go. I didn’t know what the hell it was at first, and neither did the customs inspector, but I figured why give away something that might be useful someday, so I told him it was a lubricant. He didn’t care. It wasn’t till a couple weeks later that I saw a picture of Semtex in a book and realized, holy shit, that’s what I had stowed up in the garage.” Darling turned the end of the salami toward Sharp. It was the color of eggnog. “We’ve got enough here to blow the end off Bermuda and send it all the way to Haiti. But we do have one little problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “No detonators. Mike must have put ‘em ashore and forgot to bring ‘em back. Mike doesn’t”—Darling paused, took a breath, then corrected himself—“didn’t like sailing with things that might sink us.”

  “We may be able to make one,” Sharp said.

  “What do you need?”

  “Benzine … regular gasoline.”

  “There’s a can for the outboard down below.”

  “Glycerine. You have any Lux flakes?”

  “In the galley, under the sink. That it?”

  “No, I need a trigger, something to ignite it. Phosphorous would be best. Maybe if you’ve got a box of kitchen matches, we could—”

  “No problem. Manning’s got a couple hundred rounds of phosphorous tracers. How many?”

  “Just one. A little bit goes a long way. But, Whip … I’ve never done this before. I’ve read about it, but I’ve never actually done it.”

  “I’ve never chased a ten-ton squid before, either,” Darling said.

  “It doesn’t look like a bomb,” Sharp said when they had finished. “More like a piece of cheap fireworks.”

  “Or a butcher’s idea of a practical joke,” said Darling. “Think it’ll work?”

  “It better, hadn’t it.”

  “One consolation, Marcus: If it doesn’t, there’ll be nobody left around to chew you out.”

  They had blended the gasoline and the soap flakes into a thick paste, which they pressed, like a wad of gum, to the end of the stick of Semtex. Then Sharp had pried open one of Manning’s phosphorous tracer bullets. He worked with his hands in a pan of water, for phosphorous ignites on contact with air, and when he had discarded the lead slug, he had poured the residue of phosphorous and gunpowder and water into a small glass pill bottle, which he had then sealed off and embedded in the paste.

  Now they used duct tape to affix the contraption to the end of the ten-foot-long boat hook. Darling lifted the boat hook and shook it to make sure the bomb was secure. “What happens if he swallows it before he breaks the pill bottle?” he asked.

  “It won’t go off,” Sharp said. “If air doesn’t get to the phosphorous, it won’t ignite. If it doesn’t ignite, it won’t trigger the rest of the detonator. It’ll be a dud.”

  “So you want me to make the thing bite it.”

  “Just for a second, Whip. Then jump, or—”

  “I know, I know. With any luck, Talley’s plan will work and we won’t need it.” Darling paused. “Of course, with real luck, we won’t find the bastard to begin with.”

  He climbed to the flying bridge, went forward to the wheel, turned the boat to the south and began to look for the floating buoys. It had taken them an hour to rig the explosive and bolt a rod holder to the railing in which to stow the boat hook upright, out of harm’s way. He hadn’t worried about the buoys, hadn’t thought about them.

  He was surprised to find that he didn’t see them right away. The boat couldn’t have drifted more than half a mile from the buoys, and on a clear day like this, those big pink balls should have been visible for at least a mile. Still, he knew exactly where they were; he had taken landmarks when he dropped them. There was probably more of a swell on than he’d realized, and they were in a trough. He’d pick them up in a minute.

  But he didn’t. Not in a minute or two or three. By the time he had been heading south for five minutes, he knew from his landmarks that he was beyond the spot where he had left them.

  They were gone.

  He picked up the binoculars and focused them on a trail of sargasso weed. If the buoys had drifted with the tide, they’d be going in the same direction as the weed, so with his eyes he followed the trail all the way to the horizon. Nothing.

  He heard footsteps behind him, then Manning saying, “Have you lost them?”

  “No,” Darling said. “I just haven’t found ‘em yet.”

  “God dammit! If you hadn’t wasted so much time—”

  Darling held up a hand, suddenly tensing; he had heard something, or felt something, sensed something.

  The feeling was coming through his feet, he realized, faint and far below, a weird thumping sensation. Almost like a distant explosion.

  “What in God’s name are you—”

  Now Darling recognized it, even though he could hardly believe it. “Sonofabitch!” he said, and he shouldered Manning aside and went to the railing and looked down into the bottomless blue.

  It came into view then, the only one left intact, and it was rushing for the surface like a runaway missile. It broke water with a loud, sucking whoosh sound, and flew half a dozen feet into the air, spraying them, before it settled back onto the surface and bobbed there, trailing beneath it the burst tatters of the two other buoys.

  Talley and Sharp had heard the commotion and come out of the cabin, and by the time Darling reached the deck Sharp had snagged the rope with a grapnel and was hauling the buoy aboard. Darling unsnapped the buoy, tossed the rope aside, then wrapped the rope around the winch and turned it on.

  “Is it him?” Manning said. “Is it the squid?”

  The rope was quivering and shedding drops of water. Darling felt it with his fingertips. “I can’t say, Mr. Manning, but I’ll tell you this much: Anything strong enough to yank the stretch out of half a mile of poly rope, plus sink three mooring buoys each designed to float half a ton—sink ‘em so deep that two of ‘em bust— that is one humongous motherfucker.” Darling leaned over the side, then said, “I can’t tell if he’s still there or not.”

  “If he was hooked,” Talley said, “he’s there. He can’t break those wires or bend the hooks.”

  “Never say never, Doc, not when you’re dealing with something that’s off the scale.” Then Darling said to Sharp, “Get a knife, Marcus, and use the stone on it till it’s like a razor. Then come and stand right beside me.”

  Sharp went into the cabin, and Talley followed and began to load his video camera.

  “A knife, Captain?” said Manning. “What for?”

  “If this is a real monster, if he’s half the size Doc says he might be—and if there’s even a spark of life left in him—I’m gonna cut the line and let t
he bastard go.”

  “Like hell you are. Not before I get a shot at him.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “We certainly will,” Manning said, and he headed down into the cabin.

  Talley set a tripod on the flying bridge and mounted his video camera on it, while Manning positioned himself against the railing, his rifle loaded with a thirty-round banana clip and held against his chest. Below, Darling ran the winch as Sharp fed the rope into a plastic drum.

  When the drum was half-full, Darling reached out and strummed the rope with his fingers. Then he stopped the winch and wrapped a hand around the rope and tugged on it.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “If it was ever there. It’s gone now, there’s nothing on this rope but rope.”

  “It can’t be!” Talley said.

  “We’ll know in a minute,” Darling said, and he started the winch again.

  “He wasn’t really hooked, then.”

  “You mean he pulled those buoys down just for sport?”

  The first of the umbrella rigs came up, and Sharp lifted it aboard. The baits were there, whole, untouched. A moment later the second rig came up, then the third. Nothing had eaten any of them.

  As the fourth umbrella rig came into view, Sharp held up a hand, and Darling slowed the winch.

  “Lord,” Sharp said, reaching for the rig, “this thing looks like it was run over by a train.”

  The rig had been crushed, and its wires had been wrapped tight around the rope. Intertwined with the rope and wires were strands of a white musclelike fiber. Two of the baits were whole, still secured to the hooks, but the other baits were gone, and nothing was left of the hooks but a couple of inches of gnarled shaft.

  Talley’s camera was running, his eye pressed to the viewfinder. Darling held one of the hooks up for the camera. “Can’t bend ‘em out, huh? Can’t bust ‘em off? Well, Doc, whatever’s down there didn’t just bend ‘em out, he bit ‘em off.”

  Sharp plucked some of the white fibers from the rig, and they left a pungent stench on his fingers. He grimaced and wiped his hands on his trousers.