White Shark (8 page)
Authors: Peter Benchley
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Mystery, #Suspense, #Thriller, #Horror
The fishermen were coming, coming to
slaughter the pregnant shark.
Chase and Tall Man had had no
discussion.
They had fetched some
explosives from below — a brick of plastique left over from the building of the
Institute's docks — and had carefully inserted charges into parts of the whale
farthest from where the shark was feeding.
They had detonated the charges one by one, blasting the whale carcass
into pieces that immediately began to disperse and sink.
The fishermen's radar target was gone; now
they could never find the remains of the whale — or the shark.
The shark submerged, following pieces of
blubber down into the safety of the deep.
If the EPA or the DEP wanted to try to
make a case against them, Chase thought, let them.
There had been no witnesses, the evidence
would be flimsy and if any of the charter fishermen were smart enough to figure
out what he'd done and why, and fool enough to lodge a complaint, they'd be
hanging themselves by admitting they'd been intending to get closer to the dead
whale than the law allowed.
Most important, the shark would still be
alive.
They had lowered their tracking sensor and
followed the white for a few more hours as she moved eastward into deeper water
and then turned to the north.
Under normal circumstances, Chase would
have pursued the shark without interruption, for to break away meant risking
losing her; she could wander out of range, and they might not find her again
before the transmitter's batteries gave out — two days, three at most.
But Max had been scheduled to arrive at
the Groton/New London airport that evening, flying in from Sun Valley via
For the first time ever, Max was going to
spend a solid month with his dad, and Chase was damned if he'd let the boy be
met by a taxi driver from the nearby town of Stonington, and then ferried,
alone and in twilight, out to a rock that would have looked to him about as
appealing as Alcatraz.
So he and Tall Man abandoned the shark,
prying that she wouldn’t roam up to
and that with luck they could be back tracking the animal within six
hours.
Chase had no idea how close she
was to giving birth, but the electronic sensor would record the event if it
occurred, would transmit changes in body temperature and chemistry.
They might even see the birth if it happened
near the surface.
No one — no scientist
or sportsman — had ever witnessed the birth of a great white shark.
Max had said he didn't need to unpack, and
they hustled out of the airport, into the truck, onto the ferry, out to the
island and onto the boat.
Red-eyed,
exhausted, the boy had also been deliriously excited at the thought of seeing a
live white shark.
When he called his
mother from the cellular phone on the boat, the only adjective he could summon
up was ‘awesome.’
Corinne had been less than thrilled, had
asked to speak to Simon,
had
lectured him to be
careful.
Max had settled the
matter.
He had taken the phone back from
Chase and had said, "Chill out, Mom, it's okay.
Great whites don't want to hurt people."
"What do you mean?"
Max had laughed and said, "They just
want to eat them."
But when he
heard his mother gasp, he had added, "Just kidding, Mom... a little shark
humor."
"Do you have your windbreaker?
"
Corinne had asked.
"We're fine, Mom, really... love
ya."
Then Max had hung up.
Within an hour, they had relocated the
shark, which Chase regarded as a fortuitous confirmation of one of his pet
theories.
He was particularly interested in — and in
fact was considering writing his dissertation about — the question of
territoriality in great white sharks.
Researchers in
places like Dangerous Reef and
temperature varied little from season to season, had concluded that the
region's whites were definitely territorial.
Their food source was stable — colonies of seals — and in the course of
roughly a week each white would make a tour of its territory and return to
begin again.
Here on the East Coast of the
where the water temperature varied by as much as thirty degrees from winter to
summer, and food supplies appeared and disappeared unpredictably,
territoriality would seem to be impractical.
Though no one knew for certain.
Chase had been gathering evidence suggesting
that these whites might be migratory:
they seemed to go south in the winter, reappear in the spring or early
summer (traveling, some of them, s far north and east as the Canadian
Maritimes), stay till late September or early October and then begin to move
south again.
But what intrigued Chase most was that the
records of years of tagging were beginning to show that some whites returned to
the same area year after year after year and reestablished the same general
territory during their stay in that area.
If he could prove that there were patterns of repetition, he might be
able to open up a new field of research into the navigational capacities and
memory-engram imprinting in great white sharks.
That is, as long as there were any great
white sharks left to
study.
*
*
*
*
*
"She's goin' down again," Tall
Man called from the cabin.
"I guess she's one fickle lady,"
Chase said, disappointed.
He looked
toward shore.
Napatree Point was abeam,
the town of
"Where
to now?"
"She's off to Montauk, looks
like.
But not with any
great purpose.
She's
strolling."
Chase walked forward into the cabin, hung
up the camera and wiped sweat from his eyebrows.
"Want a sandwich?" he called to
Max.
"Not one of those gross
sardine-and-onion things."
"No.
I saved you a peanut-butter-and-jelly."
"Crack me a beer," Tall Man
said, looking at his watch.
"This
watch may say
it's
nine-fifteen, but it doesn't know
diddly about what time it really is."
They had been sleeping in erratic four-hour shifts for the past forty
hours.
"My guts tell me it's
straight up on beer o'clock."
Chase took a step toward the ladder that
led to the galley below, when suddenly the boat lurched, lurched again and lost
forward motion.
The bow seemed to heave
up, the stern to drop.
"What the hell's that?
"
Chase said.
"You hit something?"
"In
a
hundred
feet of water?"
Tall Man frowned at the Fathometer.
"Not hardly
."
The engine seemed to be laboring.
They heard a sound, as of rubber stretching
— a complaining screech — and then the television monitor and the signal
receiver began to inch backward on their mounts.
The connecting wire was stretched taut
through the doorway.
"Reverse!
"
Chase
shouted as he ran to the door.
Tall Man shifted into reverse; the
connecting wire went slack and drooped to the deck.
Outside in the cockpit, Chase saw that the
coil of rubber-coated wire was gone; three hundred feet had spooled
overboard.
"The twine must've
broken," he said.
"The
sensor's hitched in something on the bottom."
Chase took the wire in his hand and began
to pull, and Max coiled it on the deck behind him.
When the wire tautened again, Chase jigged
it, pulling it left and right, giving it slack and then hauling it tight.
There was no give; the sensor was caught
fast.
"I can't figure out what it's hitched
in," he said.
"Nothing down
there but sand."
"Maybe," Tall Man said.
He put the engine in neutral, letting the
boat drift, and joined Chase and Max in the stern.
He took the wire from Chase and held it in
his fingertips, as if trying to decipher a message from its vibrations.
"That nor’easter last week...
forty knots of breeze for a day and a half
will kick up hell with the bottom.
Sand'll shift.
It could be
anything:
a rock, a car somebody
deep-sixed."
"It could be a shipwreck," Max
said.
Chase shook his head.
"Not around here.
We've charted every wreck in the
area."
To Tall Man he said "We
got any tanks aboard?"
"Nope.
I didn't plan
on diving."
Chase went forward, into the cabin, and adjusted
the scale on the Fathometer to its most sensitive reading.
When he returned, he was holding a face mask
and snorkel.
"Thirty meters," he said
.
"Ninety-five
feet, give or take."
"You gonna dive for that sensor?
"
Tall Man asked, his voice rising.
"
Free
-dive?
Are you
nuts?"
"It's worth a try.
I've dived ninety feet before."
"Not without a tank, you
haven't.
Not since you were
eighteen.
Hell, Simon, you'll black out
if you try
forty
feet."
"You want to try?"
"Not a chance.
This country's already got enough dead
redskins."
"Then we got a problem, ‘cause I'm
damned if I'm gonna lose three thousand bucks worth of wire and three thousand
more of transmitter."
"Buoy it," Tall Man said.
"We'll get some tanks and come back for
it later."
"By then we'll have lost the shark
for good."
"Maybe... but we won't have lost
you."
Chase hesitated, still tempted to try to
free-dive for the sensor, or at least go down far enough down to be able to see
what had snagged it.
He was curious to
know if he could still dive that deep.
As youngsters, he and Tall had free-dived to bottoms invisible from the
surface, had swum around the hulks of old fishing boats, had stolen lobsters
from traps nestled in crevices in deep reefs.
But
Tall
was right; he was no longer a teenager,
an athlete who could party all night and swim all day.
He might make it to the bottom, but he'd
never make it back.
Starved for oxygen,
his brain would shut down and he would pass out — near the surface if he was
lucky, far below if he was not.
"Talk to the man, son," Tall Man
said to Max.
"Tell him you didn't
come all this way just to take your daddy home in a box."
Max started at Tall Man's bluntness, then
put a hand on his father's arm and said, "C'mon, Dad..."
Chase smiled.
"Okay, we'll buoy it," he said.
"Can we get some tanks and come back
and dive on it?
"
Max asked.
"That'd be cool."
"You know how to dive?"
Chase felt a pang, almost of pain, as if the
fact that Max had learned to dive without him, somewhere else, was a reprimand
for his failures as a parent.
"Where'd you learn?"
"At home, in the
pool.
Gramps got me some lessons."
"Oh," Chase said, feeling
better.
At least the boy hadn't really
been diving; he'd been preparing for his visit.
"We'll put you in the water, sure, but I think we'll start a little
shallower."
Tall Man went to the cabin to disconnect
the wire and waterproof the plug with O-ring grease and rubber tape.
Chase lifted a hatch in the stern and found a
yellow rubber buoy, eighteen inches in diameter, on which the initials ‘O.I.’
were
emblazoned in red Day-Glo tape.
