Beast (29 page)

The boat was straining against its lines, rocking gently. He was about to step aboard, when suddenly he sensed that someone was there, in the cabin. He wasn’t sure why he knew, so he stopped and listened. Over the routine noises of the lines creaking and water lapping against the hull, he heard breathing sounds.

Some damn reporter, he thought, one of those smartass kids who think that “no” means “try harder” and that they’ve got a God-given right to invade a man’s privacy.

He crossed the gangplank and stepped down onto the steel deck and said, “By the time I count three, your ass better be up and ashore, or you’re goin’ for a long, long swim.” Then he stepped over the threshold into the cabin, said, “One …” and saw Marcus Sharp sit up with a start and strike his head on the upper bunk.

Sharp yawned, rubbed his head, smiled and said, “Morning, Whip …”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Darling said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I thought maybe you could use some help today.”

“I’d welcome a pair of friendly hands, that’s for sure, but what does Uncle Sam have to say about this?”

“Uncle Sam sent me … sort of. Scientists from all over the country—all over the world—have been trying to goose the navy into launching an expedition to hunt for the squid, but the navy claims it doesn’t have the money. I think the truth is that the navy doesn’t want to tackle something they don’t know anything about, and run the risk of looking foolish. Anyway, they’ve been getting on Wallingford’s case, as if he’s supposed to come up with some magic formula. When I told him you were going out, he thought it would look good to have the navy go too, sort of show the flag—that is, me. I’m supposed to make it look as if Wallingford is actually doing something.” Sharp paused. “I tried to call. I thought you wouldn’t … I hope you don’t mind.”

“Hell no. But look, Marcus, I want you to know up front what you’re signing on for. These folks—”

“I’ve seen the beast, Whip. Or almost.”

“Okay, then. You’ve had demolition training, right?”

“A year.”

“Good. We’re gonna need it.” Darling smiled. “Meantime, first thing to do is make some coffee.”

At six-thirty, they cast off and motored slowly across the bay to the town dock, where Talley and Manning waited beside a rented pickup truck piled high with cases. Talley wore a windbreaker, khaki pants and short rubber boots. Manning looked as if he had stepped from the pages of a catalog: Topsider boat shoes, pleated trousers, a beige shirt with a club logo on the breast and a crisp new Gore-Tex foul-weather jacket.

“What’s all that crap for?” Darling asked from the flying bridge while Sharp tied the boat to the dock. “You aiming to build yourselves a skyscraper?”

Neither of them answered, and Darling realized there was tension between them. Curious, he thought: What now? They’ve gotten their way, everything should be peachy.

They unloaded twenty-two cases in all, placing them aboard the boat under Talley’s supervision. He wanted some of them inside the cabin, protected from the weather, but most were stacked on the afterdeck.

When all the cases were aboard, Manning reached inside the cab of the truck and brought out a long case. From the way Manning carried it, Darling could see that it was heavy, and from the care he took not to bang it on anything, he could tell that it was precious.

“What’s that?” Darling asked him.

“Never mind,” Manning said, and he disappeared into the cabin.

Is that so? Darling said to himself. Well, we’ll see about that.

A van from the local television station wheeled around the corner at the end of the lane and stopped at the edge of the dock. A reporter got out, followed by a cameraman who scrambled to assemble his equipment.

“Captain Darling?” called the reporter. “Can we talk to you, please? For ZBM.”

“No,” Darling said from the flying bridge.

“Just for a minute.” The reporter looked behind him to make sure the camerman was ready and rolling. “You’re going out after the monster. What makes you—”

“No we’re not. Hell, son, nobody in his right mind would do that.” He looked aft and said to Sharp, “Cast her off, Marcus,” and when he saw that the last of the lines were aboard, he put the boat in gear and began to move slowly through the dozens of boats moored in the bay.

He waited until he was sure that they were out of earshot of the dock, and then he leaned over the side of the flying bridge and said, “Mr. Manning, would you come up here a second?”

Manning climbed the ladder and walked forward and said impatiently, “What is it?”

“What’s in the case?”

“I told you all you need to know.”

“Uh-huh,” Darling said. “I see.” A hundred yards dead ahead, a sixty-foot schooner lay broadside to their path, flanked by two fifty-foot fishing boats. “Okay, then …” He reached over and grabbed one of Manning’s hands and put it on the wheel. “Here you go.”

Then he turned and walked off the flying bridge and headed for the ladder.

“What are you doing?” Manning shouted.

“Gonna take a nap.”

“What!?”

“It’s your show; you run it.”

“Come back here!” Manning cried, looking ahead. The schooner was fifty yards away now, and they were closing on it. He had nowhere to turn; there were boats on all sides.

Darling started down the ladder. “Call me when we get there,” he said.

Manning pulled back on the throttle and spun the wheel, but the boat didn’t stop; it yawed; it was aimed directly at the schooner. He jerked the throttle back, and the boat rumbled into reverse and began to back toward the stern of a fishing boat. “What do you want?” he shouted.

Darling said, “You want to run the show, go ahead and run it.”

“No!” Manning protested. “I … help!” He slammed the throttle forward, and again the bow aimed for the schooner.

Darling waited for another second, until Manning, panicked, flung his hands in the air and lurched backward. Then he took two steps up the ladder, walked quickly across the deck and took the wheel. He spun it, gunned the throttle and, like a tailor threading a needle, nosed the boat between the bow of the schooner and the stern of the fishing boat, missing each by no more than six inches.

“Funny, isn’t it?” Darling said when they were clear. “The things money can’t buy.”

Manning was angry. “That was completely unne—”

“No, it was very necessary,” Darling said. “Look, Mr. Manning, we have to work together. We can’t have folks running all over the boat with their own agendas. Talley knows the animal but doesn’t know anything about the ocean. Marcus knows the ocean but doesn’t know the animal. I know something about each, and you, I figure, don’t know shit about anything but making money. So: What’s in the case?”

Manning hesitated. “A rifle.”

“How did you get it in? Bermuda doesn’t take kindly to guns.”

“Disassembled. I spread the pieces around in Talley’s cases. It would have taken an armorer to put the puzzle together.”

“What kind of rifle?”

“A Finnish assault rifle. A Valmet. It usually shoots a standard NATO seven-point-sixty-five-millimeter cartridge.”

“What do you mean, ‘usually’? You’ve had something done to it?”

“To the bullets, yes. The clips are loaded so that every third bullet is a phosphorous tracer, and the others are filled with cyanide slugs.”

“And you think you can kill the beast with that.”

“That’s our arrangement. Talley will find it, do whatever studies he wants, and then I’ll kill it.”

“It has to be you.”

“Yes.”

Darling thought for a moment, then said, “Do you really think there’s anything you can do for your kids at this point?”

“It has nothing to do with them, not anymore. It has to do with me. This is something I have to do.”

“I see,” Darling said with a sigh. “Okay, Mr. Manning, but take a word of counsel: Do it right the first time, ‘cause I’m only giving you one chance. Then it’s my show, I’m taking over.”

“And doing what?”

“I’m gonna blow him into dust. Or try to.”

“Fair enough,” Manning said. “Want some coffee?”

“Sure. Black.”

Manning walked aft toward the ladder, and said, “I’ll tell the mate to bring you some.”

“The mate, Mr. Manning,” Darling said, “is a lieutenant in your United States Navy. Don’t tell him; ask him. And say ‘please.’ “

Manning opened his mouth, closed it. “Excuse me,” he said, and he went below.

At the mouth of the bay, Darling turned to the north. As he rounded the point and headed for the cut, he looked back. Between two Norfolk pines on the end of the point stood Charlotte, her nightgown billowing in the breeze. He waved to her, and she waved back, then turned away, and walked up the lawn toward the house.

Sharp brought Darling some coffee and stood beside him on the flying bridge. They looked to the northwest, to the spot at the edge of the deep where the Ellis Explorer had anchored.

For a moment, neither of them spoke, then Darling said, “You liked that girl.”

“Yes. I even thought … well, it doesn’t matter.”

“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.”

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.