Beast (30 page)

“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 insurance.” 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 the 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.

“It’s Architeuthis.” Talley said. “Smell the ammonia. He left us his calling card.” He turned off the camera.

“Don’t other things stink of ammonia?” Darling asked.

“Not like Architeuthis does, Captain. It’s his signature, and it’s the main reason we know anything about him. Nobody has seen a live one, not in this century, except for one that killed some people in the 1940s, and that was in the dark and they never really saw it. But people have seen dead ones; two washed up off Newfoundland in the sixties. The reason they washed up instead of sinking—they’re not like fish, they don’t have swim bladders—is that their flesh is full of ammonium ions, and the specific gravity of ammonium ions is slightly less than that of seawater. It’s one-point-oh-one against one-point-oh-two-two, if you care. I saw the dead ones, Captain, and they didn’t just smell of ammonia, they reeked of it.” Talley turned to Manning and grinned. “It’s him, Osborn. He’s here, no question. We’ve found him.”

“Listen, Doc,” Darling said, “either you’re crazy or you’ve been holding out on us. You can’t catch a giant squid on a hook. You can’t catch him with a submarine. So how in Christ’s name do you plan to catch him?”

Talley said, “Living things are driven by two primal instincts, Captain, isn’t that correct? The first one is hunger. What’s the other?”

Darling looked at Sharp, who shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Sex?”

“Yes,” Talley said, “sex. I intend to capture the giant squid with sex.”

TALLEY HAD NUMBERED his cases, and had included detailed descriptions of their contents in the customs manifest. Now he consulted the manifest and, with the help of Sharp and Darling, sorted the cases and arranged them on the afterdeck in a precise order.

Manning stood aside, and stared out at the water. To Darling, he seemed to be reducing himself to a single core, with a single purpose, stripping away the layers of social conditioning and leaving only a naked compulsion to kill. Darling had known people like Manning in the past, people who had lost all regard for safety; there was nothing more dangerous on a boat.

When Talley was satisfied with the arrangement of his cases, he beckoned Darling and Sharp over to a long aluminum box the size of a coffin, which was secured with snap locks. He undid the locks and lifted the lid. “Admit it,” he said proudly. “Isn’t this the sexiest thing you ever saw?”