by JE Gurley
The only thing going right was the weather. The sun shone down on a gentle sea. No dark storm clouds marred the perfect powder blue of the sky. The burnished copper glow of the sunset beckoned them toward the horizon with the promise of a better haul from the next string of pots. The unnaturally warm mid-October weather teased them into forgetting just how treacherous the Bering Sea could be. Ships that disregarded the weather reports or played too close to the edge in pursuit of crabs often paid a heavy price for their folly, like his father.
“How much farther?”
Daryl turned to see deckhand Jonas Long standing at the open bridge door with a cup of coffee in his hand. He had known Long for years, since high school. They had toiled together under his father heaving heavy six-hundred-pound pots baited with shad over the side, and then winching them in again two days later, usually filled to overflowing with red or blue king crab or opilio snow crab.
He glanced at the GPS screen. “Another couple of miles.” He saw Long staring ahead of the boat. “Too far away to see yet.”
Long smiled. “You caught me. I hope it’s a good haul this time.”
Daryl frowned. “Me and you both.” He looked at Long’s drawn face and guessed what he was thinking. “Go ahead. You can say it.”
Long shook his head. “It’s not your fault. No one is having any luck.”
“Maybe so, but I’m the captain now.” He paused afraid to ask. “What do the others think?”
Long shrugged. “There’s some grumbling, but no calls for a mutiny yet.”
“Maybe an armed insurrection would enliven things a bit.” He craned his neck to stretch aching muscles.
Seeing his discomfort, Long asked, “Want me to take over for a while?”
Daryl shook his head. “Naw, I’m okay. You go below and get the others ready. We’ll be there in a ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Okay.” Long turned to leave; then, paused and squinted out the window. “What’s that?”
Daryl followed Long’s gaze toward a speck in the distance. “Too big for a buoy.” He checked the radar and saw a small blip on the screen, appearing and disappearing between troughs in the waves. “It’s showing up on radar. Must be some debris from a passing cargo ship.”
Two minutes later, as they drew near enough to see it more closely, Daryl recognized the rudder and keel of a ship upside down in the water. The tension in his aching shoulders pulled at his spine with a dread of impending doom.
“It’s a boat,” Long noted. His voice showed equal concern.
Daryl slowed the engine and let Fool’s Luck drift closer. As he circled the capsized boat, he read the upside down name on the stern. “It’s the Casey’s Chariot.”
“This is bad, real bad,” Long replied.
“Go alert the others. We’ll search for survivors.” He didn’t have much hope of finding anyone alive in the water. Twenty minutes in the frigid 34-degree water was enough to kill a person. The Chariot had been incommunicado for forty-eight hours. It could have capsized anytime during those two days. He wondered what could have caused it to roll over on its belly. The weather had been as perfect as it got in the Bering Sea. He had heard no SOS, no distress call, no plea for help. He picked up the radio and dialed Coast Guard Channel 16.
“Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This Fool’s Luck position 125 miles east of St. George, 145 miles NNE of Unimak. Mayday. Encountered capsized vessel Casey’s Chariot. Searching for survivors. Over.”
“Fool’s Luck, this is Coast Guard Cutter Trinity. Is your vessel all right?”
“Affirmative, Trinity. We are in no danger. I’ll send GPS coordinates.”
“Appreciated, Fools Luck. Standby.”
After relaying the coordinates, he replaced the mic. By then, the entire crew had crowded into the small bridge cabin. By their distraught expressions, he knew they too held out little hope of survivors. Crabbing in the Bering Sea was one of the most dangerous professions on the planet. Every season or two, a boat sank. Each season produced its share of injuries or casualties. On a crab boat, you spun the Wheel of Fortune and took your chances. Casey’s Chariot had landed on Bankrupt.
“We’ll run an expanding spiral around the Chariot until the Coast Guard cutter arrives. Anders, you climb atop of the bridge and keep a sharp lookout. Give a shout if you see anything.”
Chris Anders, a skinny eighteen-year-old college student from Portland on his first trip to sea, nodded and left, eager for a change in the brutal routine of dropping and hauling in crab pots. To one so young, who seldom dwelt on death, the fate of the crew of the Chariot did not affect him as it did the more experienced hands that saw the Grim reaper’s visage in very storm. They knew it could have very well been them.
“First, we’ll pull, alongside and pound on the hull. If anyone’s alive inside, they’ll hear and respond. Chachi, Steadman, get out the medical kit and some blankets, just in case.”
“What about the string?” Kelly Kacek, a native Homer boy on his third season with the Fool’s Luck asked.
Daryl frowned. “The crab can wait. People come first.”
Kacek looked as if he wanted to say more, but nodded and left. The others followed suit, all except for Long.
“This is a waste of time,” he said.
Daryl nodded. “Probably, but they’d search for us if we sank.”
Long lowered his head and spoke softly. “Yeah. You’re right. Too bad. I knew the captain, Hassel Mays. A real bastard, but a good captain.”
Daryl knew Mays, too, as well three of the crew of Casey’s Chariot. At sea, they were competitors, but on shore, they were friends and drinking companions. “Don’t speak ill of the dead,” he warned. “It’s bad luck.”
Long looked up. “Bad luck. Well, we’ve had our share, I suppose.”
“Look, chances are slim that they’re still alive. If we don’t find anything, my last spiral will take us to close to our string. It’ll be dark by then anyway. We’ll pull the pots before we come back at daybreak to resume the search. The Coast Guard will be here soon. Maybe they’ll find something.”
“Makes sense.” Long grinned, pulled a well-worn rabbit’s foot from his pocket, and rubbed it. “For luck. Maybe this one is the one.”
Daryl said nothing. The rabbit’s foot hadn’t been lucky for the rabbit. Their luck wasn’t running much better. He wondered idly if the Chariot’s holding tanks were full or empty when she sank. It would have been a bitter twist of fate to sink with a full hold. He nudged Fool’s Luck gently against Casey’s Chariot’s hull. As Long prepared to leap across the open gap to the ship’s exposed keel, Casey’s Chariot heeled over onto its port side, revealing a gaping ten-foot-wide rent in the starboard section of the bow.
“My God,” Daryl exclaimed, incredulous at the amount of damage to the Chariot. “What did she collide with to cause that?”
Long leaned over the side and plucked something from the edge of the rip in the hull, and then showed it to Daryl. It took a moment for Daryl’s confused mind to comprehend what he was looking at. Its curved triangular shape was unmistakably a tooth, but it was at least eleven inches long, the biggest tooth he had ever seen.
“It’s a damned shark’s tooth,” Long said, as incredulous as Daryl.
“Impossible!” Daryl responded, refusing to believe what he was seeing. “If it is, the shark would have to be fifty or sixty feet long. No toothed shark grows that large.”
“It’s something’s tooth,” Long challenged. “What else could it be but a shark?” He touched the cutting edge of the tooth with the tip of his finger, yelped in pain, and drew it back. Blood dripped from his lanced finger. He jammed the finger in his mouth, and then examined the laceration. “It’s as sharp as my knife.”
Daryl studied the rent in the hull more closely, now noticing the regular jagged pattern; exactly what a row of teeth the size the one Long held would leave. It was unbelievable, akin to claiming to have seen a sea monster, but the tooth was proof. It was difficult to grasp th
at a creature so large roamed the Bering Sea, had killed the crew of Casey’s Choice.
The stricken ship rolled slightly, revealing part of the drowned interior of the cabin. The upper torso of a body floated out. Though the corpse had been in the water overnight and nibbled on by fish, Daryl recognized Captain Mays. His gaunt face still bore the look of horror it had worn as the shark had bitten off the lower half of his body. Daryl hoped he had died quickly.
His voice cracked as he said, “Bring him aboard, and wrap him in a blanket. Put him in the freezer.”
Long and Kacek used a boathook to snag May’s coat and pulled him onto the deck of Fool’s Luck. Kacek took one look at the mutilated body, and his face turned a sickly pale. He heaved his guts over the side of the ship; retching until no more came up. Daryl didn’t blame him. His own stomach felt like a disturbed nest of vipers. He covered Mays’ face reverently with a corner of the blanket.
“Let’s go,” he said. In spite of the tragedy that had befallen Casey’s Choice, they still had crabs to catch.
* * * *
Their spiral search pattern produced no results—no lifejackets, no more bodies, or no debris. Just after 9:00 p.m., they pulled alongside their first buoy, hooked it, and began winching in the pots. Daryl could tell by the sound of the winch that the pots were empty. When the first one broke the surface bearing only two king crabs, a peculiar silence fell over the usually boisterous crew, a gloom that had begun with the discovery of Casey’s Choice and now reached into the bridge and clamped icy fingers around Daryl’s heart. He stared at their faces in the ghostly glow of the work lights and saw their bitter disappointment. They dutifully placed the pair in the holding tank, as if hoping they would mate and miraculously fill the tank with offspring before they reached port.
The second pot produced similar results, not enough for a good dinner for the crew. The third pot looked as if someone had attacked it with a sledgehammer and bolt cutters. The door dangled from the misshapen pot by a single bent hinge. Most of one end of the pot was missing, ripped away. Daryl immediately thought of the fate of Casey’s Choice. His instincts told him to leave, but economics demanded they recover their string of pots, empty or not. They were too valuable to leave behind.
When the hoist winch began groaning as they raised the fourth pot, the mood on the deck lightened. Maybe their luck had changed after all. The cable suddenly snapped taught, placing a strain on the winch. Shadows danced on deck, as the work lights bounced on their stand. The motor whined out its agony. Daryl eased off on the ship’s engine; then, cut it altogether, as the davit arm continued to bend under the strain. With a loud snap, the line hauler tore away from the davit. Long shoved Kacek aside just in time to prevent the errant cable from decapitating him. They rolled across the deck, as the line hauler pounded the hull, and then went slack.
At first, Daryl thought they had lost the pot. They would have to grapple it to recover it, a time-consuming process. Then, the cable snapped taut in the water and beat a staccato tempo against the gunwales.
One bit of luck in an otherwise dismal day.
Long quickly rose from the deck. “Restring the cable through the port winch pulley.”
The crew scurried to comply. Long manned the second winch and began hauling the errant pot aboard ship. When the ship listed to starboard, Daryl thought the pot had snagged something on the bottom, a piece of wreckage or a rocky spire. Just as he started to tell them to cut it free, the pot broke the surface, followed by a living nightmarish creature plucked from Neptune’s watery hell.
The pot held not a load of red king crabs, but a single monstrous crustacean clinging to its side. The pale white creature looked like no crab with which he was familiar, certainly nothing in Alaskan waters. Its pasty carapace measured six feet across. Spikes protruded from the edges of the shell like some dystopian armored vehicle. As soon as the pot broke surface, the giant crab leaped from it onto the deck, spreading its thirteen-foot-wide legs and scuttling along the deck. Two sightless waved atop its eyestalks. Blind, the creature swiveled to follow every sound.
Faced with an armored monster, the crew scattered, but not quickly enough. The crab reached out one massive clawed chelipad and grasped Kacek around his shoulders, as his booted feet slapped the first rung of the ladder. The serrated claw dug deeply into his flesh. The sickening crunch of breaking bones was audible over the groans of the still straining winch and Kacek’s screams. Long had the presence of mind to attack the crab with the boathook, pounding at the claw that held Kacek in its grip, but the crab ignored his pitiful efforts, plucked Kacek’s head from his body, and brought it to his mouth. With a cry of anger, Long jabbed the tip of the boathook into the crab’s blind eye. Wounded, it reared in pain and dropped Kacek’s limp body to the deck.
Daryl fumbled in the desk drawer for the Very pistol. Loading it, he took careful aim at the giant creature stalking the deck of his ship. He took a deep breath, released it slowly, and squeezed the trigger. The flare struck the creature squarely in the mouth. The crab danced in a circle, trying to extricate the burning object from its mouth, knocking over the work lights, plunging the deck into darkness. It stumbled against a stack of empty crab pots in the stern. The pots toppled over the crab, trapping it beneath tons of steel cages, but before anyone could get close enough to kill it, the creature began flinging pots away from its body. One flying six-hundred-pound pot caught young Chris Anders in the chest, crushing him against the gunwale and killing him instantly.
Long and Chachi Cuthbert raced to the open door and dove open down the steps to the cabin. The crab, now free of its entanglements, followed them. Using the only weapon available, Daryl stepped from the bridge holding a fire extinguisher. He sprayed the creature in its remaining eye with the freezing foam. The crab screeched in pain and backed away, clawing at its damaged eye, until falling over the side of the ship. Dropping the empty extinguisher, he slid down the ladder to the deck, grabbed a fire ax from the wall, and freed the stringer cable from the winch. Then, racing back up to the bridge, he shoved the throttles forward. The propeller, powered by the Luck’s GMC 725-horsepower engine, dug into the water. The bow rose from the water, as the Fool’s Luck shot forward away from the grisly scene of death. He had lost two crewmen, his string of crab pots, and, when he failed to pay his bank loan, probably his boat as well, but he was alive, and for now, that was enough.
Then, from the darkness, illuminated by the fallen work lights, he saw the thirty-foot-tall fin rise from the water paralleling the ship, and his heart hammered in his chest. The shark, if one could call such a monstrous creature a shark, raced ahead of the Fool’s Luck and rose to the surface. He stared at the pale gray flesh, the dead white eyes watching his approach, and felt a deeper fear than he had ever felt in his life. He could not outrun the creature. His only choice was to crash into it head on, use the Luck’s powerful engines and momentum of the ship as a battering ram.
He crossed himself, something he had not done since his days as an altar boy at Saint Andrews. He braced himself for impact, the image of Captain Mays of Casey’s Choice running through his kind, the amputated torso, waterlogged and fish nibbled. The ship struck the shark like ramming the dock. The ship stopped, but he did not. His body flew across the bridge and through the forward window. The pain of glass slicing into his flesh was momentary, compared to the impact with the bow deck. Fool’s Luck rolled to port, tossing him into the freezing water.
His ship, his father’s ship, slowly sank beneath the waves, the bow staved in. The giant shark, a megalodon, if his few biology classes in school were right, was unharmed. It circled the sinking ship, like Moby Dick circling Ahab’s Pequod, creating a whirlpool that spun him in a circle. Then, the megalodon came for him. Its open mouth looked cavernous, the fourteen-inch teeth, pearly white razor-sharp stalactites and stalagmites that closed slowly to meet around his body. He felt no pain, just an instant of shock, and then nothing more.
4
December 24, 20
18 Semi-submersible Drillship Vanguard, Beaufort Sea, Arctic–
Asa Iverson avoided his crewmates on the Vanguard as much as possible, earning him a reputation as a lone wolf. He didn’t mind that they thought him aloof and laconic. Since the Global Kulik incident, he had no love for his fellow oilmen, many of whom had seemed determined to blame him for the Global Kulik’s sinking and the deaths of friends or people they had known. That his own friends, people he had worked with for years, had died did not seem to matter to them. Someone was to blame, and he was a handy target.
His story to the Coast Guard when they rescued him had not helped. They assumed it the ravings of a half-frozen survivor. The more he repeated it to various agencies, the less they believed him. He saw in their eyes and in the manner in which they perfunctorily nodded their head in agreement that they considered his unbelievable story a desperate concoction designed to conceal some blame he might have had in the ship’s demise. He soon learned to keep his mouth shut, especially when the U.S. Navy eventually became involved. The military squelched his story before it reached the newspapers and threatened him with prosecution under some obscure national security law if he spoke about it publically.
Global Oil dropped him like last week’s newspaper, citing unspecified emotional turmoil due to stress, another name for bat-shit crazy. He had spent seven months ashore, living off his savings account, replaying every moment of the sinking in his mind in a desperate attempt to persuade himself he had imagined the entire episode. No one returned his phone calls or asked for a meeting when he left his resumes. Word spread. He had become persona non grata, a pariah.
