“All I’m saying is that if we’re going to do something extreme, we need more of a plan than ‘let’s do something terminally stupid that will get us killed and get SeaLove sued out of existence.’”
Powell scoffed, spat another wad of blood. “You three can do whatever you like. I’m not having any part of it.”
He pushed past Feole and Ash and went down below. Ivor nudged the throttle forward, turning the ship so that it cut across the waves, lessening the back-and-forth a bit.
“What kind of plan are we talking about?” Ash said. “We’ve got to stop them.”
“They can’t prove who we are,” Ivor growled. “I’ve got a case of whiskey down below. Why don’t we pull alongside and toss Molotov cocktails at them? That’d send them home.”
“Might still get arrested,” Ash replied.
Ivor barked laughter that sounded harsh but genuine. “You were angry enough to let me cut them off, but now you’re afraid to go to jail?”
Feole dropped his hands from her shoulders and turned away. He stood, swaying on the deck in the rain, watching the Thaumas draw even farther out of range. They could all see the massive seal herds following, dark heads glistening as they popped up from the water before submerging and carrying on. They had moved into the wake of the research vessel themselves and Ash glanced around to see that they were in the midst of the seals now. She caught a glimpse of a shark fin and then another.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Feole announced, “but maybe Ivor’s right about the Molotov cocktails. We’ve got to turn them around. I won’t die for this, but if I’m not willing to go to jail for it…”
Ash felt a tremor of excitement go through her as his voice trailed off. She grinned at him. “Tony, are you sure?”
“Hell, no, I’m not sure! But I’ve already tried scaring them off. I wanted to scare the crap out of Dr. Cheong and ended up getting in a tussle with Ashmore. Never mind pushing Wolchko’s buttons. I’m too old for this shit, but I’m out here anyway, and if I’m out here then I ought to do what we came here to do.”
Ivor throttled down again, turning to stare at Feole. Ash understood the look of disbelief on his face. Her old friend had become almost conservative over the past few years.
“You serious?” she asked as the wind swept over the deck. Down inside her, a kind of war cry began to build.
Feole took off his rain-peppered glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose, and Ash knew he had already begun to have second thoughts. In a second he would regain his senses, all the boring logic that had gotten him promoted up the ladder inside their organization, and he would try to talk them down.
Instead, he glanced up with narrowed eyes and a look of determination she hadn’t seen on him in ages.
“Screw it, yeah. If I don’t do this now, what was the point of anything?”
Ash let out that war cry that had been building inside her. Grinning, exultant, she wrapped Feole up in a hug. Ivor growled at them, told them to stop wasting time, to go down and get the damn whiskey, but Ash barely heard him. For so long it had felt like she and Feole had drifted apart, but now they were tight again. All the awkwardness bled away and they were partners in crime once more. This time, literally.
“Time to go out in a blaze of glory,” she rasped into his ear as the boat drifted into a trough, tilting hard to starboard.
Feole tightened the hug as the boat righted itself, then began to tilt to port on an enormous wave. “I wouldn’t want to go to jail with anyone else. But let’s see if we can avoid—”
Something struck the boat underwater, not a simple bump but a heavy, thudding collision. Ash cried out as she felt them tilting, felt the wave rising up on the starboard side, and then another impact jolted the hull. She heard a crack, but by then she felt her feet slipping on the rain-slicked deck, felt Tony Feole try to break their embrace. Then they weren’t just tilting; they were tipping.
She screamed and grabbed Feole’s arm. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ivor holding on to the wheel, locking his arm through it to keep from falling, but in a flicker of foresight she saw how foolish this was, knew he would only trap himself under the boat.
They were going over.
Even as she slid, Ash maneuvered her legs beneath her and kicked off the deck, diving out and away and into the ocean. Heart slamming in her chest, she crashed down into the ocean, plunged beneath the waves, and then began to claw frantically toward the surface. Salt water shot up her nose and for a panicked moment she thought the boat would slam on top of her. Something bumped her, slid against her. Twisting in the water, unsure for a moment which way might be up and which down, she felt herself floating, felt the undulation of the current beneath her, and chose.
Kicking her legs, she let the surge carry her and burst from the water, gasping for air as panic seized her, fear coursing through her veins. There were seals everywhere, an endless herd of them darting past her in the water, swimming with a primal urgency. In the rain, she rode up the crest of another wave and then dropped into a trough, going under for a moment. Coughing, she felt the ocean rising beneath her again and whipped around, searching for Feole and the others, searching for her boat. In the distance, in the night and the rain, she saw the lights of the Thaumas sailing northward. Sailing away from her. The seals pursued it, the herd parting to go around her as if they barely noticed her presence.
Then they were gone, only a handful of stragglers still around her. The bulk of the herd had passed by. Already her limbs were tired and she knew she had to find something to keep her afloat. The water was cold and the shore so far away. Ash scanned the darkness for debris … and saw the upside-down hull of her own boat rise into view on a crest off to her right. She screamed for Feole, and for Ivor, and for Powell, but she heard no answering cry.
She screamed for them again, but the maelstrom seemed to swallow her words.
Thunder crashed overhead. Lightning flickered up inside the storm, and in that moment of haunting illumination she saw the huge fin of a Great White knifing toward her through the water. And beyond it another, even larger.
The lightning faded and they were only shadows in the rain.
Ash kept screaming. As another wave rose beneath her, she lost sight of those fins, but she could sense them there, could feel them.
Coming for her.
CHAPTER 16
Tye stood on the deck, cold and numb, watching the seals churn through the Thaumas’s wake. Standing on the deck for so long, leaning into the wind, had left him bone weary. He had no idea of the time but knew it must have been well after midnight. His stomach ached and he felt a flutter of queasiness, not from seasickness—he didn’t get seasick anymore—but from sheer exhaustion. He hadn’t slept well last night, and now this day had gone on forever. Another couple of hours and he could wake Kat, give himself the gift of a little shut-eye. It wouldn’t be much more than a long nap, but it would have to be enough.
He shivered, hating the slick chill of rain against his skin. He wore a heavy, hooded Grundens coat, made for this sort of weather, but somehow the rain always managed to get inside it, down the back of the collar. In a gale like this, there was no staying dry.
“Why don’t you go inside?”
Tye turned to see Rosalie had come up behind him. Over the howl of the wind and the sea, he hadn’t heard her approach.
“Go on,” she called, gesturing toward the wheelhouse. “Get some cover for a while. I’m starting to dry off and we can’t have that.”
“You sure?”
“Shit, yeah! You can monitor the broadcast signal just as well as I can. Both jobs are boring as hell. Might as well switch it up for a while.”
The ship rode up a swell and Tye grabbed her arm to keep his balance. They shared an anxious grin.
“This is crazy!” he said. “We should’ve postponed!”
“Every forecast had this crap going out to sea,” Rosalie said.
Tye became aware of their closeness
, the intimacy of the moment, so late at night and out to sea. He released her and they stared at each other for a moment. They already shared a secret, which was its own sort of intimacy—its own excitement—but he told himself he didn’t want to get any closer.
He started toward the wheelhouse, and then paused. “Can I ask you a question?”
She grabbed hold of the railing to steady herself. “So serious. What’s on your mind? Having second thoughts?”
Tye glanced toward the wheelhouse, but it was a foolish thought. The others were below, and in this storm even Bergting wouldn’t hear their conversation, though the wheelhouse was only twenty-five feet away.
“It’s not about that,” he said, tracking Rosalie’s eyes. “I just wondered why you’re being so nasty to Naomi. I agree she doesn’t belong here, but—”
The boat rolled. Rosalie reached out a hand and Tye grabbed it. They stood like that in the wind and rain, and she pulled him closer, her dark eyes gleaming.
“I worked hard to get where I am. Not that I think I’m going to share any of the glory of this jaunt. That’s why when you asked me—”
“Your name will be on the research, Rosalie,” Tye said, rain trickling along his nose. “You know that.”
“I’m still working toward my PhD. It’s your project, Tye. Yours and Kat’s, and that’s only right. But the idea that this undergrad is gonna get a ton of exposure for coming in here now and writing about it … it just makes me furious. I know it’s stupid. The girl was attacked, lost her leg, and I wouldn’t want to trade places with her. But it still makes my blood boil.”
Another swell made Tye slip a bit on the deck, so he moved to the railing beside her, still gripping her hand. He squeezed her fingers for emphasis. Not wanting to enhance their intimacy. At least he didn’t think that was what he wanted.
“I get it. You know I do. But in science, we play the long game. It’s about building a legacy, and you’re very firmly on the path to build yours. It’s everything we’ve been talking about.”
Her expression softened. “I know. Which is why it seems so strange hearing you say it now. Strange, and deeply hypocritical. I mean, are you seriously lecturing me on biding my time? Waiting my turn?”
Rosalie smiled. “I mean, damn.”
Her hood had fallen back and her hair was slicked against her skull, but despite the misery of the storm, she seemed suddenly at ease. Her hand was still in his. Self-conscious, he released her, and Rosalie laughed silently at his sudden awkwardness.
“Relax,” she said. “I’m not going to jump your bones. At least not until I’m convinced you’re actually over her.”
Tye held on to the railing a little tighter. “I’m over her.”
“You keep saying those words and maybe eventually they’ll sound true.”
Tye let go of the railing, starting back toward the wheelhouse. He opened his mouth to speak some nonsense words, just some happy-talk gibberish to extricate himself from the moment, and then something thumped against the side of the boat hard enough for him to feel the tremor under his feet.
“Whoa,” Rosalie said, gripping the railing with both hands. “What was that?”
Tye held out his arms for balance, just in case, and slid along the deck to rejoin her at the aft railing. Together they stared at the dark, rolling sea. Tye prayed they hadn’t struck a smaller boat, maybe something halfway scuttled, but he couldn’t imagine what else it might be. Maybe a buoy had come unmoored and drifted.
He saw dozens of seals, their heads popping up or their backs breaking the surface, glistening wetly, but it couldn’t have been a seal they’d struck. Whatever it had been was a hell of a lot bigger than that.
“Look at them all,” Rosalie said.
Tye shrugged. “It’s what we wanted, isn’t it?”
“I figured we’d get the seals,” she replied, “but I’m talking about the sharks. That’s a hell of a lot of fins.”
Tye had seen them, of course. He’d noticed the presence of the Great Whites all through the night and knew they had been attacking some of the seals. Instinct demanded it. But with the rain and the high waves and the dark, he hadn’t noticed just how many sharks there were. Squinting, he stared at the rough seas in their wake and began to count. Familiar curved shadows appeared in the mist and in the dim glow of lightning up behind the storm.
“Son of a bitch,” he rasped, still tallying. “We’ve got more than half a dozen back there.”
“That you can see,” Rosalie replied. “I figure that means there are twice that many. If we keep this up long enough, there won’t be any seals left to make it to Bald Cap.”
She was exaggerating. Even a couple of dozen sharks weren’t going to be able to eat well over a thousand seals. But Tye had not expected the sharks to react so immediately and so directly to the seal exodus. He and Kat had anticipated that the sharks would continue to move along their normal migration patterns, just a bit sooner. Luring the seals north had been a way to keep the sharks from threatening the swimmers on Cape Cod. This, though, was more than he and Kat could have hoped.
“The tourist bureau’s going to be thrilled,” he said.
As he spoke, there came another heavy thump against the hull. He felt the vibration in the railing and through the deck underfoot, and a deep frown creased his forehead.
“That’s twice,” Rosalie observed. “Is that normal? A Great White bumping a ship like that?”
“It’s not unheard of. They’re in a frenzy right now, losing their tiny little shark minds that there’s so much food swimming around, and thanks to our signal, the seals aren’t even trying to swim away.”
The words were true, but he saw doubt cloud Rosalie’s face, and rightly so. A Great White might bump a ship. With this much underwater traffic, it might even happen twice. But by now he figured most of the sharks had eaten their fill, and that was the thing that troubled him most. They weren’t killing to eat anymore. The sharks were killing just to kill.
A terrible thought flickered at the base of his brain, a suspicion that he did not want to entertain. Tye pushed the thought away, but he stood in the rain as the boat tilted hard to port, and he started to count the fins again, reminding himself that the experiment was the important thing. The signal. And it was working. That was all that mattered.
He counted as high as eleven this time before the storm and the night and the roll of the boat made him lose count.
After that, he didn’t want to count anymore.
CHAPTER 17
Feole felt his lungs about to burst. He clawed at the water around him, tried to feel for the current, to sense the direction the gases in his body wanted to float. Which way was up? His chest burned with the need for oxygen and he had to choose, had to risk it. A ticking noise clicked again and again inside his skull, like the baseboard heat at his grandmother’s house going on, and he knew that couldn’t be good … that sound meant something bad. Salt water stung his eyes, so he kept them tightly closed, and he swam, kicked his legs …
And surfaced.
Gasping for air, he drew several ragged, panicked breaths and twisted around in the water. He rose on a massive wave and then slipped into a trough, but there were no breakers out here. The wind howled around him and the rain came down, but he could float awhile. Long enough to find debris, he told himself. Long enough to find something to hold on to, something that would let him ride out the storm. If only he had been alone there in the water.
But he wasn’t alone.
Seals darted past him, their sleek bodies like wraiths, appearing and disappearing in an instant as they sped by. The SeaLove boat had capsized. Fifty feet away, its aft end thrust out of the water, upside-down. He could only make out the shape of it in the darkness, looming there, diminishing as it sank.
“Ash!” he screamed, his voice ripped away by the storm. “Ashleigh! Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
“Powell! Ivor! Anyone, goddammit, are you there? Are you with me?”
he shouted.
He heard only the sea and the distant rumble of thunder. Seals whipped by and the frigid water sapped what little strength he had. The looming hulk of the boat vanished a little more and he knew he had to find some kind of debris, a cooler or a life vest or a chair or something, anything, to hold on to.
Pressure on his back, sliding by. Feole screamed, not once but several times as he swam away from that pressure. Just a seal, he told himself. But now he couldn’t continue pretending to himself that the seals were the only things in the water with him. His lips trembled and he began to cry softly, and he told himself it was the cold water, the pounding of his heart, the thought of drowning. But drowning sounded almost welcoming, almost romantic.
There. He spotted something floating on the water, jutting out. Several somethings. Soaked clothes dragging him down, he tore off his coat and waited for a swell to rise and fall, and then he struck out toward that debris. Got his hand on it. A plastic deck chair, something Ivor sat in when he wanted to do a little fishing from the boat, in a lull. Would it keep floating? Would it keep him alive?
Seals glided past him, their eyes not seeing him at all. He meant nothing to them.
A larger bit of debris floated nearby, perhaps more reliable, but did he dare abandon the chair? Instead, he tried to drag it with him, but the swelling, roiling sea fought him and he had to choose. He let go, hoping he could get the chair later, and he swam to the dark thing floating on the water. Cushions from the cabin, maybe. No. Ivor’s duffel, that was it. The fabric had soaked through and looked black, but it was floating, so he reached out. His fingers grazed it on the first try, and as he reached again the thing turned in the water and he saw it wasn’t Ivor’s duffel at all. It was Ivor. The top half of Ivor. His face shone pale and bloodless, his mouth frozen in a rictus of terror. Below the waist, there was only ragged flesh and trailing viscera.
Again, Feole screamed. He thrust away, one hand slapping at a seal passing by, and he swam back toward where he’d found the chair.
Shark Island Page 10
