The men with the boathooks pulled them aboard carefully, checking as best they could that those which looked dangerous were dead before passing them on up the line as everybody else heaved and sorted and the winch span and rested. But it was simply impossible either to be certain that the big predators were as lifeless as they seemed to be, or to disentangle them from the net and separate them from the fish that the crew so desperately needed to throw into the fast-filling freezer holds. But fish were only part of what was coming on to Pilar’s streaming after deck. The nets dragged in great lengths of seaweed. Sheets of polystyrene. Disposable bottles. Plastic bags. Crisp packets. Styrofoam cups. Cut fishing tackle. Tangles of mooring rope and cordage. Rubbish of all sorts — much of it indestructible polymers. Suddenly Miguel-Angel was in business. As the smallest crew member there, it was he who crouched down behind the line of men freeing the fish from the net and either throwing them down the hatch or hurling them over their shoulders and back into the foaming sea. As soon as he got down he saw that the scuppers were partially blocked. He slid full length on to the deck beneath the seat, fighting to keep them clear. Behind him stood a wall of legs. In front, beneath a narrow bench seat scarcely more than a foot wide, lay the line of scupper holes at deck level designed to let water flow off the deck as fast as it came aboard. But the rubbish — flora, flotsam, jetsam and the rest — was blocking these even more rapidly than Hernan had feared. All the water coming aboard from the sky and the sea built up rapidly. Miguel-Angel slithered along the deck as lithe as any of the fish going into the hold. He used his thick-gloved hands to ease the mess of weed and rubbish back out into the ocean, glad of the jacket as the water washed past him increasingly forcefully.
But then he learned — the hard way — that Hernan’s suggestion of jacket and gloves was to protect him from more than just the cold. He had fallen into a rhythm of sliding up and down the deck on his right shoulder, pushing and pulling the rubbish until he could shove it overboard. As he tired, he grew slower, until the surface of the outwash was up against his right ear and, occasionally, his right cheek. Suddenly his cheek was aflame and he felt as though he had been slapped very hard indeed. He jerked his head up fast enough to bang it hard on the underside of the seat. And as he did so, something large and slimy slid past. Its body was clear and glassily lucid. Its heart was a delicate tracery of purple. The whole of its bulk was more than a metre wide. It dragged a tangle of tentacles behind it that started as thick as string and ended as fine as thread. What sort of jellyfish it was, the boy never knew, but that one fiery lash across his tender cheek was more than enough warning to keep his head up and his senses alert. But the pain in his cheek was real and hard to bear. So he struggled out from beneath the seat once more and complained to Hernan, who was understanding. ‘The pain will pass,’ he said. ‘We have nothing aboard that will ease it.’
‘But there might be more,’ said Miguel-Angel. ‘And I cannot keep the scuppers clear if I am worried about keeping my face free of jellyfish.’
‘A fair point,’ allowed Hernan. He reached behind him and pulled a bright yellow bundle free of a fitting beside the winch. ‘I tell you what. Here’s one of the lifejackets. Put it on but do not inflate it. That will help keep your face up out of the water and away from jellyfish.’
So Miguel-Angel pulled the lifejacket on over the too-big oilskin, and found that it did indeed go round his neck tightly enough to keep his face above the water. Even uninflated, it was like a cushion. He went back beneath the long seat with more enthusiasm and stayed alert. Which was as well, for the next crisis arrived scarcely more than a minute after he went to work once more. In the distance, beyond the thunder of the rain, the sloshing of the boots, the flapping of the desperate fish and the relentless cascade of rubbish and water through the scuppers, he heard someone call, ‘Tenes cuidado todos! It’s a big one. Muy grande! Muy peligroso!’ Of course, he squirmed over to get a good look at the very big, very dangerous creature that was coming aboard. Through the gaps in the stockade of legs he saw the body of a shark come sliding up the deck. What sort of shark it was he had no idea. Nor at that stage did he particularly care. For, big though it was, and dangerous though it looked, it was clearly dead.
Until shockingly — terrifyingly — it wasn’t.
The shark suddenly came to life. More than five metres of rock-hard muscle, sandpaper skin, white-tipped flippers, fins and tail were suddenly thrashing wildly about among the scattering crew. A head at least a metre wide slammed this way and that, its mouth, just as wide, snapping open and closed, the razor-sharp hooks of its numberless teeth coming out past the vivid pink edges of its lipless maw, scything this way and that, bouncing off the wall of the raised hatchway to come slithering through the suddenly empty air between the hatch and the scuppers, face-to-face with Miguel-Angel. The boy saw the flat yellow coin of its black-centred eye and realized that it was fastened on him. There was a shiver of communication. A flash of feral intelligence and deadly purpose that made him freeze with utter horror. He understood that the next lunge would bring that huge mouth, bristling with teeth, up against his head and chest. But he simply couldn’t move. He gasped in a breath to scream, but chocked to silence with his stomach wrenching. He was overwhelmed by the stench of the thing — worse than any of the stinks that had accompanied the rubbish he had been pushing through the scuppers. And he knew that he would soon be dead.
But as the monster tensed itself for that fatal lunge, Pilar’s stern slammed round to port. The winch gave a protesting scream. The deck tilted as the port side sank beneath the strain. The net was jerked back out through the hole in the transom, as though another set of whales had run into it. And the shark was yanked back with it. For a moment, the great sleek body was jammed sideways across the opening in the transom, but then the relentless pressure of the net simply snapped the shark in half, and it was gone.
Pilar, powerless and drifting, answered the imperative of that sudden new tension on the float line and sluggishly swung round until her stern was pointing along the curve of the net towards something, perhaps half a kilometre distant, indistinct in the relentless downpour, that looked like a fairytale floating palace of light.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘What is it, Captain?’ asked Nic a couple of minutes after the summons over Maxima’s tannoy.
‘My ghost contact has reappeared,’ answered Toro. ‘It suddenly came out of nowhere dead ahead and well inside the five-mile line. One second there was nothing, then there was a firm contact. It is the same vessel, I am sure, because it is in exactly the same place as the earlier insubstantial contact was, only this time it looks more solid. It is very disturbing. And there is another, much less substantial contact, too, perhaps a quarter of a mile north-east of it.’
‘What do you think, Captain?’
‘Obviously my first action was to contact the first by radio. It is not a large signal, you understand. It is most likely to be a fishing vessel of some sort. But all the legitimate fishermen down here should have a VMS system aboard and switched on at all times when they are at sea so the fisheries protection service can monitor where they are and what they are doing. This vessel has no such signal. When I radioed her I used all the usual bands, and they must have known I was addressing them as I gave their precise location. But, whoever they are, they aren’t answering.’