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The fishing contest seemed a stroke of genius. It galvanized them as soon as Richard suggested it. As the lines were being prepared, a babble of excitement spread between the boats. The stewards arranged a dazzling array of wagers. The more staid Palestinians joined in of course, many of them the offspring of generations of fishermen. McTavish glowed, having fished the Clyde estuary from Largs to Ardrossan as a boy. Ben looked down his nose at them like a schoolmaster with an unruly form, but he took a line. Then, thinking that no one was looking, he took another and tied them both together, doubling the length and the number of hooks. John became adjudicator, even though he was taking part himself. Watch officers, it was decided, should remain aloof. Such tinned meat as they had would have to do for bait. The lines were readied, and on John’s signal, dropped. A concentrated silence descended. The boats moved apart slightly. They had to. With more than twenty lines out, the risk of a massive tangle was high. The contest began.

The day was hot and bright. The sun might have been overpowering, but the steady south wind that had blown away the fog remained surprisingly cool. The boats rose and fell easily on the shoulders of the great waves. The water was limpidly clear, though once in a while the telltale rainbow effect would blemish the glassy surface, showing where oil had been spilled. Every now and then they would see small black globules of tar. The first man to pull in his line, certain that his bait must have fallen off, found his hands covered in sticky black marks.

One of the stewards caught the first, a small tuna. He made much of the effort required to pull it in, drawing out the performance skillfully, convincing the others that he had caught something big. Taking it off the hook for him, John said to them all, “Remember. If you hook into anything really big, just let your line go.” He said it without thinking, and it was a wise thing to say; but it reawoke that very element that Richard had been most hard put to quiet: the nervousness they all felt at the simple size of the ocean.

As the morning wore on, the sea moderated and the waves became smaller, though they continued to roll silently by, like the backs of huge fish. With their attention on their lines, they all became intensely aware that they had entered one of the great currents of the deep, at the point when the Canary current swings west to become the North Equatorial current. It jerked and pulled at the lines like a live thing. One moment they would all stretch away to port then for no reason they would be pulled to starboard, kicking and twisting as the strength of the water grasped them. The lines plunged down out of sight, though the water remained so clear you would have thought the seabed should have been easily visible, and there was no way of telling what was at the bait. Even John became depressed, unconsciously suffering from agoraphobia and an overwhelming sense of his own frailty. Suddenly a particularly vicious cross-current tore at the lines and there was pandemonium in the bow of Robin’s boat. One of the stewards, convinced the current was the jaws of some monster clamped around his line, had let go of his tackle with a cry of fear. “He say it just pull an’ pull,” yelled Ho to the adjudicator. “He say he couldn’t hold on no more.”

“It was just the current,” John called back bracingly.

“Maybe yes. Maybe no. You look out all same.”

Ben gazed dreamily into the limpid water. The effort of holding the long line had proved too arduous for him some time ago and so he had just tied it to the boat’s side and was sitting with one finger on the bright, braided nylon line, daydreaming contentedly.

Noon came and went. There was no change of watch. Some of Ho’s stewards desultorily set about preparing lunch. It would be baked beans. The meat content of this particular meal was being offered to the fish.

“Hey,” called Ben in the middle of this, “I’ve got a bite!” He knelt up on his seat, leaning over the side like an excited boy, pulling in his catch hand over hand. Lunch forgotten, the men in Richard’s boat strained round to see.

The line stretched straight down in the still water, jerking and jumping as the still invisible fish fought every inch of the way. After a few minutes he came to the knot that joined the two lines and he wrapped the heavy-duty nylon round his hand for a breather.

“There it is,” shouted someone excitedly. Vague at first, but becoming clearer as it swam up, trailing the line behind it, came a large tuna, its blue-and-silver flanks flashing. “Twenty, twenty-five pounds,” said John knowledgeably. “We’ll have a job getting that one aboard.”

“What’s that?” Robin’s voice came sharply over the water. She had pulled closer so that her lot also could see Ben’s tuna come aboard. She was leaning over the side, looking down. “There…No…But there was something.” She looked across at Richard. “Something big.”

“It’s bleeding a bit,” said Ben cheerfully. “You probably just saw the blood.”

“Better get it up quickly, then,” snapped Richard. But he was too late.

“There!” called Robin urgently. She said more, but her words were drowned out in the pandemonium.

Ben, the line still wrapped around his hand, was slammed against the thwart. His arm stretched out, a taut extension of the humming spitting line. He looked down unbelievingly. The tuna was gone. In its place, a mere sixty feet away, firmly attached by the tangle of line to his right hand, was a hammerhead shark. Not a monster by any means. A powerful, deadly fifteen-footer. The line angled out of the corner of its mouth, stretching up behind the protuberance housing its left eye. It didn’t seem to know that it had been caught. Yet. One more beat of its majestic tail was enough, though. The flat, alien head turned. Even as Richard leaned forward to cut the line, the hammerhead turned back and began to circle inquisitively around the two frail boats.

After a few minutes it was joined by another, a twelve-foot tiger this time.

Then another…

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The danger of the element they were now so close to could not have been brought home to the dejected crew more clearly. Above the surface, everyday normality. Below it, scant inches of wood and fiberglass away, was horror and death. And, as if to emphasize the lesson, the dangerous predators followed them, cruising in menacing circles around them, every now and then brushing against side or keel with a sound like distant thunder.

And so the rest of the day passed, with Richard and Robin sitting together with the thinnest possible strip of water between them, the only contented people there. At sunset, the watches changed. Ben, recovered from his shock, came back to relieve Richard; McTavish came back to relieve Robin, and Richard stood up so that he could move down his boat with her, the need to be near her almost unbearably strong in him.

And, because he was standing up, the only one doing so at that moment, and because he was looking away from the sunset into the crystal calm of the gathering night, he saw her first, surprisingly close at hand, her upper works painted blood-red by the rays of the setting sun. He knew her at once, although he could not see her name. There could not be two like her. No other would present all those black windows, lacking the glass to reflect the sun. No other would have that great scar up the middle of her bridge. And he knew her as a parent knows its child, by something deeper than sight.