He stopped. How could he have got from the lobby command post to Albany Street? He couldn’t run that fast. “Maybe you were blown out,” Flaherty said. “A lot of guys were picked up and blown out from the concussion.”
“Where’s Albany?” Shea asked.
“It’s over here,” Flaherty said. We started to run, mud splattering our shoes. We turned down a small street. There were cars still covered in ash, their windows shattered. Shea recalled that the doctor had told him that he said he had crawled two hundred feet toward light. Shea walked several paces, then stopped and turned around. “This is where they found me,” he said. “Right here.” He looked back at the tower, surveying the distance. “Is there a garage around here?” There was one up the road, Liam said, and we ran again, past a burned-out building and several men in surgical masks. “This must be it,” Shea said.
The garage was small and dank. We waited a moment, then were rushing out into the street again, down one alley and another, until we arrived at the edge of the Hudson River. “This is where they lowered me down on a stretcher.”
As he finished his story, drawing new theories from Flaherty about being blown out, estimating the wind speed and the power of the concussion, we were cold and exhausted. By the time we got back to the site, it was dark, and the workers had turned on their spotlights. While the others wandered off, Shea walked toward what was left of the south tower.
He stood, listening to the cranes. I watched him for several minutes, then asked, “Are you O.K.?”
“Yeah.”
He seemed aware that, after months of searching, he might never know everything-that there was no way to piece together a logical story for that day. “I’m so tired,” he said. He wiped his eyes. No matter what happened, I offered, he’d done his job, and at some point he needed to let go of the rest.
Shea stepped closer to the hole, his feet balancing on the edge, and said, “I just wish I had learned one thing today-anything-that showed I was trying to save someone other than myself.”
– January, 2002
Part Two
“A strange enigma is man!”
SHERLOCK HOLMES, in “The Sign of the Four”
The Squid Hunter
CHASING THE SEA’S MOST ELUSIVE CREATURE
On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the record for the fastest sailing voyage around the world, when his boat mysteriously came to a halt. There was no land for hundreds of miles, yet the mast rattled and the hull shuddered, as if the vessel had run aground. Kersauson turned the wheel one way, then the other; still, the gunwales shook inexplicably in the darkness. Kersauson ordered his crew, all of whom were now running up and down the deck, to investigate. Some of the crew took out spotlights and shone them on the water, as the massive trimaran-a three-hulled, hundred-and-ten-foot boat that was the largest racing machine of its kind, and was named Geronimo, for the Apache warrior-pitched in the waves.
Meanwhile, the first mate, Didier Ragot, descended from the deck into the cabin, opened a trapdoor in the floor, and peered through a porthole into the ocean, using a flashlight. He glimpsed something by the rudder. “It was bigger than a human leg,” Ragot later told me. “It was a tentacle.” He looked again. “It was starting to move,” he recalled.
He beckoned Kersauson, who came down and crouched over the opening. “I think it’s some sort of animal,” Ragot said.
Kersauson took the flashlight, and inspected for himself. “I had never seen anything like it,” he told me. “There were two giant tentacles right beneath us, lashing at the rudder.”
The creature seemed to be wrapping itself around the boat, which rocked violently. The floorboards creaked, and the rudder started to bend. Then, just as the stern seemed ready to snap, everything went still. “As it unhooked itself from the boat, I could see its tentacles,” Ragot recalled. “The whole animal must have been nearly thirty feet long.”
The creature had glistening skin and long arms with suckers, which left impressions on the hull. “It was enormous,” Kersauson recalled. “I’ve been sailing for forty years and I’ve always had an answer for everything-for hurricanes and icebergs. But I didn’t have an answer for this. It was terrifying.”
What they claimed they saw-a claim that many regarded as a tall tale-was a giant squid, an animal that has long occupied a central place in sea lore; it has been said to be larger than a whale and stronger than an elephant, with a beak that can sever steel cables. In a famous scene in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Jules Verne depicts a battle between a submarine and a giant squid that is twenty-five feet long, with eight arms and blue-green eyes-“a terrible monster worthy of all the legends about such creatures.” More recently, Peter Benchley, in his thriller “Beast,” describes a giant squid that “killed without need, as if Nature, in a fit of perverse malevolence, had programmed it to that end.”
Such fictional accounts, coupled with scores of unconfirmed sightings by sailors over the years, have elevated the giant squid into the fabled realm of the fire-breathing dragon and the Loch Ness monster. Though the giant squid is no myth, the species, designated in scientific literature as Architeuthis, is so little understood that it sometimes seems like one. A fully grown giant squid is classified as the largest invertebrate on Earth, with tentacles sometimes as long as a city bus and eyes about the size of human heads. Yet no scientist has ever examined a live specimen-or seen one swimming in the sea. Researchers have studied only carcasses, which have occasionally washed ashore or floated to the surface. (One corpse, found in 1887 in the South Pacific, was said to be nearly sixty feet long.) Other evidence of the giant squid is even more indirect: sucker marks have been spotted on the bodies of sperm whales, as if burned into them; presumably, the two creatures battle each other hundreds of feet beneath the ocean’s surface.
The giant squid has consumed the imaginations of many oceanographers. How could something so big and powerful remain unseen for so long-or be less understood than dinosaurs, which died out millions of years ago? The search for a living specimen has inspired a fevered competition. For decades, teams of scientists have prowled the high seas in the hope of glimpsing one. These “squid squads” have in recent years invested millions of dollars and deployed scores of submarines and underwater cameras, in a struggle to be first.
Steve O’Shea, a marine biologist from New Zealand, is one of the hunters-but his approach is radically different. He is not trying to find a mature giant squid; rather, he is scouring the ocean for a baby, called a paralarva, which he can grow in captivity. A paralarva is often the size of a cricket.
“Squid, you see, hatch thousands of babies,” O’Shea told me in early 2004, when I called him at his office at the Earth and Oceanic Sciences Research Institute, at the Auckland University of Technology. “Most of these will get eaten up by larger predators, but during periods of spawning the sea should be filled with an absolutely fantastic amount of these miniature organisms. And, unlike the adults, they shouldn’t be able to dart away as easily.”
Rival hunters once viewed his plan skeptically: if no one could find the animal when it was sixty feet long, how could anyone discover it when it was barely an eighth of an inch? Lately, though, many have come to see O’Shea’s strategy as a potential breakthrough. “It offers several advantages,” Clyde Roper, an American who is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on squid, told me. Roper is a giant-squid hunter himself, who once descended underwater in a steel cage, in search of his quarry. “First, you could find the juvenile at shallower depths. That makes it a lot easier to catch. Furthermore, there are more of them around, because at that stage, even though mortality is high, the adult female will release up to four million eggs. That’s a hell of a lot of baby giant squid running around.” He added, “It’s a matter of a numbers game, pure and simple.”