I wish to God -' she said and broke off and for the rest of the time she managed to sound almost normal, with her voice no more than subdued.
'What's the best weapon?'
'I'll come to that,' she said. 'These things have got large olfactory sacs, and their sense of smell is acute. A test they made at Lerner's showed that a shark can detect one part of tuna juice in twenty-five million parts of sea-water. When they smell anything that interests them, they turn upstream and home in on it. So if you feel any current running and you see a shark upstream of you, you're in better shape as far as your scent is concerned. I know you probably won't have to use any of this but if you do run into problems it's going to give you an edge.' She was standing in front of me now, fastening the last strap of the scuba harness, her eyes watching me in the light from the binnacle, the green pupils iridescent, darker than I'd seen them before, more concentrated, and I had the passing thought that she was looking at me for what might be the last time, but if that kind of thing was in her mind she would be wrong, she would of course be wrong.
'Does everything feel okay?'
I shrugged the harness a bit higher and she took up the slack on the buckles. 'Okay now?'
'Fine.'
She turned away and got a metal cylinder from the cabin, black-painted with a fire-extinguisher type lever. That was all the bad news, as I said. This is the only good news we've got. It's a concentrate from the Moses sole fish, gives out a milky fluid, but the toxicity's only potent enough if it's released into the shark's mouth.' She buckled it to the left side of the harness at the hip. 'Don't forget you've got it, for God's sake. Everything comfy?'
I said yes and walked to the rail and she held the gear steady while I climbed over and turned my back to the sea and looked up at her as she offered me the unexpected miracle of a quick, flashing smile and I let go and the cylinders hit the surface and spread bubbles around me like a veil of white lace as I turned over and began swimming.
It was huge, a long shadow lying under the surface.
I'd heard someone say it was two thousand tons, the size of a destroyer. It looked even bigger than that, its outlines etched by the play of moonlight through the water, broken by a shoal of fish swarming near the twin screws aft, flashing as they turned, darkening and flashing, their quickness mesmerising.
There were sounds here, muffled but not distant, the sound of generators and voices and music, so faint sometimes that I believed that silence had come, then getting louder as the current swirled and I rose through the water, breaking the surface under the dark slope of the keel. There was no music now; it hadn't been a party on deck or anything; I think it had come from radios in the crew's quarters, aft, where I'd approached the target, the motor-yacht Contessa.
I began work straight away, and fixed the first one a foot above the surface on the starboard side. The magnet was strong, and made a sudden ringing sound as its field pulled it to the hull with the force of a hammer blow.
I hadn't been ready for that. I didn't like it. A fish, even a big fish, moving at speed and turning, hitting the hull obliquely, wouldn't make a sound like that. I think it would have been heard, inboard, I think it would have been heard by people in the well of the ship.
I used the flippers to drive me below again so that I could take sightings. I didn't feel comfortable with the lower half of my body dangling below-surface. Looking down the length of the hull I could see the shoal again, a swarm of two or three hundred small fish, flashing silver as they turned and turned again with a speed that gave them the semblance of an illusion.
They're also attracted to fish moving in a shoal. If you see a shoal, steer clear of it or try and swim towards it to turn it away.
I was all right here: they were as distant as the length of the ship. There was no other movement anywhere, except for bubbles rising from vegetation on the sea bed. The anchor chain hung in the water not far off, under the bows, a rope of black pearls in the filtered light of the moon. In the other direction the twin screws bloomed like dark flowers, their rounded petals silvered at the tips. The moon was above the port beam, so that one half of the hull was dark, the other barely visible, lit from the surface as brightly as the sea itself and merging with it.
I moved slowly to the other beam, and spread one hand against the painted metal, palm towards me, and laid the next unit over it; but the magnet was stronger than I'd thought and it was a job to pull my hand free, and when I did there was still a slight hammering sound as the unit met the ship's plate. I would have to do better than that.
In the next half-hour or so I fixed four more of them, using a fabric strap as a buffer to deaden the sound, and then duck-dived to take another sighting below, and saw the shark.
It was half the ship's length away and looked motionless, a ten or twelve foot grey cylinder, flattened a little horizontally. It was just below the surface, its profile silvered by the moon and not easy to see, except for its size. Then it began moving, at first across the beam of the ship and then turning to stand off again, nearer me but not close yet. It was pointed now towards the stern, and did nothing for a while; then the long tail-fin moved suddenly and it was streaking the length of the hull and hit the centre of the shoal before the fish had time to scatter. It looked like a big window being smashed, with the bits of glass exploding from the centre.
I was about midship, and needed to move aft. The shark had turned and was facing towards me, but at a fair distance. What was left of the shoal had regrouped and was shimmering in the water near the hull again, apparently unable to learn.
Itching on the skin, the nerves shaken and sweat springing, not unexpected. I'd done most of the work down here in comfort, free of any concern except for the noise of the magnets jamming home, but now things had changed.
I know you probably won't have to use any of this but if you do run into problems it's going to give you an edge.
It was time to remember the other things she'd told me, and I kept my arms close to my sides and my legs together, drifting closer to the hull. There was so little movement of the water against my hands that I wasn't sure there was a current at all; but if there was, I was downstream of that bloody thing and it couldn't smell me. But of course it could see me: she'd said they could see well enough in dim light, and the moon was bright enough through the clear water to define the shark's dorsal fin even at this distance. It could see me very easily.
You've placed six of those things. Now get out.
We need eight. That man Parks recommended eight.
Six are good enough. For God's sake get out while you can.
Panic will get us nowhere. I shall stay exactly where I am.
But it wasn't easy. It was not easy, my good friend, to stare at that hideous two-ton killing machine while it stared me back. It had kept still like this, just like this, before it had suddenly shot forward and hit that shoal like a missile.
For the sake of Jesus Christ get out, get out, get out.
Sweat crawling on the skin under the wet-suit, itching, making me want to move, to pinch the flesh through the rubber, the only way to scratch. But let us be reasonable; nothing much has changed, when you stop and think. I knew this was dangerous, and I knew Ferris would have tried to stop me if I'd told him what I meant to do, and I knew that by the end of this long day I would come to realise that I was mad, and that when she had given me that wonderful smile, when she had mustered all the courage she had needed just to do it, to give me that flashing beatific smile, I knew that she hadn't thought much of my chances, that she was in all likelihood looking upon this vain and ambitious madman for the last time, and had managed to bring herself to offering him everything of life she could, the gentle valedictum, the grace of her womanhood. I knew those things.