Born Predators - Chapter 10

A Hint of Food

Occasionally as she travelled, Hennessey dove, angling down, using her weight to coast deeper into the green ink. The light failed, but her other senses kept watch, and she could skim the seabed 500 meters deep with a flash of fins and sharp-dagger tail, raising a cheer from the worms that lived such dull lives, kicking up a stream of sediment that had not been disturbed for millennia.

She stayed in the deep only a little while. The temperature collapsed as she sank, gaining the chill of the ancient water of the depths. The bone cold challenged her ability to keep her pups warm, using only the energy of her working muscles. So too, the oxygen levels dropped as she slid further from the surface, straining the ability of her gills to provide for her and for her pups. So, she returned quickly to the warmth and light, the world she could see and scan for opportunity. She’d look for a faint glimpse of distant prey to chase. She’d look for a challenge or an easy meal. She’d look for an opportunity written in the dim distance.

And sometimes the ocean delivered an opportunity. From nowhere, a smell suddenly pulled at her. Turned her around. A smell of food.

Chapter 10

Miranda bounced with the freshening afternoon wind, dancing with the perky chop that came with it. Kinney had told Fossi to motor offshore, away from Seal Rocks, while she figured out the real heading they needed. She sat on the little ship’s bow deck, working on her laptop, and watching the ocean.

Long Island’s low strip of emerald receded into the horizon, and eventually their surroundings were full of churning sea and the reflective white diamonds of distant fishing boats. Those other vessels labored in the distance, on alternative courses. Some of them, Kinney knew, thought they were going after a true man-eating killer. That they were doing a service. America’s relationship with sharks was defined by atrocities visited on shrieking blonde starlets by oversized cinematic props. And that conception of the world left no room for noble predators propping up valuable ecosystems. Miss Jilly and her friends knew differently, but the broader culture had set its money-making storyline. Kinney watched the boats recede and wondered how she could get through to this group. She wouldn’t expect them to jump in the water to save a shark…even she could hardly believe she did that! But how to help them discard the idea of sharks as monsters and start thinking about them as wildlife?

She could try to show them the data and let that change their minds. Science education used to operate that way, on the deficit model – a scientist only had to fill the deficit of true facts in another person’s mind and they would start thinking the ‘right’ way. At least, the scientists always thought it was successful. But in fact, most people usually thought the way their friends and other people around them thought. So to change people’s attitudes, you had to think about changing a whole community.

Kinney stared at the boats: insistent blips on the horizon. This was the center of her conflict with Captain Honeypie—with anyone who saw the ocean only as a rifle range, full purely of plunder. Without the sharks, decades of ecological progress could be undone in mere weeks, and fishermen depended on that balance more than anyone. It was a little silly that they hated the seals so much for eating their fish—but most didn’t appreciate the sharks for eating the seals. The professionals like Fossi knew deep down that the only way they were going to survive as a community was to protect the coastline and the balance of nature in it. So why were they so scornful of science? Maybe it had to do with control. Influence. Right now Fossi and his friends were the balance of nature. And they liked that. They felt like they understood things—and had a say. And that scientists were just obscure, and were detached from the daily realities of making a living on the water.

But it’s all our ocean, Kinney sighed. Somehow it has to be the ocean for everyone.

The sea always mesmerized her. She could sit for hours watching the infinite variety of sunlight glinting off waves. Every second the ocean was different but every hour it was the same. The incongruity somehow let her navigate her own life, with its events and non-events, a little better.

Soon she shook off the siren pull of the waves, and scrambled to the back deck.

Kinney pulled away some of the lines that secured the cable strung over Miranda’s aft-mounted winch, inspected the connections and slapped the coarse black canvas of the hammock-like cradle strung from the dangling hook.

“You’ll forgive me,” said Will from behind her, he’d been madly typing into his tablet every spare second. “But how does anyone get a live pissed-off shark into that?”

“It’s not as hard as you’d think. First you chum the hell out of the surface. When you see your fish of choice, use bait on a pole to lure it close to the boat. The cradle’s weighted, so you sink it a few feet. The shark just swims on top of the cradle, right? Then you hoist it up. Ever see those helicopters that rescue cows from flooding? Like that, but sharks tend to have sharper teeth,” she grinned wide, showing hers.

Will looked skeptical, “What’s keeping it inside a sling? Seems like it’d just slip out with all the water.”

“Her brain can’t really process being grabbed or constrained, especially from below. Her sense of danger is millions of years out of date, right? And once we start hauling her up, her weight keeps her in place. We pull her up, clip off her tag and drop her back in.”

“Wait,” he frowned. “Aren’t we out here to catch the thing? Get it out of the water? Calm people down?”

“Not at all. We can’t keep her.”

“Put it in an aquarium…?”

She shook her head. “There are a handful of aquariums in the world with enough big tanks to keep a grown White shark, but only for a while. They never thrive in tanks for long.”

Will absorbed this as he helped Kinney unfurl the canvas sling, thinking ahead. “How’re we going to even find it? You said Triton’s map for Hennessey was wrong.”

She smiled, “I’ll show you. It might even work!”

They clambered up the ladder to join Fossi in Miranda’s wheelhouse. Kinney pulled out her laptop to show the Triton display of Hennessy’s recent activity. She pointed at the red dot: “That’s Hennessey’s last known position from Triton.” She pointed vaguely towards the south-western horizon. “Her tag says she’s out there, beyond Seal Rocks. But I took the distance and direction that Hennessey’s tag jumped the night of the party, and used it to correct the red dot’s position by the same amount. That’s the green dot.”

She pointed to the screen where a green dot floated, “We’re going there. Where Hennessey really is, not where everyone else thinks she is.”

***

They reached their destination just before one in the afternoon. Not that it was a destination: nothing but a virtual dot on an electronic map, a patch of undifferentiated blue like any of a hundred million others in the North Atlantic.

Fossi set the engines to idle and came with Kinney to unstack a set of white plastic buckets from their position lashed behind the cabin to the edge of the aft deck. Will pitched in too, and once they were set in place, Fossi re-wrapped them with thick bungie cords striped in blue and wasp yellow. “Start from the outside,” he instructed.

“The corrected data show a position as of 10 minutes ago. Hennessey was heading north by northeast. Fossi, would you please follow that course? Pretty much riding the continental shelf, that’s where she’ll be.”

Will squatted and wrapped his arms around the outermost chum bucket. With a grunt he straightened his legs and hoisted the load up to waist height: from there he swung it around on his hip to rest on top of the gunwale. Kinney dug her fingers into the rim of the solid cap. “Best not to look at it,” she advised. “And whatever you do, definitely don’t get your nose near it.”

She popped it open. Will’s eyes flickered down, just for a moment, and she saw the color drain from his face. “Told you, don’t look!”

“Oh my God,” he croaked, resisting the urge to pinch his nose shut.

“And the secret ingredient,” Kinney added a bottle of cod liver oil.

Will could only shake his head and heave the bucket forward, pitching its top-heavy contents into the sea. The heavy splashes were sickening but eventually they thinned to a dark crimson slurry. He set down the empty pail and looked queasily at the horizon while Kinney replaced the lid with quick snaps of her fingers. Miranda’s engines surged under their feet and both of them stumbled with the sudden snap of inertia, though Kinney stepped cleanly into it with practiced grace. Will stumbled into the buckets, splashing fish sludge all over him, and slipping to the slippery deck.

“Fuck,” he declared emphatically covered in pungent slime.

“Will, Jesus! Are you OK?” Kinney rushed to his aid.

“Knee popped a bit. Not sure I’ll ever smell the same.” He looked down at the normal-day-at-the-office pants he’d chosen to wear, now splattered from ankle to knee in fish guts.

“With those shoes, no wonder you’re slipping,” Kinney frowned. “Those black department store bricks, no tread. I used to wear shoes like those when I waited banquets in college.”

“Flip flops seemed wrong,” Will raised himself, tried to brush off the biggest chunks of rotting fish, and went back to the chum buckets.

They poured out the second, and the third bucket, as Fossi took Miranda along Kinney’s prescribed course. Gradually the chum’s grotesque smell seemed to infuse the ocean, the very atmosphere around them reeking of metallic, bloody, oily, rot. Oblivious to the smell’s effect on Will, Kinney grabbed a pair of binoculars and scanned about with her lower lip rolling between her teeth. Searching for a fin.

***

She sensed a dozen smells at the same instant. Mostly blood, but overlaid with the thick slippery oil of very big fish, and a reek of salty body fluid that was like a leash pulling her head around. Backward along the path she’d moved already. Back toward opportunity that she had to taste.

Instinctively Hennessey turned and loped toward the smell. Questing. Testing.

Tasting would come next.

***

They motored into midafternoon, shifting course each time there was a position update for Hennessey. Then Kinney’s spirit started to pick up. “Tail flip,” she declared to the very bored and nauseous Will Orrin.

“Hmm?”

“Tail flip. Out there,” she pointed. “It happened again.”

“I don’t see it.”

“There! That little splash.”

“How can you tell?”

“There’s a curve to it. It’s not regular like the chop. The shark’s testing the surface, trying to see why there’s all these tasty fish guts floating around.”

He came up beside her. “That’s what we’re looking for? That’s Hennessy?”

“Oh, no,” Kinney snapped her eyes away from the glasses to shoot him a chiding look. “First one that shows up? It’s also way too small for our girl. This is just a sign we’re on the right track.”

East they ran, at Miranda’s humble clip. Kinney stayed on the binoculars, putting them down only to dump the occasional chum bucket, and over time the slaps of shark tails grew both more frequent and more pronounced.

“They’re getting bigger,” she announced to Will.

“One right here!” he called. “About to go under the boat!”

She rushed to look and her eyes lit up at what she saw in the grey form separated from them by yards of space and eons of time. “That one’s a hammerhead! Beautiful.”

“I imagine these things really clean out the other fish,” Fossi had popped his head out of the wheelhouse.

With him in earshot, Kinney said, “Yeah, but that’s actually a good sign for the region. Sharks in general are a signal that a place is really productive. Same with the seals. The sharks keep moving along the coast and the fish come back soon after they’re gone—because the area’s healthy. Everyone should be happy.”

“Except for people on the beaches,” Will ventured.

Fossi groused. “Describe for me the ecological value of a pack of pasty blimps lounging on a beach. Anyone from the City with a vitamin D deficiency can just scoot his ass to a damn water park instead.”

“You’ve met our humanist Captain Fossi?” Kinney laughed.

Miranda rode on and the sharks multiplied around them: mostly hammerhead, but blue and Mako as well. They came to a strange place in the sea: a sort of convergence in the Gulf Stream between several tributaries, each a slightly different temperature and density. The sharks spun under each other in a churn of sleek power. Above them lapped strange waves, eerie sloshing rollers unmoored from any shore break. Like a flock of birds spinning around a barber’s pole, sharks of all kinds came from nowhere.

“It’s where the Labrador Current flows down and under,” Kinney told them mysteriously. “Pretty productive. Good spot for sharks.”

Fossi kept the boat moving in something like a straight line and Kinney manned the binoculars, feet spread wide and back planted against Miranda’s winch. “Ooh, a white!” she exclaimed. “At least the fin looked like it. Man, I want to pull that one up too. Just for a close look at her.”

“Kay…what’s that?” she lowered the glasses to follow Will’s outstretched finger.

“What am I looking at?” She couldn’t see.

“It went down. Shit. It was a big fin, though. I saw a splash and something black, sticking out on this side.”

“Keep an eye peeled, I guess—“

“There! It’s back! Doesn’t that look like an antenna?”

She peered and she saw. “Fossi!” she said loudly.

“Got a bite?” His reply drifted on the gusting wind.

“Pull port and drop the engines. Time to get a lure out.”

***

Kinney squatted over her backpack and zipped it open. She reached in and pulled out a strange object, dark and fuzzy and ragged, more substantial on one end than another. It hung limp in her hands and looked for all the world like a bedraggled bit of roadkill.

“What the hell is that?” Will inquired.

“With all the chum, we don’t need real meat. This is basically what we use back home. I got a scrap of dark carpeting and had one of the guys at the hardware store staple it to a plywood block. That’s how you build a fake seal, D.I.Y. style.”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “That doesn’t look like a seal.”

“You’re not a shark, are you? It mostly has to smell like a seal.” Kinney poured cod liver oil over it all.

Fossi appeared with a long spool of thick line and a crescent-shaped hook of dramatic size attached to a strong steel cable. From his pocket he produced a grease-stained pair of pliers and with a decisive grunt he clamped the hook’s barb flush with its lunar sweep. Kinney pushed its point through the carpeting, maneuvered it all the way through and looped it back for a second piercing. When a big shark spotted a target, she would try to swallow the thing in one gulp.

Kinney took the pliers from Fossi and bent the hook back on itself. “The shark will hang onto the bait well enough by itself,” she told him. “I need the hook to hook the bait, not Hennessey.”

Fossi nodded—pretending he agreed—and went back inside. Miranda pivoted, bringing them closer to where the black-marked dorsal fin churned bloody water. The fish was big—very big.

“Fossi, we need this in the water now,” Kinney muttered nervously.

“Goofy-ass-hookless-bait won’t matter a damn if the line snaps or snags, will it?” He threaded his end securely into a spooling reel bolted to a long fiberglass fishing pole, and slotted its handle into one of several gunwale-affixed mounts made of PVC pipe. At his nod, Kinney wound up and used all her strength to hurl the bait overboard. It flew out and dropped, to wobble sullenly on the chop.

“The current’s headed that way,” she gestured to Fossi. “So I figure if we come around like that, we’ll get good tension on the line and it’ll jump the way we need.”

He nodded, went into the wheelhouse and began the maneuver. The reel commenced whirring; Kinney took hold of its handle to keep it from running out further, and the bait took up a sinuous motion over the water. “See that?” she told Will. “It gets that swimming motion. Oh man, here she comes!”

The shark had seen their bait and languidly closed with its target. The dorsal fin vanished. Kinney smiled, let out a bit of line, crouched to get ever so slightly closer to the sea. “She’ll want to hit from below. Wait…wait…waaai-oh yeah!”

A great splash, and the pole bowed like a green willow branch. Kinney gripped it with both hands and gritted her teeth, pulling on the bait literally inside of the shark’s mouth. “Got her coming in!” she shouted.

Kinney moved the bait closer to the boat, to the back end of the sling, drawing Hennessey in. “Oh my god, just look at her.” Just below the surface and swimming still, undulated a grey torpedo of muscle and sinuous grace. The tail fin was sharply bifurcated into a V, edged in dark grey whereas the rest of her flanks were much lighter. Her sixteen-foot body quaked with raw power, her fleshy pectoral fins offsetting a bulletlike snout. In her gaping mouth shone a cutlery shop of ripping and grasping dentition.

“And there’s the tag!” The sleek, angled-back dorsal fin had a thin wire antenna poking out from behind, erupting from a black tube the length of a cell phone.

“Hey, take the pole,” Kinney gestured to Will.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“She’s close enough. Just keep the bait in front of her, bring her here, you get me?”

Now Fossi was at the winch controls, cursing under his breath, rolling the rusty contraption into a loud, grinding start. The arm swung and the cradle turned with it. It reached a ninety-degree angle, perpendicular to Miranda’s heading, and Fossi pounded a button with the heel of his fist to bring the cradle hissing down. The canvas floated a moment on the surface before the weights sucked it under.

Fossi halted the machine, flipped the LIFT switch and took the pole back from Will. Kinney ran inside the cabin and emerged with a heavy arm-length bolt cutter. With deliberate speed Fossi led Hennesey closer to the boat, and then moved to one side, so the shark was closer to the winch’s dangling arm. The shark was in position now, directly alongside the boat, seemingly half its size, and above the sunken sling. “Bring it up, Will!” Kinney shouted. “Hit the button!”

Will rushed to the station and did as he was told. With a shriek the machine jumped into motion, the arm rising, a great disturbance occurring in the water below as Fossi hustled ahead to keep his line from tangling. Black material broke the plane of water; grey flesh thrashed with rage at the cradle’s fore and aft. Will’s brain took two solid seconds to process the angular assertion of its head, the flat black eyes rolling in their deep-set sockets. The massive shark kept her resolute attention on Kinney’s do-it-yourself bait.

“Hell yeah!” she bellowed, hopping up on the gunwale, reaching out to secure herself against the cradle. The boat had heeled over with the weight of nearly a ton.

“Will, I need you to clip that line on the cradle, and then hand me the cutters!” He complied, attaching a chain to the cradle on one end and the gunwale on the other. This kept the cradle from swinging away if the boat pivoted. Kinney took the bolt cutters he offered and leaned out over the side of the boat, waited for a gentle moment amidst the chop and competing waves. At the right moment she lunged. Her tool found solid purchase and there was a loud cracking sound as the transponder’s plastic anchoring pin gave way. Kinney threw the bolt cutters back to the deck. She let out a whoop and hopped backwards with the satellite transponder in her hand.

“That’s it! You’re done, baby! Now get out of here!” She slapped the side of the cradle. “Let her down!”

Fossi was on it, having already cut the bait line. He flipped back the LIFT switch and hit the red button, sending the shark back down with a smash of water and a baritone whir. Hennessy’s dorsal fin wobbled in their view, a vacated hole punched clean through showing a nickel-sized spot of sky. “What now? She just swims away?” Will wanted to know.

“Maybe. She’ll be pissed after this, and might patrol the surface. We’ll watch.” And then Kinney’s eyes widened. “Will—oh shit, Will! The chain’s still attached!”

Nobody had remembered the chain he’d hooked between cradle and boat. The winch lowered and the links strained. Pinned on one side and not the other, the cradle began to tip on its side. Kinney’s arms weren’t long enough to detach it—the reason Will had been tasked with the cord to begin with—and so Will rushed forward. He bent over the side, stretched out and wriggled at the bright yellow hook. It took a long moment to work free but come free it did and for a triumphant moment Will Orrin stood tiptoed on the deck with the loose cord in his hand. But then the world fell away.

Impossible to say what did it—some unfortunate melding of sea and wind and wake and basic Newtonian physics—but Miranda chose that moment to dip precipitously to the port side. The deck under Will’s fleet dropped to a badly acute angle and the only thing to arrest his fall was the side of the gunwale. Stretched out as he was, the lip struck him in the thighs and imparted a spin. With the briefest shout of shock, he flipped right into the Atlantic Ocean.

“Will!” Kinney shrieked, first steadying her balance and then running to the side. She looked out at an empty ocean, no sign of Will, as the boat continued to yaw side to side in the steel grey waves. “Will!” she yelled again. And he surfaced a moment later, spluttering and cursing, untangling himself from the bait lines, awkwardly attempting to tread water while fully dressed. Rogue waves crashed over his head. He coughed water from his mouth and desperately spun around to find the boat. “Kay!” he called hoarsely.

Kinney cast about. There was a life preserver hanging from the back of the cabin, a thick donut of orange foam in the classic style. She grabbed it threw it out to him. He took hold of it gratefully. But already he’d already doubled his distance from the boat. The currents were driving them apart. Will looped one elbow through the float and used the other to desperately paddle towards rescue. He thought himself a strong swimmer but found breath coming ragged to his lungs. He thrashed toward Kinney, but the ocean kept them apart, pushing him further away.

“We gotta get him out!” she shouted to Fossi. He’d clung to the winch station to steady himself through the boat’s dip and now looked gravely past her into the water.

“She’s loose,” he said, quiet.

Kinney’s gut lurched. She turned back to the water and saw the cradle empty. Hennessy had liberated herself and now swam free, turning, circling back toward the one living thing that still struggled in the sea. She headed directly for Will. Kinney’s mouth dropped open. She wanted to scream but stopped herself. She forced the dread into a kind of accelerated calm. “Will, I need you to listen to me,” she called to him.

“Kay, get me out!”

“I need you to listen to me right now. Listen right now. The shark’s coming.”

“What? AHHHH!” his voice leapt high.

“Listen to me, Will. You need to be calm. Don’t kick. Don’t move. Use the float and don’t move! We’re coming.”

“Get me the fuck out of here!”

“Bringing her around!” Fossi called.

Kinney watched as Hennessy approached Will, flat head barely submerged, her dorsal fin a herald of danger. She’d been tricked, and her simple mind demanded to know the source. At first she swam at an angle–not directly toward Will. Just as Kinney thought she might pass him by, she abruptly turned, and closed in on the flailing form.

Will shut his eyes and felt a tug at his leg. He screamed.

“Will!”

“Fuck!”

“Will! Are you bitten?”

“Yaaahhh!” He was certain.

“Where?”

“No!” He wasn’t certain.

“What?”

“Fuck!” He steeled himself for a wave of agony but it never came. In a panic he reached his treading arm down, accidentally swallowing salt water, and felt the inundated sock hugging his ankle. He was intact. “I’m not bit!” he shouted. “But it touched me!”

Hennessey’s fin showed again on the surface, moving away.

“That’s a bump!” Kinney shouted back. “First step in checking you out.”

“It’s turning back!” Fossi called. The fin had circled back toward Will.

“You smell like fish but act like seal. She wants to know more.” The fin tracked back toward Will as Kinney watched in horror.

“What?” he wasn’t exactly listening to her. “Kay, is it gonna bump again?”

“Maybe. Probably. Calm down! Do not thrash!” She tried without success to stop him from paddling with all his might.

“Jesus!” as the huge form came, he screwed his eyes shut and pulled up his legs into a ball. Hennessey went under him. Her back scraped the soles of his shoes. “Ahhh!”

Kinney fought the fear welling up in her. “Okay, Will. Look at me. That’s another bump. She’s bumped you twice and turning again. Keep looking at me. Just tread. Don’t swim. She’s coming back, Will. Look at me!”

The fin had made a longer wider turn. Kinney watched it pause for a moment, as if deciding.

“What’s that mean? Coming back? Kay!!”

Kinney took a shuddering breath. “She wants to do a test bite.”

Will’s eyes bulged. “Shit!” he screamed, paddling with all his might.

“Stop! You have to kick her! Turn and kick her!”

“What?”

“Stop swimming and face her!”

“You’re fucking crazy!”

“Do it! You have to do it!”

Kinney watched in horror as Will did the opposite. He thrashed and swam toward the boat, spinning every few seconds in panic as he tried to find the shark.

“Fossi, he can’t do it! He’s half drowning in panic.”

She decided instantly what to do. “I want you to motor over there, now Fossi!”

He hesitated, “Between the shark and Will? I could hit him.”

“No! Right at him! Then veer at the very last second to come around behind. Now get there in ten seconds or I’ll take over and do it myself.”

Fossi, threw the boat into gear and burned toward Will.

Kinney grabbed a snorkel mask hanging on the wall next to the winch. She watched intently as Fossi guided them toward Will, and toward Hennessey, still swimming in his direction. Mentally counting down five four three…

Kinney threw herself at Hennessey.

She hit the water feet first, one hand protecting the mask on her face, the other holding a screwdriver she’d picked up from the chum buckets. Fossi saw her maneuver and completed a fast ‘S’ turn to end up behind Will, instantly stopping the engines to settle into place no more than 5 feet from him.

Kinney grazed Hennessey’s flank as she entered the water. She felt more than saw the great fish spin away. She knew Hennessey would circle and return.

Kinney took a breath and sank to about 5 feet deep, then spun slowly to face the approaching shark. Kinney was rock still. Not exhaling. Moving not a muscle, slowly slowly sinking into an empty blue expanse.

Hennessey approached and slowed. Kinney watched her carefully. Behind she could hear Will clambering out of the water onto Miranda’s deck.

The shark kept slowing. She flicked a fin and turned slightly. Kinney knew this was just to let her see better. They both came to an utter stop.

Kinney forgot about air, water, Will, Fossi, danger and fear. Almost three times her length, Hennessy hung in the water suspended like a planet. Her two side fins projected out like wide marble steps. Her open mouth sampled water to identify Kinney. Her belly bulged, rounded out like a gigantic zeppelin by the nearly-grown pups inside. So close was she to giving birth that she had a double chin.

Her eyes gave back Kinney’s steady gaze. The coal black orbit seeming to be a conduit into her mind. As Kinney sank inch by inch in the water, those eyes pivoted slightly to follow.

Kinney would remember this for her whole life. The connection. The puzzled contemplation. The quiet. Before her floated the pinnacle of the shark empire, what she had studied and wondered about her whole life. And now, there was a link between them. If only Kinney could travel that link and ask Hennessey what her life was like.

The two of them regarded one another as rare opportunities, the one hoping for knowledge the other for food. But somehow equals.

***

Hennessey threw her entire range of senses at Kinney. The mother shark was puzzled at finding another creature who seemed to care as much as she did about observing and understanding the world, the ocean, this encounter, this connection. No other prey ever looked back at her so steadily. Never. No other creature had ever put aside its hunger or drive or migration or social status to be simply and utterly…curious.

***

A small ripple traveled the length of Hennessey’s body. Her back arched slightly. The side fins splayed out a tiny bit. Kinney watched, unmoving, slowly sinking, eyes locked with the great shark’s.

Then Hennessey was gone, one strong snap of her arched tail and she arrowed away. Kinney could see a thin trail of red blood left behind, from the small wound where the tag had been.

Delicately, Kinney kicked upward, her need for air taking hold and screaming at her. She turned slightly to see the hull of the Miranda barely ten feet away, a rope ladder hanging down. She allowed herself to exhale gently and angled toward it, spinning slowly at the last minute to see if Hennessey had returned. Greeted by clear, empty, green water, she grabbed the ladder and climbed.

Breaking the surface, she blew out her stale air and gulped in fresh. Will was leaning over the gunwale, grasping her arm, saying “Oh my God! Kinney! Oh my God!”

Fossi leaned over smiling broadly, and hauled her up the ladder onto the deck, picking her out of the water like a doll. Setting her down gently, he threw her the towel, grinning stupidly, “Don’t you ever stay on the boat?”

***

Will took the coarse wool blanket that Fossi handed him and wrapped it around his shoulders. Though his heart still galloped and no part of him was cold. He perched on Miranda’s back fantail, with his back to the engines, his face still ashen, soaked denim clinging to his skinny legs. They were headed upwind towards home and so the ride was a bit choppy now. The thin diesel fumes that had followed them were gone, blown aft by the wind, and for the first time all day Will could breathe the pure air of the sea. The Miranda seemed to be different too. The small craft bucked the oncoming waves, but the up and down movement of the deck, the slight shifts in heading, the side to side rocking all seemed to center on him, keeping him in one place while the ocean and boat and world jostled around him.

Will never felt this way on a boat before…at the center. But he realized that he seldom felt at the center anywhere. He was the outsider. The reporter. The observer. He was good at describing the center when it was occupied by other people—not occupying it.

But his encounter with Hennessey had also been an encounter with himself. The swirling, terrifying engagement made him somehow realize—now, cold and wet and at the fulcrum of the boat’s motion—that he also had his own center. Family. Profession. Friends. Old friends. Truth. That center seemed right to him. It seemed like something that had been there all along but never really noticed.

As he pondered, Kinney sat down, cradling a cup of tea, looking at him for some hint of what he was feeling.

“I kicked a shark. Sort of,” Will opened. “And then you jumped in for me.”

“Oh, I wanted to get a look at her anyway. Not the way I’d planned,” Kinney tried to be casual about it.

“Ever do that before?”

“No! I was on this cruise boat once, with a guy who did stuff like that. Said he could communicate with the pack mind of sharks. Like they were wolves. So he jumped in all the time to commune. The Shark Whisperer we called him. We were all sure he was going to get bitten one day. So, no. I never did that before. Did you ever fall into the jaws of a shark to get a story before?”

“It wasn’t my fault! I had to lean out there and the boat rocked.” Will lifted the blanket from his shoulders and shifted it: it was starting to smell like wet dog.

He smiled and tried not to take a deep breath. And then said simply. “Thanks.”

“Huh?”

“For jumping in. You didn’t need to.”

“It wasn’t about needing to. It was about being able to. It was something I could do.”

“Well, it was something I needed, so thank you.”

Kinney was still, and then took a sip from her tea cup. “The last time you needed something, I couldn’t do it.”

Will sat a little straighter, “It was a crisis, Kay. For both of us. But most of all for you.”

She sighed. “I know, Will. But that night, when Mom and I ran, and we went to my Aunt’s in Florida, we were going to come back. Eventually. Probably.”

“But as the weeks passed, that night became a wound that had been cauterized, and coming back seemed more and more impossible. Mom divorced Dad, and then in the last week in August, Duke let me in off the wait list.”

Will sat quietly absorbing details he’d never heard. “You could have told us. Me. That you weren’t coming back. I’d have dealt with it.”

“Neither of us could deal with it Will—we were just kids.”

Will looked out over the waves slipping by as Minerva churned toward home. “My family stood by me after your Dad melted down and you were gone. And you know what they told me, when the months went by? And I was so uncertain and hurt? They said, ‘Don’t blame the victim. And don’t blame yourself’. And that’s how I’ve been operating. I don’t blame you for leaving. And I don’t blame myself for being hut.

He smiled, looking out at the ocean but seeing something else, “And now I have Laurie and Maxi—nothing else comes close. They’re the only things that matter. Nothing I write will count compared to them. Nothing I do will count for more than my love for them. And because you came back to find me pretty well centered in my own family, I can finally say - I’m sorry for what happened, Kinney. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. And that you had to leave.”

Kinney searched for the right words. In a soggy, smelly, choppy back of a small boat she settled on: “I’m sorry too, Will. I always have been. And from then on, the person who protects me is me.”

***

When they were almost back to the harbor, after a long silence, Will smiled, “So! Was that shark stand-off worth it? I mean did all that make a difference? How do we read the tag?”

“Easy,” Kinney said, and crossed the deck to pick up the tag. Since it wasn’t attached to a one-ton shark anymore, it was just a small, nondescript black box. She showed Will its stubby stock. “Just a USB-c jack, behind a rubber plug. I’ll unseal it once we’re back onshore.”

“What do you think you’ll find?”

“I know what I’ll find. The tag will say that Hennessey was never in Hampton Bay. Her online data has been altered, but her tag will tell us the real story.”

“That’s the part I don’t get. If somebody can alter the tag data, how will reading the tag data help?”Kinney looked at him quizzically, then realized, “Ah, there is a small important fact here you don’t know. The data in the tag gets transmitted out to the nearest satellite. But the tag can’t receive any signal – so there isn’t any way to change the data stored in the tag itself.”

“And how do you already know what the tag data will say?”

“Because today Hennessey was not where the transmitted data said. To find her I had to know how to correct the online data. And if the online data are wrong, then she wasn’t in Hampton Bay, and then she was not responsible for Brinson’s death –“

“One hell of a scheme. Jesus. How do you fake a shark attack?”

“You’d have to know Brinson was going in the water at the yacht party, far enough in advance to manipulate Triton’s database. And know he was going to die in the water. Knocked unconscious? Then drowned? Maybe like Puja saw.”

Will rubbed his stubbled chin. “And once someone starts yelling shark, the story’s established. A lie that’s too wild to question.”

“This will do it, turn people around. Maybe even Captain Honeypie will relent,” Kinney smiled

“You don’t really believe that? That you can throw facts in the table and suddenly everybody thinks differently? After everybody believes something different?”

“But this is so obvious!”

“One fact, against a whole social media storm! Who’s going to make that miracle happen?”

“If anyone could, it’d be the man who kicked a shark to break a story and solve a crime!”

He laughed aloud. “Hell, I’m just a working-class kid who was too lazy to work manual labor and just barely smart enough to figure out how to avoid it. Not like there’s anywhere to go from here.”

“You’ll have a million options once this story gets out.”

“Options for what? Freelancing? I already have a job and it’s the one job I’m good at. The one job I like. Which should be fine!” Here an edge crept into his voice. “It should be perfectly fine, to grow up somewhere, and stay there, and find a job you can live on, and maybe raise a family. In a place where they need you…really need you…to tell them the new time the library closes! But most of the time it doesn’t feel that way. Tommy pays me everything he can, but it feels like I’m always on the verge of drowning. If the Augur closes up, I’m unemployable, Kinney. Every week I read about layoffs in someone else’s newspaper.”

“Someone else’s newspaper wouldn’t be covering this story this way, the way you cover it,” Kinney told him. But she could see he doubted it. He could see that his sense of vulnerability had returned. That the confidence he had and the confidences they shared had suddenly been covered up like a curtain drawn over garden door. And she wondered how much that was due to her.

“Look at this,” Fossi broke in from the wheelhouse. They had motored back to shore and were puttering into the harbor, turning into a line of docking slips full of newly arrived boats. Miranda, as a working boat, was always stationed at a cheaper slip. These big, recreational fishing yachts took up the prime spots. With the Miranda’s engine barely turning over, politely burping diesel, they eased through the crowded passages between docks. Kinney mentally tallied dozens of boats.

One had four huge Yamaha engines, like four stallions draped in white silk. It had leather upholstery, with hints of sky-blue navigation equipment peeking around edges and corners. Another boat’s aft deck was like the inside of a huge jewelry box of polished teak. The most luxurious boasted gleaming wood panels and leather conversational nooks arranged on their broad and sweeping aft decks.

Kinney could hear the bravado and laughter from deck to deck. Shouted claims of fishing records. Prizes won. Men in shorts and baseball caps, gesturing loudly with cans of beer. Polishing the reels, sorting out their indestructible fiberglass rods. Half the boats had been out today hunting sharks. Half had just arrived.

They all dwarfed Miranda. And no matter what the boat, its size, or color or name, all featured massive emplacements for heavy rods and reels.

The Revenge Fleet had arrived.