Clive Cussler - Shock Wave

Giordino held it up. “You want me to operate on you too?”

“There’s a small shark under the boat,” Pitt explained. “I’m going to entice it to the surface. When I grab it, you ram the screwdriver into the top of his head between the eyes. Do it right and you might stick his pea-sized brain.”

Maeve wanted no part of this business. “Surely you’re not bringing a shark on board?”

“Only if we get lucky,” Pitt said, tearing off a piece of his T-shirt and wrapping it around the small gouge in his leg to staunch the bleeding.

She crawled to the stern of the boat and crouched behind the console, happy to get out of the way. “Mind you don’t offer him anything to bite on.”

With Giordino kneeling beside him, Pitt slowly lowered the human bait into the water. The mackerel circled it, but he jiggled the line to discourage them. A few of the tiny scavenger fish darted in for a quick nibble, but they quickly left the scene as the shark, sensing the small presence of blood, homed in on the bait. Pitt hauled in on the line every time the shark came close.

As Pitt worked the hook and bait slowly toward the boat, Giordino, his upraised arm poised with the screwdriver held dagger-fashion, peered into the deep. Then the shark was alongside, ashen gray on the back, fading to white on the belly, his dorsal fin coming out of the sea like a submarine raising its periscope. The screwdriver swung in an arc and struck the tough head of the shark as he rubbed his side against the flotation tubes. In the hand of most other men, the shaft would never have penetrated the cartilaginous skeleton of the shark, but Giordino rammed it in up to the hilt.

Pitt leaned out, clamped his arm under the shark’s belly behind the gills and heaved just as Giordino struck again. He fell backward into the boat, cradling the one-and-a-half-meter hammerhead shark in his arms like a child. He grabbed the dorsal fin, wrapped his legs around the tail and hung on.

The savage jaws were snapping but found only empty air. Maeve cringed behind the console and screamed as the bristling triangular teeth gnashed only centimeters away from her drawn-up legs.

As if he were wrestling an alligator, Giordino threw all his weight on the thrashing beast from the sea, holding down the body on the floor of the boat, scraping the inside of his forearms raw on the sandpaper like skin.

Though badly injured, the hammerhead displayed an incredible vitality. Unpredictable, it was aggressive one minute and oddly docile the next. Finally, after a good ten minutes of futile thrashing, the shark gave up and lay still. Pitt and Giordino rolled off and caught their breath. The writhing fight had aggravated Pitt’s bruises, and he felt like he was swimming in a sea of pain.

“You’ll have to cut him,” he gasped to Giordino. “I feel as weak as a kitten.”

“Rest easy,” Giordino said. There was a patience, a warm understanding in his voice. “After the beating you took on the yacht and the pounding from the storm, it’s a wonder you’re not in a coma.”

Although Pitt had honed the blades on his Swiss army knife to a razor edge, Giordino still had to grip the handle with both hands and exert a great deal of muscle in slicing through the tough underbelly of the shark. Under Maeve’s guidance as a professional marine zoologist, he expertly cut out the liver and made an incision in the stomach, finding a recently eaten dorado and several herring. Then Maeve showed him how to slice the flesh from inside the skin efficiently.

“We should eat the liver now,” she advised. “It will begin decaying almost immediately, and it is the most nutritious part of the fish.”

“What about the rest of the meat?” asked Giordino, swishing the knife and his hands in the water to remove the slime. “It won’t take long to spoil in this heat.”

“We’ve got a whole ocean of salt. Slice the meat into strips. Then string it up around the boat. As it dries, we take the salt that has crystallized on the canopy and rub it into the meat to preserve it.”

“I hated liver when I was a kid,” said Giordino, somewhat green around the gills at the thought. “I don’t think I’m hungry enough to eat it raw.”

“Force yourself,” said Pitt. “The idea is to keep physically fit while we can. We’ve proven we can supply our stomachs. Our real problem now is lack of water.”

Nightfall brought a strange quiet. A half-moon rose and hung over the sea, leaving a silvery path toward the northern horizon. They heard a bird squawking in the star-streaked sky, but couldn’t see it. The cold temperatures common to the southern latitudes came with the disappearance of the sun and eased their thirst a little, and their minds turned to other things. The swells beat rhythmically against the boat and lulled Maeve into thoughts of a happier time with her children. Giordino imagined himself back in his condominium in Washington, sitting on a couch, an arm draped around a pretty woman, one hand holding a frosty mug of Coors beer and his feet propped on a coffee table as they watched old movies on television.

After resting most of the afternoon, Pitt was wide awake and felt revitalized enough to work out their drift and forecast the weather by observing the shape of the clouds, the height and run of the waves and the color of the sunset. After dusk he studied the stars and attempted to calculate the boat’s approximate position on the sea. Using his old compass while locked in the storage compartment during the voyage from Wellington, he noted that the yacht had maintained a southwest heading of two-four-zero degrees for twenty minutes short of thirty hours. He recalled John Merchant saying the yacht could cruise at 120 kilometers an hour. Multiplying the speed and time gave him a rough distance traveled of 3,600 kilometers from the time they left Wellington until they were set adrift. This he estimated would put them somewhere in the middle of the south Tasman Sea, between the lower shores of Tasmania and New Zealand.

The next puzzle to solve was how far were they driven by the storm? This was next to impossible to estimate with even a tiny degree of accuracy. All Pitt knew for certain was that the storm blew out of the northwest. In forty-eight hours it could have carried them a considerable distance to the southeast, far from any sight of land. He knew from experience on other projects that the currents and the prevailing winds in this part of the Indian Ocean moved slightly south of east. If they were drifting somewhere between the fortieth and fiftieth parallels, their drift would carry them into the desolate vastness of the South Pacific, where no ship traveled. The next land fall would be the southern tip of South America, nearly thirteen thousand kilometers away.

He stared up at the Southern Cross, a constellation that was not visible above thirty degrees north latitude, the latitude running across North Africa and the tip of Florida. Described since antiquity, its five bright stars had steered mariners and fliers across the immense reaches of the Pacific since the early voyages of the Polynesians. Millions of square miles of loneliness, dotted only by the islands, which were the tips of great mountains that rose unseen from the ocean floor.

However he figured it, no matter how strong their desire to survive, and despite any good luck they might receive, the odds were overwhelming against their ever setting foot on land again.

Hiram Yaeger swam deep in the blue depths of the sea, the water rushing past in a blur as if he were in a jet aircraft flying through tinted clouds. He swept over the edge of seemingly bottomless chasms, soared through valleys of vast mountain ranges that climbed from the black abyss to the sun-glistened surface. The seascape was eerie and beautiful at the same time. The sensation was the same as flying through the void of deep space.