Peter Benchley - The Deep

Gail’s arm touched Sanders” side, and the sensation was a trigger that snapped him forward. His right hand was extended, the knife blade pointing up.

The shark saw him coming and dodged, its head jerking to the right, its tail thrashing twice. But instinct told it to avoid the reef, and, apparently confused, it slowed enough to let Sanders jab the knife into its underside, a foot ahead of the tail.

Sanders’ only conscious thought was how soft the flesh was; the knife went in up to the hilt. Then the body convulsed and tore the knife from his hand.

Blood spurted from the wound in a thick green cloud.

The shark darted away, swimming erratically, its body shuddering, tail twitching. The head turned and the jaws snapped at the bleeding belly. The shark was trying to eat itself.

The knife had fallen a few feet away, and Sanders swam to retrieve it, worried that the shark would return and, in anger, attack.

But it was not the shark that attacked. Sanders felt a hand grip his ankle and drag him backward. Lying on his back, he gazed into Treece’s furious eyes. He saw Treece’s lips moving, and he heard sounds, but no words.

Treece grabbed Sanders’ arm and yanked him to his feet. His fingers completely circled Sanders’ upper arm and, on the inside of the arm where they met, pinched painfully.

Scared and confused, Sanders didn’t know what he had done to enrage Treece, and as he looked into the shouting face, he was genuinely afraid that Treece might kill him.

Treece grabbed the knife from Sanders’ hand and rammed it into the air-lift intake. It rattled up the tube. Then Treece pointed at the surface and started up. He stopped, returned, and gathered up one of the artillery shells.

Gail still crouched on the bottom. Sanders took her arm and helped her to her feet, pulled three times on one of the ropes, and guided her hand to it when the rope was tightened by Coffin’s pull.

As he swam with Gail to the surface, Sanders saw a gray shadow moving in the distance. Hazy as it was, Sanders could see that it was big, much bigger than a man.

When he neared the boat, he looked down and saw the wounded shark, twisting and rolling on the reef. Then the air stopped flowing into his mask.

He kicked to the surface, exhaling the last of his air. He grabbed the diving platform with one hand, removed his mask, and said, “Hey, what…” The sound of Treece’s voice silenced him. “dis … dumb, goddamned, idiotic, crazy thing to do I ever saw in my life!” Treece was already in the boat, railing, Sanders assumed, at Coffin, who had turned off the compressor.

Sanders dipped his face in the water to clean his nose, so he didn’t see the hand that reached for him.

He heard the word “You!” and felt himself grabbed under one arm and hoisted out of the water and over the transom.

His feet slammed onto the deck.

Gail, hanging off the platform, watched Sanders fly out of the water, and a picture struck her: a man, wedged high in a tree, with his limbs splayed backward.

Treece held Sanders by the arm and shook him, snapping his head back and forth. “What in the name of the gentle Jesus do you think you’re doing? You think you’re goddamned Tarzan? You’re a goddamned hazard, that’s what!”

“What…”

“Bugger up a day’s work… Jesus Christ!”

Treece pushed Sanders away and turned to take Gail’s tank off the platform.

Sanders rubbed the welts on his arm. “She was bleed—!”

“Cat shit!”

“She was! In her mask. She cleared it into the water.”

Treece looked at Coffin and said, “Christ, spare me from idiots.” He turned back to Sanders and opened his mouth to shout, but apparently changed his mind. “All right,” he said, struggling against his temper. “First off, that little fish wasn’t about to eat us.”

“Little!” Sanders said. “That thing was at least seven feet long.” Confident now that Treece was not going to hurt him, he felt embarrassed, aggressively resentful. He wanted to question Treece’s declarative cockiness.

“If it was five feet, I’m the King of Spain.

Water magnifies everything.”

Sanders felt himself blush. “Even so…”

“Second,” Treece said, “there wasn’t enough blood in the water to make him more than a little nosy.

He was having a look-see. If he’d have got serious, you’d have seen the excitement ripple along his body; he’d’ve got real agitated. And soon as I spotted that, all we had to do is gather together in the air-lift cloud. Sharks won’t go in it, or if they do, they’ll get the hell out in a hurry without waiting to bite anything. The sand clogs their gills, and they hate that: it can kill ’em. I had his grandfather try to eat me once—a big bastard of a tiger shark, all of fifteen feet long comand I just waited him out in the cloud. But sticking him with a knife is the last bloody thing in the world you want to do. The last ! When you’ve got no other choice, when it’s either stick him or be dinner, then you stick him. But not before.”

“Why?”

“He’s liable to bite you. They’re not supposed to have enough brains to get angry, but I tell you, I’ve seen ’em do a right fancy imitation of being pissed off. You want to see another reason, get in the water.”

“What? Where?”

Treece tossed him a face mask. “Put this on and hang off the platform.” He said to Gail, “You, too. But for Christ’s sake, don’t go tooting off somewhere.”

Tentatively, not knowing what to expect, David and Gail slipped off the platform and clung to the chains that attached it to the boat. They held their breaths and put their faces in the water.

The scene thirty feet away, on the reef, looked like a gang fight. All that remained of the shark Sanders had stabbed were a few mutilated pieces, and those were being fought over, with savage frenzy, by countless other sharks. Half a dozen large tiger sharks flailed in a blurred ball around a piece of offal. A smaller shark chased a shred of flesh to the bottom, took it in his mouth, and sped away, pursued by two others. There were sharks everywhere, swimming in frantic bursts, responding to smells and sounds and commotion in the water, searching for prey. Some were gray, some brown, some striped.

Large sharks took random swipes at smaller ones, who darted out of reach-or, when they were not quick enough, were wounded and set upon by the mob.

As the Sanderses watched, more and more dark, sinuous shapes glided out of the twilight blue. One cruised directly beneath the boat, and, seeing something on the surface, rose toward them. They hoisted themselves onto the platform and climbed into the boat.

Treece and Coffin were counting ampules on the deck. Treece did not look up. “See what you did?” He was not gloating; his tone of voice said simply: Now you understand.

“I see.”

Gail said, “How long will they stay around?”

“Till the food runs out. But if they’re beating up on each other like they usually do, the food won’t run out. They’ll be there a good long while.”

“So today’s wiped,” Sanders said. “I’m sorry.”

“Aye.” Treece relented. “It’s no great tragedy. We got a fair load for today, and one thing about those beasts: They’ll keep anybody else from messing around down there.”

Gail shivered. She removed her wet-suit top and dried herself. “How many have you got?”

“Four thousand”-Treece looked at Coffin-“eight hundred and seventy,” Coffin said, wrapping the last plastic bag of ampules.

“Not enough.” Treece looked at the shore. “And not much bloody time. I imagine Cloche has had people on the bluffs all day.”

Coffin said, “He can’t make ’em into good divers in two days. And he’ll have to build an air lift.