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“Y
ou’re not really going in with those things, Doc?”

“Please don’t be so dramatic. I dive with Humboldt squid all the time.” Val began connecting her BC vest and regulator to an air tank in the stern. Dawn was still hours away, but she knew the squid could soon start their descent to deeper water.

“Maybe so. But not these ones. Hell, you saw what this one just tried to do to my dog!” Sturman kicked the side of the squid heaped in the stern of his boat. “You saw what they did to Steve Black.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll make sure I’m tethered to the boat, and I’ll surface immediately if I’m worried by their behavior. They’re normally afraid of unfamiliar objects, like a person in scuba gear. I’ll be lucky to get near one.”

“Steve was
in
scuba gear.”

Val paused. “True. But we’re still not absolutely positive he was attacked by Humboldt squid. And even if he was, it must have been under incredibly rare circumstances.”

Sturman shook his head. “You’re fucking serious, aren’t you?”

“We need to attach the transmitter to a healthy squid, or else there will be no reliable way to follow this shoal and find out if it might be a threat.” She fixed Sturman with a hard stare. “You have any better ideas?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t understand how tracking them now is going to help us figure out what they’ve already done. Give me a minute to think.”

“I can get a better idea what their habits are and we can warn the local authorities if they move too close to shore. Look, we can’t risk the shoal getting away. They’re here now.” Val slid a neoprene hood tightly over her head and adjusted it around her face. Unlike most of her dives with
Dosidicus
, before which she usually felt excited, this time she felt a hint of fear. She couldn’t let Sturman know. Without his cooperation, she couldn’t make this dive.

“Let me do it, then.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Val smiled, and was grateful for the neoprene covering much of her face. Considering how dangerous Sturman saw the situation as being, it was brave of him to offer to go in her place. “I have much more experience with these animals than you do. If they do get agitated, I can read their behavior. Besides, this is your boat. It makes more sense to have you topside.”

Sturman looked her up and down, making her feel self-conscious in the unflattering full-body wet suit and hood.

“That’s a good look on you, Doc.”

“Let’s be serious, Sturman. I know you’re worried, but I don’t want to joke around now. I know these animals better than almost anyone in the world. Despite how crazy this must seem to you, I’m not suicidal.”

Sturman looked her in the eyes. “How do you plan to get this”—he picked up the transmitter and shook it—“hooked to a squid, underwater, while it’s alive and doesn’t want to be bothered?”

Val smiled. “I’ve got an idea.”

 

 

Val paused on the transom of Sturman’s boat, holding on to the vessel to brace herself in the gentle nighttime swells. She had donned full scuba gear. The lines had been reeled in. The transmitter was prepped in the boat. In her hand she held a capture net. Sturman knew the plan, and was waiting behind her with nylon ropes coiled in each hand.

Everything was ready. It was time to get in the water. But she hesitated. The generator hummed loudly, steadily, in her ears.

Val cursed herself for her apprehension.
You’re letting your imagination get to you—just like a child.

“You all right, Doc?” Sturman yelled over the generator.

She looked at the cool, black water below the transom, focusing below the reach of the rented lights, where she knew the bottom was almost a thousand feet down, then back into the well-lit cabin of the boat. Bud stood leashed nearby, watching her and wagging his tail. “Yeah. Just give me a minute.”

“You don’t have to do this. We can try to catch a healthy one on the fishing lines.”

On some level, Val knew Sturman was right. But this hesitation was irrational, even if these squid had possibly killed a few people during a feeding frenzy. She knew these animals. They simply didn’t kill people.

Sturman’s concern had her feeling a bit panicked, even though she had dived with the animals many times under similar conditions. She shivered as a cold breeze hit her neck, water dripping down her exposed skin from the wet dive mask she had already defogged and dipped into the ocean.

Logic dictated that this would be like any other dive with Humboldt squid. As long as she was tethered, she would be fine. She looked back again, this time at the lights shining down into the water along the sides of the boat, bugs darting underneath them in a thick swarm.
The shoal probably looks something like that under the water,
she thought
.
Sturman and Bud looked at her, waiting. They appeared almost comical, sharing similar expressions. She laughed out loud to relieve the tension.

“Why are you laughing?”

Now or never, Val.
“Just watch the lines, Sturman. I’ll be back soon.”

Val turned and lifted the regulator up to her mouth. She drew a long breath, listened to the comforting hiss of air flowing freely through the hose. She bit down on the rubber mouthpiece and forced away the terrible thoughts trying to creep into the back of her mind. Time to focus on the task at hand.

She placed her hand over her mask and regulator to hold them in place, raised one leg up, and stepped out over the open ocean.

As she entered the water, it became very quiet as the sound of the generator faded to a low buzz. Cold water flowed past her face with a rush of small bubbles as her momentum carried her down from the surface. She could hear faint clicks and hums from marine organisms now, and very distant boat motors, because of water’s ability to transmit sound much farther than air.

The white hull of the boat stood out dramatically, brightly illuminated by the lights shining into the water, but underneath there was nothing but a black void. She clicked on her flashlight and looked down into the blackness underneath her swim fins, but the beam was swallowed up by the darkness almost before it left the bulb. The shoal was still a few hundred feet down, and she needed to lure them closer. To have enough air to go deep safely, she would have to hurry. She checked her air supply one last time and felt for the reassurance of the tether at her waist. She raised the air release valve on her BC, dumping out the remaining air trapped inside. A moment later she could feel the pressure start to build around her as she sank into the void.

She sank feetfirst. There was no need to waste energy. The lead weights in her vest would do the work for her. The best thing to do was utilize the negative buoyancy provided by the weights and simply control her descent, offering occasional upward kicks and releasing small amounts of air from the scuba tank into her vest, where the air could expand and prevent her from sinking too fast.

Val looked at her dive computer and watched as the depth gauge slowly counted past twenty feet, thirty feet, forty feet. She scanned the black abyss below her with the light, but still saw nothing but a fine soup of particulate matter. Every few feet, she pinched her nose and blew, equalizing the pressure in her ears to match the mounting force of the water around her sinuses.

When she passed a hundred feet, she depressed the fill valve on her BC for several seconds, transferring more air into it. After thirty seconds of fine-tuning, the added air in the vest stopped her descent. Hovering in the darkness, she took a deep breath and shut off her dive light.

Slowly, her eyes began to adjust. The bright lights shining down from above provided the only illumination, just enough that she could make out the outline of her hand two feet from her eyes. She felt the fine filaments of the net snag her gear as she moved it out away from her body. She would need to compensate Sturman for ruining his fishing net. They had cut the netting free from its handle and wide aluminum ring, and secured it instead to the end of a long, nylon nautical rope in such a way that when the rope was pulled taut, the net would cinch closed. Val had been able to capture Humboldt squid in Mexico using a similar net fashioned by her crew there. If she was able to lure a squid into the net, she intended to close the webbing around it, then tug on the rope as a signal to Sturman to haul in the catch.

Val reached into the folds of the netting and pulled a black drawstring pouch off a glowing neon fishing lure, hooks removed, that was zip-tied to the inside of the net. They had used Sturman’s protective sunglasses pouch to serve as the makeshift cover because the lure inside was a powerful attractant. In the blackness of the deep, its exposed greenish fluorescent glow actually hurt her eyes for a moment.

If it was this bright to her, she knew her friends wouldn’t have a hard time finding it. It was just a question of time.

Val focused on her breathing, making as few movements as possible to maintain her position underwater. By relaxing, she knew she could maximize her air supply and the resulting bottom time.

After a few minutes, she looked at her dive computer. Then back into the blackness around her, turning in slow circles and trying to watch in every direction.

Time dragged on as she alternately watched for approaching life and kept an eye on her gauges. After eight minutes, she began to wonder if her presence near the light was keeping the animals from approaching, but knew her plan wouldn’t work if she wasn’t holding on to the net, at the ready. It was possible that the shoal was already here, simply staying far enough away from her as to remain unseen as they assessed her. But something needed to happen soon. She moved the net up and down again in quick jerks, trying to imagine what it would look like when they were jigging the lures at the ends of fishing lines. The glowing lure in her net danced erratically up and down in the darkness, like a wounded fish.

Then she saw something.

It had only been a momentary change in the blackness, but she was certain something large had passed by her, vaguely illuminated by the glow of the lure. She moved the lure more rapidly, careful to keep the net open.

She felt a slight pressure wave as something displaced the water near her.

Val began to turn her head to see what had caused the disturbance, then flinched at a sudden movement near the net. A Humboldt rushed out of the darkness and splayed its arms in the green glow in front of the net, like a huge flower quickly opening its petals. It fired its two coiled tentacles toward the lure. The lure moved violently backward as they struck it, but the squid didn’t hold on. An instant later it vanished into the blackness.

Val’s heart pounded in her rib cage. She willed herself to keep moving the bait. A soft touch brushed down her calf, but when she looked down, there was nothing there. Only her imagination? She thought of the torn flesh on the corpse in the morgue, the missing face.
Stop scaring yourself, Val. You’ve been here before.

The shoal descended on her in a mad rush. Val wasn’t sure how many animals suddenly appeared—four, maybe five. A smaller squid in the group went straight for the lure, but before Val could react the animal had grasped it and was pulling it away, causing the open area of the net Val had created to collapse and tangle. The squid stubbornly refused to release the lure, emitting flashing bursts of bioluminescent light in its frustration. Val knew this was her chance. She kicked toward the squirming mollusk, trying to close the net around it. Just as she managed to drag the net over its flashing mantle, she felt a powerful clenching around her thigh, and an instant later she was being dragged downward.

 

 

Waiting on the boat, Sturman lit a cigarette to calm his anxiety. Worry was not an emotion he had felt for a long time.

Val had been gone for more than ten minutes, but he hadn’t seen any signs from her yet. He took off his hat and tossed it into the open cabin doors behind him, wiping the sweat off his brow with a thick forearm. Bud wagged his tail and Sturman scratched his ears.

He looked at the two ropes running into the water, each tied to a different cleat, and reminded himself which was tied to Val and which was connected to the net. She would tighten the rope on his left when she had a squid in the net, signaling him to hoist it up; the rope cleated off on his right was her lifeline.

As Sturman took his second pull off the cigarette, savoring the burn of the smoke entering his lungs, the line on the right suddenly drew taut.
Val’s line.

Sturman flicked his cigarette into the sea and grabbed the rope. As his hands closed around it, he swore as he felt an incredible weight at the other end and the vibrations of an obvious struggle. He considered pulling Val in, pausing as he remembered her request not to worry about her tether unless she was likely out of air. He glanced at his watch—she probably still had ten more minutes.
This is crazy.