Below (17 page)

The line remained tight for a full minute. He decided not to wait any longer. Let her be pissed—he wasn’t going to let her die down there while he stood idly on the boat picking his nose. He would have to pull her up very slowly, to prevent giving her decompression sickness, so he should probably start the process.

As Sturman braced his feet to begin hoisting her to the surface, the tension instantly left the rope. He slowly drew on the braided nylon, water dripping through his fingers as he passed the now slack line over his palms. He pulled in the line until it ran straight down into the water again, semi-taut, and concentrated on feeling for movement. It was still.
Shit.

To his left, Sturman caught movement out of the corner of his eye and looked over to see a floating coil of the second rope begin to go under. Something was pulling it down into the water. The second line grew taut, then shuddered off a spray of water as it was jerked tight. He had to make a decision.

He couldn’t pull Val rapidly to the surface—it would kill her. He had only one choice.

Dropping her tether, he grabbed the other rope near the cleat and pulled on it with both hands. Something heavy was thrashing aggressively on the other end. He pushed his knees against the gunwale, took a deep breath and, hand over hand, began to haul in the line. The loose rope began to quickly gather into a messy coil at his feet.

A few times during his struggle to bring in the capture net, Sturman was stopped momentarily by powerful downward jerks as the weight on the end of the line seemed to increase dramatically. Once he watched helplessly as the rope spooled out several feet, and grimaced as the flesh on his palms tore under the friction. Heaving and cursing, his back muscles aching, he continued to retrieve the now-bloodied line. Then he finally saw something nearing the surface.

The lure.

With three more long pulls, the net appeared, tangled around a squirming animal. In a single powerful heave, Sturman swung the heavy catch up out of the water, dropping the sopping mess onto the floor of the boat. He yelled at Bud to stay put.

Inside the net was a squid. It wasn’t nearly as big as the other one they had brought aboard, but it seemed a lot more upset. Grabbing the transmitter and its attachment device, he knelt in the pool of cold water around the squid and hastened to remove the tangled netting wrapped around its body.

Tagging the squid was easier than he had anticipated. Beginner’s luck, maybe. The squid, though powerful when underwater, flapped helplessly and squirted ink-stained water on the floor of his boat. Sturman aligned the transmitter against the animal’s body on the inside of one of its broad fins, just as Val had demonstrated for him on the dead squid, then pierced the fin with the sharp steel point of the attachment device, which looked kind of like a flare gun. After clipping the orange transmitter to the animal, he cinched it tightly against the squid’s body with two plastic loops running out from the transmitter’s barbs, tugged on it twice to make sure it was secure, then grabbed the squid around its smooth fins and, careful to avoid the beak and tentacles on its business end, lifted it off the floor and stepped to the side of the boat.

The squid fired a final defiant burst of inky water all over Sturman’s legs as he threw it overboard. There was a loud splash as it entered the water, and then it was gone.

Sturman turned and looked at the other line. It had grown very slack, several broad loops floating on the surface and drifting into the side of the boat. Sturman looked at his bleeding hands, then desperately down into the water.

And waited.

N
ever before had Val been happier to be out of the water.

She had spent the last fifteen minutes waiting at her safety stop, just twenty feet below the surface. They had been some of the most frightening minutes of her life. As she lingered in the darkness under the curved, white hull of the boat, kicking awkwardly with one fin, she had fought the incredible urge to sprint to the surface and scramble out of the water. The shoal had robbed her of her other fin, but thankfully had left her alone once she had separated herself from the glowing lure.

As she waited for the nitrogen to leave her body, she had focused on her breathing, and simply counted the seconds until she could surface safely. Then she had rushed topside and heaved herself onto the boat’s transom. Now she sat in the stern, shivering, her gear heaped in a puddle of seawater at her feet.

“Are you cold?” Sturman appeared from the cabin and wrapped a thick towel around Val’s shoulders.

“Yeah. Thanks. So you got it tagged the way I told you?”

“Bet your ass I did.” He sat down next to her. “Glad you’re all right, Doc.”

“So am I. I told you I’d be fine.”

“What the hell happened down there?”

Val explained how the shoal had seized her just as she had first attempted to net the small male squid, and how only the tether had prevented them from pulling her deeper. “These squid were more aggressive than I’m used to, maybe because they’re not getting enough to eat. But as soon as they distinguished me from the lure, they seemed to lose interest in me.”

“How hard was it to get his ass into the net?”

“I don’t really remember, to tell you the truth. He just seemed to work his way inside it, and I pulled on the rope.”

“Let’s find out if that was worth it.”

“Good idea. Can you grab my laptop?”

Sturman returned with Val’s computer, and opened it awkwardly with his crudely bandaged hands.

“Jesus, Sturman! What happened to your hands?”

“Rope burns. I shoulda worn gloves.”

“Are you okay? You’re bleeding a lot.”

“I’ll be all right.”

Sturman navigated on the laptop for her as she toweled off and explained how to open the correct program.

“The research branch of the aquarium I work for has a website researchers can use to track the movements of all our tagged marine animals. Every fifteen minutes, we should get a new location from the tag.”

Sturman zoomed in on a map of their general location on the water, locating several dots that represented readouts since they had turned on the transmitter. “So does this mean it’s working?”

“We need to wait and see if the transmitter takes a new reading now that’s it’s on the squid.” Val paused. “Thanks for trusting me. I’m sure it was hard for you to let me go down there.”

“You kidding? For a while there I didn’t think you’d come back.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Really. But I figured I was gonna make a killing when I sold off your state-of-the-art equipment.”

“Asshole. Hey, check it out.” Val pointed at the new dot on the screen, clustered near the others. “It looks like it’s working. He’s still pretty much below us.”

“Now what?”

“Now? Let’s get the hell out of here and go find a late-night diner. I’m starving.”

T
he first thing Sturman noticed as he entered the lab was the odor. Although it looked very sterile, it smelled like a fish market in all its blood-and-scales-and-fins-and-guts glory, mixed with other smells that brought him back to his tenth-grade biology class—alcohol and formaldehyde.

“Damn, Doc. How do you work in this stink?”

Val looked up from the side of a stainless-steel examination table. “I guess it does smell pretty bad in here, doesn’t it? I suppose you get used to it pretty fast if you want to be a marine biologist. Come on in.”

Walking past metal shelves covered in assorted jars of pickled, giant-eyed fish, marine worms, and other oddities, Sturman took off his cowboy hat and joined Val beside the examination table. She had her dark brown hair pulled back in a neat ponytail and was bent over the table looking through protective plastic lab glasses at a large squid carcass. Based on the size and injuries, Sturman could tell this was the squid that had died on his boat.

They were inside the marine laboratory at the Weston Research Institute, where Val had been granted access to examine the squid. She knew a top researcher, a Swede, at the institute, and had agreed to let him and one of his grad students retain the carcass when she was finished. He also studied Humboldt and other squid species, but focused more on identifying and tracking shoals using a novel technique of sonar imaging.

Sturman pointed at her glasses. “You worried it’s gonna squirt on you?” Running his hand over the stubble on his head, he turned to look around the room. “What are all these things?”

“The specimens? You name it. This lab has organisms from every animal phylum, collected on various projects around the world. It’s pretty cool, but I think the lab keeps them here more for ambience than anything else.”

“Yeah. It’s really got a homey feel to it. You catch any of these critters?”

“No. I’ve never worked for Weston. I hope you don’t mind that I started working on this girl without you. You want to record for me as I start cutting?”

Sturman returned to the table. “Sure. This clipboard here?”

Over the unpleasant smells in the lab, he could now smell Val’s perfume as he stood next to her—an arousing blend of florals and tropical spices. He felt a charge of electricity run through his chest as her hip brushed against his own, but she seemed unaware as she leaned down to peer at the dead squid. He tried to focus on the examination table, realizing he was looking down her shirt at a gold necklace resting in the dark line formed by her cleavage. Sturman cleared his throat and forced himself to look instead at the data sheet on the clipboard.

Val had already filled out a few sections: her name, the capture date and location, and a few other details. He read one filled-out section aloud. “Female . . . length, one-point-seven-four meters . . . weight, thirty-nine-point-eight kilograms . . .”

“She’s a big girl, all right. And heavy.”

“How did you manage to weigh her, and get her up on the table here?”

“That student I mentioned who gets to examine her later helped me. You should’ve seen his face when one of her tentacles snagged his belt loop. He thought she was grabbing on to him.”

Sturman looked down at the lifeless mass of flesh on the cold steel table. Val had stretched it out to its full length. It had flattened out even more than when on his boat, the seawater now drained out of its cavities, and much of the color had left its skin. The animal was now a mottled mix of pale pinks and oranges, resembling a giant, wet balloon that had lost most of its air.

“It’s hard to believe that this sorry-looking thing is so powerful underwater.”

“I know. But you’ve got to remember, Humboldt squid don’t have a skeleton, like we do. They do have a hardened remnant of a shell inside their body—the gladius—but really they use the water itself as their skeleton, to support their body and provide volume to the body cavity. This is pretty much what we’d look like if someone pulled out our skeletons.”

“Huh. Don’t know if I’d look like this. So what
are
we looking at here, anyway, Doc?”

“Oh yeah, I probably should give you the guided tour. Let’s start at the top.” Val walked over to the pointed end of the squid. “The squid travels in this direction, even though its eyes are on the other side. When alive, she would have turned her body around to hunt or defend herself.”

Val slid her latex-gloved fingers under the meaty, flattened sides of the squid. “These here are her fins. A squid bends and flaps its fins like wings or rudders, to steer and make smaller movements. This whole thing here”—Val ran her hands slowly down the long, tubular main body—“is the mantle. Ever ordered a calamari steak?”

“Good stuff.”

“Well, now you know where it comes from. On Humboldts, the mantle is ideal for cutting into steaks. It’s basically just a smooth, muscular tube with a fairly uniform thickness.”

“That seems a lot thicker than the steaks I’ve eaten.”

“Well, this is a much bigger girl than the squid that normally go to market. Anyway, if we looked at this tissue under a microscope, you’d see the chromatophores that let it change color for camouflage. And inside the mantle are the organs.”

“Yum.” Sturman licked his lips. He looked at the gashes and marred flesh around tears on the body. “It looks like her shoal found her tasty as well.”

“She’s pretty banged up, isn’t she? Her sisters were hard on her. Anyway, moving down here, you can’t miss her big, beautiful black eyes, but harder to see is the siphon.” Val searched the soft, wet carcass using the fingers of both hands, and quickly found a thick extension of the flesh next to eyes as large and dark as those of a cow. “Underwater, this feature looks more conical, like a party hat. The siphon is where she gets her propulsion. She expands her body to draw in water, then squeezes that muscular mantle and forces water out the hole at the end of the funnel—just like a jet engine.”

“I don’t know about water, but I do know she can fire ink outta that thing.”

Val smiled. “Right. When she’s in a flight mode, she produces ink that also is emitted from the funnel . . . along with all of her waste.”

“Hmm. I better clean my boat again. She has ten arms, right?”

“Actually, she has eight arms, like an octopus, but unlike octopi, squid also have two longer tentacles used to capture prey.” Val ran her hands down the longer appendages extending a foot farther down the table than the arms. “These two tentacles, or ‘whips,’ are really quite amazing.”

“They look like leaves.” The tubular appendages each ended in a structure shaped like a large tree leaf.

“They do, don’t they? A squid can fire them out quite far from its body to latch on to a fish or other prey with the suckers. The arms”—Val picked up the end of one of the arms, which Sturman thought looked like short, thick snakes—“are then used to subdue the prey and draw it into the beak.”

He felt the ends of the tentacles. “Wow. They’re pretty sharp.”

“Each one contains hundreds of small teeth to hold on to slippery prey.” Val grunted as she lifted several of the shorter, sucker-lined arms up to reveal a small circle at their juncture. “And here’s the beak, or radula.”

“That black thing in the middle of the circle?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty tough to see, because it’s nested in a ring of muscle. When we cut the beak out, I’m guessing it will be about the size of an orange.”

“Damn. That big?”

“Bigger than it looks here. She can swivel it in all directions to tear off bite-sized pieces. A squid beak looks an awful lot like a parrot’s beak, except shorter.”

Val spent the next several minutes measuring the arms, tentacles, and other exterior dimensions on the squid, while Sturman recorded the data. “Well, what do you say we go inside?”

“Inside her? As long as it doesn’t smell any worse.”

Val smiled. “I think the lab smells worse than this girl. She’s still pretty fresh.” Val picked up a scalpel and carefully ran it along the length of the mantle, making an incision. She set the scalpel down and spent the next few minutes carefully separating the flesh at the opening, then used both hands to spread the mantle out into a few square yards of thick flesh. Inside the exposed cavity were several distinct organs, but mostly it just looked like a colorless, unidentifiable mess to Sturman.

“Looks like she was about ready to have kids. See her ovaries here?” Val lifted a pale, fleshy gob near the top of the mantle. “They’re loaded with eggs, but probably haven’t been fertilized yet. This also confirms that she’s female.”

Val pointed out the gills, three different hearts, digestive organs, and other parts that all looked relatively indistinguishable to Sturman. Then she touched a small, darker organ with her index finger.

“Guess what this is? I’ll give you a hint: it’s responsible for the mess on your boat.”

“Ink gland?”

“Right. We call them ‘ink sacs,’ but same difference. And this concludes your first tour of a Humboldt squid. I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride.”

“So what are you hoping to learn here?”

“Well, I don’t see anything unusual so far, but I’ll examine the contents of her digestive tract, take some tissue samples to study under a microscope, and look for parasites. See if I can find anything. You want to stick around?”

“I’ve gotta work on the boat some before we head out again. Have fun without me.”

Val brushed her bangs away from her dark eyes with her forearm, which hadn’t been coated in squid juice. “I’ll try. Want to get dinner later?”

Sturman thought of Maria. “Uh . . . can’t tonight. Gotta meet Montoya.”

“Oh. Well, he can come over here if he’d like to see our culprit. Then we can all grab a bite.”

“Well, I told him I’d meet him at this place, and—”

“All right, fine. Some other time. I’ll just call you when I figure out more here.”

Sturman nodded. “See you later, then.”

“Fine,” she said dismissively, and turned back to the squid.

He picked up his hat and walked out of the room.