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Captain MacDonald spat into the water, ignoring the remnant strand of saliva that clung to his gray beard. He often sang when at sea, usually unaware that he was. It was a habit he’d formed when fishing with his father and uncles in Newfoundland, sometimes for squid. They all sang. Singing kept a man from losing his sanity.

Tomás had set off on the skiff a few minutes ago. A capable lad, and unshakeable. Better than his other deckhand, a big, strong fellow but dumb. And better than these soft researchers getting in the way and filming everything, and the son-of-bitch cop with them. He looked as green as any virgin deckhand after a night of rough seas. Served him right. MacDonald sang toward the cop’s back, and the cop turned to film him.

“First one’s hooked by Jimmy, and shouts go round the fleet . . . he’s gonna get some supper, from fifty fathoms deep!”
MacDonald liked that part. Now how did the rest go? He took off his glasses and wiped salt and mist off the lenses onto his rough sweater.

MacDonald stood facing the darkness around his vessel, feeling the ocean’s rhythms through the deck. She was really beginning to calm, which pleased him. Hauling in a purse net in rough seas was no fun at all. He fished a fresh wad of wintergreen-flavored tobacco out of the tin in his shirt pocket and placed the treat inside his lip.

The captain listened as the skiff motor began to hum louder. Tomás was picking up speed. He would make the half-mile loop in less than five minutes, dragging the lead end of the net, despite the darkness and rough conditions. The captain felt his heart beat faster. He hadn’t gone after larger squid since he was a younger man, and never had gathered an entire net-full. Soon he would have a mess of the flying jumbo squid in the hold. Asian markets were paying top dollar for these squid right now, and if he could haul them in with the setup he already had . . . as a cool night breeze on his whiskers gave him goose bumps, he remembered the end of the song his uncle had taught him:

J
oe tried to track the skiff towing the seining net as it hurtled through the waves in a wide circle that would end back at the
Centaur
. He couldn’t actually make out the small boat in the darkness, especially not through the camera’s narrow viewfinder, just the single small light on its bow as it gradually progressed. He wondered how crappy this footage was going to look, especially with the accompanying audio dominated by the obnoxious captain singing loudly behind him.

“Captain, I’m glad you’re the only singer on this boat. What’s up with your deckhands, anyway? The younger one never even talks.”

“Tomás?” The captain smiled grimly. “Aye. For good reason. Missing part of his tongue.”

“What?”

“I found him living near the port in Guerrero Negro, when he was fifteen.”

“Down in Baja?”

“Aye. He was doing odd jobs for the men loading salt. Big salt mine there, you know? Anyway, his mother . . . let’s just say she had quite a few boyfriends working at the mines. One of ’em didn’t like the boy talking so much, and tried to cut out his tongue. Only got part of it, though. Kid’s mother did nothing.”

“Jesus. That’s terrible.”

“Now the
Centaur
’s his home. Best hand I’ve ever had.”

“Your other deckhand doesn’t seem to talk, either. Surely—”

The captain chuckled as he walked away. “Naw. He’s just a big, stupid galoot with nothing to say.”

Joe smiled and turned back toward the edge of the boat. He couldn’t forget about the dynamite, but maybe he could let the captain off with just a warning.

He directed the camera toward the water below him. The waves were much smaller than they had been during the day, and he could see fairly well into the water next to the hull because of the
Centaur
’s bright lighting. Were there any squid gathered underneath them now? The ocean out here was very clear, but all he could see alongside the hull were occasional smaller fish darting past in the boat’s lights or hovering in the shadow it cast. He could tell there were some larger fish hovering underneath them, but there was no way to film them because of the angle he was shooting from, and the distance above the water.

Joe looked back up at the horizon, where the skiff was now maybe five hundred feet away and probably two-thirds of the way finished with its route. As he watched the distant, oscillating light, a wave of nausea suddenly washed through his stomach. He was going to retch again. He paused the camera.

He gripped the cold metal edge of the gunwale as his abdomen tightened and he dry-heaved over the side. There was still the smell in his sinuses from his earlier sickness, which didn’t help any. As a second convulsion subsided, he opened his tear-filled eyes and for an instant thought he saw a large, pale shape moving in the water into the shadow underneath the boat. He hit the record button on the camera and leaned farther out to see if he could find what he had seen.

To the camera, he said, “I think I just saw something big. Maybe a Humboldt squid. I’m going to lean out for a closer look.” Bracing his knees against the side of the boat, Joe stretched out over the water. He still couldn’t quite get a good angle to film under the boat. He leaned out farther. An instant later, a rogue wave abruptly lifted the opposite side of the seiner. Joe lost his balance and instinctively grabbed for the side of the boat with both hands. He watched helplessly as the expensive camera dropped into the ocean.

“Fuck!” He held his breath for several seconds, waiting, until he saw the camera bob back up to the surface. Apparently the air trapped inside the waterproof plastic housing made the camcorder buoyant.

“Hey, guys? A little help?” Joe looked over his shoulder. The captain and his big deckhand were nowhere in sight, and Val and the Swedish researcher were inside the wheelhouse. Joe scanned the deck for something to retrieve the camera and saw a long wooden pole with a large hook on the end—maybe an oversized gaff. He dragged it over to the side to find the camera still visible, but now slamming up against the hull.

He could fish the camera back on board if he could snag its shoulder strap, but doing that was harder than it seemed. The camera kept moving in the surging froth, all the while moving steadily aft. Dodging equipment as he stumbled along the side to keep up with the camera, he tried several times to snatch the camera, but missed. The captain yelled at him from up in the wheelhouse, wondering what the hell he was doing, but he ignored him. If he didn’t retrieve the camera pretty quick, it was going to vanish into the darkness behind the seiner. He stepped up onto the side, almost to the stern end now, and thrust the pole tip under the water, jerking upward once, twice, three times.

He felt resistance. He had it.

Slowly, he lifted the camera up. As he reached to grab it with a free hand, he heard the squeak of ungreased hinges and turned just in time to see a large, rusty pulley swinging toward him.

Suspended from the towering boom by cables, the heavy pulley struck his shoulder, disrupting his balance and forcing his upper body out over the water. He tried to turn and grab at the pulley, but couldn’t reach it.

As if in slow motion, he felt himself falling over the side.

His left shoulder hit the cold water first and he plunged below the surface. In the brightly lit water beside the boat, he thought he saw shifting movement below him that contrasted with the blackness of the deep. He kicked up to the surface and frantically grabbed at the side of the seiner with both hands, not pausing to look down. He realized that he couldn’t climb up the featureless metal side of the vessel, which rose five or more feet out of the water. He kicked for the stern, only a few body lengths away, but it was as sheer as the rest of the boat. He heard shouts from up on the deck.

Then something tugged at his right leg.

He looked down and saw something pale moving below him in the dark water. Something big. Suddenly the thing wrapped tightly around his leg and pulled.

Yelling in fear, he kicked at it and clawed at the side of the seiner. The captain’s face appeared above him, and a second later a rope landed on Joe’s head. Just as he grasped for it, the tugging increased on his leg and he went under. He reached up over his head with his hands and managed to get them around the rope.

He had been a pretty good rope climber back in junior high, beating most of his gym classmates as they raced to the top. He was in worse shape than he’d been all those years ago, but he would have dominated his younger self in this particular rope-climbing competition. He exploded out of the water and, using all his strength, he pulled, kicked, and clambered up the rough metal until he tumbled headfirst onto a stack of netting in the stern of the
Centaur
. Sprawled out on the rigging, Joe looked at his leg, expecting to see the pulpy body of a squid affixed to his calf. But he had come out of the water alone.

“Jesus Christ!” Joe pushed himself to his knees, water pouring off him onto the deck. He rubbed his hand over his wet pant leg, but saw no damage or sign of injury. He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Val.

“Are you okay—?”

“You damn fool!” the captain yelled. “Almost became a meal for our squid, eh? Looks like I need to be babysitting this head-in-his-ass copper.”

Joe crawled off the stacked net, grateful for the hard wooden surface of the deck beneath him. He looked at Val and began to laugh.

“My camera?” she said.

“Shit. Your camera. Sorry, Val.” He laughed again.

He wouldn’t have thought a few minutes ago that he could actually be happy to be on the rusty old seiner.

 

 

“What the hell were you doing, you fool?” Captain MacDonald squinted down at Joe, sopping wet and shivering at his feet.

Joe could hardly stop laughing. “Thanks, Captain.”

“You deaf, lad? What the holy Moses happened? Looks like you aren’t going to be filming after all, eh?” The captain began to laugh, too.

“And my goddamn cell phone was still in my pocket.” They both laughed harder.

“You two think this is funny, but that was an expensive camera.” Val crossed her arms.

“Too bad, ain’t it, losing that camera? Would have made some nice video.” The captain spit tobacco onto the deck. “Tomás knows how to handle a skiff. I’ll wager he closes off the net before the shoal sounds, and lands us some squid.”

“I guess I owe you a camera,” Joe said.

She sighed. “Well, Joe, we can—”

“You owe them a camera, son!” the captain shouted. “Now get the hell away from my net and get out of the way.”

There was a whistle, and Joe realized that Tomás was already pulling up to the
Centaur
with the lead end of the net. Val grabbed Joe’s shoulder and together they hustled away from the stern, climbing the short, steep staircase to the wheelhouse platform to get out of the way. Karl stepped out of the wheelhouse to join them, and from the raised deck they watched the action unfold.

The bigger deckhand, Ari, hurried down the gunwale to meet Tomás. In a few moments they had secured the lead end of the net to the seiner’s machinery. Using a hydraulic power block mounted to the long black boom, the big man began to wind the weighted cable at the bottom of the net through the boom, the machinery groaning under the strain. If there was anything inside the net, as Karl assured Joe there would be, they would soon find out.

“The weighted lead line will now be cinched tight. This will close off the bottom of the net and prevent the escape of what is inside,
ja
?” Karl ran his hands around and under an invisible vase, clinching his fists below it. “They will then stack the net as they draw it in and—how do you say?—
squeeze
our catch in the ocean alongside the seiner. You see?”

“How do you know so much about this, Nikkola?”

“Well, Joe, I am from a family of fishermen. And I have been before on vessels such as this one.”

With the net apparently secured and on its way in, Captain MacDonald climbed up to the wheelhouse and shouldered past them. He stepped into the cabin and came back with a dry towel and threw it to Joe. Joe realized he was shivering. After drying his head and neck, he followed the others inside the wheelhouse as the deckhands continued to work.

Joe said, “So what now?”

The captain looked down at Joe’s feet and frowned. Joe realized that he was dripping all over the floor.

“Put on some dry clothes, lad, before you drown my boat. I’ve got a clean sweatshirt under here somewhere. . . .” The captain leaned down to fish through the mess underneath the helm. “What we do now, you say? We wait. Closing a net that size takes time.”

“And then?”

“If the squid are in there, we’ll let your friends here do what they need to do. Then we’ll brail the buggers out of it and fill my hold with profits. Aha! Found the damn thing.”

A moment later a smelly, grease-stained sweatshirt landed in Joe’s face.

M
idnight came and went.

More than a half hour had passed since they started pulling in the seining net. The large volume of water inside the net had now been reduced to a fraction of what it had been before, and most of the net’s length was back on board, dripping in huge stacks in the stern between the two deckhands. From the actions of the crew, Val sensed the net was almost completely hauled in.

She and Joe waited together on the starboard side of the seiner, his hair and pants still damp, but the rest of him looking warmer under a dry T-shirt and hooded blue sweatshirt that said “Alaska!” in huge white letters on the front, with a peeling image of mountains and wildlife. It was colder out in the breeze on deck than inside the cabin, but Joe’s nausea had returned after his adrenaline had worn off, and he clearly felt better out in the open air. Val told him that she planned to keep an eye on him, in case he dropped something else overboard.

And, like Joe, she couldn’t resist seeing what they had inside the net.

The waiting reminded Val of the excitement of catching her first fish when she had been a child in Florida, her imagination at play as she’d wondered what was on the other end of the line. You never knew what you had until you landed it. When she was six, it had been a shimmering sunfish, and her father had been relatively sober. Despite his drinking even when they went fishing together, they’d always had fun and she’d quickly become interested in aquatic life.

She was a long way from that first cane-pole attempt to catch sunfish. There were probably ten or more tons of jumbo flying squid inside their net.

“The captain was right, Joe.”

“What do you mean?”

“You do owe us a camera.”

“Ha ha.”

“Did I tell you Sturman called me back?”

“No . . . when?”

“I just pulled up the message a little while ago. He’s still in Gull Harbor, not far from here. He said he wants to help us out. I figured I’d call him in the morning.”

Joe smiled. “That’s great to hear. Dumb bastard’s finally coming to his senses.”

“Yeah, he is a dumb bastard, isn’t he?” They laughed together. “Still, he’s got a few good qualities.”

Joe looked over at her. “Been my best friend for a long time. At least he’s got great taste in women.” He smiled.

“He said he was married to your sister once.”

“That he was. Like I said, great taste.” Joe cleared his throat. “So . . . I was wondering. What are we going to do with these squid when we have them drawn in next to the boat?”

“Yeah . . . well, Humboldt squid have these very high metabolisms, which is one reason they spend the daytime in deep, cold, oxygen-depleted water. Some people call the low-oxygen layer the ‘dead zone.’ Humboldt squid can slow their systems down to conserve energy, sort of like going into suspended animation or short-term hibernation.”

“Okay. I’m following you so far.”

Overhead, the power block clanged loudly under the strain of the incoming net cables.

“Well, the idea is that if we keep them in the net near the surface for a few days, without food, theoretically they’ll all weaken and die and can then be brought on board.”

“I’m a little surprised that you’re okay with that. You seem to be a champion for these squid.”

She sighed. “Someone needs to be. Look, I don’t agree with our methods here. But I’ve been outvoted. I’m just focused now on the possibility of obtaining live squid for observation or research, even if they don’t live long on the surface.”

“You’re one of those ‘the net is half full’ kind of people, then?” Joe smiled at her.

“Stick to law enforcement, Joe.” The net clanged up on the boom. “I think the net’s almost in.”

It was difficult to make out the outline of the floating upper edge of the net at first, but as the last several hundred feet of net were drawn in, the
Centaur
’s lights revealed the yellow floats of the corkline on the surface. A confined space no more than about a hundred and fifty feet across now remained inside the shrinking enclosure, with still no sign of any catch inside. The crew had greatly slowed the winch as the volume inside the net decreased, so that the heavy line barely crept through the boom pulleys. The captain walked out of the cabin and hopped down next to them at the gunwale.

After another few minutes and nothing visible in the net, Val was beginning to wonder if they had come up empty when Captain MacDonald spoke quietly.

“There.”

“What? Do you see anything?”

“Aye.” MacDonald squinted down into the net. “We’ve got something.”

 

 

The shoal was agitated.

Drawn in by bright lights, the squid had found some small fish but little food. Now they jostled against one another as though they had been forced into shallow water, something pressing them together.

Those on the outer edges of the shoal instinctively tried to separate from the group to allow more room for the others, but found themselves held back by the rough lines of an almost invisible barrier in the water. Those that sounded in an effort to escape found themselves up against a much more obvious barrier, a thick gathering of the object and heavy obstacles gathered in a tight mass beneath them.

As the space inside the barrier continued to shrink, the painfully bright lights above drew closer. While some of the squid began to make panic-stricken rushes into the rough barrier or lash out at one another, most in the shoal followed their instincts and moved toward the deep, huddled as far from the light as possible.

And waited.

 

 

“Is it the shoal?” Joe saw a torpedo-like shape catch the lights from the vessel as it hurtled across the shrinking space inside the net, a fathom or two under the surface. “Was that one of them?”

“Aye. We may have caught the shoal after all. Tomás! Slow it down!”

Joe heard the winch slow to an almost imperceptible crawl. Now that he knew what he was looking for, Joe began to see the shoal. Not just a few squid. All of them.

“That’s them, all right. What do you think of them, Joe?” Val looked excited and sad at the same time.

In the black water within the net, the ghostly bodies materialized. The shapes were huge, seemingly lifeless. Most drifted in place, barely visible as they crowded together in a great mass at the bottom of the net, almost out of sight of the surface.

“They look like rows of gigantic sardines in a can.”

Val smiled. “I guess they do, crowded inside the net like that.”

A few more panicked squid darted frantically above the organized mass, releasing flashes of self-generated bioluminescence, apparently aware that they had been caught. Many of the squid were the size of large tuna, and appeared to have a similar shape as they jetted through the net.

Joe watched as one of the light-emitting creatures propelled itself against the side of the net, then slowly turned and changed shape, its body spreading out dramatically under the waves as its body unfolded from a neat point into a tangled confusion, its arms seeking a means of escape as they grabbed at the webbing along the wall of the net.

“How many are there, Captain?”

MacDonald grunted. “Hard to say yet. We’ve got a decent catch, though. And if—look at that!”

The captain was pointing at the water toward the center of the net, but movement there had already caught Joe’s eye. A lone squid erupted from the water, blasting skyward with tremendous speed to reveal a wet, bruised-looking body hurtling in the lights. It arched through the air, trailing a perfect jet of water, then splashed down into the water thirty feet away with a loud smack.

Joe laughed. “Holy shit! That was awesome!”

“That’s why they’re called flying squid.” Val shook her head. “Remarkable, isn’t it?”

“Goddammit, Ari! Back to the net!” The large deckhand had ambled over to see what the commotion was all about, but hustled aft at his captain’s orders.

Joe said, “Damn, they’re huge.”

“These do look bigger than what I’m used to.”

The captain didn’t seem as interested. Joe noticed that the man was frowning. He figured out why a moment later, when a pair of squid erupted from the water almost simultaneously, leaving the water at about the same spot near the far side of the net. They gradually separated in a broad V as they lofted above the water, then splattered down into the ocean.

Only one landed back inside the net.

“Shit.” MacDonald shoved Joe out of the way and hurried to the net machinery. Joe could hear the motor grow quiet as the captain shut it down, but it was too late.

Another squid rocketed out of the water, almost straight into the air, and while it hung motionless over the net for a split second, several more broke free of the water in all directions.

“The shoal knows it’s been corralled. Some are trying to escape.” Val smiled broadly.

“Yeah, I can see—”

Thwump.
Something struck the
Centaur
just above the waterline, but when Joe looked down it was already gone. He watched as the air became alive with a continuous display of jumbo flying squid erupting from the surface in the artificial light cast by the two vessels. The captain and his deckhands moved to stand beside Joe and Val and watch the show. The squid emerged as singles, pairs, even threesomes. Many were now hurtling through the air to land outside the perimeter of the net, where they immediately vanished into the deep, leaving faint tracers of bioluminescent light. The seemingly coordinated groups of squid blasting out of the ocean trailing ropes of water looked strangely similar to a water show Joe had once witnessed outside a Vegas casino.

Twenty feet away, a hefty projectile launched out of the water, directed at Joe and Val. He grabbed her shoulders and pushed her down just before the animal cleared the gunwale and sailed just over their heads. Water rained down on them as the flying squid finished its balletic flight with a graceless, resounding splatter of soft flesh on the wooden deck. They hurried over to the animal, which was the size of a short adult.

Joe said, “What do we do with it?”

“Just don’t touch its business end.”

The squid was huge and alien-looking, a flattened oddity of squirming meat, somehow alive. A stream of dark fluid jetted out of the squid and found Joe’s feet, covering them in watery ink.

“Nasty fucking things.”

“They’re just foreign, Joe. There’s nothing nasty about them.”

Joe stepped back from the squid as it struggled to return to the water, its tentacles writhing and mantle contorting. The big deckhand rushed past Joe and struck the squid near the eyes with a wooden club. He struck again, the swing ending with a smack that sounded like a palm striking skin. Val cried out and stepped toward him. He struck a final time before Val grabbed his wrist.

“Please. There’s no need for that.”

The big man retreated a few feet. The squid still moved, but barely.

Joe heard another thump against the side of the boat and looked at Val. He sensed that she too realized they couldn’t afford to stare at this ill-fated squid when others were still dangerously airborne. They dashed over to Captain MacDonald and the other deckhand, who stood near the boom supporting the net.

“They’re escaping, Captain!”

“Aye, is that what they’re doing, copper? I sure as shit know they’re goddammed escaping!”

“What can we do?”

“We give ’em more room.”

Joe watched as the captain and Tomás started to slowly run the net back out. The reason suddenly hit him—they wanted to add volume back to the space confining the shoal, so they wouldn’t feel so trapped. The squid continued to escape as they watched, despite their efforts. Joe figured that by the time they had enough net out to calm the shoal, half of its members would be long gone.

The captain cursed, and Joe heard the winch motor quiet. It had stopped peeling out line. Joe followed the captain’s gaze upward. At the tip of the sturdy steel boom, the line had coiled where it had tangled on its way out. They probably didn’t usually attempt to run the net out backward through the winch.

“Tomás! Free it up!”

The nimble deckhand was already running to the base of the boom. He straddled it and began pulling himself up to the top, where the net had tangled in the rollers.

“Is that safe, Captain?” Val asked.

It was a good question. The end of the boom, besides being fairly high over the hard wooden deck, looked like it might reach out past the stern—over the water. And the blackened metal looked dirty, almost greasy. Joe didn’t like the idea of anybody moving out over the squid inside the net, especially after his experience earlier, but MacDonald ignored Val’s question.

They all watched as the slender Mexican quickly reached the end of the elevated boom, then crossed his ankles to grip it. He leaned down and began jerking with both hands at the coils caught above the taut line. He was only there for a few moments when Joe saw the squid.

Suspended in the darkness behind Tomás was another of the airborne squid, clearly visible in the lights. It was impossibly high, much higher than any of the other flyers, its trajectory carrying it toward the boom. Joe opened his mouth to shout, but he was too late. He watched as the squid crashed into Tomás’s back.

The impact ripped the small man bodily from the boom, sending him tumbling off toward the deck twenty feet below. He jerked in midair, and Joe realized that his foot was hung up in a loop of loose rope, suspending him. The squid fell onto the stern, splatting loudly on the metal as it just missed the water inside the net. For a split second, Joe’s eyes met those of the panicked deckhand before his body twisted round once and his ankle came free. He plunged headfirst toward the squid on the stern and struck the edge of the deck with a disgusting thump. His limp body rolled off the boat into the dark water inside the net.