Read Online Shark Trouble by Peter Benchley - Free Book Online Page A

there’s nothing visible against which to gauge distances.
    At the very edge of my vision I saw a shark swimming by. I couldn’t discern what kind it was, and I didn’t much care, for it was ambling, really, and showing no interest in me or the tuna.
    Meanwhile, far up on the bow of the fifty-five-foot boat, one of the crew—bored and tantalized by the sight of so many delicious meals swimming so close to the boat—rigged a fishing rod, dropped a baited hook into the water, and let it drift back into the school of tuna. He had not asked permission, nor had he told anyone what he was doing, for—hey, who cares?—he was staying out of the way and minding his own business. When he hooked a fish, he would simply drag it up to the bow and haul it aboard, and no one need be the wiser.
    Stan gestured for me to move away from the buoy, so that he could frame me and the fish cleanly against the blue background. I let go of the chain and kicked my way out into open water. Obligingly, the tuna followed.
    Suddenly I was gone, jerked downward by an irresistible force, with a searing pain in my lower leg, arms flung over my head, broomstick aiming at the surface. I could see Stan and the tuna receding above me. I looked around, panicked and confused, to see what had grabbed me. The shark? Had I been taken by the shark? I saw nothing.
    I looked down. I was already in the dark blue; all that lay below were the violet and the black and …
wait
…
there, against the darkness … what could it possibly
—
    A tuna, fleeing for the bottom, struggling, fighting …
fighting? Against WHAT?
    Then I saw the line, and the silvery leader. The fish was
hooked,
for God’s sake. Somehow it had gotten …
no, impossible, no way it could have
—
    A cloud billowed around my face, black as ink, thick as … blood.
My blood.
    I leaned backward and kicked forward, wanting to see my feet.
    The steel leader was wrapped around my ankle. The wire had bitten deep, and a plume of black was rising from the wound, a sign that I was already down very, very deep, for blood doesn’t become black till the twilight depths. (The sea consumes the visible spectrum of light, one color at a time, beginning a few feet under water. Red disappears first, then orange, yellow, green, and so on, until, when you reach 150 or 200 feet, blood looks black.)
    All I could guess was that, in some implausible fluke, as the fish had fled the surface it must have passed between my legs, or circled around my feet, or
somehow
wrapped the leader around my leg. And all I knew was that, somehow, I’d better find a way to free my leg before I was taken to depths from which no traveler returns.
    I reached for my knife, to cut the line, but—encumbered by gear and disoriented by fear—first I couldn’t find the knife, and then I couldn’t release it.
    The tuna stopped diving and turned, and the change in pressure against its mouth, the release of resistance, must have convinced it that it was free, for it swam upward, toward me.
    The line slackened, the leader eased and spread, and I slid my foot and fin out through the widening coil.
    Giddy with relief, I checked my air and depth gauges: 185 feet deep, 500 pounds of air, more than enough for a controlled ascent but nowhere near enough for a decompression stop, if one was necessary, a contingency about which I knew nothing. Diving computers were still years in the future (as were any computers for the common man). Because I hadn’t intended to leave the surface, certainly not to venture deeper than, say, ten feet, I hadn’t consulted the standard of the day: the U.S. Navy’s decompression tables, a reliable guide—though calibrated for a twenty-five-year-old male in peak physical condition—to safe diving at various depths.
    How long have I been at this depth? At any depth? How long have I been in the water? No idea.
    I started up, slowly, and now the