Dead Sea Read Free

surgeon placing a stent in a blocked artery, he reached
Neptune
’s longest arm forward until the crab-claw clipper at the end of it could cut the mare’s nest of dead and living fibres apart. He extended a second arm equipped with pincers, and gently took hold of one end of the cable. Only when he had a firm grip did he start cutting the tangle of netting free.
    The huge jellyfish whirled into motion at the first touch. Like a fisherman at the end of a line, Richard seemed to feel the power of the creature’s reaction.
Neptune
’s head jerked down. The gripping pincers slid back along the cable as the jellyfish fought to escape. Like some kind of massive kite on the windiest of days, it heaved again and again. Richard’s concentration remained focused upon the Gordian knot of palp and plastic he was cutting. A third incision coincided with a fourth huge downward heave. The net tore free and the jellyfish was gone, its speed enhanced immeasurably by the fact that
Neptune
was now holding the putrid sea anchor which had been slowing it down so terribly.
    But even as it did so,
Salacia
’s warning systems kicked in.
Neptune
’s sonar started acting up, going haywire. As Richard looked at the monitors, trying to work out what on earth was going on now, Nic’s voice drawled through his headset: ‘Hey, Richard, looks like there’s something really big down there just below us. And it’s coming up towards us pretty damn fast. Far too fast for comfort, in fact . . .’

Deep
    â€˜I t’s coming up!
’
    â€˜Can you see it? See what it is?’
    â€˜Not yet. But I think it’s pretty big! Yes. I’m sure it’s big!’
    Sudden excitement at
Poseidon
’s stern filled the last moments before the eight bells sounded for the noon watch. Crewman Ironwrist Wan had managed to hook something at long last and now he was wrestling his fishing rod as though trying to land a whale. His mate, Fatfist Wu, was jumping in ungainly leaps around him, calculating whether Ironwrist would get his catch aboard before First Lieutenant Straightline Jiang called them on to duty, which he would do the instant the bell sounded or Captain Mongol Chang would be down on him like a ton of bricks. His nickname ‘Straightline’ referred to his preferred navigating technique. Her nickname, ‘Mongol’ referred to her leadership style – reminiscent of Genghis Khan’s on a bad day – rather than to her appearance or ethnicity, though she was notoriously ugly, in the opinion of her adoring crew.
    The thought of time running out prompted Ironwrist to depart from his much-vaunted artistry as the ship’s master angler and simply jerk his catch out of the littered sea. A sizeable tuna soared up out of the water and on to the deck where it landed with a considerable
whack!
to lie writhing in the last shade under the ship’s Changhe CA109 helicopter. The men gathered round it and Ironwrist shouldered his way through until he was crouching over it. He tried to get the hook out of its mouth but the fish seemed intent on biting off his fingers; so, aware of the speed with which noon was approaching, he whacked it over the head with the handle of his rod until it lay still. As soon as he was certain it was dead, he pulled out the gutting knife he had wheedled out of the ship’s cook on the promise of giving his catch over to be added to the pot for dinner.
    But somehow the fish didn’t look all that appetizing. It was well over a metre in length, and bore all the usual familiar markings of a Pacific Bluefin tuna. But where the body between head and tail should have been rounded, full-packed, almost like a shell for a twenty-five-millimetre gun, there were only lean flanks, dull grey sides, and a strangely distended grey-white belly.
    â€˜That’s a sorry-looking specimen,’ said Staightline Jiang, arriving to stir up his watch before eight bells called