"BRYANT, Edward - Shark (v1.0)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bryant Edward)

VERSION 1.0 dtd 032800


EDWARD BRYANT

Shark

Shark: symbol of terror. It is the same throughout the world.
Shark is the enemy, to be killed, or fled, but never ignored.
You stand on the beach and see the fin in the distance,
and even knowing you are safe, the feeling comes. Shark:
fear. A racial memory perhaps, of a time when we co
existed in the oceans, when shark was synonymous with
death. And Ed Bryant. a Wyoming man, growing to adult
hood where the mountain lion or bear might have been
the symbol of terror, understands the feeling that comes
to the pit of the stomach when you see that fin at sea.
The war came and left, but returned for him eighteen years later.
Folger should have known when the clouds of smaller fish disappeared. He should have guessed, but he was preoccupied, stabilizing the cage at ten meters, then sliding out the upper hatch. Floating free, he stared into the gray-green South Atlantic. Nothing. With his tongue, he keyed the mike embedded in his mouthpiece. The sonex transmitter clipped to his tanks coded and beamed the message: "Query-Valerie-location. " He repeated it. Electronics crackled in his ear, but there was no response.
Something moved to his right-something a darker gray, a darker green than the water. Then Folger saw the two dark eyes. Her body took form in the murk. A blunt torpedo shape gliding, she struck impossibly fast.
It was Folger's mistake and nearly fatal. He had hoped she would circle first. The great white shark bore straight in, mouth grinning open. Folger saw the teeth, only the teeth, rows of ragged white. "Query-" he screamed into the sonex.
Desperately he brought the shark billy in his right hand forward. The great white shape, jaws opening and closing, triangular teeth knifing, whipped past soundlessly.
Folger lifted the billy-tried to lift it-saw the blood and the white ends protruding below his elbow and realized he was seeing surgically sawed bone.
The shock made everything deceptively easy. Folger

reached behind him, felt the cage, and pulled himself up toward the hatch. The shark flowed into the distance.
One-handed, it was difficult entering the cage. He was half through the hatch and had turned the flotation control all the way up when he blacked' out.
Her name, like that of half the other women in the village, was Maria. For more than a decade she had kept Folger's house. She cleaned, after a fashion. She cooked his two meals each day, usually boiled potatoes or mutton stew. She loved him with a silent, bitter, unrequited passion. Over all the years, they had never talked of it. They were not lovers; each night after fixing supper, she returned to her clay-and-stone house in the village. Had Folger taken a woman from the village, Maria would have knifed both of them as they slept. That problem had never arisen.
"People for you," said Maria.
Folger looked up from his charts. "Who?"
"No islanders."
Folger hadn't had an off-island visitor since two years before, when a Brazilian journalist had come out
on the semiannual supply boat.
"You want them?" said Maria.
"Can I avoid it?"
Maria lowered her voice. "Government"
"Shit," said Folger. "How many?" sawed-off
Just two. You want the gun?" e
twelve-gauge, swathed in oilcloth, leaned in the kitchen
closet.
"No." Folger sighed. "Bring them in."
Maria muttered something as she turned back . through the doorway.
"What?"
She shook her matted black hair. "One is a woman!" she spat.
Valerie came to his quarters later in the afternoon.
;

The project manager had already spoken to Folger..
Knowing what she would say, Folger had two uncharacteristically stiff drinks before she arrived. "You can't be serious," was the first thing he said.