White Shark by Peter Benchley Read Free Book Online Page B

in, but he knew that the
threat would be persuasive:   no
government — federal, state or local — wanted to be stuck with the cost,
possibly as much as a hundred thousand dollars, of removing fifty tons of putrefying
whale from a beach.   He gave inaccurate
coordinates for the whale's current position, placing it where he wanted to two
it, so that if he was denied permission he could claim that he hadn't moved it,
and if permission was granted, he could two it even farther away, into deep ocean where no sportsfishermen would be likely to come
upon it.
    He hadn't waited for a reply from either
agency.   He and Tall Man had loaded
grappling hooks and a barrel of rope into the Institute's boat and gone looking
for the whale.   They had found it right
away, and, at around midnight, in the glow of the moon, they had sunk the hooks
into the rotting meat and begun to tow the carcass out into the Atlantic beyond
Block Island
.   The vile stench of decay followed them, and the horrid grunting sounds
of sharks leaping out of the water to rip at the fatty flesh.
    The whale was a young humpback, and at
first light they saw what had killed it.   Fishing nets floated like shrouds around its mouth and head.   It had blundered into huge commercial nets,
had ensnared itself further by thrashing in its struggle to escape and had
strangled to death.
    The white shark had arrived just after
dawn.   She was a big mature female,
probably fifteen or twenty years old, of prime breeding age.   And she was pregnant, which Chase had discovered
when the shark rolled on her back as she plunged her massive head deep into the
pink meat of the whale's flanks, exposing her swollen belly and genital slit.
    No one knew for sure how long great whites
lived or when they first began to breed, but current theory favored a maximum
age of eighty to a hundred years and a breeding cycle that began at about age
ten and produced one or two pups every second year.
    So, to kill her, to hang her head on the
wall and sell her teeth for jewelry, would not be to kill a single great white
shark.   It would be to wipe out perhaps
as many as twenty generations of sharks.
    They had inserted the transmitter dart
quickly and easily.   The shark had never
felt the barb, had not interrupted her feeding.   The had watched her for a few minutes, and
Chase had taken pictures.   Then, as they
prepared to leave, Tall Man had turned on the radio and heard charter fishermen
talking back and forth about the whale.   Clearly, the bluefisherman had gone to a bar and, feeling that he had
done his duty by phoning the Institute first, had been unable to resist making
points with his mates by talking about the whale.
    Where had it gone ? the fishermen would have wondered.   Who took
it?   The goddamn
government?   Those
bleeding hearts from the Institute?   East.   They had to have taken it East of Block.
    The fishermen were coming, coming to
slaughter the pregnant shark.
    Chase and Tall Man had had no
discussion.   They had fetched some
explosives from below — a brick of plastique left over from the building of the
Institute's docks — and had carefully inserted charges into parts of the whale
farthest from where the shark was feeding.   They had detonated the charges one by one, blasting the whale carcass
into pieces that immediately began to disperse and sink.   The fishermen's radar target was gone; now
they could never find the remains of the whale — or the shark.
    The shark submerged, following pieces of
blubber down into the safety of the deep.
    If the EPA or the DEP wanted to try to
make a case against them, Chase thought, let them.   There had been no witnesses, the evidence
would be flimsy and if any of the charter fishermen were smart enough to figure
out what he'd done and why, and fool enough to lodge a complaint, they'd be
hanging themselves by admitting they'd been intending to get closer to the dead
whale than the law allowed.
    Most important, the shark