Phantom Prospect - Alex Archer [25]
“Maybe fifty yards.”
Annja frowned. She wouldn’t see it yet. She just had to keep the beam on. She flashed the light across the waves.
And then the glow dimmed.
“Oh, crap.”
The light beam vanished, plunging the area into total darkness. Annja sighed. In all of her adventures, there seemed a constant she could always count on—poorly charged batteries ruining something.
She heard another splash and suddenly felt a lot more exposed without the aid of the flashlight.
Time to get back on the boat.
Annja turned and stepped back onto the rear deck. As she did so, something large slapped down against the waves far out from the boat. Annja turned and tried to see, but she couldn’t.
“It’s gone.”
She looked up at Hunter. “What did you say?”
“Gone. One moment it was headed right at you. The next, it vanished.”
10
“Heard you had an interesting night,” Cole said to Annja as she helped herself to scrambled eggs in the galley.
“Oh?”
Cole smirked. “Hunter mentioned that you guys tracked the shark on the sonar around midnight.”
Annja shook her head. “I thought he and I agreed that telling you might not be the best thing to do.”
“Why? Because he thought I would get the ol’ wet suit on and go for a midnight swim?”
“Something like that.” Annja bit into the eggs and chewed, appreciative of the peppers she’d added. “Hunter didn’t want you going overboard without much to go on. We were just trying to get some sort of bead on the thing last night.”
“Which is why you felt the need to taunt it with the flashlight?”
Annja looked at him. “Believe me, taunting was the last thing I wanted to do. But Hunter mentioned that there was research done with sharks using ambient light. I thought it might be kind of cool to see if that worked with this one.”
Cole took a spoonful of oatmeal. “The sharks in that research were hunting seals. Do you know why?”
“No.”
“Because the seals had adapted themselves to hunting at night in order to avoid the sharks that prowl the waters looking for them during the day. That part of South Africa, the rocks that jut out of the ocean are home to the seals. But they’ve got to swim into deeper water to get to the fish. The sharks know this and prowl just beyond in the deepwater channels.”
“Okay.”
“The seals were getting picked off constantly, so one colony decided to hunt at night. For a while, it seemed to work.”
“Until the sharks noticed the change.”
Cole smiled. “They went from eating well to hardly at all. And so they adapted, too. What was that line that Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park? ‘Life finds a way.’ She really does.”
“So, what’s the problem with what I was doing last night?”
Cole grinned. “No seals around here. At least, none that I’ve seen so far.”
“Which means what?”
“It means our shark might not have been hunting much of anything last night. It might simply have been cruising around.”
Annja frowned. “The batteries in the flashlight died, anyway. I never saw a thing.” She paused. “I heard some splashing, though.”
“Splashing?”
“Yeah.”
Cole frowned. “Interesting.”
“How is it interesting?”
He took another spoonful of his oatmeal. Annja noticed that he had a large amount of maple syrup on it. He swallowed and looked at her. “It just is, that’s all.”
“So what now? What’s our next play?”
Cole kept eating. “I need to get out there.”
“In the water?”
“That’s generally where the sharks are, yeah.”
Annja sighed. “It’s not safe. Something tells me you shouldn’t be in the water. No one should be.”
Cole smiled. “Annja, in case you haven’t noticed, this is a huge investment we’re undertaking. And, for Hunter, it’s something of a personal quest.”
Annja nodded. “Yeah, he mentioned that to me last night before the shark showed up.”
“I can’t imagine what the poor guy’s been feeling ever since Brazil. God knows I’ve tried to give him his space. But this dive is important to him. The Fantome wreck is a legend in treasure-hunting circles. A lot of people—most of them, in fact—tend to think it’s a wild-goose chase. That there’s nothing much of value on the ship itself.”
“But not Hunter.