But back to the kill out near Great Arch Rock. There is red all around us and the sharp smell of seal, and I gag when I see the body, ripped in two. Gordon slows the boat and we drift, searching for any signs of shark. This patch of sea is crawling with white sharks at this time of year, and it feels dangerous to befloating in such a small vessel with who knows what swimming around below us. We’ve brought underwater video cameras affixed to poles, and Max and I lower them.
Neither of the men say anything, and I can feel our collective heartbeats going through our feet and into the fiberglass hull of the boat. White sharks can “hear” your heartbeat in the water, and if one came close enough now, I wonder if it would home in on ours. This is my first time out with the guys in the boat, and I try to keep cool, but my hands are trembling.
Then Gordon yells, pointing. We both turn port and the boat leans uncomfortably. “Holy shit,” Max says. First we see the boil and then a tail fin breaking the surface. Everything is quiet and the shark cuts toward us, fast. I hold my breath and watch as its sleek black form darts under us, sending the Whaler rocking. My eyes must be wide, because Max grabs my arm, almost tenderly. “It’s okay,” he says. This is not my first rodeo, but something about the myth of these islands and the dark foreboding water gives my skin a chill. And then it comes around again.
Shecomes around.
At the same time, both guys say, “Greta!”
I’ve just seen my first Sister.Or maybe I’ve seen one of these beauties before, just not here. But I don’t tell them that.
Chapter 3
The Other Victim
Kaikua?ana: older sibling of the same sex, to address someone as such is a sign of respect; older sister
If Minnow hadn’t known better, she would have sworn the woman was dead. Pale as milk, with a tangle of wet hair spread out around her like seaweed, her face cut across by a four-inch gash that sliced into her upper lip. Even in this state, she was beautiful. And even in this state, Minnow knew exactly who the woman in the photograph was.
“Angela Crawford?” she said, her voice hushed.
Angela Crawford, Oscar-winning actress and soon to be ex-wife of actor Bradley Stone. The biggest couple in Hollywood, another casualty. Minnow felt sad for anyone whose life was so microscopically scrutinized, but there was a price for everything, a balancing of scales. Nature preferred homeostasis, and even movie stars could be classified in the natural order of things,Homo sapiensthat they were.
“The shark didn’t know who she was, apparently,” he said with a shake of his head. “She and Zach Santopolo have been staying at theKiawe resort, flying under the radar and doing a good job of escaping the paparazzi. But this is going to blow up, especially if she dies.”
Zach needed no introduction either. Hottest man alive, or soPeoplemagazine said. These kinds of people interacted with their own kind. And like many animals, they followed a certain hierarchy.
“How did it happen?”
“One of the hotel’s owners lent them his motorboat and a driver, and they were following along a school of spinner dolphins south of Papio Bay. Angela wanted to swim with them, so they went ahead of the pod, anchored and jumped in the water, hoping to intercept. She was on a boogie board floating around in about eighty feet of water, looking like lunch. According to Zach, there was a huge explosion, like a bomb went off. She got rammed and then shoved about fifty feet through the water.”
To a shark, people on boogie boards resembled seals, a favorite meal of the great white. Minnow had seen firsthand what happened when you floated a seal decoy around an aggregation of white sharks. The decoy never lasted long.
“No more photos?” she asked.
“There are photos, but they wouldn’t let me take any of them out of the hospital. There’s a burly dude standing guard who wanted to search me when I left, but I talked him out of it. Movie stars don’t interest me. The lower half of her arm was barely hanging on, the docs were most likely going to amputate, and there are bite marks all along her right side and several ribs broken. She’s badly bruised and lost a ton of blood, but luckily for her, they had the boat and a cell phone and were able to get her to the hospital pretty darn quick.”
“Did any of the witnesses get a look at the shark?”
“Zach said it was hard to tell what he was seeing. He saw the thrashing and lots of red and that the animal looked almost black and was as wide as the boat. He thought maybe it was a whale, but then it went under. The ocean went still and he thought for sure it wasgoing to come for him next, but it never came back. The boat driver sped over and scooped him up. He saw about the same thing as Zach, except he said the dorsal was probably three feet high.”
“Any tooth fragments?”
“Nothing.”
“She hit her with hurricane force, didn’t she?” Minnow mused.
“Like a motherfucking freight train.”
They sat for a few moments in silence and Minnow looked out on the water, thinking about the Sisterhood on the Farallones and where these behemoths went when they left the rocky offshore islands. Recent satellite tags had shown something surprising: They didn’t hang out up and down the coast as previously thought. They ventured out into the deep blue Pacific, spending much of their time roaming the high seas. They moved fast, sometimes covering as much as sixty miles in a day, and they dove deeper than anyone expected, at least a half mile down, maybe more.
“I wonder if one of the Sisters is here. That would be something,” she said, half to herself. Suddenly before her was the possibility of a hunt and what would happen if a Sister was caught. Her veins turned to salt.
“The Sisters?”
“When I was working at the Farallones, the shark project guys there called the posse of big females ‘Sisters’—collectively, ‘the Sisterhood.’ They’re all over seventeen feet and wider than a Ford truck,” she said with reverence.
Whenever she thought of these sharks, which was often, she felt an overwhelming tug to go back to those dark, savage waters. These animals possessed a magnetism all their own, and she was caught up in their field, sure as night.
