Marius didn’t look surprised behind his bubbled acrylic dome port, and Cédric wondered for a moment if he might simply take amusement from hearing him state and restate the obvious. An odd thought, and improbable, but not out of the question. Could it be that he was being made a goat?

Cédric chased the question from his mind, having more serious matters to occupy it. Such as why the goblin at least appeared to be going at the cable. Ignoring him, it had swum off toward the sandbank on his left, assumed an almost vertical attitude in the water, and then angled its horny snout down toward the crippled fiber.

Cédric watched the shark resume stitching into the bottom sediment. He remembered that in the early days of submarine cable installation—around the late 1980s—it had been common to find dozens of shark teeth imbedded in sections of damaged line. That problem had been solved by encasing the cables in multilayered armor—a tough yet flexible sheath of plastic laminate steel wrapped in a thick nylon roving. The sharks would still bite, but their teeth rarely penetrated to the electrified copper.

Rarely wasn’t quite the same thing as never, though. As Cédric and Marius had discovered earlier.

Still, Cédric was convinced the shark attacks were only half the story, and that the initial cable fault could be blamed on drag trawlers or dredgers—long-line fishing vessels that dropped heavy nets down to the seabed for tuna, mackerel, cubera, and, in the case of the dredge boats, shellfish. In addition to Gabon’s domestic fleet, the boats came from countries as far to the north as Morocco, Nigeria, and Libya, and as far in the opposite direction as South Africa. They came, as well, from outside Africa’s continental boundaries—Europe and Asia in particular. Fisheries based in Cédric’s native France sent their vessels here. As did companies in Japan, Korea, China, Germany, and the Netherlands. Most were licensed for deepwater operations in the Gulf of Guinea, but there were enough illegal ships that would trawl the spawning grounds nearer the coast, where tight zoning rules had been placed on commercial fishing . . . the Chinese being the worst offenders.

Cédric knew environmental impact was part of the reason for the restrictions. Fishing accounted for two thirds of Gabon’s economic production, and low yield had been a problem in recent years. But another serious concern was protecting the submarine fiberoptic network that represented a cooperative investment of nearly a billion dollars for local businessmen and their foreign partners in the broadcasting and telecommunications industry.

Unfortunately, policing the seaways was an impossible challenge for Gabon. A runt of a nation, its navy consisted of five hundred men, a couple of patrol boats, and the same number of amphibious hovercraft. This paltry force could not by any stretch keep up with poachers who were skilled at evasion and equipped with state-of-the-art countersurveillance apparatus.