They waited. There was no movement on the surface of the water. No birds dived, no fish jumped. The only sound was the liquid plop of the chum Hooper ladled overboard. Then the port line began to run.

“Leave it in the holder,” said Quint. “No sense in getting ready if he’s going to chew through this one, too.”

Adrenaline was pumping through Brody’s body. He was both excited and afraid, awed by the thought of what was swimming below them, a creature whose power he could not imagine. Hooper stood at the port gunwhale, transfixed by the running line.

The line stopped and went limp.

“Shit,” said Quint. “He done it again.” He took the rod out of the holder and began to reel. The severed line came aboard exactly as had the other one. “We’ll give him one more chance,” said Quint, “and I’ll put on a tougher leader. Not that that’ll stop him if it’s the fish I think it is.” He reached into the ice chest for another bait and removed the wire leader. From a drawer in the cockpit he took a four-foot length of three-eighths-inch chain.

“That looks like a dog’s leash,” said Brody.

“Used to be,” said Quint. He wired one end of the chain to the eye of the baited hook, the other to the wire line.

“Can he bite through that?”

“I imagine so. Take him a little longer, maybe, but he’d do it if he wanted to. All I’m trying to do is goose him a little and bring him to the surface.”

“What’s next if this doesn’t work?”

“Don’t know yet. I suppose I could take a four-inch shark hook and a length of no-shit chain and drop it overboard with a bunch of bait on it. But if he took it, I wouldn’t know what to do with him. He’d tear out any cleat I’ve got on board, and until I see him I’m not going to take a chance and wrap chain around anything important.” Quint flipped the baited hook overboard and fed out a few yards of line. “Come on, you bugger,” he said. “Let’s have a look at you.”

The three men watched the port line. Hooper bent down, filled his ladle with chum, and tossed it into the slick. Something caught his eye and made him turn to the left. What he saw sucked from him a throaty grunt, unintelligible but enough to draw the eyes of the other two men.

“Jesus Christ!” said Brody.

No more than ten feet off the stern, slightly to the starboard, was the flat, conical snout of the fish. It stuck out of the water perhaps two feet. The top of the head was a sooty gray, pocked with two black eyes. At each side of the end of the snout, where the gray turned to cream white, were the nostrils—deep slashes in the armored hide. The mouth was open not quite halfway, a dim, dark cavern guarded by huge, triangular teeth.