The Cable Ship

At 4,000 metres, something is biting through the cable. And every night, it comes a little closer.

Ruth Penhallow has spent twenty-five years splicing fibre-optic cable in the rolling holds of ships. Now she is cable superintendent on the CS Halloway, an ageing British cable layer running Atlas-7, a new transatlantic data line from Bude in Cornwall to Nova Scotia.

Four weeks out, over the deepest part of the Newfoundland Basin, the line goes dead. When the cut end is hauled on deck, it has been sheared clean through, and the marks in its jacket are the shape of a bite more than two metres wide.

Then the sonar finds a contact on the seabed, sitting on the cable. The next night it is higher. The night after that, higher again. It is climbing the line towards the ship, and the ship is still tied to it.

With a storm closing in, a client who wants the cable laid at any cost, and a captain carrying a secret about a ship that vanished on this same route in 1961, Ruth must work out what the creature wants before it reaches the surface.

The Cable Ship is a deep-sea creature thriller for fans of Meg, The Abyss and Peter Benchley's Beast.