The peñero of the fisherman Maximiliano Quiñones, launched at Pampatar in two thousand seventeen from the yard of Eulogio Marcano, was built according to the pattern the cabinetmakers of Margarita had inherited from the Canary Islanders who came ashore in the sixteenth century, that is with the keel slightly convex, the bow raised twelve degrees above the waterline and the two inner beams in red mangrove rather than cedar: a local variant, a sort of dialect of wood, which allowed the peñero to enter the coral shallows without scraping the bottom. Eulogio had died in twenty-two, of an apoplectic stroke while planing a block of guayacán, and his yard had been closed by his sons, who lived in Bogotá and did not know what to do with it. Maximiliano therefore owned, without knowing it, one of the last peñeros built by the old method, and he cared for it in a distracted way, the way one cares for a thing that will outlive us. That Thursday the eighteenth of June two thousand twenty-six, at four twenty-two in the afternoon, while he was cleaning the caked salt from the deck, he stopped a moment to look at the line of water creasing the port side and thought that the peñero was, after all, a patient creature. It was not. For seven months now a cracked beam had needed replacing. Maximiliano knew it.

The fisherman, forty-four years old, a widower since twenty-three, father of a single daughter, Doris, lived in a house of concrete and small yellow bricks at number fifteen Calle Las Vegas, in the La Asunción district of Margarita. The house belonged to his mother, who had died in Caracas in twenty-two in unclear circumstances, and Doris slept in the room that had been her grandmother's, on a single bed with a mustard-coloured coverlet. That afternoon Doris was in Porlamar, where she worked as a shop assistant in the pharmacy of one Iván Bermúdez. Doris earned a hundred and eighty bolívares a week, which at the rates of that June came to roughly sixteen American dollars; Maximiliano, in a good week of fishing, brought home forty-two. The difference, as will be seen further on, was not negligible.

Artisanal fishing on the island of Margarita, since the declared collapse of the oil sector in two thousand eighteen and the progressive devaluation of the currency, had become an activity of subsistence rather than of market: eighty-three per cent of the coastal families of Nueva Esparta, according to the figures published by the INE in Caracas in twenty-four and never updated since, depended directly or indirectly on what came up in the night nets. Night fishing was fishing for grouper fry, for the dusky grouper, for the sail mackerel; the full moon was a favourable beast, because it lit the water without blinding the shoals. The moon of the eighteenth of June had been calculated by Maximiliano by counting the days since the last full phase, and that evening it was to stand at seventy-two per cent, sufficient. Maximiliano had planned to go out at nine fifteen in the evening, with the sixteen-horsepower Yamaha engine that he had himself reconditioned the year before using a crankshaft of Colombian provenance, bought from a parts trafficker in Maracaibo who had given him a friendly price because he knew Doris's father.

At nine minutes past nine, while he was casting off the bow line from the jetty, Maximiliano heard the noise. It was not the noise of the MQ-Nine drones, which he had by now learned to recognise over eight months: it was the noise of another engine, lower, steadier, a sort of almost mute humming. He thought of the motorboat of Casto Salazar, which at that hour came back in from the grouper fishing. But it was not Casto. Maximiliano raised his eyes and saw the first light, a star moving too quickly out of the north-east. He thought: the drone. Then he thought, immediately: I am carrying nothing. He thought: I am a fisherman with artisanal fishing licence number zero-zero-five-four-two, issued by the Ministry of Popular Power for Fisheries, expiring December of thirty. He thought: this is not enough.

Operation Southern Spear, according to the statistics published by the Southern Command of the United States on the sixteenth of June two thousand twenty-six, had by that day struck sixty-three vessels and produced two hundred and ten confirmed dead across the Caribbean arc, including the international waters off Venezuela. None of the vessels struck had been identified as a fishing boat, according to the official bulletin; all had been designated as narcotrafficking carriers or, in the formula adopted from the seventh of June, suspect carriers. The difference between a fishing boat and a suspect carrier, in the open sea, at seventy-two per cent of moon, depended on three things: the speed of the target, the number of occupants, the presence or absence of cargo visible to the thermal camera. Maximiliano was alone, at six knots, with three trawl nets folded tidily at the stern. The nets, in thermal data, could look like sacks.

Maximiliano switched off the engine. He hauled in the bow line and made fast to the jetty again. He went back up the shore walking slowly, because the star in the sky went on moving and because he did not want to look like a man who runs. At fourteen minutes past nine he sat down on the low concrete wall in front of Casto's kiosk, lit a cigarette, and watched the star move away towards the south-east, towards the waters of the Rey Shoal, where probably at that moment another fisherman, with another licence in his pocket, was already at six knots under the sky. He heard, two minutes later, the noise of something falling from very high up and ending on the water. He heard, six seconds later, a dull roar. He saw, above the horizon, an orange light that lasted perhaps half a second and then vanished. Casto came out of the kiosk drying his hands on his apron, looked at him, said nothing, went back in. Maximiliano put out the cigarette on the wall and went home. Doris was cooking the rice. He did not tell her not to go to work the next day.