The water was suddenly full of blood. Just visible, was Betty’s head, little more than the jaws and gill slits, now tumbling free. Betty’s mouth gaped wide like she was trying to draw a breath, and as the damage had occurred so quickly, he wondered whether she even knew what had happened.

Jackson’s mind refused to process what he had seen. Something, maybe a shark, some sort of whale, or some other sea monster had erupted from below, and cleaved his twenty-one-foot shark in two with a single bite.

A fist punched down hard on his shoulder, and he screamed again, spinning to see Arty’s red face behind his goggles. He looked like he was screaming something – Jackson didn’t need to know what it was. He pushed himself to the cage controls, and immediately punched the green button to lift the cage.

Jackson looked up and saw that his boat seemed to be miles above him, and he wished now he hadn’t dropped them that extra few feet lower. The lights of the boat were obscured and they lifted through a dark red haze. Impossibly, a scream and rush of bubbles dragged his head around. Philippe had climbed to the top of the cage, drawing his legs up, and facing down. His eyes almost filled his facemask. Jackson’s head snapped down.

Rising into the range of the lights was a vision straight from hell. He knew what it was now, a shark, but of such monstrous proportions it defied belief. The monster came with its jaws already open, and the gullet behind those long daggers seemed bottomless. It came for its next meal. Them.

The shark exploded into the titanium cage, ripping it from its cables, and launching it and itself from the water. In the air now, Jackson had a brief image of his boat, and the deck hands, the captain, and behind them, the morning sun. It was if time moved at one-quarter speed. The men on deck were frozen in place with their eyes wide and mouths hung open, as the monster from the deep hung in the air, metal cage in its mouth, and three men still trapped inside, before falling back into the dark water to create a wave that nearly swamped the boat.

It took them down rapidly, and as it travelled, its jaws began to compress, and the titanium bars, formidable against most anything under the ocean began to crumple. There were furious bubbles and movements from his two colleagues, and a feeling of intense pain in their heads as they began to move into very deep water.

Jackson found himself crushed to the top of one side of the cage, with Philippe and Arty on the other. Ten-inch shovel-sized teeth gripped them, and behind it there was nothing but blackness and, Jackson knew, death.