The great white shark, frustrated at Spanish Galleon Cay by the water-skier's escape, had returned to the fresh corpse he had disgorged and this time swallowed it whole.

His appetite whetted, he headed west, across Tongue of the Ocean deep, toward Andros Island. In Tongue of the Ocean, at fifty fathoms, he found giant squid in great numbers, but something drew him north. He cruised past Guana, Hawksbill, and Ship Channel Cays until he reached the shallow waters of Masthead Sound again.

He arrived by moonlight and cruised under ebony waters splotched with molten gold. As always, night was day to him, for he simply hunted with his sensors now, by instinct, hearing, and smell.

By midnight he was patrolling the waters off Masthead Point, famished and alert. His slim tail, as tall as a man, moved ceaselessly.

The point of the harpoon had worked its way farther into his flesh. Passing a reef, he tried to rub it off. He only drove it deeper. The transmitter on the stub of the shaft was scratched and battered but still operating.

His heart rate had not changed at all: Boom... boom... boom.

On Neptune's Folly, tied to the dock, Mike and Jake had left the battery switch and the transducer speaker on, to alert Mike in the main house if the shark returned.

All at once, in the deserted deckhouse, a series of marching peaks appeared on the computer's emerald screen, and a muffled drum began to echo, bow to stern.

Boom... boom... boom...

Neptune's Folly tugged at her lines like a living thing, but it was far past midnight now, and there was no one to hear.

***

Ellen swam through jet-black waters that grasped at her like liquid lava but were as cold as ice. Ahead, through swells that hid him, lifted him, and dropped him again, struggled Marty. His eyes, when she could see them, entreated her to hurry, but though his mouth was open, as if he were shouting to her, no sound came out.

She swam in total silence, save for a slow, incessant drumbeat growing closer. Boom... boom... boom...

Marty's heart? No. His heart was weak, and this one was strong.

A shark? Now he was pointing, whenever he was lifted by a swell, pointing behind her, but she had no time to turn. She must get to him before he drowned; she knew mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, she had tried to give it to him when he died, but if he had died, how could he be drowning? It was not Marty at all but Sean! Not Sean but Mike—no, Thea...

She awoke wide-eyed and sweating, panting in the night.

And then she saw it through the studio door, on the wall beyond the statue.

An enormous shark, as black as the night, was rising from the deep. In his jaws he clasped a skeleton, arms hanging limply, and his dorsal fin was moving as he leapt.