"Yah, mon, I just hope the Ministry doesn't run out of funds."

With the shark gone back to wherever he came from, at least they could go to the Festival and ogle the pretty girls.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The great white shark had cruised from Masthead Point south to Pretty Sally Bay, sensing the activity in Prince George Town and excited by the drums. He was ravenously hungry now, and the wound in his flank enraged him.

In Pretty Sally Bay, bordered by the whitewashed cottages north of the village, he hit a diving cormorant the instant the bird struck the water, swallowing it whole and hardly knowing what he did.

All at once he sensed cooler water ahead. A flood tide was sweeping through Bowsprit Cut, south of Whiskey Cay, and the idle shallows he lazed through now were heating from the morning sun.

He hesitated. The drums of Prince George Town were even louder, arousing his curiosity. But cold water meant bigger prey, and he was famished.

He turned away from the drums and swam south.

Suddenly he heard, as the drumbeats faded behind him, the booming of the Outer Passage surf. Something massive was punctuating its rhythm; a slapping jolt, a half dozen breakers, then the jolt again.

He picked up speed and swam out Bowsprit Cut.

***

The blond, lithe young man on the Windsurfer skimmed along the surf line past the cut at the southern end of Whiskey Cay.

He was a pre-law sophomore at Yale, with a minor in the classics, Skull and Bones, squash team, vice-president of his class. He had launched his twelve-foot Mistral board, made in France and bought in Nassau for twelve hundred U.S. dollars, as the morning breeze ruffled the waters off his family's winter estate on Harbor Island Beach.

He was bound this morning for the Windsurfer championships at Prince George Town. He had won in the semis at Nassau the previous week and had placed second in the Third Annual Water Junkanoo at the Matthews Town Regatta.

He was hot on the island circuit this vacation, lean and hungry for silver cups to join the others in New Haven in his dormitory room. His father was a Wall Street lawyer whose demands on his only son were simple: always win.

He was flying a sixty-five-square-foot, full-battened, high-aspect rig from a mast that towered seventeen feet above the board.

He was halfway to Prince George Town when he heard the surf in the outer passage. He was making a good twelve knots on a starboard reach, spewing a swirl of water through the chop, mated to his board with foot straps. Occasionally, out of sheer good spirits, he would lay back against the wind, gripping his boom. He would hike the thrumming sail so far past the vertical that he could let his head fall back and dip his hair in the water.