And all at once she saw the fin, knifing through the water a hundred yards away.

She stared at it for a moment, then stumbled into the deckhouse. She took Sean's gun from the chart table where she had left it and lurched back to the rail.

"Leave us alone!" She pointed the gun at the slicing fin and fired. There was a splash, halfway between her and the shark, and a whining ricochet.

All at once the fin was gone, but the boom... boom ... boom grew louder.

She could not stand not knowing where the beast had gone. "Come up!" she screamed. "Come up here!"

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom... The drumming grew louder, the rhythm faster, and then, on the starboard side, the great shape loomed against the setting sun, higher and higher, teeth gleaming, and crashed down....

For an instant she was looking into the eye, Papa Jacques's, the shark's—whoever's—but it was as black as the ocean's depths, as black as the River Styx.

She scrambled behind the compass binnacle. The great form crashed onto the deck, half aboard, and slithered back into the ocean.

She stared. The cockpit combing was gone. A single tooth, three inches long, lay rocking on the deck.

From the deckhouse came the relentless beat of the great pale creature's heart.

She crouched, shivering for a moment, staring at the gun.

Its sound did not frighten him off but attracted him—that was easy to see.

She had simply fired too soon.

She had been a fool. She had wasted a bullet.

But she had five more.

One to attract him back?

And the next from Sean, whose gun it was, dead in the gleaming eye.

And if she missed? Then she would have three....

One more to make him attack her.

And another for the eye.

And then, when only one was left?

Before she let him sink the boat and take her, that one was for her.

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

At nine thousand feet above Spanish Galleon Cay, Mike Brody shivered in a shirt and slacks as the icy wind slammed past his right shoulder.

With the entire right panel of the cabin removed, and eighty knots of airspeed in the climb, the temperature was freezing, but he did not know if he was trembling from cold or from fear.

He glanced at Hoagie. The Englishman's lips were blue. The big automatic still nuzzled the back of his head. He saw his eyes slide sidewise, in his lazy way, and their gazes met, but he could read no hope.

On the sun visor above the windshield was a mirror. In it he could see Jake, in the seat behind him, his beefy, black face tinged with green, his eyes quite bleak with fear.