This time the fin broke the water five hundred yards away. It was heading for the bow. It broached, far forward, stretching almost full-length from the water, and she could see the ebony eye focused on the bowsprit, as if it expected to find her there.

From here she could never hit it, but she fired, anyway, in blind rage, and saw the slug strike the great creature's flank, near a bleeding wound where someone—Mike or Jake, she imagined—had implanted the transmitting device. A splat of water flew from the side of the shark where the bullet hit, but he seemed not to notice at all.

His enormous mouth opened and clamped the bowsprit, a full six inches in diameter. As the creature slammed back into the water, the bow pitched down and Ellen was thrown to the deck.

She screamed. He was pulling the forty-foot ketch down with him, bow first, as if it were a toy. The stern came up; water washed through the hawse pipes forward and slashed against the anchors on the foredeck.

Then the bowsprit broke with a crack like a limb off a giant elm tree, and the bow came up again.

Shaken, she struggled to her feet and sidled forward.

The end of the shortened bowsprit was jagged. The steel forestay from the top of the mast dangled, swinging in the swell, its shackle and turnbuckle lethal missiles at its end. She dodged them as they crashed against the deckhouse side.

She looked up. The mainmast, without the tension of its forestay, was swaying dangerously with the roll. She knew from her sailing days that she should stay below. The mast was a menace to anything topside, but she could not wait inside for the monster to sink her. She would rather stay topside and fight.

Three rounds left.

She raised the gun and fired at the water once again.

She heard thunder rumbling to the north. From the deckhouse came the steady, ominous drumming, louder with every beat.

To the south she heard the droning of an airplane, but she was so intent upon the water to starboard that she didn't look up.

Or see the fin approaching from the port.

***

Hoagie was the first to spot the ketch. He saw her from five thousand feet, almost dead ahead, ten miles off Whiskey Cay, slatting in the swells. Her stern was toward the plane.

"I think that's her," he reported tersely. "Dead in the water. Weather coming too."

Behind the ketch hung a cloud formation that reminded him of Longfellow's smithy under the spreading chestnut tree.

The anvil cloud was a black one. There was thunder and trouble in that one, for the airplane and the boat.