He poured on thirty inches of manifold pressure, though it made the old bird shake. And he nosed down, red-lining his airspeed at a hundred and fifty knots, the "never-exceed" airspeed in the book. She had never flown so fast. From the whistling draft through the open barn door and the rattles from her landing gear, he was afraid that he'd tear her wheel pants off.

But he didn't like the look of the storm, and when he identified the ketch for certain, he was going to call the coast guard, the Bahamian Defense Force, and the Prince George Town harbormaster and see who could get there first.

Mike looked better now; his teeth had quit chattering, and he had stopped shivering. Here at fifteen hundred feet the air screaming past his shoulder was warm and tropical.

Hoagie could see that the boat was Neptune's Folly, all right. Ellen, in her bright yellow swimsuit and her terry-cloth beach robe, was swaying on the foredeck. She was holding on to the mizzenmast, gazing out to starboard, and had not even noticed them.

Hoagie leveled off at a thousand feet. He picked up the microphone to call for help. And all at once he saw the fin slicing toward the ketch's port bow.

"Oh, my God!" cried Mike. "You see it?"

"I see it, but she doesn't," barked Hoagie. "Hold on!"

He tossed a wing up, pushed his nose down, and rolled into a screaming spiral toward the fin. The slipstream became a maelstrom. His airspeed wavered and climbed: one hundred sixty, one hundred seventy... A vibration started somewhere, and the controls grew as hard as steel. One hundred seventy-five... one hundred eighty...

He pulled out, the wheels clipping the wave tops, and jazzed the engine, once, twice, once again. Then he was past, looking back. He saw Ellen whirl at the sound of his passing. There was a gun in her hand. The great shape rose from the water. The weapon flashed as she fired up at it.

Then everything disappeared below his starboard wheel. He cursed, pulled into a climbing right bank, struggled up to a thousand feet, and headed back for the boat.

The monster was sliding back into the water. Ellen was cowering behind the whipping mast. The boat was at a thirty-degree list to port, from the shark's weight. As it slipped back in, Hoagie saw that it had torn away the varnished rail, from the bow halfway to the stern.

Slowly the ketch righted herself.

What could they do from here?

"These things responsive to noise?" he asked suddenly, twisting around to Jake. "You're the Ph.D."

"Responsive? Attracted! Fascinated!" Jake nodded.

Hoagie climbed, reporting a vessel under shark attack to Nassau and Whiskey Cay and giving her position. He searched for the fin, finally spotted it heading for the ketch. He flung up a wing and dived again.