He felt the swirl of a mighty body past his legs and drew them up to his chest, cowering like a fetus, moaning in fear.

The shark gathered himself for another charge. Half in, half out, Mike struggled to enter the hole. He couldn't, because of the tanks.

He took a deep breath, spat out his regulator mouthpiece, and worked free of his backpack. He snaked in and dragged his tanks in after him.

His lungs were searing, and his heart felt as if it would burst. He fumbled for his mouthpiece, found it. He jammed it into his teeth. It was full of sand.

With his chest in paroxysm and his lungs heaving for air, he somehow cleared the regulator and felt the blessed air pour in.

For a long while he lay inside the hole, unable to move. He could hear the shark crashing against the metal plates. He finally cleared his mask. Sand was swirling past the hole, stirred by the current or the shark.

The hole was uncovering, as it did twice daily, in the ebb and flow of the tide. If it was too small now for the great white shark, it would not be for very long.

Slowly Mike swam away from the hole through clouds of brilliant butterfish and darting, flitting guppies. He saw the conch, in a circle on the sand-strewn salon deck, the one wearing the BPST in the center. He regarded the hundred-dollar bait for which he'd sacrificed his life.

Savagely he ripped it off and stuffed it into his netted bag. At least, if they ever found his body, they'd know he had not failed.

Then he swam through the silent green vastness of the salon to the creaking door in the purser's office beyond. He pried it open and squirmed inside.

For a moment he floated, looking around. Light from a single port flickered from above. He sensed that there was something awful in the corner. When he saw it, he recoiled, and the mouthpiece fell from his lips.

On a rusted, tattered swivel chair sat a skeleton. It grinned at him, the remnant of a shirt moving in the current.

One of its hands was still intact, resting on a knee bone. The fingers, picked clean by fish, were dangling. In the current, the forefinger seemed to beckon.

His bubbles were rising, homing on an air pocket trapped above. He rose with them, removed his mask, and sniffed it. He almost retched.

The air had been there, like the skeleton, for over forty years. He jammed his mask back on and dived.

He swam to the creaking door and peered out. Across the vast salon, through the flitting parrot fish, he could see that the current was sweeping the hole wider. He could hear a crashing somewhere. The shark had not left.

Like the pocket of air above his head, he was thoroughly, eternally trapped.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3