teeth came erect like the quills of a porcupine and flared outwards.
They were a matched pair, each about twelve feet in length from nose to tail-tip, with the standing blade of the dorsal fin as long as a man’s arm; they were slaty blue across the back and with snowy white bellies and dark tips to tail and fins, they could bite a man in half and swallow the pieces whole.
One of them saw us crouching in the mouth of the gunport, and it turned sharply and came down over us, planing a few feet above us as we cowered back into the gloom so that I could clearly see the long trailing spikes of the male reproductive organs.
These were the dreaded white death sharks, the most vicious fish of all the seas, and I knew that to attempt to ascend in the clear and decompress adequately with limited air and no protection would be certain death.
If I were to get Sherry out alive I would have to take risks that in any other circumstances would be unthinkable.
Quickly I scribbled on the slate: “STAy! I am free ascending for air and gun.”
She read the message and immediately shook her head in refusal and made urgent signs to prevent me, but already I had pulled the pin out of the quick release buckle of my harness and I took the Last deep, chest-swelling breath before I thrust my scuba set into her hands. I dropped my weight belt to give myself buoyancy and slid down the side of the hull, using the wreck to cover me as I finned swiftly for the cover of the cliff.
I had left Sherry what remained of my air supplies, perhaps five or six minutes” breathing if she used it sparingly, and now with only the air that I held in my lungs I had to run the gauntlet of the pool and try for the surface.
I reached the cliff and began to go up, close in against the coral, hoping that my dark suit would blend with the shades. I went up with my back to the coral, facing out into the open pool where the great sinister shapes still swirled and milled.
Twenty feet from the bottom and the air in my lungs was expanding rapidly as the pressure of water decreased. I could not hold it in or it would rupture the tissue of my lungs. I let it trickle from my lips, a silver beacon of bubbles that one of the white death sharks noticed immediately.
He rolled and turned, dashing across the pool with slashing strokes of his tail, bearing down upon me. Desperately I glanced up the cliff and found six feet above me one of the small caves in the rotten coral. I dived into it just as the shark flashed past me, turned and sped back for a second pass as I shrank into my shallow shelter. The shark lost interest and swirled away to pick up the falling-leaf body of a dead snapper, gulping it down convulsively.
My lungs were throbbing and pumping now for the oxygen had all been absorbed from the air I held, and the carbon dioxide was building up in my blood. Soon I would begin to black out into anoxia.
I left the shelter of the cave, but, still following the cliff, I drove upwards as hard as I could with the single swimming fin, wishing bitterly for the use of the other still trapped under the gun carriage.
Again I had to release expanding air as I rose, and I knew that in my veins nitrogen was also decompressing too rapidly and soon it would turn to gas and bubble like champagne in my blood.
Above “me I saw the silvery moving mirror of the surface and the black cigar shape of the whaleboats hull suspended upon it. I was coming up fast and I glanced down again. Far below me I could see the shark pack still milling and turning. It looked as though I had escaped their notice.
My lungs burned with the craving for air, and the blood pounded in my temples as I decided that the time had arrived when I must forsake the shelter of the cliff and cross the open pool to the whaleboat.
I kicked out and shot towards the whaleboat where it lay a hundred feet from the reef. Halfway across I glanced down and saw one of the white deaths had seen me and was chasing. It came up from the blue depths with incredible speed, and terror gave me new strength as I drove for the surface and the boat.
I was looking down, watching the shark come. It seemed to swell up in size as it rushed towards me. Every detail was burned into my mind in those frantic seconds. I saw the hog’s snout with the two slitted nostrils, the golden eyes with the black pupils like arrowheads, the broad blue back from which stood the tall executioner’s blade of the dorsal fin.
I came out through the surface so fast that I broke clear to my waist, and I turned in the air and got my good arm over the gunwale of the boat. With all my strength I swung my body forward and jack-knifed my legs up under my chin.
In that instant the white death struck, the water exploded about me as he burst through the surface, I felt the harsh gritty skin tear across the legs of my suit as he brushed against me, then there was a shuddering crash as he struck the hull of the whaleboat.
I saw Chubby and Angelo’s startled faces as the boat heeled over and rocked wildly. My violent contortions had thrown the shark off his run, and he had missed my legs and collided with the hull.
Now with one more desperate kick and heave I tumbled over the gunwale and fell into the bottom of the whaleboat. Again the shark crashed into the hull as I went over, missing me again by inches.
I lay there pumping air into my aching lungs, great sweet gulps of it that made me light-headed and giddy as on strong wine.
Chubby was yelling at me, “Where is Miss. Sherry? That big Johnny Uptail get Miss. Sherry?”
I rolled on to my back, panting and sobbing for the precious air.
“Spare lungs,” I gasped. “Sherry waiting in the wreck. She needs air.”
Chubby leaped into the bows and dragged the canvas sheet off the extra scuba sets stacked there. In a crisis he is the kind of man I like to have covering for me.
“Angelo,” he growled, “get them Johnny pills.” They were a pack of copper acetate shark repellent pills which I had ordered from an American sports goods catalogue and for which Chubby had professed a deep and abiding scorn. “Let’s see if those fancy things are any bloody good.”
I had breathed enough to drag myself off the floorboards and to tell Chubby: “We’ve got problems. The pool is full of big Johnnys, and there are two really mean uptails with them. That one that charged me and another.”
Chubby scowled as he fitted the demand valves to the new sets.
“Did you come straight up, Harry? I nodded. “I left my bottles for Sherry. She’s waiting down there.”
“You going to bend, Harry?” He looked up at me and I saw the worry in his eyes.
“Yes,” I nodded, as I dragged myself to my tackle box and lifted the lid. “I’ve got to get down again fast - got to put pressure on my blood again before she rises.”
I picked out the bandolier of explosive heads for my hand spear.
There were twelve of them, and I wished for more as I strapped the bandolier around my thigh. Each head was hand-tapped to screw on to the shaft of a ten-foot stainless steel spear. It contained explosive charge equivalent to that of a 12-gauge shotgun shell and I could fire the charge with a trigger on the handle. It was an effective shark-killer.
Chubby hoisted one of the scuba sets on to my back and clinched the harness, and Angelo knelt before me to strap the shark repellent tablets in their perforated plastic containers to my ankles.
“I’ll need another weight belt,” I said, “and I lost a fin. There is a spare set in, I did not finish the sentence. Blinding burning agony struck me in the elbow of my bad arm. Agony so fierce that I cried aloud, and my arm snapped closed like the blade of a clasp knife. It was an involuntary reaction, the joint doubling as the pressure of bubbles in the blood pressed on nerve and tendons.
“He’s bending,” snarled Chubby. “Sweet Mary, he’s bending.” He leapt to the motors and gunned them, taking me in close to the reef. “Work fast, Angelo,” Chubby shouted, we got to get him down again.”
The pain struck again, a fiery cramping agony in my right leg.
The knee doubled under me and I whimpered like an infant. Angelo strapped the weight belt around my waist, and thrust the swimming fin on to my crippled leg.
Chubby cut the motors and we coasted in under the lee of the reef, while Chubby scrambled back to where I crouched on the thwart. He stooped over me to thrust the mouthpiece between my lips and open the cocks on the air bottles.
“Okay?” he asked, and I sucked from the set and nodded. Chubby leaned over the side and peered down into the pool. “Okay,” he grunted, “Johnny Uptail gone somewhere else.”
He lifted me like a child, for I had lost the use of arm and leg, and he lowered me into the water between boat and reef.
