immediately I saw her regaining strength and purpose. Satisfied I turned my attention to removing a demand valve from one of the abandoned lungs from which the air supply was exhausted and using it to replace the one damaged by the shark.
I breathed off it for half a minute, before strapping it on to Sherry’s back and retrieving my own mouthpiece.
We had air now, enough to take us through the long period of slow decompression ahead of us. I knelt facing Sherry in the gunport and she grinned lopsidedly around the mouthpiece and lifted her thumb in a high sign and I returned it. You okay, me okay, I thought, and unscrewed the expended head from the spear and renewed it from the bandolier on my thigh.
Then once more I peered from the safety of the gunport out into the open waters of the pool.
As the supply of dead. fish was depleted so the shark pack seemed to have dispersed. I saw one or two of the ungainly dark shapes still searching and sniffing the tainted waters, but their frenzy was reduced. They moved in a more leisurely fashion, and I felt happier about taking Sherry out now.
I reached for her hand and was surprised at how small and cold it felt in mine, but she answered my gesture with a squeeze of her fingers.
I pointed to the surface and she nodded. I led her out of the gunport and we slid down the hull and under cover of the bamboo crossed quickly to the shelter of the reef.
Side by side, still holding hands and with our backs to the cliff, we rose slowly up out of the pool.
The light strengthened and when I looked up I could see the whaleboat high above. My spirits rose.
At sixty feet I stopped for a minute to begin decompressing. A fat old Albacore shark swam past us, blotched and piebald like a pig, but he paid us no attention and I lowered the spear as he drifted away into the hazy distance.
Slowly we rose to the next decompression stop at forty feet, where we stay6d for two minutes, allowing the nitrogen in our blood to evaporate out through our lungs gradually. Then up to twenty feet for the next stop.
I peered into Sherry’s face-mask and she rolled her eyes at me, clearly she was regaining her courage and cheek. It was all going smoothly now. We were as good as home, and drinking whisky - just another twelve minutes.
The whaleboat was so close it seemed that I could touch it with the spear. I could quite clearly see Chubby’s and Angelo’s brown faces hanging over the side as they waited anxiously for us to emerge.
I looked away from them, making another careful search of the water about us. At the extreme range of my vision, where the haze of water shaded away to solid blue, I saw something move. It was just a suspicion of a shadow that had come and gone before I had really seen it, but I felt the returning prickle of fear and apprehension.
I hung in the water, completely alert once more, searching and waiting while the last few slow minutes dragged by like crippled insects.
The shadow passed again, this time clearly seen, a swift and deadly movement that left me in no doubt that it was not an Albacore shark. It was the difference between the shape of the prowling hyena in the shadows around the campfire and that of the lion when he hunts.
Suddenly, through the misty blue curtains of water, came the second white death shark. He came swiftly and silently, passing fifty feet away, seeming to ignore us and going on almost to the range of our vision and then turning steeply and returning to pass us again, like a caged animal back and forth along the bars.
Sherry cowered close to me and I disengaged my hand from the death grip in which she had it. I needed both hands now.
On the next pass the shark broke the pattern of its movements and went into the great sweeping circles which always precede attack. Around and around it went, with that pale yellow eye fastened hungrily upon us.
Suddenly my attention was distracted by the slow descent from above of a dozen of the blue plastic shark repellent containers. Seeing our predicament Chubby must have emptied the entire. boxful over the side. One of them passed closely enough for me to snatch it up and hand it to sherry.
It smoked blue dye in her hand, and I transferred my attention back to the shark. It had sheered off a little from the blue dye, but it was still circling swiftly and grinning loathsomely at us.
I glanced at my watch, three minutes more to be safe, but I could risk sending Sherry out ahead of me. Unlike myself she had not already had a nitrogen fizz in her blood, she would probably be safe in another minute.
The shark tightened its circle, boring in relentlessly on us.
Close - so very close that I looked deep into the black spear-headed pupil of his eye, and read his intention there.
I glanced at the watch. It was cutting it fine - very fine, but I decided to send Sherry up. I slapped her shoulder and pointed urgently to the surface. She hesitated, but I slapped her again and repeated my instruction.
She began to rise, going up slowly, the right way, but her legs dangled invitingly. The shark left me and rose slowly in time with her, following her.
She saw it and began to rise faster, smoothly the shark closed in on her. Now I was under them both, and I finned out fast to one side just as the shark went into the stiff, tailed attitude which signalled the instant of his attack.
I was directly under him, as he turned to maul Sherry. I reached up and pressed the spear-head into the softly obscene throat, and I hit the trigger.
I saw the shock kick into the bloated white flesh, and the shark reared away with a convulsive beat of its tail. It shot upwards and went out through the surface, leaping out high and clear, and falling back heavily in a creaming froth of bubbles.
Immediately it began to spin and fly in maddened, crazy circles, as though beset by a swarm of bees. Repeatedly its jaws opened and snapped closed.
Torn with terrible anxiety, I watched Sherry maintain her mental discipline and rise leisurely towards the whale, boat. A pair of huge brown paws were thrust down through the surface to welcome her. As I watched, she came within reach of them. The brown fingers closed on her like steel grabhooks and she was plucked with miraculous strength from the water.
I could now employ all my attention on the problem of staying alive through the next few minutes before I could follow her. -The shark seemed to recover from the shock of the charge, and it exchanged its mindless crazy gyrations for the terrible familiar circling.
It began again on the wide circumference, closing in steadily with each circuit. I glanced at my wristwatch and saw that at last I could begin to rise through the final stage.
I drifted upwards slowly. The agony of the bends was fresh in my memory - but the white death shark was pressing closer and closer.
Ten feet below the whaleboat, I paused again and the shark was suspicious, probably remembering the recent violent explosion in its throat. It ceased its circling and hung motionless in the pale water on the wide pointed wings of his pectoral fins. We stared at each other across a distance of fifteen feet, and I could sense that the great blue beast was gathering himself for the final rush.
I extended the spear to the full reach of my arm, and gently, so as not to trigger him, I finned towards him until the explosive charge was an inch from the nostril slits below the snout.
I hit the trigger and he reared back in shock as the explosive cracked. He whirled away in a wide angry turn and I dropped the spear and shot for the surface.
He was angry as a wounded lion, goaded by the hurts he had received, and he charged for me with his humped back large as a blue mountain and his wide jaws gaping open. I knew there was no turning him this time, nothing short of death would stop him.
As I shot for the surface I saw Chubby’s hands waiting for me, the fingers like a bunch of brown bananas, and I loved him at that moment. I lifted my right arm above my head, offering it to Chubby and as the shark flashed across the last few feet that separated us I felt Chubby’s fingers close on my wrist.
Then the water exploded about me. I felt the enormous drag on my arm and the powerful disruption of the water as the shark’s bulk tore it apart. Then I was lying on my back upon the deck of the whaleboat, dragged from the very jaws of that dreadful animal.
