Hawkins looked over his shoulder. The Magellan finished its turn and headed back toward them. The crane, which normally lowered submersibles and Zodiacs into the water, rotated out over the water, a line dangling down. If they held on to the wire, the winch would have no trouble plucking them from the ocean. He waved his knife in the air, hoping the glint of sunlight off its blade would alert them to their position. A shark was bad news, but being run over by a two-hundred-seventy-four-foot, three-thousand-ton research vessel could really ruin a guy’s day. “It’s going to be dead weight once it’s free, so we’re going to have to time this right.”
With the Magellan closing in, Hawkins said, “Ready?”
“After you,” she replied.
Hawkins didn’t really understand how he’d become the ring leader of this unauthorized salvage, but he was determined to see it through. He pushed the air from his lungs and descended through the debris.
The turtle, still bound to the lump of plastic detritus, was easy to find, despite the poor conditions. Hawkins kicked over to the loggerhead and began cutting away its bonds. As the first flipper came free, Joliet slipped up next to him and took hold of the turtle. He had no idea if the turtle would be buoyant at all—it might sink like a stone—but he hoped there was enough gas trapped in its deformed body to keep it afloat. If it sank, there was no way he and Joliet could keep it aloft.
He moved to the second of the four bound flippers and began hacking away at the ropes. The lines fell away like overcooked spaghetti. Free from its bonds, the turtle fell forward, but its descent stopped when it leveled out. Hawkins allowed himself a grin. Gas trapped beneath the shell would make the job much easier.
Gripping the cut lines, Hawkins pushed himself down and started on the line binding one of the back flippers to the mass. But the knife had no impact.
Steel cable, Hawkins thought. Damn.
A distorted shout and hard tap on his shoulder brought his eyes around. Joliet clung to the turtle with one hand, but the other stabbed out toward the open ocean.
A shadow slid through the debris like a wraith through fog. Circling. Closing in. Sharks weren’t above scavenging the dead, but the electric impulses of their racing hearts and kicking feet drew the predator toward the promise of a fresh meal. Man-eating sharks, bears, and big cats were often treated as aberrations needing to be hunted and killed, but Hawkins knew his place in the food chain.
With renewed urgency, Hawkins moved the knife up and hacked off the turtle’s rear flipper. The large reptile came loose, but it didn’t sink. Joliet kept it aloft. Hawkins looked for the shark again, but it was lost in the field of debris. That he couldn’t see the hunter didn’t put him at ease. The sharks ampullae of Lorenzini—jelly-filled electroreceptors on the snout—would easily detect the electric field produced by their bodies. While they were blind, the shark would see them with the clarity of a falcon hovering overhead.
A loud rumble through the water announced the presence of the Magellan, reversing its screws and coming to a stop. Hawkins slid over the top of the turtle, took hold of its shell on either side, and kicked for the surface. He felt lumps of hard plastic bounce off his back as he rose. The debris grew bigger as he neared the surface.
Almost there, he thought. But a garbled scream and jarring impact told him he wouldn’t be reaching the surface. He turned to the right and saw the maw of a great white shark open to envelop him.
2.
Hawkins clung to the reddish-brown loggerhead shell, hoping the armored carapace would shield him from the snapping jaws. The shark’s snout hit the turtle’s underside, scraping deep grooves in the softer underbelly as it manically snapped its jaws open and closed, searching for a bit of flesh to bite into. The impact drove the deformed shell into Hawkins’s torso, knocking out what little air remained in his lungs.
The turtle rolled around the shark’s nose and spun past its gills, bumping Hawkins into the large predator’s body. The unexpected collision caused the shark to twitch. It craned its head, and open jaws moved toward Hawkins and bit down hard, finding a limb.
With a vicious shake of its head, the shark’s serrated teeth went to work, carving through flesh and bone as easily as Hawkins’s knife. The limb came free, clutched in the giant’s jaws. With surprising speed, the great white gave a twitch of its tail and sped away to devour its prize.
Still reeling from the attack, Hawkins watched the shark swim away, keenly aware of how close the shark had come to eating his arm. Luckily, the loggerhead wouldn’t miss its fin. Not that the two-foot-long appendage would satiate the shark’s hunger for long. It would soon return and the turtle had only one large fin left to sacrifice.