The Deep

With the knife in his right hand, Sanders had only his left free to gather ampules, and that hand couldn’t accomplish much because Gail wouldn’t take any more ampules from him; she stayed rigid on her knees, clutching a half-full bag and waiting, panicked, for the shark to reappear.

He saw it first. As before, it came from the right, still keeping its distance but, Sanders thought, slightly closer than on its previous pass. It approached the preoccupied Treece and moved toward Sanders, who crouched, holding the knife in front of him. Then Gail saw it, and, shocked, she flailed her arms. The shark saw the movement, and its head twitched, dipping toward Gail.

Gail’s arm touched Sanders” side, and the sensation was a trigger that snapped him forward. His right hand was extended, the knife blade pointing up.

The shark saw him coming and dodged, its head jerking to the right, its tail thrashing twice. But instinct told it to avoid the reef, and, apparently confused, it slowed enough to let Sanders jab the knife into its underside, a foot ahead of the tail.

Sanders’ only conscious thought was how soft the flesh was; the knife went in up to the hilt. Then the body convulsed and tore the knife from his hand.

Blood spurted from the wound in a thick green cloud.

The shark darted away, swimming erratically, its body shuddering, tail twitching. The head turned and the jaws snapped at the bleeding belly. The shark was trying to eat itself.

The knife had fallen a few feet away, and Sanders swam to retrieve it, worried that the shark would return and, in anger, attack.

But it was not the shark that attacked. Sanders felt a hand grip his ankle and drag him backward. Lying on his back, he gazed into Treece’s furious eyes. He saw Treece’s lips moving, and he heard sounds, but no words.

Treece grabbed Sanders’ arm and yanked him to his feet. His fingers completely circled Sanders’ upper arm and, on the inside of the arm where they met, pinched painfully.

Scared and confused, Sanders didn’t know what he had done to enrage Treece, and as he looked into the shouting face, he was genuinely afraid that Treece might kill him.

Treece grabbed the knife from Sanders’ hand and rammed it into the air-lift intake. It rattled up the tube. Then Treece pointed at the surface and started up. He stopped, returned, and gathered up one of the artillery shells.

Gail still crouched on the bottom. Sanders took her arm and helped her to her feet, pulled three times on one of the ropes, and guided her hand to it when the rope was tightened by Coffin’s pull.

As he swam with Gail to the surface, Sanders saw a gray shadow moving in the distance. Hazy as it was, Sanders could see that it was big, much bigger than a man.

When he neared the boat, he looked down and saw the wounded shark, twisting and rolling on the reef. Then the air stopped flowing into his mask.

He kicked to the surface, exhaling the last of his air. He grabbed the diving platform with one hand, removed his mask, and said, “Hey, what…” The sound of Treece’s voice silenced him. “dis … dumb, goddamned, idiotic, crazy thing to do I ever saw in my life!” Treece was already in the boat, railing, Sanders assumed, at Coffin, who had turned off the compressor.

Sanders dipped his face in the water to clean his nose, so he didn’t see the hand that reached for him.

He heard the word “You!” and felt himself grabbed under one arm and hoisted out of the water and over the transom.

His feet slammed onto the deck.

Gail, hanging off the platform, watched Sanders fly out of the water, and a picture struck her: a man, wedged high in a tree, with his limbs splayed backward.

Treece held Sanders by the arm and shook him, snapping his head back and forth. “What in the name of the gentle Jesus do you think you’re doing? You think you’re goddamned Tarzan? You’re a goddamned hazard, that’s what!”

“What…”

“Bugger up a day’s work… Jesus Christ!”

Treece pushed Sanders away and turned to take Gail’s tank off the platform.

Sanders rubbed the welts on his arm. “She was bleed—!”

“Cat shit!”

“She was! In her mask. She cleared it into the water.”

Treece looked at Coffin and said, “Christ, spare me from idiots.” He turned back to Sanders and opened his mouth to shout, but apparently changed his mind. “All right,” he said, struggling against his temper. “First off, that little fish wasn’t about to eat us.”

“Little!” Sanders said. “That thing was at least seven feet long.” Confident now that Treece was not going to hurt him, he felt embarrassed, aggressively resentful. He wanted to question Treece’s declarative cockiness.

“If it was five feet, I’m the King of Spain.

Water magnifies everything.”

Sanders felt himself blush. “Even so…”

“Second,” Treece said, “there wasn’t enough blood in the water to make him more than a little nosy.