The boat returned obediently to the Gaviota and was hoisted aboard. Daylight was still a good seven hours away and I didn’t expect to be in the vicinity when it arrived. By a very rough guess, I figured we were somewhere in the Gulf of Honduras. I took a bearing on the stars, and as soon as the sounds up on deck diminished, I struck out with a long-non-splash stroke for the east, which I calculated was the direction of the nearest land. The water still felt warm, and the sea had calmed enough to make swimming easier. With luck, I might reach some kind of land or be spotted by a friendly boat.
As I swam off quietly, moving slowly to conserve my energy, I again wondered what could have happened to Rona. I felt a deep pang of sadness.
Eleven
Daylight sneaked in, all pink and golden somewhere ahead, as I stroked, floated, stroked steadily on through the Caribbean. My body heat had been dissipated hours before and the once warm waters now felt teeth-chattering cold. When it grew light enough, I paused to survey the horizon. At first I saw no land in sight, and my muscles shrieked their protest at swimming on with no reward in sight. Then I spied a smudge of brown where the blues of sea and sky met in the east. Land. I decided it was either Honduras or, if the currents had carried me to the north, Yucatan. It didn’t much matter. Any hunk of dry, solid ground would be welcome.
I gave myself a couple of minutes to float, then rolled over and began a long, easy crawl toward the distant shore. In a little while I had company.
At first it was just a ripple in the smooth surface off to my right. Treading water, I watched and saw another ripple. Then another. And another. I knew what they were even before the first sickle-shaped dorsal fin broke the surface.
Sharks.
When I stopped moving, they changed direction, cutting across in front of me, then circling back behind me, closer now. I was able to make out three of them, though I didn’t doubt they had friends nearby. When I submerged I could see them clearly, circling me at a distance of about fifty feet. They had the slate-colored backs and white underbellies of the blue shark. Though the white shark is a more vivious man-eater, the blue is not my favorite companion for a long-distance swim.
The three specimens circling me were from eight to ten feet long. I was a strange intruder in their waters — clumsy, slow-moving, possibly dangerous, but a potential meal. Now and then one of the trio would dart in toward me, then veer away as though testing my response. I knew that sooner or later one of them was going to come all the way in and take a slash at me with those razor teeth.
I resumed swimming toward the ridge of land. With an effort, I kept my stroke slow and relaxed as if I were not in the least worried about the three predators. This was more for my own benefit than for theirs; you don’t psych out a shark.
My escorts moved steadily closer as I continued my painful progress toward shore. Luckily, the blood had long ago washed away from the wound on my head and the cut along my thumb where I had sliced it with the glass from the fluorescent lighting fixture. If I had been leaking fresh blood into the water around me, the sharks would have ripped me apart without hesitation.
With my attention riveted on the sharks, I hadn’t seen the brown sail between me and the land, a bit to the north. Since I didn’t know the size of the boat, I couldn’t determine its distance from me. But it was coming my way, and I mentally tried to reach out and speed it up. With a sail it wasn’t likely to be from the Gaviota, and even if it were, I would rather just then have taken my chances with Gorodin’s crew than with the deadly torpedo shapes that continued to close in on me.
While I was thinking these thoughts, something rushed by just below me. It didn’t touch me, but the turbulence spun me in the water like a cork. My playmates were preparing to attack.
I quit swimming and waved my arms frantically at the boat. I couldn’t tell if I had been seen, but the boat kept sailing in my direction, which was encouraging. When another of the sharks made a pass just six feet in front of me, I slipped Hugo out of the sheath and gripped the hilt underwater in readiness. The stiletto didn’t do much to change the odds against three killers weighing in at three hundred to four hundred pounds apiece, but it gave me a chance.
I dove repeatedly to watch the sharks, while keeping an eye on the approaching boat. Now another of the sharks peeled away from his companions and came at me. There is a popular theory that because a shark’s mouth is located on the underside of his head, he has to roll over on his back to bite. Don’t believe it. When the lower jaw drops on its hinge, the vicious crescent mouth opens into a deadly sawtoothed cave. A shark can chew you up from almost any position.
This one chose to come at me head-on. I flattened out below the surface to meet him the same way, presenting the smallest target possible. He was on me like a blue-black underwater missile before I could bring Hugo into a defensive position. Man’s maneuverability under water is limited at best. And there was only time to lunge upward and let the great black shape pass under me. It was such a near miss that the sharks grainy skin scraped my shoulder.
Having found me seemingly defenseless, the shark made an instant change of direction and rejoined the other two. Their agitated movements suggested that they might be preparing for a concerted attack. Stealing a glance at the boat, I could see now that it was a simple wooden craft with just the one sail. Small, dark-faced men stood in the bow pointing toward me. They seemed to be shouting, but I could not hear the words.
A dorsal fin sliced the water nearby. I dove deeper this time and so did the shark. He made a hook below me and headed up, jaws wide, his malevolent eyes seeming to challenge me. I kicked into a somersault and avoided the deadly teeth by inches, but this time I had Hugo ready. I plunged the blade into the sharks upper belly. My arm was wrenched as though I had stabbed a rushing freight train, but I held on as the shark’s momentum carried us both upward, and the stiletto blade sliced through the tough white belly skin.
Before we reached the surface, I kicked away from the wounded shark who trailed dark red blood behind him like smoke, a loop of intestine bulging out of the slit along the belly.
I churned up and away from the stricken killer, looking back just once to see one of his recent buddies strike his middle and, with a savage jerk, tear away a great chunk of flesh and entrails. The third shark wasn’t far behind.
I broke the surface and gulped the sweet fresh air into my lungs. In a minute my ears stopped ringing, and I heard voices. Ten feet behind me the boat bobbed on the light swell, sail reefed. There were four men in the boat. They were short and dark with fine features set symmetrically in small round heads. The words they spoke were unintelligible to me, but I recognized the language as Mayan, the ancient language of lower Mexico, now spoken in the southeastern part of Yucatan, Quintan a Roo.
Brown hands on sinewy arms reached down to me and hauled me out of the water into the wooden boat At a sound behind me, I turned and looked at the bloody froth on the water where the two sharks tore the wounded one to bits. In a few more minutes I’d have been the next course.
I held out my hands in a gesture of thanks to my rescuers, but their hooded eyes and impassive faces showed no response. One of them motioned for me to sit in the bow. I did so, and they reset the sail. The wind caught the canvas and the light boat seemed to lift in the water and skim toward the land.
Twelve
As the boat moved smoothly and soundlessly to-ward the shore, my exertions of the past sixteen hours began to catch up with me. The fight and escape from the Gaviota, the long swim, and the battle with the sharks had exhausted me. I let my head nod and closed my eyes just to rest them, and in a second — so it seemed — the bottom of the boat scraped gravel and people were running down from a cluster of huts to pull the craft up on shore.