by Peter Cotton
With that, he threw his arms over his head and backstroked off through the chop, eyeing us as he moved away. He was soon a dark form in the near distance, barely distinct. Then he was gone altogether. There’d been no point trying to stop him. I had the steak knife, but I hadn’t been prepared to use it. Our chances of surviving were fair to middling, and shrinking by the minute. Any unnecessary exertion, especially a struggle, would’ve brought us all undone.
Jade shuddered against me. The optimum temperature of the human body is about thirty-seven degrees Celsius. Despite it being summer, the water in the bay was somewhere between twenty and twenty-two degrees, so the core temperature of our bodies was dropping fast. There was no reversing the process, but we could slow it down. I got Jade to bring her knees up to her chest, and I moved behind her and wrapped my arms around her.
‘We’re in deep shit this time, eh?’ she said.
‘We’ll be right,’ I said. ‘They’ll be here soon.’
If we were going to survive this ordeal, we’d face a number of challenges, both physical and psychological. The main psychological challenge was the uncertainty about when, or if, salvation would arrive. I tried to get Jade’s mind on other things.
‘Any idea what your uncle meant?’ I said. ‘About this area turning to dust?’
‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust?’ she said. ‘I dunno.’
‘Did you know what he was up to?’
She unwrapped my arms and turned to face me.
‘I told you before,’ she said, her lips pursed, ‘I’ve got no idea what he’s been doing, but whatever it is, it got Kylie and Shero killed, and us here, so fuck him.’
Her body shook, and a trail of tears merged with the droplets that dotted her cheek.
‘Sorry,’ I said, laying a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry.’
I tried to think what else I might ask without further upsetting her, but my mind was clouded — the cold was getting to me. My teeth chattered like a cartoon character eating a corncob. I’d lost feeling in my fingers and toes, and was suddenly very tired.
I looked across the water. Fires burned at Creswell, illuminating a large column of smoke that billowed above them. The jagged hills around the bay sat low on a lightening horizon. Purple ribbons of cloud streaked the sky.
A low-level thudding sound, distorted and barely distinct, came and went. I stretched upwards, but couldn’t hear it again. I swung around a full three-sixty degrees, hoping to see a vessel speeding towards us. Our salvation. But I saw nothing except a school of small fish that flew out of the water and plopped back in as one. Then something moved at the edge of my vision, and was gone. A few seconds later, it appeared again. About twenty metres away. A dorsal fin, cutting through the chop.
16
We rotated in the water, our eyes locked on the small triangular fin that circled us from about eight metres away. I’d previewed this encounter in my mind, and thought I was ready for it, but the reality of confronting a shark in open water was far more shocking than I’d anticipated. Given the size of the fin and the light wake the shark created, I assumed it was a juvenile. Not that that gave me any comfort. A juvenile shark could still tear serious holes in us.
The fin suddenly slid beneath the surface and disappeared. If seeing it had unsettled me, losing sight of it jolted me in a much deeper place. I held the steak knife above my head and focused on the area between us and where the shark had dived, expecting it to materialise at any moment and attack us. But minutes passed. Then a question came to mind. One that had me fearing the answer.
‘Ah, Jade,’ I said, still scanning the water for the fish. ‘This is not something I’d normally ask a woman. But, um, is it your time of the month right now?’
My embarrassment at having to ask the question temporarily swamped my dread of the shark.
‘What’s it to you?’ she said, a hint of anger in her voice.
‘Blood attracts sharks,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what your, ahh, your situation is, but it’d be nice to know.’
Her anger immediately dissolved into understanding.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘No, it’s not. Thank God.’
A dark form surfaced in the middle of some blackened flotsam about thirty metres away. It was there for a moment, and then dropped back under.
‘Is that another one?’ said Jade, pointing at the turbulence the fish had created.
Her answer came seconds later when a much larger fin surfaced fifteen metres away and headed straight for us. The fish wasn’t a fast mover, but it looked totally committed, as though it’d found what it was looking for. When it was about six metres away from us, it dived, and I braced myself for impact, fully expecting to be snapped up and ripped apart. I felt particularly vulnerable around my legs and feet. Seconds passed. Jade and I turned this way and that, searching for the fish, but it seemed to have moved on like the other one.
They say your life can flash before your eyes in the seconds before you die. I had a bit more time than that to mull things over. More like minutes. The thing was, I didn’t need to dig too deeply to assess my life. I had no abiding regrets about my dealings with people, or about the way I’d handled challenging work situations. And I’d never accumulated a bucket list. Whenever I really wanted to do something, I generally did it.
But slowly, something started to the surface, penetrating my consciousness and fundamentally challenging some of the assessments I’d made about my life. People talk about scales falling from their eyes. They credit revelations that let them see a situation for what it is. That’s what happened to me at that moment. I suddenly saw my future, and my future was with Jean, because I loved her and wanted to be with her.
The realisation shocked me, and I immediately tried to discredit it. I was vulnerable. My life hung by a thread. I was under immense pressure. It was natural to idealise my flawed relationship with Jean, especially when both our fates were so uncertain. And the thing was, I’d never seriously worked at the relationship, and I’d seen my inertia as indicative of my true feelings for her. But as I felt it through and thought about it, treading water before the next shark arrived, I realised my greatest regret in dying here, now, would be that I’d never kiss her again. Or hold her close. And I knew that if I got the chance, if we both survived our separate ordeals, I wanted to commit myself fully to Jean.
These musings were interrupted by a big fin that surfaced twenty metres away. Was it the same big fish, or did the fin belong to an altogether different beast? If we were going to be attacked by multiple monsters, our end would come quickly. The shark started to circle us.
A set of images popped into my mind. A fly struggled to escape a spider’s web. The spider appeared at the side of the web and moved in to eat its catch. A second spider joined the feast. And a third. Jade and I were the flies in that web. Easy pickings.
The shark’s orbit began to shrink, and it was soon about twelve metres from us. It suddenly arched its back and it seemed to bounce up and down in the water, creating some sizeable waves. I figured it was a preparatory move to an attack, like a gorilla beating its chest, or a street fighter hurling insults.
‘What now?’ said Jade, her head swivelling as she tracked the fish.
‘When it comes at us,’ I said, ‘be aggressive. Hit it in the gills or the eyes as hard as you can, as many times as you can. And only straight jabs. No round-house shots. They won’t work in the water. And if you get a shot at its nose, take it. But be careful — the nose and the teeth are close together.’
Transfixed by the shark, I’d forgotten about the engine noise from a few minutes before. The rhythmic thudding reached me again, but louder this time. I spun around, desperate to see a rescue vessel, but despite the strengthening light, I couldn’t see anything moving on the water.
Jade gasped, and I swung back to the fish, which was now zigzagging and thrashing its tail, sending sp
ray out everywhere. I pulled Jade behind me, and the fish slowed and sank low in the water till it was almost submerged. Then it moved and turned towards us, its trunk and upper fins riding high out of the water. I jerked in a deep breath and raised the knife above my head. The beast was about five metres from us when it slid under the water, and I resigned myself to the worst.
The first contact, when it came, had less impact than I’d anticipated — the shark grazed my side with its head, and as it glided past, I plunged the knife into its back. I quickly withdrew the weapon, and the fish reared up and whacked its tail down hard on my chest, just below my left shoulder. The force of the blow pushed me under the water and knocked the knife from my hand.
‘You okay?’ said Jade, her voice urgent in my ear as I came up to the surface.
My life jacket had cushioned the blow, but the force of the contact had winded me. As I fought to breathe, I opened my mouth and swallowed some water and started to gag. The shark had resumed circling us from about twenty metres away. It zigzagged and thrashed its tail again. Having been knifed on its first sortie, I expected it to literally rip into us when it came again.
‘Ohhh dear,’ I said, trying to control my gag reflex. ‘That-really-hurt.’
‘What’s that?’ said Jade, turning her head.
‘What’s what?’ I said, turning, too.
A small grey craft sped towards us from the direction of Creswell. It was about a kilometre away and closing fast. Jets of spray shot out from its bow. We’d either been spotted from the base, or the craft was responding to the flares Bynder had sent up.
‘Here we go again,’ said Jade, her voice breaking.
I swung around to face the predator. It came straight at us again, faster this time. When it was a few metres away, it dived, and I lifted my hands in a double fist and got ready to whack it. But I didn’t get the chance. The beast surfaced and slammed its tail into my chest again, knocking all the air out of me and pushing me under. It rasped my face as it swam past and spun me around, and my ears filled with water. My awareness slipped a few gears, and as the life jacket raised me to the surface again, I surrendered to my fate, and waited to be torn apart. I felt the air on my face, seconds passed, but nothing happened.
I took a deep breath. The shooting pain that electrified my chest put an end to that. At best, it meant broken ribs. I didn’t want to think about the worst. I restricted myself to shallow breaths, and the pain became manageable. The right side of my face had been rubbed raw. When I raised my hand to check the damage, water dripped onto the wound, and it stung like hell.
Then I remembered Jade. I swung round, but I couldn’t see her. I was on the verge of panic, when she surfaced about ten metres away. Her eyes were closed. Her head lolled back and forth on the raised shoulder of her life jacket. The water around her was turning dark in the dawn light.
I tried to swim freestyle towards her, but I couldn’t tolerate the pain in my chest. I tried side-stroke and found I could do that okay. I’d taken a few strokes when a dorsal fin surfaced a few metres behind Jade. The shark must’ve sensed me moving, because it swam past her and headed straight for me. It moved high in the water and was in no hurry, but it didn’t deviate.
When the shark was a few metres away, I pushed through the pain and raised my hands above my head to give it one last whack. It was a pointless show of defiance, because regardless of what I did, there’d be no escape this time. The shark opened its mouth. Water swirled around its bullet-shaped head. Its dull eyes showed nothing of its deadly intent. I braced for what was to come, and hoped it would be quick. But just as the shark was almost upon me, a hail of bullets ripped bits of flesh and cartilage from its back and sides, and it jerked and juddered wildly in the water.
I swung around. A zodiac about thirty metres away was racing towards us. A sailor with an assault rifle to her shoulder stood braced against a support in the bow of the vessel. She kept her eye on her scope and swung her weapon in slow arcs between Jade and me. I turned back to the fish. It’d slumped into the water so that only a small area of its ragged fin was visible above the surface.
I swayed in lines of wash as the zodiac moved in beside Jade. Two sailors got their hands in under her armpits and lifted her still body from the water. Blood drenched the side of the vessel as they eased her up into it and lowered her onto the deck.
They then manoeuvred the zodiac till it loomed over me, and two sailors extended their hands.
‘Grab on,’ one of them said.
I reached up, but a shooting pain in my right side forced me to drop my hands back into the water.
‘Hang on a second,’ the same sailor said.
The zodiac moved a few metres away, and when it closed in on me again, the sailors put their hands under my armpits as they’d done with Jade. They adjusted their grip, lifted me into the vessel, and lay me on the rubber decking. I was freezing and almost out to it, too exhausted, and in too much pain, to speak.
A sailor sat me up and gently removed my life jacket. He cut me out of my T-shirt, squeezed some white ointment onto an abrasion on my chest, and cleaned the wound with gauze. The gauze quickly became bloodied. He sprayed the area with a stinging mist from a small white bottle and waited half a minute before he clamped a large dressing onto it. He leant in close to my ribs and pressed them with his index finger. I jumped, and he whipped his hand away. He touched my face where the fish had whacked me, and I gasped.
‘Nose …’ he said, regarding mine from several angles, ‘maybe broken. Right ribs …’ he said, eyeing the area, ‘definitely broken. Probably multiples. Shark burn, left face. Severe.’
He took a syringe and a small vial from a large plastic box, pressed the needle into the vial, and withdrew some fluid.
‘Something for the pain,’ he said.
He upended the syringe, depressed the plunger slightly, and a small amount of fluid squirted out. Despite the movement of the vessel, he plunged the needle into my arm and pumped the fluid into me.
‘That’ll help,’ he said.
He draped an emergency blanket over my shoulders, pulled it tight, and handed me a drink bottle. The liquid tasted both salty and slightly sweet. The driver raised the throttle lever, forcing me back against the gunnels, and we shot across the water towards Creswell. I sipped the drink bottle and watched the sailors work on Jade. One of them kept a huge wad of bloodied gauze pressed to the right side of her chest, another adjusted the drip already in her arm, and another kept looking in the direction of the base as he took her pulse. I felt no real distress at what I was seeing. It seemed so unreal I could have been watching a movie.
A dozen or more sailors stood along the jetty in front of the submarine hangars. They watched intently, and as we approached, a couple of them stepped onto a lower platform. A sailor on the zodiac threw a line, which one of the sailors on the jetty caught and hitched to a bollard. Another line was thrown and secured.
They lifted Jade onto a stretcher, carried her up the steps onto the jetty, and began working on her again. A couple of sailors helped me up the steps and got me onto a stretcher a few metres from Jade. She had various drips in her arms and new dressings on her wounds. They quickly wheeled her to one of the waiting ambulances, three medics jumped in the back with her, and the vehicle sped off through an open gateway. The two halves of the gate lay buckled and blackened on the other side of the fence.
A couple of medics wheeled my stretcher to an ambulance and pushed me into the back of the vehicle. They secured the stretcher to the floor, the doors closed, and we moved off. The medics sat on either side of me. One took my temperature. The other checked my pulse and measured my blood pressure.
‘Do you know where you are, sir?’ asked the female medic.
‘In an ambulance,’ I said, feeling quite ethereal. ‘At Creswell. On my way to the infirmary, I guess.’
‘Do you know what day it is?
’
‘The day after yesterday,’ I said.
I laughed, but the medic didn’t even crack a smile. A few minutes later, the vehicle stopped, and the doors opened. They slid me out, wheeled me through a bare-walled foyer and up a featureless corridor into Casualty. Three women in blue took me into a cubicle, where one of them removed my boots and socks while another one cut my leather trousers along the seams and whipped them away. They assisted me off the stretcher, took my emergency blanket, and helped me into a hospital gown. Two of them lowered me into a wheelchair while the third steadied me from behind.
I was wheeled into an examination room where an assortment of doctors and nurses checked me over in every way. After that, one of them bandaged my face and put a plastic hat on my head, which he said was to protect the dressing. He then sat me under a hot shower for about ten minutes. When I was as warm as toast, he dried me, and helped me into a fresh hospital gown. Then he wheeled me to a private room and helped me into a bed with a firm mattress and nice cotton blankets. He put another bottle of the salty sweet drink and two rounds of tuna sandwiches on my bedside table, he advised me to eat slowly, and he left.
I demolished the food and drink, though swallowing it was painful, and another nurse came in and strapped an ice bag to my ribs. She was followed by a doctor, who told me I needed to ignore the pain in my chest and breathe as deeply as I could. She said that was the best way to ward off a lung infection. And, given that it’d take four to six weeks for my ribs to heal, she said, I’d better get used to ‘breathing in pain’.
The doctor had just pulled the bed covers over me when the door opened and McHenry, Commander Peterson, and Trainor filed in, accompanied by a bloke I didn’t know.
‘When will you learn, Glass?’ said McHenry, shaking his head, which set his jowls wobbling. ‘Just look at you. Banged up by a shark, now, of all things.’
‘There’s a lot I need to tell you,’ I said, igniting my chest as I pushed myself up onto the pillows. ‘It’s urgent.’