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The wet-suited attacker had come out of nowhere.  Grabbed her from behind, an arm around her throat. With his other hand, he was messing with her tanks, and she knew her air supply was being cut off.

She used every trick she knew, everything she’d been taught. But it was hard to inflict real damage underwater, and her desperate backward kick to his groin hadn’t been very effective.  She reached back with one hand to find an eye or ear she could gouge or twist, but his head was covered with slippery rubber, a whole-body diving suit.  She grabbed his face mask and succeeded in yanking it down. He let go of her tanks for a brief minute while he readjusted his mask and the mouthpiece that had been jarred, but he never took his arm from her throat.

The odd thing was that she was still breathing air from her tanks.  Made no sense. She continued to twist, flail, tried to reach the knife strapped to her thigh. Just as her hand closed over it, the man grabbed her wrist and squeezed so hard that her whole arm went numb. The knife went spiraling down into the darkness.

She realized they were moving upward. Fast, too fast–she was sure to get the bends, but the man didn’t stop or slow down.

Then she saw the shark. Huge body, empty eyes. It could be on them in less than a heartbeat. Her panic rose. She knew she was about to die, either from murder or shark attack. Neither was her death of choice. She had nearly lost consciousness when suddenly they surfaced, and hands coming out of the darkness above were pulling them up, up out of the water. She had no idea where she was, who those hands belonged to, or what would happen next.

No one was holding onto her any more.  Exhausted, she rolled to her stomach, got to her knees, and slowly stood. She came face to face with a man in a wet suit, but he’d pulled off the head covering and his mask. He looked at her with eyes almost as flat as the shark’s eyes had been.

“What were you doing down there alone, Agent Whittier?  You’ve been trained better than that.  I could have killed you in a moment if I’d been a bad guy. You have some explaining to do.”







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