On a spring morning of cloudless blue sky in Western Australia, a teenage boy is attacked in the waters off Cottesloe Beach by a massive great white shark, so beginning an oceanic odyssey.
Two years later, as another great white is the suspected culprit for a series of attacks along the same stretch of coastline, two local marine biologists think they see a pattern to the carnage and hatch a crazy plan of their own. But they’ll need some help.
Are you ready to enter the water?
A brief excerpt...
Nathan, at 26, was two years younger than Brian and both of them had been nowhere near the water on the day Tommy was taken, two years before. It still felt like yesterday in lots of ways. The mood around the club after that day was dreadful. People were fearful, disappointed and bitterly angry that they couldn’t participate in their respective sports – clean, upstanding and outdoorsy sports that highlighted both strength and spirit in a person. It was never discussed openly but this was the fact that irked people the most. This was their beach, their strip of water, and how dare some animal come in and just take one of them when it felt like it?
What the shark did was considered to be an immoral aberration – not evil, exactly, but close – and many took it very personally. But time is a cure-all and despite the near-miss with that bloke last year, it was only over the past six months or so that people had started to swim and paddle again with the same enthusiasm as before. Talk of sharks and big dangerous sharks, especially, was secretly frowned upon as being negative, although most club members couldn’t let it out of their minds completely. How could they? Tommy had been killed right here – right out the front – and how lucky had that bloke been, rushed in the shallows like that, last year? But, powering close to the coast on water that was milky-grey and as quiet as a churchyard made some things easy to forget.
‘Okay Nath’, let’s go mate,’ Brian encouraged his training partner. Nathan replied with a sharp, ‘Yep.’
During the first couple of circuits they’d talked intermittently about work, the club, the girls at the club and what they had planned for the weekend, but with a lap to go both men were panting hard and working harder. They had perfect ski conditions and the only sounds were the slap of paddle-on-water and their heavy breathing. They could see the bottom easily enough when they took the time to look. Nathan enjoyed the flecks of black reef that skirted beneath them as a tangible measure of their velocity. It felt good to be out there, although that would have changed had they known that, for the past twenty minutes, they were being stalked and analysed from beneath the surface.
Brian was paddling on the beachside of Nathan, only a few metres to his right, when the edge of his peripheral vision captured a rush of black beneath him that couldn’t have been reef. The giant shark rushed up at him, smashed into his shiny white surf-ski. In the most horrific moment of his life Brian was tossed into the air like a discarded doll with the vivid picture in his mind of a huge great white with the front half of his ski in its mouth. His world unravelled. In slow motion, he willed himself not to fall back into the water with the beast that was about to bite him in half. Winded and panic stricken, he hit the water at the same time as Nathan who fell off his ski when the shark crashed across his bow. Both men were now in the water with their greatest living nightmare....
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More coming soon!
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eBookPie
love hock !
cant wait hocko!!!
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