He had never been a big man and now, after more than a decade of training, he was thinner yet, with only his very thick wrists to hint that he might be something other than a thin six footer with a somewhat gaunt face, high cheekbones, and dark eyes, and a sensual quietness about him that could make an elderly nun kick over a statue of St. Francis of Assisi.

He saw the shark before the hunters.

It moved low and steady above clear white sand. Remo flashed the white of his body and gave short choppy flips with his hands to look like a fish in trouble. The shark, like a computer aboard a cruiser, zeroed in, and with great gray strength closed upon the man in a small black bathing suit.

The key, of course, was relaxing. The long, slow relax and to attain this, you had to disengage your mind, for this was the shark's home, and a man was a lesser being in this ocean place. A long, slow relax for to try to resist the rows of driving shark teeth meant the ripping of flesh and the loss of limb. You had to become like the rice paper of a kite, light and accepting, so that the shark's plunging snout drove into your belly and you collapsed around its great fins, causing it to snap its head in frustration at the light paper in front of its mouth, always in front of its mouth, never allowing it to get a mouthful of the beautiful white tender meat. And then you allowed the great force of its snapping body to bring your left arm under its belly, and there with sudden power the left hand closed, solid and eternal, on the rough, thick skin.

All this Remo did, until finally, as he and the shark snapped at each other, in one wrenching moment the shark's belly skin ripped out, and the shark swam away in its own dark blood, its intestines trailing behind it. And, tasting its own blood, in fury it attacked its trailing belly.