Ahh! Ahh!” I shrieked again, sounding a lot like Teddy. I climbed up on the pallet, trying desperately to get my entire body out of the water and onto the wooden surface. Clambering up and onto it, I landed right next to Benny, who came awake with a shout.

“Whoa! Patty boy, what are you doing? What’s wrong?”

I was too scared to speak. The pallet was tipping and Benny was sliding off.

“Hang on, sport! Calm down now, little buddy. You’re gonna tip us over.”

Benny looked me in the eye and tried to calm me down.

“Patrick, listen to me now. You’re gonna tip us over. This hunk of wood is going to take us all down with it, if you don’t settle down. You’re scared. I understand. But look over there.” He pointed with one of his clawed stumps. The eastern horizon was reddening now.

“The sun is rising. That means help is coming, pipsqueak. So calm yourself and tell Benny what—”

A piercing, ear-shattering scream carried across the water and cut him off.

“NO! Please! Oh God noooo!” It was the southerner. But he wasn’t the only one in danger.

“Look out! Stay together! Back-to-back!” he yelled.

Benny looked at me with his eyes wide.

“What’s going on? Tell me, Patty, tell me what’s happening. Has the sub come back? Sometimes those stinkin’ subs will resurface after they sunk a tub and machine-gun any survivors in the water. You hear anything that sounded like gunfire?”

I shook my head.

Benny got right in my face.

“Patrick,” he said calmly. “You gotta tell me what’s going on. Benny can’t help if I don’t know what’s happenin’.”

“They … they said there … were … sharks! I heard men scream and …”

“And what? And what, Patty boy?”

“I was in the water. Trying to … to push … the pallet, and something bumped against me. Brushed my leg and … and it was hard and scaly. And I screamed and climbed up here.”

Benny looked around at the water. The waves were calming down as the sun rose, and it was easier to see. Far off in the distance I could finally see some of the men I’d heard in the darkness. Most of them were wearing life jackets, and they had fastened them together somehow. They looked like a map I’d seen of the Philippines, dozens of individual islands bobbing on the water. But these islands moved, twitching and jerking and pointing in every direction.

“You saw a shark?” Benny asked, looking back at me.

“No … no … I felt it bump up against my leg,” I said.

“All right,” Benny said. “You did the right thing. Climbin’ up here like you did. But I gotta tell you, it probably weren’t a shark. These swabbies, they’re hurt, they been out in the water all night. They’re tired and waterlogged. And what happens is your mind starts playing tricks and you hallucinate, see …”

“Oh, God, it’s Ballard!” Benny was interrupted right at that moment by the southern man’s voice ringing out. We both looked and saw what he was shouting about. The dead body of a crewman bobbed in the water halfway between the floating crew and our pallet. And circling around the body, I spotted several large fins.

“Don’t look, Patty,” Benny said. “Don’t look.” I saw him glance over at Teddy, who tossed restlessly in his sleep. Benny had been telling me not to look at bad things ever since the ship went down. But I couldn’t draw my eyes away from the slowly circling fins.

There were three of them, dark triangles cutting through the water like the prow of a ship. The crewman floated facedown in the water, making no effort to swim away from the danger that was bearing down on him and drawing nearer every second. He was obviously dead.

It happened fast.

One of the fins darted away from the others and lunged toward the body. The water splashed and churned and then just like that, the dead man disappeared below the ocean surface. He was gone. The other two sharks followed, and the water soon calmed again.

“You did the right thing, pipsqueak,” Benny said. “Don’t you think you didn’t. Heck, if one of them critters bumped up against me, I’d a done a lot more than yell. But you listen to me now. Help is on the way. There’s two things your United States Navy is good at. One is giving us marines a ride when we gotta go do the fightin’ somewhere. The second is pickin’ up their crews when one of these rust buckets unexpectedly loses its ability to float. It’s going to be all right, you’ll see. Or my name ain’t Benjamin Franklin—”

“Poindexter, Private First Class of the United States Marines,” I finished for him.

“You see?” Benny chuckled. His laugh was coarse and rough like someone had scrubbed the inside of his throat with sandpaper. “Now you’re beginning to think like a jarhead. Like a straight-up, squared-away marine.”

The pallet was still tipping. It felt like I was going to fall back into the ocean, which was the last place I wanted to be. I scrabbled backward on my butt, away from the edge. The pallet tilted more and we all nearly fell in.

“Whoa!” Benny croaked. “We gotta spread out, pipsqueak.” He struggled to move himself over the rough surface of the wood but finally made it into a corner. We were now like three points on a triangle drawn inside a square. The pallet righted itself, and I felt a little better. I made sure no part of my body was touching the water.

“There we go,” Benny rasped. “We should be fine now. All we gotta do is sit back until the SAR teams come looking for us.”

“What does SAR mean, Benny?”

“It means ‘search and rescue.’ The navy’ll send out ships and planes looking for us. Probably planes first. Then they’ll radio our coordinates and send a ship to pick us up.”

We floated there a minute. Benny lay his head back down and drifted off to sleep. The sun finally cleared the horizon and I felt the heat rise instantly. It was still humid, but I started thinking maybe Benny was right. We might be okay. If our luck held, we’d get rescued sometime that day. But of course, we weren’t very lucky.

Thirty yards away, a large black fin popped out of the water.

One of the sharks was back, and it started swimming directly toward us.

“Benny!” I couldn’t help it. I shouted as loud as I could. The fin kept coming, heading straight for our raft. It looked impossibly big in the water. It was twenty yards away, then ten.

“Benny!”

He finally lifted his head up, but he was groggy.

“Wha …” he mumbled. I knew he had to be in horrible pain, but I didn’t know what else to do.

“Look!” I said, pointing at the approaching shark.

Benny struggled to sit up. He had trouble focusing his eyes, but when he saw the giant fish, he sat up straighter.

“Holy—” Benny never got to finish what was probably another curse. Because the shark dived beneath us, lifted the pallet into the air, and tilted it to the side. We nearly tumbled into the water. Teddy awoke with a start and immediately started whimpering.

“Teddy! Quiet!” I said. He stopped making his noise. Somehow, during the worst times in the jungle on Guam, I’d taught Teddy to listen to me. To be quiet when the Japanese patrols went by. He’d do it. But it was real hard for him. I don’t know how he learned it, whether it was the tone of my voice or a certain look on my face. Whatever it was, he knew when I meant business, and he’d calm down.

The pallet rocked as the shark thrashed beneath it.

“Hold on, boys! Hold on, now!” Benny shouted.

But I didn’t want to hold on. The spaces in between the slats of the pallet were exposed to the water and I envisioned the shark pushing through them to bite off my hands. But it didn’t. As quickly as it had come, it disappeared into the ocean and our makeshift raft stopped shaking.

We all sat there a moment in stunned silence. Finally I mustered up the courage to speak.

“What … what was that thing doing?” I said. Teddy rocked back and forth to soothe himself.

“Lookin’ for its next meal. I expect it’s gone now,” he said. “I’ve heard plenty of stories about sharks. Don’t know what’s true and what ain’t. But one thing I heard is they’re eatin’ machines. They basically swim and eat. So if he’s swum away, it means he ain’t found nothin’ to suit his fancy here. Shoot, I ain’t nothin’ but bone and muscle and you two together is barely an appetizer. Ain’t no shark gonna come back and eat us.”

“I don’t know, Benny,” I said. “That was awful close. What about before? That body …” I stopped because I didn’t want to think about what happened to the dead man we’d seen earlier. Ballard. I know he was already dead, but still.

“That was different. That was an easy target for the shark. If he comes back here again, he knows Benny Poindexter is going to give him a pop on the kisser that would make the Brown Bomber proud. And then he’s gonna get a quick lesson in what’s what, capisce?”

Benny was weak and basically helpless. With his curled-up, burned hands, he couldn’t punch a pillow, much less a shark. But the look on Benny’s face was what struck me the most. For the first time since I’d known him, I saw Benjamin Franklin Poindexter, Private First Class, United States Marine Corps, born in the Bronx in New York, fan of the hated Yankees and lover of Lindy’s cheesecake, with a look on his face I’d never seen before.

And that look was fear.