Chapter 1
Off the Central Coast of Australia, a hundred-and-forty-four-foot catamaran was bearing down on the French research vessel Galago and a very blood scene. The crew was shouting to be heard above the gunshots as they fired at the dozens of great white sharks that were swimming at the surface of the crimson sea. The ship rolled in the eight-foot swells of the dark, windy day and the crew was panicked.
“Who’s that fool on the sailboat?” Captain Phillippe Monroe screamed to his first mate,
Jacques Trudeau, as they both watched the approaching vessel.
“I don’t know. But he just appeared well inside our radar screen,” answered Jacques.
“What do you mean he just appeared?”
“One minute, nothing on the screen; next minute, there he is.”
“Well, keep signaling—Merde, it’s too late! He’s already on top of us.”
Everyone on deck watched as the huge catamaran pulled alongside the research vessel. Christian, a very fit blond man appearing to be in his late thirties, appeared atop the mast.
“Can we be of any assistance?” he shouted from over 200 feet in the air.
“Yeah, get the hell out of here!” the captain screamed.
“Thank you, that’s just what I had in mind,” Christian shouted as he smiled.
With that, he leapt in a perfect swan-dive from the top of the mast into the bloody ocean and the midst of dozens of agitated, hungry sharks. Strangely, right after he hit the water, the sun broke through the clouds and the seas began to calm.
“The crazy fool. What do you suppose he thinks he’s doing?” asked Jacques.
“Providing dinner for the sharks, I imagine,” the captain quipped.
“Hell with the sharks, the dive should kill him. That’s like diving off of a twenty-story building.”
Dolphin-kicking effortlessly, Christian quickly swam down to find a diver trapped in a shark cage. The once-agitated sharks calmly hovered near him, showing no signs of aggression. As he approached the cage, he saw that it seemed to have broken loose from the winch and gotten lodged in a crevice. The sharks had all but destroyed the cage trying to get to the wounded diver. One shark was almost inside when Christian reached the cage, but the frenzied fish swam away from him as if it were being chased by a thirty-foot orca. The old, steel cage weighed over a ton, but Christian effortlessly freed it from the crevice and flipped it over to get to the door. Ula, the diver, was clinging to the inside of the cage, dazed and in shock, so Christian swam inside.
Once he had Ula’s attention, he reached out and gently touched her on the shoulder, causing her tense posture to relax immediately. Christian was in no hurry to surface, nor did he need to share Ula’s scuba.
He used diver hand signals to communicate with her so she might feel safe enough to let go of the bars. But each time she considered leaving the cage, she caught a glimpse of one of the passing sharks and retreated to the back of the cage. Christian signaled Ula to watch him, then swam outside the cage and right up to one passing shark after another, showing her that it was perfectly safe.
After Christian had spent over twenty minutes underwater with no air, Ula finally seemed ready to leave the cage. He offered her his hand and she gripped it firmly before they slowly rose through the water. As soon as they broke the surface, a Zodiak inflatable sped to their side and swiftly plucked them from the water.
Ula felt exhausted from the ordeal as they sat side by side in the boat, and for a moment she allowed her head to rest against Christian’s shoulder. To her surprise, this immediately imbued her with a strong feeling of safety.
Once they reached the Galago, the waves had calmed and the crew helped Ula onto the deck. The shining sun accented Christian’s well-developed body, evident in his racer’s Speedo, as he easily leapt up from the inflatable boat to the deck.
Ula looked at him with tears in her eyes. “How did you lift that cage?”
Christian turned toward her, smiling, as she continued her questioning.
“It weighs over a thousand kilos. You saved my life.”
The sun was quickly heating up the day, so Ula unzipped and peeled down her wetsuit top, revealing her beautiful, tanned body. Surprising everyone, Christian stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her, hugging her like one might a long-lost friend.
Ula pulled back very slowly, as she didn’t really want Christian to stop… but she needed to question him further. “And the sharks—they totally ignored you. I don’t understand… I was sure I was going to die today.”
Christian smiled, looked deeply into Ula’s eyes, and said, “I’m just happy I could help. Besides, I owed you one.”
“Have we met before?”
“Not recently, and not that you would remember.”
Ula looked at him more thoroughly, as if she were trying to remember him so she could make some sense of what he’d just said. Normally, if someone she hardly knew had hugged her the way he just had—pressing his bare skin to hers—she would have been taken aback. But there was nothing about this man’s hug that offended her in any way. She opened her mouth to question him further, but before she could get any words out, the ship’s doctor stepped forward and said, “Ula, you need to come with me to the infirmary.”
“I’m not infirm. I feel great, actually, and I don’t want to go anywhere just now,” said Ula adamantly while staring at Christian with a dazed look on her face.
“Well at least sit down, please,” said the doctor, motioning a deck hand to bring over a nearby chair.
Ula acquiesced and sat in the chair, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Christian.
As the doctor began to give her a cursory check-up, he was surprised to find she was calm and showed no real signs of her ordeal.
The captain, who had been standing by and listening to everything, chimed in, “I don’t know who you are or what you’ve got going with my diver, but you’re lucky to be alive.” He looked at his watch and shook his head. “And you just happened to beat the world record for underwater free diving.”
“Hello, Captain. My name is Christian, and luck really had nothing to do with it.”
“We were watching you on our monitors; how the hell did you lift that cage? We broke our winch trying to free it from the crevice.”
“My purpose was to free your diver, so I didn’t consider the weight—only that the cage needed to move.”
“I’ll be sure to remember that the next time I have a flat tire and don’t have a jack handy,” the captain said, trying to engage his onlooking crew with humor. “Can you tell me why those sharks didn’t eat you alive?”
“I just told the sharks to have no interest in me.”
“So you just said to them, ‘Pretty please, don’t eat me’?”
“Actually, the way I spoke to the sharks ties into your team’s research. Aside from Ula being an old friend in danger, I also came to give you the answers you’ve been seeking about the sharks.” Christian leaned in to the captain and lowered his voice. “And don’t ask Ula about me; she won’t remember. It was a very long time ago.”
Ula piped up and said, “I heard that!”
She tried to stand to move in closer to the conversation, but the doctor pushed down on her shoulders and said, “Would you please just sit still and stay calm?”
All this time, Dr. Melvin Garland, the leader of the research team, had been standing by, listening to the conversation. Finally, he spoke. “So, Christian—I believe that’s your name—you certainly have me intrigued. How is it you know so much about sharks?”
“Well, I’ve always been interested in all kinds of animals, the undersea ones especially.”
“I’ve been doing research on sharks for more than five years and I’ve never heard of you. Do you go by some other name? Are you a famous professor I should know?”
“No, I’m not famous, but stop me if I’m wrong… Your initial goal was to learn how sharks navigate and you now feel that their navigation skills might be related to how they find their dinner. That is one of the reasons you used this shark cage and baited the sharks. You have four tagged sharks that you’ve been tracking and you wanted to see whether they would diverge from their normal routes to investigate the food you were putting in the water. You had surmised that they might use some kind of electrical signal and now you’ve come to believe that magnetism might be involved. Is that a pretty good summary?”
“How could you possibly know all that? I’ve not published any of my findings.” Shaking his head, Dr. Garland stepped towards Christian for emphasis as he spoke.
“As you’ve guessed doctor, sharks use both electricity and magnetism to navigate and find food. The main way a shark decides what it will eat for dinner is by picking up signals its food puts out. And, unlike their keen sense of smell, which can detect blood or a potential mate up to a quarter mile away, these other skills have a range of many, many miles. So fish put out signals that sharks use to determine what to do. On the simplest level, those signals tell the sharks of injuries, weaknesses, and even extreme fear. There are more complex levels that I won’t go into, but I believe your biggest question is how it works.”
“Well, yes, it is. It’s fine to say sharks can do these things but there’s no evidence to support how they do it.”
“In the shark’s head, centered between his eyes, is a bean-sized gland that—”
“I’ve dissected many, many sharks and I have never found any such gland,” interrupted the doctor, putting his hands on his hips.
“Have you ever dissected a live shark, Dr. Garland?” continued Christian.
“Well, no, but what does that have to do with anything?”
“It has quite a lot to do with the reason you’ve never found the gland. You see, it must have a constant supply of the oxygen in the shark’s blood to exist. It takes very little time, after oxygen is deprived, for the gland to dissolve. But if you keep the shark alive and perform the surgery, you will find it. And if you carefully open the gland’s casing, you’ll be able to detect a weak electric pulse. That gland is what the shark uses for detection.”
“How is it you know this?” questioned the doctor.
“Let it suffice to say I do, and you can confirm it for yourself.”
Christian looked towards the captain as he continued. “I said earlier to the captain that I ‘talked’ to the sharks, in a way. It was sort of like the power of suggestion. I imagine this will seem a bit farfetched to you, but I suggested to the sharks that they were upside-down. I won’t go any further into the how of the suggestion, but I am sure you are familiar with tonic immobility.”
“Of course. TI is the effect of rendering a shark fairly helpless by turning it upside down. If that’s what you actually did, all I can say is I’d love to learn that skill,” said Dr. Garland.
“Maybe another time, sir. For now, my friends are waiting and I’d like to have a word with Ula in private.”
“Of course, go ahead. But I will be checking up on your theory.”
Ula heard what Christian said about having a private conversation and this time she made sure to free herself from the chair and the doctor. “Be right back, doc. You heard the man; he wants to talk to me in private.”
As Ula approached Christian, she started to get butterflies of excitement in her stomach—she wondered what he might want to say to her in private.
Christian met her half way and gestured as he spoke. “Let’s move over to forward deck, away from everyone.” Once they were out of earshot, he said, “I know this has been a big day for you… You may need to think for a while about this, but would you consider leaving the research vessel business and signing on to my yacht, Helios?”
Ula rolled her eyes upward, pretending to think hard, but then quickly said, “Well, absolutely, yes. But what would I do?”
“That was quick.” Christian said, smiling. “I just happen to know that you’re a very able sailor with experience on big yachts. Helios would take a bit of getting used to, but I’m sure you’d catch on quickly.”
“So what part of the crew would I be?”
“I’d like you to be my first mate, if that’s okay with you…”
Ula moved over to the rail near where they were standing and gripped it firmly then lifted her head up to the sun and took a long, deep breath.
Christian watched her closely as he waited for her to respond. She’d been on The Galago for over a year now and had thought it would be her life for quite a while to come, so she wondered why she’d been so quick to say yes to this man. Regardless of what he’d said about the past, she had no memory of him—why would he remember her? So many unanswered questions … yet her heart was telling her to go for it.
Still looking towards the sun and the sea, she said, “When you first asked me to join your crew, I was ready to come on board and swab the decks if that was the offer. But now I’m wondering why you would make me your first mate. What would the rest of the crew think?”
“Trust me, the crew will totally understand. And I can explain that some other time. So what’s your answer?”
“One more thing. I know you said I was an old friend from a long time ago,” Ula said as she spun around to face Christian, “but I have a pretty good memory and I’m pretty sure I’d remember if I’d met you before.” Feeling a little more confident about taking him up on his offer, she looked him up and down and offered him a cute but provocative smile. “Although I do have to admit there is something about you that seems familiar. Maybe we knew each other in a past life.” She laughed.
Christian paused for a moment at her words before answering. “The main reason I’m offering you the job of first mate is that I happen to know you’re a great sailor. But I have to admit there is one more little thing I will need from you.”
Ula jerked upright, standing tall and fierce with her shoulders back. “I knew there had to be a catch. What exactly do you need from me?”
“What I mean is that I want you to be my student.”
“A student of what?” Ula asked without relaxing her stance.
“Don’t worry, I’m a teacher and I’d like you to enroll in lessons about living an optimal life. They’re called the Postures and there are nine of them. I offer them only to people I think are ready to learn. And I’m sure you’re ready.”
Ula felt relieved at Christian’s answer and finally relaxed her pose to resume her previous excitement about the prospect of being on such a ship. “Okay, I’ll take your word for it. Sign me up.”
“Consider yourself signed. I know Galago is due in Sydney tomorrow and you must have a few loose ends to tie up, so how about I have my helicopter meet you at Kingsford Smith Airport’s Executive Terminal in two days? Friday morning, ten am. Pack light; most things you might need will be available on board Helios.”
“I feel like I must be dreaming. I mean the last few hours have been a trip, for lack of a better word. Usually one can’t go from nearly being eaten by sharks to landing an amazing job on what I have to say is the most beautiful catamaran I’ve ever seen.”
“No dream,” said Christian as he playfully pinched Ula. “But I’ve gotta go now. I’ll see you in two days.” With that, a rope swung over from his boat. He grabbed ahold of it and swung back to his yacht.
Ula watched as the catamaran sailed off, at the same time stilltrying to understand what had just happened and how her life was about to change. Nearly the entire crew of the Galago was on deck watching as they’d heard what had gone on below the surface. Everyone studied the beautiful lines of the mega-yacht, with its clear, confident attitude, as it turned its bow away and sailed towards the setting sun.
