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the staff and found a woman wearing the aquarium’s blue-gray uniform. Pale and thin, she looked more helpless than the rest of us.
     
Instinctively, I muscled through the crush of gawking people. They rubbernecked. The surreal vision, Charlie Kelemen sinking to the bottom of the Giant Ocean Tank, paralyzed them. I cut left and dashed along a concrete path that spiraled to the tank’s surface. Five seconds had elapsed since Great Bangs’s first scream. It seemed like five lifetimes.
     
Do something, I told myself. A half step behind, Alex Romanov joined my pursuit. We had no idea what we were chasing. We had no time to think.
     
Charlie sank ever more. Over my shoulder I saw Romanov stop and spread his hands out against the glass. He stretched them wide and peeredup into the unforgiving abyss, trying to decide what next. For a moment he looked like he’d been crucified. But we needed more than a religious gesture from a hedge fund manager to save Charlie. I felt powerless. I started running up the path again, drawn to the tank’s surface. It was the only point of entry. It was the only place to fish Charlie out.
     
As Charlie plunged, he blinked in my direction without comprehension. Panic and waning oxygen wrecked his reasoning. I saw him look at Romanov, and just for a second Charlie appeared to regain his senses. He stopped thrashing. His face turned resolute. He wrestled with the knots that secured the cord to his ankle. But his movements remained jerky, his struggles in vain. I noticed plumes of red liquid billowing from his arms and the tops of his hands. They spread in eerie red-chocolate clouds that fouled the otherwise clear water. I wondered how he had cut himself.
     
It all happened lightning fast. I raced up the pathway, racking my brain for a solution. Romanov drew level with Charlie, who had grown frustrated from his losing battle against time and knots. He no longer controlled his lungs. My best friend, the man who had saved me, edged closer toward his own death.
     
     
 
     
Water can be so refreshing. The way it cleanses cotton mouth after too much liquor. The way it rinses off the salt and perspiration from 120-mile bike rides.
     
But water can be damning and unfamiliar. As water passes the larynx, drawn by alveoli panicking from the lack of oxygen, some victims cough or swallow the fluid. They cannot fight their natural instinct to breathe. The body’s desperate confusion, driven by the need for air when only water is available, leads to laryngospasm. The larynx and throat constrict, preventing any more water from filling the lungs. Or air. Nothing is worse than drowning.
     
So they say.
     
     
 
     
Charlie flapped his arms desperately with gasps of violent motion. Against the cart’s weight, he made no headway toward the surface. He floundered without hope. His wild, lashing gesticulations only scared the fish.
     
Some of the fish.
     
The Sand Tigers did not scare. Far from it. Charlie’s frenzy aroused them. The cloud of blood whetted their hunger. It stoked their lust for food and revived their visceral instinct to kill. The aquarium’s biologists still had no antidote for the vital fluid’s opiate impact.
     
A seven-foot Sand Tiger whizzed through the water. She lunged at Charlie’s arm, three thousand teeth crunching and snapping and gnawing even before contact. She hit. She turned and twisted, working to wrench Charlie’s limb from his body. Carcharias taurus failed. But that arm hung uselessly at his side. A new plume of blood poured from his body.
     
The crowd gasped. Someone shouted, “Call nine-one-one.”
     
A second shark, almost nine feet in length, barreled into my hapless friend. Clearly in pain, Charlie surprised me. He fought back, oblivious to the rows of serrated teeth. He bludgeoned the shark’s gills with his good arm. He threw hammer punches, again and again. The bloody spectacle, man versus shark, immobilized Romanov and me. We stopped running.
     
The