But the voice was gone. Only the monotonous waters spoke.
Regathering his energies, Remo made a decision. He would live for Freya. If for no other reason, for Freya. Freya was somewhere in danger, and he would find her. Somehow.
The shark was threshing more now. Remo kneed it. It huffed, expelling water from its bleeding mouth.
Its triangular head twisted and bucked. Remo held on. He caught glimpses of the remaining teeth down in its lower jaw.
If the shark ever caught him in its mouth, those few ragged teeth would still saw through his flesh like razors.
"You wanna eat me?" Remo growled.
The shark threshed, one eye coming into view. It was flat, black and inhuman. But Remo sensed a cold, predatory intelligence that saw him as warm food.
"You want to eat me, you rat bastard?" Remo repeated, angrier this time.
The shark flexed its stiff cartilage tail.
"Well, maybe I'll eat you instead."
Reaching forward, Remo snapped off a shark tooth. It happened so fast the shark couldn't react in time.
Remo plunged the tooth into the tough hide. It went in. Sharks were not immune to shark bites. They frequently cannibalized one another.
Blood erupted, dark, almost black-red. Remo placed his lips to the wound and drank deep. It was salty and bitter but it was sustenance. It was fish blood, so he could drink it safely. Beef blood would probably poison his purified system.
After drinking all he could stand, Remo reinserted the tooth deep, then ripped it straight back.
The tough hide parted, exposing reddish pink meat.
With quick motions Remo sliced row after row of lines, filleting the shark alive.
It struggled. Remo quieted it by squeezing until its gills expelled water. And reaching in, Remo ripped out a slab of shark steak.
He began eating it raw. Taking big bites and gobbling the food down. There was no time for the niceties of chewing it correctly. He needed the energy from its meat, its life force, in his belly. Now.
The shark tried rolling. Remo steered its fin against the motion. The shark righted itself. It resumed threshing and twisting, but ultimately it was weak from loss of blood. Its blood oozed out, a reddish shimmer on the surrounding waters.
Remo ate on, ripping out fistfuls of tough meat. The taste was rank. Sharks ate the trash of the sea and they tasted like it. So even though Remo's diet was restricted by Sinanju training to certain varieties of rice, fish and duck, Remo rarely ate shark.
As Chiun had once explained to him, "He who eats shark eats what a shark has eaten."
"Sharks sometimes eat people," Remo had said, understanding.
"He who eats shark risks being a cannibal by proxy."
So Remo avoided shark. But this was life or death. His life and the shark's death. It was the law of the sea. The big fish ate the little ones.
Little by little the shark's struggles became noticeably more feeble. After a while it just floated, still alive but dying.
And inevitably the fins of other sharks, attracted by the smell of seeping blood, appeared in the water.
They came from the north, south and west. At first they cut the water in aimless, searching circles. Closing in, they would rip red chunks from the shark's inert carcass in a matter of minutes.
And from Remo, too, if he let it happen.
Remo Williams wasn't about to let it happen.
Fuel in his stomach, his body temperature stabilized, he got up on his hands and knees. Then, balancing carefully because the shark carcass was unstable, he found his feet.
The approaching fins slicing the heaving swells were only yards away now. They knifed the water with cold intent. Remo could almost hear the Jaws theme in his head.
Selecting one fin swimming away from the others, Remo faced it.
The first maws yawed upward and lunged. It was now or never.
Remo jumped from his perch.
Landing on the solitary shark's back, he dropped to one knee, grabbing the stabilizing fin in his hand.
Twisting, he steered it away from the carcass just as the feeding frenzy began.
"Get along, little doggie," Remo muttered as he fought the shark, steering it with its own fin.
In the beginning the shark wasn't exactly cooperative. But it was only a fish. Remo was a man. Remo stood on top of the food chain. No shark was going to disobey him.
He lined up the shark's fin with the western horizon and established a course.
The shark fought naturally. But to live it had to keep swimming forward. Sharks do not sleep. Sharks cannot rest. To keep breathing, they have to continue forward. Or they die.
And since the shark had to keep swimming, it was just a matter of controlling the direction.
Remo kept the shark on course. Sometimes with the fin, other times with a hard slap to its sensitive snout. When it tried to dive, Remo wrenched it back, and the shark would forget all about diving and try to bite the annoying thing on its back.
After a while the shark grew too tired to resist. But it wasn't too tired to swim. It had to keep swimming.
So it swam toward land, with its gills submerged just enough to scoop oxygen.
An hour passed, two, then three. During that time Remo digested the food in his stomach and started to hunger for more. His body was burning calories at a fierce rate. Sustaining his elevated body temperature in the cold North Atlantic was taxing his Sinanju powers.
When he felt strong enough, Remo broke the shark's spine with a single chopping bow. It coughed, an explosion of air. When it slowed to a glide, by using only his index fingernails Remo scored the dorsal hide, carving out a fresh shark steak. He ate two. Then he stood up.
Somewhere in the offshore breeze, Remo smelled land. He had no idea how near it was, but he was ready to make a run for it, especially because the heavy swells were calmer here.
Stepping back, he set himself, charged his lungs and, with tiny steps to create maximum forward momentum, Remo ran the length of the shark and stepped onto the water.
His toes touched, skipped, touched again and kept on skipping.