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THE DIVE INSTRUCTOR knew he was in trouble when the shark began to circle. Seeing the bleached edges of its dor­sal fin, Hassan Salem realized this was an oceanic whitetip, a species with a well-documented and disturbing habit. Before it moves in for a kill, it swerves around its prey in long, slow loops that slowly get tighter.

An oceanic whitetip isn't as visually terrifying as a great white, the subject of most common shark nightmares. It's not as fast as the Galeocerdo cuvier, the ferocious tiger shark. But among expe­rienced divers, the whitetip is the one

to look out for, a clever and highly per­sistent killer, "the most dangerous of all sharks," as Jacques Cousteau wrote.

Salem peered through the glass-clear water as the predator cut circles around him. Its inside eye—black and shiny— watched him. The diver brought his camera up to his face as the whitetip swerved and came at him. Breathing hard, Salem raised the camera a few last inches and jammed it hard into the shark's snout while furiously blowing bubbles to confuse the animal. The shark rolled its head, then dashed off, heading straight for two nearby snorkelers.

Frantically, Salem reached over and tapped his air tank with the camera as a warning. The snorkelers turned their heads sharply, then swam quickly to a piece of exposed coral and clambered on top. Salem rattled out a breath. He spun around, but the whitetip had dis­appeared into the depths. Then Salem felt something brush past his scalp. The terrified diver ducked, but the shark shot away from him, straight at a Rus­sian swimmer who was looking down at the coral, unaware of the whitetip bar­reling toward her.

The diver slammed the camera against the metal. The sound pinged through the water. But the woman didn't look up.

THE ATTACK Hassan Salem witnessed was the second that day in late November

2010 at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. The next day, two more attacks occurred, and four days later there was a final, fatal attack on a German woman. Taken together, the string of inci­dents were unprecedented in their violence and bizarre circumstances. The outbreak caused havoc, closed beaches and temporarily crippled the linchpin of Egypt's multibillion-dollar beach tourism industry, send­ing economic shock waves through an already volatile Middle East nation.

Five days after the fatal attack a Lufthansa jet was cruising 30,000 feet over the Atlantic as passenger George Burgess put aside his drink, pulled out his laptop and began looking at the images of the victims. He studied the pictures, zooming in on the torn flesh and shorn-away limbs. He turned the laptop away from the aisle so passengers on the way back from the bathroom couldn't get a glimpse.

To anyone else, the richly saturated color photos sent hours before from Egypt would have proved hideous. But to Burgess—director of the Florida Program for

Shark Research at the University of Flor­ida Museum of Natural History and the most respected attack investigator in the world—they were the first pieces of evi­dence in a singular case the Egyptians were counting on him to solve, right up to then president Hosni Mubarak, who was at that moment facing the first wave of unrest that would eventually cost him his dictatorship two months later.

Judging by the extent of the German victim's injuries, she had died of exsan-guination, "bleeding out" into Sharm el-Sheikh's bath-warm water. Look­ing at the wounds, Burgess knew she hadn't stood a chance. If there had been a trauma surgeon sitting next to her in the water, he thought, he wouldn't have been able to save her.

The marine biologist was baffled. The pictures told him two species were

involved. Two different kinds of teeth were clearly evident—sharp thin ones like a mako's, which "cut people to rib­bons," and the sheared-off marks of the triangular-toothed Carcharhinus fam­ily, which includes the oceanic whitetip. This type of shark grips the flesh of its prey, anchoring its serrated teeth down to the bone, and then whips its head back and forth, literally sawing its vic­tim apart. Two different shark species, five victims and six days—that doesn't happen. The only recorded instance of the same shark making multiple attacks on humans was the 1916 Matawan incidents—the true story on which Jaws is based—when a seemingly deranged great white (or possibly bull) shark had gone on a killing spree.

"I knew immediately," Burgess says, "Sharm el-Sheikh was the most unusual attack scenario ever recorded."

One other thing was immediately clear to Burgess: The killers were both big. An average-size blacktip shark, for example, could gnaw at a human all day without detaching a limb. But here the sharks had taken arms and legs with a single bite. Eyewitnesses stressed the fury of the attacks. A Brit­ish tourist who'd been only feet away

from the German victim described a shark that seemed enraged. "The water was churning like I was in a washing machine," he told reporters.

The main suspect in the attacks— the strangely beautiful blunt-bodied whitetip—had shadowed Burgess his entire career. It had been the dominant predator in the infamous 1945 attacks on the men of the USS Indianapolis, which Burgess had studied obsessively, even interviewing the survivors decades later. And it had been the culprit in a terrifying attack described in Jacques Cousteau's The Silent World, the book that had caused Burgess to become infatuated with sharks as a boy.

The son of an Air Force officer, Burgess had grown up a water geek,

collecting specimens—pointy-beaked squid, barracuda, gnarly-looking freaks of the depths—and toting them home, where they'd sat in murky-wateredjars that ringed his room, which began to smell like a swamp at low tide. The boy had practically worshipped at the feet of one local hero, the great Frank Mundus. Crusty and self-aggrandizing, Mundus was the model for the shark hunter Quint in Jaws. "I would sidle up to him on the docks when he came in," says Burgess. "He was too crotchety to be much of a role model, butjust watch­ing him was enough."

Now 60, Burgess had become a vet­eran of shark-attack investigations, and he'd need every bit of his experience to solve the Sharm el-Sheikh incidents.

AS SOON AS HE STEPPED off the plane at Cairo International, Burgess realized how eager the Egyptians were to solve the case. "There was this entire entou­rage waiting for me," he says. "You can't move three feet in that airport without bumping into some soldier with a sub­machine gun." But soon he and the scrum of high-ranking ministers were running across the polished floor with no one daring to stop them.

SHARK WEEK

.-SHEIKH ATTACKS

SHARKS BAY, NOVEMBER ^O O Around two p.m., Olga Martsinko is swimming with her daughter when a shark strikes. After being savagely attacked, she swims toward a nearby jetty, pursued by the predator. Res­cuers haul her from the water. Two hours later, a shark stalks Lyudmila Stolyarova. Biting off her wrist, the shark follows her as she swims toward shore, tearing off her foot before she is pulled onto the beach.

RAS NASRANI, DF.CEMBFR I Q Near a floating pontoon, Yevgeny Trishkin is attacked, losing his left arm below the elbow and severely injur­ing his right hand. That same afternoon, Viktor Koliy is swimming with his family when a shark mauls his right leg. Koliy slams the animal on the head and strikes out for shore.

v a ,\ M a n a v n v r P m n r u <r ft A German tourist suddenly screams as a shark hits, churning the water red. A lifeguard pulls her onto a piece of exposed coral reef, but she dies within minutes.

A jet bound for Sharm el-Sheikh was being held on the tarmac. A hulking, silent man—a bodyguard, Burgess guessed— took the seat next to him. The preparations were impressive and a bit unnerving.

Burgess has identified four stages to these kinds of things: panic, denial, more intense panic and acceptance. The

Egyptians were now in stage four, but they'd spent a few crucial days in stage two, denial. The governor of South Sinai, who was responsible for Sharm el-Sheikh, had gone as far as to scuba dive in the ocean with his aides to show there were no man killers lurking nearby. And he'd ordered the ritual shark cull, sending

boats out to spear every­thing with a dorsal fin.

The governor had pub­licly accused the Israeli spy agency of sending the shark to Egypt as a provo­cation. "What is being said about the Mossad throw­ing the deadly shark [in the sea] to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question," he told report­ers, "but it needs time to confirm." Other bureau­crats suggested the shark's head had been fitted with a GPS receiver to steer it toward Egyptian shores.

The Egyptian beach tourism industry was in

free fall. Now they'd called in Burgess to make the attacks stop. Already the British tabloids were reporting that "the Mr. Big of the shark world" was flying in to Sharm to catch the killer. When he arrived at his four-star hotel—the one where the German tourist had been staying—Burgess grabbed some sleep and was up with the sun the next morn­ing. The hunt was officially on.

A shark attack investigation is run much like a murder investigation, with one difference: Burgess didn't give a damn about catching the indi­vidual killers. Before he arrived, a mako had been caught and exhib­ited on a local dock, a chain hooked through its mouth revealing rows of dagger-like teeth. "A sacrificial kill is par for the course," Burgess says. "If you want an eye for an eye, go ahead and do it. But these sharks can move 30 miles or more in a day, and you have a slim to no chance of catching the real culprit."

What Burgess wanted to know was what had brought the whitetip and the mako to (continued on page 108)

THE ANATOMY »/« KILLER

. volution has made sharks the world's most perfect hunters. Juliet Eilperin, author of Demon ' Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks (published this month), explains.

Sharks have a sophisticated sense of smell. They can detect a drop of blood in a swimming pool. Species such as nurse sharks hunt prey by sensing the differences when a smell hits each nostril. Researchers at Mote Marine Laboratory call it "smelling in stereo."

Shark skin is covered in denticles, which reduce friction by forcing water to flow in channels, allowing the hunters to move through the sea in near silence.

Tail shape helps determine a shark's role. The fast-swimming species (great whites, makos) have tails with upper and lower lobes that measure almost the same length, giving these sharks more thrust per stroke.

With relatively good eyesight, sharks are able to identify prey in low-light conditions, as well as see in color.

The jav of a shark are layered with multi­ple rows of teeth on the top and bottom. As these teeth break, spare teeth behind them take their place. The largest great whites can bite with up to 3,600 pounds of pres­sure. By comparison, an African lion can produce roughly 1,200 pounds of force.

In some instances the thickness of its skin hints at a shark's mating practices. Male blue sharks bite females fiercely during copulation, which is why the females' skin is demonstra-bly thicker than their male counterparts'.

Most of the biggest sharks breathe through a process of ram ventilation. They have to swim con­stantly with their mouths agape to get the oxygen they need to survive.

Male sharks have two pelvic fins, called claspers, that must be inserted into a female shark to fertilize her eggs. Recently, however, scientists have dis­covered that females in some species are capable of parthenogenesis, or asexual reproduction.

Many sharks have a row of small holes that run from head to tail and have tiny fluid-filled sacs known as ampullae of Lorenzini in their snouts and chins. They can detect the electromagnetic fields generated by a fish's beating heart, and they can navigate ocean basins by picking up the earth's magnetic fields.

SHARK!

(continued from page 52) Sharm el-Sheikh in the first place—and what had caused them to strike at humans.

"We had to look at the oceanography, storms, water temperatures, weather anomalies, changes in the fishing stock, salinity. Are the food resources going up or down? Is there anything here that shouldn't be here? Is there anything miss­ing that should be here?"

Burgess wanted to see the attack scenes. He jumped into the nondescript govern­ment car the Egyptians had provided, along with a driver and Nasser, a top Egyp­tian scientist who would be his right-hand man for the investigation. They headed north to the ironically named Sharks Bay, the first attack site.

Olga Martsinko is a 48-year-old emer­gency-services telephone operator from a small town near Moscow. A self-confessed underwater fanatic, she'd wanted to dive Sharm for years. And it had lived up to its billing. "I saw what I'd been dreaming about," she said about the trip.

On her fourth day at Sharm, Martsinko went for a morning swim with her daugh­ter and another tourist. They stayed well within the marked-off areas, away from the abyss where the reef dropped off into black water. Burgess studied the victim's postattack testimony, which she had given to local authorities:

"I was slightly ahead of the other two, swimming on my back, and my left hand suddenly felt something rough, like a kind of sandpaper with warts on it. The first thought was, Could it be a dolphin? I realized it was something really large and powerful. It left me momentarily, then came back and I felt its jaws sink into my arm.

" It pulled me down for a minute under the water, trying to shake me this way and that. I saw the bottom of the sea as I was pulled under, and I also felt that my arm had been severed. There was a sharp pain and then a numbness. At some point I came up for air—I think I was screaming."

Martsinko realized the predator was playing with her, nuzzling her body as he pushed it through the water as though it were a baby seal, "perhaps trying to tire me out before killing me."

She swam desperately for a floating jetty, where other swimmers pulled her aboard. The shark had ripped off her arm, torn off her left buttock and ripped away most of her right one as well. The base of her spi­nal cord was exposed.

Arriving at Sharks Bay, Burgess stepped out of the car into the 88-degree heat and ambled down to the water's edge. "Being there gives you a feel for the event, a vibe, if you will," he says. As he walked, the American scientist was thinking about a detail from Martsinko's testimony—the shark pushing her through the water as if she were a baby seal.

"Look how close that strait is to the beach," Burgess said to Nasser, pointing to a fast-moving current just off the coral reefs. "You can't tell that from the pic­tures." That meant that anything dumped into the strait would have been carried swiftly down, parallel to the beach. It could be significant, or it could be nothing.

Burgess flipped to his notes on the next attack. Approximately two hours after Martsinko was maimed, Lyudmila Stolyarova had come to a nearby beach in Sharks Bay. Despite a premonition of her husband, who didn't want to go into the water on the last day of their holiday, the 70-year-old Russian woman had been swimming for 10 minutes when she saw a dark shape in the water.

Stolyarova called for help. But there were no lifeguards watching from shore. Burgess had noticed that too. The ratio of guards to swimmers was way too low. And it worried him. From Stolyarova's testimony:

"It circled me. It was three meters in length. It just came straight at me and bit my wrist clean off... It came up behind me, biting at my back. But I could never prop­erly see it. I felt its teeth all over me."

Why did it start with the wrist? Bur­gess thought. Such a small, thin area of the body. Sharks go for the middle of the mass, the buttocks, the stomach.

There was one reason it could have tar­geted Stolyarova's hand: Perhaps people had been hand-feeding the predators. Burgess asked Nasser to check. Later the Egyptian scientist would confirm: Some dive operators had been feeding bread and cake to the sharks to drum up business. It was a telltale clue.

As the sun hit high noon, Burgess and Nasser jumped back into their car. "Ras Nasrani," Nasser said, and the driver headed north to the second attack site, a few miles up the coast.

The day after the first maulings, 54-year-old Yevgeny Trishkin was at Ras Nasrani, diving about 60 feet from shore, photographing the stunning coral and native fish flitting through the brine. No warning signs had been posted on the beach. No shark nets were safeguard­ing the swimming areas. The lifeguards watched calmly as thousands of swim­mers, including young children, waded into the Red Sea.

Trishkin, a career naval officer, was so entranced by the natural splendor in front of his lens that he didn't see the macro predator approach until it was a few feet away. He later recalled:

"It was huge. It went for my left arm. As its jaws locked, I struck some blows on its snout, and for a second it released its grip on my arm—only to bite my other hand."

Later that day a Ukrainian tourist, Viktor Koliy, was bitten severely on the legs. By the time he was dragged to shore, a full-blown panic had gripped Sharm el-Sheikh.

Standing on the golden sand, Burgess peered at the spot where the swimmers were attacked. Just off the coral reefs, fast-moving water cut a channel. "The flow regime is definitely north-south," Burgess said to Nasser, who nodded.

The attacks had followed a geographi­cal pattern: center-north-south. The killers had followed the general direction of that strait. But why?

Now Burgess wanted to see all the attack scenes—including the final, fatal one in Naama Bay—from the water. The Egyptians produced a 35-foot speedboat owned by a rich local investor. Burgess climbed aboard with Nasser. The twin engines sputtered to life and the boat shot southward.

When they reached Naama Bay, Burgess sent divers into the water and stared over the ship's railing at their black forms. Right under the prow of the boat was where the fifth victim, the unnamed 71-year-old Ger­man woman, had bled out.

"The shark kept coming up and tak­ing bites of her and then coming back for more," one witness had told reporters. "It was ghastly, like something out of a horror film," said another.

Burgess knew it had been horrible. Inca­pacitated, the diver had had no protection from a voracious predator. But Burgess had to visualize the scene from the point of view of the shark.

What brought you here? he thought to himself. Why Sharm?

The drop-off from the coral reefs to deep water was clear—a black line just a few feet away. But whitetips spend most of their lives in one place, deep in black water, often resting on the ocean floor, stacked one on top of the other like a cord of wood. Why had this outlier come hundreds or thousands of miles to find a meal?

Burgess shook his head. He was still coming up empty. After staring at the water for hours, he rubbed his eyes and ordered the speedboat to drop him off at his hotel.

As he turned in grueling 18-hour days, Burgess was at least spared one thing: victim interviews. They were the worst part of his job. "I remember every dead victim I've seen," he sighs. Once he had walked into a Florida mortuary and found a body lying under a sheet. The coroner had arranged the sheet to expose only the torso, but Burgess told him he needed to inspect the entire body in order to see the defensive wounds. He pulled the sheet off. Lying on the slab was a pretty 14-year-old girl. "I saw my daughter's face in hers," he says.

Still, he had to talk to the witnesses and fast. 'Just like a cop, you want to get 'em while they're fresh," Burgess says. Many of them were still traumatized. Hassan Salem, the dive operator who'd scared the white-tip away, was so frightened by what he'd seen that he told Burgess he couldn't imag­ine going into the water again.

And then, something snapped Burgess's head up.

A local fisherman was droning on when the marine biologist caught a word: tuna.

"Say that again," Burgess barked.

The translator rattled off a question in Arabic. The man replied. "He says, 'The tuna didn't come this year.'"

Burgess nodded. The Red Sea, he knew, was a tropical body of water without riv­ers feeding into it. Very little detritus, what biologists call "energy," to support schools or large fish. Plenty of species but not very high numbers. Which meant that any shark that came into its waters would find little to eat.

And now the tuna hadn't come?

Burgess sensed a plotline. "People were telling me illegal overfishing had been going on for at least 10 years," he says. Officials had overlooked boats taking tons of illegal fish out of the Red Sea. It had left the sharks nothing to eat. Except the foreign guests.

A local biologist brought in another tan­talizing clue. The water temperature had

been unusually high, 82 to 84 degrees Fahr­enheit, for weeks before the attacks. Some scientists believe spikes in water tempera­ture increase a shark's metabolism. Burgess believes that idea has credibility, but he has a more unusual theory. Call it the "Hot Town Summer in the City" postulate.

"When do riots start? When do people murder each other?" he says. "In the sum­mer, that's when. When it's hot and sticky."

Burgess believes sharks may have heat tol­erances. Go above them, and the shark gets irritated—some can even die from thermal shock. So the predators in the Red Sea were not only hungry, they were pissed off. Bur­gess was starting to set the scene. But the key question remained: What had brought these deep-ocean species to Sharm el-Sheikh in the first place? It was the domino that set off the whole chain of events, and he didn't have it.

Every day of the investigation Burgess felt the tension at Sharm el-Sheikh ratchet

up. The Red Sea resorts, he learned, are the premier vacation spot for Eastern Europeans. "You can live in a tiny flat in Vladivostok or wherever, but you save your whole life for a trip to the Red Sea," he says. "And you can go home and brag about it for the rest of your life."

Now Burgess was denying the tourists their lifelong dreams. As he walked the beach, he noticed bizarre behavior from the people he was supposed to be saving: Egyptian lifeguards were chasing swim­mers out of trie ocean. And the Russians were telling them to go to hell. Burgess had never seen anything like it. Even the Eastern Europeans who were obeying orders and staying ashore made it clear they were far from pleased.

"I'd go down to breakfast," Burgess says, "and the guy next to me would say, 'So, Mr. Burgess, when can I get back in the water?'"

Every time the American sped back to his hotel, a new crop of powerful people would be waiting—politically connected businessmen desperate to keep money flowing into their hotels and restaurants. One of them was a middle-aged man with the last name Mubarak. Burgess realized he was shaking hands with Gamal, a son of the man who was, for the moment at least, president of the republic.

It turned out that Sharm el-Sheikh was the president's second home. He had a mansion nearby, and his children had grown up swimming in the clear waters. "It's like Hyannis Port for the Kennedys," Burgess says. All Burgess needed was to complete his investigation and have a Mubarak eaten the next day.

As he probed, the Sharm el-Sheikh rumor mill was working overtime. That's how the next clue rolled in. Most of the scuttlebutt was about a mystery ship seen throwing dead sheep off the side, far off at sea, in the months before the incidents. Then, more than a week into the investiga­tion, the Egyptians came to Burgess with a critical piece of information. A sheep car­cass had washed ashore near the scenes of the attacks.

It turned out the ship, bound for the Mideast out of New Zealand with a load of sheep for post-Ramadan celebrations, had been tossing sick and dead animals close to shore. Burgess shook his head in disbelief. "This brought the sharks right to the victims' feet," he said.

The last piece of the puzzle clicked into place. The sharks hadn't migrated to Sharm from the deep blue—they'd been led there.

Now Burgess could relive the entire sequence of events, literally visualizing the journey of the oceanic predators. As the ship crossed the Red Sea, the crew was wash­ing down the decks daily, sloughing sheep excrement and dead animals into the water. "They left a chum slick all the way from New Zealand to Egypt," Burgess says.

It made perfect sense: The whitetip is a tracker. Centuries ago this shark had earned the nickname "sea dog" because of its habit of following sailing ships across the Atlantic. The behavior is ingrained— ships resemble large schools of baitfish.

The sharks can even stick their snouts out of the water and sniff prey thou­sands of feet away. On its way to Jordan, this particular ship passed near Sharm el-Sheikh—specifically to the north. The offshore strait brought sheep carcasses straight past the beautiful sand beaches, a virtual meat conveyor belt for sharks.

So a careless boat crew had led the white-tips and the makos from their hunting grounds to Sharm el-Sheikh. And once there, the scarce fish populations of the Red Sea had reduced them to near starvation. There were a few tuna to be had but almost noth­ing else. Once the sharks finished them off, there were only the humans, chumming the waters and even feeding them by hand.

Burgess called a meeting with the gov­ernor and his ministers. They gathered at a sprawling conference center where President Clinton had once conducted negotiations to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The marine biologist walked past an enormous photo of Clinton and other world leaders to a room where the gover­nor of Sinai and his aides were waiting. Dressed in his khakis, Burgess sat next to the balding, powerfully built official in his fabulously expensive suit.

"There's no for-sure in this business," Burgess told them. "But I have to tell you that the sharks will be back. That's the bad news."

The governor nodded slowly as Burgess explained: Sharm el-Sheikh lured so many tourists, shark attacks were going to hap­pen. As he laid out the reasons and what could be done to prevent more attacks, he tried to lighten the mood. "In a way, the sharks are paying you a backhanded

compliment," Burgess told the table of officials. This town had arrived. "You're in the big leagues now."

He handed the governor a to-do list: Ban illegal fishing, stop the sheep transports from dumping carcasses, get more life­guards and better stations for them, train people for the next time. Because there would be a next time.

As he flew back to Gainesville, Burgess knew the story wasn't over. In Moscow, the second victim, Lyudmila Stolyarova, was beginning to recover, but she was still frag­ile, her mind seared by what had happened. "I looked at my wounds afterward and seri­ously thought it would have been better if the shark had just eaten all of me," she says.

The larger story, the one that radiates beyond Sharm el-Sheikh, is almost as dis­turbing. By the most conservative estimates, every year humans kill about 5 million sharks for every one person we lose to them. This indiscriminate slaughter has brought the population of some shark species down to near-extinction levels. And yet, mysteriously, shark attacks rise decade by decade. That doesn't make sense—fewer sharks, more attacks. But it does possibly say something about what's happening in the oceans.

"I can't prove this now, but in 20 years we may look back at Sharm el-Sheikh and say it was part of a continuum," says Burgess. "Global warming, overfishing, increased human activity in water...."

It could be the shark is the canary at the bottom of the seas. According to this the­ory, the spike in attacks is a message, even a warning. And if that's true, what happened in the Red Sea in December is a pinprick compared with what's coming toward us.

"I KNEW IMMEDIATELY

IT WAS THE MOST

UNUSUAL ATTACK

SCENARIO EVER

RECORDED."