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Horror in the Red Sea

by David Moller

    Life seemed good to Martin Richardson as he lounged in the waters of the Red Sea. It had been a perfect, almost cloudless day and at 6 p.m.； the water, more than half a mile offshore from the low, sandy desert hills of the south Sinai Peninsula, was still bath-water warm.

    The wiry, 29-year-old six-footer was three days into a diving course taught by fellow Briton Harry Hayward. That day, July 23, 1996, he had graduated from routine exercises to some actual diving. Maneuvering among the clumps of coral in the crystal-clear sea, he had seen fish in blazing red, yellow and rainbow colors.

    At the end of the day, 23-year-old, fair-haired Hayward congratulated his student: "That's it. You're a diver now. Just another couple of deep dives and the rest is mainly theory. You'll get through it, no problem."

    In high spirits, Richardson rejoined the half-dozen others on board a 75-foot motor yacht, Jadran, for the 50-minute run back to the Egyptian port of Sharm el Sheikh. Standing at the upper deck rail, they spotted three adult bottlenose dolphins and a baby swimming nearby.

    Dolphins would often come alongside boats in the Red Sea and ride their bow waves. If the craft stopped, they would sometimes stay and play near the swimmers.

    Still clad in his swimming trunks, Richardson said, "Let's swim with the dolphins." Hayward and Dani Hermon, the skipper's son, joined him, but climbed back the dinghy and returned to the Jadran when they thought the dolphins had gone.

    As the yacht circled to pick him up, Richardson struck up a strong crawl to meet it halfway. Tired from the day's diving, he changed his mind. Why bother? Let the boat come to me. The whole point of travel is to take thing easy.

    After working in America for three years as a technician installing pollution-monitoring equipment in factories, Richardson had saved him enough money to take him on an extended tour through Greece and the Middle East and on, he hoped, to Australia. Now, happily at once with his surroundings, he trod water, lapping up the heat and the vast emptiness of the sea and desert.

    Suddenly, he felt something rip into the left side of his back and saw blood in the water around him. Again there came the shock of giant teeth ripping into his back. He yelled, "Shark! Shark!" Once the creature bit into his back, tearing the flesh.

    On the aft deck of the Jadran, Hayward heard Richardson's cries of anguish and saw him propelled out of the water up to his waist.

    Instantly, Hayward leapt into the dinghy tied to the back of the yacht. In seconds, he untied the 19-foot craft, started its outboard engine and was speeding toward Richardson at full power.

    When sharks attack like that, Hayward thought, they usually continue until their victim is dead. Once a shark smells blood, it's in a feeding of frenzy.

    As the shark moved in again, Richardson saw its rubbery grayish-blue head. He clenched his right hand and punched with all his might. But razor-sharp teeth fastened on to his left shoulder and upper arm, and ripped.
Desperately, Richardson scanned the watch for the shark, to spot where it would lunge from next. But he could only see the deep, dark sea. He yelled, willing Hayward to hurry. Please, God, don't let me die here!

    Ten seconds crawled by. Suddenly, unseen, the monster was back. Ramming against his chest, it sank its teeth into his right side, then came back to graze his lower stomach.

    Summoning his remaining strength, Richardson swam backward as fast as he could. Blood will attract the shark. Get away from the blood! But his blood was trailing him in the water. Frantically he kept pumping his legs. There could be more than one of them. They could finish me off as a pack.

    As Hayward closed in, he noticed a disturbance in the sea around Richardson. Then he saw the fin of a dolphin cutting the water by Richardson's head. The dolphins must be circling him； perhaps they're protecting him. “Harry!” bawled Richardson, now surrounded by a pool of blood about 13 feet across. "Get me out of here!" A final terror suffused his mind. My legs - the shark is going to get my legs!

    Richardson's arms were like lead as Hayward hauled him over the side of the dinghy. Hayward laid him face down on the wooden planking. Blood pumped out of Richardson's back, splashing on to Hayward's body and shorts.

    Hayward suppressed a gasp when he saw great folds of flesh hanging loose on Richardson's back. With the ribs exposed, he thought he could saw his heart, lungs and other vital organs, but he didn't dare say anything. "It's not too bad," he reassured Richardson, as he gunned the motor into full throttle.

    Back at the Jadran, they decided to leave Richardson where he was. Into the dinghy clambered the yacht's Israeli captain, 54-year-old Itsik Hermon. To stop the bleeding, Hayward and Hermon packed the lacerated flaps of flesh back against Richardson's wounds with towels.

    Protected from most of the pain by shock, Richardson was mainly aware of the whine of the Jadran's two 280-horsepower diesel engines as the craft headed full tilt for port. I've got to survive, he told himself. Please, God, let me get back to see my family.

    Slowly he became aware of suffocating heat. "I'm so hot," he murmured. Bottle after bottle of drinking water was passed down into the dinghy and poured gently over his head and shoulders.

    "I can't breathe," mumbled Richardson. Hayward wondered whether one of his lungs had been punctured. He got one of the oxygen cylinders from his diving equipment. But with the mask on, Richardson found it almost impossible to exhale. The cylinder was put aside.

    "I'm so tired," sighed Richardson, "I just want to sleep."

    "Martin, you must not sleep." Hermon's face was close to his. "You have to keep awake." During many years' service with the Israeli army, Hermon had seen a lot of battlefield casualties in a similar state of shock. He knew they had to stop Richardson from losing consciousness, letting slip the will to live.

    Hermon piled him with questions about his family, his brother and three sisters, about all the traveling he had done and the journeys he still hoped to make. "But now I just want to sleep," Richardson concluded.

    As Hayward poured more water over Richardson's shoulders, he saw that his eyes were rolling back into his head. He was losing consciousness. Hayward began talking to him about the diving course. "You're about the best student I've ever had. You picked it up very quickly, so we'll definitely finish the course one day."
Richardson grunted in appreciation. "How much longer before we get to port?" he asked weakly. Dani Hermon made a call to Sharm el Sheikh to alert them they had a serious casualty on board.

    Fifty minutes after the attack, the Jadran berthed and Dr. Magdy Zakaria, a slim, bearded 43-year-old slipped down into the dinghy. He quickly realized there was nothing he could do while Richardson still lay in the bloodstained water that sloshed in the bottom of the boat.

    Richardson was eased on to a stretcher, then hoisted on to the back of a pickup truck for the three-minute drive to the Hyperbaric Medical Center. Although the center, with its decompression chamber, dealt mainly with diving casualties, Richardson was lucky enough to have fallen into the hands of an inspired trauma surgeon trained not only at Cairo University Medical School but also in England, Germany and the United States.

    As Zakaria unwrapped the blood-soaked towels from Richardson's body, he noticed the look in the eyes of his assistant Frederique Dalifard, a 22-year-old on a three-month break from medical school in Paris. For a moment, he wondered if she would freeze.

    Wisely he kept her busy as he fed the first of three pints of fluid through an intravenous line into Richardson's right arm, then administered drugs to counteract the shock and pain, combat infection and help to raise his perilously low blood pressure. Zakaria estimated he had lost as much as 20 per cent of his blood.

    As she and Zakaria cleaned and bandaged his wounds, Dalifard reassured Richardson with a constant commentary, "Your injuries may look bad, but they are really not too serious. You're going to be all right."

    The shark had not removed too much flesh, except on the left shoulder and back. There, a patch about eight inches square had been destroyed where the shark had bitten through into the thoracic cavity, causing the collapse of one lung, and chewed off portions of two ribs.

    Zakaria now faced a major problem. He had installed a chest tube to drain off blood and fluid. But re-inflating the collapsed lung required a full-scale surgical procedure for which he had neither the staff nor the facilities.

    Richardson needed to be taken to a well-equipped hospital. The nearest was a new military facility at El Tur, 62 miles to the north. But with the Englishman's breathing capacity down to about 50 per cent and decreasing, Zakaria knew he would have to try to inflate the lung before he could be moved.

    Acting almost instinctively, Zakaria began to improvise something he had never attempted before. He grabbed the square, sterile nylon wrapping from inside the chest tube pack. With this firmly attached to the surrounding skin on three sides, he fashioned a makeshift flutter valve that would create negative pressure inside the chest cavity, allowing the collapsed lung to re-inflate.

    After 40 minutes of hectic emergency treatment, they were ready to set off on the hour-long dash to El Tur. In the ambulance, Daslifard crouched over Richardson, an arm around his shoulders and head. She continued to reassure him， "You are doing very well... It won't be long before we get to hospital... Dr. Zakaria is taking good care of you."

    Zakaria smiled as Richardson murmured, "At least I managed to punch the brute." The doctor marveled at his spirit. With those injuries, and so much pain, others would have died within half an hour.

    Richardson, exhausted, hovered on the edge of unconsciousness. Near the end of the journey he grew restless. "When are you going to give me something for the pain?" he asked.

    Zakaria explained that they already had, "but its effects are beginning to wear off." He didn't want to administer more painkillers because they might further suppress Richardson's circulation or breathing. "We'll be at the hospital soon. Then we'll give you a proper anesthetic, so we can patch you up."

    As soon as they arrived at the hospital, Richardson was whipped off to the operating theater. With their patient on his side, Zakaria and two other doctors worked on him simultaneously, one on the front, two on the back. It took them three hours to wire up his damaged ribs, repair the thoracic wall and close the flesh wounds with almost 300 stitches.

    By early afternoon the next day, Richardson was awake; hours later he was eased out of bed and into a wheelchair. By the following day, he was able to haul himself out of bed with the help of a length of bandage tied to the end of the bed. Determined to regain his usual fitness, he began gentle workouts, bending down and stretching his muscles.

    A week after his admission to the hospital, he discharged himself to fly home to Britain to see his family and to undergo skin grafting.

    The night before he left, he spent the evening on board the Jadran, sharing a meal and some beers with his friends under a starlit sky. With Harry Hayward he pondered the miracle of his survival. Why had the shark, probably an oceanic white tip, not come back to finish him off? What could have deterred it from its usual deadly pattern of attack?

    While Richardson had not seen the dolphins once he hit the water, Hayward remembered how he had sighted them as he sped to the rescue in the dinghy. "It has to be the dolphins that got rid of the shark," he concluded.

    David George of the Marine Biological Services Division at London's Natural History Museum agrees. "Dolphins regard sharks as enemies and can certainly drive them off, even kill them, by ramming them with their beak-like snouts. They are also generally friendly toward humans. There have been numerous instances of dolphins apparently trying to help people in danger, such as holding a drowning person above water."

    Though Martin Richardson accepts that the dolphins saved him, that remains only a partial explanation. What made the dolphins come back at just the right moment? He often wonders. God, too, must have played some part in sending them back to protect me.
　　　　

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