Extinct (15 page)

In the Jeep, the ring sounded again. It came from the locked glove compartment. On the floorboard beneath the glove compartment, Alan’s sport coat, folded, was slid back far enough under the seat that it was almost hidden from view.

The ringing stopped.

A few seconds later it began again.

*   *   *

Douglas pushed off the ladder at the rear of the Coast Guard forty-one. A watertight camera hanging from its strap around his neck, a net-bag trailing from the hip of his flowered shorts, and the Coast Guard diver assigned as his diving partner following along behind him, he glided toward the doctors’ craft, turned upside down on the sandy bottom. The damage caused by whatever the boat hit was obvious from one end of the hull to the other. The tooth had been found about forty feet away from the craft, close to the remnants of the dead reef off to his side. Everything about the bottom appeared normal—it seemed.

But how in the hell would I know?
he thought.

A frown tightening his face around his mouthpiece, he kicked his flippers and glided out farther from the Coast Guard craft. His head moved slowly from side to side as he tried to spot something that would catch even his untrained eye, anything that looked like it might be caused by some kind of upheaval.

Yet the sandy bottom stretched flat in every direction. The reef, while dead, was like a solid, molded piece of concrete, no crack or other sign that the ground under it had moved.

He kicked his flippers and glided over the wide top of the reef.

Its other side was the same, no sign of a crack anywhere.

He turned over onto his back and, kicking his flippers slowly, moved away from the reef, getting a perspective from one end to the other. Except for the normal up-and-down flows of what had once been living organisms, there was no sign of any of its length being thrust higher or sunken in a spot.

The sand on that side was the same, too.

He glanced up at the shadowy hull of the forty-one as a four-foot barracuda swam under the keel. His eyes narrowing behind his face mask, he watched the thin fish with the ugly smile until it passed out of sight into the green veil in the distance, and then he looked back at the sunken boat.

It rocked slowly with the force of a wave rolling overhead. Above it the forty-one’s keel rose and fell. Douglas could see the white foam breaking on the opposite side of the craft. The increasing waves on the surface were strong enough to be felt now.

He looked at the sand below him.

Though the sea grass moved in rhythm with the rolling backwash from above, the sand barely stirred at all, only a slight rising and then resettling of the finest particles—the actions of waves wouldn’t have uncovered something as deep as the tooth should have been buried.

Now he felt his body pushed to the side and noticed a particularly large swell moving across the surface above him. The forty-one’s hull rose and fell sharply. The water around him grew dimmer. He turned his gaze back to the bottom and, kicking his flippers, swam farther out from the reef.

Could an upheaval have happened some distance away and then a resulting strong storm have swept the tooth to where it had been found?

How would he know?

A few moments later, far enough away from the reef that it was only the barest, hazy figure in the distance, and the forty-one’s hull couldn’t be seen at all, he began the start of a long circle, the other diver following along a few feet behind him.

CHAPTER 17

Douglas stopped kicking his flippers. He stared through his faceplate at the depression running from below him out into the distance like a shallow V-ditch cut across a sandy beach.

He refocused his eyes to be certain he wasn’t viewing some kind of distortion caused by the mask’s glass or an optical illusion caused by the water. He wasn’t. It
was
like a shallow V-ditch, but more rounded than a V. A wave above caused sand to slide down the gentle slope at a side of the sunken area.

Not realizing he had stopped breathing from the instant he had seen the depression, he suddenly felt the need for a breath. He took in a great gulp of the cool air, self-consciously glanced back at the diver behind him, and settled closer to the bottom.

The depression ran into the distance, so shallow it lost its shape in the haze of water and the surrounding sand and patches of sea grasses to its sides. A wave’s backwash caused more sand to crumble below him.

He kicked his flippers softly, starting along the sunken area. Its length clicked off in his mind.

Thirty-five to forty feet later the depression ended, narrowing to a rounded point. But he could see another depression eight to ten feet beyond the point, this area more easily discernible because it was deeper, maybe a full foot deeper. It ran in a different direction, at an angle directly across the sunken area he was above—like the line topping a T.

A swell sweeping the surface suddenly thrust him downward, then lifted him. A large section of sand at the end of the sunken area crumpled and ran like a miniature avalanche toward the center of the depression under him.

It was quickly filling in.

He stared at the newly formed loose pile of sand. The storm above, though kicking up waves high enough to have made him uneasy when he had prepared to enter the water, was nothing compared to some of the storms that would have regularly swept the area. The depression couldn’t have been here long or its trace would have already been obliterated.

He let his body settle lower, his flippers gently touching the sand at the center of the sunken area.

And his mind went to a new thought:
If there was this place, sunken, would there be another place somewhere else, thrust upward?
Upward enough, and from a deep enough depth to have pushed a tooth up from several feet below the bottom? A million years or more his uncle had said the megalodon had been extinct. Maybe the upthrust would have had to push up from several hundred feet below the bottom. He looked around him into the green veil of water, the color thickening into the distance until a dark curtain of green cut off all farther view. If a mountain range rose only a few hundred feet away he wouldn’t have been able to see it.

He looked down at his feet.

The toes of his flippers barely touched the sand. He kicked them gently. As he rose a couple of feet from the motion, the sand disturbed by the flippers swirled into a tiny dust cloud and settled back into the center of the trench.

Did there have to be a protrusion somewhere of great magnitude, or was he, untrained and unknowing, looking at something that already portended a much greater disturbance than he could guess?

His uncle was crazy to have sent him. Here he was looking at
something.
By the time he could get somebody else back to the area who might know what it might represent, the depression might already be gone, swept smooth once again.

He looked at the sand, still crumpling in rhythm with the swells passing overhead.

He looked back past the diver behind him in the direction of the reef, unseen from his distance.

Could the reef being dead have anything to do with something that might have taken place here years before? Corrosive agents brought up from deep in the earth by an upheaval that had settled now but left the tooth?

He shook his head in disgust.
How would he know?
Irritated, he caught his camera, turned where he faced back down the long depression, and raised the camera to his faceplate. A large swell rolling across the surface above caused his body to be pushed down once more. Another mini-avalanche slid down the slope to his side.

Something dark, barely visible, showed in the sand.

Black. Thin filaments.

He reached out his hand.

The thin pieces came easily loose from the sand.
Decaying plant matter.
Buried sea grasses. He dug his hand into the sand. More of the black matter was exposed, still held together in its former living fashion, but crumbling as it was exposed. He dug in another spot. More of the dead grasses.

He looked ahead of him along the trench. To each side the grasses that ran above the depression weaved with the action of the waves, but the depression itself was devoid of living matter.

But the grasses had grown there not long ago. He had no idea exactly how long—he wasn’t a marine botanist either. He had no idea how long it would take for buried grasses to completely disintegrate and disappear. But once—days, weeks, maybe months—they had grown there. And then been wallowed beneath the sand.

Wallowed,
he thought.

He looked at the long depression stretching ahead of him. Behind him was the smooth, flat area of undisturbed sand, and then the other depression, crossing the first at a right angle.

Wallowed?

He suddenly visualized a long, bulky shape lying breathing on the bottom, its body wallowing out a trench. The trench ending where the rear part of the thick body curved upward from the sand in a curve toward the tail—the tail sweeping slowly back and forth, digging a trench.

Now he did know.

And his heart raced. He suddenly became disoriented, looking around wildly for the direction of the forty-one. Just as quickly he reoriented himself and, barely taking time to motion to the Coast Guard diver that he was surfacing, he kicked his flippers hard and swam rapidly in the boat’s direction.

CHAPTER 18

At the point where the tree-lined, east bank of the Pascagoula gave way to the vast expanse of marshland curving back into the distance, the small doe fed on a clump of tender grass growing in the sunlight at the edge of the water. Her fawn stepped into the water and reached his head around in front of her to get at the grass. Pushing against the side of her face to move her head out of the way, the fawn stiffened his legs, and his front hooves sunk into the mud. Rearing to jerk them loose, his rear hooves slipped out from under him and he splashed sideways into the water. He kicked his legs into the air and his back submerged. Jerking his head back toward his mother, stepping out into the water after him, the fawn slid farther away from the bank. He submerged completely for a brief instant, splashed upright on his knees, his head straining toward the bank, his chin held up, and caught the slippery mud under his body with his hooves. They slipped again. He slid backward down the slope angling toward the center of the channel. The doe stepped farther out into the water and reached her muzzle toward him.

He was jerked backward under the water.

The mother’s forelegs stiffened. She tried to whirl toward the bank, but her hind legs slipped from under her and she sat sideways into the water. As she lunged forward, stretching her neck out for the bank, the mouth came out of the water behind her and grabbed her hips. Her thin forelegs kicking into the air, her head thrashing wildly, she vanished backward under the water.

A few feet from the bank the water boiled.

Bubbles rose.

In a moment the surface began to calm once again.

*   *   *

Why would the megalodons, known by fossil evidence to have once roamed all the world’s seas, have retreated to the deepest trenches and remained there ever since? Vandiver wondered. For that’s what they would have to have done; the only place possible they could have remained alive and their presence not be known.

Something chasing them from the shallower waters? It was unlikely that there was ever a creature that swam the seas that was so fearsome that the megalodon had run in fright. Maybe not a creature at all, he thought. Perhaps in the world changing from glacial to tropical climates a hole unimaginable today had appeared in the ozone layer. Maybe somehow the megalodons were sensitive to that. The last dim rays of the light spectrum could penetrate to around fifteen hundred feet in water—that might have driven them at least to those depths. Or perhaps a switching of global temperatures created something on the order of an all-encompassing, worldwide poisoning of the shallow waters in the same manner that weather triggered what would be termed a red tide today. Or maybe climatic changes caused great winds, creating huge worldwide dust storms to pollute the ocean’s shallower waters, sending the megalodon to the trenches where the deep waters alone would serve to dissipate the settling dust. Vandiver smiled at that thought—was the megalodon moving to the depths simply no more mysterious than an asthma patient moving to Arizona?

Then his expression became serious once again. To try to guess what caused the migration was useless. He knew that even if he guessed correctly he would never be able to confirm it. And it would be even more difficult to guess why the megalodon, after retreating to the depths, would have stayed there. Maybe it was better for him to concentrate his efforts on coming up with the reason why one might have suddenly moved up from the depths now. That it had happened before, and more than once over the last few hundred years, he would bet his life on. A buzz from his intercom brought him out of his thoughts.

“Dr. Tegtmier on line one, sir.”

It’s about damn time,
Vandiver thought, and took a deep breath as he reached for the phone.

“Admiral Vandiver here.”

“Admiral, the preliminary tests are inconclusive. I expected them to be. These kind of solitary items are nearly impossible to date with any great degree of accuracy without knowing the layer of sediment they came from. Often, in fact, when you hear of anything as old as a megalodon tooth being dated, the scientist in reality often dated the layer of sediment associated with the find. We’re sending the tooth to Massachusetts for radiocarbon dating, but that isn’t always conclusive on phosphatic samples like shark teeth. I’m only speaking preliminarily at this stage, of course, but there appears there is an outside chance that there is a degree of retardation of aging due to prior association with some unknown gas or element in the location where the tooth was—”

“What does it look like to you, doctor?”

“Sir? Look like? I mentioned we’re going to have to send it out for further evaluation before we can—”