Authors: Charles Wilson
Stark raised his face at the sound of the helicopter sweeping up the river toward them. It flew so low he could see the face of the brunette from WLOX through its Plexiglas front.
* * *
The Sound bristled with charter boats, too. Anyone driving along Highway 90 between Bay St. Louis and Pascagoula and looking out over the beach would think it was one of those times when speckled trout or redfish swarmed the Sound, except for the fact that all of the boats were empty of paying passengers and were pulling thick single or double lines behind their sterns, instead of having fishing lines running from the ends of rods and reels.
The Gulfport Coast Guard Station also had their boats out. One of their forty-ones came slowly around the western tip of Ship Island. As Fort Massachusetts moved back to the boat’s left, Bos’n Mate Third Class Beverly Cowart looked past the blocky structure to a small sailboat, its canvas down and two little children in orange life preservers splashing in the shallow water between the craft and the island. They weren’t over a couple of hundred meters from where the foot had been found. Though the ferry from Biloxi was tied against the narrow, wooden dock extending out from the island and tourists walked in and out of Fort Massachusetts, the glistening white sands on the Gulf side of the island had been completely devoid of swimmers, only one couple, fully dressed, sitting in deck chairs under the shade of an umbrella and reading. But there was always somebody who didn’t get the word. Maybe transients on their way between anchorages who hadn’t heard any of the warnings broadcast by the radio and TV stations up and down the Coast. Cowart raised the forty-one’s loud hailer microphone to her lips.
“Attention, sailboat dead ahead. There was a shark attack in the immediate vicinity night before last, and there is reason to believe the shark is still in the area.”
The bronzed young man and the blond-haired woman, in bathing suits and lying on a blanket at the bow of the craft, looked her way. The man raised up on his elbow and waved with his other hand and nodded, then lay back against the blanket.
Beverly stared in disbelief.
The man turned his face towards the blond and said something, making a shrugging motion in the air with his arm, obviously discounting the danger. The blond glanced toward the children and then nestled her head against the man’s shoulder.
Beverly stared in sudden anger now, mixed with disgust. She jerked the mike back to her mouth.
“Mister and Miss whoever in the hell you are, if you’re not going to remove your children from danger, I suggest you at least get in the water with them and give them a fifty-fifty chance that the shark might rip your heads off instead of theirs.”
The two Coast Guardsmen on the bow stared back at Beverly. Several tourists coming down the walkway from Fort Massachusetts were now talking rapidly with each other and pointing in the forty-one’s direction. An old man at the end of the ferry landing nodded his head and stared at the sailboat.
The couple got the children out of the water.
* * *
“Broderick said the pressure was consistent with teeth marks,” Douglas said. He sat in a chair across the desk from his uncle. Now he held up his hand with his fingers spread and cupped like a claw. “He said when a bite closes it’s like your fingers come down and your thumb comes up—the pressure is exerted toward the center of the bite. But after he calmed down, he started backing off some. He said there were so many slashes on the hull that the semicircular patterns he thought he saw could have been formed by chance. He’s not going to go out on a limb for you, sir.”
“I didn’t expect him to. I knew we were basically on our own, that somehow we were almost going to have to be able to point the megalodon out before we could get anybody to believe. And, you know what, I think we have a shot at it.”
Douglas’ eyebrows knitted questioningly.
“Okay, Douglas, what’s the one thing we can say we know for certain? It’s that the doctors called their wives one night, then didn’t reach their destination the next night. From that approximate spot to where the boat is off the Everglades is about seventy miles.”
“Yes, sir, it had to be carrying the boat with it, playing with it like it was a toy.”
“Seventy miles,” Vandiver repeated. “On a north, northwest course. If instead of seventy miles we had a track of a few hundred miles in one direction we could get some general idea where we might look to try to find it. That’s why where it came from is important. The longer the distance it has come in one general direction, the more likely it is we’d know which way it’s headed. Isn’t that right?”
Douglas nodded.
“So I kept thinking about that—where would it have come from, why would it have left there in the first place? Something had to cause that. Are you familiar with subduction zones?”
“No, sir.”
“Picture the world as a soccer ball with its outside layered with plates.”
“Yes, sir, I know that.”
“Okay, there are places where matter is coming up out of the mantle to form new plates, and other places where matter on the surface is going into the mantle. Now, for instance, it’s coming up in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s called the mid-Atlantic Ridge. And it’s called ocean floor spreading. So the floor of the Atlantic gets wider and wider, spreading both east and west. So if it’s getting wider someplace, it has to get narrower someplace else. Well, that’s a subduction zone. That’s where a plate has collided with and is going under another plate, the crust going down into the mantle. The Marianas Trench, for example, is a subduction zone, where the ocean floor is depressed by the plate collision. The collision can cause earthquakes. So I was wondering if some of our seismic studies might give me an idea where there might have been some catastrophic activity that might have spooked a megalodon in the last few months. A longshot. But I realized a long time ago that if you start your mind working on something, sometimes it sparks a thought from out of nowhere. It did. I thought of another quite different kind of disturbance in the South Pacific—the French tests—and suddenly I remember one of my people talking about it scaring the hell out of a whale. You
are
familiar with the French tests?”
“Yes, sir. Generally.”
“They originally scheduled eight, but there was such hell raised around the world about the resumption of nuclear testing that they finally announced they were cutting the tests back to six. They detonated the last one this past January twenty-seventh. What they didn’t announce was that to make up for cutting the overall number of tests back, they jumped that one up to a hundred twenty kilotons in order to learn as much as they could. This was four times the power of their fifth test only the month prior. The end result was that they fractured the atoll where they conducted the test. That could be our big problem eventually. If the atoll continues to deteriorate, as some scientists forecast it will, and it eventually fractures into the sea, you could possibly have radioactive contamination of the entire fish stocks in the Pacific. Plutonium 239 can remain radioactive for nearly a quarter of a million years. Can you even comprehend that? The starvation around the Pacific Rim would be unbelievable—and essentially forever.
“But that’s for worrying about later. For our purposes now, the important thing is that the test not only fractured the atoll, but generally knocked the hell out of the floor of the Pacific surrounding the atoll. We recorded fractures in the sea floor as much as twenty thousand feet deep and several miles in length. And then one of my people talking about the whale. I went to the files and … Do you have security clearance for … Never mind. We had submarines there. Most of the world did. We might have bitched about the tests, but we would have been foolish not to take advantage of them to learn as much as we could.”
He lifted a tape recorder from his desk and depressed the play button. “Listen.”
There was a faint roaring noise, punctuated by what could best be described as dull thumps.
“This is a muted tape,” Vandiver said. “It would blow out your eardrums if it wasn’t. Did you hear that quick, shrill sound?”
Douglas shook his head no.
“It doesn’t matter. Nobody else did either at first. You’ll hear it again in a minute. What you’re getting ready to hear is the voice communication in one of our subs.”
“Still sounds like the world’s ending.”
Vandiver said, “That’s the sonarman on station.”
Several seconds of silence passed.
“What in…”
“Sonarman again,” Vandiver said.
“Like a … like a screech, Captain. Bearing two-five-zero. A few miles from the atoll, in front of the range of peaks there. Moving, sir. But I can’t pick up a screw, reactor plant, engine noises.… Yet something barely perceptible—high-pitched.”
“A whale?”
“That’s the duty officer next to him,” Vandiver said. “I think he’s pissed off the sonarman by insinuating that he wouldn’t recognize a whale. The sonarman doesn’t answer the question.”
There were a few more seconds of silence. Except Douglas could hear a faint breathing sound in the background.
“Russian, British, Israeli, no telling who else. Take us all together, we probably look like a school of sharks lying around the test site. Go to active sonar. Give her a ping. Let her know we saw her first.”
“The captain speaking to the sonarman,” Vandiver said.
A few more seconds of silence.
“Permission for continuous pinging, sir.”
There was a different tone to the sonarman’s voice.
“Permission granted.”
The surges could be heard, one right after the other:
Ping. Ping. Ping.
“Target’s running at … I lost her, Captain. She went behind the peaks. Slipped through a gap at full bore. I mean real speed … top end speed of an Alfa at full power. And, sir … still no sound of a drive.”
“A whale?”
It was the young duty officer’s voice again.
“Not with the damn echo we got back…, sir.”
“Listen, now,” Vandiver said. “It’s computer-enhanced.”
A moment later there came a high-pitched squeal—a sound almost like a baby’s shrill scream of pain.
CHAPTER 26
Douglas felt the chill still tingling across his shoulders as his uncle laid the tape player back on his desk. “This one recording wouldn’t be very definitive in and of itself, Douglas. There are people in this section who think it
was
a whale—that the shock waves reverberating through the water from the test distorted what was fed back to the submarine—even the reading of the speed. But I’ve been running my computer through every search I could think of. And I think I found where it happened again—sort of—a month later off the tip of South America. One of our submarines picked up the same real-time swimming motions, the same rapid cutting motions when the target turned in the water and disappeared in the distance. You’re not entitled to know how, but I can tell you the reflection wasn’t off steel, titanium, anything like that. And the reflection was the perfect size as far as I’m concerned. But there’s a caveat again as far as my people are concerned. I see it as an angled reflection off something fifty feet long or longer. They see it as a broadside shot of something around thirty feet—and are certain it’s a small whale. And I have to admit I have people a lot more attuned to the reflections than I am. But I can’t help it—I come up with what I come up with.”
Vandiver leaned back in his chair. “So if I’m not just wanting to believe so badly as to be seeing ghosts, we have a shot of a megalodon off the atoll, another shot off the tip of South America, and, we know for certain, a stop off in the Everglades. It looks for all the world like it’s been headed here from the beginning, and that it’s gone on into the Gulf now. If I had my say, I’d start an all-out search for it there right this moment. But I don’t have my say, and I’m not going to unless I can come up with something more than sonar and laser reflections no one can agree on. Short of it popping up in clear view of some freighter or fishing trawler, we’re going to have to come up with something else before I can go to the head of the Joint Chiefs and say, ‘It’s real.’”
Vandiver slipped a cigar from inside his tunic, began speaking again as he stripped it of its cellophane wrapper: “I think there’s at least a chance we
can
find that something else. I have to believe that the megalodon has been kingpin no matter what else is in the depths. It gets hungry, it eats. And I think that other big fish and people would appear to him to be more the size of lunch than a school of redfish. That’s what I think happened to the doctors. And I don’t see it stopping with them. What I want you to do is start making some calls. The computer can only spit out what it’s been fed. We know about the doctors’ boat, but we don’t log every Tom, Dick, and Harry who’s drowned or every boat that’s disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the Gulf. Sheriff’s departments along the Coast would. I want you to check on that.”
“Along the Coast?” Douglas asked in a tentative tone. “Sir, do you have any idea how many counties are along the Gulf Coast? You’re speaking of Florida through Texas.”
Vandiver nodded as he slipped the cigar in his mouth. “Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. No telling how many counties, and that’s before you cross over to the Spanish-speaking sheriffs.”
* * *
Deputy Fairley dipped a bucket into one of the rusty forty-gallon drums and lifted it out. He hefted the bucket to the rail of the workboat and dumped the thick blood and congealed matter into the water. Behind the wide craft, alternating dark stains of the beef parts and blood spread in a V-shaped trail.
“What we are really doing,” he said, “is probably attracting what bull sharks that
aren’t
here for sure now.”
“Naw,” the older deputy said as he dumped a bucket over the stern of the craft. “River current will wash it out.”
“Yeah, guess so, down to the Sound where they can all eat up somebody there.”