Extinct (7 page)

At the very edge of the water the flippers were slipped on.

“Ready?” Alan asked.

Everybody nodded. Alan pulled his mask down over his face and fitted his mouthpiece into place. The firemen in the
Mako
looked toward the bank as the line of men stepped ankle-deep into the water. At their next step, water came to their knees.

Another yard, and the bottom fell away.

*   *   *

Like diving in a cup of warm tea,
Alan thought—the visibility was less than a couple of feet and cast with a brown murkiness at that. He felt the unseen tugs on the rope until each diver settled at the same depth. He leaned forward, having to lower his faceplate almost to the muddy bottom before it came into view.

A few feet farther and he leveled off and, moving at not much more than a crawl, inched slowly in the direction of the middle of the channel.

An eighteen-wheeler tire mostly buried in the mud materialized behind the slowly flowing, larger particles of sediment floating past his mask. The tire had been something the grappling hooks had missed. He passed over it. An out-of-sight diver to his right slowed, pulling the line in that direction, and Alan waited until the pressure eased, then inched forward again.

A glimpse of white ahead of him. He pulled himself closer to the object and found it to be a short section of plastic pipe.

He moved across it. Holding the rope in one hand, he found it easiest to progress at the slow pace forced on him by pushing off the mud with his other hand rather than using his flippers. He looked to the right and left, saw only the murky water stretching out inches from him, quickly becoming a solid brown curtain cutting off all visibility in a close-in circle all around him. It was as if he were at the center of a deep earthen well, cut off from sunlight from above, the water closest to him seeming to glow dimly with its own light. He slowly pulled his body forward.

*   *   *

Carolyn watched the circles of bubbles spaced a few feet apart, one circle sometimes lagging behind the others. At times a circle moved a couple of feet ahead of the line before pausing for the rest of the circles of bubbles to catch up. The men had been down for several minutes and weren’t even a tenth of the way across the channel. On the river’s far side, the firemen ran the bow of the
Mako
onto a mudflat. As they did, a heron suddenly flapped up from the tall water grass ahead of the boat and turned back over the marsh toward the Interstate 10 bridge in the distance.

Carolyn looked back at the bubbles. The line was stopped once more, waiting for a circle to catch up. With each of the divers having only one tank apiece she knew they weren’t going to be able to cover even half the area Alan had hoped.

*   *   *

Alan felt the string move across his wrist before he saw it—a nylon line the same brown color as the water. A trot line—with short strings hung with sharp, barbed hooks every few inches along its length. When first set out the hooks would have been baited with balls of stinking cheese or minnows to attract the big catfish in the river.

Had the search-and-rescue divers noted it? If a swimmer hung one of the razor-sharp hooks in his leg, he couldn’t break the strong nylon with his hands. The only way to escape back to the surface would be to yank the hook’s barbs, flesh and all, from his leg. And if a swimmer was hooked, he wouldn’t have much time to make up his mind to endure such pain before he grew dizzy from lack of oxygen and then would no longer have the strength to pull the hook through his flesh. Wondering if the line was still anchored to the far side of the channel, Alan pulled on it. It came easily toward him.
Easily,
he thought.
No resistance from bodies hung somewhere along its length.

Still pulling in the line, carefully avoiding each hook as it came into view, at the same time he had to keep moving forward to keep up with the other divers. Then, from out of the brown darkness one string trailed backward with something on its end. A catfish head, he saw, as it came closer to his hand, its body missing behind its ribbed, circular gills.

As the head slowly passed by his fingers, he noted its gaped mouth was large enough to place both his fists inside the jaws. The fish had been at least thirty pounds. The men who had set the line had caught it, but the turtles had reaped the benefits. The line still came easily. He released it and pulled himself forward to keep from holding the others back.

Clank!

Alan’s head jerked toward the knife clanging against a scuba tank. The rope went slack in that direction.

Clank! Clank!

He kicked his flippers toward the sound. He immediately lost all bearing with his surroundings—and slowed to keep from crashing into another diver responding to the sounds.

Clank! Clank! Clank!

The sounds came from above now.

And ceased altogether.

Alan broke the surface. Four other faces already bobbed behind their face masks. One of them, the young blond named Donald, held his hand out of the water and stared at his closed fist. The rest of the divers broke the surface.

The one closest to Donald suddenly twisted his face away from the clenched fist and vomited a yellow stream of liquid into the water.

Alan saw it now.

In Donald’s closed fist were two long, blue fingers extending from what was left of the hand of one of the teenagers.

“I … I…,” Donald tried to say. “I felt it under my hand. It moved. I thought it moved.…” He shook his head in dismay. “I … God,” he said.

*   *   *

On the bank, Carolyn’s eyes had knitted at the vomiting of one of the divers. She saw Alan look in her direction and past her. Julie was coming down through the trees; Barry, holding her by the arm, appeared to be trying to stop her.

All the divers stared at the couple. The men started toward the bank. The blond kept holding his fist out of the water, as if he clutched something he didn’t want to get wet.

Julie stared at the divers looking at her. “No,” she said.

The divers neared the bank.

“No,” Julie said again. Beside her, Barry’s eyes narrowed as he tried to see.

The divers came out of the water to the bank. The young blond seemed to hesitate, lagging behind, then came up beside the others.

He looked toward Julie and Barry.

Skip’s parents came a few feet behind them.

“No,” Julie said.

Alan kicked his flippers off, shrugged his tank to the ground and hurried toward her. Barry suddenly collapsed to his knees, and started sobbing. Carolyn saw what the blond held. Oh, God, no!

“NO!” Julie screamed,
“NO! NO!”

“NOOOOOO!”

CHAPTER 8

An ambulance backed into Carolyn’s driveway for the bodies. The attendants stepped outside with body bags, but stopped as they saw Mr. Herald standing a few feet away with the partial palm and two fingers wrapped in a handkerchief. The driver went back inside the ambulance and brought out a plastic garbage bag. He inserted what there was in the bottom of the bag and gently folded it into a square.

As the ambulance drove out of the drive and Mr. Herald walked toward the house, Alan held open the front door. Mr. Herald looked at him but didn’t speak as he passed him and went inside the house. Alan stepped inside, closing the door behind him. Jonas “Pop” Stark, the Jackson County Sheriff, spoke on the telephone that sat on the coffee table. A heavy man with a gruff voice, he wore gray slacks and a blue sports coat over a beige shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and kept fidgeting with the collar. He nodded at something that was said over the phone, replaced the receiver, and came across the carpet.

“So let’s go over it one more time, Dr. Freeman. Am I missing anything—bull sharks, this far up in freshwater, attacking in a pack?”

That had to be the case, Alan knew, and Stark did too, even before they had discussed it. The only other creature in the river capable of an attack was an alligator. Not only was such an attack so rare as to be almost dismissed outright, but there would have been only one victim held below the water and drowned. One of the boys would have made it back to the bank. And bull sharks were the only sharks off the American coast to venture into freshwater. “They’ve been spotted as far as two hundred miles up the Mississippi,” Alan said.

“They’ve always been here,” Stark said. “Lake Pontchartrain is full of ’em. A couple of people have been chewed up a little, but I never heard of nobody being killed. Hell, they’re all along the coast from Texas to Florida and I’ve never heard of nobody being eaten before. Why now?”

The question was an expression of frustration, not meant to be answered. That bull sharks had finally killed somebody was not surprising, Alan knew. While most people thought of a great white when they thought of a shark attack, any marine expert would tell you bull sharks were much more likely to attack unprovoked. Only their size kept them from being worse than they were. The largest ones he had seen around the coast had seldom exceeded five or six feet in length.

Stark must have been thinking the same thing, for he said, “They’re not big enough to take a victim in one bite. For neither Skip nor Dustin to surface after they were attacked, I…” He shook his head as his words trailed off. “How damn many of them were there?” Again it was a question born of frustration at bull sharks, normally solitary creatures, swimming in a pack, and what that pack might do now.

Alan answered as best as anybody could about creatures driven nearly totally by instinct. “If they’ve gone back out into the Sound or the Gulf, it’s unlikely they’ll stay together. But if they’re still in the closed confines of the river and come upon some more swimmers … maybe.”

The sheriff’s gaze went toward a wide window at the front of the living room. Outside the glass on the street, a tall, attractive brunette patted powder on her face as she stood next to the WLOX-TV satellite truck. A young cameraman with salt-and-pepper hair adjusted a tripod-mounted camera near the rear of the vehicle. In front and behind the truck, vehicles of all kinds were parked bumper to bumper up and down the street.

Carolyn said, “I want to go after Paul.” She was looking out the window, too. “But I don’t want to bring him here in the middle of all this.” As she spoke, a man and woman walked past the window, the man pointing out something of interest in front of him as they moved across the lawn.

“We’ll run everybody off as soon as we talk to the media,” Stark said. “So we put out the word—tell everybody not to be swimming in the river until we know for certain they’re gone.”

Alan nodded.

Stark added, “And be cautious in the Sound.”

Alan nodded again.

A deputy speaking into a small, hand-held radio stepped from the dining room into the living room. He lowered the radio to his side and looked at Stark. “The men are out of the water,” he said. “Didn’t find any more body parts. They’re wanting to know if you want them to refill their tanks and try again.”

“No,” Stark said, “they’ve taken enough of a chance.” As his face came back around from the deputy’s, he said, “Hell, Dr. Freeman, sharks shouldn’t have been in a damn pack. Are you certain they won’t go after somebody now—even in open water?”

“Certain?” Alan asked, and shook his head no.

“Let me go talk to the TV,” Stark said, “and then I’ll get these people out of here.”

Mr. Herald walked toward the telephone. “I’m going to remind Martha to be certain she doesn’t let Paul watch TV.”

“She won’t, Daddy.”

He lifted the telephone anyway.

“Alan,” Carolyn said, “I’m sorry, but after this I really don’t feel like going out.”

He nodded, then looked at the television set on the far side of the room. The volume was turned too low for what was being said to be heard, but the screen showed the brunette now speaking into the camera. The shot moved from her face and panned past the trees to the house, where the man and woman who had walked past the window now stood at the side of the yard. The man was pointing out something in the general direction of where the boys had gone into the water. He saw the camera and smiled broadly toward it.

The woman beside him smiled, too.

The television now showed a moving shot of the marshland. The shot froze in place and a graphic of a bull shark was superimposed across the tall grasses.

A warning was obviously being given.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—4:30
P.M.

Admiral Vandiver, his concentration evident in the tightness of his wide, dark face, studied an intelligence report open on his desk. He raised his eyes at the buzz of his intercom.

“Yes.”

“Sir, Admiral Kendrick, U.S. Coast Guard, is on the line.”

Vandiver smiled as he lifted the receiver to his ear. “Gus, you bastard, how are you? Your boys must have sunk a submarine for you to call me.”

“Something you’ll like even more, you old warmonger. They found a megalodon tooth.”

“Found one?”

“In the waters between the Keys and the Everglades.”

“Damn, Gus.”

“I knew that would excite you.”

“You certain it’s a megalodon tooth?”

“Unless we have a hellacious-sized white shark running around down here—and needing to brush his teeth bad, they’ve turned dark. It measures nearly seven inches in slant-height and evidently is in pristine condition.”

“Seven inches.” Vandiver calculated roughly in his mind. “I have a two-and-a-half-inch tooth from an eighteen-foot white. If the tooth you’re talking about is one of the larger ones from the front of the jaw, the megalodon could have been forty to fifty feet long; one of the smaller rear teeth and it could have been twice that size. Hell, maybe a hundred feet. Damn. A Miocene deposit kicked up to the surface, some deposit—how?”

“You’re asking me? That’s your field.”

“Damn,” Vandiver said for the third time. “A hundred feet.”

“Manual doesn’t exactly spell out standard operating procedure for what to do after finding a prehistoric tooth. I decided I could either call the black market or you. You won out since I still owe you a hundred dollars from that last poker game you conned me into.”