Meg: Hell's Aquarium (19 page)

Jonas sits down on the edge of the beam, allowing Fran to detach the cable from his harness. Lying flat, she feeds the line through the pulley before reattaching the cable to his harness, making sure everything feeds cleanly.

“You’re good to go, J.T. Remember, don’t drop the cable.”

He watches her retreat and speaks into his headpiece. “Jon, I’m set here. Mac, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Dr. Crazy.”

“Mac . . . nothing even close. At the first sign of trouble, you launch the Manta Ray out of the tank.”

“Define trouble. Trouble to me is the occasional bout of constipation . . .
that
particular trouble I don’t have at the moment.”

“If you have any doubts—”

“I’ll handle my end, Cochise. You just get your ass back up on that beam with Moretti’s cable.”

Mac is strapped into the Manta Ray’s cockpit, his sub suspended ten-feet above the Meg Pen’s eastern wall. Scanning the aquarium, he searches for the lead-gray back of the always-dangerous Belle. He spots her moving deep, heading for the northern end of the tank.

Mac starts the sub’s engines—

—signaling Baird. He’s back in the boom’s cab, lifting the Manta Ray into the aquarium. The harness releases cleanly, the sub belly-flopping in the water, twin engines pumping.

The disturbance immediately registers with Lizzy. The albino creature abandons her post above the downed
Jellyfish
and moves off to investigate.

“Now, Jonas! Jump!”

God help me.
Securing his mask to his face with both hands, Jonas steps off the steel expanse beam—

—plummeting three, stomach-churning stories—

—plunging feet-first into the water. He drops like a lead brick, the speed of his descent through the toxic blue world scaring the hell out of him, his eardrums popping as if squeezed in a vise. With the mask over his entire face he cannot even pinch his nose to depressurize.

His feet strike the hard surface of the
Jellyfish’s
damaged hull, the sudden impact spraining his ankle, his knees collapsing into his chest, driving the wind from his lungs. His legs sprawl overhead as he slides down the side of the sphere on his buttocks, tumbling to the bottom of the tank in a heap.

Keeping both foot pedals to the floorboard, Mac grips the two joysticks in both hands, his palms sweaty as he accelerates the sub toward the bottom—

—cut off immediately by Belle. The dark Meg’s mouth spasms open, offering a potentially fatal reflexive bite—

—that barely misses. Mac releases his right foot and jams both joysticks to starboard, veering away from Belle, registering a blur of white as the other sister charges in from above!

Mac banks hard to port, the Manta Ray’s smooth belly scraping the bottom of the tank before leveling out and soaring past Lizzy’s open jowls, doing twenty knots.

Moretti is treading water, the frightened pilot down to his last six inches of air. Having felt Jonas’s impact with the hull, he grabs a breath and ducks underwater, pressing his face to the interior glass, watching his employer and friend struggle to stand on the bottom.
Crazy mother . . . what the hell does he think he’s doing?

The blue world spins as Jonas wheezes into his mask, his wobbly legs fighting to stay upright against a swirling artificial current.
Twenty seconds . . . come on, asshole, what the hell are you doing?! Grab the line and get the hell out of here.

“Jonas, it’s Jon! Can you hear me?”

“Yeah.” He turns to see Dr. Stelzer staring at him from behind the gallery window, the biologist’s smallish frame made gigantic by the four-foot-thick acrylic glass.

“By your left knee . . . the cable!”

Jonas looks down. Sees the cable. Reaches awkwardly for it, everything spinning . . . and misses it.

“Oh, Jesus . . . no!”

Stelzer’s voice inflection hits him like a jolt of electricity. Regaining his senses, he reaches down and snags the snake-like cable in his right fist—

—as his eyes lock onto the albino predator’s reflection in the acrylic window before him.

“Now! Pull me up!” Jonas releases the eighty-pound weight belt with his left hand—

—as Fran’s right palm slams the winch’s lever into REVERSE. The spool reels in cable, dragging Jonas away from the bottom, away from the
Jellyfish
—

—and into the direct path of the charging ivory-white beast! Lizzy cocks her head to one side, her mouth hyper-extending open to take her prey in one bite—

—as Jonas’s left hand rips the release cord of his smell suit, igniting five hundred tiny explosions of putrescene that envelop his quickly rising body in a cloud of red dye.

Lizzy veers away, the sudden smell of death overwhelming.

Jonas clutches the steel cable as he rockets to the surface—

—passing the Manta Ray, now engaged in rolling figure-eights, the maniacal Belle in pursuit, her snout banging into the sub’s tail-like antenna, unable to catch the swifter creature heading straight for the southern wall of the tank.

“Aw, hell!” Mac jams both feet to the floor while yanking back hard on the joysticks, the sub racing for the surface—

—launching clear out of the tank. The Manta Ray’s belly skims the four-foot guardrail surrounding the Meg Pen and hurtles over twelve feet of deck before landing hard on the brick pavers, the impact jarring Mac’s back teeth loose. The submersible skids and spins another eight feet—

—before flipping wing-first over the edge of the lagoon’s northern sea wall, plunging into the deep Pacific-blue waters of Angel’s lair.

Suddenly airborne, Jonas is hauled upwards like a marionette on a string, his back driven into the beam’s pulley with such force he is nearly knocked out from the impact. For a long moment he simply dangles fifty feet over the Meg Pen, the
Jellyfish
cable held loosely in his right fist, his body pinned against the steel beam—unable to move.

Woozy, he watches the two sisters surface, their broad backs circling below like some perverse, animated
yin yang
symbol—

—until the dark one abruptly goes deep.

The image of Angelica’s demise hits him like a bucket of ice water. “Fran, get me down! Wait! Not down! Just a few feet of slack . . . only a few feet!”

Fran’s hand quivers above the winch’s control board.
Just a little tap. Tap it and reverse.
She hits forward then stop—

—releasing sixteen feet of cable.

Belle leaps out of the tank, seawater rolling away from her opening jaws—

—as Fran quickly reverses the winch, yanking Jonas back to the beam. The leaping Megalodon bites down on crisp Monterey air, eight feet below Jonas Taylor, who has managed to wrap his legs and arms tight around the beam in a bear hug, breathless—

—as Belle’s twenty-one-ton girth plunges back into the aquarium, barely missing the half-inch steel cable still dangling from Jonas’s hand.

The beam shakes as Fran races to him. Fishing knife in hand, she cuts loose the canvass straps of his harness and drags him to his feet. Together, they hurry back across the length of beam, the cable trailing.

Mac opens his eyes, feeling disoriented.
I’m still in the water? What the hell?
His eyes widen as he suddenly realizes the azure Meg Pen is now a telltale, deep Pacific blue.
Sweet baby Jesus . . . from the frying pan into the fire . . .

Shaking loose the cobwebs in his brain, he jams both feet to the floorboard, sending the sub spinning in a tight circle.

“Broke the damn prop!”

Blip . . . blip . . . blip . . . blip
. . .

He looks down at his on-board sonar, his pulse beating in time with the blips. Something immense is moving from the canal into the lagoon . . . heading right for him.

Angel . . .

Brent Nichols hustles his burly frame from the far end of the Meg Pen to the western bleachers bordering the canal, his breath taken away as he stares at the water, staggered by the sheer size of the ancient predator rising from the depths. Angel’s back is as wide as a three-lane highway. Her sheer-white hide lights up the surrounding sea with the luminescence of an iceberg. Unlike the frenzied movements of its offspring, the adult Megalodon glides slowly, in total command of its domain. Moving just beneath the surface, the shark displaces a river of current behind the sweeping strokes of its towering caudal fin.