Meg: Hell's Aquarium (3 page)

As it moves through its dark underworld, the Meg’s ampullae of Lorenzini detect a strange object along the sea floor. Attracted by the faint electrical field, Scarface alters its course to investigate.

Its would-be-prey rests half-buried along the bottom, 12,145 feet below the surface. The rusted steel hull of the World War II Japanese destroyer teases the hungry predator, the diseased metal still producing an electrical current in the water.

Determining the object to be inedible, Scarface moves on, eventually coming to a rise—the Western Mariana Ridge. It ascends along the steep basalt escarpment, its ancient surface covered in thriving coral reefs. Gas bubbles percolate from the rocky formations—methane gas and hydrogen sulfide escaping from the ancient sea below.

At 7,670 feet, the ridge levels out, revealing a vast, deep sea basin, the geology of which predates the Megalodon species existence by some 200 million years.

The geological anomaly had formed 180 million years ago when Pangaea had broken apart, separating into Laurasia (North America, Europe, Asia, and Greenland) and Gondwanaland (Australia, Antarctica, India, and South America). The “slow rift” that had occurred between the two continental plates had created an expanding sliver of crust adjacent to modern day southern China. The stretched section of hardening magma, hundreds of miles long, had thinned and subsided underwater, creating an undersea shelf. While some of this shelf was subsequently destroyed due to other tectonic forces, the crust at the southern part of the West Philippine Basin had thickened, creating, in essence, a false bottom 7,775 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, concealing the ancient subduction zone that dropped to the ocean’s true depths another four miles down.

Over the next 30 million years, the magma spewed from this volcanic subduction zone gradually sealed up the shelf, isolating the habitat from the rest of the Pacific. Nutrient-filled currents insured a perpetual food chain, while the warmth provided by the region’s hydrothermal vents attracted a wide variety of prehistoric life to an abyssal sea that spanned almost five thousand square miles beneath the hardened magma shelf, concealing the true depths of the Philippine Sea.

Reverberations in the water excite the neuromast cells located within the Meg’s lateral line. Scarface alters his course, heading for the alluring current.

It is a hole in the sea floor—a black void—four hundred feet across. Warm water rises from the dark geological orifice, a tropical outflow mixed with methane gas . . . and something else!

The Megalodon circles the crater-like aperture, its nostrils inhaling the enticing alien outflow, a scent-filled stew that feeds information to its brain. Scarface grows excited, his mouth opening wider, the increased flow of water causing his gills to flutter even faster, his pulse to race. The Meg’s muscular keel, as wide as a sewage pipe, pumps the hunter’s powerful caudal fin briskly through the water as it arches its back in an involuntary spasm, its senses on fire.

Something is rising from the hole!

The ray-finned fish is ten feet longer than Scarface and eight tons heavier. A docile giant, the juvenile plankton feeder races out of the gap into open ocean—

—unaware of the lurking Megalodon.

Scarface drives his hyperextended jaws sideways into the startled fish, burying his teeth across the filter feeder’s pelvic fin, crushing its lower vertebrae.

The sixty-eight-foot Leedsichthys quivers as if shocked by 50,000 volts of electricity, its spasming torso creating a sawing action that assists the Megalodon’s serrated upper teeth to cut quicker and deeper. Scarface whips his mammoth head to and fro until his prey’s vertebrae snap off in his mouth, separating the tail from the torso in a cloudburst of blood.

Propelled by its heavy ray-shaped, forward pectoral fins, the prehistoric fish continues swimming up and away from the hole without its lower extremity.

His jowls full, Scarface allows his prey to escape, satisfied to continue grinding the two-thousand-pound bite of gristle and meat into swallowable pieces. Sluggish, its senses momentarily distracted, the Meg detects the presence of another creature rising from out of the hole—failing to distinguish prey from predator.

The leviathan shoots out from the hole, its imposing jaws—thirty-two feet from snout to mandible—slamming down upon the Megalodon’s pelvic girdle. Dagger-shaped fangs emasculate Scarface, snapping off his twin claspers before grinding the cartilage supporting the base of the shark’s thick caudal fin into mince meat.

Scarface whips his head around, his jumbled senses taking in the larger hunter as it continues rising majestically from the hole to circle the wounded Meg.

At 122 feet, the female pliosaur is longer than a blue whale and just as heavy. Behind its immense crocodile-like skull is a long, muscular torso powered by forward and rear flippers, ending at a stout tail. Incredibly agile for its size, the monster banks hard, performing a series of quick, tight loops around its adversary, ever mindful of the Meg’s fearful set of jaws. Possessing a keen sense of smell, the hunter’s sensory system has locked in on the steady stream of blood pouring from the Megalodon’s partially severed tail. It can feel the pulsating rhythm of the shark’s two-chambered heart, it can taste the hot, pungent blood pumping from the wound.

Barely able to propel itself forward, the wounded megalodon fights to stabilize itself against the circling predator’s powerful current.

What happens next is as fast and furious as it is deadly.

With a colossal thrust of its powerful forward flippers, the one-hundred-ton pliosaur shoots off into the darkness. Then, with the grace of a sea lion, it banks into a 180-degree turn and, circling in from behind, strikes the floundering Megalodon with its open maw, the force matching that of a charging locomotive hitting a stalled car.

A burst of bloody excrement explodes out of Scarface’s mouth as its internal organs are crushed beneath 22,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. The Megalodon’s stomach convulses and turns inside out, protruding from its cavernous mouth like a pinkish balloon as it regurgitates the undigested remains of its own partially swallowed meal. The shark lashes back and forth as the larger predator sets its jaws harder into its belly’s pliant flesh, the pliosaur rolling its head back and forth like a crocodile to quiet its prey—the rocking motion allowing its ten-inch, spike-shaped teeth to sink deeper into the shark’s albino hide.

For twenty long minutes the two titans remain interlocked, their bodies bathed in the warm outflow of the hole’s rising current—the Megalodon held sideways, suspended in a vice grip as it bleeds out and drowns, its killer’s fang-filled mouth clamped down in an unyielding death-hold, its locked jaw muscles tensing against its dying prey’s final throes.

Finally, Scarface’s once-rigid form goes flaccid, his massive cardiac muscle ceasing to pump. The pliosaur shakes the dead Megalodon back and forth several more times just to be sure, then whips its body into snake-like gyrations as it disappears back down the fissure with its young’s next meal—

—leaving behind a dispersing trail of blood.

PART 1

“NO AQUARIUM, NO TANK IN A MARINE LAND, HOWEVER SPACIOUS IT MAY BE, CAN BEGIN TO DUPLICATE THE CONDITIONS OF THE SEA. AND NO CREATURE WHO INHABITS ONE OF THOSE AQUARIUMS OR ONE OF THOSE MARINE LANDS CAN BE CONSIDERED NORMAL.”

—Jacques-Yves Cousteau

1.

Monterey Peninsula Airport
Monterey, California

Saturday

The black Lexus JX sedan is double-parked outside Gate B, the vehicle’s driver, Jonas Taylor, eyeballing the airport cop who has sent him circling the airport four times already. The sixty-six-year-old paleobiologist glances at his twenty-four-year-old daughter, Danielle, curled up in the passenger seat next to him. The model-pretty blonde, who works part-time for a local NBC-TV affiliate as a news reporter and weekends emceeing shows at the Tanaka Institute, is staring at the digital clock on the dashboard, growing impatient. “Almost four thirty. If his plane doesn’t get here soon, I’ll miss the evening show.”

“His plane just landed. Relax.” Jonas taps the steering wheel to an old Neil Diamond tune on the radio. “Anyway, Olivia can always emcee the show in a pinch.”

“Olivia?” Dani looks at her father as if she just swallowed turpentine. “Dad, the Saturday night show is my gig. Period. Now would you please turn off that annoying song.”

“I like Neil Diamond.”

“Who?”

“Come on, I’m not that old.”

“Yeah, you are. Seriously, Dad, I will pay you to let me change the station.”

“Fine, only no gangster rap.”

“It’s ‘gangsta,’ and get with the times. Ghetto is in. It’s what we relate to.”

“My mistake. I forgot your mother and I raised you as a poor black child in a gang-infested neighborhood.”

The airport cop approaches the Lexus. Before he can signal Jonas to move the car, twenty-year-old David Taylor steps out of the baggage claim exit, an orange and blue University of Florida duffle bag slung over one broad shoulder. Jonas’s son is wearing a gray Gator’s Football tee-shirt, faded jeans, and sneakers. He is fit and tan, his brown hair long, speckled with golden highlights from being in the sun, his almond-brown eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses.

David tosses his duffle in the back seat of the Lexus and climbs in. “Sorry. Plane was an hour late.”

“No worries. We just got here. Right, Dani?”

“Wrong. You know dad, he had to leave an hour early.” She allows David to kiss her cheek. “You look good . . . Jesus, Dad, drive!”

Jonas pulls into traffic, following the signs leading to Highway 68 West.

“You look like you gained a few pounds. Lifting weights again?”

“Yes . . . and no, for the last time, I am not trying out for football.”

“Sure, I know. I just saw the shirt and thought—”

“It’s just a shirt.”

“—because the coach called our house twice last week. He lost two wide-outs to injuries in spring training. With your speed—”

“Dad, enough! My playing days ended in high school.”

“Okay, okay. I just remember my playing days at Penn State . . . those were the best of times.”

“Please, that was half a century ago.” Dani ruffles her father’s thick mane of snowy-white hair. “David, what do you think of Dad’s new look?”

David smiles. “It’s as white as Angel’s ass. It was still gray last time I saw you.”

“Comes from working too closely with monsters.”

“I thought you enjoyed working with Angel’s pups?”

Jonas smiles at his daughter. “I was talking about you.”

Dani smacks him playfully across his head. “I told him he should use that hair stuff that gets rid of the gray.”

“Don’t listen to her, Dad. It makes you look more intelligent. Sort of like Anderson Cooper, only a lot older.”

“Good. I can use all the help I can get. David . . . about this internship—”

“Dad, we talked about this.”

“There are other specialties in marine biology. We just completed the Manta Ray sale with the Naval Warfare Center, thanks, in part, to your piloting demo. The Navy knows you’re the best pilot we have, and the Vice Admiral mentioned they could use a good trainer.”