Meg: Hell's Aquarium (41 page)

His wife sits up next to him. “What else?”

“As I was falling, I said to myself, ‘you really screwed up this time.’ I remember thinking it aloud, as clear as I’m speaking with you. What does it mean?”

“Jonas, you went to bed last night worried sick about the Meg Pen, wondering if the tank would flood before you made the necessary repairs. Your subconscious mind is telling you something.”

“That I screwed up?”

“Or a major crash is just around the bend.” She touches his cheek. “Maybe it’s time to cash in our chips and get out.”

“What? Suicide?”

She smacks him playfully in the head. “The Institute! Maybe it’s time we retired. You know . . . get away from the stress.”

“What do you expect me to do? Play golf? I suck at golf. Golf gives me stress.”

“Monsters give me stress. After twenty-five years I’ve had enough. You promised me we’d travel one day, that we’d take a cruise to Alaska.”

“So we’ll plan a vacation. Doesn’t mean we have to retire.”

“Your subconscious mind says otherwise.”

“Maybe I just need to get the brakes fixed on the Lexus?”

“You think it’s a joke? Jonas, last night I was watching
The Tonight Show
, that damn R.A.W. group hired Lana Wood as their spokeswoman.”

“Who’s Lana Wood?”

“An actress. She was a Bond girl back when your hair was brown. Anyway, she showed footage of the
Jellyfish
shocking Belle and Lizzy the night they attacked the runt.”

“What! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You had enough on your mind.”

“Where the hell did they get the footage? I’ve got to call Tommy.” He grabs the phone off his night table—

Terry takes it from him. “Jonas, just listen. We have enough money put away to take care of our children and our grandchildren. The stress of running the Institute, dealing with R.A.W. on a daily basis, with Angel—it’s taking away what little time we have left. If one day we’re blessed with grand-babies, I’d like to be around to enjoy them. Both of us.”

Slow down. Life’s too precious.

He hugs her to his chest, stroking her long, silky onyx hair. “Okay, granny, tell me what you want me to do.”

“Release Angel? Were you standing too close to the microwave or something?” Mac stares at Jonas from across the booth, bits of his partially chewed sandwich spewing from his open mouth. “Seriously, J.T, are you insane?”

“A little louder next time. I don’t think the waitress heard you.” Jonas leans forward, speaking in a hushed tone. “Think it through. Even if we manage to repair the Meg Pen, Bela and Lizzy are growing way out of control. Now imagine them in five years when they’ve reached Angel’s size.”

“But releasing Angel?”

“Which poison is more lethal, releasing Angel to the wild or the sisters?”

“That’s like asking me if I’d prefer to be hung or shot in the head. Either way I’m still a dead man.”

“Hear me out. We don’t just open the canal doors and release her with some parting gifts. We transport Angel by boat to the Western Pacific then use the neural implant to send her deep. Once she’s back in the Mariana Trench—”

“Gee, that’s a real Hallmark moment, except for one thing, dickhead . . . what happens if she doesn’t stay there?”

“We use the GPS system to track her. If she moves near a coastline, we alert the authorities. But she won’t. We can use the implant to keep her away from the shallows and the whale migrations. So she kills an occasional gray or humpback. It’s a big ocean—”

“—and she’s a big fish . . . with big teeth.”

“What’s the alternative, Mac? If we do nothing, in a day or a week or a month, Bela will crash through the Meg Pen glass and flood the Institute, killing herself and Lizzy in the process while causing God knows how many millions of dollars in damage.”

“Or here’s another option: I take a harpoon gun and shove it in Angel’s neuro-implant, and we turn the lagoon over to the two sisters. After we seal off the canal.”

“Yeah, I thought of that, but I don’t feel good about it.”

“Think of Angel as Old Yeller. Old Yeller was sick, a danger to the family, so Paw went out with the shotgun and
BAM!
Right between the eyes.”

“I visited Ed Hendricks a few days ago in the hospital. I asked him if he thought we should kill Angel. Know what he said?”

“Let me guess, he said we should cut off her two pectoral fins and he’d eat them.”

“He said she never should have been penned in the first place.”

“Wow. Good for Ed. I guess having your legs bitten off makes one more spiritual. Be sure and share his sentiments with the families of the victims Angel devoured in McCovey Cove a few years ago.”

“I don’t want to kill her, Mac.”

“And what if she’s pregnant?”

“I’m not God. If Nature intended these creatures to breed, who am I to stop them?”

“Tell you what, you take Terry on a week’s vacation and when you come back—”

“Mac . . .”

His friend shakes his head, giving in. “By boat, huh?”

“Yes. And this stays between us. Someone is Stelzer’s department’s been feeding R.A.W. our footage. The last thing we need now is the public getting wind of our little plan.”

“About that plan . . . what kind of boat can hold a fifty-one-ton, seventy-four-foot monster?”

Jonas smiles. “I’m going to show you.”

Aboard the Dubai Land I
Philippine Sea, Western Pacific

Thunder rattles the gray dawn like a noisy upstairs neighbor, the baritone reverberations echoing across the dark surface, foretelling another rough day at sea for the ships’ two crews.

David Taylor lies in the lower bunk of the cabin formerly occupied by Peter Geier. He has barely slept, his mind restlessly debating bin Rashidi’s offer. He mentally rehearses the dive. Imagines the disorienting steep-angled descent as he spirals into endless blackness, the remotely operated barracuda leading the way, serving as a visual compass. Even in the swift Manta Ray the voyage to reach purgatory will take almost ninety minutes, assuming conditions are stable. Once they reach Maren’s lab, the robot will be used to trigger the docking procedure. Leading to the most harrowing part of the mission.

At 31,500 feet, the weight of the ocean approaches an unforgiving fourteen thousand pounds per square inch. Fish do not register the pressures of the abyss because the water moves through them, but anything possessing an air bladder—human, habitat, or sub—will implode instantaneously should its protective hull be compromised.

To avoid this, engineers attempting to reach the ocean’s deepest realms have always employed a spherical design so that pressures are distributed evenly across the hull. David has faith in his father’s submersible—the cockpit/emergency pod being an acrylic bathyscaphe. What worries him is the deepwater dock. An oval design is far less stable than a sphere, and the thought of the docking station collapsing upon his vessel is causing him serious trepidation.

Incredible water pressure. Dangerous currents. Faulty docking designs. And potential encounters with nightmarish predators. His father was right; it was a suicide mission, and no amount of money could persuade him to go—

—except there is another factor at play . . . he’s in love.

David knows that if he doesn’t go, Brian Suits will, and the captain will recruit Kaylie as his co-pilot. While David respects Suits as a commander, the war veteran lacks experience piloting submersibles, having logged less than one hundred hours aboard the Manta Ray. More important, the man has never dived beyond the shallows of the Persian Gulf.

David had selected Rick Magers over Kaylie as his co-pilot because of his feelings for the girl. Diving the abyss required complete concentration and he knew their on-again, off-again relationship could be a distraction. As his godfather, Mac, has told him on numerous occasions, “you don’t shit where you eat, and you don’t face death with a hard pecker.”

He could have requested Brian Suits at sonar, but he has seen too many military-types lose it in deepwater dives. The thought of having to manhandle the former soldier as he’s experiencing a claustrophobic meltdown six miles below the surface is too daunting a task to even consider.

David glances at the wall clock: 6:35 a.m.

With or without you, they leave in an hour. Dad dived the Mariana Trench in a one-man Abyss Glider. At least I wouldn’t be alone.

He also ran into Angel’s mom . . .

Asshole. You should’ve listened to your father and gone to football camp.

Lying in bed, he can hear the Japanese crewmen working on the upper deck above his head, untying the trawler’s lines from the tanker. His presence had been a topic of conversation among the men in the galley last night, the deck hands speaking in hushed tones about his Asian/Caucasian features. A few of the men had made loud references in Japanese, baiting him to see if he spoke their language.

He had not let on, taking the lessons his maternal grandfather had taught him about combat to heart.

Masao Tanaka had studied Samurai strategy as written by the legendary Japanese warrior, Miyamoto Musashi. Musashi had written his
Go Rin No Sho
(
The Book of Five Rings
) while living in a cave in the mountains of Kyushu in 1645. The Kendo master had penned the manuscript a few weeks before his death, intending it to be the ultimate guide to sword fighting. Hundreds of years after his death, the book was considered to be the most perceptive psychological guide to strategy, battle, and business ever conceived.

How would Musashi advise me?

He closes his eyes, hearing his grandfather’s raspy voice quoting the combat master:
There is timing in the whole life of the warrior, in his thriving and declining, in his harmony and discord. There is also timing in the Void. Before entering in battle, distinguish
between gain and loss in worldly manners while perceiving those things which cannot be seen . . .

David opens his eyes, the restlessness gone.

Twenty-four years ago, Masao’s son, D.J., had rushed into the Void, cocky and head-strong, only to be devoured by it. David’s father had survived the abyss and its terrors four years later because his mission had been pure—to rescue his mother.

If my motive remains pure and I’m prepared, then I can enter the Void and return, triumphant. That means I can’t do this for the money. It must only be to prevent Kaylie from making the dive.

His thoughts are dashed by the sudden knock on his cabin door. He rolls out of bed and answers.

It’s Kaylie.

“Brian told me everything. Are you actually considering making the dive?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re taking me as your co-pilot.”

“This isn’t about money, Kaylie.”

“Then what’s it about? I hope it’s not some kind of macho way of protecting me.”

“Actually, I’m protecting me.”

“By taking Rick? I’ve gone deeper than he has and I’m a better sonar operator on my worst day than he’ll ever be.”

“I can’t dive with you, Kaylie . . . not this deep. I need to remain focused.”

“You’ll focus better with a competent co-pilot.”

“Rick’s focused.”

“Rick’s off the wagon. He drinks before every dive. I’ve smelled it on his breath. As for protecting me, if you can’t trust yourself with me when there’s really something at stake, then what kind of future do we have together? Unless you’re telling me what we have is only sex?”

“I didn’t say that—”

“Good. Then I’m going. See you up on deck.”

He watches her go, wondering how Miyamoto Musashi would fare against a woman.

No wonder the guy wrote his book in a cave.

David emerges on deck forty minutes later, having eaten breakfast and purged his jittery bowels. The wind has picked up, gusts blowing in from the northwest at thirty knots. Six-foot swells rock the trawler, urging him to make haste and get the Manta Ray beneath the waves before he loses what’s left of his meal.

Brian Suits climbs down from the wheel house to escort him to the sub. “Big day. You ready?”

“I’m getting there. Why did you tell her?”