Meg: Hell's Aquarium (48 page)

“Well?”

“Shh!” Slabine hunches over, pressing his headphones tighter to his ears. “I’ve got something . . . ambient sounds.”

“Delta team?”

“Could be. Only one way to be sure.”

Three sonar pings reverberate through the sea. The sound waves disperse into the darkness, bouncing off of any object in their path—

—alerting every life form in the area to their presence.

“Got ‘em. Oh, shit. It’s not Delta team. They’re biologics! Five of them! Nineteen thousand feet. They’re changing course and rising fast. Jeff, get us the hell out of here!”

Jeffrey Hoch jams both feet to the floor and yanks back on the joysticks, launching their sub into a steep, vertigo-inducing ascent.

“Spiderman, this is Alpha team. We’ve got company!”

The sub soars past fourteen thousand, its pilot straining to maintain the vertical climb.

“Alpha team, how big?”

“Plenty goddam big!” Slabine yells.

“Don’t blaspheme!”

“Shut up and drive!” Slabine rechecks his sonar grid. “Five bogeys, three at least seventy to eighty feet long. They’re right behind us—”

“Stay calm, Marcus. You probably just attracted a school of Leeds’ fish.”

“Bullshit, James. These aren’t slow-moving filter feeders. They’re fast and they’re coming after us.”

“Passing eleven thousand feet.”

Marcus marks the depth and time with his stopwatch, tracking the creatures’ pursuit. “We’ve got less than thirty seconds on them. Jeff, once you reach the hole you can’t slow down, you’ve got to hit that mother doing thirty knots! Minister, are you hearing me?”

Beads of sweat pour down Jeffrey Hoch’s face, pooling behind his neck. “Too fast. We can’t pull out of the hole at that speed. We’ll get caught in the nets.”

“Screw the nets. You’d rather be fish food?”

“Alpha team, we’ve got a fix on your position. Jeffrey, your trajectory’s off-target. Come to course zero-six-zero on my mark. Three . . . two . . . one—”

“Mark!” Hoch adjusts his angle of ascent, the Manta Ray rearing back vertically like a ballistic missile.

The Minister’s arms tremble, each breath short and erratic. His exit from hell lies somewhere in the darkness up ahead, only his craft is moving far faster than his skill level allows, his faith in man—and God—pushed to its limits.

“Maintain your heading, Minister. You’re back on course. Mr. Slabine, activate exterior lights.”

The sub’s exterior lights flash on, illuminating a ceiling of rock and a black recess of water. Growing larger.

“Here we go, gentlemen. Access hole on my mark. Three . . . two . . .”

The submersible shoots through the vertical shaft of rock doing twenty-two knots—

—followed seconds later by forty tons of monster.

Spiderman’s voice grows excited. “You’re luring them up. Don’t let up!
Tonga
, stand ready with the nets.”

Disorienting outcrops of rock reach for them. Hoch swerves left. Veers back right. Every move requiring a deft counter-move, his reflexes falling behind, forcing him to—

“Don’t slow down!”

“I have to!” Easing back on both pedals, Jeffrey Hoch regains control of the sub—

—allowing the nearest ichthyosaur to close the gap. The prehistoric hunter whips its tail into a frenzy as it lurches forward, its carnivorous mouth snapping down upon its elusive prey—

—its conical teeth crushing the starboard wing.

Jeffrey Hoch and Marcus Slabine utter a short-lived scream as their craft careens sideways in a sickening spin, the Manta Ray smashing bow-first into unforgiving volcanic rock, the impact causing a two-inch-long hairline fracture along the cockpit . . .

WA
—
VOOM
!

Thirty-five hundred pounds per square inch of water pressure implodes the acrylic escape pod, folding it in upon itself, splattering blood and innards a split second before the ocean engulfs the debris field in a vacuous burp.

The alpha female swallows morsels of plastic and human flesh as it soars out of the chute into the Philippine Sea—

—swimming snout-first into one of the cargo nets! Spinning as it rises, it quickly becomes encumbered in the heavy binding as the other two members of its hunting party charge out of the hole, the first becoming hopelessly entangled in two of the nets, the second managing to avoid the chaos as it leads the rest of the pod of giant ichthyosaurs into open water.

Warning sirens blast across the tanker’s main deck, ordering all hands to their stations. Cables strain against winches as a life-and-death tug-of-war begins seven thousand feet below the surface, the hunters now the hunted—

—the exiled species suddenly free as Nature’s 210-million-year-old purgatory comes to an abrupt end.

It takes David Taylor twenty long minutes before he can ease the damaged Manta Ray into the upper reaches of the Panthalassa current’s vast embrace. Exiting the torrent, he slows the submersible, allowing it to drift. The low roaring
whoosh
of water continues to move beneath them, the torrent raging into endless black sea.

Kaylie listens over her headphones. “Sonar’s clear. How far from the chute are we now?”

He checks their position twice. “Wow. The exit hole’s forty-seven-point-seven miles due west, and that’s not counting the four mile ascent. Try the radio.”

“Delta to Spiderman, come in please. Delta team to Spiderman? It’s no good. I’m getting nothing but static. I think one of those creatures bit off our antenna assembly.”

Exhausted from the near-death encounters, David lays his head back and closes his eyes to think, the soothing sound of the Panthalassa current combining with the heat blowing in from the ventilation system to relax his body, sinking him deeper in his seat. His eyelids grow heavy, his body shutting down—

“David!”

“Sorry. I’m wiped out.”

“Here, eat something.” She opens a glove box, removing sealed bags of trail-mix snacks. She tosses him one, keeping the other for herself.

David shovels a handful of peanuts, dark chocolate, and raisins into his mouth, the sudden rise in blood sugar momentarily staving off sleep. “Where’s Maren’s charts?”

Kaylie reaches behind her seat, grabbing the two maps. She unravels the first. “This is a bathymetric chart of the Panthalassa Sea. I count twelve exit holes, including these three Maren highlighted in red.”

David points to one of the highlighted markings. “This is the hole we descended through.” He removes a slide rule from a storage compartment and checks their present location. “That puts us right about here, along the eastern half of the Panthalassa.”

Kaylie scans Maren’s chart. “Looks like we have a few choices. The nearest exit is here, twenty-two miles to the northeast.”

“That runs right into the Mariana Trench. No way am I going into that Megalodon nursery.”

She scans the chart again, measuring distances with the slide rule. “What about this exit? Granted, it’s eighty-five miles from here, but it’s due east. We could probably ride the current most of the way out, making it in half the time. Plus Maren highlighted it. I’m assuming that’s a good thing.”

“Or we could go back.”

She looks up at him, her eyes full of fear. “The ichthyosaurs are back there. Do you really want to go that way?”

“Right. East it is. Hold on.” David pushes down on his foot pedals, accelerating to twenty knots, building speed as he eases down on the joysticks—

—immersing the Manta Ray belly-first inside the roaring Panthalassa current.

Aboard the McFarland
Pacific Ocean

A tapestry of stars blankets a moonless night sky, the ocean, lead-gray and velvet, melting into endless horizon.

Jonas is seated on the starboard catwalk’s steel grating, his chest and elbows leaning against the guardrail’s lower rung, his legs dangling twenty feet above the hopper.

Below, the dark pool of seawater glows softly from its submerged occupant’s snowy-white hide, the only movement coming from the upper lobe of Angel’s caudal fin, each east-west stroke of its tail as effortless and steady as a metronome.

The scene takes Jonas back twenty-six years when Masao Tanaka’s ship, the
Kiku
, had drugged and netted Angel’s mother. On a night similar to this, Jonas and Terry had stood by the stern rail, contemplating whether to drag the captured Megalodon into the Institute’s lagoon, or drown it.

Terry was livid. All she wanted was revenge for her brother’s death. I’m the one who wanted the Meg kept alive, if only to prove to the world that it really existed, that I was right. That was a crossroad—a decision that ultimately affected a lot of innocent people. How
many victims might still be alive today if I had killed Angel’s mother when we had the chance? How many families would have been spared their grief? I could have ended this whole affair back then . . . no Meg, no Angel, no Belle and Lizzy.

Ten years from now, assuming I’m still around, will I look back at this night as a crossroad as well? What if my decision to free this monstrous pet of mine leads to my own death . . . or worse, the death of a loved one? What if she is pregnant again? How can I allow the resurrection of a species that was never intended to share the oceans with modern man?

Kill her! Do it now! Gut her remains and sink the evidence, then fly home in a week and announce she’s been successfully returned to the abyss. Seal the lagoon for good. Seal it so her evil brood never tastes open water.

Jonas smells the smoke from the meerschaum pipe a moment before he turns to see Captain Neal watching him from the forward deck. “Your friend seems upset.”

“Mac? What happened?”

“Don’t know. He’s in the bridge, speaking with someone on the radio.”

With a heavy heart, Jonas enters the command center. He finds Mac outside, standing on the catwalk balcony overlooking the forward deck. There are tears in his friend’s eyes.

“Mac, what happened? Was it Trish? The baby?”

“No.”

Relief and panic hit him at once. “What, then?”

“I didn’t trust bin Rashidi, so I arranged to get someone on the inside—someone to keep an eye on David for me.”

Jonas’s skin tingles. Sweat breaks out across his body.

“I just heard from my guy. David took bin Rashidi’s offer. He made the dive into that isolated sea. He’s missing.”

Jonas grabs Mac by the shoulders, his blood pressure soaring. “What happened? Tell me everything!”

“They sent David and another pilot down in one of the
Rays
to access a deepwater lab. They docked—”

“Where? How deep?!”

“Deep. Thirty-one thousand feet.”

“Oh, Jesus . . .”

“They made it inside. A short time later the docking station imploded. The detonation destroyed the barracuda. There’s no way of knowing if they made it out alive.”

The world spins in Jonas’s head. He collapses to his knees and covers his face, his rage blunting his sorrow, his body shaking with emotion.

“The radio’s not working. It could just be interference—”

“Get me there.”

“I already called for a chopper. You’re on a flight out of San Francisco to Hawaii, catching a connecting flight to Guam. I’ll have another chopper ready when you arrive that will fly you out to bin Rashidi’s ship.”