The water fell away but the creature kept going up, finally giving Maria a clear view of it if only for the space of a heartbeat. The distinctive shape of the head made it very clear that this thing was a hammerhead shark, but the size of it was unlike anything she had ever thought possible for the species. In those few seconds she had to assess the shark, she guessed that her earlier estimate of its length was wrong. From nose to tail, this thing had to be around forty feet, comparable to a whale shark. Instead of the blue or gray color typical in most sharks this one had brown mottled skin. It also had its mouth wide open.
No one had a chance to scream or cry out or even try to look away. The shark’s jaws closed on Murphy’s hip, ripping him almost in half with just that one bite. Even from this distance, Maria could see his blood spurting and completely coating the shark’s t-shaped head.
Then gravity finally took over again. The shark dropped back to the water at a slight sideward angle, causing an enormous splash that sent shockwaves through the teaming sharks. As though that was a cue they had been waiting for, all of the other sharks disappeared below the surface, the water becoming calm as they vanished. The enormous hammerhead’s dorsal fin could still be seen above the water for a few more blinks before it dropped below the surface as well. The Zodiac hit the water last, and with that once again the ocean looked as it should be.
The entire incident, from the explosion in the Cameron’s engine room to the giant hammerhead vanishing, had only lasted about five minutes.
Maria stood frozen in place. She couldn’t speak. What even could she say? From behind her, though, Vandergraf did not have the same problem.
“Gary, please tell me you got that on camera,” he said quietly.
Maria turned to see Gary, just as shell-shocked as her, with the camera still up to his face. He lowered the camera and, without even closing his slack-jawed mouth, nodded that he had indeed.
9
“What the hell… what the hell… WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!”
Gutierrez’s voice as he ran up next to her finally broke Maria out of her stupor. Monica followed close behind.
“What? What was it?” Monica asked. “I didn’t see.”
Maria didn’t have the slightest clue how to answer that. And giving the colossal hammerhead a name or trying to study it was the last thing they needed to do on a very long list.
“We don’t have time to talk about it,” Maria said. “It might be back and we need to get as many people onto the Cameron as we possibly can before…” Except at the moment she wasn’t sure what she thought would happen next. The hundreds of sharks and their one freakish relative had disappeared just as quickly as they appeared. That behavior made just as little sense as anything they had been doing before that. So she couldn’t predict whether they were really gone or for how long. She just knew they needed to take advantage of this moment of relative peace for however long they had it.
She suddenly remembered that she still had the walkie-talkie in one hand and the binoculars in the other. “Cindy?” she asked the walkie. “Cindy, are you still there?”
There wasn’t any response.
“Cindy, please tell me nothing happened to you guys.”
For several seconds the silence continued. Then it was broken as the walkie-talkie squawked, “Did you fucking see that?”
“I saw. Continue with rescue operations and move it. Direct all the life rafts you see to get to the Cameron.” She paused, still taking in what she had just seen. “Please hurry. It doesn’t look like the Zodiac is going to be any kind of defense against that thing.”
There was a sound that might have been Simon snatching the walkie from Cindy’s hands. “Oh gee, you think?” There was a distinct note of manic panic in Simon’s voice, but Maria could see their Zodiac as it started moving again.
“Gutierrez and Boleau, both of you get back to the engines now. We need to get the hell out of here yesterday.”
“What?” Monica continued asking as Gutierrez pulled her back inside. “Would somebody please tell me what’s out there?”
Gutierrez babbled on as they went in. It sounded like all he had seen was that last fleeting glimpse of the ridiculously large dorsal fin, but that was enough to scare the hell out of him.
“It’s a fair question,” Vandergraf asked. All signs of his earlier cockiness were gone, replaced by a grim, serious expression. “What is out there?”
Maria used the binoculars to see the place where the hammerhead had gone back below the water, then set them down on the deck. “Survivors. Come on, you two. We’re going out there.”
Just as she had suspected, neither of them moved. “Out, uh, out there?” Vandergraf asked.
“No, we’re just going to rescue the people that are here on the deck. Of course out there.”
“You did just see the same thing we did, right?” Gary asked. “If you somehow missed it, I can show you the footage again.”
The thought of watching what had happened to Murphy again made her queasy. She hadn’t liked the guy even before she had realized he was some kind of eco-terrorist, but that didn’t mean she would have wished that fate on anyone. Which was exactly why she needed to talk some sense into these two and get out on the water fast.
“Whatever the hell caused all the sharks to act like that looks like it’s stopped for now. I highly doubt it’s going to stay that way for long. I’m going out there with or without you, but I’m going to have problems if I’m doing it just by myself. If there’s still people in the water when the sharks come back and you could have done something to stop it, are either of you really going to be able to live with yourself?”
Gary was the first one to take a deep breath and nod his head. “Okay. What do you need me to do?”
“You can start by putting down that God-damned camera. If you try to take it with us, it’s only going to get in the way.” She looked at Vandergraf. “And you?”
It took him more time, but he eventually silently nodded as well.
Maria got a couple of oars and, with a lot of reluctance on everyone’s part, the three of them got in the emergency life raft and pushed off from the Cameron. She kept in touch with the Gutsdorfs to make sure they were all right, but instead of going toward them and survivors of the Tetsuo Maru she pointed Vandergraf and Gary in the direction of Murphy and Mercer’s Zodiac.
“Oh hell no,” Gary said.
“Murphy may be dead but Mercer still seems to be alive. We can’t just leave her floating out to sea.”
“Now that the camera’s not rolling I have no problem saying this,” Vandergraf said, “but why the hell not? We may not know how many made it off the Tetsuo Maru yet but it probably wasn’t the whole crew. Some of them probably drowned and others were killed by the sharks. She’s a murderer.”
She thought about taking the high road and saying that she didn’t deserve this kind of fate or that she needed to be put in front of a jury for what she had done, except Maria wasn’t sure she was willing to risk her life on the open water just for that. Instead her reasoning was much more pragmatic. “She’s a murderer who had an escape plan. We need to know what it was just in case Gutierrez and Boleau can’t fix the engines.”
“But the Navy’s coming, right?” Gary asked. “You said they were going to show up not long into the encounter with the Tetsuo Maru anyway, and Dr. Hoyt was trying to get them to come sooner.”
“Maybe, but Mercer still might have information that’s important. Especially since I don’t think she and Murphy were working alone.”
Vandergraf raised an eyebrow as he realized what she was getting at. “You don’t think it’s just us out here on the sea right now, do you?”
“They were headed farther out to sea. There’s no way that makes any sense unless they were expecting someone to pick them up.”
They rowed as fast as they could despite every dip of the oars in the water making Maria nervous. Given the timing, it seemed likely that the sharks and their gigantic f
riend had been agitated by the explosion and the sinking ship. For all she knew, every little disturbance on the surface could be telling the hammerheads that the raft was another suitable target. The closer they got to the abandoned Zodiac the more nervous Maria became. What would happen if the super-hammerhead decided to pop up right now? Would they get a warning or would its jaws crush all three of them before they even knew they were in trouble? Given the behavior she had seen from the Cameron, she thought they would at least see its dorsal fin, although that still wouldn’t be ample warning given how fast it had been.
They could see Diane Mercer floating in the water for a full minute before they reached her. Given how still she was Maria was afraid the girl had died, possibly from the shock to her system or some wound that Maria hadn’t been able to see with the binoculars. As they approached, though, Mercer began flailing like she had just now decided that she was going to drown despite the life vest that had kept her alive this far still firmly on her body.
“Stop flailing,” Maria called out to her. “You might attract the sharks again.”
Mercer immediately stopped moving. They were close enough now that Maria could clearly see the look of abject terror on her face. Maria tried not to take too much pleasure in that.
Once they were close enough she had Vandergraf and Gary help her haul Mercer into the raft. After she was in Gary “accidentally” smacked her in the head with his oar as he went to put it back in the water. He looked disappointed that she was already too dazed to notice or comment on it.
“Oh god,” Mercer said through her quivering lips and chattering teeth. “Oh god, thank you. Thank you thank you thank you.”
“You shut your damned mouth right now or I’m going to shut it for you,” Maria said. Mercer looked taken aback by this and turned to the other two as though she expected them to come to her defense. Maria couldn’t help but notice the way Vandergraf unconsciously brought his legs together tighter. He was probably happy that Maria’s wrath was focused on someone else this time.
“So we’ve got her,” Gary said. “Now what?”
“We’ll want the Zodiac, too,” she said. “From here it looks a little deflated, but it’s not completely flat, so we still might be able to use if in a pinch. And then…” She looked back in the direction of where the Tetsuo Maru had once been. Large amounts of flotsam were bobbing in water but the ship itself had by now completely vanished into the sea. Most of the lifeboats looked like they were headed to the Cameron and Maria couldn’t see any more people flailing their arms for help. Either they had drowned, been eaten, or rescued by now. There wasn’t much else they could do out here.
“And then we grill this bitch,” Maria finished. Mercer, already a bluish-pale from her time in the cold water, somehow managed to look even paler.
Maria directed them to start rowing for the Zodiac, yet she called for them to stop before they’d taken more than two strokes. Farther out she could see fins again.
“Oh shit,” Vandergraf said. “They’re going to come for us. They’re going to—”
“Wait,” Maria said, holding up her hand. Something about the sharks’ movements looked different this time. When she’d first seen the fins pop up and head for Murphy and Mercer’s Zodiac, there had been something undeniably predatory about the motions. This was different. She saw four dorsal fins cutting through the sea, yet they weren’t in any kind of formation she’d ever seen. They sliced through the space between them and the Zodiac before vanishing back below. Maria got the impression that the others in the raft wanted her to give the okay for them to go forward again, but she didn’t. She waited, starting to form an idea of what was going on and knowing that if she watched long enough it could be confirmed or denied. After about half a minute it was confirmed. Four more dorsal fins appeared right about where they’d first seen them. They went through the water between the two rafts and then vanished again.
“Go forward toward the Zodiac,” Maria said quietly. “But do it slowly. Very, very slowly.”
“I don’t understand,” Vandergraf said.
“I’m not one hundred percent certain I am either,” Maria said. “But I’ve got a suspicion.”
The three of them (since Mercer was still too shaky to be any help) dipped their paddles in the water and inched forward. At this rate it would take them forever to reach the Zodiac, but by now Maria suspected they weren’t going to reach it one way or the other.
Again the four fins appeared. As the emergency raft got closer to them, the sharks swam in a more agitated manner, splashing the water as though in a show of force. No, Maria realized. Not just as though. Exactly like a show of force. It was a blatant attempt to scare them back. Hammerhead sharks shouldn’t have been able to make that kind of intelligent decision. Then again, they shouldn’t have been swimming single file in a patrol between them and the Zodiac. Because that was exactly what they were doing. The sharks were guarding them.
“Just keep moving,” Maria said. “Maybe a little faster now. Let’s see if—”
They didn’t have time to see if anything. The water exploded in front of them as something enormous once more breached the surface. This time, however, it wasn’t with quite the same showmanship that it had first attacked the Zodiac and killed Murphy. Maria only got the quickest glimpse of the shark’s deep brown head as it came up and latched its teeth into the side of the Zodiac. When it went back down into the water, the resulting splash soaked all four of them in the emergency raft. Mercer and Gary both screamed, although Gary’s could barely be heard next to Mercer’s high-pitched, panicked squeak of pure fear. When the water settled, they could still see shredded parts of the Zodiac floating on the surface, but the engine and any hope of it every being intact enough for anyone to ever ride in it again were gone.
“Oh God oh God oh God,” Mercer said. “It almost got us. It almost got us!”
“No,” Maria said. “It didn’t.”
“Are you blind?” Vandergraf asked. Apparently in the heat of the moment all worry about damage to his balls was gone. “It was only like ten feet in front of us! We’ve got to get back to the Cameron before it comes back.”
Maria nodded and directed them to immediately start rowing back to the Cameron at full speed (Mercer now joining them, having gotten over her shock enough that she rowed faster than all the others and tended to send them slightly off course). She knew full well that they didn’t have anything to worry about, at least not in this exact moment, but she was afraid if she said so the others would think her crazy. Once back at the Cameron she would have to discuss this with Kevin to see if they could come up with some scientifically plausible explanation. For now though, she knew exactly what this had been. They were being directed to stay within a specific space. She didn’t know how and she didn’t know why, but that gigantic hammerhead was directing the other sharks to keep them in place.
It was intentionally imprisoning them alone out here on the sea.
10
To Maria’s chagrin, she got back on the Cameron just in time to learn right along with everyone else that Simon had named the monster shark Teddy Bear.
“I told you earlier we weren’t going to call it that,” Cindy said. They’d gotten back to the Cameron ahead of everyone else, unloading the six people they’d been able to rescue before assisting survivors off the other lifeboats. Despite everything else that had just happened, this one little act of her brother seemed to offend her most of all.
“Teddy Bear?” Maria asked as she shoved Mercer up onto the deck, where she promptly collapsed into a crying mess that everyone else ignored for now. “The hell?”
Simon shrugged. “You know. Because it’s brown.”
“A lot of things are brown, not just teddy bears,” Cindy said. “Real bears, dirt, shit…”
“Yes, by all means let’s just call it Shit,” Gutierrez said. He was using bandages from one of the first-aid kits to wrap up a head-wound on a dazed-looking sailor. “That name is going to be
taken so much more seriously.”
“We don’t exactly have to name it anything,” Kevin said as he came out on deck, gingerly stepping over the Japanese sailors sitting all over. There were far more people on the Cameron now than there safely should have been, but they didn’t want to leave them in lifeboats in case Teddy Bear made another attack. “We could always just call it ‘That One’ and I’m pretty sure we’d all know which one we’re talking about.”
Maria perked up when she saw him. “Did you get a hold of the Mexican Navy? Are they almost here?”
Kevin sighed. “Yeah, about that. There’s a problem.”
“Oh come on. You’ve got to be kidding me,” Maria said.
“According to the original schedule, they were supposed to be here no more than fifteen minutes from now. But most of the ships got diverted to investigate the whale beachings.”
“What? They knew the Tetsuo Maru was on its way. Didn’t they think that was more important?”
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