Ocean's Hammer

by D. J. Goodman

  “Smith is all you’re going to need. Especially since I’m sure both of us want this to be over and done with as soon as possible.”

  She wondered for a moment if maybe she’d been too paranoid in thinking that he planned to kill them. Maybe it really was possible that they could get out of this just by turning Mercer over, that this man would take her somewhere far away where she would take on a new name that wasn’t associated with a terrorist act.

  There was movement near the bridge of the nameless ship. She wished she had the binoculars with her, because it had almost looked like the glint of sunlight on glass. It could be someone looking at them through their own binoculars. Or it could have been a sniper scope.

  She looked once more down at the water. All at once the sharks dove down below the surface. The man was too intent on her to notice any of this. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? she thought.

  “All we want is to get out of here alive,” Maria said. “Is that something you think can happen?”

  She thought there might have been a pause in his voice before responding. “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  There was another glint from somewhere behind him. She was sure it hadn’t been her imagination. As she tried to follow it, she thought she saw what might be the barrel of a rifle poking out ever so slightly over the top of the bridge. It wasn’t in the same place she’d thought she’d seen one earlier. There were at least two people on that boat with guns pointed straight at them.

  She looked over to Vandergraf where he stood behind a wall just out of Smith’s sight. He looked like he was about to take that as a sign to pull out Mercer again, but that was the absolute last thing any of them wanted right now. Mercer was the only one this man one hundred percent definitely wanted out of the way. If either of those snipers took her out then they lost all chance of getting out of this. She shook her head, hoping Vandergraf understood what that meant, and brought her attention back to Smith.

  None of them ever got a chance to find out how far this stand-off might have gone, because that was when Teddy Bear made her presence known again.

  Smith’s boat suddenly rocked violently for no visible reason. Smith, already unsteady standing out on the sea as it was, stumbled and dropped his bullhorn over the side. It splashed in the water where a sudden violent white storm of churning water erupted around it before subsiding. Apparently the hammerheads hiding below hadn’t found it very appetizing.

  Everyone on the Cameron became agitated as Smith’s boat rocked again. Kevin saw where this might head and took the initiative. He yelled something in Japanese, then repeated it English. “Everyone that can fit, get below deck!”

  Maria didn’t think there was enough room for everyone to fit inside, considering there wasn’t even technically enough room for them to be on deck, but that didn’t stop everyone from making a mad dash into the cabin. Maria and Kevin both jostled to stay in place, along with Cindy. She still had the flare gun in her hand. That was good, Maria thought. They might need it in just a moment.

  Smith, for his part, didn’t seem to have the slightest clue what was going on. He just knew that the ship shouldn’t have been violently shimmying beneath him. He shot a comical look Maria’s direction as though he thought she might somehow be responsible for this. Maria couldn’t resist giving him a shrug in response, although any mirth she might have felt was short-lived. The boat rocked again, but this time it was accompanied by a violent splash large enough to soak her all the way back on the deck of the Cameron. It had happened too fast for her to be sure, but it had looked to her like Teddy Bear had come straight up from underneath to ram the boat. Even with the shark’s abnormal size, she didn’t think it could do any real damage, but it sure seemed determined to try.

  Several other people suddenly appeared on the deck with Smith, one not making any attempt to hide that she was carrying a sniper rifle. The sniper didn’t appear to have any interest in targeting anyone at the moment, though. Instead, she and the other man looked more concerned about getting Smith off the deck and out of any potential danger. Smith, still not appearing to realize how much danger he might be in, spent several seconds trying to keep their hands off him.

  The movement got him just a little too close to the edge at the wrong time.

  The boat was hit again, and this time there was no doubt that Teddy Bear was responsible. The giant hammerhead hit the boat with enough force that Maria could almost swear the entire front end came out of the water to show the shark’s distinctly shaped head for just a second. The force was enough to send Smith and the man currently gripping his arm up off the deck. Smith went over the edge and the man looked for a split second like he might be able to land with the right stance to keep both of them from falling into the water, but Smith’s weight proved too much for him and they both went over. The female sniper made no effort to help them, instead running back for the bridge as her apparent boss and coworker hit the water.

  Smith didn’t have the time to splash or flail about. Seconds after he went under, the blue sea around him turned red. The man who went in with him, however, wasn’t lucky enough for it to be over that quickly. His head came back up after a few seconds, his hair slicked with blood and viscera that obviously didn’t belong to him. He didn’t appear to be aware of it, though, instead immediately trying to swim for the boat. But there was no way he was going to get back on board without a ladder or rope, and no one on board seemed too concerned about helping him. In fact, as soon as the sniper was back in the bridge the boat began to reverse, moving out of the man’s grasping fingers right as he tried to touch the side. He cried out, more out of anger and surprise than any fear, but that didn’t last long. The tone of his scream turned to something that was very clearly pain, then he dipped below the water for several seconds. When he came back up, the water around him was even darker red, although if it was coming from him he was in too much shock to realize it. Instead, he flailed until he was facing the Cameron and, probably realizing it was his only chance, started swimming toward it. He didn’t get far before something below yanked him under again.

  The water where he had been became calm again. Maria waited for him to reappear, only now realizing that she had her hands over her mouth to cover her shock and disgust. The man did come back to the surface, or at least a part of him did. An arm popped up, obviously not attached to anything, and bobbed there for a few seconds before a hammerhead snatched it and dragged it back below.

  Maria would have thought that would be the end of it, but as the boat continued to back away as fast as it could, it continued to rock as though from its own personal earthquakes. The first couple were minor, as though Teddy Bear was unsure how to attack a moving target, but the third time Teddy Bear’s shape came up from the side and caught some air first, slamming into the side and rocking the boat to a full forty-five degree angle.

  “Oh dear God,” Kevin said beside her, startling Maria. She hadn’t even realized that he was still next to her. Everyone else had disappeared below, even Cindy by this point, but he stayed with her, his hand gripping hers tightly as though he were afraid she too could share the fate of Smith and the other man at any second. And, she realized, she probably could for as long as she remained on deck.

  “We need to get inside,” she said. Kevin just nodded in agreement.

  14

  Although the Cameron was not facing the right direction for them to see Smith’s boat from the bridge, those who were crammed inside it rather than further below were silent enough they could all hear every thud as Teddy Bear relentlessly beat at it. Each sound got farther away as the boat tried to escape. Eventually the noises stopped. No one was sure if that was because it had gotten away or if it had finally taken so much damage that it had gone to join the Tetsuo Maru.

  Somehow the silence that followed was even worse. Maria would have expected everyone to start talking or at least muttering to themselves to fill the quiet, but no one said anything. It was because they were expec
ting something else to fill that void for them, she realized. If the enormous monster patrolling the waters around them could practically sink a boat like the one Smith had come in on, then there was no reason it couldn’t do the exact same thing to the Cameron.

  Yet it didn’t. For every second that passed by with them all still above the sea rather than below it, Maria became more and more convinced that her theories about Teddy Bear, no matter how ridiculous they seemed even in her own head, had to be right.

  “Kevin,” she finally said. Several of the men huddled near her startled at the sudden intrusion of her voice. “We need to talk.”

  “What, we can’t do it here?” he asked. He practically said it directly into her ear. There were so many people in here that they were literally shoulder to shoulder.

  “We could, but it might be difficult,” she said. “Usually, in order to talk, people need to be able to breathe.”

  “I don’t think that many people went below deck,” Kevin said. Maria doubted that. She never had gotten a good head count on how many of the Tetsuo Maru’s crew they had rescued, but it was enough that more than a few would have had to escape to the meager quarters below. Still, she made her way through the shifting ocean of scared survivors and followed him down the steep stairs. To her surprise, it wasn’t nearly as crowded down here as she had suspected. Which was to say she could still move, provided she didn’t want to go more than a few inches at a time. Still, the ones who had ventured down the stairs seemed to be the younger members of the crew and as such were a little more adept at moving and shifting to let them through. They eventually made their way to one of the labs, which was where Maria had wanted to end up anyway. The aquariums and specimen containers that had been firmly secured to several of the shelves had still managed to get smashed or fall to the floor during the course of the day’s misadventures, meaning that few people had wanted to walk through the glass-covered mess. One young Japanese sailor had worked his way to a semi-sitting position between the wall and a work bench, where he seemed to be much calmer than many of his fellow survivors. The other people who’d found their way in here were Monica Boleau and Simon Gutsdorf. Maria was fine with that. The fewer members of the Cameron’s actual crew that she needed to explain things to later, the better.

  “So what is it, Maria?” Kevin asked.

  “It’s time we stop reacting to the situation and instead start taking an active role. We need to science this whole thing hardcore.”

  He raised an amused eyebrow. “I do think it’s terribly sexy when you use science as a verb.”

  “Should we leave?” Boleau asked. “You guys are giving each other that look like you’re ready to rip each other’s clothes off.”

  “Which, you know, we don’t blame you if the last thing you want to do before we all die is get your freak on,” Simon said. “We just think it would be only decent if you didn’t make the rest of us watch.”

  The young Japanese man said something, and despite the situation Kevin had to forcibly keep himself from laughing.

  “What?” Maria asked. “What did he say?”

  “Roughly translated? He said, well, maybe you don’t want to know. Just realize that he can apparently understand English well enough, even if he’s not speaking it.”

  Maria sighed. “For the love of Christ everybody, can we please get serious? Or would you all rather just jump one by one into the raging whirlpool of bizarrely violent sharks waiting just outside these walls?”

  That forced everyone to quickly drop their mirth. “Okay,” Kevin said. “Let’s work the problem. What is it that you see?”

  “It’s not about what I can see,” Maria said. She gently moved past Simon and Monica until she was at a metal chest near the far wall. There were a large number of components and scientific instruments in its many drawers, but the ones she was looking for were at the bottom. They hadn’t expected to need these on this trip. In fact, for as long as the hammerheads had appeared permanently vanished from El Bajo, they had thought the money they spent on these things had been completely wasted. They were a part of the project that one of Kevin’s colleagues had spearheaded a number of years ago, a hypothesis that had slowly gained traction in the marine biology community but had proved incredibly difficult to prove without any live hammerheads to use them on.

  Finally, she found one of the things she was looking for. “It’s not about what anyone can see, or any of the other four senses we all take for granted. It’s about a sixth sense. Or seventh or eighth.” She looked to Kevin and he shrugged.

  “Honestly, with some marine animals who knows sometimes,” he said.

  Maria held what she had found up for everyone else in the room to look at. Everyone craned their necks to see, even the Japanese man. Admittedly what she held was so small some of them probably still couldn’t see it in the room’s unreliable light. When Mercer had destroyed the engines, she knocked out all but a few of the trimaran’s emergency lights.

  “That?” Kevin asked. “What does that have to do with…” He trailed off, getting what Maria liked to refer to as his “sciencing face.” It meant he was working the problem in the same way she had, and probably with a lot more technical terms that she hadn’t quite learned yet. Honestly, he probably would have come to the same conclusions she had if he’d been as up close to Teddy Bear as she had been instead of on the bridge.

  “I don’t get it,” Simon said. He reached out to touch the thing in Maria’s hand but she pulled it away. They had so few of them on the Cameron that they couldn’t afford to lose this one, especially considering how many she thought they might need before the day was over. “What the hell even is it?”

  The thing she had in her fingers, possibly their best hope at living through the day, didn’t look like much more than a piece of translucent plastic not much bigger than her thumb. Inside were a number of electronic pieces that Maria herself couldn’t quite explain. She was studying to be a marine biologist, after all, not an electrical engineer. Protruding from the plastic was a large, thick metal hook. If she handled it wrong, the hook could very easily rip through the tender pads of her fingers. It had better, considering it had been designed with the idea of breaking through that toughest of ocean hides, shark skin.

  “A transmitter,” Boleau said. Simon cocked his head at her and she shrugged. “What? This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve done plenty of volunteer work with One Planet. That included tagging beaked whales in the Pacific Northwest. Except this little puppy looks a little more heavy duty than the ones we used.”

  “That’s because this isn’t just a normal transmitter. The ones you’ve used were only to give off a weak signal that could be tracked to keep an eye on the whales’ migrating habits. This, though. This has a very special purpose.”

  Kevin finally seemed to understand where she was going with all this. “Wait. Really? This is really what you’re thinking?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s crazy.”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Kevin stared down at the floor for several seconds before he looked back up at her, a distinct wild gleam in his eye saying that, despite the danger and horror of their situation, he was honestly excited.

  “It may just save every single person on this boat.”

  15

  “Alright,” Simon said. “Could every person here stop being so cryptic and get on with explaining what the hell this little thing has to do with stopping a giant man-eating hammerhead? I feel like I’m in a bad movie on SyFy and that line you just said was the big cliffhanger before a commercial break. It’s kind of obnoxious.”

  “You volunteered for this,” Maria said, “but do you have a lot of training in marine biology?”

  “Not really,” he said. “Cindy’s the fish buff. I’ve just been tagging along because it looks good on resumes. But I suspect this would be the part in the ridiculous killer shark movie where the two brilliant scient
ists explain the science of the situation in layman’s term that even a drunk frat boy can understand after he got stood up for his Saturday night date and has nothing better to do than watch cable.”

  Boleau raised an eyebrow. “That was a little too specific for you to have made up on the spot.”

  “Bite your tongue,” Simon said. “I would never join a frat. On purpose.”

  “Ahem, can I continue?” Maria asked.

  “Oh, please do,” Simon said. “We’ve only got about seven or eight minutes before the next commercial.”

  “So what I was trying to say is that there’s been some speculation for a very long time that certain marine animals have a sense that humans do not. And not just marine animals, but also things like birds. You see, there has to be a way migratory animals can navigate enormous distances over the earth when going between their summer and winter homes. And the theory is that they can sense the magnetic fields of the Earth itself and follow it.”

  “Wait, you mean they can literally feel the Earth’s energy?” Simon asked. “That’s very hippy-dippy New Age.”

  “No, it’s not like that at all,” Kevin said, clearly annoyed that mysticism was invading his science.

  “It’s kind of like that,” Maria amended. “But again, remember that I’m using tiny words for you and our viewers at home to understand. Could you please stop interrupting? If I’m right, we are sort of on a time limit before more people die.”

  Simon’s smile went away. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

  “Right. So there’s been a lot of study regarding this. It’s all but been proven in geese. But it’s a bit harder to tag and track and study things that spend almost their entire lives in an environment hostile to humans. There’s been some studies with whales, if I remember correctly.”

  Kevin nodded. “And a while back several of my colleagues came down to El Bajo because they thought they’d found a way to one hundred percent prove it was also true with hammerhead sharks.”