by Greig Beck
Brenner still half crouched on the edge of the pod, his knees bent. Even in the growing darkness, Jack could see the young man’s knees were shaking.
Oh for Chrissakes, he thought. Cate turned in the water with him. He clung to her. “Don’t even think about it, he’ll be fin—”
The dark column of flesh exploded upwards, filling his vision. Jack’s mouth dropped open and blinked as his mind near short-circuited as it tried to process what he was seeing.
Cate screamed. He might have as well. The column kept rising, towering over them. Huge jaws held the submersibles, with the shape of Brenner hanging on to one side. The man screamed like a siren as the monster shark stopped rising, and hung at the top of its arc for perhaps a single second.
Jack couldn’t tear his eyes away as he watched Michael Brenner just slide off, and fall into the maw.
“Je-jesus,” was all he could mumble.
As the shark fell back into the water, Jack was sure he could still hear an echoing scream coming from the belly of the beast. The impact wave from the shark covered all of them, and from beneath the water, he could feel, as well as hear, the crunch of metal and glass as massive jaws pulverized the submersibles.
“Swim!” he yelled. He knew it would only take the monstrous creature seconds to work out that, other than Brenner, what it had attacked was inedible, and as a threat, was destroyed. And that meant it would seek out the next object of size – which was a choice of Jack and Cate, Andrews or Sam and Andy.
Jack spun back toward the Anastasia – it was mere seconds away now, but even that timeframe might prove fatal.
Cate must have realized the same thing. She pushed him away. “No choice now; we need to be smaller, or it’ll come for us next.” She looked panic-stricken, but there was resolve in her eyes.
She lifted an arm to point at him. “Swim, Monroe!”
He wanted to grab at her, but knew she was right. They drifted apart, but continued to stare back into each other’s eyes. Her eyes, so wide and frightened, gave him a pain in his soul like he had never felt before. Please God, he prayed, take me, not her, and don’t make those eyes the last thing I remember.
He swam backwards, trying to smile calmly and mask the panic he felt in his gut. But he wasn’t sure she could see him clearly anymore as twilight was turning to dusk. He could just make out Sam and Andy, who had also separated, and Thomas was well out to the side of them and leading the race.
Their floating debris had either sunk or scattered now, but more had surfaced from the destroyed submersibles. It still barely gave them the camouflage they needed.
They were alone now.
Several hundred feet to the north, between them and the approaching boat, a dorsal fin rose, higher and higher, and then thirty or so feet behind came the top of a scythe-like tail.
The swimmers stopped dead in the water and watched as the Megalodon slowed and then rolled. It lifted its huge snout from the water, and hung there like a massive conical mountain.
Jack couldn’t fully make it out in the growing dark, but he bet one massive eye was looking over the surface now, just like the great whites observed seal colonies, trying to spot stragglers, or perhaps choosing one from the group.
Jack bared his teeth. You’re looking for us, aren’t you, you big bastard? His anger grew as the shark hung there, blocking them. At least get out of the way and give us a fighting chance, you damned demon.
The monster shark rolled and sunk below the oil-slick like water. Jack looked toward the approaching Anastasia – it still seemed too far away. How long had it been since he last looked – minutes? More like seconds, he knew.
Jack couldn’t see Cate, but he felt her looking at him. It was just a hunch, as the light had faded to the point that he could only make out the shape of her head, and further out, the shapes of Sam, Andy and Thomas.
“Swim!” he yelled. And that meant swimming right over the top of where they had just seen the shark.
Jack swiveled in the water, looking for the telltale fin. But there was nothing. What did it matter now? he wondered. Even if it was there, they couldn’t outswim it, hide from it, or fight it. Maybe it would just be better not to know.
“Swim,” Cate repeated.
Thomas Andrews was leading them, followed by Andy and Sam who were evenly spaced in the water. Then came Cate, with himself last. He hated being last, as he constantly felt the chill hand of death tickling his neck. It made him want to turn every few seconds, or maybe swim backwards.
Jack stroked hard, but not hard enough to overtake Cate. The only upside of his position was that at least he could keep an eye on her. He snorted. Not that he could do anything anyway. And if he was taken, then at least Cate might not see it happen – one second he’d be there, and the next he wouldn’t.
Swim, he thought. Swim and pray, keeping your eyes on the Anastasia. Every second and every stroke brought them closer to safety.
The still water turned to a river of gold as the last sliver of sun began to vanish. A hundred feet out in front, Thomas suddenly stopped swimming and began to tread water. His head whipped one way and then the next.
“God!” Sam shrieked.
Jack felt his neck hair rise and his stomach knot as the massive conical snout surged from the water, cavernous mouth open. Thomas had time to hold up an arm as the jaws went right over the top of him. In a single smooth motion the shark’s dorsal fin arced up as the massive body went down again. A flick of its sail-like tail and the shark, and Thomas, were gone.
The sun was totally gone now. Jack knew they were blind to the shark, while it undoubtedly saw them with ease, now that it had found them. He snorted softly; it had never lost them.
The larger submersibles had been attacked as a threat, but the small, warm bodies were just food, to be picked off the surface like soft fruit that had fallen from a tree.
Jack realized they were all treading water, heads turning one way or the other in indecision. Small waves lapped at their chins – that minor disturbance on the ocean surface all that was left of Thomas.
Or perhaps not – maybe they were all floating in a massive slick of the young man’s blood. He shuddered at the thought.
“We must keep going,” Jack said softly, but his words still carried in the stillness.
Cate began swimming toward him.
“Stop – stay there,” he protested, but she came anyway.
“No.” She kept coming.
In another few seconds she was beside him. “It’s found us anyway – big or small, it found us. It was always going to.” She put a hand on his shoulder and spun in the water to face the dark shape of the Anastasia.
“So close now.”
There was a flash from the bow, and at first Jack thought they were being signaled, but then a booming followed it, and a hundred yards out to their left a geyser of water erupted followed by an orange detonation beneath the surface.
Even though it was a distance away, he felt the compression impact against his stomach, groin and legs. Any closer and it would have shattered his internal organs – but he didn’t care at all.
“They’re shelling – cover fire.” He pulled Cate close to him. “Keep your head above the water.”
CHAPTER 44
The surface, foredeck of the Anastasia
Sonya was at the bow of the Anastasia. She had seen the monstrous shark rise up and take the person in the water. She didn’t know who it was that had been lost, but to her, it was Valery being killed over and over again.
She screamed and leaned into the deck-mounted Mark-38 machine gun. It was a big weapon with the gun weight alone coming in at 250 pounds, and a barrel length of nearly nine feet. Each of its rounds was as long as her forearm.
Sonya propped both shoulders in the two padded half-circle recoil-rests. The gun Valery had installed on the deck of the Anastasia was military grade and had laser sighting, computer assist and a bonus grenade launcher – which Sonya used now.
Each explosive shell was fed
individually, but when she wanted standard rounds, the heavy chains fed fast and she ramped it up to the chain-gun mode that belted them out at up to 200 rounds per minute.
Though the swimmers were so close now, Sonya knew she needed to give them a few more precious seconds. The only way she could, without throwing her own people into dinghies and certain death, was to create a diversion, or at least an irritation, to the monster by exploding grenades around it – Valery had told her how sensitive the creature was to sounds, smells and light, so she’d try and fry its brain.
With the sun now set, it was difficult to see so she switched to the computer assist and laser sighting to keep her explosive rounds away from the people in the water.
“Feed another,” she barked at the two crewmembers who were kneeling beside the deck mount.
They worked together like a machine, and the red-tipped round was loaded, firing mech closed and then the men crouched away.
Sonya, eyes blazing, hissed through clenched teeth. “Firing.”
The recoil pushed her back a step and she knew her shoulders would be blue–black tomorrow. She couldn’t care less. She wanted the swimmers rescued, and something child-like inside her clung to the hope that maybe Valery was going to be one of them.
But then brutal logic screamed out that he was dead, killed by the beast. So now her only priority was to inflict pain and death on the Megalodon shark.
She watched as the second explosive round threw up a geyser from the dark water’s surface. She reached out a hand to the side.
“Glasses.”
A pair of night-vision field glasses was slapped into her palm and she scanned the water – there were now just four heads on the surface among the debris, and no sign of the Megalodon. It had either dived deep or was circling just below them.
The ship would reach the swimmers in a handful of seconds, and her plan was to ease the Anastasia to a stop and use it to give the swimmers cover. She had several crewmembers with machine guns ready to support them, and the drop lines and nets on standby to immediately be lowered to the surface. The rest was up to the guys in the water.
The proximity meant she couldn’t risk anymore explosive rounds. She handed back the field glasses. “Load up a belt – tracers.”
“You got it.” One crewmember had the metal box open and strained to lift out the heavy rows of blue-tipped bullets strung together on their feed belt.
Sonya had chosen tracers as she needed to see where she placed her rounds. The projectiles were designed with a small pyrotechnic charge in their base that was ignited by the burning powder. The pyrotechnic composition burned very brightly, making the projectile trajectory visible during nighttime firing. It was like sending fiery comets at your enemy. And ones that left a hole the size of a melon.
Sonya wanted to see them travel but, more importantly, she wanted to see each one hit the seaborne devil. She wanted to see the damage and know she was causing it pain. And, finally, she wanted to send it back to hell a ragged mess.
There.
The fin rose only two dozen feet out from the floating heads of the survivors.
“Muda-aaak!” The Russian curse burst through her gritted teeth as she fired the first round of the deck gun. Even though the gun was mounted, the stirrups jerked at her shoulders and punched back hard. But she leaned back in, fighting it. She ignored the pain and sent streams of flaring projectiles at the beast.
The shark angled toward the swimmers, and she followed it with her rain of fiery death.
CHAPTER 45
“Look out!” Jack Monroe
“Shit!” Jack yelled as the tracer fire threw up a line of geysers in front of them. He pulled Cate toward him.
The boat was so close he had to look up to see the deck now, and it was near impossible to keep his impatience in check. Up there, safe and dry, he saw people moving about. He saw a lone person behind a massive gun, blonde hair flowing out behind them like some sort of ancient Valkyrie warrior – Sonya, he knew.
He heard her scream a curse as another line of tracer fire spat out of the barrel of the huge jerking gun. Once again, the geysers shot up, this time behind them, even closer.
The proximity of the strikes scared the shit out of him for two reasons: the first was the percussive force was begging to knock the wind out of them. But the second reason was that he was damned sure that Sonya could see things that he couldn’t. It probably meant the monstrous shark was in the water close by, and the explosions hadn’t dissuaded it from its prey – them.
As if to answer Jack, the huge animal surged to the surface, so close that even in the darkness Jack could see the light from the tracer fire reflected back in the glossy black eyes. The fin was high above them, and he pushed Cate behind him, even though he knew if the shark took him, she was also as good as dead.
He raised an arm as the heat from the burning tails of the bullets seared his skin and also left him night-blind for a few seconds after they struck the water. But he was in time to see a shot strike the massive fin and a softball-sized hole be punched right through it. Another struck the edge of its back, chopping out a double fist-sized chunk of flesh.
“Yeah.” He shouted as the fish thrashed, creating an enormous wave that swamped them.
Behind him came the yell of the Anastasia crewmembers as they urged them on. Sam and Andy were already striking out toward them.
“Let’s get out of here.” He pushed at Cate.
He felt even more jittery now than before – he remembered the shocking tale of the Indianapolis, a World War II destroyer on a top-secret mission at the end of the war. A Japanese torpedo sunk it and 900 men were thrown into the warm, dark water of the Philippine Sea.
It wasn’t long before the sharks came, in ones and twos at first, but then in the hundreds. They took the carcasses of the dead to begin with, but once they were depleted the frenzy on the living began. Of the 900 that went into the water only around 300 survivors were pulled out, and most said that the most fearful part was the wait to be lifted out when the rescue ships arrived. It seemed that the sharks knew their food was about to be snatched from them, and they became even more frenzied and aggressive.
Jack’s legs tingled in anticipation of the crunch of tooth on bone and flesh, as death probably glided just below him.
The glaring discs of searchlights shone down on them, and moved over the water. Jack put his head below the surface and kept his eyes open in the illuminated water. The spotlight beams’ rays shone down a few dozen feet. Did something pass underneath them or was that the light bending in the water? He pulled his head back, as it was just giving him more to worry about.
He looked up. There was no crane or hoist aboard the Anastasia, as any exit and entry was expected to be via the underwater bomb-bay type doors that the Nautilus had launched from.
The crew had rigged drop lines, two of them. A man with a headband flashlight was lashed to the end of each line and these two brave souls went over the side, where they waited and called to the people in the water. Above, their crewmates waited to haul them up. One of the men yelled and pointed at Jack and Cate.
“Yo!” Jack pushed Cate toward the man, who reached out and grabbed her, wrapping his arms tight around her.
Cate reached out for Jack, and he grabbed her hand. It was cold and white, and he saw her teeth chattered. He kissed it, and she forced a smile.
“Don’t suppose this is a two-for-one ride?” she said.
The crewmember held up his hand flat to Jack. He let Cate go. “I’ve already got my ticket – next ride is mine.” He grinned, but felt almost giddy with nausea. He looked to the crewmember. “Go!”
The man nodded. “Be right back, buddy.” He turned. “Up!” Immediately they started to rise the forty feet up toward the deck, and the waiting arms of the crew and safety.
Samantha Britt was already in the arms of the other crewmember, and her fingers were curled into claws as she clung on. In a blink she too was being dragged heavenward.<
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Jack looked to Andy, who glided closer and trod water beside him. His eyes were like round white discs in the darkness, and Jack bet his were the same. Neither spoke. Jack had no words of comfort for the young man, or Andy for him. Besides, his heart beat too hard in his chest now, and he knew his voice might crack from fear.
The searchlights from above continued to illuminate the water below them, but neither he nor Andy wanted to look down now. They just floated and waited, with their backs to the night dark ocean – they didn’t want to see that either.
Fear was the killer, Jack tried to tell himself. But he knew that was bullshit. Because where he and Andy were, a monster shark was the real killer and he could act as brave as he liked, and it’d make no difference to what happened in the end.
“Look out!”
The shout from above felt like a stabbing electric shock that shot through his body. Immediately gunfire erupted from above. This time not the heavy deck gun Sonya had used, but small arms, probably M16s by the spitting sound they made.
What scared Jack the most was that the rounds struck the water not a dozen feet behind them – whatever the crew were firing at was too damned close. He lifted his legs, and as if in response there came a huge wash of water up against he and Andy, and both of them were pushed back against the Anastasia’s hull. He spun to the open water.
“Did you see it?” Andy said, floating so close his back actually bumped up against Jack.
“No.” Jack’s eyes felt so wide they could have popped out of his head as he searched the water. The crewmembers above him had a view over the water that he and Andy didn’t. Just as well, he thought.
The yells came again, and then the side of the boat rang like a giant bell. The ship rocked, and he and Andy were forced apart by a massive wave that broke hard against the ship.
The current that had been created from the wash continued to push them along toward the opposite ends of the boat and also, horrifyingly, out into open water. Jack tried to swim against the current to get back to the pickup point.