by Greig Beck
“How did that get there?” Olander blubbered.
She ignored him and began to push, and he realized he was on some sort of rolling table, like a hospital gurney.
“What’s happening? What are you doing?”
“You love the ocean,” she said. “You love the cool, clear water. To you, it is your heaven.” Her eyes blazed down at him. “So, it’s only fitting punishment that, instead, I send you to hell.”
His feet bumped up against something and he winced as the heat coming from it was unpleasant against his legs. Sonya vanished from his sight, and he heard a heavy metallic clank, and then the squeal of a door opening. Immediately the heat became overwhelming.
“What? What is? What are you doing?” Olander started to jerk up and down, straining against his bonds, but there was another rope around his waist. When he jerked, whatever he was lying on jerked upwards with him. It felt like some sort of pallet top. “Please tell me what’s happening?”
“Okay.” She paused. “At your feet is an industrial furnace. It reaches temperatures of around 2000 degrees – even hotter than a crematorium.” She leaned forward, her eyes glowing. “It should take between forty and seventy minutes to turn your entire body to ash. Happy now?”
“W-w-whaaat? Stop! I’ll give you anything.” He began to panic then, thrashing like a landed fish on the deck of a boat.
“Can you give me back Valery?” She moved to the end of the trolley above his head and began to push him. The pallet began to roll off the gurney table onto a set of feeder rollers that led to the mouth of the furnace. But it stopped at the lip.
“You win. What do you want to know?” He thrashed so hard, his wrists and ankles began to bleed. “Cain went rogue. He exceeded his orders.”
Sonya strained under Olander’s bulk, but eventually she got his pallet up on the feed tray. Olander could already smell the leather of his deck shoes as they began to smoke.
Sonya came around to stare into his face. “My only regret is that I can’t watch you burn.” She pushed the pallet and it slid on rollers down into the mouth of the furnace. “See you in hell.” She slammed the heavy iron door.
Hell was excruciating.
EPILOGUE
Fingal Bay, Port Stephens
Frank Hodges cut the engine and let his fifteen-foot wooden boat, the Nellie, float for a few moments. He had a storm lantern at his feet, a thermos of coffee, and a pack of cigarettes. He also had his phone ready to take a few pictures, of himself, the shoreline, Shark Island from half a mile out, and the star-sprinkled sky – all time-stamped of course.
He craned his neck to look up at the sky. Away from the town, the stars always seemed brighter and closer. Still, without a moon, it was as dark as shit out here, and he could barely see a thing – no wonder people never came out on nights like this, and not because of some dumb giant shark legend.
He’d put the lantern on in a minute or two, but first he wanted to get some pictures while he had everything in darkness. He stared back toward the shoreline – even this far out, it looked close enough to swim to. But he knew there was a lot of deep water, a few running currents, and as it was still warm, he knew there’d be the odd shark. He snorted. Like he told that uppity American woman, there was nothing out here big enough to trouble you in a decent-sized wooden boat.
He let the Nellie glide to a stop, and then the boat bobbed on gentle waves. There was just the sound of water lapping softly against the boat’s side. Frank sat for a moment; sometimes, if you listened, you could hear penguins squeak out in the darkness, or even the bark of a seal. But tonight it seemed he had the ocean all to himself.
The boat rocked as large ripples moved up against its hull. He turned, one way then the next, looking for a passing boat, even one that was already miles away, its wake having traveled for a distance until it reached him. But there were no passing lights on an invisible horizon – all was dark and empty.
Just you and the monster, he joked but felt his neck prickle. “Let’s just get this farkin’ done,” he whispered. He took his first picture of the night sky, then the Fingal Bay shoreline, his wristwatch, and finally the lump of Shark Island. Then Frank turned the camera on himself and took a few smiling shots – some with flash, some without.
“That’s gonna be fifty bucks from you, Jock, you silly old sausage.”
Frank grinned and lit a cigarette, sucked in the hot smoke and then exhaled through pressed lips. He sniffed, catching a whiff of something unexpected – it was like the bottom of a boat pulled up in dry dock, or maybe something that had floated up from the depths of Davy Jones’ locker. Small waves rocked him again.
He took another drag on the cigarette, and reviewed his pics. Most were hard to make out, but there was enough info here, and with a time stamp, to prove to Jock and the boys he had been out here when he said. He’d dine out on this for weeks.
He slid the pictures across the viewer and then got to the ones of himself with a flash of him grinning. The flash glaringly illuminated his face, his grizzled whiskers, and the dark ocean behind him. He grinned back at them, but for only a second.
His bushy brows snapped together. In one of the pictures there was something behind him that wasn’t supposed to be there.
“For fuck’s sake!” He spun, but there was no chance of seeing anything in the dark.
Pitiless eyes as dark as the devils.
Jock’s stupid poem rung in his head.
As big as the tide, and ten axe handles wide.
Frank lifted the camera to look at the picture again, praying he was mistaken. Jock refused to shut up in his head: She rises from the deepest wells of hell to feast, and leaves no trace of man or beast.
But there was no mistake; there it was, a fin as big as a house passing right behind him.
The ripples, of course, and the smell of something from a thousand fathoms down. He lunged for the outboard, jamming a callused thumb on the starter button.
The smell came again then, stronger than ever. He needed light, and immediately lifted his camera, and pressed the picture button. It illumined a dark cave right beside the boat, lined with white, shovel-shaped daggers.
The flash went off as he threw an arm up over his head. The jaws crashed closed, taking Frank, his ironclad proof, and the entire rear of his beloved Nellie.
Everything else sank. Back down to hell with the monster of Fingal Bay.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Many readers ask me about the background of my novels – is the science real or fiction? Where do I get the situations, equipment, characters or their expertise from, and just how much of it has a basis in fact?
In the case of the Carcharodon Megalodon, it is all fact. The only disputed area is whether the creature may still exist today in the deep, dark depths of our oceans. And the conclusion to that dispute might have more to do with time, than location.
THE SEARCH CONTINUES
For every piece of information we uncover that might give a clue as to whether the Carcharodon Megalodon shark still exists, it is refuted by another scientific piece that dashes our hopes (or perhaps fears).
But we have much yet to do, and much yet to explore – the oceans are the lifeblood of Earth, covering more than seventy percent of the planet’s surface. We are, in reality, a water world. Yet, for all of our understanding of the dry places we live on, ninety-five percent of our oceans remain unexplored, and as yet unseen by human eyes.
A new piece of information came to light in interviews conducted by John A. Long, Professor in Paleontology, Flinders University (also President, The Royal Society of South Australia 2016–18, and Past President, The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology).
Professor Long spoke to Mr. Colin Ostle, who, back in the mid-1970s, was employed by the department of fisheries to measure the whale carcasses that were taken by the then whaling companies.
A report of measured bite marks on a whale carcass off Albany during the last decade of whaling in Western Australia was a go
od insight into just how big great whites might grow.
Mr. Ostle told Professor Long how he also routinely measured shark bite marks on whale carcasses and recorded them in his notebook. Over a seven-year period he also caught around sixty great whites, so he was very familiar with their behavior.
The largest bite marks he ever recorded measured nineteen by twenty-four inches as part of five bites, all made by the same very large shark which attacked a floating sperm whale carcass that had broken free of its chain as it was towed in to the harbor.
When compared to a sixteen-foot shark (4.87m) with a known bite gape of eleven by thirteen inches, the scaling up of these large bites would suggest a shark up to twenty-six feet (7.8m) in length was then alive in the seas off Albany (bigger than the shark in Jaws who was twenty-five feet). In 1968, even larger shark bites were claimed to have been observed on a whale carcass, but measurements were not recorded.
Shark ecologist Dr. Charlie Huveneers of Flinders University is cautious about extrapolating absolute size from bite marks, but conceded to Professor Long:
“[ … ] it is quite conceivable that sharks larger than the scientifically confirmed maximum size exist, as for most species scientists are unlikely to have measured the largest individual of that species.”
My view is that the truth is out there, and we just haven’t seen it yet.
* Excerpt provided with thanks from article written by Professor John A. Long for Lifehacker magazine.
WHAT’S REALLY DOWN THERE?
This question is difficult to fully answer with the technology we currently have. We are able to drop down to the deepest places on earth, but stay only for a matter of hours, and view life through porthole windows over a tiny patch of trenches that run for thousands of miles. However, life is there, and we have seen it.
In July 2011, an expedition to the bottom of the Mariana Trench used unmanned free navigating mini-submersibles, called dropcams, equipped with cameras and lights to explore the deep region. Among many amazing life-forms they encountered were massive single-celled amoebas that were more than four inches in length. In December 2014, a new species of snailfish, a little like a foot-long tadpole, was discovered at 26,722 feet, well beyond the previous depth for a fish ever captured on film. Several other new species were seen, including huge crustaceans known as supergiants. In what is known as marine gigantism, deep-sea species grow much larger than their shallow-water relatives.
HYDROTHERMAL VENTS – DEEP-SEA OASES
Deep-sea hydrothermal vents form as a result of volcanic activity on the ocean floor. Water seeps through cracks in the Earth’s crust, and this water, which can reach temperatures of 750°F, gets pushed back up through cracks to the sea bottom and surrounding water to form a hydrothermal vent.
When scientists first came across these vents in the 1970s, they were amazed to find that even in very deep water (5000 feet), they had thriving populations of crustaceans, giant tubeworms, molluscs, sea slugs, fans and anemones, and a variety of fish. These rare warm-water places turned out to be oases on the otherwise dark and barren ocean floor, with a life-mass equivalent to that of a rainforest.
At first glance, the animals inhabiting deep-sea hydrothermal vents may look the same as other deep-sea creatures. But, in fact, they are unlike any other life on Earth. More than 300 species have so far been identified around vent ecosystems, of which over ninety-five percent have never been documented before.
Amazingly, vent life forms have changed little over many millions of years. In fact, a whole new category of life was discovered in the deep vent ecosystems, called Archaea, an ancient form of life more closely related to the first life on Earth.
Other vent life also appears to have characteristics that have a far greater resemblance to ancient animals than to animals living closer to the ocean’s surface. Some researchers have even speculated that the very first life on Earth began in extreme environments similar to hydrothermal vents.
ALL THE WAY DOWN TO HELL
I love the ocean, being in it, on it, or even just watching it. But, I admit, deep water scares me, always has. Ever since my father took my brother Brad and I a few miles out off the coast of Bondi Beach, Sydney, in his small wooden boat, the Nellie, and told us stories of seeing the big sharks out there.
I’d look over the side and see the rays of sunlight penetrating down into the blue until it turned to an endless black. He only took us out when we were in our early teens as he said we needed to be strong enough to be able to swim at least a mile in the event the boat tipped over. Physically, swimming the mile would not have been a problem, but psychologically, being in that deep, dark water would have been the challenge.
Where we were fishing was only a few hundred feet deep but still looked fathomless to me. So it’s almost unimaginable to think what the ocean might be like where it is a hundred times deeper, or thousands.
We categorize and layer those depths into zones and we now know that different elements occur at different depths (pressure, light, heat), and also live in those layers – from the Sunlight Zone, all the way down to Hades.
Epipelagic zone (the sunlight zone) – the surface layer of the ocean is known as the epipelagic zone and extends from the surface to 200 meters (656 feet). It is also known as the sunlight zone because this is where most of the visible light exists. With the light comes heat. This heat is responsible for the wide range of temperatures that occur in this zone.
Mesopelagic zone (the twilight zone) – below the epipelagic zone is the mesopelagic zone, extending from 200 meters (656 feet) to 1000 meters (3281 feet). The mesopelagic zone is sometimes referred to as the twilight zone or the midwater zone. The light that penetrates to this depth is extremely faint. It is in this zone that we begin to see the twinkling lights of bioluminescent creatures. A great diversity of strange and bizarre fishes can be found here.
Bathypelagic zone (the midnight zone) – the next layer is called the bathypelagic zone. It is sometimes referred to as the midnight zone or the dark zone. This zone extends from 1000 meters (3281 feet) down to 4000 meters (13,124 feet). Here the only visible light is that produced by the creatures themselves. The water pressure at this depth is immense, reaching 5850 pounds per square inch. In spite of the pressure, a surprisingly large number of creatures can be found here. Sperm whales can dive down to this level in search of food. Most of the animals that live at these depths are black or red in color due to the total absence of light.
Abyssopelagic zone (the abyss) – the next layer is called the abyssopelagic zone, also known as the abyssal zone or simply as the abyss. It extends from 4000 meters (13,124 feet) to 6000 meters (19,686 feet). The name comes from a Greek word meaning “no bottom”. The water temperature is near freezing, and there is no light at all. Three-quarters of the ocean floor lies within this zone. Some of the deepest fish ever discovered were found in the Puerto Rico Trench at a depth of 8372 meters (27,460 feet).
Hadalpelagic zone (the trenches or the hadal, from the French word for Hades, meaning hell) – beyond the abyssopelagic zone lies the forbidding Hadalpelagic zone. This layer extends from 6000 meters (19,686 feet) to the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean. These areas are mostly found in deep-water trenches and canyons. The deepest point in the ocean is located in the Mariana Trench off the coast of Japan at 10,911 meters (36,070 feet). The temperature of the water is just above freezing, and the pressure is an incredible eight tons per square inch. That is approximately the weight of forty-eight Boeing 747 jets. In spite of the pressure and temperature, life is still found here.
HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?
People living along the coast have always had an affinity with the water, and a desire to know more about what’s down there. One of the first attempts to go beyond the capabilities of simply holding one’s breath was the first evidence of a diving bell as recorded by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC: “they enable the divers to respire equally well by letting down a cauldron, for this does
not fill with water, but retains the air, for it is forced straight down into the water.”
Good idea, except there were no windows, it was dark, and pretty soon filled with carbon dioxide. However, from there, things accelerated, and today, we can finally touch the bottom of the world. But just how deep can we go, by ourselves, and in our machines?
Free Diving – how far can you dive when just holding your breath? Herbert Nitsch, an Austrian freediver, has held world records in all of the eight freediving disciplines recognized by AIDA International. He is the current freediving world record champion and “the deepest man on earth”. This title was given to him when he set a world record in the “No Limits” discipline at a depth of 214 meters (702 feet). But in 2012 he surpassed his own no limits depth with a world record dive to 253.2 meters (831 feet).
Tank Diving – A deep tank dive, which you need to be trained to achieve, is generally to a specified depth range of deeper than thirty meters (ninety-eight feet). Some recreational diving agencies award a certificate for this, and it’s regarded as a form of technical diving. In technical diving, a depth below about sixty meters (200 feet) is where hypoxic breathing gas becomes necessary to avoid oxygen toxicity. The current depth record for open-circuit scuba diving is held by Ahmed Gabr, who descended to 332.35 meters (1044 feet) on 18 September 2014.
Submarines, Submersibles and Collapse Depth – Of course we wanted to go deeper, so we built machines to take us there, starting with the early diving bells and then the submarines. And it was those that allowed us to see the world’s basement.
German World War II U-boats generally had collapse (or crush) depths in the range of 200 to 280 meters (660 to 920 feet), however, modern nuclear attack submarines like the American Seawolf class are estimated to have a test depth of 490 meters (1600 feet), which would imply a collapse depth of 730 meters (2400 feet).