Demon Key

by David Brookover

  Joe Carter was a Pentagon intelligence lifer who had successfully deciphered enemy codes during World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. After the advent of supercomputers, he was transferred to the Satellite Intelligence Department where he spent his ten-hour shifts watching a bank of monitors. He was bored stiff, but he decided not to request a transfer. At his age, that would be interpreted as discontent, and discontented employees would be handed a gold watch and forced into retirement. He wanted to avoid that at all costs. Being shackled to his termagant wife 24/7 would drive him to the nuthouse. So he stuck with his new career, holed up in the bowels of the Pentagon, and he would watch those monitors until he stroked out or died of boredom.

  This was his second day of scanning the satellite shots of the northern Gulf of Mexico. He was given just enough information to whet his curiosity. Report any sightings of a large sea animal.

  Large? How large was large? A whale shark? Orca? Tarpon?

  Joe stifled a yawn as his bloodshot eyes continually shifted from monitor to monitor. He sipped his Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee and absently smoothed a colic in his thinning gray hair. What he couldn’t comprehend was why the brass upstairs would authorize the considerable expense of re-positioning a defense spy satellite for a fishing expedition. There had to be more to this assignment than they were willing to disclose. Perhaps they were hunting a terrorist boat or even a submarine. He smiled. Yeah, that had to be it.

  Suddenly, he stiffened and gawked at the scene unfolding on monitor seven.

  “Jesus H. Christ! Mel, take a look at this!” he shouted. Coffee splashed over the cup lip and burnt his hand, but it barely registered in his brain.

  Joe’s African-American co-worker, Mel Daily, gladly abandoned his station and peered over Joe’s shoulder.

  “What the hell is that thing?” Mel exclaimed.

  They watched in amazement as the Mosasaur burst through the surface like a submarine-launched Harpoon cruise missile and closed its massive jaws over a hammerhead shark. The frothy Gulf roiled around them.

  “Zoom in! Zoom in before we lose the fucker,” Mel demanded.

  Joe fidgeted with the console controls, and the monstrous head grew larger.

  “Jesus, man, what is that thing?” Mel asked.

  “Hell if I know, but look what it’s got in its mouth!”

  Mel moved closer to the screen. “Zoom in closer. Whatever it is, it sure is ugleee.”

  “It’s a hammerhead shark . . . about twenty feet long,” Joe guessed. “Look at the way it’s trying to escape the bigger predator’s mouth.”

  “Yeah, but it ain’t working, man. The big fucker’s got it good.”

  They watched as the mouth closed ever tighter over the hammerhead’s thick frame, crushing it until it finally ceased struggling. They both sank into the crimson waters.

  Joe picked up the red phone on his left.

  “Shit, man, who you callin’ on that phone?” Mel asked. “Fish and Game?”

  Joe laughed, and his hand trembled excitedly as he dialed General Waring’s office extension. Finally, some action!

  General Waring descended to Pentagon sublevel four to view the digitally recorded incident. He took his three assistants with him. He referred to them as Larry, Curly, and Mo. Actually, the threesome weren’t that incompetent, especially when he was absent from Washington. Then they could focus on their duties instead of kissing his ass.

  Waring knew old Joe Carter well. He had been a damned good cryptologist at one time, but those times had changed and supercomputers had rendered him obsolete. Joe should’ve retired then, but Waring didn’t force the issue. He was acquainted with the poor guy’s wife.

  Joe replayed the recorded incident over and over for Waring and his silent entourage. Mel kept a prying eye glued to his co-worker’s station and one to his video assignment, while Joe kept his mouth shut and just manipulated the controls. Waring finally broke the silence.

  “How big would you guess that monster is, Joe?”

  “Well, when I saw this live, I judged the hammerhead to be about twenty feet long. It was a big one, that’s for sure.”

  “And?”

  Joe’s mind whirled. He wasn’t used to producing intelligence data under such scrutiny.

  “My guess, and of course it’s just a guess, because we couldn’t see much of the creature’s body . . . most of it was underwater . . .”

  Waring nodded understandingly.

  He generated some saliva to lubricate his dry mouth. “I figure the predator’s somewhere close to fifty feet long.”

  Waring appeared incredulous. “Really? That long?”

  Joe exhaled. “Or longer.”

  One of Waring’s assistants stepped forward. “Could we see the wide view again, Joe?”

  Joe looked askance to the general, and he nodded his approval.

  After Joe backed out of the zoom picture, the assistant pointed at a small white object close to the incident. “Can you zoom in there?”

  “No problem,” Joe replied. He chastised himself for not noticing the object before. He and Mel had been too intent on viewing the sea monster in action. Now he wished he’d done a more complete analysis before he’d called Waring.

  “It looks like a boat,” Waring commented.

  “Not just any boat,” the assistant said. “Look at the equipment in the stern and those orange markers surrounding it. It’s a dive boat and looks to be a forty-five footer.”

  “Dive boat?” Waring asked pensively. “How many people do one of those things carry?”

  “I’d say about a dozen divers. The captains of those commercial operations usually take out as many scuba-diving tourists as they can squeeze in.” He turned to Joe. “Can you get closer so we can make out the name of the boat?”

  “I’ll try, but we might have perspective issues.” Joe fiddled with the knobs until they could accurately read the soda can labels near the stern, but the satellite’s camera angle prevented them from viewing the boat’s name. Joe maneuvered the satellite camera to the license identification on the port side.

  Waring appeared worried. “How far is that boat from the shark incident?”

  “I can tell you exactly, sir,” Joe replied. He did some more fiddling. “Six point three miles northwest of the incident locale.”

  While Joe answered Waring, monitor five displayed the live northern Gulf satellite feed. It displayed a close-up of a bearded man wearing a rumpled fishing hat and stepping from the boat’s cabin. He placed a beer can to his lips and threw back his head; his Adam’s apple bobbed several times. They could make out a thin trickle of the amber fluid dribble over his chin onto his tee shirt. There was no business identification on the shirt. It simply read: “Farting is a Gas.”

  “Hey, check out monitor five!” Mel shouted.

  Joe and Waring shifted their gazes to the scraggly man stretching on the deck. Suddenly, he ceased in mid-stretch and stared wide-eyed to his left.

  “Move out to a wide angle!” Waring hissed at Mel.

  Mel quickly obliged, and the wide angle revealed the source of the man’s terror. Joe wrung his hands, as the other four men simply held their breath.

  A monstrous silhouette, cruising just beneath the rolling aquamarine surface, was headed directly toward the dive boat. It was less than a half-mile away.

  Waring snatched the red phone receiver from its cradle, rapidly punched in a number, and spoke urgently to a high-ranking subordinate. When he finished, he looked anxiously at the others.

  “I’ve scrambled an entire sea-and-air-rescue team and a fighter-jet squadron to take out that fucking sea monster. We can only pray that they arrive in time.”

  “Fat chance,” Mel muttered beneath his breath, both eyes glued to monitor number five.

  Chapter 69

  “So what’s a mosasaur doing here in Florida?” Teddi asked Jilly. “And especially now.”

  “Good question,” the professor responded. “I’m afraid I’m as much in the
dark about that as you all are.”

  “So if it’s a sea creature, then how did it survive all those days in the freshwater Glades?” Jackson posed.

  “Oh, that I can answer,” she replied. “Mosasaurs populated freshwater rivers toward the end of their reign, but preferred the larger ocean food supplies.”

  “But the water’s so shallow in the Everglades. Wouldn’t the damn fish’ve died out there by now?” Dex queried.

  Jilly laughed. “First, the mosasaur isn’t a fish. It’s a giant marine reptile that breathes air like you and me. Its mouth is shaped similarly to an alligator, but it’s most closely related to the monitor lizards of Africa and Asia. Mosasaurs are also linked to snakes in respect to their skull structure and body locomotion.

  “Like certain constrictors, the mosasaur can unhinge its jaw, which allows it to swallow sizeable prey. Its teeth are round in cross-section and used to seize and crush its prey. There are an additional two rows of pterygoid teeth that hold the prey while it’s being swallowed.”

  “So they aren’t dinosaurs,” Jackson confirmed.

  “Correct. They’re more like serpentine marine lizards.”

  “With a tail like a huge eel,” Jackson added.

  “Good observation,” Jilly responded. “Mosasaur tails undulate side-to-side like a conger eel’s tail.”

  “If they’re related to monitors, then why don’t mosasaurs have legs?” Dex wondered.

  “They do — in a way. By studying their fossils — and they are common throughout the world — it appears that their legs gradually evolved into shorter-boned paddles. They also developed a tail fin to assist in movement. But, their earliest ancestors would go into the ocean and hunt for food by day and return to the safety of land by night. Of course, they’re mainly theories — nobody’s ever studied a live mosasaur.”

  “By the size of the one I saw on the television news, it wouldn’t have to fear any creature,” Jackson exclaimed.

  Jilly smiled. “That’s because the one we’re dealing with now is a giant mosasaur, also referred to as a Hainosaurus. Fossils have been found as large as fifty feet! That’s not to say there weren’t some that were even longer.”

  “Well, our sea monster is definitely a Hainosaurus,” Jackson agreed.

  The others nodded their accord.

  “What did they eat?” Teddi asked.

  “Anything they wanted!” John joked.

  Everyone laughed loudly, relieving some of the tension suffusing the room.

  “Actually,” Jilly began, after the room quieted again, “they fed on ammonites, birds, and turtles.”

  Dex was incredulous. “Those big bad monsters ate that sissy stuff!”

  “I’m not kidding, but the larger ones did feed on sharks and plesiosaurs from time to time,” she replied. “However, the mosasaurs weren’t immune to attacks from other sea creatures. For instance, one fossil was found with shark bites in its spine. Although they were powerful swimmers, they weren’t real fast in the long haul, but a mosasaur could outrun its enemies with short bursts of speed. It didn’t need to very often.”

  “Musta been some kinda kick-ass enemy to worry a mosasaur,” Dex interjected.

  “Well, let’s see. There were the megaladons for one — the colossal ancestors of the great white sharks. A typical meg was sixty to a hundred feet long and weighed in at least fifty thousand pounds.”

  “Holy shit!” Jackson cried out.

  “But there weren’t as many megs back then as there were mosasaurs,” Jilly added.

  “So how do we kill it?” Dex asked.

  Jilly’s eyes dropped. Clearly, she hadn’t thought of that. Being a scientist, she preferred to capture and study it. But realistically, she realized that it would be nearly impossible to take one alive.

  “That’s the military’s problem,” she snapped.

  “Sensitive subject,” John noted.

  “Yes, it is,” she retorted. “A marine reptile that we thought was extinct for millions of years suddenly shows up, and all we can think about is destroying it.”

  “For our own protection,” John argued.

  “Protection? You mean protect our precious beach tourists.”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” John said quietly, preferring not to aggravate her further.

  “Which brings us around to why this mosasaur has been feeding on people,” Jackson said diplomatically, effectively ending the awkward disagreement.

  “I think Bo Swinson was responsible for that,” Teddi surmised. “You know, feeding it those women.”

  “I agree,” Jackson said. “Since it’s tasted human flesh, it seems to have added us to its menu.”

  “And there’s nothing we can do about that now,” Jilly said sadly.

  “Why in tarnation did it leave the grotto, then? I mean, it was fillin’ its belly on a human buffet down there.”

  Jackson paced the small area at the foot of the bed. “And that brings us to the big-money question: where’s it headed?”

  “It certainly seems to have a pretty fair idea, the way it skedaddled out of the Everglades into the Gulf,” Dex commented.

  “Yeah, it certainly appears that way,” Jackson grunted.

  Suddenly, hallway screams broke their reverie. Jackson rushed to the door and poked his head outside. He hailed the closest woman.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded.

  The woman was breathless with excitement. “Turn on the Fox channel — quick! They’re showing a real sea monster killing people — live!”

  Teddi switched on the room television and swiftly located the Fox channel. They were sickened by what they saw.

  A male reporter spoke ardently. “. . . unbelievable! Again, if you just joined us, we’re hovering above the Gulf of Mexico off the Mississippi coast in our helicopter, where some kind of prehistoric sea creature has attacked and eaten several unidentified divers. Repeat, this is not a B-movie. This is actually happening . . .

  “Wait! Hold on! We’ve just been ordered to leave the vicinity. Can you believe this! What we’re hearing from the military authorities is that a squadron of jet fighters is on its way here to destroy the monster. Repeat, we’ve just received an order to . . .”

  Jackson switched off the television.

  “Why’d you do that!” Teddi objected.

  He stared at the blank screen. “Because I have a damn good idea where the mosasaur’s heading.”

  Dex leaned forward in his chair. “Where?”

  The others eagerly awaited his answer.

  He turned. “My place. In the Bayou.”

  Chapter 70

  News manager and former anchor, Bryan Harding of the New Orleans Fox affiliate, snapped his cell phone shut and clapped his hands in joy. His paid military informant had finally earned his keep on the station payroll. And how! Bryan now had exclusive access to a top-secret military search-and-rescue operation in the Gulf of Mexico just east of New Orleans! Sounded like a national headline news scoop to him. And of course he, Bryan Harding, would receive the lion’s share of accolades.

  He phoned the airport, instructed the station pilot to fuel the weather helicopter and complete his pre-flight check, and then read him the destination coordinates. Next, Bryan located his top cameraman, Jason Levy, in the lunchroom and directed him to pack his gear for a major assignment. Levy shot him a shit-eating grin and jogged toward the equipment room.

  Within thirty minutes, the news chopper was in the air and heading east over the Gulf. The trip to the incident locale seemed an eternity. Bryan felt like a sugar-buzzed kid waiting for Christmas dawn, but his Christmas morning had arrived early!

  He opened his briefcase and retrieved the compact mirror that never left his side. He slicked back his mud-brown hair, wet his bushy eyebrows until they laid flat, applied a light coat of powder to reduce camera glare, and practiced his disaster-scene expression. Perfect! He carefully returned the mirror to the briefcase and practiced his vocal calisthenics.

 
; Then Bryan saw it and nearly emptied his bowels. Halleluiah! This wasn’t the aftermath of a disaster . . . it was one in the making! Some huge prehistoric-looking sea serpent was eating divers like popcorn! Halleluiah! What a story!

  Levy switched on the camera, and Jason immediately initiated the live feed to their New Orleans facility. From there, the feed would be forwarded to the national boys. Bryan Harding. Live, nationwide. What a thrill! So what if a few people had to be devoured to advance his career? Shit happened.

  Bryan glanced down at the carnage. The water around the dive boat was like red Jell-O. There were no floating body parts. The monster was a tidy eater.

  He cleared his throat and narrated the horrible news phenomenon in his deepest voice. His tone was somber, incredulous. His expression sad, but professionally aloof.

  “How in the hell did Fox News get hold of this story?” President Hanover bellowed into the phone at General Waring. “You’re goddamn right there’s a leak somewhere. Find it and plug it! And while you’re at it, kill that fucking sea serpent! This doesn’t look good, General. People are going ape-shit out there. The White House switchboard is flooded with frightened callers. Put an end to this, Waring, or pack your bags.” Hanover slammed down the receiver and buried his stressed face in his hands. What a monumental fuck-up!

  The mosasaur exploded toward the divers with a tremendous surge. Humans were its favorite food. Mosasaur filet mignon. Its prey swam at a shallow depth of forty feet and bunched together. The mosasaur continued its feeding frenzy, snapping its jaws wildly; it swallowed the small prey easily, which quickly cleared its mouth for another.

  There were fourteen divers in all, and by the time the Fox News helicopter arrived, there were only six divers left alive. One of them escaped the mosasaur, surfaced, and rapidly scaled the chrome ladder to the deck. The young woman collapsed on the teak planking, curled into a fetal position, and sobbed hysterically.