Meg

by Steve Alten

  “You said it right, Uncle Mac. It just sounded ugly coming out of your face.”

  “Be careful about what comes out of your face, Monty, or that GPS might just beach you on an iceberg in Alaska.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Strait of Georgia

  Salish Sea, British Columbia, Canada

  THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA and the Georgia Strait were created during the last Ice Age when massive glaciers advanced through British Columbia. These excavated canyons eventually filled with seawater, with any spared land formations becoming islands and islets.

  Denman and Hornby were private islands located along the east coast of Vancouver Island. Home to about a thousand residents, they had become popular retreats among the rich and famous, so it was no surprise to see the 60-foot Hatteras sports yacht become a common fixture on the seascape.

  The Hot & Spicy was two-thirds bow and one-third flybridge and tuna tower, stacked above a three-seat fishing deck which occupied the stern. Sleek outside, she was all luxury within, the contours of her four staterooms, heads, galley and dinette decorated in gray leather and teak. Below decks, she harbored two 21.5 kw generators which supplied the electricity needed to run the latest in electronics and AV systems, and her twin engines were capable of cranking out the horsepower necessary to maintain a top speed over 40 knots.

  For two months the grey-hulled ship could be seen trolling the Georgia Strait, the size of their lines indicating they were after serious game fish. After about five weeks the yacht settled upon the deep waters located between the southeastern tip of Hornby Island and Flora Islet―a moonscape of rock inhabited by hundreds of sea elephants and seals. The mammals barked and belched and dove in and out of the emerald-green waters of the Georgia Strait, but none would venture far from land.

  * * *

  Ben Smallwood awoke from his afternoon nap at 4:44, a minute before the alarm was set to go off. A framed photo of his wife, Shelly, and their two children greeted him on the teak night table. The yacht had been a gift from Shelly’s family, but it came with one condition attached:

  Kill every Megalodon pup in the Salish Sea.

  Ben Smallwood had been born and raised in London, earning degrees in engineering and the marine sciences from Imperial College. Six years before, he had traveled to British Columbia to attend a two-week symposium in Vancouver where he’d met Shelly Shelby, a thirty-year-old Texas native and marine biologist who was in town for the same event. By the third day they had been inseparable, attending lectures by day, the nights reserved for more intimate rendezvous.

  Shelly’s father, Heath, had flown in with his daughter on his private jet. The former Associate Vice President of Operations at Enron Corporation was an avid fisherman and had chartered the forty-eight-foot fishing vessel, Bite Me-2, for the week, hoping to land a prize halibut to adorn the office of his new summer getaway in Prince Rupert Sound.

  With the weekend upon them, Shelly Shelby had invited Ben to join her aboard the boat. They had flown to Vancouver Island Friday night and met her father for dinner at an upscale seaside restaurant in Victoria.

  “Daddy, this is my friend, Ben Smallwood.”

  “Smallwood? Well son, if I feel the boat rocking later, we may just have to change your name to Driftwood.”

  Two hours and five shots later, the two men were the best of friends.

  It took most of Saturday for the crew of the Bite Me-2 to hook Shelby his halibut. They had been cruising the Swiftsure Bank on the southwest coast of Vancouver Island between Port Renfrew and Sombrio Beach when the fishing rod’s heavy Dacron line suddenly spun out on its reel.

  Ben had done his best to stay out of the rain and the way of the first mate, who had quickly secured the billionaire into the deck-mounted chair. As the captain put the boat in reverse, the boisterous Texan was handed the rod and had begun taking up the slack on the six-hundred-pound fish.

  “Christ, he’s strong.”

  “She. We hooked you a big female. Just bring her in nice and easy.”

  Ben had feared Shelby might have a stroke as he watched the fifty-three-year-old’s face turn from red to purple, the veins in his neck popping out like rope. “She’s coming up a bit … I can feel her weakening.”

  The first mate stood ready with a gaff. “Keep the end of the rod in that steel swivel, Mr. S. Let the chair do the heavy lifting.”

  “Hey Smallwood, make yourself useful and get Shelly’s camera.”

  Ben had headed inside and made his way forward to the cabin where his girlfriend was sleeping. Locating the Nikon carrying case, he’d removed the camera.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Your Dad hooked a huge fish; come take a look.”

  “I’m sick. Tell them to take me back to the dock.”

  Ben had emerged in the stern as a cloudburst of rain pelted the deck, the splatter of a trillion droplets cloaking all other sound. Using his T-shirt, he’d wiped condensation from the camera’s lens and snapped several shots as the big Texan wrapped the crook of his arms around the rod.

  Water had poured off the soaked bill of Heath Shelby’s 49ers baseball cap. The man’s arms were burning with lactic acid, his back and legs trembling from muscular exhaustion. Still he had refused to give an inch, knowing his daughter’s new boyfriend was watching.

  Locking down the tackle he had straightened his legs and leaned back, drawing in line with his entire body―

  ―unaware that two hundred feet below and a quarter of a mile away, a far larger predator had entered the arena and was homing in on his would-be trophy.

  The first mate patted Shelby on the back. “Stay with it; I’m going to get the bigger net.”

  “You do that Gilligan. Smallwood, you getting this?”

  “Yes―” Ben watched as Shelby fell back in the chair, the tension on the pole gone.

  “No … no!”

  “Did you lose him?”

  “Shut-up.” Gripping the pole with his left hand and arm, he’d reeled in line rapidly with his right. “There you are … I can feel you. You’re running to the boat, aren’t you? Dumb bitch, I got you now! You’re not getting away this―”

  Ben had blinked. One moment Shelby had been there, the next he was gone―flying through the air and over the transom into the sea, along with the chair and the wood planks it had been bolted to.

  In a state of shock, his mind unable to respond to what his eyes had just witnessed, the Englishman had walked around the hole in the deck and stood in the downpour by the back of the boat in a rain-muted white noise, the empty expanse of sea mocking him.

  His eye had caught movement and the lens followed, the whirring clicks catching an impossibly large white dorsal fin just as it disappeared beneath the gray-blue waters … and then it was gone.

  They had searched all evening, the Coast Guard joining them, along with a dozen local crafts. Shelly had been inconsolable. Ben had stayed with her in her father’s hotel room until Tuesday when her cousin, Mark, announced that the search for his uncle was over.

  Ben had kept the roll of film, waiting until he had returned to London before having it developed. Most of the shots of the water had been blurry, but in one he could see what appeared to be the upper half of a ghost-white caudal fin slapping the surface.

  The story had broken on BBC-1 two nights later. Angel, the Megalodon shark raised in captivity that had broken free of her pen seventeen years earlier, had returned to the Tanaka Lagoon … along with a sixty-one-foot, 67,000-pound male. From the vicious bite scars along Angel’s pectoral fins the two brutes had mated―an event the larger female was apparently none too happy about, as the dead male’s remains had been found bleeding out at the bottom of the canal.

  The results of a necropsy on the male a week later had revealed the contents of its stomach which included a baseball, a 625-pound halibut … and the remains of Heath Shelby.

  * * *

  Kill every Megalodon pup in the Salish Sea …

  Ben’s first
move was to seek help from one of the locals. Nick Van Slicken had led the public outcry six months earlier when Lizzy and Bela had escaped from the Tanaka Institute and invaded the Salish Sea, wiping out an entire pod of orca. The director of the Adopt-an-Orca foundation informed him that a diver had been attacked by what he first thought were six small great whites―three albinos and three sharing Bela’s bizarre pigment pattern. One of the dark-backed pups had been netted and killed by Paul Agricola, a retired marine biologist, leaving five Megalodon offspring to terrorize the Salish Sea. It was Agricola who had used his company’s hopper-dredge, the Marieke to capture Lizzy and return her to the institute.

  Anthony Marcinkowski had been first mate aboard the Marieke; for $2,000 a week he agreed to carry out similar duties aboard the Englishman’s yacht. Unfortunately, every island in the Salish Sea looked alike to the former paramedic, but he did manage to isolate their search for the Meg nursery to the Georgia Strait.

  The yacht’s fish finder had given them their first glimpse of their prey when one of the pups passed beneath the boat in the waters off Texado, an island just northeast of Hornby. Sonar had painted a predator that was thirteen-to-fifteen-feet in length, weighing an estimated 3,500 pounds. If this was a Meg pup, then the sharks had doubled in size and tripled their girth over that of their seven-foot sibling Paul Agricola had netted and accidentally drowned six months earlier.

  That presented a problem; these juvenile killers were far too large to bring in on a rod and reel. Rigging a trawl net was a possibility; but the Megs seemed to prefer the deep. Enticing one to the surface without the sea drone Anthony Marcinkowski’s former employer had used to bait Lizzy would be a challenge, and chumming in the Salish Sea was illegal. They would have to hook something on the order of a halibut as bait and drag it ahead of the open mouth of the trawl if they had any hope of netting one of these killers.

  Nick Van Sicklen, a valuable ally, had introduced Ben to a commercial fisherman who sold him a used trawl and set of winches. The director of the Adopt-an-Orca program also arranged to have a number of charter boat captains on standby so that, when a pup was captured, it could be hauled off to another area in order to keep the actual location of the Meg nursery from the local media―and Jonas Taylor’s expedition.

  They had been searching the Georgia Strait for several weeks, focusing on the local seal population when they had their first surface encounter―a midnight banquet in the waters off Flora Inlet, the pups’ albino hides appearing bio-luminous in the lunar light.

  That the sharks were nocturnal hunters was not unexpected; after all the subspecies of Megalodon inhabiting the Mariana Trench lived in perpetual darkness. What Ben had not considered was the effect of the moon’s phases on the creatures’ feeding schedule. Lunar light gave the hunters a decided advantage in that it reflected off bait fish as they surfaced to feed. With the juvenile Megs, the full moon appeared to send them into an absolute feeding frenzy.

  Releasing the trawl, the crew of the Hot & Spicy attempted to sweep the pups up into the heavy nylon trap. On the third pass they succeeded in netting one of Lizzy’s albino offspring―along with a half-eaten sea lion and three adult seals.

  Ben contacted Nick Van Sicklen, who quickly tracked a resident pod of orca congregating in the waters off the San Juan Islands. The two boats rendezvoused a half mile northeast of Hadron Island just before dawn. As the sunrise blistered the horizon gold, the net holding Lizzy’s thrashing offspring was raised halfway out of the sea, affording one of the crew armed with a chainsaw an angle to cut off the Meg’s right pectoral fin. The bleeding animal was then released to the circling pod of killer whales, the bulls taking turns eviscerating the shark as they fought to claim its liver―

  ―the entire scene filmed by Nick Van Sicklen on his iPhone.

  The second Meg was netted twenty-nine nights later. A heavy rain and six-foot seas rocked the yacht beyond the point of nausea while the full moon remained concealed behind dense storm clouds.

  The weather let up by 4:20 a.m.; the skies had cleared an hour later. With dawn approaching and both the full moon and their opportunities waning, two crewmen were set ashore on Flora Islet with clubs and burlap bags. Ten minutes later the trawl was baited with a freshly-killed pair of sea lions. By 5 a.m. the bleeding carcasses had attracted a pup, which refused to enter the open net … until a second Meg appeared on the yacht’s fish finder. Realizing it was about to lose its meal, the first juvenile―another albino―darted inside the trap and was captured.

  Three 12-gauge shots to the brain killed the beast. An eight-inch barbed hook was then hammered into place beneath the lower jaw using a rubber mallet. The rod and reel were then passed off to another charter boat, who towed the dead “game fish” into the shallows between Stuart, Waldron, and the west coast of Orcas Island. Two local news teams arrived just in time to film the catch as it was hauled in. According to several unidentified eyewitnesses, the monster had gone berserk, forcing the crew to kill it.

  Few who saw the ghostly two-ton, fourteen-and-a-half-foot albino beast hanging from a construction crane thought to protest.

  By now, the crew of the Hot & Spicy had the routine down pat; so much so that Ben ordered the yacht anchored off Vancouver Island, giving his men three weeks of paid leave while they waited for the arrival of the next full moon.

  It was then that the Shelby family’s personal mission of revenge turned into an international game of “Dead Pool.”

  It began when officials on San Juan Island confirmed a report from a local diver stating that he had counted six Megalodon offspring―three from each deceased “sister” when he had been attacked in the shallows off Orcas Island. Since then, one of Bela’s pups had been killed to two of Lizzy’s … and suddenly the hot topic of conversation was which sister―the cunning albino or the dark-backed brute―possessed the best traits to allow its pup to be the last shark swimming?

  Odds were posted, Las Vegas covering the action. Within a week boating traffic in the Salish Sea doubled.

  Thankfully, most of it was confined to the San Juan Islands where the three Megs had supposedly been captured. A local expert was needed to handle interview requests and Nick Van Sicklen stepped into the limelight to preach about the “evil trio” still stalking the Salish Sea. The press ate it up and soon there were rumors of Van Sicklen running for mayor.

  Realizing that things could easily get out of hand, Ben met with his crew before weighing anchor, reminding them that they had signed non-disclosure agreements and that wagering in the Dead Pool would not be tolerated.

  Despite Ben’s worries, last night’s netting, kill and staged capture of Bela’s second pup had played out with military precision. With the Dead Pool tied at two, the next pup captured would win it … or lose it, depending upon the wager.

  Then Nick Van Sicklen took things too far. Before a crowd of reporters, the amped-up orca advocate had taken out a chainsaw and proceeded to eviscerate the dead juvenile’s belly, hoping to produce human remains. Instead, he galvanized a public backlash, led by protests from animal rights groups, who were demanding the Executive Council of British Columbia take action against those who were hunting a protected species.

  * * *

  It was five-thirty in the afternoon by the time Ben Smallwood entered the pilothouse. Keith Amato was on duty, the yacht’s co-pilot occupying the captain’s chair, his attention focused on the fish finder.

  “Are you tracking one of the remaining pups?”

  “No, boss. Something a lot bigger.”

  Ben joined him at the monitor, the sonar “painting” an object tracking slowly along the seafloor, moving south by southeast at three knots. “Twenty-five feet, weighing nine thousand pounds. It’s either a juvenile orca or a young humpback.”

  “It’s not a whale. I’ve been matching its course and speed for forty-three minutes and it hasn’t come up for air. It’s gotta be a whale shark.”

  Ben shook his head. “Whale sharks prefer the tropics.
These waters are way too cold.”

  “It’s rare, but it happens. A few years ago, a dead female washed ashore not too far south of here in Lincoln Beach. Not sure how it died.”

  “Maybe it was assassinated.” Ben reached for the cell phone vibrating in his front pocket. He read the text message out loud. “The pigeon is still in its coop.”

  “You raise pigeons?”

  “It’s code, Mr. Amato. It means the competition is still stuck in the starter’s gate. If you need me, I’ll be in the galley. And stop shadowing that whale shark. It may not have any teeth, but its size could be keeping the Meg pups away.”

  Peace Island Medical Center and Hospital

  San Juan Island, Salish Sea

  Jackie certainly looked better. The color had returned to her complexion and she had regained her appetite.

  David sat in a cushioned chair next to her bed, watching her devour a cheeseburger. “I’m glad to see you’re eating.”

  She nodded, her mouth full. “Thanks for smuggling this in, babe. I needed it.”

  “Like you needed the opioids?”

  “Percocet. And I told you, I only took them because I’ve been having problems falling asleep.”

  “Jackie, you’re talking to the reigning champion of insomnia; it comes from harboring fears which lead to nightmares and a whole lot worse. So why don’t you quit lying and tell me the truth.”

  She crumpled up the remains of the burger in its foil wrap and threw it at him. “Now I’m a liar?”

  He was about to respond when his cell phone chimed, Pop Goes the Weasel. He glanced at the text message:

  False Bay. Fifteen minutes.

  He replied, Okay, and then tossed the rolled-up sandwich in the wastepaper basket. “I gotta go.”

  “You’re leaving me to meet Monty?”

  “Who said that?”

  “I know his ringtone, David.”

  “Jackie―and I can’t believe this is coming from me―but you need counseling. The guy I was seeing back in Monterey wasn’t bad … I can get you his number.”