by Steve Alten
Gregg took the bottle from her. “The escape pod’s too thick to digest. You would have eventually passed out it’s rectum like a giant enema.”
“Or you could have ignited the hydrogen tank; turned the pod into a rocket.”
“The chassis was gone, Kevin. The emergency burn wasn’t an option. Face it, David saved us. Who even knew you could electrify the Lexan glass? I didn’t know; I doubt Molony knew.”
Rick took the bottle from his co-pilot. “So where is the Wonderboy now?”
Tina scoffed. “Probably in his luxury suite banging the marine biologist.”
“Je … je … jealous?” Kevin asked, opening the second bottle.
“No.”
“Je … je … jealous?”
“I said, no. Are you deaf?”
“Easy, it’s his Tourette’s.”
“Je … je … jealous?”
“Jesus, take another drink. And don’t backwash.”
Rick drained what remained of the first bottle. “So what happens now that we’re down to one sub? You know David’s got the pilot seat locked up. Who’s turn is it next to ride shotgun with Mad Max?”
The three other pilots remained silent.
Rick looked at Tina. “Two hundred grand. Is it worth the risk of being deep throated again?”
She wiped away tears. “I don’t know.”
“David’s aggressive, and maybe that’s needed to capture this monster. But he takes unnecessary risks. When the Lio surfaced we backed off. When it tore itself free of the net Gregg and I were three meters off the Tonga’s bow. That’s standard operating procedure during a surface confrontation. What did Taylor do, Tina?”
“He didn’t listen. We all tried to tell him how fast the Lio is, but he’s—”
“Je … je … jealous?”
“Cocky.” Tina took one last swig and resealed the bottle. “To answer your question, Rick, I’m done. My nerves are frayed and I know I’ll be seeing that monster in my dreams for years to come. I’m asking for my funds to be wired and then I’m going ashore in Brisbane. Anyone else care to join me?”
Rick nodded. “Gregg and I talked about it; we’ve had enough. Kevin?”
“I’m ge … ge … gone.”
San Francisco International Airport
San Francisco, California
Danielle Taylor slowed the black Lexus-JX sedan, attempting to time her arrival outside Gate-C. The Cambridge graduate student was forced to circle the airport one more time before her father emerged from the baggage claim exit.
Jonas Taylor climbed in the passenger seat. Dark circles framed bloodshot eyes. Two day stubble was coming in white, matching his sideburns. An ace bandage was wrapped around his left forearm.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
“Hey, Dad.” She leaned over for the kiss. “What happened to you? You look like hell.”
“Been there enough times to collect frequent flyer miles. How’s your mom?”
“Better. The doctor changed her meds. We haven’t told her about David; we thought it would upset her.”
“What about David? What happened?”
“He’s fine, don’t have a heart attack. He had a run-in with the Lio. They air the show tomorrow night but the Crown Prince e-mailed Mac a preview just to prepare us. You can’t see him actually being eaten, but he talks about it during the reenactment.”
“Good God.”
“He’s fine. He electrified the escape pod and the Lio regurgitated him. Like father, like son, huh?”
Jonas laid his head back, closing his eyes. “This has got to end.”
* * *
An hour later they exited Cabrillo Highway, heading south on Sand Dunes Drive. Jonas stared at the concrete and steel bowl in the distance—wishing he could turn back the clock on his life.
Mac’s car was the only vehicle in the parking lot. Jonas found him seated in the west bleachers, watching the ocean run up through the lagoon’s canal.
Groaning with the effort, he sat backwards on the grooved aluminum bench next to his friend. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.”
“The McFarland en route?”
“As of noon today. Two Mantas on board, along with four Valkyrie lasers, courtesy of Bill Stone at Stone Aerospace, arranged a month ago by your spooky pal, Dr. Zachary Wallace. Oh yeah, he also delivered thirty-five sonar buoys, God only knows why. Does this guy use a ouija board or does he have crystal balls?”
“I have no idea. But he tends to be right. Who’s rigging the lasers to the Mantas?”
“Cyel Reed, and he’s not a happy camper. Hopefully he’ll have field tested them before you arrive in Chile.”
“Anything else?”
“You mean, am I flying down with you? To be honest, I hadn’t made up my mind, though I was leaning toward staying here. Then I heard what happened to that kid. Fucking Lizzy; she’s as mean as her mama and a lot smarter.”
“So then you’re going?”
“I was … until I got bumped.”
“Bumped? By who?”
“By me.”
Jonas turned to see his wife making her way slowly up the bleachers.
“I’m going with you to bring back our son. I’m going to Antarctica.”
PART THREE
ANTARCTICA
18
Weddell Sea, West Antarctica
At just over eight million square miles, Antarctica is bigger than both Australia and the United States, with ninety-seven percent of its land mass covered by an ice sheet that averages two miles thick. The continent is divided into three distinct sections: its east and west regions and the peninsula.
The Antarctic Peninsula, nicknamed the “Banana Belt” for its less frigid temperatures, officially begins with the outlying South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands. The peninsula itself encompasses a five-hundred-mile stretch of mountains, the peaks of which tower over 9,000 feet. West Antarctica occupies the land mass located directly below the peninsula and is separated from the larger eastern region by the Trans-Antarctic Mountains. East Antarctica is the largest of the three regions and spans two-thirds of the continent from the Trans-Antarctic Mountains clear to the eastern coastline. A desert of ice, East Antarctica is the coldest, most desolate location on the planet.
Antarctica’s spring and summer and its extended hours of daylight run from October through February. Darkness arrives in March, with temperatures dropping another forty degrees. The coldest temperature ever measured on Earth was minus 135.8 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded in East Antarctica at Russia’s Vostok Station.
* * *
At only three hundred feet and displacing a mere 4,500 tons, the passenger ship Ortelius had originally been designed as a research vessel built for the Russian Academy of Science. Reflagged and outfitted with luxury suites, the cruise ship could accommodate one hundred passengers, serviced by a crew of fifty-eight on its twelve-day Antarctic excursions.
Captain Christopher Rafalski sat in his chair in the oversized bridge, pretending to read a daily weather bulletin. Seven crewmen on Alpha shift manned the controls while his executive officer scanned the Weddell Sea for ice. Milling about the command center were half a dozen passengers—the cruise line offering its guests unrestricted access to his bridge. After nine years of splitting his year between the Arctic and Antarctica tours, the captain still struggled with his social skills, though he did perk up when the two Swedish women entered his domain.
After several minutes he realized they were a couple and went back to “reading” his daily report.
The voyage had begun five days earlier in Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world. Sailing south through the Beagle Channel, the captain managed to cross the Drake Passage seven hours ahead of a nasty weather system, sparing his passengers and crew a rough trip. A solitary tabular iceberg greeted them on day four as they entered the Weddell Sea, the Antarctic Sound as free of sea ice as Captain Rafalski could ever remember—the real
ities of global warming in full display, despite the ignorant rants of the dozen or so climate change deniers on board.
For the passengers, less ice meant greater access to Emperor penguin colonies. This afternoon they would come ashore on Brown Bluff, a flat-topped, steep-sided volcano known as a tuya. Formed when lava had erupted through the ice sheet, Brown Bluff featured an easily accessible cobble and ash beach, its photographic red-brown tuff cliffs towering in the distance.
Rafalski’s executive officer scanned the deserted shoreline as the Ortelius navigators slowed the ship to anchor. “Captain, conditions appear ideal for landing. No tidewater glaciers, no brash ice present.”
“Alert the passengers and the expedition staff. Everyone desiring to come ashore is to report to the main deck in fifteen minutes wearing life vests.”
* * *
It was late in the afternoon by the time the motorboat carrying Jennie Bachman and her partner, Marie, landed on the ash-covered shoreline. This morning’s events had been derailed by Jennie’s migraine. Medication and two hours of sleep left her with a hangover, but the crisp Antarctic air had cleared her head, enticing her to come ashore. While the late afternoon sun kept temperatures tolerable, the ship’s staff warned them that the evening would bring conditions approaching zero.
A drop in temperature did not scare off the two thirty-five-year-olds, both of whom were born in Stockholm, Sweden, and could tolerate the cold. Bundled in layers beneath their matching fur-lined neon-orange ski jackets, they trudged ashore in their rubber-soled boots to check in with the staff.
A fire pit was stacked ten feet high with wood, folding tables set up to accommodate a dinner buffet. They approached a Russian officer who located their names on a passenger list. “Sorry ladies, you missed the last hike to the volcano, but the shoreline makes for a nice walk. Sunset is in an hour; we’d like everyone back before then to work on your group’s skit.”
The women scanned the coast in both directions. To the north, a family of four could be seen and heard a quarter mile away.
They headed south.
Small waves lapped along the beach. The Weddell Sea was calm and disappointingly ice-free. In the distance they could just make out the towering white rise that marked the Larsen Ice Shelf. The women paused to take a few selfies with their iPhones, then locked arms and set off at a leisurely pace.
They had walked just under two miles when they heard a haunting cry coming from the south.
“Jennie, what was that?”
“I can’t be sure, but it sounded like a whale.”
Breaking into a jog, the two women followed the shoreline around a bend to the west which concealed a small cove. A pod of humpback whales had stranded themselves in the four foot shallows. The haunting cries appeared to be coming from an adult, its right flipper slapping weakly along the surface, the cetacean’s head propped along the beach.
Jennie, who volunteered at Animal Rights Sweden when she wasn’t working as a film critic, gazed into creature’s half-open eye. “Marie, we need to call the captain … get some rope and a few boats. The tide’s rising … with a little effort we can still save—”
“Jen, stop! Look at the water—it’s not red from the volcanic ash … that’s blood.”
“Blood?”
Marie led her to the other side of the stranded humpback. From their new vantage they could see a ten-foot-long, three-foot-wide wound along the whale’s partially submerged belly.
“Oh my … what could have done that?”
“Probably a pod of orca. We saw a bunch of them on the way here.”
“Marie, look at the size of that bite—that wasn’t an orca. It had to be a Megalodon.”
“Maybe it was Angel?”
“Angel’s dead.”
“You don’t know that. According to two different Angel websites, Jonas Taylor lied about her death in order to deal with pending lawsuits from … Jennie, what are you doing? Are you crazy?”
“I need a picture of that wound.” Jennie stepped onto the back of a dead whale, cell phone in hand. Stepping carefully, she made her way along its barnacle-encrusted blubber to get a closer shot of its mate’s gushing belly wound.
She managed a dozen shots and three selfies before the sun dipped below the volcanic rise to the west. She continued snapping photos using her flash.
“Jennifer, enough! It’s getting dark and I’m cold.”
“Two minutes.” She shot a short video, describing how she and her life partner had found evidence proving that Angel was still alive.
It was dark by the time she finished. The tide was coming in fast now, lifting the whale carcass beneath her.
The loud ka-chauwff sound startled her.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know.” She aimed her flash out at sea.
The beached humpback began thrashing its fins, attempting to climb farther out of the water.
“Jennie, your whale’s panicking. Come in!”
“Marie, there’s something out there!”
Ka-chauwff.
“Did you see that? It’s a whale spout. Maybe it is an orca; I can see black and white markings. Walk back around the cove and see if you can video it.”
“Not until you come ashore.”
“I’m coming. Go now, before you miss it.”
Marie jogged around the mouth of the inlet to where the deeper waters entered the cove. She saw the beast lurch forward as she reached her best vantage.
It was a gargantuan bull sperm whale, its enormous blunt head straining in the rising tide to reach the remains of the meal it had returned to claim. The size of the creature startled her—from the top of its skull to the tip of its slapping fluke the creature had to be eighty to ninety feet long.
Aiming her iPhone, Marie snapped a few photos.
With a sudden ka-chauwff from its blowhole, the bull breached the shallows, its head rising two stories as it forcibly chomped down upon the carcass of the female humpback. Rolling onto its side, the sperm whale attempted to tow its meal out to sea, in the process revealing a bizarre alabaster-white underbelly and a wide lower jaw that was more orca than sperm whale. It was as if the two species had mated to produce a monstrous offspring.
A scream—followed by a splash!
Jennifer …
Marie sprinted around the inlet, her heart racing as she reached the shallows where her fiancée was trudging out of the water, dripping from head to toe.
“It pulled the dead whale out from under me. I dropped my phone in the water.”
“Forget the damn cell phone; we need to warm you up before you freeze to death. Switch jackets with me; here, take my hat and gloves.”
Marie helped her shivering partner slip on the dry jacket, then led her back around the inlet. The two women jogged in the direction of a distant bonfire—the wounded humpback crying out in the distance.
19
Aboard the Supertanker Tonga
Tasman Sea, 28 Miles NW of the Coast of New Zealand
Jason Montgomery opened the watertight door, releasing a blast of cold salty air. Sealing the interior hatch behind him, he descended two flights of rust-covered steel grated steps to a narrow catwalk overlooking the very bowels of the ship. The immense space, situated five stories beneath the underside of the main deck and originally designed to hold three million barrels of crude oil, now held sea water. Divided into two large holding pens, the tank was lined with a rubber sealant and contained a simplified filtration system.
Monty followed the catwalk to a circular stairwell that lead down to a porous steel deck.
Seated on the edge of the walkway was David Taylor.
The distraught twenty-one-year-old looked up as Monty joined him. “How’d you find me?”
“I was a former Marine Recon medic.” The barrel-chested, tattooed man half sat, half collapsed onto his buttocks next to his friend, wiping moisture from his shaved head and six-inch “devil’s” goatee. “Actually, Jackie told me. She’s
worried about you. She says you’ve hardly slept in three days.”
“I’m afraid to sleep. Every dream is the same. I’m alone inside the escape pod … trapped in the creature’s belly. In the darkness I hear Kaylie calling out to me, calling my name.” David pounded his right fist against the grating, his knuckles covered in blood. “I keep searching, only I can’t find her … I can’t make her stop—”
“David, it was just another night terror, triggered by what happened the other night. Kaylie wasn’t in there. Even if you had allowed the Lio to swallow you, she’s long gone.”
He watched David continue to pound his fist, then reached out and grabbed his wrist, holding the bleeding knuckles up to the light. “This isn’t who we are. Flesh and bones—it’s just a wrapper the soul lugs around while we’re stuck in the physical world. Kaylie’s soul is where it’s supposed to be. She’s safe. You’re the one who needs to be rescued.”
David nodded, his eyes welling with tears. “I do. I need to be rescued. I don’t want to feel like this anymore. I’m tired of being scared.”
“When I got back from Iraq, I was the same way. You need to exercise; maybe think about getting back on the meds. You’ll get better, I promise.”
David wiped away tears—streaking his cheeks with blood. “I’m not used to you being so coherent.”
“I’ve been getting laid on a regular basis. Probably raised my serotonin levels. But you, my friend, need to sleep. There was a Russian scientist—Marie Mikhailovna de Manacéïne. She conducted one of the earliest experiments on sleep deprivation. She found that when she deprived puppies of sleep, they all died within four or five days. Fucking Commie bitch, testing her theories on puppies … like they didn’t have lab rats back then. Now giraffes are different. Giraffes only sleep about two hours a day in ten minute sessions. Koalas, on the other hand, sometimes sleep twenty-two hours a day. I think my roommate back in college was part koala.”
“Douche bag, you never went to college.”
“I didn’t?” He smiled. “I think you’re right. By the way, I heard bin Rashidi had one of his engineers devise a way to capture the Lio directly into the Tonga’s net. With the other pilots gone and only one Manta available, who do you think they’ll assign as your new co-pilot?”