He pressed his ear against the door and was instantly transported back to his teenage years. He was eighteen and at a Rolling Stones concert with Andrea. One of their songs captured his imagination, and it had become his theme song while in the SEALs—the song he imagined that his enemies heard before he paid them a visit. It seemed strangely appropriate to hear the song again; after so long, he still remembered every word to “Sympathy for the Devil.” In his mind, the song was about him, and he was the Devil. But he didn’t want sympathy…only vengeance.
Atticus knocked on the door. For some reason he felt compelled to know who was listening to the music. The beat shut off in an instant and the door opened a crack. Atticus was surprised to see the priest, O’Shea, peeking out. Atticus couldn’t help but smile.
“I never thought I’d meet a priest who was a fan of the Stones,” Atticus said.
O’Shea smiled. “We all have our vices.” He opened the door, motioning for Atticus to enter. “You are actually just the man I wanted to see.”
O’Shea led Atticus into the suite, which looked to be a cross between what a priest’s chambers would look like: a crucifix (though it was large enough to have come from a church…and probably had), a small desk sporting a Bible and pages of notes, and a minimum of décor. On the other hand, the three laptop computer stations situated on a U-shaped desk in the center of the living room spoke of a man possibly more in touch with modern technology than with God.
O’Shea saw Atticus’s eyes lingering on the laptops. “Knowledge is power, my friend, and saving the few souls on this ship that care to listen will take a lot of knowledge. I can’t count on one hand the number of people here willing to hear the good word.”
Atticus smiled. “Well, don’t add me to the handful either.”
“No? I took you for a God-fearing man.”
Atticus suddenly grew uncomfortable with the topic. Discussing God with a priest could only lead to argument, and if Atticus were to consider God at that moment, after what he’d been through (and where he was going), he knew that belief would cause him to curse God rather than praise him. That road was better left not traveled.
“You said you wanted to talk to me?”
O’Shea picked up on the hint easily enough and let the subject drop. “Ah, yes. I’ve been doing some research on your little beastie.”
“First of all, it wasn’t little. Second, how can you do research on something no one has ever seen before?”
“That’s where you’re wrong. There have, in fact, been more than two hundred sightings of the creature since the United States was first colonized in the 1600s.” O’Shea sat in a black-leather, swiveling, computer chair and rolled a second one toward Atticus. He used the touch pads on all three laptops to, bring their screens to life. On each was displayed several Firefox Internet browser windows containing various articles.
Atticus caught one of the headlines, obviously from an old newspaper.
__________________
A Monstrous Sea Serpent
The largest seen in America
Has just made its appearance in Gloucester Harbor,
Cape Ann, on August 14, 1817, and has been seen by hundreds of Respectable Citizens.
__________________
The next one that caught his eye was much the same.
__________________
The Real Sea Serpent
That came ashore at Old Orchard, Maine, in June 1905
~ The Most Marvelous Mammal in Creation. ~
__________________
In fact, all of the articles were very similar, each telling of a massive creature spotted in the waters of the Gulf of Maine. Atticus went numb as his mind soaked up the possibilities. The creature had been around for untold generations. It had been seen by hundreds of witnesses, yet had never been confirmed to exist by science—let alone discussed by anyone in his profession. He’d spent his life at sea, primarily in the Gulf of Maine, and he had never even heard of it.
He spotted a book on the desk next to one of the laptops. Its cover featured a picture of a sea serpent, obviously an old print. It was eerily familiar in some ways, but so wrong in others. He picked it up and read the title: The Great New England Sea Serpent, by J.P. O’Neill.
Atticus must not have heard O’Shea talking because he was repeating his name over and over. “Atticus. Hello. Atticus?” “Yeah, sorry,” Atticus said. “This is just a little unexpected.”
“You’re telling me.” O’Shea took the book from him and flipped through the pages. “Look at this,” he said, holding the open book up for Atticus to see. “This thing, which can only be your creature, has been spotted hundreds of times all over the Gulf of Maine.” The pages O’Shea flipped through contained dates, places, and names for all of the sightings. “And these are just the reported sightings!”
Atticus recognized most of the hundred-odd cities named: Gloucester, Lynn, Penobscot Bay, Nahant, Salem, Portland, Kennebunk, Boston Harbor, Rockport, and Portsmouth. All were cities strung along the coasts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine that gilded the entire Gulf of Maine. Next, the numbers and professions of the witnesses struck him. In some instances the creature had been seen by more than two hundred people at a time. Other sightings had been reported by fishermen, lobstermen, ship captains—even the Coast Guard. All were people accustomed to life at sea. If the creature struck them as unusual, as it had Atticus, who better to judge between shark, whale, or something else entirely?
“Why don’t more people know about this? Why didn’t I?” Atticus asked, his voice nearly a whisper.
O’Shea shrugged. “The Loch Ness Monster became a tourist attraction. It was good for the community. But this just didn’t catch on. Perhaps the no-nonsense New England atmosphere was simply too much for the creature to pierce? The world knows how strong-willed and stuck in your ways you New Englanders can be.”
Atticus smiled. He knew O’Shea was trying to lighten the mood. He flipped through the pages of the book one more time, stopping at drawings of the serpent and descriptions given by witnesses. As before, he noted that several details were accurate, while others fell short. It was at least 150 feet long and showed a black coloration on top and white beneath. Its double-decker-bus-sized head looked like a horse’s. It undulated up and down as it swam, like a mythical marine serpent, but it had large fins like a whale’s, two in front and two in back. And its eyes were lemon yellow and split by dark serpentine pupils. Atticus jolted from the memory. He suddenly recalled more details, and it jarred him to the core. For a moment he felt terrified of the water, thinking twice about facing that thing again.
Then the door burst open.
“Don’t you ever knock?” O’Shea blurted out at the brightly Hawaiian-clad Remus.
“Trevor wanted me to get you,” Remus said to Atticus, totally ignoring O’Shea. “We’re tracking the creature and will be on top of it within the hour.”
As Remus delivered his last bit of shocking news, Atticus felt the Titan lurch into motion, making his feet unsteady and his stomach constrict uncomfortably. But rather than give in to his fear and misstep, he righted himself, followed Remus, and set his mind to the task; it was time to face his fears.
Time to kill the beast.
21
The Titan—Gulf of Maine
“How are you tracking it?” Atticus sounded unbelieving and indignant as he entered the bridge of the Titan, followed closely by Remus and O’Shea.
Trevor turned to him with a gleaming smile. “Good morning, Atticus. I trust you slept well?”
Oblivious to Trevor’s polite conversation, Atticus took in the bridge. A technological wonder, the bridge had more screens and buttons than the space shuttle. In fact, it looked like something straight out of a science-fiction film. A crew of five, including a captain, who never spoke, sat around the oval room, working at computer consoles and wearing headsets. At the center of the oval bridge, which had a 360-degree view of the ocean, sat an oval table that displ
ayed maps and charts digitally, a massive touch screen.
Trevor’s words intruded again, but this time captured his attention. “The beast hasn’t traveled far since your initial encounter.”
“Where are we?”
“Where we have been since you boarded…Jeffery’s Ledge.”
Atticus met his eyes. “How are you tracking it?” he asked a second time, adding resolve to his voice.
“Ahh, yes,” Trevor said. “While you slept I had crews deploying sonar buoys throughout the Gulf of Maine.”
Atticus squinted. It was a ridiculous notion. The Gulf of Maine was simply too big to cover with radar buoys.
Trevor picked up on Atticus’s disbelief and added, “Not the entire gulf, mind you, just the spots that most resembled the location in which we knew it had been sighted. We knew from your account that it had been pursuing a school of herring, so we buoyed all known herring hot spots, which was no small task, mind you.
“But it seems the creature is in no hurry to leave. It has been slowly following a school of herring, I assume keeping its prey close by.”
Atticus nodded. That was certainly an odd behavior, but the creature was completely unknown and unrelated to anything Atticus had ever studied. Predicting its hunting habits would be impossible. But if it shadowed a school of herring, he had no doubt it would eventually feed on them. “It will surface when it feeds on the herring.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Trevor added with a glimmer of excitement. “And we’ll be waiting for it when it does. But I must ask a favor of you before such an encounter occurs.”
Atticus waited, neither nodding nor speaking.
“I need to know everything you do about this creature. Anything you can recall about the beast will help us immeasurably. To kill it, we must first know it.”
Atticus pictured the attack—his memory still fractured. He thought about drawing the beast, but he was no artist and didn’t want to misrepresent its size, abilities, or speed. “I’m not sure how much help I could be…I don’t remember…”
“Don’t remember or don’t want to remember?” Trevor asked, his voice gentle and soothing, just as it had been the previous night. He topped the sentence off with a firm grip on Atticus’s shoulder.
Remus and O’Shea shared a glance. It seemed everyone found the gentle touch and calm voice to be strange.
“Either way,” Atticus said, “any information I provide would be suspect.”
Trevor sighed and relented. “Understood, but we still must—”
“Wait.” Atticus’s eyes were wide. “Where are we?”
“The man already told you,” Remus chimed in, “Jeffery’s Ledge.”
Atticus glowered at the man. “Jeffery’s Ledge isn’t a small place. Where are we, exactly?”
Trevor looked at the floor for a moment. “I hope it won’t ruffle your feathers too much, my friend. We are at the coordinates you broadcast in your distress call. We have been here since your boat was taken away.”
Atticus smiled, which in turn caused Trevor to relax. “Perfect.”
Confusion washed over Trevor’s face. “Why is that, precisely?”
“Giona…my daughter…and I were carrying cameras that day,” Atticus said, feeling cold as he spoke. The day she was taken seemed like a lifetime ago, yet was only two days previous. So much had changed. Would Giona understand what he was doing? Would Maria? Before the guilt found purchase, he pushed it away. “I was carrying a video camera. I dropped it when I surfaced, but there’s a chance I got it on tape.”
Trevor’s eyes lit up. “Where is the creature now?”
The captain, who was most likely not even needed, as the ship that could pilot itself if need be, looked at a circular screen displaying several green blobs of varying sizes. Atticus approached the screen and instantly understood what he was looking at. Schools of fish, whales, and other assorted sea creatures made their appearances on the screen, but most obvious was an ominous object moving slowly behind a smaller hazy one.
“It’s three miles out, still following the fish,” the captain said. “Still moving slowly.”
Trevor looked at Atticus.
“I’m going in,” said Atticus.
Trevor thought for a moment, chewing his pale lower lip. “We’ll go together.” Trevor suddenly stood tall, smiling and filled with energy. “Prepare the sub! Ready the harpoon! Hoist the mainsails! Batten the hatches! Et cetera! Et cetera!”
When Trevor was finished, the captain and three other crew members scuttled from the room, intent on fulfilling Trevor’s requests.
Remus stepped forward. “You’re not actually planning on going down in the sub with that thing down there?”
“Try not to fret, Remus. We will be perfectly safe, and I will hear no more arguments about it.”
The tone in Trevor’s voice silenced any further argument. “At least let me drive.” Remus said.
“I would rather you man the harpoon gun. If we run into trouble, we will surface, and you may defend us as gallantly as you wish.”
“And who pilots the submersible?”
“Why, Atticus, of course.”
Atticus seemed taken unawares by that pronouncement. He had not expected to pilot the sub. His experience with submersibles was not a matter of public record. He was about to inquire about the assignment when Trevor explained.
“Atticus took part in a top-secret one-man attack-sub program. NAVY SEALs could use the subs to approach enemy ships, submarines, oil platforms, what have you. And no one would be the wiser. The subs moved quickly and quietly, but in every way they appeared to be denizens of the deep—shaped as mantas, sharks, even turtles. PUSS (Personal Underwater Stealth Submersible). I won’t repeat what they called the pilots, but several SEALs, who were not submersible pilots, were used in testing the devices. Since they were to be used by your average SEAL, they had to be tested by average SEALs. Not that Atticus here was anything but stellar, but his previous experience at the helm of a submersible was nonexistent.”
Atticus stared at Trevor unblinking, astounded by the man’s in-depth knowledge of a project few even in the Navy even about. Trevor turned from Remus and looked at Atticus. “I do believe you will find our submersible not too dissimilar from the ones you piloted during your days with the PUSS program, except, of course, for its size.”
Atticus smiled. He didn’t care how Trevor had come upon the information, and he knew Trevor could sense as much. The two men were united in a common cause. Rules and morality would be set aside until their quest concluded. Maybe Trevor had an informant. Maybe he’d had the priest hack into a Navy database. Atticus didn’t care. Getting that tape off the bottom of the ocean and using the information it contained to hunt down and kill the creature was all that mattered. Nothing else did.
Not anymore.
Andrea paced the deck of the Coast Guard cutter, watching the gleaming Titan just sitting in the distance.
What were they up to?
Where was Atticus?
Why weren’t they moving?
She couldn’t stop running through the questions that wracked her mind over and over. With so little information, the number of unknowns was driving her crazy. Worse, she couldn’t tell her commanding officers of her concerns about Atticus. It would be clear to all that she wasn’t out there to watch Manfred; she was there for something—someone—far less official.
But she also sure as hell couldn’t justify keeping a Coast Guard cutter in pursuit of Trevor Manfred if he was simply sitting still! To make matters worse, Trevor had done exactly what she thought he would. Ever since the confrontation in the morning, several men could be seen fishing off the back of the Titan. They’d been monitored closely, but what was discovered only backed up Trevor’s fishing trip claim. The men were occasionally catching fish, and one man was nearly pulled in by something before his line snapped.
She’d seen the men hauling in large fish, easily a hundred pounds, some maybe more. Their lines had to be
tough. What could have snapped the line? Something huge, Andrea thought.
Something huge. The torrent of thoughts in her mind came to a screeching halt. She knew why Trevor was there. She knew why Atticus had joined him. They were working together to find and kill the creature. How Atticus had contacted the mogul so quickly was beyond her, but he obviously had. Atticus and Trevor Manfred were in league with each other.
Atticus, you have no idea what you’re in for, Andrea thought, shaking her head. In that moment, Andrea determined she would get in contact with Atticus one way or another, even if she had to swim to the Titan.
22
The Titan—Gulf of Maine
If not for the unholy goal of the mission, Atticus might have felt excited. But the footage they were going to retrieve at the bottom of Jeffery’s Ledge filled Atticus with dread. His memory, fragmented and blurred as it was, would be brought into crystal clarity as the 3CCD video camera and its slow-motion capabilities would cause him to relive the violent end of his daughter’s life…again…and again.
Atticus followed Trevor deeper into the belly of the Titan than he had yet been. The air grew cool and moist. The extravagant décor faded, leaving only pale gray metal and a rubber-grip-coated floor. Trevor had explained that he’d been prone to slipping when his feet got wet, and the rubber grips kept him from floundering like a fish.
They approached a large metal hatch labeled: ray’s bay.
“Ray’s Bay?” Atticus asked.
“Ray is our submersible,” Trevor said proudly. “I realize it’s not the most formidable name. Nonetheless, I believe you’ll find it appropriate.”
Trevor twisted the hatch’s lever and it opened with a dull clunk. It swung open noiselessly, revealing a large docking bay with a hatch, currently closed, that opened to the ocean. But the most startling feature in the room was what hung above the floor, supported by four thick metal cables.
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