by JE Gurley
At seven p.m., after assuring the staff got the evening meal on the serving line for the hungry crew, he changed into casual clothes, in this case jeans and a colorful Hawaiian T-shirt, ran a comb through his blond hair, and went to the recreation lounge to wait for Iverson. To his surprise, Iverson showed up.
“I hoped you’d make it,” he said.
Asa looked uncomfortable, glancing at the few faces watching a soccer game on the television, but he took a seat across from Simon with the chessboard acting as a barrier between them. “I thought a game of chess might help me unwind.”
“Tough day?”
A quick grin flickered on Asa’s lips. “New apprentice.”
“Is he or she any good?” Simon knew little about anything mechanical except gas ranges, ovens, and deep fryers. His mechanical ability was another reason wanted to gain Asa’s trust. He needed to get Asa to relax. Idle chitchat seemed a good way.
“He’s got good hands and a grasp of the fundamentals, but he’s a little ill at ease on a rig.”
“He’ll get over it,” Simon replied. “Rigs are intimidating.” He glanced at Asa as he set up carved black and white chess pieces on the chessboard. He clutched the white queen in his hand, thinking of Ilsa. “Have you worked on many rigs?”
The grimace that crossed Asa’s face meant he had touched a raw nerve. Simon decided to pull back slightly.
“This is my fourth,” he said. “Vanguard seems like a tightly run ship. I’ve got a good kitchen staff to work with.” He finished setting up the board, placing the white queen on her square, and leaned back in his seat. “You move first.”
An hour later and after two beers each, Asa conceded defeat, knocking over his king when Simon’s bishop and queen prevented any hope of escape. Asa’s cigarette, now only a long column of ash, sat untouched in the ashtray, forgotten in his concentration on the game. Simon had adjusted his game, playing less aggressively, but Asa had not exploited the numerous openings Simon had intentionally left for him. His mind seemed on things other than the game, but he had eventually relaxed. Most, but not all, of the tension had left his face.
Asa sat back in his seat and smiled. “Good game. It’s been too long. I played defense all night.” He cocked his head to one side and stared at Simon with a mischievous grin. “I think you took it easy on me. Why?”
Simon spread his hands. “Kicking someone’s ass is not a good way to make new friends.”
Asa cleared his throat. “You might not want to invest too much time in me as a friend. You might make a few enemies instead.”
“Because of the Global Kulik?”
Asa’s eyes flashed, and his face instantly went cold. Simon thought he would stand up and walk away, but after a few seconds, Asa’s expression softened. “So you’re just curious.”
“More than curious.” He paused. “Come with me to my room. I want to show you something.”
Asa stared at Simon, refusal on his lips. Simon thought he had lost him, pushed too hard, but to his surprise, he nodded. As soon as they entered Simon’s quarters, Asa’s gaze fell on the map on the wall. He stiffened, but walked to the map as if drawn by it. He stared at it for over a minute, his finger tracing a line between several of the points on the map. He withdrew his hand and made a fist; then, turned to look at Simon.
“What’s your game?” he demanded.
“No game. My sister was on the Global Kulik. I wanted to know how she died. The more questions I asked, the harder the Navy pushed back and the more curious I grew. It took me four months and a lot of time spent surfing conspiracy websites to separate the wheat from the chaff and come up with this. You,” he nodded his head at Asa, “may be my best hope.”
Asa sat on the edge of the bed, his face ashen. “Look, the Navy, the Coast Guard, and fucking Homeland Security shoved their collective noses up my ass and ran me through the ringer the entire time I was in the hospital. They made it abundantly clear either I keep my mouth shut, or I go to jail. Hell, they already set it up so I look like a mental case. Hell!” He slapped the bed with his open palm. “Maybe I am. I don’t know anymore.”
Simon shook his head. “Over two hundred people have died under mysterious circumstances since the Global Kulik disaster. People have reported giant crabs, enormous sharks, and strange-looking fish. The water temperature of the Chukchi Sea has increased three degrees, and the warmer water is spreading outward into the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Sea. Fishing and crabbing catches have dropped sixty percent over the last six months.”
He saw he had Asa’s attention. “The Navy has sent three nuclear submarines into the area. A small task force of two LHD helicopter carriers, three missile frigates, and almost a dozen attending vessels are cruising the Arctic Ocean between Wrangel Island and Prince Patrick Island. No one knows how many ships the Russians, the Canadians, and the Chinese have in these waters. Tensions are running high. Things are nearing a critical breaking point. One wrong move and we’ll have WWIII.”
Asa shrugged. “So what am I supposed to do about it?”
“Why did you come back to the Arctic?”
Asa shrugged again. “I needed a job.”
Simon shook his head. “You could have gone anywhere. You want to see it for yourself, to make sure you didn’t imagine it.” Simon went to the map and swirled his hand across it. “The current moves this way. The warmer water has already reached this area. Eventually, those megalodon are going to show up here. That’s why I’m here. I think you’re here for the same reason.”
Asa lowered his head. “I have to know,” he said just above a whisper. He raised his head and looked at Simon. “What did you call them?”
“Megalodon, Carcharodon megalodon, giant sharks that supposedly went extinct twenty million years ago during the Late Cenozoic Era, toward the end of the Miocene Epoch.”
“That’s what Ilsa said.” He winced as he said her name. He looked up at Simon. “I didn’t get the connection until I saw your culinary school photo on the desk—Simon Thorin. I knew your sister. She was my friend.” He paused, as if he wanted to say more but stopped. “She mentioned phytoplankton and crab larvae she had found in the water. I found some type of pale gray kelp clogging the thrusters. Then, the Kulik drilled into a cavern below the seabed. It collapsed and sank the Kulik.”
Simon nodded. Now, things made sense to him. No wonder the military wanted to keep it a secret. “And released the megalodon and God knows what else into the Chukchi Sea.” He placed his hand on Asa’s shoulder. All doubts he had harbored about the mechanic vanished. “It’s not your fault. My sister died because of a senseless accident. We came up here searching for oil and found a gateway to the past. Now, we’ve unleashed creatures so terrible we may have to abandon the oceans to them.”
Asa looked up bewildered. “Because of giant sharks?”
“From what I’ve learned, megalodon were top predators in their time. No one knows exactly how big they really grew. A few scientists made comparisons to modern-day sharks by analyzing teeth, but it looks as if they were wrong. I read reports of megalodon from fifty to eighty feet. One is purported to be two-hundred-feet long.”
Asa shook his head. “The shark I saw was big, but not quite that big.”
Simon gasped. “You really saw it?” He didn’t know if he was relieved that the rumors were true or disappointed. He hesitated asking the question he really wanted answered, the one he had been dreading since he had learned of the monsters.
Asa shuddered at the memory. “I saw it, all right.” He clamped his hands over his eyes. “God help me,” he sobbed. “I can’t get the image out of my mind, like a silent gray ghost rising from the depths.”
Simon felt sick to his stomach with the horrifying thought that his sister might have ended up inside the creature. “You need a drink. We both need a drink.” He reached into a drawer of his desk and pulled out a dark wooden box with the Roman numerals XXV printed in gold leaf on the top. “This is twenty-five-year-old Bunnahabhain Scot
ch. It’s a single-malt Scotch—really smooth and fruity. I think you’ll like it.” He removed the three-quarters-full bottle from the box, found two glasses, and splashed two fingers of Scotch in each glass.
Asa whistled. “Bunnahabhain. At $385 a bottle, it’s a little out of my price range.”
Simon shrugged. “One of the perks of a chef. I use a little in a steak sauce, and the company pays for it.” He waited for Asa to take an experimental sip, and then smiled at his reaction.
Asa ran his tongue over his lips. “I taste ginger and chocolate.”
“Good taste buds.” His estimate of Asa went up slightly. In his opinion, no one with sensitive taste buds could be all bad. “Look, why don’t we work together?”
Asa shook his head. “I’m not chasing giant sharks. I just want to get my life back.”
Simon sneered. “Bullshit! You’re here because the sharks are here. You want to prove to yourself that you’re not crazy. Well, you’re not.”
Asa took another sip, and then sighed. “Maybe we both are.”
“Ilsa wasn’t.”
Asa blinked his eyes several times rapidly and set his glass down on the desk. His hand trembled slightly. “Look, I appreciate the drink and understand what you’re doing, but you’ve got the wrong man. I’m not the man I once was. I’m …” he winced, “broken.”
Simon was not going to let him off so easy. He needed Asa’s help. “We’re all broken, some more than others. The only way to mend ourselves is to see this thing through.”
Asa stared at him looking distraught. For a moment, Simon thought he would leave; then, with a heavy sigh, Asa replied, “We could die.”
Simon shrugged. “I owe it to Ilsa to try.”
At the mention of his sister’s name, Asa swallowed hard and then nodded. “Okay, I’m in.”
Simon smiled and held out the bottle. “Another?”
Asa shook his head. “I shouldn’t have had that one. I leaned heavily on the bottle for a long time. I don’t want to become too familiar with it again.”
Simon nodded and set the bottle back down. “Later, I’ll show you copies of reports I managed to get from a friend in the Navy Office.”
“You’ve got friends in high places.”
“Not everyone agrees with the current policy of secrecy. They’re treating this occurrence as if it’s a battle to win, not as an ecological disaster.”
Asa rubbed his forehead. “Between the Scotch and the information, my head’s ready to explode. I think I need to mull things over tonight.”
“I understand. We’ll get together tomorrow.” As Asa headed for the door, Simon said, “Thanks for helping me. I appreciate it.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I’m not sure what I can bring to this little cabal, except maybe doubt.”
“You’re an eyewitness. That’s enough. There are few around. Tomorrow, then.”
Asa said, “Yeah, tomorrow.”
Asa shut the door behind him, leaving Simon alone. He faced the photo of his sister and lifted his glass to it. “I have an ally, Ilsa. I’ll set things right.”
5
December 24, 2018 USS Sunfish, Beaufort Sea, Antarctic Ocean –
A day spent fishing beat any day lumbering ashore. At least that’s what Captain Wilson ‘Will’ Cobb used to think. Now, he wasn’t as certain. The kind of fishing expected of him defied credibility. His orders were plain enough, although he had read them twice to be certain. His mission, to seek out and destroy any giant sharks he encountered on his way to Barrow, had read like a poorly written science fiction short story, but the Navy hadn’t asked his opinion; they simply sent him where they needed him. He had reservations about his mission in spite of the rumors he had heard, but the Navy was not one for jests. The two new depth charge racks on the stern of his Mark VI patrol boat, the USS Sunfish, installed just before embarkation from their homeport at San Diego Naval Base, added a lethal credulance to his strange orders. The shipyard had also revamped the pair of MK-38 Mod2 25mm miniguns mounted fore and aft, increasing their rate of fire. Four .50 caliber machineguns added to the Sunfish’s lethal arsenal.
Giant sharks. What next, sea monsters?
He had read the carefully worded reports of sunken and vanished ships, but ships disappeared without a trace in the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean all the time. Still, something strange was occurring in the area. He scanned the horizon with his 7x550 binoculars. Both the radar and sonar, newly refurbished, operated at maximum range, but nothing beat a pair of human eyes scanning the ocean. Will did nothing by halves. Neither did the Navy.
His boat was one of four Mark VI fast attack craft in the area, along with three submarines, four missile frigates, a pair of new Littoral Combat Ships, and numerous support vessels. His eighty-two-foot boat might seem a poor choice for hunting a ninety-foot shark, but the boat’s formidable firepower and speed gave him an edge.
Another Christmas Eve at sea. He didn’t mind. It was not the first holiday he had been away from home and family. He was single. Some of his crew wasn’t. It was rougher on them. The tiny, artificial three-foot tree on the bridge lent a holiday air to the boat, but it could not replace family and friends. His executive officer, Ensign JG Richard ‘Rich’ Hall, caught him staring at the Christmas tree with a forlorn expression.
“Thinking about family, Will?” he asked.
Hall, who had just returned from the outside deck, wore his woolen watch cap pulled down over his ears and had buttoned his pea coat all the way up. Will, inside the cabin, wore his cap and a light waterproof parka.
Will shook his head. “Just wondering what my present was.”
Hall glanced at the oblong box wrapped in shiny red paper tied with a large white bow. “It’s from the crew, so it could be anything. My guess is a bottle of rum.”
“I wish. No alcohol on a U.S. ship.” He removed his cap and rubbed his shaved head. “Maybe it’s hair tonic.”
“Or shark repellent.”
Asa stared at his second. He and Hall had served together for two years, and he could read Hall like a novel. “Not you too, Rich.”
“The whole crew’s got Jaws fever. Are we supposed to believe there is some kind of mutant sharks out there as big as the Sunfish?”
“Megalodon, not mutants, and that’s what the orders say.”
Hall waved his hand in dismissal. “Megalodon, smegalodon. Someone’s been hitting the medicinal brandy. Thirty-million-year-old giant sharks my ass.”
“Not that old. They’ve just been around that long, underground.”
“Yeah, the Global Kulik report. I read it. I still don’t believe it. An ocean under this one sealed off for millions of years. It doesn’t seem possible, like something you’d hear from a Hollow Earth kook.”
Will shrugged. His shoulders ached from leaning against the console for hours. He worked his right shoulder to loosen it. Standing rather than sitting in his command chair allowed him to pace the cabin without looking nervous. “It doesn’t matter. We still have our orders. Just think of it as a holiday cruise to Barrow.”
“Not the first destination I would pick to spend Christmas. Why Barrow, Alaska?”
“To refuel, refit, pick up a group of civilian scientists and a Navy submersible dive team, and then transport them to their destination, the USS Utah, a Virginia-Class sub.”
“A taxi, that’s what we are, a freaking water taxi.”
“It pays the same.”
Hall smiled. “If there are giant sharks out there, I hope we run into one. I’d love to cut loose with the 25mm miniguns. Shark fin soup sounds good.”
“Careful we don’t wind up on the menu. Personally, I’d like nothing better than to transport our passengers to the Utah without incident and head back home, an uneventful voyage.”
It was what he was supposed to say, but deep down inside, he agreed with his second. If giant megalodon roamed the Arctic Ocean, he wanted a chance to test the Sunfish and her crew in something other than simulated battle
conditions. Make-believe could never replace the thrill of actual combat, where fear and adrenaline washed away everything but the moment, and time stood still.
The paragraph in his orders about a refit bothered him, especially since they had just undergone an extensive refit in San Diego. It’s like they expected more of him than simply ferrying passengers. If it meant chasing giant sharks, he was all for it.
Hall checked his watch. “Three hours to Barrow. It’ll be dark before we get there.” He grinned. “If we open her up, we can be there in two.”
Apone, the coxswain, looked up from his control seat and grinned. His hands held the two joysticks controlling the engines, and he wanted to test them out.
“We’ll keep the helm steady at thirty knots,” Will warned. “It wouldn’t do to arrive too early.”
He understood the pair’s desire for speed. The Sunfish’s twin diesel engines that powered her water-jet drives were capable of producing a cruising speed of forty-five knots, but the wear and tear on the engines shortened their effective operational lifespan.
“We’ll save the extra throttle in case we need it.”
Apone grinned. “Whatever you say, Skipper.”
When Gunner John Mason, who had drawn mess duty, came in with a tray of cups of coffee and doughnuts, Will gratefully accepted both, the caffeine to stay awake and the doughnut for quick energy. The day had been long with little chance for rest, and the Sunfish would be in Barrow for less than three hours for refueling, refitting, and embarking their passengers. He would have little time to rest. The night passage to the sub rendezvous would be dangerous. The unusually warm water had forced most of the ice farther north, but small bergs and floes still lurked in the darkness. Hitting one at thirty knots would be disastrous. He and the crew would be at alert stations all night.
I’ll sleep tomorrow, he thought, stifling a yawn.
He turned to Hall. “As soon as we dock, send someone ashore for pizzas, something quick and easy. I like Italian sausage on mine, minced.”