by JE Gurley
The crab made one last attempt at gaining entrance to the cabin. It ripped away a metal brace between two windows and enlarged the gap by pulling at the metal around the window’s edge. It thrust its chelae through the larger rent. Technician Zeke McGee sat at his station, his attention focused on the radar screen in front of him, shouting directions through the maze of channels to Will. He noticed the crab’s claw at the last second but did not move quickly enough. The large claw struck him in the head, knocking him senseless. The crab then clamped the claw around McGee’s chest, crushing it instantly, and yanked him out through the opening. Will heard a SCAR Mk-46 erupt outside the window. The crab retreated, bearing its grisly trophy. Haig walked by holding the SCAR, his face twisted in a mask of fury. He poured a steady stream of 5.56mm rounds into the creature, chipping away at the carapace until he punched a hole; then, fired directly into the opening from a distance of five feet. The crab, injured, fell over the side, pulling McGee’s lifeless body with it.
The Sunfish reached the wider lead. Will shoved the throttles forward, urging the boat through the winding waterway. Crabs continued to watch their passage from the shore, but did not attack. Behind them, the algal mat was a blazing inferno. He hoped it would kill the algae, but knew most of it was underwater. The same channels of water that aided their escape would prevent it from spreading. Nevertheless, the cloud of smoke billowing to the sky heartened him.
Apone, Levitt, and Grayson, all that remained of his crew, and Haig, their hitchhiking diver, gathered on the bridge. Simon sat by himself in the galley. Asa remained with the engines. They looked as if they wanted to hear a few words of encouragement from him. He didn’t know what to say, as he waited on inspiration that did not come. He stared into their faces, feeling their anger, their pain.
Simon provided the words he could not find. He stood at the door. Crab blood covered his face and arms and stained his shirt.
“You did good. You’re all heroes in my book. I know you lost comrades and colleagues. It hurts, but we’re dealing with an enemy that will show no mercy. We have to stand strong. You saw the megalodon; know what they’re capable of. Now, you’ve seen the giant crabs. Who knows what other creatures escaped their deep-sea cavern. They are part of Earth’s past. They have no place in our present. We must eradicate all traces of them, or we face extinction.
“I’m sorry for your losses. I didn’t know them, but I trust they were good people, good shipmates. These things have killed many people. They will kill a lot more if we don’t stop them. I …” He shook his head. “That’s all I’ve got to say.”
He walked back to the galley and began making a pot of coffee. Simon’s speech moved Will. He saw that it had touched his crew as well. He nodded.
“What he says is true. The battle’s not over yet. We’re crippled, out of depth charges and missiles, the 25mms don’t work, and we’re low on .50 cal ammunition, but we can replenish our supplies when we rendezvous with the fleet or the Utah. We’re not out of the fight yet. Now, get some rest. I’ll man the con.”
One by one, they left, leaving him alone with his thoughts. They were dark ones. He felt like a failed leader. Half his crew was dead. His boat suffered from severe damage and was barely afloat. He had lost someone they had rescued. He depended on two cantankerous civilians and a Navy DSV diver to keep his boat running. He knew the worst was yet to come.
They never said command would feel this heavy in command school.
16
December 28, 2018, 3:00 p.m. USS Utah, Chukchi Sea, Arctic–
Twenty hours after the battle, the Utah was still tending to its wounds and grieving for its dead. Among them was First Officer Tack Hardin, killed when the aft payload lockout hatch flooded. To save the ship, he sealed himself inside the lockout to secure the outer hatch and drowned. Altogether, the Utah had lost nine crewmates, and the bilge pumps were working overtime to keep her from going to the bottom. In spite of everything, they were in pursuit of the giant megalodon, perhaps the sole remaining creature from the undersea cavern.
Captain Prescott had not slept since the day before the battle. He stood as rigid as a ship’s mast in the command and control center, ready to handle any crisis that came up. They were numerous, chief among them his inability to contact anyone at a distance farther than a few miles. One of the photonic masts and all of the communication masts on the sail were gone, swept away during the battle. By all rights, he should make for a port and repair his boat, but unable to report the megalodon’s location or the direction in which it was moving, the Utah remained the best chance of killing the last remaining megalodon. At the very least, he could track it and apprise the fleet.
On the way, they had passed beneath a miles-wide floating mat of algae from the cavern. He had risked a peek through his one good photonic mast, poking it through the algae, amazed at the mat’s burgeoning ecosystem. It was just one more sign of the havoc the flora and fauna of the cavern were causing with the delicate ecosystem. He could do nothing about the algal mat, but he could stop the last shark, somehow. The Utah still had teeth. Four Mk-48 Mod 7 torpedoes and six Tomahawk ASM/LAM missiles remained in her arsenal, one tipped with a W80-1 nuclear warhead, although employing a tactical nuke required a higher authority, and he had no communications.
“Any luck on getting out a signal?” he asked for the fourth time in the past hour.
The communications technician was as weary as he was, but refrained from the obvious retort. “Short-range only, sir. The damage to the SATCOM mast is total. We lost the AN/BLQ-10 warfare mast, one of the AN/BVS-1 photonic masts, and the AN/BPS-16 radar mast suffered severe damaged.” He sighed. “I’m sorry, sir. Unless someone is flying directly over us, we can’t talk to them.”
Prescott grimaced. Half blind, deaf, and mute was no way to fight a war. “Very good, sailor. Why don’t you take ten and grab some coffee?”
The technician shook his head. “No thank you, sir. I’d rather remain at my station. Someone might come within range.”
Prescott nodded. Such devotion to duty was typical of his crew. He was proud of them, especially Hardin. He had given his life for his ship and crew.
“Any sign of the megalodon?” he queried of his sonar technician.
“Not in the last hour. It’s about ten clicks ahead of us, swimming at a leisurely pace.”
“Yeah, it knows we can’t catch it.”
He was surprised the behemoth megalodon, half as big as the Utah, had so far ignored them. During the fight at the Vanguard, it had attacked and eaten everything in its path. Instead of finishing them off, it chose to return to familiar waters. He could only wonder why.
They rode the surface in hopes that some passing airplane, drone, or ship might spot them, anything that could signal the Fleet. He wondered why the Kirby had not sent surveillance drones in their direction following the megalodon. They had been in the air during the battle. Someone had screwed up and left him holding the bag. It had been his duty to follow the megalodon, even in a crippled boat. The trap at the Vanguard had for the most part been a success. Only one creature remained, and if he could catch up with it, he would end the threat for good.
“We’re at the coordinates of the cavern, sir,” Kyle Mason announced.
Some of the tension left his body. They had made it. He nodded to the bosun’s mate, now acting as his first officer. He faced a hard choice. He could either remain on the surface, hoping that another ship made contact, or he could take his damaged boat down into the unknown depths of the cavern in pursuit of the megalodon. The safe course would be to bide his time, but how long could he afford to wait? If the megalodon slipped away or disappeared into the bowels of the cavern, they would have lost it, and with it, the war. He took one last look at the surface through the photonic mast camera, wondering how he had come to be surrounded by so much water. Back in his Strawberry Mansion neighborhood in North Philly as a boy, broken fire hydrants spraying the street on hot summer days were as close to a lake or
ocean as he ever thought he would get.
Few neighborhoods in North Philadelphia were as tough or as impoverished as ill-named Strawberry Mansion. Bounded by 33rd Street to the west, 29th Street to the east, Lehigh to the north, and Oxford Street to the south, Strawberry Mansion was one of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the city. Abutting Fairmount Park, a place where discarded heroin needles outnumbered squirrels, and dealing and prostitution fueled the underground economy, the neighborhood, once home to John Coltrane, offered little incentive for success. Prescott had fought hard to get an education in a system on which most city planners had given up hope. Some people called it perseverance. He just called it his stubborn streak.
“Take us down, Mr. Mason.”
With the damaged ballast tank, he took the sub into a steep dive to pass through the two-hundred-yard-wide mouth of the cavern. The sub shuddered and bucked as rising thermal currents buffeted it like a taxi ride down a pot-holed Philly street.
“I’m picking up metallic debris scattered along the bottom directly beneath the opening. It must be the Global Kulik. Should we investigate?”
“No. We can’t help them. Keep her steady on course.”
The entrance became a long sloping tunnel barely a hundred yards wide. He had doubts about entering the confined space, but he had come to investigate, and backing up solved nothing. To his relief, it soon opened into a wider chamber. Watching the monitor feed from the remaining photonic mast, the crew enjoyed a panoramic view of the cavern’s interior. Exterior lights illuminated clouds of plankton so dense they absorbed the light like a solid wall. Billions of tiny dinoflagellates, diatoms, and bacteria, unable to synthesize nutrients from sunlight, thrived on sulfur and other compounds dissolved in the water. Zooplankton, composed of krill and the larva of crustaceans, consumed the dinoflagellates. Schools of fish darted through the cloud eating everything. Larger predator fish patrolled the edges of the cloud, devouring smaller fish. The vista presented a prehistoric circle of life that mirrored the one in the ocean above it.
The sonar reflections revealed an irregular-shaped cavern a dozen miles long and ten miles wide. The bottom, a series of underwater smooth ridges and jutting mesas, registered an average of eight-thousand feet in depth. A large opening in the center cavern’s floor dropped into an abyss so deep the sonar could not find a bottom. Numerous clefts and ledges overgrown with pale gray kelp forests rimmed the interior walls of the cavern, providing food and shelter for a host of crustaceans ranging from miniscule to the size of small automobiles. Ominous dark openings of various sizes dotted the cavern walls
“It looks like a lava chamber,” Prescott noted of the cavern’s shape. “That might explain the heat.” He glanced at the exterior temperature gauge. It read fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. “Mr. Decosta, any sign of the shark?”
“I’m picking up large objects,” the sonar technician reported, “but none as large as the megalodon we’re chasing. Most are fifteen to twenty feet in length. Listen to this.” The technician played the audio through the main speakers. A deep rumbling sound filled the room, haunting in its beauty.
“It’s whale song, Mr. Decosta,” Prescott said, smiling. “I wonder how the words have changed in twenty-million years.”
“Well, whales are mammals,” Mason noted. “They’re breathing something.”
“Yes, it would indicate air pockets in some of the side chambers. This cavern probably contained an atmosphere as well before the collapse.”
If their quarry was not in the cavern, it must be in one of the side chambers. He chose an opening at random and pointed to it. “Take us in there. Make our speed ten knots.”
“It will be a tight fit, captain. The opening is barely thirty yards wide.”
“We’ll just put our nose in. Don’t scratch the paint.”
He tried not to dwell on the many instances in which he had poked his nose in places it didn’t belong. He had won a few fights and lost a few, but he had not let the experience quell his sense of curiosity.
The atmosphere in the control room grew tense, as the almost four-hundred-feet long, thirty-four-feet-wide Utah edged her nose into the opening. She had no maneuvering room. If they encountered an obstacle or if the tunnel became too twisting to continue, they would have to back out. The exterior lights exposed lines of small crablike crustaceans scuttling along the walls toward the main cavern. Unlike the larger denizens, many of the smaller crustaceans varied in color from pale blue to red to multicolored, a throwback to the ages before the sightless species branched off from their marine counterparts.
Pockets of plants resembling sponges and fragile spires of coral waved in the current.
“The tunnel widens out in six hundred yards. A larger cavern lies beyond that.”
Prescott nodded. “Prepare tubes one and three for firing. If we meet our giant gray friend, I want to be ready.”
The bow of the Utah nosed out of the tunnel into the cavern. The sonar image disappeared, indicating a cavern larger than the one they had left. Prescott began to imagine just how extensive the underwater cavern system might be.
“Increase speed to fifteen knots.”
Before the engine room could reply, the bow of the sub shot upward, sending everyone not seated flying across the control room. The shriek of shearing metal sounded like screaming people. Prescott slammed hard into a console with his back. His head napped backwards and struck the hard metal. The lights began flickering, and he didn’t know if it was the lights or his vision fading in and out. Moments later, the sub struck the roof of the tunnel. This time, the sound of grinding rocks mixed with that of the overstressed metal hull.
“All engines stop!” he yelled; then, pulled himself to his feet. “What hit us, Mr. Decosta?”
Decosta’s face was grim. Blood oozed from one nostril. “It’s the megalodon. Eighty yards away and coming for us again.”
“Engine room, reverse engines. Take us back inside the tunnel.” It would not stop the shark from attacking, but he would have a direct shot at it with the torpedoes. The concussion in such close quarters might damage the boat, but it offered their only chance. “Torpedo room. Fire both tubes on my mark.”
“Tubes one and four inoperable,” the torpedo room replied.
“Damn. Fire three. Mark.”
Ten seconds later, the sub rocked violently with the blast wave of the explosion. The lights failed. Emergency lighting flickered on.
“Miss, sir. We struck the tunnel wall.”
Prescott swore. They were sitting ducks inside the tunnel. “Back us out. Twenty knots.”
The helmsman looked at him nervously, but pushed the throttle forward. They risked banging the walls and rupturing the hull, but if they didn’t get away, the megalodon would do that for them.
As soon as they exited the tunnel, he took the sub in a steep dive along the cavern wall, hoping to mask the sub from the shark. It didn’t work. The megalodon rammed them just forward of the engine room, between the engine room and the reactor. The chief engineer reported a massive leak, but then the intercom failed.
“Engine room completely flooded, sir,” the damage control officer reported.
“Did anyone escape?”
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“We also have leaks in the missile launch compartment and the bow dome. A coolant line ruptured in the reactor. The engineer is shutting down the reactor and evacuating the reactor compartment. Switching to battery power.”
They would soon lose power. They would never reach the surface. “Blow all ballast tanks and steer for the exit tunnel.”
A few minutes later, he knew they would never escape. The megalodon rammed them twice more, rolling the sub like a log at a lumberjack logrolling contest.
“I’m losing helm control,” the driver said.
“Try to set us down on that ledge.”
The ledge was just inside the exit tunnel and barely wide enough to accommodate the Utah, but it offered the only hope to ke
ep them from descending to the bottom below the sub’s crush depth. The sub scraped the wall as it settled onto the ledge.
“Mr. Mason. Inspect the aft section. Secure all watertight doors and repair any leaks you can. Send the crew forward. I’ll take the torpedo room and forward sections.”
Mason took several deep breaths and nodded. “Yes, sir.”
As Prescott took the ladder to the lower sections, he cursed himself for his folly. His decision had doomed his boat and maybe his crew. Unless help arrived soon, they would remain where they were until air ran out or the carbon dioxide built up to a lethal level.
And that damn shark is still out there.
Suddenly, Strawberry Mansion didn’t look so bad.
17
December 28, 2018, 2:00 p.m. USS Sunfish, Chukchi Sea, Arctic Ocean–
Asa perched atop the Sunfish’s 25mm chain gun on the bow deck wearing a sour expression. Beside him stood Simon and Will. With the engines off, the depth of the silence around the boat was disconcerting. No wind disturbed the surface of the water. No squawking birds wheeled in the sky overhead. The odor of rotting vegetation and the stench of sulfur tainted the air, rising in a roil of bubbles from the depths as if escaping from hell.
“We’ll, we’re here,” Asa announced, his frustration evident in his tone. “Where is everybody?”
Will glared at the mechanic and continued scanning the area with his binoculars, hoping he had missed something. As the radar had indicated, there were no ships in sight. The fleet had not arrived, and he saw no sign of the Utah. They were alone in the spot where it all had started.
“If the Utah sent a message, they’ll be here,” he said. “We beat them here.” He could not allow his own reservations taint the crew, what was left of his crew. They had come to do a job, though he was not sure how to accomplish it alone.