by JE Gurley
He turned and disappeared below deck. A few seconds later, the single engine revved up, and the Sunfish began pulling away from the ice floe. Will stood there staring after her. He should have been the one to do the job, not Apone.
Grayson clasped his shoulder and squeezed. “Come on, Skipper,” he said. “We need you.”
Will nodded and fell in line behind the others. The sound of the engine gradually faded, leaving them walking in silence but for the steady crunch of boots on ice and the panting of exhaled breath. He was surprised when Asa stepped up beside him and walked with him. For a couple of minutes, he said nothing, but then he spoke, quietly so the others wouldn’t hear him. What he had to say was for Will’s ears alone.
“I didn’t know. Apone said he could fix the throttle while I changed out of my wet clothes. I wouldn’t have … I would have … told you.” He groaned. “I should have been the one.”
“No. No,” Will replied. “My job, my responsibility. I’m the captain.”
Asa looked at him with remorse in his eyes. “I’ve been a dick. I’m sorry. I focused my ire on you because you were an easy target. The megalodon didn’t care if I was angry or not. You tried to make amends, but I shut you down. I’m not sure what I want. Part of me wants to survive, to get back at least part of the life I once had. I’ve wanted that for fifteen months. Another part, the one that seems to be becoming dominant, knows that’s impossible. You’re military, so you know. It’s like PTSD. I can’t control it; it controls me. Some days I make it through with no problem. Others, anything reminds me of what happened. All this,” he jerked his head around to encompass everything around him, not just the ice upon which they trod, “just puts the icing on the cake.” He paused, as if gathering courage for what he had to say next. “I don’t expect to make it. If it comes down to a choice between saving someone, like Simon, or me, make it Simon. I’m a burned-out shell. I can’t go on.”
“Yes, you can,” Will snapped. “You will. No more people die on my watch. No one.”
He brushed past Asa and walked quickly to move ahead of the group. He was the leader. He would meet whatever they encountered head on. No more people on my watch. Damn you, Apone.
22
December 29, 2018, 7:10 a.m. USS Sunfish–
Apone had lied to his captain. Not a big lie, at least not in the grand scheme of things, but a lie nevertheless. He had managed to fix the throttle in a fashion. It was the first lie he could remember telling Will. He regretted his act of insubordination, but too many lives were at stake. Too many friends had died already. He didn’t want to see more die. The crew of the Utah had suffered enough. Someone had to survive to tell their story; someone had to tell all the stories of heroism and foolishness, of terror and inspiration. Such tales were the lives of sailors, the litany of dead ships, dead crews, and captains—Titanic, Lusitania, Arizona, Lexington, Thresher, Utah, and countless others.
The one thing he had not lied about was his determination to kill the damn megalodon that had killed his friends. He stood at the throttle, pushing the single engine for every horsepower it could churn out heading directly for the shark. He had powered up the sonar and the blip aimed for the Sunfish like a giant gray arrow fired from a bow straight from the heart of hell. Four M67 fragmentation grenades lay on the console in front of him, duct taped around a box of magnesium signal flares. When the time came, he would pull all four pins and shove the package down the bitch’s throat like a red hot, high-explosive cocktail, chasing it with a seventy-five-ton, cold steel aperitif.
The Sunfish limped along at fifteen knots; the megalodon raced toward her at thirty-five. One thing he had learned growing up on the streets in Secaucus, New Jersey—in a boxing match, size, weight, and reach went to the opponent. Heart played a role, but it was hard to trump physics. That’s why he didn’t fight by the rules. His style was more WWE wrestling meets MMA cage fighting: kick, punch, slam, bite, and use anything handy to batter his opponent into submission. Anger helped, and he was mad enough at the shark to take the fight to her with righteous retribution.
He checked the sonar. She was rising from the depths to meet him, spy-hopping. He had read a book about sharks once on shore leave on a rainy day with nothing to do. Sharks fascinated him. He had dived around sharks many times—Makos, White tips, Tigers, Bulls, Hammerheads, even Great Whites—without fear. However, the megalodon racing to meet him was like a Great White on steroids with an attitude. He knew that sharks detected electrical impulses of their prey using a row of sensory organs called the Ampullae of Lorenzini. The sonar was blasting out an invitation to come take a bite.
“Eat this, bitch,” he muttered, as he pushed the throttles forward and held them there, hoping for a few extra revolutions, a few more pounds of force to throw at the creature.
He saw the gray first dorsal fin break the surface three hundred yards out; then, the second smaller dorsal fin behind it. Both fins rose into the sky until he thought they would scrape the clouds. Then the head appeared, a conical snout and a jaw the size of a cargo bay door below it. The upper lobe of the caudal tail fin swished back and forth like a curious cat’s tail, as it propelled the megalodon forward at great speed. He imagined its giant pectoral fins spread out just below the surface, acting like the diving planes of a WWII submarine, keeping it level and true.
If it had any fear of the Sunfish, the shark did not show it. Its course did not vary, nor its speed. He was close enough to see the creature’s dead white eyes, sightless but still menacing. He raced to the bow of the boat with his deadly package, waiting. His gaze focused on a spot between the shark’s eyes, painting an imaginary target on its forehead. Channeling all his rage and frustration at the shark, he willed it into her brain.
“If you can read my mind, bitch, you’ll love this.” He pulled the pins and clasped the package to his chest, counting down silently to his and the megalodon’s deaths.
Then, to his horror, at twenty yards, the megalodon stopped swimming and dove beneath the surface. The tip of the dorsal fin looked like a ski ramp as he rammed it. With a bone-jarring thud, the Sunfish left the water, sailing like a flying fish for thirty feet. Apone fell backwards and slid into the bridge forward bulkhead. As it flew, the Sunfish rolled to port. Apone rolled with it. He tried to grab onto the 22mm minigun, but he would not release his package. One arm wasn’t enough to stop his momentum. He disappeared over the side and came up sputtering seawater. The Sunfish landed on her port side, powered into the water, and sank from sight.
Without looking, Apone knew the megalodon was coming up from below for him. It wasn’t the boat she was after; it was human flesh. He could do nothing. He waited, still counting down silently in his head. He felt the water rush up around him, smelled the stench of sulfur and decaying meat, just as his bomb exploded.
“Fuck you,” was his last coherent thought.
23
December 29, 2018, 7:25 a.m. An ice flow, Chukchi Sea, Antarctic Ocean–
Everyone stopped walking, and all heads turned toward the sound of the faraway explosion. Its echo reverberated across the surface for a dozen heartbeats before dying away.
“Do you think he killed it?” Asa asked. His heart vacillated between delight and despair. His nerves, raw from so many days of living on the edge with little sleep and no hope, tingled like high-voltage power lines singing in his head. He wanted to dance, to run, to laugh, or cry, anything to prove he was whole and alive, but uncertainty prevented him from such release.
Simon continued to stare toward the distant explosion. Asa could not read his expression, but he seemed subdued, perhaps reflective. After all, Apone had struck the blow he had wanted to deliver. “I don’t know,” he answered quietly. “I hope to God he did. It was a brave thing he did.”
“It was foolish,” Asa countered, but in his heart, he knew it had not been a fool’s errand, at least not to Apone.
Simon nodded. “Maybe, but brave nonetheless.”
One by one, they co
ntinued their march across the ice. Only the Sunfish’s captain, remained standing, gazing back the way they had come. Asa understood Will’s anguish. He considered it his duty to save his crew, not his crew’s duty to save him. Apone had died for them all. Asa hoped it had not been for nothing.
They trudged in silence. No one spoke, but by their posture and the will with which they moved forward in spite of the cold and their misery, Asa knew they did not believe Apone had succeeded. They had all seen the gargantuan megalodon and did not believe a man with a small bomb could prevail against a thing that torpedoes, mines, missiles, and a nuclear bomb had failed to vanquish. Asa was of their mind. He could feel the megalodon’s presence like a giant specter looming over the fifteen months of his life. The shark was still out there, and it was coming for them. For me, he thought, to finish the job it started.
An hour later, the shark still had not arrived. Asa began to believe he was wrong. Maybe Apone had delivered a lethal bellyache to the creature. He grasped at the thin sliver of hope like the shiny brass ring of a merry-go-round.
“I see something, Skipper,” Levitt called out.
Asa’s stomach clenched. “No,” he moaned. “Is it the megalodon?”
Levitt laughed aloud. “No, it’s a ship.”
Asa followed the direction of Levitt’s gaze. Sure enough, a large ship, an icebreaker approached from the northwest. It was too far away to see any markings or flag, but to Asa, it didn’t matter. They were saved. Without a word, they all turned and trekked toward the ship, too eager to meet it to wait for it to come to them. The low rumble of steel grinding the thick ice to rubble reverberated through the ice, up through the soles of his boots, directly into his soul. If he had not been so exhausted, he would have laughed with joy.
At first, occupied with the approaching ship, now clearly a Russian icebreaker, he failed to notice the other sound, the high-pitched squeals from beneath the ice. Then, a hundred yards away the ice bowed and heaved, a ripple moving toward them. Shards of ice and a frozen cloud of ice dust rose above it. All eyes fixed on the movement.
“Scatter!” Will yelled out.
Limbs frozen with fear finally moved. Men ran in all directions. Asa dropped the bag of food he carried and grasped the boathook tightly. He glanced at the slim rod and felt a sense of impending doom. The boathook was too flimsy to fight off a hungry stray dog, much less a two-hundred-ton mega-shark. His speech to Will about believing he would not survive haunted him. He found he very much wanted to live, but the bitch shark was not making it easy. He turned away from the shark and faced the ship.
Simon did not run. He dropped the SCAR Mk 12 and began pulling something from the bag he carried slung over his shoulder. Asa shuddered in dumbfounded astonishment when he withdrew the injector arm assembly for the Vanguard’s ROV. Asa had brought it aboard the Sunfish on a whim and had promptly forgotten about it. He had no idea Simon had added it to his load when they fled the Sunfish. The chef stood like a pudgy Pillsbury Doughboy, legs splayed slightly apart, with the injector aimed toward the shark, its deadly load of saxitoxin ready for delivery.
“My God, Simon,” Asa yelled. “It’s not enough. We estimated the dosage for a megalodon half this one’s size.”
Simon shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
Simon’s acquiescence troubled Asa. He had thought the chef over his vendetta against the megalodon. “Don’t be a hard-headed fool, Simon.” He waved toward the Russian icebreaker, now just a hundred yards away. Men scrambled over her deck, many with weapons. Someone was lowering the ship’s boarding gangway. Others threw ropes over the side. “Let’s run for safety. We’ve both been through enough.”
“You go, Asa. I’m too fat to run and too tired to care. It has to end here, now.”
Asa pleaded. “No, Simon. Come with me. We’ll do a bottle of Bunnahabhain together. I’ll buy.” He did not want to be a coward and leave his friend behind to face death alone—he had lost too many friends and acquaintances—but he found it difficult to summon the same kind of courage or rage that Simon had discovered within him. Asa’s legs ached to run away. Only his friendship with Simon kept him from bolting blindly toward the Russian ship.
Others of the group had decided to make a stand as well. Grayson held the .50 caliber in both hands and peppered the ice ahead of the advancing ripple. With clenched jaw and deeply furrowed forehead, he held down the trigger, ignoring the danger. The bullets did not penetrate the four feet of solid ice, but he did not care. His intentions were not to kill the creature. Drawn by the sound, the vibrations in the ice, the rippled veered slightly toward him.
The three-foot-high wall of ice slammed into Grayson’s leg and bowled him over. He spun one complete rotation and landed on his knees still holding the .50 cal. He reversed direction and continued to fire at the megalodon.
The icebreaker blew its horn, as the captain of the icebreaker attempted to draw the shark to him. The deep rumbling blast rolled across the ice like a clap of thunder. The megalodon did not take the bait. It turned and circled back toward the group of men on the ice. The ripple disappeared. Asa held his breath for what he knew was coming. The ice beneath Grayson bulged upward, and then erupted around him in an explosion of ice shards, as the megalodon broke through the floe. A shower of ice chunks and powdery ice dust sprayed Asa and Simon. Massive jaws closed around Grayson while he poured lead into its open mouth. Then the jaws snapped shut and the .50 caliber went silent. The shark landed on the ice with a thunderous thud, its massive body barely supported by it. Asa noticed the scars on its snout and that several of its two-foot-long teeth were missing, leaving blackened gaps in its pale gums. It still had enough teeth to slice through steel, and given time would replace the missing teeth from the rows of teeth beneath the missing ones. One blind eye dangled from its right socket. Apone’s bomb had injured it, but had not stopped it.
The thin ice could not support the creature’s massive weight. The ice cracked beneath it, sending cracks racing outward it like the rays of a star. One passed directly between Asa’s legs, sending him scrambling to keep his footing. Will walked calmly past him toward the shark firing his 9mm pistol, his face a twisted mask of wrath. It would have been funny for the absurdity if not for the dire consequences the captain of the Sunfish faced.
“Asa!”
Asa looked to Simon. The plate of ice upon which he stood tilted upward with the shark on the low end and him perched on the upper end. His eyes went wide with panic, but as Asa watched, a change came over the chef. He squared his shoulders and held the injector arm ramrod stiff in front of him, as he slid inexorably toward the shark. Asa ran at the creature with the boathook, but couldn’t reach it for the open water around it. Simon picked up speed, propelling himself forward to meet his fate. As he reached the megalodon’s waiting open mouth, he jammed the injector into its snout and held on with both hands, as he held down the pressure valve, releasing the full supply of neurotoxin into the creature’s bloodstream. Then, the shark swung him like a pendulum. Its jaws closed around Simon’s upper torso and jerked its head, ripping Simon in half like a ripsaw through a board. Dead, he released his grip on the injector, and his upper body fell onto the ice amid a shower of blood.
“No!” Asa screamed and ran forward.
Will grabbed him and pulled him away from the edge of the ice as the megalodon thrashed around sending cracks all around it. He didn’t know if the dosage was sufficient to kill such a behemoth, but the saxitoxin had begun to affect it. Asa relished its suffering as the potent neurotoxin rushed through the creature’s bloodstream, the saxitoxin dihydrochloride binding with the sodium in the axon nerve cell membranes, paralyzing the creature.
Asa wanted to stand and watch its death throes, but Will shoved him toward the icebreaker, now stopped less than a hundred feet from them. Some of their group was already scrambling aboard up the gangway. Others clung to ropes as members of the Russian crew pulled them aboard. Voices in English and in Russian urged them t
o run to the icebreaker. Four Russians in heavy parkas rushed passed them. Each carried two harpoons with bundles attached. They surrounded the last megalodon and hurled their harpoons into its flesh; then rushed back to help him and Will up the gangway. He tried to protest. Harpoons would not kill it. They needed to hack it to pieces, burn the pieces, and scatter the ashes to the winds so that even its ghost could not return to haunt them.
As soon as they were on the gangway, the icebreaker reversed engines and began backing away from the shark.
“No!” he yelled, but no one paid him any heed.
He reached the deck and joined the crew of the icebreaker and the group they had rescued in watching the megalodon’s death throes. The ship’s captain stepped to the forward rail with a remote control switch in his hand. He pushed the button. Simultaneously, eight explosions blew holes in the megalodon’s body. Sprays of blood turned the ice red. The shark did not stop thrashing, but its movements became sluggish as the neurotoxin took effect. Mortally wounded by the explosions and paralyzed by the saxitoxin, it slipped into the water and sank out of sight, leaving a pool of blood on the surface that quickly began congealing in the cold, a telltale stain on the otherwise pristine white surface.
“It’s over,” Will said. His rage had left him with the shark’s death. He stared at the spot where the megalodon had rested with clinical interest. “Simon’s concoction worked. If it can’t move, it can’t breathe. If its wounds don’t kill it, it will soon suffocate.”
Asa stared at him, unable to say anything. The churn of emotions, a mixture of grief and relief, threatened to overwhelm him. He knew the creature was dead, but the vacuum its passing had left had yet to heal. It would take time for him to separate his emotions and deal with them. This time, he would not shove them away and try to forget them. He nodded.