by Hugo Navikov
“Holy crap,” Mickey said.
“But blood ain’t gonna bring Gigadon, not according to anything I’ve learned. That means the sharks are the ones looking for a meal now. Hundreds of them, frenzied out of their prehistoric minds. This was not well-planned on their part.” He let out a breath, almost in a laugh. “I mean, that’s the understatement of the year, but people have to think—they have to plan.”
Sean Muir had come through again, a scientist through and through, logical and brilliant. Mickey had no idea why his old friend was messing with him, but he didn’t murder anyone. He couldn’t murder anyone. It made no sense. It wasn’t logical from a scientist’s standpoint. Murder would have no possible benefit for an innocent man behind bars.
“Well, time to die,” Sean said, his eyes never moving from the increasingly agitated pool of sharks, the creatures now knocking into the small vessels with greater frequency and intensity. “Horrible. Beyond horrible. But maybe there’s a silver lining: I see a paper in this, maybe even a cautionary chapter in my memoir.”
A paper? Mickey thought. Letting all these people die just so you can write a—
A paper. Sean Muir was thinking of the paper he could write after watching all this death he would do nothing to allay. Just like, maybe, he had murdered a man just so he could continue his research without distraction.
No, he’s not killing these idi—people. He’s just keeping the people in his charge safe. It’s not the same thing at all. He was messing with me. Now he’s just messing with everybody. Sean always did have a scientist’s weird sense of humor. Inappropriate, that’s all.
A scream now, from Sharkasm. It was Orville “Popcorn” Blum, the computer specialist, and he shrieked like it was his own tubby flesh being bitten, not that of someone on the smallest fishing boat in the circle. The doomed man also screamed as he was set upon by several sharks at once and went under, spouting blood from his mouth, never to return.
“Doctor Muir!” Orville shouted to his boss on Spit. “We have to do something!”
“What do you suggest?” Sean shouted back, but too calmly. Or maybe not. It was hard for Popcorn to tell when he himself was so freaked out.
The scientist had no suggestions, nothing to offer. But the stricken look on his face—and now, Sean noticed, on the faces of every member of the crew at the rail of Spit—told him that it was going to be detrimental to morale if he didn’t organize an attempt to do something to help.
Sean picked up the comm and switched the frequency to include everyone on all the Bentneus boats. “I’m not a fisherman, commercial or amateur. Does anyone on this mission know what to do in a shark feeding frenzy?”
Silence on the comm.
“Yeah. Don’t even bother getting on the radio to tell us your ideas, if anyone comes up with any. Just go ahead and do it.”
Sean took his thumb off the comm button and said to Mickey, who looked almost gray with shock and helplessness: “You’re the sailor here—is there anything we can do?”
Thank God you asked that. Thank God in Heaven, Mickey thought, literally sighing with relief.
Sean smiled, looking abashed. He shrugged his shoulders and whispered, “At least they’re thinning out the competition, right?”
Mickey had an entire ocean to do it in, but he could make it only to the sink before vomiting. He ran the water and wiped off and rinsed out his mouth. I quit. I have to quit. My friend has lost his freaking mind.
“You’d think someone with your experience wouldn’t get seasick anymore,” Sean said with a laugh. “No, but seriously, what do you think? We have an armored hull. The sharks shouldn’t be able to get through that, right? So, maybe we could … I don’t know, use the winch to pick them off their boats, one by one?”
A loud creak sounded over the water, a bending stretched from inaudibility to ear-splitting, was followed by a hard crack, and a great white shark at least thirty-five feet long burst through the bottom of one of the wooden-hulled boats with a gigantic plank of painted wood between its teeth. The shark crunched the board and kept munching until it was splintered beyond recognition. It definitely looked like it was celebrating.
As might it should. Apparently, the section of hull that the great white had broken through and then broken off was an important piece indeed, as the fishing boat immediately listed to port and started sinking so fast that just a few of the shouting men onboard were able to jump from the boat before it vanished below the waves. The tiger sharks, great whites, blacktips, all of them converged on the fresh meat and dragged it under so fast it was hard to tell the churning of the prey being devoured from the churning of the water created by the sinking boat.
Bits of the boat floated to the surface, broken planks and bits of metal and plastic. And a shredded pair of trousers. And a head, although another shark came along and swallowed it almost before the dozens of horrified onlookers from the Bentneus expedition could even identify what it was.
And if the men and women safely ensconced on the large research vessels outside the circle of the fatally shortsighted fishermen were horrified, the yacht captains and commercial fishing boat crews and small craft mariners without exception were panicked into complete paralysis.
One boat—not wooden, this one made of some kind of metal-plastic alloy—was knocked sideways and stayed there. Its crew could do nothing while shark after shark hurled itself at them, dragging them out into the water like dogs with new chew toys. Some men and women remained inside the vessel as it finished capsizing, hidden in the recesses and cabins where the sharks wouldn’t be able to reach them. These lucky sailors would die a lonely and horrible death as the oxygen ran out in their air bubbles inside the ship, but they were betting that death by shark would be even worse.
They were probably right.
It was impossible to keep track of which boat was nearest its doom as the sharks ripped right through them, knocked them over, even bit off the propelling screws, which killed them in the process … but by then, the damage had been done and the boat was dead in the water. It would not escape.
In fact, it struck Sean as strange how few of the boats actually tried to get the hell out of there, how few tried to get away from the roiling blood sea they had helped create and which now was getting bloodier by the second. He saw opportunity after opportunity for a craft to get its motor running and speed away from the circle of death, but terror had seized the crews almost to a man, and Sean could see that they were mesmerized by the horrors around them. They were supposed to be millionaires! They knew shark hunting like no one else!
Amid the shouting and wailing on Spit, Sean yelled loudly to the rapidly dwindling number of living people on still-seaworthy boats, “Gigadon is not a giant shark, my friends! Get the hell out of here and save your asses!”
There were two boats—bigger commercial vessels with reinforced fiberglass hulls—which were being battered right and left, swaying in the water like they were docked in the middle of a hurricane. The special hulls wouldn’t be able to stand much more direct pummeling from the dozens of sharks still unsated in the midst of their feeding frenzy—soon they would crack, and that crack would travel up and down the entire keel in seconds. The ships would then open like an egg and sink like a stone.
Sean was surprised that tears were coursing down his face. He wiped his cheeks and stared at the wetness on the back of his hand. So he wasn’t a monster, happy to see the competition get taken out of the picture by way of death. He could even feel himself wishing there was something he could have done, any of them could have done, with their millions of dollars of equip—
Or could do. They had everything on this ship.
“Mickey!” Sean yelled, almost screaming. He whipped around to see where his mission chief was—shit!—which was standing right next to him, not having moved this whole time.
Despite himself, Mickey let out a startled laugh. “Right here, boss.”
“Who’s in charge of the big gun up there?” Sean s
aid quickly, pointing toward the War-Mart machine gun atop the highest place on Spit. “Get them shooting! We haven’t lost everyone yet! There are still boats floating! We can save the dumb sons of bitches!”
“It’s Crockett, but I don’t know if he’s even awake—”
“Move!” Sean shouted, and ran all the way to the ladder, then scaled the height to the machine gun, which hadn’t been loaded or primed. It could be done in thirty seconds … by someone who knew how to operate a goddamn machine gun. “Jesus Christ, what do I do here?”
“I’m getting Crockett!” Mickey yelled and ran out of sight, toward the crew quarters. It was hard to believe anyone could sleep amidst all the screaming and shouting and dying, but sailors knew how to get to sleep and stay there until it was exactly time to get up, no matter what was going on around them. They responded to whistles and bells to get them out of bed unexpectedly, and screams weren’t whistles or bells.
Watching the sharks roiling in the water, trying to swim over one another to get at the “prey”—the two luxury fishing vessels, the only boats still afloat from the circle—and they were rocking the two boats hard—Sean felt his stomach sink. Everyone thought he was a killer—he’d “confessed” things to his best friend and right-hand man to make him believe he was a killer. But he wasn’t, not in his heart. And this was his chance to save people—idiots, yes, but still people doing the best they knew how to land what they saw as the most monumental shark in the world. He maybe could have saved them and many more if he had remembered that the Bentneus vessels were each armed to the teeth. But Crockett would never get up there in time, those yachts had to be close to going under—
“Get ready to start shootin’,” a voice spoke right next to him, making him jerk out of his thoughts.
The voice belonged to Slipjack McCracken. Sean couldn’t have been more surprised if Gigadon had been standing there. “Slipjack, Crockett is—”
“Don’t talk to me,” Slipjack said. “We can’t wait for Crockett—he’s probably on the shitter. I know this gun from the Navy.” He pushed and pulled a series of levers, then loaded the massive belt of ammunition into the machine gun, and hit one final switch. “Go!”
Sean looked from Slipjack to the yachts under assault a hundred yards in front of them. “Thank you, Sl—”
He was alone again. Only now he could reduce the attacking sharks to a fresh batch of chum. He stepped on a pedal and brought the gun to bear—he remembered that much, at least, about how the machine gun worked—aimed, and pulled the trigger tight against the guard.
POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOW
The firing was so loud that the entire crew assembled at the rail fell to their feet, covering their ears. Sean thought both his eardrums would burst, but he didn’t have time to worry about this, because after the first couple of POWs, the big gun took on a life of its own—its barrel swung wide, and when Sean tried to correct it, he swung too hard the other way. The deafening discharge of ammo never stopped, because Sean had the trigger mashed against the metal of its guard and couldn’t think to let go as he swung around with the out-of-control machine gun.
The first casualties he noticed were the two yachts under direct attack from the sharks. Sean didn’t see that he had hit any of the predators, but he did see that he and his out-of-control machine gun had blasted a seam open in the side of one yacht and completely wiped out everything and everyone on the other boat, which now sunk like it had been pulled under by the Kraken.
The crew of the still-floating yacht shouted and waved, screaming for Sean to stop shooting.
But he couldn’t. He was too busy just trying to control the machine gun, feeling like he was riding a bucking bronco at the rodeo. The gun swung too far in one direction, and then, when Sean tried to correct, it again swung in the opposite direction, burning metal cutting everything down that was unfortunate enough to fall into the gun’s line of fire. Both yachts, of course, but so much more.
That included Sea Legs to port. It just exploded, a fiery blossom shooting pieces of ship, communications equipment, and crew members.
It also included the UC San Diego ships a quarter of a mile away. Still unable to control the gun, Sean sent rounds through the crew cabin of their main ship, struck one of their support ships below the waterline, its crew jumping into the water before the whole thing could sink and take them down with it. The other support ship immediately set off its alarms and dropped lines and divers to recover their sister ship’s crew before the sharks came over their way.
That done, the two surviving UCSD ships hit the throttle and were gone, out of sight and chugging back toward Guam in a matter of two minutes. That crazy bastard Sean Muir is killing everyone he can! they were thinking, Sean could feel it. How could they let that murderer get hold of a machine gun!?
Finally, mercifully, the ammunition ran out and only empty clicks sounded from where the booming of firing rounds was assaulting everyone’s senses just a moment before. At this, Sean released the trigger, and the gun abruptly stopped swinging.
Crockett, the ordnance man, reached the top of the ladder with a face drained of all color. Behind him was Mickey, not looking that much better.
“I—I had to get shooting—had to get the sharks from killing everyone—I didn’t know—Slipjack—”
“Boss, don’t bring him into this.”
“No, he loaded the gun; he set the switches and levers! He—”
“Doctor Muir,” Crockett said, examining the position of certain of those switches and levers, “the feedback control is disabled.”
“I don’t even know what that is,” Sean said, disoriented as he watched black smoke fill the sky from the destroyed vessels that had not yet surrendered and gone under. “It got away from me. I couldn’t control it. Slipjack.”
“Slipjack what, Sean?” Mickey snapped.
“Slipjack didn’t tell me how to control it.”
Crockett shook his head as he examined another switch. “I’ll bet the gun ‘got away from you.’ Without feedback control, you can’t hit what you’re aiming at because every shot knocks the gun one way or the other, and when the gunner tries to correct for that, it swings the other way, and so on and so on. The feedback control keeps this from happening.”
“But it was off? Disabled?”
“Doctor Muir, it is never disabled—unless someone deliberately switches it off. That would mean lifting the metal hood, thumbing the switch, and replacing the hood as it is now.”
“Maybe I hit it with my foot while I was fighting it for control?”
Crockett shook his head. “Not unless your feet have opposable thumbs.”
“Then what? How could it have gotten flipped? Unless Slipjack—”
“Jesus Christ, Sean!”
“—disabled it when he was up here loading the gun,” Sean finished, undeterred.
“Did anyone see him up here with you?” Mickey asked, a bit remotely, keeping his distance after the revelation of murder made the night before, and now more than half of the competition for the Bentneus Prize just being blown to bits by the very same man. A man who was in prison for killing his wife.
“I—I don’t know. They were all watching the sharks trying to sink the yachts, looking out to sea rather than up here. The gun was the only thing I could think of to save the yachts—I only wish I had thought of it sooner.”
“Yeah, I bet,” Crockett said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
Crockett shrugged. “That switch doesn’t just flip off without someone intentionally doing it. Your foot wouldn’t even reach it, Doctor Muir. You had to switch it off. Why, I don’t know, but I bet a lot of the crew and the law are gonna see lots of motive in you ‘accidentally’ killing fifty people or so. People who were your competitors—and are now, way conveniently, eliminated.”
“No! Slipjack must have done it when he was showing me how to use the gun! It’s Slipjack who just killed all these people!”
Crockett looked
at Sean with the most violent disgust Muir had ever seen. “I’ll go ask the crew—and Slipjack—whether anybody was with you up here. Who knows? Maybe this was a plan all along.”
“None of those fishermen were a serious threat to our success—”
“And yet, they’re dead. At your hand. Them and the other crew most likely to bag the Gigadon, the one from UC San Diego. You want that billion dollars.”
Mickey exchanged a meaningful look with Sean. Mickey knew what Sean wanted was freedom; the money would just be a nice cherry on top. But he remained quiet. He did still have loyalty to his friend.
Crockett made for the ladder, fire in his belly. “You can forget about that prize money, Doc. Bentneus will call off this contest as soon as word of entrants’ deaths reach him.” He continued down the ladder and out of sight.
“Well, ain’t this a fine mess.”
“Mick, you got to believe me—this was a total accident!”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore, man. We all want to win, but you just committed a one-man My Lai out there. You killed, God, fifty at the least.”
“It wasn’t my fault. It was an accident. If Crockett had been up here, he could’ve saved people. But he couldn’t get his bearded ass out of his bunk in time. That gave Slipjack a new chance to betray me—”
Sean saw Mickey’s fist fly from out of nowhere right at his jaw; the whole world went white for a second, a horrendous bonk! filling his skull. Suddenly woozy, he hit the deck—the roof of the bridge—falling with his whole body.
“Don’t say that name to me again, goddamnit. Not one more time. Not until we have this shit cleared up.”
From the deck, his lip cracked and his jaw bruised, Sean nodded.
“And you know what else, Sean? I’m starting to wonder for the first time if you aren’t really the one who killed Kat. I’ll work with you for this mission, but after that I’m done with you. One way or the other, you’re a murderer. A sociopath, too. No wonder Kat wanted to leave you.” With that, Mickey visibly restrained himself from strangling his mission director right there and then and stomped off to the ladder. Sean lay there, feeling broken into pieces by Mick’s punch and the fall, but for all that pain, his mind raced, thinking how he could keep Bentneus—and the American authorities in charge of this part of the ocean—from calling off the mission.