by Rick Chesler
White’s faced turned crimson. “Weeks! Am I hearing this right?”
Al nodded. “Unfortunately, you are, James. I understand the urgency of the situation, and I wish I could paint a rosier picture for you, but I’m just being realistic here.”
White let out a long breath, resigning himself to the fact that Al was right. “What does the fix entail?”
Al gave his boss a hard stare. “Why don’t we start with what happened to this thing in the first place?” He glanced over at the video before continuing. “Because we don’t want it to happen again, that’s for sure, and so maybe we can do something to prevent it during the restoration process.”
White, who’d been standing up to this point, took a seat at the table and tented his hands.
“Our marine biologist is blaming it on a large sea creature of indeterminate type.”
“Indeterminate type?”
“She didn’t see it happen. She speculates it may be a large shark. I think it’s wishful thinking on her part. You know how marine biologists are—all obsessed about Jaws—she’s probably hoping this will be her personal Jaws moment for all I know. You see what you want to see, and all that.”
A wave of chuckling passed around the table. Al shrugged. “If it is an animal of any kind, it was probably just a random encounter, and will never happen again. I don’t see what we could do about it, anyway.”
“Build a cage around it?” one of the engineers put forth.
White stood again. “Good idea. See about implementing that after you get it back to the way it was. So in the meantime, Al, how’s the intermediate fix with the wall units going?”
Al checked his smartphone. “Latest update a few minutes ago had my people in the air en route to Suva. As soon as they get there, they’re heading to our supplier, and they’ll be in contact.”
“Contact me when you hear. I’ll be down in the hotel.”
#
In Mick’s “sub shack,” as he called the maintenance hut that held the tools of his trade, Coco stood in front of a workbench on which sat her laptop computer. She held the oversized tooth extracted from the pipe up to her screen where a photo of a life-sized megalodon tooth was shown to scale. It was black after undergoing the fossilization process over the eons, but other than color, the two teeth could have been from the same mouth.
“Looks like a match, doesn’t it?” Mick looked over her shoulder while he performed a routine check of the sub’s carbon dioxide scrubber, a small cylinder containing material that absorbed the gas so that it wouldn’t accumulate in the close confines of the craft. Coco smiled without taking her eyes off the monitor.
“It sure does. Look at these serrations.” She moved the mouse cursor over the tiny saw-like indentations on the sides of the extinct shark’s tooth. “They’re highly characteristic of a megalodon. Mick...”
She turned to look into his eyes, and he held her gaze.
“This is a megalodon. I’m sure of it. I don’t know how...but this tooth...the size of that shark down there...”
Mick set the scrubber down on the bench, and turned all of his attention to Coco and the tooth. “That canyon—it goes way down deep, right?”
Coco nodded. “To the abyss.”
“So is it possible a giant prehistoric shark could have survived in the deep ocean all this time? What would it eat? And why would it come up now, after so long?”
“You’re just full of questions aren’t you? I like that.”
Mick smiled sheepishly. Coco went on.
“First question first. Is it possible? Nobody knows for sure, but to me it’s not impossible. Riddle me this: what happens to whales when they die?”
Mick looked at the ceiling while he made a show of pondering this. “Unless they wash up on a beach somewhere, I guess they usually sink to the bottom of the ocean.”
“Exactly! That’s a heck of a lot of calories raining down from above.”
“But megalodons are like Great Whites—they’re hunters, not scavengers.”
Coco shrugged, staring at the tooth in her hand. “Maybe they’ve adapted, evolved over time to a new environment. Perhaps climate change rendered the shallow seas uninhabitable for them—too warm, too salty, too something—so they went deep.”
“Okay, but again, if they did, why would they come to the surface now?”
Coco tugged at her lower lip while she thought. At length, she said, “I know that the construction of the underwater hotel had quite an impact on the local marine environment. A negative one, some say. Dynamiting the reef to blast channels and post holes to place the building supports, dredging to create deeper water passages for bigger boats, tons of SONAR surveys that ping down into the ocean...”
Mick’s eyes widened. “All that commotion could have disturbed the megalodon way down there!”
Coco tilted her head while she stared at the laptop screen. “It’s just a thought. I don’t have any way of knowing for sure.”
The knock on the wooden door of the shack came about two seconds before it opened. James White poked his head inside.
“Coco. Come with me, please. I’m going down to the hotel, and want you to come with me to do an eco-lecture. Just from inside the main lobby or maybe the restaurant. Something to keep the guests happy down there while we work on the air conditioning issue.”
Coco flipped her laptop shut. She tried to shove the tooth into the pocket of her shorts but it wouldn’t fit, and actually tore through the fabric. She looked up to see White frowning at her, and so she handed the tooth to Mick.
“Mick, make absolutely sure that sub’s ready to go at a moment’s notice, okay? Everything charged, air topped off, all that. Clear?”
“As a bell, sir.”
Coco trailed after White as he left the shack. She turned around to close the door, and looked back at Mick, who made a comical stabbing motion in White’s direction with the tooth.
Chapter 12
Coco stepped into the tram along with James White and four newly arrived guests—a couple of investment bankers from New York City and their wives. In the reception bure he started to tell them about the air conditioning problem, but then stopped when a reporter drew near. In front of him, when the new guests asked if they could be shown down to their suites right away, White said of course, and so now here they were, rolling down the tunnel through the sea to the hotel.
As expected, the bankers were loving the ride, marveling at the sheer novelty of it. The reporter had been denied entrance to the hotel, which White put down to “capacity issues,” but he knew there was already one reporter in the hotel, and didn’t want to add more with the developing situation. When the train entered the hotel, more people were waiting to be taken back to shore than there were seats on the tram. They feigned politeness as the new passengers disembarked, and they got on.
“How is it? Leaving so soon?” the bankers inquired.
“Too damn hot,” someone said point blank. “Ready to lay on the beach and catch the breezes for a while,” said another. They were cordial, but Coco could see that their smiles were forced, their civility strained. A minor scuffle even broke out as a child threaded his way through the crowd and sprawled across a row of seats to save for the rest of his family. White diffused the situation by handing the displaced family a voucher good for a free meal at the hotel’s restaurant, while reminding them that the tram would be back in about ten minutes.
Even with that, the latest arrivals were suitably impressed with the spectacle of it all. Walking around the grand lobby lit by shifting rays of sunlight filtered through the sapphire-hued lagoon, they stared in awe at the incredible view out the hotel’s acrylic walls. Uniformed servers offered the new guests complimentary beverages, while White chatted up the clients, introducing Coco as the marine biologist in residence. After about ten minutes of this, one of the hotel staff approached White and spoke softly to him for a few seconds, her expression serious. White turned to the guests he’d been speaking with and excused himself an
d Coco, imploring them to enjoy their stay.
“What is it?” Coco asked as she and White followed the Fijian woman out of the lobby.
White kept his voice low. “Train alarm. Apparently the tram stopped in the tunnel. We’ll find out more up here.”
He nodded to a small room at the end of a hallway marked Employees Only. The staff woman led them inside and then left, closing the door behind them. The room was smaller than the walk-in closets of many of the hotel’s guests, and served as a “switching station” for the tram. The room’s only occupant besides White and Coco, a diminutive Indian man seated at a stool in front of a computer terminal of sorts, did not turn around to greet the newcomers as he hit buttons on a control panel. A battery of red LEDs blinked while an alarm buzzed.
“Kamal, that alarm is not audible outside this room, correct?”
“That is correct, sir. Only the fire alarms and flood alarms are audible throughout the hotel, sir, and those have not been activated.”
“So what’s the problem with the train?”
“I’m afraid the news is not good, Sir. The tram has been decoupled from the cable which means it has stopped about halfway up the tunnel on its way back up to the beach. Worse, I’m detecting an air pressure change in the tunnel, which means we likely have a leak.”
“How about a video feed?”
Kamal shook his head. “The project to set that up, sir, is still ongoing. As you recall in the last progress meeting, we were instructed not to fast track anything that wasn’t absolutely require—“
“Okay, okay, I get it. So we can’t see what’s going on in there.”
“We can send people on foot from Topside, sir.” Then he looked at Coco. “Or from the water via scuba or submersible.”
“We can communicate with them, though, right? They can hear us through the PA system?”
“Yes, that system is still functional. It’s one way though, so they can hear us, but we can’t hear them.”
“Good enough. Let me say something.”
He reached for a microphone on a stand and then spoke into it. “Attention guests in the train tunnel. This is James White speaking on behalf of everyone here at the Triton Undersea Resort. We are aware of your situation, and are sending people to you now in the tunnel. Please stay put until help arrives. It will be there momentarily.” He set the microphone back down.
Kamal appeared concerned. “I would expect that at least some of them will try to walk out of the tunnel, sir. They were almost halfway to the beach.”
White shrugged. “That’s fine if they do, but I still want them to know help is coming. Do we know who is on that tram?”
“We have no way of tracking who boards the tram, sir, nor would we ordinarily be able to know how many riders are aboard. However, in this case, we know that the tram is at maximum capacity since there were more people waiting to get on than could board. So there are twenty people aboard, sir.”
“I happened to see that one of them was that reporter from the New York Times,” Coco said.
“Shit.” White raised his radio to his lips. “Hotel to Topside: Al, this is James, do you copy?” He repeated the message once before they heard Al’s voice emanate from the radio.
“Al here, James. Train situation, right?”
“Right. Tram stopped about halfway through en route from hotel to beach with twenty on board. We need to get somebody in there now, Al. Escort the guests out.”
“Bobby and Taj should be just about there now.”
“Good. What do you recommend for an external view?”
“Probably SCUBA would be the most expedient, and thorough enough.”
“Thanks, Al, keep me informed. Out.”
White turned to Coco. “I need you to scuba dive over the tunnel, and check it out.”
Chapter 13
Coco entered the hotel’s dive locker. Situated in the lower part of the cylindrical tower on the opposite side of the hotel from the lobby, it featured a full dive shop including tanks, an air compressor, and other equipment. Access to the water for scuba diving was via an airlock—a wet-dry room with a system of double doors that sealed the chamber off from the rest of the hotel so that it could be flooded with water, and then emptied again.
Coco put on her scuba gear—a single air tank and regulator, buoyancy vest, mask, and fins—and stepped from the gear room into the airlock. She pressed the button to seal the first door, the one that separated the airlock from the dive area and the rest of the hotel. Then she stepped across the airlock to the outer door—the one beyond which the ocean waited. She strapped on her fins, and put her breathing mouthpiece in place. This last step—opening the outer door—was always a little unnerving for her, and this was the first time she’d had to do it by herself. The thought of all that water out there waiting to come rushing in was scary, but she knew that the airlock was slightly pressurized to prevent a catastrophic rush of water that could breach the hotel itself. When returning to the airlock, the process would be reversed, with greater pressure activated in order to expel the water back outside.
She read the pressure gauge on the wall, taking comfort in the green LED that told her the airlock was properly pressurized. Then she hit the button to open the outer door, and waited while it slid up. Water pooled inside the airlock, quickly rising to her knees, waist, and then chest as she stood there. Through her mask, she stared at the control buttons on the wall until the door had risen all the way up, the entire airlock now flooded. She inhaled through her mouthpiece, taking comfort in the familiar rasp as air was delivered to her. She kicked off the floor, and swam outside of the hotel, pausing to press the button on the outside wall to close the outer airlock door.
Looking to her right, the bulk of the underwater hotel stretched across the coral reef, the tower on its far end nearly reaching the lagoon’s surface. It was an odd sensation, swimming along while looking into a glass building, watching people walk around inside. So surreal; she still hadn’t gotten used to it. She had a job to do now, though, and a serious one at that, so she kicked faster, and forced her mind to focus as she finned over the corals.
The train tunnel itself wasn’t easy to see from far away simply because it was so clear that it blended with the water. Unless the tram happened to be rolling through it when she looked, she’d often been surprised at just how invisible it seemed. That was one of Triton’s selling points: architecture that was a harmonious fit with the natural seascape. But right now it made it difficult to discern the structure, even though she knew where it was.
She angled away from the hotel when she neared the opposite end.
There! The train tunnel.
Coco spotted the glint of sunlight off the shiny surface. She headed toward it. She looked down and ahead at the reef as she went, and found herself questioning something. What was different? By now she’d logged hundreds of hours on this reef. She knew it like her own backyard in Hawaii, and right now something didn’t seem quite the same. It hit her as she glided past a large coral head, one that usually teemed with activity.
The fish! Where were they? That was it. The entire reef was just so...still. Not normal at all. But there was no time to dwell on ecological matters. This was a safety dive. Potentially even a rescue dive, she reminded herself.
She neared the train tunnel not far from the hotel. She knew the tram was farther up, about halfway to shore. The structure was suspended a few feet up from the ocean floor—more so the farther it got away from the hotel as it angled up toward the island—and she had a choice to make: swim over or under the tunnel. She took the high road, looking down into the tram tunnel as she passed over. No tram.
She kicked along over the top of the tunnel as it angled up toward the beach. As she neared the middle of the tunnel, problems became apparent. Water pooled on the tunnel floor. A few of the light fixtures had shattered. They weren’t needed in the daytime, but the tram was designed to run 24/7. How had that happened? she wondered, looking for the tram
up ahead. Did the tram hit the walls, and shake them loose? She was definitely no expert in how the tunnel system was constructed, but it seemed unlikely.
A few fin strokes later, and the tram came into view. A sharp hiss came from her regulator mouthpiece as she sucked in her breath at the sight of it. From Kamal’s description, she’d been expecting that the cable attached to the tram’s flywheel system that pulled it along had separated from it, leaving the tramcar sitting there waiting for someone to reattach it.
That was far from the sight with which she was greeted.
The entire tram lay on its side. A significant crack raced along the top of the tunnel, and ran down along the side. Water dripped steadily into the tunnel. Coco had to swim away from the crack to get a clear view of the tram, and when she did, it was not a pleasant one.
She could see now that at least a couple of passengers had been pinned beneath the tram when it overturned, their arms crushed beneath them. Water sprayed into the tunnel from the crack, making it difficult to see clearly, but it looked as though a few of the passengers were rendering aid to those injured. She could see one woman, arm held beneath the tram, a puddle of blood seeping out from under it, shrieking at the top of her lungs while two men held her closely. To Coco the woman’s screams were oddly silent. She could only watch, not hear. A couple of those in the tunnel saw her, and they pointed.
#
In the tram tunnel, Stanley and Priscilla Doherty looked into each other’s eyes, Stanley from a kneeling position on the acrylic floor, and Priscilla from inside the overturned tram with one arm crushed beneath the vehicle. Her face was very pale, and her eyes were open, but her breathing was shallow. Around them was chaos as their fellow passengers struggled up from their tram seats in a daze.
“Priscilla, stay with me, dear. Don’t fall asleep. I want you to try to slide your arm out from under the tram when I lift up on it, okay? Can you do that?”
Just then a passenger from the row of seats behind them fell from the left side of the seat—the side of the tram that was in the air—and landed on the inside of the tram next to Stanley, adding to the pressure on his wife’s arm.