Extinct

by Charles Wilson

  Carolyn looked at Alan. “Yes.”

  “Don’t attempt disposal until I’m able to get to you to examine the carcass. This is on Naval Authority. I…” There was another moment of silence. “Ma’am, whom am I speaking with, please?”

  “Carolyn Haines.”

  “Ms. Haines, this might be important. Could you hold your position until I can get there?”

  “We’re already on our way back.”

  “Back? You said you hadn’t disposed of it yet.”

  “We haven’t.”

  “Yes, Captain, well, I’m coming that way anyway. Keep coming and I’ll meet you.”

  “We have some sharks going after the carcass,” she said.

  “Damn. Can you go faster or something?”

  “Not unless we take a chance of the tow breaking loose.”

  “Do whatever you can until I get there.”

  A loud crack came from the fishing cockpit as Stark fired the first shot.

  Carolyn gave the Admiral her position and replaced the mike on its hook on the radio.

  “He knows what it is,” she said. “How?”

  * * *

  Vandiver hurried from the building. Bos’n’s Mate Third Class Beverly Cowart, carrying an M-16 rifle, trotted along behind him. Across the pavement, all the berths were empty except for the twenty-two-foot Boston Whaler.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Cowart said. “Everything is out on patrol. If you want me to call in a forty-one…”

  Vandiver shook his head as he stepped into the Whaler. “We’ll be there before they could get back here.”

  Cowart slipped on a bright orange life preserver and handed one each to Vandiver and Douglas. Vandiver laid his on the seat and Douglas followed suit. Cowart looked out toward the Sound. It only showed choppy waves, but she knew with the wind as high as it was that the open water beyond the barrier islands would be much worse. “It’s going to be a rough ride, sir. You might want to put that on.”

  Vandiver stared at her.

  She turned the ignition key and the seamen pitched the lines inside the boat. Douglas began winding them into proper coils in the bottom of the craft.

  The Whaler started backing from its slip.

  “Wait!” Vandiver yelled, startling everybody.

  He stared at the large shark tooth lying on a cardboard box impregnated with a shiny, wax-paper-looking substance.

  “Dynamite the sheriff confiscated,” Cowart said when she was able to regain her composure.

  “No, the tooth,” Vandiver said, stepping over the Whaler’s windshield onto the bow and hopping up onto the slip. He stared down at the tooth.

  The seamen looked at the other Coast Guardsman and then at Vandiver.

  “Sir, it’s from a big shark killed over in Back Bay last night. A guy cut a couple of teeth out of it. I collect … you know, sir, knickknacks. I paid twenty dollars for it.”

  Vandiver slowly lifted the tooth in front of him. It was an off-white or a light beige in color, its body was rounded more than normal, and it still had some of the gum tissue clinging to its base.

  “Sir,” Douglas said, “it’s shaped just like—”

  Vandiver shut him off with a sudden shake of his head and a stare. He slowly laid the tooth back on the box marked RED DIAMOND BRAND, DITCHING DYNAMITE, 50% STRENGTH.

  “Did you see the shark?” he asked the seaman.

  “Yes, sir, before I came on duty.”

  “It looked the exact same, didn’t it?”

  “Sir?” the seaman questioned.

  “Sir…,” Douglas started.

  Vandiver stared again. Then he motioned with his head for Douglas to follow him, and walked away from the seamen.

  Twenty feet from the boat he stopped and turned back to face his nephew. “What, Douglas?”

  Douglas swallowed hard. “Sir, this tooth is the same size as one from a white that’s twenty-five feet. If the one that lost the tooth in the Keys came here, too … We have to tell them. It could kill somebody else if—”

  “You doubted that I was going to inform them, Douglas?”

  “Well, no, sir, I guess you were, uh…”

  “But if you don’t mind, Douglas, let me do it in my own way. We start yelling megalodon and what happens?” He stared at his nephew as he waited.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “The sharks cut the tow loose and the megalodon sinks to the bottom … maybe they finish devouring the body before we can get somebody down to attach some cables to it and bring it back up. And then let’s say the other megalodon is either not in the area or, if it is, leaves without anybody ever seeing it and goes back to where it came from. And even if it is seen, all we’re going to have is a sighting of a bigger world-record white. Here we are, talking about a shark extinct for over a million years, a shark that looks exactly like a white, and no proof to show it isn’t.”

  “The tooth, sir.”

  “Didn’t I get a tooth from the Keys? We know now it was deposited there at most only months ago. What good has it done? Who’s going to say it came from a living megalodon?”

  “But we have eyewitnesses to where this one came from.”

  “Eyewitnesses, Douglas? Some character saying he cut the teeth out of this particular shark … some people saying they saw him do it? An inquiry then, and somebody suggests maybe there’s a fraud being perpetrated, says that some character heard about the giant shark and wanted to become famous, so he rushes a couple megalodon teeth over here to say he cut them out of the mouth.”

  “Sir, with all proper respect … that doesn’t make—”

  “Sense, Douglas? There’s only one thing that makes sense, only one thing that guarantees there won’t be any doubt. We get to the megalodon that boat’s towing and get it back here … safe and sound where it can be examined by any scientists the world over … anybody that’s not going to want to believe it until they see it for themselves.”

  “But, sir, you are going to tell them … something—warn them.”

  “Douglas.”

  His uncle’s stare kept Douglas from asking anything more.

  Vandiver walked to the Whaler and Cowart and the seamen and the apprentice, all of them obviously nervous at how he was acting. He stopped in front of the seaman who had seen the shark himself.

  “Son,” he said, “I have reason to believe that there might be another white out there. Maybe an even bigger one.”

  The seaman’s brow wrinkled.

  “Yes,” Vandiver said, “bigger. I want you to get the word out to vessels in the area, the local sheriffs, whomever you would normally notify, and tell them of the possibility…” He looked back at Douglas standing behind him. “… of the likelihood that there is a serious danger out there. Maybe anywhere along the coast.”

  The seaman nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, and started for the building.

  * * *

  Sheriff Stark fired the revolver.

  A hammerhead twisted off in the water and disappeared below the surface. A few seconds later it appeared twenty-feet farther back behind the buoy, splashed its tail and disappeared again.

  Two fins turned in its direction and swam back toward the spot, sinking beneath the surface. Two more long, shadowy shapes rushed under the water toward the stricken hammerhead.

  The first shark that had appeared high enough at the surface for Stark to wound had been a five-foot bull shark. It had rolled off bleeding behind the buoy, too, and had pulled some of the others after it. But those leaving the net had more than been replaced by the new ones that had arrived, cutting swiftly across the water toward the buoy from all directions.

  Stark fired again, and only nicked the top edge of a fin that had flashed quickly above the water.

  A bull shark, its mouth streaming a long, red piece of visceral fining, broke the surface—and Stark pulled the trigger again.

  The weapon clicked on an empty cartridge.

  “Where’s some more ammunition?” Stark shouted towa
rd the flying bridge.

  “That’s all there is,” Carolyn said. “Just what was in the gun.”

  Out to the sides of the boat, still more fins converged in the direction of the buoy.

  CHAPTER 37

  “There!” the curly-headed little boy said.

  Alvin stared in the direction his stepson pointed. He saw the spray break over something and, driven by the wind, whip through the air. But only over something. A long log? “Give me those binoculars,” he said.

  “I’m using them,” the boy said.

  As the boy moved them back to his eyes, Alvin jerked them from his grasp.

  “Alvin!” his wife said.

  There wasn’t a log where he had seen the spray. There wasn’t anything. He lowered the glasses and looked with his naked eyes to make certain he had focused on the correct spot, then he moved the glasses back to his eyes again.

  Still nothing.

  But there had been something.

  He turned the wheel of the Gulfstar in that direction.

  “Told you,” the boy said, and took his binoculars back.

  The little blond continued to brush her hair. After each swipe of the brush the stiff Gulf wind whipping across the Gulfstar blew her hair in every direction. “I don’t want to see the whale,” she whined. “I want to go back to Jackson.”

  “Alvin, it is getting a little rough,” his wife said.

  “No, you said that we needed to see if there was a whale.”

  He pushed the dual throttles farther forward. The Gulfstar began to pound harder into the long swells. The blond looked up at him. The binoculars bounced up and down against the boy’s face as he tried to control them. His wife braced herself with her hand on the side of the flying bridge.

  He had them in his power now.

  * * *

  Admiral Vandiver, sitting in the front seat of the twenty-two-foot Boston Whaler as it raced south across the Sound in the direction of the barrier islands, looked over his shoulder at his nephew.

  “Damn, Douglas, I remembered the name. Chalumna.”

  “Sir?” Douglas said, and bounced in his seat as the Whaler smashed through a swell.

  “The Chalumna River, Douglas. Where the coelacanth was caught off South Africa. Near the mouth of the Chalumna River. I knew it would come to me. I remember something else, too. You know where we are?”

  Douglas waited.

  “Almost on top of the very area where the Navy tested shark repellents during World War II. They had the whole country in which to find a testing spot and they chose the waters off the Chandeleur Islands. Does that tell you how many sharks there are around here?” Vandiver looked around out over the water and smiled.

  “And does that tell you that something here might be especially attractive to sharks?” he added. “Maybe I was correct about the lower Mississippi Basin—drains right into here. Where there have been sharks since time began, maybe? The old home place. How about that?” He laughed aloud.

  Bos’n Mate Third Class Beverly Cowart looked out of the corners of her eyes at the Admiral.

  * * *

  At the Gulfport Coast Guard Station, the seaman sat in the “watch-stander’s” chair close to the radio. The apprentice seaman sat in the chair across the desk from him with his feet up on top of the desk. “A bigger one?” the apprentice said. “Did that admiral seem a little flaky to you?”

  “Petty Officer Johnson seems a little flaky to me.”

  “Yeah, but that’s because your girlfriend dropped you for him.”

  “I dropped her.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Mayday! Mayday!”

  The seaman grabbed toward the radio.

  “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”

  “Be quiet a moment,” the seaman mumbled, “so I can find out where you are.”

  “Mayday!”

  The call stopped.

  “Vessel hailing distress, this is Coast Guard Station Gulfport. “What’s your—”

  “The damn shark’s not dead! It’s out here! And it’s not twenty-five feet! It’s twice that damn long!”

  The seaman was taken aback.

  “Damn it, Coast Guard, are you there?”

  “Your position, Captain?”

  “The damn thing’s chasing me! At the Chandeleur Light! It’s almost made up the…”

  The man suddenly stopped talking, but his thumb remained frozen on the mike button. The sound of his boat’s roaring engines could be heard.

  Then a scream—a long, wailing, high-pitched scream of a little girl.

  “Mommaaaa!” she screamed again.… And then a crashing sound.

  And then silence.

  * * *

  Two miles off the northern tip of the Chandeleur chain, Petty Officer Ken Dickinson, in command of one of the Gulfport Station’s forty-ones on routine patrol in the Gulf, reached for the radio at the bridge and lifted it to his mouth. “Station Gulfport, this is forty-one, three sixty-four. We are two miles from Chandeleur Light and en route to the distress call.”

  * * *

  Admiral Vandiver looked across his shoulder at Douglas.

  “The second one!” With a chance to see a living megalodon, he ordered Bos’n’s Mate Beverly Cowart to break off her route toward the Intuitive and turn southwest toward the Chandeleur Light. He knew all that he could do if he continued on to the Intuitive was accompany it and its unseen tow back to the Coast Guard Station. There would be time for meeting it there later and having the carcass transported to some kind of refrigeration area where it could be preserved until scientists could arrive to study it. Meanwhile, he had the chance to glimpse a living megalodon and he wasn’t going to pass that up. As the Whaler turned southeast, he reached for its VHF radio mike and spoke the forty-one’s call letters:

  “Coast Guard forty-one, three sixty-four, this is Admiral Vandiver, U.S. Navy. Forty-one, three sixty-four, do you copy me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Report immediately to me if you have any sighting of the shark. I say report immediately if you have any sighting. I’m preceding toward the Chandeleurs.”

  Vandiver looked at Cowart. “How far?”

  “Eight miles, sir.”

  Vandiver nodded. As he looked out over the water ahead of them, a smile crossed his face.

  * * *

  Fifteen miles away from the Chandeleurs, Alan, standing beside Stark in the fishing cockpit of the Intuitive, stared back at the trailing buoy riding above the most exciting marine discovery in history. He knew if he left the megalodon’s carcass to float motionless in any one spot there would be even more opportunity for the sharks to strip it to not much more than a skeleton.

  But from the excitement he had heard in Vandiver’s voice when he radioed the forty-one that he was headed toward the Chandeleur Light, there was now no doubt in Alan’s mind that the shark reported in the distress call was another megalodon, no less scared of man and no less the same kind of hunter that had claimed five lives that he knew of in four days, and had attacked boats four separate times. With the radio that had made the distress call suddenly going dead, he had no idea if the man making the call had been at the wheel of a small boat that had no chance or a large boat that did. And he didn’t know what caused the crashing sound, though he feared he could guess. There had been the child’s scream. There might be survivors. The Coast Guard forty-one might find them first—and then they might not. He had no choice. He cut the rope trailing the Intuitive and watched the buoy as, anchored by the weight underneath it, it immediately stopped its forward motion and nearly completely submerged on a lifting swell as fins slashed toward it from all directions.

  Beside him, Paul stared with his jaw tight. On the flying bridge, Carolyn pushed the throttles all the way forward, and the Intuitive rode rapidly up one swell and smashed through the next one. Alan gave a last look at the buoy and then looked in the direction of the Chandeleur Light.

  CHAPTER 38

  The Coast Guard forty-one slowed
as it rounded the tip of the shoal stretching out underneath the water north of the Chandeleur Light. Petty Officer Ken Dickinson, standing at the bridge, lowered a pair of binoculars and stared toward the Gulfstar, hard aground, with its bow angled upward only yards from the rough beach. Fifty feet out from the Gulfstar, a small white dinghy bobbed on the long swells running behind the island.

  Minutes later, the bow of the forty-one neared the dinghy, and the seaman at the wheel pulled back on the throttles. Dickinson stared at the cracks running up the side of the Gulfstar’s hull, then looked across the island again. A moment later he spoke through the forty-one’s loud hailer.

  “Attention on the Gulfstar, this is the U.S. Coast Guard.”

  “There,” the seaman said, nodding toward the figures coming out of the trees at the center of the island. There were four of them, two adults, a curly-haired little boy, and a little girl with blond hair. They came slowly toward the shore, but stopped well short of the water.

  “Come and get us!” the man yelled, keeping his gaze out over his side across the water as he did.

  The two seamen at the forty-one’s bow had secured the dinghy alongside. “I’ll go after them in this,” one of them called toward the bridge.

  Dickinson nodded.

  * * *

  As the dinghy neared shore, the adults and children made no move to come closer to the water.

  The seaman beached the dinghy and stepped over its bow.

  Alvin shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything so big,” he said.

  “I’m not getting back in that,” the little girl said, staring at the dinghy.

  “You’re going to have to,” her mother said.

  “No.”

  “Unless you want to stay here,” Alvin said.

  The girl started sobbing. Her brother tightened his jaw and started toward the dinghy.

  “Is that steel?” Alvin asked, looking toward the hull of the forty-one.

  Before the Seaman responded, Alvin added, “The shark would have come right through the fiberglass.” He looked toward the hull of the Gulfstar.

  “Sir, how long did you say the shark was?”

  “Fifty feet at least,” Alvin said.

  “Sir, the world record for a white is only a little over thirty-two feet.”