The others dropped to their knees and returned fire, forcing Brielle to crouch. She popped up in a different location to shoot, but the attackers had taken shelter behind a berm close to the trees that lined the shore. More bullets pinged off the stones. She crabbed over to the back wall of the gatehouse roof and poked her head up to survey the interior grounds of the fortress.
The flood lights illuminating the tower walls cast a ghostly hue on the whole complex. Although the perimeter walls were fairly intact — and tall enough to prevent Zim’s men from scaling them — most of the inner buildings had been razed to their foundation centuries ago. She could see there was little shelter for hiding.
Opposite her, a small archway in the center of the back wall had a wooden gate that opened onto a set of steps leading down to the loch, which bordered the castle grounds on two sides. To her right was an undulating series of mounds covered with manicured grass and sidewalks. To her left was a path leading to the cobbled yard in front of the Grant Tower, the imposing five-story ruin they had used as a landmark while cruising Loch Ness.
Neither direction provided any better stronghold than what they had now.
She crossed over to the front and waved for Grant and Sinclair to stay low. She raised her head and saw one of the men making a break for the castle entrance. She fired a shot that hit only grass, but it made the man dash back to his hidden position.
Her tactic wouldn’t work for long, though. She only had four rounds left. Once she was out, they would soon realize it and rush the castle, reminding Brielle of two other famous sieges that didn’t end well for the defenders inside the fort.
One was Masada in Israel. The other was distinctly American.
The Alamo.
FORTY-EIGHT
Riding on the surface of Loch Ness in the darkened and whisper-quiet GhostManta felt odd to Alexa, as if she were adrift on the open ocean, but she understood the benefit when she saw the other sub pass them on its way toward Urquhart. It was visible only because of the reflected glow of its canopy, the two occupants oblivious to its twin going in the other direction.
When she and Tyler reached the whaler, he circumnavigated it and found a rope ladder on the side away from the castle. He tied up the sub.
They knew Dunham and Zim were out of the way, but they weren’t sure how many crew had remained on the Aegir. With a boost from Tyler, Alexa raised herself up so she could peer over the edge of the deck. She gasped when she saw a corpse riddled with bullet holes. A half-dozen others littered the deck around the Loch Ness monster. It looked like they wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of the crew.
When she felt confident the coast was clear, Alexa heaved herself onto the deck and got her first up-close look at Nessie, which lay prone and unmoving. She forgot her dire circumstances as she marveled at the sight.
The charcoal-colored creature was covered by netting that was tacked down at four corners. The scale was apparent now that she was next to it. The animal rivaled an orca in size, its body stretching all the way from the boom to the wheelhouse. From her vantage point at its rear, she could make out the humped dorsal spine but saw no signs of activity.
Under the boat’s lights, the creature’s skin glistened. She reached out and touched it. The surface had a smooth, tacky feel, neither like the hard scales of a reptile nor the rubbery give of a dolphin’s hide. The tail curled around and rested against the gunwale so that the tip was close to her. She stooped and saw a pale scar across the tip where Darwin’s hatchet had sliced off a piece.
It had grown back. Other than the scar, the tail was completely intact, ending in the shape of a shovel blade. From this angle, she could see how it could be mistaken for a head from a long distance, like in the surgeon’s photograph.
Tyler hopped onto the deck and froze when he saw the legendary beast.
“Wow,” he said in hushed awe. “Incredible.” Then he noticed the dead bodies, and his jaw set in a grim expression.
“I know. I’ve never seen anything like it. Any of it.”
Their quiet contemplation of the tableau was shattered by muffled explosions beneath them. It wasn’t enough to throw them off their feet, but they stumbled against one another.
“What was that?” Alexa asked.
She could see Tyler’s gears working, culminating with an aha moment.
“Zim’s sinking the boat,” he said. “He must have placed charges to scuttle it.” The ship was already showing the first traces of a list.
Tyler gave her his Leatherman tool. “Here. Find the sample capsule and pull it out with the pliers. I think we hit it on the left side. If you can’t find it or it’s too hard to remove, there’s a small saw on the tool to cut off a piece of the animal.”
He hurried to the nearest bulkhead hatch.
“Tyler, where are you going?”
“To see if our pilots from the other sub are still alive. I’ll be right back.” He cautiously surveyed the interior, then disappeared through the opening.
Alexa stepped over the tail and walked around until she was on its left.
An appendage was splayed out to the side. She hadn’t noticed one on the right because it must have been tucked under the body. She bent and saw that the limb had the outline of a flipper but possessed vestigial toes poking from the edge, like those of a sea lion.
Embedded in the flipper was the wooden handle of a gaff hook impaled through the meatiest part, confirming what she’d seen in the video. Nessie having no way to remove it, John Edmonstone’s defensive weapon was still stuck in the animal two hundred years later.
She stood and drew a sharp breath when she saw the damage caused by the harpoon grenade. A two-foot-diameter crater had been carved out of its back. However, the injury looked odd. Instead of raw chunks of meat hanging by sinew from the gaping wound, it looked as if had been cauterized. No blood dripped from the opening. The surface of it had the same smooth look as the skin, although the coloration was a dull red.
Alexa continued on toward the head, struggling to figure out what kind of animal it was. She reached the neck and saw no gills, which meant it couldn’t be a fish.
The flat head, which had the outline of a broad chisel, rested to one side. She nearly jumped back when she saw a black saucer-sized eye staring back at her, lidless and unmoving. As with the squid, the gigantic optical organ must help the creature navigate the dark depths of the loch.
The wide jaw that she’d seen earlier lay open. She could make out rows of sharp teeth curving back toward the throat, which would aid in the capture of fish.
Her eyes drifted back and rested on an unusual stalk of feathery filaments that extended from its head like a horn. An identical stalk was on the opposite side of the head.
Alexa put her hand to her mouth to stop herself from shouting in revelation. She knew what kind of animal this was.
The stalks were external gills. The Loch Ness monster was an amphibian.
In fact, it had many of the characteristics of an axolotl, a rare fully-aquatic salamander found only in lakes around Mexico City and now almost extinct in the wild. The axolotl was prized by biological researchers because of its uncanny ability to regenerate limbs.
Suddenly, everything made sense. As an amphibian, it didn’t need air to breathe, getting all its oxygen from the water, so it rarely had cause to surface. The regenerated tail and cauterized wound was consistent with a salamander’s capability, but Nessie seemed to have an even more advanced ability to heal itself, perhaps even preventing the cells themselves from aging. Its body could have a genetic method for preventing telomere shortening so that its cells were essentially immortal.
Alexa practically shook with the exhilaration of her discovery, but her excitement was immediately dashed when she realized that the dead creature would never be studied in its natural habitat.
If nothing else, she could preserve part of this animal for posterity, so she worked back toward the creature’s rear, stooping to palpate the skin for any rup
ture. Just behind the front flipper, she felt the nub of a metal protrusion almost at the level of the deck. That had to be it.
She opened the pliers on the Leatherman and gripped the end of the object. With a gentle touch, she pulled with the pliers, but the angle made it difficult to get any leverage.
She sat on her butt and put the soles of her shoes against the animal’s body on either side of the pliers. When she thought she had a good grip, she yanked the tool backwards.
Two things happened simultaneously. She extracted a gleaming five-inch-long aluminum tube, and Nessie woke up.
The pain of the tube’s removal must have brought the animal out of its comatose state. It thrashed around in the confines of its restricting shackles, the tail whipsawing back and forth.
Alexa screamed and scrambled against the gunwale. She heard a high-pitched mewl, like the sound of a baby crying, and realized it was coming from Nessie. She’d heard something similar from a recording of the Chinese giant salamander’s vocalizations. Nessie’s whine was uncannily distressing, as if it were advertising its suffering.
The animal flailed a moment longer and then came to rest, either exhausted or comatose again.
Alexa stood, the tube still in her hand and tears brimming in her eyes, and realized she had to save the poor creature. If she could free it, it might be able to survive its wounds. Lashed to the deck, it would certainly starve to death no matter how efficient it was at regenerating.
She flipped the Leatherman open to its saw and hacked at the nylon tie-down near its head.
Tyler appeared on deck with two men dressed in sweatshirts and jeans. One of the Gordian employees was holding up the other, who looked badly beaten and was supporting himself with only one leg.
Tyler rushed over to her. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Get them onto the sub.”
“What are you doing?”
“Freeing her.”
“Isn’t it dead?”
“No, just wounded. Go.”
“You know what they say about a wounded animal being the most dangerous kind.”
“I know. Be ready for me.” She gave him the tube.
Tyler glanced at the men struggling to get over the side and then back to Alexa.
“Hurry up. The ship is sinking fast,” he said, and ran around to the other side out of sight behind Nessie’s tall back.
Alexa finished sawing through the strap and braced herself in case the animal thrashed again. It remained still. Her hope was that it would stay in place as long as it wasn’t disturbed, and then swim free once it was in the water.
She moved back to the rear strap and sawed again. Two would be enough to release it.
When the strap was cut, she stood and put the tool in her pocket.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement, a person climbing over the gunwale. At first she thought Tyler had circled around to pick her up on this side, but a head with a crewcut rose into view.
Victor Zim. He’d come back.
He vaulted over the side and lunged at her. She stumbled backward and tripped over Nessie’s flipper.
She tried to crawl away, but Zim grabbed her by the hair to pick her up.
“No, no,” he said, “I need you for my negotiation with your brother.”
Alexa screamed and grabbed for anything to resist his pull. Her hand settled on the handle of Edmonstone’s gaff, the wood preserved perfectly by the cold depths of the loch.
Alexa tried to loosen his hold by shaking her head as she worked the hook free. The pain set Nessie going again, squealing and thrashing about, and in raising its flipper, the gaff came loose. At the same time, Zim lost his grip on her hair. She turned and saw him momentarily paralyzed by the movement and sound of the creature he thought was long dead.
With a war whoop to give her strength, she lashed out with the hook and stabbed Zim in the thigh.
The gaff sank into his flesh until it hit the femur. This time it was Zim who screamed.
Alexa let go and he stumbled backward toward the bow, where he was knocked over by the swinging tail.
“Pryor!” Zim shrieked. “Help!”
She wasn’t going to stick around to find out what that meant. She got to her feet and ran in the other direction.
A skinny man wielding an assault rifle faced her at the opposite end of the ship near the wheelhouse. He stood safely away from the writhing head of the animal. He had to be Pryor.
Alexa was at serious risk of being crushed against the gunwale if Nessie decided to roll in her direction, but she put up her hands. If she tried to jump overboard, Pryor would kill her before she got one foot over the side.
He smiled and nodded that she’d made the right decision. Then he aimed the gun at Nessie.
“No!” Alexa screamed.
Bullets poured from the gun into Nessie’s side, the vicious man’s smile only growing wider as the animal barked in agony, wailing like a stricken infant.
The animal’s mouth gaped, and its throat convulsed. An enormous tongue shot forward at lightning speed, hitting Pryor’s body with a splat. The mucus adhered to his clothes, and he yelped as he was reeled back toward Nessie’s mouth.
He fell to his knees and was dragged the rest of the way screaming. The giant salamander clamped its jaws around Pryor and bit hard, bones crushed with a sickening crunch. Pryor’s screaming abruptly ceased.
Nessie spit him out, apparently unhappy with the taste.
Tyler appeared near the body, then ran over to Alexa, his panicked eyes searching her for wounds.
“Are you shot?”
She shook her head.
“Thank God,” he said, putting his arm around her. “We better leave. The ship’s about to go under.”
“Zim is here,” she said.
Tyler’s head swiveled around. “Where?”
“I don’t know. He was at the bow.”
“We’ll worry about him later. Let’s go.”
He escorted her around Nessie’s head and they scrambled down the ladder. Alexa saw how Tyler planned to get them all to safety with the small sub. The Gordian submarine pilots lay on the wings gripping the handholds. It didn’t matter that the GhostManta could no longer dive; the sub would have to remain on the surface.
Tyler cruised away from the ship. Alexa turned in her seat so she could see Nessie swim free.
Instead, she watched in horror as Zim climbed onto the Aegir’s harpoon cannon pedestal. He was limping, blood pouring down his leg from where he’d removed the gaff hook, as he loaded a fresh harpoon.
“Tyler!” she yelled. “Go back!”
“We can’t. We don’t have any weapons.”
The stern of the Aegir descended into the water, and the deck was immediately awash.
“Come on, Nessie,” Alexa chanted. “You can do it.”
At the feel of water on its skin, Nessie struggled to free itself of the netting.
Zim finished loading the harpoon and moved back to the trigger. With both hands on the grips, he swiveled it around to aim it at Nessie.
The animal flopped over the gunwales but it was too late.
Zim fired.
The harpoon speared Nessie through the base of the tail but didn’t explode, and Alexa understood what Zim’s plan had been. He’d loaded a cold harpoon, one without a grenade and trailing five strands of the strong nylon rope.
Zim wasn’t trying to kill Nessie. He wanted it to go down with the ship.
The other end of the rope was securely lashed to the welded pedestal holding the cannon. Nessie was big, but if she couldn’t loosen a gaff hook in two hundred years, she wouldn’t be able to pull out a huge harpoon. She struggled to swim away, but the harpoon was lodged too deeply.
Zim staggered off the pedestal and sloshed along the deck to pick up Pryor’s assault rifle, which she had stupidly left behind in her shock. He jumped back in the sub he had commandeered and came after them.
“Tyler,” she said, “Zim’s on his way. It lo
oks like he’s faster than we are.”
“We’re running on only one impeller and weighed down by four people. I’ll make a run for that little beach in front of the castle and hope we can get there before he catches us.”
Alexa watched the Aegir founder. Its bow went up in the air, dragging Nessie backward.
She sobbed when the fishing boat disappeared beneath the water, dousing the last light illuminating the creature. All she could do was listen to the animal’s final haunting cry burble into silence as Loch Ness reclaimed its monster.
FORTY-NINE
Zim’s throbbing leg only fueled his rage at the Lockes, not only for injuring him but for killing Pryor, who was a good supporter of the white cause even if he’d been annoying at times. Zim would savor the success of getting rid of that ugly animal later. First, he was going to show Alexa and Tyler that a hook through the leg was a pinprick compared to the pain they’d endure.
He held the rifle above his head and loosed some rounds in their direction, but at this distance any hit would be luckier than winning a lottery jackpot.
Zim withdrew the rifle and used the strap to tie a tourniquet around his thigh. It slowed the blood loss to a trickle and alleviated some of the agony. He convinced himself he’d be able to walk.
Trailing by only a hundred yards, he saw where Tyler was headed: a small rocky beach with a staircase leading up to a stone archway and a wooden gate flanked by low walls on the back side of the castle grounds.
With Dunham and his well-armed men positioned at the opposite entrance, Zim could catch them all in a classic pincer movement.
Tyler ran the GhostManta up onto the beach, where it tilted to one side. The two pilots on the wings slid off and clambered up the staircase.
This might be Zim’s best chance to kill them. Tyler and Alexa climbed out of the sub and scrambled for the steps. Zim stood, ignoring the sudden lightheadedness, and loosed a volley at them. Tyler was hit in the left arm and went down. Alexa stopped to help him get to his feet.
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