The MEG

by Steve Alten

  “Turns out he was right. Why not just leave it alone.”

  “So he was right. His actions still killed two men. You and Shaffer were close, weren’t you?”

  “We went to the same high school, our families knew each other.” Heller lowered his voice. “I should have never allowed you to talk me into pushing Taylor on that last dive.”

  “He was fine.”

  “He was exhausted, unfit to pilot that sub.”

  “Those geologists wanted one last dive. The Pentagon was calling the shots. You and I … we were just following orders.”

  “Whose orders were you following when you pushed for his dishonorable discharge? Face it, Richard, Jonas Taylor was the best deep-sea pilot in the navy and we made him a scapegoat to cover our asses.”

  “You’re out of line, doctor.” Danielson’s neck was turning red.

  “Whoa, Frank, Captain, take it easy.” Dennis moved between them. “Come on, Frank, I’ll take you out for a quick bite. Skip, I’ll be back at sixteen-thirty hours.”

  Danielson stood in silence as the two men headed into town, the first drops of rain echoing against the outer steel casing of the antiquated nuclear submarine.

  *

  North Shore, Maui

  The towering swells, rising into walls of water six to eight stories high, rolled on to the rocky beach, carrying quarter-size chunks of whale blubber and debris. None of that seemed to bother the thousands of onlookers who had braved rain, no parking, and a long hike down private back roads to witness the Jaws-Maui leg of the annual Billabong XXL Global Big Wave contest. Spectators lined the shore and surrounding cliffs. Professional photographers were strapped to the open doors of helicopters or the rails of boats bobbing and weaving just beyond the break. A constant flow of competitors were being towed out by brave friends on jet-skis while judges watched from their covered tents.

  Pe’ahi, more commonly known as Jaws, was the biggest big wave surfing break in Maui. It takes a variety of conditions to form big waves, the two most important factors being the distance a swell travels over deep water and the effect created when it hits the shallows. Jaws-Maui possessed a uniquely shaped underwater ridge along with a dramatic depth change from one-hundred-and-twenty feet to just under thirty, the combination creating waves that rose into seven story giants. Because the waves are moving so fast, wave runners must tow the surfers into the path of these powerful swells, with rides lasting as long as thirty seconds ... and wipeouts sometimes fatal.

  *

  The big-name competitors had been at it all day, Laird Hamilton, Pete Cabrinha, Dave Kalama, and Buzzy Kerbox. Now, as the sun began to set, the youngsters moved in to try their luck.

  Twenty-two-year-old Wade Maller had been cutting waves since he was twelve. He was joined by his younger brothers, Dylan, a defenseman on the University of New Hampshire ice hockey team, and Austin, a freshman at Florida State. The Maller boys had only recently begun training on the big waves, but with the Billibong finals in town the three brothers were more than game, especially with an audience of spectators and cameras present.

  Dylan pulled on his black and purple wet suit while Wade and Austin studied the break. As he headed for the water with his board, the twenty year old circled around a group of girls he recognized from his early teen years living in South Florida. Kelsey Danielle caught his eye and gave him a quick wave, the knockout blonde jump-starting his heart. Confidence brimming, he caught up with his brothers—only to see they had been joined by another surfer.

  Surfing is a spiritual release, with everyone watching out for one another, especially when it comes to riding the big waves. Michael Barnes was driven strictly by ego, which was why none of the big surfers on the circuit wanted anything to do with the gang banger, who was reputed to carry a small arsenal of weapons in his van.

  Austin was on his wave runner, waiting in the shallows. Wade pulled Dylan aside. “Barnes is going to join us; just let it go.”

  Dylan was about to object when the muscular heavily-tattooed twenty-seven year old pushed his way into their conversation. “She’s out of your league, faggot.”

  “Huh?”

  “The blonde. Don’t even bother.” Barnes ran through the surf and paddled out to hitch a ride on Austin’s tow rig.

  “Asshole.” For a moment Dylan debated whether to leave. The skies were darkening, the crowd beginning to thin. He saw Austin waving them out and knew Kelsey was watching …

  Wade put his arm around his younger brother’s shoulder. “Forget him. Let’s just get one good ride.”

  Bellying up on his board, Wade dove into the surf, Dylan paddling behind him.

  Minutes later, the three surfers and their Jet Ski tow were waiting beyond the breakpoint for the next incoming set. They were a good half-mile out, in water more than one hundred feet deep.

  *

  The female moved lazily along the sea floor, digesting the remains of her last meal. Nestled within her swollen oviduct were live young, each six to seven feet long, weighing upwards of five hundred pounds.

  Almost sixteen months had passed since the violent act of copulation that had impregnated the female. As embryos, her unborn offspring had been sheathed in a protective, transparent capsule, nourished by an external placenta-like yolk sac attached to their gut. Over time these capsules had ruptured, exposing the developing Megalodon sharks to a womb whose liquid world was far different from the chemistry of the ocean. As the day of their birth rapidly approached, their mother’s uterus steadily regulated their ion-water balance, preparing the unborn young for their emergence into the sea.

  For all its life-giving chemicals, the depths of the Challenger Deep were not equipped to sustain a large colony of apex predators, so it was left to nature to balance the scales and thin the herd. Undernourished, the unborn Megs at first subsisted on ovulated, unfertilized eggs. But as they grew larger, the pups instinctively turned to cannibalism, the larger infants feeding upon their smaller, less fortunate siblings.

  What had begun as a brood of seventeen was now down to three.

  For the big female, inhabiting the abyss meant longer gestation periods than her surface-breeding ancestors had to endure, her internal anatomy delaying contractions until her pups could achieve greater size. This evolutionary feature, designed to increase the pups’ rate of survival in the wild, was taking a toll on their mother, forcing the female to expend greater amounts of energy during these final weeks of pregnancy.

  Expending more energy meant an increase in feeding.

  Since leaving her abyssal habitat, the female had stalked more than a dozen different whale pods. Most of these earlier attempts had failed, but the Meg was learning, having succeeded in her last three tries.

  Failure or not, the whale pods around Hawaii were spooked by the hunter’s presence. Haunting warning calls from humpbacks and gray whales reverberated through miles of ocean. Almost as one, the pods began altering their migratory course, skirting west away from the island chain. By morning of the third day, very few whales could be found in Hawaiian waters.

  The Megalodon sensed the departure of its prey, but did not give chase. Gliding through the thermocline, the boundary between sun-warmed waters and the ocean depths, it headed toward the shallows, its senses enticed by a strange new stimulus.

  *

  The three Maller brothers and Michael Barnes waited impatiently for their first set of waves to arrive. The sun was going down, the air had turned chilly, and they were losing their audience as the weather began gusting.

  Austin was the first to register the arriving swells. “Here we go. Wade and Barnes are first up; Dylan I’ll be back for you in three minutes.”

  The wave runner took off with the two surfers in tow, leaving Dylan behind.

  The first wave struck the underwater ridge, channeling its force vertically into a majestic deep blue mountain of water five-and-a-half stories high. Wade was on the inside as the fifty-four foot crest broke from right to left. He was in a z
one, a mind space where his only focus remained at the front of his board and a hundred feet down the line. Rooted within this tunnel vision, he never saw what was happening behind him.

  Barnes had just made his turn, pulling into the wave’s tube for what he knew would be an “insane” ride. For a quick second, he stole a glance toward the beach, hoping to see the blonde—his peripheral vision catching a bizarre wall of white water emerging on his right.

  Never seeing the creature break through the wave, Michael Barnes surfed right into the Megalodon’s open mouth!

  The gangbanger was slingshot into darkness, smashing headfirst into an arching wall of cartilage. He bounced across an undulating tongue as rows of serrated white teeth gnashed his surfboard and tossed him about, spraying him with fiberglass splinters.

  Disoriented, unable to catch a second to reason, Barnes was convinced he was underwater, being pummeled by the wave’s fury, the lacerations now flailing at his wet suit and skin caused by the sharp ridges of coral along the bottom.

  He attempted to swim against the current to reach the surface as the Meg’s opening and closing jaws searched for his flesh, its hideous tongue pushing him towards chomping rows of teeth … and suddenly, he knew!

  Michael Barnes heard himself scream — as his existence was crushed into scarlet oblivion.

  *

  Austin Maller circled on his wave runner, searching for Barnes. As the roar of the breaking wave passed, he heard shouts coming from the beach, the crowd waving frantically—pointing.

  Turning, he saw the white dorsal fin—as tall as a small sailboat. Gunning the engine, he raced after Wade.

  *

  Her appetite primed, the female circled the kill zone, gnashing her teeth as she swam. Beneath her thick skin along either flank was a thin canal that contained sensory cells called neuromasts. Mucus contained in the lower half of these two canals transmitted vibrations from the seawater to these sensitive cells, giving the predator a spectacular “vision” of her surroundings through echolocation.

  Somewhere close was more prey, and her senses were isolating it.

  *

  Dylan Maller shivered from the cold, waiting for Austin to come back out and get him. The swells were pushing him closer to the breakpoint, but were still moving too fast to catch.

  What’s taking him so long?

  Something struck his leg, causing him to look down.

  “What the hell?” Small bits of bloody flesh clung to his surfboard. He felt vomit rising in his throat and swallowed hard to keep it down.

  Then he spotted the dorsal fin. It was impossibly tall and pure white … gliding straight for him. Dylan pulled his legs onto his surfboard and froze, willing his muscles and nerves to be still, Looking down, he saw his board was quivering in the water.

  The Megalodon rose to the surface, the sheer mass of its moving girth creating a current that towed the surfboard and its hijacked passenger out to sea. Beyond the dorsal, the upper section of a half-moon-shaped tail lashed back and forth along the surface. Stretching higher than Dylan’s head, it swatted past his face, missing him by mere inches.

  Dylan felt something lifting him. His heart fluttered, anticipating the bloody mouth and rows of fangs. But the shark was still swimming away from him; the pressure had been caused by a swell. The next waves were coming in, fast and furious, and he needed to catch one.

  He turned around, the monster already a good sixty feet behind him.

  Go!

  Dylan rolled onto his stomach and paddled, stroking as fast as he could, his pounding heart threatening to explode from his chest.

  The Megalodon turned, zeroing in on these new vibrations. The female’s peppered white snout broke the surface thirty feet behind him, snorting sea like a Brahma bull.

  Dylan slammed the left side of his face against the board, simultaneously gripping the outer edges with his ankles as he plunged his arms into the water, double-stroking furiously. He screamed as he registered the monster’s nostrils along the soles of his bare feet, and then he fell over the edge of a cliff.

  Plunging down the rolling mountain of water, Dylan somehow managed to remember to pop up at the last moment on his exhausted legs, feet wide, crouching low. He reached back with his right hand, the sixty-six-foot wave roaring at him like a tornado, its whitewater crest twenty feet above his head, threatening to bury him beneath the sea floor.

  Dylan cut hard to his right as the Megalodon burst through the wave, missing him by two board lengths, its forward momentum sending it momentarily airborne. The surfer stole a quick glance then dug in, looping over the monster’s head as the crashing wave consumed the beast and spit Dylan out its pipeline.

  Refusing to be tossed, the trembling youth rode the dying wave another fifty yards. The ride was over, the shoreline a good seventy yards away.

  The dorsal fin surfaced, the shark searching for him.

  He heard the outboard and turned to see his Austin on the jet-ski, older brother Wade waving frantically, instructing him to get ready to jump.

  Austin never slowed. With the monstrous shark less than twenty feet behind Dylan, he cut across its path, racing past his brother, who leaped onto the wave runner’s tow rig—Wade grabbing him before he could roll over the side.

  The jet-ski shot through the shallows and straight onto the beach, the delirious crowd chanting, “Dylan, Dylan, Dylan …”

  Austin leaped off the wave runner and joined Wade, who was hugging Dylan, slapping him on the back as the crowd swelled—parted by an official from the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Contest who presented him with a trophy, congratulating him on the ride of the day.

  Dylan was exhausted, shaking with fear, the burst of adrenaline nearly forcing him to puke. He caught himself as Kelsey appeared, a huge smile stretched across her face, tears in her blue eyes as she hugged him.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “You scared the hell out of me.”

  Dylan cleared his throat and took a breath. “Yeah…it’s cool.” Then, seeing his opening, he flashed a crooked smile. “So Kelce, you doing anything tonight?”

  Battle At Sea

  THE COAST GUARD HELICOPTER hovered two hundred feet above the breaking swells. Spotting the predator’s alabaster hide, the airship followed the female as she headed out to sea, radioing her position to the naval base at Pearl Harbor.

  Within minutes, both the Nautilus and the Kiku had put to sea, racing north past Mamala Bay. By the time the Kiku reached Kaena Point, the incoming storm had reached gale-force proportions, the raging night fully upon them.

  Jonas was in the bridge when the door leading to the outer stairwell was wrenched open against the howling wind and Mac slipped into the dry compartment, dressed in a yellow slicker. He slammed the hatch closed behind him.

  “Copter’s secured. So’s the net and harpoon gun. We’re in for a rough one.”

  “This may be our only chance. If we don’t tag the female before she heads into open water, we may lose her for good.”

  They joined Masao, who was standing over a crewman seated at the sonar console. He looked grim. “The Coast Guard broke off its pursuit because of the weather.” Masao turned to the crewman. “Anything on sonar yet, Nash?”

  Without looking up, the technician shook his head. “Just the Nautilus.”

  Everyone grabbed a console as a twenty-foot swell lifted and tossed the research vessel from one side to the other.

  Captain Barre stood at the helm, his sea legs giving naturally with the roll of his vessel. “Hope nobody had a big dinner. This storm’s gonna be a bitch.”

  *

  Life on-board the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine was relatively calm as the ship entered Waimea Bay one hundred feet below the raging storm. Though refitted several times during its life span, the sub still possessed a single nuclear reactor that created the superheated steam necessary to power its twin turbines and two shafts. It was an antiquated system, far from battle-ready.

  Commander Dan
ielson, too, felt far from battle-ready, but the semi-retired naval man was more than game. “Anything on the sonar, Ensign Raby?”

  The sonar man was listening with his headphones while watching his console. The screen was designed to give a visual representation of the difference between the background noise and a particular bearing. Any object within range would appear as a light line against the green background. Because they were searching for a biologic, sonar was actively pinging the area every three minutes, Raby looking for return signals. “Lots of surface interference from the storm. Nothing else yet, sir.”

  “Very well, keep me informed. Chief of the Watch, what’s our weapons status?”

  Chief Engineer Dennis Heller, six years younger than his brother Frank, yet still one of the oldest members of the sub’s makeshift crew, looked up from his console. “Two Mark 48 AD-CAP torpedoes ready to fire on your command, sir. Torpedoes set for close range, as per your orders. A bit tight, if you don’t mind my saying, sir.”

  “Has to be, Chief. When sonar locates this monster, we’ll need to be as close as possible to ensure an accurate solution.”

  “Captain Danielson!” The radioman leaned back from his console. “Sir, I’m receiving a distress call from a Japanese surface vessel. Hard to make out, but it sounds as if they’re being attacked.”

  “Navigator, plot an intercept course, ten degrees up on the fair-weather planes. If this is our friend, I want to kill it and be back at Pearl in time for last call at Grady’s.”

  *

  The Japanese ship rolled with the massive swells, rain, sea, and wind pelting her crew mercilessly. For two days the storm front had chased the ship east, bringing it into Hawaiian waters. The captain had no desire to be this far from home, but his ship was riding low in the water and he couldn’t risk his crew … or their valuable cargo.