“No, I don’t,” Misty said evenly.
“Misty, we could up the ante a bit,” Janet coaxed her. “Maybe get you some air time. This could be a big boost to your career.”
“Please, Misty, just say yes?” Peter wheedled.
“Well, okay.”
Misty had agreed to go, and wasn’t sure if she had just made a huge mistake or not. She felt certain the boat was big enough, and they would be up off the water. She also somehow didn’t think that they would ever actually find the shark. It was an odd feeling, but somehow she felt that Ghostie had made an appearance just for her, and was gone now. Back to where she had come from.
What if she was wrong about that?
Peter wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and propelled her towards Jethro and Hobart, snapping her out of her temporary reverie.
“You stick with these guys,” he assured her. “They’ll look after you. Go ahead, I’ll meet you out front in ten.”
Peter turned and jogged off down the hall, leaving Misty with Jethro and Hobart. Jethro noticed the cooler she held tightly to her chest.
“I see you got your lunch there,” he said in an effort to be friendly with her.
The artist and editor gave him a horrified look.
“What? What’d I say?” Hobart asked, exasperated with them.
Misty just laughed at their pale expressions.
Chapter 20
Barry walked along the docks, reading numbers out loud from the pier addresses. He was dressed casually, not in his usual ranger uniform, and carried a duffle bag. All around him dozens of people milled about, mostly fishermen by their looks, loading equipment on board their boats.
He carefully worked his way around them, avoiding being knocked into the water. He repeated the slip number out loud, “forty-eight, forty-eight, forty–eight.”
“Ahoy there!” McGill called out to him.
Barry stopped looking down at the slip markers and looked up instead at McGill waving at him, another five boats down.
“Ah, so, forty-eight?” he asked McGill facetiously.
“Yes! Good one. You found me. Come on! Get over here!”
Barry jogged down to the boat and tossed his duffle bag onto the back deck, and then jumped on board.
The boat was about forty-five feet long, and appeared to be quite expensive with large motors on the back end and a well-appointed wheelhouse complete with radar and sonar, along with state-of-the art communications equipment. A Zodiac hung above the fantail, inflated and ready to launch as a fast escape vehicle.
“Wow. Some dinghy you got here, Lawrence.”
“You like? Needed something this big at least to go hunting for a shark that size. Remember, call me McGill, not Lawrence. Only my mother calls me that.”
Barry smiled to himself and tried to imagine what McGill’s mother looked like, and could only envision McGill’s face, but without the beard. It wasn’t an attractive image. At least, he hoped she didn’t have a beard.
McGill led Barry inside the wheelhouse. Up close, Barry could see there was a lot more sensing equipment on board. There were two sonar rigs and monitors hooked up to underwater cameras, fore and aft, along with another whole system he did not recognize.
“Holy mackerel! Where’d all this stuff come from?”
“Belongs to a friend of mine who owns a small fleet of these. Does site analysis for some of the offshore oil rigs.”
“I see cameras, and sonar, but what is this thing?” Barry pointed at one of the systems.
“Oh, underwater microphones. To listen and broadcast.”
“Sheesh. This stuff is expensive as hell. And your friend just lent it to you? To go look for a shark?”
“Well, I had to barter a bit.”
“Oh? Not just your pretty face?”
The image he had had of McGill’s mother filled his head again and he shook it to clear the vision away.
“Funny! Now I know who to use for bait if I want to go trolling for this shark. No no, I just showed him some pictures of Ghostie. He was more than happy to lend it out. We find her with his rig, he’ll get a boatload of publicity, pun intended.”
“Pictures? What pictures?”
“Ah yes, pictures,” he started, sounding a bit remorseful, “I saved a few screen grabs from the young lassie’s tape.”
“That wasn’t very cricket of you, McGill.”
“No, it wasn’t, and I’m not too proud of myself, but this is a find of incredible proportions, Barry. I hope she’ll forgive me, but this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I just could not let it pass me by. Yes, she saw it first and has the proof; she will always have that, but it’s a big ocean out there and I need to see this shark for myself. I had to do it. Have you talked with her lately? Our little Miss Misty?”
“No. I actually don’t know where she is right now, but I’m guessing she might have something to do with what I’m seeing here.”
Barry pointed out through the window of the wheelhouse to the dozens of news helicopters and planes sweeping up and down the shore. Numerous boats packed with people carrying cameras and guns and a plethora of fishing equipment edged their way out of the packed marina.
“Nooooooo, no, ah, that was me.”
“What?”
Barry was truly shocked by this.
“I got the idea from you, actually, when you told the Coast Guard about the shark and then that ship went down. They started yakking on their radios and pretty soon the whole marina was in a tizzy. After I negotiated for this boat, I posted the pictures on a website then let my colleagues know via email what the internet address was. It’s amazing how quickly information gets around the internet, especially when you tell people to keep it a secret!”
“Are you nuts? What did you do that for?”
“In case I don’t make it back, the evidence is in the public domain now. At any rate, it will be if Miss Misty’s decides whether or not to let anyone else see that tooth or that footage of hers. And who’s to say, she hasn’t already spilled the beans already as it were. All I posted were the photos and a statement I made stating that I thought there might a Megalodon out there. It isn’t proof, not by a long shot, but it provided me with enough amunition to help us today.”
Barry heard Misty’s screams in his head, from her nightmare the night before, remembering when she said that McGill was eaten by the shark. He shook that hideous image from his mind.
“McGill, is there something you want to tell me? You’re not planning on doing anything stupid are you to get the evidence you want?”
“No! Of course not. Not more than usual,” he winked as he said that. “Look, my boy, there is a risk to any kind of research and this one will have plenty of risks, especially when we find her. You must be aware of that.”
“I am, but you’re not going to put us in harm’s way, are you?”
“No. And I do hope you know I value our friendship, that I wouldn’t put you in harm’s way. Findnig Ghostie and studying her, proving she exists, is very important to me, but not if it meant risking your life. I do hope you believe that about me.”
Feeling a bit sheepish, Barry nodded his head yes then pointed to all of the activity in the marina.
“And all of this competition doesn’t bother you?”
“No, of course not. Quite the contrary. These boobs are going to help me.”
McGill fired up the powerful engines.
“How?”
“Be a good boy and throw off the lines, would you? That’s a good mate. Once we get underway, I’ll explain everything to you. If you still want to go, that is.”
“Aye aye. I think I am as curious as you are to see this shark.”
Barry left his duffel in the wheelhouse and went out onto the deck, where he tossed off the lines. McGill steered them away from the dock and they headed out to sea surrounded by the flotilla of curious seekers looking for a shark that was bigger than most of the boats hunting her.
About twenty m
inutes later, McGill throttled back and pointed to several bright yellow caution buoys floating on the water.
“This is where that schooner went down, isn’t it?” Barry asked.
“Yup. Right over there.”
McGill motored slowly around the area filled with hundreds of boats, many moored just inches apart. If a gigantic shark had been here, how could it have caused the schooner to go down without taking out more in such a crowded space?
“You think that shark had something to do with this?”
“Based on the eyewitness accounts and the fact that a forty-five foot masted ship was pulverized and sunk in less than a minute, I would say so, yes.”
“I don’t get it, McGill. Why here? What would prompt a monster like that to just appear so close to the shore and start taking out ships like this? And seriously, if it did, how did it miss all of these?”
Barry swept his hand towards the marina filled with dozens of nesting boats.
McGill unfurled a map with colored lines drawn onto it. The site of the sinking of the Molly G was marked with a black X.
“Why, indeed,” McGill mused.
He pointed to a pale blue streak indicating the area they were in now.
“See, Megalodons eat whales, giant squid, really big stuff. They’d have no interest in coming close to us, close to any shore. First of all, the water gets way too shallow for them to come in. How many whales—healthy whales—have you ever seen swimming close to shore?”
“None.”
“Exactly. So, it only goes to show that these big sharks, who eat said healthy whales, stick pretty close to them, out in deep water.”
“Yup. I can see that. But every year, the news helicopters are out there, shooting pictures of migrating whales. Wouldn’t the sharks be seen then?”
“No, I don’t think so, but I do believe the reason why has everything to do with how this schooner was sunk. First of all, as we saw on Misty’s movie, that shark exhibited a lot of the same behaviors that great whites do, and if that is true, then when they attack their prey—like whales—they would do so from underneath. You’d never see them coming. Secondly, and I base this on information regarding a great white that was kept in captivity up in San Francisco a few years ago—”
“Oh yeah, I remember that. Up at Steinhart Aquarium in Golden Gate Park. They had to let it go, didn’t they?”
“They discovered the shark couldn’t handle the electrical field generated by anything metal.”
“I’m guessing there was a lot of metal used to create the tank it was in.”
“Yes. Every single joint. They also discovered—not only about that shark, but pretty much all great whites—that they are repelled . . . well, not repelled so much as, ahhhh, driven crazy by the vibrations made by any machinery.”
“Like the engine of the news helicopters that shoot the whale migration each year?”
“Or a boat. The eyewitnesses to the sinking of the schooner here said that as soon as they heard the engine start back up, the ship started to go down. And, it was a wooden ship, no metal bothering the shark, which is why it was so close in the first place. Ghostie was probably right underneath that wooden schooner when the engine started. Those poor people had no idea what was under them.”
“So, all the engines and shallow water and metal we have along the shores here keep the Ghosties away?”
“That’s my theory, yes.”
“And this one came so close to shore because . . . ?”
McGill pointed to the pale blue area on the map again.
“The shipping lane?” Barry asked, “That area is dredged regularly. Its deep water all the way in to shore here.”
“Yes, that’s right. And mostly wooden or fiberglass boats, and here,” he pointed to an area along the shore, “sewers dump into the sea. And here, drainage from a fish processing plant. Lots of tempting aromas for a shark.”
“But again, why just this one? Why not others?”
“Believe it or not, I think her coloring has something to do with it.”
“How so?”
“She’s an aberrant. She’s atypical. When animals, humans—what have you—display odd physical characteristics, more often than not, other parts of the body are affected as well. For example, people with Marfan’s syndrome, tall and gaunt looking like President Lincoln, have severe heart defects as well as their outward physical differences.”
“So, what on Ghostie do you think is affected?”
“Her vision and perhaps other sensory organs. I had a chance to make some cursory studies on the tissue I took from the end of her tooth. She has a lot of similarities to great whites, but her pigment is drastically altered, which could affect her vision a great deal. She was probably right next to that schooner and attacked it by accident, out of fright, when the engine started up.”
“Okay, so, she don’t see so good and blundered her way in here following the deep water. What now? How do you propose we find her?”
McGill referred to his map again. He pointed to areas of deeper water and arrows indicated water currents.
“Whales are migrating south to north right along here,” McGill continued. “Right now.”
“You think she’s somewhere around there?”
“Near there.”
“Near?”
“Let me explain. See these red markers?”
McGill pointed to a grouping of red diamonds on the map.
“Yes, I see them. Here and here.”
“Killer whales. Wherever the Orcas are, the Megalodons won’t be there.”
“A Megalodon is bigger than an orca. Why would they keep clear of an orca?”
“True, but orcas hunt in packs and are a whole lot smarter. My guess is the Megalodons will avoid them, but will keep close to the whales, so, taking the deep water into consideration, the patterns of the whales and the orcas would put Ghostie right about . . . here.”
McGill pointed to an area twenty miles due west of Los Angeles.
“Alrighty then. We have a plan, so tell me, how are the boobs going to help you?”
“The what?”
Barry burst out laughing at the confused, comical look on McGill’s face. He pointed to ships leaving the marina, and the numerous helicopters and fixed wingcraft circling the area.
“Oh right, the turistas. Get ready for the fun to begin.”
McGill turned on the radio and then spoke frantically into the microphone.
“Mayday, Mayday! I see it. I see a shark. It’s bigger than my boat! Mayday, Mayday! Can anyone hear me?”
Barry buried his head in his hands.
“McGill, I didn’t bring any bail money with me.”
“Shhhhhh!” McGill said to him as he covered the microphone.
“This is the Coast Guard. We hear your Mayday,” a voice called out over the radio. “We need your location and call sign. Where are you?”
McGill provided them with a location that was several miles southwest of their current location. Barry shook his head in amazement as he saw several powerboats speed up and head that way. A few helicopters turned as well and sped off to the south.
McGill shut off his radio, severing any further connection with the Coast Guard. He and Barry watched the show as more ships and flying craft headed south.
“And that is going to do what besides get us arrested?” Barry asked.
McGill pointed to the arrows on his map showing water direction.
“All of those engines are going to make a helluva lot of noise.”
“Ah! It’ll keep Ghostie from heading too far south? Instead it will keep her moving towards more of the whales migrating north?”
“Exactly! It’ll keep her between the boats and the orcas, narrowing the area we have to look for her. Let’s hope I’m right.”
“Well, alright then. What are you waiting for?”
“Indeed!”
McGill fired up the powerful engines again and he and Barry headed west, away from the cadre of bo
ats heading south. They were soon all alone on the ocean.
Barry held on tightly, riding out the motion of the boat as it sawed through the waves.
What are you going to do when you find her? Barry wondered.
Chapter 21
Dozens of seals played in a thick kelp bed, darting in and out of the tall plants. One small seal looked up in fright as an enormous shadow passed overhead, blotting out the sun. Ghostie swung through the area, oblivious to the seals, and pulling kelp plants along with her as she swam that accidentally drifted into her mouth.
The surface of the ocean was suddenly churned up by the twin screws of a powerboat blasting its way south, followed by another. Ghostie shook her head strongly, then turned and went in a different direction.
More boats ripped along the surface, the noise from their engines thudding through the water.
One small seal found itself in the path of the Megalodon and panicked, darted ahead, and just managed to nip into a rock crevice where it waited until the enormous shark swam past. As Ghostie cruised through the area, now heading north, she resembled a strange party favor with long clusters of kelp streaming from the corners of her ample mouth.
Chapter 22
The seventy-five foot long sleek white vessel from the Riker Institute plowed along the surface of the ocean, cutting effortlessly through the higher swells of the deep water. The California coast was a thin, barely perceptible strip just visible to the east.
Misty sat on a stack of coiled ropes, her feet propped up on the railing as she looked out over the ocean. Peter came up on deck, looked about for a few moments, and then, located her. He came over and popped down on the deck next to her.
“See? Safe as in your mother’s arms,” he said jovially.
“Hi Peter.”
“Thanks for coming with us.”
“Oh, you’re welcome. Ummm, where are we headed, anyways?”
Peter pointed up to the wheelhouse, where Riggs and Haruki were piloting the boat. Riggs saw her and gave a friendly wave, which she returned.
“They’re in charge. I guess we’ll know when we get there.”
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