KRONOS RISING: After 65 million years, the world's greatest predator is back.

by Max Hawthorne

  Winking at his friend Mike as he tossed the remaining length of cable overboard, Lane grinned and gestured for silence as he waited for Willie’s reply.

  “Dat’s OK, mon,” Willie said. “I got enough problems wit da smelly crew we got on dis boat already. If ya don mind, I tink we’ll leave dat dead whale where he be.”

  “That’s a big ten-four, Willie,” Lane chuckled. “We’re heading back now.”

  Willie Daniels sat in the Harbinger’s observation room, arms folded. He scratched his nose, checked his watch for the umpteenth time, then spun his seat toward Adam Spencer.

  “Mon, it’s seven o’clock and we got no call from Amara. Her radio’s off and I can’t reach her by cell.”

  “What do you want to do?” Adam asked from behind his lenses. “She told us to document the sperm before it’s chewed up by scavengers. With the current water conditions, you know the mini-sub’s the way to go. I hate to say it, but we can’t wait for her. Besides, she wouldn’t want us to.”

  Cracks of frustration crinkled Willie’s brow and he stifled a curse. As much as he hated the decision he was now forced to make, there was no choice. He brushed his hands off on his jeans and rose. All eyes turned toward him.

  “Okay, guys, we followin da captain’s orders to check out dis dead whale. I need everyone to dere places. We be launching da William for da first time.”

  Willie picked up his radio and gave the order forward to prep the submersible.

  “So, who’s going down with her?” Adam asked. As he spoke, his hands weaved their spell across two keyboards simultaneously. “You need a two-man crew, right?”

  “Dat’s right, mon,” Willie said. He checked his sonar screen. “I was goin ta go myself, but wit Amara not here, it looks like Lane and Mike get da nod once again.”

  He sat and studied his scope. After a few last minute adjustments, he inserted a pair of video discs into the overhead units. “Any ting showing up on camera, Adam?” he asked without looking. “Sonar’s showin a lot of activity around da dead whale.”

  “It’s hard to tell.” Adam turned a dial. “The water’s clouded up big time. I imagine every scavenger within five miles will show up for a buffet this size.”

  Willie looked up as a loud creaking sound, punctuated by a tremendous splashing, echoed through the ship’s hull. He looked over Adam’s shoulder and watched the William creep past their hull cameras.

  “Wow, that’s something you don’t see every day,” Adam said. He pointed with his pencil as the gleaming mini-sub filled the nearest screen.

  “I sure hope ya recordin dis, mon,” Willie advised. “Ya know Amara will have ya head if ya don’t.”

  “Relax, old friend.” Adam grinned as he jabbed a few buttons. “It’s bad enough she’s not here for her sub’s maiden voyage. You don’t think I’d let her miss the rerun?”

  Willie rolled a chair over to Adam’s station and plopped down beside him, his big hands clasped under his chin. Oblivious to the interns around them, the two technicians studied the William, watching as the unwieldy-looking vessel moved away from the Harbinger’s protective hull. With its diesel engine powering its shielded prop, the twenty-two foot submersible glided beneath the swells, its metal pontoons spouting tiny air bubbles from its virgin ballast system.

  The William moved in, its rudder shifting it in the direction of the current-driven carcass. As it did, the six-foot observation bubble that comprised its prow became visible, along with its manipulators, drawn up beneath it like the claws of a praying mantis.

  “She’s looking good,” Adam said with a proud grin. “Do either of them know how to use the actuators?”

  “No, dey don’t.” Willie reached for his radio. “Lane, it’s Willie. How’s it goin?”

  “Read you loud and clear, Harbinger,” Lane’s voice sprang out of the speaker. “So far, so good. We’re approaching the carcass now. Distance is fifty meters and closing.”

  “Sounds good, mon,” Willie said. He looked nervously at the overhead monitors. “Turn on all cameras and start transmittin. And no mucking around wit da robot arms, if ya please.”

  “No problem,” Lane chuckled. The sound of flipping switches carried over the mike. “How’s this?”

  The room’s monitors shimmered, their images changing as the feed from the William’s cameras took over.

  Like some colossus emerging from the gloom, the bull sperm emerged into view. Its gigantic jaws hung open in a hideous grimace, its tattered body filling the screen.

  Adam dropped his pencil. “Holy shit! Forget what I said before. Now that’s something you don’t see every day.”

  “Amen, mon,” Willie agreed. “Lane, circle da carcass and focus on where some ting bit da whale.”

  “You got it,” he replied. “Whoa, check it out! It’s like a feeding frenzy down here!”

  Dipping under the heavy tow cable that bound the undulating carcass to the Harbinger, the mini-sub circled the cetacean’s body at a distance of fifty feet. Amara’s concerns were well founded. The sperm whale was peppered with clinging scavengers, writhing over and under each other. Dozens of bull, blue and mako sharks were present, as well as fish of every conceivable shape and color, all partaking in the mobile mountain of flesh nature provided for them. As the scavenging sharks tore into the flanks of the dead cetacean, they shook their heads in primal fury, shearing away gobs of blubber the size of a human head. They clouded the surrounding sea with billows of blood and fragments of tissue, spewing from their gluttonous jaws.

  “God, mon. What a mess,” Willie said under his breath. “Okay Lane, I need ya to send dat info please.”

  “Processing now, Harbinger,” he replied.

  With a hum, the William’s laser scanning beam swept out, moving eerily back and forth across the whale’s body in synchronized sweeps. The submersible inched closer, focusing its laser on the dead bull’s flank.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Adam said. “Look at the size of that bite! That’s impossible!”

  “Obviously not, mon,” Willie remarked. He raised his radio: “Lane, what ya got for me?”

  “System is coming up now, Harbinger. Total length is . . . twenty one point eight meters, estimated weight . . . ninety three point five tons. Minus the bite, that is.”

  “Wow, that’s a big sperm whale.” Adam whistled, tearing himself away from the screen as he jotted the stats on a piece of paper.

  “What about da bite?” Willie peered intently at the screen as the William’s prow cameras zoomed in on the enormous wound.

  “Bite radius is about two meters in width by three meters in height. Holy crap, that’s huge!” Lane exclaimed. “Hmm, now this is interesting . . .”

  “What?” Willie asked.

  “Based on the gouge marks visible at the top and bottom of the excised area, and despite the damn sharks nibbling on the edges, the computer says the wound pattern indicates something called caniniform anterior dentition. What the heck is that?”

  Willie exchanged speculative glances with Adam, then handed the videographer his radio.

  “Lane, this is Adam. Did you say caniniform?”

  “That’s affirmative.”

  Adam’s eyebrows dropped low over his eyes. He took his finger off the talk button and turned to Willie.

  “Caniniform anterior dentition means that whatever took a bite out of poor Elvis has enlarged fangs at the distal ends of its jaws, enabling it to bite chunks from its prey. I’ve been a naturalist for ten years, but I have no idea what did this.”

  “I hear dat, mon.”

  “Hey fellas, check this out,” Lane said. His voice was laced with excitement.

  Shifting the William, he skirted the frenzied jaws of a dozen sharks and moved to the sperm’s mountainous head. His cameras zoomed in on it, revealing a series of jagged, white lines that crisscrossed the bull’s head and shoulder region.

  “From what I see, it looks like Elvis had a run in with a squid of some kind, and a damn big one from the
looks of things. Some of these sucker marks are a foot across! These wounds are fresh, guys. Do you think a giant squid did this?”

  “I doubt it, mon,” Willie called into the mike. “Maybe a squid fed on da whale after it was already dead. Who knows?”

  Suddenly, a fourteen-foot tiger shark appeared on the screen. There was a loud thump as it collided with one of the William’s pontoons, pushing the bulky submersible off balance and jostling its passengers.

  “Well, that was interesting,” Lane laughed into the radio as he pulled them level. “I think Mike just pissed himself! We’ve got quite a rogue’s gallery gathering, guys. All we need now is the squid this whale was battling and we’ll make it complete!”

  Adam grabbed a hand mike. “We can’t promise you an Architeuthis, Lane, but if you look out your port window, you’ll see a couple of nice Humboldts headed your way.”

  A school of six-foot squid began to move past the hovering William. Known in the Sea of Cortez as Diablos Rojos, the “red devils” fastened themselves to the whale’s head region and began tearing away with parrot-like beaks. A fraction of the size of their giant cousins, the two hundred pound cephalopods were vicious predators in their own right, ones that wouldn’t hesitate to attack humans or even sharks if hungry.

  “God, what a gang of marauders,” Mike Helm chimed in. “It’s like every nightmare in the ocean converged on this one spot.”

  “Aye, hell is empty. All da devils are here, mon,” Willie said.

  “You and your Shakespeare.” Adam smirked. “Macbeth?”

  “Da Tempest.” Willie smiled wide.

  The two men were still grinning when something huge appeared in the background.

  “Holy shit!” Lane yelled. “Harbinger, are you seeing this?”

  As Willie watched, the sharks and squid stopped feeding and scattered. Gnashing their teeth and flailing their tentacles, the big predators fell back, making way for something far larger and fiercer. Soaring enigmatically into view, it approached.

  At twenty-three feet and over six thousand pounds, the female Carcharodon carcharias was the most feared carnivorous fish in the world. A notorious man-eater that often mistook swimmers for seals, the great white was a giant, its powerful jaws lined with triangular teeth over three inches in length.

  Intrigued by their similarity in size, the white shark circled the hovering submersible. Its soulless black eyes glared inside the craft’s observation bubble, intently studying its wary occupants.

  “No sudden moves, Lane,” Willie whispered. “Dat’s one big muddah of a shark!”

  “Are you kidding me?” Lane said. On the monitor, streams of sweat trickled down his face, despite the chilly temperature inside the William. “The only movement I’m contemplating right now involves my bowels, thank you very much!”

  The great white eventually dismissed the strange object as a non-threat and veered off in the direction of the dead sperm. Void of emotion, the killer shark swam to the wound area and began to feed. Opening its mouth wide enough to engulf a grown man, its wrinkled upper lip pulled back in a hideous grimace, revealing rows of serrated teeth. Propelled forward by powerful sweeps from its tail, the shark buried its head to the gills in the dead sperm’s muscles. Shaking its three-ton body from side to side, it sheared away hundred pound chunks of putrescent flesh like a deli-slicer carving luncheon meat.

  “Jesus, what a monster!” Lane spouted fearfully.

  As the white continued to feed, the smaller sharks returned en masse, nearly bowling the William over in the process.

  “Shit!” Lane cursed as he struggled to retain control of his vessel. “Listen guys, we’ve gotten the data Amara wanted, and enough bonus footage to win every documentary award known to man. That being the case,” he added nervously, “it’s starting to get hairy down here. Now, ‘JAWS’ over there notwithstanding, we’re sure this tin can we’re sitting in is well made, and we don’t want to sound like a couple of Marys. But, if you don’t mind, Mike and I would like to get the hell out of here and come back onboard!”

  Shaking all over, Willie chortled into his handset. “Okay, ya big chickens. Make ya way to da portside crane and we’ll rescue ya lily-white asses.”

  “Actually, I haven’t seen Mike’s, but mine’s furry and freckled . . .”

  His eyes wide, Willie exchanged horrified grimaces with Adam, then collapsed into his chair. He rested his chin on his knuckles, his mind wandering to the previous day, and the mysterious entity that came up from the nearby abyss. What baffled him wasn’t how it tossed the Harbinger around as it passed beneath them. A really big blue whale could do that. It was the thing’s velocity that gave him pause.

  Blue whales were the fastest of the great whales, maxing out at over thirty miles an hour. Their mystery guest had moved at nearly fifty, and might be capable of even greater speed. If he hadn’t seen it first hand, he wouldn’t have believed it.

  Initially, he suspected the navy’s “bloop” findings were correct, and that they were dealing with some sort of giant octopus, the ones said to inhabit the deepest depths. With a tentacle span of two hundred feet, an Octopus giganteus would have the sheer body mass to create such a monstrous wave. It would also be capable of such speed when jetting backwards.

  Having seen the bull sperm carcass and the wound that caused its death, however, Willie now decided he was dealing with an entirely different class of predator. It was very big and very fast, with interlocking, armor-piercing teeth that could shear a metric ton of flesh from a struggling whale in a single bite. If he was right, they would have to rewrite the definition of nightmare in the Oxford unabridged dictionary.

  Looking up, he reached for the CD that contained the audio profile of their gigantean anomaly. He turned it repeatedly in his hand, gnawing his lower lip before putting it away. He’d spent several hours of the last twenty-four listening for it on the hydrophone. Once or twice he thought he detected something, but the signal was too brief and too far away to be tracked. Still, it was out there somewhere. If the Blake Plateau and Ophion’s Deep were indeed its home, as he believed, sooner or later it would come to them.

  Willie’s eyes burst open and he did a double-take at his sonar screen. A thousand yards off and closing was a massive reading. He adjusted his settings, increasing gain and contrast. The reading was impossibly huge, yet seemed to possess no set shape. It was spreading out in multiple directions at the same time.

  It was a giant octopus.

  “Lordy, mon!” Willie sprang to his feet and grabbed his radio.

  “Lane, where are ya guys?”

  Adam’s eyes shifted in his direction. “What’s going on?”

  Willie said nothing. He pointed at the starboard video screen, focused on the dead sperm.

  Adam’s head snapped back on his spine. He checked his glasses and gaped at the monitor. The feeding frenzy was over and all the predators were gone. Only the whale carcass remained. Even the monstrous white shark had fled the area.

  “Harbinger, it’s Lane. We’re approaching the starboard crane now. You should see us waving any second.”

  “What’s taking you guys so long?” Willie asked, trying to conceal his panic.

  “Sorry. We had a delay down here. Out of nowhere, all our beasties took off running. There were so many of them, they nearly rolled us over. Pretty weird, huh?”

  “Yeah, mon.” Willie stared apprehensively at the growing sonar signal. Whatever it was, from eight hundred yards away it had frightened off a collection of the fiercest marine carnivores he’d ever seen. “Listen, Lane, surface by da starboard crane. It’ll be faster.”

  Lane’s voice took on that whiney tone he used when extra work was unexpectedly thrown his way. “But, isn’t that crane having winch problems? What’s the rush?”

  “Ya remember dat ting dat chased ya dee other day?”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “It’s back, mon,” Willie said. “And it’s coming dis way.”

  “Shi
t! Starboard crane it is! Tell those slackers to be ready!”

  Willie glanced at the sonar screen. The amorphous green symbol continued to pop up with each repeated sweep. It was only four hundred yards off and closing steadily. He could hear the metallic groaning noises and thrumming vibrations that indicated Joe Calabrese was lowering the cable to the William.

  Willie cursed under his breath. It was too late. The mini-sub and her crew wouldn’t be clear in time.

  He reached for the bright red lever that activated the Harbinger’s warning claxon. A moment later, sirens throughout the ship shrilled, warning the crew to rush to their emergency stations.

  And to brace for collision.

  Amara awoke with a start.

  There was a pounding noise vibrating through the ceiling, dragging her out of her exhaustion-induced slumber.

  It was gone. No, wait . . . there it is again.

  Sitting up with a gasp, her eyes bounced around the sheriff’s station. Panic welled up within her as she took in the unfamiliar surroundings. A stiff neck, combined with the pain of sleeping with her face on a keyboard, brought her back to reality and helped slow her rapidly beating heart.

  She sat upright, then groaned and lowered her chin onto her forearms. Eyes closed, she rested. Another barrage of sound forced her to open one eye and she narrowed it on the wall clock. A curse slipped out of her mouth. It was half past six.

  With a grimace, she placed her palms on top of the computer desk and seesawed to her feet. Her injured hip complained more than a desperate housewife, and she found herself doing a drunken high-wire routine, swaying back and forth as she struggled to regain her balance.

  She kicked at a blanket that had somehow collected at her feet and shook her head in disgust. She needed Advil and the world’s strongest cup of coffee. Not much of a morning person, her condition invariably left her terse and grumpy when she got up. Five hours of frustrating research didn’t do much to improve her disposition.

  Groaning again as she dragged her tired dogs to the rest room, Amara splashed cold water on her face and rubbed gently at the embarrassing marks on her cheeks. The right one looked like she used a waffle iron for a pillow. Disgusted, she gargled with some mouthwash, then closed the door to pee.