The twenty-story-high lizard was reluctant to leave the protection of the midtown skyscrapers. He hesitated in the shadows, his wide feet rooted to the ground, his only movement the slow flapping of his bony dorsal fins. After the unexpected trouble his last free meal had cost him, he was being more cautious this second time around. Suddenly, with that astonishing quickness of his, he bolted out into the open. He scampered two blocks closer to the trap, then quickly ducked into a new hiding place, crouching alongside the imposing Dakota apartments.
“Hold your fire,” O’Neal’s voice said steadily. “We don’t shoot until he’s clear of the buildings and into the park.”
With a series of lightning-fast moves, Gojira wended his way through the maze of streets on the Upper West Side, appearing and disappearing several times as his sense of danger wrestled with his desire to plunge headlong toward the all-you-can-eat smorgasbord the army was tempting him with. Frustrated by his own indecision, he threw his head back and rent the night sky with a high-pitched, screeching howl.
“Come on, you scaly bastard,” O’Neal muttered absently, unaware he was still broadcasting. “Get out here where we can see you.”
At last the crafty, mutated saurian stepped into the open and tiptoed—as best a five-hundred-ton lizard can tiptoe—slowly toward the food. When he came within a few body lengths of ground zero, O’Neal whispered into his radio, “Prepare to fire.” The sound of thousands of guns cocking simultaneously gave the beast a sudden case of cold feet. Hunching low to the ground, he began to slowly back away, turning as he went. He took a few halting steps, still unsure of himself, retreating along the path he’d come in on.
Hicks, miles away but monitoring this U-turn on his computer screen, didn’t understand what the hell O’Neal was waiting for. Even though he was only looking at a blinking light moving across his situation board, he understood the creature was about to bolt out of sector five and return to its hiding place. He screamed into the handset of his radio, “Damn it, O’Neal, fire! Shoot it down before it gets away again. Fire!”
A heartbeat later O’Neal gave the signal. “Fire at will! Fire at will!”
The quiet evening shattered like a fireworks factory, erupting into a pandemonium of gun bursts and rocket fire. From all directions at once, a staccato blaze of muzzle blasts lit up the sky. The deafening racket of grenade launchers and small rockets filled the air. Overwhelming this great din, Gojira screeched once more. This time his tormentors offered more injury than insult. Powerful explosive shells tore deep into the leather of his scale-plated flesh, buffeting the animal’s body first one way, then another. In the blink of an eye the hunted animal turned and charged out of the park. He headed south for a mile or so before making a sudden turn onto West Fifty-seventh Street.
A thwacking roar filled the sky as a fresh squadron of Apache helicopters lifted away from their hiding places and over the nearby rooftops. Fearlessly they bore down on the fleeing reptile. According to the rules of engagement, the choppers were to pick their shots carefully. Stray shells had already done more severe damage to the city than Gojira ever would. The Apaches ignored these rules entirely. They’d learned the hard way what could happen to pilots who got too close and used too few rounds of ammunition. The helicopters threw open their gun ports, blasting away with everything they had. Their combined firepower ripped into the creature’s flesh and the surrounding buildings with equal savagery. Fountains of blood sprayed from Gojira’s wounds.
A contingent of mobile rocket launchers skidded to a halt at the intersection of Fifty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue, cutting off another potential escape route. Before the vehicles’ tires had stopped rolling, the gunnery crews fired, sending a phalanx of missiles streaking through the night just above the pavement. Gojira reacted by deftly throwing himself against the side of a building. He took one of the shells in the back, but the others slipped by him and plowed through the front windows of Manhattan’s Planet Hollywood franchise, vaporizing it. Before a second round of rockets could be fired, the enraged beast charged the rocket launchers, trampling and smashing them as he sprinted past. He continued to race westward along Fifty-seventh, crushing parked cars and swiping the buildings with his tail. The Apaches screamed in from above, riddling his back with shells.
“We’ll have him pinned down when he gets to the highway,” one of the chopper pilots said. But as the animal approached the sheer concrete barricade of the West Side Highway, he increased his speed and sprang high—impossibly high—into the air, hurling himself over the roadway. The pilots remarked that as he soared through the sky, the keeled plates on his shoulder blades flapped like wings. These bony fins were, of course, far too small to affect the heavy creature’s aerodynamics, but this attempt to fly was an intriguing clue about his mysterious ancestry. The same genetic memory that makes a flightless barnyard chicken flap its wings when in danger must have been at work in the brain of this overlarge reptile. With a tremendous splash he broke the surface of the Hudson River and plunged into its murky depths.
“Lost him again,” reported one of the helicopter pilots.
Hicks threw his head back and pierced the night with a high, screeching howl of his own. “Nooooooooo!” He slammed his fist down, jarring the computerized table before him. “It’s just a goddamned lizard! Why can’t we kill it?”
Admiral Phelps, a calm, thoughtful man who had largely held his tongue until that moment, flashed Hicks a supremely confident smile. “Not to worry, Colonel. The navy has a little something waiting for him down there.”
The navy’s “little something” was a trio of nuclear-powered submarines, the Utah, the Indiana, and the Anchorage. All three were poised for battle, certain they could handle whatever an unarmed, semi-intelligent amphibious lizard could throw at them.
With klaxons blaring through the bridge, the captain of the Utah studied the massive blip moving across his tracking screen. “This is the Utah,” he murmured into his microphone. “We have our target on sonar and are proceeding to close in.” The captains of the other two subs reported that they were doing the same, following a previously choreographed battle plan.
“This shouldn’t take long,” one of them said.
“Oh, great. Now what?” Audrey asked.
“I guess we follow them.” Animal shrugged. The two of them were standing in the ruined subterranean cathedral that had once been Penn Station. High above, they could see me and my European secret-agent friends walking up a broken escalator and then disappearing into the dark recesses of Madison Square Garden.
The gaping hole in the ceiling was finally within our reach. The Frenchmen and I stacked trash bins and large chunks of debris into a pile, then climbed up and lifted ourselves through the opening. When we were assembled on the floor above, we found ourselves in a foyer of some kind. Although it was pitch dark, our noses told us we were surrounded by fish. Only when we tried to move did we realize the slippery, ripening carcasses were everywhere underfoot.
Roaché led the way across the foyer and poked his flashlight into what looked like a demolished conference room. One of the walls had been ripped out, probably as a result of Gojira’s tail swiping at it from the outside. Overturned furniture and construction debris were strewn everywhere. The hole in the wall led to a much larger space beyond. Pointing our flashlights through the hole, we saw a confused clumping of rounded objects. I walked past Roaché to investigate and confirmed that we had discovered the nest.
Three enormous eggs, between eight and nine feet tall, were resting peacefully on a bed of broken concrete. Despite their frightening size, I remember feeling a false wave of relief. Only three of them, I told myself, thinking that I’d overestimated Gojira’s laying power. We moved closer and let our flashlights dance nervously up and down the textured, sticky brown surfaces. The shell exteriors were atypical. Rather than the smooth, spotted appearance of most reptile eggs, these were uniform in color—a rich brown highlighted by many streaks of ivory—and had rough s
urfaces. I moved closer to investigate and learned that the texturing on the shells was the result of thousands of miniature, overlapping curlicue designs. These raised swirls were largely transparent and exhibited a dull sheen. They appeared to be solid, but when I dragged my finger across the surface, they broke apart like delicate, waterlogged spaghetti. Holding my flashlight close to my moist fingertips, I saw that the curlicues were moving—they were some sort of parasitic, sluglike worms that had infected Gojira’s reproductive system. I made sure to wipe my hand clean, since lizards are known to carry many diseases.
Glistening sheets of membrane clung to the shells, connecting them to the floor and each other. Like the eggshells, these draping membranes were a rich shade of brown, but they showed no signs of parasitic life. Lost in my fascination, I circled around one of these nine-foot structures until I was on the far side of it. It was easily wide enough for me to hide behind. I estimated the circumference was fourteen feet. Once I was on the far side of the egg, the flashlights held by the rest of the crew penetrated the partially translucent shell walls, illuminating the bulky embryo within. It was moving.
“Um, Phillipe,” I said, gulping, “maybe you should look at this.”
Roaché followed a path through the rubble until he was standing at my side. I called his attention to the silhouette of a man-sized fetus twitching and wriggling behind the brittle egg wall. “Merde,” he muttered, and grimaced.
“Well, there’s good news and bad news,” I told him. “The bad news, obviously, is that these eggs are about to hatch. The good news is there are only three of them. Some species of lizards are capable of laying up to a dozen eggs at once. I thought there would be more.”
Jean-Luc’s voice came from the doorway. “Nick, you were right. There are more.” Leaving the trio of eggs undisturbed for the moment, we followed him through a short hallway to another set of doors that pushed open to reveal the main arena of Madison Square Garden.
We could only see a tiny portion of the arena, but we knew the place was wrecked. Many of the seats around us had been crushed flat or torn out of the concrete floor. Overhead, a chunk of the balcony had broken loose; it dangled above us, suspended by thin strands of steel bar. In my immediate vicinity alone, I could see at least two dozen eggs.
“That’s impossible,” I remember saying. “That’s got to be more than twenty eggs. I’ve never heard of any lizard that can do that.” Then it hit me: crocodiles! There is a reason these ghoulish ancient dragons have survived into the modern era long after all their Cretaceous brethren had slipped into extinction: They lay hundreds of eggs at a time. They are the most fertile and reproductively gifted members of the class Reptilia. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it sooner, especially since so many of Gojira’s outward mutations showed crocodilian influences.
A couple of the men found the main light board and threw a switch. When the arena’s work lights were turned on and illuminated the damaged auditorium, we looked out onto a dramatic and stunning tableau. There were hundreds of eggs. They were everywhere—in the aisles, in the balconies, in the entrance tunnels—all of them nine feet tall and slathered with the same ivory-streaked brown mucous. From the cheapest seat in the nosebleed sections all the way down to the courtside chairs, the ruined Garden was teeming with eggs. Needless to say, I was astonished.
“Start counting,” Roaché told me.
“Four hundred meters and closing fast,” a technician reported without emotion.
“Utah, you are in the path. You are red and free. Fire when ready,” Hicks radioed, giving them the go-ahead.
The submarine’s sonar showed a cigar-shaped blip moving straight for the center of the screen. The lights in the narrow, equipment-packed room dimmed in preparation for battle.
“Are we locked on?” the captain asked when the swimming object crossed the three-hundred-meter mark.
“Locked on and ready to fire, sir,” the ensign reported.
“Then let’s put this bad boy to bed. Fire.”
“Fire!” yelled the ensign into his headset. “Fire!”
In a furious frothing of river water, a fifteen-foot torpedo erupted out of its firing tube and sliced away toward its target. With an uncanny ability to detect approaching danger, Gojira swerved abruptly out of harm’s way. Unlike the airborne projectiles he’d faced moments before, however, the torpedo followed him.
Downward he dived, until his great belly scraped across the thick pillow of pollution coating the bottom of the river, stirring up a black cloud of toxic silt. The torpedo plunged into the darkness after him.
The chief sonar technician aboard the Anchorage followed this fast-paced game of cat and mouse with professional calm until it took a dangerous turn. “Uh-oh!” he said when he realized what was happening. “Sir, he’s heading straight for us.”
The Anchorage’s captain looked over the man’s shoulder, studying the sonar display until he reached the same conclusion. “Shit! Full astern!” he bellowed. “Full astern!”
But the swimming saurian and the torpedo that was chasing him were zipping along at over three times the Anchorage’s top speed. While they were sitting dead in the water, the engines only just beginning their backward thrust, the sub was rammed from below. Crew and equipment slammed against the floor, then ricocheted off the ceiling as the quarter-mile-long vessel lurched in the water. A split second later, the torpedo hit them square amidships. With a single concussive blast the sub was torn in half. The enormous spray of water that erupted from the river could be seen from the command center, not far to the south.
Hicks leaned over the situation table and hung his head between his arms when the radioman reported, “Sir, we’ve lost the Anchorage.”
Standing behind him, Admiral Phelps seethed with anger.
On the bridge of the Utah, the sub’s captain called for a status report. “Which way is he headed?”
“He’s shifted course, sir. He’s headed back toward Manhattan.”
Without hesitation, the captain ordered the engines to maximum. “He’s trying to go ashore. Let’s get him before he’s out of the water. Full ahead. Close in and lock on.”
Coming from another angle, the Indiana pursued the same tactic. The ships churned the water, pushing toward the shore in a pincer movement.
The very moment his ensign reported the targeting systems were locked on, the captain shouted the order to fire. Almost simultaneously the two submarines fired one torpedo each. The swimming smart bombs closed in on the target, one from either side.
Boxed in by the warships and knowing what awaited him if he climbed back into the city, Gojira reached the underwater shoreline of Manhattan and began furiously burrowing his way into a large drainage pipe. As his gigantic claws slashed deep into the earth, tearing away at the underwater wall, an enormous turbulence of silt and mud spread through the water, cloaking him completely.
On the bridge of the Utah, captain and ensign stared down at the sonar screen, watching the cloud of detritus expand outward around their target. Both men shook their heads at the animal’s awesome resourcefulness. “Impact in eight seconds … seven … six …”
No one breathed on either sub or in the command center along the river. The torpedoes disappeared into the cloak of silt.
“… in three … two … one …”
Not far from the docking space of the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, almost directly across the Hudson from where Hicks and his superiors were orchestrating the attack, two muffled explosions were followed by a tremendous eruption in the surface of the river. The twin blasts blew a column of water a quarter of a mile into the air.
The next seven and a half seconds seemed an eternity. Everyone who was following the chase—whether on land, in the air, or underwater—held their breath and waited for a report from one of the submarines. Finally the radio squawked and a technician’s voice, smooth as butter, told them what had happened.
“This is the Utah. We have one very large lizard body si
nking to the bottom after a direct hit.” On the sonar screen, a huge blip drifted lifelessly toward the riverbed like a cement-shoed gangster.
All hell broke loose in the command center. Everyone threw their hands in the air and cheered at the top of their lungs. Hats and fists and reams of paper were tossed toward the ceiling. Elsie, in her enthusiasm, planted a kiss on Mendel’s lips. And Colonel Hicks, the most relieved man in America, turned and accepted congratulations from Admiral Phelps.
“We got him!” Phelps shouted over the noise.
“Finally!” Hicks sighed, wiping his brow.
General Anderson marched up through the mayhem, smiling broadly. He pumped the colonel’s hand enthusiastically. “Knew you could do it, Hicks. Wonderful job.”
As I moved around the eerie, goop-slathered interior of Madison Square Garden, gathering tissue samples and jotting down notes, the French agents were laying out spools of cable and wiring up several pounds of plastic explosive. I still had my Fun Saver camera and snapped off several pictures of the egg-filled arena. A voice came from directly overhead. Jean-Marc leaned over the balcony’s railing and called down to Roaché, speaking urgently to him in French.
I couldn’t understand a word of it, but I could tell by Roaché’s reaction that something was very wrong. He ran a hand over his beard, nodding and thinking about what the man had said to him.
“What did he say?” I asked.
Roaché kicked a fish out of the way on his way over to where I was examining a nine-foot-tall egg. The smile on his face told me he was about to give me some sort of bad news. “Nick, we have a problem. We don’t have enough explosives. We need you to—”
Godzilla Page 16