by Steve Alten
She held on as the chopper landed, then she climbed back into the main cabin with her team. “Guys, we need to shed some weight, so we’re leaving you to be picked up by the tanker. Damaris, have your crew see if they can free those elephant seals from the net—they’re weighing us down.”
The Indian nodded. Searching through their supplies, he exited the helicopter carrying a chainsaw.
Aboard the Yellow Dragon
Western Pacific
The darkness was heavy and suffocating—he couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face. His breathing became erratic as the fear took root, shutting down his muscles … turning his blood to lead. He felt the powerless Lexan coffin reverberate beneath his sweat-laced body and realized the movement was caused by his own trembling limbs.
Stop shaking … it can feel you.
Lying on his back, he stared out of the clear nose cone into the abyss, the weight of seven miles of water sitting on his downed submersible—sixteen thousand pounds per square inch of pressure searching for the tiniest fissure in which to force its way in and implode his skull.
The pulse in his carotid artery throbbed in his neck as the forty-ton female passed over him, the albino flesh of its swollen belly inches from his face, the claustrophobia drowned in a wave of sheer terror—
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
Jonas shot up in bed, his T-shirt soaked in sweat, his eyes drawn to the rectangle of daylight framing the bay window’s drapes. Still disoriented from the night terror, he stumbled to the floor and tore open the curtains—
—exposing the deep blue horizon of the Pacific glistening beneath a midmorning sky. Below, an enormous AG600 amphibious transport plane sat motionless in the water just outside of Dock-4, a fire hose feeding the contents of its cargo bay into a holding tank located between the outer and inner shell of Dragon Pod-4.
Like his wife, Dragon Pod-3 was missing.
* * *
Jonas entered the command center like a mad bull, his mop of gray-white hair uncombed, his face sporting a five o’clock shadow.
Catherine Ying looked up from the command post. “Professor Taylor—”
“Where’s Terry?”
“She left you a note.… What did I do with it?”
Catherine flinched as Jonas wiped her desk clear of a stack of reports. “Where the hell is she?”
“We were short pilots. She insisted on going with Dulce Lunardon.” Kneeling by the pile of papers, she quickly located an envelope with Jonas’s name handwritten on the outside. “They’re aboard Sting Ray-3.”
Jonas tore open the envelope, removing the note.
Dearest Jonas,
Thirty years ago, my father insisted that you accompany my brother on a dive into the Mariana Trench. I fought you tooth and nail, but you replaced me as his wingman—no doubt saving my life. Years later, you returned to this hellhole and saved me again.… Two years ago, you rescued our son from the Panthalassa Sea.
The stress from these dives has weighed heavily on your subconscious, the fear manifesting in horrible nightmares. You’ve endured enough, my darling—now it is my turn to save you … and hopefully the millions who suffer from the same disease that nearly killed me.
Please don’t worry; Dulce and I will be fine. Nothing scares this girl, and—in case you forgot—I used to be a damn good pilot.
See you in a few days.
You are my heart,
Terry
Jonas turned to Catherine. “Where are they now?”
“We lost them the moment they entered the Panthalassa Sea. We’ve been waiting for your secret weapon to be delivered so we can dive the platform and reestablish contact.” She turned to the Chinese tech seated at the station to her right. “What is the status of Dragon Pod-4?”
“Storage tanks are filled. We’re waiting for the transport plane to clear the area before we dive the platform.”
Jonas felt his blood pressure rising. “Where’s Dr. Hon?”
“He is returning to China on important business.” She motioned to her screen, where the cargo plane, its weight borne on large landing skiffs, was bounding along the surface.
“Dive master, open ballast tanks A through M.”
“Aye, ma’am. Opening tanks A through M.”
For several minutes nothing happened. And then Jonas felt the chamber sinking—
—the underwater view from the bay windows changing as the Yellow Dragon, its diving platform, and the remaining five Dragon Pods began a seven-mile descent to the deepest gorge on the planet … and the access hole into purgatory.
Jonas rubbed his eyes, fighting to keep them open. He felt groggy, and wondered if his wife had slipped something into his glass of wine before they had gone to sleep. “Catherine, how long until we arrive?”
“Three hours, seventeen minutes.”
“Where can I get something to eat?”
“There’s a galley on this floor. Exit the command center and turn left.”
Quatsino Sound
Vancouver Island, B.C.
Twenty minutes had passed since the sun had begun its descent, the western sky melding from a golden yellow to crimson red.
Dawn Hurtienne was in the flybridge, conversing over the radio with the captain of the Marieke. Large voluminous air bubbles burst to the surface behind the hopper-dredge’s stern as the big ship’s engines gurgled to life.
David watched the last rays of sunlight diminish into shades of violet dusk. The fishing boat’s inboard motor rumbled beneath his feet, and then they were off, the bow bouncing along the surface as the craft headed east doing 8 knots. Using his night-vision binoculars, he scanned the expanse of sea between their boat and the Marieke. The hopper-dredge was keeping pace, the trawl net stretched out between the two vessels, the yellow strap securing the ratchet to the cod end rattling against the fiberglass surface of the transom.
* * *
Sharks are creatures ruled by instinct—“instinct” defined as a consistently demonstrated behavior initiated as a response to specific stimuli. Conversely, adaptation overrules instinct. It is acquired over time as a result of nature’s need to improve upon its design, or learned via trial and error through senses designed to hear, taste, touch, smell, and track electrical and chemical signals in their four-dimensional liquid environment.
As the ocean’s apex predator, Megalodon’s instinct throughout its thirty-million-year rule was to feed, propagate its species, and avoid confrontation with its own kind. Territorial disputes between two sharks of the same gender were to the death.
Contact with the opposite sex was dictated by whether the larger, bulkier female was in estrus, in which case the male’s role was simply to track down a potential mate through its pheromone trail. The act of copulation among sharks is the animal kingdom’s equivalent of rape. To position the female so the two were belly to belly, the male is forced to bite down upon the female’s pectoral fin, at which time it inserts a barbed clasper inside the ovulating creature’s cloaca. Following insemination, it is not unusual for the female to strike back.
For the subspecies of Carcharodon megalodon inhabiting the Panthalassa Sea (and to a lesser extent, the Mariana Trench), a diminishing male population threatened the species’ survival. Nature adapted by providing the females with the ability to internally self-fertilize their own eggs—essentially cloning themselves.
Angel had been nineteen years old when one of the last surviving male Megalodons had detected her scent and left the abyss to track her down and inseminate her. Eight months into her eighteen-month gestation period, her ovaries had released an additional batch of eggs, only these were already self-fertilized. The birthing event yielded two distinct litters—Lizzy and Bela (born as a result of copulation) being far larger and more developed than Angel’s three cloned offspring.
The sisters’ reproductive systems had adapted to self-fertilization when their senses could not detect the presence of a single male Megalodon in the Salish Sea. While female sharks reproducing via co
pulation did not reach the age of sexual maturity until they were fifteen, self-fertilizing females could reproduce within their first four years or even sooner, depending upon the species’ populace within a given territory.
As the only Megalodon—male or female—in the Salish Sea, Belladonna was undergoing rapid hormonal changes. As her first ovulation approached, she selected the waters off Vancouver Island’s western coast to serve as her nursery.
All that was needed was to vanquish any perceived threats to her future offspring.
* * *
Dawn reduced their speed as they approached the deserted inlet, her voice crackling over David’s headset. “We don’t want to draw it into the shallows. Hang on, I’m going to come about and head north.”
Seated in one of the two vinyl chairs facing aft, David buckled himself in as the boat changed course. Salt water sprayed in his face, soaking his night-vision binoculars. Using his shirt, he dried off the lenses—
Whomp!
The boat rolled hard to port as the Megalodon sideswiped the starboard side of the hull, the sudden change in course preventing a direct hit. Ducking beneath the keel, the sixty-thousand-pound shark momentarily hoisted the twenty-eight-foot craft onto its back before the propeller caught ocean and spun the vessel free.
Hanging sideways in his chair, David held on as Dawn pushed down on the twin throttles, the boat accelerating to 22 knots.
“Kid, get up here and switch places with me.”
“Why?”
“Just do it!”
He unbuckled his seat belt and climbed the aluminum ladder to the flybridge. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know. The damn fish finder’s not working. Take the wheel.”
He slid in behind her as she vacated the bucket seat. “What are you doing?”
“I know this fish.… I’ve studied its tactics. Stay on this course. She’ll come up along our starboard side. When I say, cut hard to port—that’ll put her right behind us and I’ll release the net.”
“Okay.”
Dawn descended the ladder, disappearing from his view.
David kept his head on a swivel, searching either side of the boat for Belladonna. This is no good—she’s way faster than this bucket of bolts.
As he glanced to starboard, his right eye caught a blotch of white torpedoing at them below the surface on a collision course.
He spun the wheel hard to port and then back around to starboard, the S-maneuver preventing the Meg from plowing into the back of the boat. Turning to his right, he saw the Meg’s six-foot-tall gray dorsal fin shoot past the starboard bow, the creature’s caudal fin slapping the side rail a moment later.
Jesus, she’s bigger than Luna.…
The powerful shotgun blast caused his racing heart to skip a beat. He stood up to find Dawn leaning over the transom, the barrel of an A-Square Hannibal big-game rifle pointed skyward, its concussive blow having felled her to her knees.
“Damn it kid, I told you not to change course until I said so!”
Picking up the thirteen-pound weapon, she ejected the empty shell, then reached into her shirt pocket and removed another .577 Tyrannosaur cartridge, inserting the 14.9mm, 49-gram monolithic solid projectile into the breech.
* * *
The bullet had grazed the right side of the Meg’s face, leaving a three-foot-long bleeding gash halfway between her eye and gill slits, the stinging wound chasing her deep.
Shadowing her challenger in a hundred eighty-seven feet of water, Belladonna’s senses homed in on the vibrations generated by the fishing boat’s propeller. Through trial and error, the predator had learned that a direct blow to this organ would incapacitate her enemy, and so she ascended, her ampullae of Lorenzini guiding her toward the electric discharge created by the spinning metal blades.
* * *
“Dawn, what the hell are you doing?”
“This bitch ate my friend—we call this payback. I’m going to blast a hole in her brain the size of a shot-put ball. Now, come about.”
“No.”
She stood, aiming the barrel of the rifle at him. “Come about, or—”
The fishing boat heaved beneath them, the force of the blow depositing Dawn and David on their backs, the impact snapping the fishing boat’s propeller shaft and cracking its keel, opening a six-inch-wide, eleven-foot-long fissure along the bottom of the boat.
David picked himself up off the flybridge’s deck. The steady growl of the vessel’s twin engines was gone, replaced by a whooshing sound as a geyser of salt water entered the lower deck.
“We’re dead in the water … and we’re sinking!”
Raising the butt of the rifle to her right shoulder, she circled the main deck, aiming the barrel of the gun at the surface of the black water. “Turn on the keel lights. Then contact the Marieke … and tell the captain to haul ass.”
David searched the polished mahogany dashboard, flipping each toggle switch until the underwater lights along either side of the boat illuminated, turning the sea an azure green. Locating the radio, he turned the dial to half a dozen different frequencies, his headphones filling his ears with static.
Water seeped out of the boat’s cabin, flooding the main deck. “Dawn, what channel?”
“Twenty-six-point-four megahertz.”
He turned the dial back the other way as a dark shadow circled just outside the perimeter of lights. “Marieke, come in.”
“Marieke here. We read you.”
He was about to respond when a tremendous force struck the starboard bow, tossing him from his seat. Another high-decibel craaack of gunfire was partly muted by his headphones; he never heard Dawn’s scream or splash, but he was on his feet in time to see her flailing along the portside of the stern—
—the Meg’s albino head turned sideways underwater as it bit clear through the woman’s lower torso in one stomach-convulsing bite.
“David, are you there? What’s happening?”
He stared at the gushing upper torso sinking into the scarlet swirl of light … the main deck now underwater … the hopper-dredge a quarter mile to the west—
—the trawl net floating behind the rapidly sinking boat.
David slid down the aluminum ladder, landing knee-deep in water. “Marieke, retract the net as fast as you can!”
“Did you net the Meg?”
“Just do it!” Freeing the ratchet from the transom, he wound the yellow canvas belt around both of his wrists and dove over the starboard side—
—his arms nearly wrenched from their sockets as the Marieke’s twin winches dragged the empty trawl net—and David with it—through the water.
Unable to breathe, he rolled onto his back, his head channeling the sea, allowing him a fragile pocket of air to gasp a few desperate breaths. He was flailing along the surface at 20 knots, the force of his wake stripping him of his sneakers, his pants pried off his waist and wedged inside out around his ankles. He focused his mind on his hands, the canvas strap balled tightly in both fists, the fishing boat disappearing from view, the pain in his arms and back excruciating.
Close to passing out, he was about to let go when the Meg’s dorsal fin rose out of the dark Pacific thirty feet behind him, Belladonna following in his wake.
The rush of adrenaline pumped new life into his grip and he held on, his body bouncing awkwardly along the surface even as the streamlined creature effortlessly halved the distance between them, the Meg’s albino head breaking the surface, its hideous snout inhaling his scent.
Torquing his upper body, David twisted from side to side and became a moving target, forcing the Meg to alter its line of attack. Seeing the beast lunge at him, he kicked wildly, the heel of his left foot connecting with the monster’s upper gums before he quickly tucked his legs to his chest—
—and was suddenly underwater, the keel of the Marieke inches from his face. And then he was rising vertically toward a brightly lit surface, the Meg right below him, its jaws hyperextending open, the dark expa
nse of its gullet summoning him to hell.…
David flew onto the hopper and was yanked horizontally from Belladonna’s closing maw, which clamped down on the empty night air. Falling back into the water, the thirty-ton shark floundered along the surface before righting itself with a flick of its powerful caudal fin—
—only to collide with one of the hopper’s walls as the bottom of the tank sealed shut beneath the disoriented creature.
Barely conscious, David was dragged twenty feet across the net-covered deck before he mercifully passed out.
Aboard the Yellow Dragon
Mariana Trench-Western Pacific
The massive amphibious platform maintained its neutral buoyancy in more than thirty-five thousand feet of water, its oval docks harboring the Yellow Dragon and five of its eight smaller Dragon Pod spheres. Propelled by whisper-quiet pump-jet propulsor units mounted along the outside of its circular undercarriage, the monstrosity of aerogel and titanium trekked east at its maximum speed of 5 knots above a vibrant primal world that harbored the planet’s very cauldron of life.
Jonas stared out the command center’s bay windows, incredulous. He had dived the Mariana Trench more times than any human, but his trips had been performed in near to total darkness—a limit placed on him by the few external lights afforded him on his submersibles.
The aptly named Yellow Dragon was far more than a deep-water vessel—it was a small sun, the golden hue cast from its smart shell illuminating a valley of hydrothermal vents pumping superheated, 700-degree-Fahrenheit mineral water into the frigid sea. On prior voyages these black smokers had appeared in his night vision as petrified rock forests. Bathed in the Yellow Dragon’s radiance, these outflows were transformed into colorful elixirs of chemosynthesis.
A dense vermilion mist dissipated over a Serengeti of tube worms that absorbed the fog’s delivered nutrients through their scarlet-drenched tips. Bright emerald particles of magnesium twinkled in the artificial light amid dark violet funnels of sulfur that rose a mile above the valley floor to coalesce into an ominous ceiling of churning minerals—the plume insulating the warmth for exotic life-forms that inhabited a garden of primitive flora and fauna.