Extinct (11 page)

In seconds, its body never dropping low enough for its dorsal fin to submerge, it raced after the small boat in the distance.

*   *   *

Leonard’s hands, cramping, clasped the twenty-footer’s steering wheel as if it was a rope to salvation. He wouldn’t let go until he ran the boat up on the beach at Biloxi and sprinted over its bow onto the sand. He looked back across his shoulder. The stretch of water between him and Ship Island was bright now, with the moon totally free of the obstructing cloud. With his path directly behind Ship Island and the island’s long bulk preventing any of the waves from the Gulf to come farther, the water was perfectly smooth.

He saw the fin.

Two hundred feet back, like the tall, thick periscope of a submarine, it split the surface, throwing a shower of water reflecting in the moonlight to each side. Leonard didn’t realize how much his heart had slowed until he felt the blood rushing through his veins again. He looked at the speedometer. He was at thirty-eight knots. He pressed hard on the throttle, then jerked his hand away, suddenly afraid that any more strain on it might break the cable. He looked forward past the bow at the lights of Biloxi, growing brighter—but still so far away. He looked past the stern again. Saw nothing but the smooth water.

There it was.

Off to the side of where he had first seen the fin.

The shower of water was higher now.

He looked at the speedometer. He looked back at the fin. He felt again like he was going to pass out. There was no doubt it was gaining. But it couldn’t be. He closed his eyes, looked at the mirrorlike surface of the water ahead of him, the lights still miles away. He looked back at Ship Island—much closer. He bit his lip, felt the whipping of the wind freezing the sweat running down his round face and dripping off his chin to be blown backwards toward the wide wake trailing the boat.

He looked at Biloxi again. He looked back at Ship Island again.
My God,
he thought,
what did I ever leave the island for?
He could have huddled in the center of the sand until the bright morning when he could be seen. Somebody would have come to help. Somebody in something much bigger than a twenty-foot boat setting so low in the water. The terrible picture had never fully left his mind—the great wide head of the creature. The body had to be fifty feet long. At that, another thought nearly caused his heart to stop. A determined effort of a creature that big swimming hard into the side of the boat, even a bump at this speed, he thought, and the boat could flip, flying upside down into the water.
Sending him into the water.

He started shuddering so hard he was afraid the vibration of his hands was going to cause the wheel to break. He looked back across his shoulder.

*   *   *

The creature, with great steady swipes of its huge crescent tail, continued to close the distance. Its head completely underwater, its eyes unable to see far in the murky darkness, it nevertheless knew exactly where the boat was, the sensitive, wide lateral line canals running along each side of its length picking up the boat’s vibration, pinpointing the roar of the prop and the slashing of the boat’s bow through the water more accurately than any towed sonar array of a submarine. The creature’s only handicap was the shallowness of the Sound. Not more than twelve to fourteen feet deep at any spot and only ten and eleven feet in places, the water was almost too shallow for its great bulk to navigate. Had it been low tide the creature couldn’t have come as far into the Sound as it had, but it was high tide, at its peak. Still, its belly was scraping bottom in the soft mud at times and the sweeps of its tail were casting up great clouds of silt. Had the boat turned only a little more east toward the waters directly between Horn Island and Biloxi the craft would have crossed into even shallower waters and the creature couldn’t have come any farther. But the craft suddenly turned hard back to its left, west, away from the shallower water, and came around in a wide circle, and the beast shifted its angle towards the boat.

*   *   *

Leonard realized his only chance was to make it back to Ship Island, to the safety of being huddled in the sand in the very center of the place. He saw the fin and spray of water angle to cut off the boat. He looked at the throttle, pressed all the way forward. He closed his eyes.

The boat now headed directly toward the island. The tall fin came toward him from a corner angle off his bow. He refused to look. The sand on Ship Island glistened in the moonlight.

The fin kept coming, still toward the bow, closing the distance.

The bow went past the line where it would intersect with the fin. Leonard looked toward Ship Island a few hundred yards away and closing rapidly. He had the advantage. He stared as the fin turned sharply, throwing a tall spray out to the side like a slalom skier, and moved in a line toward the boat again.

Leonard looked at the island.

The fin straightened now, the showers out to each of its sides beginning to mount.

Two hundred yards to the island.

The gap between his boat and the island narrowed.

The gap between the fin and the boat narrowed.

He looked at the island. He looked back at the fin. The showers to each side of the fin were so high now they resembled sprays coming from firehoses—and so close.

And closer.

His eyes locked on the thick, dark protrusion, he watched it angle out toward the left of the boat. Tears started running down his cheeks. He watched the fin as it drew even with the boat. He watched it as it began to draw slightly ahead of the boat, the spray from the fin falling across the motor. Into the rear of the boat. Across him. “Get away. Get away!

“Get away!”

The fin suddenly angled, leaned slightly to the side. The head angled under the front of the boat.

It happened almost exactly the way he had feared, him screaming, the motor roaring, the creature’s head nudging under the bow, and then rising hard, lifting the boat, where, aided by the thrust of its own propeller, it climbed into the air, starting to revolve, went higher, turned almost completely upside down, and then crashed back into the water like a submarine on an emergency dive.

Leonard, thrown clear, was running in the air, his arms flailing, his feet hitting the water and seeming to start to walk across it, and then he splashed hard against the surface, flipped, skidded across the water, and disappeared under it.

*   *   *

Ensign Douglas Williams looked from the rear seat of the F-16 Fighting Falcon as it neared touchdown. He could see the orange-striped Coast Guard helicopter that was to be his next ride, setting off to the side, its rotor blades spinning. The night sky was already growing darker with clouds rolling across the face of the moon. He shook his head and looked in the direction of the water off the Everglades.

CHAPTER 13

Taking advantage of a high tide, the charter fishing boat, returning from an all-night fishing trip at the oil rigs south of the Chandeleur chain, headed toward the short cut through Camille Cut rather than the longer route around the western tip of Ship Island into the Sound. The captain, a barrel-chested, bearded man in his early forties looked from the flying bridge toward the faint glow of light in the eastern sky. In the rear of the boat, three middle-aged couples from Chicago carried on a conversation too low for him to hear over the hum of the boat’s twin diesel engines.

“Kevin,” his wife called from the bottom of the ladder leading up to the bridge. She held a plate of sandwiches in her hands and lifted it in a gesture asking if he wanted one. He shook his head and she turned toward their passengers. Kevin looked past the dark shape of Fort Massachusetts toward the lights of the freighter making its way past the end of the island along the deep-water ship channel leading toward Gulfport. The Russian national flag whipped at the vessel’s stern. The freighter rode high in the water, meaning it had delivered its original cargo elsewhere and was now making the passage into Gulfport to load cargo for its return trip. Most likely frozen Mississippi chickens. Vessels from the old Soviet Union and its client states often arrived there for that cargo.

*   *   *

Aboard the freighter, the stocky captain standing at the bridge yawned. His mouth froze open when he glanced at the depth sounder.

“Vladimir! Glubina!”

The first mate stared at the depth sounder. Four meters under the keel. Three meters. Two. Holding at two.

Still holding. Three. Four. Five—and the depth under the vessel dropped back to a normal reading.

The captain released the bulkhead he had grabbed to brace himself for the grounding that hadn’t come.

“Myelkie vody ili zdyes’ shto-to zatonulo. Soobshchite amerikanskoi pribrezhnoi okhrane.”

The first mate lifted the mike from the Single-Side-Band radio and spoke in perfect English.

“U.S. Coast Guard. This is the Russian freighter
Sholokbov.
”

Then he repeated what the captain had ordered him to say:

“The channel is shoal or something is sunk here.”

*   *   *

A hundred yards behind the freighter’s churning wake, and moving with the tip of its thick dorsal fin barely beneath the surface, the long, dark shape passed Ship Island into the Gulf. From out of the deep blackness a quarter mile off to its side came faint vibrations of another large creature passing under the water, moving in the opposite direction. But the vibrations were familiar and comfortable, and the long creature didn’t vary from its course or change its speed, already fast, though its great crescent-shaped tail undulated and swept sideways only once every minute or so.

*   *   *

The bow of the charter boat bumped with a loud thump. Something scraped along its bottom as Kevin grabbed for the throttles, jerked them back, and pulled the engines out of gear. His wife braced her feet at the sudden slowing and looked up at him. She hurried up the ladder to the flying bridge.

“What was it?”

Kevin shook his head. He looked back past the stern. Then he cut the wheel toward the left, engaged the gears, and edged the throttles forward, turning the boat in a slow circle.

He peered forward off the port side of the vessel, and eased the throttles back a little. His wife stepped across the bridge and stared off the starboard bow. The couples in the fishing cockpit stood at its sides now, looking at the water.

The oldest man among them said, “I see it. It’s … I lost it. Something black and about five or six feet across. It was right under the water.” He leaned his thin frame way out over the rail and stared back toward the rear of the boat.

Kevin pulled the throttles the rest of the way back and took the engines out of gear. He pulled a flashlight from the control panel and shined it over the side of the craft into the water close to the stern. His wife shook her head. “I didn’t see anything,” she said. “There!”

He centered where she pointed with his light. The upside-down stern of a speedboat missing its motor and bobbing only inches under the surface slowly passed behind his craft. His light had penetrated far enough through the water to read the name across the stern. He reached to the VHF radio, turned it to channel sixteen, and lifted its mike.

“Coast Guard,” he said, and gave his vessel’s name, then said, “there’s a small boat sunk just north of Camille Cut, nearest the eastern section of Ship Island—maybe a hundred feet from shore.”

He waited a moment. “Coast Guard, do you read me? This is the charter fishing—”

“This is Coast Guard station Gulfport. Go ahead, Captain.”

“I’ve come upon a speedboat sunk north of Camille Cut. The stern is buoyant right under the surface. I scraped it with my keel. It’s too dark to see much. It’s name is
Scent.
I know it. It’s berthed at the Broadwater. Guy that owns it has a Bertram, too, called
Bigger Scent
—an oilman from New Orleans. A short, nice little guy.”

*   *   *

There were sections in the Pentagon that never closed down. Admiral Vandiver’s office was not among them, but he was at his desk despite the early morning hour and the fact that he had not gone home until well after midnight the night before. He blew a cloud of gray cigar smoke across his desk and glanced at his watch. He had met the courier with the package from south Florida over an hour before. It should almost be at the laboratory now—a laboratory where he could rely on an old acquaintance to give him the facts the way they were and not the way somebody with a preset opinion might think they should be.

But then there were so many variables in the testing—in dating anything. He thought of the example currently making the rounds in the nation’s newspapers. The Shroud of Turin, an ancient fourteen-foot three-inch burial linen somehow imprinted with the image of a man who had been crucified, who wore a crown of thorns and who greatly resembled the earliest artists’ depiction of Jesus, had been thought when first discovered to possibly be the shroud in which Jesus’ body had been wrapped. Then carbon dating indicated the cloth had been woven after the year 1200. Now, a team of scientists from the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio had, upon subsequent testing, concluded that a layer of bacteria and fungi had contaminated the earlier test. The Shroud could indeed be what many thought it to be from the beginning. Both groups of scientists stuck to their results.

Then there was also the story of the ancient map containing the outline of continents generally thought to have been unknown to Europeans at the time the map was said to have been drafted. Dating of the ink used on the map showed the map couldn’t possibly be as old as claimed. Subsequent dating by other scientists indicated it could be. Again, both sides stuck to the results they had obtained.

Classic examples of different groups of highly educated professionals, both using the latest technology available, coming to diametrically opposed conclusions—and the Shroud and the ancient map weren’t the only examples of this. Far from it. Contamination, advanced aging caused by association with certain elements, the retardation of aging caused by other elements, what had originally lain in association with the object to be tested, even how long it had or had not been exposed to the simple rays of the sun—all of these circumstances and a multitude more could throw off various tests used to determine an object’s age.