Extinct (32 page)

“Admiral?”

“Yes, Mr. Cunningham.”

“I think it might have gotten that young man and woman. The reason I think that was that there was a windsurfing board floating in the water. I thought they had left it lying on the beach and the wave just washed it off. I pulled it up for them before I left the first time. But there were two boards in the boat when they left the marina. We really need to get on out of here, Admiral. They say this hull is made out of aluminum—I guess that’s strong enough.”

“You’re perfectly safe, Mr. Cunningham.”

Douglas looked at him. Cowart eased the throttles back and the Whaler quit bouncing so hard as it began to slow. It coasted up one swell and down its opposite side closer to the forty-one.

On the island, the two seamen were walking back toward the shore by themselves.

CHAPTER 39

The workboat was designed with just that in mind—work. Its engine was geared low—for transporting heavy loads or towing. Even at top speed it neither roared like an outboard motor nor hummed like the kinds of diesels found on yachts, but putted.

That’s the sound it was making as it turned off the Pascagoula River into the narrow channel running through the marshes and came toward Carolyn’s speedboat, still sitting three hundred feet from the river with its bow pushed up into the tall grasses.

Putt. Putt. Putt.

The rhythmic sound make it even more difficult for Deputy Fairley to stay awake. With only a few hours’ sleep in the last seventy-two and none in the last twenty-four, he figured that even the shrill loud sound of a train whistle would probably put him to sleep.

And now, with the soft shadows settling over the marshland as the sun dropped below the trees, with the stiff breeze that came off the Gulf slowing to a more gentle warm flow after having reached the land, Fairley was, in fact, for all practical purposes, already asleep. His head nodded, he jerked, his eyes opened again. He neared Carolyn’s craft and pulled the workboat’s engine out of gear, guiding the bow up into the tall grasses next to the speedboat.

He had to climb over the side into waist-deep water to attach a rope to the bow of the speedboat and then push the craft back out into the middle of the channel. He worked the bow around behind the workboat’s stern and looped the rope around a cleat at one corner of its stern. Then he caught the boat’s side, tensed his muscles, and sprang up out of the water and over into the craft.

Once again behind the steering wheel, he put the big engine in gear and backed the workboat’s bow out of the grasses. A corner of its stern bumped the speedboat, and he grimaced. But the collision left no mark on the smaller boat’s fiberglass. He moved the workboat’s gear into forward and swung its bow toward the river.

A few minutes later, he entered the Pascagoula and turned down its channel in the direction of the Ingalls Ship Building yard.

Yawning, he leaned back against the seat’s tattered backrest. A fly buzzed around his face and he barely flicked his fingers to drive it away.

A thump behind him. The speedboat hung against something for a moment. Its bow rope pulled loose from the cleat at the stern of the workboat and dropped into the water. The speedboat drifted to a stop.

Fairley looked to see what might be floating in the water to cause the bump, but didn’t see anything. Yawning, he slipped the workboat’s engine into reverse and began to back slowly toward the other craft.

Looking back over his shoulder, he put the gear into neutral and turned and made his way back across the hard, dried blood and animal parts in the bottom of the boat to its stern. The breeze slowly moved the speedboat’s bow to the side, swinging the rope hanging from it out of his reach.

He climbed up on a corner of the workboat’s stern and reached his arm out. The rope was still a few inches out of his grasp. Catching a firm grip on the stern, he leaned farther forward, putting himself in an unstable position out over the gap in the water between the two boats. Teetering, his grip on the stern about to slip, he reached his hand as far as he could and caught the rope in the tip of his fingers. He worked the rope into his palm and began to pull it toward him. His gaze went to the water below him. Its surface reflected a cloud with a wide, black hole at its center. The outer edges of the cloud shimmered, then blurred.

It took him a moment to realize that the reflection was beneath the surface, not on top of it, and the shimmering was something rushing up toward him.

He tried to yank his body back into the boat. His hand slipped, his fingers barely holding. He pulled hard, and his body wrenched backward as the gaping mouth exploded up through the surface in a rush of water. As his body slid into the boat, his outflung hand didn’t come with him. Its fingers still clutching the rope, his hand rose into the air in the shark’s mouth. Fairley landed on his back on the hard steel floor of the boat.

There was no pain, only the stub halfway down his forearm, his artery spraying blood up into the air to fall back to splatter on the dried blood covering the bottom of the boat.

Fairley’s scream echoed up and down the river and through the marsh. A heron flapped up into the dying rays of the sun and turned away from the direction of the scream.

Fairley cupped the end of the stub with his hand, trying to stop the spurting blood. It sprayed through his fingers and across his face and chest.

He struggled to his feet looking wildly for something to tie around his forearm.

The shark slammed into the bottom of the hull, lifting the boat in the water and tilting it slightly to one side. Fairley’s feet slipped in his own blood and he fell forward, crashing into the side of the boat. He tried to rise but his hand slipped down the steel framework of the boat and he crashed hard back onto the floor.

The craft bounced violently. Water splashed out from under it. It bounced again. Fairley pushed himself to his knees. He grabbed the stub and lunged toward the front of the boat and its controls.

One side of the craft lifted, hung, and crashed back into the water. Fairley’s shoulder slammed into the controls. He turned toward them, pushed himself off the gear and grabbed its handle. His hand, slippery with his blood, slid off, and he grabbed for the gear again.

The head exploded out of the water, rocking the boat again. The identical twin of the dead megalodon rose a third of its length out of the water and hung there like a dolphin standing on its tail. The mouth gaped wide, exposing rows of shiny brown teeth. The shark moved forward.

Fairley, lying on his back in the seats, saw the boat paddle lying on the steel floor beside him. He grabbed it, forcing himself upright in the seat.

The head towered over him. He pulled his knees under him and lifted his upper body high in the seat. The gaping mouth came down. He slammed the paddle hard into the jagged teeth.

The paddle splintered.

Fairley drew the broken handle back and jabbed it forward. The front of the shark’s heavy body came down on the side of the boat, tilting the craft toward the weight. Fairley jabbed the handle into the hollow center of the cavernous maw as the mouth closed around him. He was lifted whole, his feet kicking, and the teeth closed together. His legs went limp.

The shark sank back beneath the surface of the river.

Bubbles rose to the top of the brown water.

The paddle handle popped to the surface.

*   *   *

The forty-one moved north in the distance toward the barrier islands on its way back toward Gulfport. The Whaler moved slowly across the shallows west of the Chandeleurs. Alan lowered the pair of binoculars he had trained on the Whaler. “That’s the Admiral,” he said. “Two men in Navy dress uniforms with the Coast Guardswoman. They’re looking for the people that were on the windsurfing boards.”

Carolyn stared out over the water, then looked down at Paul for a moment before raising her gaze back to Alan’s. “They’re not going to find them,” she said. “I’m going in.”

Alan looked back over the
Intuitive
’s stern in the direction of where they had left the net containing the body of the megalodon.

“Carolyn, I…”

He stopped as he saw her looking down at Paul again. Then her eyes came back to his once more. He nodded. “Take him on in,” he said.

Carolyn looked toward the Whaler.

Alan shook his head. “The Admiral is a big boy. He knows what’s going on, too—obviously knows more than we do. If he wants to stay there, that’s not our problem.”

Carolyn turned the wheel in the direction of the barrier islands.

Stark stared toward the Whaler now. “I first figured that the guy making the distress call panicked with all that had been going on the last couple of days. He saw a shark fin, or what he thought was a fin—and it became a monster to him, I was thinking. But, you’re right, that Admiral was on his way to us—he knew what we were towing. And then he became all excited at the distress call, and now he’s here. There is a fifty-foot shark out there, isn’t there?”

Carolyn looked down at Paul again. She thought of how her father said Paul had acted at the river … how Duchess had acted. She reached for the VHF radio and lifted its mike.

A moment later she was in contact with the marine operator.

It took a couple of minutes to connect the call.

“Mother,” she said, “I’m not certain what’s going on, but I want you and Daddy to stay away from the river—don’t go down by the dock.”

She listened a moment. “I’m not certain, just stay away from the water.”

“And Duchess,” Paul said, looking up at her.

She nodded. “And lock Duchess in the house until we get back.”

Paul smiled.

“A blooming idiot,” Stark said, looking toward the Whaler, now appearing pitifully small in the distance.

*   *   *

Vandiver’s eyes were everywhere at once, searching. Douglas looked at the setting sun, now almost touching the horizon. Soon it would be too dark to see and they would
have
to go in. He closed his eyes for a moment, then looked across his shoulder behind them, which he had been doing constantly ever since the captain of the Gulfstar had said the giant shark had come up behind his boat.

Vandiver was on his feet now, his hands resting on the Whaler’s windshield, his gaze sweeping back and forth. He frowned when he looked toward the setting sun. “Damn,” he mumbled under his breath, “going down like a damn shooting star.”

To Douglas, it had never settled below the horizon so slowly.

“Sir?” the Coast Guardswoman said. “If they found one of the windsurfing boards on the Gulf side of the island, it seems like a better chance the other one’s in the water over there, too—and any survivor.”

Vandiver nodded. “Good chance,” he said. “But since we’re already over here, let’s keep looking for it here for a while.”

Keep looking for a fifty-foot megalodon,
is what his uncle really meant, Douglas knew.
Fifty feet long and about a half a mile west of the island—where they were now.

“Over there,” Vandiver said.

Douglas’s head jerked in that direction. But his uncle was only giving Cowart a new direction to turn. The water out in front of them shimmered brown in the fading light. To the east the sky had already turned gray. Out of the corner of his eyes, Douglas caught a long line of spray whip up into the air in the distance. He didn’t say anything, only kept staring carefully at the spot.

Cowart, her bright orange preserver giving her upper body a swollen look, came to her feet behind the steering wheel and peered off to her right Her eyes squinted.

Douglas quickly swung his face in that direction.

“Sir,” she said.

Vandiver looked in the direction she stared. She swung the boat to the right. Douglas still didn’t see anything.

Then he did.

A brown fin, a flash of shining yellow …

“The board, sir,” Cowart said. The sail trailed in the water to the side of the brownish-yellow board, shining in what sunlight was left. The board’s end looked little different from a rounded fin. It rode up another swell, its sail acting as an anchor, dragging in the water, pulling the board to the side where it made a tight, sweeping circle on the wave and bobbed up in the air again.

Half a board,
Douglas saw now.

Cowart maneuvered them closer.

The place where the rear half of the board had been bitten from the section they now stared at showed great, widely spaced serrations, like someone had taken a saw and cut gaping triangles into the end of the board. Cowart’s eyes tightened questioningly. She looked at Vandiver. He raised his face out over the waters surrounding them. Douglas, thinking of the slashes in the hull of the doctors’ boat, continued to stare at the board. He closed his eyes briefly, then looked toward the sun again.

“Sir,” he said.

“Yes, Douglas,” his uncle said without looking back at him.

“It’s going to be dark soon.”

“Yes, I know.”

Douglas waited a moment. He shrugged off Cowart’s look back at him, and looked at his uncle again. “Sir, if the shark should come up with it much darker we might not be able to see it.”

“I know. I would give my right leg for a flood lamp on the front of this damn boat.”

Douglas looked at his uncle’s leg.

“Sir, maybe we can come back tomorrow—in a bigger boat.”

Vandiver stared back across his shoulder at him, then moved his gaze on toward the twin hundred-thirty-horsepower Johnsons clamped to the rear of the Whaler. “Douglas, if anything
should
come up after us, those motors would keep us as far away from it as we wish. Now keep looking. My eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

They were all crazy, Douglas thought. Except maybe Cowart.
She had no idea.

And that wasn’t right.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Douglas.”

“This is crazy, sir.”

His uncle’s face turned back across his shoulder.

But that didn’t stop Douglas. “Sir, what good is it going to do if we do see it—that still won’t be proof. You said so yourself. A giant shark, that’s all.”