Meg: Hell's Aquarium (10 page)

“Excuse us for just a moment, gentlemen.” Jonas grabs his friend by the elbow, leading him out of his office. The security detail allows them to pass, watching as they head down the third floor corridor. “Mac, this is Michael Maren’s work. I’m sure of it.”

“Maren? Christ . . . still, that doesn’t make it real. The Institute spent two years exploring the Philippine Sea. Other than a few benign encounters with Scarface, the expedition found nothing.”

“Maybe we were looking in the wrong place.”

“And somehow the Arabs found the right one?”

“Those drawings were Maren’s. Somehow, they’ve gotten access to his research.”

“Research isn’t proof. As for Maren, that blowhard was nothing more than a psychopath with a big vocabulary and an axe to grind.”

“He managed to tag Scarface.”

“And you tagged Angel’s mother. It doesn’t make you Jonas Salk. Mention Maren and my Spidey sense starts tingling. I say we sell them the sisters, offer to validate their parking, then we walk away from whatever wacky proposal they have tucked up their pajama sleeves.”

“Agreed.”

They return to Jonas’s office and the Dubai consortium. “Gentlemen, since Angel’s pups were born, the Institute’s been searching for suitable aquatic facilities that can meet the needs of an adult Megalodon. If your aquarium can meet those needs, and it certainly looks impressive on paper, then we can begin making the arrangements.”

Bin Rashidi’s black eyes narrow, but his smile never wavers. “So the man who discovered the existence of not one, but two prehistoric predators living in the Mariana Trench refuses to believe other extinct species might also exist?”

Jonas shrugs. “The ocean’s a big place. Less than one percent of its depths have been explored. If these creatures exist, I hope you find them.”

Bin Rashidi opens a second manila envelope, removing seven color photos. “Tell me, Dr. Taylor, do you recognize this particular species of fish?”

The crown prince’s cousin lays out the eleven by fourteen inch photographs of an immense, ray-finned fish. The multiple angle shots were taken on an unidentified beach, the creature long dead. Its dark gray flesh is marred with bite marks from other predators, its lower extremity completely missing. Despite this fact, the head and upper torso are longer than the flatbed truck that appears in two of the photos.

Mac grabs the last photo. “Damn. What’d you fellas use as bait? An elephant?”

“It’s not a carnivore, Mac. Believe it or not, it’s a filter feeder. Alfred Leeds discovered the species’ fossils back in the nineteenth century. He named it a Leed’s fish.”

“Its correct scientific name is
Leedsichthys
,” Al Hashimi says. “With its lower section intact, this fish would have been seventy feet long, making it an immature adult. The mature adults reached ninety feet. It was the largest fish that ever lived, and it lived in the Late Jurassic, more than 150 million years ago.”

4.

Tanaka Oceanographic Institute
Monterey, California

David Taylor sits behind his mother’s desk, the phone pressed to his ear. He has been on hold nearly ten minutes, his already agitated blood pressure now a rolling boil. Gazing out the bay windows at the empty arena below, he watches Teddy Badault and his team lower a side of blood-drenched beef into the lagoon from the steel A-frame, each worker wearing a safety harness attached by cable to a concrete pillar supporting the southern bleachers.

For the next eight minutes the crew bobs the hunk of meat in and out of the water without a response from their intended diner. David is about to hang up and join them when a familiar voice comes on the phone.

“Ricardo Rosalez. Is this my lawyer?”

“Lawyer? No, man, it’s David . . . David Taylor.”

“David? How the hell are you, man? How’d you find me?”

“I called Sandra, and she gave me this number. Where are you, anyway?”

“Man, I’m in the brig, charged with assault.”

“Assault? You? No way, man. What the hell happened?”

“Couple of Marines and I were in a bar. There was a guy there who kept slapping this woman around. I told him he better stop, so he wheeled back and punched her. Broke her jaw. Me and my buddies, we beat the holy hell out of him.”

“Good! They should give you a medal.”

“Not this time, Bro. The woman was a prostitute. Turns out the guy abusing her was the deputy JAG officer’s favorite nephew. His uncle’s looking through my personnel file to see if he can build a case to have me court-martialed.”

“That’s f’d up, man.”

“Screw ‘em. My lawyer’s dealing with it. Let ’em discharge me. If it was my daughter, I’d want someone stepping in to protect her. I don’t care how she earns her living.”

“How is your daughter? Alex, right?”

“Alekzandra Francisca Yesca Rosalez . . . and she’s great. So what’s up with you? Why the call?”

“The Institute wants to hire you to train Angel. We need to get her to respond to a new feeding stimulus.”

“Wow. Wish I could help you, amigo, but I’m officially unavailable. Besides, for a monster like Angel, you’ll want the best, and that’s the guy who taught me. His name’s Nichols, Dr. Brent Nichols. Degrees in marine biology and ecology from Jacksonville State with a doctorate in molecular systems and evolution from South Florida. I met him years ago at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Mobile, Alabama. Guy’s a real shark fanatic. Discovery Channel uses him on all their specials. I’ll ask Sandra to e-mail you his contact info.”

“Thanks, man. And don’t let the discharge get to you. The Navy did the same thing to my old man thirty years ago. In the end, he proved them wrong, too.”

Thomas Cubit finishes reading the newly edited version of the Dubai Aquarium’s non-disclosure agreement. Finally satisfied, he hands a copy to Jonas and one to Mac, indicating where to sign.

“Thanks, Tom. Glad you were around.”

“Just make sure you don’t sign anything else unless I approve it . . . especially if the fine print’s in Arabic.” Cubit offers Jonas a playful backhand smack to the chest and leaves.

Mac hands his signed NDA to Jonas. “There you go, pal. Now we can
officially
step in whatever pile of crap your new friends have in mind.” He follows Jonas back to the conference table where bin Rashidi’s people have laid out a series of maps of the Philippine Sea. The man in the gray business suit remains off to one side, disinterested.

Bin Rashidi introduces the clean-shaven associate in a
dishdasha
who has yet to speak. “Gentlemen, this is Dr. Ahmad al-Muzani, head of the Geology Science Department at United Arab Emirates University. Eighteen months ago, Dr. al-Muzani was asked to review research data provided to us by Miss Allison Petrucci, former assistant to the late Michael Maren. This data—Dr. Maren’s legacy—included never-before-seen gravity and bathymetric charts of the Philippine Sea along with a detailed computer journal and sonar signatures supplied from a series of remotely operated vehicles. The volume of research compiled by Dr. Maren would put Darwin’s
Origin of the Species
to shame. In a word, the man was a genius—”

“That fat prick was a murderer, responsible for the deaths of half a dozen people,” Mac states with contempt. “He’d step on his own mother’s throat if he thought it would get him on the cover of
National Geographic
. If it wasn’t for Jonas, he’d have killed even more innocent people and would have probably gotten away with it.”

The businessmen never flinch. Bin Rashidi offers a conciliatory nod. “When the aquarium opens, the families of the deceased will receive a most generous compensation. May I continue?”

Mac exhales. “Yeah, do whatever. It’s J.T.’s show. I’m just wall covering.”

Bin Rashidi nods to Dr. al-Muzani, who refers to the first chart—a satellite map of the Philippine Sea. “The tectonic forces that created the Philippine Sea are most unusual. As you can see from this map, volcanic islands form the four borders of the sea, revealing the effects of the tectonic plate’s subduction zones below. To the west is Taiwan and the Philippine Islands; to the north, Japan; to the east, the Marianas; and to the south, Palau.”

The geologist rolls out a second map—a bathymetric chart of the Philippine Sea Plate and the surrounding lithosphere. Jonas notices the signature at the bottom: M. Maren.

“Now we can better understand and appreciate the Philippine Sea Plate for what it really is—a marginal basin plate, completely surrounded by subduction zones and as many as six different tectonic plates. To the east, we have the massive Pacific Plate, subducting into the Mariana Trench, along with the Indo-Australian Plate to the south. To the west is the Eurasian Continental Plate, the northern boundary consisting of three smaller plates: the North American, the Okhotsk, and the Amurian Plate. The northern tip of the Philippine Plate ends at the Izu Peninsula where the Okhotsk Plate meets at Mount Fuji.

“Each of these subduction zones created a deep sea trench, where we find some of the deepest locations on the planet. Dr. Taylor, of course, is familiar with the Mariana Trench, running some 1,550 miles in length, but the Philippine Trench is nearly as deep, stretching just over 700 nautical miles to the east of the Philippine Islands. Completing the diamond-shaped basin are the Yap, the Ryukyu and Izu-Bonin Trenches . . . every gorge seismically active, representing some of the oldest-known sea floors on the planet.”

“Dr. Maren’s focus was not on the trenches that border the Philippine Sea Plate, but the unusual contours and anomalies of the basin itself. From this map it is clear that the sea floor is actually divided into four distinct basins. Moving from east to west from the Mariana Trench we have the Mariana Trough, a narrow basin that leads to the Western Mariana Ridge. From here the sea floor widens considerably, with the Shikoku Basin to the north, the Parece Vela to the south, and then farther to the west, the massive West Philippine Basin. For hundreds of millions of years the sea floor has been slowly gobbled up to the west by the Eurasian Plate, while it expands to the east atop the subducting Pacific Plate. And yet the basin we are looking at is not representative of the true sea floor. It is, in effect, a geological anomaly.”

Jonas can feel his heart racing with adrenaline.

“The first clues that led Dr. Maren to discover the true nature of what lies beneath the Philippine Sea began with a comprehensive study of the Shikoku and Parece Vela Basins back in 1979. Two geologists, Drs. Mrozowski and Hayes, found irregular oceanic crust and magnetic anomalies along these eastern basins. More recently, researchers at the University of Sydney reported anomalies in the basement sediment of the Parece Vela Basin.”

“What sort of anomalies?” Jonas asks.

“Geological age discrepancies. Big ones. While the northern section of the east basin, the Shikoku, is less than 30 million years old, the basalts dredged from the Parece Vela Basin reveal geochemical characteristics that date back to the Early Cretaceous period, approximately 150 million years ago. We now believe the floor of the Parece Vela is actually part of an ancient sea shelf that formed as far back as 275 million years when two continental plates rifted apart, the magma creating a crust that eventually stretched east before colliding with the Western Mariana Ridge, approximately 7,000 feet below the surface. This remains a working theory, mind you, but it is supported by Dr. Maren’s overwhelming evidence. More important is what Maren discovered hidden beneath the basin . . . a vast ancient sea that has remained isolated from the Pacific for hundreds of millions of years!”

“Whoa, slow down a minute.” Mac stares at the bathymetric chart. “Let’s pretend I’m a fifth grader. What I think you’re telling me is that this sea floor here,” he points to the Parece Vela Basin, “isn’t the real sea floor, that it’s just a shelf, a ceiling of volcanic rock, located thousands of feet above the real sea floor. And beneath that shelf is an ancient sea, isolated from the Pacific, that I’m guessing Maren believed harbors life from what? You said a coupla’ hundred million years ago?”

“Or perhaps as far back as the Devonian Age.”

“Devonian, huh?” Mac glances at Jonas. “Exactly how far back is that, Mr. Peabody?”