Meg: Hell's Aquarium (5 page)

Despite the presence of the protestors, the adjacent public parking lot is packed with cars for the evening show.

Dani runs ahead to the Lower Level gate to get ready, while David follows his father through the staff entrance into the administration building. They take the elevator up to the third floor then follow the main corridor to Terry Taylor’s office.

David’s mother sits behind her desk, speaking on the phone. She waves and smiles at her son, signaling, “One minute.”

Jonas taps David on the shoulder, ushering him to the bay windows. He raises the Venetian blinds to reveal the lagoon and its surrounding arena, the bleachers packed with people of all ages. Dusk is settling over the Pacific, bathing the western horizon in shades of gold and magenta. With the sun fading fast, light towers posted along the stadium perimeter slowly come to life, their bright beacons illuminating the azure-green, windswept waters of the main tank—a three-quarter-mile-long, eighty-foot-deep artificial lake running north and south along the coast. Connecting this man-made body of water to the Pacific is a perpendicular channel located at the midpoint of the lagoon’s western border. Consisting of two concrete sea walls running parallel to each other, the canal extends across the beachhead behind the facility like a highway off-ramp before it submerges a thousand feet into the Pacific, ending fifty yards short of the Monterey Bay Canyon drop-off. Only a pair of mammoth underwater doors made of reinforced steel prevent the lagoon’s star attraction from escaping to the open sea.

David’s eyes search the main tank. The lagoon is empty, its lone occupant preferring the depths of the canal and its steady rush of ocean current. Craning his neck, he looks to the northern end of the bowl to see a new section of bleachers still under construction.

Five years ago, the stadium’s original northern bleachers had been removed to expand the facility, allowing for the construction of a brand-new, state-of-the-art, sixty-million-gallon saltwater aquarium. Dubbed the “Meg Pen,” the rectangular tank, along with its medical pool became home to Angel’s five female pups. Though designed as a separate habitat, the pen was technically connected to the larger lagoon via a twenty-foot, submerged concrete tunnel, the doors of which always remained sealed on both ends to protect the pups from their overly aggressive parent.

Situated on a boom truck anchored close to the Meg Pen is the
Jellyfish,
a maintenance submersible featuring a twenty-two-foot-in-diameter, four-inch-thick spherical hull made of clear acrylic too wide for Angel and her aggressive brood to wrap their jaws around.

Two stories below the Meg Pen’s main deck is the largest underwater viewing window in the world. Thirty-two feet tall by eighty-five feet wide, composed of four-foot-thick, clear acrylic glass and buttressed by seven-foot-thick concrete pillars, the Meg Pen Gallery was quickly rivaling Angel’s Lair as the most popular attraction at the Institute.

Beside its smaller medical holding tank, the Meg Pen could be divided in half by a retractable, rubber-coated, titanium chain-link fence set on tracks. The intent was to give the facility’s staff the option of segregating one or more of the pups . . . should the need ever arise. With each passing day, that need seemed to be gaining a new sense of urgency.

The standing-room-only crowd of 15,596 cheer as three men in orange staff jumpsuits wheel a headless, skinned steer carcass toward the large, steel A-frame that stands poised at the southern end of Angel’s tank. Teddy Badaut, a French-Portuguese marine biologist, instructs his two “guest feeders” on how to prepare Angel’s meal. Tucked within fatty pockets of the 225-pound side of beef are pouches of vitamins and mineral supplements. Using digestible plastic ties, Teddy and his two assistants attach the A-frame’s four-inch-thick steel chain to the carcass’s rib cage before swabbing the meat down with mop-fulls of fresh blood as the sound of voodoo drums simultaneously flow out of the arena’s sound system and
thump
through the lagoon’s underwater speakers.

Danielle Taylor, the show’s emcee, waves to the crowd as she approaches the southern end of the bowl and the more expensive seats. Her podium is located behind the A-frame, close enough for the nauseating scent of raw meat from the star attraction’s prepared meal to wash over her. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls . . . welcome to the Tanaka Institute.”

Hovering in the deepest part of the ocean-access canal, her snout rubbed raw from her ampullae of Lorenzini’s attraction to the electrical discharges emitted by the porous steel doors, is the twenty-seven-year-old female Megalodon known as Angel. The predator—pure white—inherited her albino features from an ancestral line that had inhabited the eternally dark recesses of the Mariana Trench over the last quarter of a million years.

Basketball-size pores perforating the steel doors channel a steady current into the Meg’s nostrils and open mouth, enabling her to breathe without exerting much energy. Upwards of a thousand gallons of seawater flow through her body every minute, providing oxygen to be processed by her gills while conveying a sensory picture of the environment just outside her realm. Angel can taste whale urine drifting from a passing pod of humpbacks three miles away and can feel the reverberations of their exertions. She can hear the annoying whine of speedboats and whale watchers. Farther to the south, she senses the electrical pitter-patter of heartbeats—a family from New Jersey wading in the shallows off scenic Carmel.

And then, like a wave of white noise, the underwater cacophony of bass drums overwhelms Angel’s sensory orchestra, sending the sensitive neuro-cells along her lateral line into spasms. Her routine disrupted, the Meg bashes her triangular snout against the gate several times and then circles, heading back into the lagoon to register her annoyance.

A great roar rises from the crowd seated in the western bleachers, the cheers spreading throughout the rest of the bowl as a slow-moving wake, six feet high, rolls majestically into the main tank, the submerged creature’s sheer girth pulling a river of current.

A cold Pacific wind whips through the open-air arena. Visitors adjust their collars against the sudden chill. Parents zip their children’s jackets and bundle their infants in souvenir blankets while they wait impatiently for the main attraction to surface. To the purists among them, simply bearing witness to
Carcharodon megalodon
circling the bottom of the tank is worth the price of admission. Here was a living, breathing prehistoric monster everyone believed extinct—a giant great white shark that had ruled the planet’s oceans over most of the last 30 million years.

Turn back the clock a mere 100,000 years and you would find Angel’s predecessors stalking whales along this very coastline. Why these apex predators ever disappeared remains a mystery. How a sub-species managed to survive in the abyss is a paradox of evolution. To the millions who have seen her, the big female’s presence in modern man’s world seems nothing short of a minor miracle. But to some locals and experts alike, the Megalodon and her five maturing pups represent the potential revival of a dangerous species that many feel is better off left extinct.

Angel remains deep, moving along the bottom of the lagoon in a perpetual figure-eight pattern. Reaching the northern end of the tank, she circles back to the south, rushing head-first into her own oncoming current.

The sudden surge invigorates her gills while momentarily muting the annoying underwater acoustics—stimulating a cause-and-effect response.

Danielle Taylor’s blue eyes focus on the approaching wake, its height rising noticeably as its speed increases. Crossing the length of the lagoon, Angel abruptly circles back again to the north, one swell running into the next—

—the sudden displacement of sea causing the water level in the far end of the tank to drop precipitously.

Something’s wrong. She’s moving way too fast.

Dani grips her microphone, uncertain what to do. “Ladies and gentlemen . . . Angel, Mother Nature’s own angel of death!”

The side of beef is swung into place over the southern end of the tank. Blood drips from the chain, falling thirty feet to the surface. Patrons steady their camcorders and cell phone cameras, waiting for the money shot, while up in his mother’s velvet perch, David watches, spellbound, his heart pounding in his chest. “Something’s setting her off. Dad, the swell—it’s rising higher than the sea wall!”