Meg: Hell's Aquarium (58 page)

Of course, everything had changed twenty-eight years ago when Angel’s mother had surfaced from the Mariana Trench.

Two days ago, the dive instructor had been contacted by Joseph Michael Park. The shock video guru was interested in setting up an underwater video sequence at night and needed an experienced man he could trust. Jenkins passed . . . until he was told the location would be outside of Angel’s Lagoon.

Scott Jenkins owns nearly eight thousand Megalodon teeth, but none of them of the white, unfossilized variety. Logic tells him that Angel must have shed dozens of teeth over the last five years, teeth that can be easily dug up from the sea floor within the canal. With the big female long gone and the siblings on the way out, Jenkins will have a few hours to explore the bottom to locate teeth, each pearly white fetching $250,000 to upwards of a million dollars from private collectors.

With the assistance of his daughters, Shannon and Shauna, it had taken Jenkins less than an hour to set up underwater cameras along the periphery of the canal. The sight of the devastated steel doors had unnerved him, giving him second thoughts about making the dive.

One quick dive at dawn. The first tooth I keep for myself, the rest we sell.

He changes his mind yet again as the two creatures appear on his undersea monitor.

Up on deck, a buzz takes the yacht as Lizzy’s albino fin is sighted.

Sara Toms calls out from the pilot house, “Here they come!” The R.A.W. leader forces herself not to look at Shauna Jenkins’s camera as she delivers the news.

Off camera, one deck below, two members of the Lost Boys biker gang carry the carcass of a 220-pound Pacific white-sided dolphin out to the transom, the dead mammal wrapped in a bed sheet. Their leader, a shaved-headed roughneck named Blair Bates, ties one end of a long nylon rope to a ten-inch hook. Reaching under the sheet, Bates shoves the barbed end of the hook into the dolphin’s mouth and out its blow-hole, piercing the thick skin.

Lana Wood stands by the starboard rail of the yacht’s open flybridge, her grandson, Max by her side. She looks away in disgust as the dolphin is tossed overboard, attached to a three-foot orange buoy.

“Nana, look! Here they come!” Climbing the flybridge rail, Max points to the canal where a six-foot, white dorsal fin cuts the dark waters, circling the yacht to resounding applause.

“Nana, it’s Lizzy! It’s Lizzy! Where’s Belle?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t want you climbing the rail like that.”

Two decks below in the V.I.P. stateroom, Scott Jenkins continues monitoring the images displayed on his six viewing screens. Three of his underwater cameras transmit night vision images taken from the canal doors, two from the yacht’s keel, the last from a hand-held unit attached to a reach pole, held over the side by his daughter, Shannon.

Annoyed that he cannot locate the dark-backed Meg, Jenkins yells over his headset to his daughter carrying the reach pole and camera. “Shannon, she’s still circling, and all I have is a forbidden shot of Flipper twisting on a hook. Where’s my port-side view?”

“The walkway’s too narrow, and there must be twenty bikers on the bow. I can’t—”

“Can’t? Sorry, never heard of the word.” He switches channels. “Sara, we can’t give you documentary footage if your bikers are in our way. Tell the Lost Boys to get lost before we lose our subjects.”

Jenkins focuses in on Lizzy, the albino Meg circling the bait, remaining cautious. “Peek-a-boo, I see you. Now where’s your nasty sister?”

The dive master scans his monitors. Then he sees her, the dark-backed creature’s stark-white triangular head filling the screen—

—on his daughter’s remote.

“Shannon, get back! Bela’s charging the yacht!”

Panthalassa Sea

Twenty-four thousand feet.

Particles of silt and bits of mosasaur continue to flake away from the bottom of the titanium lab like a comet’s tail. Steel cable creaks, the sound violating primordial silence as the line strains to support the object’s forty-seven-ton mass.

Escorting the lab on its ascension through the seemingly endless pitch is the Abyss Glider. The submersible’s pilot is cramped within the confines of his cockpit, sweating every square foot of pressure and every tick of the digital clock, knowing that precious drops of water are emptying from his son’s life support system, dispersing with it the last molecules of air.

Twenty-three thousand feet.

For the umpteenth time Jonas recalculates the lab’s rate of ascent.
Eighty-five hundred feet divided by sixteen minutes . . . that’s four hundred seventy-two feet per minute. Figure four hundred seventy feet, with another 23,000 feet to go . . . that’s another forty-eight minutes to the surface . . . assuming everything goes without a hitch.

He hesitates then grabs the radio. “David, how much air do you have left?”

“Stand by.”

Jonas can hear David checking the water tank’s capacity meter. He hears the strain in his son’s voice as he reports, “Eighteen minutes.”

Beads of sweat burst from every pore of Jonas’s body.
Thirty minutes short!
He swallows hard, forcing himself to sound calm, refusing to peek inside his mind’s eye and the image of Steven Moretti’s dead body being pulled from a similar underwater sphere.

“David, you’re rising fast, but it’s still going to be tight. Is there any more water?”

“None. And both our bladders are empty. How much farther do we have to go? . . . Dad? . . . Dad, are you there?”

Jonas shuts off his radio. For days he has been running on adrenaline and fear—fear for his son’s life. Despite making repeated trips into the crushing depths of the Panthalassa Sea, despite barely having survived attacks from Angel and an assortment of creatures that would give Mother Nature nightmares, he has never given a thought to his own well-being—

—until now.

The monster’s presence had resonated on sonar seconds before it appeared from out of the darkness. Jonas stares at the beast as it effortlessly ascends with his sub, gawking at its incredible size. Trembling at his own sudden insignificance. The creature’s head is larger than a school bus, its crocodilian jaw line over-flowing with crisscrossing, needle-like teeth, some as long as his own forearm. The left eye, yellow and luminous in the night glass, is clearly sizing him up. The creature’s cold, reptilian mind debating whether to taste him, kill him, or if the energy expended is even worth the effort.

An upheaval of muscles jump to life beneath the liopleurodon’s massive shoulder girdle as its forelimbs execute a single, graceful forward thrust, moving a river of water as it circumnavigates, almost lazily, around the Abyss Glider to take a closer look at the lab. An ancient ocean predator that hunted with its nose, the gargantuan pliosaur now uses its two nostrils to taste the surrounding sea—

—locking in on the scraps of mosasaur meat still clinging to the bottom of the titanium sphere.

The strange creature is not only edible, but wounded. The big female opens her mouth, the action that causes the edges of her upper fangs to slide against the lowers—sharpening her own teeth as the 200,000-pound liopleurodon reaches for its prey.

“No!”

Terrified the leviathan’s interaction with the lab will snap the cable and send his son careening to his grave, Jonas powers on his lights and charges the beast head-on!

Momentarily blinded, the monster twists its head sideways, veering away from the lab. A rear flipper, as large as a house, blooms in Jonas’s view, its tidal wave of current flipping him bow over stern—

—directly into the path of the creature’s tail, which whips sideways, snapping off his port-side wing assembly and propeller. The force of the blow nearly knocks Jonas unconscious. Suspended upside-down in his harness, his bearings shot, he gropes for the hydrogen burn, igniting the fuel—

—the pink flame scorching the liopleurodon’s snout as its teeth clench down upon the
AG III
’s starboard wing, shearing the remaining engine assembly like husk from an ear of corn.

Having lost both its propellers, the crippled Abyss Glider becomes a twisting, rudderless rocket, its hydrogen burn dying rapidly as it soars past the lab, out of control. His controls rendered useless, his life again teetering on the brink, Jonas reaches for the sub’s robotic appendage controls with his left hand, unbuckling his harness with the right. Estimating the trajectory of the titanium sphere rising beneath him, he slams his body back and forth against his seat while pumping hydrogen blasts in a desperate attempt to guide the rocketing hunk of acrylic in the direction of the steel cable before he loses what little power remains.

After several attempts, the
AG III
’s nose strikes the rescue line. Jonas extends the sub’s hydraulic claw and grasps hold of the steel cable as the rising titanium sphere plows upward into his aft burner assembly, giving the crippled sub and its distraught pilot a ride to the surface.

The liopleurodon rises with them, the enraged predator all business now as it snaps its charred jaws at its fleeing prey. It lunges for the Glider and misses, then attempts to bite hold of the lab, the titanium hull splintering two of its front teeth on contact.

Changing tactics, the predator soars past its prey and disappears into the darkness—

—only to reappear moments later, bull-rushing the lab.

She’ll tear the lab from the tow line!

Powerless and out of options, Jonas clenches the radio in his trembling hand.
You failed, old man. You’re best wasn’t good enough and you failed.

The crocodilian mouth widens, the creature bearing down on the pod—

—veering off at the last possible moment!

The wake causes the Abyss Glider to spin, the ten-inch steel claw all that adheres the submersible to the rising lab’s platform. After a long moment the cockpit resettles, offering Jonas a far different view—

—this one of Angel. The Megalodon is circling the remains of its mosasaur meal. The shark’s broad back is arched, its pelvic fins pointed down, the Meg’s posture revealing its intent to defend its kill against the liopleurodon.

37.

Tanaka Oceanographic Institute
Monterey, California

Agitated by the presence of what it perceives as yet another territorial challenger, Bela attacks the yacht’s keel with 42,000 pounds of testosterone-laced fury.

Camerawoman Shannon Jenkins, balancing on a narrow slice of deck running along the outside of the main salon, manages two strides before the Megalodon strikes the boat, the titanic impact launching her sideways over the rail and into the water.

The bone-jarring jolt rolls the ship a dizzying thirty degrees to port, pitching the ship’s passengers into chaos.

Standing on the flybridge, Lana Wood nearly flips head-first over the rail as the boat suddenly tilts, the sea reaching up for her. Clutching the rail, she hangs on, managing to maintain her balance while lunging for Max—

—her young grandson already airborne, flung into the night.

“Max!” The former Bond actress lands on her back as the yacht rights itself. On hands and knees she crawls to the circular stairwell, then bounds down the steps to the main salon, pushing her way through an entanglement of bodies and out onto the aft deck, her eyes frantically searching the dark water.

“Max!” Lana is bordering on hysterics. “Help me, somebody help! I can’t see him!” She drags Blair Bates to his feet, the biker’s shaved head trickling blood. “My grandson fell overboard. I can’t find him!”

Bates scans the surface—

—as Lizzy breaches sideways out of the surf, a gushing object clenched within the albino’s chomping jaws.

“Max!” Lana collapses to her knees, her blood-curdling wail eliciting screams from the other passengers.

Bates grabs her by the arm. “No, lady. That was the dolphin! Look, there’s your kid!” He points to where the boy has surfaced thirty feet off the port-side bow.

Max treads water, wide-eyed and terrified, barely able to muster the strength to keep his head above the five-foot swells, let alone call out in the darkness for help.

Spotting her grandson, Lana kicks off her high heels and leaps into the Pacific.

One deck below in the V.I.P. stateroom, Scott Jenkins retrieves a monitor from a pile of equipment, an underwater image appearing sideways on the screen, a pair of woman’s legs suddenly plunging into the frame. “Jesus, there’s someone in the water.” He adjusts his headset. “Shannon, did you lose the camera overboard? Shannon?” He switches channels. “Shauna, where’s your sister?”

“I don’t know? Wait . . . I see her camera and reach pole floating overboard. Dad, that actress is in the water!”

“Find your sister!” Scott’s eyes are locked onto the monitor as a lead-gray dorsal fin moves vertically down the frame, gliding just beneath Lana Wood’s churning feet. “Dear God.”

Swimming with the current, Lana closes on her grandson—

—oblivious of Bela, who glides ten feet beneath her, homing in on Max’s fluttering heartbeat. Interpreting Lana’s presence as a rival competing for her meal, the agitated predator banks away from the boy and rises to the surface—