What Lurks Beneath (31 page)

“S
hit! DORA's offline,” Eric shouted over the sheeting rain.

The doors to both the A/V room and to the storm outside were propped open now. Water was running in a small river over the concrete outside.

Beside Eric, Rabinowitz took off his hat and rubbed his head. “Can someone please tell me what we just saw?”

On the screen, briefly, had been rows of round suckers, then what looked like some huge eye, then a dark opening before the camera went black. Eric moved to the outer door, and began pulling the ROV's umbilical back in, hand over hand. Far too easily. He turned to Valerie.

“She's not even attached anymore. The son of a bitch crushed her, Val. She's gone.” He tore his glasses off and began to clean them.

Rabinowitz said, “What crushed her? What
was
that?”

“What do you think it was?” Val said. “We just saw our giant octopus.”

“No shit?”

Val said, “Never mind that. We need to find a way to get air to Will and the others. Right away.”

Eric finally pulled the end of the severed cord across the concrete and held it up in front of them. Something had torn through it crudely, and cut copper wire was exposed. He dropped it and came back into the A/V room.

He said, “How are we gonna do that? DORA's ruined now. We can't just dive down there with it. You heard what Rabinowitz said. Even the Navy's smarter than that.”

“Thanks,” Rabinowitz said.

Mack burst through the outer doorway and hurried into the room. He was drenched, and panting from exertion, but grinning.

“Air holes,” he said.

 

 

Mack soon left the room, followed by Eric and a few emergency services personnel. They were headed to deliver fresh air down to the survivors.

He'd located small ventilation holes, concealed under vegetation on the rocky ground, which were bored straight down to the tunnel where Sturman and the others were huddled. Mack's plan was to lower the air hoses from the resort's SNUBA underwater breathing apparatuses, sending them twenty-five feet below the surface.

When Mack had found the holes, he'd communicated with the others. Apparently, the rain had made it very difficult to understand them, but Mack thought Sturman had shouted up to him that rising water was reducing their airspace. And something about toxic fumes. They still needed to hurry and think of a way to get them all out. The SNUBA rigs would only buy them a little more time.

As Val stepped out the door to follow Mack and the others into the rain, Rabinowitz stopped her.

“Wait, Dr. Martell.”

“What?”

“I think I need to share something with you,” he said. He looked guilty. “But I could get in a lot of trouble for doing this.”

She nodded. He led her back through the door into the small A/V room. He shut the door behind them.

“Well?” she said. “We need to hurry.”

He glanced over his shoulder nervously. “I think I might know why that thing's here.”

Val put her hands on her hips. “Go on.”

“This is classified information, so you can't—”

“Spare me that bullshit. My boyfriend—your friend—is down there now. He could die. If you know anything, you need to tell us.”

“Look. I'm heavily involved with our research team. Sonar and weapons testing, here off Andros, in TOTO—the Tongue of the Ocean. Anyway, the sonar we're testing now mimics the booming clicks produced by sperm whales.”

“The loudest sounds in the animal kingdom,” Val said. “Used to locate and subdue prey.”

“Right—230 decibels. Generated right inside the whales' blocky, oil-filled heads. The idea is that if we can generate sonar similar enough to the sounds emitted by whales, not only will this technology not harm sea life, as some of our other sonar devices have, but it would be undetectable to the enemy.”

“Go on.”

“So if it works, all we need to do is add in recognizable patterns, something like Morse code, and then the whale sounds could be identified by the US Navy alone, even convey information. But I think it's having an . . . an unintended consequence.”

Val mulled it over. “So you think this sonar drove the octopus up out of deeper water?”

He looked over his shoulder again, through a small window in the door. “Why not? It makes sense. Maybe whales eat giant octopuses, or whatever that is, just like they eat giant squid.”

“Okay . . .”

“And I'm pretty sure this octopus or others like it have encountered our equipment on the seafloor before. I've never seen one until today, but we've found evidence. Things get destroyed.”

“I think you may be on to something. But how does that help us now?”

“I don't know. I guess it doesn't.”

“So let's say your testing scared it up to the shallower reefs. It headed into familiar, safe environments. The caverns under the island are dark, low in oxygen, protected. It found food. . . .” She paced around the room, thinking. “It's killed people. Probably for food. But it isn't eating anyone now. Maybe because it only wants to escape.”

She thought of the bodies officials had recovered from in and near the ruined tank. She'd also learned of an older security guard's body they'd found, inexplicably crushed and floating in another aquarium. Octopuses near death, or females guarding their eggs, ceased to eat. But then why had the animal eaten all the life in the tank? It didn't matter. It was still aggressive. What mattered was how to stop it from killing people. To separate it from the survivors, so they could dive down and get them out. They couldn't get past it unless it was gone. Unless they got it to leave—

Of course. She's seen the schematics. A long outflow pipe ran beneath all the big tanks here, allowing water to circulate out to the ocean. It led to the reef. It might be big enough. But then why wasn't it leaving now? She thought of the images of rubble inside the tank, when DORA went in.

She looked at Rabinowitz. “I think I know how it may have gotten in here. And how we might get it to go back to the ocean.”

“W
ait!” Val yelled, jumping and waving her arms in the rain near the edge of the ruined tank. The crane operator probably couldn't hear her, sitting inside the cab fifty yards away. Lightning flashed, followed seconds later by the crack of thunder.

“Rabinowitz, go tell him he's in the wrong place. We need to focus near the center of the tank. That's where the pipe opening would be.”

Rabinowitz ran over to relay the message. He leaned in and spoke with the operator—an American contractor named Mark, who wore an orange hard hat and had a cigarette dangling from his lips. He reached forward and adjusted some levers. The long cab and steel lattice boom pivoted, and the massive clamshell bucket suspended from the cables swung slowly over the gap, ten feet above the water.

With the naval officer's help, Val had convinced the construction crew to bring the massive crane over. From up on the rock wall, she looked down into the deep water of the tank, but could see nothing. Where the hell was the octopus?

Despite the lightning, the rain had slowed some, at least for the moment, increasing visibility. But rubble obscured the bottom of the tank, and the octopus was nowhere in sight.

The operator lowered the metal claw. A minute later, it returned to the surface, water pouring out between its teeth. Filled with tons of rock dredged from inside the aquarium, it pivoted and dropped the load onto the cement near the tank, backing up two policemen there to keep others away. He swung the arm back over the water and lowered the claw for another load.

He withdrew a boulder, and then dragged a long piece of Plexiglas off the bottom and out of the tank. He lowered the claw again, filling it with debris. He was raising it again when the octopus revealed itself.

 

 

Two enormous, reddish arms erupted out of the water beneath the clamshell. They slammed into the side of the boom, causing it to sway. A third arm darted up the claw, sliding over it and spiraling up the cables toward the head of the boom.

As a blob of flesh the size of a shed emerged out of the water beneath the arms, Rabinowitz scrambled behind the cab. He saw the policemen running away. He considered jumping from the crane, running after them. But he couldn't go without the operator. He started back around the crane platform.

The operator stepped outside the cab, to see why the load had stopped moving. Val yelled at him. When Rabinowitz joined in, the man finally saw the beast. He turned to jump from the machine. But just as his front foot left the tracks of a skid, one of the tentacles found him. It encircled his torso and lifted him lightly into the air. He screamed and struggled. Then his limbs whipped to one side as the tentacle cracked like a whip.

The monster slammed his limp body against the crane's metal framework, and there was a sharp report as his hardhat blew apart. His head was now bent impossibly far backwards, bouncing off his own spine, his mouth agape, as the tentacle shook him like a terrier worrying a rat.

Rabinowitz ducked behind the cab as the octopus pulverized the man's lifeless body, smashing it against the crane until his head came free. With a sudden flick, the tentacle tossed the headless corpse thirty feet into the air. Val jumped back as it thudded onto the rocky ground ten feet away.

The octopus was distracted. Without thinking, Rabinowitz hurried around the cab and moved inside the crane. He heard Val yelling at him.

But he had watched the operator, and thought he knew what to do. He fell into the torn black seat and seized the levers. A moment later, the claw began to move again. The crane groaned as it cleared the water.

A huge tentacle slithered up the wet cables above the claw, then another, each seeming to test the machine. The crane shuddered under the weight as more of the steel attachment rose into the rain. Two more of the octopus's arms slid above the waterline, stretching upward to grasp the lattice boom. Rabinowitz looked out the door, toward the safety a short distance away. But he knew why this thing was here. Why people were dead. He gritted his teeth.

The claw continued to rise. And the crane held.

The arms tugged at the steel frame, squirming like earthworms that had just felt the pierce of a barbed hook. If the tentacles slid Rabinowitz's way, they would easily reach the open cab.

He pivoted the arm away from the pool and over the wet concrete, the claw still rising toward the pulley at the tip of the towering boom. Suddenly, there was a huge flash of light, and searing pain behind his eyes.

And then everything went black.

 

 

Val was sitting on the ground. She was unable to see, and her flesh tingled. There was a high-pitched, steady ringing in her ears.

There had been a blinding flash, and a deafening boom. She realized a bolt of lightning had just struck the crane directly. Burned into her retinas was the momentary image of the jagged bolt descending from the clouds to course over the crane and the octopus's outstretched body, like molten fire.

Rabinowitz was in the crane. He might have gone into cardiac arrest. She had to get to him.

Her vision returned some. The octopus had disappeared back into the water. Val stood unsteadily and moved toward the crane, groping slowly around the pool. After stumbling into a railing and then moving a few steps along it, her vision fully returned. She hurried around the pool, until she could see Rabinowitz slumped inside the cab. A bolt of lightning could heat the adjacent air to 50,000 degrees, and carried hundreds of thousands of volts.

She wondered if he was still alive.

S
he was hurt. Badly.

Her flesh, her skin and muscles, all burned with pain. She could not remember where she was, or how she had gotten here. But she needed to escape.

She moved across the bottom of the small water-filled cavity, still blind but feeling every surface with her tender suckers. She sensed a light current, pulling the water downward.

An arm tip followed it, and came across a small hole. Water flowed down into it. It might be wide enough. A large rock partially covered the hole, but she shoved it aside and began to force the tips of half her arms into the space. Inside it felt smooth, cylindrical. It ran sideways. She remembered. She had entered this way. But where did it go?

It might lead to the ocean. To her den.

She slid the slender tip of another arm into the narrow opening, then two more, elongating them into the pipe. Each raced forward, trying to surpass the others, causing the arms to shrink in size. To align against one another. They slid together along the smooth surface, worming forward in unison, through a series of rhythmic contractions. Each pull was anchored by hundreds of suckers pressing against the sides.

Soon the only solid, inflexible part of the great octopus's boneless body arrived at the opening. She eased herself forward, pushing with her trailing arms, pulling with those already inside. She squeezed her hard mouth-parts, and the rigid ring of tissue around them, into the pipe.

She fit.

She pressed her body forward. Soon she reached another opening to a pool above, and knew that she had entered here. But before she had gone the wrong way.

She moved with great difficulty down the long, narrow pipe. Each contraction of her muscles brought intense pain, but she continued, inching forward toward the open ocean. She stopped to rest, but realized in this constricted state that she was almost entirely unable to breathe. Not enough water could flow past her gills to deliver oxygen. If she lingered here, she would quickly die.

She reached her arms farther down the dark tunnel, gripped the sides with her suckers, and again pulled her body forward.

At last, when her arm tips stretched forward, instead of meeting the unvarying, curved walls of the pipe, they arrived at the end. She felt something blocking her exit, but could now taste familiar waters. She was near her den.

She slid a slender arm tip through an opening in the lattice and coiled it twice around a metal bar. There was a loud clang as the bolts burst from the rock wall and the circular grate came free in a single, powerful jerk. With the metal grate now gone, her arms began to emerge and eagerly fan out. When her head and mantle reached the end, with one final great heave she spilled free and rolled forward, melding with the rough, slanted cavern floor below her.

She felt cool, fresh seawater fill her mantle. She moved toward her den, her young.

She was home.