1.
Monterey Peninsula Airport
Monterey, California
Saturday
The black Lexus JX sedan is double-parked outside Gate B, the vehicle’s driver, Jonas Taylor, eyeballing the airport cop who has sent him circling the airport four times already. The sixty-six-year-old paleobiologist glances at his twenty-four-year-old daughter, Danielle, curled up in the passenger seat next to him. The model-pretty blonde, who works part-time for a local NBC-TV affiliate as a news reporter and weekends emceeing shows at the Tanaka Institute, is staring at the digital clock on the dashboard, growing impatient. “Almost four thirty. If his plane doesn’t get here soon, I’ll miss the evening show.”
“His plane just landed. Relax.” Jonas taps the steering wheel to an old Neil Diamond tune on the radio. “Anyway, Olivia can always emcee the show in a pinch.”
“Olivia?” Dani looks at her father as if she just swallowed turpentine. “Dad, the Saturday night show is my gig. Period. Now would you please turn off that annoying song.”
“I like Neil Diamond.”
“Who?”
“Yeah, you are. Seriously, Dad, I will pay you to let me change the station.”
“Fine, only no gangster rap.”
“It’s ‘gangsta,’ and get with the times. Ghetto is in. It’s what we relate to.”
“My mistake. I forgot your mother and I raised you as a poor black child in a gang-infested neighborhood.”
The airport cop approaches the Lexus. Before he can signal Jonas to move the car, twenty-year-old David Taylor steps out of the baggage claim exit, an orange and blue University of Florida duffle bag slung over one broad shoulder. Jonas’s son is wearing a gray Gator’s Football tee-shirt, faded jeans, and sneakers. He is fit and tan, his brown hair long, speckled with golden highlights from being in the sun, his almond-brown eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses.
David tosses his duffle in the back seat of the Lexus and climbs in. “Sorry. Plane was an hour late.”
“No worries. We just got here. Right, Dani?”
“Wrong. You know dad, he had to leave an hour early.” She allows David to kiss her cheek. “You look good . . . Jesus, Dad, drive!”
Jonas pulls into traffic, following the signs leading to Highway 68 West.
“You look like you gained a few pounds. Lifting weights again?”
“Yes . . . and no, for the last time, I am not trying out for football.”
“Sure, I know. I just saw the shirt and thought—”
“It’s just a shirt.”
“—because the coach called our house twice last week. He lost two wide-outs to injuries in spring training. With your speed—”
“Dad, enough! My playing days ended in high school.”
“Okay, okay. I just remember my playing days at Penn State . . . those were the best of times.”
“Please, that was half a century ago.” Dani ruffles her father’s thick mane of snowy-white hair. “David, what do you think of Dad’s new look?”
David smiles. “It’s as white as Angel’s ass. It was still gray last time I saw you.”
“Comes from working too closely with monsters.”
“I thought you enjoyed working with Angel’s pups?”
Jonas smiles at his daughter. “I was talking about you.”
Dani smacks him playfully across his head. “I told him he should use that hair stuff that gets rid of the gray.”
“Don’t listen to her, Dad. It makes you look more intelligent. Sort of like Anderson Cooper, only a lot older.”
“Good. I can use all the help I can get. David . . . about this internship—”
“Dad, we talked about this.”
“There are other specialties in marine biology. We just completed the Manta Ray sale with the Naval Warfare Center, thanks, in part, to your piloting demo. The Navy knows you’re the best pilot we have, and the Vice Admiral mentioned they could use a good trainer.”
“You know I love piloting the subs. I just like working with the Megs more. There’s something about big predators—”
“You want big predators? San Diego needs a new trainer for their female orca. I could make a call—”
“Pass.”
“Nothing, if you enjoy teaching dog tricks to a whale. Angel’s pups have special needs.”
“Pups? Christ, you make them sound like a litter of cocker spaniels. The three runts are already larger than an adult great white, and the two sisters . . . you tell him, Dani.”
Dani nods, text messaging on her cell phone. “The sisters are evil. They’ll be as big and nasty as their mother.”
“Why do you call them ‘the sisters?’ Technically, all five are sisters.”
“When you see them every day like Dani and I do, you’ll understand. They may have shared the same womb, but the three runts look and act nothing like Bela and Lizzy.” Jonas exits Highway 68, heading south on Highway 1. “How’s Corrine?”
“We broke up.”
Dani looks up. “Seriously? I never liked her.”
“Wait,” Jonas jumps in, “what was wrong with Corrine?”
“She was getting too serious.”
“What’s wrong with serious? Is serious so bad?”
“How’s mom?”
“She’s good. And don’t change the subject.”
“Mom’s stressed out,” Dani says.
“Not PETA again?”
“Worse. A thug off-shoot. They call themselves R.A.W. Stands for Return Animals to the Wild. Dad had to hire a security outfit; they were puncturing the staff’s tires. I’m trying to convince my producer to let me do an exposé. These assholes don’t give a damn about the Megs. They’re just after the free publicity.”
David says nothing, preferring to gaze out his passenger window at the Pacific Ocean peeking through the rolling hillsides.
Jonas weighs the sudden silence. “Go ahead and say it, David. ‘The pen’s too small. The pups are getting too big.’ ”
David looks at his father. “What did the State Assembly say?”
“Same as they’ve always said. No more expansion, at least not along the coast. They offered us six hundred acres in Bakersfield.”
“Bakersfield? Why not Death Valley?”
“There may be another option. Mac and I have a meeting on Monday with Emaar Properties out of the United Arab Emirates. Rumor has it they’re constructing some kind of new state-of-the-art aquarium and hotel in Dubai.”
“I heard about that. The place is supposed to be incredible, ten times the size of the Georgia Aquarium. You think they want one of the pups?”
Jonas nods. “I’d bet the house on it.”
The Lexus heads south on Cabrillo Highway, exiting onto Sand Dunes Drive. David stares at the ocean, mesmerized by its crashing surf, marveling at the differences between Monterey’s rough Pacific and Florida’s calmer Atlantic. He has spent the last three summers interning at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce, completing field work in order to earn his bachelor’s degree in marine biology. Up ahead he sees the familiar concrete and steel bowl, the arena’s ocean-access canal running out to meet the deeper ocean waters like a submerged pier.
The Tanaka Institute and Lagoon: home to the most dangerous creatures in the planet’s history.
Built by David’s maternal grandfather, Masao Tanaka, more than thirty-five years ago, the lagoon had originally been designed to function as a field laboratory to study cetacean behavior. Each year, tens of thousands of whales migrated south from the Bering Sea along California’s coast, searching for shallow, protected harbors in which to birth their calves. The Tanaka Lagoon, essentially a man-made lake with an ocean-access canal, was thought to be the perfect birthing place for pregnant females who were struggling to make it down to Baja.
Masao had mortgaged his family’s future to build the facility, but when rising costs had depleted those funds, he had been forced to seek help from the Japanese Marine Science Technology Center. JAMSTEC was more interested in creating an early-warning, earthquake detection system off the Japanese coast, and Masao held the patents on UNIS—a new Unmanned Nautical Information Submersible. In exchange for funding his whale lagoon, Masao accepted a high-risk contract with JAMSTEC to deploy twenty-five UNIS robots seven miles below the Western Pacific along the seismically active sea floor of the Mariana Trench.
To complete the mission, Masao’s son, D.J., had to escort each UNIS to the bottom using an Abyss Glider, a one-man, deep-sea submersible resembling an acrylic torpedo with wings. It would take months to deploy the robots, but once the system was up and running the network worked like a charm. And then, one after another, the drones stopped transmitting data. JAMSTEC froze funding on the whale lagoon, insisting Masao fix the problem. To do that required retrieving one of the damaged UNIS robots—a two-submersible job—but Masao refused to allow his other pilot—his daughter, Terry—to make the dive with her younger brother. Instead, he turned to an old friend for help.
Before he became a paleobiologist, Jonas Taylor had been the best deep-sea submersible pilot ever to wear the Navy uniform . . . until his last dive in these very waters seven years earlier. Working in a three-man submersible below 33,000 feet, Jonas had suddenly panicked, launching the Navy’s vessel into a rapid emergency ascent. The duress of the maneuver had caused a malfunction in the cabin’s pressurization system and the two scientists on board died. Jonas, the only survivor, claimed he had performed the risky ascent after being confronted by “an enormous, ghost-white shark with a head bigger than the entire sub.”
The Navy diagnosed their prized argonaut with psychosis of the deep. His naval career over, his confidence shot, Jonas set out to prove to the world that he was not crazy, that the unexplored 1,550-mile-long gorge was indeed inhabited by Carcharodon megalodon—a sixty-foot, prehistoric version of a great white shark, an ancient predator long thought extinct.
Masao cared little about Jonas’s bizarre theories. What he needed was a second deep-sea pilot to accompany his son on a salvage operation. Forced to confront his fears, Jonas accepted the mission, but only because he was convinced he could recover an unfossilized white Megalodon tooth—proof that the creatures were still alive.
What he found was a nightmare that would haunt him the rest of his days.
Jonas Taylor was right: The deep waters of the Mariana Trench contained an array of undiscovered life forms comprising part of an ancient food chain dependent on chemicals originating from hydrothermal vents. These volcanic pumps created a tropical bottom layer capped off a mile above the sea floor by an insulating silty plume of debris. For tens of millions of years, this isolated habitat had been a haven for prehistoric sea life, its deadly pressures discouraging man from venturing into its forbidden depths.
After an hour’s descent in suffocating darkness, Jonas and D.J.’s one-man subs managed to penetrate the hydrothermal plume and were soon tracking down one of the damaged UNIS robots. The titanium shell had been crushed, but what Jonas had taken to be a white tooth was merely the severed arm of an albino starfish. Feeling the fool, he assisted D.J. in digging out the half-buried seismic device.
But the vibrations created by the sub’s robotic arms reverberated sound waves throughout the underwater canyon, attracting a forty-five-foot male Megalodon. D.J. was attacked and killed when his sub imploded, while the Meg became hopelessly entangled in the sub’s retrieval cable. As the surface ship unwittingly hauled the entrapped beast topside, an even larger Meg—a pregnant female—showed up and attacked its struggling mate, following its gushing trail of blood topside.
Because of Man’s intrusion into the abyss, history’s most dangerous predatory species had been released from its 100,000-year purgatory.
The Tanaka Institute was charged with the task of hunting down the female. Their goal: to quarantine the monster within the whale lagoon. Jonas was eventually forced to kill the Meg, but one of the female’s surviving pups was captured and raised in Masao’s cetacean facility.
COME SEE
ANGEL: THE ANGEL OF
DEATH
TWO SHOWS DAILY
ALWAYS YOUR MONEY’S WORTH!
Over the years, Angel had grown into a seventy-four-foot-long, seventy-thousand-pound monster, her presence attracting millions of visitors. Jonas and Terry were married. And then, one day, Angel broke through the giant steel doors of her canal and escaped, making her way across the Pacific to the Mariana Trench, returning to her species’ ancient habitat to mate.
Two decades later, the creature would find its way back home to California waters to birth a second litter of pups in the man-made lagoon.
Masao died tragically in the interim, but Angel’s return gave his institute a new lease on life. With help from the state of California, the Tanaka Lagoon once again became the most popular tourist attraction in the world.
But success is fleeting, bringing its own innate set of problems. Running an aquarium as large as “Angel’s Lair” required an extensive staff: marine biologists and animal husbandry specialists to care for the Meg as well as her new pups; an environmental team charged with maintaining the lagoon and the new Meg Pen; and administrators and public relations staff, security and food handlers. Working with a fully mature, fifty-one-ton Megalodon and her five offspring created its own unique challenges, where any mistake could be a fatal one.
The Lexus turns right onto Masao Tanaka Way, a private drive that leads to the aquarium’s grounds. Jonas pulls around three lines of cars seeking entrance into the facility, turning down an access road for the staff lot.
Several dozen protestors wearing Army fatigues were carrying signs in blood-red paint that read: FREE THE SHARKS; MEG-A-TORTURERS; and MONEY + EXPLOITATION = CRUELTY. Recognizing Jonas’s car, the picketers swarm in, hurling raw eggs and insults. Bodies press against the windows, rocking the sedan, threatening to roll it over.
A thin Hispanic woman in her late thirties, wearing a red tee-shirt featuring dead, finless sharks lying on a pier, presses her bra-less chest against David’s window as she yells an expletive-filled diatribe about slaughtering the shark population.
“What is wrong with these people? The Institute isn’t about killing sharks. We protect them!”
“All I know is that these assholes are making me late.” Danielle leans over and honks the car horn, alerting a team of security guards. Armed with tasers, they rush out of their booth, scattering the crowd.
Jonas rolls down his window to speak with the head of security. “I thought these bozos were told they had to stay outside the main entrance.”
“Yes, sir. The cops have already been here twice. They issued citations. Even hauled a few of them off. But they just pay the bail money and are back out here in a couple of hours. Local TV crew was out here earlier. I think it just encourages them. Maybe you ought to sic Angel on ‘em, huh?”
Dani leans over her father. “What TV station? It wasn’t Channel 5, was it?”
Jonas cuts her off. “Don’t taser anyone—” he winks “—at least not while the film crews are around.” He seals his window and drives on to the staff lot, recently enclosed with chain-link fence.
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!”
“Sweet Jesus.” Jonas grabs the walkie-talkie from its charger on his wife’s desk. “Dani, get out of there. Clear the deck! Dani, can you hear me? Dani!”
Danielle Taylor’s earpiece is tucked snugly inside her shirt collar; she can hear nothing but the echo of cheers and groans as the Meg races around the oval tank like a mad bull. The lagoon is essentially a giant bathtub, the female’s moving mass creating an ever-increasing ebb and flow that lifts a mountainous swell at one end of the tank, a retreating valley at the other, the inertia building, each swell growing exponentially higher until . . .
Dani backs away from her perch beneath the A-frame, falling, stumbling over the concrete base as an eighteen-foot wall of water rolls out of the tank, its towering crest blocking the arena lights from her view.
Sound disappears, followed by an intense ocean roar as Danielle Taylor is lifted off her feet and launched backwards over the suddenly submerged deck, her head striking the concrete riser in the second row. The wave pounds the south bleachers and blasts skyward, drenching the audience twenty rows up with bone-chilling water and foam before its backwash, an eight-foot, retreating torrent, rolls back into the lagoon, dragging the Institute’s two guest handlers with it.
Submerged beneath the wave, Andy Murch, a staff photographer at Shark Diver magazine, claws at the concrete sea wall, his left hand somehow maintaining its grip on painted cinder-block as he fights and kicks like mad against the powerful current, trying to outlast the wave before it sweeps him into the lagoon. Just as the water level recedes, he’s struck by the floundering figure of the second guest handler, twenty-one-year-old Jason Francis, a varsity soccer player at usc.
The crowd gasps as the two men surface in the south end of Angel’s Lair.
Having heard his best friend yelling to Dani over the walkie-talkie, James “Mac” Mackriedes races out of his office in the new Meg Pen annex and out onto the lagoon’s main deck, confronted by chaos.
Two men in orange handler jump suits are floundering in the water.
Drenched fans in the lower southern bowl seats are climbing over people in the upper rows to get to higher ground—
—while in the main tank, Angel is riding a two-story swell that could easily wash her over the five-foot sea wall and twenty feet of decking—all that separates the lagoon’s waters from the Meg Pen.
Mac holds his breath, watching as the albino creature submerges a split second before the wave crashes against the sea wall, the wall of water rolling across the northern deck and into the Meg Pen.
Hurrying to an equipment closet, Mac grabs a rescue ring and rope from a hook—
—while on the far side of the arena, Jonas exits the eastern stairwell. Slogging through ankle-deep water, he searches for his daughter.
Three stories up, his wife shouts commands to him over the walkie-talkie, “Jonas, I see her! She’s in Section D, in one of the front rows.”
Jonas rushes to Dani. Cradling his unconscious daughter in his arms, he looks up, bracing his legs against the aluminum bleacher in front of him as another swell—this one even higher than the last—breaches the lagoon sea wall. Pinching Dani’s nose while maintaining mouth-to-mouth, Jonas breathes air into his oldest child’s lungs as the wave crashes atop the concrete deck and submerges them.
He holds on, closing his eyes as the surge threatens to rip him from his refuge.
Finally, the wave recedes, dissipating across the deck and returning the evening light.
Jonas struggles to his feet. Dani is breathing, but her head is bleeding badly. He yells into his radio for an ambulance before carrying his daughter out of the southern end of the arena, racing to get out of the bowl before the next swell arrives.
Terry drops the walkie-talkie and dials 911 on her office phone.
David grabs the radio, changing frequencies. “Dr. Stelzer, it’s David! Angel’s going berserk! Shut off the acoustics, now!”
Mac emerges from the equipment room with a life ring and a hundred feet of towline, his eyes searching the lagoon’s chaotic waters for the two missing men.
Jason and Andy are being dragged toward the center of the tank, struggling to tread water in a tumultuous sea, unable to reach the eastern wall as the water level beneath them suddenly drops from its eighty-foot depth to a mere forty-five. At the northern end of the tank, Angel is knifing beneath the surface, catching up to a thirty-foot wall of water rolling towards the Meg Pen.
The crowd gasps as the wave washes over the northern sea wall into the juvenile’s tank, beaching Angel as it recedes. Caught by surprise, the fifty-one-ton shark flounders like a giant eel along the flooded deck until she manages to slide back inside the lagoon.
Shaking its head, the stunned creature draws in mouthfuls of sea to breathe—
—as the reverberations in her brain suddenly cease. The predator calms. She zigs, then zags, regaining her senses, which immediately lock onto the heartbeats of the two life forms that have entered her domain.
Mac runs along the eastern sea wall to get a closer shot at the two men. The crowd noise beckons him to turn around.
The white dorsal fin rises like a sail as the Megalodon heads for the southern end of the tank.
Christ, she sees them.
Andy and Jason see the telltale dorsal fin, too . . . just before it disappears beneath another rolling mountain of water. They start swimming toward Mac, who throws the life ring at them, the nylon rope feeding out sixty feet.
Jason is closest to the ring. The college senior lunges for it and holds on for dear life, hooking his elbow around the doughnut-shaped flotation device. Mac tows him in, guiding the ring towards the second man.
Andy swims for Jason and the rope, missing both as he’s lifted by the approaching swell and washed away.
Hand over hand Mac takes up the slack. Staff members rush in to help, their combined effort propelling the usc student-athlete rapidly along the surface of the water . . . like bait on a hook.
Gliding just beneath the surface, Angel rolls sideways onto her left flank, her primordial senses locked in on the fleeing intruder. Her mouth opens, exposing a band of pink gum line and rows of seven-inch teeth.
A bizarre sensation rushes through Jason Bruce Francis’s mind as his body suddenly becomes lighter. Maintaining his grip on the flotation device, he bounces along the surface before going airborne, his body lifted over the sea wall and let down onto the flooded deck—
—while back in the tank, everything below his waist is devoured and swallowed.
Lying on the ground, going into shock, a relieved Jason looks up at Mac and smiles. “Man, that was a close one, huh?” he says . . . as a tide of blood drains from the dead man’s face and out his open chest cavity onto the deck.
Back in the lagoon, Andy Murch is lifted over the southern sea wall by the dying fifteen-foot swell and tossed sideways into the fourth row of seats. Barely conscious, he wraps his arms around the aluminum bleacher and holds on until the wave recedes over his head, and the evening sky returns its breath of cold night air.
Angel hovers near the bottom of the lagoon. Her appetite teased by the morsel of food still caught in her teeth, she circles back into the southern end of the tank and rises. The emotionally spent crowd lets out a collective gasp as the monster’s enormous head and upper torso rise surreally out of the water. The Megalodon’s upper jaw hyperextends as it opens, its retracting gum line, stained red with Jason Francis’s remains, exposing a murderous upper row of triangular teeth that snatches the swaying side of beef like a steel bear trap striking a wild pig. Screams ripple through the arena as Angel whips her garage-size head back and forth on the iron support chain until she rips the entire carcass loose.
The A-frame snaps back on its base. The 102,000-pound predator falls sideways into the water, soaking the already-frazzled crowd in the lower bowl seats once more.
The audience swoons. A few applaud, then are silenced by the sheer horror of what they have just witnessed.
COME SEE
ANGEL: THE ANGEL OF
DEATH
TWO SHOWS DAILY
ALWAYS YOUR MONEY’S WORTH!