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?”

“About 320 million years.”

“Oh. Is that all?”

Dr. Al Hashemi smiles. “It’s incredibly exciting, don’t you agree? A lost world, preserving the most dangerous life forms ever to have existed.”

Mac looks at the geologist and shrugs. “I’m just a working stiff, pal. The shelf and the ancient sea . . . sure, that I can believe. But these other monsters? I mean, granted, Jonas did find a Megalodon population inhabiting the Mariana Trench—”

“—along with a subspecies of Kronosaurus,” adds bin Rashidi.

Jonas turns his attention back to the bathymetric chart. “Megalodon only disappeared between ten and a hundred thousand years ago. The Kronosaurus . . . I always considered their survival more of a fluke of nature, sort of like the Coelacanth. But these species?”

“Look at the common variables,” Al Hashemi says. “Survival over eons of time is a matter of adaptation combined with circumstantial luck. There have been several mass extinctions that wiped out land and sea creatures alike since the Devonian Age. For any species to survive that long would require a vast isolated habitat possessing a perpetually replenishing food chain. This particular area, which Dr. Maren called the Panthalassa Sea, is contained beneath a five-thousand-square-mile geological ceiling, isolating and protecting its inhabitants from sudden environmental changes resulting from volcanism, asteroid strikes, ice ages. If the Coelacanth managed to defy the odds in the isolated deep waters off the coast of Africa, then—”

“The Coelacanth is a fish,” Jonas snaps. “Half the creatures on your wish list began life as air-breathing marine reptiles. Living in the sea is one thing; living beneath it is another. At some juncture they would have had to evolve gills—”

“—just as the kronosaurs you encountered in the Mariana Trench managed to do,” Ibrahim Al Hashemi retorts. “Considering that the first land creatures were once fish like the Coelacanth, reacquiring gills over the last several hundred million years would probably not be a big leap up the evolutionary ladder.”

“What about the food supply down there?” Mac asks.

“The entire region is volcanically active,” answers Dr. Al Hashemi. “We believe there are vast hydrothermal vent fields down there, using chemosynthesis as a basis to sustain a thriving, diverse food chain.”

“There is also evidence of high levels of methane gas,” offers Dr. al-Muzani. “Dr. Maren’s notes indicate the western section of the Panthalassa Sea may contain more than a thousand square miles of cold seeps.”

A harsh glance from bin Rashidi tempers the geologist’s excitement.

“Cold seeps?” Jonas ponders this new information. “Yes, that would make sense. Cold seeps emit methane and hydrogen sulfide at a slower and far more dependable rate than hydrothermal vents. We’ve discovered huge abyssal communities supported by cold seeps, with prokaryotes—chemo-autotrophic bacteria—processing abundant amounts of chemical energy. Exactly how much methane gas did Maren indicate he discovered down there?”

The geologist looks to bin Rashidi for help.

The cousin of the crown prince waves the matter off. “Impossible to say. But the sonar signatures Maren left behind provide evidence of a variety of life occurring in several different locations beneath the Parece Vela Basin. His notes and drawings go far to theorize what these creatures might be.”

Mac looks again at the chart. “If this ridge ceiling is sealed like you say, how did your genius manage to get his remotely operated vehicles down inside this ancient sea?”

“He discovered a hole in the basin . . . here.” The Dubai geologist points out a red dot located in the southwest section of the basin. “This access point became Maren’s base of operations . . . and ours.”

“Thank you, Dr. al Muzani, that will be all.” Bin Rashidi once again assumes control of the discussion. “Based on Dr. Maren’s findings, along with the recent evidence of the dead Leeds’ fish, the crown prince has generously committed a billion dollars to fund the new Dubai Aquarium and Resort and stock it with these amazing remnants of the prehistoric age. Dr. Taylor, in addition to purchasing two of your Megalodon juveniles, the crown prince has asked me to employ the services of both you and your staff. We also wish to purchase a dozen of your institute’s new Manta Ray submersibles, which we would use to help lure and capture life forms inhabiting this ancient sea. Your field expertise would be invaluable, Dr. Taylor. You and your associate would be extremely well paid for your services.”

Jonas and Mac look at one another . . . and break into hysterical fits of laughter.

Bin Rashidi’s smile disappears.

Mac wipes tears from his eyes. “Oh, baby, that was worth the price of admission.”

Jonas clears his throat. “Forgive me, but after everything we’ve been through, there’s not enough oil in Dubai to convince us to return to that hell hole, especially on a venture having anything to do with Michael Maren.”

“Five million dollars each, gentlemen. Think it through.”

“The old deal or no deal, huh?” Mac fights to control his smile. “Tell you what, toss in a luxury box at Pac Bell Field and a peace treaty between the Israelis and Hamas, and we’ll pack our bags for the Philippine Sea.”

“Mac, enough.”

“I offer you the opportunity of a lifetime and you mock me?” Bin Rashidi signals to his entourage. The four men in dishdashi stand as one to leave—

—until the Arab in the gray business suit speaks to bin Rashidi quietly in Arabic.

Bin Rashidi’s demeanor changes. “Dr. Taylor . . . my colleague requests a moment with you . . . alone. Please, it would be most appreciated.”

“Of course. Again, my apologies.”

The four men in dishdashi exit the room. Jonas nods to Mac, who follows them out, closing the office door behind him.

Jonas turns to the man in the gray suit. “Your Highness, it’s a pleasure.”

The crown prince smiles with his eyes. “You knew?”

“I recognized you from your photos.” Jonas pulls out a thick file from his desk drawer and holds up several State Department photos of the crown prince. “I always like to know who I’m dealing with before any business meeting. Masao taught me that years ago.”

“A wise man. So? As one businessman to another, tell me your opinion in regard to our little venture. Is it feasible, or am I wasting my time and money?”

“Is it feasible? If the creatures Maren claims to have found really exist, then sure, anything’s feasible. What’s puzzling is why you would need my help.”

“You were the one who captured Angel’s mother twenty-five years ago with nothing more than a net and a harpoon. Who better to lead the expedition?”

“For starters, anyone younger. If you haven’t noticed, I passed my prime long ago; moreover, I did my time in hell chasing sea monsters. Besides, you and I both know you’re not really after these creatures. You’re after the methane.”

The crown prince’s eye lose their sparkle.

“Yeah, I know about that, too.” Jonas leans back in his chair. “Philippine basin’s loaded with gas hydrates. Estimates of the Nankai Trough alone exceed 27 trillion cubic meters. The Japanese are already drilling for the stuff, pinpointing locations using Bottom Simulating Reflectors. Maren probably bribed an official for the sediment data.

“No offense, Your Highness, but I’ve traveled down this road before. Twenty years ago, Benedict Singer stole the Institute from Masao in order to gain access to manganese deposits located in the Mariana Trench. The way I figure it, teaming your expedition with our institute buys you the same kind of credibility and backdoor access. Hell, if it works for you go for it; the world certainly needs to get off the fossil fuel needle. But other than selling you two of Angel’s pups and a few of our submersibles, my family and I won’t be a part of your little methane venture. And there’s no wiggle room in my answer.”

“Fair enough. But you are wrong about the aquarium. While it is true the hydrates would subsidize the venture, the aquarium stands on its own virtue. Attracting tourists to my country remains my primary objective, and a new resort featuring such aquatic attractions would certainly accomplish that. The main tanks are already complete, and two refitted oil tankers are on their way to the Philippine Sea as we speak to locate these creatures and capture as many of them as we can. What harm would it do for you to supervise such a venture aboard the lead vessel?”

“Again, Your Highness, you have my final answer. As for the sale of the Meg pups—”

“Mr. bin Rashidi will negotiate the terms and conditions of the two surviving runts.”

“Mary Kate and Ashley? Really? I thought for sure you’d want the sisters.”

“While they are, by far, the more impressive specimens, they are too vicious, making them unpredictable. I may be a risk taker, Dr. Taylor, but I am not a gambler. You have given me your answer, and I must respect your wishes. However, before I leave, I really would like to see Angel. And of course, those wonderful submersibles of yours.”

“I’ll have my son show you the subs. As for Angel, unfortunately, Your Highness, she is also unpredictable. But we’ll do our best to coax her out of the canal.”

“I would be most grateful.”