18.
Tanaka Oceanographic Institute
Monterey, California
The morning is overcast and gray, the air a chilly fifty-six degrees. Virgil Carmen stands just inside the open cabin in the stern of the forty-two-foot dive boat, trying not to appear nervous to the two men in wetsuits who are checking their scuba equipment on the tank racks.
Fran Rizzuto is with the boat captain in the flybridge, her walkie-talkie positioned on her jacket close to her right shoulder, her cell phone in her left breast pocket. The boat is moving south along the coast at fifteen knots, the empty arena on the eastern horizon, the rectangular outline of barbed wire that marks the canal just coming into view.
“Easy, Captain, nice and easy. Let’s not agitate her any more than we have to.”
The captain pulls back on the twin throttles, dropping his speed to three knots as he approaches the canal.
Virgil covers his nose as plumes of blue exhaust kick up from the twin 385-horsepower Cat engines. Swells lift and drop the boat, pushing them ever closer to the barbed wire coil barrier less than ninety feet away.
The captain reverses his engines, backing them toward the gated underwater entrance.
Beyond the barbed wire, a resounding slap echoes across the surface—a warning from the agitated predator’s caudal fin.
Virgil’s heart races. Sweat pours down both sides of his face.
Sixty feet . . . fifty. Jesus, that’s enough!
“Weigh anchor.” Fran’s voice startles him. He watches as the anchor line feeds out over the side, securing their position just outside the submerged steel doors.
The engines are silenced. Waves lap at the swaying fiberglass hull.
A deep boom, like distant thunder, rattles his bones.
The two divers look at one another. Ed Hendricks smiles nervously at his companion, Carlos Salinas. “She’s just letting us know we’re uninvited guests.”
“I hope she doesn’t like Mexican food.”
Fran climbs down from the flybridge. “You boys ready? Let’s check your communicators.”
The two men secure their full-face dive masks to their heads. “Testing. Can you read us?”
Fran adjusts the volume on the walkie-talkie. “Loud and clear. Virgil, start the pump.”
Bolted to the floor of the dive cabin is a hydraulic pump with an eight-inch intake hose and matching outflow, all connected to a seventy-five-pound slurry feed bucket. Virgil slips a gas mask over his face as he empties a fifty-pound bag of Finquel MS-222 into the bucket. He adds water to the white powdery anesthetic, mixes the elixir with an oar, then starts the machine.
The two divers secure their air tanks and buoyancy control vests, adjust their weight belts, then carry their fins down to the swim platform. Sitting on the edge, they slip their feet into their fins, the rolling Pacific rocking them from side to side.
Fran unwinds slack from the rubber outflow hose and walks it out to the divers. With a thumbs-up, the two men ease themselves into the water and submerge, dragging the length of hose with them.
Ed Hendricks, big and muscular, sucks in shallow breaths as he kicks toward the steel barrier looming thirty feet ahead. Married, with a teenage daughter getting ready to graduate from high school, Hendricks is an experienced diver who has open dived with great whites off the coast of South Africa. He has never feared the water . . . until now.
The two divers level out at sixty feet then slowly begin swimming to the barrier, their hearts racing faster as the doors loom into view. Twenty feet away, Hendricks can see through the array of pores ventilating the face of the algae-covered steel, the Pacific blue peeking through—
—suddenly brightening to an ivory white.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Carlos’s voice rattles in his ears as Angel rises into view from behind the massive barrier, her presence causing both divers to hover in their tracks.
“Ed . . . I can’t do this!”
“I can’t!”
“Carlos, she can feel your pulse racing. She can sense everything. Slow and easy movements. Pass me the hose, I’ll do the dirty work. Frannie, can you hear me?”
“Yes, Ed.”
“Start the anesthetic.”
A twenty-second delay, then the hose jumps to life, becoming rigid as a milky-white substance pours out from its open end.
Securing the hose beneath his right armpit, gripping it tightly with both hands, Ed swims to the door, aiming for a line of holes close to Angel’s mouth.
Whump!
The resounding wallop seems to penetrate his bones. Hendricks kicks harder, his muscles like lead as he reaches the door, its surface slick with seaweed. Each vent hole varies in size, from basketball-size pores to the occasional oval hole, large enough for a man’s shoulders to squeeze through.
Avoiding the larger holes, he peeks through a smaller orifice—
—as a white blur bashes against the steel facing to his left, an SUV-size snout momentarily widening the six-inch gap between the two sealed doors.
The brain-rattling impact nearly sends Hendricks into shock. In a state of panic, he releases the hose and swims away—
—colliding with Carlos. “Easy, amigo.”
“D—Damn, she’s big.”
Carlos pulls up slack on the hose until he retrieves its gushing end. “We’ll do this together, okay?”
They swim the hose back to the door, shoving the free end into one of the holes.
Angel presses her snout against the enclosure, the seventy-four-foot shark enraged at the presence of the two seal-like creatures. Moving back and forth along the door, the caged animal rubs her nose raw against the algae-coated steel panels—
—her nostrils suddenly inhaling an alien, pungent scent. Her movements slow, her jaws going slack as the incoming current pushes a steady stream of the alluring chemical into her open mouth.
The pounding slows, then stops.
Angel hovers in sixty feet of water, her snout pressed against the doors. Her caudal fin slows, churning the sea in long, heavy strokes.
Then the tail stops moving, and the big female sinks.
The two divers descend with her, relocating the hose as they follow her to the bottom. She lands upright on her pectoral fins, her head remaining poised against the steel door eighty-seven feet below the surface, her lighter tail reaching up into the shallows at a thirty-degree angle.
“She’s out! Stand by!” Ed locates the nearest large oval pore and peeks in at the sleeping behemoth. His confidence returning, he unhooks his BCD vest and pushes it through the hole, following his air tank inside the canal.
Carlos feeds him the tube through another pore. Ed pulls the slack through then gently swims toward the cavernous mouth, now hanging open like a jagged crevice in a mountainside. Slowly, carefully, he eases the gushing hose inside the slack jaw between two lower side teeth, his pulse pounding.
Hendricks remains by the mouth an excruciating forty seconds longer until the milky-white substance begins bleeding out of the Megalodon’s fluttering gill slits.
Leaving the hose in place, he swims forward to Angel’s eye—
—which has rolled back into the skull, only the bloodshot white sclera showing. Thank you, God. “One fifty-ton monster, sleeping like a lamb. Hey, Frannie, you tell Jonas I want a raise!”
Jonas hears the message in his ear as he, Mac, and six staff members lower his daughter’s twenty-one-foot, fifteen-hundred-pound sports utility ski boat from its portable winch onto a skiff that angles from the lagoon’s eastern sea wall down into the water. Resting in the speedboat’s open bow is the benthic surgical chamber: a domed, clear-acrylic, rectangular affair the approximate size of two coffins positioned side by side. Next to the device, lying on one of the seats is a porous canvass tool bag containing the components for the Meg’s relay antenna.
Fran’s voice squawks over Jonas’s earpiece, “J.T., the patient’s ready.”
“On our way.” Jonas and Mac climb into the speed boat, chosen for its 250-horsepower EFI outboard, capable of hitting speeds of up to 70 miles an hour.
Mac guns the engine and they’re off, the boat racing across the lagoon into the canal, both men wearing wetsuits and scuba gear.
The boat slows as they approach the barbed wire barrier. Mac cuts the engine, allowing them to drift, the two men looking over the side at the pale object resting off the bottom.
Mac looks around. “Potential problem: We can’t drop anchor and we can’t let the boat drift while we’re down there.”
Jonas nods. “Okay. You stay with the boat. I can handle this myself.”
“Agreed.”
“Agreed? Really? No argument?”
“Hey, if you say you can handle it, you can handle it. Who am I to question your ability?”
Both men jump in their seats as a diver surfaces close by. Hendricks yells at them through his mask’s communication device. “Get that goddam surgical thing-a-ma-jig in the water now, before I shit my wetsuit!”
Jonas straps his dive mask and flippers on then quietly lowers himself over the side. Mac hands him his tool bag, waits until Jonas has secured it around his waist, and then eases the acrylic chamber overboard into the two divers’ hands.
The contraption is open along the bottom, its sides outfitted with a thick, pliable rubber housing and snag bolts. Its clear, domed interior supports three, pencil-thin cameras along with a series of retractable robotic surgical arms, one of which is gripping the neural implant. Attached to one end of the rectangular housing is a small hydraulic pump.
The weight distribution of the object causes it to flip over as it sinks. Jonas and Hendricks each grab an end, guiding it down sixty-seven feet—
—moving it into place atop the sleeping Megalodon’s massive skull.
Less than a mile away, images from the chamber’s three exterior cameras appear over three computer screens located in the Tanaka Institute’s lab. Jonathan Stelzer monitors the images, while Dr. Nichols sits at the primary control station of the da Vinci Surgical System, both hands resting in two hand controls fitted with finger-hole sleeves. Leaning forward, he looks through a three-dimensional view-master that allows him to zoom in or pull back on any of the surgical chamber’s three cameras.
“Gentlemen, can you hear me?”
“Go ahead,” Jonas replies, tension in his voice.
“There are two bumps located atop the Meg’s skull, the supraorbital crests. Position the chamber so it rests dead-center of these two processes, with the front end located approximately six feet behind the tip of the snout.”
“Did you have to say dead-center?”
“Sorry.”
“Okay, we’re in position.”
“Excellent. Lock her down.”
Jonas and Hendricks press down on the chamber so its rubber housing is squeezed securely against Angel’s thick albino hide. Snag bolts, made of biodegradable plastic, puncture the skin, drawing whiffs of blood as they draw the chamber in tighter, ensuring a watertight seal.
“You sure she can’t feel this?”
“Absolutely sure. Mr. Hendricks, start draining the chamber. Jonas, you have your own work to do.”
Jonas offers Hendricks a thumbs-up before swimming past the gills and dorsal fin, ascending along Angel’s torso toward the immense half-moon-shaped tail, now angled toward the surface.
Ed Hendricks activates the hydraulic pump, which quickly drains the acrylic chamber. A few seconds pass, then he watches in amazement as one of the surgical arms jumps to life, a whirring, ten-inch buzz saw that extends down from the appendage, its teeth carving a razor-thin, longitudinal incision deep into the alabaster hide—
—while a second surgical device, equipped with a tiny camera and light, rinses off the bleeding wound with saltwater. The buzz saw completes the sixty-inch cut then realigns itself, beginning a second incision six feet away, parallel to the first.
Aided by the current, Jonas rises past the towering dorsal fin. He ascends another twenty feet before arriving at the Megalodon’s powerful caudal keel. The secondary dorsal fin is located just forward of the muscular tail section—an equilateral triangle of flesh the size of a small child. Straddling Angel’s back, Jonas removes the antenna from his tool bag. The cylinder, approximately three feet long, is attached to an eight-inch-square, rubber faceplate, its four holes holding four plastic screws. Jonas fishes out his underwater drill, clips it to his weight belt, then lines the faceplate up against the surface of the small dorsal fin. Pressing the Phillips’ head screw bit to the first screw head, he squeezes the trigger.
Instead of puncturing the skin, the screw chews into the thick hide, twisting the tough muscle—
—the pain causing the half-moon-shaped tail to suddenly flick!
Jonas stops the drill, his heart beating so hard in his chest that he fears he’s about to go into cardiac arrest. “Hey, Dr. Nichols . . . small problem here.”
“I’m a little busy, Jonas. Can you handle it?”
“Yeah, sure. Sorry to disturb you, but Angel’s reacting to the faceplate.”
“Define reacting?”
“Her tail’s flicking. The screw twisted up under her skin when I used the drill. She can feel it, and she doesn’t like it. Suggestions?”
“Don’t use the drill. Use a screwdriver.”
Jonas searches his tool bag, his limbs quivering. “Don’t have one. Mac?”
“Stand by, I can see your air bubbles. I’ll toss one overboard.”
Virgil Carmen watches as the slurry bucket drains the last of the chalky anesthetic into the hydraulic pump. Returning to the supply rack, he retrieves another fifty-pound bag of tricaine methanesulfonate, shocked to discover it’s the last bag on the shelf.
“Hey, Fran. I’m on the last bag of Finquel.”
Fran Rizzuto climbs down from her perch. “That’s impossible. We brought twice the dosage needed. How could you be out?”
“How can I be out?” Virgil tears open the last bag and dumps the powder into the slurry bucket. “Maybe someone miscalculated.”
Fran searches the shelves then goes below, dragging out another large bag, this one marked QS.
“Quinaldine sulfate? Frannie, are you crazy? She’ll be a terror when she comes out of it . . . if she comes out of it.”
“Mix it with diazepam.”
“I didn’t bring any.”
“Dammit!” She turns her back on him, calling into her radio. “Dr. Nichols, how much longer?”
“Don’t bother me, I’m operating!” His face pressed against the viewfinder, Brent Nichols remotely manipulates the buzz saw, completing a transverse incision, which connects the first two parallel cuts. Switching to a robotic forceps, he carefully grips the edge of the excised skin and pulls the six-inch-thick flap towards the Megalodon’s snout, Dr. Selby assists with a second clamp, rolling back the fifty-two-inch-long, ninety-pound section of skin and muscle. Armed with a scalpel, Dr. Nichols shears away the remaining connective tissue as he exposes a smooth layer of underlying cartilage.
“Dr. Selby, secure the skin flap while I slice through her skull.”
It takes the biologist another few minutes to surgically remove the two-inch-thick section of cartilage. Adjusting his camera angle, Nichols pans out, revealing the inner workings of the creature’s brain.
“Magnificent . . .”
Unlike a human brain, the Megalodon’s brain is long and thin, spread out across the cranial cavity like an inverted Y, the extensions reaching out to the nostrils and olfactory bulbs, as well as a labyrinth of nerve cells located in the snout.
Dr. Nichols stares at the anatomical design in awe.
Stelzer nudges him. “They’re running out of anesthetic.”
“Right.” Switching controls, he manipulates the robotic appendage gripping the neural implant, positioning the device so that it rests atop the brain’s Y junction. One eighteen-inch-long, wire-thin electrode at a time, he begins connecting the device to various surfaces of the predator’s brain.
Fran Rizzuto and Virgil Carmen stare at the empty slurry bucket.
“That’s not good.”
“No shit. Keep pumping water.” Fran speaks into her radio, “Jonas, how much longer?”
“Stand by, Fran.” The packet of screwdrivers, attached to the fishing line, is being pushed inland by the current. Jonas swims out to it, tearing it from its barbed hook—
—slicing open his right thumb in the process. He curses as blood trickles from the open wound. Pinching the cut, he kicks hard against the incoming tide just to get back to the base of the tail.
Mac’s voice chirps over his ear piece. “Jonas, did you get the screwdrivers?”
“I got them, and a nasty cut from your damn hook.”
“Thank me later. I just got off the radio with the guys who tag great whites in Baja. They advise that you line up the faceplate then drill four pilot holes with the quarter-inch bit. Use the bolts and nuts in your tool bag. They say it’s far less invasive than a screw.”
“Okay. Thanks.” Jonas reaches into his tool bag. Retrieving a bit, he locks it in the drill. Lining up the faceplate, he drills a quarter-inch hole through the secondary dorsal fin, his eyes never leaving Angel’s tail.
No movement.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he quickly drills two more holes, then slowly removes the screw twisted into the flesh and re-drills that hole as well. Feeling into the tool bag, he locates four ten-inch plastic bolts and four matching nuts. One by one, he inserts the bolts and tightens the nuts down against the opposite side of the fin by hand.
Brent Nichols wipes sweat from his forehead as he sits back, admiring his handy work. “All electrodes connected. Preparing to close. Wish we could test this thing first. We always tested them with the hammerheads and nurse sharks.”
“Brent, this isn’t a frickin’ nurse shark! We’ve got divers in the water—”
“Okay, okay. Ready with the clamp.” Using the forceps, he assists Dr. Stelzer in adhering the severed section of upper skull in place with glue. Satisfied the cartilage will hold and mend, the two marine biologists proceed to roll the heavy section of skin back in place. Dr. Nichols then begins the arduous task of suturing the incisions—
—while Jonathan Stelzer injects the surgical area with a combination of anti-inflammatories and antibiotics.
Ed Hendricks is positioned above the surgical chamber. Fascination quells fear as he witnesses a robotic appendage stitch a bleeding flap of skin using a fourteen-inch titanium needle, the sutures made from Megalodon intestine taken from Angelica’s remains.
“Ed, how much longer?”
“I don’t know, Frannie. They’re suturing the incisions now. Five, maybe six minutes. Plus another two to flood the chamber and release the device. Carlos, what’s happening at your end?”
Perspiration pours down Carlos Salinas’s face, creating a small pool inside his face mask as he keeps the saltwater feeder tube in place between Angel’s slack jaws. “Man, it’s been at least fifteen minutes since I saw white stuff coming out of the monster’s gills.”
“Any sign she’s coming out of it?”
“How the hell should I know? Do I look like a vet?”
“Check her eyes.”
“Her eyes. Yeah.” Leaving the tube wedged between two lower teeth, Carlos swims forward to check on the Meg’s left eye.
The blue-gray pupil has rolled back in place—
—staring at him!
Carlos’s voice deserts him as his throat constricts in primal fear. His limbs refuse to move though his mind is screaming at them to do so.
Angel sees what appears in her blurred vision as a juvenile sea elephant. She continues to breathe water without exerting herself, the veil cloaking her senses slowly clearing, yet not quite enough to awaken her muscles.
The realization that he is still alive breaks Carlos’s momentary paralysis. He kicks his fins, propelling himself past the Megalodon’s open mouth to the steel door in seconds flat—
—his wake causing the saltwater hose to slip from out of Angel’s mouth.
Forgetting to remove his BCD vest and air tank, Carlos forces his way through the shoulder-width hole, wheezing breaths from his mask as he attempts to shout a warning to Ed Hendricks. “She’s . . . awake! Get out . . . she’s—”
“What did you say?” Hendricks looks up in time to see Carlos disappearing through a slime-covered hole in the door. His heart racing, the diver abandons his post and swims like mad for the barrier.
With the jet stream no longer delivering water into Angel’s mouth, the Megalodon’s gills stop fluttering. Seconds pass without a breath, triggering an internal alarm. The creature’s core temperature suddenly jumps, releasing a burst of adrenaline that causes the thick red muscles running the length of her back to spasm—
—tossing Jonas from his mount as he finishes tightening the antenna’s last bolt.
“She’s awake! Carlos, Ed, get the hell out of there!”
Jonas swims for the surface only to be swatted aside by the thirty-foot caudal fin.
The Megalodon propels itself forward, ramming a mouthful of seawater into her gills—
—just as Ed Hendricks reaches the door.
The diver can feel the gargantuan presence bearing down on him. In a state of panic, he tries to ram his shoulders and air tank through a steel hole that is far too small. He kicks and squirms, the slick algae allowing him to twist his way through to his waist—
—just as Angel’s snout bashes into the barrier, her front row of teeth clamping down upon the base of his air tank and through both his legs. The punctured gas cylinder explodes—
—propelling him through the hole and out the other side in a burst of air bubbles and blood.
Forty feet from the surface, Carlos’s eardrums register the disturbance. He turns, long enough to see his friend sinking toward the bottom in a cloud of blood. Instinct blotting out fear, he releases air from his BCD vest, and plunges after his friend’s body. He grabs Ed’s arm, still full of life, over-inflates his vest, and rockets to the surface.
Angel shakes her mammoth head, the collision with the steel barrier causing her numbed ampullae of Lorenzini to tingle. For several moments she hovers by the door, her nostrils still registering acidic scents from the anesthetic, unaware that the remains of Ed Hendricks’s severed legs are caught in her upper front teeth like a pair of human cigars.
Blood rises from the amputated appendages, inhaled by her nostrils like smoke. The scent revives the Meg. Banking slowly along the steel doors she turns, heading back toward the canal entrance—
—her lateral line detecting an intruder.
Mac cranks the speed boat in tight circles as he yells frantically into his face mask, “Jonas, where the hell are you? Jonas—”
“Forty feet beneath you! Stop moving the damn boat!”
“I have to move the boat! Drop your weight belt and get the hell up here. Your girl’s awake!”
Jonas releases his weight belt, kicking hard for the surface.
Angel rises directly beneath him like an ivory dirigible.
“Mac, she’s coming up right behind me! There’s no way I can get in the boat that quick!”
“Don’t! Grab the rope!” Mac tosses the water ski rope behind the boat. “Say when!”
Jonas kicks for the red and white wooden handle bobbing above his head along the surface . . . grabs it!
“Go!”
Mac jams the throttle down, the bow kicking out of the water as the 250-horsepower engine launches the speed boat ahead, nearly yanking Jonas’s arms out of their sockets as he’s dragged across the surface like a human torpedo.
Angel’s eyes roll back in her head, momentarily blinding her as she bites down on empty sea. Detecting the boat, she levels out to give chase, her muscles, still feeling the affects of the anesthetic, struggling to move.
Jonas rolls onto his back, propping his feet and fins in the air as he’s whipped and bounced over the speed boat’s wake doing thirty knots.
Mac glances over his shoulder, relieved to see that his friend is still there, the Meg still back at the canal doors. He throttles down, afraid of going too fast lest he lose Jonas. “Hold on, pal, we’ll be on dry land in a second.”
Jonas grits his teeth as the boat races into the lagoon, then veers for the floating ramp—
—driving straight over the angled Astroturf surface, its fiberglass hull skidding across the concrete deck.
Jonas’s butt slides across the ramp at fifteen knots. Releasing the rope, he curls himself up in a ball and rolls to a dead stop in front of a concession stand. For a long moment he just lies on the blessed dry deck, analyzing his injuries. Scuffed elbows . . . knee hurts like hell . . . not too bad. “Mac?”
Mac sits up in the speedboat’s bow. The two men look at one another and suddenly convulse in wild laughter, the joy of still being alive making them giddy. “J.T., we have got to stop doing this shit.”
“Agreed. Maybe we can sell Amway?”
“I was actually thinking about opening a strip club for seniors.”
“Early bird specials. I like it.”
“Jonas? It’s Fran—”
“Fran, we’re okay—”
“We need an ambulance—make it a chopper! Ed lost both legs. He’s bleeding out. We’ll be at the dock in two minutes!”
Jonas sits up. The dive boat races past the canal as a white dorsal fin slips beneath the waves. I hate you, Angel . . . I really hate you.