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—

—engulfing its prey whole!

Disoriented, suddenly cloaked in darkness, yet still very much alive, Lana fights to swim back to what she believes is the surface against a steady flow of water streaming in from Bela’s partially open jaws. She flails, prone in the suffocating pitch, slicing her hands against a sharp object, her bare feet pressing against something that feels like rubbery sandpaper. Convinced she has stepped on one of the Megalodon’s backs, she kicks wildly, her lungs on fire—

—only to be driven chest-first against the Meg’s tongue by the roof of Bela’s mouth. Pinned down, the Megalodon’s tongue heaves Lana Wood sideways in the muted blackness—

—unseen daggers puncturing her flesh! Her cries are stifled by an ungodly embrace that crushes her existence into pulp and releases her soul to a heavenly light, even as Bela’s tongue guides her physical remains into hell.

Unable to see over the dark swells, Max never witnesses his grandmother’s demise. Caught within Bela’s undertow, the boy is dragged back toward the yacht snatched from the sea by Blair Bates. The Hell’s Angel releases the child to the deck, fighting to catch his own breath.

“You okay, kid?”

Max nods, still in shock. “Where’s Nana?”

“Help! Somebody help me!”

Bates and several crewmen hurry forward to the yacht’s bow. Shannon Jenkins is treading water by the anchor windlass, the boat’s freeboard far too high for her to reach up and grab onto the rail. “What is wrong with you people? Didn’t anyone hear me screaming?”

The camerawoman is helped on board as a Coast Guard cutter appears from the south, its lights flashing. Danielle Taylor is in the bridge, wrapped in a wool blanket, her mother, Terry, by her side.

A three-hour search for Lana Wood will yield nothing. By daylight, the news is everywhere, the incident shockingly reminiscent of the tragic drowning of her beloved sister, Natalie, decades earlier.

By noon Pacific Time, the developing story will continue with the arrests of Sara Toms and Jessica Thompson. Within hours, manslaughter will be added to the R.A.W. founders’ growing list of charges as the remains of Virgil Carmen are pulled from the Tanaka Lagoon’s main drain.

A small craft advisory is issued. Surfing beaches are closed, all diving ceased until further notice. Boat captains and fishermen are asked to report any shark sightings immediately to the Coast Guard, with he licop ters added to patrol the shoreline.

None of these precautions will prove necessary. Freed from the confines of their birthplace, the two Megalodon siblings have gone deep, following the abyssal terrain of the Monterey Bay Canyon to open water, far away from the lingering scent of their dominant mother.