39.
Aboard the Dubai Land I
Philippine Sea
“What do you mean, the cable snapped?”
“It was an accident, Mr. Mackredies, just as Captain Suits reported.” Fiesal bin Rashidi’s cold, ebony eyes return Mac’s accusing glare. “The lab and Glider made it out of the Panthalassa Sea but remain marooned along the Philippine Sea floor in 7,800 feet of water. We will not send a rescue sub down with another line until we get what we want.”
“David’s running out of air as we speak!”
“Then I advise you to stop speaking and begin instructing your monster. Once the liopleurodon surfaces, we will make the Shinkai available to you to so that you can attach another tow line . . . provided you supply your own crew. Those are my terms, Mr. Mackreides. And I won’t be adding a luxury box at Pac Bell Field or a peace treaty between the Israelis and Hamas.”
Bin Rashidi smiles smugly.
It takes all of Mac’s reserves to keep from bashing the man across his uni-brow with the laptop. He storms out of the wheel house, pushing past Ibrahim Al Hashemi.
Bin Rashidi turns to the marine biologist. “The harpoon gun loaded with the tagging device . . . it is operational?”
“Yes. Mounted in the trawler’s bow.”
“Be ready, my friend. We may need it.”
The liopleurodon rises from the depths, its 200,000-pound frame slicing through the sea, leaving barely a ripple. It cannot see the Megalodon but it can smell its blood, just as it can taste the mosasaur’s remains. The monster homes in on both, ascending in a steady, spiraling pattern so as not to reveal her presence.
Equipped with the best sensory array afforded by nature, Angel tracks its challenger as it rises, its ampullae of Lorenzini locked in on the electrical impulses emanating from the pliosaur’s beating heart. The liopleurodon’s speed and angle of ascent, similar to that of a great white attacking a seal, places the Megalodon in grave danger.
The Meg continues to circle the dead mosasaur in short, muscular bursts, its predatory instinct preventing it from abandoning its kill.
And then another signal reaches its brain, stimulating its olfactory senses, beckoning it to the surface. The Meg becomes agitated, the danger growing, its challenger streaking toward it from below.
Snatching the mosasaur remains in its jaws, Angel launches her girth topside, her caudal fin pumping hard.
Shifting from stealth to speed, the liopleurodon executes a series of quick downward strokes, closing the gap to fifty feet. Opening its jaws, it lunges forward to bite Angel’s caudal fin—
—when it’s bashed sideways by a roaring river!
The Panthalassa current whips the pliosaur sideways, forcing it to streamline its limbs. By the time it has resumed its ascent, the Megalodon is gone.
Emerging from the current, the giant female once more picks up the Meg’s scent. Swimming side to side like a crocodile, it races toward the subterranean ceiling in pursuit.
The lab is teetering on its side, the interior a shambles. Equipment lies in heaps, computer monitors smashed, books buried beneath collapsed shelves. Darkness beckons, the lights flickering behind the nearly drained backup generator.
David claws his way up the slanted lower deck floor to the life support system. The unit is bolted to the floor, but the tank is angled sideways, preventing the hard-earned pint of remaining water from draining into the liquid-gas conversion unit, stifling the flow of air.
“David, your father!”
He slides down the floor to the ladder and enters the upper level, now on an equal plane to the lower. Kaylie has cleared a path to the portal and is staring out the thick acrylic window, the sea bathed in the lab’s eerie red exterior lights.
The sphere lies on the crater’s precipice, the hole looming beneath them. Just visible below the viewport is the bow of the AG III, the lab pinning the sub’s cockpit.
“Dad!” David scrambles through the pile of smashed equipment, locating the radio. “Dad? Dad, can you hear me?”
“I’m . . . here.” Suspended sideways at a painful angle in his seat, Jonas releases his harness, allowing his body to tumble to the top of the inverted escape pod, now wedged under the lab.
“Are you hurt?”
“I’ve been better. What’s your status?”
“Life support’s off line. I need to find a way to drain the water into the system.”
“Find a way. The good news is that we’re out of the Panthalassa. They can send a vessel down with another tow line.”
“Dad . . . here comes the bad news.”
Angel rises from out of the crater, her albino hide glowing behind the night glass, her jaws clenching the remains of what had been a forty-foot mosasaur. Emerging into the Philippine Sea, the Meg releases the ragged carcass and circles the hole.
David presses his face to the portal, catching a glimpse of her posture. “She’s really agitated. I’ve never seen her like this.”
Unable to see, Jonas watches the sonar moni tor and the rising blip. “The liopleurodon, it followed her up. David, hold on!”
The pilosaur soars out of the hole—
—as Angel launches her attack, driving her hyper-extended jaws into her larger foe.
But the liopleurodon is far too big and is moving way too fast. The Megalodon’s jaws miss the creature’s forelimb, glancing off a muscular torso as big around as a C-5 cargo plane. The devastating impact costs Angel two front teeth.
Reacting quickly, the pliosaur rolls its body away from the shark’s jaws, biting its secondary dorsal fin, its eight-inch needle-sharp teeth succeeding in crushing the neurotransmitter’s antenna.
The two titans continue to rise, entwined as they bite and gnaw at one another—
—oblivious to the Tonga’s nets.
Aboard the Tonga
Philippine Sea
Storm clouds roll in from the east, the late afternoon shower soaking the crewmen toiling on the supertanker’s main deck.
Monty rests his exhausted body on an expanse of pipe, his mind entering an almost vegetative state as he watches his Uncle James chase after the heavyset engineer.
“You have six winches! All I need is one.”
“For the last time, Mackreides, two winches per net, three nets in the water, those are Mr. bin Rashidi’s orders. He said nothing about lowering the Shinkai back into the drink. And believe me, with those two monsters down there, that slow-moving bucket of bolts is the last place you’d want to be right now.” John LeBlanc hustles to the crew manning the bow winches.
Mac gives chase, refusing to back down. “The last place I’d want to be is in that lab. My godson’s trapped down there, suffocating! Now I want a tow line and that Japanese sub in the water right now, or—”
“Or what?” LeBlanc turns to face him, backed by three rain-soaked, grease-covered members of his crew. “Listen, friend, the moment we haul bin Rashidi’s new pet out of the sea, we’ll harness the sub. Until then, stay the hell out of my way.”
The rain is coming down in sheets now, forcing Monty to turn away. On the distant horizon he can make out an approaching vessel—the Mogamigawa—the Tonga’s sister ship. Still many miles away, the massive supertanker is preparing to slalom—to commence a braking pattern that veers the ship back and forth from starboard to port while her engines run full astern, the boat’s captain attempting to bring his vessel in as close as he can to the Tonga.
Monty stares at the distant speck, the idea germinating in his head buried beneath an avalanche of scatterbrain thoughts. Big ship . . . pray for David. Pray for the ship. A praying mantis can’t impregnate the female while his head is still attached to his body. The female initiates mating by ripping the male’s head off. A headless cockroach can live nine days before it starves to death. Right-handed people live nine years longer than left-handed people. Polar bears are left-handed. I wonder if Jonas Junior is a southpaw.
Monty slaps himself repeatedly across the forehead, trying hard to focus. Tanker, tanker, tanker, tanker. How can the tanker help David? Tankers are so big they can’t stop. Fleas are small, but they can jump three hundred times their own body length. Ants can pull thirty times their weight. Tankers can pull submarines off the bottom, it’s called the Venturi effect . . .
Mac grabs him by the shirt collar. “Come with me. I need your help rigging a tow line and hook to the Manta Ray.”
“Tankers can pull submarines off the bottom!”
“I know. But first we need to attach a tow line.”
“No, Uncle James. No, we don’t!”
The two super-predators break away from one another, both bleeding from flesh wounds, neither seriously hurt.
Liopleurodon’s rule over the Panthalassa Sea dates back tens of millions of years, the species’ evolution, from a marine reptile to a gilled giant, allowing it to establish dominance. Since reaching maturity, the prodigious female has never been challenged, even by her own kind, but the Megalodon’s sheer ferocity, combined with the biting power behind her jaws, makes the shark a formidable opponent and a real threat to her survival.
Opting for a less risky method of victory, the pliosaur descends quickly, veering toward the abandoned mosasaur remains. In one motion, the female plucks the discarded carcass off the bottom and banks sharply to retreat down the crater.
But unlike her rival’s serrated teeth, the liopleurodon’s fangs are narrow and smooth, designed for puncturing, not gripping. Double-clutching the eviscerated mosasaur, the pliosaur loses its hold and must loop back to grab it again before the sinking carcass strikes the sea floor.
WHOMP!
With a full head of steam, Angel strikes the liopleurodon flush on its thickly muscled neck, pile-driving the one-hundred-ton goliath sideways into the silty bottom. The pliosaur’s neck is too wide even for Angel’s hyper-extended jaws, but the impact with the sea floor provides enough leverage to allow the Meg’s lower teeth to sink root-deep into the thick hide, her upper teeth buried to the gum line.
The puncture wounds are deep. The liopleurodon tries to twist itself free, but its enemy has pinned it awkwardly against the sea floor. Each attempt to free itself provokes the Megalodon into whipping its head to and fro, the frenzied action causing its seven-inch, serrated teeth to saw into the nerve endings within the pliosaur’s thick neck muscles.
The pain is paralyzing in its intensity.
The liopleurodon stops struggling, conceding defeat.
Her challenger immobilized, Angel maintains her death grip. It is just a matter of time.
For David Taylor and Kaylie Szeifert, time is nearly up. The backup generator has died, the air expired, the powerless lab growing colder by the minute. Lying on their backs on the slanted lower-deck floor, the young couple stares into the suffocating darkness, holding hands—awaiting death.
David is first to gasp.
Kaylie squeezes his hand tighter. “I want to marry you, David. But I want a spring wedding. So you’d better hang on. Do you hear me, David Taylor? You’re not weaseling out of this!”
He smiles in the darkness, tears rolling down his cheeks.
His father’s muted voice stirs him from unconsciousness. “. . . wait until the lab strikes the supertanker’s keel, then open the hatch and swim to the surface. David, can you hear me? If you can’t speak, at least give me a sign that you understand! David?”
Kaylie crawls to the radio. Taps the microphone twice.
“Good! Hold on to the hatch, kids. I can hear the tanker bearing down on us!”
Kaylie grabs David and shakes him awake. Digging her nails into his wrists, she drags him toward the hatch and holds on—
—as the forty-seven-ton sphere is heaved upwards as if by the hand of God.
Cruising at sixteen knots, displacing over 300,000 tons, the eleven-hundred-foot-long supertanker Mogamigawa races past its dormant sister ship, its titanic wake actually dragging the Tonga a quarter of a mile to the east as its vast keel excavates a vacuous channel across the surface of the Pacific—
—plucking the lab, the Abyss Glider, the fishing nets, the mosasaur carcass, and the two interlocked predators off the sea bottom with its prodigious suction, inhaling them into its keel.
Centrifugal force pins David and Kaylie to the floor as the lab spins wildly in the darkness, their arms interlocked around the hatch’s wheel house.
Dong!
The titanium sphere bashes against the supertanker’s reinforced steel hull. Kaylie twists open the wheel until a sliver of blue water rushes in and becomes a raging waterfall that tears open the hatch. The sphere bounces against the keel twice more before the flooding lab is spit sideways beyond the propeller shaft and rapidly sinks.
Gripping her unconscious companion in a headlock, Kaylie drags David out the open hatch into the roaring Pacific. The lab falls away beneath them as they are suddenly rocketed to the surface by the drag from the passing tanker.
Kaylie gasps a life-giving lungful of air then shakes David . . . no response. Cradling his head, she breathes into his mouth until his blue complexion pales and he coughs up seawater.
She floats on her back, positioning the back of his head between her breasts. Rain beats down upon them, the sky billowing with thunder clouds.
Simply seeing daylight again makes her giddy. “David, lay back and breathe. Just breathe, baby.”
He gasps several breaths, opening his eyes against the blinding downpour. The feeling slowly returns to his limbs. “How?”
“A miracle.”
“My father?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
He lifts his head away from her chest and treads water, the two of them searching the surface, unable to see beyond the nearest swells.
The Tonga’s stern looms a hundred yards away. Something massive is being hauled out of the water alongside the tanker. The creature’s body is tangled within a fishing net, its tail free, slapping the side of the ship.
A shiver shoots down David’s spine. “Angel . . .”
Fiesal bin Rashidi bounds across the Tonga catwalk to confront his engineer, Brian Suits in tow. “Who gave the orders for the Mogamigawa to pass us? Answer me!”
“I did.” Mac joins them. “Told them I was you. Must’ve sounded like an asshole on the radio because they believed me.”
“Captain, have this man removed from my ship. Let the Taylors rot in the depths—”
“There!” Monty is at the port rail, searching the sea through a pair of binoculars. “Two survivors. Looks like David and Kaylie!”
Brian Suits takes Monty’s glasses and confirms the sighting. He activates his walkie-talkie. “Captain Gober, we have two survivors in the water one hundred yards due west. Unhitch the trawler and pick them up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No! You will contact the Mogamigawa and order their return. Then empty the net of this abomination and find the liopleurodon!”
“Yes, sir . . . right after we pick up my two pilots. Mackreides, get to the trawler. See to it that my orders are carried out.”
“You got it.”
“There it is!” Monty points below, where an immense dark-backed creature is circling beneath the thrashing Megalodon.
Fiesal bin Rashidi rushes to the rail, gawking at the beast. “Incredible. Engineer, ready your nets!”
As he watches, the pliosaur submerges.
“David, there. I see your father’s escape pod.” Kaylie points in the direction of the Tonga. Forty yards away, a small acrylic escape pod is rising and falling with the swells.
They swim out to the buoyant sphere, Kaylie on one side, David the other, the two of them using the remains of the AG III’s shredded wings as a flotation device.
Pressing his face to the night glass, David peers inside.
His father is strapped halfway in his harness. He is not moving.
“Dad!” David bangs his hand repeatedly against the dense cockpit. “Dad, can you hear me?”
“David . . .” Kaylie points to the tanker.
He looks up to witness the liopleurodon in mid-leap, the creature’s immense head rising thirty feet above the surface as the pliosaur’s monstrous jaws slam shut along the base of Angel’s flicking tail.
Angel convulses in the net, blood spraying in all directions. The liopleurodon remains suspended halfway out of the water, her jowls clenched tight. Twisting like a crocodile, the monster’s sheer weight forces her teeth to tear through the Meg’s thick band of muscle and cartilage.
Angel heaves upward in spasms as her entire caudal fin is torn from her body.
The liopleurodon plunges back into the sea. Blood gushes from the Meg’s mortal wound, spraying the side of the tanker, pooling along the surface.
Kaylie looks down at her chest, already covered in oily blood. Amazed that the current could spread Angel’s remains so quickly, she turns, shocked to find the mosasaur’s shredded carcass floating beside her. In a sudden panic, she kicks both legs, churning up a pink froth as she tries to climb atop the Abyss Glider’s escape pod.
David’s face is pressed against the cockpit glass, he can see his father stirring inside! Overjoyed, he looks up at Kaylie, a smile on his face—
—his expression turning to horror, fear bursting through every pore of his body as the impossibly large crocodilian mouth rises from below, the jaws opening to snatch the mosasaur remains—
—Kaylie along with it!
The girl wheezes as the breath is driven from her chest, the dagger-like teeth impaling her. She looks at David, bewildered, then disappears beneath the crimson-frothed surf.
David bellows a blood-curdling scream, pounding his fists against the escape pod’s glass, rousing his father. And then his tortured mind simply shuts down and he passes out.
Lying in the bottom of the cockpit, Jonas opens his eyes in time to witness Kaylie as she’s dragged underwater and devoured. He turns away only to see his son’s pale face sinking underwater.
Jonas activates the emergency escape hatch. Blows the lid off the cockpit. Lunging over the side, he grabs David by his hair and hauls his inert body into the open sphere.
The pod swirls like a giant teacup, caught within the current generated by the liopleurodon’s moving mass. The monster circles just below the surface, gauging the floating object.
The trawler bears down upon them. Standing in the bow, Ibrahim Al Hashemi fires the harpoon gun, the lance and its tracking device shooting through air and sea before burying itself deep within the creature’s broad back.
The liopleurodon submerges, returning to the deep with the mosasaur’s remains.
Mac rushes to the trawler’s bow and looks down. Jonas is hugging his unconscious son to his chest, his face pale and distraught.
“J.T.? Is David okay?”
“He’s alive. I’m not sure if he’ll ever be okay again.”