The MEG Read online

  “Maggie, they don’t even know if it surfaced. The crew of the Kiku are claiming it never left the trench.”

  “Just stay on it, someone will talk. There’s an extra grand in it for you if you can get me some inside dope about this second shark. I’ll call you as soon as I land in Guam.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  Maggie hung up.

  Bud was standing next to her. “So?”

  “Bud, I need your help. Who do you know in Guam?”

  *

  Aura Naval Hospital, Guam

  The navy MP on duty outside Jonas’s room at the Aura naval hospital rose to attention as Terry approached the door.

  “Sorry, ma’am. No press allowed.”

  “I’m not with the press. My name’s Terry Tanaka. I was with—”

  “Oh … excuse me.” The MP stepped aside. “My apologies, ma’am. And … my condolences.” He averted his eyes.

  “Thank you.” She knocked softly, then entered the private hospital room.

  Jonas lay in bed, facing the window. A gauze bandage was wrapped around his forehead, an IV dripped into his left arm. He turned toward Terry as she entered, his face pale.

  “Terry? I’m sorry.”

  She nodded. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better. Just tired. Where’s your father?”

  “Making funeral arrangements. He’ll be here in the morning.”

  Jonas turned toward the window, unsure of what to say. “This is my fault, I should have never—”

  “You tried to warn us. We ridiculed you … especially me.”

  “I shouldn’t have let D.J. go. I should have—”

  “Stop it, Jonas,” Terry snapped. “I can’t deal with my own guilt, let alone yours. D.J. was an adult, and he certainly wasn’t about to listen to you. He wanted to go, and so did I. We’re all devastated … in shock. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I can’t think that far ahead—” Tears flowed from her almond eyes.

  Moving to him, she sat on the edge of his bed, hugging him while she cried on his chest.

  Jonas smoothed her hair, trying to comfort her.

  After a few minutes, she sat up and turned away from Jonas to wipe her eyes. “You’re seeing me in rare form. I never cry.”

  “You don’t always have to be so tough.”

  She smiled. “Yeah, I do. I told you, my mom died when I was very young. I’ve had to take care of Dad and D.J. all these years by myself.”

  “How’s your dad doing?”

  “He’s a wreck. I need to get him through this. JAMSTEC’s not making that easy. The Japanese are flying in tomorrow morning, insisting on a meeting.”

  Jonas looked up at her. “Terry, you need to know something. There were two Megs in the trench. The one that the Kiku hauled up, it was attacked by a larger female. She was rising with the carcass ...”

  “No, it’s okay. Everyone on-board was watching. Nothing else surfaced. Heller says the other creature, this female, couldn’t survive the journey through the icy waters. You told us that yourself.”

  “Terry, listen to me.” He tried to sit up, but the pain forced him down again. “The male’s carcass … there was a lot of blood in the water. Megalodons are like Great Whites. They’re not warm-blooded like mammals, but they are warm-bodied.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “When the Kiku began hauling up D.J.’s sub, the male became caught in the steel cable. I saw the larger Meg, the female … she was rising with the carcass, remaining within the warm-blood stream. I watched her disappear into the colder waters. I think the male’s blood trail was keeping her warm.”

  “How do you know she didn’t return to the trench?”

  “I don’t. But she wouldn’t be so quick to abandon her kill. If the female remained within her dead mate’s blood stream, she could have made it to the thermocline. She’s much bigger than the male, sixty feet or more. A shark that size could probably cover the distance from the trench to the warmer surface waters—”

  “Jonas, the second shark never surfaced, just the remains of the first … and D.J.” She wiped back tears. “I have to go. Try to get some rest.”

  She squeezed his hand, then left the room.

  Evidence

  JONAS AWOKE WITH A START. He was in the Abyss Glider capsule, bobbing along the surface of the western Pacific. Sunlight glared through the Lexan Plexiglas sphere; waves washed over the escape pod’s acrylic dome.

  The Kiku was gone.

  I’ve been dreaming. The rescue, the hospital…Terry—it was all a dream.

  He stared at his hands, covered in dried blood. He felt the lump on his scalp.

  How long have I been out? Hours? Days?

  The water beneath him rippled with curtains of sunlight. He stared down into the deep blue sea, watching … waiting for the Megalodon to appear.

  He knew she was down there.

  He knew she was coming.

  The white glow appeared first, then the snout and that demonic grin. The albino monster rose majestically beneath him, her sinister mouth widening, her jaws opening, revealing her pink upper gums as her front row of serrated teeth jutted forward, hyperextending … her widening mouth a black abyss—

  *

  “Ahhhh!”

  Jonas awoke with a start. He was in bed, his hospital gown bathed in sweat. He was alone in his room. The digital clock read 12:06 a.m.

  A dream? More like a nightmare.

  He fell back on the damp sheets and stared at the moonlit ceiling, then forced a deep breath, exhaling slowly.

  The fear was gone. Suddenly, he realized he felt better. The fever, the drugs … maybe it was the vindication. I’m hungry, he thought.

  Wrapping a blanket over his shoulders, he gripped the I.V. drip’s stand and wheeled it into the empty corridor. He found the MP at the nursing station flirting with one of the nurses.

  “Mr. Taylor … you’re up.”

  “And I’m hungry. Where can I find something to eat?”

  “Cafeteria’s closed till six,” the nurse said.

  The MP fished through a brown paper bag. “I’ve got a sub … a sandwich. You can have it.”

  Jonas stared at it, his mouth watering. “No, that’s all right—”

  “Go ahead. It’s good stuff.”

  “All right, sure, thanks.” Jonas took the Italian sub and began to eat. He felt like he hadn’t tasted food in days. “This is great,” he said between bites.

  “Good subs are hard to come by out here,” the young man said. “Only place I know is halfway around the island. Me and my buddies, we make the trip once a week, just to kind of remind us of home. I don’t know why they don’t open something closer to the base. Seems to me …”

  The kid continued talking, but Jonas wasn’t listening. Something had caught his eye on the television. “Excuse me,” he said. “Can you turn that up?”

  The MP stopped talking. “Sure.” He raised the volume.

  “… fourteen pilot whales and two dozen dolphins beached themselves along Saipan’s northern shore. Unfortunately, most of the mammals died before rescuers could push them back out to sea. In other news …”

  “Saipan. That’s in the middle of the northern Marianas, isn’t it?”

  The MP nodded. “That’s right, sir. Third island up the chain.”

  Jonas looked away, thinking. “Thanks for the sandwich.” He turned and headed back down the hall, wheeling his I.V.

  *

  Western Pacific

  Eight Miles off the Coast of Saipan

  The 455-foot cargo ship, RMS St. Columba, pushed through the dark waters of the western Pacific, her mass displacing 7800 tons. The vessel had set sail from the United Kingdom two months earlier, making her way to South Africa, the Ascensions, and the Canary and St. Helena Islands before continuing her voyage along the Asian coast. While most of her gross tonnage was devoted to cargo, she also carried seventy-nine passengers, the majority of them boarding in Japan, boun
d for the Hawaiian Islands.

  Thirty-year-old Tehdi Badaut stood by the starboard rail, watching the moonlight dance across the surface of the Philippine Sea. The French-Portuguese officer had been assigned to oversee the transportation of six Arabian horses, caged in pairs in specially built stalls that were mounted in the forward deck. Two of the horses were studs, worth a small fortune, the others all national and Legion of Honor winners.

  Tehdi approached the first stall, offering a carrot to a three-year-old black mare. He enjoyed caring for the animals, and the truth was, there were worse duties on-board. “How’s my lady tonight? Bet you wish you could run around this ship, huh? I’d love to take you out of that cage, but I can’t.”

  The mare shook its head, agitated.

  “What? Suddenly you don’t like my carrots?”

  The other horses started prancing in tight circles, rising up on their hindquarters. Within minutes they were all snorting and bucking, bashing their frames against their wooden stalls.

  The officer pulled the radio from his back pocket. “It’s Badaut, on the main deck, forward. Better send that horse trainer, something’s wrong with the horses.”

  *

  The female moved effortlessly through the thermocline, its torpedo-shaped body gliding with slow, snake-like movements perpetrated by the shark’s powerful swimming muscles, which attached internally to her cartilaginous vertebral column and externally to her thick skin. As her flank muscles contracted, the Megalodon’s crescent-moon-shaped tail pulled in a rhythmic, undulating motion, propelling the monster forward. The immense caudal fin gave the fish maximum thrust with minimal drag while maintaining a streamlined flow through the sea.

  She was one of the last of her kind, and the first in more than 80,000 years to venture from the abyss. Hunger had driven her from her warm-water purgatory, and she had guarded her kill nearly to the surface, until the gray curtains of daylight had burned into her sensitive nocturnal eyes, forcing her retreat into the depths. She had remained two thousand feet below the surface in total darkness, her senses “seeing” everything. Her ampullae of Lorenzini knew the Kiku by the electrical impulses emanating from the ship’s keel. The female had followed the ship to Guam, her primordial senses gradually becoming attuned to the magnetic variations in her new geography.

  Although the Megalodon had no external ears, the female could “hear” sound waves as they struck sensory hair cells located in her inner ear. Carried by the auditory nerve, these signals not only alerted the predator to fluctuations within her environment, but allowed her to track the precise direction the disturbances were originating from.

  Unlike the trench, there were disturbances everywhere. The female could feel deep, tantalizing heartbeats coming from distant pods of whales, and she could sense a cacophony of sounds created by the splashing of dozens of breaching dolphins. More alien acoustics and electrical fields teased her senses ... but she remained in the mid-water realm, waiting until the painful sunlight had diminished before rising once more.

  Hitching a ride on an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water, the creature ascended, the oxygen-rich surface waters continuing to stimulate her hunger.

  *

  The horse trainer, a Floridian woman named Dawn Salone, watched helplessly as a half-Arabian pinto filly bashed its head against the wooden gate of its stable, the other horses following suit. “What the hell’s spooking them? I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “They’re getting worse,” said Tehdi. “Perhaps you should tranquilize them before they injure themselves. And those wooden gates ... they won’t hold up too much longer.”

  The moon peeked out from behind a cloud formation, casting its glow upon the Pacific—

  —illuminating a seven-foot-tall ghostly-white dorsal fin that had surfaced minutes earlier off the starboard beam.

  The horses went into a frenzy, neighing and bucking, their coats lathered in sweat. A few of the taller stallions smashed their skulls against the fifteen-foot stable roofs.

  Dawn had seen enough. “I’ll get the tranquilizer gun, you stay with them.” She headed aft, jogging along the starboard rail as she headed for the cargo ship’s infrastructure.

  Hitching a ride on the displacement current generated by the moving ship, the 62,000-pound shark continued gliding through a stream of surface refuse and human waste discharged by the steel vessel.

  Detecting the vibrations of the panicking horses, the curious female did something her ancestors had once practiced while hunting close to shore—she raised her head above the surface and spy-hopped.

  The Meg watched the moving landmass long enough to determine she would not be feeding upon the giant. Descending once more, she headed inland toward the coastal waters off Saipan.

  *

  Saipan

  The moon retreated behind a canopy of cirrus clouds. Small waves lapped along Saipan’s deserted beaches. Somewhere at sea, a humpback moaned a distress call, the haunting cry blotted out by the thunder of the approaching airship.

  The landing struts of the two-passenger Guimbal G2 Cabri helicopter bounced twice upon the dirt runway before settling down. The pilot glanced over at his lone passenger, who looked a bit shaken after the forty-five-minute flight.

  “You okay, J.T.?”

  “I’m fine, Mac.”

  “You don’t look fine, you look pale.”

  “I’ll be sure to work on my tan.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have yanked out your own catheter.”

  “After the way you pulled out my I.V., I wasn’t about to let you touch that.”

  Jonas took a deep breath as the chopper’s rotor blades gradually slowed to a stop. They had landed on the perimeter of a makeshift airfield. A faded wooden sign read, “Welcome to Saipan.”

  “Okay, Mac, where’s this fisherman friend of yours? I thought he was meeting us?”

  “They usually keep the boats near the water. And he’s not a friend; he’s the brother-in-law of one of my former girls. So don’t expect any favors; this is strictly a business transaction.”

  Jonas followed Mac down a path leading to the beach, the sounds of the crashing shoreline growing louder in the distance.

  *

  The last boat anchored in the shallows hardly looked seaworthy. Eighteen feet long, carrying a deep draft that left less than two feet of free board, the wooden vessel lay low in the water, its worn gray planks showing specks of red paint that dated back to the Korean War. Only one person was on-board, a short, thick Filipino man in his mid-thirties, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. He was busy repairing a crab trap when the two Americans appeared on the beach.

  Mac waved.

  The islander ignored him.

  “John Paul, what’s wrong, bro?”

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong is you still owe me money. Last time we do business you want three girls for those two congressmen from Texas, I get you three girls, you never pay me!”

  “Girls, John Paul. You sent me livestock. The fat broad weighed more than me, and the older one had to be in her sixties—hell, she had no teeth.”

  “Ahh, forget you.” The fisherman looked at Jonas. “You have money?”

  “John Paul Chua, this is Jonas Taylor.”

  Jonas extended his hand.

  John Paul ignored it, sniffing the night air. “Smell that? Dead whale, floating about two miles out. You want I take you there? Cost you one hundred American. Cash up front.”

  Mac shook his head. “Fifty, which is worth more than your whole damn boat.”

  “Eighty. You take it or leave it.”

  “Fine.” Jonas turned to his friend. “Mac, pay the man.”

  “What? You don’t have any money?”

  “My wallet’s back on the Kiku. Besides, you owe me twice that in bail money. Or did you forget our trip to Tijuana?”

  “You remember that, huh?” Mac dug into his wallet, handing John Paul two twenty-dollar bills. “You’ll get the rest if and when we make it back to t
he dock in one piece.”

  “Ahh.”

  Jonas and Mac climbed aboard, the boat rocking beneath their weight.

  *

  Jonas knew he needed some kind of evidence to prove the female had surfaced. The numerous whale and dolphin beachings weren’t enough, but if John Paul Chua had really come across a dead whale and the female had killed it, then the oversized bite radius would be all the proof he needed.

  The Filipino cut the engine as the dead whale’s stench became overpowering. Handing Mac an oar, he had him paddle the last fifty yards.

  “There she is, just like I said. Now give me the rest of my money.”

  Mac fished out another forty dollars, slapping the bills in the fisherman’s hand. “I want a receipt.”

  “What you need a receipt for?”

  “I’m sending it to your wife.”

  Jonas located a flashlight, using it to inspect the dead whale. It was a Humpback, a mature female, perhaps forty feet long. “Mac, there’s blood pooling everywhere but I can’t find the wound.”

  “Orcas like to attack the belly,” John Paul said, counting his money.

  Grabbing Mac’s oar, Jonas used it to bob the carcass up and down in an attempt to flip it over, his effort causing the boat to teeter.

  “Lose that oar, it cost you another twenty dollar.”

  “Easy, Crazy Eddie.” Mac turned to Jonas. “There’s thirty tons of whale there. You’ll flip our boat before you roll that carcass.”

  “Agreed. John Paul, do you have a diving mask?”

  “A diving mask? Jonas, are you crazy? What are you going to do? Stick your head underwater for a quick peek? With all that blood in the water, there must be a dozen sharks down there, waiting for a dumbass like you to join the buffet.”

  “Actually Mac, I haven’t seen a single shark. Have you?”

  Mac aimed his light at the water. “You’re right.”

  Jonas stopped to think about that when something illuminated in Mac’s flashlight beam. “Wait. Shine your light near that flipper, that’s it, right there.”

  The beacon settled on a jagged object jammed into an exposed section of the whale’s ribcage just above the waterline.