MEG: Nightstalkers (9 page)

The shark twisted its head sideways and swam off.

Lucas knew he was hyperventilating, the fear of being eaten unleashing waves of anxiety. He checked his air and was actually relieved. I’ll suffocate before the bitches can sink their teeth into me …

And then, miraculously, the crate began to rise.

*   *   *

Attached to the
Lebofilm
’s keel was an underwater camera. While Donna Johnston remained out on deck working on her tan, Steven Lebowitz had been watching Lucas Heitman’s descent on the boat’s closed circuit monitor.

The kelp had obscured much of his view until the diver had reached the sea floor. He knew Lucas had emptied the crate because the tension on the winch’s cable had eased. Using the boat’s fish finder helped fill in more of the missing pieces to the puzzle.

No one in their right mind would have dived within fifty miles of a Megalodon sighting unless there was a big payoff to offset the risk. That meant drugs or weapons. Having radioed his fellow charter captains, Lebowitz knew the girl was an associate of Alexi Lundgard, a reputed dealer in the black market. Weapons were easy enough to purchase in the States, so it had to be drugs.

They probably had to dump their stash overboard when the Coast Guard shadowed Lundgard’s yacht.

Lebowitz was about to radio the authorities when the first shark appeared on his fish finder.

With the abundance of food available in the Salish Sea—including seals and sea lions, favorite delicacies of the great white—one might assume shark sightings were prevalent around the San Juan Islands. In fact they were rare. Great whites, it turned out, were an orca delicacy. While the offshore killer whales patrolled the entrance to the Juan de Fuca strait, the transient and local orca pods protected the kayakers and divers.

And yet the fish finder had identified not one but six juvenile great whites.

From their rapid movements, Lebowitz knew the sharks were hungry and that they were aggressively circling his diver. He had tracked Lucas back to the crate when the first predator launched its attack.

The sudden stress on the winch’s cable painted a clear picture of what was transpiring below.

Lebowitz ran out on deck, the .12 gauge shotgun in his hand startling Donna Johnston. “Captain?”

“We’ve got visitors.”

“The sisters?” She backed away from the rail into Lebowitz, who was reversing gears on the winch.

“It’s not the Megs, but there are an unusual number of great whites circling your diver.”

“Is he okay? Is he able to surface with the crate?”

Lebowitz restarted the winch, the cable and pulley straining under the additional weight. “If I’m right, he’s
inside
the crate.”

“Inside the crate? But what about…?”

“The drugs? Guess he had to leave them behind.”

Donna moved to the starboard rail, catching sight of a gray dorsal fin. “It wasn’t drugs. It was pinto abalone.”

Lebowitz looked up. “You risked his life for a bunch of…”

The word
shellfish
caught in his throat.

Steven Lebowitz had experienced fear twice in his life—the first time at age eight when he was swimming in the ocean alone and found himself caught in a riptide; the second at age fourteen when he suddenly ran out of air while going for his SCUBA certification.

That was fear; this was terror—the shortness of breath, the rapid thumping in his temples, the sudden weakness in his legs … it all seemed like an out-of-body experience.

Gripping the winch to keep from collapsing to his knees, he stood by the starboard rail and gazed in awe at the spy-hopping albino goddess. The Megalodon’s head was so incredibly large he felt embarrassed to have challenged the creature’s authority, her gray-blue eye so close that he could have prodded it with the barrel of the shotgun had he the audacity to move. The peppered underside of the snout … the thick muscle set around a mouth so immense he could have climbed inside its trap door of a jaw—the silently jabbering lower hinge offering a hint of serrated teeth.

Queen Lizzy stared at her human subject as if she were debating its fate.

Donna Johnston’s blood-curdling scream shattered the moment and returned Steven Lebowitz into his body.

Raising the shotgun, he fired.

The buckshot blasted a ring of lead pellets in and around the Megalodon’s left eye, spraying blood and cornea bits across Donna’s chest.

Insane with pain, the albino slammed its inflamed, gushing eye socket against the surface in looping east-west gyrations, scooping up great swaths of sea, which rolled the fishing boat.

Realizing he had just “poked the bear,” Steven Lebowitz raced up the ladder to the helm and powered up the engines, slamming down the throttle.

*   *   *

For Lucas Heitman, the miracle of his rescue had turned into a nightmare.

Rising within the wooden crate, he braced for the impact of the swarming juvenile great whites—only to see them flee into the kelp forest. Elated, the diver whispered a prayer of thanks into his regulator, then wondered how his employer would react to the loss of the abalone.

Alexi’s going to be pissed. No doubt Donna will blame it on me.

Looking up, he saw the boat’s hull pass overhead—and realized, to his horror, it was one of the Megalodons. The monster’s belly and pectoral fins resembled a small passenger jet, its tail methodically pushing it into an easy glide which ended with a ballet-like vertical ascent as Lizzy’s head broke the surface.

Helpless and terrified, Lucas could only hang on and wait while his crate continued to rise alongside the Megalodon’s gently swaying caudal fin, the half-moon-shaped appendage channeling a rush of water that pushed him beneath the boat.

Twelve feet from the keel all hell broke loose.

Blood splattered across the surface—which erupted in a maelstrom as the forty-six-foot albino beast shook its head to and fro beneath the frothing shallows, unleashing a tornado of kelp.

Seconds later the twin engines spun a dervish of bubbles and suddenly the crate—and Lucas—were bouncing along the surface.

*   *   *

The MH-65C Coast Guard helicopter chased its shadow over the emerald-green waterway, approaching Obstruction Island from the west. The co-pilot’s eyes shifted from the white speck on the horizon to the airship’s fuel gauge. “Captain, we’re on fumes. One flyover, then we need to refuel at Shaw Island.”

Captain Royston glanced at Mac. “Don’t look so worried,
grandpa
. There’s always a little reserve left in the tank.”

“Really, douche bag? Because my wife says the same thing … just before she runs out of gas.”

Jonas had moved nearer to the open cargo door, the shifting cabin making it difficult to keep his binoculars trained on the fishing boat up ahead. For a brief second he thought he saw Lizzy’s head poised above the water … until the frame spun away as the craft beneath his feet started losing altitude.

*   *   *

He needed to head north for the safety of East Sound, only the
Lebofilm
’s bow was pointing south. As Steven Lebowitz accelerated and then pulled his boat into a tight portside turn, the former movie producer realized he had made a costly error.

The anchor was dragged thirty feet through the kelp forest roots, digging in tighter and deeper until it had become firmly entrenched between two rocks. The more Lebowitz gunned the engines, the higher his bow rose and the less his boat moved.

“Son of a bitch!”

Tethered to the bottom, they were sitting ducks.

*   *   *

The Coast Guard chopper hovered sixty feet above the rotor-blown surface, its crew mesmerized by the spectacle taking place below.

The fishing boat’s twin engines were running at full throttle, yet the charter seemed frozen in place. Twenty feet to port was the Meg. Like the ship, the albino monster seemed stuck in place, its enormous head—easily the size of the ship’s bow—whipping the sea as if the shark had gone insane.

“Captain, I’ve got the target sighted!”

“Hold your fire until that boat clears the area.”

“Why isn’t it moving?”

“Its anchor’s hung.”

Jonas focused his binoculars on Lizzy. “Mac, she’s wounded.”

“Good. Where’s Bela?”

Jonas’s flesh tingled.
Where was Bela?
“Captain, watch our altitude!”

The reflection of the late afternoon sun and the propeller-whipped whitecaps had camouflaged Lizzy’s dark-backed sibling. Charging the surface, the twenty-one-ton Megalodon rose out of the sea, her snout coming within five feet of the chopper’s struts before gravity compelled its return.

Twisting sideways, Bela struck the surface with a thunderous
clap
, the impact spraying water across the helicopter’s windshield.

That was enough for the two pilots. “Captain, if we don’t leave now—”

“Sir, there’s a man in the water!”

*   *   *

Suspended three feet below the surface, Lucas Heitman knew two things—that the
Lebofilm
’s anchor was caught along the bottom and that he was out of air. Now he had to choose—drown or attempt to board the boat before the captain cut the line and left him to be eaten.

Releasing his grip on the crate’s lid, he pushed himself out of the wooden container … and sunk.

Stripping off his weight belt returned him to neutral buoyancy. Slipping out of his gear forced him to kick his way to the surface for a desperate breath of air.

His head emerged into a wind storm, the helicopter’s rotors whipping his face with salt water drenched with carbon monoxide fumes. The boat’s transom loomed ten feet away, only it was swaying to and fro so violently that Lucas hesitated to get near it lest he be sucked into the twin propellers.

Something blotted out the sun, causing him to look up seconds before the bright orange harness struck him in the head.

*   *   *

“He’s in, Captain, we’re reeling him up.”

Jonas peered over the hoist operator’s shoulder, watching the pace of the rising survivor, the pilot maintaining a static hoist evolution. “Captain, you can’t keep us stationary like this, you’re serving him up to Bela as lunch.”

Royston knew Taylor was right. “Pilot, switch rescue procedure to a dynamic hoist and get us to Shaw Island.”

“Not enough fuel, Captain. We’ll have to set her down on—”

The pilot’s eyes widened as the sea erupted beneath the fishing boat, flipping it out of the water. Twisting on the anchor line, it landed keel up, its twin propellers slicing air.

*   *   *

One minute Steven Lebowitz was shouting at the girl to grab the ax—the next he was leaving his feet, the helm controls spinning in his vision, the top of his head smashing painfully against the deck which was somehow above him.

And then he was underwater.

Disoriented, Lebowitz kicked away from an entanglement of aluminum ladder rungs and curtains of charts, his reeling mind recognizing that the boat he had called home for the last eight years was sinking on top of him and he desperately needed to move.

Swim to daylight …

Steven Lebowitz swam to what his eyes perceived to be the surface—his primordial fears igniting as the white surroundings suddenly rushed at him, inhaling him into a moment of excruciating darkness.

Lizzy did not swallow her prey as much as she chomped down upon its flesh until its blood and innards squished warm between her teeth.

Donna Johnston remained trapped in the submerged inverted galley, her mind freaking out as Bela gnawed her way through the cherrywood cabin to reach her. Refusing to be eaten alive, the Scot asked God for mercy, said goodbye to her family, and then inhaled the sea deep into her lungs.

*   *   *

Lucas Heitman was dragged inside the aft bay just as one of the Coast Guard helicopter’s twin turbine engines coughed … and died.

Jonas and Mac looked at each another. A breath later the five ton aircraft pitched sideways as it lost altitude, its pilots fighting to reach Obstruction Island with their remaining engine.

“Hold on, we’re going down!”

Jonas gripped the mounted hoist’s boom with one hand, the door frame with the other as the emerald surface whipped past the open bay at a sloping thirty-degree angle, the chopper rapidly running out of altitude.

For extended seconds the pilots held gravity at bay—the depths marbling into azure shallows. And then the second engine seized silent and the airship fell forty feet, collapsing onto the beach.

6

Aboard the Supertanker
Mogamigawa
77 Nautical Miles South of Japan

The converted Japanese supertanker,
Mogamigawa
moved through the dark waters of the Western Pacific, displacing 300,000 tons. She was as large as they came—a Malacca-max VLCC (very large crude carrier) designed with a draft shallow enough to navigate the Straits of Malacca, the preferred route between the Persian Gulf and Asia. A floating steel island, the
Mogamigawa
and her sister ship, the
Tonga
were 1,100 feet in length and 196 feet wide, with a superstructure rising out of the stern that towered twelve stories. But it was the converted crude holds that made these goliaths unique—six large seawater pens, each rubber-lined saltwater tank equipped with saline and temperature controls, along with jet stream breathers designed to tranquilize, subdue, and safely transport extreme aquatic life forms that were larger than whales and bore the ferocity of a tiger.

Accompanying the
Mogamigawa
was the
Dubai Land-II,
a 196-foot, 280-ton fishing trawler which held two Manta submersibles designed by Jonas and David Taylor. The pilots aboard the
DB-II
had been trained to use their subs to entice a targeted sea monster up from the depths of the Panthalassa Sea—a prehistoric purgatory isolated beneath the Philippine Sea Plate. That mission had shifted dramatically (to the sub pilots’ relief) when several species had escaped into the Western Pacific.

The Boeing CH-47 Chinook twin engine heavy lift helicopter hovered above the
Mogamigawa
’s helipad. Fifteen restless passengers were seated in the cargo bay, exhausted from their ten hour flight into Tokyo. Upon landing, they had been ushered through customs and taken by bus to a commuter airport for the two hour helicopter ride south.