Sharkman (21 page)

34

M
aybe it was the salty air blowing in from the portal, maybe it was the unexpected budding relationship with my dad, but that night I slept better than I had since before the car accident.

My father knocked on my door at first light, carrying a breakfast tray. “I brought you a ham and egg sandwich and a few bananas for potassium. I didn’t know if you drank coffee.”

“No, but maybe a Coke—just to wake me up.”

“We’ll grab one on the way to the lab. How’d you sleep?”

“Surprisingly good.”

“You’ve got sea legs, just like your old man.”

“I’ve got more than sea legs, Dad; I’ve got gills and fins.”

My father wiped a tear. “You know how long it’s been since you called me Dad? Fourth grade. I remember because you got in trouble in school. ”

“Do you remember what I did? A teacher’s aide said I was talking during a fire drill. Turned out to be a Filipino kid who was suspended a week later for bringing a switchblade to school. When I tried to explain what happened, you grounded me for a month.”

“It was excessive, I know.” He stood by the open portal, breathing in the briny air. “My father was a military man, his father and two uncles before him. The Wilsons have always believed in the virtues of discipline. You think I was tough? My old man used to take a hickory switch to my behind if I was so much as late to supper. It was a different time—the world always at war. Guess it’s the only world I’ve ever known.”

For my father, it was as close to an admission of guilt as I was going to get, and for some reason it made me think of Rachel Solomon. She had told me that her father couldn’t get past being a victim; as a result, he died an angry, bitter man. After seventeen years, my father had just apologized the only way he knew how . . . and his confession lightened my soul.

“Come on, Dad. Let’s go retrieve your uranium.”

Gibbons’s lab was located in the lowest of the three decks, aft of the engine room. To enter the sealed-off chamber you had to proceed through two pressurized doors which created an airlock that was similar to the BSL-3 safety measures back at ANGEL.

Entering the lab, I realized the compartment served a far different purpose.

At the center of the chamber was a diving well—a volcano-shaped resealable opening to the sea that peered straight down into the abyss. Only the pressurized air inside the chamber prevented the ocean from flooding the hull.

The rest of the lab held worktables and lamps attached to magnifying glasses and an assortment of luggage, including several small suitcases and an army backpack about the size of my Doors bag. There were also supplies packed in stacks of military crates that gave me the distinct impression that Professor Gibbons had sanitized the lab before allowing me inside.

“Sit.” He pointed to a folding chair, addressing me as if I were the family pet.

I glanced at my father, who nodded.

Gibbons opened a folder and removed two glossy images. “Look closely at this first photo—it comprises the debris field of the sunken submarine. Note the position of the bow; you’ll use that as a reference point as you approach the wreckage. This second image is a thermal sensor, taken at the exact same angle. See the dark outline of the bow? Everything is cold and black—except for this orange speck right here. That speck is your target; the enriched uranium is radiating heat.”

“What are these blurry red things circling the orange speck?”

“Probably just some fish attracted to the warmth.” Gibbons retrieved one of the camouflage-green canvas backpacks. “This backpack is reinforced and lined with lead; it will protect you from the radiation. Your target is a crate marked in Arabic writing. Inside you’ll find an object composed of thick plastic—about the size of a basketball. Don’t open it; inside is the enriched uranium. Just shove the object in the backpack, strap it on your back, and surface straight into the diving well. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Admiral, did you tell him about the injection?”

“Not yet. Kwan, Professor Gibbons is going to give you a B-12 injection which contains a stimulant we offer our Navy SEALs before they embark on missions in cold waters. It may give you the edge you need to withstand the near-freezing temperatures.”

“We need to make you more efficient,” Gibbons reiterated as he extracted a hypodermic needle and an alcohol swab from a medical kit. “Drop your pants and pick a cheek.”

I lowered my sweat pants and pulled down the edge of my boxers, allowing him to inject me in my left butt cheek.

“He’s set, Admiral. I suggest we allow him to mutate before you give him the depth gauge.”

“Depth gauge?”

Gibbons reached into a pocket of his lab coat and removed a device shaped like a large-faced watch. “The digital display calculates depth as well as direction. Course zero-nine-zero is straight down; adjust to course zero-zero-zero to surface. It’s easy to become disoriented down there.”

“Dad, I don’t need this. I can hear the surface; I can feel the bottom—even five miles down. The electronics will just annoy me.”

Gibbons started to protest, only my father cut him off. “Let him do it his way.”

He walked me over to the edge of the diving well, his arm draped over my shoulder. “Remember, son, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Steady pace; keep your wits about you. If you feel the need to surface—”

“I’ll be fine.” Stripping off my clothes, I fastened the empty backpack around my shoulders and waist, then climbed over the edge of the diving well and slid feetfirst into the water.

The sea was warm and incredibly clear. Sucking in my gut, I forcibly exhaled, causing my rib cage to flatten as a steady burst of air vacated my lungs, sealing my esophageal membrane behind it. Gills fluttered in my neck as I inhaled the ocean, my secondary respiratory system fully engaged.

I looked up at my father as my blurred vision wiped clear. He gave me a thumbs-up, and I returned the gesture with some difficulty—my denticle
skin thickening quickly, the rigidity restricting my range of motion. Waiting for my heels to deform, I continued to sink so that my eye level was just below the hull.

The water was a brilliant royal blue, sparkling with shards of sunlight. I took note of a strange looking device attached to the ship’s keel—no doubt responsible for the two images taken of the sub—and then it was time to go.

Ducking my head, I settled into an easy seventy-degree descent, my swaying lower limbs propelling me down a shaft of light until it faded into a deep burgundy shadow some six hundred and fifty feet below the surface.

Growing up in San Diego, living near the Pacific, I became addicted to oceanography. As I descended, years of watching the Discovery Channel came back to me, my inner voice describing ocean realms normally visited by the episode’s narrator aboard a submersible.

I was leaving the epipelagic or sunlight zone, entering the mesopelagic region. The sea darkened into shades of gray until the depths extinguished the last speck of light, casting me into the eternal night of the bathypelagic zone.

Luminescent lights twinkled all around me, blinking in and out of existence as if I had entered another universe. I slowed my descent, momentarily disoriented by flashbulbs of color—greens and blues that were visible over great distances to attract mates, reds and yellows that flared like fireworks in order to confuse predators. A fluorescent-white entanglement of limbs floated by, resembling a hydra’s head.

Perceiving me as a threat, a scarlet vampire squid turned itself inside out, casting a false glowing turquoise eye upon yours truly before it expelled a cloud of bioluminescent mucus, executing a magician’s vanishing getaway.

My eyes adjusted to the dark, turning the starry night sea into an olive-green minefield of ugliness and evil. A thousand shadows materialized around me in every direction, becoming bulbous eyes and jaws that unhinged, and bizarre fish with frightening teeth, casting bioluminescent bulbs that dangled before their open mouths like bait. They were everywhere—viperfish and gulper eels, fangtooths and dragonfish, and angler fish with teeth that would put a piranha to shame.

And then my senses identified a far more terrifying presence as it descended through the bathypelagic zone two thousand feet above me—closing fast.

I heard its
clickity-click
of echolocation—a beacon of sound that grew louder as it descended. I felt its heart pumping swimming pools of hot blood; its fluke displacing a steady river of seawater.

Petrified, I raced into the depths, chased by the most formidable predator in the sea—a monster the size of an eighteen wheeler that possessed a toothed lower jaw capable of crushing a small boat in half. There was no outmaneuvering it, nowhere to hide. The bull sperm whale was sixty feet and seventy thousand pounds, and it was plunging through the darkness toward me like a runaway locomotive.

I had one chance—I needed to reach a depth beyond the bull’s limitations.

How far could a sperm whale dive?

I racked my brain, tracking down a speck of memory from eighth grade marine biology.
Sperm whale . . . deepest diving mammal. Mature bulls could reach the deepest part of the bathypelagic zone—about twelve thousand feet down.

Regretting not taking Gibbons’s depth gauge, I closed my eyes, fighting to ignore the charging predator closing quickly from above—willing the senses flanking my dermal denticles to register the vibrations caused by the undersea current rushing along the bottom of the canyon. Locating the telltale disturbance, I triangulated my position using the surface and seafloor some twenty-five thousand feet down.

I was a third of the way down, maybe less. Figure seven thousand feet.

That translated into another five thousand feet before the bull sperm whale would be forced to turn back. That didn’t bode well—the leviathan had already closed the gap to a thousand feet and was descending at twice my speed.

There was nothing I could do, the math did me in—I had no chance.

And then I sensed them . . . squid—thousands of them—racing through the depths somewhere below me.

I changed course, aiming for the center of the school, my hip and leg muscles on fire. Altering the angle of my descent allowed the whale to gain on me, but like a camper running through the forest from a bear, I didn’t have to be faster than the bear to keep from being eaten, I just had to be faster than the slowest camper.

Minutes became seconds. The monster’s clicks became clanging bells, tolling my death. Tucking my chin, I looked back and saw my swishing feet—outgunned by a giant fluke undulating steady and true, driving a gargantuan head that occupied my entire field of vision—a head scarred white from a hundred battles.

And then its mouth opened and I was inhaled backward in a sudden, terrifying suction that separated my legs and ceased all forward propulsion. I caught a quick glimpse of cone-shaped teeth and a dark, cavernous gullet—igniting a final jolt of adrenaline.

One arm thrust is all I had time for . . . one powerful downward stroke that sent me flailing chest-first into the sperm whale’s head like a bird hitting a windshield.

My arms and legs stretched wide to embrace the wall of blubber, my teeth gnawed into the flesh, securing my face to the charging bull’s rostrum . . . anything to avoid being eaten.

Whap! Whap . . . whap! Whap!

Jelled bodies slapped against my back, shards of tentacles adhering to my denticle-covered limbs as the whale plowed through the school of squid like a mad bull, rolling out of its two-mile descent to feed.

I hung on, waiting until the majestic beast slowed.

Hovering in eleven thousand feet of water, the monster clicked once more, sending a bone-rattling reverberation through my body. With a tremendous shake of its mammoth head, it shook me loose, sending me into a desperate dive to avoid its flapping thirteen-foot-wide fluke as it righted itself to return to the surface.

Exhausted, I watched it ascend. The behemoth had altered my marathon dive into an energy-depleting sprint. Fortunately, I didn’t have to exert myself nor travel far to feed—the surrounding sea a battlefield of bleeding body parts and torn tentacles.

For the next twenty minutes I fed on fresh calamari, desperate to regain my strength while I prepared myself mentally to continue my descent—another three miles to go until I reached bottom.

35

W
hile I was descending to the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench, Rachel Solomon was using her GPS to locate the home of Jeffrey and Gay Gordon. She arrived after seven in the evening, her knock answered by their son, Jesse.

“Hey, Mrs. Solomon. Everyone’s in the den.”

She followed Jesse through the house to a rec room where a very tall, lanky man was speaking to half a dozen familiar faces seated on two matching sofas.

Rachel hugged Sun Jung, nodded to Principal Lockhart and Coach Flaig, and accepted a folding chair offered by the speaker. “Sorry I’m late. Mordechai needed a ride to practice. Mr. Gordon, I’m Rachel Solomon, the school counselor.”

“Jeff Gordon, Jesse’s dad.”

“We appreciate your firm looking into this case.”

“I’m happy to help. Unfortunately, as I told Kwan’s grandmother, there’s not a lot my law firm can do at this juncture. Because Sun Jung was never appointed by the court to be Kwan’s legal guardian, his father maintained all parental rights. That includes the right to provide his son with medical care without having to reveal his whereabouts to the public, or to his grandmother.”

“He’s not in rehab, Dad. They disappeared him.”

The attorney turned to his son. “Jess, just for argument’s sake, let’s say that’s true. How do we prove Kwan’s parent—an admiral no less, kidnapped his own son? Even if we filed criminal charges, the admiral’s attorney would ask the court for thirty to ninety days so Kwan can rehab out of the public eye. Most judges are going to grant it—especially for an admiral.”

“I understand where you’re coming from, Mr. Gordon,” Rachel interjected, “however, I have to agree with your son. Kwan wasn’t doing drugs; he did, however, tell me he had a terrible relationship with his father. Contact the hospital in San Diego and you’ll find Admiral Wilson only visited his paralyzed son twice after the car accident—once to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order. Is that the kind of loving parent Sun Jung should entrust to care for her grandson?”

“No. Absolutely not. Sun Jung, when was the last time you spoke with Kwan?”

“Friday night. He said he was spending the weekend with friends.”

“Anya was with him Friday night,” Jesse said. “He was supposed to hook up with Tracy, this super-hot cheerleader, only Tracy freaked out, saying Kwan was deformed or something. So everyone marched down the beach to see if he really had two . . . um, if he really was a freak. Turns out Tracy was lying, only maybe something really was wrong with Kwan because Anya and Li-ling rushed him out of there in Li-ling’s car, except Kwan left his Doors backpack in my car, and Kwan never goes anywhere without that backpack.”

Sun Jung nodded, tears in her eyes. “He love that stupid backpack. Something definitely wrong if he leave that stupid backpack behind.”

The attorney jotted a few notes on his legal pad. “Sun Jung, how long have you been taking care of Kwan?”

“Let me think . . . nearly four months.”

“We may be able to convince a judge that Admiral Wilson granted you physical custody of his son; that you assumed he’d be filing custody papers to that effect in California. I know one of the judges over at the Fifteenth Judicial Court . . . Kamilla Cubit. Her father, Tommy, and I are old friends; his son’s in the navy. I’ll get a copy of that DNR order and show it to the judge. We’ll try to establish that the admiral had forfeited his legal rights and that Sun Jung had assumed physical custody. At the very least, Judge Cubit should force Admiral Wilson to provide Kwan’s location and grant her visitation rights. If the admiral refuses, it would give us grounds to file criminal charges—”

“Which would not sit well with the navy,” said Annie Moir, jumping in. “I could issue a press release about the resuscitation order that would cause the public to demand the admiral release Kwan’s whereabouts.”

Rachel turned to the petite brunette. “Excuse me, but who are you exactly?”

“Annie Moir. I’m Kwan’s manager.”

The high school counselor’s intense hazel eyes seemed to burn straight into the woman’s brain. “The manager who mentioned cocaine might be involved to that AP reporter?”

“I never . . . who told you that?”

“A former student of mine works for the Associated Press. The question is—who do
you
work for, Ms. Moir?”

Puerto Rico Trench, Atlantic Ocean

The abyssopelagic or abyssal zone covers 13,124 to 19,686 feet of the ocean depths, an expanse that includes much of the planet’s seafloor. The water temperature is near freezing; there is no light and very few fish.

Fish can handle the extreme water pressure far better than the frigid environment. Cold-blooded vertebrates tend to avoid the deep; their core body temperature dropping with their surroundings. The exception are large-bodied sharks like the great white, a species that adapted to the extreme cold by developing a web-like structure of veins and arteries located beneath its swim muscles. This blood-warming adaptation, known as gigantothermy, utilizes the heat generated by the great white’s working muscles to transport hot venous blood into the arteries, allowing the shark to maintain a core temperature far warmer than its environment.

I was not a great white, but I was warm-blooded, a factor that allowed my mutated cardiovascular system to transport heat to my internal organs in a similar fashion. Still, my prolonged exposure to these thirty-four-degree-Fahrenheit surroundings had numbed my dermal denticles to the point that my movements were becoming alarmingly sluggish.

Of greater concern was the crushing depth. I hadn’t felt the water pressure inside the hyperbaric chamber, but I sure felt it now as I sank headfirst into the abyss, my legs barely moving. My bones ached. My skull hurt worse. And the deeper I went, the harder it was to breathe.

I was barely functioning by the time I plunged into the hadalpelagic zone, the ocean realm that plummets beyond 19,686 feet, encompassing the world’s sea canyons and trenches. The deepest point on the planet is located in the Mariana Trench in the Western Pacific. Seven miles down . . . 35,797 feet. The water pressure is an incredible eight tons per square inch—the weight of forty-eight Boeing 747 jets. And yet life had found a way to exist.

The Puerto Rico Trench reached a depth of 28,373 feet. The dark chasm appeared below, its depths formidable, its canyon wall rising to meet me like a coffin.

No longer swimming, I was simply sinking headfirst with my mouth open, my gills struggling to inject life-giving oxygen into my condensing bloodstream. At my present rate of descent, I would hit bottom in a matter of minutes—my final resting place.

My field of vision narrowed. Olive-green became shades of lead gray.

I began to hallucinate, my mind in free fall. I looked to my left and saw a mermaid endowed with Anya’s face.
“I’m here for you, Kwan.”

“Are you, Anya? You promised me if things went bad, you’d put me out of my misery.”

“Soon enough.”
She looked at me with those turquoise eyes and winked.

I reached for her . . . and she was gone.

I have no idea when the object distinguished itself from the black valley below or how long I had been staring at it before I realized it was the bow of the sunken submarine.

Paralyzed by the cold, I no longer cared. I was back in ICU, on life support, my father having issued the Do Not Resuscitate order.

And then a pulse of sensation trickled into my vegetating brain, forcing me from my stupor. Something was alive down there. Something dangerous.

Four hundred and thirty feet from the bottom of the Atlantic, I spun myself around and slowed my descent, the sudden shot of adrenaline shocking my consciousness awake.

There were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands; it was impossible to tell. Translucent bodies . . . six to seven feet long. Some glowed rose-red, others preferred albino-white, the beasts changing colors at will as they converged into a frenzied kaleidoscope of swirling,
seemingly mindless madness over an unseen section of seafloor.

Diablo Rojo
—the Red Devil.

Humboldt squid.

A cannibalistic carnivore, the Humboldt squid possesses eight lightning-quick tentacles, two longer sucker-equipped feeder arms, and a razor-sharp parrot-like beak that can slash and devour its prey like a buzz saw. It can jettison itself through the water at speeds up to twenty-five knots and stop or change direction on a dime. Ferocious fighters, Humboldts have been known to attack every species in the sea . . . including man.

And then my senses alerted me to the presence of another predator.

The goblin shark circled the chaos a hundred feet below me, biding its time. Eleven feet long from its surfboard-shaped snout to its rounded tail, the creature resembled a sand tiger shark, only with blue fins and a pink belly—the latter color caused by an abundance of blood vessels located beneath its semitransparent skin. I couldn’t see its dagger-sharp teeth or its stomach, but I could
hear
the hunger gnawing at its insides . . .
feel
the electrical impulses running along its back as its muscles coiled to attack.

As I watched, the goblin shark made a sudden descent, targeting a wounded Humboldt bleeding from the remains of three missing tentacles.

In a blink, dozens of agitated squid rose tentacles-first to engage the outnumbered challenger.

The goblin shark spun away in retreat . . . too late.

Tentacles bloomed like exploding fireworks, distracting the shark even as pairs of feeder arms grabbed the overmatched predator and drew it into the snapping beaks of the voracious killers.

My heart pounded irregularly in my pressure-impaled chest. Within seconds the squid had eaten all but a few bloody morsels of the goblin shark. Still in the throes of their feeding frenzy, they battered one another, probing for weakness among their peers.

And then they stopped.

My heart pounded, my life hanging in the balance—as the creatures rose as one to feed upon me! With a burst of speed I descended, heading for the submarine wreckage, seeking cover within the twisted caverns of steel. Racing parallel to the seafloor, I soared past sixty feet of hull before locating a gap large enough for me to squeeze through.

It was large enough for the Humboldts, but they didn’t pursue me, their senses perceiving the submarine as a larger predator.

Safe for the moment, I took in my new surroundings.

The submarine was resting on its portside, tilting every apparatus that remained bolted down. I inspected a rack of torpedoes stacked sideways, moving carefully past a maze of crushed computer stations and an open watertight door.

Thankfully, there were no human remains to be seen.

There was, however, a Geiger counter, its glass cracked, its metal box flattened—and now I realized why the Humboldt squid were congregating along the bottom.

It’s the uranium. They’re attracted to the heat.

The flooded chamber started spinning. I gasped mouthfuls of seawater, struggling to compensate for the flow needed to keep me conscious. My body convulsed—
if I couldn’t swim, I couldn’t breathe . . . I couldn’t create enough heat to keep my internal organs functioning.

If I didn’t leave the sub, I’d die.

If I left the sub, I’d be devoured.

Do Not Resuscitate.
My father had been right after all. Suffocation . . . it was more humane.

Facing death . . . it’s a scary thing. But I was done, my mind was baked. Every breath burned, every labored beat of my heart threatened to be the last. I was freezing and alone, surrounded by a darkness that was closing in rapidly. Buried beneath five miles of ocean, there was no hope, no escape . . . now it was just a matter of seeking my final resting place.

I made my way slowly through the open hatch of the torpedo room, somehow comforted by my human surroundings. The corridor led to a rush of ocean where the bow had split open upon impact with the seafloor, depositing its payload of Tomahawk missiles across the trench floor.

I scanned the debris field—a graveyard of technology, flattened by five tons per square inch of water pressure. The only recognizable remnants of the attack sub were sections of the titanium vertical missile silos.

The ampullae of Lorenzini became a five-alarm fire in my brain. I looked up and saw hundreds of Humboldt squid racing for me—red and white darts of death.

Desperate, I squeezed inside a five-foot length of titanium pipe lying along the seafloor. The fractured missile silo was open on one end; the other end was covered by a hatch that was intact but suspended open. Crawling toward the spring-loaded opening, I reached out and grabbed the round metal door by its interior wheel and slammed it shut—severing two intruding tentacles in the process.

I was trapped and far from impregnable—my feet exposed at the other open end of the tube. Relentless killers, the Humboldts reached in and tried to drag me out of my makeshift titanium shell by my ankles. I kicked at them, attempting to defend the thirty-inch-in-diameter opening.

Hold on . . . few more minutes . . . before you . . . suffocate.

Their sucker pads had barbs, forcing me to squirm closer to the sealed hatch.

In my delirium, I popped open the silo door just enough to reach my arms out. Allowing the metal disc to rest on the back of my head, I pushed against the sandy seafloor with every ounce of strength left in my body until the fractured missile silo levitated horizontally away from the bottom.

I changed my flutter kicks to the now-familiar east–west hip swivel and the titanium casing lurched forward, the curvature of the silo actually channeling the current more efficiently, like the hooded propeller used on the latest nuclear submarines. Using my back, I managed to keep the nose of my armored hull level as I crawled straight into the maelstrom of squid.

To the enraged Humboldts, I was simply a crustacean moving along the bottom in a protective shell. They battered it, attempted to pry it loose, but in the end the predators were forced to yield to it.

The overexertion heated up my muscles, thawing my dermal denticles. Breathing became easier, the casing around me lighter—until I realized it wasn’t just me—the water was noticeably warmer.