Meg: Hell's Aquarium, page 32
The submersible shoots through the vertical shaft of rock doing twenty-two knots—
—followed seconds later by forty tons of monster.
Spiderman’s voice grows excited. “You’re luring them up. Don’t let up! Tonga, stand ready with the nets.”
Disorienting outcrops of rock reach for them. Hoch swerves left. Veers back right. Every move requiring a deft counter-move, his reflexes falling behind, forcing him to—
“Don’t slow down!”
“I have to!” Easing back on both pedals, Jeffrey Hoch regains control of the sub—
—allowing the nearest ichthyosaur to close the gap. The prehistoric hunter whips its tail into a frenzy as it lurches forward, its carnivorous mouth snapping down upon its elusive prey—
—its conical teeth crushing the starboard wing.
Jeffrey Hoch and Marcus Slabine utter a short-lived scream as their craft careens sideways in a sickening spin, the Manta Ray smashing bow-first into unforgiving volcanic rock, the impact causing a two-inch-long hairline fracture along the cockpit . . .
WA—VOOM!
Thirty-five hundred pounds per square inch of water pressure implodes the acrylic escape pod, folding it in upon itself, splattering blood and innards a split second before the ocean engulfs the debris field in a vacuous burp.
The alpha female swallows morsels of plastic and human flesh as it soars out of the chute into the Philippine Sea—
—swimming snout-first into one of the cargo nets! Spinning as it rises, it quickly becomes encumbered in the heavy binding as the other two members of its hunting party charge out of the hole, the first becoming hopelessly entangled in two of the nets, the second managing to avoid the chaos as it leads the rest of the pod of giant ichthyosaurs into open water.
Warning sirens blast across the tanker’s main deck, ordering all hands to their stations. Cables strain against winches as a life-and-death tug-of-war begins seven thousand feet below the surface, the hunters now the hunted—
—the exiled species suddenly free as Nature’s 210-million-year-old purgatory comes to an abrupt end.
It takes David Taylor twenty long minutes before he can ease the damaged Manta Ray into the upper reaches of the Panthalassa current’s vast embrace. Exiting the torrent, he slows the submersible, allowing it to drift. The low roaring whoosh of water continues to move beneath them, the torrent raging into endless black sea.
Kaylie listens over her headphones. “Sonar’s clear. How far from the chute are we now?”
He checks their position twice. “Wow. The exit hole’s forty-seven-point-seven miles due west, and that’s not counting the four mile ascent. Try the radio.”
“Delta to Spiderman, come in please. Delta team to Spiderman? It’s no good. I’m getting nothing but static. I think one of those creatures bit off our antenna assembly.”
Exhausted from the near-death encounters, David lays his head back and closes his eyes to think, the soothing sound of the Panthalassa current combining with the heat blowing in from the ventilation system to relax his body, sinking him deeper in his seat. His eyelids grow heavy, his body shutting down—
“David!”
“Sorry. I’m wiped out.”
“Here, eat something.” She opens a glove box, removing sealed bags of trail-mix snacks. She tosses him one, keeping the other for herself.
David shovels a handful of peanuts, dark chocolate, and raisins into his mouth, the sudden rise in blood sugar momentarily staving off sleep. “Where’s Maren’s charts?”
Kaylie reaches behind her seat, grabbing the two maps. She unravels the first. “This is a bathymetric chart of the Panthalassa Sea. I count twelve exit holes, including these three Maren highlighted in red.”
David points to one of the highlighted markings. “This is the hole we descended through.” He removes a slide rule from a storage compartment and checks their present location. “That puts us right about here, along the eastern half of the Panthalassa.”
Kaylie scans Maren’s chart. “Looks like we have a few choices. The nearest exit is here, twenty-two miles to the northeast.”
“That runs right into the Mariana Trench. No way am I going into that Megalodon nursery.”
She scans the chart again, measuring distances with the slide rule. “What about this exit? Granted, it’s eighty-five miles from here, but it’s due east. We could probably ride the current most of the way out, making it in half the time. Plus Maren highlighted it. I’m assuming that’s a good thing.”
“Or we could go back.”
She looks up at him, her eyes full of fear. “The ichthyosaurs are back there. Do you really want to go that way?”
“Right. East it is. Hold on.” David pushes down on his foot pedals, accelerating to twenty knots, building speed as he eases down on the joysticks—
—immersing the Manta Ray belly-first inside the roaring Panthalassa current.
Aboard the McFarland
Pacific Ocean
A tapestry of stars blankets a moonless night sky, the ocean, lead-gray and velvet, melting into endless horizon.
Jonas is seated on the starboard catwalk’s steel grating, his chest and elbows leaning against the guardrail’s lower rung, his legs dangling twenty feet above the hopper.
Below, the dark pool of seawater glows softly from its submerged occupant’s snowy-white hide, the only movement coming from the upper lobe of Angel’s caudal fin, each east-west stroke of its tail as effortless and steady as a metronome.
The scene takes Jonas back twenty-six years when Masao Tanaka’s ship, the Kiku, had drugged and netted Angel’s mother. On a night similar to this, Jonas and Terry had stood by the stern rail, contemplating whether to drag the captured Megalodon into the Institute’s lagoon, or drown it.
Terry was livid. All she wanted was revenge for her brother’s death. I’m the one who wanted the Meg kept alive, if only to prove to the world that it really existed, that I was right. That was a crossroad—a decision that ultimately affected a lot of innocent people. How many victims might still be alive today if I had killed Angel’s mother when we had the chance? How many families would have been spared their grief? I could have ended this whole affair back then . . . no Meg, no Angel, no Belle and Lizzy.
Ten years from now, assuming I’m still around, will I look back at this night as a crossroad as well? What if my decision to free this monstrous pet of mine leads to my own death . . . or worse, the death of a loved one? What if she is pregnant again? How can I allow the resurrection of a species that was never intended to share the oceans with modern man?
Kill her! Do it now! Gut her remains and sink the evidence, then fly home in a week and announce she’s been successfully returned to the abyss. Seal the lagoon for good. Seal it so her evil brood never tastes open water.
Jonas smells the smoke from the meerschaum pipe a moment before he turns to see Captain Neal watching him from the forward deck. “Your friend seems upset.”
“Mac? What happened?”
“Don’t know. He’s in the bridge, speaking with someone on the radio.”
With a heavy heart, Jonas enters the command center. He finds Mac outside, standing on the catwalk balcony overlooking the forward deck. There are tears in his friend’s eyes.
“Mac, what happened? Was it Trish? The baby?”
“No.”
Relief and panic hit him at once. “What, then?”
“I didn’t trust bin Rashidi, so I arranged to get someone on the inside—someone to keep an eye on David for me.”
Jonas’s skin tingles. Sweat breaks out across his body.
“I just heard from my guy. David took bin Rashidi’s offer. He made the dive into that isolated sea. He’s missing.”
Jonas grabs Mac by the shoulders, his blood pressure soaring. “What happened? Tell me everything!”
“They sent David and another pilot down in one of the Rays to access a deepwater lab. They docked—”
“Where? How deep?!”
“Deep. Thirty-one thousand feet.”
“Oh, Jesus . . .”
“They made it inside. A short time later the docking station imploded. The detonation destroyed the barracuda. There’s no way of knowing if they made it out alive.”
The world spins in Jonas’s head. He collapses to his knees and covers his face, his rage blunting his sorrow, his body shaking with emotion.
“The radio’s not working. It could just be interference—”
“Get me there.”
“I already called for a chopper. You’re on a flight out of San Francisco to Hawaii, catching a connecting flight to Guam. I’ll have another chopper ready when you arrive that will fly you out to bin Rashidi’s ship.”
“Contact the Institute—someone you trust. I want the AG-III prototype crated and loaded on board my planes.”
“An Abyss Glider? Jonas, bin Rashidi has Manta Rays—”
“This is a rescue mission. I need something with a grappler arm.”
“Okay.” Mac stares at the Pacific. Swallows hard. “Jonas, David’s a good pilot . . .”
Jonas nods, choking on his words. “I’ll find him.”
29.
Panthalassa Sea
Our planet is an interactive biomass, possessing a self-regulating homeostatic system that stabilizes global temperatures and chemical compositions—conditions necessary to sustain life.
Earth’s womb is its oceans, its vast currents the circulatory system that regulates global temperatures and provides nourishment to every living creature. While these currents are affected by wind and tides, the moon’s gravitational pull and the planet’s rotation, the real power train that keeps these planetary rivers of water flowing is thermohaline circulation. Warm water has a tendency to rise, while colder, saltier water, being denser, will sink. Density differentials in water, created by temperature (thermo) and salinity (haline) move large rivers of water just as the jet stream moves great volumes of air—
—a prime example being the Gulf Stream.
Part of the oceans’ global circulatory system, the Gulf Stream is a shallow, warm current that moves more water than five hundred Amazon rivers. Heated by the equatorial sun, the Gulf Stream rises, releasing enough heat to power the world a hundred times over. As it flows north past Florida, it is chilled by the wind, accelerating evaporation. Now saltier and cooler, the current sinks into the North Atlantic depths, replaced in turn by warm water, which follows its downward flow.
Reaching sub-polar temperatures around Greenland, the current descends to depths of six thousand to ten thousand feet, where it begins its southerly flow into the Western Atlantic Basin. Influenced by the contours of the deep ocean floor, this submarine river winds past Antarctica before flowing into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, looping into other currents before upwelling back to the surface to begin its planetary journey back in the Gulf Stream. So vast is this oceanic conveyor belt that it can take over a thousand years just to complete one lap around the globe.
The Panthalassa submarine current circulates nutrients in a similar way. Cold seeps rising from the ancient sea floor create a massive upwelling of dense, frigid water which is drawn in a clockwise easterly flow by the planet’s rotation. As this current continues east it collides with a warm influx of water created by a seismically active sea floor dominated by thousands of active hydrothermal vents. These vents, or black smokers, excrete superheated, seven-hundred degree Fahrenheit water, heavily laden with chemicals and minerals. As the heated water rises, it meets the freezing cold layer, forming a hydrothermal plume.
This swirling ceiling of dense mineralized water effectively traps and seals in the heat, creating a tropical layer below. The density differential between the upper cold layer and the tropical abyss drives the Panthalassa current like a raging river, increasing its flow rate over the next six hundred miles. As the current reaches the eastern-most point of the subterranean sea, the vents become sparse, the ocean temperatures cooling rapidly. The cooled current sinks as it flows to the south, then west, where it eventually meets the cool water seeps to begin the process all over again.
In the isolated depths of the Panthalassa Sea, the extreme differences in heat and cold that fuel the thermohaline submarine river has provided a perpetual supply of food for its prehistoric inhabitants for more than 250 million years. But the cold seeps and hot vents do far more than circulate nutrients; their vastly different temperate zones also serve to segregate its population into two very distinct food chains.
David Taylor closes his eyes as he urinates into the flexible plastic six-inch tube attached to the sixteen-ounce bottle. “Oh, baby, that feels good. My back teeth were floating.”
Kaylie ignores him, too focused on piloting the sub through the Panthalassa submarine current.
“All done here. Sure I can’t interest you?”
“I told you, I’m covered.”
“With what? Is it some kind of diaper or something?”
“When we get out of this mess I’ll let you try it on, okay. Now hurry up and finish, the current’s getting rougher.”
“You can’t rush a guy when he’s peeing. Cut it off mid-stream and you’re liable to blow out your prostate.” He moans for effect then feels the sub rising. He glances at the depth gauge.
. . . 19,175 feet . . . 18,840 feet . . .
“Kaylie, keep us level. You’re ascending too fast.”
“It’s not me. It’s the current.”
As if in response, the sub’s bow suddenly heaves upward, causing David to spill urine all over his pants before Kaylie can level them out again.
“That’s not funny!”
“I didn’t do it! I told you, it’s getting too rough for me!”
He caps the bottle and zips up, setting his hands and feet at the port-side master controls. “Switching over . . . now.” The two joysticks instantly animate in his palms, the current’s torque on the sub’s two wings registering throughout his upper torso. “What the hell? The current’s upwelling.”
“No shit. Take a look at the sea temperature.”
The gauge reads fifty-seven degrees Fahrenheit and rising.
“We must be entering a hydrothermal vent field.”
“Is that good?”
“Not while we’re still traveling in the current. The temperature differential could—”
Kaylie screams as a column of rushing water catches the Manta Ray’s wing expanse like hurricane winds peeling away a tile roof. The submersible’s bow flips straight up, continuing into a 360-degree somersault as the swirling vortex catches the wings like a sail, tossing the craft sideways, punishing the tiny submersible and its two helpless passengers.
Mercifully, the current spits them free.
The damaged sub stalls. Neutrally buoyant, it hovers upside-down in the water, its shaken occupants struggling to regain their equilibrium.
David massages his throbbing head, his brain rattling like it did after his football concussion.
Kaylie moans, “Can you at least right us before I puke?”
He fumbles at the inverted controls, managing to restart the engines. The starboard shaft grinds metal against metal, forcing him to ease off before he tears up the housing. Using only his left pedal, he rights the sub, moving them ahead at a cautious three knots. “You okay?”
“My head’s pounding, I’m seasick, my diaper’s full, and I’m scared shitless. Would you describe that as being okay?”
“Beats being dead. And if I remember correctly, I practically begged you not to come.”
“Remind me later to pat you on the back.” She searches a medicine bag for aspirin. Swallows four with a swig of icy water. “Any idea where we are?”
He checks their position. “About four miles southwest of Maren’s access hole and two miles beneath the Panthalassa crust. Can you hear anything on sonar?”
She listens over her headphones. “Only that current. It’s blotting out every ambient sound in the sea.”
“I’ll move us farther away.” David engages the port-side propeller when he sees something looming in the darkness ahead. Adjusting the cockpit’s night glass contrast, he stares into the olive-green abyss—
—then shuts down the engine, allowing them to drift.
“What are you doing?”
“Shh! Overhead and up ahead.” He points.
She looks up, gazing at swirling shadows of movement converging on a whale-size mass two hundred feet above their present location. Kaylie’s eyes adjust, allowing her to identify the ancient participants of the eastern Panthalassa food chain.
Hadopelagic krill swarm through the sea like hordes of locusts, rising up from the depths to feed on microscopic particles of food. Spiraling around a twinkling, albino cloud of shrimp are schools of anglerfish, their bioluminescent orbs swirling through the darkness like a million fireflies caught in a tornado. Dive bombing into the maelstrom are sharks, the predators moving far too fast to identify.
At the heart of the abyssal smorgasbord is an 83,000-pound Leeds’ fish.
Wounded, gushing blood from dozens of gaping wounds, the eighty-five-foot behemoth is literally being eaten alive as it attempts to distance itself from the Panthalassa’s true warm water predators.
A twelve-foot halosaur attacks one of the creature’s enormous ray-shaped pectoral fins. Paddling with its four limbs, the small mosasaur snaps its crocodile-like jaws upon the lashing fin and holds on, its double row of pterygoid teeth, located along the roof of its mouth, puncturing flesh and bone. Gill adaptions flap behind the ancient marine reptile’s powerful neck as it whips its head to and fro until the sixty-pound morsel rips free.
Drawn to the fresh wound is a pair of six-foot Hybodus sharks. Bearing a heavy upper-lobed caudal fin like the modern-day thresher shark, this denizen of the Triassic-Cretaceous period possesses a pair of devil’s horns protruding behind their eyes and a spine on the frontal tip of its split dorsal fin, the built-in weapon allowing it to ward off attacks from above. The sharks—both females—swoop in upon the Leeds’ fish, burying their blunt jaws nose-deep into a bleeding patch of pink flesh. Wiggling their entire bodies back and forth in a vicious frenzy of movement, they use their serrated teeth to chew through tissue and bone.
