Hotel Megalodon: A Deep Sea Thriller (23 page)

Chapter 45

Coco didn’t know what fate exactly would befall the hapless fish. Would it sink all the way to the bottom—presumably from whence it came to remain undetected for all these years—or would it snap out of it at some point on the way down? She had no idea, but she knew one thing. The lack of oxygen in the sub’s cabin was threatening to send her into her own tonic immobility state—and a permanent one, at that— if she didn’t do something about it soon. She had done her job, drawing the shark away from the hotel while they activated the escape pod.

It was time for her to get back to the island.

She jettisoned the last of the submersible’s ballast—lead weights to help the craft sink—so that it would rise faster. Still, she was concerned. She had no choice but to surface now if she wanted to live. If the megalodon followed her back up, there would be nothing she could do about it.

She pointed the sub up, and just as she hit the thrusters the batteries died, sending the cabin into darkness. But because she had ditched the ballast, the sub was rising. She leaned back and looked up, wondering if she would pass out before she reached the surface.

#

“Well done, Mick!” Albert Johnson clapped Mick on the back as he coasted his small boat up onto the sand and stood next to the escape pod which he had towed here. The pod was open, and the surviving guests and staff, including a dumbfounded-looking James White, stumbled out of it in a daze onto the moonlit beach.

Mick muttered a quick thanks, and looked back out to sea, his gaze tracing the reef line.

“What’s the latest you heard from Coco?” he asked the engineer, eyeing the handheld radio clipped to his belt. His expression softened as he answered.

“Last transmission we received from her was about an hour ago. She said she was a couple of hundred feet down where the drop-off becomes sheer, nose-to-nose with the shark.”

“What? That’s it? No more contact?”

“No more. If she went deeper than that, though, we’d probably lose radio contact, so I’m hoping that’s what happened. Because I keep trying...” He picked up the radio, and uttered quick syllables into it...”Coco, Topside, repeat: Coco this is Topside, do you copy, over?” He stared at the radio for a few seconds, and when no reply was forthcoming, he resumed speaking to Mick.

“The other possibility is that maybe she did surface but drifted with the currents...”

But Mick was already running back over to his boat, no longer listening. He pushed the Zodiac into shallow water, and then jumped in and started the outboard. He called into his radio transmitter as he turned the craft around so that it faced out to the reef.

“Coco, this is Mick. I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’m taking the boat out to the reef to look for you.” He dropped the transmitter, and threw the boat into high gear, jetting out toward the reef, a single bow-mounted light scanning the water as he went.

He passed the hotel, now marked by bits of flotsam and floating debris—and there—a body floating face down in the water. He slowed the boat and maneuvered to it, in case the person might somehow still be alive. But when he reached the form it was clear that this was now a corpse. He grabbed the lifeless human by one arm and flipped the body over. He stared into the slack-skinned face of the Arab who had fought with White in the tower, Abdullah bin Antoun. Mick let the body go, and started the boat again. It was too late for him to help that man. He just hoped it wasn’t too late for Coco.

#

Coco found it hard to think straight through the throbbing headache induced by lack of oxygen and buildup of carbon dioxide. The entire sub was electrically dead—she had no power, was rising only because earlier she’d had the foresight to empty the ballast—there was no radio, no depth gauge, nothing. The only thing that gave her hope was that, even at night, she could see the water growing lighter as the craft buoyed up closer to the surface of the moonlit lagoon. Was she almost there? It was too much effort to raise her head to get a good look around...

She started to nod off. Her thoughts came in an incoherent montage of memories...the megalodon drifting into the abyss in its seemingly blissful state of tonic immobility...Mick and Clarissa making out in the sub shack...the faces of the divers from the first pod who had been tossed into Hell...peering inside the tower at James White standing atop a flaming floor...

Time passed, she didn’t know how much, but she was shaken from her trance-like state by a change in motion patterns. Rocking, side-to-side. It was a very different feeling from the steady rise the sub had been doing. She forced her eyelids up, and tried to focus.

Water. Moving. Sloshing over the bubble dome. When her vision resolved, it was on a fine spray pattern of water droplets exploding off of the sub’s dome. And then the realization of what that meant hit home.

She was on the surface!

But too weak to deal with opening the hatch.

Where was the megalodon?

And then she heard the sound of a boat engine, muted through the sub hatch. The sound stopped, and she saw the bow of a small boat pull up alongside the sub. An inflatable boat.

Mick!

She saw his strong hands unlatching the catches for the dome, and flipping it open. Gloriously cool night air flooded the cabin where she sat, her lungs working furiously to suck in this new source of energy. She heard a voice, as if in a dream calling her name.

“...me, Coco, Mick...Coco? Coco!”

Then she felt a hand on her face, feeling for breath under her nose, in front of her bluish lips.

“Coco! Wake up!”

She focused on his blue eyes, watching them swirl until they solidified into two distinct orbs. Slowly she lifted her head from the seat.

“Mick?” Her voice was faint, tentative.

“Yes! Coco, it’s me. Let me get you into the boat. Do you know where the megalodon is?”

She let her head fall back into the seat. “Down...deep. Deep down...”

“Okay, good. We’ve got the pod up on the beach. Now we’ve just got to get you up there, and we can call it a day. You with me?”

“Hell yes.”

Mick grinned his million-dollar smile at her. “Excellent. On three, here we go...”

He lifted her from the seat, and Coco felt like she was floating up and out of the sub...into the Zodiac where she was gently placed in a horizontal position on the floor, a pile of life jackets for pillows.

“Get the sub.” Coco’s voice was still very weak, but must have been stronger than before to carry across the air in the open boat. Mick shot her a disapproving look.

“My, we must be feeling better to worry about that old rust bucket.” But deep down he understood her reason for wanting to bring it back. She was a professional sub pilot; to come back without her craft would be to her a shortcoming, having achieved her objective on the dive or not.

Quickly, Mick rigged a tow harness from the sub to the boat. While he did he stared out at the water towards the reef, searching for signs of the megalodon, ready to ditch the sub and hightail it in the Zodiac to shore the second he saw anything. He hoped Coco was right and not in a state of total delirium when she had said the shark was down deep. By the time the sub was secured behind the boat, however, he had still not sighted the prehistoric fish.

“Coast is still clear, Coco! I’ve got the sub. Let’s go home.”

Mick put the boat into gear, slowly at first, mindful of the sub in tow, but before long they were making steady progress toward the beach, where a large crowd was gathered around the rescued escape pod and its disheveled, raggedy group of survivors.

Chapter 46

After so much time in the sub, alone in the ocean, the scene on the beach seemed like a madhouse to Coco.

She looked at Mick as he helped her from the boat onto the sand. “Where did all these people come from?”

“Reporters flew in from the main island to be here once word got out that the hotel was in trouble. Then, of course, we’ve got the whole Topside crew who came out of their holes in the wall to check it out, and last, but not least...” Mick raised his voice when he saw that several reporters were closing in on him and Coco with cameras and microphones extended. “...our survivors from the hotel who have you to thank.”

Coco rose unsteadily to her feet, and took her first few exploratory steps while still holding Mick’s hand. She couldn’t help but notice Clarissa standing nearby, watching them with a scowl on her face. Coco couldn’t blame her. Her dolphin program was up in smoke along with the hotel, many of her dolphins either dead or missing, the resort itself in shambles. And here was Coco being carried to the beach by her love interest.

But that wasn’t Coco’s problem. In fact, like Mick had said, she was ready to go home—only for her she really meant
home
, not just back to her
bure
here on the island. She was ready to go back to Hawaii. Back home for real. This place would never be the same for her again. The hotel was done, and she was done with it.

That went for Mick, too. She liked him, had been with him for a time, but he had feelings for another woman, and coming to her aid would not change her mind about that. Just before the reporters began shouting questions at her, she looked into Mick’s eyes, and with all the sincerity she could muster, said “Thank you.”

And that was that. She had washed her hands of her island romance; wrapped up that piece of her life.

Coco walked among the crowd, looking for Aiden. She couldn’t find him anywhere. She found a somber staff member with a list of missing and dead. “Aiden?” she asked, terrified of the reply. The Indian woman ran her pointer finger along a printed list, then shook her head with a heavy expression.

“I’m sorry. He was last seen in the tunnel leading from the main lobby, he has not yet been found.”

“Let me see that.” Coco grabbed the clipboard, and scanned down the list of missing and deceased. She was saddened to find Kamal’s name under those who had passed. She thought of him taking her side in the train control room against Mr. White, and smiled. She scanned the list a bit longer, heart breaking with each of the names on the list as she placed a face to the name, and recalled a memory she had shared with them. But then she was being assailed with questions she could no longer put off. She handed the clipboard back to the woman.

Now it was time to deal with the reporters.

“How long were you down there in the sub for?”

“What happened to the big shark—what’s it called?”

Coco took the softball question first. “
Carcharadon megalodon
. A primitive relative of the Great White. Long thought to be extinct, but apparently not!”

To her surprise this got quite a few laughs from the contingent of reporters. It didn’t stop the questions from coming, though.

“How long were you trapped in the hotel for?”

“What exactly happened down there in the hotel?”

“What happened to the megalodon?”

Coco was exhausted, and the first two questions didn’t have short answers, so she tackled the third. It was also more familiar ground for the marine biologist, since it concerned sharks.

“I lured the megalodon away from the hotel in the submersible...” she pointed to the yellow sub, now being wrangled up onto the sand by hotel staff ...so that the engineering staff could get the escape pod launched without interference.”

“So where is the shark now?”

“I took care of it. It’s—”

At that moment James White stepped into the circle of reporters, walking over to Coco, a fake smile perched on his lips. “That’s right, folks, our marine biologist took care of our little shark problem, and the Triton Undersea Resort will rise again. We have already initiated the rebuilding plans.”

Most of the reporters had a question on their lips, but it was Coco who was the most vocal. “I certainly hope you’re kidding, Mr. White. That would be reckless.”

White shot Coco the dirtiest of stares for about a microsecond, about as long as he thought it could go unnoticed. “Pardon me? Didn’t you just say you took care of the mega-what’s it—the one-in-a-million dinosaur shark? It’s dead, right? So we won’t have to—“

“No, Mr. White. It’s not dead. I said I took care of it, I didn’t say I killed it.”

The developer stood there with his mouth agape for a second too long, and the reporters jumped at the opportunity.

“Where is the shark now?”

“What did you do to it?”

“Is the shark not real—just a ploy to divert attention from operational problems?”

White looked like he was about to have a heart attack. His outburst of
whoa, whoa, whoa
! was ignored in favor of hearing what Coco had to say.

“The shark is very real,” Coco said with White nodding enthusiastically in agreement. “But it is also very alive. I baited it into chasing me in the submersible down the submarine canyon to deep waters. Once there, I used the sub’s grab-arm to stimulate the shark in such a way that it entered into a condition known by shark experts as
tonic immobility
. This is where a shark is upside-down in the water and becomes very sleepy, sort of like it’s drunk.”

Amazingly, this was met with complete silence as everyone tried to make sense of this; a few reporters even took notes. Coco was about to continue when White butted in, attempting to hijack the spotlight, and put his own PR spin on the outgoing information.

“So basically the shark was dead as it sank into the depths, meaning that now we can move forward knowing that our beautiful tropical lagoon is once again safe from any threats.”

Coco shook her head emphatically. “No, Mr. White. I stand by my professional assessment that the megalodon shark is not dead.”

White’s carotid bulged as he replied in fury. “You lie! You’re just trying to create a sensational story to get your name out there, get your own reality TV show—
Shark Girl
—or some such nonsense!”

The reporters ate it up, alternately zooming in on the incensed hotel developer, and the irritated but more sedate marine biologist. Coco was about to simply refute her boss’s allegation when it occurred to her that she could do better than that.

“Don’t believe me? Well then, what’s the old saying? A picture is worth a thousand words? Here you go...”

She jogged over to the sub, its dome hatch still open while Mick inspected it for damage. She reached in behind the pilot’s seat and unsnapped the GoPro video camera from its mount. She withdrew her arm from the sub, holding the little camera high for the crowd to see. To her great satisfaction, White’s face paled visibly when he recognized what it was. Coco addressed the reporters, most of whom now had their own cameras focusing in on the GoPro held in her hand.

“Let’s see the footage!” a reporter from a New Zealand newspaper shouted, eliciting a chorus of
yeah
s.

Coco asked for a laptop. One was quickly produced, and she connected the video camera to it, transferring its files. She started the video from the last dive with the megalodon, while the news media people crowded around, filming the laptop screen as the video played. White got into a brief shoving match with a cameraman as he fought for a decent vantage point from which to view the footage.

On screen, the yellow frame of the submersible was visible in the foreground while the background was filled with the toothy visage of the planet’s greatest predator of all time. The parts of the submersible visible in the foreground gave some scale to the shark. Gasps of wonder and excitement issued from those watching. The shark’s head was positioned upside-down relative to the sub.

“Look at it—it’s practically dead!” White shouted joyfully.

Coco calmly shook her head. “No, this is textbook tonic immobility.” She pointed to a portion of the screen. “Watch here. See how it rolls its eyes back when the manipulator arm passes over the skin just below the mouth? Then when I take it away its eyes open—watch.”

The events unfolded in the video exactly as Coco described, while the reporters murmured amongst themselves in excited tones. Coco resumed her narration.

“This is where I leave the megalodon behind, and it sinks into the deep ocean while I start back to the surface in the sub.” The video depicted the living fossil writhing slowly with its eyes closed as it fell into the black abyss, illuminated only by the sub’s floodlights. It would fall still for a moment or two, and then come to life with a small burst of muscle activity, wriggling until it found the upside-down orientation again, and settled into a state of torpor.

“And there it goes, this is it...” They all watched as the truck-sized shark began to sink beneath the cone of light.

“It’s on the verge of death right there!” White said. “Its eyes aren’t open at all. You probably gave it some sort of electrical shock with that thing on the sub.” Coco silently shook her head to refute this, while they continued to watch the video.

Soon only the fish’s monumental head was visible at the bottom of the lit zone. Just as the megalodon drifted out of the light, both of its eyes opened wide, and with a powerful swish of its massive caudal fin, it turned and swam straight down into the blackness.

“Didn’t look dead to me,” one reporter said.

“It was alive, at least at the last we saw it on camera,” added another.

“Apologies for being late, but I’ve just flown in from Singapore after hearing the news. Play the video again for me, would you?” The new voice made heads turn as the tall man it belonged to threaded his way through the crowd until he was standing in front of the laptop. Mr. Frederick Cimmaron, James White’s boss and the chief bankroller of the Triton Undersea Resort, watched the portion of the video where the megalodon opened its eyes just before it sank into the abyss. He made a spitting noise, and then turned to address White.

“James, we’re done here. That thing—and who knows how many others like it—could very well still be alive down there waiting to cause us more grief. Now
you
might be willing to serve up a buffet for these fish, but I’m not. I’m pulling out of the Triton project, James, effective immediately. I expect we’ll have lawsuits to deal with as it is—or settlements, as the case may be—and that’s fine. I’m not trying to run from anything here. But the project is over. That’s my final word on the subject.”

White’s face turned purple. “That’s preposterous! You’re going to base the fate of a billion dollar enterprise on the word of this...this...
girl
?”

White’s boss did an about-face, and delivered a challenging stare to White. “Her word, her video...” He paused to wave an arm out toward the reef where so much construction debris now lay on the seafloor. “...the death and destruction that occurred here. Face it, Mr. White. This project was too risky. We gambled and lost. Sometimes it happens. For me it’s on to the next. For you...”

He left the sentence unfinished as he worked his way back out through the group, the film teams stepping over one another to video him. White watched expectantly, calling out after him.

“For me, what?”

“For you it’s over. You’ll never work in this business again, Mr. White. Go home. You’ll be hearing from my legal team.”

White was left there stammering in the old man’s wake, while the reporters moved on, turning their attention back to the hero of the day.

“Miss Keahi, Triton’s chief investor just said rebuilding the resort is not an option that’s on the table, due in large part to information that you yourself provided. What’s next for you?”

Coco looked at the throng of reporters on the beach—at Mick, at Clarissa, at the other hotel staff, and back to Mick. She looked him in the eyes while she answered.

“I’m going home.”