Meg: Hell's Aquarium (29 page)

Carlos feeds him the tube through another pore. Ed pulls the slack through then gently swims toward the cavernous mouth, now hanging open like a jagged crevice in a mountainside. Slowly, carefully, he eases the gushing hose inside the slack jaw between two lower side teeth, his pulse pounding.

Hendricks remains by the mouth an excruciating forty seconds longer until the milky-white substance begins bleeding out of the Megalodon’s fluttering gill slits.

Leaving the hose in place, he swims forward to Angel’s eye—

—which has rolled back into the skull, only the bloodshot white sclera showing.
Thank you, God.
“One fifty-ton monster, sleeping like a lamb. Hey, Frannie, you tell Jonas I want a raise!”

Jonas hears the message in his ear as he, Mac, and six staff members lower his daughter’s twenty-one-foot, fifteen-hundred-pound sports utility ski boat from its portable winch onto a skiff that angles from the lagoon’s eastern sea wall down into the water. Resting in the speedboat’s open bow is the benthic surgical chamber: a domed, clear-acrylic, rectangular affair the approximate size of two coffins positioned side by side. Next to the device, lying on one of the seats is a porous canvass tool bag containing the components for the Meg’s relay antenna.

Fran’s voice squawks over Jonas’s earpiece, “J.T., the patient’s ready.”

“On our way.” Jonas and Mac climb into the speed boat, chosen for its 250-horsepower EFI outboard, capable of hitting speeds of up to 70 miles an hour.

Mac guns the engine and they’re off, the boat racing across the lagoon into the canal, both men wearing wetsuits and scuba gear.

The boat slows as they approach the barbed wire barrier. Mac cuts the engine, allowing them to drift, the two men looking over the side at the pale object resting off the bottom.

Mac looks around. “Potential problem: We can’t drop anchor and we can’t let the boat drift while we’re down there.”

Jonas nods. “Okay. You stay with the boat. I can handle this myself.”

“Agreed.”

“Agreed? Really? No argument?”

“Hey, if you say you can handle it, you can handle it. Who am I to question your ability?”

Both men jump in their seats as a diver surfaces close by. Hendricks yells at them through his mask’s communication device. “Get that goddam surgical thing-a-ma-jig in the water now, before I shit my wetsuit!”

Jonas straps his dive mask and flippers on then quietly lowers himself over the side. Mac hands him his tool bag, waits until Jonas has secured it around his waist, and then eases the acrylic chamber overboard into the two divers’ hands.

The contraption is open along the bottom, its sides outfitted with a thick, pliable rubber housing and snag bolts. Its clear, domed interior supports three, pencil-thin cameras along with a series of retractable robotic surgical arms, one of which is gripping the neural implant. Attached to one end of the rectangular housing is a small hydraulic pump.

The weight distribution of the object causes it to flip over as it sinks. Jonas and Hendricks each grab an end, guiding it down sixty-seven feet—

—moving it into place atop the sleeping Megalodon’s massive skull.

Less than a mile away, images from the chamber’s three exterior cameras appear over three computer screens located in the Tanaka Institute’s lab. Jonathan Stelzer monitors the images, while Dr. Nichols sits at the primary control station of the da Vinci Surgical System, both hands resting in two hand controls fitted with finger-hole sleeves. Leaning forward, he looks through a three-dimensional view-master that allows him to zoom in or pull back on any of the surgical chamber’s three cameras.

“Gentlemen, can you hear me?”

“Go ahead,” Jonas replies, tension in his voice.

“There are two bumps located atop the Meg’s skull, the supraorbital crests. Position the chamber so it rests dead-center of these two processes, with the front end located approximately six feet behind the tip of the snout.”

“Did you have to say dead-center?”

“Sorry.”

“Okay, we’re in position.”

“Excellent. Lock her down.”

Jonas and Hendricks press down on the chamber so its rubber housing is squeezed securely against Angel’s thick albino hide. Snag bolts, made of biodegradable plastic, puncture the skin, drawing whiffs of blood as they draw the chamber in tighter, ensuring a watertight seal.

“You sure she can’t feel this?”

“Absolutely sure. Mr. Hendricks, start draining the chamber. Jonas, you have your own work to do.”

Jonas offers Hendricks a thumbs-up before swimming past the gills and dorsal fin, ascending along Angel’s torso toward the immense half-moon-shaped tail, now angled toward the surface.

Ed Hendricks activates the hydraulic pump, which quickly drains the acrylic chamber. A few seconds pass, then he watches in amazement as one of the surgical arms jumps to life, a whirring, ten-inch buzz saw that extends down from the appendage, its teeth carving a razor-thin, longitudinal incision deep into the alabaster hide—

—while a second surgical device, equipped with a tiny camera and light, rinses off the bleeding wound with saltwater. The buzz saw completes the sixty-inch cut then realigns itself, beginning a second incision six feet away, parallel to the first.

Aided by the current, Jonas rises past the towering dorsal fin. He ascends another twenty feet before arriving at the Megalodon’s powerful caudal keel. The secondary dorsal fin is located just forward of the muscular tail section—an equilateral triangle of flesh the size of a small child. Straddling Angel’s back, Jonas removes the antenna from his tool bag. The cylinder, approximately three feet long, is attached to an eight-inch-square, rubber faceplate, its four holes holding four plastic screws. Jonas fishes out his underwater drill, clips it to his weight belt, then lines the faceplate up against the surface of the small dorsal fin. Pressing the Phillips’ head screw bit to the first screw head, he squeezes the trigger.

Instead of puncturing the skin, the screw chews into the thick hide, twisting the tough muscle—

—the pain causing the half-moon-shaped tail to suddenly flick!

Jonas stops the drill, his heart beating so hard in his chest that he fears he’s about to go into cardiac arrest. “Hey, Dr. Nichols . . . small problem here.”

“I’m a little busy, Jonas. Can you handle it?”

“Yeah, sure. Sorry to disturb you, but Angel’s reacting to the faceplate.”

“Define reacting?”

“Her tail’s flicking. The screw twisted up under her skin when I used the drill. She can feel it, and she doesn’t like it. Suggestions?”

“Don’t use the drill. Use a screwdriver.”

Jonas searches his tool bag, his limbs quivering. “Don’t have one. Mac?”

“Stand by, I can see your air bubbles. I’ll toss one overboard.”

Virgil Carmen watches as the slurry bucket drains the last of the chalky anesthetic into the hydraulic pump. Returning to the supply rack, he retrieves another fifty-pound bag of tricaine methanesulfonate, shocked to discover it’s the last bag on the shelf.

“Hey, Fran. I’m on the last bag of Finquel.”

Fran Rizzuto climbs down from her perch. “That’s impossible. We brought twice the dosage needed. How could you be out?”

“How can
I
be out?” Virgil tears open the last bag and dumps the powder into the slurry bucket. “Maybe
someone
miscalculated.”

Fran searches the shelves then goes below, dragging out another large bag, this one marked QS.

“Quinaldine sulfate? Frannie, are you crazy? She’ll be a terror when she comes out of it . . .
if
she comes out of it.”

“Mix it with diazepam.”

“I didn’t bring any.”

“Dammit!” She turns her back on him, calling into her radio. “Dr. Nichols, how much longer?”

“Don’t bother me, I’m operating!” His face pressed against the viewfinder, Brent Nichols remotely manipulates the buzz saw, completing a transverse incision, which connects the first two parallel cuts. Switching to a robotic forceps, he carefully grips the edge of the excised skin and pulls the six-inch-thick flap towards the Megalodon’s snout, Dr. Selby assists with a second clamp, rolling back the fifty-two-inch-long, ninety-pound section of skin and muscle. Armed with a scalpel, Dr. Nichols shears away the remaining connective tissue as he exposes a smooth layer of underlying cartilage.

“Dr. Selby, secure the skin flap while I slice through her skull.”

It takes the biologist another few minutes to surgically remove the two-inch-thick section of cartilage. Adjusting his camera angle, Nichols pans out, revealing the inner workings of the creature’s brain.

“Magnificent . . .”

Unlike a human brain, the Megalodon’s brain is long and thin, spread out across the cranial cavity like an inverted Y, the extensions reaching out to the nostrils and olfactory bulbs, as well as a labyrinth of nerve cells located in the snout.

Dr. Nichols stares at the anatomical design in awe.

Stelzer nudges him. “They’re running out of anesthetic.”

“Right.” Switching controls, he manipulates the robotic appendage gripping the neural implant, positioning the device so that it rests atop the brain’s Y junction. One eighteen-inch-long, wire-thin electrode at a time, he begins connecting the device to various surfaces of the predator’s brain.