Meg: Hell's Aquarium (60 page)

Bin Rashidi smiles smugly.

It takes all of Mac’s reserves to keep from bashing the man across his uni-brow with the laptop. He storms out of the wheel house, pushing past Ibrahim Al Hashemi.

Bin Rashidi turns to the marine biologist. “The harpoon gun loaded with the tagging device . . . it is operational?”

“Yes. Mounted in the trawler’s bow.”

“Be ready, my friend. We may need it.”

Panthalassa Sea

The liopleurodon rises from the depths, its 200,000-pound frame slicing through the sea, leaving barely a ripple. It cannot see the Megalodon but it can smell its blood, just as it can taste the mosasaur’s remains. The monster homes in on both, ascending in a steady, spiraling pattern so as not to reveal her presence.

Equipped with the best sensory array afforded by nature, Angel tracks its challenger as it rises, its ampullae of Lorenzini locked in on the electrical impulses emanating from the pliosaur’s beating heart. The liopleurodon’s speed and angle of ascent, similar to that of a great white attacking a seal, places the Megalodon in grave danger.

The Meg continues to circle the dead mosasaur in short, muscular bursts, its predatory instinct preventing it from abandoning its kill.

And then another signal reaches its brain, stimulating its olfactory senses, beckoning it to the surface. The Meg becomes agitated, the danger growing, its challenger streaking toward it from below.

Snatching the mosasaur remains in its jaws, Angel launches her girth topside, her caudal fin pumping hard.

Shifting from stealth to speed, the liopleurodon executes a series of quick downward strokes, closing the gap to fifty feet. Opening its jaws, it lunges forward to bite Angel’s caudal fin—

—when it’s bashed sideways by a roaring river!

The Panthalassa current whips the pliosaur sideways, forcing it to streamline its limbs. By the time it has resumed its ascent, the Megalodon is gone.

Emerging from the current, the giant female once more picks up the Meg’s scent. Swimming side to side like a crocodile, it races toward the subterranean ceiling in pursuit.

The lab is teetering on its side, the interior a shambles. Equipment lies in heaps, computer monitors smashed, books buried beneath collapsed shelves. Darkness beckons, the lights flickering behind the nearly drained backup generator.

David claws his way up the slanted lower deck floor to the life support system. The unit is bolted to the floor, but the tank is angled sideways, preventing the hard-earned pint of remaining water from draining into the liquid-gas conversion unit, stifling the flow of air.

“David, your father!”

He slides down the floor to the ladder and enters the upper level, now on an equal plane to the lower. Kaylie has cleared a path to the portal and is staring out the  thick acrylic window, the sea bathed in the lab’s eerie red exterior lights.

The sphere lies on the crater’s precipice, the hole looming beneath them. Just visible below the viewport is the bow of the
AG III
, the lab pinning the sub’s cockpit.

“Dad!” David scrambles through the pile of smashed equipment, locating the radio. “Dad? Dad, can you hear me?”

“I’m . . . here.” Suspended sideways at a painful angle in his seat, Jonas releases his harness, allowing his body to tumble to the top of the inverted escape pod, now wedged under the lab.

“Are you hurt?”

“I’ve been better. What’s your status?”

“Life support’s off line. I need to find a way to drain the water into the system.”

“Find a way. The good news is that we’re out of the Panthalassa. They can send a vessel down with another tow line.”

“Dad . . . here comes the bad news.”

Angel rises from out of the crater, her albino hide glowing behind the night glass, her jaws clenching the remains of what had been a forty-foot mosasaur. Emerging into the Philippine Sea, the Meg releases the ragged carcass and circles the hole.

David presses his face to the portal, catching a glimpse of her posture. “She’s really agitated. I’ve never seen her like this.”

Unable to see, Jonas watches the sonar moni tor and the rising blip. “The liopleurodon, it followed her up. David, hold on!”

The pilosaur soars out of the hole—

—as Angel launches her attack, driving her hyper-extended jaws into her larger foe.

But the liopleurodon is far too big and is moving way too fast. The Megalodon’s jaws miss the creature’s forelimb, glancing off a muscular torso as big around as a C-5 cargo plane. The devastating impact costs Angel two front teeth.

Reacting quickly, the pliosaur rolls its body away from the shark’s jaws, biting its secondary dorsal fin, its eight-inch needle-sharp teeth succeeding in crushing the neurotransmitter’s antenna.

The two titans continue to rise, entwined as they bite and gnaw at one another—

—oblivious to the
Tonga’s
nets.

Aboard the Tonga
Philippine Sea

Storm clouds roll in from the east, the late afternoon shower soaking the crewmen toiling on the supertanker’s main deck.

Monty rests his exhausted body on an expanse of pipe, his mind entering an almost vegetative state as he watches his Uncle James chase after the heavyset engineer.

“You have six winches! All I need is one.”

“For the last time, Mackreides, two winches per net, three nets in the water, those are Mr. bin Rashidi’s orders. He said nothing about lowering the Shinkai back into the drink. And believe me, with those two monsters down there, that slow-moving bucket of bolts is the last place you’d want to be right now.” John LeBlanc hustles to the crew manning the bow winches.

Mac gives chase, refusing to back down. “The last place I’d want to be is in that lab. My godson’s trapped down there, suffocating! Now I want a tow line and that Japanese sub in the water right now, or—”

“Or what?” LeBlanc turns to face him, backed by three rain-soaked, grease-covered members of his crew. “Listen, friend, the moment we haul bin Rashidi’s new pet out of the sea, we’ll harness the sub. Until then, stay the hell out of my way.”

The rain is coming down in sheets now, forcing Monty to turn away. On the distant horizon he can make out an approaching vessel—the
Mogamigawa
—the
Tonga’s
sister ship. Still many miles away, the massive supertanker is preparing to slalom—to commence a braking pattern that veers the ship back and forth from starboard to port while her engines run full astern, the boat’s captain attempting to bring his vessel in as close as he can to the
Tonga
.

Monty stares at the distant speck, the idea germinating in his head buried beneath an avalanche of scatterbrain thoughts.
Big ship . . . pray for David. Pray for the ship. A praying mantis can’t impregnate the female while his head is still attached to his body. The female initiates mating by ripping the male’s head off. A headless cockroach can live nine days before it starves to death. Right-handed people live nine years longer than left-handed people. Polar bears are left-handed. I wonder if Jonas Junior is a southpaw.

Monty slaps himself repeatedly across the forehead, trying hard to focus.
Tanker, tanker, tanker, tanker. How can the tanker help David? Tankers are so big they can’t stop. Fleas are small, but they can jump three hundred times their own body length. Ants can pull thirty times their weight. Tankers can pull submarines off the bottom, it’s called the Venturi effect . . .

Mac grabs him by the shirt collar. “Come with me. I need your help rigging a tow line and hook to the Manta Ray.”

“Tankers can pull submarines off the bottom!”

“I know. But first we need to attach a tow line.”

“No, Uncle James. No, we don’t!”

The two super-predators break away from one another, both bleeding from flesh wounds, neither seriously hurt.

Liopleurodon
’s rule over the Panthalassa Sea dates back tens of millions of years, the species’ evolution, from a marine reptile to a gilled giant, allowing it to  establish dominance. Since reaching maturity, the prodigious female has never been challenged, even by her own kind, but the Megalodon’s sheer ferocity, combined with the biting power behind her jaws, makes the shark a formidable opponent and a real threat to her survival.

Opting for a less risky method of victory, the pliosaur descends quickly, veering toward the abandoned mosasaur remains. In one motion, the female plucks the discarded carcass off the bottom and banks sharply to retreat down the crater.

But unlike her rival’s serrated teeth, the liopleurodon’s fangs are narrow and smooth, designed for puncturing, not gripping. Double-clutching the eviscerated mosasaur, the pliosaur loses its hold and must loop back to grab it again before the sinking carcass strikes the sea floor.

WHOMP
!

With a full head of steam, Angel strikes the liopleurodon flush on its thickly muscled neck, pile-driving the one-hundred-ton goliath sideways into the silty bottom. The pliosaur’s neck is too wide even for Angel’s hyper-extended jaws, but the impact with the sea floor provides enough leverage to allow the Meg’s lower teeth to sink root-deep into the thick hide, her upper teeth buried to the gum line.

The puncture wounds are deep. The liopleurodon tries to twist itself free, but its enemy has pinned it awkwardly against the sea floor. Each attempt to free itself provokes the Megalodon into whipping its head to and fro, the frenzied action causing its seven-inch, serrated teeth to saw into the nerve endings within the pliosaur’s thick neck muscles.

The pain is paralyzing in its intensity.

The liopleurodon stops struggling, conceding defeat.

Her challenger immobilized, Angel maintains her death grip. It is just a matter of time.

For David Taylor and Kaylie Szeifert, time is nearly up. The backup generator has died, the air expired, the powerless lab growing colder by the minute. Lying on their backs on the slanted lower-deck floor, the young couple stares into the suffocating darkness, holding hands—awaiting death.

David is first to gasp.

Kaylie squeezes his hand tighter. “I want to marry you, David. But I want a spring wedding. So you’d better hang on. Do you hear me, David Taylor? You’re not weaseling out of this!”

He smiles in the darkness, tears rolling down his cheeks.

His father’s muted voice stirs him from unconsciousness. “. . . wait until the lab strikes the supertanker’s keel, then open the hatch and swim to the surface. David, can you hear me? If you can’t speak, at least give me a sign that you understand! David?”

Kaylie crawls to the radio. Taps the microphone twice.

“Good! Hold on to the hatch, kids. I can hear the tanker bearing down on us!”

Kaylie grabs David and shakes him awake. Digging her nails into his wrists, she drags him toward the hatch and holds on—

—as the forty-seven-ton sphere is heaved upwards as if by the hand of God.