Ocean's Hammer

by D. J. Goodman

  This part, at least, Simon seemed to understand. “But he couldn’t do it, right? You can’t study something that stubbornly refuses to be there.”

  “That’s right,” Kevin said. “If he had started his study ten, maybe even five years earlier, he would have found massive schools of hammerheads peacefully going about their business. He could have just tagged them with his specialized transmitters by taking a quick dive alongside them, and bam. Hypothesis proven. Instead, he spent his time wandering aimlessly searching the Sea of Cortez by day and getting drunk on my back deck by night.”

  “So now we have sharks,” Simon said. “Yippee yay yahoo. If you ask me, this doesn’t exactly seem like the best time to pull out old experiments.”

  “Probably not, but my friend’s theories went a little deeper than just proving that hammerheads navigated using magnetic fields,” Kevin said. He nodded at Maria. “That’s what you’ve been getting at, right?”

  “Yeah, it is,” Maria said. “I know it seems crazy but everything we’ve seen so far seems to suggest it.”

  “Okay, being cryptic again,” Boleau said.

  “Sorry. You see, his hypothesis couldn’t be proven just by tracking them. This…” She held up the little plastic device. “…can track them, but it also emits its own small magnetic field. The idea was that by manipulating the magnetic fields that the sharks felt, you could actually change their migratory patterns. If he put these on some hammerheads, activated them, and suddenly the sharks started swimming willy-nilly, then there he was. Theory proven and his name in all the scientific journals again. And if he could turn the devices on and off in the right patterns, give them fine enough control over magnetic pulses…”

  Boleau perked up. “You could control the direction the sharks went. You could make them do whatever you wanted.”

  Maria shook her head. “Certainly a possibility, except the prototypes he made didn’t have quite that level of precision. But yeah. In theory, someone with that kind of control could tell the hammerheads to swim left, swim right, go deeper or head to shallow water, just swim in circles, or do any number of things that might not usually make sense for them.”

  “Holy shit,” Simon said. “Are you saying that everything going on outside is because someone is telling the hammerheads to go all Sharknado on us?”

  “No,” Kevin said. “Not someone. Something.”

  Maria watched as the truth dawned on both Simon and Monica. The two of them were too shocked at the idea to say anything. The young Japanese man, though, wasn’t.

  “Teddy Bear,” he said in English that was much clearer than he had let on.

  “That’s right,” Maria said. “He or she is the one factor that seems to be at the center of all of this.”

  “But it’s not possible for a hammerhead to have the level of intelligence to pull this off,” Boleau said.

  “It’s also not possible for a hammerhead to grow to that size,” Kevin said. “And yet we can see the evidence otherwise just outside. It’s entirely within the realm of possibility that whatever natural occurrence or mutation or modification, whichever the case may be, caused Teddy Bear to grow to that size also affected it’s mental capacity. It’s definitely not like sharks are stupid to begin with.”

  “You seriously think we have a genius level shark monster sitting out there?” Simon asked.

  “Maybe not genius level,” Maria said. “But with enough logical ability to have problem solving capabilities.”

  “But why?” the Japanese boy asked.

  “Why is it doing this, you mean?” Maria asked.

  “Yes.”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you that one.”

  “Maybe you could,” Kevin asked. “If you’re still thinking about this problem in the same way I am.”

  Maria cocked her head. “Maybe I am. Care to tell me what you’re thinking?”

  “Wherever Teddy Bear specifically comes from, whether natural or man-made, there’s enough true hammerhead shark in it that it came back here, most likely based on instinct. Maybe it did that in the past, maybe this is the first time. But its instincts say it needs to be here to mate and, well, it didn’t find anything.”

  Simon gave him a blank look. “You’re saying he’s angry because he couldn’t get laid.”

  “Or she,” Maria said. “Either way, sure. She arrived, there weren’t any of her kind here, so it calls others. Maybe she had to go around rounding them up from elsewhere, or maybe her magnetic manipulation ability is strong enough that she can call others over great distances. She fixes what she sees as a problem, but that wasn’t enough. She really was pissed about the situation. She wanted revenge.”

  “Okay, now your theories are just getting ridiculous,” Boleau said. “You two are supposed to be scientists or something. So don’t make such huge leaps in logic. There’s no evidence to suggest Teddy Bear has emotions and is being ruled by them.”

  “True enough,” Kevin said. “But whatever the reason, there is still evidence that she has a plan. We’ve seen it.”

  “There is a very clear perimeter around El Bajo,” Maria said. “The smaller hammerheads aren’t going any farther than a certain distance. Also, there’s what happened with Murphy and Mercer. Teddy Bear didn’t show herself until they tried to leave that perimeter. And she showed herself again when the rescue Zodiac got too close to the edge. Now that we’re here, it’s clear that Teddy Bear doesn’t want us to leave.”

  “And we still don’t understand why,” Boleau said.

  “No, I think maybe we do,” Kevin said. “Although I fully expect you to think we’re crazy.”

  “I’ve sort of had that impression ever since I got on this boat,” Simon said. “Might as well continue talking and keep the idea going.”

  “Okay, maybe we should be more careful than to assign any emotion to what Teddy Bear is doing,” Maria said, “but the end result is the same. Whether she’s angry and wants revenge for what was done to her breeding ground or if she’s just really, really hungry, her end goal is the same. Don’t you guys see it yet?”

  “I see it,” the Japanese man said. “We are, um, I cannot think of the word.”

  “Bait,” Maria said.

  “Yes, that is it,” he said. “We are bait.”

  “Bait for what?” Simon asked.

  “Other boats,” Kevin said. “We come to El Bajo and we’re not allowed to leave. Others come for us, like Smith and his mysterious people looking for Mercer, and they aren’t allowed to leave either, but in a much more violent way. We continue sending out a distress signal for help…”

  Boleau put her hands to her mouth. “And others fall into the trap.”

  Kevin nodded. “And right now we’ve got an entire Navy worth of people coming to help us and investigate the wreck of the Tetsuo Maru.”

  “Yeah, but so?” Simon asked. “These aren’t going to be tiny rowboats they’re sending. The Mexican Navy will be coming with huge ships, right?”

  “And how big do you think a vessel would have to be to completely protect it from Teddy Bear?” Maria asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe as big as…” Simon trailed off. He was finally coming to the same conclusion she’d come to earlier. Smith’s boat should have been big enough to weather an attack. Although they couldn’t be sure at this point whether it had sunk, they couldn’t make the assumption that it hadn’t, either.

  “Someone should have kept an eye on our mystery ship,” Boleau said quietly.

  “Yes, someone should have. And then they probably would be food,” the young man said.

  “Nothing we can do about it now,” Kevin said. “Instead we need to concentrate on what we can do.”

  “I still say we wait it out for the Navy to show up,” Boleau said. “It’s not like we can’t communicate with them and warn them. You must have already told them what’s happening, right?”

  “None of the higher ups that I talked to seemed to believe me, at least not about the sha
rks,” Kevin said. “Hell, they even sounded skeptical when I said we had nothing to do with the sinking of the Tetsuo Maru. I suspect we’re going to need that footage Vandergraf and his man shot if we’re going to avoid any kind of legal action.”

  “So maybe the fact that they didn’t believe you doesn’t matter,” Simon said. “They’re a fricking Navy. They can blast the shit out of anything coming at them.”

  Kevin visibly paled. “We can’t just slaughter this creature.”

  “Kevin, honey, no offense but I don’t think we can afford to take that kind of attitude right now,” Maria said. “Teddy Bear is killing people. And if it’s allowed to live, it will probably kill a lot more.”

  “Maria, what if Teddy Bear is an entirely new breed of hammerhead? Not just a single aberration, but the first specimen of a new species. There can’t be many of them if we’ve never seen anything like this before. For all we know, we could be pushing a species to the brink of extinction on our first encounter with it.”

  “But we are in a situation where it could be kill or be killed. I understand your thoughts that we have a moral imperative to protect a possible new species, but if we talk morals then our true duty has to be to the people on this boat. Maybe it would be safer to let the Navy deal with Teddy Bear.”

  “Excuse me,” the young man said, loud and clear enough that everyone else in the room immediately stopped and listened. “But do I and the rest of my crewmates not have some say in this?”

  Maria took a deep breath. “Yes, of course. Although I don’t think we really have the time to go around explaining the situation and polling every one of them.”

  “I was third-in-command on the Tetsuo Maru,” the young man said. “Considering the first mate and my uncle the captain are gone, that gives me the right to speak for them.”

  Kevin cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you and Captain Ito were related. You have my condolences.”

  “He could be a son of a bitch, I believe is your term in English, but he was still family. So thank you.” He turned to look at Maria. “Not everyone on the ship believed in what we were doing. I understand that the way my uncle fished for sharks was unsustainable. He saw money in it, but that money will be gone if there’s nothing left to fish. If there is some way we can do this without destroying even more, I would put all my support behind it.”

  Maria nodded. A part of her had desperately wanted to wait for the Mexican Navy to show up and simply blow Teddy Bear out of the water. Another part had hoped someone would convince her otherwise.

  But the problem was that more human lives would be put at risk with the plan she had in mind. No, she realized. Not lives plural. Only one person needed to do this. She already knew who it would be.

  “Okay then,” Maria said. “Then I know what needs to happen.”

  “What’s that?” Boleau asked.

  “I’m going to need to swim with the sharks.”

  The room went silent for several seconds, only to be interrupted by Simon.

  “Aaaaaand… go to commercial break.”

  16

  Maria gathered up all the specialized transmitters she could find while the inevitable argument ensued.

  “Maria, you can’t possibly be serious about doing this,” Boleau said. Even in the cramped space of the lab, she had backed away as though Maria had caught a very special communicable version of crazy that she too might catch if she got too close.

  “Someone’s got to,” Maria said.

  “Then maybe Kevin is the one who should,” Simon said. He looked at Kevin as though for support. “Right?”

  Maria stopped what she was doing long enough to watch Kevin’s reaction. Out of everyone on the boat, there were really only two people who could do this, her and him. She knew Kevin well enough that she already understood the shape of the argument to come, and he didn’t disappoint.

  “He’s right,” Kevin said. “Between the two of us, I’m the one who has the most diving experience.”

  “What about me? I have plenty of diving experience,” Boleau said, although she seconds later she looked completely horrified as she realized what she was volunteering herself for. Lucky for her this wasn’t only a matter of diving experience.

  “This is going to need to be precision work,” Maria said. “You may know your way around a scuba tank, but you’ve never tagged a live shark before. And even if you have, it probably wouldn’t have been one that was actively trying to eat you.”

  “And you have?” Boleau asked.

  “Sort of,” Maria said. During one of her first times out with Kevin, they had been tagging some tiger sharks, most of them small. Kevin had warned her just in time as a much larger and more aggressive one had come at her from behind. It had scared her shitless yet she still, somehow, looked back at the memory fondly. She had been infatuated with marine biology before that, but the adrenaline rush of that instance had turned her feelings into outright love.

  “Monica,” Simon said, “maybe it’s not the smartest thing for you to be arguing that you’d rather act as shark chum instead of someone else. I think something might be wrong with your survival instincts.”

  Once Maria had all the transmitters, she cast about the lab for the pole they used for tagging. It didn’t look like there were any in here, so she gently yet firmly pushed past everyone else out into the hall. Predictably they all followed, even the young man who had been hiding away from everyone else.

  “It should be me,” Kevin said.

  “We don’t really have the time to make an argument of this, Kevin.”

  “I have a better chance if I’m the one the one to do this.”

  “Not really that much better. Have a little faith in your teaching skills. Besides, between the two of us, you’re the one that’s famous.”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with any of this!”

  “Sure it does. Because when this is all over someone is going to need to talk about everything that happened here today. Between the sinking of the Tetsuo Maru, Murphy and Mercer’s mysterious employers, and the fact that we’ve suddenly seen a brand new sea creature that shouldn’t even exist, the plain and simple truth is that someone is going to need to inform the world, even it’s just in the form of easily digestible sound bites on biased cable news networks. And let’s face it, honey, yours is the face everyone would want to see, the only one they might listen to. And you can’t do that if you’re shark food.”

  “You’re making it sound like whoever goes out there isn’t going to come back.”

  Maria was about to say that wasn’t true, but the reality of the situation finally hit her. She’d done plenty of dangerous things in the ocean before, yet this was the first time where she was honestly, truly scared for her life before she even started.

  “That’s because no one who has gone in the water when the hammerheads were in a frenzy has come back out,” Maria said quietly.

  “Mercer did,” Simon said. They were all following her as she shouldered her way through the men crowding the hallway. Farther down the hall Vandergraf stood, looking lost until he saw Maria. She looked away, hoping he wouldn’t be able to get through to her before she found what she needed and headed back for the deck.

  “And that’s why maybe you shouldn’t all be that worried,” Maria said. She was aware that the words were more to convince herself than anyone else. “They’re not just mindlessly savaging everyone. Teddy Bear is controlling them according to some kind of plan, whether or not any of us can agree what that plan is.”

  “My uncle might disagree, if he could,” the young man said.

  “Besides, I think we could use the transmitters to protect me while I’m in the water, so I’ll need someone who can manipulate the signals properly from the boat. And you, honey, are better trained with these things than I am. If I were the one staying behind while you dove, it’s much more likely that I would screw you up and get you killed.”

  Kevin made a pout that Maria wo
uld have thought cute under any other circumstances. “I’m not that much more trained.” He seemed to understand how ridiculous he looked and regained his composure. “But I suppose you’re right. I am the one who had to listen to him drone on about the engineering of these things while he was three sheets to the wind. Hopefully he didn’t slur so much that I misunderstood something vital.”

  Maria made a face. “That’s comforting.” She grimaced even more when she saw that Vandergraf had found Gary again and they were coming toward her, Gary once again with the camera ready in his hand. Maria ducked into a nearby supply closet where she thought they kept the tagging poles, hoping that Vandergraf would lose her in the confusion of people outside. Unfortunately Kevin, Simon, Monica, and the young Japanese man still stood outside and gave her away.

  She heard Vandergraf speak without turning around to look at him. “You have something planned.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” Simon asked.

  “You don’t get to be a reality television producer by missing the stories all around you. I’m trained to know these things.”

  Maria snorted as she found three poles buried behind some nets. “Sounds like an amazing skill. Don’t know how the rest of us have survived this far without it.”

  She turned around hoping to see him look insulted, but her comment hadn’t fazed him. “You all are planning something that can get us out of this, and I want to be around to see it.”

  “You mean you want your cameraman around to see it,” Kevin corrected.

  “They’re the same thing.”

  “We don’t have time for you to get in the way,” Maria said.

  “We’re in the reality television business,” Vandergraf said. “We know how to remain unobtrusive.”

  “If you’re going to hang around then you’re going to have to help,” Maria said, shoving the poles into his hands. Vandergraf looked like he didn’t know what to do with them. It was as though carrying anything for himself was a foreign concept. She turned back to Kevin. “Is this settled then?”