by JE Gurley
As he stood along the portside rail finishing his after-lunch cigarette, he spotted a dark smudge on the horizon, growing larger as it approached. He hoped it was the supply ship. The commissary was getting low on Pall Malls. The blur soon became distinct enough for him to recognize the silhouette of a small Navy patrol boat. A sense of dread swept over him. The Navy meant trouble. When the dull black sail of a nuclear submarine broke the surface less than two miles from the drillship, his stomach did flip-flops, his mind recalling the looming gray dorsal fin of the monster megalodon. Then he saw the bright yellow submersible with its red conning tower sitting on the rear deck of the submarine and knew the shit was about to hit the fan.
* * * *
Simon sat in his cubbyhole office composing a list of supplies to order. The cold weather encouraged the crew to eat more soup, and he was running low on stock. He usually made his own fresh stock from meat scraps, bones, and the trimmed bits of vegetables and herbs, but demand was outpacing supply. He had prepared a red pepper coulis soup for the Christmas meal that seemed to be a big hit, as well as roast turkey with all the trimmings, rum-glazed baked ham, candied yams, garlic-basil mash potatoes, green bean casserole with fried tobacco onion garnish, sweet baby carrots, cornbread dressing, and roast asparagus. His mind was not entirely on the job. His first meeting with Asa had gone better than he had hoped. Asa’s admission that he had known Ilsa had been a shock, but he had carefully refrained from prying. He had a dozen questions about her, about her death, but knew Asa was a little gun shy. He didn’t want to drive him away with too much information too soon. His plan required Asa’s help.
His laptop chimed, notifying him of a message from a chef friend in Barrow. He saved his order for later—he still had plenty of time—and opened the message.
“Greetings, Simon. Navy DSV team left Barrow at 2000 hours 12/24 aboard patrol craft for rendezvous with USS Utah. Captain reported encounter with school of megs. Lost two men. Believe sub and DSV headed your direction. Good hunting. Antonio.”
Simon smiled. It always amazed him how easily military personnel talked in a restaurant in front of the wait staff, especially in an innocuous pizza joint. He sent a reply.
“Thanks for the heads up, Tony. Simon.”
He checked his watch. If they cruised at full speed, the sub should arrive within the hour. That meant the sharks were close as well. His pulse quickened and his mouth turned to cotton. He licked his lips. After months of searching, this was as close to the megalodon as he had gotten. Until now, it had been almost like a game—gather information, then wait for the sharks, repeating the procedure throughout the Arctic. Now, at last, he would have his chance at killing a megalodon. If all goes right.
He had no doubt that the Navy would be hunting them as well, and he did not begrudge them their opportunity to kill the creatures. By all accounts, there were enough to go around. He only wanted to see one of the megs close up, stare into its dead eyes, as he used his secret weapon to kill it. He didn’t know if it would be an act of revenge or one of atonement. He and his sister had parted on bad terms the last time they had met. Since her death, he had regretted not reaching out to her. Words left unspoken were less than useless. Now, he would never have the opportunity to beg her forgiveness. Avenging her death was his only recourse.
A shadow fell across him. He looked up to see Asa standing in the doorway, his face ashen and crisscrossed with tension wrinkles.
“You’ve got to fucking see this,” Asa said.
* * * *
2:50 p.m.–
Asa stood by the door in the cafeteria, the only space large enough to accommodate the entire crew of the Vanguard, even if they sat or stood elbow to elbow. Farris Wheeler, the Offshore Installation Manager, flanked by the rig captain and Chief Mechanic Brock, stood in front of the serving line, while cooks prepared coffee and sandwiches behind the line, glancing up occasionally with worried expressions. He didn’t see Simon anywhere. He had disappeared right after Asa had informed him of the Navy’s arrival.
Wheeler cleared his throat. “The Navy has just notified me that we must evacuate the rig.” He glanced at a young Navy officer standing at the edge of the room. The lieutenant bore a grim look on his face that made him look older than his years, but he otherwise ignored the proceedings. Wheeler waved his hand in the air to quell the instantaneous outburst of questions and comments from the crowd. “I cannot go into any details at this time. We will institute the emergency shutdown procedure in fifteen minutes. Helicopters are in route to transport crew to a Navy carrier. You will carry only essential personal belongings.”
The room erupted in questions despite Wheeler’s efforts. Two stood out. One was from one of the roughnecks. “Why not simply move the rig?” Wheeler’s answer was enlightening to Asa.
“The Navy has a use for the rig.”
Asa recognized Simon’s voice as he asked the next question. “Who’s staying? I need to know how much food to cook.”
“The Dynamic Positioning Officer, the Chief Mechanic, and two crane operators will remain until things are squared away. Then, they will be airlifted out as well.”
He suspected Simon had asked the question for a reason other than to learn how many for dinner. Asa wondered just how the Navy wanted to use the drillship. He had seen the DSV on the sub and suspected it would not end well for the rig. He knew one thing—he had to remain on the Vanguard. He hadn’t come all this way, waited all this time, just to leave when things were getting dicey. He glanced at the serving line and saw Simon’s head appear from behind a steel column. His gaze fixed on Asa, and he nodded. The cook was thinking along the same lines.
“What about the riser?” one of the drillers asked. “If we simply disconnect, we’ll lose 4,000 feet of pipe.”
“It can’t be helped,” the OIM answered. “We’ll shut down the subsea BOP and activate the emergency disconnect system.”
“But we’ve found traces of oil.”
Asa understood the driller’s plight. Leaving oil in the ground was tantamount to sacrilege. They might be able to set up on the Blowout Preventer again, but only after they removed the twenty-five-hundred feet of drill pipe that would collapse over the BOP when it disengaged.
Wheeler’s jaw clenched tight, as he said, “It can’t be helped. I have no say in the matter. Just do it.” From the look on his face, he was having a difficult time keeping his frustration in check. Though they were not friends, Asa felt sorry for him. He, too, had dealt with the Navy and had come out on the short end of the stick.
Wheeler raised his hands in the air palms forward. “Okay, no more questions. We don’t have time. Do your jobs. Work fast but safely. Gather one bag of personal effects and wait on the deck below the helipad. We’ll assign you numbers to indicate which helicopter to take. The first chopper arrives within the hour.”
Asa hung back, pretending to pour a cup of coffee from the urn, and waited for Simon. Simon brought out a fresh pot and poured some of it into the top of the urn, which was still almost full. Few had an appetite for coffee after the hard-hitting news of evacuation. Speaking almost too softly for Asa to hear him over the clamor of hundreds of work boots scuffing the tile floor as people filed out of the cafeteria, Simon whispered, “Meet me in my quarters.” He then turned and left, leaving Asa confused.
By the time he left the cafeteria, Asa had determined not to allow anything to deter him from his goal, as tenuous as it presently was. He knew that if he left the rig now, he would probably never be back. He would continue to live his life a scarred and broken man. His only chance at reuniting the tattered remnants of his life lay on the Vanguard. Whatever happened, whatever was in store for the drillship, he would be a part of it. His face went hard and his jaw clenched so tightly it began to twitch. This time, I won’t abandon ship.
“What do we do?”
He whirled to find his apprentice, Settlemires, standing behind him. He had forgotten about his new watchdog. He shifted his thoughts back to
the present.
“We try to stay out of the way as much as possible. The Roughnecks can handle the shutdown.”
“Shouldn’t we—?”
“Look, kid,” Asa snapped. “You worry about getting aboard one of the choppers out of here. I think things are going to get bad around here damn fast.”
Settlemires stared at him without comprehension, but he nodded, accepting Asa at his word. “What about you?”
“I have a chess game to finish. Go on, report to the mechanic’s shack, and pick up your tools. You’ll make a good mechanic someday. Whoever you work with will be lucky.”
Settlemires stared at him. “You sound like you’re not coming back.”
Asa shrugged. “Who knows what’s going to happen. We may not come back to the Vanguard.” He reached out and offered Settlemires his hand. “Good luck, kid.”
Settlemires shook it, but looked unconvinced by Asa’s story. “Yeah, same to you.”
Settlemires left, but looked back over his shoulder before disappearing down the corridor. Asa hated to abandon him, but he didn’t need anyone following him around. He knew he should have returned to the mechanic’s shack with Settlemires to help shut down the rig, but his mind was elsewhere. There were enough mechanics to do the job. He waited in the corridor until he saw Simon leave the cafeteria and head to his quarters, and then followed him at a discrete distance. Simon left the door open a crack. Asa slipped inside and closed the door behind him, feeling somewhat like a frat boy sneaking into the girl’s dorm.
“What now?” he asked, breathless from the intrigue.
“I was hoping for more time,” Simon replied, “another day or two, but it looks as though time has run out.”
“Do you have a plan?” Asa asked. He hoped they were not a tiny cabal of wannabe conspirators with no more purpose than to witness a naval battle between man and monster.
Simon smiled. “Being a chef allows me a little leeway bringing material onto the ship, like the Scotch. Over the past six months, I’ve been accumulating a stash of a poison that should be capable of killing anything that swims–saxitoxin, a neurotoxin made from a secretion of the dinoflagellate Nitzchia occidentalis. You may have heard of it as Red Tide.”
Simon’s resourcefulness stunned Asa and frightened him a little. The chef had put a lot more effort into learning about the megalodon than he had even considered. “You have neurotoxin here?” He glanced around Simon’s room as if expecting it to be sitting on a shelf in plain view. “How much?”
“About two hundred milligrams in the cooler.”
He whistled. “My God, how did you manage to accomplish that?”
“I have a friend in San Francisco, a marine researcher who manufactured it for me from cultures in his lab. He used to make it for the military until they banned biological weapons.”
Asa wondered what kind of friend would be willing to break international treaty laws on bio-weapons manufacturing. Did he, too, have personal reasons for wanting the megalodon dead?
“Is that enough?”
Simon drummed his meaty fingers on the desk. “Half a milligram can kill a human.”
“How do you propose we use it, some kind of spear gun?” The idea of actually swimming in close proximity to the megalodon frightened Asa almost to immobility. A horrid vision of the pale gray ghost from the Global Kulik slowly circling him with its blind eyes staring at him, as if it could see into his soul, sent shivers running up his spine. What had he gotten himself into? He wondered if it was too late to back out.
Simon smiled. “We use one of the ROVs. You’re a mechanic. You should be able to build a simple injector mechanism to attach to one of the manipulator arms, something powered by compressed air from the ROV tanks. I have a rough diagram I drew up.”
Asa considered Simon’s proposal. Using one of the rig’s remotely operated vehicles used to uncouple the undersea Blowout Preventer might just work. Anything that placed distance between him and the megalodon was worth considering. “How do you propose we do all that with the Navy on board?”
“As quietly as possible. I figure it will take an hour or so to adapt the ROV. Whatever use the Navy has for the rig, they’re not going to notice a little activity for a while. Then, we lay low until the megalodon arrive.” Simon’s face broke into a macabre mask of hatred that threatened to split the flesh around his suddenly cold eyes. “Then, we kill them.”
Asa knew a lot could go wrong with the plan, but it beat anything he could have conceived. If they were caught, the Navy would not be as lenient on him the second time. Still, it was better than doing nothing. Trying to live his life in the shadow of the megalodon hadn’t worked out so well for him so far. Some fears must be faced; some futures must be risked.
“What if they don’t show up for a while? We can’t hide out indefinitely.”
“I overheard that lieutenant talking to Farris. A storm front is due to hit us by early morning. The storm will herd the megalodon this direction. I’m betting that’s why the Navy showed up when they did. The Vanguard is right in the middle of the front’s path.” He stared at Asa. “Well?”
Asa didn’t want to answer. Saying yes would set him on a path that could send him to prison or to his death. However, doing nothing, joining the others in their exodus, would leave him where he was, and that was unthinkable. He swallowed hard and nodded. “I’m in.”
Some of the tension faded from Simon’s face, but the coldness remained behind his eyes. “We have to beat the Navy. I didn’t plan all this just to watch someone else finish the job.”
Asa knew how Simon felt. He, too, wanted to strike out at the creatures that had taken his future from him. “Okay, let’s do it.”
7
December 25, 2018, 4:14 p.m. USS Sunfish –
Captain Will Cobb shifted his weight slightly to keep his balance, as the Sunfish banged against the floating dock attached to one of the rig’s vertical columns. The waves were increasing in size as a rapidly building weather front fifty miles to the southwest moved relentlessly toward the drillship. The hope among the Navy Brass was that the storm would herd the megalodon their way. Observations from unmanned drones seemed to verify the fact that they were coming. Will hoped they were right. He was tired of waiting. He just wanted it to be over.
“Give her some slack,” he said to one Able Seaman Zeke McGee and watched him loosen the line on the cleat to allow the boat to drift farther from the dock to ride the waves more easily. He didn’t want any additional pressure on the damaged hull plates. The workers in Barrow had performed the refit quickly, but that had not included reinforcing the weakened bow. The crew had reinforced them as best they could with pieces of four-inch diameter steel pipe and two-by-fours. Under normal circumstances and in a calm sea, the makeshift repairs would be adequate, but against giant sharks in the midst of a storm, he wasn’t as positive.
The bizarre contents of the starboard and port freshwater tanks caused the Sunfish to ride lower in the water than usual. Water for drinking, cooking, and the toilet now came from a supply of five-gallon plastic jugs. The shower was inoperable. If anyone wanted to clean up, they would have to avail themselves of the drillship’s facilities.
He backed away from the railing, as a wave crashed against the side of the boat, creating a fan spray of frigid salt water. He glanced over at the Utah floating four clicks off his port beam, barely discernible as a black smear against a dark sky. Her seventy-nine-thousand metric ton displacement kept her steady in the rising swell, though her deck was awash. He had rendezvoused with the submarine and delivered the DSV crew as planned, but because of his ill-fated encounter with the megalodon, his superiors had amended his orders to deliver the civilian scientists directly to the drillship Vanguard. Keeping pace with the slower-moving submarine had tried his patience, likening it to walking a short-legged dog on a long leash.
The civilians, three men and one woman, all tight-lipped about their mission, had kept to themselves below decks, poring over t
heir laptops with only the occasional word passing among them. He didn’t like secrets aboard his boat, especially ones to which he was not privy. For his part, he had ignored the scientists, even the woman, who, in his opinion was much too good-looking for a scientist. He had always pictured female scientists as dowdy spinsters with their hair in a tight bun and wearing thick, heavy-framed glasses. This one looked as if she had stepped off the pages of Elle magazine. He realized some might misinterpret his views as misogynistic, but his only acquaintance with female scientists was through 50s sci-fi movies. If nothing else, the trip had raised his esteem of female scientists.
The three Navy divers had been almost as reticent about their mission. The chief diver, Haig, had hinted at secret weapons but refused to elaborate further. He seemed to take delight in withholding information from the Sunfish’s curious captain.
Will’s orders after delivering his passengers remained unclear. He did not like that either. He wanted to be in the upcoming fight. In fact, he needed to be in it. He had lost two men to the sharks, two friends. The pain of their loss still soured his mouth. Only the blood of a megalodon could wash the bitter taste from his tongue.
Blood. That’s what this all comes down to. It’s what all battles come down to—blood. Whose would spill first, his men’s or that of the megalodon?
When he had delivered the orders from the admiral to the Offshore Installation Manager to evacuate the platform, the OIM had made his disdain of the Navy’s heavy-handed usurpation of his power very clear. That a mere lieutenant had delivered the orders made the humiliation even more difficult to swallow. The OIM had Will’s sympathy, but he was just the messenger boy.
The one thing that gave him hope that the Sunfish would take an active part in the coming battle was her refit in Barrow. The repair crew had broken speed records by replacing one of the .50 caliber machineguns, as well as the one ripped away by the megalodon, in just over two hours. In their places, they had mounted two MK-60 launcher systems, each capable of launching four BGM-176B Griffin missiles. After witnessing the destructive power of the megalodon firsthand, he approved of the added firepower. The Sunfish now also carried a SeaFox mini-ROV for underwater surveillance and four aerial mini-drones for surface detection of the megalodon.
