by Hunter Shea
This new pod was the one that had unwittingly let the chimera fish out of the bag, so to speak.
They had been flown here to find a way to divert the orcas. Blocking the ELF waves from Russia’s HAARP was out of the question. Chet learned that the Earth itself was an antenna for ELF waves. There was literally no way to stop them.
Which meant they had to draw the orcas away from the lab housing the chimera fish. His idea was to program a series of decoded orca sounds that he hoped would distract them enough to cause confusion and stop their progress. He accessed his considerable audio files, cobbling them together as best and quickly as he could. The idea was to lower speakers into the ocean and broadcast them well ahead of the island facility.
“Those chimera fish are slaughtering them,” Ivan said.
It was true. The orcas may have tipped the scales in terms of numbers, but the ghost sharks had them beat on size and ferocity. The orcas must have sensed the ancient fish and gone for them, caught in the throes of their insatiable hunger. One or the other or both had demolished the underwater holding cage, setting up a bloody free for all.
The waters around the island were stained crimson. Ragged bits of orca bobbed on the waves.
Rosario said, “Maybe it can still work. We just need to lead the orcas away.”
“And let them handle the rest,” Raquel said, indicating the second, idling helicopter. It was loaded with Navy SEALs. Their job was to wipe out the chimera fish once and for all as soon as Chet and his team pulled the orcas clear of the island.
Chet’s guts churned. “You’ve seen what happens. Once the orcas find a target, they don’t stop until it’s been obliterated. And those chimera fish aren’t going to let a meal just walk away. They’ll follow them.”
“We have to at least try,” Rosario said, tugging on his arm.
A giant chimera fish burst out of the water, two orcas flailing in its jaws. It clamped down on them, splitting their bodies in two before slamming back under the water.
“Hijos de puta!” Raquel screamed.
Chet didn’t know what was worse, watching man slaughter the orcas with his weapons or a force of nature from millions of years ago savaging the majestic beasts. He got a chill thinking the ghost sharks were taking a certain degree of pleasure out of masticating the frenzied orcas.
“I just wish to hell they would do something about that Russian HAARP,” he said, seething. “What the hell’s taking them so long?”
“Don’t count on it,” Ivan said. He stalked along the edge of the roof with a scowl, watching the lunacy below. “You think it’s easy to destroy something on Russian soil? They’ll weigh the countermeasures Russia will take and back off. It will be easier for them if they wipe out every orca on the planet.”
“Don’t say that,” Rosario said.
He looked at her with grim resolution. “Either way, someone loses. Us, or them. I think you know what they’ll choose.”
The door to the other helicopter swung open. A man who looked to be part mountain, clad in black, approached them. He held a formidable looking rifle against his chest, the barrel pointed at the ground.
“It appears we’re late to the party,” he said. He wore dark sunglasses, so Chet couldn’t tell if he was talking directly to him.
“That doesn’t mean we can’t still try,” Rosario said.
“Your call.”
“Hey!”
Chet turned to see Ivan reach for Raquel and missing. She had found a ladder that led down the side of the building.
“Where is she going?” the SEAL asked.
Chet and Rosario ran over and saw Raquel scrambling down the rungs. She jumped off the last few, landing on her feet along the narrow strip of shoreline. Waves pounded the blood red sand and rocks. Hunks of flesh and blubber had washed ashore.
“Raquel, get back here!” Chet shouted.
“What do you think you’re doing, you crazy bitch?” Ivan spat.
“Give me a gun,” she said, eyeing the maelstrom that was dangerously close to her position.
The SEAL said, “I’ll get her. If you want to try to lure those killer whales away from here, get in the chopper now.”
“I’ll stay with Raquel,” Ivan assured Chet. “Someone has to make sure that impulsive lunatic doesn’t get herself killed.”
Chet had to peel himself away from the ledge with Rosario in hand. They ran into the helicopter, slamming the door shut.
He said to the pilot, “We’re going to proceed as planned. Just take us a mile from the island and we’ll deploy the speakers.”
The pilot gave him a thumbs up, the engine humming to life.
Rosario handed him a helmet so they could hear each other when the chopper took to the sky.
“Raquel is out of her mind,” Rosario said into the small microphone.
“I think we knew that when we rode in the car with her. We need to move the fight away from the island.”
The helicopter lifted off. In seconds, they were above Raquel, Ivan and the SEAL, who was trying to push Raquel toward the ladder. Chet tensed when he saw her grab the man’s pistol and run into the water. He couldn’t hear anything, but he could see by the way her wrist kept jerking back that she was emptying the clip into the water. A gigantic chimera fish rose from the water, facing Raquel.
“I can’t look,” Rosario said.
It started to come for Raquel, just as the SEAL and Ivan had grabbed her from behind.
Suddenly, the chimera fish was slammed in its side by a trio of orcas, knocking it from its trajectory. It turned and ate the dorsal fin off one of the orcas. The other two dove under it before it could get them.
The scene faded as the chopper went further to sea.
“We’re at the drop point,” the pilot said.
Chet scrambled to the other door and slid it open. Rosario helped him lift the underwater speakers over the lip so they were dangling in the air. The speakers were attached to thick cables. Chet punched the button that lowered the speakers into the water.
Maybe he couldn’t stop this pod from being demolished by the chimera fish, but he could divert the approaching pod from the melee. It was the longest of long shots, but there was literally nothing else to do.
Rosario fired up the laptop that contained the audio file. He clung to a hand bar on the side of the craft so he could be half-out of the chopper, making sure the speakers touched down. Once they disappeared under the water, he turned to Raquel and said, “Let ’er rip!”
He scrambled back to watch the display. They couldn’t hear it, but a pulsating graphic showed them that sound was coming out of the speakers.
The water by the island was still a boiling frenzy of fighting. The ghost sharks were doing their best to devour every one of the orcas, but the pod was holding their own. Grabbing a pair of binoculars, Chet found it impossible to see if any of the ghost sharks were among the dead.
He did see that several other SEALs had made it to the shore. Their assault rifles were up and they were firing into the battle.
“No, not yet,” Chet said.
“Not yet what?” Rosario asked, taking the binoculars. “Wait, it’s okay. It looks like they’re shooting a chimera fish that’s riding on top of a row of orcas.”
“Are they hitting the orcas?”
“I can’t tell.”
He looked at the display on the laptop, increasing the sound to the maximum level. “Are any orcas heading this way?”
“Um, I don’t think so.”
Chet tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Maybe we should move in closer. They may not be able to hear it. With everything going on, it’s probably deafening down there.”
The chopper glided closer to the island, but slowly so as not to break the cables tethered to the speakers. Chet looked outside the door. He saw dozens of orcas still furiously engaged with the freed chimera fish. The speakers seemed to be doing nothing.
He could only imagine the frantic cries of the dying orcas, the living
barking orders so they could somehow outflank the chimera fish. Generations of hunting tactics were useless against the behemoth ghost sharks. Unlike large whales when attacked by a pod of orcas, the ghost sharks were fast and vicious, ready to make any predator regret taking them on.
The recorded orca sounds emanating from the speakers might be as effective as spitting in a hurricane.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jamel couldn’t believe his eyes.
The power coming out of the Alaskan HAARP was off the charts. When he’d worked there, it wasn’t capable of such force. The Navy, despite their cover story that they were done with HAARP, must have been very, very busy the past couple of years.
This was no mere test. They had turned that sucker on to do some damage.
And he knew exactly where it was focused.
In Kalach, the skies turned to coal, lightning illuminating the pitch. The ground shook as thunder that sounded as if it was issued from God himself pounded the atmosphere.
Hail the size of softballs pelted the hidden HAARP array, damaging the heavy-duty antennas. It came down with increasing ferocity, denting and twisting metal.
Windows shattered. The scientists in the main lab froze, knowing this was not nature bearing its weight upon them. Their computers flashed, then blinked out. Electricity was lost as jagged bolts of lightning rained down, striking up sparks. The smell of fried ozone stung their nostrils as they huddled in the center of the lab, careful not to get near the windows.
A call via landline was made to Moscow, reporting what had befallen the complex.
The floor of the lab bucked.
The bespectacled man dropped the phone, falling onto his side.
Now there was rumbling from below them as well. The ground shook and shattered, a rift opening up, spreading wider and wider until it swallowed the lab whole.
In Alaska, the men and women in charge of the HAARP facility were surrounded by the military. The readouts on their screens showed that the Kalach compound had been successfully destroyed. The intense storm had pounded Kalach both from above and below. Triggering the earthquake may have been heavy handed, but the powers that be had made it abundantly clear they didn’t want anything left. Now all they had to do was wait for the satellite imagery to confirm that Russia’s HAARP installation was nothing but a gaping crater filled with the shattered remains of their multi-billion dollar project.
“Kalach isn’t the only one,” someone said.
No, it wasn’t. Now they would have to wait and see if they needed to redirect HAARP’s attentions to another sector of the globe.
If anything, what happened here today was a kind of coming out party. Enemy nations were now put on notice that the most powerful weapon since the atomic bomb had not only been borne, but stepped confidently into adulthood.
“It’s working!” Rosario shouted so loud, Chet almost ripped off his helmet. She was leaning out of the chopper and pointing.
“Finally, something’s going our way.” He then told the pilot to lead the orcas away from the island, but not fast enough for them to lose the audio in the going on under the surface.
The orcas were being trailed by the much larger chimera fish. Chet wasn’t sure if the orcas were following the recording, or finally deciding to beat a hasty retreat from the slaughter.
“We have incoming,” Chet said to Rosario.
The second chopper full of SEALs was in the air. They rained holy hell on the ghost sharks. The dinosaurs were just far enough behind the surviving orcas so they bore the full brunt of the assault. Side mounted machine guns tore into the chimera fish. Chet’s mouth dropped open when there was a puff of smoke followed by some kind of missile that split a chimera fish in two as it exploded within its ancient flesh.
He spotted an inflatable boat in the water with several suicidal SEALs aboard. They were dumping something overboard, dangerously close to the remaining ghost sharks. The boat sped away just as two chimera fish broke the surface to swallow up the floating objects. They submerged quickly. The water swelled as whatever the SEALs had left for them detonated. A geyser of pink froth shot into the air.
Chet returned his attention to the orcas.
They were splitting up!
“Do a quick count and tell me how many you come up with.”
He and Rosario did separate counts. It wasn’t easy, but the pilot heard them and hovered over the dispersing pod as best as he could.
“I got fifty-six,” Rosario said.
“I counted fifty-two. Close enough. Looks like they’re splintering into their original pods.”
Seven headed west, deeper into the Atlantic. A pod of twenty-one steered for Ireland’s coast. The rest separated into two other pods, heading south. They no longer swam with the same mad urgency. It was almost as if nothing had happened, though Chet knew orca behavior enough to realize they would mourn the family they had lost.
“Can you take us back to the island?” he asked the pilot.
The reply came when the nose dipped and the chopper made a forty-five degree turn. They touched back down on the room minutes later. Ivan and Raquel sat by the ledge, soaked to the skin.
“Well?” Ivan asked.
“It looks like the orcas have returned to normal,” Chet said. His legs felt like rubber, even though he wanted to pop some champagne.
“I shot one of those putas,” Raquel said with a devilish smile.
“Yes, but he would have eaten you if those orcas hadn’t saved your ass,” Ivan reminded her.
“We look out for one another.”
Rosario tugged on Chet’s arm.
“Chet, what’s that?”
He turned to see what had caught her attention.
His heart dropped to the floor.
After firing off the press release to all the media outlets he’d been able to find, Jamel thought it best to pack his shit up and get the hell out of Dodge. They would be on to him in a New York minute and he didn’t want to stick around to find out what hole they’d dump him in for the rest of his life.
He’d blown everything wide open, from HAARP to Russia’s involvement in the rash of orca attacks. He provided links and documents for them to fact check to their heart’s content.
Sure, most of them would ignore his email. But it would only take a few. Once they picked up the story, the others would rush to follow suit. It may have sounded crazy, but Jamel was sure he’d given them enough facts to see past their disbelief. Besides, as he’d mused before, the world was a different place. The impossible was possible. Only those who willfully chose not to see were able to avoid the cold hard facts.
He struggled to carry several bags to his car. It was raining yet again. That would make driving difficult for him, as the roads out here weren’t the best. Then again, it would be equally difficult for anyone coming to get him.
Jamel rushed back inside to make sure he had everything he needed. He hated leaving so much stuff behind, but there was only so much he could fit in his car and needed to be long gone before the men in black suits came for him.
A loud crash of thunder shook the floor, made everything on his shelves rattle and dance.
It can’t be.
The weatherman had called for light rain today, but not a storm that felt like Thor’s hammer pounding the heavens. Rain lashed the windows, pummeling the roof.
They weren’t sending the men in the black suits this time around.
Stepping into the squall, Jamel looked to the pitch black sky, the cold, heavy rain blinding him. He’d lived through two hurricanes and one tornado, and none of them looked as foreboding as the pop up storm that had settled over his house.
Slamming the trunk closed, he was momentarily blinded by an intense flash of light.
Shielding his eyes, he leaned against the wet car to keep from falling.
“No,” he whispered.
Seconds later, the light was followed by a deep, hideous rumble.
Jamel’s tears intermingled with
the cold, hard rain.
They were using HAARP to finish him, concentrating the array to build a super storm right over his head.
Live by the sword, die by the sword, he thought, seeing that there was no way he could drive out from under the black, roiling clouds. There just wouldn’t be enough time. Not enough time to…
His keys slipped from his fingers, landing in a puddle.
There was no sense running now.
There wouldn’t be anyplace to run to.
The flash of lightning hit him like a tractor beam, burning him to a crisp in seconds.
Chet held Rosario tightly in his arms as they watched a massive storm blossom from literally nowhere and head toward England’s direction. Shards of lightning zigzagged within the onyx, gathering clouds. If there were such a thing as God’s wrath from on high, this was it.
He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The storm swelled with each passing second, moving unnaturally fast, as if it were late for a date with death. It may have been a force of nature, but it was not nature that had culled it from the atmosphere.
“This can’t be happening,” Rosario sobbed.
Even from their safe vantage point, it was terrifying. Chet felt a primal fear seep into his bones. He wanted to look away, fall to his knees and pray. Pray that everyone and everything in the storm’s path somehow managed to survive.
Chet had a feeling those prayers would not be answered.
Ivan cursed so long and loud, Chet could hear it over the whooshing of the helicopter’s whirring blades. “Has everyone gone mad?”
Constant chatter bleated from the Navy helicopters. It was hard to make out exactly what was being said, but it appeared that intense weather activity had sprouted up all over Europe, North America and parts of Asia. Then the radios faded to static.
“They opened Pandora’s box, and there’s no closing the lid again,” Chet said, feeling as if he’d been woken up from a nightmare only to tumble into a new, worse horror.
