“Barbas, when it gets here, turn the light on,” he said.
The surface of the water rippled as it rose toward them.
CHAPTER 69
“I’ve found someone!” Eric shouted.
Val, who’d been standing a few feet away at the window, watching the storm, turned to join him and Mack at the computer. Eric sat with his laptop on the desk, connected to power cables that ran out the door and into the rain. It was now coming down in sheets.
They had moved into the hotel’s security offices, not far from the flooded tunnel, into a small A/V room, where a panel of monitors used to survey the grounds dominated the small space. Outside the small room, police were gathered inside the offices, along with a small group of Navy personnel now on scene, all trying to come up with a strategy. They’d finally located a tunnel schematic, which apparently lacked the new construction areas, but nobody had any safe ideas for a rescue. So they’d allowed DORA to go down to lessen the risk of casualties—after Val had told them it would be sort of like using an underwater drone.
Eric had carefully placed the ROV into the water twenty minutes ago, in the flooded exit stairwell, and run her power cables back to the security offices a short distance away, at the base of a hotel tower. After firing her up and piloting her down the dark, nondescript passage for a little over a hundred feet, he’d encountered a pile of rubble, perhaps where the tunnel had caved in from the power of the rushing water. It had taken him several long minutes to find a way through. They were running low-light so as not to attract attention, using only a weak LED for illumination, with the camera set for maximum light sensitivity. The resulting effect on the screen was what looked like a film negative.
There had still been no sign of the octopus. Perhaps it had somehow left. They had seen a dead resort worker, though, whose body had been jammed between two chunks of rock or concrete from the force of the outrushing water.
Moments later, the ROV had come across a mutilated metal door against the tunnel wall, hanging from its hinges, where a maintenance man had said the new construction tunnel led off. Eric and Val exchanged a glance before he turned the ROV into the doorway. Then they’d seen movement on the screen.
What might have been jeans-clad, kicking legs now reappeared on the screen, and then what appeared to be a bare foot nearly struck the camera on the front of the ROV.
“Is that a leg?” Mack asked.
The door to the A/V room swung open. It was Will Sturman’s Navy buddy, Tom Rabinowitz, wearing a drenched raincoat over his khaki uniform. He was a shorter man, with close-cut brown hair and a slight paunch. As part of the Navy contingent on site now, he’d met them upon their arrival and quickly persuaded his commanding officer to let him be the Navy’s official observer of their ROV effort, since Sturman was his friend.
“What’s going on?” he said.
Eric said, “I think the ROV just found someone. A survivor.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. But look . . . this one is definitely moving. They’re alive.”
The screen went all-white.
“What’s wrong now?” Mack growled.
“It’s blinded,” Rabinowitz said.
Eric nodded. “Right. I think someone turned on a bright light. We’ll switch off high sensitivity, and use DORA’s other lights.”
The image on the screen regained clarity. DORA seemed to be pointed downward. Two sets of bare feet, standing on the bottom, were partially visible on the monitor. The camera suddenly started to turn sideways.
Eric said, “I’m not doing that. They must see us. . . .”
On the laptop monitor a man’s squinting face, distorted in the fish-eye view, appeared as he trained DORA’s camera on himself.
“Will!” Val said. She put a hand over her mouth.
“I’ll be damned,” Rabinowitz said, smiling. “Way to go, Sturman, you lucky bastard!”
Sturman looked pale, exhausted, and from the shaking camera he might have been shivering. But he didn’t appear hurt. Val felt a huge weight lift off her chest. He was alive, but definitely not out of the woods.
He held his hand in front of his face and pointed first to himself, then held up three fingers. He then turned the camera on someone else in the tunnel: It was the resort’s owner. Then, on a young boy, clinging to someone’s shoulder, then . . .
“Ashley!” Eric yelled as her face filled the screen. She looked scared, but she was smiling. “All right, then!”
The camera went back to Sturman. “So it looks like there are four survivors in that air pocket,” Mack said.
“Right,” said Rabinowitz. “Wait . . . Sturman’s doing something.”
Sturman held the camera back from his face. He mimicked choking himself with one hand, drew his index finger across his throat. He paused, pointed downward with a finger and then lifted a hand, palm down. Then he pointed upward, jabbing with his finger, and held up two fingers in a V.
“What you make of that?” Eric said.
Val said, “He’s trying to tell us they’re out of air. Or almost out. And maybe that the water is rising. They’re in trouble.” She bit her lip. “But I don’t know what the two fingers are for . . . Something that starts with a ‘V’? Or two of something?”
Rabinowitz said, “I don’t know. But I need to tell my CO we have survivors. Maybe we can get a dive team in there.” He hurried out of the room.
Sturman turned the camera off himself and set it back in the water.
Eric said, “They aren’t really going to send Navy divers in, are they? That thing’s in there.”
“I don’t know,” Val said. “Eric, just get DORA back out here to us. As fast as you can.”
“All right.” On the screen, the tunnel walls began to move past, more clear now that the headlights were on.
“You think your ROV can bring a scuba tank back to them?” she said.
He frowned. “Maybe. But it could easily get stuck.”
She turned to her uncle. “Mack, let’s get a tank ready anyway. Maybe we can rig something.”
He grunted and left the room.
Val sat down by Eric. “Will kept pointing upward, at the tunnel ceiling, or the ground above. And held up two fingers. What do you think he meant by that?”
“Beats me.”
“We need to figure out what’s right above that part of the construction tunnel.”
The octopus stirred.
She had been resting, gathering her strength before she resumed her own search for a way out. Before something had alerted her to its presence. She waited, wondering what she had sensed or tasted.
She sensed a whirring sound, and extending a tentacle toward it she felt a light movement in the water. It was close. Her eyes focused in the direction of the sound, and then she saw lights.
Another arm uncoiled. Slithered toward it.
As the arms moved to meet the object, her eyes focused on it. There was definitely something there, coming out of the side tunnel, something the size and shape of a large fish. But it didn’t move like a fish. It drifted forward with no sweeps of its tail, no visible actions to propel it.
Her arms met it, wrapping around it tightly. Her suckers felt along the smooth, hard surface, sending information back to her brain, and then she twisted several more feet of a muscular arm around it. It hummed with activity within. But it was not alive.
She brought it back toward her, and regarded it only briefly with one eye before sliding it up underneath her body, where she could no longer see it. She forced it into her open beak.
There was a muffled pop, and a burst of bubbles.
CHAPTER 70
“Shit! DORA’s offline,” Eric shouted over the sheeting rain.
The doors to both the A/V room and to the storm outside were propped open now. Water was running in a small river over the concrete outside.
Beside Eric, Rabinowitz took off his hat and rubbed his head. “Can someone please tell me what we just saw?”
> On the screen, briefly, had been rows of round suckers, then what looked like some huge eye, then a dark opening before the camera went black. Eric moved to the outer door, and began pulling the ROV’s umbilical back in, hand over hand. Far too easily. He turned to Valerie.
“She’s not even attached anymore. The son of a bitch crushed her, Val. She’s gone.” He tore his glasses off and began to clean them.
Rabinowitz said, “What crushed her? What was that?”
“What do you think it was?” Val said. “We just saw our giant octopus.”
“No shit?”
Val said, “Never mind that. We need to find a way to get air to Will and the others. Right away.”
Eric finally pulled the end of the severed cord across the concrete and held it up in front of them. Something had torn through it crudely, and cut copper wire was exposed. He dropped it and came back into the A/V room.
He said, “How are we gonna do that? DORA’s ruined now. We can’t just dive down there with it. You heard what Rabinowitz said. Even the Navy’s smarter than that.”
“Thanks,” Rabinowitz said.
Mack burst through the outer doorway and hurried into the room. He was drenched, and panting from exertion, but grinning.
“Air holes,” he said.
Mack soon left the room, followed by Eric and a few emergency services personnel. They were headed to deliver fresh air down to the survivors.
He’d located small ventilation holes, concealed under vegetation on the rocky ground, which were bored straight down to the tunnel where Sturman and the others were huddled. Mack’s plan was to lower the air hoses from the resort’s SNUBA underwater breathing apparatuses, sending them twenty-five feet below the surface.
When Mack had found the holes, he’d communicated with the others. Apparently, the rain had made it very difficult to understand them, but Mack thought Sturman had shouted up to him that rising water was reducing their airspace. And something about toxic fumes. They still needed to hurry and think of a way to get them all out. The SNUBA rigs would only buy them a little more time.
As Val stepped out the door to follow Mack and the others into the rain, Rabinowitz stopped her.
“Wait, Dr. Martell.”
“What?”
“I think I need to share something with you,” he said. He looked guilty. “But I could get in a lot of trouble for doing this.”
She nodded. He led her back through the door into the small A/V room. He shut the door behind them.
“Well?” she said. “We need to hurry.”
He glanced over his shoulder nervously. “I think I might know why that thing’s here.”
Val put her hands on her hips. “Go on.”
“This is classified information, so you can’t—”
“Spare me that bullshit. My boyfriend—your friend—is down there now. He could die. If you know anything, you need to tell us.”
“Look. I’m heavily involved with our research team. Sonar and weapons testing, here off Andros, in TOTO—the Tongue of the Ocean. Anyway, the sonar we’re testing now mimics the booming clicks produced by sperm whales.”
“The loudest sounds in the animal kingdom,” Val said. “Used to locate and subdue prey.”
“Right—230 decibels. Generated right inside the whales’ blocky, oil-filled heads. The idea is that if we can generate sonar similar enough to the sounds emitted by whales, not only will this technology not harm sea life, as some of our other sonar devices have, but it would be undetectable to the enemy.”
“Go on.”
“So if it works, all we need to do is add in recognizable patterns, something like Morse code, and then the whale sounds could be identified by the US Navy alone, even convey information. But I think it’s having an . . . an unintended consequence.”
Val mulled it over. “So you think this sonar drove the octopus up out of deeper water?”
He looked over his shoulder again, through a small window in the door. “Why not? It makes sense. Maybe whales eat giant octopuses, or whatever that is, just like they eat giant squid.”
“Okay . . .”
“And I’m pretty sure this octopus or others like it have encountered our equipment on the seafloor before. I’ve never seen one until today, but we’ve found evidence. Things get destroyed.”
“I think you may be on to something. But how does that help us now?”
“I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t.”
“So let’s say your testing scared it up to the shallower reefs. It headed into familiar, safe environments. The caverns under the island are dark, low in oxygen, protected. It found food. . . .” She paced around the room, thinking. “It’s killed people. Probably for food. But it isn’t eating anyone now. Maybe because it only wants to escape.”
She thought of the bodies officials had recovered from in and near the ruined tank. She’d also learned of an older security guard’s body they’d found, inexplicably crushed and floating in another aquarium. Octopuses near death, or females guarding their eggs, ceased to eat. But then why had the animal eaten all the life in the tank? It didn’t matter. It was still aggressive. What mattered was how to stop it from killing people. To separate it from the survivors, so they could dive down and get them out. They couldn’t get past it unless it was gone. Unless they got it to leave—
Of course. She’s seen the schematics. A long outflow pipe ran beneath all the big tanks here, allowing water to circulate out to the ocean. It led to the reef. It might be big enough. But then why wasn’t it leaving now? She thought of the images of rubble inside the tank, when DORA went in.
She looked at Rabinowitz. “I think I know how it may have gotten in here. And how we might get it to go back to the ocean.”
CHAPTER 71
“Wait!” Val yelled, jumping and waving her arms in the rain near the edge of the ruined tank. The crane operator probably couldn’t hear her, sitting inside the cab fifty yards away. Lightning flashed, followed seconds later by the crack of thunder.
“Rabinowitz, go tell him he’s in the wrong place. We need to focus near the center of the tank. That’s where the pipe opening would be.”
Rabinowitz ran over to relay the message. He leaned in and spoke with the operator—an American contractor named Mark, who wore an orange hard hat and had a cigarette dangling from his lips. He reached forward and adjusted some levers. The long cab and steel lattice boom pivoted, and the massive clamshell bucket suspended from the cables swung slowly over the gap, ten feet above the water.
With the naval officer’s help, Val had convinced the construction crew to bring the massive crane over. From up on the rock wall, she looked down into the deep water of the tank, but could see nothing. Where the hell was the octopus?
Despite the lightning, the rain had slowed some, at least for the moment, increasing visibility. But rubble obscured the bottom of the tank, and the octopus was nowhere in sight.
The operator lowered the metal claw. A minute later, it returned to the surface, water pouring out between its teeth. Filled with tons of rock dredged from inside the aquarium, it pivoted and dropped the load onto the cement near the tank, backing up two policemen there to keep others away. He swung the arm back over the water and lowered the claw for another load.
He withdrew a boulder, and then dragged a long piece of Plexiglas off the bottom and out of the tank. He lowered the claw again, filling it with debris. He was raising it again when the octopus revealed itself.
Two enormous, reddish arms erupted out of the water beneath the clamshell. They slammed into the side of the boom, causing it to sway. A third arm darted up the claw, sliding over it and spiraling up the cables toward the head of the boom.
As a blob of flesh the size of a shed emerged out of the water beneath the arms, Rabinowitz scrambled behind the cab. He saw the policemen running away. He considered jumping from the crane, running after them. But he couldn’t go without the operator. He started back around the crane platform.
/> The operator stepped outside the cab, to see why the load had stopped moving. Val yelled at him. When Rabinowitz joined in, the man finally saw the beast. He turned to jump from the machine. But just as his front foot left the tracks of a skid, one of the tentacles found him. It encircled his torso and lifted him lightly into the air. He screamed and struggled. Then his limbs whipped to one side as the tentacle cracked like a whip.
The monster slammed his limp body against the crane’s metal framework, and there was a sharp report as his hardhat blew apart. His head was now bent impossibly far backwards, bouncing off his own spine, his mouth agape, as the tentacle shook him like a terrier worrying a rat.
Rabinowitz ducked behind the cab as the octopus pulverized the man’s lifeless body, smashing it against the crane until his head came free. With a sudden flick, the tentacle tossed the headless corpse thirty feet into the air. Val jumped back as it thudded onto the rocky ground ten feet away.
The octopus was distracted. Without thinking, Rabinowitz hurried around the cab and moved inside the crane. He heard Val yelling at him.
But he had watched the operator, and thought he knew what to do. He fell into the torn black seat and seized the levers. A moment later, the claw began to move again. The crane groaned as it cleared the water.
A huge tentacle slithered up the wet cables above the claw, then another, each seeming to test the machine. The crane shuddered under the weight as more of the steel attachment rose into the rain. Two more of the octopus’s arms slid above the waterline, stretching upward to grasp the lattice boom. Rabinowitz looked out the door, toward the safety a short distance away. But he knew why this thing was here. Why people were dead. He gritted his teeth.
The claw continued to rise. And the crane held.
The arms tugged at the steel frame, squirming like earthworms that had just felt the pierce of a barbed hook. If the tentacles slid Rabinowitz’s way, they would easily reach the open cab.
He pivoted the arm away from the pool and over the wet concrete, the claw still rising toward the pulley at the tip of the towering boom. Suddenly, there was a huge flash of light, and searing pain behind his eyes.
What Lurks Beneath Page 29
