Sharkman

by Steve Alten

  “Sit.” He pointed to a folding chair, addressing me as if I were the family pet.

  I glanced at my father, who nodded.

  Gibbons opened a folder and removed two glossy images. “Look closely at this first photo—it comprises the debris field of the sunken submarine. Note the position of the bow; you’ll use that as a reference point as you approach the wreckage. This second image is a thermal sensor, taken at the exact same angle. See the dark outline of the bow? Everything is cold and black—except for this orange speck right here. That speck is your target; the enriched uranium is radiating heat.”

  “What are these blurry red things circling the orange speck?”

  “Probably just some fish attracted to the warmth.” Gibbons retrieved one of the camouflage-green canvas backpacks. “This backpack is reinforced and lined with lead; it will protect you from the radiation. Your target is a crate marked in Arabic writing. Inside you’ll find an object composed of thick plastic—about the size of a basketball. Don’t open it; inside is the enriched uranium. Just shove the object in the backpack, strap it on your back, and surface straight into the diving well. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “Admiral, did you tell him about the injection?”

  “Not yet. Kwan, Professor Gibbons is going to give you a B-12 injection which contains a stimulant we offer our Navy SEALs before they embark on missions in cold waters. It may give you the edge you need to withstand the near-freezing temperatures.”

  “We need to make you more efficient,” Gibbons reiterated as he extracted a hypodermic needle and an alcohol swab from a medical kit. “Drop your pants and pick a cheek.”

  I lowered my sweat pants and pulled down the edge of my boxers, allowing him to inject me in my left butt cheek.

  “He’s set, Admiral. I suggest we allow him to mutate before you give him the depth gauge.”

  “Depth gauge?”

  Gibbons reached into a pocket of his lab coat and removed a device shaped like a large-faced watch. “The digital display calculates depth as well as direction. Course zero-nine-zero is straight down; adjust to course zero-zero-zero to surface. It’s easy to become disoriented down there.”

  “Dad, I don’t need this. I can hear the surface; I can feel the bottom—even five miles down. The electronics will just annoy me.”

  Gibbons started to protest, only my father cut him off. “Let him do it his way.”

  He walked me over to the edge of the diving well, his arm draped over my shoulder. “Remember, son, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Steady pace; keep your wits about you. If you feel the need to surface—”

  “I’ll be fine.” Stripping off my clothes, I fastened the empty backpack around my shoulders and waist, then climbed over the edge of the diving well and slid feetfirst into the water.

  The sea was warm and incredibly clear. Sucking in my gut, I forcibly exhaled, causing my rib cage to flatten as a steady burst of air vacated my lungs, sealing my esophageal membrane behind it. Gills fluttered in my neck as I inhaled the ocean, my secondary respiratory system fully engaged.

  I looked up at my father as my blurred vision wiped clear. He gave me a thumbs-up, and I returned the gesture with some difficulty—my denticle skin thickening quickly, the rigidity restricting my range of motion. Waiting for my heels to deform, I continued to sink so that my eye level was just below the hull.

  The water was a brilliant royal blue, sparkling with shards of sunlight. I took note of a strange looking device attached to the ship’s keel—no doubt responsible for the two images taken of the sub—and then it was time to go.

  Ducking my head, I settled into an easy seventy-degree descent, my swaying lower limbs propelling me down a shaft of light until it faded into a deep burgundy shadow some six hundred and fifty feet below the surface.

  Growing up in San Diego, living near the Pacific, I became addicted to oceanography. As I descended, years of watching the Discovery Channel came back to me, my inner voice describing ocean realms normally visited by the episode’s narrator aboard a submersible.

  I was leaving the epipelagic or sunlight zone, entering the mesopelagic region. The sea darkened into shades of gray until the depths extinguished the last speck of light, casting me into the eternal night of the bathypelagic zone.

  Luminescent lights twinkled all around me, blinking in and out of existence as if I had entered another universe. I slowed my descent, momentarily disoriented by flashbulbs of color—greens and blues that were visible over great distances to attract mates, reds and yellows that flared like fireworks in order to confuse predators. A fluorescent-white entanglement of limbs floated by, resembling a hydra’s head.

  Perceiving me as a threat, a scarlet vampire squid turned itself inside out, casting a false glowing turquoise eye upon yours truly before it expelled a cloud of bioluminescent mucus, executing a magician’s vanishing getaway.

  My eyes adjusted to the dark, turning the starry night sea into an olive-green minefield of ugliness and evil. A thousand shadows materialized around me in every direction, becoming bulbous eyes and jaws that unhinged, and bizarre fish with frightening teeth, casting bioluminescent bulbs that dangled before their open mouths like bait. They were everywhere—viperfish and gulper eels, fangtooths and dragonfish, and angler fish with teeth that would put a piranha to shame.

  And then my senses identified a far more terrifying presence as it descended through the bathypelagic zone two thousand feet above me—closing fast.

  I heard its clickity-click of echolocation—a beacon of sound that grew louder as it descended. I felt its heart pumping swimming pools of hot blood; its fluke displacing a steady river of seawater.

  Petrified, I raced into the depths, chased by the most formidable predator in the sea—a monster the size of an eighteen wheeler that possessed a toothed lower jaw capable of crushing a small boat in half. There was no outmaneuvering it, nowhere to hide. The bull sperm whale was sixty feet and seventy thousand pounds, and it was plunging through the darkness toward me like a runaway locomotive.

  I had one chance—I needed to reach a depth beyond the bull’s limitations.

  How far could a sperm whale dive?

  I racked my brain, tracking down a speck of memory from eighth grade marine biology. Sperm whale . . . deepest diving mammal. Mature bulls could reach the deepest part of the bathypelagic zone—about twelve thousand feet down.

  Regretting not taking Gibbons’s depth gauge, I closed my eyes, fighting to ignore the charging predator closing quickly from above—willing the senses flanking my dermal denticles to register the vibrations caused by the undersea current rushing along the bottom of the canyon. Locating the telltale disturbance, I triangulated my position using the surface and seafloor some twenty-five thousand feet down.

  I was a third of the way down, maybe less. Figure seven thousand feet.

  That translated into another five thousand feet before the bull sperm whale would be forced to turn back. That didn’t bode well—the leviathan had already closed the gap to a thousand feet and was descending at twice my speed.

  There was nothing I could do, the math did me in—I had no chance.

  And then I sensed them . . . squid—thousands of them—racing through the depths somewhere below me.

  I changed course, aiming for the center of the school, my hip and leg muscles on fire. Altering the angle of my descent allowed the whale to gain on me, but like a camper running through the forest from a bear, I didn’t have to be faster than the bear to keep from being eaten, I just had to be faster than the slowest camper.

  Minutes became seconds. The monster’s clicks became clanging bells, tolling my death. Tucking my chin, I looked back and saw my swishing feet—outgunned by a giant fluke undulating steady and true, driving a gargantuan head that occupied my entire field of vision—a head scarred white from a hundred battles.
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br />   And then its mouth opened and I was inhaled backward in a sudden, terrifying suction that separated my legs and ceased all forward propulsion. I caught a quick glimpse of cone-shaped teeth and a dark, cavernous gullet—igniting a final jolt of adrenaline.

  One arm thrust is all I had time for . . . one powerful downward stroke that sent me flailing chest-first into the sperm whale’s head like a bird hitting a windshield.

  My arms and legs stretched wide to embrace the wall of blubber, my teeth gnawed into the flesh, securing my face to the charging bull’s rostrum . . . anything to avoid being eaten.

  Whap! Whap . . . whap! Whap!

  Jelled bodies slapped against my back, shards of tentacles adhering to my denticle-covered limbs as the whale plowed through the school of squid like a mad bull, rolling out of its two-mile descent to feed.

  I hung on, waiting until the majestic beast slowed.

  Hovering in eleven thousand feet of water, the monster clicked once more, sending a bone-rattling reverberation through my body. With a tremendous shake of its mammoth head, it shook me loose, sending me into a desperate dive to avoid its flapping thirteen-foot-wide fluke as it righted itself to return to the surface.

  Exhausted, I watched it ascend. The behemoth had altered my marathon dive into an energy-depleting sprint. Fortunately, I didn’t have to exert myself nor travel far to feed—the surrounding sea a battlefield of bleeding body parts and torn tentacles.

  For the next twenty minutes I fed on fresh calamari, desperate to regain my strength while I prepared myself mentally to continue my descent—another three miles to go until I reached bottom.

  35

  While I was descending to the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench, Rachel Solomon was using her GPS to locate the home of Jeffrey and Gay Gordon. She arrived after seven in the evening, her knock answered by their son, Jesse.

  “Hey, Mrs. Solomon. Everyone’s in the den.”

  She followed Jesse through the house to a rec room where a very tall, lanky man was speaking to half a dozen familiar faces seated on two matching sofas.

  Rachel hugged Sun Jung, nodded to Principal Lockhart and Coach Flaig, and accepted a folding chair offered by the speaker. “Sorry I’m late. Mordechai needed a ride to practice. Mr. Gordon, I’m Rachel Solomon, the school counselor.”

  “Jeff Gordon, Jesse’s dad.”

  “We appreciate your firm looking into this case.”

  “I’m happy to help. Unfortunately, as I told Kwan’s grandmother, there’s not a lot my law firm can do at this juncture. Because Sun Jung was never appointed by the court to be Kwan’s legal guardian, his father maintained all parental rights. That includes the right to provide his son with medical care without having to reveal his whereabouts to the public, or to his grandmother.”

  “He’s not in rehab, Dad. They disappeared him.”

  The attorney turned to his son. “Jess, just for argument’s sake, let’s say that’s true. How do we prove Kwan’s parent—an admiral no less, kidnapped his own son? Even if we filed criminal charges, the admiral’s attorney would ask the court for thirty to ninety days so Kwan can rehab out of the public eye. Most judges are going to grant it—especially for an admiral.”

  “I understand where you’re coming from, Mr. Gordon,” Rachel interjected, “however, I have to agree with your son. Kwan wasn’t doing drugs; he did, however, tell me he had a terrible relationship with his father. Contact the hospital in San Diego and you’ll find Admiral Wilson only visited his paralyzed son twice after the car accident—once to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order. Is that the kind of loving parent Sun Jung should entrust to care for her grandson?”

  “No. Absolutely not. Sun Jung, when was the last time you spoke with Kwan?”

  “Friday night. He said he was spending the weekend with friends.”

  “Anya was with him Friday night,” Jesse said. “He was supposed to hook up with Tracy, this super-hot cheerleader, only Tracy freaked out, saying Kwan was deformed or something. So everyone marched down the beach to see if he really had two . . . um, if he really was a freak. Turns out Tracy was lying, only maybe something really was wrong with Kwan because Anya and Li-ling rushed him out of there in Li-ling’s car, except Kwan left his Doors backpack in my car, and Kwan never goes anywhere without that backpack.”

  Sun Jung nodded, tears in her eyes. “He love that stupid backpack. Something definitely wrong if he leave that stupid backpack behind.”

  The attorney jotted a few notes on his legal pad. “Sun Jung, how long have you been taking care of Kwan?”

  “Let me think . . . nearly four months.”

  “We may be able to convince a judge that Admiral Wilson granted you physical custody of his son; that you assumed he’d be filing custody papers to that effect in California. I know one of the judges over at the Fifteenth Judicial Court . . . Kamilla Cubit. Her father, Tommy, and I are old friends; his son’s in the navy. I’ll get a copy of that DNR order and show it to the judge. We’ll try to establish that the admiral had forfeited his legal rights and that Sun Jung had assumed physical custody. At the very least, Judge Cubit should force Admiral Wilson to provide Kwan’s location and grant her visitation rights. If the admiral refuses, it would give us grounds to file criminal charges—”

  “Which would not sit well with the navy,” said Annie Moir, jumping in. “I could issue a press release about the resuscitation order that would cause the public to demand the admiral release Kwan’s whereabouts.”

  Rachel turned to the petite brunette. “Excuse me, but who are you exactly?”

  “Annie Moir. I’m Kwan’s manager.”

  The high school counselor’s intense hazel eyes seemed to burn straight into the woman’s brain. “The manager who mentioned cocaine might be involved to that AP reporter?”

  “I never . . . who told you that?”

  “A former student of mine works for the Associated Press. The question is—who do you work for, Ms. Moir?”

  Puerto Rico Trench, Atlantic Ocean

  The abyssopelagic or abyssal zone covers 13,124 to 19,686 feet of the ocean depths, an expanse that includes much of the planet’s seafloor. The water temperature is near freezing; there is no light and very few fish.

  Fish can handle the extreme water pressure far better than the frigid environment. Cold-blooded vertebrates tend to avoid the deep; their core body temperature dropping with their surroundings. The exception are large-bodied sharks like the great white, a species that adapted to the extreme cold by developing a web-like structure of veins and arteries located beneath its swim muscles. This blood-warming adaptation, known as gigantothermy, utilizes the heat generated by the great white’s working muscles to transport hot venous blood into the arteries, allowing the shark to maintain a core temperature far warmer than its environment.

  I was not a great white, but I was warm-blooded, a factor that allowed my mutated cardiovascular system to transport heat to my internal organs in a similar fashion. Still, my prolonged exposure to these thirty-four-degree-Fahrenheit surroundings had numbed my dermal denticles to the point that my movements were becoming alarmingly sluggish.

  Of greater concern was the crushing depth. I hadn’t felt the water pressure inside the hyperbaric chamber, but I sure felt it now as I sank headfirst into the abyss, my legs barely moving. My bones ached. My skull hurt worse. And the deeper I went, the harder it was to breathe.

  I was barely functioning by the time I plunged into the hadalpelagic zone, the ocean realm that plummets beyond 19,686 feet, encompassing the world’s sea canyons and trenches. The deepest point on the planet is located in the Mariana Trench in the Western Pacific. Seven miles down . . . 35,797 feet. The water pressure is an incredible eight tons per square inch—the weight of forty-eight Boeing 747 jets. And yet life had found a way to exist.

  The Puerto Rico Trench reached a depth of 28,373 feet.
The dark chasm appeared below, its depths formidable, its canyon wall rising to meet me like a coffin.

  No longer swimming, I was simply sinking headfirst with my mouth open, my gills struggling to inject life-giving oxygen into my condensing bloodstream. At my present rate of descent, I would hit bottom in a matter of minutes—my final resting place.

  My field of vision narrowed. Olive-green became shades of lead gray.

  I began to hallucinate, my mind in free fall. I looked to my left and saw a mermaid endowed with Anya’s face. “I’m here for you, Kwan.”

  “Are you, Anya? You promised me if things went bad, you’d put me out of my misery.”

  “Soon enough.” She looked at me with those turquoise eyes and winked.

  I reached for her . . . and she was gone.

  I have no idea when the object distinguished itself from the black valley below or how long I had been staring at it before I realized it was the bow of the sunken submarine.

  Paralyzed by the cold, I no longer cared. I was back in ICU, on life support, my father having issued the Do Not Resuscitate order.

  And then a pulse of sensation trickled into my vegetating brain, forcing me from my stupor. Something was alive down there. Something dangerous.

  Four hundred and thirty feet from the bottom of the Atlantic, I spun myself around and slowed my descent, the sudden shot of adrenaline shocking my consciousness awake.

  There were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands; it was impossible to tell. Translucent bodies . . . six to seven feet long. Some glowed rose-red, others preferred albino-white, the beasts changing colors at will as they converged into a frenzied kaleidoscope of swirling, seemingly mindless madness over an unseen section of seafloor.

  Diablo Rojo—the Red Devil.