by Steve Alten
The captain glanced to starboard. For weeks they had been following a course that took them past the Mariana Islands, each mountainous mass carpeted in green jungle. “I would have thought the depths around these islands far more shallow.”
“As it turns out, these volcanic islands sit in the deepest waters we have yet come upon. The sea bed is ancient, yielding a treasure-trove of fossils and manganese nodules. This morning’s sink line exceeded thirty-five hundred fathoms and still there is no sign of bottom. We had to splice in another …”
The captain grabbed the teetering scientist and held fast as the bow lifted again, then crashed back into the Pacific. “How soon until a new length of cable can be made ready?”
“I’m told another twenty minutes.”
“Very well. Helm, come hard to starboard. Mr. Lauterbach, lower the mainsails; prepare to engage steam engines.”
“Aye, captain.” The first officer rang his copper bell, the signal mobilizing two dozen crewmen as the Challenger leaned onto its starboard flank to shed the wind within the valley of a swell.
Captain Nares waited until the scientist disappeared safely down a hold, then returned his gaze to the Pacific, staring hard at the heaving waters.
Thirty-five hundred fathoms … more than six kilometers of ocean. How deep could these waters run? What strange life forms could they be concealing?
The depths surrounding this strange archipelago had certainly offered a bounty of clues, from cetacean vertebrae and whale ear bones to thousands of shark teeth, more than a hundred of these manganese-encrusted fragments as large as his hand. Moseley had identified these larger specimens as the genus, Carcharodon, those teeth exceeding four centimeters belonging to the species Megalodon, a true ancient sea monster.
The spectacular size of the creature’s teeth led to nightly debates in the galley as to whether these sharks might still be alive. The dark lead-gray serrated triangles were fossilized to be sure; only a white specimen would bear proof of the Megalodon’s continued existence. For his part Professor Moseley carefully inspected each haul, hoping to find one ivory treasure among the fragments—so far, to no avail.
“Some of these fossils are not that old, captain,” the scientist had cooed the night before last, draining his third brandy. “This tells me the creatures might still be around, prowling the deeper fathoms.”
“Exactly how big would these mega-sharks of yours be?”
“Some say thirteen meters, but these fragments tell me different. I’ve held an eighteen centimeter tooth in my hand; its owner had to measure twenty meters from snout to tail.”
“Good God, man! That’s more than half the length of the Challenger. A creature that size … we’d need a bigger boat. Has any man ever spotted such a beast?”
“There have been rumors, whalers mostly. Lots of blood in the sea attracts all kinds of sharks.”
“Attracts them? How so?”
“Unknown. Perhaps they can taste the blood. Sharks are not my specialty, but a devil like this Megalodon … I’ll confess, captain, each time we retrieve the nets I find myself watching the sea, secretly wishing our cast would lure one of these monsters up from the depths, if only so I could lay eyes on such a magnificent animal, surely nature’s most feared creation of all time.”
Staring at the foam-covered swells, Captain Nares shook his head, trying to imagine a shark that could consume four of his men in one bite, wondering if such a fish could still be alive, inhabiting the unexplored realm harbored by these ungodly depths.
1
Aboard the U.S. NAVY DSV-4 support ship: Maxine D
Philippine Sea
Present Day
CAPTAIN RICHARD DANIELSON stood defiantly on the main deck, his ears assaulted by the thirty knot winds swirling southeast across the broiling Pacific. Each gust disturbed the twenty-nine ton beast held aloft above the stern, each sway threatening to tear harness from machinery and cast the “white whale” from its perch.
For the American naval officer, the spray of sea and the incessant rolling steel beneath his feet were a constant reminder that his scheduled twelve day mission was now entering its third week. A commander who commanded best from behind a desk, Danielson was clearly out of his element. Three years ago he had transferred to the U.S. naval base at Guam seeking a non-combat position where he could spend his days pushing papers until his retirement. Guam was exactly what the doctor ordered—a tropical island paradise brimming with pristine beaches, deep sea sport fishing, and world class golf courses. And the women—exotic islanders and Asian delights. True, the job was flavored with the occasional “readiness at sea” command, but these maritime exercises occupied no more than a few of his days every quarter.
Danielson knew he was in trouble the day the Maxine D arrived in port. More research ship than naval vessel, the boat was essentially a steel camel designed to transport its charge—a Deep Submergence Vehicle. Unlike his other maritime exercises, his orders were being sent directly from the Defense Department. The DSV’s deployment site was prioritized as top-secret, its location—a six hour voyage from Guam in the Philippine Sea. The DoD had made it clear from the onset that while the Guam Naval Base commander was technically in charge of the tender, the eggheads on-board would be running things.
The problem was that up until last week, barely anything had been running. First it was the A-frame’s winch, then the primary generator, then the DSV’s sonar relay. The seemingly endless breakdown of equipment had rendered Danielson a prisoner to a mission he knew little about, and the scientists on-board only served to irritate him more. Compounding the repeated delays was the weather, which had grown uglier by the day. Danielson had puked-up his last solid meal ten days ago; even the most experienced sailor felt perpetually queasy and hung over.
Ironically, it was Mother Nature that decreed an end to the assignment. P.A.G.A.S.A., the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration, was tracking a powerful category 2 typhoon, dubbed Marian. The name was apropos; the storm’s predicted path would take it south from the Sea of Japan on a long sweeping arc that traced the Mariana Island chain before channeling it farther east away from land. Packing ninety-two-mile-an-hour winds, the typhoon’s eye wall would be upon them in twenty-six hours.
Protocol should have sent the Maxine D on its way back to Guam, the southernmost island in the chain. At the urging of the scientists on-board, however, the Pentagon had insisted on one last dive on what would be their fourth venture into the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep.
The Mariana Trench was the lowest point on Earth, a seven-mile-deep, 1,550 mile-long, forty mile-wide canyon formed by a volcanic subduction zone. Named after the British research vessel that had dredged its depths more than a century earlier, the Challenger Deep was its deepest section.
Why the navy would want to expend time and money to explore this hellhole was beyond Dick Danielson. At this point his only concern was getting the scheduled seventeen hour dive underway as soon as possible, allowing him as large a window as he could get to recapture the DSV, secure it to the deck, and race back to the naval harbor at Guam before Typhoon Marian turned the surface of the Pacific into a watery version of the Himalayas.
As the outer storm bands played havoc with the teetering Sea Cliff and the DSV’s pit crew struggled to ready its launch, one man was screwing up Captain Danielson’s plans.
*
The late afternoon sun was hot, the beach crowded. Jonas Taylor rose off the blanket onto his knees, his lower back sore from lying on his stomach. He stretched, then turned his gaze to the model gorgeous blonde stretched out in the beach chair next to him, her tan, oiled breasts two swollen grapefruits in the skimpy red bikini.
Jonas beckoned his wife to join him for a dip in the ocean.
Maggie waved him off.
Jonas jogged to the shoreline. The Pacific was calm, barely a ripple. He strode in up to his waist, joining a dozen other bathers.
Turning to his r
ight, he saw an Asian boy standing next to him, the child no more than ten years old. Piercing almond eyes matched an expression of deep concern.
“Don’t go.”
Jonas stared at the boy. He scanned the crowd for a potential parent.
Curious—the other bathers were now gone.
He turned back to the beach. Maggie was standing, ready to leave. She was no longer in her bikini. Instead she was wearing a topaz dress with stiletto heels. She walked away without so much as a glance.
Bud Harris was there with her. His best-friend was decked-out in a tuxedo, his slicked back dark hair in a ponytail. Jonas waved at his friend.
Bud waved back, then followed Maggie up the beach.
Jonas turned to the boy.
The boy was gone.
Jonas was alone.
His heart pounded, disrupting the silence. Every breath echoed in his ears.
A deep rumble built like distant thunder. The sky remained clear.
A mile out to sea the tidal wave appeared, levitating the horizon. It crested slowly, majestically—a mountain of curling dark water rising twenty stories high.
Jonas turned to flee, but his legs felt like lead.
He looked up. The sheer wall of water blotted out the sky. With a clap of thunder it fell …
“Ahhh!”
*
Jonas Taylor sat up in bed, his flesh and the tangled sheets drenched in so much sweat that for a moment the thirty-year-old naval commander wasn’t sure if the tidal wave had been a nightmare or real.
The familiar gray cabin walls assured him it was a dream.
And then the room began to spin.
He closed his eyes, but the nausea said no and he reopened them. The suddenness of the vertigo returned him to a similar sensation experienced a decade earlier as he lay semiconscious on a grass football field, the junior tight end’s head ringing and Beaver Stadium rolling sideways in his vision. Penn State’s team physician had shouted his name over the crowd noise. “Don’t move, J.T.! Focus your eyes on one spot until your vision clears!”
His first choice back then had been to focus on the football, still clutched in his hands; the choice now was the porthole, but with the ship swaying he held up his left hand and stared at his wedding ring.
As his pupils locked on, the vertigo passed.
An insistent knock demanded his attention.
“Shut up already and come in.”
Michael Royston entered, the DSV pilot’s East Tennessee State University tee-shirt soaked in sweat from a morning workout. “Sorry to wake you, boss. Heller wants you in sick bay for the pre-dive. Jonas, you okay? You look like hell.”
“Been there. Three times in the last eight days. Don’t have a fourth in me. Not today anyway.”
Royston’s eyes widened behind his glasses. As the mission’s back-up hydronaut, the twenty-seven year old was accustomed to playing Robin to Jonas’s Batman. Twice in the last year he had accompanied his mentor to the bottom of the Middle America Trench, but co-piloting a DSV at 20,000 feet and making a solo dive to 36,000 feet suddenly seemed worlds apart—the equivalent of asking a Single-A pitcher to strike out Mickey Mantle in game seven of the World Series.
“Jonas, you think I’m ready? I mean, hell yeah, I’m ready. I’m your back-up, right? If you need me to stand in, then sure, let’s do it.”
It was a bad play. Royston’s cockiness was gone, replaced by trepidation. A healthy dose of fear was warranted before any deep sea dive; what concerned Jonas was that his young co-pilot was a better actor than this. Clearly he wanted to be bailed out.
“Let’s see what Heller says. Tell him I’ll be there in five.”
*
From his porthole, Jonas could see the shadow of the DSV as it rocked back and forth within its harness, forcing its “pit crew” to hold on. Thirty feet long, with a twelve foot forward beam that tapered back to an eight foot propeller shaft, the Sea Cliff (DSV-4) and her sister ship, Turtle (DSV-3) had been the navy’s workhorses since they were commissioned back in 1968. White with an orange-red dorsal hatch, the sub was designed around a six-foot-in-diameter, four-inch-thick titanium sphere that held its three-man crew. The exterior hull was neutrally buoyant fiberglass, supporting a propulsion unit, ballast and trim system, lights, cameras, steel weights, grappler arms, and a series of collection baskets.
What few people outside the Pentagon knew was that the Sea Cliff had recently received an extensive overhaul, the titanium pod and aluminum chassis upgraded to withstand 18,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. Life support capacity was doubled to thirty-two hours, descent weight increased by eight hundred pounds—features necessary when taking an elevator to a bottom floor whose basement exceeded Mount Everest’s height. Of course, if something failed on Everest’s summit, the pressure didn’t implode your skull.
It took a cool customer to pilot a DSV; it took the best the navy had to offer to guide the upgraded Sea Cliff into the Challenger Deep, the deepest most unexplored realm on the planet. Only two manned descents had ever ventured into these depths—both in 1960 using bathyscaphes. There was no piloting involved, the vessels simply went down and came back up. On one of these dives, the lone viewport had actually cracked, four inches of reinforced glass buckling under 16,000 pounds per square inch of pressure.
In the three decades that followed, no human had returned to dive the Mariana Trench.
Jonas Taylor had been preparing for the Challenger Deep for six months. His nerves were rock-steady, his attitude evolving from “cavalier cowboy” to a higher, zen-like state once he’d entered the DSV’s titanium sphere—a claustrophobic life support chamber somehow deemed large enough to accommodate three passengers for upwards of twenty hours.
The top-secret mission was as straightforward as it was dangerous; Jonas would pilot the DSV six miles down, hovering just above a silty warm oasis of ocean created by the superheated mineralized water pumping from the abyss’s hydrothermal vent fields. Once the sub was in position, the two scientists on-board would release a robotic drone which would enter the Challenger Deep and sink another five thousand feet to the bottom where it would gather samples of manganese nodules via a remotely-operated vacuum assembly.
Jonas had no idea what was so special about these pineapple-sized chunks of rock, nor did he care. As he told Danielson at their first meeting, “To me, the descent becomes routine the moment we pass beyond the light, right around twelve hundred feet. There’s a lot going on in the universe outside that porthole—bioluminescent creatures, mating rituals, schools of jellyfish and things that glitter in the night—but until I get down to the basement, all I’m watching are my control panels. I don’t want to know what’s out there, I don’t want to think about anything other than operating the DSV. Once I slip on my headphones and tune into some classic rock, I’m pretty much on auto-pilot for the next fifteen hours.”
The first descent, eight days ago, had changed his tune.
Deep dives into the Hadal zone meant longer missions, the additional “on” time affecting the pilot’s mental and physical attributes. Like an airline pilot or radar control operator, stress and fatigue quickly become a dangerous twosome, compromising the mind’s ability to reason. Work-rest cycles of both submersible pilots and their surface support crews have to be strictly monitored, with back-up personnel on hand lest mental acuity be affected.
Diving the Challenger Deep was like nothing Jonas had ever experienced. The water pressure was tremendous, causing an unnerving rattle in the titanium sphere. Worse was the hydrothermal plume. Temperatures below this raging river were tropical, above the layer near-freezing, and the temperature differential created unpredictable water currents that threatened to flip the submersible into oblivion. It was like hovering above Niagara Falls while balancing on a tightrope.
Sixteen hours after the first dive had begun, the DSV surfaced. Jonas had been so exhausted that he had to be carried out of the sub.
Two more dives had followed in le
ss than a week. Over fifty hours spent in a six-foot titanium sphere with two scientists, and now they wanted him to do it again.
Every man has a limit. Jonas knew he had surpassed his after the last dive when he could no longer tell if he was piloting the Sea Cliff or dreaming that he was piloting the Sea Cliff.
*
Dr. Frank Heller may have been a first generation medical man, but he was third generation navy, his grandfather having served in World War II aboard an aircraft carrier, his father and two uncles assigned to the battleship USS Missouri during the Korean war. Younger brother Dennis was an Assistant Chief Engineer aboard a Los Angeles Class attack sub, their older sister a former diving officer.
Heller knew that Chief Warrant Officer Carolyn Heller-Johnston would never have certified the pilot seated on his exam table as dive-ready. But then, his big sister didn’t have to deal with a pencil-pusher like Dick Danielson or the other desk jockeys back at the Pentagon.
Taylor’s last dive had yielded the type of manganese nodule the team of scientists had apparently been hoping for. Now they were demanding that Taylor make another descent before the brunt of Typhoon Marian arrived by noon tomorrow. Rough weather, a subterranean current, even a school of fish could cause their bounty to drift to another location, making it impossible for a returning mission to locate the same patch of volcanic rock.
Danielson essentially gave Heller little choice. As long as Jonas Taylor appeared reasonably coherent, he would be cleared for one more dive.
*
The forty-four-year-old physician with the graying crew cut removed the blood pressure cuff from Jonas Taylor’s left bicep. “One-thirty-seven over eighty. Slightly elevated, nothing to write home about.”
I’m normally one-ten over sixty.”
“You’re anticipating this morning’s dive. Arms out to the side, eyes closed. Now touch your nose with your right index finger.”
“Whoa!” The vertigo washed over him, causing Jonas to lose his balance. He reopened his eyes, struggling to stop the room from spinning.
