Ghostie dove out of sight.
Back on board the Riker vessel, Delbert smiled after watching McGill’s performance.
“This is going to be easier than I thought,” he said to Riggs and Haruki.
“Why is that?” Riggs asked him.
“He just tagged her,” Delbert explained. “If Ghostie moves out of the area before we have a chance to catch her, McGill will follow. We just need to keep an eye on his boat.”
Delbert headed back below deck to continue his work monitoring the shark.
“Or just get his monitoring gear,” Riggs said just loudly enough for Haruki to hear him.
Haruki nodded and smiled.
“We’re going to need verification of her size,” Riggs called after Delbert.
Delbert stopped at the bottom of the steps and turned to face him.
“I already did that,” he said. “She’s a bit bigger than I originally estimated.”
“How big?”
“Sixty-two feet on the nose, gentlemen.”
Delbert disappeared below deck. Haruki and Riggs exchange a worried look.
“Time to talk to Arata,” Riggs said.
Delbert quickly reappeared and said, “Oh, and yes, she is female.”
Riggs and Haruki headed off to the communications station below deck with Delbert. Peter, who had been close enough to overhear them, said to Jethro and Hobart, “I’m going to follow them. See what else I can find out.”
“Good idea, Peter,” Hobart egged him on.
As soon as Peter disappeared, Hobart took some wires and a small metal microwave dish and headed towards the conning tower. Grasping the objects in his mouth like a Ninja warrior, he started to climb the tower. Misty watched all of this with a confused look on her face. Jethro put his finger to his lips, silently asking her to be quiet.
“What are you guys doing?” she whispered to Jethro.
“Getting us some help,” he whispered back to her.
Chapter 27
Back on their own boat, McGill frantically typed information into one of the computers he had in the wheelhouse. A steady beeping sound emanated from one of the monitors. Ghostie was, apparently, broadcasting successfully. Barry watched him from the open doorway, marveling at the burst of energy from the scientist.
“That was a stupid stunt you pulled,” Barry said to him.
“She didn’t see me. She just saw the entire boat. I wasn’t in any real danger.”
“No, of course not. No real danger. She could have just sunk the entire boat. She’s bigger than we are.”
“Well, there is that.”
McGill studied the readouts.
“Excellent!” he exclaimed. “She’s just circling below us. Looks like she might stay in the area for a bit. At least as long as that carcass is still floating out there.”
He turned on the underwater cameras, and they could see her ghostly white form circling below them.
The sun had disappeared completely below the horizon, and this far out to sea, the darkness almost seemed to have weight. Both ships, aware of one another’s presence, no longer felt any need to hide and turned on their running lights.
On board the Riker vessel, Delbert busied himself with his monitoring equipment. Riggs and Haruki stood behind him, watching him work. Misty and Peter watched quietly from the darkened hallway.
“You’re sure of that? She’s exactly sixty-two feet long?”
“On the nose,” Delbert assured him.
Peter, fascinated with this piece of information, stepped into the room.
“Do you think that’s it? I mean, is she as big as she’s going to get?”
“Who knows,” Delbert explained to him. “No one has been able to study any of these before. Fossil records don’t really support anything bigger, but then again, fossil records were telling us these things were extinct.”
Delbert flipped on the underwater lights and cameras. Every so often, Ghostie swam past one of the cameras, looking very ghostlike in the lights.
“And you’re seriously going to try and catch that?” Misty asked, as she pointed at the monitor showing Ghostie moving past.
“That is the plan,” Haruki told her, clearly annoyed.
“I think you’re crazy,” she snapped at him.
“Maybe we should use you for bait,” Haruki told her. “Seems as if she already likes you.”
“That’s enough!” Riggs told him.
Misty, disgusted with all of them, turned and left the equipment room, followed quickly by Peter. She pushed open the door and they headed onto the deck.
“These people are dangerous,” she said to Peter.
“Let’s just try not to piss them off anymore than is necessary. They’ll get what they want, we all go home . . . ”
“You get your story. Your Pulitzer!”
“That’s the name of the game, sweetheart.”
Peter saw Hobart climbing down the conning tower.
“Now what the hell are those idiots up to?” Peter said.
Down below, Delbert cued up some footage he had shot of the shark.
“Yeah, that’s good,” Riggs said. “Can you send that to Arata?”
“It’s already on its way.”
Riggs pulled out his phone and Delbert hooked it into one of the computers.
Thousands of miles to the west, Arata sat in his darkened office. The only light came from a large saltwater tank off to one side. He watched his computer monitor as a file was downloading.
“I’m getting the images right now,” Arata said.
He stared in amazement at the footage of the gigantic white shark opening on his computer.
“I see her now. She is amazing. More amazing that I could have ever imagined.”
“She’s just too big, Arata,” Riggs explained to him. “And way too powerful. I’m not going to risk it. Even if we got her back alive, I don’t think she’d survive more than a week or two. She’d be too dangerous to keep and even our biggest tank there won’t give her enough room.”
Haruki and Delbert watched Riggs, waiting for the outcome of his conversation with Arata. After a few moments, he ended the call with his boss and turned towards the two of them. Misty had come back downstairs and listened from the dark hallway, unobserved by them.
“What does he want us to do?” Delbert asked.
“Easy. He wants us to kill her and bring her entire body back so he can have her put on display at the park.”
Horrified, Misty backed quietly away and headed back up on deck. Haruki exited as well. Ghostie swam close to the Riker vessel, gliding underneath them like a graceful zeppelin.
“Do you think she’s just a fish?” Delbert asked Riggs as Ghostie moved closely by the cameras.
Riggs just grunted then left the room followed by Haruki. Delbert shut out all of the lights and stared at Ghostie in the dark, his fingers trailing across the monitor.
“Beautiful,” he whispered.
Misty heard Riggs and Haruki coming up behind her, so she popped off her shoes and ran as quickly and quietly as she could back up top. Frightened, she dashed towards the fantail to find Peter and the camera crew.
“They’re going to kill her,” she whispered, partly from fear, partly from being out of breath from running.
Jethro held out his hand and she gripped it tightly for support as she balanced on one foot, to slide her shoes back on.
“What?” Peter asked, sounding fairly obtuse.
“I overheard them down below. She’s too big for that aquarium, so, they’re going to kill her and take her body back to Tokyo.”
“We’ve got other things to worry about right now,” Peter told her.
“Like what?”
“Getting the hell off of this ship,” Hobart explained to her patiently.
“What about them?” Misty asked as she pointed to the boat that held McGill and Barry.
“What about them?” Peter asked, running short on patience with her.
�
��Can you see them?” she asked.
Jethro shouldered his camera and used the zoom feature to look into the wheelhouse. Hobart turned on a small monitor hooked into his camera so that they could all see what Jethro was pointing it at. Jethor fiddled with the controls a bit and then Barry and McGill’s faces swam into focus. They were both peering intently into monitors, most likely watching the spooky white shark circling below them.
“They’ll help us!” Misty exclaimed.
“How can you be sure?” Peter asked suspiciously.
“Just trust me,” she implored. “Please. If we can just signal them.”
“Oh, we gotta signal, alright.” Hobart assured her.
Jethro smiled broadly. For the first time during the entire trip, Misty stared in amazement at all of the gaps in his smile where teeth were missing. She wondered how on earth she had failed to notice that before.
Hobart and Jethro leaned over and whispered to her, explaining the plan they had.
* * * * * *
Riggs slipped into his private cabin and unlocked the combination to his footlocker. He sorted through some clothing and equipment, then, pulled out a wetsuit and a substantial dive knife. Quickly, he began to undress and change into his diving rig.
Chapter 28
Peter hissed at Misty and the others, then cocked his head slightly towards the bow of the boat, indicating that they should all be quiet. Haruki strode across the deck and opened more of the crates that were lashed down. He saw Peter and the others clustered close to the fantail, but ignored them.
He popped open the crates and pulled out small, metal cylinders which he placed carefully on the deck. Riggs came up behind him, fully dressed in his wetsuit. He carried swim fins and a mask, which he set down next to the metal cylinders and busied himself with strapping a large dive knife to his lower right leg.
“Where the hell does he think he’s going?” Peter whispered as he took in Rigg’s outfit.
“To kill her,” Misty said.
“These guys are full-on nuts,” Hobart whispered.
“I know what those things are, man,” Jethro said in hushed tones. “They’re bombs. These assholes shot a whale, right in front of us, let us record all of that shit with my camera, and are now letting us see all this illegal ordinance they got here.”
“Yeah well, we’ll broadcast one helluva story about all of this,” Peter said greedily.
Jethro and Hobart just looked at him in disgust and shook their heads.
“Dude. The only way we get to broadcast any of this is if we‘re around to do it. You dig?” Hobart hissed back at him.
Peter stared at them, not comprehending the level of danger that Jethro and Hobart felt they were in. Misty didn’t want to believe it, but knew in her heart it could be true. She wondered who was more bloodthirsty—the sharks in the water or Riggs and Haruki, however, she already knew the answer.
Keeping to the shadows, Misty slipped away from Peter and the others. They were too engrossed watching Riggs and Haruki preparing their gear to notice that she had left. Misty darted to the back of the fantail and saw a small emergency raft tucked behind one of the gear lockers.
The deepwater swells made enough noise slapping against the hull of the boat that no one heard her slipping the raft down onto the water. Hanging onto the rope tied to the front of the raft, Misty descended the ladder and peeled up the oar that was locked down onto the edge of the raft and stepped on board.
Using the oar, she pushed away from the back of the boat.
“What am I doing?” she asked herself, totally terrified being on the water, but also feeling like the level of insanity on board the Riker vessel might cost all of them their lives.
Struggling against the high waves, she fought to paddle the raft over to McGill and Barry’s boat.
Back on deck, Peter, Jethro, and Hobart watched Riggs and Haruki arming the small bombs. They listened intently to their conversation.
“We’ll bait her with the whale,” Riggs said. “How many of these do we have?”
“Twelve. Just one can kill her though, if we can get her to swallow it. They’re pressure sensitive. I can set them to a depth of fifty feet, and when she gets down that far, then, boom. We’ll kill her from the inside out.”
“Arata will like that,” Riggs said with some satisfaction. “It will keep her intact for the taxidermist.”
“But, if we can’t get her to eat the blubber,” Haruki added, “I can always use this.”
He patted the harpoon gun, still hidden beneath the shroud he had hastily pulled over it when McGill and Barry arrived on the scene.
The pod of whales had long since departed, leaving their dead companion behind, mostly ripped to pieces at this time by Ghostie and other predators. Misty eyed the gruesome mound floating on the surface of the water, unrecognizable as a whale by now, because it was so chewed apart. The exposed white flesh glowed eerily in the moonlight. She steered clear of it.
Out on the open water between the two boats, Misty slapped the water loudly with the oar, as she did her best to paddle the small raft forward. She hadn’t been able to make much progress, but kept struggling hard to cross the two hundred or so feet of open water, determined to get to Barry and McGill.
Fearfully, she looked about hoping no one onboard the Riker vessel would see she was gone, and hopeful that Ghostie would ignore her. From the corner of her eye she saw the carcass of the whale jerk violently, then disappear beneath the waves. After a second or two, it bobbed to the surface again. Something was feeding on the remains, and she hoped it was the giant shark. If Ghostie was occupied with that, she felt safer that she, in her tiny boat, wouldn’t attract her.
Misty paddled harder, determined to reach the other ship. She dared not yell out to let Barry know she was coming. She didn’t want to attract any attention from the Riker vessel, either.
A few more minutes passed by as she struggled through the water. Ghostie rose up next to Misty, her enormous eye just a few feet from the raft. Misty screamed wildly and froze from fear. Her scream was loud enough that she was heard on both boats. The massive shark slid easily by her, staring with its soulless black eye, which was the size of a hubcap. Misty pulled the oar out of the water and slid to the very center of the small raft, trying to make herself as small as possible.
Riggs and the others rushed to the railing to locate the cause of the commotion. Barry and McGill quickly spied her from their ship. Ghostie circled the small raft. Completely terrorized, Misty dropped the little oar in the water then held onto the gunwales of the small raft, buffeted about by the sizable swells created by the massive white beast. In the moonlight, Ghostie’s skin glowed like an energized apparition.
Barry grabbed the binoculars and looked out at the ocean, just as Riggs—from his ship—trained a powerful spotlight on her. Ghostie nosed the small craft, and the displacement of the water pushed Misty up onto the shark’s head, then slid partway down her back. Water flew everywhere, drenching Misty and filling her tiny craft.
Barry dropped the binoculars and raced towards the back of their boat. McGill was hot on his heels, and helped him with the Zodiac they kept suspended from a harness above the fantail. Barry pushed the craft out over the water and McGill punched the release—dropping the boat, which would normally be lowered carefully, into the water.
The impact caused Barry to bang his jaw shut, and he was pretty sure he cracked at least one tooth, maybe more. He fired up the engine and turned the nimble little craft towards Misty. Ghostie turned her head abruptly towards the sound and vibration of the engine. The sudden movement caused Misty’s little boat to rip across the shark’s rough skin. The friction was too great, and her boat tore open along one of the seams. Her craft was rapidly deflating. The shark thrashed about, her jaws distended, trying to grab for the tiny raft and her terrified passenger.
Ghostie sounded, dropping Misty’s only means, albeit a terrifying one, from staying on the surface. She tried to bail the raft, b
ut it was collapsing too quickly. With the shark gone from directly below her, the sea tore more quickly at the raft.
Barry continued towards Misty as fast as he could go, not knowing where the shark might be. About seventy feet from his target, Ghostie suddenly struck Misty from below. Her conical snout broke the surface of the water at a terrifying speed. Her jaws hung open and tons of water sluiced through her hundreds of teeth.
Misty’s raft had nearly fully deflated, and she wrapped her arms around the remaining buoyant piece. On either side of her, she could see the razor sharp teeth rising up like a huge trap. The sluicing water carried her off to one side, and as the huge jaws began to slam shut, she was shunted out the side, her hair and clothing torn by the ragged teeth at the corner of Ghostie’s mouth.
The shark continued to rise further into the air, still propelled upward from the powerful strokes created by her tail when she started her attack run from below. As gravity took over, her body rolled slightly to one side and several tons of shark slapped the surface of the water as she returned to her aquatic environment.
Misty hit the water as well, and lost her grip on the remains of the raft. Waves rolled over her, and she slid out of sight under the oily black water. Barry, now almost to the area where Misty had disappeared, cut the engine of the Zodiac and drifted into the turbulent waters. He looked about frantically, trying to spy where Misty had gone under.
Ghostie had disappeared beneath the surface again, and Barry was sure she was right below him. He dared not turn on the engine.
Misty popped up to the surface about twenty feet from the bow of the Zodiac. Giddy with relief, Barry threw himself across the bow and reached towards her.
“Misty, swim!”
She thrashed about in the wild water. Barry could see the whites of her eyes in the moonlight. They were wide, wide open and that—plus the frantic useless splashing about she was doing—told him she was in a full-blown panic.
Barry peered into the water over the side of the Zodiac. Passing below him, still well below the surface, he could see the glowing, submarine shape of Ghostie circling below them. A tiny array of light emanated from the dart, still firmly fixed to her back near her dorsal fin. He spun around to the side of the boat, looking for an oar, but saw none. In his haste to get to Misty, neither he nor McGill thought to make sure one was on board.
Big Ass Shark Page 12
