Meg_A Novel of Deep Terror

by Steve Alten

  He looked back at Maggie, who was still laughing with Bud and Harold.

  “Another beer, sir?”

  Jonas looked at his bottle, suddenly realizing he had emptied it. “Give me one of those,” he said, pointing at the gin.

  “Me too,” a voice said behind him. “With a lime.”

  Jonas turned. It was the balding man from the book signing and lecture.

  He looked at Jonas, peering over his wire-rimmed bifocals with the same tight grin on his face. “Funny coincidence, meeting you here.”

  Jonas regarded him suspiciously. “Did you follow me?”

  “Hell no,” the man replied, scooping up a handful of almonds from the bar. He gestured vaguely at the room. “I’m in the media.” He offered his hand. “David Adashek. Science Journal.”

  Jonas ignored it. “You’re playing a dangerous game, Mr. Adashek.”

  “How so?”

  “What is it you want?”

  The man finished a mouthful of almonds, washing it down with a swig of his drink. “My source told me you made the Mariana Trench dives; what he didn’t tell me was what you were looking for.”

  “Who’s your source?”

  “Former navy guy, just like you.” Adashek slipped another almond into his mouth, chewing it noisily like a stick of gum. “Funny thing, though. I interviewed the fellow about it four years ago. Couldn’t get a word out of him. Then last week he calls out of the blue, says if I want to know what happened I ought to talk to you… Did I say something wrong, Doc?”

  Jonas’s brown eyes blazed at the shorter man. “Be careful; I wouldn’t want to see you choke on your nuts.” He turned, locating Maggie and Bud at their table.

  From the other side of the room, a pair of dark Asian eyes followed Jonas Taylor as he made his way across the ballroom, watching as he took a seat next to the blonde.

  · · ·

  Four hours and half a dozen drinks later, Jonas found himself staring at the Golden Eagle now perched on the white tablecloth, a TV camera clutched in its claws. Maggie’s whale film had beaten out a Discovery Channel project on the Farallon Islands and a Greenpeace documentary on the Japanese whaling industry. His wife’s acceptance speech had been largely a passionate “save the whales” plea. Her concern for the cetaceans’ fate had inspired her to make the film, or so she said.

  Jonas wondered if he was the only one in the room who didn’t believe a word she was saying.

  Bud had passed out cigars. Harold Ray made a toast. Fred Henderson stopped by to offer his congratulations, adding that if he wasn’t careful Maggie would get snapped up by a major station in Los Angeles. Maggie feigned disinterest. Jonas knew she’d heard the rumors... she had started many of them herself.

  They were all dancing now. Maggie had taken Bud’s hand and led him onto the floor, knowing Jonas wouldn’t object. How could he? He didn’t like to dance.

  Jonas sat alone at the table, chewing the ice from his glass and trying to remember how many gins he’d downed in the last few hours. He felt tired, had a slight headache, and all signs pointed to a long evening still ahead. He got up and walked to the bar.

  Harold Ray was there, picking up a bottle of wine and a pair of glasses.

  “So how was Baja, professor?”

  Jonas wondered if the man was drunk. “Baja?”

  “The cruise.”

  “What cruise?” He handed his glass to the bartender, nodded for a refill.

  Ray laughed. “I warned her three days was no vacation. Look at you, you’ve already forgotten.”

  “Baja? You mean... last week.” Then it hit him. The business trip to San Francisco. The tan. Bud Harris.

  “Too many margaritas, professor?”

  Jonas stared for a long moment at the glass in his hand, then scanned the dance floor for his wife. The band was playing “Crazy,” the lights dimmed low, the couples dancing close. He located Maggie and Bud, clinging together like a pair of drunks. Bud’s hands were caressing her back, working their way down. Jonas watched as his wife repositioned his hands to her buttocks, kissing him on the lips.

  Blood rushed into Jonas’s face, the veins in his neck throbbing. He slammed his drink down, then made his way awkwardly across the dance floor.

  Oblivious, Maggie and Bud continued to grind their groins against one another, lost in their own world.

  Jonas tapped Bud on the shoulder. “Excuse me, pal, but I think that’s my wife’s ass in your hand.”

  Maggie and Bud stopped dancing, a look of apprehension coming over the millionaire’s face. “Easy big guy, I was only—”

  The right cross was a glancing blow, but still had enough force to send Bud crashing into another couple, all three sprawling to the dance floor.

  The band stopped playing.

  The lights came up.

  Maggie looked at Jonas, aghast. “Are you crazy?”

  Jonas rubbed his sore knuckles. “Do me a favor, Maggie. Next time you take a cruise to Baja, don’t come back.” He turned and left the dance floor, the alcohol spinning the room as he strode toward the exit.

  · · ·

  Jonas stepped out the front entrance and ripped off his tie. A uniformed valet asked him for his parking stub.

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “Would you like a taxi, then?”

  “He doesn’t need one. I’m his ride.” Terry Tanaka stepped out the door behind him.

  “Man, when it rains it pours. What is it you want, Tracy?”

  “It’s Terry, and we need to talk.”

  “You talk, I need to puke.” He staggered down the block, searching for a trashcan, settling for the back of a dumpster.

  Terry turned her back as he heaved his dinner. She searched her purse, then tossed him a pack of gum when he finished. “Now can we talk?”

  “Look, Trixie... ”

  “Terry!”

  Jonas sat on the curb and combed his fingers through his hair. His head was throbbing. “What is it you want?”

  “Following you here... it wasn’t my idea. My father sent me.”

  Jonas glanced back at her. “Masao’s an old friend. Find me on Monday, we’ll talk. This isn’t exactly a good time... ”

  “Ever hear of UNIS?”

  “Is that your sister? No wait... it’s some kind of deep ROV, isn’t it?”

  “Unmanned Nautical Informational Submersible. UNIS. Our institute holds the patents. They’re made for deep-water assignments, their hulls able to withstand 19,000 pounds per square inch of pressure.”

  “I’m happy for you. Now I need to find a cab and a bottle of aspirin.”

  She removed a manila envelope from her purse and shoved it in his face. “Look at this.”

  He opened the envelope and pulled out a black-and-white photograph taken underwater. The image was of a UNIS, lying on its side, its hull crushed almost beyond recognition.

  Jonas looked back at the woman. “Where was this drone deployed?”

  “The Mariana Trench.”

  UNIS

  THE DODGE CARAVAN SPED along the rain-slick streets of San Diego. Terry was at the wheel, the rental car challenging every yellow traffic light. Jonas laid back in the passenger seat, the window open, the cool breeze soothing his headache and sore knuckles. His eyes remained open and on the road—the woman’s driving was making him nervous—but he kept studying the photograph in his mind.

  Taken 35,000 feet beneath the surface of the western Pacific, the black-and-white photograph showed a spherical remote-sensing device resting near a dark canyon wall. Jonas was somewhat familiar with these remarkable robotic devices, having followed their development in science journals. He had heard rumors that JAMSTEC, the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center, was involved with the Tanaka Institute in a joint project.

  “My father agreed to deploy twenty-five UNIS drones into the Challenger Deep in exchange for financing for our whale lagoon in Monterey,” Terry told him as they reached the freeway. “The UNIS array is essentially
an earthquake early warning system designed to monitor tremors along a 125-mile stretch of the underwater canyon where the Philippine Sea Plate meets the Pacific Plate. Within days of the system’s deployment, our surface ship, the Kiku, began receiving a steady stream of data, and seismologists on both sides of the Pacific were eagerly studying the information.

  “Then something went wrong. Three weeks after the array was up and running one of the drones stopped transmitting data. A week later, two more units shut down. When another one stopped a few days after that, JAMSTEC cut off our funding, demanding my father repair the array.”

  Terry looked at Jonas. “He sent my brother, D.J., down in the Abyss Glider to video one of the damaged units.”

  “Alone?”

  “D.J.’s the most experienced pilot we have, but I agree with you. In fact, I argued with Masao to allow me to escort him down in the second glider.”

  “You?”

  Terry glared at him. “You have a problem with that? I happen to be a damn good pilot.”

  “I’m sure you are, but at thirty-five thousand feet? What’s the deepest you’ve ever soloed?”

  “I’ve hit sixteen thousand twice, no problem.”

  “Not bad,” Jonas admitted.

  “You mean, not bad for a woman?”

  “Easy, Gloria Steinem, I meant not bad for anyone. Very few humans have been down that deep.”

  She forced a smile. “Sorry. It gets frustrating, you know. My father is strictly old-fashioned Japanese; his grandmother was a geisha. Women are to be seen and not heard. It drives me crazy.”

  “Finish the story. What happened with D.J.? I assume he took this photo?”

  “Yes. The photo came from his sub’s night vision camera.”

  Jonas glanced again at the photograph. The titanium sphere had been cracked open, its tripod legs were mangled, a bolted bracket torn off. The hull itself looked battered beyond recognition.

  “Where’s the sonar plate?”

  “D.J. found it forty feet down-current. He managed to haul it to the surface—it’s back at the Institute in Monterey. That’s why I tracked you down. My father needs you to take a look at it.”

  Jonas stared at her skeptically. “Why me?”

  “He didn’t say. You can fly up with me in the morning and ask him. I’m taking the Institute’s plane back at eight.”

  Lost in thought, Jonas almost missed his house. “There—on the left.”

  She turned down the long, leaf-littered driveway, then parked in front of a single story Spanish Colonial buried in foliage.

  Terry switched off the engine. Jonas turned to her and narrowed his eyes. “Masao sent you all this way, just so I could render an opinion on scrap metal?”

  “My father needs advice about redeploying along the Challenger Deep.”

  “You want my advice? Stay the hell out of the Mariana Trench. It’s far too dangerous to be exploring, especially in a one-man submersible.”

  “Everything’s dangerous to a man who’s lost his nerve. D.J. and I are good pilots, we can handle this. What the hell happened to you anyway? I was only seventeen when we first met, but you were different. I still remember your piss-and-vinegar attitude. I was actually attracted to your swagger.”

  “Swagger leaves you when you grow old.”

  “You’re not old, but you are afraid. What are you so afraid of? A sixty-foot prehistoric Great White shark?”

  “Maybe I’m afraid of Asian women with too much swagger.”

  She smirked. “Let me tell you something–the data we collected during those first weeks the UNIS array was functioning was invaluable. If the earthquake detection system works, it’ll save thousands of lives. No one’s asking you to dive the Challenger Deep, we simply want your opinion on why the UNIS was damaged. Is your schedule so damn busy that you can’t take a day to fly up to the Institute? My father’s asking for your help. Examine the sonar plate and review the video that my brother took and you’ll be home to your darling wife by tomorrow night. We’ll pay you for your time, and I’m sure Dad will even arrange a personal tour of our new whale lagoon.”

  Jonas took a breath. He considered Masao Tanaka a friend, a commodity he seemed to be running short of lately. “When would we leave?”

  “Meet me tomorrow morning at the commuter airport, seven-thirty sharp.”

  “The commuter… we’re taking one of those puddle jumpers?” Jonas swallowed hard.

  “Relax. I know the pilot. See you in the morning.”

  Jonas exited the van and watched her drive away. “What the hell are you doing, J.T.?”

  · · ·

  Jonas shut the door behind him and switched on the light, feeling for a moment like a stranger in his own home. The house was dead quiet. A trace of Maggie’s perfume lingered in the air. She won’t be home until late. Ah, who are you kidding, she won’t be home at all.

  He went into the kitchen, pulled a bottle of vodka from the cabinet, then changed his mind and turned on the coffeemaker. He replaced the filter and added some coffee, then filled the slot with water. He ran the faucet, sucked cold water from the spigot, and rinsed out his mouth.

  For a long moment he stood at the sink, staring out the back window while the coffee brewed. It was dark out back, all he could see was his reflection in the glass.

  A favorite Talking Heads song kept replaying in his mind...

  And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house, and you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife. Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was…

  When the coffee was done, he grabbed a mug and the pot of coffee and went into his study.

  Sanctuary. The one room in the house that was truly his own. The walls were covered with contour maps of the ocean’s continental margins, mountain ranges, abyssal plains, and deep-sea trenches. Fossilized Megalodon teeth cluttered the shelves of a glass bookcase, sitting upright in their plastic support holders like small, lead-gray stalagmites. A framed photo of a Great White shark hung above his desk, sent to him by Andrew Fox, son of Rodney, the famous Australian photographer who had nearly been bitten in two by a similar creature many years ago. Now the entire Fox family made a living taking pictures of the very animal that had scarred Rodney for life... and had given him a new livelihood.

  Jonas set the coffee mug down beside his computer, then positioned himself at the keyboard. A set of jaws from a twelve-foot Great White gaped at him from high above his monitor. He punched a few keys to access the Internet, then typed in the Web address of the Tanaka Oceanographic Institute.

  Jonas sipped the hot coffee as he waited for the Web site to upload. He typed in the word “UNIS.”

  UNIS: Unmanned Nautical Informational Submersible

  Designed and developed by the Tanaka Oceanographic Institute to track seismic disturbances along the sea floor. The UNIS system is composed of a three-inch-thick titanium outer shell. The unit is supported by three retractable legs and weighs 935 pounds. UNIS is designed to withstand pressures of 19,000 pounds per square inch and communicates information back to a surface ship by way of fiber-optic cable.

  Jonas reviewed the engineering reports of the UNIS systems, impressed by the simplicity of the design. Positioned along a seismic fault line, their tripod legs burrowing deep into the ocean floor, the UNIS remotes could detect the telltale signs of an earthquake or an impending tsunami, providing, as Terry had said, an invaluable early warning system.

  Southern Japan had the misfortune of being geographically located within a convergence zone of three major tectonic plates. Periodically, these plates ground against one another, generating about one-tenth of the world’s annual earthquakes. One devastating Japanese quake in 1923 had killed more than 140,000 people.

  Masao Tanaka had been desperately seeking a bank to underwrite his dream project, a man-made cetacean lagoon located off the coast of Monterey. JAMSTEC had agreed to fund the Tanaka Institute in exchange for the completion of the UNIS early warnin
g system.

  Now the system’s breakdown was pushing the Tanaka Institute toward bankruptcy, and Masao needed Jonas’s help.

  He drained his coffee cup.

  The Challenger Deep. Submersible pilots referred to it as “hell’s antechamber.”

  Jonas just called it hell.

  · · ·

  Six miles away, Terry Tanaka, freshly showered and wrapped in a hotel bath towel, sat on the edge of her queen-size bed at the Holiday Inn, her blood pressure still elevated. Jonas Taylor had really irked her. The man was obstinate, with strong chauvinistic ideas. Why her father had insisted their team seek his input was beyond her.

  Pulling out her briefcase, she decided to review the personnel file on Professor Jonas Taylor.

  She knew the basics by heart. Bachelors of Science from Penn State University, advanced degrees from the University of California, San Diego and Scripps Institute of Oceanography, trained at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute as a submersible pilot and now had just published a controversial book on paleobiology. At one time, Jonas Taylor had been considered one of the most experienced argonauts in the world. He had piloted the Alvin submersible seventeen times, leading multiple explorations to four different deep-sea trenches. And then, seven years ago, for some unknown reason, he had simply given it all up.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” Terry said aloud. Thinking back to the lecture earlier that evening, she remembered the balding man who had revealed that Jonas had piloted a naval expedition into the Mariana Trench. Her father knew this of course, it was the reason he had sent her to bring Jonas into their council.

  The three month stay in a mental ward, however, was news to her.

  Terry powered up her laptop. She entered her password, then accessed the Institute’s computers, searching for “Mariana Trench.”

  MARIANA TRENCH

  LOCATION: Western Pacific Ocean, east of Philippines, close to island of Guam.

  FACTS: Deepest known depression on Earth. Measures 35,827 feet deep (10,920 m), over 1,550 miles long (2,500 km), averages 40 miles in width, making the trench the deepest abyss on the planet and the second longest. The deepest area of the Mariana Trench is called the Challenger Deep. Note: A 5 pound bowling ball dropped from the surface would require more than an hour of descent time to reach bottom.