Meg_A Novel of Deep Terror

by Steve Alten

  He looked at Masao. “There’s no creature on Earth with teeth that big.”

  MASAO

  THE SURFACE OF THE PACIFIC ocean sparkled like diamonds beyond the western bleachers; a cold wind howled through the barren canal.

  The man-made lagoon was spread out before them like God’s bathtub. Massive drains were set along its walls, part of a massive filtration system. A glint of sun reflected off the acrylic windows situated along the southern wall twenty feet below the main deck, the gallery accessible from inside the arena.

  The arena itself provided bench-style seating for 10,000.

  Jonas was awestruck by the lagoon’s sheer size. “To see a pod of gray whales inhabiting this waterway, or better yet a few Humpbacks... you could watch them for days on end and not be bored.”

  Masao Tanaka nodded, warming his face in the late afternoon sun. “This lagoon has been my dream since I was six years old. Forty million dollars, almost seven years of planning, four years of construction, Jonas. I did all I could, gave it everything I had.”

  He turned and faced him. “I fear, my friend, that we will never see her open.”

  Terry was straddling a rail five rows down, her back to them.

  Masao lowered his voice. “Taylor-san, with all due respect, I don’t see how this object on the video could possibly be a tooth.”

  “It’s a bottom tooth. You can tell the difference; the upper teeth are much wider, they were used for crushing whale bone. The bottoms are narrow, designed to puncture and grip prey.”

  “The object was white, Jonas. There are no white Megalodon teeth.”

  “Mas, white indicates it’s not a fossil, that the creature who owned it may still be alive. It’s the reason we have to retrieve that tooth. It proves my theories.”

  “Your theories?” Terry slid down from the rail and approached. “Are those the same theories that landed you in a mental ward for three months? The theories that earned your dishonorable discharge? Here’s a reality check for you, professor—there are no giant prehistoric Great White sharks in the Mariana Trench or any other trench, for that matter. And even if there were, since when do sharks eat titanium robots?”

  “They don’t,” Jonas snapped, “unless the titanium robots happen to be transmitting electrical signals, like your UNIS.” He turned to Masao. “Years ago, I was hired by AT&T to investigate problems they were having with a fiber-optic cable system. They had just laid cable along the ocean floor in six thousand feet of water, the line encased in stainless-steel mesh, and yet the sharks were still attacking it, tearing it up, costing the company millions of dollars in repairs. The sharks’ ampullae of Lorenzini were attracted to the electronic booster signals originating in the fiber-optic bundles.”

  “Ampullae of who?” Terry sneered.

  “Lorenzini,” Jonas shot back. “It’s a cluster of sensory cells located along the underside of the shark’s snout. Masao please, I need D.J. to recover that tooth; it’s very important to me.”

  “What if I offered you an opportunity to collect the tooth yourself?”

  Terry’s almond eyes blazed. “No, no, no. If anyone’s descending with D.J., it’ll be me!”

  “Enough.” Masao looked at his daughter, the old man’s eyes fierce. “I will speak to my guest about this; for you, this discussion is over.”

  Terry glared at Jonas then stormed off.

  Masao closed his eyes, taking a few slow, deep breaths through his nose, exhaling from his mouth. “You will stay with us tonight as my guest. My daughter is a very good cook.”

  Jonas looked at his friend. “I’m sure she is. I just might need a food taster to make sure she didn’t drop arsenic into my serving.”

  Masao smiled and breathed deeply again. “Jonas, you smell that ocean air? Makes you appreciate nature, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “My father... he was a fisherman. Back in Japan, he would take me out on his boat almost every morning before school. My mother, Kiku Tanaka, died when I was only four. There was no one else to take care of me. Just my father.

  “When I was six, we moved to America to live with relatives in San Francisco. Four months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. All Asians were locked in detention camps. My father... he was a very proud man. He could never accept the fact that he was in a prison, unable to fish, unable to live his life. One morning, my father just decided to die. He left me all alone, locked in a prison in a foreign land, unable to speak or understand a word of English.”

  “You must’ve been pretty scared.”

  Masao smiled. “Very scared. Then I saw my first whale. From the prison gates, I could see them leap. The humpbacks, they sang to me, kept me company at night, occupied my mind. My only friends.” He closed his eyes for a moment, lost in the memory. “They bussed us out to Idaho a month after my father died. The Minidoka War Relocation Camp. This is where I learned to speak English.

  “You know, Taylor-san, Americans are funny people. One minute you feel hated by them, the next loved. After eighteen months, I was released and adopted by an American couple, Jeffrey and Gay Gordon. I was very lucky. The Gordon family loved me, supported me, put me through school. But when I felt depressed, it was always my whales that kept me going.”

  “Now I understand why this project means so much to you.”

  “Hai. Learning about whales is very important. In many ways they are superior to man. But capturing and imprisoning them in small tanks, forcing them to perform stupid tricks so they can receive their rations of food, this is very cruel. This lagoon, it will allow me to study the whales in a natural setting. The lagoon will remain open so the whales can enter and exit of their own free will. No more small tanks. Having been locked up myself, I could never do that. Never.”

  “The lagoon will open, Masao. JAMSTEC won’t hold the money back forever.”

  Masao shook his head. “Unless we can get the array working again, the project is cancelled.”

  “What about finding another funding source?”

  “I tried, but my assets are already heavily leveraged and no bank will support my venture. Only JAMSTEC. But they don’t care about building lagoons, they just want the UNIS array to monitor earthquakes. The Japanese government will not back down, there are political careers at stake. We either fix the array or declare bankruptcy.”

  “You’ll finish the lagoon, Masao. We’ll figure out what happened.”

  “Jonas, you and I are friends. I tell you my story, now you tell your old friend Tanaka the truth. What happened to you in the Mariana Trench?”

  “What makes you think—”

  Masao smiled knowingly. “We’ve known each other... what? Ten years? Do not underestimate me, my friend. I have contacts in the navy as well in the Pentagon. I read a report filed by your commanding officer, Richard Danielson. Now I want to hear your side.”

  Jonas rubbed his eyes. “Okay, Masao, for some reason it seems the story’s being leaked anyway. First off, Danielson wasn’t my C.O., he was assigned to Guam when our mission began, then ended up overseeing the dives as they were in his waters. I had trained for the mission for several years along with three other pilots, two of which eventually dropped out.

  “The sub was called the Sea Cliff; the navy having refitted her to handle the Challenger Deep. Three teams of scientists were flown out to supervise the mission. I was briefed with some bullshit story about measuring deep-sea currents in the trench in order to determine if plutonium rods from nuclear power plants could be safely buried within the subduction zone. Funny thing—when we descended on that first dive the eggheads were suddenly no longer interested in currents, what they came for were rocks.”

  “Rocks?”

  “Manganese nodules. Don’t ask me why they wanted them, I haven’t a clue. My orders were to pilot the sub down to the hydrothermal plume and remain there while the geologists operated a remotely-controlled drone designed with a vacuum.”

  Jonas closed his eyes. “The first dive went okay
; the second was three days later and by the time I had surfaced again I was seeing double.”

  “What about the other pilot?”

  “He wasn’t ready. I made a third dive four days later, and then a storm front moved in.

  “The eggheads decided the last patch of rocks was the Holy Grail and demanded one last dive. It was barely forty-eight hours after my last dive and I wasn’t fit enough to operate a TV remote, let alone a submersible. But with a little prodding from Dick Danielson the ship’s physician, Frank Heller, certified me ready.”

  Masao shook his head. “Go on.”

  “I managed to get us to the plume. The scientists were busy conducting tests when sonar picked up a school of squid. There must have been a river of them... they passed beneath us like a freight train. Then sonar picked up another biologic, only this one was clearly a predator. It circled and then moved off. Anyway, two hours later I was gazing out the porthole, staring down at the swirling hydrothermal plume when I thought I saw something big circling just below the layer.”

  “What can you see in darkness?”

  “I’m not sure, but the sub’s light reflected off something large and white. At first I thought it could be a whale, but I knew that was impossible. Then it just disappeared. I figured I had to be hallucinating.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I... to tell you the truth, Masao, I’m not sure. I was so tired, I could barely keep my eyes open... but suddenly this huge triangular head emerged out of the hydrothermal ceiling. It was monstrous, as big as a truck, its jaws filled with huge teeth. I don’t remember much after that. They say I panicked, dropped every weight plate the sub had and rocketed toward the surface. We ascended way too fast, and something went wrong with the compression system. The two scientists died. I was rushed inside a recompression chamber and woke up in a hospital three days later... never knew what happened.”

  “And the mental ward?”

  “A parting gift from Danielson. Actually, the rest did me good. But the dive left me with a bit of an anxiety issue.”

  “What makes you think this biologic was a Megalodon?”

  “Mas, before this accident happened I didn’t know a Megalodon from a Mastodon. It was only after... it was after I saw a psychiatrist that I started piecing things together.”

  “But the monster... it never pursued you to the surface?”

  “Apparently not. Like I said, I blacked out, but it could have overtaken us at any time. My guess is it wasn’t interested in being in that cold layer, where the water temperature’s barely above freezing.”

  “Two men died on your watch. Knowing the kind of man you are, that karma must have been hard to live with.”

  “Still is. Not a day goes by I don’t think about it.” Jonas looked to the horizon. “The truth is, it’s been so long, I’ve begun to doubt my own memories of the event.”

  Masao sat back in his chair. “Jonas, I believe you saw something, but I don’t think it was a monster. You know, D.J. tells me there are giant patches of white tubeworms located all along the bottom. D.J. says these worms reflect the light so it appears like they are glowing. You never did make it to the very bottom of the trench, did you?”

  “No.”

  “D.J. made it. That boy loves deep-sea exploration, says it’s like being in outer space. Jonas, I think what you saw was a patch of tubeworms. I think the currents pushed them in and out of your sight line, your submersible’s exterior light catching their glow. That’s why they seemed to disappear. Remember, you were exhausted, staring into the darkness. The navy worked you too hard, three dives in eight days is not safe, a fourth is criminal. Were you falling asleep?”

  “Like I had terminal narcolepsy.”

  “Given the circumstances, what is the more likely event—that you were attacked by an extinct species of shark or that you dreamt the attack and panicked when you awoke?”

  Jonas sat in silence, tears clouding his vision.

  Masao placed his hand on Jonas’s shoulder. “My friend, I need your help. And I think maybe it’s time to face your fears. I want you to return to the Mariana Trench with us and make the dive with D.J., but this time you’ll make it all the way to the bottom. You’ll see these patches of giant tubeworms for yourself. You were once a great pilot, and I know in my heart you still are. You can’t live in fear your whole life.”

  “What about Terry? She wants to make the dive—”

  “She’s not ready. Too head-strong. No, I need you. And you need to do this, so that you can get on with your life.”

  Jonas nodded. “Okay... I’ll go back.”

  “Good. And when all of this is over, you will come work with me at the Institute, yes?”

  “We’ll see.” Jonas choked back a laugh. “Boy, your daughter is going to be pissed at me.”

  Masao nodded. “She will be upset with us both. Let’s skip the home-cooking; I think it best we eat at a restaurant tonight.”

  THE KIKU

  THE AMERICAN AIRLINES JUMBO JET soared 36,000 feet above the blue carpet of the Pacific Ocean, five hours out of San Francisco.

  Terry rose from her first-class seat and headed forward towards the plane’s restroom. Alphonse DeMarco was seated in the row behind her next to Jonas Taylor.

  The former naval submersible pilot had a briefcase-sized Abyss Glider-II flight simulator on his lap, a dark visor over his eyes. The simulator’s dual joysticks allowed Jonas to practice coordinating yaw and pitch with speed and stabilization while focusing on underwater images appearing in his visor.

  For a contraption he had labeled a “kid’s video game,” the experience turned out to be quite intense.

  Removing the head gear, he took a break to rest his eyes. There’d be plenty of time for more practice. It was a twelve-hour flight across the Pacific to Guam, not counting a stopover in Honolulu for refueling.

  Terry’s attitude toward Jonas had gone from cold to ice. She was visibly hurt that her father had ignored her qualifications to back up her brother, D.J., and felt Jonas had lied to her about not being interested in piloting the sub into the Mariana Trench. She flatly refused to help train Jonas on the simulator.

  Having been at it for three straight hours, Jonas opened his sleep pod to take a break. Staring out the window at the night sky, he thought about his last conversation with Masao Tanaka.

  Despite seven years of self-analysis, it had never occurred to Jonas that he could have been focused on a cluster of tubeworms. According to D.J. Tanaka, vast expanses of Riftia grew along the bottom of the Challenger Deep. If true, then it was possible he had been staring at a worm cluster through the swirling debris of minerals, fallen asleep, and dreamt the triangular head.

  The thought made Jonas ill. Two men had died for his mistake, two families shattered. At least the Megalodon defense had served to lessen his guilt. Coming to grips with this new evidence which suggested he may have imagined the entire threat was not sitting well with his psyche.

  Jonas knew Masao was right; he had to face his fears and return to the trench. If a white Megalodon tooth could be found, it would justify seven years of research. If not, so be it. One way or the other, it was time to get on with his life.

  · · ·

  Fifteen rows behind Jonas and DeMarco, David Adashek closed the hardback Extinct Species of the Abyss by Jonas Taylor, Ph.D. He removed his bifocals, positioned his pillow against the window, and fell asleep.

  Western Pacific Ocean

  The naval transport helicopter soared two hundred feet above the waves, its co-pilot glancing over his shoulder at Jonas and DeMarco in the second seat. “She’s just up ahead.”

  “About time,” DeMarco said. He turned to wake Terry, who had been sleeping in the third seat since they’d left the naval station in Guam.

  Jonas trained his eyes on the horizon, a faint line separating the gray ocean from the gray sky. He couldn’t see anything.

  Maybe I should have slept. He was certainly tired enough. They’d b
een traveling for more than fifteen hours.

  Moments later he saw the ship, a flat speck quickly growing larger in the distance.

  The deep-sea research vessel, Kiku, was two-hundred-and-seventy-four feet long with a forty-four foot beam and was outfitted with labs, machine shops, and accommodations to support a dozen scientists and a crew of eighteen for extended voyages. The ship was also equipped to launch submersibles, a reinforced-steel winch and A-frame towering over its stern deck. Behind the winch was a massive spool containing more than eight miles of steel cable.

  Approaching from the north, the helicopter hovered high over the Kiku’s helipad but did not attempt to land.

  DeMarco peered out of his window, then motioned to Terry.

  An athletic man wearing a black and neon-green wetsuit was kite-boarding along the port side of the ship. The wind was gusting at forty knots, the swells twenty feet high, generating ideal conditions to achieve radical lifts.

  Glancing overhead, the kite-boarder saw the hovering chopper. Executing a heel turn jibe, he quickly reversed his direction, creating incredible tension on the lines. Feeling a gust of wind take the kite, he edged his board as he headed into an incoming fifteen foot swell, then released the built-up kinetic energy and soared over the top of the wave, becoming airborne.

  As the helicopter passengers watched, the kite launched its rider eighty feet into the air. Defying gravity, the daredevil whipped his body into a tight one-eighty, hovering high over the Kiku’s bow. For the next twelve seconds he pirouetted into the wind, then, bleeding air from his kite, he dropped onto the aft deck and skidded to a halt.

  Terry beamed proudly at Jonas. “D.J.”

  · · ·

  Twenty-four-year-old D.J. Tanaka was lean and tall like his father, his body taut with muscles, his skin a deep Asian tan. He hugged his older sister as she stepped off the chopper, ushering her to a quiet location away from the helicopter’s dying overhead rotors to talk.