Getty was in the company boat, two miles offshore and in no rush to reach his destination. It was beautiful out today. No people, no other boats. Just a ton of kelp strands in the water. Looking forward Getty eyed a few hundred gliding seagulls. A football field away, the birds darted above the ocean, and Seth was pleased to see them. He’d brought along a loaf of Wonder Bread after all. He suddenly squinted. What was that? Directly beneath the birds, two smallish black shapes flew out of the sea then fell right back in. Getty stared at the spot, but as he motored closer, whatever it was didn’t reappear. He cut the engine and threw bread all over the large gray deck. Like vultures, the birds immediately descended, hopping everywhere to eat as much as they could. There were so many they took up the entire deck, but Getty didn’t mind. He squeezed into a too-small black wet suit and reminded himself to go on a diet.
As he jumped into the sea, the birds continued to eat.
GETTY DOVE to two hundred feet, carefully checked the cable’s current readings, and began to ascend. When he was a hundred feet from the surface, however, he noticed a moving black shape to his right. He froze. He couldn’t make it out at all—visibility was very poor—but whatever it was, he thought it was swimming toward him. He glanced up and, far above the surface, thought he saw the gulls gliding in the sun. He turned back. The black shape was much closer now. Then he noticed movement from another direction. There was a second black shape also swimming toward him. Then he noticed a third. Then a fourth. Then hundreds. They were coming from all sides.
Suddenly Seth Getty was terrified. He started to swim up. But then he froze again. Now they were coming from above, too.
“WHAT MISSING repairman?” Jason asked.
On the back of the Expedition, Craig shrugged. “The coast guard just sent out an all-points. Some guy doing maintenance on a fiber-optic cable. Apparently he just disappeared, right around here.”
“Where was he exactly?”
“About ten miles north, off Los Padres.”
Jason paused. “That’s right where the kelp trail’s leading. . . . I wonder if maybe—” He stopped talking.
“What? You think the rays have something do with it?”
A smile. “Of course not.” That was ridiculous, not even within the realm of possibility. “But whatever got this guy . . . I wonder if maybe it could get them, too.”
“Come on, Jason. He probably just drowned, then got carried away by the currents.”
But in the exact location they’d tracked the rays to? “Let’s get up there and check it out.”
THEY DID but found nothing unusual—just more kelp. They continued north, and by late September were easing into the waters off Carmel, then Pebble Beach and Monterey. This was a truly gorgeous part of California, with stunning vistas and jagged rock cliffs everywhere. No one noticed the scenery.
The plankton supply had continued to decrease, and Lisa Barton was still baffled. Her onboard Plankton Measuring System only gave her “what” without the “why.” To get real answers, she needed the kind of equipment found only in the most sophisticated marine labs in the country. One morning she called the prestigious Okezie Marine Center, near Washington State University, then FedExed them a plankton sample in seawater. They got back to her in less than a week, on a sweltering-hot day.
“Lisa, an e-mail came for you.”
She turned to Phil Martino. Since Phil’s computer was the only one configured to the Expedition’s satellite link, he managed all of their incoming e-mails. “From the Okezie Center?”
“Uh, I think so.”
“Fantastic. Can I see it, Phil?” She started to go below deck, but he stopped her.
“I printed it out for you already. Here . . .”
He handed her ten stapled sheets.
She eyed the cover page, then her eyes suddenly widened. “Holy Mother of God.”
CHAPTER 14
LISA DIDN’T move. She just stood in the hot sun, reading the pages slowly and carefully. It wasn’t light material, the report’s title “Mechanisms for Planktonic Deterrence Based on North Pacific Samples.” She suddenly looked up. “Phil, where’s Jason?”
“Uh . . .”
“He’s still in the water with Darryl and Craig.” Monique climbed up from the sea in a tight white one-piece, not noticing Phil’s drooling over her. “God, it’s hot.” Then she noticed the papers in Lisa’s hand. “What’s going on, Lisa?”
“I’m not the only one who noticed that plankton levels are down in the Pacific. There have been reports from New Zealand to Japan, from the southern tip of Chile all the way up to where we are right now.”
“Jesus Christ.” That covered a huge chunk of the entire Pacific Ocean. “Why?”
“No one knows. But the raw data look accurate.”
“What are the raw data?”
“Plankton samples from across the Pacific. All with massive amounts of DMSP.”
“What’s DMSP?”
Lisa turned back to the report again. “Dimethylsulfoniopropionate.”
“Oh, sure, that.”
Absorbed in the papers, Lisa didn’t hear Monique’s sarcastic remark. She simply nodded.
“Lisa. What the hell is DMSP?”
“Oh.” Lisa looked up. “It’s a defensive chemical that plankton releases.”
“What do you mean ‘defensive’?”
“When plankton thinks it’s going to be attacked, it releases it.”
“I didn’t know plankton was that smart.”
“It’s very smart. You know what else it does when it thinks an attack’s coming?”
“What?”
“It cuts its own reproduction.”
Monique was stunned. “So that’s why levels have been so low. Do they think it’s fighting off GDV-4?”
“No. Just like Craig said, there’s no evidence of that at all. Actually, I need to talk to Craig. Right now . . .” She quickly grabbed her fins.
DARRYL AND Jason kicked slowly, heads down, their bare backs glistening in the scalding sun. With the aid of Supra 902 magnifying masks, originally manufactured for exclusive use by the navy, they could see all the way to the bottom, a hundred and twenty feet below. Sand, sand, and more sand. There was no kelp anywhere.
Floating lazily on a giant black inner tube, Craig yawned. “God, this is boring.”
Just then Darryl and Jason popped up. “Take a break, Darryl?”
“Definitely. We’re not getting paid enough for this.”
“Really, Jason, we’re not.”
Darryl turned to the inner tube. “We’re not?”
“I’ve been busting my ass too, Darryl.”
Darryl looked at Summers blankly. In angular, silver sunglasses that made him look like he was in a techno band, Craig held the look for a moment—then chuckled heartily.
Jason wasn’t amused. Visibly frustrated, he scanned the desolate waters. “Those rays have to be around here somewhere, right?” Indeed, they weren’t in this particular location by accident. The director of the Monterey Aquarium had called them after an oil-rig diver reported seeing a small group of “fairly large birdlike shapes” on the seafloor near one of the rig’s massive legs. Jason and company had immediately visited the hulking metal contraption. They found nothing, but clearly whatever had been there was still close—and still migrating north.
Darryl looked up at the sun. “What do you think that rig diver saw, Jason?”
“What do you mean? He saw the rays.”
“I know that. I mean adults or newborns.”
“He said they were ‘fairly large,’ right, so it couldn’t have been adults; he would have called those enormous, bigger than cars.”
Darryl nodded. “That’s my point. He must have seen the newborns, only now they’re small juveniles. These things grow fast, don’t they?”
“Not as fast as a shrew, but yeah.” Some species of shrew ate up to 1.3 times their body weights in a single day. “They could easily weigh two hundred pounds. What I want
to know is what the hell have they been eating? If not plankton, what?”
“It’s the ocean, Slick, how about fish?”
“Mantas can’t catch fish, Darryl. They can’t catch anything. They swim too slowly, that’s why they just eat masses of floating stuff.”
Craig hopped into the water. “What I want to know is why haven’t we seen one of these things yet. All this time and we haven’t seen one.”
Darryl dunked his mask. “You think that’s so unusual?”
“Yeah. Mantas are friendly, right? They like to show themselves, they like to play. Whatever these things are, they’re not doing that. In fact, it seems like they’re hiding.”
“Under the circumstances, that’s natural.”
“What circumstances?”
“Doing a migration they’ve never done before. They’re just being cautious. Even humpbacks, when they do a new migration they’re much less visible than normal. What I’ve been wondering is where are these things from? Any thoughts on that, Jason?”
A shrug. “Could be a lot of places. Mexico . . . Costa Rica or Ecuador . . . Hawaii, the Marquesas. Maybe further west like Australia or Malaysia.”
“Hey, is that Lisa?” Craig squinted. Someone was swimming toward them from the boat. “Oh man, I hope she’s wearing that bikini I like—you know, the tight one with the blue polka dots.”
Darryl shook his head. “Give it up, man. She wants nothing to do with you.”
“Some smooth lines and a night of drinking could change that.”
“You don’t have any smooth lines.” Darryl turned. “Besides, I think she might dig you, Jason.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious. You guys have that love-hate thing going on. I think there might be something there. Shut up, here she comes. . . .”
As she swam up, she immediately smelled a rat. “Boy talk, huh, Darryl?” She shook her head at him as Craig carefully scanned her body, realizing with disappointment that there were no polka dots anywhere on it.
“Craig.” She almost caught him looking. “Is there anything new with GDV-4 lately?”
Summers’s demeanor changed. “A ton, actually. Hot off the presses. They’re beginning full-scale testing for it in the Pacific soon.”
Lisa was stunned. “They are? When the hell did that happen?”
“They announced it publicly first thing this morning.”
“Who?”
“The Woods Hole Virus Group.”
Lisa paused. Did the virus have something to do with the plankton depletion after all? “Are they looking for anything in particular?”
“GDV-4’s origins, among other things.”
“They’re looking for that in the Pacific?”
“Evidently, they’re not positive it originated in the Atlantic anymore. They’re testing at multiple depth levels too.”
“I thought it was a confirmed surface virus.”
“It was, but evidently they’ve been reevaluating that, too.”
Lisa realized she had work to do. She’d share her findings from the Okezie Center later. “OK, thanks . . .”
As she started to swim back, Darryl wearily put his mask back on. He was still exhausted but wanted to find one kelp strand—just one—to confirm that they were still on track. He ducked his head into the water and suddenly, with fresh eyes, saw something below that he’d missed earlier. It wasn’t kelp but a small pile of little white objects, lying right on the dark sand. He pulled his head out.
“Hey, Lisa.”
She continued swimming, not hearing him.
“Lisa!”
She turned back. “Yeah.”
“Stick around, I might have something for ya. . . .” He inhaled and dove. He kicked very hard, knowing he had to reach the bottom on a single gulp of air. He reached the pile without difficulty, carefully grabbed a handful, then ascended.
At the surface, Jason didn’t even let him catch his breath. “What do you have there?”
Darryl removed his mask and handed them to Lisa. “Shark’s teeth.”
“Yeah?” Jason tried to see them over Lisa’s shoulder, but she became annoyed and turned away, blocking his view. She studied the glistening little objects. Were they really shark’s teeth? Most sharks went through tens of thousands of teeth during their lifetime, constantly replacing blunt and broken ones, some species as often as every other week. These teeth were the size of human fingertips, and slightly curved, almost like fat, stumpy S-shapes. Lisa wasn’t a tooth expert by any means, but as an oceanic nutrition specialist, she’d seen her share of them. She didn’t recognize these, but there were tons of shark species. . . .
Darryl didn’t recognize them either. “Can I see those again?”
She handed him a few, but he wasn’t as careful as he should have been. “Damn, they’re sharp!”
They all watched as a few drops of his blood fell into the sea. Jason shook his head.
Maybe they’d been looking for an excuse, but now they had to get out of the water. If the shark that had lost its teeth was still around, it would smell the blood.
They swam back immediately.
As Jason cut through the water, he considered the teeth more carefully. Had they really come from a shark? Was it just a coincidence they’d found them in the exact spot they’d tracked the new species to? It had to be. No ray species had teeth like that. Perhaps some sharks were hunting them.
Darryl suddenly stopped swimming and so did Jason—rather nervously. “Something wrong, Darryl?”
Darryl smiled, raising a dripping kelp strand. “We’re still on track.”
“Good. Let’s get back to the boat.”
They reached the Expedition without incident. On deck, Phil immediately began photographing the teeth. Then Craig started the engine, and they motored away.
AS THE Expedition disappeared, Darryl Hollis’s blood dissipated. Just as they had feared, something did smell it. Only it wasn’t a shark.
CHAPTER 15
MORE THAN a mile away, the adult rays smelled the blood. Completely unseen in the blackened waters, they were on the move again, swimming north along the ocean’s floor. All were alive but not healthy. Several thousand had recently died.
Far above them, just fifty feet below the surface, were their younger brethren, now juveniles. Unlike the adults, these animals had eaten well and their numbers were undimished. The younger animals now averaged two hundred pounds and were formidable, frightening-looking creatures. Blocks of lean, tapered muscle, they were five feet across the wings, four feet long, and as thick as a three-hundred-pound man’s stomach at their centers.
They floated listlessly in the sun-dappled waters. Strands of kelp hung from many of their mouths. They’d frozen midchew when they first sensed the boat. The boat was gone now, and nothing else was near. Still, none moved. Their attention had just shifted. Another sense—smell—had alerted them. Now they knew what their much larger brethren below had known moments ago.
There was blood in the water. They dove down and followed the others north.
CHAPTER 16
THE Expedition had docked at a crowded San Francisco marina and the team was waiting for Lisa Barton to return. It would be a while.
The previous day, Lisa had researched the unusual fat S-shaped teeth using the available resources and come up empty. Sharks and anglers had been the most obvious source of the teeth, but Lisa found nothing establishing a direct link between either. Almost every species of shark has teeth that are fundamentally triangular in shape. The teeth can vary in width, some narrow and pointy, others fat and wide, but every single known species, from tigers to hammerheads to great whites to makos, possesses teeth that are in one way or another triangular. Wondering if perhaps an extinct shark species had reappeared, Lisa also checked fossil records. But from sand sharks to cow sharks, among many others, they all possessed the same triangular shape.
Anglers had been the next suspect. Anglers were vicious, roundish fish, about the siz
e of a baby’s fist. But across the board, anglers had teeth that were slightly curved, like a tiger’s fangs. Nothing like fat, stumpy S-shapes, either.
With nowhere else to go, Lisa thought of Mike Cohen, an old friend she’d gotten to know at various oceanic nutrition conferences over the years. Cohen was the number three expert in the world on the arcane subject of animal teeth analysis and was based at the biosciences and bioengineering department at UC Berkeley. Starting today, Cohen’s department was hosting a weeklong conference at which Cohen himself was a featured speaker, but he’d still agreed to meet with her.
Before she’d left, Jason had insisted on attending the meeting, but in yet another fight, Lisa had flat-out refused. Michael Cohen was her contact, and she wouldn’t have Jason second-guessing her in front of an important colleague.
Jason had work to do anyway. While the others did chores on the boat, he spent the first part of the morning on Phil’s computer in the tiny living room below deck, writing notes and continuing with his outline. He hoped the latter would eventually become the basis for a formal report to the Species Council, the twelve-person committee in Washington, D.C., that determined what was a new species and what was not.
By late morning, thin cumulus clouds had rolled in above the marina, and everyone except Craig was on deck. In loose-fitting black sweats and a white tank top, Jason was tapping away on Phil’s laptop when Darryl sat next to him. “Craig still on that phone call?”
“I think so.”
Natural Selection Page 7
