With that said, let’s get back to the story.
It was raining cats and dogs in New York City when a cab dropped Audrey Timmonds off in front of the WIDF-TV building with two armfuls of groceries. Yes, the same delightful Audrey whose photos adorn the inside of my equipment box, the same small-town girl I fell in love with when were in college. After leaving me in the lurch, she’d gotten out of Ohio and headed for the bright lights of Manhattan. She was determined to launch a career in journalism, and WIDF-TV was where she’d landed a job. It wasn’t exactly the prestigious NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. In fact, it wasn’t even a network affiliate—just a funky little station with a double-digit channel number that specialized in covering lurid crimes and local politics. The important thing was, she’d gotten a foot in the door. From there, she was sure, her hard work and talent would carry her to the top.
She rode the elevators up to the nineteenth floor, then hurried through the busy office trying not to break open the soggy bags and spill the groceries on the floor. She succeeded in reaching Lucy’s desk, where she gingerly set down her load. “Can you believe this weather? They’re saying it’s going to rain like this all week!”
Lucy leaned back in her chair and turned an eye toward the wet bags on her always-organized desk. “What’s all this?”
“Groceries.”
“I can see that, can’t I?” Lucy, the station’s receptionist, was from Patchogue, Long Island, and had the accent to prove it. She was also something of a fashion plate who had become Audrey’s unofficial wardrobe consultant. “And why, may I ask, are you bringing groceries with you to work?”
Audrey lowered her eyes in shame and admitted the truth. “They’re not mine. They’re Caiman’s groceries.”
Lucy clapped her hands over her face and shook her head in disappointment. She peeked out from between her long green fingernails and moaned. “Oh, girl, now he’s got you doin’ his shopping? Tsk, tsk, tsk.” Audrey said she could explain, that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, but when she tried to talk, Lucy interrupted her, saying loudly, “Speak of the devil.”
Just then the dapper if little figure of Charles H. Caiman, WIDF’s lead anchorman for the past two decades, was moving past them, the top of his head being the only part of him that was visible. It bobbed past the partition that defined Lucy’s workspace, his transplanted hairs covering most of his bald spot. People were always telling him he didn’t look a day over forty, and the fifty-eight-year-old anchor paid a staff of cosmetologists to keep it that way. Like many men who are under 5'4", Caiman had a Napoleon complex. But unlike many of his pusillanimous peers, he didn’t suffer from the syndrome, he cultivated it. Sometimes he went so far as to tuck his hand into the gaps between his shirt buttons.
The mere sight of him—or part of him—threw Audrey into a dither. “Think I should ask him?”
“No!” Lucy said.
“I’m going to ask him. You think I should? I will.” And as Lucy rolled her eyes and shook her head, Audrey took off.
Caiman was walking fast. He was headed for the broadcast studio at the far end of the office and seemed to be preoccupied with other thoughts. When he noticed Audrey chasing after him, he walked faster still. But it was no use. She caught up to him and peppered him with questions as they walked.
“Did you talk to Humphries?” she asked, biting her lip.
“Ms. Timmonds, this is neither the time nor the place—”
“Oh, come on, just tell me. Did you talk to him?”
The anchorman kept moving. “He said he’d consider it. It’s between you and Rodriguez.” The expression on his face was calculated to dampen her hopes, but Audrey took the news as though she’d just won the lottery and did that cute little clappy-jumpy thing she does whenever she gets really excited.
“Are you serious? That’s great. You’re serious, right? He’s going to consider me for the job? That’s terrific. What else did he say?”
They came to the door of the soundproof broadcast studio. A large-as-life cardboard cutout of Caiman stood beside the entrance. With one Caiman standing there beside another Caiman, it was impossible not to notice that he was much taller in cardboard than he was in real life. He turned to Audrey and ran his tongue once around the inside of his mouth.
“Why don’t I tell you all about it over dinner tonight? Say, your place? Say, eight o’clock?” His collagen-enhanced lips stretched into a lascivious, Cheshire-cat grin as his eyes hungrily examined the parts of Audrey between her neck and her knees.
“Mr. Caiman,” Audrey gasped, “you’re married!”
He already knew that, and he leaned in far closer than he should have. “And you’re very beautiful. Have I ever told you that before?”
“Mr. Caiman!”
“Call me Charlie.”
Audrey was stunned. Angry and hurt, she wanted to burst into tears, but she knew she couldn’t because Caiman would just dismiss it as a “female” reaction. “Mr. Caiman! I’ve been doing extra research and tracking down leads for you after hours and on weekends for three years now. This job—the one from Humphries—is really important to me. I’m too old to be your assistant anymore. I need to know this position is leading someplace.”
Most men would have been fazed, taken aback. Not Caiman. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening before making the price of his help explicit. “Look, Miss Timmonds, I want you to get the job. So, let’s have—you know—‘dinner’ together. I’d really, really like to have ‘dinner’ with you.”
Is this the price of getting ahead? Audrey asked herself, repulsed by the idea. She watched a fast-forward nightmare flash through her mind—the last three years and all the hard work she had done were a path leading up to this supremely ugly conversation. Now her promotion had boiled down to a sexual thing. She took a breath and looked him squarely in the eyes. “Mr. Caiman, I can’t do that.”
“It’s your choice,” he said softly. Then, with a wistful oh-what-could-have-been smile, he pulled open the door and marched into the studio. Through the soundproof glass Audrey watched him hurry past the cameras to the news desk. There was a new co-anchor, Desirée Pawn, and the two of them quickly shook hands. When Caiman settled into his chair, he looked across and noticed, much to his consternation, that Pawn was a full head taller than him. He looked like a child sitting at a dinner table. In a panic he called for the stagehands to bring him something to sit on: a cushion, a phone book, anything.
But there wasn’t time. They were going on the air any moment. “Five, four, three …”
“No, hold on!” Caiman said. But Murray the station manager flashed him the signal that announced they were live. Caiman reacted by lifting himself out of his chair and saying to the cameras, “We’ve got news and sports just ahead. Now here’s Fat Pat with the weather.”
Audrey stood on the far side of the glass staring daggers at her libidinous boss. She was so angry, she wanted to kick something or somebody. Instead she took out the wad of gum she was chewing and smeared it across the cardboard nose of the smiling Caiman cutout.
My kidnapping at the hands of the American military was beginning to feel like a cut-rate vacation in the hold of a cargo plane. From Panama we flew to Jamaica. We landed on solid ground this time, not far from Great Pedro Bluff. The Jamaican authorities were waiting for us with ground transportation. We three scientists climbed into a Jeep and met our driver, Peter, a tall, severe man in mirrored sunglasses. He wasn’t exactly a talkative fellow. Mendel and I rode in back, while Elsie rode up front. Before we started out, Peter took care to strap down the equipment we’d brought out of the plane. It’s a good thing he did, because the unpaved road we took was extremely bumpy.
Once we got up to speed, Elsie turned around and lifted her sunglasses so she could take a good long look at me. Her eyes traveled slowly from my hiking boots up to the beret I was wearing on my head, scrutinizing every inch of me, sizing me up. I’d never met a woman who flirted so aggressively. When sh
e opened her mouth to speak, the bumps in the road distorted her voice.
“Three yeaEars out in the booOOndocks digging up worms? How did Mrs. Tatopoulos haAAndle that?” she asked as we bounced along. When I explained that I wasn’t married, she made no effort to disguise her delight. “ReaLLy? A girlfriend, then? Or are youOU the kind of guyEYE who has a woman in EHevery port?” She sounded like she had the hiccups, but they were sexy hiccups. Although I didn’t want to, I started thinking about Audrey and tried to change the subject.
“No. EYEI’m the kind of guy who woERks too much.” I glanced over at Mendel, who, it seemed to me, was fuming with jealousy. Although he would never cop to it, I think he was madly in lust with Elsie Chapman.
She wasn’t going to let me off the hook easily. “Are youOO telling meEE there’s no one who holds a speEHcial place in your heart?” she asked. In fact, there was someone who held a special place in my heart. Audrey had an entire wing dedicated to her, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Elsie was playing pretty hard, unaware that she was opening up an old wound.
“Not for a long time noOW,” I said.
“Well, I think you’re cute,” she announced, leaning back and taking a quick bite out of the airspace in front of my nose. With a broad, satisfied grin, she turned away to enjoy some of the passing scenery.
I leaned toward Mendel and whispered, “Is shEE always like this?”
Masking his heartbreak, he whispered back conspiratorially, “I’ve had to BEeat her off with a stiIIck.”
“I heard that,” Elsie said.
Our convoy of Jeeps brought us to the edge of a beautiful white beach and parked at the tree line. We unlashed our equipment and carried it toward the water, where we beheld an alarming sight.
The entire beach was occupied by an enormous Liberian cargo ship lying on its side in the sand. It must have been left there by the receding tide. Two spectacular holes had been torn into the vessel’s hull, one at the front and the other at the rear. The smaller opening, the one at the front, was approximately twenty-five feet across. The opening at the rear of the ship pierced all the way through to the opposite wall. In addition, there were fifty-foot gashes torn down the side.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” quoth Mendel as we made our way down the sandy slope toward the shoreline.
A fair number of local people had come out to gawk at the mangled metallic corpse of the ship. Most of them were gathered up on the dunes, talking among themselves, exchanging ideas about what in the world could have opened the ragged wounds in the ship’s flanks. A conspicuous group of Caucasian men in fashionable clothing was busily investigating the wreck. They were no tourists. In addition to their cameras and tape measures, they seemed to be using Geiger counters and ultrasound equipment. Something about them was vaguely familiar.
“Who the hell are those guys?” Hicks wanted to know. He ordered his soldiers to establish a cordon around the wreck. He wanted the local civilians to be kept off the beach, and he wanted to know who the nattily dressed white men were. He didn’t have to wait long for an answer.
“They are with me,” someone answered in a French accent. A man with a salt-and-pepper beard and secret-agent sunglasses was puffing on an unfiltered cigarette. With a friendly smile he tossed his cigarette into the sand and approached us with a confidence that looked almost like boredom.
“And who might you be?” Hicks asked in a way that suggested no matter what answer the man gave, he and his men were going to be booted out of the area with the others.
“Hey, you’re the guy from the hospital we saw on the videotape,” Mendel said. “The guy with the lighter, right?”
The Frenchman answered with an enigmatic smile. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a business card. With a magician’s manual dexterity, he twirled it around a couple of times between his fingers before extending it to Colonel Hicks.
Cie. de La Rochelle Internationaux
Property and Casualty Insurance
Paris, France
There was no address, no phone number, and none of us could begin to pronounce the name of the company.
“My name is Phillipe Roaché, and my company represents the registered owners of this ship. We are preparing a report on the damage,” Roaché said.
“You sure got down here awful fast,” Hicks observed, openly skeptical of the man and his story.
The Frenchman shrugged. “That is our job.”
Elsie must have smelled a rat. Or perhaps she was flirting again. She stepped up close to the stranger and narrowed her eyes. “And I suppose you also insure whichever Japanese company owns the ship that went down in Tahiti.”
“We’re not discussing that subject,” Hicks reminded her.
The insurance agent offered the barest shadow of a smile to the paleontologist. “Our great size,” he explained, “allows us to offer very attractive rates.”
Hicks wasn’t prepared to let himself be sidetracked by a bunch of insurance peddlers, especially French ones. “I apologize to you and your company, sir. But right now your people are getting in the way of my job and I want them cleared out of here.”
“Colonel, let me ask you a question. What in the world do you think could have done this?” There was a dollop of mockery in his voice, a light challenge that did not go unnoticed by Hicks.
“Get your people out of the way,” Hicks said between clenched teeth, “or I’ll move them myself.”
“Very well,” Roaché replied, moving jauntily down shore to begin collecting his men.
“And from now on put your butts in a trash can!” I added. When he spun around to face me, I made sure he knew what I meant. “Your cigarette butts shouldn’t be thrown on the beach.” He thought for a moment before offering me a sturdy thumbs-up.
“Another battle won in the war to save Mother Earth,” Mendel said sardonically, picking up his gear and walking toward the water.
For the next hour or so we conducted a close-up investigation of the wrecked ship while Hicks’s soldiers combed the beach in search of additional clues. What we found was significantly more frightening than an oversized paw print. Mendel and I waded out knee deep into the water to get a closer look at the far side of the ship, which towered above us.
He went into one of his sneezing fits, nearly dropping the Geiger counter he was carrying into the water. “It’s hot,” he told me. “I’m picking up the same levels of radiation we found in Panama. Why would it be radioactive?”
While he worked and sneezed, I took several steps back, moving deeper into the water so that I could get a better view of the damage. “Am I imagining this,” I called, “or does it look like something punctured the walls before prying them back?” I gulped. “It almost looks like this hole was clawed open.”
Mendel looked up and studied the damage. “Like opening a can of sardines,” he agreed.
And that comment turned out to be closer to the truth than either of us expected. I felt something under my foot, something that didn’t feel right, so I reached my hand into the water and grabbed it. I pulled up a six-ounce can of tuna fish, one of hundreds I noticed scattered around me. An unformed idea started worming around in my brain: fishing boat, fishing village, cans of fish.
But the pieces of the puzzle didn’t fit themselves together in my mind until about five minutes later, when I noticed something dangling from one of the razor-sharp edges of the torn hull. Opening my tool kit and avoiding eye contact with the photographs of Audrey inside, I took out a specimen jar and a pair of tweezers. Then I collected my first tissue sample.
It was a five-inch-long strip of meat. It was covered on one side with a protective layer of scales, each one the size of a thumbnail. These scales were keeled instead of being flat, so I knew for sure it hadn’t come from a fish. It had come from a reptile.
I dropped the sample into the jar and looked around for Mendel, anxious to tell him about this latest discovery. But he had wandered deeper into the cargo area, which contained hundre
ds of thousands of boxes of tuna. The gaping hole around me made it feel as though I were standing inside the giant jaws of some sharp-toothed sea creature. For some reason I became uneasy. I felt like I was being watched. And when I looked out into the sunlight, I realized I was. The Frenchman, Roaché, was standing on the beach staring straight at me. Although he was quite a distance away, I sensed that he knew what I knew.
TWO
An hour and a half later we were back on the plane, headed for Washington, D.C., and the National Institute of Paleontology, where we could do further analysis of the data we’d gathered. But none of us was really expecting to get there. The mysterious creature was on the move and we were expecting another sighting to be reported at any moment. In fact, we were anxiously hoping there would be one. At that point we still had no idea what we were up against. We were eager to catch up with the animal and find out what it was.
From comments Elsie made as we boarded the plane, it was clear she thought the beast must be a dinosaur of some kind, a refugee from a lost world, flushed out into the open after sixty-five million years of hiding. Mendel, smitten with the shapely paleontologist, wanted desperately to agree with her dino theory but found he couldn’t. Too many things didn’t fit. When he began pointing out the inconsistencies to her, she angrily challenged him to come up with a better theory.
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