by Steve Alten
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About the Author
Copyright Page
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Sarigan Island, Northern Mariana Islands
Western Pacific
Located in the Western Pacific, the Mariana Islands are a relatively young by-product of volcanic activity that began with the formation of Guam thirty million years ago, the remaining landmasses eventually working their way around the archipelago to the north. The power train behind this geological entity, known as the Izu-Bonin-Mariana arc system, came into being hundreds of millions of years ago, when the massive Pacific Plate subducted beneath the Philippine Sea Plate to form the floor of the Mariana Trench—the deepest location on the planet.
* * *
Professor Jiang Wei wiped beads of perspiration from his brow as his team of six men and his young female assistant followed their Filipino guide through the jungle-dense vegetation. It was a violation of the “old boys’ school” to allow a woman to be part of an archaeological find but, as the head of paleontology at China’s prestigious Peking University, Jiang had insisted that Jie Chen join them; she being the department’s lone graduate student, he felt he owed her that much.
Then again, perhaps he was paying back the good deed that had been bestowed upon his career when his own mentor, Dr. Carlos Jaramillo, had extended an invitation to join him on a dig in Colombia. Jiang had been working on his doctorate degree at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute at the time; the experience would be the major stepping-stone that launched his career.
The Colombian town of Cerrejón was located sixty miles from the Caribbean coast—a dusty coal mining region encompassing enormous pits fifteen miles in circumference, the sites connected by dirt roads. More than ten thousand laborers worked for Carbones del Cerrejón Limited, and the multinational company was not about to suspend operations for very long for a bunch of scientists collecting dinosaur bones.
“Jiang, Cerrejón is one of the most important fossil deposits in the world, in that it dates back to the epoch which immediately followed the asteroid impact sixty-five million years ago. After the resulting Ice Age passed, this entire region became an immense, swamp-covered jungle. The fossils unearthed on this expedition will give us a rare glimpse of the creatures that ruled the Earth after the dinosaurs perished.”
Jiang Wei had spent six months at Cerrejón, helping collect and document more than two thousand plant specimens, along with several giant turtle shells and the fossil remains of at least three different species of crocodiles, each more than a dozen feet long. But it was another graduate student who would stumble upon the biggest find of Cerrejón—a monstrous snake measuring more than forty feet long, dubbed Titanoboa cerrejonensis.
* * *
The jungle opened, the path leading them to the base of Sarigan’s volcano, its summit replacing the cobalt-blue sky.
Jiang waited for Jie Chen to join him. “How are you holding up?”
“I am good … mostly excited. You never told me how you learned about the cave.”
“It was discovered by Chunzi Wang, a seismologist who was assigned to investigate a recent seaquake two kilometers to the south. The cave leads to an ancient lava tube. Chunzi said the lava tube was blocked by what appeared to be an immense fossilized skull. She reached out to me as an alumnus of Peking University.”
“And she hasn’t told anyone?”
“No. But all things considered, I felt it best we get to the site right away.”
The team quickly set up camp and then repacked their gear, each person carrying a headlamp, flashlight, LED lamp, candles, lighters, radio, ropes, air mask, and a backpack in which to store their belongings. Two of the younger men carried a twelve-foot aluminum ladder.
It was late in the afternoon by the time they entered the cave.
Chunzi Wang had covered the four-foot opening with brush. Pulling it aside, Jiang adjusted his headlamp and knee pads and crawled in.
The cave was made of basalt; the volcanic rock carried a heavy scent of sulfur. The walls were damp, the ceiling alive with bats. Mosquitoes were everywhere, forcing the team to don their breathing masks.
They continued on, the cave floor descending at a thirty-degree slope until it merged with the entrance of the lava tube—a thirteen-foot-high opening, its entrance marked by a pair of curved, razor-sharp stalactites and stalagmites.
Jiang led his team inside, their headlamps revealing a bizarre lava pattern apparently left behind by the last eruption. Every six to eight feet, the flow of magma had paused in its ascent just long enough to harden, creating a series of eight-to-twelve-inch-thick archways that continued through the dark tunnel like buttresses in a cathedral.
After another seventy feet, the tube twisted to the left. Jie Chen took the lead, her light momentarily disappearing around the bend.
“Dr. Wei … here it is!”
The men joined her, their lights illuminating the fossilized skull and jawbone of an immense crocodile, the creature’s remains wedged tightly between the floor and ceiling so that there was no way past it.
An open debate ensued between flashes from half a dozen iPhone cameras.
“What species is this?”
“It can’t be a modern-day crocodile; the jaw alone is over two meters.”
“How did it get here?”
“I imagine this tube connects with the sea. The creature must have gotten caught in the cave during the last eruption.”
“Gentlemen … and lady … excuse me please. A two-meter jawline would equate to a body length in excess of fifteen meters. The biggest prehistoric croc was Sarcosuchusimperator—”
“It cannot be Sarcosuchus,” one of the scientists stated as he aimed his light at a crushed forelimb. “This animal possessed flippers, making it a prehistoric sea creature … a plesiosaur, no doubt. My guess would be … Kronosaurus.”
Jiang shook his head. “Plesiosaurs died off forty million years before this island rose from the seafloor.”
“Dr. Wei?”
“You are forgetting, my friend, which seafloor lies beneath us.”
“He’s right. Jonas Taylor documented the existence of Kronosaurus in the Mariana Trench more than twenty years ago.”
“Excuse me, Dr. Wei!”
The men stopped talking, turning around to face Jie Chen.
“Sorry, but this creature did not die from the lava. If it had, there would be no fossilized evidence left behind. Look at its skull—it appears to have been crushed by the ceiling.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Sir, I don’t think this is a lava tube.”
Jiang
Wei shone his light along the section of the ceiling, which appeared to be pressing down upon the creature’s crushed skull. “Where is the ladder?”
The twelve-foot aluminum ladder was set up for Dr. Wei.
Retrieving a small pickax from their supplies, the paleontologist climbed the rungs until he was only a few feet from the curved ceiling. With all his might, he swung the tool in an arc, burying the flat blade into the smooth surface—
—which crumbled into soot-like flakes, unleashing thousands of bats, their flapping wings chasing the fossilized flesh from the vertebral column of a monstrous, hundred-fifty-five-foot-long creature.
PART ONE
SUNSET
I’ve reached the point where I hardly care if I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can’t do anything to change events anyway.
—Anne Frank
Aboard the Tonga
Tanaka Oceanographic Institute
Monterey, California
The bull was lost.
For the entirety of its adult existence it had been the master of its domain—a domain defined by sound. A simple clickety-click and the silver-gray behemoth immediately recognized its territory, be it the subglacial lake in Antarctica where its kind had survived for eons, the shallows where its harem of cows had birthed their calves, or the now-accessible depths of the Southern Ocean where the dominant male had, up until recently, foraged for food.
None were present. Nor was there a memory of how the bull had come to be in this unrecognizable sea. And so it took refuge in the shallows in a semiconscious stupor, its blowhole remaining free of the water.
* * *
Jacqueline Buchwald adjusted the hood of her parka over her shoulder-length, strawberry-blond hair, the air temperature inside the bowels of the Malacca-class oil tanker kept at a brisk 42 degrees Fahrenheit. The Tonga and her sister ship, the Mogamigawa, no longer transported crude, their enormous holds having been scrubbed and refitted with seawater pens by their new owner—a Dubai crown prince—to stock Dubai-Land, his ambitious prehistoric aquarium theme park in the United Arab Emirates. The size of the tank was a necessity—the species targeted for capture were among the largest and most dangerous life-forms ever to have existed on the planet.
The twenty-six-year-old marine biologist stood dead center of the catwalk, a narrow expanse of grated steel connecting the two walkways anchored along the port and starboard bulkheads. The hold was purposely kept dark in order to accommodate the eyes of the nocturnal species they had been hunting over the past year, the only light coming from strings of Christmas decorations wrapped around the walkway’s guardrails.
Jackie used the night-vision scope of her harpoon gun to search the dark waters forty feet below her perch for the lone animal that now occupied the Tonga’s hold. Jonas Taylor had dubbed the creature “Brutus,” and the name was apropos; at eighty feet and a hundred eighty-seven thousand pounds, the Livyatan melvillei was certainly a brute. Unlike the other prehistoric species, the Miocene whale had been discovered in an ancient habitat somewhere in Antarctica, its location safeguarded by Jonas’s colleague, Zachary Wallace, the marine biologist who, years earlier, had resolved the mystery of the monster that inhabited Loch Ness.
Capturing the Miocene whale had been an accident. Jonas’s son, David, had set the Tonga’s nets at the exit point of an Antarctic bay to capture the adult Liopleurodon they had been chasing for nearly a year when Brutus showed up, springing the trap.
Three weeks had passed since the whale’s capture. The feisty bull was not keen on being held inside the tight confines of the tanker, forcing Jackie to introduce phenobarbital into its pen to calm the beast. It was a tricky proposition; too little tranquilizer and the prehistoric mammal might go berserk, too much and it could drown.
Her employer, Fiesal bin Rashidi, had made it clear that he was in favor of the latter.
“Miss Buchwald, I did not spend tens of millions of dollars and eight long months at sea to capture a whale.”
“This isn’t just a whale, sir. Livyatan melvillei was a prehistoric sperm whale, only it possessed the lower jaw of an orca. Megalodon and melvillei were the two dominant predators during the Miocene era … maybe of all time. This creature’s teeth are actually bigger than a Meg’s teeth, and its bite is just as powerful. Your cousin just purchased the Tanaka Institute from the Taylors; the lagoon would be perfect for Brutus.”
“And what happens when it dies? All our specimens are female, capable of internal fertilization. You know firsthand that we’ve been storing eggs to ensure our exhibits’ longevity. This menace is a male. Without a female, the creature is a dead-end investment.
“The public also feels differently about penning a whale—even a prehistoric menace like this creature. Animal rights groups are staging protests outside the governor’s mansion in Sacramento. The crown prince has agreed to release the animal during this afternoon’s festivities aboard the Tonga. A special tracking device has been prepared. At precisely two o’clock, an hour before the prince makes his speech, I want you to tag the whale and prepare it to be released. Is that clear?”
“Two o’clock … yes, sir.”
* * *
Jackie peered through the harpoon gun’s night scope, which lifted the veil of darkness, rendering everything olive green. Bin Rashidi had given her an hour to tag the melvillei with the radio transmitter and then bring it out of its drug-induced state by adding fresh seawater to the tank so that it would be able to escape under its own power once they opened the tanker’s keel doors.
An hour’s not nearly enough time. Brutus has been drugged for three weeks; it could take several hours before he comes around. The last thing the crown prince wants is for the whale to go belly-up in front of the international news media.
She glanced at her cell phone to check the time before placing it in the ziplock bag and tucking it in the back pocket of her jeans.
Twelve-fifteen. Tag it and then wait another fifteen minutes before you add fresh water.
She located the semiconscious bull in the shallows where the keel angled to conform to the Tonga’s bow. Selecting a location between the whale’s blowhole and its dorsal hump, she squeezed the trigger and fired.
* * *
The harpoon buried the transmitter four feet inside the Miocene whale’s spermaceti organ, eliciting a stabbing pain accompanied by a burst of adrenaline that lifted the phenobarbital-induced fog.
Enraged, Brutus slapped its tail along the surface as it lurched ahead—beaching itself in twenty feet of water.
The sensation of being trapped sent the beast into full panic mode. Whipping itself into a barrel roll, it attempted to dive, only to end up stuck on its side, its fluke unable to strike the hull in order to gain leverage, its ninety-three tons crushing its lungs and internal organs.
* * *
Jackie watched the Miocene whale through the night scope as it flailed helplessly on its left flank, seconds from flipping over onto its back. She reached for the walkie-talkie held snugly inside a holster clipped to her belt. “Bridge, this is Buchwald—pick up, goddammit!”
“This is Ensign Slatford.”
“Andrew, Brutus beached himself. Open the stern hatch; we need to raise the water level so he can swim free.”
“Jackie, I can’t add ballast without clearing it with the captain.”
“Then ask him; just do it fast!”
“Stand by.”
Jackie removed the night scope from the harpoon gun and faced the stern. Thirty seconds passed before a stream of bubbles and foam rose to the surface, indicating the keel doors were open.
She returned her gaze through the night scope to Brutus. The water level was rising about a foot a minute, gradually lifting the beached behemoth, which was wriggling furiously while desperately slapping its fluke against the steel hull to prevent itself from going belly-up.
The rising tide finally floated the behemoth. It rolled onto its belly and wriggled away from the
bow’s shallow incline until it slipped beneath the dark waters and disappeared.
“Buchwald to bridge—we’re good. Andrew, close the keel doors.”
“Roger that.”
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt … zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.
The double blast of echolocation sent Jackie’s skull reverberating as if it had been struck by a giant tuning fork. Looking down, she saw a ten-foot wake pass along the surface as Brutus accelerated toward the stern end of the hold two football fields away.
* * *
The water was rancid, permeated with the toxic scent and taste of phenobarbital, the acidic animal tranquilizer burning the delicate tissues of the whale’s blowhole. The fresh ocean water entering the tanker’s hold was a river of life.
The whale raced for it, homing in on its cooler temperatures.
Whomp!
The Miocene whale’s squared-off skull impacted and popped open a seam of rivets connecting two steel plates along the stern’s inner hull. Jackie registered the collision deep inside her bones. A moment later, she experienced a wave of nausea as the rusted grating beneath her feet began to shake and the darkness on her right squealed its final warning.
Dropping the harpoon gun, she grabbed for the safety rail and held on as the bolts connecting the bridge to the port bulkhead snapped and suddenly one side of the catwalk dropped, the grating sliding out from beneath her as it collapsed at a forty-five-degree angle.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God—”
The loose end of the bridge splashed down into the water, the starboard bulkhead holding tight.
Jackie pulled herself up, managing to straddle the rail. Realizing she had dropped the walkie-talkie, she looked down in time to see an undulating gray mass pass twenty feet beneath her unsteady perch—
