Extinct (19 page)

“Thought so,” Fred said. “That’s why he was breathing hard on the heavy-bag—after only ten minutes.”

San-hi still didn’t speak.

“Well, wish you smoked, too,” Fred said. “Wish all of you smoked and had lighters, matches, a whole pile of matches. Smoked like an old train engine. I’d take your matches and your lighters and your cigarettes and build the biggest, nastiest, smoking signal fire you ever saw.”

San-hi smiled.

The expression left his face at the sudden splashing sound.

Alan slipped backward from his preserver and stood in water to his waist. Fred held his preserver in front of him. San-hi stared ahead of them.

It came again:
Splash-splash, splash-splash, splash, splash.

It wasn’t ahead of them. It was in the tall grass off to their right.

Alan moved away from the grass toward Fred. San-hi edged behind them.

The hiss came short and deep.

“Get up in the grass,” Alan said in a low voice, pushing on Fred’s shoulder. “Hurry.”

Fred sloshed to the side, pulling his feet as quickly as he could out of the mud that sucked at his shoes. San-hi was quicker, reaching the grass, faltering a moment as he tried to move his feet up the mushy bank, and then pulling himself into the thick growth.

Across the channel, two quick splashes, and an alligator stuck its broad snout into the open. Its forelegs parted the grass, and took two more quick, choppy steps. The reptile hissed again.

Alan pushed Fred farther into the grass. He felt a shoe suck from his foot. San-hi splashed forward rapidly for a couple of steps, and his feet sinking again, tilted forward. He tried to catch himself by wrapping his arms around a clump of the grass, but pushed it down with him as he splashed face-first into the water.

Alan glanced back over his shoulder as the alligator’s head disappeared. He slowed, caught Fred’s shirt, said in a low voice, “She’s not coming after us.”

A
she
because it was obvious. If it had been a male, he would have swum off at the first sound of the three of them talking, coming in his direction. A female would have, too, if she wasn’t guarding a nesting ground she had fashioned on a high damp spot hidden somewhere behind her.

San-hi was shaking the mud off his hands. At Alan’s next step his leg sunk into what almost seemed to be a hole dug by a posthole digger. He went to his side, his arm down in the water, trying to get his balance. Fred caught him until he could regain his feet.

San-hi seemed to be stuck. His eyes widened in the moment it took him to move his feet again.

Parting the tall grass before them with their forearms, they struggled around the side of the channel.

*   *   *

The speedboat was pushed half into the tall grass to the side of the channel, the rear of the craft projecting back into the open water. Armon’s cheeks glistened with his silent tears. Gnats swarmed the fluid-soaked T-shirt wrapped around his arm. Mosquitoes buzzed around the craft, lighting on the boys leaning back against its sides, causing hands to slap constantly against skin. Every time something splashed in the dark it made Carolyn nervous. Paul stood by the motor, looking up the narrow channel in the direction Alan and the others had gone. As he continued to stare, his eyes began to tighten. To Carolyn or any other adult there would be nothing to see but the long, thin strip of brown water fading into the distant night. But until a child approaches ten years of age, his eyes retain a greater ability to see in the dark than those only slightly more advanced in age. It was that ability that Paul used now.

“Mother.”

His tone caused her head to come around quickly.

She stepped to his side and clasped his arm.

The blond brothers lifted their heads over the side of the craft and looked in the direction he stared.

It was almost a full minute before Carolyn made out a long, thick shape moving toward them in the middle of the channel. By then, Paul and the younger blond could see it clearly.

“An alligator gar,” Paul said, his tone showing his relief. The eight-foot-long fish continued slowly along the channel. Unlike the thin, needle-nosed gar that had been hooked in the river, the fish he looked at now had a wide, thick body. Anybody at first glance might think they were actually viewing an alligator. To people not accustomed to the creatures of the marshlands, rivers, and sloughs of the lower Mississippi Valley, the confusion might remain even after a longer look. The gar’s head was flat, stretched out long and rounded like an alligator’s snout. Even its markings were similar to the thick scales of the reptile, and its lower fins greatly resembled four stubby legs. The fish, relatively unchanged from its prehistoric ancestors who moved through the same kind of wetlands, swam slowly by the boat toward the river. The blonds’ heads disappeared back below the boat’s side, and Paul looked up the channel again.

A loud splash in the tall grass in front of the craft caused Carolyn to jump.

*   *   *

Alan floated in front. Fred was off to the side, his large form mashing a preserver deep into the water. San-hi floated at their rear. Another intersecting channel lay ahead, this one much wider than the ones they had passed before.

Alan pushed his arms out in front of him and pulled his hands back through the water in a slow breaststroke. Fred kicked his feet rhythmically. They entered the intersection.

San-hi moved backward off his preserver, and his head went under. It immediately surfaced. He sputtered and spit the brown water from his mouth.

Fred looked across his shoulder at the boy. Alan slipped backward off his preserver and tried to touch the bottom with his feet. He held his breath and, keeping his hands on his preserver, slowly sunk underneath the water. His feet still didn’t touch. It was the first time since they had started traversing the narrow channel that they couldn’t stand with their faces above the surface. He looked down the intersecting channel stretching wide back to their left and disappearing around a bend in the direction of the river. Fred kicked his feet harder, and was using his hands again now. San-hi splashed even with him. Alan quickly followed, swimming with one arm extending out in a sidestroke, pulling his preserver along behind him.

It was a hundred yards before their feet could once again touch the bottom.

It was still a mile to the bridge.

CHAPTER 23

James L. Broderick III was famous in southern Florida law-enforcement circles. At fifty-five, with a sharply receding hairline and wearing baggy swim trunks and a too-short T-shirt that left a strip of skin exposed around his wide middle, he didn’t cut that impressive a figure as he stood at the forty-one’s rail, being soaked by showers of spray arching back from the bow every time the boat crashed through a wave. “Gets me used to the water,” he said.

To Douglas, standing nearer the center of the deck on the lunging craft, it didn’t make much sense. But Broderick should know. A former Navy Seal in Vietnam, and then a hard-hat salvage diver for several years before he suddenly went into law enforcement, few people could claim more hours under water. Then Broderick had suddenly started doing something else, attending night school until he earned a master’s in forensic science. He could have a job anywhere, he had told Douglas. Several universities had courted him, and he might go into that someday. But for the moment he remained one of the most knowledgeable, highly educated police detectives that ever continued to serve in law enforcement.

Bite marks were his self-proclaimed specialty, and genuinely so—he had solved untold cases where such imprints had been left behind on victims’ bodies, and written more than one paper on the subject. “But this is a first,” he said, thinking aloud as much as addressing the remark to Douglas. “Across the bottom of the hull. How large did you say the slashes were again?”

“Large enough to stick your arm through,” Douglas answered.

Broderick shook his head in awe, but his thoughts were that he had a highly imaginative, basically undereducated young navy officer on his hands. Yet the trip to examine the doctors’ sunken speedboat would be well worth the time spent, Broderick thought. Proving somebody wrong was in many ways as exciting as proving something correct.

He nodded knowingly to himself—he had a habit of doing that when he was certain of something. Then he looked through the night at the lightning flashing in front of the forty-one. In its quivering illumination a black line of rain moved rapidly toward him.

He never left the deck through the ensuing torrential downpour and booming thunder. He had a flair for the dramatic.

*   *   *

The Vice Chief of Naval Operations was a short, heavyset man with graying, brown hair and a perpetual squint. Vandiver had done all of the talking so far, explaining about the discovery of the tooth by the Coast Guard and about the subsequent discovery of the trenches by a highly talented young officer he had sent to the area. Vandiver still didn’t feel free enough to openly express his long-held theory, only what possibly had taken place. He did, however, lay the groundwork for what he was wanting to put into operation by reminding the Vice Chief that there had already been one other species of shark that, after remaining hidden at the bottom of the depths and having never been seen by man, had suddenly come up into the shallows—a huge shark now commonly known as the megamouth. In fact, the megamouth’s emergence had, in one sense, surprised scientists more than they would have been if a hundred megalodons had suddenly emerged from the depths. For, unlike the megalodons that through their teeth had at least left evidence of their existence at one time in the oceans, there had been absolutely no prior knowledge of the megamouth having ever existed, with no fossilized evidence of any kind having ever been found, the giant shark spanning its hundreds of thousands, even millions of years in complete anonymity. Until 1976, when in November one had been snared off Hawaii. Now the species, for reasons still not even to be guessed at by scientists, had surfaced en masse, becoming widespread throughout the relatively shallow waters of the world.

“It could be coincidence,” the Vice Chief said.

“Sir?”

“A depression in the vicinity where the tooth was found could be coincidence.”

Vandiver nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Where is the tooth now, Admiral?”

Vandiver told him.

“And you say that you have an officer trying to confirm the possibility that this tooth is from a … living shark?”

“Evidence that might tend to confirm the possibility. Yes, sir.”

“You’ll let me know if any evidence points in that direction.”

He sounded almost unconcerned, certainly not like a man who thought the world might be facing the reemergence of the most fearsome creature to ever swim the seas. Vandiver went to the next step in his plan, lifting a book he had retrieved from the bookcase off to the side of his office, and handing it across the desk.

“You might take this with you to glance through. You can make of it what you will, but I’m certain you’ll find it interesting.”

The Vice Chief looked at the cover photograph of a shark. The book was a nonfiction work by Theo Brown, a prominent Australian marine researcher and naturalist. Its title was
SHARKS, The Silent Savages,
published by Little, Brown & Company of Boston, and it could be found in any major library. In the work, Brown cited eyewitness reports ranging from a captain of a vessel who told him in 1963 that a shark at least as long as eighty-five feet had drifted beneath his boat when they were stopped and making repairs in the Central Pacific, to the well-known story first reported in 1918 by naturalist David G. Stead of a giant shark possibly over a hundred and fifteen feet long appearing off New South Wales. Dozens of fishermen who were said to have witnessed the creature and who refused to go back to sea for some days afterwards, though their livelihood depended on their fishing, swore to seeing this shark surface and swallow whole a long fine of lobster pots nearly four feet in diameter and filled with catches. And these reports only mirrored similar tales that went back as far as the ancient Polynesians moving across the Pacific in their dugouts. This wasn’t going to be the first time a megalodon had moved, Vandiver knew. But he also knew the fish might go back to the depths as quickly as it had risen, without leaving a scintilla more evidence—and he couldn’t take the chance of going too far out on a limb. But if it didn’t go back, he wanted to be ready for that, too. And now his plan:

“If the officer now at the site finds enough evidence to confirm the, uh, at least the possibility of such a shark still existing,” he said, “then I think we should have a contingency plan.”

“Such as?”

“There isn’t a great deal we could do, sir—except maybe alert the fleet to the possibility.”

“Alert the fleet?”

“Yes, sir. Put into action a detailed search. Unpublicized of course. But at least not risk having one of our officers dismiss a sighting as being a whale.”

“A whale with a dorsal fin, Admiral?”

“Sir, it would take a very brave officer to report that he thought he saw a fifty-foot-long prehistoric shark without being aware of the possibility there was such a creature out there. Most career officers I know would blink, rub their eyes, go down and take a drink, and never mention it to anyone. Maybe it would be wise to discreetly reposition some of our submarines in, let’s say, a thousand-mile circle around where the tooth was found. Do some sonar and laser soundings with surface vessels. A few other things I could think of.” It was his dream—a concentrated, concerted search for such a creature. He was almost certain if that happened there would be results
now.

The Vice Chief shook his head slightly. There still remained the relaxed air of his not being very interested in the meeting. In fact, he now looked at his watch and yawned. Coincidence was still much more likely.

As far as the Vice Chief was concerned.

*   *   *

San-hi dug his fingernails and toes into the rough face of the slanted, concrete piling. Above him vehicles roared across the bridge. His hands slipped, he grabbed at the concrete, and fell ten feet to splash into the water. He went completely under and had to tread water when he came up. It was several feet over their heads now. Fred looked at the life preserver he laid across. He slipped backward off of it, and sweeping one hand back and forth to stay afloat, raised the preserver with his other hand and tried to throw it straight up in the air. It went ten feet and fell back across his head.