Extinct (34 page)

“
My God
,” the pilot said.

Joycelyn’s mouth fell open at the sight of the wide, dark shape speeding into the side of the
Intuitive.

*   *   *

Though Alan was braced, the crash threw him to the side, nearly jerking the steering wheel from his hands. Carolyn and Paul were thrown into the side of the flying bridge. Douglas yelled his terror. The shark had not slammed into the side of the boat at the waterline, but come up higher, smashing its broad head into the edge of the deck, driving the fiberglass and rail back against the cabin. The great mouth had gaped as Douglas slid across the wet deck into the corner of the fishing cockpit nearest the shark’s body.

Vandiver and Stark scrambled to their feet as the head hung above the side of the boat across from them. The shark’s teeth clanged together with the sound of a steel trap as Douglas scooted backward on his hands and heels away from the head.

The head rose higher and then came down hard, smashing into the fiberglass like a massive redwood trunk, crumpling the side of the cabin. The flying bridge sank to that side. Paul slid toward the shark. Carolyn grabbed for him and missed. The upper, rounded row of teeth in the shark’s jaws pulled the side of the flying bridge toward it. The fiberglass tore loose with a ripping sound. Paul slid through the gap and splashed into the water below the shark’s raised head.

Carolyn screamed in horror and lunged on her hands and knees at the gap as the shark’s gaping mouth came toward her. Alan caught her legs and jerked her backward.

Paul bobbed back along the shark’s side toward its sweeping tail.

Alan pushed Carolyn off the flying bridge into the cockpit and fell after her. She came to her feet, screamed and tried to jerk away from Stark, grabbing her as she pulled toward the side of the cockpit. The shark sank beneath the water.

“NOOOOO!”
Carolyn screamed.

*   *   *

Joycelyn Johnson clasped her hand to her mouth in horror. The TV camera vibrated on the floor of the helicopter at her feet. The pilot’s face was drained of all color as he watched the small boy drift backward alongside the shark and float out behind the creature on the waves from the great, sweeping tail.

On the boat, the man who had been at the steering wheel raced around the undamaged side of the cabin toward the Zodiac lashed to the forward deck.

The small rubber boat came loose quickly. The shark’s massive head again rose high out of the water and lurched forward toward the fishing cockpit. Its occupants pressed their bodies back against its far side as the shark tore a wide section of fiberglass from the boat’s other side.

*   *   *

There was a scraping sound against the bottom of the hull. The
Intuitive
lurched. The scraping sound grew louder, the boat slowed and came to an abrupt stop. The spinning prop began to swing the stern around toward the bow.

The shark’s upper body, riding nearly half out of the shallow water, stayed at a right angle to the boat. The eyes stared toward Carolyn and the others pressed against the far side of the fishing cockpit.

Alan wrestled the Zodiac over the side of the boat opposite the shark and dropped it into the water.

Paul was fifty feet behind the shark’s crescent tail now. His face white against the silt-colored water, he began to stroke toward the shore.

Somehow he managed to keep his strokes slow enough not to splash.

Hoping the shark wouldn’t hear him.

*   *   *

Alan pulled the cord of the small motor at the rear of the Zodiac. The motor immediately caught, roared its sharp, grinding sound, and the Zodiac sped across the
Intuitive
’s stern and shot out to the side of the boat.

The shark’s big eye to that side rotated in a line with the movement.

*   *   *

The wide head began to turn.

Paul’s eyes came back toward the sound of the Zodiac.

Alan only cut the throttle slightly as he leaned over the side of the Zodiac and reached for the boy.

Paul’s arms slapped into Alan’s and the boy was jerked out of the water into the small craft.

Alan jammed the steering arm toward shore.

The tall fin raced along out to their side, between them and the shallow water nearer the island.

Alan turned the steering arm out toward open water.

*   *   *

Joycelyn Johnson held both her hands over her face, peering between her fingers. The pilot operated the helicopter’s controls rapidly.

“Hang on,” he said. “I’m going to try and give them a chance.” The craft leaned on its side and swept down toward the Zodiac.

*   *   *

Alan looked up as the sound of the helicopter overpowered the sound of the Zodiac’s motor. He stared directly into the pilot’s face. The landing skid to that side moved toward Alan. He wrapped his arm tightly around Paul, already clinging to his neck. The shark put on a burst of speed. Alan came to his feet, swayed as he tried to keep his balance, and reached for the skid, just out of his reach.

The downdraft from the spinning rotors battered the Zodiac. The steering arm began to turn. The craft’s bow moved slowly around, then turned abruptly to the side. Alan grabbed the skid, locking his elbow over it as the helicopter swung hard to the side. He was jerked forward out of the craft and to the side. His feet splashed into the water. Pain tore through his shoulder. Paul had his eyes closed, his face buried into Alan’s neck. Alan’s arm slipped. His elbow came up at a right angle to the skid. The helicopter couldn’t lift the combined weight of the two people inside it and the two hanging on beneath it. Alan’s feet splashed against the water again. The shark’s head, five feet behind them and racing, began to rise higher in the water.

The helicopter jerked upward. Alan revolved on the skid, his arm wrenching. The shark came by under their feet. The helicopter turned toward shore. Alan’s arm slipped off the skid. He fell a foot, his hand, somehow, still clasping the damp metal of the skid.

Two hundred feet to the island.

His hand slipped loose, and they plummeted the fifteen feet to the water, slammed into it hard, skipped across it, and disappeared under the surface.

*   *   *

The
Intuitive,
racing as fast as it could with only one prop and its hull filling ever deeper with the water seeping into its interior, came toward them in a direct line paralleling the shallow shoal extending out from the island.

*   *   *

Alan splashed frantically toward shore, Paul hanging onto his neck with one hand and trying to help swim with the other.

Spray mounted above the shark’s fin as it drove directly toward them. The head rose above the water. It rose more as the hard shoal underneath the creature’s stomach angled sharply upward.

Forty feet between them.

Thirty.

Twenty.

The shark’s stomach scraped bottom. It lunged ahead.

Ten feet.

The bow of the
Intuitive
slammed into the creature’s side. This time, with the shoal against its stomach, the shark wasn’t forced down into the water, but rolled hard over onto its side, the
Intuitive
riding up on the thick body. The craft’s heavy tonnage, made even heavier by the hundreds of gallons of water filling its hull, crushed down into the shark’s body, and the bow angled up above the creature, the ribbed keel cutting deeply into the thick skin.

The shark, pinned under the boat as the craft slammed to a stop atop it, flopped on its side like a fish lying on dry land. The
Intuitive
bounced as if juggled nervously in a giant, moving hand. The boat leaned sharply to the side.

The shark flopped violently.

The hull’s bottom caved in, sat back down onto the thick body beneath it, then leaned sharply to the side and began to turn over as the shark flopped a last time and moved out from under the craft.

*   *   *

“Dive! Dive!” Alan shouted from where he stood chest-deep in the water toward the island.

Carolyn shot from the boat in a racing dive. Douglas splashed into the water behind her. Vandiver didn’t leave the cockpit.

*   *   *

The shark rolled in the water, hit its side hard on the bottom, and rolled back upright. It leaned to the other side. Blood seeped from its mouth and from the long gash across its back and flank.

*   *   *

Douglas looked back over his shoulder at his uncle and quit splashing toward shore.

“Dive!”

*   *   *

The shark slipped backward into deeper water. Its head began to submerge. The fin slowly turned off toward the rear of the
Intuitive.

Alan caught Carolyn’s hands and pulled her toward him.

She grabbed Paul into her arms and nearly went under before her feet touched the shoal.

The fin moved in a straight line now, toward the tip of the island a hundred feet out in front of the shark. It moved slowly, a dark stain spreading out behind it.

A minute turned into two, then three as the fin kept moving slowly in the same direction, leaving an ever-widening dark stain in the water behind it.

They stared silently now.

The fin began to rise. The upper body rose above the surface, the water dropping farther and farther down its sides. The shark came to a halt.

“It’s grounding itself on the shoal,” Carolyn said.

The shark lay there, not moving, then slowly began to move its tail back and forth until, with a last sideways motion of its thick trunk, it turned and faced back toward the boat.

“It’s coming back again,” Douglas said.

“It’s dying,” Carolyn said.

The stain in the water around the creature continued to widen.

A white film settled across the black eyes, leaving them only a blurred shadow behind the film.

The mouth slowly cracked open.

A barely perceptible, high-pitched sound began to rise from deep within the creature.

It grew louder, growing shriller as it mounted in intensity, until finally the air was filled with a sound not unlike a baby’s piercing, crying scream of pain.

They were walking toward shore now, up only to their knees in water, but Douglas stopped, feeling the same kind of chill pass over him as he had experienced when his uncle had played the tape from the submarine.

Then the sound began to lessen in volume. The mouth slowly closed. The dorsal fin tilted slightly to the side.

Alan saw Paul looking at him with a questioning expression on his face.

Alan nodded.

“My God!”
Douglas suddenly exclaimed.

Two hundred yards beyond the shoal, out in the deeper Gulf water, a fin stood stark and enormously thick in the dim twilight. Already twice as tall as the fin of the shark lying silent on the shoal, it continued to rise into the sky.

Alan felt Paul’s hand clasp his trousers.

It still rose.

Sixty to seventy feet in front of the fin, the water mounded, as if a great bubble of gas were lifting it from beneath. A gigantic head broke the surface, water pouring down its sides. Black eyes as big as truck tires and set thirty feet apart rose above the water. The swells rolling in from the Gulf caught against the creature’s sides and broke into foam as if they had run into a two-hundred-foot-long cliff suddenly emerging from the water. The giant head moved forward. Douglas stepped back involuntarily.

“Damn,” Stark said in a low voice, almost a whisper, and looked toward Vandiver, now up on the
Intuitive
’s partially demolished flying bridge and looking toward the head.

A sound.

Coming from the giant.

Barely perceptible at first, then rising in volume, something like the sound the shark on the shoal had made, but deeper in tone.

The sound rose, became louder and louder until, finally, it filled the Gulf air with its intensity, sweeping across them like a giant’s groan broadcast over a loudspeaker turned to its highest volume.

Paul moved his hands to his ears.

“Look,” Carolyn said.

The shark on the shoal had moved. Slowly, its tall, crescent tail began to swipe sideways. The head moved. The trunk arched to the side now, and the tail swept with a greater motion. The body began to slip backwards, and then to the side. The tail swept again.

The blood that had dwindled to a slow seep from the wound across its back began to run down the dark body again. The shark moved farther sideways on the shoal, its actions stronger now. It twisted again, and slipped sideways into deeper water. The body began to move forward toward the giant two hundred yards out in front of it. The giant’s head began to move slowly backward. The distance between the two gradually closed.

The helicopter moved above the pair.

In minutes, the smaller fifty-foot shark was passing to the side of the giant’s head. And then the giant turned behind it.

They moved slowly in the direction of deeper waters, the helicopter keeping pace above them.

Another minute.

The giant head slipped lower into the water and submerged with a rush of water and the surface swirling into a whirlpool, only the towering fin remaining in sight.

Soon, it, too, slipped under the swells.

The smaller fin remained visible for a moment, tilted to the side, straightened, then itself slid beneath the green water.

“Mother,” Paul said. He was looking back toward the
Intuitive,
past it in the direction of the barrier islands.

Moving toward them was the Coast Guard forty-one, its bow throwing wide white waves out to its sides. Everyone looked toward it.

Except Vandiver. He continued to stare at the spot where the giant head disappeared. In his mind he was looking at the captain who told in 1963 of seeing a shark over eighty-five-feet long pass under his freighter. And he was listening in the presence of David G. Stead in 1918 as the fishermen told him of the shark over a hundred and fifteen feet long that had swallowed their lobster pots. And he was paddling with the Polynesians who looked from their dugout canoes to see monster sharks nearly a hundred and fifty feet long slashing through the waves in front of them.