Extinct (35 page)

And he had bested them all.

A faint smile crossed his face … then went away as he looked back over his shoulder at the bright orange life preserver floating alone behind him.

CHAPTER 42

The workboat and Carolyn’s speedboat floated empty, side by side down the Pascagoula River. The twenty-five-foot twin of the shark that had been killed by the dynamite had already left the river, responding to the deep call that had vibrated through the water from off the Chandeleur Islands.

Ahead of the twin, in the twilight dimness at the bottom of the Gulf floor south of the barrier islands, long, shadowy shapes slashed in and out around the carcass contained in the ripped and gaping net. Hammerheads, sand sharks and bull sharks, their mouths agape, repeatedly smashed into the great bulk, shaking their heads violently as they bit down.

Suddenly, they began darting away from the body to disappear quickly in the twilight water beyond the carcass.

In only a moment nothing could be seen but small particles of flesh suspended in the water slowly settling to the sandy bottom.

Stillness ensued.

At the fringe of the dark green curtain fifty feet from the carcass, a rounded nose tapering back to a streamlined head appeared. With pectoral fins set to its sides like airplane wings, one of the first Great Whites to reach this northernmost part of the Gulf in years swam slowly into sight.

Able to know that its quarry was dead by the first scent that had reached its nose a mile away, the sixteen-foot adult dispensed with the stealth it would have shown in tracking a live victim, swimming directly toward the carcass.

A magnificent creature, king of the seas for hundreds of thousands of years and neither instinctively nor consciously fearing anything that swam temperate waters, the white kept all its senses directed at the carcass.

Its nose lifted and its bottom jaw dropped, its great mouth unhinging so that it could take as large a bite as possible. Gleaming white, razor-sharp serrated teeth set in rows in its gums reflected the dim light.

From out of the dark to its side came a shape swimming so rapidly as to appear almost blurred. The twenty-five-foot twin, its mouth gaping, its great teeth a shiny brown, plowed into its cousin of a million and a half years’ distance, driving the White sideways through the water, biting it nearly completely in half with the first crushing pressure of its jaws.

Then, gulping the moist, bloody meat down its cavernous gullet as it turned, the megalodon came back to bite off and swallow a second large portion of the body before the White had time to settle next to the carcass of its ancestor.

Moments later, the twenty-five-foot twin put on a burst of speed toward the south.

CHAPTER 43

The buoy was found late that night by a forty-one conducting a search. Neither the net nor carcass of the twenty-five-foot megalodon was ever found. Maybe someday somebody would discover one of the teeth that for one reason or another wouldn’t be quickly covered by silt being spread out toward the Gulf’s depths by the many tributaries draining the lower Mississippi Basin. But Vandiver knew that would prove nothing to the surprisingly large number of skeptics who still insisted on discounting the evidence of the teeth that had been cut from the megalodon’s mouth and couldn’t be dated as anything but of recent origin. And, with the WLOX reporter having let her camera slip out the helicopter door into the Gulf, and thus no video around for proof, very few scientists put much stock in the report of a two-hundred-foot giant. Not that the scientists doubted his or any of the others’ honesty. But it had been twilight, nearly dark, at the time of the sighting, the skeptics argued, and it would have been possible for a whale to have momentarily visited the northern Gulf—though of course, not a two-hundred-foot whale. Again, it was nearly dark.

*   *   *

But Vandiver didn’t care about the skeptics. For that matter he didn’t care about the many who did believe. As far as he was concerned, he had all he really wanted out of the incident, to know for certain what he had always felt.

“Sir?”

At his nephew’s voice, Vandiver looked toward the computer terminal on the far side of the office. Douglas had brought up the artist’s rendition of the megalodon and was looking at the creature, its mouth gaped and its pectoral fins spread wide to its sides, facing out from the screen as if it were about to swim into Douglas’s lap.

“Sir, did you do this?”

“The changing of the body color?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Uh-huh, hit the control and C key together and you can have your choice of a brown to grayish-brown upper body and dirty-white underbody, or blue to bluish-gray with white below—but not solid brown anymore. The same colors of whites of today. I thought about making one pink, too, just for the sake of argument. But that wouldn’t be honest, would it?”

“No, sir. Sir, do you think they’ll come back again?”

“Certainly. They have for centuries. Give them another fifty to sixty years and somebody will be reporting seeing them again.”

“But they’ve gone back to the depths now?”

“They always have, haven’t they?”

“The megamouth and the adult six-gill haven’t, sir.”

“No, they haven’t, Douglas.”

“You think something might be different this time, sir?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, sir—maybe whatever made the megamouth and six-gill come up to stay.”

“I wouldn’t say the megalodon is exactly the type to play follow the leader, would you Douglas?”

“No, sir. I don’t guess so, sir.”

“Well then, let’s just assume they have gone back, Douglas—in case I have to send you scuba diving somewhere again.”

His nephew looked back across his shoulder.

And Vandiver chuckled.

*   *   *

Three months later, Carolyn was leaning against Alan’s arm as they stood at the bow of the
Intuitive II
anchored off the Chandeleur Light. Alan stared out toward the open Gulf.

“You know,” he said, “I was thinking about Fairley drowning … especially with his body never being found. You remember how Duchess acted that morning? I wonder if there’s any chance that there might have been another—”

“I don’t want to know,” Carolyn said.

“And I’ve wondered—if there were only the two—if one was a male and one was a female, and if we were witnessing the last remnants of a magnificent species.”

“I don’t want to know that, either.”

“Mr. Alan,” Paul called as he came up the deck from the fishing cockpit after taking his nap, “don’t you want a sandwich?”

Carolyn looked back at him. “I’ll fix you one in a minute, Paul. But come here right now. I have a surprise for you I think you’re going to like.”

She held up her hand with the engagement ring that now took the place of her old wedding band.

“What do you think about this?”

“I already knew,” Paul said, and smiled. “He told me first.”

*   *   *

At that moment, several hundred miles beyond the mouth of the Gulf, the fifty-foot megalodon and the twenty-five-foot twin dove at a sharp angle down through the clear, blue water of the Atlantic. Ever deeper they sped, the light beginning to fade around them. They slowed as they approached the pair of great long two-hundred-foot giants swimming side by side, and turned in beside them.

Staying close to the bottom that angled ever deeper, the four swam slowly toward the dark curtain in front of them, and out of sight.

*   *   *

“Like I said, give them fifty or sixty years,” Vandiver said as he walked out of his office with Douglas.

Douglas’s mother, her broad back to the office door, stood in front of the receptionist’s desk. Vandiver quickly slipped his arm around his nephew’s shoulders, startling Douglas.

“Fine boy, sis,” Vandiver said. “Didn’t know you were in town.”

His sister folded her thick arms across her chest and smiled at the friendly scene.

The receptionist stared, too.

*   *   *

“What in the hell?”
Norman “Bubba” Fitzwald said. He was thirty-five miles south of the Chandeleurs, on one of the oil-well platforms anchored in the clear waters of the Gulf. Smoking was strictly forbidden on any of the platforms and he had moved down the inclined metal steps circling one of the round legs supporting the platform to escape from being seen as he puffed on a Marlboro Light. What he saw now was the long shadow—a hundred and fifty feet long, at least—of something moving beneath the water close to the surface a couple of hundred yards out from the platform.

Then he looked up toward the bright sun. A thin, long cloud moved slowly across the sky. He looked back at the shadow, smiled at his imagination, flicked the stub of his cigarette out toward the water, and turned and started back up the steps.

Behind him, the long shadow abruptly changed direction.

A moment later, gaining speed, it moved rapidly in the direction of a Russian freighter on its way out of Gulfport with a load of frozen Mississippi chickens.

*   *   *

Six months after that, people began swimming in the Gulf again.

St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by Charles Wilson

D
IRECT
D
ESCENDANT

F
ERTILE
G
ROUND

E
XTINCT

PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF CHARLES WILSON

FERTILE GROUND

“Provides fast-paced suspense.”

—
The Commercial Appeal,
Memphis, Tennessee

“If you enjoy a good whodunit, you’ll like the latest scientific thriller by Charles Wilson.”

—
Northeast Mississippi Journal

“Wilson has written another medical thriller to keep readers of that genre engrossed.”

—
Brazosport Facts

DIRECT DESCENDANT

“Move over,
Jurassic Park
 … A terrific read, one done better with your door locked.”

—
Clarion Ledger,
Jackson, Mississippi

“A story as technically correct as Tom Clancy, as terrifying as Stephen King … A surefire bestseller.”

—Johnny Quarles, author of
Fool’s Gold

“Lean, tight, and compelling.”

—Greg Iles,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Spandau Phoenix

NIGHTWATCHER

“Splendid … A lean, tight, compelling story that was over much too fast. I wanted more.”

—John Grisham

“Wilson throws one curve after another while keeping up the suspense like an old pro; the whole book rushes over you like a jolt of adrenaline.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

WHEN FIRST WE DECEIVE

“Steadily accelerating suspense…”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Tightly plotted suspense that is also a subtle examination of the role trust plays in relationships, both personal and professional.”

—
Chicago Tribune

EXTINCT

Copyright © 1997 by Charles Wilson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

ISBN: 0-312-96212-6

St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition/May 1997

eISBN 9781466828322

First eBook edition: September 2012