Extinct (8 page)

“You can consider us even now.”

“I already do. I’ll get the tooth on a plane to you as soon as it gets into the station.”

“Thank you, Gus. I can’t wait.”

After their conversation ended with both of them promising to stay in better touch, Vandiver replaced the receiver and leaned back in his chair. A smile crossed his face. While his position was Director of Naval Intelligence, his doctorate was in marine biology, and his love, too. To be able to hold in his hands a megalodon tooth that had been found exposed on the ocean floor, even if his part wasn’t any more than having it pass through his hands to the Smithsonian or wherever it would end up, made him feel, he imagined, a little like an artist who was going to get to be in the chain of possession of a newly discovered Van Gogh.

What was even more exciting was that the find rekindled the fire under a thought he had carried for years. This particular tooth being exposed on the bottom would likely not pose a mystery. One of the hurricanes of the last century could conceivably have exposed it. Spanish galleons buried in the sand for hundreds of years had been uncovered that way. There was a possibility that a nearby river draining the Everglades, flooding time and time again, could have cut down through layers of sediment to where the tooth had lain for millions of years and washed it out to sea. But neither of those circumstances were possible in the case of the megalodon tooth that had first made him wonder.

It had been brought up by a dredge sampling the floor of the Marianas Trench. No rivers cut through layers of sediment at that depth. No hurricane, no matter how powerful, affected the bottoms of seas under thousands of feet of water. Yet the tooth had lain exposed or only slightly covered, allowing the dredge to scoop it up and bring it to the surface.

How was that possible? he had wondered at the time. The bottoms of the great depths were constantly being bombarded with a never-ending shower of decaying animal and plant matter floating down from the surface—what scientists termed marine snow. This was how many of the smaller bottom dwellers gained their sustenance. And this constant bombardment not only fed these creatures but also, over hundreds of thousands and millions of years, built up the floor of the seas by literally hundreds of feet. That was basically how oil and gas deposits formed under the sea, the organic material settling to the bottom, creating layers, and then having other layers deposited on top of them, the pressure caused by the ever-increasing weight of these overlapping layers eventually creating the fuels. So, again, how did a tooth from a creature extinct for some one and a half to five million years remain in a shallow enough position to have been brought up by a dredge?

He had heard one scientist quite confidently state that the tooth had obviously been buried deep at one point in time and then, through some underground anomaly such as a pocket of methane gas being released, been pushed to the top of the sea floor. Vandiver guessed any coincidence was possible. Any set of coincidences: the coincidence of that particular tooth being upthrusted, the coincidence of the dredge then sampling the particular few-square-feet area where it lay out of all the tens of thousands of square miles of the Marianas Trench. Maybe hard to believe, but possible.

But he had also continued to wonder. And, driven by that wonder, he had begun to research and found that there was much more coincidence than he would have ever dreamed. So much more it became almost a mathematical impossibility for it all to indeed by coincidence. At least that was how he started to believe.

And that had caused him to form a pet theory. Of course not one that he shared openly with most people—it was a little too far out. But, on the other hand, not any farther out than was the thinking of a handful of scientists some years before who had decided the majority of their colleagues were wrong in the decades-held philosophy that dinosaurs had been cold-blooded animals. Now enough evidence had come forward to make the warm-blooded theory the prevailing one.

And
his
conclusion was that the megalodon hadn’t become extinct over a million years ago, but rather at least a number of them had lived up until the last few hundred years, maybe longer—maybe much longer.

And he knew that there was now not only coincidence that pointed to that possibility, but, as in the case of the advocates of the warm-blooded dinosaurs, mounting evidence.

Then he thought again of the tooth Gus had called about. It
might not
have been washed out to where it lay by the action of a river or uncovered by a hurricane. It could conceivably.… He smiled at his thought. Surely he was grasping now. Especially with the tooth in such shallow water so far from the great depths. But then there was always a possibility, wasn’t there? He spent a moment longer thinking, the idea of what could be possible growing in his mind, then he leaned forward and pressed the panel at the base of his intercom.

“Yes, sir?”

“Have Ensign Williams report in here straight away, please.”

“Sorry, sir, but he’s in the process of delivering Senator Lott to Andrews.”

“Very well. Get word to him I want him to report in here as soon as he returns—no matter how late it is.”

*   *   *

“She’s not doing right by Paul,” Mr. Herald said as he watched Carolyn in her Ranger turning out of the driveway with Paul sitting in the front seat beside her. “She ought to go ahead and take him on out to the islands like she planned, do whatever else she can think of to get him back around water before he gets scared of it. It’s a horrible, horrible thing that happened to those boys, but when is the last time a shark ever attacked anyone around here, much less killed anybody? I can only remember once in my lifetime. What’s happened is a terrible, terrible tragedy. More than terrible. It makes me sick to my stomach. But it’s a terrible tragedy when lightning strikes somebody, too. And I’ve heard of lightning killing people a lot more often than once over the years. But you don’t stop going outside. You use common sense. Stay under cover when it’s storming and you’re pretty well home free. What does she want Paul to do, never go in the water again? Maybe even never want to be around it—because she’s scaring him to death telling him he can’t go to the islands now.”

His wife lowered the magazine she was reading to her lap. “She’s not doing any such thing, Fred. She’s his mother. When she was a little girl, would you have wanted her to go on to the islands and swim right after a shark attack?”

“Of course not. I don’t want her to go into the water now, for God’s sake. But she can still anchor out with him; what does she think the sharks are going to do—jump in the boat?”

“Fred, she’s just too depressed to be taking the boat out for fun now. And how’s Paul going to feel after he finds out what happened? You know she’s going to have to tell him before he hears it from somebody else.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding his head. “And telling him and then giving him the impression she’s afraid to go out on the water—all she’s doing is making it worse. I don’t feel so hot myself, and you think I’m not going to go ahead and take my boys camping tomorrow?”

“We brought up two children, Fred. Why don’t you let her bring up her child the way she wants?” Under her breath she added, “And I bet Calvin is tickled to death he lives in Memphis and can bring up his girl without having to listen to you.”

“What?” her husband said, and cocked his ear in her direction.

“Nothing, Fred. I was talking to myself about the price of clothes in this magazine.”

“I thought you said something about Calvin.”

“Calvin Klein,” she said, and turned her attention back to her reading.

But a few seconds later, with her husband still staring out the glass in the front door, she lowered the magazine again. “Now, Fred, don’t you get any ideas about starting up a little game between you and Paul—working on Carolyn.”

She stared a moment longer at the back of his large frame.

“You have already, haven’t you?”

CHAPTER 9

Admiral Vandiver stared at the monitor of his computer terminal, linked by secure line to the megacomputers kept under around-the-clock armed guard in another section of the Pentagon. He wasn’t studying any kind of intelligence information, but rather a photograph anyone connected to the Internet could view.

Displayed on the monitor was a coelacanth, a heavy-bodied, five-foot-long fish with bony, armorlike scales and rapierlike teeth. It looked for all the world like what it was, an ancient fish thought to be extinct for over seventy million years—until one was caught off the coast of South Africa in December 1938.

“By the trawler
Nerine
pulling a net in two hundred feet of water,” he mumbled, voicing his thoughts aloud. It had been a hell of a shock to the scientific community. He smiled a little at that thought, then turned his face across his shoulder at the knock on his office door.

“Enter.”

The door remained closed.

“Enter,”
he said in a louder voice.

A young black ensign in a white dress uniform stepped inside, shut the door behind him and, facing the computer, came to attention, holding his cap tightly under his arm.

“Took you long enough,” Vandiver said. The ensign remained rigidly at attention. “Come on, Douglas, relax. If my sister learns you stand like that when you’re alone in my office she’ll be all over my case. Sometimes I get the distinct impression she thinks the military silly, anyway.”

The young man removed his cap from under his arm and came across the floor.

Vandiver nodded toward the photograph on the monitor. “You know what that is?”

Without waiting for an answer, Vandiver said, “A coelacanth, thought to have been extinct for over seventy million years, until one was caught off South Africa in ’38.” He worked his fingers across the terminal’s keyboard, then leaned back in his chair as an artist’s rendition of a thick-bodied shark materialized on the monitor. Facing outward and looking like it was about to swim off the screen, the shark’s wide pectoral fins stuck straight out to the sides and its mouth gaped, exposing several rows of tall teeth. The artist had shaded the creature’s body a dark brown color, even its teeth.

“You know what that is?”

Douglas was quicker this time: “Almost looks like a great white, but its nose is a little too blunt, not tapering down narrow enough to the front. And the color…”

“Carcharodon megalodon, Douglas.”

“Sir?”

“Carcharodon megalodon. The giant ancestor of the great white shark of today, possibly reaching up to a hundred feet in length from the fossil evidence available. Deemed to be extinct for a million and a half to five million years, depending on which scientists you ask.”

“Deemed, sir?”

“Been extinct,” Vandiver said.

Douglas nodded.

Vandiver ran his tongue under his upper lip and seemed to be thinking. “I can’t recall the name of the river.”

“Sir?”

“The initial coelacanth was caught at the mouth of a river off the South African coast. Its name escapes me.”

Douglas was surprised anything to do with the oceans escaped his uncle. There was nobody in the naval department who could even come close to matching his knowledge of the seas and their inhabitants. His doctorate not only came from that field, it was his hobby, too.

Vandiver stood and walked toward his desk. He pointed to a chair in front of it. As Vandiver settled into his seat, Douglas sat down in the chair, placing his cap across his lap and sitting so straight he almost seemed to be still at attention.

Vandiver stared at him. “You simply can’t relax, can you, Douglas? Well, you come by that naturally. Our whole family’s always been uptight. It’s a Vandiver characteristic.”

Douglas tried to sit more at ease, but actually looked more uncomfortable in doing so.

Vandiver smiled a little. “Well, I’m going to give you a little vacation—maybe that’ll loosen you up. I’m going to send you down to south Florida for a couple of days.”

There was the slightest wrinkling of Douglas’ brow.

Vandiver felt the breast pocket of his uniform tunic. He lowered his hand to his trouser pockets. “Is my secretary still out there?”

“Sir, it’s nearly eight o’clock.”

“She never tells me when she leaves. Comes of working with the same person for fifteen years—they lose their fear of you.”

He opened a drawer at the side of his desk. “Ah, ha,” he said. He lifted a cellophane-wrapped cigar out and held it over the desk toward Douglas.

“No thank you, sir.”

“Still can’t think of the name of the river,” Vandiver mumbled to himself. A pensive look on his face, he stripped the cigar, placed the cellophane in an ashtray, lit the cigar, and blew a thick cloud of gray smoke toward the ceiling.

He looked directly across the desk. “Let me get to the point, Douglas. I’m sending you to a site where a megalodon tooth was found today. I want you to go down and look at the bottom where it was discovered. I want to know what you think of the terrain. Specifically, whether you think there’s any evidence of old volcanic activity, an upheaval in the land—anything like that. I want you to take rock samples, too, coral, anything in the area that stands out.”

“Sir, my degree is in English.”

“Geology would be better. But I don’t have a nephew with a degree in geology. And what you’re trying to find for me is some evidence that indicates whether this tooth could have been shed there say some few thousand years ago instead of a million and a half. If I told anybody else that was what was on my mind, I’m afraid I might be facing being medically boarded out.”

A slight smile played over his uncle’s face, but Douglas knew he had been serious in his words about the age. “Sir, why would you think—”

“Let me give you a little science lesson,” his uncle said. “In fact, let me carry you a little further to make certain you do have an open mind when you’re down there looking. Megalodons once roamed all of the world’s oceans. Their teeth have been found in layers of sediment that show they swam tropical seas and layers of sediment that show they swam the most frigid seas during the ice ages. They swam the shallow areas that are now dry land—as far inland as central Maryland in this area, for example—and they swam the deepest trenches that have always been deep water. The Marianas Trench, for example. You know how deep it is?”