Sharkman (22 page)

With renewed vigor, I kicked and propelled and pulled my way into the whirling dervish of invertebrates until the seafloor beneath me became the crushed remains of a wooden crate and then—eureka!—a plastic object the size of a basketball, encasing the enriched hunk of uranium.

Reaching down, I grabbed the precious object, which warmed my hands like a roaring fireplace on a cold winter’s day. I slammed the hatch and locked it, then peeled the lead-lined backpack off my shoulders and shoved the radiating sphere inside, zippering the lead-lined casing shut.

And then something unexpected happened . . . the missile silo went vertical, rising away from the bottom!

It was the uranium. By heating the water inside the sealed tube, it was causing the missile silo to become buoyant.

To aid the process, I positioned the backpack between the hatch and my head. I held on as the titanium shell plowed through the dispersing school of Humboldt squid—the nasty creatures never realizing I had just made off with their magic orb.

The water inside the tube went from warm to hot in minutes, increasing the silo’s rate of ascension. Looking down, I watched the dark canyon disappear from view—the open end of the silo spinning wildly in my head . . .
need to breathe!

Reaching up, I secured the backpack’s straps to the inside wheel of the hatch, then slid feetfirst out of the back end of the rising silo until my head was free. Maintaining a grip along the inside of the titanium tube, I shoved my face into the current of water and opened my mouth to the rushing sea.

I had lived seventeen years, but that moment right there—that was the best. To have escaped death so many times, to be surfacing with my life and a gift for my father—I wanted to scream to the heavens.

Ascending fast . . . the water pressure easing, the pain in my skull gone, my chest expanding. Rising higher, the waters were growing dense again with life. Viperfish and gulper eels, fangtooths and dragonfish—no longer ugly, no longer gruesome—beautiful creatures, miracles of creation and adaptation—mutations, like me . . . all of us just trying to survive.

The sea remained in nocturnal-olive, yet I could feel the warmth of the shallows and the lapping waves, and suddenly I was rocketing free of the water, falling sideways onto the titanium shell, which started to sink. Ducking back inside, I untied the backpack, popped open the hatch, and squirmed back outside.

Relieved of its buoyancy, the empty shell fell away, beginning its return descent into the abyss. Glancing up at the starry night sky, I thanked my mother’s soul for guiding me to it.

I searched the horizon, locating the
Malchut
half a mile to the east. Her crew must have been tracking my ascension on sonar because she was heading my way.

Slinging the backpack over my shoulders, I expelled water from my esophagus and inhaled a chest-inflating breath, forcing air into my collapsed lungs. My skin softened to flesh—the flesh burning with frostbite. My eyeballs ached as my sinus cavity squeezed open. My ear canals popped, causing my head to ring with tinnitus. My leg muscles spasmed. My stomach contorted, my heart raced.

Exhausted, hungry, writhing in pain, I was Kwan Wilson . . . human.

36

W
aiting for the boat, I nearly drowned from the exhaustion of treading water.

The crew mercifully lowered a rescue ring and hauled me onto the deck. My father barked orders while Professor Gibbons tore the backpack from my shoulders and looked inside.

“Sonuva gun . . . it’s here. He actually did it.”

“Of course he did! He’s my kid, isn’t he?”

My father may have hugged me—I can’t be sure. Relieved of my burden, I passed out.

Daylight burned red behind closed eyelids. I opened them, moaning in pain.

I was in my stateroom, propped up in bed. A doctor was peering into my left eye with an annoying light. A nurse was applying an ointment to my raw, bare feet.

The physician spoke in a Hispanic accent. “You’re my first frostbite patient. How long were you locked in the galley freezer?”

“Whaa?”

“Seventeen hours,” I heard my father say.

“He’s lucky to be alive. We’ll start him on an IV for the pain, but he really should fly back with us to San Juan.”

“He’ll be fine, Doc. We appreciate you coming. Can you stand next to him for a moment? I want to get a quick photo of my son receiving medical care . . . you know, just in case we need to sue that freezer manufacturer.”

Through heavy lids I saw my father aim his iPhone at me. Then he handed the doctor a wad of cash and I passed out.

Key Largo, Florida

The patient was propped up in bed. Her complexion was sickly pale, her forearms bruised from multiple intravenous needles and injections. An IV bag dripped steadily into a vein in her right hand, the toxic liquid having vanquished the woman’s jet-black curls days ago. Long strands of hair littered her bedsheets.

Dr. Kamrowski leaned over Sabeen, inhaling her noxious breath as she removed the thermometer from beneath the teenager’s tongue.

The Syrian rebel gazed up at her through feverish dark pools. “How bad?”

“A hundred and one point five, same as yesterday. Open wide; I want to check your throat again.” Aided by a wooden tongue depressor, Dr. Kamrowski shined her light into Sabeen’s mouth, noting the creamy-white lesions. “The thrush has gotten worse. We need to boost your immune system.”

“I thought the shark stem cells were supposed to be doing this?”

Ignoring her, Dr. Kamrowski moved to the end of the bed and lifted the blanket and sheet to examine Sabeen’s feet. What had been petite size 7s had mutated into knotted size 13s that curved sharply from toe to heel.

“They have grown larger?”

“Sabeen, every subject reacts differently to a new drug.”

“Answer me!”

“Yes, but it’s okay. Your internal organs are changing, too, preparing you for an amphibious existence, which is what we wanted. The problem is that the HGH isn’t stabilizing your human DNA the way it did with Kwan. It may be that the tiger shark stem cells are more aggressive, or it might be the difference in the male and female testosterone levels. Whatever the reason, I feel our best course of action is to get you stronger . . . allow your immune system to stabilize before we inject you with any more human growth hormone.”

“Stabilize me how?”

“By getting you into the water sooner than we planned. We’ll allow the mutation to run its course at an accelerated rate, which is what it seems to want to do. If it works, you should feel much better.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Let’s not go there.” Dr. Kamrowski removed a walkie-talkie from her belt. “Joe, are you ready for Sabeen?”

“On my way.”

The early afternoon was thick with humidity, the South Florida sun veiled behind gray islands of stratocumulus clouds.

Sabeen Tayfour squinted through feverish eyes at the emerald-green horizon of ocean spread out before her. Shallows littered with pockets of coral reefs led to darker patches of deep water.

Her teeth rattled as the Australian man pushed her wheelchair across a stretch of boardwalk, then down a ramp that ended ten feet of rock and sand short of the waterline.

Joe Botchin made it one revolution on the beach before the wheels became hopelessly buried. Gently, he leaned over and scooped the Syrian beauty up in his thick arms, carrying her down to the water’s edge. The shark wrangler’s boots sunk ankle-deep into the muddy bottom—his eyes behind the dark sunglasses darting to Sabeen’s dressing gown as it soaked up the sea, adhering the flimsy patterned cloth to her naked breasts.

Sabeen closed her eyes to the lust-filled stare. The water was a balmy seventy-seven degrees in the shallows but still felt frigid, casting goose bumps across her feverish flesh.

The Australian moved deeper. The water rose to her neck.

And suddenly he was on top of her, his arms wrapped around her chest in a bear hug, his weight pinning her underwater!

Adrenaline coursed through her body even as the rancid air hissed from her mouth. She screamed in protest, the sound muffled in her ears. She tried to reach for his eyes . . . his private parts, only her arms were pinned and he had rolled himself on top of her. Pressing her deformed feet to the muddy bottom, she managed one massive heave of her legs, only her head never cleared the surface.

Her lungs burned. Her vision tunneled into blackness.

Joe felt the fight leave Sabeen Tayfour’s body. He waited another moment, then released her, planting a boot to her lower back to keep the corpse underwater and out of sight. “She’s dead.”

Dr. Kamrowski nodded from the beach. “A waste of precious time and resources.”

“Spooky guy, the Admiral. I’d hate to get on his bad side. Why do you think—”

“She became expendable the moment Kwan salvaged the package. The last thing Amalek’s council needs now is to expend more personnel at the compound. Believe me, having seen the way those rats suffered, this was a far more humane way to—”

“Ahhhh!” Joe screamed, then fell backward into the shallows—a fountain of blood spurting across the surface.

Dr. Kamrowski ran to the water’s edge and froze, unable to see beyond the Australian’s thrashing limbs and the frothing pool of blood.

And then everything stopped.

Nadja Kamrowski’s heart pounded in her chest as Joe Botchin’s body surfaced, his corpse floating facedown in the scarlet waters. Blood pooled around two massive bite wounds—the first coming from his savaged upper right thigh and torn femoral artery, the last from his neck, which was nearly severed from his head.

The killer’s face rose slowly from the sea, revealing a porous scalp and two coal-black eyes filled with hatred which remained just above the water line.

“Sabeen, I’m sorry.”

Blood ran past her sunken cheekbones and flattened nose into her open mouth. Her gills rippled red with the outflow, remained underwater.

“It was the Admiral’s orders, Sabeen. I don’t question my Amalek superiors.”

The face submerged. A moment later, a mutated pair of feet lashed the surface, splashing blood across Dr. Kamrowski’s blue lab coat.

A long, dark form glided through the shallows toward deeper water . . . and then she was gone.

Aboard the
Malchut

I was gliding in a cool blue sea, the surface above my head undulating in thick waves of mercury that muted all sound.

“He can be useful to us, Jeffrey.”

“I’m sorry, Admiral, but the council disagrees.”

The sea grew warmer. The voices were disturbing Queen Dilaudid, the surface rippling with sound.

“Gibbons said he was able to salvage enough U-235 to incinerate Port Everglades and the convention center. You really think Kwan’s going to remain silent with half a million people dead?”

The sea boiled, the pain returned. Swimming to the agitated surface, my head popped free—sound returning with a
whoosh
.

My eyes snapped open.

The cabin was empty. The voices were coming . . .
from my forearms?

I looked down at my arms. The flesh was covered in dermal denticles—my brain fooled by the drug-induced dream. The sensory cells beneath my shark skin were picking up reverberations of sound coming from my steel bed frame which was bolted to the wall behind my head.

Turning around to face the wall, I pressed my forearms to the plaster, eavesdropping on my father’s conversation in the adjoining stateroom.

“How will you kill him?”

“Drug overdose—we stay with the rehab story. I’ll inject it right into his IV bag; he won’t feel a thing.”

“I’m concerned about the timing. Amalek was very clear—the three Iranians arrive tomorrow at seventeen hundred hours.”

“Which is why it has to be done now. We’ll fly Kwan’s remains to Miami tonight and hold a press conference at Jackson Memorial Hospital in the morning. You’ll shed a few tears, the coroner will schedule an autopsy—that school counselor and her attorney will do whatever they’re going to do . . . and none of it will matter. By tomorrow night Kwan’s death will be yesterday’s news—a trickle of water over a bursting dam.”

Sweat poured down my face. I held my breath, waiting for my father’s protests . . .

“Do it. Kill him.”

37

M
y mind raced, my thoughts fluctuating between madness and panic. Hearing the door to my father’s stateroom open, I climbed back into bed, ripped the IV from my vein, shoved the bloodied needle into the mattress, and then pulled the covers up over my arm to hide the evidence.

My eyes closed as the cabin door opened. I could feel the CIA assassin hovering close. Heard him remove something from his jacket pocket. Through half-closed eye slits I saw him inject a syringe of clear liquid into my IV bag.

He adjusted the drip, then traced the line back to my right arm, lifting the blanket . . .

Sitting up, I clubbed him across the face with my left fist.

It was a glancing blow, allowing me a few precious seconds to leap out of bed and grab his wrist before he could aim his 9mm at my head. And in the midst of this brief struggle something bizarre happened to me.

One moment I was consumed by a tornado of emotion—anger and rage and fear; the next I found myself in the eye of the storm, a place of calm . . . a place where my consciousness seemed to observe my reactive behavior and quell it. And within this Zen-like state I found the keys to controlling my mutation. It was as if I were an infant seeing my hand for the first time, realizing that not only did this strange five-fingered limb belong to me, but it was mine to control.

Accessing a reservoir of strength I had no knowledge of seconds earlier, I crushed Jeffrey Elrod’s wrist in a vice grip that snapped his radius and ulna bones. So great was his pain that my would-be assassin let out a moan, rolled his eyes up in his head and fainted.

Releasing the swollen, deformed joint, I lifted him off the ground by his waist and placed him in bed as if he were a child. Tearing the sheets into strips, I bound his ankles and wrists to the bedrails and gagged him.

Yes, the thought to kill him had occurred to me. It would have been so easy to jab that IV death drip into his vein and justify the act using an-eye-for-an-eye justice . . . only I didn’t do it. And no, it wasn’t mercy or a sense of weakness as the Admiral would have called it; it was something beyond that . . . a sense that by killing this scumbag I’d be tainting my own soul.

The act of restraint strengthened my resolve to stop my father from using a weapon I had delivered to him on a silver platter—only first, I needed to collect my bearings.

Moving to the porthole, I slid back the curtains and realized that it was daylight and we were moving. That meant the diving bell would be sealed, preventing me from accessing the lab from under water.

Moving to the door, I pressed my palms to the metal surface and changed the flesh on my hands to dermal denticles, manipulating my DNA as easily as a chameleon altered its color. Using the sensitive neurons located beneath the thick skin-teeth, I could feel/hear the engines reverberating two decks below, but the corridor itself seemed clear.

Exiting the stateroom, I moved quickly down the empty passage to a watertight door that sealed a steep set of stairs. Setting my palms and instep on the handrails, I slid down the seventy-degree slope to the next landing, repeating the process to access the lower deck.

Yanking open another watertight door, I entered the engine room.

The noise of the running engines concealed the deck creaking beneath my weight as I made my way aft to the lab. Peering through the porthole window, I located Professor Gibbons. The man’s back was to me as he carefully packed a spherical device the size of a volleyball into a chocolate-brown leather carry-on tote bag.

I entered the lab, quickly sealing the two watertight compartments behind me. The chamber pressurized, causing him to turn around. “Kwan? What are you doing here?”

“My father sent me down for a briefing,” I lied.

“Briefing?”

“Amalek, the council, the whole nine yards.”

“The Admiral discussed these things with you?”

“How else would he recruit me? I’m in, dude. We’re in this thing together.” I pointed to the object he was packing in the brown carry-on bag. “Is that it?”

“Huh? Yes.”

“If you’re half the genius my father tells me you are, then I’m sure this baby will do some serious damage.”

Gibbons smiled. “It wasn’t easy. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were aerial detonations; it’s hard to generate that kind of blast radius with a ground device. Plus this one’s being detonated on board a cruise ship, leading to all sorts of challenges. Would you like to see how it works?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

His ego properly stroked, the nuclear physicist stepped aside to show me the spherical device, which had a small clear Plexiglas canister strapped to it with duct tape. Inside the canister the back of a cell phone was visible.

“We call this a SADM—Special Atomic Demolition Munitions. Inside this porous metal sphere are two polished sections of enriched uranium and a brick of C-4 plastic explosive. The cell phone’s battery connects to a blasting cap in the ball. When you dial the phone number, the ring will send a power surge to the blasting cap, setting off the C-4. The C-4, in turn, will blow one piece of the enriched uranium through the other, starting a chain reaction that will end in a nuclear explosion that will vaporize every object upwards of ten stories high inside a five-mile radius.”

“Awesome. But what if you get a telemarketing call or a wrong number before the big boom?”

“First, no one else has access to the phone number but members of the council. Second, the device is pre-armed using a timer. I just set the device to arm itself at seven o’clock tonight. In approximately six hours and forty-two minutes, Amalek himself will place the call, and once again the world will change.”

“Nice.” My heart pounded as he rezippered the tote bag, my mind racing like Michael Corleone before he shot Sollozzo and that corrupt police captain in
The Godfather
. “The SADM . . . is it waterproof?”

“Of course. Why do you ask?”

Grabbing Gibbons by his arm, I flung him over a crate. Gripping the carry-on in my left hand, I reached for the sealed lid of the diving bell with the right and spun the wheel.

The nuclear physicist regained his feet in time to see what I was doing. “No!”

A fire hydrant of seawater erupted into the chamber, cutting off his screams and setting off alarms. The lab filled within seconds—by which time I had mutated into my shark alter ego. Clutching the leather bag to my belly, I jumped feetfirst into the aqua-blue hole, sinking like a rock.

The keel of the
Malchut
passed overhead, both blades churning, shredding the clothing my dermal denticles had already sliced and shed from my body. Hovering in eighty feet of water, I looked down, surprised to find the seafloor a mere hundred feet below. Darting to the surface, I spy-hopped, my eyes searching the horizon.

The
Malchut
had cut its engines, drifting several hundred yards away. Two miles farther to the west, I could see the Miami Beach shoreline.

I quickly submerged, swimming north at a brisk twenty knots.

According to Gibbons, the nuke would detonate in just under seven hours. That left me two choices. I could bury the device far out to sea, or I could bring the SADM to the authorities and have my father and his mysterious Amalek colleagues arrested and brought to justice.

I decided upon the latter for several reasons. First, if I buried the device along the seafloor, the resulting blast could wipe out any passing ships and create a tsunami. Second, unless I exposed my father and his fellow warmongers, I could never find peace—they’d come after me and my loved ones and “disappear us” as Jesse Gordon had called it.

I considered pulling out the wires connecting the blasting cap to the cell phone. In the end, I decided to let the authorities handle this, not knowing if the act might automatically arm the device or even detonate the SADM.

I sensed the
Malchut
bearing down on me seconds before my ampullae of Lorenzini detected a tiny electrical current pulsating along my left butt cheek.
Gibbons’s injection . . . it wasn’t intended to help me survive the near-freezing temperatures in the trench, it was a tracking device!

Even moving at twenty knots, I wasn’t about to lose the suped-up fishing trawler. Wherever I went, the ship would follow, the Admiral ready to deploy a crew to recover the device.

There wasn’t enough time to make it back to the Puerto Rico Trench, so instead I went where their ship couldn’t follow.

Altering my course, I trekked west . . . heading for land.

Key Largo, Florida

The creature was eight and a half feet long from the top of her pore-blemished scalp to the sickle-shaped curve of her mutated toes and heels. The additional length was a painful deformity caused by her bone softening into a lighter, more flexible, cartilage-like substance which stretched her skeleton like taffy. This sudden lack of rigidity along her spinal column had initially caused her to move through the water with inefficient serpent-like sweeps, until her dermal denticles had thickened along her dorsal surface to compensate. Black in color, these double-plated layers of “skin-teeth” were streaked gray every twelve to twenty inches with lateral lines—specialized clusters of sensory cells that allowed her to detect vibrations in the water over great distances. Set in four-inch-wide vertical canals along her dark dorsal surface, these silver-gray neuromasts resembled tiger stripes, fading as they wrapped around her pale abdomen.

Her mouth had widened to accommodate a lower jaw filled with jagged triangular teeth. Her nose and brows had flattened with the extinction of her sinus cavity. Having lost their bone density, her arms had atrophied into semi-useless T-Rex-like limbs which hung flaccid by her side when she swam.

Sabeen Tayfour had been close to death, her human DNA overwhelmed by a rapidly metastasizing army of shark stem cells that were systematically destroying her human immune system, yet remained stuck in a neutral state. Ironically, it had been the Australian brute’s attempt to drown her that had released a lifesaving wave of adrenaline and cortisol, the latter’s secretion instantaneously “switching on” her mutated genes.

Sabeen’s transformation into a gilled species lacked the genetic balance necessary to reverse the mutation. With each passing minute she was becoming less human, and yet she was still bound to her
Homo sapien
species by her brain, her thoughts, and her tarnished memories. War had stolen her loved ones; revenge had demanded she become a freedom fighter. Her time in prison had robbed her of her dignity; her jailers’ cruelty had turned her into a predator.

The final act of evil perpetrated against her had left her more dead than alive.

Ravaged by fever, Sabeen hadn’t eaten in days. She had fought off her intended killer with a rush of adrenaline that was so sudden and so close to her demise that she never knew she had transformed. Held underwater, her inflicted bites had been a primordial reflex honed by a hundred million years of shark evolution.

The effort had saved her life but had exhausted her physically, all cognitive thoughts jettisoned in a state of delirium. Swept away from shore by the currents, Sabeen drifted in and out of consciousness, oblivious to the fact that she was breathing underwater through a pair of gills in her neck. Her lower body dragged along the bottom as she futilely attempted to bob to the surface in twelve feet of water to gasp a breath of air. Too weak to use her legs, she propelled herself forward by wiggling her upper torso—an ineffective maneuver that left her struggling to push enough sea down her throat for her gills to process an adequate supply of oxygen.

Hovering nearly vertically in the coral-rich shallows, her mind gone, Sabeen Tayfour was systematically drowning.

Claudia Kukowitsch had arrived in Key Largo two days earlier with her boyfriend, Andy. Born and raised in Switzerland, the thirty-seven-year-old Alpine beauty had long blonde hair, blue eyes, and curves in all the right places.

She had come to Florida on vacation with two goals: to visit Universal Studios in Orlando and to snorkel in the Keys. Andy had reluctantly joined her yesterday on a two-hour snorkeling excursion, but his back was scorched red with sunburn, providing him with an excuse to play golf.

With the basics now behind her, Claudia opted for a charter boat—a thirty-foot Pro Kat high-powered catamaran she shared with four other guests and the captain. The vessel had left the dock an hour earlier, cruising across the brilliant green-blue shallows of Key Largo’s National Marine Sanctuary. Arriving at one of the park’s protected coral reefs, the five patrons had donned snorkels, masks, and fins, and then it was every man and woman for themselves.

Drifting facedown along the glassy surface, Claudia gazed at the myriad of life darting in and out of soft coral beds that swayed with the currents. Toting a used underwater camera she had purchased at a local dive shop, she photographed clown fish, angelfish, a spotted sting ray, a pair of parrotfish, and a grouper that remained partially hidden within a cluster of sea grass.

Growing bored, she fluttered her swim fins, moving beyond the reef and an expanse of empty seafloor until she arrived at another contained ecosystem—and the presence of a life form that took her breath away.

The creature was immense—black with gray stripes. At first she thought it was a wounded eel, by the way it wriggled through the water. Hovering above the struggling creature, Claudia was shocked to see some seriously bizarre, almost human features. There was the shape of its skull and the hourglass spine that formed a mutilated tail. Split into two segments, the lower curved lobes resembled elongated, deformed toes.

Then it occurred to her—
My Gott . . . it’s a mermaid!

Paddling along the surface, Claudia followed the sickly creature, snapping dozens of photos, only to realize she needed to get a lot closer for the money shot. She watched in fascination as the mermaid managed to wedge itself between two coral reef formations, its open mouth inhaling a stream of current that dusted up the sand, obscuring it from view.