Vostok (41 page)
Instead, the lagoon would become home to
Carcharodon megalodon
, the sixty-foot prehistoric cousin of the great white shark.
Like
Livyatan melvillei
, megalodon was a Miocene monster believed to be extinct. Jonas Taylor had discovered them inhabiting the deep waters of the Mariana Trench while piloting a top-secret dive for the Navy. According to his testimony,
“I was staring out the portal at the hydrothermal plume when sonar picked up an immense object rising from below. Suddenly, a ghost-white shark with a head bigger than our three-man sub emerged from the mineral ceiling.”
Two scientists on board had died during an emergency ascent, and the deep-sea submersible pilot was blamed. Discharged from the Navy, Jonas decided to become a marine biologist, intent on proving the megalodon was still alive.
Seven years later, rising construction costs on the Tanaka Institute forced Masao to accept a contract with the Japanese Marine Science Technology Center. The mission: to disperse sensory drones along the Mariana Trench that would function as an early-warning earthquake detection system. To complete the array, D.J. Tanaka, Masao’s son, had to anchor each drone to the trench
floor using an Abyss Glider, a sub resembling a one-man version of the
Barracuda
. When several of the drones stopped transmitting data, Masao needed a second diver to help retrieve one of the damaged sensors.
He selected Jonas Taylor.
Jonas accepted the offer, desiring only to recover an unfossilized white megalodon tooth photographed in the wreckage. But the dive ended badly.
Jonas and D.J. came face to face with not one but two Megs. The first was a forty-five-foot male, which became entangled in the surface ship’s cable. The second was its sixty-foot pregnant mate, which was accidently lured topside.
The Tanaka Institute took on the task of capturing the female. Jonas and Masao were determined to quarantine the monster in the whale lagoon, with JAMSTEC agreeing to refit the canal entrance with King Kong-sized steel doors.
The hunt lasted a month, culminating in an act that surpassed my own nightmare in Loch Ness. In the end, one of the megalodon’s surviving pups was captured and raised in Masao’s cetacean facility—and a monster-shark cottage industry was born.
Angel, dubbed the Angel of Death, was a 70-foot albino, so fearsome she was easily one of the most terrifying creatures ever to exist. The monster would earn the Tanaka-Taylor family hundreds of millions of dollars. She also managed to escape twice, birth two litters of pups, and devour no less than a dozen humans, five of them in her lagoon.
Yet people still lined up by the tens of thousands to see her, and they wept when they learned she had died. Angel had met her own Angel of Death last summer, following her most recent escape. She had been tracked to the Western Pacific and had been caught in open water in an industrial fishing net, where she became entangled and drowned.
At least, that was what the world had been told…
The rusted-white steel superstructure of the 319-foot-long hopper dredge
McFarland
towered five stories above the deck and nearly twice that over the waterline. Everything aft of the command center and crews’ quarters was dedicated to the business of dredging. Built in 1967, the ship was designed to clear waterways of sediment by vacuuming up slurry—a mixture of sand and water—from the sea floor using two large drag arms. After being pumped through pipes, the slurry would be deposited in a hopper, a massive hold that occupied the mid- and aft-decks like an oversized Olympic swimming pool. The
McFarland’s
hopper could hold more than six thousand tons of slurry and evacuate it in minutes through its keel doors.
The Tanaka Institute had purchased the
McFarland
a year after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had decommissioned the ship and three months after Angel had birthed her five pups in captivity. Jonas had been looking for a vessel large enough to safely transport the juvenile sharks to another aquarium, knowing the Institute simply wasn’t large enough to house six full-grown megalodons.
It was still dark outside when I left sickbay and made my way to the bridge, the hood of the crewmen’s jacket Angus had left me pulled tightly around my head and face, just in case the Colonel had one of MJ-12’s satellites watching the boat.
We were headed north at three knots, the ship’s bow maneuvering through lead-gray surface waters dotted with islands of ice. To port rose the snow-packed cliffs that dominated the East Antarctic coastline; to starboard, the dark horizon and open ocean. I paused at the guardrail to look down at the ship’s main deck and its mammoth hopper. The open hold occupied the deck space between the bridge superstructure and the ship’s bow. The 175-foot-long, 45-foot-wide, 55-foot-deep tub remained in the shadows, the machinery designed to stir the captured slurry long since removed.
Locating an interior stairwell, I ascended to the bridge.
The
McFarland’s
command center seemed far too big for its solitary row of computer consoles. Large bay windows surrounded the chamber on all four sides, looking out nine stories above the ocean. There were two men inside. The boat’s captain, a Georgia man named Jon Hudson, was at the helm. The other man sat at a chart table, studying a map of the continent.
Gray-haired and in his mid-sixties, Jonas Taylor appeared fit, but the dark circles under his eyes told a different story. Rising to meet me, he greeted me in a bear hug.
“Zachary Wallace, you look good for a guy who didn’t have a pulse an hour ago. Sorry about the way we had to bring you aboard, but you’re messing with an intelligence agency exercising a mercenary mentality. I guess that’s a necessity when dealing with extraterrestrial threats.”
“There is no extraterrestrial threat. The D.C. attack was a false flag event staged to look like an E.T. vessel.”
“Staged by whom?”
I glanced at the Captain, whose back was to us. “Is there somewhere we can speak in private?”
“Captain, how far are we from the Amery Ice Shelf?”
“Just under five nautical miles. No close contacts on sonar or radar.”
“All engines stop. The bridge is mine. Get some breakfast.”
Jonas waited until the Captain left. “For the record, I trust the Captain.”
“I have no doubt he’s a loyal employee, but we’re dealing with sociopaths. Killing is as natural to them as it is to Bela and Lizzy. If you have the information they want, they’ll get it.”
“
They
being MAJESTIC-12?”
“MJ-12 oversees the black ops weapon systems and the military bases. The guys calling the shots are a cartel of power brokers, bankers, and egomaniacs who think the rest of us are here
to serve them. These are the same assholes that stole my Vostok generators and burned our factory to the ground. They act above the law, have no interest in improving the lives of the seven billion people on this planet, and don’t give a damn that their organizations are destroying the earth’s biosphere.
“And they kidnapped William and Brandy to force me to lead them back to Lake Vostok.”
“Why? What’s in Vostok?”
“I’d rather not say, but it’s important enough that MJ-12 designed a sub to travel beneath the ice sheet through a network of subglacial rivers into the lake. Jonas, it’s critically important I make it to Vostok before them.”
Jonas scanned his chart, using a slide rule to measure distances. “Vostok’s at least eight to nine hundred miles away. My Manta subs are equipped with Valkyries, but they don’t pack nearly enough juice to take you that far.”
“They don’t have to. MJ-12’s sub will lead me into the lake’s northern basin. Once I’m there, I’ll be able to overtake them and get to where I need to be before they do.”
“And how will making it back to Lake Vostok ahead of these guys save William and Brandy?”
“Again, I’d rather not say. The less you know the better.”
“It’ll take you twenty to thirty hours just to reach Vostok. Maybe more. Who’s your copilot?”
Angus must have been eavesdropping from the interior stairwell, for he came bursting in on cue. “I’m going with the lad.”
Jonas and I looked at one another with the same startled expression.
“Wha’s with the long faces? I can handle it.”
“Forget it,” Jonas said. “I have no interest in sponsoring a suicide mission. If this is really about saving your family, then let’s go to the authorities. I campaigned heavily for the President, and the Institute was a major donor to his election campaign. One
phone call and you’ll be speaking with the national security advisor himself. ”
“I appreciate the offer, Jonas, but these guys operate outside White House jurisdiction.”
“Tell Jonas everything, lad. Him not knowing isn’t going to matter tae these people. The moment they see the Manta, they’ll realize he arranged yer escape.”
I knew my father was right. “There’s an extraterrestrial vessel in Vostok. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen. Seven years ago I was allowed access.”
“Allowed? By what?”
“An entity… a higher life-form. It shared the secret of zero-point energy with me. I need to destroy it before MJ-12 finds it. Once that threat is removed, I’ll initiate a dead-man’s trigger—a threat to expose Colonel Vacendak’s entire operation if he doesn’t release William and Brandy within twenty-four hours.”
Jonas was about to respond when a man dressed from head to toe in ECW gear entered through an exterior door, blasting us with a gust of frigid air. As he stripped away his hood and mask, I could see it was James Mackreides, Jonas’s partner at the Tanaka Institute—his most trusted friend.
Mac acknowledged me with a nod, then handed Jonas his binoculars. “The
Tonga
just came into view; she’s headed toward Prydz Bay.”
Jonas moved quickly to the starboard windows and focused on the dark horizon, using the night-vision glasses. “That’s her, all right. Where’s the
Dubai-Land
?”
“Out in front. I caught sight of her bow wake.”
“If the trawler’s out front, then David may already be in the water.”
“I don’t think so,” Mac said. “They’re using the two boats to drive the creature to the ice shelf. David won’t launch until the
Tonga
drops her nets into the water.”
I looked at Jonas, confused. “David? As in your son?”
Jonas let Mac answer for him. “Remember that arse marine biologist, Michael Maren? Before he croaked, he discovered the remains of an ancient sea called the Panthalassa, buried beneath the Philippine Sea Plate. After he died, his fiancée sold maps of the subterranean sea to a guy named Fiesal bin Rashidi. Bin Rashidi happens to be a first cousin to the crown prince of Dubai.”
“The guy you sold two of the Meg pups to?”
Jonas nodded. “The crown prince is constructing a new theme park called Dubai-Land. The jewel of Dubai-Land will be an aquatic exhibit featuring a dozen of the largest viewing aquariums ever conceived.”
“And what goes inside the other tanks? Creatures from this Panthalassa Sea?”
“That was the plan. David impressed the crown prince and his cousin with his ability to pilot the Manta subs. Against my wishes, he joined other trained pilots who were recruited to entice these prehistoric sea creatures out of the Panthalassa and into their nets. David and another young submersible pilot—a young woman—were trapped in a bathyscape. I used Angel to escort me down to them, where she squared off with another alpha female, a 120-foot
Liopleurodon
.”
“My God.”
“I managed to free the bathyscape from its anchors and float it out of the Panthalassa. Angel and the
Liopleurodon
followed us up. The Meg had the creature’s neck in its jaws like a bulldog. Then the crown prince’s tanker passed by, sweeping everything off the sea floor and into its wake, including the bathyscape. The two kids escaped. Unfortunately, David’s companion didn’t make it.
Mac shook his head. “David’s first love. Bin Rashidi managed to tag the creature with a homing device before it swam off.”
“David’s twenty-one,” Jonas continued. “He went through a lot. Losing someone you love in any manner is hard. The kid left
California seven months ago. We found out that he and a friend rejoined bin Rashidi’s team assigned to capture the
Liopleurodon
.”
“That’s why you’re in Antarctica…it prefers the cold water.”
Jonas nodded, handing me the binoculars. I focused them on a set of lights growing larger on the eastern horizon, an oil tanker appearing out of the darkness.
“The tanker’s called the
Tonga
. She’s a Malaccamax VLCC, a very large crude oil carrier designed with a draft shallow enough to navigate the Antarctic coast. She’s as big as they come, over a thousand feet long and two hundred feet wide. The crown prince had her scrubbed and refitted to haul his sea monsters. Inside the cargo hold are saltwater pens three times the size of our hopper. David told me they had already captured a
Dunkleosteus
, a sixty-five-foot
Ichthyosaurus
, and a
Helicoprion
shark.”
“That’s incredible. And these species all survived the trip to Dubai?”