On a gorgeous sunny day in August, Craig was stretched out on a cheapo plastic lawn chair nibbling at a turkey, lettuce, and mayo when Darryl walked up. “Long day, Craig?”
“Oh yeah, I’m exhausted.”
Darryl stared at his portly friend, noticing that his back and forearms were a painful-looking medium-rare shade of pink. “What the hell are you exhausted from?”
Craig wiped some mayo on his trunks. “Thinking about the big-picture issues.”
Darryl chuckled. “Big-picture issues.”
“Seriously.” The others came around, and Craig looked at all of them. “Here’s a big-picture issue for all of us. Why kelp?”
Darryl shook his head, annoyed. “What are you talking about, Burn Victim?”
“It’s a simple question. Why kelp? Whatever we’re trailing, why the hell are they leaving kelp behind?”
Darryl shrugged. So did Monique and Lisa.
Craig turned. “Jason, you suggested tracking the stuff in the first place. Did you have a reason?”
“I still do. I think they’re teething on it.”
“Teething on it?”
“Newborn mantas, especially in the Bahamas and Caribbean, teethe on baby starfish. As we all know, there aren’t many starfish in the northern hemisphere of the Pacific Ocean, but there’s kelp everywhere. I think these rays are teething on it.”
“Hmm.” Impressed, Craig sat up fully on the lawn chair.
“Interesting idea, Jason.” Lisa was impressed too. Like Craig, she’d been dubious about the whole new-species idea from the get-go, but the trail they’d been following was no mirage, and this was a very logical explanation.
Craig shrugged. “It still doesn’t mean it’s a new species.”
Jason turned on a dime. “Want to bet?”
Everyone paused. Were they hearing things? Jason Aldridge never bet on anything.
Summers hesitated nervously. “Ah, I don’t want to take your money, Jason.”
Jason removed three bills, smacked them onto Craig’s chair, and extended his hand. “Fifty bucks says that kelp trail goes north for at least another week.”
Craig just eyed the hand. He clearly didn’t want to, but… “Done.”
They shook, and one week later, Summers handed over two stained twenties and a ten he had to borrow from Darryl. Jason wouldn’t accept a check. They’d found a sporadic trail of kelp strands floating at or near the surface and followed it for seven solid days. As they did, the markings on the strands began to change, unmistakably so. The kelp was becoming shredded, torn, and, increasingly, filled with visible indentations. There was no doubt that something was chewing on it.
They continued moving north.
It was a cloudy mid-August day, and they were thirty-five miles north of Long Beach, the sky filled with big white clouds that blocked out the sun. Darryl narrowed his eyes behind a pair of binoculars. Was that another strand? His eyelids felt heavy, and he couldn’t say for sure. He pointed.
“Craig, go that way, please.”
Summers motored the boat due east, toward the shoreline. They’d been heading northeast for more than a week. While they’d started twenty miles from the coast, they were now just five. From the boat, Darryl reached down and plucked out another dripping strand. He began studying it when from behind him Phil Martino snapped a picture. Darryl felt like cracking him. As busy as he and Monique had been, Phil’s picture-taking had been incessant. How many photos could he take of frickin’ seaweed? Darryl’s eyes were so tired he couldn’t tell if there were markings on the strand or not. He held out the strand to Monique: “May I?” Jason grabbed it first.
Monique shook her head, but Lisa was oblivious, just staring out at the empty ocean. There were much more important things to worry about now than kelp. Real problems were mounting in the Pacific Ocean. Just as in tropical Mexico, the plankton levels here were alarmingly low, particularly around the thermoclines, where they were nearly 75 percent below normal.
Lisa was beginning to suspect that something “of scale” might be going on. She had no idea what, and neither did Craig Summers. Spurred on by Lisa’s constant needling, Craig had increased the frequency of his GDV-4 testing, but just as in Mexico, he found no trace of the virus. What was going on with the ocean’s plankton levels? Summers had no idea either.
As their trek continued, Jason had many other unanswered questions. Why was this alleged new species migrating north? Why suddenly closer to shore? And what were they eating? If the newborns had normal growth rates, Jason figured they could easily grow to weigh a hundred and fifty pounds or more. Perhaps they were great scavengers, adept at finding what little plankton was out there. The Expedition continued following the trail.
AS AUGUST continued, they moved closer still to the shoreline and right up the Southern California coast, past Los Angeles, Oxnard, Ventura, and into the waters just north of Santa Barbara. Along the way, Darryl and Monique battled through many roadblocks, primarily strong surface currents. Currents could easily destroy a trail and send individual strands in every direction. Staying close was the only guarantee of not losing it, and that was exactly what the couple had done. With Jason second-guessing their every move, they worked hard for a solid month, all day every day, searching relentlessly. Darryl didn’t shoot at a single skeet, and Monique didn’t glance at a book or magazine.
Lisa found Monique’s work ethic incredible. Prior to this, she’d never seen Monique do anything other than stroll around in flip-flops, drink Diet Cokes, and read. While Lisa was well aware of Monique’s military background, she’d just never pictured her getting her beautiful fingernails dirty. But every day Monique Hollis came up winded in her wet suit. She’d worked tirelessly, and without complaint. Like Lisa, she was tougher than she looked.
Into September, the Expedition proceeded north, to Pismo Beach, San Luis Obispo, and San Simeon. Jason continued to be relentless with his note taking, even starting an outline for a formal report. Though he remained frustrated with how little the others cared about proper documentation. Darryl and Craig literally hadn’t written down their findings on anything, and Monique and Lisa’s notes, usually in little colored spiral notebooks, were often illegible.
On another gorgeous September day, mid-seventies without a cloud in the sky, Phil headed to the bow of the boat with his cell phone open. “It’s Mr. Ackerman, Jason.”
“Hi, Harry.” The conversation was brief. Ackerman wanted to know if it was a new species or not. “We still can’t say definitively,” Jason said. “All we can do is keep following the trail.”
They did. But as they continued north they had no idea that someone else’s trail was about to come to a violent end.
CHAPTER 13
SETH GETTY was forty-five, about thirty pounds overweight, and recently divorced. He lived in a pathetic one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the massive Los Padres National Forest, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and spent his personal time watching awful sitcoms on television. Heading out to sea, he was by himself. His partner had called in sick today, so he’d decided to do the job alone. Why not? The sun was out, the water was fairly flat, and it would literally be a ten-minute task. Getty’s occupation was fiber-optic maintenance and repair. Normally, this required inspecting his phone company’s central hub, a massive warehouse filled with routers and telcom switches, but twice a month Getty and his partner had to spot-check their portion of the company’s deep-sea fiber-optic cable. Invariably the cable was functioning properly, but the job was to make certain.