They were strategically positioned behind a bend in the creek. Here, they couldn’t detect the two floating devices with their sonars, just as the devices couldn’t detect them. Their ampullae of Lorenzini had no such problems, however.
The predators weren’t focused on the unseen equipment at the moment. They couldn’t focus on anything other than the smell. The smell was from the ocean, farther south and very deep, but potent nevertheless. It was the smell of blood. Far away, there was a fantastic amount of it, so much that every single animal here was salivating.
THE SLAUGHTER of the great whites was complete. There was still enough blood to fill several Olympic-size swimming pools, but the meat was long since gone. The sharks, like the rays themselves, had been very hungry, and that hunger had been used against them. A school of more than eight hundred had been lured here, nearly four miles below the surface. Then they were ripped to pieces and devoured. Three dozen of the sharks had actually escaped, but then the smell of their very own blood had lured them back. Then they, too, had been eaten alive.
Thousands of predators rested on the ocean floor, unseen. Most were of the younger generation. Their experiences at the surface were only a memory now, as was their migration. They had no plans to move. They’d found the place they’d been searching for.
IN THE creek, one predator rose up and flapped toward the ocean. Then a second animal followed. Then a third and fourth. Then all except one. The smell of blood was too much to take. Against the leader, which didn’t budge, they moved en masse, their winged bodies flapping slowly in the darkened water, heading toward the bend and the two hanging devices beyond it.
But then they stopped. The leader had just made a sound. A strange sound not designed to be heard in water. They all had the larynxes to produce the sound, but only the leader had learned how to do so while airborne. In the air, the sound would have been described as a roar, a rather terrifying one, but here, submerged and far less menacing, it was closer to a waterlogged truck horn. The others had blinked anyway.
The leader rose, lifting its great body from the mud. The four dozen animals obediently turned away from the ocean and joined it anew.
Unseen in the blackened freshwaters, they flapped inland. Most were tentative at best. Their instincts were in a dramatic state of flux, and they were physically and physiologically uncomfortable with what they were doing.
The leader moved with purpose. Its instincts alone had been irreversibly altered. Even with the vast amounts of shark blood still in the depths, it no longer felt like it belonged there. The animal veered upward. It didn’t know where it was going exactly, but it knew one fact with absolutely certainty. The light was coming.
It would never see the blackened depths of the sea again.
CHAPTER 44
“FINISHED.” CRAIG Summers nodded to himself. The fourth and final creek was wired. Sonar in the water, radar on land.
Darryl Hollis doubted if it would turn up anything, however. This creek and the two others they’d just wired possessed relatively undesirable topographies: not straight but curved, narrower, and with considerably rougher waters. Redwood Inlet still felt right.
It was early afternoon. Sweating in dappled sunlight, broken up by an onshore redwood, Craig knelt, checking the monitors. With a tiny joystick, he scanned the creeks one by one, scrolling up the coast. “Nothing… Nothing anywhere…”
Behind him, Jason turned to Monique. “You really think this conduit theory plays out?”
“I think it’s our best shot.”
“What do we do now?”
“Wait.”
Jason paused. He hated waiting, despised it; it made his skin crawl. But then he glanced at Lisa. One look said it. This is what it means to trust someone. “OK. We wait.”
THE BLACK eyes held still. Through the rippling water, the great staff of wood seemed to be almost moving, but the brain behind the eyes understood this was an illusion. The eyes shifted, moving up along the shaft, branchless for several hundred feet until a crown formed, topped off by a massive evergreen treetop.
The eyes shifted, scanning the rest of the terrain. The predator couldn’t see the prey under the early-afternoon clouds, but it knew it was out there, scattered for miles.
The hulking forms next to it sensed nothing. They didn’t even know there were trees. In a place they’d never been before, they were still uncomfortable. The water still didn’t feel right on their thick skin.
The leader’s eyes shifted as a seagull appeared.
Hundreds of feet above Redwood Inlet, the bird glided lazily, looking right back at it, looking at all of them. They were a sight to behold, four dozen living hang gliders, perfectly still just beneath the creek’s flat surface.
Comfortable here as the leader was, it knew instinctively that this was not the place. Not for its brethren anyway. They wouldn’t join it. Not here.
It turned, swimming back toward the ocean, and the others eagerly followed.
They swam for nearly an hour, a squadron of colossal, slow-moving bats.
As they neared the sea, they paused. The devices floating just beyond the bend were still emitting their powerful signals.
They swam forward, and two triangular shapes came into view, bobbing at the surface. The rays moved below and past them, entered the ocean, then hugged the jagged coastline until, again, the powerful signals disappeared. Then they continued north. This was not the place.
“Son of a bitch. We just got a reading.”
The others dashed toward Craig.
Jason arrived first. “Where?”
Somewhat mystified, Summers pointed. “That first inlet.”
“Let’s get up there, Craig. Now.”
Summers marched to the controls. As the boat started moving, Jason turned to Monique. “Maybe your conduit theory isn’t so theoretical after all.”
Monique just eyed the blinking dot on the interactive map. “We’ll see.” Then they really started moving.
CHAPTER 45
A HEARTBEAT.
The rays had been swimming alongside the towering mountain range for hours. Looming right over the sea, the mountains were black with silver flecks, had no vegetation at all, and were several thousand feet high. They were also dotted with caves. The creatures had passed hundreds of such caves, most of them small and well above the waterline.
This cave was different. First was its size. It was massive, ten stories high, four lanes wide, and with a huge rock lip opening right into the ocean. But size alone wasn’t the reason they’d halted there. It was what this cave had inside it. A heartbeat.
The creatures were ten feet below the surface, perfectly still.
Except for the leader, they were still uncomfortable and knew instinctively that they didn’t need to be here. There was food in the depths.
Still, they had detected the heartbeat, and now their predatory brains were curious. What did it belong to? The frequency was totally foreign.
They didn’t move. Minutes passed. Then hours.
The others gradually lost interest, but the leader remained focused. Its eyes didn’t leave the cave. As time passed, it began to find the space almost instinctively inviting. The towering hole was enormous, big enough to hold its own body, and totally devoid of light, just like the depths.