“Stewie told me this Colonel Vacendak is forcing ye tae lead him intae Lake Vostok. Stewie says most of these MJ-SECOR lads are secretly rootin’ fer ye tae succeed in bringing these free energy devices out intae public. The problem is Big Oil and the sociopaths in SECOR like this Colonel Vacendak, who enjoy killing. It’s the crazies tha’ keeps the others in line. They’ll kill my grandson and yer ex without batting an eye.”
I shifted uncomfortably, my skin still burning despite the I.V. drip. “Angus, can Jonas get me into Lake Vostok?”
“Aye. He has subs on board, and they’re equipped with those lasers tha’ melt ice. We rescued ye in one of ’em.”
“We? That was you in the dry suit?”
“Yes, Gertrude. And did ye have tae make such a fuss?”
“You try submerging in subfreezing water for that long and see how you handle it!”
“Stop yer whinin’. I teld ye in my note, we had tae drop yer core temperature tae disable the tracking device Stewie shot intae yer vein. The Colonel’s divers stopped searchin’ for yer body an hour ago. They gotta think yer dead. Tha’s whit we want.”
Angus stood to leave. “Finish yer I.V., then get dressed and find yer way to the pilothouse. Jonas says he needs tae train ye before he’ll give ye one of his subs.”
I had met Jonas Taylor and his friend James Mackreides eight years ago, shortly after my book, The Loch, was published. The Tanaka Oceanographic Institute had offered to host a public signing event at their California facility on the coast of Monterey. Constructed twenty-five years earlier by the late marine biologist Masao Tanaka, the Institute featured a man-made lagoon with an ocean-access canal that intersected one of the largest annual whale migrations on the planet. Designed as a field laboratory, the waterway was originally intended to be a place where pregnant gray whales returning from their feeding grounds in the Bering Sea could birth their calves. Masao was so convinced, his facility would bridge the gap between science and entertainment that he mortgaged his entire family fortune on the endeavor.
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.