Extinct (31 page)

A bull shark, its mouth streaming a long, red piece of visceral fining, broke the surface—and Stark pulled the trigger again.

The weapon clicked on an empty cartridge.

“Where’s some more ammunition?” Stark shouted toward the flying bridge.

“That’s all there is,” Carolyn said. “Just what was in the gun.”

Out to the sides of the boat, still more fins converged in the direction of the buoy.

CHAPTER 37

“There!” the curly-headed little boy said.

Alvin stared in the direction his stepson pointed. He saw the spray break over something and, driven by the wind, whip through the air. But only over something.
A long log?
“Give me those binoculars,” he said.

“I’m using them,” the boy said.

As the boy moved them back to his eyes, Alvin jerked them from his grasp.

“Alvin!”
his wife said.

There wasn’t a log where he had seen the spray. There wasn’t anything. He lowered the glasses and looked with his naked eyes to make certain he had focused on the correct spot, then he moved the glasses back to his eyes again.

Still nothing.

But there had been something.

He turned the wheel of the Gulfstar in that direction.

“Told you,” the boy said, and took his binoculars back.

The little blond continued to brush her hair. After each swipe of the brush the stiff Gulf wind whipping across the Gulfstar blew her hair in every direction. “I don’t want to see the whale,” she whined. “I want to go back to Jackson.”

“Alvin, it is getting a little rough,” his wife said.

“No, you said that we needed to see if there was a whale.”

He pushed the dual throttles farther forward. The Gulfstar began to pound harder into the long swells. The blond looked up at him. The binoculars bounced up and down against the boy’s face as he tried to control them. His wife braced herself with her hand on the side of the flying bridge.

He had them in his power now.

*   *   *

Admiral Vandiver, sitting in the front seat of the twenty-two-foot Boston Whaler as it raced south across the Sound in the direction of the barrier islands, looked over his shoulder at his nephew.

“Damn, Douglas, I remembered the name. Chalumna.”

“Sir?” Douglas said, and bounced in his seat as the Whaler smashed through a swell.

“The Chalumna River, Douglas. Where the coelacanth was caught off South Africa. Near the mouth of the Chalumna River. I knew it would come to me. I remember something else, too. You know where we are?”

Douglas waited.

“Almost on top of the very area where the Navy tested shark repellents during World War II. They had the whole country in which to find a testing spot and they chose the waters off the Chandeleur Islands. Does that tell you how many sharks there are around here?” Vandiver looked around out over the water and smiled.

“And does that tell you that something here might be especially attractive to sharks?” he added. “Maybe I was correct about the lower Mississippi Basin—drains right into here. Where there have been sharks since time began, maybe? The old home place. How about that?” He laughed aloud.

Bos’n Mate Third Class Beverly Cowart looked out of the corners of her eyes at the Admiral.

*   *   *

At the Gulfport Coast Guard Station, the seaman sat in the “watch-stander’s” chair close to the radio. The apprentice seaman sat in the chair across the desk from him with his feet up on top of the desk. “A
bigger
one?” the apprentice said. “Did that admiral seem a little flaky to you?”

“Petty Officer Johnson seems a little flaky to me.”

“Yeah, but that’s because your girlfriend dropped you for him.”

“I dropped her.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Mayday! Mayday!”

The seaman grabbed toward the radio.

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”

“Be quiet a moment,” the seaman mumbled, “so I can find out where you are.”

“Mayday!”

The call stopped.

“Vessel hailing distress, this is Coast Guard Station Gulfport. “What’s your—”

“The damn shark’s not dead! It’s out here! And it’s not twenty-five feet! It’s twice that damn long!”

The seaman was taken aback.

“Damn it, Coast Guard, are you there?”

“Your position, Captain?”

“The damn thing’s chasing me! At the Chandeleur Light! It’s almost made up the…”

The man suddenly stopped talking, but his thumb remained frozen on the mike button. The sound of his boat’s roaring engines could be heard.

Then a scream—a long, wailing, high-pitched scream of a little girl.

“Mommaaaa!”
she screamed again.… And then a crashing sound.

And then silence.

*   *   *

Two miles off the northern tip of the Chandeleur chain, Petty Officer Ken Dickinson, in command of one of the Gulfport Station’s forty-ones on routine patrol in the Gulf, reached for the radio at the bridge and lifted it to his mouth.
“Station Gulfport, this is forty-one, three sixty-four. We are two miles from Chandeleur Light and en route to the distress call.”

*   *   *

Admiral Vandiver looked across his shoulder at Douglas.

“The second one!”
With a chance to see a living megalodon, he ordered Bos’n’s Mate Beverly Cowart to break off her route toward the
Intuitive
and turn southwest toward the Chandeleur Light. He knew all that he could do if he continued on to the
Intuitive
was accompany it and its unseen tow back to the Coast Guard Station. There would be time for meeting it there later and having the carcass transported to some kind of refrigeration area where it could be preserved until scientists could arrive to study it. Meanwhile, he had the chance to glimpse a
living megalodon
and he wasn’t going to pass that up. As the Whaler turned southeast, he reached for its VHF radio mike and spoke the forty-one’s call letters:

“Coast Guard forty-one, three sixty-four, this is Admiral Vandiver, U.S. Navy. Forty-one, three sixty-four, do you copy me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Report immediately to me if you have any sighting of the shark. I say report immediately if you have any sighting. I’m preceding toward the Chandeleurs.”

Vandiver looked at Cowart. “How far?”

“Eight miles, sir.”

Vandiver nodded. As he looked out over the water ahead of them, a smile crossed his face.

*   *   *

Fifteen miles away from the Chandeleurs, Alan, standing beside Stark in the fishing cockpit of the
Intuitive,
stared back at the trailing buoy riding above the most exciting marine discovery in history. He knew if he left the megalodon’s carcass to float motionless in any one spot there would be even more opportunity for the sharks to strip it to not much more than a skeleton.

But from the excitement he had heard in Vandiver’s voice when he radioed the forty-one that he was headed toward the Chandeleur Light, there was now no doubt in Alan’s mind that the shark reported in the distress call was another megalodon, no less scared of man and no less the same kind of hunter that had claimed five lives that he knew of in four days, and had attacked boats four separate times. With the radio that had made the distress call suddenly going dead, he had no idea if the man making the call had been at the wheel of a small boat that had no chance or a large boat that did. And he didn’t know what caused the crashing sound, though he feared he could guess. There had been the child’s scream. There might be survivors. The Coast Guard forty-one might find them first—and then they might not. He had no choice. He cut the rope trailing the
Intuitive
and watched the buoy as, anchored by the weight underneath it, it immediately stopped its forward motion and nearly completely submerged on a lifting swell as fins slashed toward it from all directions.

Beside him, Paul stared with his jaw tight. On the flying bridge, Carolyn pushed the throttles all the way forward, and the
Intuitive
rode rapidly up one swell and smashed through the next one. Alan gave a last look at the buoy and then looked in the direction of the Chandeleur Light.

CHAPTER 38

The Coast Guard forty-one slowed as it rounded the tip of the shoal stretching out underneath the water north of the Chandeleur Light. Petty Officer Ken Dickinson, standing at the bridge, lowered a pair of binoculars and stared toward the Gulfstar, hard aground, with its bow angled upward only yards from the rough beach. Fifty feet out from the Gulfstar, a small white dinghy bobbed on the long swells running behind the island.

Minutes later, the bow of the forty-one neared the dinghy, and the seaman at the wheel pulled back on the throttles. Dickinson stared at the cracks running up the side of the Gulfstar’s hull, then looked across the island again. A moment later he spoke through the forty-one’s loud hailer.

“Attention on the Gulfstar, this is the U.S. Coast Guard.”

“There,” the seaman said, nodding toward the figures coming out of the trees at the center of the island. There were four of them, two adults, a curly-haired little boy, and a little girl with blond hair. They came slowly toward the shore, but stopped well short of the water.

“Come and get us!” the man yelled, keeping his gaze out over his side across the water as he did.

The two seamen at the forty-one’s bow had secured the dinghy alongside. “I’ll go after them in this,” one of them called toward the bridge.

Dickinson nodded.

*   *   *

As the dinghy neared shore, the adults and children made no move to come closer to the water.

The seaman beached the dinghy and stepped over its bow.

Alvin shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything so big,” he said.

“I’m not getting back in that,” the little girl said, staring at the dinghy.

“You’re going to have to,” her mother said.

“No.”

“Unless you want to stay here,” Alvin said.

The girl started sobbing. Her brother tightened his jaw and started toward the dinghy.

“Is that steel?” Alvin asked, looking toward the hull of the forty-one.

Before the Seaman responded, Alvin added, “The shark would have come right through the fiberglass.” He looked toward the hull of the Gulfstar.

“Sir, how long did you say the shark was?”

“Fifty feet at least,” Alvin said.

“Sir, the world record for a white is only a little over thirty-two feet.”

“Then you can get your name in the record books if you catch the one that was chasing me—good luck.”

“Sir, I’m only trying to get facts for my report. It would be real unusual for there really to be a shark that—”

“Come on,” the little boy snapped. “Let’s go. It
was
fifty feet.” He was standing close to the bow of the dinghy, but not looking back at them as he spoke, instead keeping his gaze out across the water.

*   *   *

On the bridge of the forty-one, Petty Officer Dickinson was answering Vandiver’s new call. “No, sir, they seem to be okay—there’s four of them, two adults and two children. They were on the island. Seaman Brown is bringing them aboard using their dinghy. It was adrift—I don’t know yet if there was anybody else in it.”

“We’re in sight of the island,”
Vandiver said. “
I want to speak to whoever made that Mayday call as soon as you get them aboard.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And get in touch with your station and tell them I want to know as soon as that fishing boat gets there with the carcass of the white.”

*   *   *

Vandiver replaced the radio mike and, gripping the side of the Whaler for balance as it bounced through the growing waves, stared at the forty-one stopped a hundred feet or so to the rear of the Gulfstar. He could barely glimpse the dinghy, lower in the water, making its way toward the forty-one.

He was less than a quarter mile from the forty-one when Dickinson’s voice came back over the radio.

“Forty-one, three sixty-four to Admiral Vandiver.”

“Go ahead.”

“Sir, the four people were all that were on the Gulfstar. They say there’s a speedboat beached on the other side of the island. They had seen it earlier when it left its marina. There were two young adults in it at the time. When Mr. Cunningham … that’s the name of the captain of the Gulfstar, sir.… He says that when he was here earlier he saw the boat and thought the young adults were in the trees. But he looked while he was waiting on us, and he says they’re not there. Seamen Brown and Franks have gone back in the dinghy to investigate. Here’s Mr. Cunningham—Alvin Cunningham, sir.”

“Hello,”
the voice said.

“Mr. Cunningham, this is Admiral Vandiver. You said you saw a shark twice as long as—”

“Fifty damn feet, at least. Yes, sir, I did. And if you see it you’ll wish you weren’t in that little boat you’re in.”

“How can you be certain of the size, Mr. Cunningham?”

“Because the damn thing was right behind us. And if it is all right with you, I wish you would tell these people to get us on back to Biloxi while we’re talking.”

“Certainly. But they’re going to have to wait on the two seamen who went back to the island. Now, where did you see the shark?”

“Behind me.”

“In which direction?”

“Hell, Admiral, behind … Oh, you mean … About a half mile west of here. I thought it was a damn whale at first. Then it disappeared and I thought I had just been imagining things. I turned my boat around … happened to glance back over my shoulder a few minutes later and it was coming after me. I swear the fin was ten feet tall. If I hadn’t glanced back when I did … We barely made it anyway. It was almost on us and the water shallowing stopped it. If it hadn’t…”

Vandiver looked at his nephew; “This isn’t a flake talking, Douglas. He’s speaking as logically as can be. He saw a megalodon that big—or close to it.”

At the word “megalodon,” Cowart’s brow wrinkled.