MEG: Nightstalkers (37 page)

Seconds later, the predator’s ivory hide emerged from the blackness twenty feet beneath the surface. As she swam past the jetty on her side, her mouth opened to swallow the fish.

Tania waited until she passed, then slipped feetfirst into the sea.

Tim positioned the reach pole underwater, his heart pounding in his chest. Glancing at the laptop’s monitor, he saw a flicker of white and aimed the camera for it, managing to film the Megalodon as it turned back toward the pier, moving slowly toward Tania.

Tim’s legs shook as he stood by the edge of the jetty, filming the forty-six-foot creature as it passed beneath his friend, towing her in its wake.

“Woo-hoo!” Tania waved as she was carried away from the dock and out to sea. Shoving her snorkel in her mouth, she sucked in a deep breath of air and surface dived.

Tim scanned the dark waters, his pulse quickening. “Tania?” He aimed the reach pole, but the shark had moved out of range.

He glanced at his wristwatch, the second hand sweeping past the six.

Fifty seconds later an ivory dorsal fin surfaced thirty yards away, Tania holding on with her gloved right hand, waving at him with the left.

“Holy shit! Holy fucking shit! You go, girl!” He reached for his handheld camera but by the time he had focused, the dorsal fin had slipped back beneath the waves.

Tim grabbed his fins, hastily working them over his rubber boots.
Stay beneath the pier behind the pilings. Get a few passing shots, then get out
. Positioning his mask and snorkel, he inhaled a quick breath, hugged his underwater video camera to his chest and stepped off the pier.

Tim sank six feet. Before he could surface, he kicked his way beneath the jetty, slipping behind a pair of wooden pilings, each support as thick as a telephone pole.

As luck would have it, the tide was out, providing him with two feet of air space between the waterline and the underside of the jetty. Wrapping his legs around an algae-covered piling, he was able to remain underwater while breathing through the snorkel, safe and secure.

Aiming the camera out to sea, he searched through the viewfinder for the albino shark.
Come on, come on, where are you—there!
Catching sight of the Meg’s tail he zoomed in, locating a pair of human legs dangling along the shark’s incredibly massive left flank. He stayed with the shot until they moved out of range.

Amazing … fucking amazing. I’m underwater, filming a sixty-year-old woman being towed by a Megalodon.
Using his right shoulder and the piling like a tripod, he repositioned the camera, readying himself for the shark’s next pass.

With his mask pressed against the viewfinder, Tim Rehm never saw the albino head rising from the depths directly beneath him.

Primal instinct caused him to suddenly jerk back as Bela gnawed on the piling. For a moment she remained stuck, until she shook her head, breaking off two of her razor-sharp lower teeth which remained embedded in the wood.

Tim backed away, his heart feeling as if the organ was about to burst from his chest.

Bela refused to be denied. Jamming her snout in the gap between two sets of pilings, she attempted to squeeze her way beneath the pier. When that didn’t work, she moved off.

Tim watched the dark-backed Megalodon as it swam around the backside of the jetty. With a burst of speed it rammed the bottom of the pier, the sound of splintering wood sending the cameraman kicking and paddling his way through the corridor of pilings as he attempted to reach the shallows.

A white glow filled his peripheral vision. Turning to his left he saw Lizzy and Tania. The Megalodon was swimming parallel to the jetty. His friend was waving—from inside the creature’s mouth!

Tim gagged as he swallowed a mouthful of seawater. Tania was alive, her arms flailing wildly as Lizzy’s teeth kept her pinned within its jaws.

He jumped at a resounding
thud—
followed by an ear-splitting
crack
as Bela broke through two rotting pilings, collapsing a twenty foot section of pier above his head.

Dropping his camera, the strength training coach torpedoed through the water, stroking and kicking through the ten-foot-wide channel formed by the jetty’s wooden columns—never realizing the gaps between pairs of pilings were progressively widening as he drew closer to shore.

Thirty yards from the beach … don’t stop!

The blotch of white bloomed in his right eye’s peripheral vision, the scorching pain shooting through every nerve cell in his body as Bela’s hideous mouth shot sideways beneath the pier, plucking him from his escape route.

For a fleeting moment lying somewhere between consciousness and death, Tim Rehm transformed into the twenty-foot female great white, soaring through the chilly waters off the Farallon Islands.

Bela shook her mammoth head, chasing his soul into another existence.

Lizzy waited for her sibling to join her at the end of the pier. Their prey had stopped thrashing, but the kills were fresh and the pups were still too young to be particular.

Descending into the depths, the albino predator and her pigmented twin followed the Georgia Strait to the deep waters off Hornby Island, where their surviving young waited to be fed.

28

Lake Ellsworth, 2.1 Miles Beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet
West Antarctica

Jonas Taylor shut down the two
Valkyrie
lasers and brought the Manta to the surface. Zachary quickly switched the sonar from active to passive.

Enveloped in a primordial darkness, the two men simply stared out the cockpit in silence, the sub bobbing gently in waters made olive-green by the night glass.

And then, as they watched, random flashes ignited like puffs of lightning concealed in a cloud bank—each bioluminescent burst from the frozen heavens beckoning a response from the lake’s surface until the silhouette of the lost world revealed itself to its mesmerized guests.

The lake was six miles long—an inverted S-shaped topographic hollow with two small landmasses that rose several hundred feet. The ice sheet which pressed against Lake Ellsworth was convex, sagging over the middle of the waterway, where it came to within twenty feet of meeting its surface waters. From here the ceiling gradually tapered back until it reached four to five stories along the periphery, where it buckled against the eastern wall.

An underwater light flashed close by. Curious, Jonas descended the sub, expecting to find a bioluminescent fish. Instead he discovered a pair of plant-like objects, each the size and shape of a surfboard, the anterior surface of which held several rows of barbed suction pads. These objects were not free-floating, they were attached to the underside of the ice sheet by long, vine-like appendages that dangled to the surface in pairs.

As Jonas and Zachary watched, a burst of pink light ignited thirty feet overhead. Like a slow-moving nerve impulse, the bioluminescent flash raced down the limbs to cause the two objects with the sucker pads to illuminate underwater.

“Is it a plant or an animal?” Jonas asked, circling the objects at what he hoped was a safe distance.

“I have no idea, but I need tae observe what’s happening along the underside of the ice sheet. Is there any way ye can direct one of the sub’s exterior lights directly overhead?”

“No, but I have something else that should do the job.” Unbuckling his harness, Jonas turned around in his seat and rummaged through a storage compartment, removing an aluminum lithium-powered flashlight. Ascending to the surface, he pressed the flashlight’s lens to the inside of the cockpit glass and turned on the beam, aiming it at the section of ice sheet located three stories above the sub.

Instead of illuminating the bottom of the ice sheet, the flashlight’s beam revealed a dense root system, which fanned out from the center of a hole. There were dozens of these strange orifices—perhaps hundreds or even thousands of them—poised over the lake’s surface waters, each fifteen to twenty feet in diameter. Crawling in and out of these dark holes and across the root system were thousands of centipedes—each insect three to five feet long.

Dangling from the perimeter of each hole were the two vine-like limbs, which reached beneath the surface waters to illuminate their two plant-like pods lurking underwater.

“Zach, I thought you told me Lake Ellsworth was squeezed beneath a mile-thick ice sheet? This looks more like the underside of a bizarre rainforest. Those holes remind me of the inside of a rotting trunk.”

“I agree it’s bizarre, and yet I’m not convinced this thing isn’t a living, breathing animal. Jonas, can I borrow that light a moment?”

Zach aimed the beam at the center of the hole directly above their heads as a strobe of blue-green light ignited from within the orifice, traveling outward through the roots and down the dangling pair of limbs to the sucker pads.

“My God … is it possible?”

“Is what possible?” Jonas looked at his friend, who was using the light to count the number of thick roots originating from the perimeter of each hole.

“Jonas, I dinnae think we’re looking at the underside of a tree. Each hole births eight long roots and these two strange appendages that dangle these big sucker pads underwater like bait. Doesn’t that sound vaguely familiar tae ye? It does tae me. I’ve encountered a modern-day relative of this species before … in the Sargasso Sea.”

“Eight arms, two tentacles … you think those things are cephalopods?”

“That would be my guess. Which means each hole is actually a mouth and the squid’s head is burrowed in the ice sheet. They’re using bioluminescent signals tae lure prey close enough for their two sucker pads tae grab hold so the beastie can feed itself.”

“How can they survive out of the water?”

“I don’t ken. I suppose it’s possible they evolved into ice creatures as a means of survival, especially if
Livyatan melvillei
is the dominant species in this lake. Keep us at a safe distance and let’s see what happens.”

Jonas circled the sucker pads as he gradually submerged the Manta. In the distance he could see faint sparks of bioluminescent signals, a sight that reminded him of his submersible descents into the bathypelagic zone. Living in perpetual darkness, eighty percent of the sea creatures inhabiting the deep possessed light-emitting cells called photophores that were used to attract mates as well as prey.

At least one of the species in Lake Ellsworth shared these same traits.

“Zach, since you obviously seem to have more subglacial lake memories than me; how do you suggest we go about finding our way out of here to get back to the
McFarland
?”

“I’m working on a few options.”

“Anything you care to share while we’re sitting here, waiting for God knows what to show up and get eaten?”

“The idea for our escape comes from the mission tae Lake Vostok.”

“You mean the one that never happened?”

Zach grinned. “Yeah, that one. To access Vostok our engineers designed a three-man torpedo-shaped submersible equipped with twin
Valkyrie
lasers. We literally melted our way through two and a half miles of ice tae reach the lake. Getting back tae the surface relied on a different strategy that jist might work for us.”

Zach pointed to the Manta’s exterior pressure gauge, which read 3,281 psi. “The weight of the ice sheet causes tremendous pressure within these subglacial lakes—something the Russians discovered the hard way when they drilled their first borehole intae Vostok and unleashed a geyser. Our exit strategy took advantage of the lake’s internal pressure. We were instructed tae launch vertically out of the lake with the lasers powered on. Upon contact with the ice sheet our melt hole would unleash the lake’s internal pressure and literally propel us up tae the surface, riding a geyser of water.”

“Did it work?”

“We never got tae try it. Our targeted extraction point had the ice sheet within six feet of the lake’s surface; our actual immersion spot was way off course in an area where the ice sheet was more than a hundred feet overhead. But the theory still holds true.”

“Thanks for sharing; now how are we going to leap thirty feet into the air in this weighed-down sub, when we can barely outrun a prehistoric sperm whale?”

Zach pointed to his sonar monitor where a pair of blips had appeared. “Watch and learn.”

Jonas stared at the objects which were rising slowly from the depths beneath them. “What are they?”

“I don’t ken. Every subglacial lake has its own unique ecosystem. Twenty million years ago, Lake Ellsworth was covered by ocean. Fifteen million years ago an ice age deposited a dome of packed snow over the entire continent. The Ronne Ice Shelf cut off access tae the Weddell Sea, sealing off the lake while trapping whales and other sea creatures within its landlocked boundary. Food chains are only as stable as their microbial foundations. Lake Ellsworth receives deposits of organic materials from West Antarctica’s subglacial streams. Geothermal vents replaced photosynthesis with chemosynthesis, preserving the waterway’s microbial life forms. We ken
Livyatan melvillei
survived; whit else is on the food chain is jist a guess.”

What had been two blips on sonar now numbered more than a dozen. From the circuitous manner in which the life forms rose, Jonas could tell they were not predatory by nature. This was confirmed moments later when the first creatures rose majestically into view, their massive wings flapping gently as they rode an upwelling of current to the surface.

Within minutes the sub was surrounded by a ballet of giant manta rays, the graceful creatures dwarfing the sub, their focus on the bioluminescent mating calls that were being falsely generated by the strange creatures inhabiting the ice sheet.

As Jonas watched, one of the mantas brushed its belly against a flashing sucker pad—foreplay to a primordial mating ritual.

With a heart-stopping reflex, both sucker pads suddenly animated to grab the ray by its wings, the poison-tipped barbed suckers piercing the manta’s flesh. The tentacles flexed, lifting the stunned animal out of the water and high above the lake’s surface, its wings flapping wildly as it attempted to free itself from its captor’s grip.