Dog Training The American Male (40 page)

“I’ll alert the Tooth Fairy.
Again, why am I– ”

Thomas hugged the seat in front
of him as the helicopter suddenly climbed to a higher altitude. Stealing a
glimpse out the cockpit window he saw the sheer white cliffs of the Amery Ice
Shelf rising a thousand feet above the frozen bay.

Moments later they were flying
over the top of the ice shelf – a flat white plateau of ice violated by an
immense jagged crevasse. The fissure was as wide as an eight lane highway, its
sunken crack filled with loose blocks of collapsed snow and blue ice
originating from below. The rift seemed to run endless to the southern horizon,
splitting open the ice desert like the San Andreas fault.

“It’s huge. How deep is the
crevasse?”

“It drops four hundred meters to
the sea – about a quarter of a mile down, but it will thicken four times that
amount as we move away from the bay. Our destination is up on the left.”

The chopper slowed to hover, the
pilot attempting to stabilize the aircraft for a landing. Below was a hastily assembled
base camp. Nilsson counted three four-wheel-drive vehicles, each possessing
skis for front tires and traction belts rigged to their rear axles. There were
also six skidoos – small transports that resembled motor bikes on skis.

Dominating the scene was a crane
that towered three stories over the eastern edge of the rift, its cable
attached to something hidden beneath a white tent large enough to conceal two
eighteen wheel trucks.

The pilot targeted his landing
area, adjusted his pitch and dropped the helicopter quickly, Nilsson’s teeth
rattling upon the strut’s impact with the ice.

Ming dressed, speaking quickly.
“You are here, Dr. Nilsson because we found something in the crevasse that is
beyond explanation. We need you to identify the species.”

Suddenly more curious than
irritated, Nilsson followed her out of the swaying cabin onto the ice sheet. By
now the sun was up, the wind maintaining temperatures of minus forty-three
degrees Fahrenheit. Steam rose from beneath the hoods of the running vehicles,
their built-in electric heaters preventing the engine blocks from cracking.

Ming led him to the tent. She
unzipped a door flap and he ducked inside.

The air was heavy with musk and
exhaust from the gasoline generators that powered the lights and hot-air
blowers. Perhaps a dozen men – Asians and Aussies and a few members of the
Scripps Institute were busy snapping photos. One researcher hacked at the
melting ice with a bog chisel, impatient to reach the coveted tissue samples.

Thomas Nilsson staggered toward
the object, wide-eyed as he stripped goggles and gear from his head. “My God.
You say you found this in the crevasse?”

“Yes. The water pressure pushed
it up from the bottom. One of the Tasmanian researchers spotted it three days
ago while en route to a GPS station.”

The object was not the remains of
one species but two – a prehistoric battle preserved in a block of ice. The
creature that had been doing the eating was serpent-like and immense; Nilsson
estimated its length at perhaps forty to sixty feet. The monster was lead-gray
in color where flaky, leather patches of skin were visible over its exposed
skeleton, its girth impossible to gauge accurately as it was coiled around the
crushed, squeezed-to-death unconsumed remains of the second monster – its meal.
The tail of this second creature extended out of the terminally open fangs of
the first – along with part of its left rear leg which was a skeletal mess, the
exposed bones having been damaged long ago by the relentlessly shifting ice.
The rest of the second animal’s body was concealed within the serpent’s belly,
the cartilage of which had expanded to the size of a Sperm Whale to accommodate
its undigested, life-choking supper – which had been the attacker’s demise.

“Can you identify either of these
two species, Dr. Nilsson?”

“No. But I know someone who can.”

1

“One for sorrow, two for joy,
three for a girl, four for a boy. Five for silver, six for gold, and seven for
a secret that must never be told.”–Scottish saying.

Drumnadrochit, Scottish
Highlands Scotland

The village of Drumnadrochit lies on the west bank of Loch
Ness, a sleepy Highland hamlet of nine hundred nestled between Urquhart Bay,
the Caledonian Forest, and two thousand years of history. I was born in
Drumnadrochit; in fact I died here and was resurrected –
twice
. I
suppose that last rebirth was more of a metaphor, but when your existence is
haunted by demons and you exorcize them by staring death in the face, that’s
what us Templars call a resurrection.

More
about that later.

Drumnadrochit
achieved its modern-day fame by proclaiming itself the Loch Ness Monster
capital of the world. Two hokey museums, a few smiling plesiosaur statues,
hourly tours by boat, and enough souvenir shops to shake a stick at was all it
took – that and Castle Urquhart.

No
doubt you’ve seen photos of Urquhart, its ruins perched high on a rocky
promontory like a medieval memory, the loch’s tea-colored swells roiling
against its steep cliff face – the surrounding mountains drifting in and out of
fog. Perhaps the photographer caught an unexpected wake or a mysterious ripple,
or better still something that resembled humps violating the surface. Such are
the sightings that once enticed a quarter of a million tourists to
Drumnadrochit each spring and summer – everyone hoping to catch a glimpse of
the legendary monster.

My name
is Zachary Wallace and I’m the marine biologist that resolved the legend. Using
science, I brought light to seventy years of darkness, separating a contrived
myth from the presence of a very real, very large amphibious fish that had
become a serious threat to locals and tourists alike. In the end, I not only
identified the predator, I also baited it, stared into its eyes, and vanquished
the miserable beast from its purgatory.

In
doing so, I turned a thriving cottage industry into a bunch of vacant bed and
breakfasts, rendered two local museums obsolete, and brought ruin to a
brand-new five-star resort. If you’re curious, it’s all there in my telltale biographical
thriller, aptly titled,
The Loch
.

This is
the story of what followed, the tale I leave by audio diary to my young son,
William in case I don’t survive this latest act of insanity. It’s a journey
that my wife, Brandy warned me not to take, and as usual, it began when I was
manipulated into accepting the mission by the most diabolical creature known to
inhabit the Great Glen . . . my father.

In his
youth, Angus Wallace was a brute of a man who possessed the piercing blue eyes
of the Gael, the wile of a Scot, the temperament of a Viking, and the drinking
habits of the Irish. Now in his seventies, he’s less temperamental, just as
wily, and abuses Viagra with his whiskey.

In his
younger days, it was yours truly that he abused with his drink.

Angus
met my mother, the former Andrea McKnown when she was on holiday. It didn’t
take long for the older dark-haired rogue to sweep the naive American beauty
off her feet.  I was born a year later – heir to the Wallace history. I
was small compared to my big-boned Highlander peers, leaving my father to right
his namesake’s “bad genes” the only way he knew how – by intimidating the runt
out of me.

I won’t
bore you with the details, other than to mention one pivotal event which
transpired on my ninth birthday. Angus had promised to take me fishing on Loch
Ness so I could try out my new invention – an acoustic fishing lure. Those
plans changed when I caught my inebriated sperm donor balls-deep in a local
waitress.

Allowing
a childhood’s worth of anger to get the best of me, I returned to the loch and
launched the boat myself. As fog and night rolled in, my reverberating device
attracted a school of fish . . . and with it a very real
creature that rarely left its bottom dwelling. Without warning my boat flipped
and I found myself treading in forty-two degree Fahrenheit water . . . and
then something closed around my lower body and dragged me with it into the
depths.

Terrifying
darkness surrounded me; the growling gurgles of the creature accompanying me
into the abyss. I saw a flash of white light . . . and then
the fire in my aching lungs was quenched by those tea-colored waters . . . and
I drowned.

When I
next opened my eyes it was to hellish pain, a veterinarian’s needle, and the
frightening face of my rescuer – my best-friend’s father, Alban MacDonald. At
the time, Alban served as water bailiff and it was lucky for me that the man I
disrespectfully called “the Crabbit” had happened upon the scene to rescue my
sorry, pulseless arse.

When my
mother learned what had happened (the Crabbit and vet claimed I had become
entangled in barbed wire that was wrapped around a tree, thus the bloody
markings), she saw to my recovery, divorced my no-good father, and moved us to
the good ole U.S. of A.

America.
Land of the free, home of the brave – only I was neither brave nor free. In an
attempt to escape the mental abuse associated with my near-drowning, my
traumatized brain had isolated and compartmentalized the incident. Buried
in denial, the unfiltered memory remained dormant, waiting for just the right
moment to return.

That
moment occurred fourteen years later . . . 

By the
age of twenty-five, I had already earned a Bachelors and Masters degree from
Princeton and a doctorate from Scripps, and my research into deep-sea acoustic
lures had been featured in several prominent journals. As a budding “Jacques
Cousteau” I had been asked to lead a
National Geographic
-sponsored
expedition to the Sargasso Sea in search of the elusive giant squid. To attract
the legendary colossus, our three-man submersible was armed with a lure I had
designed which emulated the sounds and vibrations of salmon.

We
descended into the blackness of the depths and waited . . . our
patience rewarded with what would be the first visual documentation of
Architeuthis
dux
– the Giant Squid. Unfortunately, once more the lure worked a bit too
well, summoning not only a curious squid but a swarm of unexpected and unknown
predatory fish. The squid panicked and tore loose our ballast tank, sending us
sinking into oblivion. The acrylic cockpit cracked, threatening to burst as we
waited desperately for a drone to secure a tow-line – the underwater robot
finally reaching us in four thousand feet of water.

Having
dodged a bullet we rose, thankful to be alive.

Unfortunately,
the crack in the bubble cockpit continued to spiderweb outward until it burst –
two hundred and thirty-three feet below the surface. The sea rushed in, killing
the pilot. Dragging the cameraman from the sinking sub, I kicked for the
surface . . . and never made it.

This
time when I came to I was in a hospital bed. My colleague, David Caldwell conveniently
blamed me for the pilot’s death and for the loss of the submersible. Fired from
my teaching position at Florida Atlantic University, I left the hospital intent
on finding a new job.

My
brain had other plans.

Unbeknownst
to me, long-dormant childhood memories had been released. Sleep became my enemy
– I’d wake up screaming from night terrors. Worse, I found myself deathly
afraid of the water, the anxiety threatening my future as a marine biologist.

In a
span of a few months I lost everything – my job, my career, my fiancι and
my quickly-fading sanity.

I began
drinking heavily – being inebriated kept me from entering the deepest stages of
sleep where the night terrors lay in wait. Days were devoted to recovering from
hangovers, nights reserved for binging on expensive booze and cheap women, both
of which I found in abundance in South Beach, my new haunt.

That’s
where Maxie Rael found me. My half-brother, who I never knew existed, had been
sent by my estranged father to bring me back to Scotland.

The
aforementioned five-star resort known today as
Nessie’s Retreat
had been
Angus Wallace’s idea, and my father rarely met an idea (or a woman, for that
matter) that he didn’t fall in love with. The Wallace clan had left him title to
prime real estate just south of Urquhart Bay and once the zoning laws had been
manipulated in his favor, Angus wasted no time in selling the water-front
property to John Cialino of Cialino Ventures – the two partners intent on
bringing luxury accommodations to the Scottish Highlands. Then one fateful
afternoon during the construction phase, my father and Johnny C. became engaged
in a heated argument on Urquhart bluff, and before you could say
Yer bum’s
oot the windae!
Angus struck his younger partner with a right cross,
sending Johnny’s arse (and the rest of him) into Loch Ness – never to be seen
alive again.

While I
was struggling to survive my own post-traumatic symptoms in Miami Beach, Angus
was locked away in a Highland prison cell awaiting his murder trial. Maxie had
been sent to bring me to Scotland so that my estranged father would have both
his sons by his side in the fight to stave off the gallows and prove his innocence.

Seventeen
years away from the old man and I fell for his lies – hook, line and sinker.

It was
all part of a well-orchestrated plan intended to save my father’s neck,
jumpstart his new venture, and force me to face the demons of my past – all by
placing my head in his noose.