Gargantua (15 page)

Then it dove back underwater.

This might not have been much of a problem—beyond the fact that it meant no more pictures—but for one feature of the creature’s anatomy. Pierce had been wondering what the rest of the thing looked like, how many legs it had, that sort of thing.

He and the others found out the hard way that it had a tail, for when it dove back underwater, the tail flipped up above the surface, impeded only by the small motorboat.

Pierce didn’t get a good enough look at the tail to see how large it was, but it certainly was big enough that the motorboat wasn’t much of an impediment.

As Pierce went flying through the air and crashing into the Pacific Ocean, his first thought was,
Damn, the salt water’ll ruin the film!

His last thought before blacking out was,
Sorry, Ma, I should’ve been a plumber.

EIGHT

T
he sun shone brightly through a cloudless sky, the fish obediently swam into the nets to be caught, and the humidity had fallen as low as one could expect for midsummer on a tropical island. It was the sort of day that inspired poets to write lines like, “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.”

Derek Lawson barely noticed it.

He thought about a nine-foot-long lizard. He thought about an arsehead of an American scientist and his arsehead son, and an Australian gob with too much time on his hands, and an American journalist with what the yanks called an attitude problem.

He thought about Fiji, and his ex-wife, and his clapped-out trawler.

He thought about a nine-foot-long lizard and how it could make a lot of the other things he thought about go away. And he thought about the phone call he’d made that morning.

“Hey, Derek, you alive in there?”

Naru’s voice brought Derek back to earth. “Sorry, just thinkin’. And dreamin’ ”

“Well,
now
I’m scared.”

“Ha ha ha. Look, I had big dreams when I was your age, mates. Very big dreams. Funny how a little back alimony and some unpaid income taxes can stuff up the best-laid plans, but—”

Kikko rolled his eyes. “Not the ‘best-laid plans’ speech
again.”

Naru laughed and covered his ears. “Not again, not again!”

Normally, Derek wouldn’t mind the japing, but today he was in an especially foul mood. “My life’s a joke, is it?”

“C’mon Derek,” Kikko said, “enough of this. You got a great life. You live in the tropics, you own your own boat—”

“A boat that’s almost ready to be scuttled,” he said, just as the wheel pulled to the left, as it often did when he let his attention drift.

Naru picked up the ball. “We make nice money from the tourists, we’re saving up for Fiji—”

“It’s a pipe dream, mates,” Derek interrupted. He was sick of pining for something he couldn’t have. “Let’s be honest, hey? Our little restaurant on the beach, lying in the sun all day, drinkin’ beer with the tourists at night, settlin’ down with sweet little native nymphs—we’ll never have the money for it. Not in this lifetime.” Derek sighed.
Bloody wonderful, now I’m depressing myself.

He thought about a nine-foot lizard.

The hell with Ellway. That sucker’s mine, and nothing’s gonna stop me from makin’ my mark with that monster.

“But what the hell,” he said with a smile, “right?”

“Right, boss,” Kikko said, slapping him on the back.

“Besides, I may have a line on something that’ll give us a little something extra in the cash department. Remember that Indonesian bloke we took deep-sea fishing? The one who was in the market for exotic species?” Kikko and Naru both nodded. “Well, I rang him up. Told him about our nine-footer. He’s interested.” Derek smiled.
“Very
interested. If he likes what he sees, he’ll buy it from us for a bloody fortune.”

Kikko and Naru exchanged glances. Naru said, “But it isn’t ours to sell.”

Derek rolled his eyes. “Now you’re sounding like that American bastard. It’s ours as much as anybody’s. All we’ve gotta do is haul it over to Kalor.”

Again, Kikko and Naru looked at each other. Then Kikko asked, “How much is ‘a bloody fortune’?”

Derek smiled, but before he could answer, something hit the boat with a light
thump.

Derek looked around, but saw nothing untoward.
So what the hell was that?

Another
thump.

This time he traced the noise to the port side. He ran over to the railing, Kikko and Naru on his heels.

Peering over the side, he saw a small motorboat, capsized, bumping up against the trawler. As he was about to make a disparaging comment about tourists leaving their crap lying about, he noticed a person clutching onto the side of the boat: a balding white bloke, wearing some kind of rain slicker, and with a camera around his neck.

“C’mon,” Derek said, “let’s haul him up out of there.”

Jack had come to the clinic searching for Brandon, only to find the place abuzz with activity. Down the street, Derek and his two hangers-on were heading toward the police station with Chief Movita.
Great, what did that idiot do this time?

As he stepped up onto the verandah, Alyson came out. “Hi,” she said, momentarily startled by his presence.

“Hi yourself. I came looking for Brandon, but, uh—Well, what’s going on?”

“Derek found some guy clutching to a capsized motorboat that washed up against his trawler. He was pretty badly injured, so he brought him here.”

Jack tried and failed to feel guilty about his disappointment that Derek hadn’t actually done anything wrong.

Alyson continued, “His wallet identifies him as Pierce Askegren. He’s got a batch of press credentials, and he had a fairly sophisticated camera around his neck.”

“How badly is he hurt?”

“Not too awful—a few bumps and bruises, and some nasty scratches. Familiar-looking scratches.”

Jack saw where this was going. “Same as on Jimmy and Dak?”

“Not quite the same—bigger. A lot bigger. Plus, he’s been mumbling about a monster.”

“He must’ve gotten wind of our amphibian.” Jack scratched his chin. “If Paul can salvage any of the film from his camera, we might get a clue what he was up to.”

Alyson nodded. “That’s a good idea. I’ll get the camera.”

Within minutes, after Alyson had retrieved the camera and left instructions for the nurse, they went to the
Malau Weekly News
office. Paul had just come out of the darkroom when they arrived, so he took the camera and went back in.

After what seemed to Jack like an appallingly long time, he came back out. “I’ll have prints in about five minutes,” Paul said.

“You could salvage it?” Jack asked. Given how much salt water the camera had taken in, he and Paul had both been half-convinced that the film would be ruined.

“Luck of the stupid. Only five exposures had been made, then the guy must’ve hit the rewind button at some point. The camera’s wrecked, but the film was all rolled up, so it was spared the worst of it. Back in a minute.”

He went back in, then came out a few minutes later with an eight-by-ten print.

Jack looked down at what the image showed.
Holy shit.

“I don’t believe it,” Alyson muttered. “Though it would explain the claw marks.”

Tearing his gaze away from the photo, Jack looked at the reporter. “Paul, call President Moki and the chief. We need to talk about this, and
now.”

Ten minutes later, the president closed his restaurant to all but Jack, Alyson, Paul, Chief Movita, Dr. Hale, and himself. They all stood around one of the larger tables, Moki holding Paul’s print in hand.

All of them kept staring at it. The creature it portrayed was a dead ringer for Superlizard, except it didn’t have the various horns. It also showed two other men taking pictures, and based on the scale, the lizard had to be at least thirty-five feet tall, maybe more.
It looks like Superlizard has a Mom,
Jack thought.

“Surely, this cannot be real,” Moki said.

“It’s not a double exposure,” Paul said, pointing to the two photographers in the foreground, “the images wouldn’t be this solid. And the film was still in the camera.”

“So all of you believe we have a creature of this size somewhere in our waters,” Moki said.

And you don’t?
Jack almost blurted out, but managed to restrain himself. Instead, he pointed out the one fact that was obvious to his trained eye. “And who’s it the spitting image of? Our nine-foot captive. Except for the horns, of course, but that means it’s probably female. I think Mom is coming to bust her kid out of jail.”

That left the room silent for several seconds. Then, finally, Paul said, “We’ve gotta let people know.”

Jack almost smiled.
Typical journalist.

“There’d be mass panic,” Alyson pointed out.

“Not as much as there would be if this thing showed up
unannounced,”
Paul said, and Jack had to admit that his logic was spot-on.

The chief was shaking his head with something like awe. “I have seven officers—six, with Jimmy laid up. I am not equipped to deal with mass panic
or
a giant creature.”

Moki, too, shook his head. “No, this is beyond us now. I will call Colonel Wayne at Fort MacArthur on Kalor.”

Jack fought down a panic attack.
The last thing we need now is some military nutcase blowing everything up.
“Wait, wait—calling out the troops—” He cut himself off, choosing his words carefully. He
was
still an outsider here, but the president had trusted his judgment up to a point.
With any luck, I won’t go past that point now.
“A thing like that can take on a life of its own. We need to decide what we want the military to do. What’s this Colonel Wayne guy like?”

“Quite reasonable for a man in his position,” Moki said without hesitation. Jack knew enough about Malau’s president to know that, while he was diplomatic, he was not a liar. That he gave that answer, and so readily, meant that this colonel
should
be okay.

Jack had to hope that he had read Manny Moki correctly. “Let’s talk to him alone, first.”

Paul said, “By chopper, he could be here in no time.”

“Then let’s get him over here right away,” Jack said, “without telling him why.”

Moki nodded. “That is very prudent.” He smiled. “Are you sure you are not a politician, Jack?”

Jack chuckled in reply as the president went over to the phone.
Geez, a mother lizard,
he thought.
Brandon’s gonna—

Oh, Christ. Brandon.

Aloud, he said, “I need to find Brandon.”

“I’ll do it,” Alyson said.

“Thanks,” Jack said, relieved. He didn’t want to miss the colonel’s arrival, but he didn’t want to go all day without even seeing his son.

Colonel J. Christopher Wayne really hated the tropics.

He never told anyone this, of course. After all, he’d been assigned to head up the United States Marine Corps base on Kalor Island, and Colonel Wayne did what he was told. It’s like his drill sergeant used to tell him:
When you wear a green tuxedo, you dance where they tell you.

Wayne missed very little about the ghettos of Philadelphia, but one of those was the winter weather. Tons of snow, huge drifts, snowmen built up in the playgrounds, icicles dripping from the fire escapes—that was winter. Right now, back home, gusts were blowing at thirty miles an hour back in Philly, with temperatures in the twenties.

As he wiped the sweat from his brow, Wayne almost wished he was there.

Almost. Born John Christopher LaMarre, his mother married Robert Wayne when John was six. Not wanting to be saddled with being named after a white Western star, John started going by his middle name after that. With the marriage came an older brother, whom the newly christened Christopher Wayne thought was God’s gift. Greg was thirteen, knew all the cool guys in the neighborhood, and always made sure that Christopher was safe. When Mattie Phillips started beating Christopher and his best friend Andy up for their allowances, Greg said he’d take care of it. Mattie never bothered Christopher or Andy again.

Christopher knew nothing of gangs and guns and intimidation until after they found Greg’s body in an alley. He heard those words from the immensely tall homicide detective who kept coming back to the house for a full two weeks after Greg died.

Only then did Christopher’s nine-year-old mind realize exactly why Mattie stopped bothering him.

After that, he started really paying attention to his surroundings. He noticed that the “cool guys” in the neighborhood were the ones who usually didn’t live to the age of twenty. He understood that nobody outside the ghetto gave a damn about the people inside it, so nobody inside gave a damn, either.

He decided to get out. The best way, to his mind, was the Armed Forces. When he was old enough, he didn’t wait to be drafted for the Vietnam War, he enlisted with the Marines. The Corps provided him with something the ghetto never had: discipline. Things were ordered in the Marines; you followed a chain of command, you followed a procedure. Christopher Wayne thrived in that environment. He was a colonel by the age of forty-five, decorated many times, as a corporal in Vietnam and as a colonel in the Gulf War.

Any situation that came up, Wayne knew how to deal with it. The Corps had a procedure for pretty much anything you cared to name.

Wayne believed that, right up until he arrived on Malau—which was, if anything, even more oppressively humid than Kalor—and was introduced to Jack Ellway and a caged, nine-foot-long lizard.

After Ellway gave the full story of what had happened on Malau over the past few days, he muttered, “Good God.” He couldn’t believe it. If Manny Moki, Joe Movita, Paul Bateman, and Ralph Hale hadn’t been with Ellway, he
wouldn’t
have believed it. But he knew all four men—besides which, he could not deny the evidence of his own eyes. There in the cage sat a creature that looked like it came out of one of those monster movies he and Andy used to sneak into when they were kids.

He looked down at the photograph that Ellway had given him, apparently taken by some idiot
paparazzo. As if this one wasn’t bad enough,
he thought,
its Mama’s out there somewhere. An AWAC might be able to track it from the air. I could contact the 31
st
MEU on Okinawa . . .