Hotel Megalodon: A Deep Sea Thriller (4 page)

Chapter 6

“Look at this view, will you! Oh my God!” Staci Lincoln stood in the bedroom of their suite in the Triton Undersea Resort, bouncing up and down with excitement. Sunlight dappled across a vibrant coral reef, while a rainbow of brightly colored tropical fish darted about. Her pro-football player husband, John Rudd, seemed mildly interested at best in the ocean outside their room’s floor-to-ceiling panoramic window. He stood behind his girlfriend, admiring her curvy form.

“It’s a little hot in here, though, don’t you think?” she said, still admiring the view.

“It sure is. I’m checking out the view, all right. Liking it!”

She reached back and swatted at him, a blow that he easily ducked. He caught her by the wrist, and led her to the king bed, done up with silk sheets and a down comforter emblazoned with the resort’s logo.

“What are you doing?”

He pulled her onto the bed, and she protested weakly. ”Hey, we’re supposed to go to brunch. I’m hungry!”

“They said we’re the first ones here. They can get things warmed up over there, while we get them warmed up in here.” He pulled her on top of him.

“John...” Her objections became weaker and less frequent.

Staci gazed out the undersea window, watching the fishes. So many of them, she thought, like being miniaturized and immersed in an aquarium.
So beautiful...

Then suddenly the school of fish she’d been watching organized into a tight ball, and swam quickly out of sight. Staci’s hands explored John’s body while she watched the reef, now devoid of fishes.
Where’d they go?

Their room was cast a shade darker as a shadow overlay the reef. Staci figured it was clouds covering the sun far above, but then the gloom out the window seemed to grow larger, to move. John called out her name and she responded, but her heart wasn’t in it.

What is that?

Then, for an instant, it materialized, clear as day, before departing just as quickly as it had come, leaving shifting rays of sunshine in its wake. Startled, she jumped up from the bed, and ran to the window.

“Babe, what’s up!?” John looked confused, hurt.

“The fuck!”

“What about it?”

“I’m serious, John. What the fuck was that?”

“Was what?”

“A huge-ass shark just swam by our window!”

“C’mon. If you don’t want to do it, just—“

“John, I’m not making this up. This thing was so big it took up the whole window!”

He took a deep breath, resigning himself to the fact that the moment had been killed. “It’s probably just something the hotel cooked up for entertainment. I’m sure we’ll hear about it at brunch.”

Staci stood in front of the window, unconvinced. The reef that moments ago had been so lively was now still.

“All the fish are gone.”

Chapter 7

“What do you think, Mick? Am I screwed or what?” Coco shielded her eyes from the sun, while Mick looked up from attaching a makeshift propeller assembly.

“Maybe not totally. I’ve got the proper part on order, but this should hold until that gets here. Pulled it from my trusty box of spares.”

Coco eyed the new thruster. It was gray in color instead of black, and appeared to be slightly smaller in diameter. “What kind of sub was it on?”

He shrugged. “Some tourist mini-sub from when I worked in the Cayman Islands. It was in the junkyard. Scavengers got most of the good parts before I got there, but I rescued this.”

“Does it work?”

“Let’s find out.” Mick moved toward the sub’s cabin to test the new thruster, when they heard footsteps creaking out onto the wooden dock. Mick cupped a hand over his mouth as he faced Coco.

“Shit! It’s the big cheese already. Hasn’t even been one day yet.”

“He must have a lot of confidence in you. At least it looks like we’re working. Or you are, anyway. I’m just sitting around on my ass after I banged up the sub.”

“You’re advising me. Don’t worry, I can spin it so that some of the damage wasn’t your fault.”

She gave him a lingering stare just before White walked up.

“Good afternoon. How’s the progress?” he looked directly at Mick.

“Good, Mr. White. An identical thruster assembly has been ordered, rush air shipment from China, probably be here in two days.”

White shook his head.

“However,” Mick continued, “in the meantime, I’ve cooked up a little replacement. Take a look.” He pointed to the mismatched thruster.

“Looks different. Does it work?”

“Hasn’t been on a sea trial yet, but take a look.” Mick stepped into the sub’s cabin, and pressed the thruster control button. They heard a soft, even hum as the new propeller spun inside its cage. Mick let go of the button, and the blur of the blades settled into visible objects once again.

“Good. It’s time for that sea trial.”

Coco and Mick traded glances. Mick tried to buy some more time.

“I was hoping to do a little more testing, because if—“

White held up a hand. “Enough. A situation has arisen that necessitates use of this vehicle ASAP.” He turned, and pointed a finger at Coco. “I need you to get in, and test it out right away.”

Coco looked dubiously at the new thruster, at Mick, and then at the lagoon. “I guess I could take her for a spin in the shallows here, see how she—“

White shook his head while interrupting. “No, I need you to take her down to the SWAC intake pipe, and have a look at it.”

Coco’s mouth dropped open before she forced it closed. Mick recovered first.

“That pipe’s at 250 feet, isn’t it, sir?”

“That’s right. There’s a problem with the air conditioning in the hotel. It’s not working. Al says he needs to get a look at the intake pipe, see if it’s clogged or broken or what.”

Coco spoke up. “What about the—“

“The oil company sub isn’t available to us now. We need you to do it, Coco. Just drop down the canyon until you reach the pipe, have a look at it, get some pictures. Possibly we might need you to use the grab arm to remove debris if there is any blocking the pipe.”

She gazed vacuously at the sub, thinking of the deepest dive she’d done in the craft yet...One hundred feet? Seventy-five? Now he was asking her to go two-hundred fifty? Perhaps he read her unease, because his next words were, “You can take Mick with you for an extra pair of eyes on that pipe.”

The sub mechanic beamed. Ironically, he didn’t usually get to ride in the vehicles he serviced. “Okay!”

“Now get this thing in the water! Let me know what you found the second you get back.” White eyed the new thruster again, and shook his head before stalking off back down the dock.

Chapter 8

“Seriously. What a jerk.” Coco flipped a few switches on the sub’s instrument panel, and looked over at Mick as he pulled down the dome hatch before sliding into the co-pilot seat.

“Don’t worry, we’ll be able to test the new thruster on the way across the reef. If we have any problems whatsoever before we get to the drop-off, then we don’t go deep. I don’t care what the big cheese says.”

Coco nodded her agreement as she maneuvered the submersible on the surface away from the dock, like a regular boat. “First sign of trouble, we call the dive.”

When she had backed the sub away from the dock, she vented the air in the buoyancy tubes, causing the sub to sink below the surface. They watched as water sheeted over the dome, and they were immersed in the underwater world, an exciting sensation she doubted she would ever grow tired of.

When the craft was a few feet above the coral reef in about twenty feet of water, Coco eyeballed the “landmarks” that were by now very familiar to her—the cluster of brain corals off to the left, the staghorn coral formation to the right—she took her bearings based on these recognizable sights, and then activated both thrusters.

The sub hummed into forward motion, gliding across the reef as expected. “So far so good.” She patted the instrument console. “C’mon little sub, you can do it!”

Mick shook his head, laughing. “You’re too funny, you know that?”

“It’s working so far, Mick!”

“Was there ever any doubt? It is my nearly supernatural repair skills we’re talking about here.”

It was Coco’s turn to laugh, and before she knew it they were passing the hotel on their right side, one of the cylindrical towers sparkling in the muted sunlight. “There it is.”

“The hot house.”

They both laughed again. “Half a billion bucks, and no A/C. Ain’t that a bitch?”

Coco’s eyes bugged out. “Is that what it cost to build this place?”

“That’s what I heard. Was only supposed to be half that, though.”

“
Only
a quarter of a billion, huh?” Coco smiled as she banked the sub, following the curvature of the hotel’s tower. Inside, they could see a few guests standing there in conversation, drinks in hand. One of them saw the submersible and waved, a gesture that Coco and Mick returned. They left the hotel behind, and headed toward the edge of the reef. Coco navigated beneath the coral overhang she knew marked the gateway to the drop-off.

“How’s it handling?” Mick looked over at her.

“Good. To be honest, I don’t even notice much difference.”

“So you feel up to the task?” They approached the entrance to the submarine canyon, and Coco eased up on the throttle so that they hovered there, peering down the sandy slope. The same place where yesterday she’d seen that...
thing
, she thought.

“Thruster’s good.”

Mick tore his eyes away from the view down into the abyss to look at his pilot. “That’s not what I asked.”

Coco’s brown eyes bore into Mick’s baby blues. “Yeah, I’m fine. 250 feet. Only 200 more to go,” she said, referencing the fact that they were currently already fifty feet down.

“Let’s have a look at this bloody pipe then.”

Coco picked up the radio transmitter that would allow her to talk to Topside, which would be one of the engineering team. “
Triton-1
to Topside,
Triton-1
to Topside, we are a go for pipe inspection. Entering the canyon now, over.”

A few seconds ticked by while the two inhabitants of the submersible silently contemplated the slope in front of them that led to their dive’s objective. Then the radio crackled with a male voice.

“Copy that,
Triton-1.
We anxiously await your report, over.”

Coco turned to Mick. “Ready, Micky?”

He grinned in return. “Rock ‘n roll!”

Coco angled the sub so that its nose pointed down, and then gunned the thrusters, hyper-cautious of the canyon’s walls closing around their fragile craft. She pointed at a spot on the wall.

“That’s where I hit before.”

Mick looked out the window. “Don’t see any busted up sub parts out there.” He turned around, and gave her a grin.

“Don’t speak too soon. I can always add new ones.”

Mick shook his head as Coco threaded the needle with the sub through the narrow geological formation.

“You thread the needle with this thing better than I could, no doubt about that.”

Before long they reached a point Coco recognized: the near-vertical drop-off into the canyon proper. She checked the sub’s instruments and wiped the sweat from her hands on the sweatshirt she wore to ward off the sub’s chilly air.

“Here we go.” She flipped on the sub’s external floodlights, since the water would be dimly lit at 250 feet. No need to have to do that while she was down there. It was a simple task, but there would be enough to do once they reached their target. She didn’t put the sub into a nose-first dive, but rather just let the craft sink in a horizontal position. Mick craned his neck and looked up at the receding surface, the silhouette of the reef shelf becoming smaller as they descended.

At around 100 feet they passed through a thermocline, where a warm surface layer of water overlay a much colder one. These sometimes resulted in unpredictable turbulence, and Coco felt the sub jolt as they passed through it. Soon after, though, their vehicle resumed its easy downward trajectory, falling only with the force of gravity, no power required.

“200 feet,” Coco called out after a few more minutes. Mick took hold of a control that enabled him to aim the spotlight outside the sub. He angled it down, sweeping from left to right, searching for the intake pipe.

“They must have run it down this same canyon right?” Coco took her eyes off the controls for a second to scan the water off to her left.

“Yeah, but it’s covered with growth by now, and hard to see. Ah, but there it is!” Mick pointed almost straight down beneath them at a section of large diameter pipe that had just enough white beneath a layer of marine encrustation to make it stand out.

“I see it.” Coco made a fine adjustment to the controls. “Right in the middle, yeah?”

“Right. So it should flare out into an intake in another—“

“There it is! Another thirty feet down, right where it should be.”

“Great. Whoa!” Mick leaned closer to the see-through hatch to reduce glare from the sub’s control panel lights.

“What?” Coco needed to concentrate on driving the sub, and couldn’t afford the luxury of a prolonged look at things outside the way Mick could. She continued her slow descent toward the end of the pipe.

“It’s banged up something awful.” Mick played the spotlight on it for a few seconds longer, and then picked up the video camera, activating it. Coco leveled out the sub at the 250-foot mark, noting how dark it was down here. Looking up, she could see a hazy gray layer of light, but looking down was only darkness, save for the sub’s lights.

She brought the sub as close as she dared to the pipe’s intake which she could now clearly see was damaged.

“Stay away from the front of it,” Mick warned. “The suction might create strong currents.”

“I’ll swing around back.” Coco gingerly tapped the thruster joystick, maneuvering the submersible behind the opening of the pipe. She held the craft in a hover while they appraised the wrecked equipment. Mick rolled the video camera for a couple of minutes before setting it down and looking at the pipe with his naked eye.

“No wonder this thing isn’t bringing the water up. Look at that.” The section of interest was L-shaped, with the intake opening on the short end of the L, the long end extending up all the way to the reef, and from there to the hotel. The portion of pipe just above the intake section was extensively crushed, with many gaping holes in it. Even if suction was applied, any water pumped into the pipe would be lost out the holes. But it was the pattern of tears that gripped Coco’s attention.

“What do you think happened to it, Mick?”

The Aussie rubbed the stubble on his face while he thought about the question. There was no easy answer. The intake was well away from the walls of the canyon. The stretch of pipe above them had no obvious damage. The actual opening of the intake was clear.

“No clue. I don’t see how falling debris that broke off the reef from above could account for this, do you?”

Coco slowly circled the sub around the back of the pipe, seeking answers. Just as she was about to reverse to avoid drifting in front of the intake, she hovered the sub in place.

“See something?” Mick picked up the camera again.

Coco squinted at the pipe, into one of the jagged tears in it. A gleam of white arrested her gaze.

“Yeah. Hey Mick, how are you with the grab-arm?” The submersible was outfitted with a single tool: a manipulator arm with a claw on the end that could be used for gripping and moving small objects. It wasn’t necessary for the eco-tours the resort used the sub for, but it had come that way from the manufacturer, and it “looked cool,” as Coco put it, so they had let it be. Now, though, she saw an actual use for it.

Mick eyed the mechanical appendage doubtfully. “That little arm’s not going to be able to do squat to fix that mangled pipe.” He called the shots the way he saw them, and by now Coco was used to his directness and even appreciated it, especially during situations like these.

“I know. But I think I see something in it. If we can grab it, maybe it’ll give us a clue as to what happened.”

Mick eyeballed the grab-arm controls. “I’m game if you are.” He tested the joystick that moved the arm, extending it, rotating it left and right, pressing the button that pinched the claws together.

Coco edged the sub in closer to the pipe, aware of the deep chasm yawning below her. When she was about three feet away she gave the throttle a touch of reverse to counteract her forward momentum, then paused, her hands frozen over the controls while she watched the pipe to see if the sub was drifting relative to it.

“That’s it, you got it.” Mick swung the grab-arm out towards the pipe. The mini-sub held position while Coco glanced down and around at their surroundings.

“Grab the prize.”

“This is a heck of a first date, trying to win you something in a claw-grabber game.”

Coco cracked a huge smile. “You sure know how to make a girl happy. Hold on, little bit of a current.” She adjusted the sub’s position with a burst of throttle, and Mick started with the grab-arm again. The claw extended into the jagged rip in the pipe, and closed around the white object.

“Got it, pulling back in three...two...one...”

Suddenly the sub was yanked to the left, rotating about the grab arm’s claw which was still pinched around the object.

“Let go, let go!” No sooner had she uttered the words than the sub’s motion stopped as the manipulator claw wrenched the object free from the inside of the shredded pipe.

“Got it! Reeling it back in...” Mick hit the button on the grab-arm joystick that retracted the arm. As it drew nearer the sub Coco let out an involuntary gasp.

“My god!”

Mick hadn’t yet taken the time to actually focus on the object he had extracted, so focused was he on working the manipulator.

“What’s up?”

“It...it can’t be!”

“
What
can’t be?” The claw hung up again just inside the edge of the opening. Mick tried a different combination of button pushes, and freed the object from the wreckage of the pipe. Still clutched in the mechanical claw, he retracted the arm again, this time pulling the object through the rip in the pipe.

“Big shark tooth...” was all she could bring herself to mutter. But in her mind ran that other word, the one she’d thought of on her ill-fated dive yesterday:
megalodon
.

Mick brought the grab-arm all the way into the sub and folded it back in to its resting position, the tooth grasped firmly in the machine’s grip. That done, he finally got the chance to get a good look at what he had retrieved.

“Holy crap! Look at that thing! It’s got to be six inches long.”

Coco said nothing, staring at the tooth as though it were a terrible omen, while Mick continued to marvel at it.

“It’ll make one hell of a necklace, right? Hey, what kind do you think it’s from anyway, White Pointer? Sorry, that’s what we call them down under. Great White?”

Coco still stared entranced at the pointed tooth.

“Coco? You okay?”

”It’s not from a White.”

“Aren’t they the biggest? This is the biggest shark tooth I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure, except for those fossilized dinosaur ones...”

That triggered it for Coco. “The
megalodons
.”

“What?” Mick stared out into the gloom while he waited for her reply.

“
Carcharadon megalodon
. It’s one of those dinosaur sharks you’re talking about.”