Leviathan, p.5
Leviathan, page 5
Sonya had been Valery’s lover, and bodyguard. She had been trained in the Mossad Special Forces camps to be a lethal weapon. He had said she was his perfect woman. But she knew she had flaws. She was not merciful and kind-hearted like Valery was. Instead, she held violence and vengeance in her heart, and a fury that would never let it go.
She would track Valery’s killers across the seas until the end of time. If they showed up, she would spend whatever it took to destroy them as they had destroyed her love.
She sat staring at nothing for several more minutes before she exhaled and watched the footage again. This time she started the film where the small submersible entered the cavern beneath the glacial ice sheet, and then journeyed on into a cave. A cave that shouldn’t be there.
She watched when the Krill-1 was attacked, and then continued watching from the SeaTayshun’s underwater cameras as the ship itself was set upon. And destroyed. What could do that to an eighty-foot ship with reinforced hull? Not a Megalodon. Unless it was a different sort of Megalodon.
There was a knock on the door and Sonya checked the external camera – she had made many enemies over the years and security was her friend now. Satisfied, she pressed a button on her desk to unlock the thick oak double doors.
The short Spanish-looking woman approached the desk, her heels clicking on the hardwood floor. She had a pleasant face that right now was all business, and her large intelligent brown eyes were unblinking as she bore down on Sonya.
Meena Delgado slid a report in front of Sonya, keeping her hand on it for a moment. “No survivors. Plenty of debris on the surface, but the bulk of the ship went to the bottom. The submersible has completely vanished. No wreckage.”
Sonya nodded slowly. “Dead men tell no tales.” She looked up. “How many families?”
Meena didn’t need to consult her notes. “Twenty-two wives, husbands, and partners, and thirteen children, ranging in ages –”
Sonya held up a hand. “That’s enough.” She sighed. “Send them each one – no, five million dollars.”
“I already have.” Meena smiled.
Sonya smiled sadly. “You know me too well, Meena.”
“One more thing,” Meena said. “The Krill-1’s transponder was still working for around ten minutes after the attack. It showed the submersible went deeper into the glacial cave.”
“How much deeper?” Sonya looked up.
“Half a mile before it stopped working.”
Sonya grunted her acknowledgment, already guessing that’s where the thing had come from and went back to.
“A territorial attack.” She turned one of her screens around to face Meena. “What do you make of this?”
Meena leaned forward and narrowed her eyes at the last images taken by the Krill-1 submersible – the maw. “Massive, serrated, triangular-shaped teeth – undoubtedly Otodontidae.” She straightened. “But the color? Megalodon or a new species?”
“I don’t know.” Sonya turned the screen back around. “But nothing we know of could do that to an eighty-five-foot ship.”
“Nothing we know of today,” Meena added.
Sonya tilted her head. “That’s right.”
“A giant, white sea creature that sinks ships.” Meena held out the package she had. “I’m guessing that’s why you wanted this?”
Sonya took the bound bundle and carefully unwrapped the paper from it. She then lay it gently on her desk and looked down at the pristine 1851 first edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
“Interesting,” Meena said.
“Research,” Sonya replied.
“Of course it is.” Meena smiled, nodded once, and then departed the room.
Sonya went back to the screens and turned to scroll through the alerts she had set up globally across the internet, in internal marine message boards, and coast guard radio frequencies. Anything related to unexplained sightings, sinkings, or attacks by unusually large predators would be scooped up and listed in a file for her.
Ever since the glacier melted and opened a large ice cavern revealing an even deeper cave, a door beneath the dark ice, then things had been going crazy.
There were messages about giant fins cutting the water, and sharks longer than ferry boats patrolling the edge of the deep-sea shelf. There were reports of fishermen disappearing in the night in Western Australia, and huge shark sightings. But she knew they always had big great whites haunting the shallows over there.
Everything would be collated, and she would dispatch teams to check them out. Every one of them. But there were also sightings of huge white things just below the surface that were only seen at dusk and dawn – they also intrigued her.
She sat back and drew the antiquarian book toward her, her fingers drumming on it for a moment. She flipped it open and began to read.
In two hours she had devoured it entirely and sat staring straight ahead with her vision turned inward. Then she sprang forward, her fingers dancing across the keyboard as she searched the internet for supplementary data on Herman Melville. She also looked for information on the whaleship the Essex, the supposed source of inspiration for the story, which in November 1820 was attacked and sunk by a giant white whale off the coast of South America – close to the freezing southern waters.
She had found out that in the early 1800s there was a brief warming period, and that meant that possibly the Thwaites Glacier might have receded just enough to open the way to the cave. Could some great beast have escaped at that time as well – a great sea beast so big it was mistaken for a whale?
And now the glacier had retreated again. Once more opening the cave to the Southern Ocean. She needed to act quickly before the monsters got out. Or rather, even more got out.
There was so much more she needed to know. And best to do her investigation at the source.
She needed to get to Nantucket, about forty miles from Rhode Island, and just ten from Martha’s Vineyard. Sonya checked her watch; from where she was in New York, she could be there in a few hours.
She headed for the door, calling out to Meena as she went.
CHAPTER 06
Four miles out, Safety Bay, Rockingham, Western Australia
Duncan Shira looked toward the western sky; the sun was dropping to the horizon and laying down a pathway of gold on the seemingly endless sea, and he knew that its usual shimmering blue would soon turn impenetrably black.
He checked his watch – only 6 pm, and the fish were biting. He’d hate to pull the pick now and head in. Some days he could sit out here for hours and not get a nibble. But today, they were definitely on.
With the sun gone he took off his hat and threw it onto the back seat of his fifteen-foot Quintrex coast runner with the new fifty-horsepower four-stroke engine.
He ran a hand through his once thick red hair, now gone gray. Duncan was weather-beaten by the years and elements but still had good strength in his shoulders and back.
He loved two things above all others – three if he counted cold beer – and they were fishing, and Angela, his wife, who said he was a grumpy bastard. But then who wouldn’t be these days with all the bills, taxes, politics, and everything coming at him like a magpie continually pecking the top of his head.
But not out here – out here it all went away. He inhaled the sea salt, taking it deep into his lungs and then letting it out slowly. He closed his eyes and smiled as he listened to the gentle lap of the waves against the tin hull.
He wanted to keep doing this until the day he died. He remembered his dad telling him once that every minute a man spent fishing was a minute that was added to the end of his life. He guessed if that were true, then he’d probably live to be a hundred and fifty.
The fish had gone quiet, so he dipped the old pineapple tin into the burley bucket which was a soup of fish guts, old prawn heads, and bloody water, and flicked it over the side. It’d take a while to sink, and if that didn’t bring them back, he’d call it a day.
Duncan sat a while longer, enjoying his own thoughts and memories, and when he inhaled again, oddly, this time the smell of clean salt air had been replaced by something else – something unpleasant: the smell of dead things, drying barnacles on rocks, and rotting fish washed up on the tide.
“What the hell is that?” he muttered and reached forward to lift one of his caught fish closer to his nose.
Nope, wasn’t that.
He turned about, but the sun had dropped to the horizon leaving just an orange line far away in the distance. He could still see the flat ocean, but this time it wasn’t all flat.
Duncan’s brows came together. There was a lump there. A big freaking lump. And it was an off-white color. Was it the bow of a sunken boat coming to the surface? he wondered. That might account for the smell and color.
He continued to watch. It hung there, not moving. It was about 200 feet from his boat and rose close to ten feet above the water. It was now too dark to make it out clearly, and his first thought was to start the engine and go and check it out. He could make a claim on it if it was a lost boat.
But an instinct told him to not even think about getting any closer to it. He was a man of the sea and had seen whales stuck on sandbanks, schools of porpoises shooting the waves, sea turtles, dugongs, manta rays as big as his front garden, and grouper that could swallow you whole. But this thing reminded him of something else.
“No. That is not a shark,” he told himself. “Nope, no way.”
The orange glow on the western horizon was vanishing and he knew that in about five minutes the only glow would come from his luminous wristwatch.
“Fuck that.” He had no idea what the thing was, but it wasn’t there before, and he didn’t want to be just a few hundred feet from it when the lights went out completely.
He began to haul his line in, his hand shaking slightly. Then he changed his mind and picked up the boat knife and just cut it through. He started to drag in the anchor, the metal pick and sandbag taking its time coming to the surface. It strained his shoulders and back, but he moved like a machine, hand over hand, coiling the rope in the front of the boat until the clank of the steel against his hull told him he had it all.
He looked around – the sun was nearly gone but so was the weird white thing. He turned one way, then the other, but there was nothing. It didn’t matter, he was outta here.
Duncan moved to the back of the small tin boat and tugged on the pull cord. Blessedly, the new engine started like a dream.
“Atta boy,” he whispered and put it in forward drive. He twisted the handle, putting the propellor in high rotation, and then moved the handle again to swing the nose of the boat toward shore.
It’d take him a good forty minutes to reach the first of the sandbanks, but every second put him further away from this spot. And that was fine with him.
For some reason, Angela’s face flashed into his mind, and he couldn’t wait to see her again. He’d tell her about the weird thing in the water. And they’d both laugh at his nervousness.
“I deserve a cold beer tonight.” He grinned. “Make it two, Ange.”
The impact was so explosive, Duncan was twenty feet in the air before he even registered what had happened.
He came down with an almighty splash, and his boat landed forty feet from him with the propellor still spinning. Bait, burley, fish, lines, and all his equipment rained down around him.
“Jesus Christ!” He spluttered salt water.
On the opposite horizon the huge moon had risen, throwing down a silvery glow onto the water’s surface.
Something hit you, his mind screamed. It was that big fucking thing in the water.
It’s not a shark, it’s not a shark, he tried to tell himself. “No shark is that big.”
But his mind knew better.
Swim.
Don’t splash.
Get out of the chum cloud.
He knew he’d be in the water for hours, but it was warm here. He could do it.
From somewhere behind him in the darkness, he heard the smashing impact as the thing hit his boat again. It was followed by the sound of crushing steel so loud it would surely have carried for miles. The propellor kept spinning, but the sound of it was getting farther away and muffled as if it had been taken below the water.
I hope someone heard that. He prayed. But there was no one for miles.
Don’t look back, just swim.
He focused, and started swimming breaststroke, slowly but surely putting a yard distance in with every stroke. Look to the moon, his experience told him; it was rising in the east, and that’s where the land is. That’s where home is.
He stroked and stroked a dozen, a hundred times. And stroked some more.
Follow the moon. Duncan kept his eyes on it. Its beautiful silver glow. Its promise of land, and warmth, of safety and life.
Then the thing passed in front of the moon.
This time Duncan saw the unmistakable fin shape. Except it was big, huge, so much bigger than anything he had ever seen or heard of in his life. And its white color cast a ghostly glow.
How tall was the fin? Ten feet? Twelve? That can’t be right.
Duncan felt a tingle run all the way to his toes and fingertips. He needed to piss, but there was no way he was putting urine into the sea now. He’d hold it forever.
He saw the fin sink, slowly, but just before the tip went fully under, he saw it begin to curve in the water. It was coming around.
Duncan began to sob.
No, no, no.
Humans have a sixth sense. Something that comes to you in the moments of your greatest fear, or when death appears to stand silently at your shoulder.
Duncan knew the beast was coming up. From below, fast. That big ole tooth-ringed mouth larger than the double doors on a barn and gaping wide open.
“Angela!” He screamed.
The Megalodon shark took him, and as he was lifted in the air, the beast bit down, sinking eight-inch, shovel-shaped, serrated teeth right through his mid-section.
Mercifully, his mind had shut off all his pain receptors, and as the creature began to fall back to the black water, Duncan finally saw it was the biggest thing in the world.
And then his mind would finally admit it. It was a shark.
CHAPTER 07
Thirty miles south of Cape Cod, Nantucket Island, Massachusetts
On the flight down Sonya made several calls, quickly found out the information she needed and then made an instant seven figure donation to the church restoration fund there.
As she expected, she was there in just on two hours and went from the chopper pad directly to the downtown area on main street.
The once thriving whaling town was still a beautiful little village-like area with pretty, well-kept houses, manicured gardens, and cafés with tall, long-limbed people sporting golden tans and blinding white teeth.
She headed for the First Congregational Church in Nantucket. She knew from her research that its oldest building, the Old North Vestry, was constructed nearly three hundred years ago, and still in use today. But it was decaying. And that was her opening.
Father Andrew Merrick met her at the door. “Ms. Borashev, it is a real pleasure.” His small hand delivered a surprisingly firm shake. “It’s not often we have a new patron, and one who arrives within the same hour as their donation for a private tour.”
Sonya nodded, looking down on the diminutive, portly man. “I’m impulsive, Father.” She looked around. “And I’ve always loved places that are built on peace and beauty. And all in the center of this beautiful little town.”
“We like it.” He clasped his fingers together proudly. “Now, how can I help you? Would you like a tour of the vestry? It was built in the early seventeen hundreds and had a lot of –”
“No, thank you, Father. But I would like to see your records. I had some old friends and relatives here that the family lost track of, and it would be interesting to see what happened to them.”
“Any particular dates we can use to track them down?”
“Around the mid eighteen hundreds, I think,” Sonya replied.
“Then those would be in new sanctuary. It was built in 1834.” He paused. “But I’m afraid anything before the 1960s is not digitized, so I hope you’re not allergic to dusty old records.”
Sonya laughed. “I’ll just hold my breath.”
He took her along the front of the ancient building. Just as she thought, it needed work. She knew how much it took to stop old buildings from trying to return to the sand and gravel from whence they came. Her money would be put to good use.
Father Merrick entered via a small gate and headed to the new building. For a new structure, it was also in need of work, and unfortunately in among the magnificently well-kept small houses just down the street it was becoming an eyesore.
“This way, this way.” Merrick took her inside and through the chapel, then down a set of steep steps until they came to a solid oak door. He turned briefly to smile and then unlocked it. He reached in to flick on lights that blinked a few times as if coming awake after a long nap.
“Watch your step,” he whispered over his shoulder.
Sonya followed him in and started down the stone steps to the basement. It smelled of old papers, dust, and something that might have been cleaning polish. But at least it was cool and dry.
“You have air-conditioning down here?” she asked.
“Yes, installed in the sixties and updated every decade. Nothing eats old records faster than mold and rising damp,” Father Merrick replied.
He crossed to an old oak bench table with a light over it. “Now, tell me who exactly you’re looking for.” He waited.
She smiled. “All records and information on Ishmael Jonah Bartholomew.”
His brows slowly came together. “Really?”
“Yes, really.” Sonya’s gaze was direct as she studied his response. He knows something. Good, she thought.
“Call me Ishmael,” Father Merrick said softly. “Not many people know he had a full name.” He pursed his lips. “But you do know that he was just a fictional character created by Herman Melville?”
