The President glared at the clear blue dawn outside the Oval Office. “Fine. What do you want me to do about it?”
The President took the first call after issuing his orders, and it just happened to be from the Secretary of Defense.
“Mr President, have you gone mad?”
“Not at all.”
“What’s the purpose of all this?”
“I’m not telling.”
“You’ve gone mad!”
“No, I haven’t.”
“What’s this all about, then?”
“None of your business.”
“With all due respect, Mr. President, it’s my business.”
“Not this time.”
The admiral looked stunned when he hung up the phone with Washington and emerged from his office, stopping a moment to gaze out the windows to the view of the vast fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor.
After a moment he shrugged to himself and noticed his staff waiting patiently. They knew something was up.
“Get them ready to sail.” The admiral waved at the window. “All of them.”
The U.S. Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force joined forces in the venture. They moved into the Pacific and deployed in the watch zone, an unaffected buffer area around the no-man’s-land of the vortex. Their ships numbered in the hundreds. The French, Japanese and Russian fleets joined the Americans, more out of curiosity than anything else. The Americans weren’t explaining why it was now so important to keep people away from the vortex.
The orders were simple: keep anybody and everybody from approaching the vortex. With the benefit of U.S. spy satellites watching the perimeter, this was easy enough.
But what became remarkable was the number of ships actually trying to get in. No one had guessed it before. Once it became clear that ships from all over the world were determined to break into the vortex, the urgency of the mission became clear.
In the first twenty-four hours, more than one thousand human beings were dragged kicking and screaming off their suicide ships.
Chapter 36
Henry Lagrasse wasn’t feeling so good this morning.
Waking up with a lunatic is a surefire way to start your day badly. Sandy’s head injury had grown worse in the night, and she was in convulsions by daybreak. Howard went for a walk while she rode them out.
The air felt different this morning. The sky was quiet. Something was wrong. He started on a patrol of the island, looking for the cause of the wrongness, but nothing had changed since the previous evening.
Nothing had changed. It hit him suddenly. There were no new shipwrecks.
How could that be? There were more every day. The shore was a junkyard of wrecks now. There ought to be some sort of watercraft washing up every half hour at least. But none?
Then he found the wreckage of a new ship. It came in the night, and one survivor was screaming for release. “Help me out!” he pleaded. “I have to go in there!” He pointed at the ruins with his one functional arm.
Lagrasse began pulling on the metal panels that had collapsed across the survivor, a man in his fifties with white hair and white stubble on his chin. He was in a priest’s collar and he was babbling about how lucky he was.
“We slipped through. They tried to stop us, but we gunned it when a bigger boat got their attention. They chased us, but then they stopped when we reached the current.”
“Who tried to stop you?” Lagrasse asked.
“Coast Guard. Navy. French and Japanese and even the Australians showed up. They’re trying to keep everybody out of here. We were lucky to get through.”
Lagrasse felt a sudden dread. The people had to get through! They had to get to the island! Otherwise—well, he didn’t know what the consequences would be.
The white-haired priest finally grew impatient with Lagrasse and pushed himself out of the wreckage, tearing himself open on the metal edges. He didn’t care. He staggered off into the city to become breakfast for the thing in the pyramid.
Without people, the thing wouldn’t feed, Lagrasse realized. That was a disaster! It must feed! It must have human beings to sustain and strengthen it!
Why? He didn’t know.
He paced nervously, then it occurred to him that he should go get Sandy and deliver them both to the thing in the pyramid. But that was no good. There was a reason he and Sandy hadn’t wanted to go into the pyramid with all the other island arrivals; they were broken in the head. They didn’t have the sustenance the thing needed.
The thing needed fresh, healthy human beings, and there were none to be had.
Chapter 37
Mark Howard was in that body again, but now the oceans were his element, not his enemy. He reached into the sea, reached impossibly far, and dragged the sea toward him.
He could feel that the body was incredibly powerful, but also aching from exertion. It was pushing itself harder than it had ever pushed.
The mind was working, but the way in which it worked was alien and he couldn’t follow it. He felt his thoughts recoiling and shutting down rather than experiencing the incomprehensible working of the creature’s brain.
There were currents in the mechanics of the thing’s thoughts that he could understand. Confusion. Some helplessness. An overpowering aggression.
Once, he saw a shape in the darkness of the ocean—huge as a submarine, but alive. It avoided the creature. The creature’s aggressive instinct became a song of bloodlust. It must attack. It must kill. The whale was the enemy and sometimes the food.
But its natural instinct was redirected to something else—something that looked almost familiar when Mark Howard saw it in the dream-mind of the alien being.
He recognized what it was and he woke up in a panic. He was drenched in sweat and Sarah was holding his shoulders, saying his name.
By the time he recovered his wits, the memory was stolen. The noontime sun was coming through the window.
“He’s taunting me,” Mark said.
“Who?” Sarah asked.
“Sa Mangsang, that son of a bitch.”
Chapter 38
Mary Ordonez took the mayor’s hand and thanked him profusely in front of the cameras.
“Even in these dark times,” she announced, “we can take heart in the joy of scientific discovery.”
The crowd offered polite but hardly enthusiastic applause.
“What the world hasn’t yet realized is that this is a major discovery. It is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Never before has a specimen of the Colossal Squid been seen alive by human eyes. Now, we have not only seen the creature, we have captured it and brought it to the Chicago Aquarium. I give you the Colossal Squid!”
She pulled the rope, and the curtain plopped to the ground. The crowd made appropriate gasps and murmurs of awe. The creature was truly magnificent and immense.
Just her luck, Mary Ordonez thought. She picked now to make the greatest biological find of the century. Now, when nobody cared.
It had seemed like a miracle when they spotted the thing tangled in a stray fishing net on the surface of the Pacific a hundred miles off Baja. They had been on their annual specimen-restocking trip. Mary had ordered the creature brought aboard and stored in the expandable holding aquariums. Everyone assumed it was dead.
But it started squirming as soon as the hook snagged the net and began to lift. It struggled until it was in the water again, in the holding tank.
Only after it recovered from the relocation did it begin to show its vigor. It lurched around in the narrow tank, looking for a way out. Ordonez knew she had to get it into a decent-sized tank soon in order to keep it alive.
She called the director of the aquarium, who called the director of the City of Chicago promotions and events, who called the mayor. In less than an hour the funds were arranged for the horribly expensive transportation of the Colossal Squid. There was just one aircraft in North America that was outfitted for the job—a whale carrier used for freeing trendy marine mammals. The specialty cargo jet met them in San Diego, where the custom aircraft bay was opened to allow the squid, again in its net, to be hoisted inside.