Jeremy Robinson - Island 731

“Good,” Drake replied. “Is Kam with him? We need to get—”

“You don’t understand,” DeWinter said. “Cahill. He’s dead.”

Drake’s face reddened. “How?”

DeWinter collected herself and answered. “He’s bound up in some netting tangled off the port crane. Looks like he fell overboard. Drowned.”

“The hell was he doing outside?” Drake grumbled.

“Have you found Kam?” Joliet asked.

DeWinter shook her head. “Should have been in the science quarters with you.”

Drake rolled his neck, the vertebrae popping audibly. He pointed to Jones and DeWinter. “You two, fish Cahill out of the water. We’ll use the wet lab as a morgue. Put the dead on ice and return them to their families. Blok and I will get Sanchez to medical and Allen to the wet lab. The rest of you, find Kam. I want control of my ship and I want it yesterday.”

As the group split up, Hawkins was thankful he wasn’t in Drake’s shoes. There was nothing that could have been done to save Allen or Cahill, but Drake took his responsibilities as captain seriously. The deaths of his second mate and a deckhand had to be eating him up.

Hawkins followed Jones and DeWinter down the stairs to the main deck, where the outer hatch was once again opened. The door must have been left open by Cahill, but why had the man gone outside? It was a suicidal move. The only reason he could think of was that someone less experienced—namely Kam—had ventured outside first. The theory didn’t bode well for their search.

Jones and DeWinter stepped through the open hatch and headed for the back of the ship, where the body of Cahill waited for them.

“I’ll start looking belowdecks,” Bray said. “Don’t feel ready to see another corpse.”

“That makes two of us,” Hawkins said. “I hope you’re the one that finds Kam.”

“I will,” Bray said. “I’m sure of it.” Then he descended the stairs toward the lower decks.

Hawkins followed the father and daughter team outside, but stopped at the port rail. Joliet joined him and together they looked out at the hilly jungle. A squawk brought his eyes up to the clear blue sky. Five large seagulls circled overhead, like vultures.

Joliet put a hand over her eyes and looked at the birds. “What are they waiting for?”

A scream replied, but it didn’t come from the birds. It came from the stern.

“That was Jackie,” Joliet said and, without a moment’s pause, ran toward the stern deck with Hawkins hot on her heels.

Hawkins stumbled over a loose buoy as he sprinted toward the starboard side of the Magellan ’s bow. The first deck at the front of the ship was normally clear of everything except for the occasional sunbathing crewmember. But now it was covered in a layer of refuse that came up to Hakwins’s knees in places. He caught himself on the rail, pushed off, and continued after Joliet, who had hopped through the debris with surprising agility.

After stepping past empty jugs, an army of rubber duckies, and endless loops of rope that made the whole mess look like some kind of giant plate of spaghetti, Hawkins arrived to find Jones holding DeWinter against his chest. His normally composed and confident daughter shook with fright.

“What happened?” Hawkins asked.

“I didn’t see it,” Jones said. “But something took the body. Cahill is gone.”

“Come look,” Joliet said.

Hawkins joined her at the rail and peered over the edge. A large swath of thin netting hung over the rail and descended into the water some sixteen feet below. It was the kind of net used to catch large fish, like tuna, but worked just as well on sharks, dolphins, whales, and apparently human beings. But there was no body in this net. Not anymore.

Joliet pointed at the water beyond the net. “Look. There’s a footprint.”

Hawkins had recently learned that a footprint, in the ocean, was an area of flattened water caused by a disturbance by something beneath, most often a surfacing whale. But this wasn’t a footprint in the traditional sense. The water here was calm. There were no waves to flatten. Instead, the footprint left behind were widening ripples spreading out from the net, presumably where Cahill’s body had been caught in it.

The mystery of what happened to the body wasn’t hard to solve. “Shark,” Hawkins whispered. “Had to be.”

Joliet nodded. “A big one. These nets are strong enough to entangle whales. Shark’s teeth would cut some of the lines, but not all of them.”

Hawkins stared into the deep blue water surrounding the ship, looking for a shifting shadow, but found nothing. If there was a shark down there, it had either retreated to the depths with its meal or headed back out to sea. He hoped for the latter, but had a feeling the shark would stick around to see if anything else fell into the water—like a dog at a dinner table. “Think it’s our friend come back for the rest of the turtle?”

“Wasn’t a shark,” DeWinter said. She pulled away from her father’s grasp and wiped her wet eyes.

“Had to be,” Hawkins said. “What else in these waters could do it? Squid?”

Joliet shook her head no. “A squid big enough to pull a man free from this netting would have to be huge, and they live in deep waters.”

“This looks pretty deep,” Hawkins said, looking down into the water.

“Not nearly deep enough. Maybe—”

“It wasn’t a shark!” DeWinter shouted. “I saw it. It didn’t stop to bite, or to shake its head. I know how sharks bite. They shake their heads so the serrated teeth can cut. Whatever took him, took him as it swam past. It never slowed down. He was there, and then he wasn’t. A shark couldn’t do that.”

Joliet crossed her arms and frowned. “She right. A shark would have made a mess of things.”

“Then what did it look like?” Hawkins asked.

“Maybe we should give her some time?” Jones said, placing his hands on DeWinter’s shoulders. “She might remember the details better if—”

DeWinter shrugged out from her father’s arms. “I remember the details just fine, not that there is much to remember. It was black, fast, and at least eight feet long, maybe bigger. It came from beneath the hull, took the body, and went deep. That’s it. Was too fast to see anything more.”

Hawkins thought about the possibilities. A shark still felt right to him. They were the biggest deep-sea predators that could also hunt in shallow waters. But DeWinter was sharp and her testimony hard to ignore.

He shook his head. This wasn’t like an attack at a national park. He’d investigated several attacks at Yellowstone during his stint there. The culprit could always be identified. Even if no one witnessed the attack, there were always tracks. Or scat. Or easily recognizable bite marks. Sometimes claw marks. Hawkins rubbed a hand over his chest. And the potential offenders were few: bears, cougars, and sometimes herd animals like elk or bison provoked into action by a heckling tourist.

But out here in the ocean, there were an array of predators that could arrive and escape unseen. Not only that, while Yellowstone is 3,468 square miles of wilderness, the ocean and its depths are essentially limitless. New species of predator, including sharks and behemoths like the giant squid, were still being discovered. Since most ships avoided this stretch of water because of the thick Garbage Patch, it was possible that a new species of predator hunted here. That the island wasn’t on any charts supported his theory, but with no facts to support it, Hawkins decided to keep his speculation to himself.

A loud splash spun the group around toward the port side of the ship, beyond which the lush, green tropical jungle swayed back and forth, as though beckoning.