Hell's Teeth: A Deep Sea Thriller Read online

  HELL’S TEETH

  Paul Mannering

  www.severedpress.com

  Copyright 2016 by Paul Mannering

  CHAPTER 1

  Half Moon Bay, Kaikoura Coast, New Zealand. Latitude: 42° 15’ 68” S, Longitude: 173° 48’ 27” E

  The northeast wind drove the surf into majestic curves that crashed against the pebble beach. The rocky coast north of the tourist town of Kaikoura on the eastern side of New Zealand’s South Island was a mecca for Southern Hemisphere surfers. The Kermadec Trench, an underwater canyon over a mile deep, lay just off shore.

  The area was famous as a home to whales and giant squid. The locals had gone from hunting whales in the 1800s to fishing and now whale conservation as they capitalized on the tourists desire to see the incredible creatures.

  Dave Halligan paddled out under the darkening sky of the late afternoon. The three-millimeter-thick, full-body wetsuit kept the worst of the chill at bay and the hard exercise of catching waves did the rest. Dave didn’t wear a hood or neoprene booties, preferring to feel the sea in his hair and grip the surfboard with his bare toes. The mountains were so close to the coast, as soon as the sun went behind them, it would get much colder. This would be the last surf of the day. After dark, it was easier to go diving, maybe catch some crayfish, the spiny rock lobster that was the other big attraction along this harsh coastline.

  Lying flat, Dave paddled through the swell, thankful the wind had been perfect today, curving the waves into great arcs that provided excellent surfing conditions. Each successful ride filled his soul with a contentment he couldn’t imagine living without.

  When the fin broke the water in front of him, Dave nearly fell off his surfboard. Sharks of different kinds were common in these waters, though attacks on surfers were rare. The surfer stared hard at the fin, and then laughed with relief. Just a dolphin. On those few occasions a shark did attack, the shark had mistaken the surfer for a fur seal. The seals lived in colonies along the rocky coast and the hunting sharks would bite the front end of the surfboard. Which, on a seal, would be a killing blow to the head.

  A moment later, the dolphin surfaced and puffed saltwater spray from her blowhole before plunging into the dark face of an oncoming wave.

  Dave grinned. Dolphins, man. The most perfect creatures in the sea. Smart, playful, and a little bit crazy. Just like surfers. Dropping into the trough between two waves, he sat up and turned his board, ready to paddle like hell to catch the rushing wave. His hands were steady on the front edges of the surfboard, his legs hanging in the water; timing was everything.

  As Dave tensed to draw his feet up and go to his knees, prior to standing for the ride, something grey stirred the water under his foot.

  “Hey, dolphin buddy,” he said, his focus on the wave building behind him. Now.

  Dave moved into a kneeling position, his hands paddling as he caught the sweet spot on the building wave. Once the board caught the wave, he stood up, adjusting his stance and steering the board along the rising wall. The sheer awesomeness of the ride filled him with joy. Dave moved his feet, twisting the surfboard, riding the plane of the wave as it rose over six feet. With both hands outstretched for balance, Dave flew across the surface, his fingers skimming the breaker, creating a boat-like wake and filling the air with a zipping sound.

  When the wide-open jaws snapped closed on his arm above the elbow, Dave only felt a sharp jerking sensation. The force of it pulled him off his board and into the turbulent storm of the breaking wave.

  He tried to scream as he saw the black emptiness of a shark’s mouth lined with triangular teeth. The water clouded with ink-dark blood and Dave swam for the surface, only then registering that his left arm was gone a few inches below the shoulder.

  He screamed with primordial terror and shock, his breath a rising storm of bubbles. The cloud of his own blood, gushing into the cold water, drove the shark into a frenzy. It lunged forward, turning on its back, again baring those unimaginable teeth. The second bite closed around Dave’s midsection. The neoprene wetsuit tore as easily as the warm flesh beneath it and the last of the air in Dave’s lungs bubbled out from his torn lungs.

  As the shark dragged him down into the deeper water, the last things Dave saw were more great white sharks, swimming together and tearing apart the remains of the dolphin.

  CHAPTER 2

  Chatham Rise, South Pacific Ocean, Longitude 44° S, Latitude 176° W

  “You remember Pacman?” Casey asked the newest member of his dive team.

  “Uhh, yeah. Kinda… I guess?” The boy looked confused.

  Casey made a Pacman jaw shape with his hand. “Great Whites, their tails look like Pacman’s mouth. That sharp angle, like a wide open mouth chasing those pills and ghosts.”

  “Okay.” The young diver didn’t look sure of where this was going.

  “The point is, don’t freak out if you see a shark. There’s plenty of them out there. Most of them are just doing their own thing. They are more interested in fish than in you. Each species has a unique shape to the tail fins. If it ain’t Pacman, it’s probably not going to hurt you.” Casey smiled reassuringly and moved off to check the rest of the expedition’s gear.

  At nineteen, Tyler was used to being bullshitted. “Is that true?” he asked Billy, the dive-crew’s second-in-command.

  “Aww, yeah,” the lean Samoan said.

  “Serious mate, no shit?”

  “Way I see it,” Billy paused in his careful coiling of ropes, “Shark comes at you, you get your knife out and stab that fella in the nose.”

  Tyler nodded. It was what he had always understood. A shark’s nose was sensitive; a good thump would send one scurrying off in search of easier prey.

  “Of course, you have to get close enough to that bloody shark to let you punch him, eh?” Billy grinned, his teeth white against the brown of his skin.

  Tyler felt less certain than ever. This far south, the Pacific Ocean was cold and grey. The nearest land was the tiny archipelago of the Chatham Islands, 420 miles off the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island. They were halfway there, a small ship alone in a vast desert.

  “Go ask those university fellas, eh?” Billy suggested.

  Tyler looked up the deck towards the bow of the ship. The addition of a marine biology team to the expedition was a nice treat, especially when it turned out the team included two girls. It was a bit weird to Tyler that one of the girls was in charge. She’d been introduced as Aroha Halligan, Doctor Aroha Halligan. Tyler reckoned that meant she’d paid a lot more attention in school than Tyler ever did.

  “Hey, isn’t it bad luck to have women on ships?” Tyler asked.

  The Samoan threw back his head and laughed. “Only if they don’t like you, mate.”

  Tyler hoped Aroha liked him. With her bleached hair, tanned skin, and fit physique, she didn’t look like a book nerd. Tyler laughed with Billy and helped him stow the ropes in the on-deck cabinet.

  *

  “I can’t believe they are seriously doing this,” Nari Prasad, the second woman on the science team said to Aroha. In their mid-twenties, they were close in age and freshly graduated with doctorates in their fields of study. For Nari, it was low-oxygen marine environments and for Aroha, it was great white sharks. Though entire libraries of research existed libraries about the most feared of the ocean predators, the Pacific waters off New Zealand’s east coast were a hotspot for the most famous shark species. In these cold southern waters, they had exhibited behavior unseen in other populations and a lot was still unknown about the life cycle of these incredible creatures.

  “It’s okay, Nari.” Aroha was focused on the rugged laptop in front of her as the
ship rose and fell with the ocean swell.

  “Any kind of mineral exploration is going to cause untold devastation to the environment,” Nari continued. “Taking samples is only going to encourage them.”

  Nari’s research into the strange habitats found in the deepest parts of the ocean had shown indicators of rich phosphate and more precious mineral deposits in the silt and mud. The mineral prospecting companies jumped on the data as they sought virgin land to exploit for resources and profit.

  “They are paying enough for us to conduct research for a year, Nari. Besides, if the mining companies weren’t footing the bill, we would both be sitting on the mainland, marking undergrad papers.”

  Nari shuddered; the only thing she loathed more than corporate mining’s disregard for the natural environment was working with students.

  “If they so much as knock over a chimney…” Nari warned. The hydrothermal vents provided a unique alien environment for many forms of life in the dark depths and mineral-rich chimneys formed around the hot water rushing out of the earth’s depths.

  “Wasn’t it you who told me those chimneys can grow at up to thirty centimeters a day?” Aroha teased her friend.

  The Indian scientist bit back her sharp reply as the deck door opened and Casey, the leader of the commercial diver team, came inside.

  “We’re all set,” Casey announced.

  Aroha nodded, a blush rising on her neck, as she went back to staring at her computer screen. Two days out of port and she still couldn’t look Casey in the eye. I am never drinking again, Aroha reminded herself.

  “I’m heading up to the bridge,” Casey said. His fair hair and unshaven face stood out in high-contrast against the wind-burned tan of his skin. “If you want to come, Doc.”

  “Sure,” Nari grinned, “I’ll come. What about you, Doctor Halligan?” she asked.

  “No, that’s fine. Go on without me,” Aroha muttered, staring at the weather report on the screen as if her life depended on it.

  Nari followed Casey up the internal stairs. The Waitangirua was a commercial diving vessel with a crew of ten and room for supplies, gear storage, and space for two mini-subs on deck.

  The ship’s captain, Vincent “Mac” Macquarie, smoked constantly. His fingers were stained with nicotine and calloused from sixty years of hard labor on ships of all sizes and types. Mac glanced at the new arrivals as they emerged from the staircase and smoke jetted from his nostrils.

  “What?” he asked, barely moving lips around the flickering tip of his hand-rolled cigarette.

  Casey spoke up. “All set, Captain. Just waiting for you to put us on the right spot.”

  Mac grunted and jetted smoke again. “Got you right on the money,” he said. A gnarled finger jabbed at the various glowing screens in front of him. “All engines stop,” he ordered.

  “All engines stop,” Kelly, the ship’s first mate, replied as she eased the throttle back on the console. The drone of the ship’s engines reduced to an idling purr.

  “What’s the depth?” Nari whispered, hardly daring to speak up in front of the gruff captain.

  “Four hundred meters. That’s over thirteen hundred feet,” Mac replied. His hearing was sharp as his navigation skills. “Anchor it,” he snarled.

  “Anchors away,” Kelly replied. The hull vibrated as anchors fore and aft plunged into the water and began their rush to the distant bottom.

  “You’d best get on with it,” Mac ordered without looking at Casey or Nari.

  “Roger that.” Casey followed Nari down the stairs as the ship rose and fell in the gentle swell.

  In the room below the bridge, the divers and science team had gathered and Casey brought them up to speed.

  “We are on site,” he announced. “The habitat was finished last month and one of our team will go down first to ensure that everything is still working. I know you have trained for this and you are all experienced divers, but, I will say this again, where we are going is nothing like your usual SCUBA trip to look at the pretty fish. At four hundred meters, it is dark and cold and the pressure is a fuck of a lot higher than you can imagine.

  “This is a saturation dive. Which means you can look forward to a couple of days in a decompression chamber when you get back. We’ll be taking you down in the dive bell and you need to obey every single instruction given to you by the dive team and alert us immediately if you find yourself in difficulty.”

  He looked around the group; three divers and seven civilians in all, two women and five men, including an underwater video specialist, his two video production assistants, a geologist, and a deep-sea mining engineer. The last two would be earning their keep, taking core samples and determining if it was worth committing company resources to a full drilling expedition. The cost of a prospecting mission with equipment like that would be high even without all the lobbying and bureaucratic rigmarole to jump through to get the necessary permits and licenses.

  The video crew were mining company men, with experience working on offshore drilling platforms, tropical jungles, and deserts. How they got into a soft job like camera operating and editing was a mystery to Casey. The three of them looked like hard bastards. Not that it mattered a damn where they were going. Casey knew from experience that even the toughest could break when they went deep.

  “There will be two trips. First, Steve and Billy will take Doctor Prasad, Doctor Halligan, Doctor Steele, and Mister Hudson. Then I’ll bring the video crew and their gear.”

  Steele, the geologist, had the tanned and wiry frame of a field scientist. Only his salt-and-pepper beard suggested he was close to retirement age and still he grinned like a kid on Christmas morning. Behind his TV screen-sized glasses, his eyes sparkled with delight.

  Hudson, the deep-sea engineer, was half Steele’s age and his face had the solemnity of a judge. Casey had worked with him before on other projects and knew that Hudson’s reputation for being the best man for the job was justified.

  Casey closed his briefing. “Any questions? Okay then, use the bathroom; trust me, it’ll be a few days before you get to go comfortably again. Steve will help you with your dive gear and complete the safety checks. I’ll see you all on the bottom.”

  The room cleared in silence, until only Casey and Aroha remained.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t have to do this. If you’re not ready, I mean. We can bring you down later.”

  Aroha looked at him for the first time. “I said, I’m fine.”

  Casey wanted to say he was sorry about her brother. The news had reached them in port two days before they shipped out. Aroha’s brother, Dave, was killed in a shark attack while surfing off the Kaikoura coast.

  Aroha had been understandably shocked and devastated; it was in support of her that Casey took her drinking the night before they boarded the Waitangirua and left the port of Lyttelton. Ending up in bed together hadn’t been what either of them intended, and since then, Aroha found it hard to make eye-contact.

  Casey nodded and walked out to the deck, inhaling the fresh air. The motion of the boat always made him nauseous and on the surface, he felt close to drowning. Underwater, those fears vanished, and he was completely calm and focused; he missed that tranquility when he was onshore.

  “First group should be ready in a few minutes,” he announced.

  “Yeah, boss,” Billy replied without looking up from doing the technical checks on Tyler’s gear.

  The young diver stood next to a large suit of armor that weighed over 500 pounds and looked like a tire company mascot. The steel and fiberglass suit protected a diver to a depth of a thousand feet.

  Casey frowned for a moment. “I’ll go start the monitoring and comms system check.”

  Tyler watched Casey walking away from the corner of his eye. “I could totally drive the bell.”

  “Uh-huh,” Billy grunted.

  “Seriously, man. Casey should let me take it.”

  “Did
n’t you crash his truck?” Billy paused and looked at Tyler.

  “I barely scratched it.”

  “You backed his truck into a concrete wall and you expect him to let you drive the bell with passengers?”

  “I—”

  “No.” Billy opened the gleaming armored suit. “You ready to get canned?”

  “Like a sardine.” Tyler pushed his arms into the stiff molded arm sections and settled his feet into the heavy boots.

  “Air okay?” Billy asked.

  Tyler felt the flow of cold gas coming into the suit caress his face. “Yeah.”

  Billy closed the suit from behind and sealed the sections.

  “You on the air yet?” Casey’s voice echoed in the fish-bowl helmet.

  “Comm’s check,” Tyler said into the helmet microphone.

  “Comm’s check confirmed,” Casey replied. “What are you going to do?”

  Tyler rolled his eyes. “I’m going to descend on the umbilical line to a depth of two-hundred and seventy meters.”

  “And then?”

  “Hold until the cargo passes and Steve brings the bell back up.”

  “Nothing else,” Casey warned.

  “The suit can go to three hundred meters easy,” Tyler said.

  “Yes, it can. But you aren’t going that deep.”

  “I could drive the bell, which would give me more certified dive hours.”

  “I haven’t forgotten what you did to my truck.”

  “Yes, Dad,” Tyler muttered.

  “Hey, you are only here because your father asked me to help out with getting you more commercial dive experience. So watch the attitude.”

  “Roger that. All suit systems green. Ready to launch.”

  Tyler had been diving since he was a kid. Finally old enough to get his commercial diving certificates and then breaking into the insular world of commercial diving had been a dream come true. It had only been possible due to his father’s connections as a maintenance engineer on ships and underwater pipelines. Casey was taking him on this job as a favor to Tyler’s old man, and there was no way the boy was going to screw it up.