Kozlov broke free and raced up to the deck. Gorkin followed. The ocean boiled, sizzled and popped like hot oil in a pan as if there was a fire lit below the deep, dark, cold water of the Bering Sea. Then an almighty thump followed by a shock wave travelled over the surface, which was immediately followed by the horizon becoming ragged and indistinct.

Kozlov let his arms drop to his sides. “The subterranean body of water has broken through.”

Gorkin turned, screaming orders. “Drop the cables, hard to starboard, full speed ahead.” He raced to the bridge room.

*   *   *

Kozlov gripped the railing, his teeth showing, and his fingers so tight on the cold steel they would have ached if he could feel anything. The engineer couldn’t drag his eyes from the thing that rose in the distance. It continued to climb, blotting out the sun, and then the sky itself. This monster was not a wall, but a cold mountain peak, rising hundreds of feet into the air and moving out in every direction like a mushroom, widening, and gathering speed. For now, it looked like it was coming at them in horrifying slow motion. But in reality, it was devastatingly fast and would soon be travelling at around two hundred miles per hour.

The Viktor Dubynin turned hard, the side of the ship dipping as it tried to flee the impossible show of nature’s power. Kozlov grinned, and then began to giggle. That fool Gorkin; didn’t he know? They didn’t need a ship, they needed a damn helicopter.

A breeze blew up, a pressure front being pushed before the spreading mountain that was rapidly becoming a range of mountains. The ship started to rise up its face, higher, and higher, the angle of the deck going from horizontal, to near vertical in a few moments.

Kozlov wrapped arms and legs around the cold steel railing as the ship was turned sideways. With the sunlight blotted out, darkness fell over him and he looked down to the ocean far below. Impossibly, beneath him, there were seagulls flying for their life to try and beat the wall of water bearing down on them.

Finally, when the ship was at the crest, they began to tumble down the face of the wall of water. Kozlov let go then.

*   *   *

The Megalodon had cruised along the edge of the rock shelf where the small creatures had fled. It had tasted them, and found them to its liking. But its huge bulk made it ever hungry and it wanted many more.