Pilot First Class, Regina ‘Ginny’ Boxer, eased the wheel around. The HH-3F Pelican helicopter responded smoothly, and turned in the air. The massive machine was seventy-three-feet long from cabin to tail, and with a rotor diameter of sixty-two feet. It was invaluable to the Coast Guard, as it was one of the few craft that was air-amphibious – being able to land and take off from water.

The Pelican was a fast and tactical search and rescue tool. The downside was that the big baby was thirsty as hell, and in an hour they’d have chewed through nearly seven hundred gallons of gas. This was their third time out that night, and this trip they’d already been out for thirty minutes and still hadn’t found any trace of the latest boat to disappear, a small pleasure craft called the Bella Donna out of Monterey, with two onboard – Brad and Cindy Levinson. It was in this search quadrant the boat had called for help; either the owner, Brad Levinson, had activated the distress beacon himself, or it was auto-activated by an EPIRB – Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon – a tracking transmitter that was triggered upon immersion, when a boat got into trouble.

So far, Vince and Regina had seen nothing up top, and their worry was that if the Bella Donna drifted, and then sunk over the edge of the shelf, then the beacon would be compromised as the pleasure cruiser models weren’t designed for depths – after about a thousand feet, they simply stopped working.

Vincent lifted the field glasses again; last night at about twenty hundred hours Bella’s beacon had lit up and pinged them, and then gone dark. He didn’t have a good feeling about their chances. So far this month there had been five boat disappearances, none had been located, and not a single body recovered. Something weird was happening, and he was pretty sure they hadn’t found themselves in some sort of new Devil’s Triangle.

“We’ll have better light in the next twenty minutes,” Regina said, confidently.

“Yup, but by then we’ll have burned through most of our tank. We’ll have to head back in and refuel,” Vincent responded.

“Then we’ll have to… whoa.” Regina slowed the craft in the air. “Hey Vince, check that out. I have never, ever seen one of those big boys – a blue whale.”