“Yes it can.” She gently pulled her arm free and disappeared down into the cabin. Jack thought she had panicked, and went to follow her when she reappeared, holding a plastic sleeve with some papers in it. She sat back down, and held it out to him.

He took it from her, turned it around, and looked at the pages. They were from a web site and showed an image of something on the deck of a fishing boat. He frowned and then angled it to get better light.

“Russian?”

Cate nodded.

Jack scanned the printed story underneath the images, and then his eyes went back to the long fish-like thing. “The Southern Bering Sea.” He looked up. “Not that far from Baranof.”

Cate just stared back at him. “There’s something else; remember that small earthquake in the papers a few months back? Well I spoke to the Colorado seismic event facilities. They recorded a huge warm-water temperature spike in the Bering Sea.”

Jack held her gaze. “Upwelling?”

Cate hiked her shoulders. Vincent watched them and reached out to take some of the pages from Jack. Regina leaned in closer to look over his shoulder. The Coast Guard officer looked up.

“Is this related?”

“Maybe,” Jack said.

“Will you stop saying that, Jack?” Vincent shoved the pictures back at him. “Listen buddy, we’ve got a dozen boats and a total of thirty people now missing off the Californian Coast. That’s in the last few weeks, and just the ones we know about. There could be more still unreported. There’ve been no storms, no tidal surges, no boat hijackers in the area.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “And then I see the shape of something that might or might not be a freakin’ nightmare, and I’m betting you guys know more than you’re letting on.” He sprang forward. “Jack, don’t bullshit me, please. Have we got a problem or not?”

Jack sat back, lifted his beer, and sipped. The liquid wet his dry mouth, but was tasteless. Cate continued to stare at the ground, but nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Okay.” Jack put down his beer and clasped his hands in front of him. “This is confidential, okay?”

Vincent shrugged.

Jack sighed. “There was an expedition a few months back – an exploratory excursion to a newly discovered environment buried below the north-western Alaskan coastline.” He looked up at his friend. “It was a body of water – huge, and been locked away for millions of years. It contained life forms, big life forms.”

Jack held up Cate’s picture of the armor-plated fish. “Like this thing; a Placoderm, been extinct for a hundred million years – same amount of time as the coelacanth.”

Vincent took the picture back, and held it next to his image of the shape under the whale. “This is not what I saw. This thing only looks to be about a dozen feet long. What I saw—”