“Stop yer whinin’. I teld ye in my note, we had tae drop yer core temperature tae disable the tracking device Stewie shot intae yer vein. The Colonel’s divers stopped searchin’ for yer body an hour ago. They gotta think yer dead. Tha’s whit we want.”

Angus stood to leave. “Finish yer I.V., then get dressed and find yer way to the pilothouse. Jonas says he needs tae train ye before he’ll give ye one of his subs.”

I had met Jonas Taylor and his friend James Mackreides eight years ago, shortly after my book, The Loch, was published. The Tanaka Oceanographic Institute had offered to host a public signing event at their California facility on the coast of Monterey. Constructed twenty-five years earlier by the late marine biologist Masao Tanaka, the Institute featured a man-made lagoon with an ocean-access canal that intersected one of the largest annual whale migrations on the planet. Designed as a field laboratory, the waterway was originally intended to be a place where pregnant gray whales returning from their feeding grounds in the Bering Sea could birth their calves. Masao was so convinced, his facility would bridge the gap between science and entertainment that he mortgaged his entire family fortune on the endeavor.

Instead, the lagoon would become home to Carcharodon megalodon, the sixty-foot prehistoric cousin of the great white shark.

Like Livyatan melvillei, megalodon was a Miocene monster believed to be extinct. Jonas Taylor had discovered them inhabiting the deep waters of the Mariana Trench while piloting a top-secret dive for the Navy. According to his testimony, “I was staring out the portal at the hydrothermal plume when sonar picked up an immense object rising from below. Suddenly, a ghost-white shark with a head bigger than our three-man sub emerged from the mineral ceiling.”

Two scientists on board had died during an emergency ascent, and the deep-sea submersible pilot was blamed. Discharged from the Navy, Jonas decided to become a marine biologist, intent on proving the megalodon was still alive.

Seven years later, rising construction costs on the Tanaka Institute forced Masao to accept a contract with the Japanese Marine Science Technology Center. The mission: to disperse sensory drones along the Mariana Trench that would function as an early-warning earthquake detection system. To complete the array, D.J. Tanaka, Masao’s son, had to anchor each drone to the trench floor using an Abyss Glider, a sub resembling a one-man version of the Barracuda. When several of the drones stopped transmitting data, Masao needed a second diver to help retrieve one of the damaged sensors.

He selected Jonas Taylor.

Jonas accepted the offer, desiring only to recover an unfossilized white megalodon tooth photographed in the wreckage. But the dive ended badly.