They’re unsure. They can’t detect us with the engines off.

The current swept us closer to where the creatures were circling.

Two hundred feet…

Remembering my night-vision goggles, I reached into a cushioned compartment on the right side of my command center and retrieved them. I placed them over my eyes and the blackness was stripped away, replaced by an olive-green world—

—and a serpent-like creature looming before us that was clearly not my Nessie.

This one was far worse.

It was just as long at thirty to forty feet but far thicker in girth. Its hide was covered in thick slime that reflected our lights from its dark undulating coils. A vertical fin ran the length of its chocolate-brown body to the tip of its tail. The mouth was hideous, rimmed with curved, stiletto-sharp teeth set outside the jaw like the oversized fangs of an Angler fish. The snout was square, its volcano-shaped, pale-pink nostrils opening and closing as it inhaled the current.

Like its modern-day relative, it was a species of giant eel, only it possessed fore-fins—gruesome clawed appendages its ancestors probably once used to climb onto land.

Oh, yeah, and it was electric.

From its gilled neck to its tail, along its flank it possessed bioluminescent cells that generated yellow zaps of electricity, which radiated signals like an alien vessel—a light show, no doubt, designed to mesmerize its prey.

I was already mesmerized in fear. “Ben, full throttle!”

As Ben stamped down on both propeller pedals, I powered on the exterior headlamps and aimed the beams at the creature’s eyes—only I couldn’t find its eyes. In my haste I had accidently powered on the Valkyries, and before I’d realized my error we had shot past the Miocene nightmare’s snapping jaws.

A flash of horizontal lightning revealed the second creature lurking in the darkness off the starboard bow. It was as large as its sibling and appeared to be communicating to it using its bioluminescent cells.

Life and death is separated by a moment. When predator meets prey and there is no escape—the fly caught in the spider’s web, the desert mouse stung by the scorpion, the seal suddenly crushed inside the jaws of a great white shark—the end happens in a startling microsecond.

It was as large as its sibling.

And in that microsecond of clarity, I knew the hyperflexed mouth that suddenly bloomed out of the darkness directly ahead belonged to the adult and not the juveniles. She could have been eighty feet or a hundred. It didn’t matter. The seal doesn’t think about the length of its killer when it’s being eaten; it’s more of a how-did-this-happen moment.

We were swallowed whole—shot right into the creature’s outstretched jaws and down its gullet!

Before we could scream or yell or react, the Barracuda was soaring through a river of water down the creature’s throat.