Free MEG: Nightstalkers by Steve Alten Page A

descent on the boat’s closed circuit monitor.
    The kelp had obscured much of his view until the diver had reached the sea floor. He knew Lucas had emptied the crate because the tension on the winch’s cable had eased. Using the boat’s fish finder helped fill in more of the missing pieces to the puzzle.
    No one in their right mind would have dived within fifty miles of a Megalodon sighting unless there was a big payoff to offset the risk. That meant drugs or weapons. Having radioed his fellow charter captains, Lebowitz knew the girl was an associate of Alexi Lundgard, a reputed dealer in the black market. Weapons were easy enough to purchase in the States, so it had to be drugs.
    They probably had to dump their stash overboard when the Coast Guard shadowed Lundgard’s yacht.
    Lebowitz was about to radio the authorities when the first shark appeared on his fish finder.
    With the abundance of food available in the Salish Sea—including seals and sea lions, favorite delicacies of the great white—one might assume shark sightings were prevalent around the San Juan Islands. In fact they were rare. Great whites, it turned out, were an orca delicacy. While the offshore killer whales patrolled the entrance to the Juan de Fuca strait, the transient and local orca pods protected the kayakers and divers.
    And yet the fish finder had identified not one but six juvenile great whites.
    From their rapid movements, Lebowitz knew the sharks were hungry and that they were aggressively circling his diver. He had tracked Lucas back to the crate when the first predator launched its attack.
    The sudden stress on the winch’s cable painted a clear picture of what was transpiring below.
    Lebowitz ran out on deck, the .12 gauge shotgun in his hand startling Donna Johnston. “Captain?”
    “We’ve got visitors.”
    “The sisters?” She backed away from the rail into Lebowitz, who was reversing gears on the winch.
    “It’s not the Megs, but there are an unusual number of great whites circling your diver.”
    “Is he okay? Is he able to surface with the crate?”
    Lebowitz restarted the winch, the cable and pulley straining under the additional weight. “If I’m right, he’s inside the crate.”
    “Inside the crate? But what about…?”
    “The drugs? Guess he had to leave them behind.”
    Donna moved to the starboard rail, catching sight of a gray dorsal fin. “It wasn’t drugs. It was pinto abalone.”
    Lebowitz looked up. “You risked his life for a bunch of…”
    The word shellfish caught in his throat.
    Steven Lebowitz had experienced fear twice in his life—the first time at age eight when he was swimming in the ocean alone and found himself caught in a riptide; the second at age fourteen when he suddenly ran out of air while going for his SCUBA certification.
    That was fear; this was terror—the shortness of breath, the rapid thumping in his temples, the sudden weakness in his legs … it all seemed like an out-of-body experience.
    Gripping the winch to keep from collapsing to his knees, he stood by the starboard rail and gazed in awe at the spy-hopping albino goddess. The Megalodon’s head was so incredibly large he felt embarrassed to have challenged the creature’s authority, her gray-blue eye so close that he could have prodded it with the barrel of the shotgun had he the audacity to move. The peppered underside of the snout … the thick muscle set around a mouth so immense he could have climbed inside its trap door of a jaw—the silently jabbering lower hinge offering a hint of serrated teeth.
    Queen Lizzy stared at her human subject as if she were debating its fate.
    Donna Johnston’s blood-curdling scream shattered the moment and returned Steven Lebowitz into his body.
    Raising the shotgun, he fired.
    The buckshot blasted a ring of lead pellets in and around the Megalodon’s left eye, spraying blood and cornea bits across Donna’s chest.
    Insane with pain, the albino slammed its inflamed, gushing eye