Free Sharkman by Steve Alten

as our eyes darted over the first series of cages. Every rat had shed its fur, giving it a gruesome baseline appearance. From there, the shark stem cells had unleashed liberties upon its hosts’ DNA that seemed to have been spawned from the sociopathic mind of Josef Mengele, the monster of Auschwitz who performed live experiments on Jewish children.
    Bulging eyes. Gill slits along either side of the neck. Thickened scale-like skin and mutilated tails that had been metastasizing into freakish caudal fins. The tortured rodents were bashing their rapidly evolving carcasses against the interior of the habitats in powerful spasms. There was blood in several cages, and a few of the rodents had actually succeeded in cracking the plastic. One rat—possessing hideous fangs, had bitten through the hose of its water bottle, flooding the cage. Now it lay in two inches of water, gasping painful breaths.
    We told Dr. Kamrowski we had seen enough.
    She led us to the final series of habitats—Stage 4 . . . death.
    Cage after cage held the evidence of a miracle gone awry—dead rodents, tortured by their evolving deformities until death had mercifully granted them a reprieve.
    I heard Anya ask, “How did they die?”
    “They suffocated,” replied Dr. Kamrowski. “After a day or so, cartilage forms in the esophagus, obstructing breathing. We’ll perform autopsies before we dispose of their remains. I realize this is shocking to see, but this is how we find cures for diseases. If we can overcome the cross-species rejection, then . . . well, there’s hope.”
    Hope . . .
    I stared at the deformed creatures, recalling a poem my mother had often recited to me as a child: “Hope is the thing with feathers . . . that perches in the soul. And sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.”
    Emily Dickinson had called hope a “thing with feathers.”
    My hope had gills.

10
    W hile I was wasting Dickinson on dozens of dead rats, rodents of a different ilk were circling their “cheese” nine hundred nautical miles to the southeast.
    To the casual observer, the presence of the 165-foot fishing trawler, Malchut , in the deep waters off Puerto Rico probably seemed natural—the vessel dragging its nets, encircling a school of fish.
    A closer inspection of the Canadian-registered ship would have revealed a different story.
    Although the trawler was equipped to fish commercially, the deck space between the net drum and bridge was designed to accommodate a helicopter. The fish holds had been converted into a weapons bay, with mounts for two .50 caliber machine guns hidden within the base of the trawl gantry.
    The biggest difference between the Malchut and a standard fishing trawler was located underwater. Fastened beneath the keel like a twelve-foot remora was a gondola-shaped device that housed a multibeam echo sounder (MBES)—a sophisticated sonar array equipped with the latest in underwater imaging.
    Over the last four hours the Malchut had been slowly circling the same patch of sea, allowing the MBES array to develop detailed images of the USS Philadelphia . The sunken Los Angeles Class attack sub was resting 220 feet beneath the Atlantic, its hull balancing precariously on a rocky precipice above the 28,000-foot-deep Puerto Rico Trench.
    Along with the five crewmen who operated the bridge, engine room, and galley, there were with two Americans on board the fishing vessel—both former Navy SEALs trained to locate and salvage sunken ships, along with nine Arab mercenaries. The latter were members of the Al-Nusra Front, a private militia that fought with the Syrian People’s Coalition against the oppressive regime of President Bashar Assad. Al-Nusra has been blacklisted by the Obama administration as a terrorist organization—a fact that only made the renegade militia more attractive to the CIA and other black ops groups.
    The commandos received their orders from the only woman on board.
    Sabeen Tayfour was the lone surviving