MEG: Nightstalkers Read Free

mental ward, after which the commander received a dishonorable discharge—a parting gift from his commanding officer, who intended to deflect his own culpability for ordering the exhausted pilot to make the dive.
    His career over, Jonas set out to prove the albino monster he had encountered was not an aberration of the deep. Five years later he graduated from the Scripps Institute with a doctorate degree in paleobiology. A year later he published a book which theorized how ancient sea creatures living in isolated extremes could evolve in order to survive extinction.
    Colleagues panned his work.
    While Jonas struggled in the world of academia, world renowned cetacean biologist Masao Tanaka was completing construction of a new aquatic facility on the coast of Monterey, California. The Tanaka Oceanographic Institute was essentially a man-made lagoon with an ocean-access which intersected one of the largest annual whale migrations on the planet. Designed as a field laboratory, the waterway was 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.
    Rising construction costs forced Masao to accept a contract with the Japanese Marine Science Technology Center. The mission: to anchor sensory drones along the sea floor of the Mariana Trench, creating an early-warning earthquake detection system. To complete the array, D.J. Tanaka, Masao’s son, had to escort each drone to the bottom using an Abyss Glider , a torpedo-shaped one-man submersible.
    When several of the drones stopped transmitting data, Masao needed a second diver to help D.J. retrieve one of the damaged aquabots in order to diagnose the problem.
    He sent his daughter, Terry, to recruit Jonas Taylor.
    Jonas accepted the offer, desiring only to recover an unfossilized white Megalodon tooth photographed in the wreckage—the evidence he needed to prove the sharks still existed.
    The dive ended badly; Jonas and D.J. coming face to face with not one, but two Megs. The first was a forty-five foot male, which became entangled in the surface ship’s cable; the second was its sixty foot pregnant mate, which was lured out of the trench into surface waters teeming with food.
    The Tanaka Institute took on the task of capturing the female. Jonas and Masao were determined to quarantine the monster inside the whale lagoon, with JAMSTEC agreeing to refit the canal entrance with King Kong-sized steel doors.
    The hunt lasted a month, culminating in an act that would haunt Jonas’s dreams over the next thirty years. All was not lost—the Megalodon’s surviving pup was captured and raised in Masao’s cetacean facility—and a monster shark cottage industry was born.
    Angel: The Angel of Death.
    Two shows daily. Always your money’s worth!
    Angel grew into a seventy-foot albino nightmare that drew crowds from across the world, earning the Tanaka-Taylor family hundreds of millions of dollars. She also managed to escape twice, birth two litters of pups, and devour no less than a dozen humans—five of them in her own lagoon.
    And yet people still lined up by the tens of thousands to see her and they wept when it was announced she had died.
    The public had an entirely different reaction when they learned “the sisters” had escaped.
    Angel had given birth to five female offspring four years earlier, but two of the sharks were nearly twice the size of their three smaller siblings and far more vicious.
    Elizabeth, or Lizzy for short, was pure albino like her mother. The voting public (swayed by various European blogs) had named the shark after Elizabeth Bathory, purportedly the worst serial killer in Slovak history. In 1610, the infamous “Countess of Blood” had been charged with the torture and deaths of hundreds, mostly young girls. Her cold savagery seemed to