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the middle of the sector the AusSAR had given Beard hours earlier. This was also a sector that rattled Beard's nerves. Several ships had disappeared in the area over the last year, and Beard had heard some of his colleagues refer to it as The Pacific Triangle, relating it to the western version of the infamous Bermuda Triangle. Beard's superstitious musings were interrupted by his first mate, who hurried to the captain with his field glasses in hand.
    "Skipper, there's a piece of a plane fuselage off the east end of the island."
    "Can you make out any lettering?"
    "Yeah. I'm afraid it's the one."
    "Shit. Okay. Is there any sign of survivors?"
    "Not so far."
    "Get us in closer."
    "Aye, Captain."
    When the frigate neared the beach, Beard could see the mangled tail end of the jumbo jet rising out of the surf.
    Jesus, he thought, all those people.
    He scanned the surrounding area. Debris floated all around, yet he saw no bodies. Not one.
    * * *
    By about two a.m., it had become clear to Buck Johnston and the rest of his team at AuSAR that the plane, if it had indeed ditched, must have done so further north of the mainland. They could do nothing more until sunrise.
    Dawn was a somewhat nominal concept as it brought little more than a grey fog to the scattering of islands off the coast. Visibility was limited for the search planes. However, as the day progressed, boat patrols in a score of little islands off Tasmania reported no sightings of the 747. The islands that skirted the mainland were all remote inaccessible places, but too small to disguise an airliner. Even one in pieces.
    It began to look as though the ocean had just swallowed the jumbo jet completely. Worse yet, the frigate Kanglour had failed to report back, which left Johnston even more rattled. Besides his concerns for the airliner, two other ships had disappeared in as many years in that same sector, known as The Pacific Triangle. Johnson wasn't a gambling man but in this case, he'd stake his life that the plane, and maybe now another frigate, had become the latest victims of the triangle. Despair began to settle around Johnston like a descending mist.

Part Two
Extinct

Four
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    P ETER C ARLSON SAT IN THE study of his suburban Washington, D.C. home, considering the worn parchment text in his lap. His grandfather had passed the ancient book on to him just hours before succumbing to lung cancer some twenty years ago. Peter was close to his grandfather. After his own father had walked off and left them, the elder Carlson raised Peter himself. Peter's mother had died when he was six. He barely remembered her, so his world revolved around his grandfather. He idolized him, and his life's work.
    As Carlson scanned the worn pages, he could see his grandfather was not the quack some of the old man's former colleagues had accused him of being. In fact, the information was as clear as a bell to Peter Carlson.
    In 1921, the Tasmanian tiger, a marsupial land cat native to the island of Tasmania, was hunted to extinction by mainland Australia. Though it was widely believed to be the result of over-hunting for sport, that wasn't the real reason they'd hunted the elusive mammals out of existence.
    The Chinese had discovered that the liver of the Tasmanian tiger, when ground into a fine paste, could cure everything from impotence to cancer, and more. The Aborigines had been privy to this information for years, having lived for centuries among the animals in the dense jungles of Tasmania. When word got out to the rest of the world, every hunter with a rifle and a week's worth of supplies flocked to the dense jungles off the Australian coast, killing every Tasmanian tiger in sight. Medical companies paid big money to have a cache of Thylacine liver to experiment with and claim as the cure for this or that. It was something akin to the medicine sideshow of the eighteenth century where one elixir would cure all ills. But unlike the medicine shows, these substances from the tiger did