Read Hotel Megalodon: A Deep Sea Thriller for Free Online

entered the single floor structure, and walked through a hallway to a room he knew the marine engineers who worked in here called “the situation room.” He wasn’t thrilled about having a situation on the hotel’s opening day, but hopefully it was just these nerds being extra thorough, wanting to apprise him about some technical issue that could be bad if an improbable combination of events happened all at the same time.
    As he passed through the completely empty building, though, room after room and the open cubicle area totally empty, he knew it must be serious. Even the break room was empty. Usually there were at least two guys in there playing Xbox games. They must all be in the Situation Room, which did not bode well. White turned down one more hallway, and was looking into the open door at his entire engineering staff seated around the conference table, arguing and pointing excitedly at their laptop screens.
    There were eight men and two women in the room. James didn’t recall the names of most of them, and he didn’t care. He only needed to remember one, and that was Albert Johnson, his Engineering Manager. This was his circus. James breezed in, and stood at the head of the table, ignoring the empty chair delicately shoved at him by a shy, female Japanese electrical engineer.
    “What have you got for me, Al?”
    The room quieted as all eyes went to the marine engineer. “The hotel’s air conditioning system stopped working about two hours ago.”
    “Two hours ago? So you could have let me know before we took the guests down there?”
    Al shrugged. “At that time I thought it would be a minor problem we’d be able to get a handle on quickly. Wanted to run some diagnostics before sounding the alarm, so to speak.”
    “Yeah, I heard one over the radio. Literally.”
    “Right, that was the temperature alarm exceeding the upper threshold. It looks like the cold water intake pipe for the SWAC system either ruptured, or else has been completely obstructed by something.”
    In order to save money on air conditioning costs, which in the tropics are a necessary evil that accounts for a large percentage of all operational budgets, they decided to utilize a somewhat experimental system that would cool the hotel at a much lower cost than traditional air conditioning systems. This SWAC technology relied on sucking cold seawater found deep down in the ocean into a pipe to bring it up into the hotel on the reef, where it could be distributed throughout. The only electrical energy required was for the pumps to suck the water up the pipe. After it had been used for cooling via heat exchangers, the spent, warm seawater was expelled back into the ocean through a return pipe.
    Both the intake and return pipes were located well away from the hotel’s reef, both in order to hide the infrastructure so as not to spoil the natural views, as well as to prevent disturbance of sensitive reef ecology by the movement of water and altered temperatures associated with the pipes. The return pipe was placed on the outer reef slope at a depth of about sixty feet. Because of that shallow depth, it was easy to maintain, and Al informed James that his team had already determined that the problem wasn’t with the return system.
    “So you’re not exactly sure yet what happened to the intake pipe, is that what I’m hearing?” White checked his Rolex, a not so subtle hint.
    “Like I said, it’s either a rupture—a puncture in one spot where the seawater is leaking out—or else the entire pipe structure has somehow been demolished.”
    “How could that happen?”
    “I don’t know, James. Rockslide? Subsea tsunami that never broke the surface? Instead of speculating, since you appear concerned about the time, what we should do is go down there and have a look.”
    White looked up at him sharply. Apparently Al did not like to be challenged in front of his team of super-nerds, even by his boss. “How deep is the intake, again? I thought