one that had him.
John gripped the controls, his knuckles popping, and held on for the fast descent to the bottom as he heard the hull around him groan and warp.
***
“John!” Bart shouted. “John! Can you hear me?”
There was no response. The com was dead. And as Bart watched his cockpit fill with water he knew he was dead soon too.
Unless…
He let go of the controls as his eyes found the depth gauge.
“Shit,” he muttered as he watched the depth increase from 500 feet to 550 feet to 600 feet rapidly. “I better do this now.”
He popped open a small compartment in the floor, grabbed a rebreather and a pair of hand fins. Not having the bottom halves of his legs made flippers useless. He settled the rebreather over his head and onto his shoulders, strapping the apparatus around his chest and back.
650 feet, read the depth gauge.
“Fuck,” Bart muttered as he put the mouthpiece in.
He tucked a hand fin into his belt then reached up and twisted four bolts in the cockpit hatch. He yanked hard on a lever then slammed it back home and the hatch exploded outward. Cold ocean water rushed in at Bart and he held himself steady until he was completely immersed.
Then he slipped on the other hand fin and pushed himself up and out of the sub.
He was an ex-SEAL, and trained to fight his fear, but his wet suit became suddenly warm as he pissed himself at the sight of the shark that had his sub gripped in its jaws and was steadily pushing it towards to bottom of the ocean.
The thing had to be over sixty feet long. It was an impossible creature.
Bart knew his sharks well enough to quickly see that the thing wasn’t a great white. He had no idea what the hell it was.
He took a large breath from the rebreather, oriented himself towards the surface, and started to swim, glad for the strength the hand fins added. But they weren’t the same as flippers on feet. In a minute, he was exhausted and had to struggle to control his breathing.
He slowed himself, very aware that if he surfaced too quickly he’d get the bends and nitrogen bubbles in his blood stream would end up in his brain. That would be bad. Deadly bad.
***
The sub, and monster shark, came to a crashing halt as it smashed into a formation of volcanic rock. Frustrated by the lack of blood from its prey, the shark thrashed its head back and forth, desperate to tear open the faux whale’s belly.
But instead of the delicious red that it sought, out came a steady stream of white. The shark chomped over and over, crushing the subs cargo hold, releasing kilo after kilo of drugs into the Pacific Ocean. The white powder dissolved quickly in its new saline environment, mixing perfectly with the seawater.
The shark pulled back, alarmed by the strange substance that filtered through its massive gills. The drug raced through the creature’s bloodstream and the shark whipped about, its senses heightened to a level that even science couldn’t have imagined.
Sixty feet of drug fueled shark sped through the water, ready to eat every damn thing in sight.
***
Suddenly, Bart had other bubbles to worry about than just the nitrogen ones in his bloodstream. Huge air bubbles rose from below. They slammed into him, bursting around his body, and he was surprised to find that when they broke, the water became milky white.
The cocaine.
Bart figured the shark must have finally ripped through the sub’s hull and into the cargo hold. All of those kilos of cocaine were now leaking into the Pacific Ocean. Bart stared as the bubbles kept coming, then grew even more alarmed because he suddenly realized the water was too murky for him to see.
That meant he wouldn’t know if anything was coming at him.
He said fuck it to worrying about the bends and started to swim as fast as he could.
Digging deep, pulling from his training, he reached above with his hand fins and stroked over and over. He’d once been offered special flippers that could strap to his