MEG: Nightstalkers by Steve Alten

sibling. Charging the surface, the twenty-one-ton Megalodon rose out of the sea, her snout coming within five feet of the chopper’s struts before gravity compelled its return.
    Twisting sideways, Bela struck the surface with a thunderous clap , the impact spraying water across the helicopter’s windshield.
    That was enough for the two pilots. “Captain, if we don’t leave now—”
    “Sir, there’s a man in the water!”
    *   *   *
    Suspended three feet below the surface, Lucas Heitman knew two things—that the Lebofilm ’s anchor was caught along the bottom and that he was out of air. Now he had to choose—drown or attempt to board the boat before the captain cut the line and left him to be eaten.
    Releasing his grip on the crate’s lid, he pushed himself out of the wooden container … and sunk.
    Stripping off his weight belt returned him to neutral buoyancy. Slipping out of his gear forced him to kick his way to the surface for a desperate breath of air.
    His head emerged into a wind storm, the helicopter’s rotors whipping his face with salt water drenched with carbon monoxide fumes. The boat’s transom loomed ten feet away, only it was swaying to and fro so violently that Lucas hesitated to get near it lest he be sucked into the twin propellers.
    Something blotted out the sun, causing him to look up seconds before the bright orange harness struck him in the head.
    *   *   *
    “He’s in, Captain, we’re reeling him up.”
    Jonas peered over the hoist operator’s shoulder, watching the pace of the rising survivor, the pilot maintaining a static hoist evolution. “Captain, you can’t keep us stationary like this, you’re serving him up to Bela as lunch.”
    Royston knew Taylor was right. “Pilot, switch rescue procedure to a dynamic hoist and get us to Shaw Island.”
    “Not enough fuel, Captain. We’ll have to set her down on—”
    The pilot’s eyes widened as the sea erupted beneath the fishing boat, flipping it out of the water. Twisting on the anchor line, it landed keel up, its twin propellers slicing air.
    *   *   *
    One minute Steven Lebowitz was shouting at the girl to grab the ax—the next he was leaving his feet, the helm controls spinning in his vision, the top of his head smashing painfully against the deck which was somehow above him.
    And then he was underwater.
    Disoriented, Lebowitz kicked away from an entanglement of aluminum ladder rungs and curtains of charts, his reeling mind recognizing that the boat he had called home for the last eight years was sinking on top of him and he desperately needed to move.
    Swim to daylight …
    Steven Lebowitz swam to what his eyes perceived to be the surface—his primordial fears igniting as the white surroundings suddenly rushed at him, inhaling him into a moment of excruciating darkness.
    Lizzy did not swallow her prey as much as she chomped down upon its flesh until its blood and innards squished warm between her teeth.
    Donna Johnston remained trapped in the submerged inverted galley, her mind freaking out as Bela gnawed her way through the cherrywood cabin to reach her. Refusing to be eaten alive, the Scot asked God for mercy, said goodbye to her family, and then inhaled the sea deep into her lungs.
    *   *   *
    Lucas Heitman was dragged inside the aft bay just as one of the Coast Guard helicopter’s twin turbine engines coughed … and died.
    Jonas and Mac looked at each another. A breath later the five ton aircraft pitched sideways as it lost altitude, its pilots fighting to reach Obstruction Island with their remaining engine.
    “Hold on, we’re going down!”
    Jonas gripped the mounted hoist’s boom with one hand, the door frame with the other as the emerald surface whipped past the open bay at a sloping thirty-degree angle, the chopper rapidly running out of altitude.
    For extended seconds the pilots held gravity at bay—the depths marbling into azure shallows. And then the second engine seized silent and