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  Brandon smiled. “Yeah, okay.”

  “Great,” Paul said. And maybe I can find out just what, if anything, the kid’s hiding. He indicated the way toward town. “Shall we?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Brandon repeated.

  “I’ll come get you in a couple of hours, Brandon,” Jack said.

  Brandon nodded as Paul led the boy away from the pier and in the direction of the Malau Weekly News offices.

  The small wooden building that housed Paul’s newspaper used to be the local dive shop. Surrounded by trees and off the main road, the owners of the dive shop had decided to move to a more visible locale, leaving the space available. Initially, Paul had also lived in the small building, until the Weekly News’s revenues were at the point where he could afford his own place.

  He unlocked the front door and led Brandon in. Paul grabbed a tape recorder and started asking Brandon a few technical questions about what the Ellways did generally.

  “Didn’t you ask us this stuff at lunch the other day?”

  Paul smiled. “Yeah, but I didn’t have my tape recorder then.”

  “Okay,” Brandon said, and proceeded to answer all of Paul’s questions by rote. The kid knows this stuff pretty well, Paul thought. Either that, or he’s real good at making it up and sounding convincing.

  As they talked, Paul took Brandon into the dark room and gave the kid a crash course in picture developing. Brandon expressed surprise at how low-tech it all was, but Paul just shrugged and said that some things didn’t require high-tech.

  They talked for a few hours, first about his and Jack’s work in general, then about some of the other trips they’d taken together in the last year. Paul avoided the subject of Brandon’s mother, which he assumed to be a sensitive subject. By the time he had selected and made prints of the captured monster, they had moved on to talking about the events of the last couple of days.

  “Do you think Derek’s gonna get to do what he wants?” Brandon asked.

  “Not too likely,” Paul said. “Derek still labors under the delusion that people respect him. He’s got great fishing instincts, and his catches are generally worth it, but as a person, he’s regarded somewhere below the plankton.”

  Brandon laughed at that. “I guess. What about what Dad said?”

  Paul frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “If there was more than one of these guys around, what do you think would happen?”

  Paul thought about that for a moment, looking down at the print of the nine-foot lizard. God, he thought, imagine a whole family of these things.

  “Well,” he finally said, “I’d say that whenever humanity has power over nature, nature’s usually the big loser.”

  Brandon sat quietly for a moment after Paul said that.

  The kid knows something. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m just curious,” he said much too quickly. “I mean, the police chief kept talking about how he might have to kill it.”

  “Well, the thing is responsible for three deaths, Brandon. I mean, when a dog gets rabid and is in danger of hurting people, they shoot it. Our Ghidrah lookalike out there has already proven to be dangerous. They may not have a choice.”

  “Ghidrah?” Brandon asked, sounding confused.

  Paul smiled. “Old Japanese monster movie.”

  “Oh.” Brandon looked over at Paul’s computer. “So what do you do with the pictures, paste ’em up?”

  “Thank God, no,” Paul said, noting that Brandon had quickly changed the subject. “I used to before I could afford the upgrade, but I do it all on the computer now.”

  I won’t push now, Brandon, but you know something, and I’m gonna find out what it is.

  In the bungalow Ralph Hale had rented, Jack watched as the older man spread a large map of the area, a smaller topographical map that included geological referents, and several satellite photos on his dining room table. The previous contents of the table—piles of papers and books, mostly—had been dumped unceremoniously on the floor. At once, Jack noticed that the resolution on the satellite photos was of much greater quality on the prints than they were on the JPEG computer files he and Hale had looked at the previous day. There were also several photos he didn’t recognize.

  “What’s with the extras?”

  “My techies at the Institute came through for me,” Hale said with a grin. “They got their hands on some shots taken by the Topex Satellite over the last couple of months. So, what’re we looking for?”

  “Well,” Jack said, “salamanders aren’t all that common around these parts, but the most likely breeding ground for aquatic salamanders would be a submerged mountain range—” he peered at the topographical map “—like that one.” He pointed to an undersea strip labelled IOZIMA RIDGE that, relative to Malau, ran northeastward into the Pacific Ocean.

  Hale peered at the map. “That ridge runs for two thousand miles.” He looked up at Jack. “Uninterrupted.”

  Nodding, Jack said, “Which would explain why no one’s spotted our creature or any like it.”

  As Jack spoke, Hale started rummaging through the satellite photos. “C’mon,” he muttered, “where is it? A-ha!” He liberated first one, then a second photo from the pile and laid them out side by side over the map. “Look at this, Jack.” He pointed to the one on the left. It provided an image that matched the basic structure shown on the geographical map of the westernmost part of the Iozima Ridge, but had the darker, negative-image—type look of most satellite photos. “Here’s the ridge at its closest proximity to Malau. Topex took this shot last month.” He pointed to the photo on the right, which was superficially similar, but for the Hale Institute logo on the edge—and the hairline across one part of the ridge, which Hale ran his finger down. “This little artery wasn’t there a month ago. I suspect it’s a fault line created by all the recent seismic activity. It leads directly from the ridge to the shallow waters off Malau.”

  Jack frowned. “Kinda like an expressway that’s suddenly developed an off-ramp.”

  Hale laughed. “Whoa, Jack, these technical terms are makin’ me dizzy.”

  Returning the laugh, Jack said, “Sorry—force of habit when your assistant is twelve.” He shifted the photos and looked again at the map. “I wonder if our amphibian friend was travelling along the ridge and decided to try the scenic route.”

  “How ’bout taking a dive and lookin’ around?”

  Jack blinked. Hale had mentioned that he, like Jack, was a certified scuba diver. But diving into a deep undersea ridge like Iozima with just a divesuit for protection against the pressure was not particularly realistic, and he said so.

  “That’s not the sort of diving I mean,” Hale said with a smile. “The Institute has a titanium submersible.”

  For what seemed like the millionth time since meeting Hale, Jack felt a pang of envy. There were only a handful of such submersibles in the world. Jack fondly remembered seeing the demonstration of Graham Hawkes’s submersible Deep Flight in Monterey, but he never dreamed he’d get the opportunity to ride in one. “You famous scientists get all the good toys.”

  “Stop complaining—it’s not like they’d trust me with a tranq rifle.”

  “Good point,” Jack said with a grin, then looked at his watch. “How soon can you get it over here?”

  “Depends on who’s usin’ it right now,” Hale said, bending over to rummage through the detritus from the dining room table, eventually liberating his cordless phone. “Worst case, we won’t get it till morning.” He pushed the phone’s TALK button and then dialed a sequence of numbers. “Hello, Josie, it’s Ralph . . . I’m doin’ just fine, darlin’. Listen, who’s got the Scorpion Fish? . . . All right, can you patch me through to him? . . . Beauty . . . Yes, I’ll hold.”

  Hale put his hand over the mouthpiece and looked at Jack. “Grant Wilhoite’s one of my bright boys. I got him studyin’ geothermal—” He cut himself off, taking his hand off the mouthpiece. “Grant? . . . Grant, it’s Ralph . . . Ralph Hale
, your boss . . . That’s right, mate. Listen, I need you to fetch the Scorp down to me on Malau . . . What do you . . . yes, I know, Grant, I’m the one who gave you that deadline, so I don’t mind if you blow it. It’s for a good cause. Now—what? . . . Look, mate, I know the project’s important, but I’ve got a lizard here out of a Ray Harryhausen movie, three dead people, and one injured copper. That takes precedent, okay? . . . Glad you think so. So get your arse down here . . . Right, I’ll see you first thing in the morning.”

  As Hale pushed the END button and put the cordless down on the table, Jack smiled. “Scorpion Fish, huh?”

  “Trust me, when you see the thing, you’ll know why.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” He leaned over the table, moving the satellite photos off the maps. “Okay, since we’re going to have a submersible, we should figure out where we’re going to take it.”

  Later on, Jack left Hale to his afternoon nap and went to pick Brandon up from the Malau Weekly News offices.

  “He didn’t ask too many annoying questions, did he?” Jack asked the reporter with a grin.

  “Nah, I’d say I won the Annoying Questions Derby,” Paul replied.

  Brandon nodded emphatically. “Big time. But I know how to use Quark now.”

  Jack frowned. “I assume that isn’t a subatomic particle?”

  Paul laughed. “A computer program. It’s what I use to lay out the paper. So where you guys off to?”

  “Feeding time at the zoo,” Jack said. “Our overgrown newt out there should be awake enough to feel peckish.”

  “Sounds like fun. Oh, hey, listen—”

  “Yeah?” Jack said.

  “Don’t let Derek get to you. I mean, he’s a complete and total asshole, no question. We’ve sorta gotten used to him. He keeps catching good fish, and we let him be a total asshole, and generally completely ignore him.” Paul scratched his cheek. “I guess what I’m saying is, he isn’t worth getting worked up over. No one around here takes him seriously—no reason why you should.”

  Jack smiled ruefully. He had let Derek get to him, to a manner Jack wouldn’t have believed possible. “Thanks. C’mon, humble assistant, let’s go do some work.”

  Brandon grinned. “Okay, Dad.”

  As they walked toward the beach, Brandon asked, “So what’d you and Doc Hale do all day?”

  Jack gave his son a précis of what he and Hale learned. “So we’ll be going out in the submersible tomorrow morning when Hale’s man gets it here.” He hesitated. How do I tell him? Oh, hell, just come out and say it. Speaking the words quickly, he said, “It’ll just be the two of us. I really wish I could take you along, but it’s just too dangerous. I can’t put you at risk like that—”

  “That’s okay,” Brandon said with a shrug. “I understand.”

  “You do?” Jack was stunned. An alien came down and replaced my son with a pod person. Brandon hated being left out of things. “You’re not upset?”

  “Nah, I got plenty of stuff to do around here.”

  Jack marvelled at the resiliency of the preadolescent boy. Two days ago, Brandon was throwing a hissy fit because Jack wouldn’t take him out in Hale’s seaplane, requiring bribery and paternal convincing. Now, Jack wasn’t entirely sure he’d have been able to talk Brandon into coming on the Scorpion Fish.

  Kids, he thought, go figure.

  “Got enough time in your busy schedule to help me feed Superlizard?”

  “Oh, sure,” Brandon said agreeably.

  “Good. Salamanders are big on invertebrates, so I figure we can start with that. Having sampled the local mud crabs, I can’t imagine that our boy won’t go for them.”

  “Maybe,” Brandon said.

  Within a half-hour, they had gathered a bucketful of mollusks and mud crabs. Brandon had seemed less than enthusiastic about the choice of food, which Jack thought odd.

  “What if he doesn’t like this stuff?” he asked.

  Jack smiled. “Oh, I think he will.”

  “Yeah, but what if he doesn’t?”

  He should know this as well as I do, Jack thought, confused. Hell, sometimes I think he knows it better. If you don’t know the species of what you’re feeding, try the food of the animal’s closest analogue. Well, the thing only has a miniscule resemblance to a salamander, but that’s a miniscule more than it resembles anything else outside of Jurassic Park. So we start with aquatic salamander food.

  Aloud, he said, “I’ll switch from an aquatic diet to a terrestrial one. You know, bugs, leaves, that kind of thing.”

  “And if he doesn’t like that?”

  “We start from scratch.”

  Brandon nodded, then continued gathering invertebrates in silence. After a moment, Jack said, “Brandon—the past year, all the running around we’ve done . . . has it been okay for you?”

  Shrugging, Brandon said, “Yeah.”

  “I mean, it’s been—fun, hasn’t it?” Jack struggled with the words.

  Another shrug. “Sure.”

  Dammit, Brandon, I’m not looking for polite answers here. “I mean, it’s a lot better than sitting around and feeling sorry for ourselves, right?”

  Yet another shrug. “Right.” Brandon held up his bucket. “I’m full up.”

  Jack sighed. Obviously, Brandon didn’t want to talk about whatever it was that seemed to be bothering him. Maybe I’m imagining it.

  They went to the pier and dropped the various fish over the top of the cage. It fell into the water with a plop!

  And then it stayed there. Superlizard recoiled from the food, then simply stared at it.

  Dammit.

  “See?” Brandon said, sounding entirely too self-satisfied. “He doesn’t like it.”

  Jack looked more closely at the beast. He stared at Jack and Brandon as much—no, more than he did at the food. “I think we’re making him uptight. Let’s leave him alone. He’ll eat, I’m sure of it,” he said, more for Brandon’s benefit, since in fact he wasn’t at all sure.

  I’ll come back in an hour with some bugs and leaves, and take it from there, he decided.

  “C’mon,” he said, “let’s get some dinner. Dr. Hale told me about a Japanese place on the other side of the island, and I could go for some tempura right about now.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Brandon seemed less than enthused, even though he loved Japanese food. What is with him? he wondered.

  Diane would know what was wrong, he thought, then quashed it. This was no time to get maudlin.

  We’ll have a nice dinner, then try to feed the big lizard. Tomorrow, Hale and I will explore, and maybe get to the bottom of this little mystery.

  He focused on that. It was easier than trying to figure out his son.

  SIX

  Malau Police Chief Joseph Movita hated hospitals. If you were in a hospital, it meant something had gone wrong, that somebody had screwed up. One of the reasons Joe became a police officer was so that he would be in a position to keep things from going wrong and people from screwing up. So a visit to Doctor Hart’s clinic was not something he especially wanted to do, since it made it feel like he hadn’t done his job.

  But he hadn’t much of a choice. Jimmy was convalescing here, and he wouldn’t be much of a boss if he didn’t visit a subordinate who’d been injured in the line of duty.

  Joe had been born on the very day that the United States Marine Corps liberated the island—which, if nothing else, made it very easy for people to remember his birthday. His mother had been with a group of Malauans who had hidden in the jungle—his father had been killed six months previously by Japanese soldiers after he protested the living conditions on Malau since the war started. A Marine named Joseph Toriccelli had found Tara Movita and the others in the jungle and stayed with them in case any Japanese soldiers happened upon them to try to get in one final shot before the USMC nailed them. In the middle of this, his mother went into labor. Private Toriccelli knew almost nothing about how to deliver a baby beyond a half-remembered training film, but somehow he
managed to do it in the middle of a humid jungle. In his honor, the boy was named Joseph Toriccelli Movita, and the private made his godfather.

  Chief Movita had only met the man who delivered him once, but he didn’t remember it. He was only three at the time, and the newly promoted Sergeant Toriccelli had made good on a promise to visit his godson on the island he helped liberate. Shortly afterward, he was assigned to the fighting in Korea, and was killed.

  A father killed for trying to make people’s lives easier; a godfather who was a soldier killed in the line of duty. No wonder he became Malau’s “top cop.”

  Jimmy lay on one of the clinic’s flat, uncomfortable-looking beds, reading a motorcycle magazine. Bandages covered several parts of his chest and arms and an IV drip lead to a vein in his arm.

  “How’s it going, Jimmy?”

  The young cop looked up and smiled at Joe. “Not too bad, Chief. It only hurts when I breathe.” He set the magazine aside. Joe saw that he was reading about a new Suzuki model, and remembered that Jimmy had been saving up to buy a Suzuki.

  The chief smiled. “Well, the doc says you should be all right in a couple of weeks.”

  “So,” Jimmy said after a moment, “what’d you do with the body?”

  Joe’s smile fell into a frown. “Body?”

  “Y’know, T. rex out there. Did you chop it up into cutlets for Manny or what? Hope you didn’t try blowing it up. There were these people in the States that tried that, and they got whale guts all over—” Jimmy cut himself off, looking at Joe.

  The chief closed his eyes for a moment. Obviously Jimmy read Joe’s expression.

  Before Joe could say anything, Jimmy said, “That goddamn thing’s still alive, isn’t it?”

  “For the time being, yeah.”

  “But—”

  “The order came straight from Manny,” Joe said before Jimmy could say any more. “Look, we don’t know what the thing is, and we have to—”

  “We know exactly what it is, Chief!” Jimmy said, shouting now. “It’s a killer! It got those two women and Dak, and it would’ve killed me!”