Dragon Song

Chapter 4

FOUR

Eva and her team were back on the dock, asking Romeo some questions to better clarify what had happened to the wild pod, when Ranger Oliver Sterling pulled up in one of the Roatán Marine Park boats.

“Hello, there, Dr. Paz,” Oliver said, his British accent thick over the boat’s engine.

Eva didn’t like the interruption, but Oliver rarely bothered her, so she assumed it was important. Besides, she owed him one. Oliver, a former SAS officer, had helped get Eva’s mother back when she’d been kidnapped by Julian not so long ago.

“Hello, Oliver. Anything I can help you with?”

Oliver gave her a polite nod. “A local fisherman reported unusual activity out at Atlantis, so I thought I’d check it out. Since most of it’s underwater, I figured it’s a job Captain Owens could help with, and I thought you might want to come along. He said he could pick you up on his way out in the Denise 2. Are you game?”

Eva’s friend and colleague, Captain Denis Owens, was still in possession of the Denise 2, a submarine prototype transparent to sonar and based on his original and eponymous Denise design, which was on loan to him from DARPA for testing purposes. Atlantis was a long-abandoned offshore mariculture farm that once belonged to the wealthy megalomaniac Julian, who had liked to play God with genetic engineering. If there was new unusual activity out there, Eva wanted to see precisely what was going on.

“I’m game. Radio Denis and tell him to pick me up. In fact, I may have an idea what we’ll find.” She showed Oliver the high-res photo of the haunting images from Romeo’s click trains.

Oliver shook his head. “The tylosaurs don’t surprise me. They’re like our invasive lionfish or the bloody Xiphactinus hybrids. Once you’re infested with fleas, you got ticks, too, and you can’t get rid of them—you can only manage them. But poachers… of our own wild pod? That’s horrific. I’ve never seen anything like that in our neck of the woods.”

That was saying something. Oliver, as head ranger of the RMP, had seen a lot in his career—not only poaching of smaller species like langostas and conch, but also a great deal of cartel crime—and he was driven by a desire to protect the reef. The invasive lionfish eradication program had been his brainchild, and it had later been the basis of the eradication program for the CobiX, a dangerous hybrid between Cobia and the Cretaceous-era Xiphactinus that Julian had engineered.

Oliver would be a great ally in investigating the missing wild pod—she could see in his eyes how troubled he was by the images. He would undoubtedly also help in creating a strategy to deal with the tylosaurs. But where to start? There was one place in the islands that malevolence always seemed to lead back to.

Atlantis.

Eva had to first visit that oceanic ghost town.

A place she never wanted to see again.