Nathan felt the burn of saltwater in his throat and sinuses as Kong hauled himself out of the water and back onto the now righted, if listing ship. The Titan was gasping, too. But his eyes were tracking Godzilla, whose fins could be seen moving in a wide circle around the fleet. Kong pulled himself up to his full height. He reached up and broke the metal band around his neck, and roared, beating his chest.
Behind him, the elevator door opened, pouring out Ilene and Jia. The Admiral and bridge crew were recovering, but the controls were all dead.
Oh, Nathan thought as Kong continued to follow Godzilla’s path. Kong isn’t going to wait for Godzilla to come back for him, is he?
No, he thought, as the gigantic ape took a very short run across the deck and leapt. He bounced off a frigate as if it were a stepping-stone in a creek and landed squarely on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. The whole ship lurched but Kong steadied himself, roaring a challenge at the other Titan swimming toward him. He grabbed one of the jets from the carrier deck and flung it at the oncoming Titan; Nathan saw the pilot eject an instant before the craft slammed into Godzilla’s back.
It didn’t slow the monster down. Tail pumping furiously, he broke from the water and slapped down on the deck, destroying several planes as he pulled his entire weight from the sea and gathered his hind legs beneath him.
But by that time Kong was ready. He threw a punch that would have made any street-brawler proud, connecting with Godzilla’s snout and knocking him back on his taloned heels—but not far enough. Godzilla recovered and returned with an open-clawed slap that overbalanced Kong, tumbling him back. Godzilla stooped over him, but then a fusillade of missiles blasted into his back, stunning him for the few seconds it took for Kong to come up swinging, this time punching Godzilla over the side of the carrier. The reptilian Titan vanished beneath the waves.
For a moment, nothing happened; Kong stared down at the sea, his huge brows knit in concentration, searching for his vanished foe. Then he suddenly leapt aside as a blue bolt of energy shot up from below, blasting through the ship and narrowly missing the huge ape. Cut in half, the carrier began to sink, as Kong plunged into the water after Godzilla.
* * *
Free of the elevator, Ilene came alongside Nathan in time to see Kong dive.
Kong had never been shy of the rivers and lakes of Skull Island. He bathed in them, hunted in them, especially for mire squids and the enormous amounts of protein they contained.
But while he liked to look out over the ocean, especially in the rare days when the storm parted, he had always avoided getting into it, probably because he didn’t like the idea of water deeper than he was tall. Whether he knew that from experimentation when he was younger, of from instinct, she did not know. Did Kong know how to swim? She couldn’t remember if other apes swam or not. It seemed unlikely. But then again, Kong was not like other apes.
Whatever the case, Godzilla spent most of his time in the water.
“Kong could hold his own on solid ground,” she told Nathan. “But this isn’t his terrain. He needs our help.”
But once again, Nathan was frozen with indecision, as if his effort in freeing Kong had drained him of all initiative.
“We’re running out of time, Doctor!” the Admiral said. The emergency power kicked in, and suddenly the controls and monitors of the bridge were alive again.
“Depth charges,” Ilene said. “Depth charges. Maybe we can confuse Godzilla.”
Lacking any input from Nathan, Wilcox seized on her suggestion.
“All ships, set submersibles for cyclical expansion. Multiple sources. Multiple sources!”
* * *
The enemy pulled Kong down.
Kong had sensed him before, many times. Sometimes it had been like an itch, but deep inside where he could not reach to scratch it. He had never seen him until now, yet there were no surprises when he did; like when he saw the bones of his parents, he knew what they were, although he did not really remember them. The shape of the enemy was like nothing he had ever seen, much less fought; but just the scent of the creature made him angry, and everything about it fit into a hollow spot inside of him, as if something had been taken out long ago and left empty until now.
He would have let it be. He had no interest in it; it did not threaten his island and those he protected. Why should he care about it or what it did?
But it had come for him, come when he was helpless. And for that, he wanted to break it, tear off its limbs, suck the meat from its bones.
But it was bigger, stronger than anything he had ever known. It made him feel things he did not understand and did not want to understand.
He had known the instant he was in the water that he’d made a mistake. He had fought things like this, the giant scaly predators that lurked in the waters of his island, that pulled smaller beasts beneath the surface and kept them there until they died. The largest of them had tried to kill him, but he always managed to plant his feet on the bottom of the river and snap them in half.
There was no bottom to this water, and the only thing to plant himself on was the enemy. While the water was also Kong’s adversary, the enemy was friends with it. Rather than trying to go back up, where he could breath, the enemy only wanted to go down, deeper, where Kong could not.
If Kong let that happen, he knew the
