by Greig Beck
The last man seemed to hesitate at the cage rim.
“Problem, Pytor?” Vlad asked.
Pytor quickly shook his head and continued in.
“You’re not worried about heights, are you?” Fradkov grinned. “Just because we’re standing in a steel cage, over a hole forty-three thousand feet deep?” He chuckled.
Pytor blew air between his lips. “Not a bit.” He refused to look down at the grating over the floor that showed a line of lights dropping to a seeming infinity. “Is that all?” He grinned.
“Are you sure?” Fradkov jumped up and when he landed, the cage shuddered.
There was a sound of something cracking, and Vlad leaned toward the young soldier. “You do that again and I’ll open the door and throw you into the pit myself. You understand?”
Fradkov nodded. “Yes, sir, sorry, sir.”
Zhukov and Valentina finally entered the cage and the door closed with a heavy clunk of finality. The captain wasn’t afraid of heights, but the weird smell, the warmth, and the incomprehensible depths made his skin crawl.
He circled a finger in the air, and Grigory turned back to the controls. The huge elevator whined to life and then with a grinding of steel it began to move.
“Going down. Next stop, Hell.” Vyrin Andripov pulled a silver crucifix on a long chain from his collar and gripped it in his fist.
***
Pytor Shamiev stared straight ahead, seeing nothing. Truthfully, he hated heights, hated doing parachute jumps, and hated cliff climbs. But he was smart and hoped to complete officer’s training and climb out of this type of field work within the next few years. Good riddance to grunt work, he thought.
His gaze was unfocused as he took himself mentally out of the cage and began to recite some of his favorite poems in his head—poems of love and friendship, and freedom and loyalty, by the likes of Pushkin and Lermontov. He tried his hardest to ignore the rising heat and blank out every clunk, grind, and jerk of the endless rails as they dropped to the bowels of the Earth.
Few of the men spoke, all, like Pytor, seemingly lost in their own thoughts. Beside him, the rock wall traveled upward at a blistering rate, and the lights dotted every few hundred feet were like a strobe light illuminating their faces for a blink to then leave them in near darkness for moments more.
The heat grew, and he remembered Yuri’s comment about Hell, and now thought them more than apt.
What Pytor didn’t know was that after thirty years of no maintenance, underneath them the formidable cage floor had been eaten through by the mix of caustic gases rising from the depths. The support superstructure had been weakened and the combined weight of the soldiers and their gear was adding a level of strain to the grate not experienced in decades.
After another ten minutes, Pytor estimated they had dropped close to a mile below the earth’s surface and had around eight more to go. He stuck a finger in beside his collar to wipe at a tickle of perspiration.
The big man shifted from one foot to the other.
That was all. And that was all it took.
Below him, the floor gave way completely and he dropped, fast.
Pytor had good reflexes and threw out a hand, grabbing the floor edge, but the combined weight of his body and pack dragged him down.
The other big men moved quickly, but the corroded steel floor beneath them groaned and sagged, and Captain Zhukov roared for them to stay still.
The soldiers were professionals and immediately complied with the order—even Pytor remained motionless as he strained with one hand to hang onto a single steel girder.
“Easy now,” Zhukov whispered, shrugging off his pack and laying down to inch forward. On his belly, he peered into the hole in the floor and the upturned face of his soldier.
Pytor was bathed in sweat and it stung his eyes, but he couldn’t dare blink as he stared firstly at his commanding officer and then at the steel bar he held onto as it began to pop and bend. Downward.
The big man began to drop further below the cage floor. Zhukov reached down but was still a few inches short of Pytor’s hand.
Zhukov turned to speak over his shoulder. “Grab my legs. Lower me down.”
Both the Russian captain’s legs were held, and he was inched forward. It wasn’t easy, as the edges of the hole were rusty, ragged, and sharp, and he doubted he’d get his shoulders through.
“No good.” It wasn’t going to work, but he had another idea. “Get some rope, form a slip knot.”
Behind him, there was furious activity. He knew that each man had two hundred feet of elasticized climbing rope, and in seconds, he was handed a length with a sliding noose at one end. Zhukov leaned into the hole again.
“Pytor, I’m going to lower this rope. You must use your dangling hand to grab it and slide it over your wrist. Then I can pull it tight, and we will haul you up. Understand?”
Pytor nodded but grimaced. “It hurts.”
“You can do it.” Zhukov noticed that just like him, Pytor had not yet donned his caving gloves, and the flesh of his hand was glistening with blood, obviously shredded from the jagged steel. And worse, it would make his hand slippery.
A fist-sized piece of floor steel broke away to bounce off Pytor’s cheek and the hanging man quickly turned to look over his shoulder and watch it tumble away further, and further, and then forever—he would never hear it hit the bottom. He turned back, his eyes glistening with fear.
“Stay strong, Pytor,” Zhukov urged. “The rope, hurry now, grab it.” Zhukov tried to move the rope loop closer to his man’s arm, but Pytor was trying to stop himself contorting while he only just managed to hold on with one hand.
Zhukov half turned to his team. “Lower.”
His men slid his body out a little further, but it was as far as he could fit into the hole. It was just bad luck or a fluke that Pytor was able to slip all the way through.
The cage bounced and rattled as it continued to drop. It didn’t help the trapped man. Zhukov could see Pytor struggling. He needed to keep him focused but calm. “Soldier, listen,” he ordered. “You will place your hand through the rope loop. Now.”
Pytor nodded and tried to slow his gyrations. As he did, his hand moved a fraction on the blood-slippery girder. Only another six inches of it remained before he fell.
The man shut his eyes for a few seconds, and then slowly reached out. Zhukov tried to match Pytor’s movements with the rope. Inches now separated them. Then only one inch.
The elevator passed over a roughened part of the tracks and jerked, just a little, but enough. The corroded steel gave up, snapped, and both it and Pytor fell into space.
Pytor never made a sound as he kept his eyes on Zhukov as his body fell away. Zhukov wondered how long he would fall—thirty minutes, more? And would he be conscious the entire way, gathering speed until he hit bottom?
Pytor finally vanished down into the abyss without making a single sound. Zhukov exhaled miserably. “Pull me up.”
He was dragged backward, and he got carefully to his feet. His team were silent and all pressed to the outside of the cage now.
“Pytor is gone. A good man, killed serving his country.” He looked along their faces. “We can’t stop and can’t turn back. We go on. Use your safety lines to hook on to the cage sides.”
The team reached into the climbing kits and took out clips and lines and latched them to the cage walls. Zhukov glanced at the young Fradkov. “And I promise you, next person to jump up and down will join Pytor.”
***
Vlad counted off milestones as they went, but the rest of the descent was completed mostly in silence as the team remained lost in their own thoughts.
Zhukov stared straight ahead. He knew military mishaps happened, but it was shit that it occurred before they had even touched down. From a resource perspective, he was already down one man.
“Forty thousand,” Vlad intoned.
And in the next instant, the cage slowed, and then slowed more, making them all
feel the weight of gravity come down on their bones, before bouncing to a stop. The gate opened and Zhukov nodded to Chaika and Andropov, and the two men headed out with guns up. The area wasn’t large and in seconds, they gave the all-clear and the rest of the team filed out.
Zhukov turned slowly. They were in little more than an excavated pit, roughly forty feet around and with what looked like a humid mist that came to their knees. It must have been a hundred degrees and the air smelled of methane, oil, and rotten vegetables.
“Where’s Pytor?” Vlad asked.
The group all looked one way then the other, but it would have been impossible to miss the man, no matter how obliterated or exploded the body might have been.
Zhukov looked up. “Maybe he got hooked up during the fall.”
The others craned upward, but again, there was little space between the elevator sides and the bored hole they had descended.
There was little other possibility—and then they found the breach in the wall.
“Here.” Fradkov pointed.
The group joined the young soldier and stood at the rip in the rock face. Zhukov stepped closer and shone a strong beam into the cavity.
“Deep. Natural caves in there.”
Vladimir leaned in beside him. “Notice which way the breach has fallen?” He turned.
Zhukov nodded and placed his hands on the edge. “I know, inward. So, the breakthrough came from in there, not from the borehole side.” He straightened. “Doesn’t matter—this is where we need to go.”
Zhukov squinted at the edge of the rip in the wall, and then looked at one of his hands. He held it up to his second-in-command—it was covered in fresh blood. He leaned further in. “I see more blood inside.”
“Pytor’s? How? Did he bounce?” Vlad exhaled. “I doubt he climbed in there himself.”
“I agree.” Zhukov wiped his hand on his pants. “As the Americans say: shit just got real.” He turned. “Doctor?”
Valentina Sechin joined them, and Zhukov showed her the blood trail. “Your opinion, please?”
Valentina used a flashlight to examine the blood on the edge of the hole and then leading in. “Fresh, so has to be from Pytor. And obviously a dead Pytor.”
“Maybe our dog people are real after all.” Vlad raised his eyebrows.
She half smiled. “And if they weren’t, would they send so many soldiers and so few scientists?”
“SOP, Doctor.” Zhukov smiled. “The American woman is estimated to be eight miles due east, and another two miles down.” He faced her. “Do you think she could be alive?”
Valentina’s mouth turned down. “I think we are more likely on a body retrieval mission.”
“I think so too.” Zhukov turned to his men. “Listen up, we’re going in. Anitoliy, Viktor, take point. Fradkov, you are at rear. Doctor, you are with me.” He circled his finger in the air and then one at a time, the men started to squeeze in through the crack in the wall.
CHAPTER 06
Office of Anderson International Salvage, New York City
Matt Kearns left the window with its panoramic view over the city and paced around the enormous office that was larger than his entire apartment. The meeting room he had been left in was sparsely furnished with a few couches and at its center, a single, enormous antique table that looked to be centuries old.
Matt crossed back to it and looked over the spread of Janus Anderson’s satellite images of the Pacific Ocean plus varying sea charts. He ran his finger over the bathymetry maps that indicated a fairly uniform 5,000 or so-foot-depth for hundreds of miles in every direction. As expected, there was nothing but a plain of endless ocean floor.
He slid the first of the satellite images closer to the bathy-maps and compared the latitude and longitude grid. They were identical for positioning, and all other aspects except for one thing —the satellite images showed a small island in the middle of nowhere.
Matt looked at the next set of images—blank. Whatever the island was, it had vanished, in true mysterious fashion.
He’d read that vanishing islands are natural occurrences and usually they’re visible at low tide and then disappear at high tide. The Philippines is home to seven of such islands while the San Juan Islands have many of them.
In the medieval period, explanations for the strange phenomenon of islands that appeared and subsequently vanished were often associated with sea monster stories told by superstitious sailors.
But that only happened in very shallow water, or water that was on the ridge of some sort of volcanic or crustal uplift… not in water that was supposed to be around a mile deep.
There was another occurrence of a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t island, where underwater volcanic eruptions could spew out tons of pumice that was lighter than the surrounding water. They created something called a pumic-raft, some of them miles wide, and were literally floating carpets. But they were thin and only a maximum of a foot above sea level, not like this island that seemed to rise for a hundred feet.
Matt had no idea what it could mean and knew he was out of his depth, so to speak. He had been brought on as a consultant to analyze a lost civilization, lost language, and potential lost world, which he was excited as all hell about. Someone like him who’d studied ancient languages all his life had found the offer irresistible. The coin had been the dangled bait, and he had bit down hard.
He felt he was over the trauma of the extinction plague, as they were now calling it—giant bugs that had burrowed up from below the ground. After a few weeks of psychotherapy, and then a few more months holiday surfing on the Australian east coast, he felt he had been rebuilt both physically and mentally. He was ready to take on something interesting and productive. Plus, the consulting fee Janus Anderson had offered him for a few weeks’ work would ensure he could holiday for the entire year if he chose.
He looked again at the large mass on the ocean’s surface and smiled; there was an old saying about us knowing more about the surface of the moon than we did about the bottom of the ocean. And he never said never when it came to the inexplicable. Matt knew there was still plenty of that in our ocean. As recent as 1997, an ultra-low-frequency, high-amplitude underwater sound was detected by NOAA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was termed: the Bloop.
The consensus for years was that it was the sound of ice sheets calving thousands of miles away. But there were the skeptics, and one was NOAA’s own Dr. Christopher Fox, who believed the sound was more likely to have come from some sort of massive animal because its signature was an undulation in frequency similar to the sounds already known to be made by large marine beasts.
But there was one crucial difference: sensors up to three thousand miles away detected the Bloop. That meant it must have been far louder than any whale noise, or any other known animal.
Matt tapped the chart with a knuckle. So, the obvious question was: is there some creature bigger than a whale lurking in our ocean depths? He straightened, still looking down at the images. No matter how much he wracked his brain, he also couldn’t think of anything past or present that fit the physical signature he was seeing here.
“How would I know, anyway?” he whispered.
He crossed to the final map that looked like another bathological production, a recent one, but this time, there were handwritten notations all over it. Janus Anderson had laid out maps showing the Mariana Trench, the famous crustal rift that ran for over fifteen hundred miles and plunged to depths of between thirty-six thousand feet and “unknown depths,” because the sensors couldn’t find a bottom in one of the obscure sections.
Janus’ handwritten notification drew attention to the fact that the trench bottom hid something else, a rift within a rift, that continued on down. Also, that the water down there was warm, not the usual abyssal cold of the stygian depths.
Matt guessed the inference—if there was something large in the ocean, these days, satellite scanning made it hard for anything to hide. That was unle
ss it had a bolthole.
“Knock knock.” The meeting room door pushed inward.
Matt turned.
Janus Anderson entered, smiling broadly and with arms wide. “Hiya, Matt, how’s it going?”
Matt nodded and smiled. “It’s going good. Just looking over your maps and trying to make sense of what I’m seeing.”
“Excellent.” Janus’ lips curved into a small smile, and he walked toward the table edge, folded his arms, and looked down at the maps, reports, and satellite images. “Pieces of a puzzle… that are all coming together.”
He sighed. “But we need to get moving now, as the salvage season will be with us soon, and the southwestern Pacific only stays calm for a few months. After that, summer typhoons can turn the place into a devil’s cauldron.”
Janus’ phone buzzed and he lifted a finger to Matt then answered it. “Okay.” He looked at Matt as he spoke, a smile spreading on his face. “Yes, send her up.”
“What is it, yet more pieces to the puzzle?” Matt asked.
“More like more people to the puzzle.” Janus continued to smile. “Many hands make light work and all that.”
There was a knock on the door.
“Come on in.” Anderson stepped back from the desk.
Matt turned as the door swung inward. He saw it was a woman, probably mid-thirties and attractive in an outdoor, athletic kind of way. She had a no-nonsense set to her jaw.
“Jane,” Janus exclaimed. He turned to Matt. “Matt Kearns, paleolinguist and adventurer, meet Jane Baxter, biologist and might I say, also an adventurer.”
Matt held out a hand. “Nice to meet you.”
She shook it, her handshake firm. He noticed then that she had some sort of lesion on the back of her hand.
She noticed him staring and she withdrew her hand, sticking it in her pocket.
Janus’ grin never slipped. “Jane can also claim to be one of the few people on the planet who has traveled to the center of the Earth.”
