Vostok

by Steve Alten

  “You’ve methodically exhausted six of the seven accessible dimensions of the energy spectrum, leaving only violet, the last wavelength. The ice tunnel will collapse behind you as you leave, sealing off further communication. If you perish this time around, I cannot save you.”

  My heart pounded with adrenaline as I moved through the ice tunnel, my eyes darting from the pulsating indigo light ahead to the Geiger counter in my hand.

  Just a quick look. One quick look and I’ll have enough information to theorize cause and effect. Then I’m up the rope and climbing out of the chasm, and we’re back in the sub and en route to the north basin. Up the ice sheet and I’m done. Done with Vostok, done with Antarctica and its insane cold. Then it’s home to Brandy and William.

  Wary of the time, I started to jog, counting each ice-crunching stride to gauge the distance back to the rope.

  Twenty-one… twenty-two… twenty-three…

  The indigo hue deepened to violet, reminding me of my fateful descent into the Sargasso Sea three years earlier, a mission that had led to my second drowning—a near-death experience that had changed my path in life.

  Would this present decision alter my path again?

  Not likely, it seemed. The tunnel simply dead-ended in a slab of volcanic rock.

  I switched the Geiger counter to the magnetometer, the needle going haywire.

  A magnified asteroid impact crater, just as I thought. What a waste of time. You let Ben and his crazy stories get inside your head.

  Without warning, the violet light disappeared, and the tunnel swallowed me in its all-consuming blackness. I fumbled with my night-vision goggles. My surroundings reappeared in a faint olive-green, but everything felt different—cold, dead—and a surge of claustrophobia unleashed a wave of anxiety that sent me sprinting back down the tunnel.

  I made it to the rope and immediately started to climb. I was halfway up when the bear-dog revealed itself to be alive, raising its head and upper body off the ice, crying out in pain.

  The animal’s hip was broken. Had I delayed my ascent it might have caught me in those sharp canine teeth.

  I left it there, howling in the darkness, its cries of pain echoing through the ice tunnel. It was still crying out as I reached the hole in the crevasse.

  I paused. Even though the animal had intended to kill me, it was clearly suffering.

  How could I just leave it like this?

  Easily, I told myself. If you climb back down to put it out of its misery, you’re using up precious energy. Think about William.

  I did.

  And that’s why I climbed back down.

  The bear-dog seemed to sense that I was there to help. It laid its head down, panting in pain.

  Trembling, I gripped the axe.

  The first blow caused it to spasm.

  The second ended its suffering.

  The ice tunnel began to reverberate.

  I leaped for the rope, a rush of adrenaline driving my arms and legs. I saw ice collapsing around me like a shattering mirror as I pulled myself out of the tunnel and up into the crevasse. Dragging myself to my feet, I swung the axe, burying its blood-covered spike into the rock overhead, climbing up the parallel walls with my boots.

  I felt the tunnel collapse beneath me, swallowing the floor of the chasm. I cursed my foolishness, an insane act of kindness toward an animal that had been crippled as it had tried to eat me.

  Managing my way out of the fissure, I hoisted my quivering body onto the snow-blanketed mountainslope. Shaking with exhaustion and spent nerves, I retraced my footprints to the remains of the rope and pulled myself up the steep incline through waist-deep snow until I was standing at the base of the mountain. Heading southeast, I set off at a quick pace, my feet numb beneath me.

  I covered the distance so fast that I actually passed Ming’s sensory device. It was only after I came upon Ben’s spikeprints that I realized I had gone too far.

  I was surprised to come across a second set of boot prints.

  Ming? Why had she set off after Ben? Maybe she had been too scared to descend through the fog alone?

  I followed the pair of footprints another thirty yards in search of return tracks, but found none.

  That was a problem. If they had gone off together and still hadn’t returned, then something had happened to them.

  They probably planted Ben’s device together, then found another way back to the sub after the crevasse opened up.

  Wanting to believe that, I retraced my steps and descended into the fog bank.

  I was fifty paces in, working through three feet of snow and near-zero visibility, when I caught a whiff of something that smelled like rotten eggs.

  Sulfur?

  I turned away from the scent, diverting down another path, a shortcut that brought me out of the fog. Below were the dark waters of the bay. As I began my descent, I saw the light.

  At first I thought it was the Barracuda, only the light was moving, following a course parallel to the shoreline. Removing my backpack, I located the night-vision monocular. Powering it on, I slid my goggles down to my neck and held the lens up to my right eye, zooming in on the light.

  It was Ben, and he was dragging something behind him.

  Ming?

  Tucking the lens in my jacket pocket, I returned the night-vision goggles to my eyes and hurried down the slope, my galloping movements through the snow startling a harem of forty or fifty female sea elephants lazying about the shoreline.

  A chorus of belches and burps alerted the male. The ten-ton bull charged out of the shallows, a rolling mass of angry white blubber.

  Seeing the beast, Ben ducked behind a boulder.

  I stopped running, my heart racing as I found myself confronted by a creature roughly the size of a cement mixer.

  The animated mammal pounded its fore flippers in the slush and shook its head, so that its three-foot-long proboscis sprayed me with snot and salty lake water, but the bull never advanced.

  Nor did I.

  After several bouts of snorting and belching, it rambled off to join its harem.

  I met up with Ben, who was kneeling by Ming, checking her pulse as she rested with her back against the rock. “Is she alive?”

  “Barely. Let’s get her inside the sub.”

  “Ben, you’re bleeding.”

  “Huh? It’s nothing. I packed some snow on it. It looks a lot worse than it is. Grab her other arm.”

  He tried to lift her as he stood, only to drop to one knee. “Guess I hurt it worse than I thought.”

  “Wait here.” I half-dragged, half-carried Ming to the sub. Laying her down, I activated the hatch, then stripped her of her backpack and lifted her into her seat, buckling her in. I tossed her pack in the storage compartment and went back for Ben.

  He had stripped off his own pack and was examining his wound. Blood was everywhere, dripping from a jagged six-inch incision along his upper left thigh.

  “Looks like you nicked your femoral artery; we need to get a tourniquet on this. How’d you do it?”

  “Fell on my climbing axe.”

  I shouldered half his weight, hustling him over to the sub, fearing what the scent of his blood might be attracting. He moved to climb inside the middle cockpit, only I stopped him. “You can’t operate the thrusters with one leg. Get in my seat; I’ll man the master control.”

  I helped him into the bow cockpit, then foraged through Ming’s backpack to find something to make a tourniquet. Removing her rope, I tied three feet of cord tightly around Ben’s wound, the pain causing him to pass out.

  Moving to the bow, I struggled to push the Barracuda backward down the shoreline and into the water. I made it halfway to the waterline before I had to rest.

  Leaning against the sub, I looked back and saw the bear-dogs. The adult was sniffing and pawing at the blood-drenched snow, her offspring following the trail toward the sub.

  I gripped the bow and pushed.

  I could see the charging adult in my
peripheral vision as my boots hit water. Another shove and I climbed inside, my feet straddling Ben as the animal struck the sub.

  The bow spun in the water.

  I fell into the middle seat and managed to seal the dome as the predator stood up on its hind legs and pawed at the acrylic, pushing us into deeper water.

  I tried the engine.

  No power.

  For a second, I panicked; then remembered Vostok Command had us on their override.

  The radio crackled. “Vostok Mobile Command to Barracuda. Colonel Vacendak here. Report.”

  “Wallace here. Captain Hintzmann’s seriously wounded, and Dr. Liao’s in bad shape. We’re all suffering from exhaustion and hypothermia. Start the engine so I can crank up the heat.”

  The sub powered on, sending a rush of cold air pouring out of my vent.

  “Dr. Wallace, what happened to the sensory devices? We’re registering Dr. Liao’s and your devices, but Captain Hintzmann’s was never activated.”

  “I’ll ask him about it when he comes to. Right now you need to get us to the extraction point before he bleeds to death.”

  A moment’s pause. “Dr. Wallace, I’m going to turn you over to Captain Eric Schager. He will pilot you into the northern basin. We’ll have a medical team waiting for you back in the dome.”

  “Thank you.” I laid my head back, then peeled off my gloves. Raising my dripping wet left boot, I attempted to unbuckle the straps with my half-frozen fingers.

  “Dr. Wallace, this is Captain Schager. I’m tracking your position using our SAT feed, but there are going to be biologics along the way that I can’t see. I’m going to take you out of the bay at five knots just to make sure that whale’s moved on, but don’t go active on sonar.”

  “Acknowledged.” I struggled to remove my climbing boots so I could warm my feet, hoping the pain of their thawing out wouldn’t affect my piloting.

  The Barracuda submerged, moving at a slow pace through the black sea.

  Rotating my seat around, I leaned over the aft console to check on Ming. Her breaths were shallow, her lips violet-blue.

  Climbing back with her, I stripped off her coat. Searching through the storage compartment, I located a wool blanket and wrapped it around her, then used the aft compartment’s microwave to heat some water for tea.

  “Ming, sip this.” I held the cup’s built-in straw to her lips, but she was unresponsive.

  I pressed the hot plastic to her face, and she moaned but still wouldn’t drink.

  I took a long sip myself, reminding me of the emptiness in my stomach.

  Gently lifting her left leg, I unlatched her boots and gently worked them off. I peeled her wool socks from one blue bare foot and then the other. Her toes were dark purple with frostbite. Warming my own hands with the cup, I sandwiched her foot in my palms, transferring the heat. I repeated this with the other foot, which was in far worse shape. She’d probably lose her two smallest toes.

  Then I saw the ECW iPhone case lying on the seat.

  It must have fallen out of her jacket pocket when I pulled it off her. Obviously, there was no reception in Vostok, but there was the device’s camera.

  I removed the phone from its extreme weather case and pressed PHOTOS.

  What in the hell… ?

  21

  “Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the unicorn,

  “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.”

  —Lewis Carroll

  The images were of the southeast face of the mountain, the photos taken from an elevation halfway up the snow-capped peak. Ben was in most of the photos, which were shot from below as he made his way up to the summit, a climbing axe in each hand.

  They were working together.

  The first dozen shots zoomed in on his ascent. The rest attempted to capture an object he had exposed at the summit.

  Find Ben’s camera. He’ll have taken the money shots.

  “Dr. Wallace, you have reentered the main river. I need you to take over.”

  “Stand by.”

  I climbed over the aft console to the middle seat. Searching through Ben’s stash of food, I consumed a container of raisins and a protein drink to raise my blood sugar and stave off the hunger pangs. My bladder signaled it was back on the job. Wincing at having to share Ben’s plastic urinal, I relieved myself.

  “All right, Captain, I’m ready.”

  I felt the console’s joystick come to life in my right palm, the foot pedals responding beneath my thawing feet. Following the main river, I kept our speed at ten knots, allowing the current to carry us.

  We had traversed several miles when Vostok Command relayed new instructions.

  “Dr. Wallace, in half a kilometer you’ll come to a tributary off your portside bow. Follow that waterway; it flows into the north basin.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  The swift current bled north into a deepwater inlet, and I knew the basin had to be close. And then my headphones were accosted by clicks, the bizarre underwater acoustics coming from multiple sonar contacts in the water directly ahead.

  I slowed to five knots, my heart pounding in my chest.

  Ben moaned something in his delirium as he regained consciousness. “Are we topside yet?”

  “We’re close to the extraction point, only something’s between us and the northern basin. Whatever they are, there seems to be a lot of them.”

  “To hell with ’em. Just pound the horn and scare ’em outta the way.”

  Before he could switch our sonar from PASSIVE to ACTIVE, I overrode his console. “Stay quiet. It could be another whale.”

  In fact, there were dozens of them, and they were bobbing vertically in the water, taking long, rhythmic breaths as they slept. The adult sperm whales were all female, their hides lead-gray or black except for an albino pigment that bleached their bellies and terrifying lower jaws white. The borders where dark met light were patterned differently, serving to distinguish one Livyatan melvillei from the next.

  The young bobbed next to their mothers, many suckling in their sleep.

  Using only my night-vision glasses, I maneuvered between these living logs of blubber at a crawl. The females were about forty feet long, their enormous heads comprising a third of their anatomy and half their mass. Husking breaths echoed in my headphones, the sounds coming from blowholes positioned at the very upper left corner on the top of their skulls. The eyes were elliptical and remained closed, situated in the middle of that tremendous head, followed by the ear hole and a relatively small swim flipper. A dorsal hump separated the box-shaped upper torso from the powerful tail, the flukes divided by a median notch.

  We passed close enough to one female to glimpse deep prune-like wrinkles running down her dark back.

  The calves were longer than our sub, weighed over a ton, and were mostly albino.

  It took more than fifteen minutes to pass through the forest of sleeping whales. Finally, we were through, moving past the plateau’s cliff face into open water.

  “This is Schager. Well done. You’ve entered the northern basin. Come to course zero-three-seven. The extraction zone is less than six kilometers away.”

  I kept the Barracuda ninety feet below the surface, maintaining our northeasterly heading at twenty knots. I was beyond tired and kept nodding off every few seconds, my drooping head snapping me awake.

  “Wallace, it’s Schager. There’s two things you need to know. Dr. Liao has passed away—”

  “Huh?”

  “—and your sonar just detected a very large blip.”

  I glanced behind my seat at Ming, then back at my sonar monitor. The blip was shadowing us, matching our course and speed as it moved along the bottom, 1,266 feet below the surface.

  It was another Livyatan melvillei. A bull, most likely the elder male. Sonar estimated his length at a staggering ninety-three feet, his girth at forty to fifty tons.

  “Schager, how close are we to the extraction point?”

&nb
sp; “Less than two kilometers. Vostok’s external pressure is rising as the ice sheet drops. Keep it nice and easy, I want you to descend to three hundred feet as you power up both lasers. Then turn the sub back over to me. Once you reach the extraction zone, I’ll launch you on a ninety-degree vertical plane and begin a countdown.

  “At zero you’ll pop up out of the water and melt the ice directly above you. The hole you’ve created will cause a vacuum effect, and the low external-pressure zone you create above you will suck the Barracuda straight up through the borehole, forcing the sub up through the ice sheet. By the time the water freezes behind you and reseals the hole, you’ll be halfway home.”

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt!

  “Shit.” I pushed down on the joystick, watching in horror as the blip rose away from the lakebed to meet us.

  “Okay, Moby Dick, let’s see if you like my noise.” Going ACTIVE, I let loose a chorus of pings, backing the monster off.

  “Schager, you there? I’m at three hundred feet. Lasers are powered up and on high. Turning over control on my count: three… two… one!”

  I pushed the button beneath my console… and prayed.

  “Cease all sonar pings and hold on to your balls.”

  I stopped pinging and gripped my armrests as Vostok Command rolled the Barracuda into a steep 2-G ascent, driving us back into our seats while slingshotting us into a vertical ascent.

  “Two hundred feet until surface. Counting down: five… four… three—”

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.

  “—two… one!”

  We launched out of the water and instantly hit a ceiling of ice, only we never actually hit the ice. It simply washed away into a progressively evaporating tunnel of mist and water while a geyser exploded upwards through the borehole from behind the sub, driving us faster, its wave pushing past around our acrylic dome.

  “Congratulations, gentlemen, you’ve achieved orbit and are headed home. Stand by, Colonel Vacendak wants to speak with you in private. See you topside. Schager, out.”

  I hyperventilated gasps of relief as I checked my depth gauge, which was already resetting to accommodate the ice sheet. A little less than four thousand meters, about thirteen thousand feet, until we surfaced. Ascending at a steady fifty feet per minute, I estimated our ascent would take a little more than three hours.