Vostok

by Steve Alten

  “Aye. And far more will go hungry this winter because of yer bravery and brains. But ye can still make things right again.”

  “You’ve been talking to Angus.”

  “Aye, and he has a plan. But he needs yer help. All ye have tae do is authenticate a monster kill, and the press will do the rest.”

  Months of pent-up frustration set my blood to boil. “I won’t do it, Brandy. I can’t do it. It goes against everything I’ve dedicated my life to. My father, on the other hand, has no morals. He’d gamble his own sons’ souls in a poker game with the devil if it meant filling his resort to capacity.”

  “And tae whit devil have ye sold yer soul, Zachary Wallace? The one who feeds yer own massive ego?”

  That conversation took place in late January. Best friends and lovers, we allowed our desire to be right to overrule our marital vows. Days passed in silence. With each passing week our love grew colder, and the noose of debt around my neck grew tighter, making me resent her even more. My thoughts turning to the previously unthinkable, that maybe Brandy and I were not meant to be together after all.

  Without discussing it with my wife, I began contacting private companies and major universities, letting them know I was now fielding offers. By March I had narrowed my choices down to a faculty position at Cambridge University, a research position at Scripps Institute, and an interesting offer from Masao Tanaka at the Tanaka Oceanographic Institute.

  Tanaka and I shared a common love for cetaceans. One of the most respected marine biologists in the world, he had constructed a man-made whale lagoon some twenty years ago on the coast of Monterey, California. The idea had been to offer pregnant gray whales migrating south from the Bering Sea a shallow harbor to birth their calves before reaching Baja. Instead, the facility had been sealed off to hold a newborn megalodon pup captured off the coast. Believed to be extinct, megalodon was a sixty-foot prehistoric cousin of the great white. The shark’s pregnant parent had escaped the deep waters of the Mariana Trench after Jonas Taylor, a deep-sea submersible pilot, had dived the abyss with Masao’s son to retrieve an earthquake sensor. The pregnant female had given birth to the pup before being captured and eventually killed (in self-defense) by Jonas. The offspring, an albino named Angel, had grown to monstrous proportions, and for the next four years, the Tanaka Institute had been the most popular tourist destination in the world—until the creature broke free and returned to the trench. That was fifteen years ago, but the megalodon’s scent trail persisted, keeping whales out of the vacated pen. Masao Tanaka was offering me three hundred dollars a week, with free room and board, plus a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus if I could figure out a way to lure whales into his empty lagoon.

  Cambridge University’s salary offer wasn’t much higher, but it was guaranteed. And its proximity to the Great Glen would allow me to visit my family on weekends.

  But it was the work at Scripps that enticed me the most. I would be set up in my own lab with a staff of my choosing. In addition to a decent salary and benefits package, I would receive thirty percent of any profits generated by my inventions, sharing the patents.

  Scripps it was. I would accept their offer and then reach out to Brandy to join me. I would apologize and tell her how much I wanted her in my life, but I would refuse to remain a victim of my circumstances or languish in a loveless marriage. If my happiness and self-worth resided outside the Great Glen, then I needed to follow that road and see where it took me—even if it meant leaving my family.

  Then one dreary afternoon in March, I received another offer—one that would change my life and the future of the Highlands forever.

  2

  Nessie’s Lair was located on the third floor of my father’s resort. I entered the restaurant at half past one in the afternoon, seeking solitude and a private place to call Professor John Rudman, the director at Scripps who had been recruiting me. The chamber was dark, the only light coming from the floor-to-ceiling windows, which offered a breathtaking view of Loch Ness and the snow-covered peaks of the Monadhliath Mountains rising along the far eastern bank.

  It was only eight-thirty in the morning at Scripps. Knowing Professor Rudman usually didn’t get into his office until nine, I flipped open my laptop to check today’s Science Journal.

  Life on Earth—Death on Mars: New Evidence

  Scientists agree that life on Earth began approximately 3.8 billion years ago, but exactly how it began has long remained an unanswered question. Biologists theorize asteroids, which are space rocks containing water molecules that created the precipitation that filled the oceans, bombarded our still-evolving planet. But Dr. Sankar Chatterjee, a professor of geosciences at Texas Tech University, believes that in addition to bringing water, these asteroids contained the chemical constituents of life that ultimately gave rise to living cells.

  “Earth was once a bizarre, hostile world that would seem like a vision of hell, reeking with the foul smells of hydrogen sulfide, methane, nitric oxide, and steam that provided life-sustaining energy,” Chatterjee says. “Meteorites punched giant craters into the planet’s surface and deposited organic materials in them. Then icy comets crashed into Earth and melted, filling these basins with water. Additional meteorite strikes created volcanically driven geothermal vents in the planet’s crust that heated and stirred the water. The resulting ‘primordial soup’ mixed the chemicals together, leading to the formation of molecules of ever-increasing complexity and, eventually, life.”

  About the same time as Earth’s primordial soup was spawning life, death was occurring on Mars with the eruption of Olympus Mons. The largest volcano in the solar system, it towers sixteen miles above the surface of the Red Planet—three times higher than Mount Everest—and is roughly the size of the state of Arizona. Olympus Mons contains six collapsed craters known as calderas. These magma chambers are stacked atop one another to form a depression that is fifty-three miles wide at the summit. The worst of the lot are resurgent calderas—geological timebombs responsible for massive eruptions and extinction events.

  There are three resurgent calderas in the United States that are less than 1.5 million years old—the Long Valley Caldera in California, the Valles Caldera in New Mexico, and the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming. The last caldera eruption on Earth occurred 74,000 years ago on the Indonesian Island of Sumatra. The Toba caldera generated nearly three thousand times more pyroclastic material than Mount St. Helens and unleashed an ash cloud that encompassed Earth’s atmosphere, which led to a decade of volcanic winter that wiped out nearly every hominid on the planet.

  I set the laptop aside, my eyes gazing out of the bay windows at Loch Ness. It was hard to fathom that every drop of water on the planet could have been delivered by meteors, comets, and asteroids, each impact blasting moisture into the atmosphere until a seemingly endless rain had fallen to cool the molten-hot world and fill its lowlands.

  I glanced at my watch. It was nearly two o’clock.

  I was about to dial John Rudman’s office number when Brandy entered the restaurant, accompanied by four strangers—three men and an exotic Asian woman dressed in a tight-fitting black silk dress and carrying a briefcase.

  Women remain a foreign species to me. For two months my wife had barely shown me an ounce of interest. Yet in the presence of this Chinese beauty I could sense the acidic jealousy churning in her belly as she escorted the woman and her three male companions to my table.

  “Zachary, this woman is here tae speak with you. Are ye sober?”

  I stood, my temper flaring. “Of course I’m sober. Hi, I’m Zachary Wallace.”

  “Dr. Wallace, this is a great honor. My name is Dr. Ming Liao. I am a geologist working in East Antarctica. These are two of my colleagues: Dr. Rehan Ahmed from Karachi, Pakistan, and George McFarland, a marine engineer working at Stone Aerospace. Mr. McFarland was recruited for this mission by NASA.”

  “NASA? Now you’ve got me curious.” I motioned for my guests to sit. I was about to ask the third gentleman his name
when I noticed Dr. Ahmed shivering. “Would you like something warm to drink? Coffee? Tea?”

  “Tea would be most appreciated.”

  “For me also,” added Dr. Liao, with a smile.

  “Coke,” said Mr. McFarland.

  I turned to the stranger to whom I had not yet been introduced. He was a rugged man in his forties, with a taut physique, dark brown hair, and a scruffy, short beard. He wore a sullen expression, like he had seen death.

  A kindred soul?

  He looked up at Brandy through bloodshot gray-blue eyes. “Coke, only put a shot of rum in mine.”

  I turned to my wife, foolishly hoping she’d volunteer to bring my guests their beverages on her way out. Instead, she plopped down in the remaining chair. “Whit? Do I look like the barmaid, then?”

  Red-faced, I strode around behind the bar and filled two cups with bottled water. I placed them in the microwave and fished out a few tea bags, then grabbed a can of cola from a stack of sodas and filled two glasses with ice, adding a splash of rum to the second. Loading everything onto a tray, I returned to the table.

  “Zachary, did ye ken yer new scientist friends here are all single? And here ye are, aboot the same age but married wit a bairn.”

  I handed out the beverages, refusing to be baited by her remark. “Guess that makes me a lucky man. Brandy, would you mind giving me a few minutes alone with Dr. Liao and her colleagues so we can talk?”

  “These gentle folk are here tae recruit ye for something. Bein’ as I’m still yer wife and the mother of yer child, I think I’ll give a listen. Is that a problem, Ms. Liao?”

  Dr. Liao smiled. “No problem, Mrs. Wallace, provided you abide by a non-disclosure agreement like the one your husband will be asked to sign.”

  Brandy smiled back. “Sure, I’ll sign. Whit ’ve I got tae lose? Willy’s crib?”

  Her response did not please Liao. “Dr. Wallace, we’ve come a long way at great expense to speak with you. While I can assure you the subject matter will both interest and astound you, it is not something we want exposed to the general public.”

  Seeking unfiltered answers, I turned to the fourth stranger, the man who had not bothered to introduce himself. “You were recruited for this mission?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What’s your role?”

  “Submersible pilot.”

  “What’s mine?”

  “Money. Your association with the expedition will bring the sponsors that pay the bills.”

  I stared hard at the man’s face. “I’ve seen your photo before. You said you’re a submersible pilot?”

  “Not by trade. Benjamin Hintzmann. Ben to my friends. I’m a fighter pilot—at least I was until the United States Air Force discharged me after an incident nearly triggered a war.”

  “Hintzmann, you’re the F-18 pilot who had the Pakistani air force shooting at him. Why’d you cross into their airspace?”

  “It’s classified. Anyway, that was a long time ago. Since then, I’ve traded in my wings for flippers and been working with Graham Hawkes, piloting his deep-sea submersibles. Amazing machines. They fly through the water just like a jet. I was training in San Diego when Ming and the ding-a-ling boys here made me an offer I couldn’t refuse—contingent, of course, on your participation. After what happened to you in the Sargasso Sea, I’m guessing they figured you’d feel safer with someone like me piloting our three-man sub.”

  “Who’s the third man?”

  “I am.” Ming Liao removed a document from her leather briefcase and handed it to me. “This non-disclosure agreement allows me to share classified information about an amazing find my team made recently. By signing this agreement, you are forbidden from sharing this information with anyone, whether you join our mission or not.”

  “You mean, at least until the television special airs.”

  “While every aspect of this mission will be documented, there will be no television crews. Nor will there be any published reports, at least for quite some time.”

  “I don’t understand. What good is a new discovery if you can’t share it with the world?”

  “The discovery will be shared once we have garnered the vast treasures this exploratory mission has to offer. Because the location of the discovery is in Antarctica we cannot prevent other nations and their scientific teams from accessing, exploiting, and contaminating the resource; therefore, we must protect its secrets as long as possible.

  “Dr. Wallace, please sign the agreement so that we may speak freely. And if your wife insists upon participating in our discussion, she must also sign. Nothing personal,” she added as she met Brandy’s glare.

  I glanced at Brandy. As she liked to say, it was a “shyte or get off the bowl” moment, only it had nothing to do with Liao’s pitch. If Brandy signed the non-disclosure now, it meant she cared enough about our marriage to be concerned where this journey might take me, assuming I was even interested. If, however, she walked out, then our marriage was as good as over.

  “Give me the bloody paper.” Using Liao’s pen, she signed the document without reading it and slid it over to me. “It’s your life. Do as ye will.”

  I reviewed the agreement and then signed it above Brandy’s signature. “Okay, Dr. Liao, both Wallaces have anted up. Make your pitch.”

  “Please, call me Ming. As I said, the discovery is located in Antarctica. What do you know about the continent, other than it’s the coldest, most desolate place on Earth?”

  “I know it wasn’t always that way.”

  “Correct. Before it was covered by ice, Antarctica was fertile land with lush forests and fresh-water lakes and streams. That was during the Miocene, a period of time that began about twenty-five million years ago. The climate abruptly changed about fifteen million years ago, leaving most of the continent covered with a dome-shaped glacier two-and-a-half miles thick. Gravity is actually pulling the ice into the ocean by way of the continent’s ice shelves. As these ice shelves reach the coastline, their bottom sections hit seawater and melt faster, causing sections of the flow to crack—a natural process known as rifting.

  “Global warming has accelerated the process. Last year alone, Antarctic ice sheets lost a combined mass of 355 gigatonnes, which is enough to raise global sea levels by 1.3 millimeters. That may not seem like a lot, but combine that with Greenland’s melting ice sheet, diminishing mountain glaciers, and the polar caps—all multiplied by the present rate of acceleration—and your winter home in sunny Florida may be underwater by the time you are ready to retire.”

  “Actually, my wife and I winter here in Drumnadrochit.” I smiled at Brandy, who rolled her eyes.

  Liao returned to her briefcase and removed a thick accordion file sealed with a combination lock. “The photos I am about to show you were taken eleven days ago by scientists from Beijing University. The preserved remains of these two creatures were found frozen within a twenty-nine-kilometer-long rift nicknamed Loose Tooth. The fissure is part of the Amery Ice Shelf in East Antarctica.” She quickly maneuvered the lock’s numbers to the correct three-digit sequence and opened the file, removing several glossy color photos, which she laid out before me.

  I stared at the objects in the images, particularly at the excavated block of ice flanked by two humans to add the perspective of size.

  The flesh on the back of my neck prickled.

  “The marine biologist on loan to us could not identify either species, though he believed the animals may have lived during—”

  “—the Miocene,” I finished. “This creature here—the one that’s being eaten—I’m reasonably certain it was a giant species of caiman called a Purussaurus.”

  Brandy looked perplexed. “Caiman? Ye mean, like a crocodile?”

  “Yes, only this one was fifty feet long. Purussaurus remains have been found in the Peruvian Amazon in South America. Two distinct species of Crocodylia were discovered—brasiliensis and mirandai. Purussaurus mirandai had a wider, far more elongated skull that
was extremely flat. Its nostrils were unusually large, the openings three feet long. No one seems to know what they were used for.”

  Ben glanced at Dr. Ahmed. “Looks like you found your brainiac. Hey, Zach, what do you call the big python that choked trying to eat the pussy-saurus?”

  “Pu-rus-sau-rus. And I have no idea. The biggest snake fossil ever found belonged to Titanoboa, which grew to forty-five feet. But it lived sixty million years ago, and even that monster was too small to go after an adult Purussaurus. Dr. Liao, you say your team found these remains on the Amery Ice Shelf?”

  “Yes, but that’s not where this epic battle took place. Dr. Ahmed, please show Dr. Wallace the I.P.R. image.”

  Reaching into the file, the Pakistani scientist removed a black-and-white satellite image taken of the Antarctic continent, only without its two-mile-thick ice cap.

  “Thanks to the development of radio echo-sounding, reflection seismology, and ice-penetrating radar, we now know what Antarctica’s geology looks like beneath the ice sheet and how the terrain would have appeared millions of years ago. As you can see, Dr. Wallace, the Antarctic landmass possesses more than a hundred and fifty lakes. Think of them as subglacial reservoirs of meltwater. As the ice sheet moves, its flow rate is affected by the level of these lakes, which rise and fall like the locks on the Panama Canal. The meltwater drains into a network of subglacial streams and rivers, which in turn keep the glacier moving out to sea. As the ice sheet passes over a lake, it causes some of its surface water to freeze. Anything caught in this accretion ice becomes part of the ice sheet.”

  “Which is how these monsters’ remains came to be discovered in the Loose Tooth rift.”

  “Precisely. As the ice sheet moves, its weight compresses gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide downward while raising sediment and other objects caught in its wake. The frozen remains of these two behemoths were squeezed topside as the ice became part of the Amery Ice Shelf. By analyzing the ice attached to the creatures’ remains, we were able to determine the location of their habitat while they were alive.”