by Steve Alten
A borehole gradually opened beneath us. The melt and drop averaged four to six feet every ten to twenty seconds with an occasional stomach-wrenching drop into free fall.
I turned in my seat to take a look below. The ice bled like a fading sunset, slush splattering against the cockpit windshield. Every once in a while a dark pocket would open and we’d drop twenty feet, only to stop suddenly, the jolt absorbed by our cushioned bucket seats.
I checked our depth gauge after thirty minutes: 1,029 feet.
Vostok was 13,100 feet beneath the ice. At our present rate of descent, we wouldn’t reach the lake for another seven and a half hours.
Ben’s voice came over my headset. “How are you holding up?”
“I’ll need some aspirin before this journey’s through. How’s Ming?”
“Sleeping like a baby. I meant to ask you; Dr. Ahmed claimed there was air in Vostok—how is that possible?”
“It’s the sheer mass of the ice sheet. The pressure squeezes oxygen and nitrogen molecules trapped in the ice below and releases them into the lake. Vostok has been experiencing this gas exchange for millions of years. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found pockets of atmosphere. Of course, if there are any organisms alive down there, they would have adapted to this unique oxygen—”
“Enough already, you’re wearing my brain out. I’m popping one of Ming’s pills. Wake me when we get there.”
He was snoring less than ten minutes later.
The slush washing against the bow settled into a soothing rhythm. Curling on my side, I closed my eyes…
The wind whipped through the Great Glen, lapping white water across Loch Ness’s foreboding surface.
True helped me with the dive suit, a heavy contraption that seemed more suited for space. “I’m beggin’ ye, Zachary, don’t go down there. Jist marry my sister and leave the Highlands behind ye forever.”
“The creature’s trapped, True. I need to free it or kill it. It’s the only way to get these night terrors to stop.”
“All right, then. Find the entrance to that underground river and use yer explosives before that thing gets a whiff of ye.” True double-checked my dive suit, then peered into my helmet. “For a runt, ye got big balls. Better grab hold of ’em.”
He disconnected my support cable, and down I went, dropping through Loch Ness’s frigid waters like an anchor. The beam from my forward light cut through the darkness, revealing a tea-colored world, but everything seemed to be spinning.
“Speak to me, Zachary.”
“Dizzy, I’m just a little dizzy.”
“That’s because yer spinning on yer cable. Look inside yer headpiece. Just below yer lower jaw you’ll see a set of gauges. Check yer compass, it’s in orange. It shows direction and course, sort of like a submarine. Press on your thrusters and come to a complete stop. Then call out yer depth to me.”
“Two hundred thirty feet.”
“Have ye stopped spinning?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now ease off the thrusters and continue descending while callin’ out yer depth.”
“Four-sixty. Five hundred feet. Five-forty—”
“Don’t get cocky. Keep it slow and steady. What do ye see?”
“Not much. Even using my light, visibility’s less than fifteen feet. Outside the beam, the water’s pitch-black. I just passed seven hundred feet. The water temperature’s a chilly thirty-eight degrees, but I’m fine. I can see the bottom. It’s a muddy, flat expanse littered here and there by petrified clumps of Scotch pine. The trees are embedded in the soot, belching streams of gas. Their branches are covered in plankton. They’re reaching out for me like the rotting arms of Loch Ness’s dead…
“Jesus, what am I doing down here?”
“Jesus, Zach, whit are ye doing down there?”
My eyes snapped open, True’s voice beckoning in my ear. “Sorry, I must have fallen asleep. Where are we?”
“Fifty feet from splashdown. Command shut yer sub down half an hour ago. The borehole’s checked out solid above ye. I imagine they’ll be allowing you tae proceed.”
“Ben, wake up. We’re here.” I kicked the back of his seat with my foot. “Ming, you awake?”
She yawned and stretched as our headsets reverberated in our ears. “Barracuda, this is Vostok Command. We’re ready for you to reignite the Valkyrie units. Are you ready to make history?”
Ben responded with a yawn. “Roger that, Vostok Command. Reigniting Valkyrie units on my mark. Three… two… one… ignite.”
“Confirm ignition. Forty feet until splashdown … ”
“Zach, activate our exterior lights.”
“Twenty feet … ”
“Hey, Zach, since you’re in the nose cone, I guess that technically makes you the first man down. Since Ming’s the first woman, where does that leave me?”
“Playing for sloppy seconds, I guess.”
“Ten feet until splashdown. Here we go, people. Eight… five… two … ”
With a final craaaaack the layer of ice beneath us peeled away, and suddenly we were free-falling backward in darkness. My stomach lurched and my heart pounded in my chest as I waited for a splashdown that wasn’t coming.
Ming screamed over the whistling of the submersible’s aft wings cutting through the air.
Ben yelled, “Hold on!” three times before we finally struck water, our submersible plunging bow-first into Lake Vostok.
10
“If you drink too much from a bottle marked ‘poison,’
it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.”
—Lewis Carroll
The Barracuda plummeted through a blackness that seemed to reach out at us. After what felt like a two-hundred-foot dive, we leveled off, orientated in the pitch by the soft glow of our command console’s lights.
I unlocked my seat and rotated it to face forward.
“Zach, how far did we fall?” Ben asked.
I checked my depth gauge, which was resetting to accommodate our new liquid environment. “According to my instruments, we’re eighty-seven feet beneath the surface of Lake Vostok.”
“That’s not what I asked you. I asked how far we fell. In case you two still haven’t figured it out yet, we weren’t supposed to free fall out of the ice sheet. The ice sheet was supposed to be pressing against the lake’s surface!”
I realized he was right. “Bring us to the surface. Let’s take a look.”
Ben shut down the lasers and powered up the submersible’s engine while Ming tried the radio.
“Vostok Command, this is Dr. Liao. Do you have a fix on our position?”
“Barracuda, this is Victor Lopez in navigation. It looks like you may have overshot your targeted submergence point. We’re waiting for a satellite pass to track your exact location. ETA is twelve minutes. Keep your lasers on so we can locate your heat signature.”
“Acknowledged. We’ll use the time to collect a water sample.”
“Overshot our targeted submergence point? What the hell does that mean?” Ben ranted as he reactivated the Valkyries, the sub’s exterior lights guiding us to the surface. “If you ask me, it sounds like somebody topside screwed the pooch. My money’s on the dumb Viking.”
“Shut up, Ben.” I watched our bow lights’ beacon cut a path through the clear, dark waters until our nose popped free of the surface.
We were surrounded by a dense fog. I aimed our starboard light overhead, but the beam failed to reach the bottom of the ice sheet. “It’s gotta be up there somewhere.”
“Zach, use the sonar to ping the ceiling.”
“That won’t work.”
“Yes it will. The computer can calculate the distance between the air and the ice by the time it takes the sound waves to hit the ice sheet.”
“Do it, Zach,” Ming chimed in.
I positioned my headphones over my ears, activated the sonar station and pushed the red ACTIVE button, sending a loud ping echoing across the surface in all direct
ions.
The acoustic reflection bounced off the ceiling, and the computer pinpointed the bottom of the ice sheet—112 feet above our heads.
Ben swore from his perch behind me. “A hundred and twelve feet. Houston, we have a major problem.”
“Captain, please calm down. Whatever the problem is, we’ll resolve it.”
“Ming, in order to return to the surface we were simply supposed to activate the lasers and launch bow-up out of the water. As the hole opened Vostok’s water pressure would drive us straight up like a geyser. That entire premise was based on the ice sheet being accessible. A 112-foot ceiling isn’t accessible. Are we supposed to grow wings and fly up to it?”
“Stay calm,” I said, my pulse pounding. “We know the first Valkyrie went down and came right back up. That means the bottom of the ice sheet isn’t uniform.”
“Zachary’s right,” added Ming. “We simply need to locate the first drone’s exit point.”
“All right, Doc, I’m buying what you’re peddling, but riddle me this: if the Barracuda launched from the same starting point as the Valkyrie, then how did we end up here, wherever here is? Something must have altered our trajectory.”
“Agreed, but remember the Valkyrie drone is basically a tethered laser with no variables to account for. The Barracuda’s trajectory is subject to a thousand possible weight displacements during the descent. Even the three of us leaning to one side could have caused us to deviate miles off course. In a worst-case scenario we can always have Vostok Command send down a second unit so we can track its splashdown. We’ll be fine.”
Ben exhaled a sigh of relief. “I knew there was a reason I brought you along.”
Waves lapped against the Barracuda, rocking us gently. For a long moment the three of us remained quiet, listening to the darkness. A roll of thunder echoed in the distance, the ice sheet rumbling overhead as it inched its way east toward the sea.
If there were a more isolated spot on the planet, I couldn’t imagine where it might be.
After a few minutes, Ming activated her sampling unit and siphoned six ounces of lake water into a collection tube for computer analysis. “Water temperature is thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit.”
Ben tapped his fingers. “Who cares about water temperature? Cold is cold, what did you expect?”
He was annoyed, anxious to hear back from Vostok Command. Defending Ming, I replied, “Water temperature is important because it governs the kinds of organisms that can live in Vostok. The presence of zooplankton and phytoplankton—even insects and fish—all thrive in different temperatures. Chemical reactions generally increase in higher temperatures. The freezing temperature would indicate there are no geothermal vents present in this area. Ming, what about E. coli?”
“Bacteria readings are still processing. Nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations are low, as we would expect. The pH is 7.1, highly conducive for fish.”
“Fish?” Ben forced a laugh. “Hate to tell you, but I don’t see so much as a speck of pond scum, let alone a fish. Seems like your people dropped us into a dead zone.”
“Ben may be right,” I said. “Bacteria count is near zero. Sorry to disappoint you, Ming, but if there are fish in this lake, they aren’t defecating in it.”
“Maybe they’re using a toilet,” I heard Ben mutter.
“Barracuda, this is Vostok Command. We have acquired your position. You can power down your lasers. As we suspected, your trajectory was altered during your descent.”
“Altered how?” Ben asked.
“We’re still working the numbers, Captain. You were right on target for the first twenty-seven hundred meters. Somewhere around that mark the sub passed through a magnetic anomaly that veered you off-course. The affected area spans a sixty-five-by-forty-seven-mile section of the plateau that separates the lake’s two basins. There was too much interference for us to catch it from up here, and your suit sensors indicate you probably were asleep during the event.”
“How far off course are we?”
“We have you 152 kilometers southwest of your extraction point. That’s about ninety-four miles.”
Ben slapped his palms to the acrylic dome above his head. “Helluva job, amigo. Your team aimed for the moon and landed us in Cleveland. We’re lucky we even hit water.”
Ming smacked the pilot on the back of his head. “Victor, can you pinpoint the source of the anomaly?”
“We’re still working on that. I’m downloading the SAT image to the Barracuda’s computer. We highlighted your location and the extraction point as references. As you’ll see, you’re in the southern basin, separated from the northern basin by the Vostok ridge. Somewhere along that rise is the source of the anomaly. We suspect the ridge is part of an impact crater from an asteroid. Celestial impacts often magnetize the geology—that’s how they located the crater in the Gulf of Mexico from the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs.”
A black-and-white photo pixilated across our computer screens. The image was generated from sensory equipment aboard Onyx and Lacrosse, a series of terrestrial reconnaissance satellites launched into orbit thirty years ago and only recently declassified. The satellites were equipped with synthetic aperture radar and other sophisticated instruments designed to see through cloud cover, ocean, ice, and even soil.
The Onyx satellite had pinpointed our sub by our lasers’ heat signature. The SAR unit had generated the view of Vostok’s topography.
“Captain, we suggest you set a course on heading zero-three-seven. If you average twenty knots, you should reach the extraction point in less than five hours. That will give your team nine hours to collect water samples and explore Vostok before you need to start your ascent.”
“Roger that, Lopez.” Ben brought the sub about until we were pointed on our northeasterly heading, cruising along the surface at twenty knots.
I laid my head back, staring at endless mist as we plowed through perpetual darkness. I could have used my nocturnal glasses, but there was nothing to see. We had just pulled off an incredible engineering feat, gaining access to a lost world preserved beneath fifteen million years of ice, and yet somehow I felt disappointed.
What had I expected? What would have made me happy? Traces of fecal matter from a prehistoric trout? Perhaps a fossil or two?
One thing is for sure: we weren’t about to find anything along the surface.
“Ben, any objections to checking out the bottom?”
“What for?”
“Maybe we can find some fossils.”
Ming raised her head from her computer. “Yes. Very good, Zachary. I wanted to collect silt samples anyway.”
“You two do realize the depths in this basin exceed twenty-five hundred feet?”
“It is a submersible,” I said, winking at Ming. “You’re allowed to get it wet.”
“Suddenly the Sargasso survivor is a daredevil? Okay, Doc. As my tenth-grade English teacher said to me before she popped my cherry, ‘Hold on, kid, I’m goin’ down.’”
I grabbed onto the padded leather support handles as the bow dropped away into a near-vertical descent, the depth gauge’s numbers advancing rapidly.
Four hundred feet…
Seven hundred feet…
“Easy, Captain, there’s no rush.”
“What’s wrong, Doc? I thought you were an adrenaline junkie.”
One thousand feet…
At 1,340 feet I felt the hull groan, the acrylic emergency pod wobbling under the sudden wave of pressure.
Ming reached forward and gripped the pilot’s right arm. “Slow it down or Zachary will pilot the sub and you can catch the next cargo plane back to Wisconsin.”
Ben eased up on the throttle, altering our angle of descent. “No worries. I was just seeing what this vessel could handle. That’s standard operating procedure on a maiden voyage—part of my job.”
“And part of my job is to minimize the risks to the crew. Zachary, are you all right?”
Ugh. “Fine, thank you, Min
g.” Yes. Thank you, Ming, for emasculating me in your penis-shaped submersible. And thank you for hiring an ego-driven headcase who managed to get himself kicked out of the Air Force for mistakenly entering a sovereign nation’s air space. And thank you, Angus, for once again screwing up my life.
As we passed two thousand feet, Ming squealed something in Chinese. “Zachary, I just took another water sample. The temperature has dropped to minus sixteen degrees Fahrenheit, with total dissolved solids exceeding two thousand miligrams.”
I turned to face her. “We’re entering a hypersaline chemocline. Vostok is a mineral concentrator. Remember, it’s connected to Antarctica’s oceans by a subglacial river. Residual salts have become trapped over millions of years, concentrated along the bottom. Lake Bonney works the same way; it has a temperature of minus twenty-three. Don Juan Pond is liquid at minus twenty-two. I wouldn’t be shocked to find weird microbial communities thriving down here.”
Geez, Wallace, you are such a nerd.
The tea-colored waters in our headlights grew more turbid as we descended, and the current increased, forcing Ben to decrease his angle of descent.
By the time we reached 2,185 feet, the Barracuda had nearly leveled off, the depths sweeping us north in the belly of a seventeen-knot current.
Ming aimed her keel light at the bottom, her underwater camera revealing a smooth, gray bedrock lake floor littered with fossils.
“Captain, slow down. I want to take a look. I want to collect samples.”
“In this current?”
I shook my head. “Just come about and put our bow into the current. Haven’t you ever changed a sail before?”
“Not in a sub, smart-ass.”
Ben executed a bone-jarring turn, the current buffeting our craft until our bow was pointing south, our propulsors neutralizing the force of the water. Maintaining a forward speed of twenty knots, we cruised slowly over the ancient bottom, the treasures of the long-lost Miocene era appearing on our video screen.