Vostok

by Steve Alten

  “What happens if it strands us in the shallows and we beach? You want to be the one who gets out and pushes?”

  Ming interjected, her tone soothing. “Ben, we have followed the plateau for twenty miles. From the satellite images we know the rise is at least thirty miles wide. Perhaps there is another inlet somewhere, but if we do not begin crossing the plateau soon we will run out of air.”

  The pilot nodded. “I’ll take the conn. Zach on sonar. Once we move into the channel, I want you to go active to gauge the depth. If it seems deep enough we’ll give it a shot. If not, we head back and continue the search. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  Ben took a moment to relieve his bladder using his plastic-bottle urinal. Then, taking over as pilot, he ascended the sub into the channel.

  We surfaced into a swiftly moving deluge, driven by ten- to twelve-foot waves that lifted our craft and nearly tossed us over the first curl.

  Ben accelerated ahead of the next swell, offering us a glimpse of what lay ahead.

  The water was being channeled between two headlands, seven- to ten-story cliffs that jutted out into the lake. The waterway was as wide as an eight-lane highway, but its length and depth were impossible to gauge.

  I waited until we were closer to the whitewater entrance before going active on sonar.

  The acoustic PING rippled across the channel, its reverberations painting the waterway’s topography. The river swept inland another half-mile before the shallows appeared, where the depths reduced from seven hundred feet to eighty-five feet—certainly deep enough to accommodate our tiny sub.

  The sonar signature disappeared into white noise as the river turned to the northeast.

  Ben kept us in the middle of the channel. Volcanic cliffs rose to either side of the sub, waves crashing against the base of the plateau.

  As we ventured farther inland, a blip appeared on my screen as something massive rose off the bottom.

  “Zachary, what is it?”

  “From its size, I’d guess another Purussaurus, or maybe the same one. It’s still in the vent field, but it’s ascending toward the channel.”

  Ben cursed under his breath. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  The Barracuda accelerated through the chop, our propeller’s signature lost in the whitewater.

  “Talk to me, Zach. Can that croc follow us inland?”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean it will. The entrance is plenty deep. I can’t see anything beyond the first curve. It’s getting a bit rough topside.”

  “Got it.” Ben dove the sub, killing our external lights in favor of his night-vision goggles. A Miocene river bed appeared below us in bright green, littered by harrowing outcroppings and boulders that churned the surface at twenty-three knots.

  My pulse raced as the Purussaurus entered the channel.

  We followed the waterway inland for several miles, the canyon’s walls gradually settling along either side of us into a rocky embankment, the volcanic rock slick with algae.

  The sound of rushing water grew louder in my headphones until I was forced to pull them away from my ears. “We’re either approaching rapids or the dispersal zone of a waterfall. Can you back us off?”

  “Negative. We’re caught in its vortex. There’s no room to come about. Hold on, boys and girls, we’re going through.”

  A thunderous echo of water reverberated through the Barracuda as the river curved to the east, slinging us sideways and grinding the keel against unseen rock as we spun downstream through subglacial rapids, the whitewater tossing our submersible about like a log.

  Closing my eyes, I held on in the turbulent darkness, waiting for the sudden rush of freezing water as our inverted cockpit repeatedly bashed against unseen rocks. I thought about Brandy and William and cursed the selfish decision that defied my own fear and intellect. Most of all, I cursed Angus for having manipulated me.

  Who was I kidding? The decision to accept the mission had been mine to make. I had forfeited happiness for a shot at immortality, and for that I would pay the ultimate price.

  Emptiness replaced fear as I realized I’d never hold my beautiful bride again, never play ball with my son, never walk him to school or watch him grow up or graduate or raise a family of his own. With my death, those responsibilities and the rewards that came with parenthood would be passed on to his mother and whomever she chose to fill the void I was about to leave in her life.

  These toxic thoughts were shunted as an unseen force drove us bow-first into the river bed. I heard Ming cry out as the sub’s tail rose behind us, the river pinning us upside-down at a nauseating angle for untold torturous minutes.

  Locating our exterior lights, I powered them on to reveal our bow now wedged tightly in an underpinning of rock and held fast by the force of the current. Through my moans and the thunderous current, I heard Ben yell, then felt his grip on my shoulder. “Release your harness and climb up here with me and Ming.”

  With trembling fingers I pried open the latch to my harness and tumbled out of my seat onto the now-slanted roof of the acrylic pod. Crawling on my belly, I made my way into Ben’s cockpit.

  Ming remained suspended upside down in her seat, her wavy brown hair dangling from her scalp.

  “Zach, we’re caught in a sieve. There’s a hole in the rock where the river flows through. The sub’s pinned by the current. We’ll die down here unless we can free ourselves.”

  “How?”

  “I shifted the prop’s gear into reverse. I’ll gun the engine and try to rock the sub enough to catch the main current with our tailfin. Climb back into Ming’s cockpit. Use your weight to help sway us back and forth. If that’s not enough, be prepared to slam your body against the highest point of the sub.”

  I nodded and then crawled into the rear compartment. “Ming, you okay?”

  “My head hurts. Please hurry.”

  Ben reached up to his command console’s joystick and revved the propeller in reverse, pressing foot pedals with his free hand to get the sub to rock. I tried to shift my weight with each roll, but it wasn’t enough to free the bow.

  “Zach, when I say jump, jump up and grab hold of the back of Ming’s chair. On three. One… two… three!”

  Reaching high overhead, I slid my hands along the base of Ming’s chair and jumped just as Ben rocked the sub in the same direction. For a surreal moment I seemed to defy gravity as the Barracuda’s tail caught the current, which pried the bow free and flipped us into the river’s powerful vortex.

  Flung head-first into darkness, I slipped into its warm embrace.

  15

  “I’m not strange, weird, off, nor crazy; my reality is just different from yours.”

  —Lewis Carroll

  I opened my eyes and was surrounded by darkness. The heavy rush of the river was gone, replaced by the pitter-patter of raindrops splattering across a metal surface somewhere above my head. My skull throbbed in pain. Reaching for the source, I felt blood pooling behind my neck.

  I tried to move, but my upper body was pinned by an immoveable object. Slipping close to panic-mode, I twisted my head free and managed to sit up, my eyes latching onto a blue LED light that slowly orientated me.

  You’re in the forward cockpit. The sub’s upside-down.

  “Ben?… Ming?”

  No reply.

  Feeling beneath my inverted chair, I found an emergency kit and a flashlight. Crawling on my hands and knees along the cold curvature of the acrylic dome, I squeezed myself into the middle cockpit and found Ben lying face-down, either unconscious or dead.

  I reached for his right wrist and felt a pulse. Using the light, I did a quick search for open wounds as I roused him. “Ben, wake up. Come on, rise and shine.”

  He coughed, groaning as he rolled over. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. The current freed us, but I have no idea where we are. The sub’s on its back.”

  He sat up, striking his head on the pilot seat’s inverted joystick. “O
w. Why’d the engine shut down?”

  “I don’t know. Wait here, I’m going to check on Ming.”

  I crawled back to her cockpit. Still strapped in her seat, she was suspended upside down and appeared to be unconscious. Reaching up, I opened the latch to her harness and let her lithe gymnast’s body slide into my arms.

  “Ming, you okay?”

  “Zach, forget her. I need your help.”

  I laid her down gently on the cockpit’s inverted ceiling and crawled back to Ben’s compartment. “What’s wrong? Are we powerless?”

  “If we were powerless, we’d be dead. Hear that humming? That’s our lithium-ion batteries.”

  “How long will they last?”

  “Longer than us, I’m afraid.” He pointed to the inverted air gauge: 147 minutes.

  My limbs began to tremble, fear pushing my mind toward a place that I knew would end badly.

  “We’re in a bit of trouble here, Zach. The river left us high and dry on its bank. We need to find a way to maneuver the Barracuda back into the water, then manage our way across this plateau into the northern basin and locate our extraction point. Allowing for a minimum ascension of thirty minutes, we need to accomplish all that, well, pretty damn fast.”

  “The river must be close. Maybe we can roll the sub manually, like a log.”

  “You’re reading my mind. First things first, we need to retract the Barracuda’s wings. I’m seeing double right now, so maybe you can locate the stabilizer controls on my command console.”

  Balancing on my knees, I used the flashlight to search the control panel. “Got it.”

  “Beneath—I mean above—the stabilizer are two small T-bars. Pull them toward you and the wings should retract.”

  Locating the devices, I gave them each a sharp tug.

  A whine of hydraulics joined us in the darkness as the wings retracted, sending the Barracuda barrel-rolling down an embankment.

  There was nothing to grab hold of, just dizzying darkness and painful bumps and an elbow to the head that drew stars. With a jarring thud, we stopped, the sub landing right side-up.

  Ben and I moaned as we disentangled ourselves in the narrow cockpit. Crawling over his dashboard, I dropped into my leather chair and closed my eyes against the vertigo and a nauseating drop in blood sugar. Feeling for my personal storage area, I removed a bottle of water and a bag of trail mix and ate.

  “Zach, use your night glasses. See if you can find the river.”

  “We’re in the river,” Ming said, groggily. “The water is gone.”

  I searched for the night-vision goggles, put them on, and stared out of the bow at the alien landscape. We were in a gully as wide as a city block, its depths tapering down two stories. The surging rapids had been replaced by a three-foot-deep trough of water, interrupted by patches of volcanic rock and mud.

  “Ming’s right, Ben. We’re in the river, but the water’s gone.”

  “Gone? How? Where did it go?”

  “Vostok has tides,” Ming reminded us. “We left on a full moon. Perhaps we are experiencing the effects of— ”

  “Come on, Ming. Full moons don’t cause a fifty-foot drop between high tide and low tide. Tell her, Zach!”

  Ben was losing it.

  So was I.

  My eyes locked on the LED instrument panel before me, hoping to steady the vertigo.

  “Zach, what’s your external pressure reading?”

  I glanced at the gauge, blinking several times. “This can’t be right. The gauge must have broken when we flipped. I’ve got 228 psi. What could be causing it?”

  “It must be it,” Ming muttered.

  Ben turned around, suddenly animated. “I knew it! I knew you were MJ-12.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Captain.”

  “The hell you don’t. Why don’t you tell Dr. Wallace what’s causing this magnetic interference? After all, that is why we’re here.”

  “What’s he talking about, Ming?”

  “Nothing. It is simply a theory.”

  “A theory… really?”

  “Ben, take it easy.”

  “No. No, I want to hear about this theory—the theory that funded this expedition. Isn’t that right, Dr. Liao?”

  “Ignore him, Zachary. My sponsors funded this historic mission to advance science.”

  “Your sponsors, of course. Tell us about your sponsors. Agricola Industries, for instance. Why would a private Canadian firm specializing in tar sand technology invest over half a million dollars in an exploratory mission of a subglacial lake? Doesn’t make much sense until you do a little digging and learn that Agricola was bought out two years ago by ITT. Have you ever heard about ITT, Zach?”

  “Why don’t you tell me after we figure a way out of this mess?”

  “They’re big in transportation and energy,” Ben said, “but their strength lies in the aerospace and defense sector. This is a company whose CEO met with Adolf Hitler prior to World War II, whose subsidiary owned a twenty-five-percent share of the German aircraft manufacturer that built Luftwaffe fighter planes. To show you how well connected they are, ITT received $27 million in restitution from the United States for damages inflicted upon their Luftwaffe plant as a result of the war. What a set of balls on these guys. They invest in our enemies, then sue America for fighting their German allies. And the bastards win! They were involved in the 1964 CIA coup in Brazil, the 1972 Republican National Convention scandal, the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile, and in 2007 Ming’s sponsor became the first major defense contractor to be convicted of criminal violations of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act when they transferred classified information about laser weapon countermeasures to China.”

  “How do you know all this, Ben?”

  “It’s public record.”

  “Let me rephrase that. Why do you know all this?”

  “I know it because their defense sector is a front for MAJESTIC-12, a tightly wound group of puppet-masters who profit from war and are committed to maintaining the status quo when it comes to our energy supply. Big Oil, Monsanto, the military industrial complex, and a select group of bankers… don’t roll your eyes, Zach. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Discover a new clean-energy source that can free us from fossil fuels and these boys will deny you a patent, steal your technology, and crush you like a bug. There’s a reason they’re funding this little venture, but it has nothing to do with marine biology. Oh, and you can bet the farm it was their GeoEye-1 satellite that pinpointed our location when we splashed down a million miles off-course.”

  The satellite… Vostok Command can’t send help unless they know where we are!

  Spinning my chair back around to my command console, I powered up the Valkyries, creating a heat signature for their thermal imaging sensors.

  Ming and Ben continued wasting our air supply. “My job in organizing this venture, Captain, was to procure enough funds to cover the technological expenses. So what if a defense contractor invested in our mission?”

  “Vostok’s huge. Yet somehow you managed to select a splashdown site where the magnetic anomaly is at its strongest?”

  “It’s a geological phenomenon. I’m a geophysicist.”

  “A geophysicist who recruited Zachary Wallace as a front, to fool the Russians into believing the mission’s aim was to discover new life-forms. Of course, you never said what kind of new life-forms.”

  The conversation was getting heated and more than a little weird. Perhaps I might have cared had we not been running out of air.

  Thick droplets of water rained down from the ice sheet, dropping out of a dense fog. The river bed twisted up ahead to the right. Beyond that, we’d probably never know.

  What if there was water around that bend?

  My eyes returned to the gauge monitoring the exterior pressure. How much could the human body handle? The ice sheet was obviously off the scale, but 228 psi— that equated to free diving in about 350 feet of water. The world record for free diving was about 420 feet.
I was certainly no diver, but leaving the sub wasn’t about holding my breath, it was about being able to handle the extreme pressures that would be squeezing my ears, sinus cavity, and lungs—something I had faced years earlier when our submersible had suddenly cracked open in the depths of the Sargasso Sea.

  If water was out there, could we drag the sub to it before our air cavities ruptured?

  I was about to broach the subject with my bickering shipmates when we felt the river bed beneath us rumble.

  Silence took the sub. I quickly shut down the Valkyries while Ben extinguished our exterior lights. Huddling in the dark, the three of us searched the landscape using our night-vision goggles.

  The reverberations were getting closer, and then a creature appeared over the rise and I forgot all about venturing outside.

  It was a Purussaurus, a pregnant female, I surmised from its labored gait. Staking out a sand-covered expanse close to the river bed and less than fifty yards from our sub, the eighteen-ton prehistoric crocodile began digging a hole with her clawed hind feet while her enormous tail swished back and forth, flicking debris in every direction.

  Ben backed away from the glass. “Mother of God… I seriously need to be drunk.”

  Sand rained across the pod, obscuring our view. I heard Ben offer Ming something. A moment later, he leaned over into my cockpit and passed me an open whiskey bottle. “A gift from your Viking pal. Go on, it’ll make it easier.”

  I took a long swig and passed it back to him. “I feel like such an arse. For the first time in my life, I had it all—the girl of my dreams, a son, a prestigious job. Why’d I do it?”

  “You’re a scientist; you did it for the work.”

  “No, it was my stupid ego. Over three thousand people have climbed Mount Everest, hundreds have been in space, but Vostok—I wanted to be the first, the Neil Armstrong of subglacial lakes, the marine biologist who ventured back in time.”

  “I suppose that makes me Buzz Aldrin. Want to know why I took this mission?”

  I glanced at the air gauge. “You have fifty-seven minutes, go for it.”