Vostok

by Steve Alten

  When it comes to meditation, I’m strictly an amateur. Hunkering down in the bone-chilling cold, I ducked my hooded head and closed my eyes, attempting to imagine the Milky Way galaxy and the spiral arm that harbored our blue speck of a planet. When that seemed silly—the E.T.s knew where I was, having just followed me halfway across the world—I shifted my internal eye to the patch of ice beneath me.

  I don’t know how long I remained in this position. I may have fallen asleep, but at some point I felt another presence.

  Opening my eyes, I found myself surrounded by mist. Directly overhead, a triangle of light seemed to be materializing out of another dimension, along with the flat metallic bottom of an extraterrestrial vehicle. It had to be hovering incredibly close, for it blotted out the stars.

  I registered a brief fleeting moment of elation, then sudden panic as the ice beneath me evaporated and I went under, my lung-collapsing yelp stymied by a mouthful of salt water. Rational thought left me as unseen tentacles dragged me deeper into water so frigid it curdled my blood into jelly and strangled my circulation. It was Loch Ness all over again; the darkness, the paralysis of cold, the mind-snapping terror. I caught a glimpse of an immense, dark object moving beneath me as a pink fluorescent light sparked to life before me, revealing a scuba diver.

  He shoved a regulator into my mouth, the device attached to a small container of air.

  Pinching my nose, I inhaled a dozen quick breaths, struggling to get them into my failing lungs. The diver motioned below to a bullet-shaped canister the size of a double-wide coffin. Grabbing my left wrist, he dragged me to it, the dark container yawning open like a clam as we approached. He laid me inside as another wave of anxiety hit.

  He squeezed in next to me and sealed the canister by pressing a device attached to his buoyancy control vest. The moment the pod sealed, a blue light activated.

  The diver held up a plastic card.

  STAY CALM, ZACHARY.

  The top of my head struck the inside of the container as the pod jettisoned through the sea and a second laminated card appeared before me.

  POD WILL DRAIN IN 2 MINUTES. CORE TEMPERATURE DROP NECESSARY TO SHUT DOWN BIOCHIP.

  I closed my eyes, comforted by my rescuer’s knowledge of the biochip, my body convulsing in the twenty-nine-degree water.

  Two minutes.

  120 seconds.

  119… 118… 117…

  Coherent thought goes hand in hand with core temperature. Stray too high or too low and you start to lose it. You start to die. In a battle of neurological functions, my mind fought to maintain a foothold of sanity as my hypothalamus struggled to control my body’s internal thermostat.

  It takes a lot to overcome this almond-sized super-organ, but subfreezing water is its kryptonite, the effects rapid and catastrophic. Within seconds of submerging, my brain had ordered the capillaries in my skin to squeeze out the blood, pushing it inward to help maintain my core temperature, and thereby inflicting horrendous pain upon my pinched extremities in the process. My muscles tightened and contracted as hypothermia swept through my body. For the first minute my muscles fought back using high-speed involuntary contractions, but the heat generated through shivering required more blood, which accelerated the drop in core temperature.

  100… 99… 98…

  The muscles in my face were fluttering. The diver noticed and clamped his hand over my mouth to keep the regulator in place.

  95… 94… 93…

  My hypothalamus continued hoarding resources, the organ willing to sacrifice a few pawns and knights to save the king. My thoughts dulled, my mind slipping into a stupor.

  90… 85…

  23…

  My oxygen-starved brain struggled to keep me awake. Urine seeped into the canister, my flooded kidneys overwhelmed by an influx of fluids.

  Just a quick nap…

  The diver shook me awake.

  What was a scuba diver doing in my bathroom stall?

  Timpani drums throttled my chest as my heart became arrhythmic and limited the oxygen to my brain. I turned to my right and saw True.

  “Relax, lad. Him that’s born to be hanged will never be drowned.”

  “You big lummox. I’m not drowning, I’m freezing to death!”

  “Aye. But yer not swinging from a rope, are ye?”

  Suddenly my skin was on fire.

  “True, help me! I’m burning up!”

  “Nothing I can do, lad. Yer hypothalamus has blown a fuse. Paradoxical undressing, it’s called. Yer brain’s last-ditch attempt at saving yer arse. Look at ye, yer blue as a fish. Ye haven’t even got a pulse. Yer not alive, but yer not quite dead either. Better pray yer rescuers ken enough tae warm ye slowly, or yer constricted capillaries will reopen all at once and cause a sudden drop in blood pressure that will send yer heart into ventricular fibrillation.”

  “True, are you here to take me to heaven?”

  “If need be. For now, jist close yer eyes.”

  32

  “How do you know I’m mad?” asked Alice.

  “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

  —Lewis Carroll

  I rode a wave of pain to consciousness but refused to open my eyes, afraid to see what monster was chewing on my extremities.

  And then the monster spoke.

  “Christ in Heaven, enough with the bloody whimpering. There’s old women in the Inverness Polar Bear Society tha’ jump in Loch Ness every winter’s morn, and ye don’t hear those daft bitches yelping. Open yer eyes.”

  I opened them as my father commanded. He was seated beside me, dressed in a wool sweater that matched his hair and beard, and his Gael eyes had fire in them.

  “There now, tha’s better. There’s work tae be done if ye want tae see yer family again.”

  I sat up, looking around the small infirmary. “Where are we?”

  “Aboard Jonas Taylor’s boat, the McFarland. She’s a hopper dredge. Been in these waters since before ye went missing in D.C.”

  “I don’t understand. How did Jonas know I’d be in East Antarctica?”

  “He didn’t. I contacted yer friend after Doc Stewart let me ken where ye was bein’ held and whit fer.”

  “Doc Stewart? You mean the English physician who worked on me back at Groom Lake? Angus, the guy’s MJ-12. He’s one of the bad guys.”

  “First, they don’t call themselves MJ-12 anymore, it’s SECOR, short for Security Organization. Second, Stewie’s only part English; his father wore the plaid. And he’s an old friend. We grew up together before he left the Highlands to join the RAF. Caught the UFO fever back in 1980 when he was stationed at a NATO air base in Suffolk—Bentwaters, if memory serves. It was right after Christmas when one of yer alien vessels appeared over Rendlesham Forest, jist east of Ipswich. According to Stewie, a triangular metal object lit up the entire forest with this brilliant white light. Lots of folk saw it, but the RAF made no claims. From tha’ day forward Stewie worked tae get himself involved with the MAJESTIC crowd. I hadnae a clue he was stationed in Dreamland Base ’til he contacted me.

  “Stewie told me this Colonel Vacendak is forcing ye tae lead him intae Lake Vostok. Stewie says most of these MJ-SECOR lads are secretly rootin’ fer ye tae succeed in bringing these free energy devices out intae public. The problem is Big Oil and the sociopaths in SECOR like this Colonel Vacendak, who enjoy killing. It’s the crazies tha’ keeps the others in line. They’ll kill my grandson and yer ex without batting an eye.”

  I shifted uncomfortably, my skin still burning despite the I.V. drip. “Angus, can Jonas get me into Lake Vostok?”

  “Aye. He has subs on board, and they’re equipped with those lasers tha’ melt ice. We rescued ye in one of ’em.”

  “We? That was you in the dry suit?”

  “Yes, Gertrude. And did ye have tae make such a fuss?”

  “You try submerging in subfreezing water for that long and see how you handle it!”

  “Stop yer whinin’.
I teld ye in my note, we had tae drop yer core temperature tae disable the tracking device Stewie shot intae yer vein. The Colonel’s divers stopped searchin’ for yer body an hour ago. They gotta think yer dead. Tha’s whit we want.”

  Angus stood to leave. “Finish yer I.V., then get dressed and find yer way to the pilothouse. Jonas says he needs tae train ye before he’ll give ye one of his subs.”

  I had met Jonas Taylor and his friend James Mackreides eight years ago, shortly after my book, The Loch, was published. The Tanaka Oceanographic Institute had offered to host a public signing event at their California facility on the coast of Monterey. Constructed twenty-five years earlier by the late marine biologist Masao Tanaka, the Institute featured a man-made lagoon with an ocean-access canal that intersected one of the largest annual whale migrations on the planet. Designed as a field laboratory, the waterway was originally intended to be a place where pregnant gray whales returning from their feeding grounds in the Bering Sea could birth their calves. Masao was so convinced, his facility would bridge the gap between science and entertainment that he mortgaged his entire family fortune on the endeavor.

  Instead, the lagoon would become home to Carcharodon megalodon, the sixty-foot prehistoric cousin of the great white shark.

  Like Livyatan melvillei, megalodon was a Miocene monster believed to be extinct. Jonas Taylor had discovered them inhabiting the deep waters of the Mariana Trench while piloting a top-secret dive for the Navy. According to his testimony, “I was staring out the portal at the hydrothermal plume when sonar picked up an immense object rising from below. Suddenly, a ghost-white shark with a head bigger than our three-man sub emerged from the mineral ceiling.”

  Two scientists on board had died during an emergency ascent, and the deep-sea submersible pilot was blamed. Discharged from the Navy, Jonas decided to become a marine biologist, intent on proving the megalodon was still alive.

  Seven years later, rising construction costs on the Tanaka Institute forced Masao to accept a contract with the Japanese Marine Science Technology Center. The mission: to disperse sensory drones along the Mariana Trench that would function as an early-warning earthquake detection system. To complete the array, D.J. Tanaka, Masao’s son, had to anchor each drone to the trench floor using an Abyss Glider, a sub resembling a one-man version of the Barracuda. When several of the drones stopped transmitting data, Masao needed a second diver to help retrieve one of the damaged sensors.

  He selected Jonas Taylor.

  Jonas accepted the offer, desiring only to recover an unfossilized white megalodon tooth photographed in the wreckage. But the dive ended badly.

  Jonas and D.J. came face to face with not one but two Megs. The first was a forty-five-foot male, which became entangled in the surface ship’s cable. The second was its sixty-foot pregnant mate, which was accidently lured topside.

  The Tanaka Institute took on the task of capturing the female. Jonas and Masao were determined to quarantine the monster in the whale lagoon, with JAMSTEC agreeing to refit the canal entrance with King Kong-sized steel doors.

  The hunt lasted a month, culminating in an act that surpassed my own nightmare in Loch Ness. In the end, one of the megalodon’s surviving pups was captured and raised in Masao’s cetacean facility—and a monster-shark cottage industry was born.

  Angel, dubbed the Angel of Death, was a 70-foot albino, so fearsome she was easily one of the most terrifying creatures ever to exist. The monster would earn the Tanaka-Taylor family hundreds of millions of dollars. She also managed to escape twice, birth two litters of pups, and devour no less than a dozen humans, five of them in her lagoon.

  Yet people still lined up by the tens of thousands to see her, and they wept when they learned she had died. Angel had met her own Angel of Death last summer, following her most recent escape. She had been tracked to the Western Pacific and had been caught in open water in an industrial fishing net, where she became entangled and drowned.

  At least, that was what the world had been told…

  The rusted-white steel superstructure of the 319-foot-long hopper dredge McFarland towered five stories above the deck and nearly twice that over the waterline. Everything aft of the command center and crews’ quarters was dedicated to the business of dredging. Built in 1967, the ship was designed to clear waterways of sediment by vacuuming up slurry—a mixture of sand and water—from the sea floor using two large drag arms. After being pumped through pipes, the slurry would be deposited in a hopper, a massive hold that occupied the mid- and aft-decks like an oversized Olympic swimming pool. The McFarland’s hopper could hold more than six thousand tons of slurry and evacuate it in minutes through its keel doors.

  The Tanaka Institute had purchased the McFarland a year after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had decommissioned the ship and three months after Angel had birthed her five pups in captivity. Jonas had been looking for a vessel large enough to safely transport the juvenile sharks to another aquarium, knowing the Institute simply wasn’t large enough to house six full-grown megalodons.

  It was still dark outside when I left sickbay and made my way to the bridge, the hood of the crewmen’s jacket Angus had left me pulled tightly around my head and face, just in case the Colonel had one of MJ-12’s satellites watching the boat.

  We were headed north at three knots, the ship’s bow maneuvering through lead-gray surface waters dotted with islands of ice. To port rose the snow-packed cliffs that dominated the East Antarctic coastline; to starboard, the dark horizon and open ocean. I paused at the guardrail to look down at the ship’s main deck and its mammoth hopper. The open hold occupied the deck space between the bridge superstructure and the ship’s bow. The 175-foot-long, 45-foot-wide, 55-foot-deep tub remained in the shadows, the machinery designed to stir the captured slurry long since removed.

  Locating an interior stairwell, I ascended to the bridge.

  The McFarland’s command center seemed far too big for its solitary row of computer consoles. Large bay windows surrounded the chamber on all four sides, looking out nine stories above the ocean. There were two men inside. The boat’s captain, a Georgia man named Jon Hudson, was at the helm. The other man sat at a chart table, studying a map of the continent.

  Gray-haired and in his mid-sixties, Jonas Taylor appeared fit, but the dark circles under his eyes told a different story. Rising to meet me, he greeted me in a bear hug.

  “Zachary Wallace, you look good for a guy who didn’t have a pulse an hour ago. Sorry about the way we had to bring you aboard, but you’re messing with an intelligence agency exercising a mercenary mentality. I guess that’s a necessity when dealing with extraterrestrial threats.”

  “There is no extraterrestrial threat. The D.C. attack was a false flag event staged to look like an E.T. vessel.”

  “Staged by whom?”

  I glanced at the Captain, whose back was to us. “Is there somewhere we can speak in private?”

  “Captain, how far are we from the Amery Ice Shelf?”

  “Just under five nautical miles. No close contacts on sonar or radar.”

  “All engines stop. The bridge is mine. Get some breakfast.”

  Jonas waited until the Captain left. “For the record, I trust the Captain.”

  “I have no doubt he’s a loyal employee, but we’re dealing with sociopaths. Killing is as natural to them as it is to Bela and Lizzy. If you have the information they want, they’ll get it.”

  “They being MAJESTIC-12?”

  “MJ-12 oversees the black ops weapon systems and the military bases. The guys calling the shots are a cartel of power brokers, bankers, and egomaniacs who think the rest of us are here to serve them. These are the same assholes that stole my Vostok generators and burned our factory to the ground. They act above the law, have no interest in improving the lives of the seven billion people on this planet, and don’t give a damn that their organizations are destroying the earth’s biosphere.

  “And they kidnapped William and Brandy to force me to
lead them back to Lake Vostok.”

  “Why? What’s in Vostok?”

  “I’d rather not say, but it’s important enough that MJ-12 designed a sub to travel beneath the ice sheet through a network of subglacial rivers into the lake. Jonas, it’s critically important I make it to Vostok before them.”

  Jonas scanned his chart, using a slide rule to measure distances. “Vostok’s at least eight to nine hundred miles away. My Manta subs are equipped with Valkyries, but they don’t pack nearly enough juice to take you that far.”

  “They don’t have to. MJ-12’s sub will lead me into the lake’s northern basin. Once I’m there, I’ll be able to overtake them and get to where I need to be before they do.”

  “And how will making it back to Lake Vostok ahead of these guys save William and Brandy?”

  “Again, I’d rather not say. The less you know the better.”

  “It’ll take you twenty to thirty hours just to reach Vostok. Maybe more. Who’s your copilot?”

  Angus must have been eavesdropping from the interior stairwell, for he came bursting in on cue. “I’m going with the lad.”

  Jonas and I looked at one another with the same startled expression.

  “Wha’s with the long faces? I can handle it.”

  “Forget it,” Jonas said. “I have no interest in sponsoring a suicide mission. If this is really about saving your family, then let’s go to the authorities. I campaigned heavily for the President, and the Institute was a major donor to his election campaign. One phone call and you’ll be speaking with the national security advisor himself. ”

  “I appreciate the offer, Jonas, but these guys operate outside White House jurisdiction.”

  “Tell Jonas everything, lad. Him not knowing isn’t going to matter tae these people. The moment they see the Manta, they’ll realize he arranged yer escape.”

  I knew my father was right. “There’s an extraterrestrial vessel in Vostok. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen. Seven years ago I was allowed access.”