by Steve Alten
“It does have a nice sense of closure to it. But how would we even get it into the hopper?”
“Paul Agricola showed me a way. By draining the tank and opening the keel hatch above the whale, the suction would inhale it straight up into the hopper. The problem is sedating it. Angel breathed the phenobarbital that was injected in the water through her gills. The whale’s an air-breather. We’d have to figure out how to—”
The ship’s navigator approached. “Excuse me, Dr. Taylor, but we’ve arrived at the first sonar buoy drop zone.”
“Are there any other ships in the immediate area?”
“No, sir.”
“How long will it take us to deploy all thirty-five buoys?”
“Sixteen hours. The sonar array will cover approximately one hundred and eighty miles of coastline along the southernmost tip of the ice shelf that parallels Lake Ellsworth.”
“Commence deployment. Oh, and ask the captain to drain the hopper-dredge.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jonas turned to his wife. “Looks like we have sixteen hours to kill. Any ideas, Mrs. Taylor?”
Terry hooked her arm around her husband’s waist. “Why don’t we go to our stateroom; I could sure use a back rub.”
Coulman Island
Ross Sea, Antarctica
Located in the Ross Sea, Coulman Island is an eighteen-mile-long, eight-mile-wide landmass composed of overlapping shield volcanoes. Flat craters share the geology with cinder cones that rise thirty-six hundred feet. A caldera occupies the southern end of the island, its magma chamber situated more than two thousand feet below the surface.
Emperor penguins inhabit the coast, the curious birds avoiding the northern section of the island where the landmass meets the Ross Ice Shelf. In another month the frozen land bridge would thin and break apart, yielding to the sea. For now it remained thick enough to support a base camp that housed scientists, technicians, and researchers from the International Antarctic Geological Drilling (ANDRILL) Program. A fleet of vehicles and two cranes mounted to tractor trailers had traversed the ice sheet from the American research station at McMurdo Sound, transporting enough equipment and supplies to support a small army. Two platforms towered above the camp, their hot water drills having melted access holes through the eight-foot-thick ice sheet.
A team of scientists inside a command trailer watched on monitors as the first drill was lowered through the borehole into the 3,115-foot depths. Videotaping the tube’s descent was a remotely operated vehicle named SCINI (Submersible Capable of under-Ice Navigation and Imaging). Equipped with cameras, oceanographic instruments, and sensors, the ROV would be used to explore the underside of the ice sheet.
Twenty minutes passed before the hot water drill reached the sea floor, spinning its way through rock and sediment. From this deep hole would emerge a core of strata that dated back fifteen million years to a period just before the climate change event that buried Antarctica beneath two and a half miles of ice.
* * *
The Liopleurodon glided effortlessly along the floor of the Southern Ocean, the thirty-seven-degree water temperatures soothing the hot blood in its veins, calming the unborn young within its womb.
More than a week had passed since it last fed.
The creature had been shadowing the pod of minke whales for the last thirty-two miles. Driven by hunger, the pliosaur arched its back as it rose from the depths, its massive forelimbs requiring but a single powerful downward stroke to streamline its body into a ninety-degree, twenty-knot vertical assault.
Fifteen hundred feet from the surface the black waters turned gray.
At twelve hundred feet the gray became an annoyance that blurred its vision.
At nine hundred feet the blurred vision advanced to a searing burn, the deep blue light casting painful blinding sparks of twilight in its eyes.
Whipping its tail, the Lio rolled away from the sun-drenched shallows, beating a hasty retreat into the depths.
The creature continued shadowing its intended prey as the whales entered the Ross Sea. And then a strange new presence rippled through the Lio’s senses. As it entered the Balleny Basin it grew stronger; as it ascended over the Adare Seamounts it teased its hunger with a potpourri of scents and vibrations. The Liopleurodon had never experienced coastal prey before, though its ancestors had proliferated in these very seas.
The pliosaur ascended gradually as the sun dipped lower in the late afternoon sky. And then, without warning, the water temperature dropped, accompanied by a sudden darkness.
The Jurassic monster rose warily, the sounds and vibrations of the surface muting in its brain even as a strange glow filled its field of vision.
Whack!
Without warning, the Liopleurodon’s snout collided painfully with the underside of the Ross Ice Shelf. Shaking its head, the creature stroked its powerful forelimbs and swam off, its head and back sliding against the ceiling of ice.
Again and again it tried to find its way around the barrier, each failed attempt fueling a growing sense of anxiety. In this muted new world there was an absence of prey. Trapped against its will, the animal drove itself into a frenzy as it zigged and zagged beneath the ice sheet, desperate to find its way out.
At some point its senses latched onto a new vibration—this one coming from below.
Banking away from the ice sheet, the Liopleurodon descended into the depths to investigate.
* * *
Scott McColl, head geologist of the Coulman Island ANDRILL site sat outside his tent before the tripod-mounted video camera. The day was fading, the sun low on the horizon, obscured behind a cloudy haze. He waited for his assistant to take his place behind the camera before logging on to Skype. Checking his image in the reference box, he placed the battery-powered headset over his ear, covered it beneath his wool cap just as the head instructor at New Zealand’s online education program, LEARNZ logged on.
Angela Rogers’s face appeared on his screen. “Good morning, Dr. McColl. We’re very excited to see you again.”
“It’s actually late afternoon where I’m at, Mrs. Rogers, but I’m excited to be back online for another virtual field trip. How many students are watching our broadcast today?”
“Over four thousand. Please tell us where you are and the purpose of your mission.”
“Mrs. Rogers, our team is on the Ross Ice Shelf close to Coulman Island, which is in the Ross Sea. We’re here with scientists from the Crary Laboratory at McMurdo station, where we’ve assembled two drill platforms, one of which went operational a few hours ago. Our ANDRILL team is using a hot-water drilling system that allows us to drill through ice, seawater, sediment and rock to a depth exceeding fifteen hundred meters. The core we’ll be extracting and studying will provide our scientists with a geological record from the present to nearly twenty million years ago. This information is important because it provides us with data about past periods of global warming and cooling. Our target date is between fourteen million and fifteen million years ago, the warmest part of the middle Miocene before Antarctica froze. Our goal is to understand how Antarctica’s sea ice, ice shelves, glaciers, and sea currents affect the world’s ocean currents and the planet’s atmosphere.”
Dr. McColl nodded to his assistant, who picked up the tripod-mounted camera and followed the geologist across the ice to the first drill site.
“As you can see, the Ross Ice Shelf is very flat. The ice beneath our feet is about eight to ten feet thick…” McColl ceased mid-sentence, watching as members of his team raced past him, everyone converging upon the trailer which served as the drill platform’s command post.
“Dr. McColl, we seemed to have lost you. Is your microphone still working?”
“Huh? Yes, can you hear me?”
“Yes. Can you tell us what we’re looking at?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure. Something exciting seems to be happening. Let’s see if we can find out.” The geologist jogged across the ice to the trailer and worked h
is way through the crowd, followed by his cameraman.
One of the techs saw him and frantically waved him over. “Dr. McColl, there’s something down there!”
“Down where? You mean the drill site?”
“No sir, the sea floor. It’s circling the line; it must be attracted to the drilling.”
“It?”
“A biologic,” said his friend, Mitchell Friedenthal. The engineer in-charge of ANDRILL’s remotely operated vehicle was working a joystick with his right hand, a keyboard with his left. “The ROV picked it up on sonar. I’m sending SCINI down to take a closer look.”
Every eye inside the trailer—along with the lens of the tripod-mounted camera—was trained on a row of monitors mounted above the engineer’s command post. The multi-angled images were dark, save for a spinning underwater light, the beam of which offered glimpses of the drill line’s flex tubing as it descended.
“Seven hundred meters to contact. I’d say whatever it is that’s down there is pretty damn big.”
“A blue whale?” Dr. McColl asked.
“That would be my guess. Who knows? Maybe the drill vibrations sound like krill? Five hundred meters until … stand by.” Friedenthal checked the ROV’s sonar. “Looks like we got its attention, boss. Whatever’s down there is coming up to say hello. Boy, this thing moves fast. Two hundred meters. One hundred meters … oh, shit.”
For a brief second a monstrous crocodilian mouth was caught in the ROV’s spotlight—a moment later all three monitors sizzled with static.
German, Italian, and English conversations broke out at once.
“Quiet!” Dr. McColl turned to his engineer who was frantically punching controls on his keyboard. “Mitch, what just happened?”
“I don’t know, but the ROV’s not responding.”
“Can you replay the tape?”
“The tape … right.” Checking the time code, Friedenthal reversed the recording, then replayed it on the monitors in slow-motion.
One side of the Liopleurodon’s massive head and left fore flipper appeared on screen, its mouth opening beyond the scope of the lens for a few frames before the images went to static.
“What the hell was that?”
Another New Zealander entered the trailer, out of breath. “Dr. McColl, you’d better get out here!”
The geologist and his team rushed out onto the ice to the drill platform. The steel frame was reverberating, the bolts securing its foundation to the ice sheet wobbling loose.
It’s got hold of the flex tube …
Scott McColl was about to shout an order when the shaking abruptly stopped.
An uneasy quiet took the frozen plain, broken only by a woman’s muffled voice coming from McColl’s discarded headset. The members of the multinational expedition looked at one another, unsure of what to do next. One by one they looked down, each man’s fear shared by all.
Dr. McColl nodded, as if reading their thoughts. “Leave the equipment; everyone in the trucks. We need to get off the—”
The creature’s dark head exploded through the ice sheet, rising clear up to its forelimbs. The two enormous appendages flopped free of the sea before sliding outward, effectively pinning the Liopleurodon’s upper torso out of the water.
Unable to move or breathe, the monster went berserk. Its lower limbs churned maddeningly beneath the ice as if treading water, its tail whipping from side to side until the pliosaur managed to slide out onto the ice sheet, its entire one hundred and twenty-two foot, hundred-ton girth exposed to the star-filled heavens.
Now it was the humans’ turn to panic.
Fifty-three men and two women shouting in four different languages attempted to distance themselves from the unfathomably large creature snapping its jaws and lashing its tail at every perceived movement.
A German geologist took advantage of his spiked boots to sprint to one of the trucks. Climbing inside, he gunned the already running engine—never seeing the appendage that upended the vehicle, tossing him through the windshield.
Dr. McColl’s assistant, Dwight Taylor not only saw it but captured it on his tripod-mounted camera, causing thousands of students and teachers in New Zealand to simultaneously whip out their iPhones, taking the frightening images viral. No relation to Jonas Taylor, the Colorado native’s last name would nevertheless spin endless conjecture among the media.
Scott McColl was slipping, sliding, and running blindly within a pack of stumbling, panicked scientists and engineers—the size of the fleeing group catching the visually-impaired eyes of the Lio. Unlike its ancestors, the pliosaur had never been out of the water and its limbs were far too weak to support its own body mass. Lunging sideways, it slid across the frozen plain, its tremendous weight cracking the ice beneath it.
The wall of ski jackets in front of Scott McColl stopped without warning as the rock-hard surface beneath their boots simultaneously fractured and compressed three feet into a crater the size of a baseball diamond. A knee-deep tide of frigid seawater seeped through the fragmented surface, creating small floating islands of ice.
Twenty-two men and two women were left in darkness, attempting to keep from falling. Several crewmen ended up in the water, the cold shocking their systems as they fought to climb back up on their frozen rafts.
Scott McColl was less than thirty feet from the monster’s open jaws when the Lio flopped sideways into the Ross Sea and disappeared underwater, unleashing a ten-foot wave. The geologist leaped, bounding across fragments of ice after his fellow fleeing explorers as the swell caught him from behind, sweeping him up in its polar embrace, churning him underwater before pile-driving him face-first onto the ice.
Scott sat up, shivering, his forehead bleeding. The wave had carried him and many of his surviving colleagues over the hole in the ice from which the creature had emerged. As he was dragged to his feet a familiar voice called out from the pond-size crater, desperate for help.
Scott stood, spotting his engineer in the water. “Mitch, hang on! Lars, grab the rope out of the Sno-Cat! Mitchell … oh, God no.”
The Liopleurodon’s massive head surfaced, the dagger-shaped eleven-inch teeth jutting out of its upper jaw gingerly plucking Mitchell Friedenthal from the floating mounds of ice, the man’s screams piercing the frigid Antarctic air before abruptly going silent.
Tears rolled down Dr. McColl’s cheeks, freezing as they fell from his face. Close to passing out from the cold, he allowed his assistant to lead him onto the jacked-up transport known as “Ivan the Terra Bus,” where the frightened survivors from ANDRILL team were anxiously waiting, praying to get to Coulman Island before the beast struck again.
25
Aboard the Hopper-Dredge McFarland
Ronne Ice Shelf, Weddell Sea
It had taken nearly two days to deploy thirty-five sonar buoys along a one hundred and eighty mile stretch of the Ronne Ice Shelf. Thirty-seven miles inland from the Weddell Sea, buried beneath more than seven thousand feet of ice, was Lake Ellsworth, a subglacial purgatory of life kept liquid by pressure, friction, and the planet’s own internal heat.
Over the next forty-eight hours three pods of orca, dozens of minke whales, hundreds of emperor penguins, four Weddell seals, and a tourist boat crossed the sonar array.
No biologics were detected moving out from beneath the Ronne Ice Shelf.
Jonas spent most of his free time field-testing the reequipped Manta. With the two bulky Valkyrie laser units strapped to its wings the sub’s performance was noticeably sluggish. Zachary Wallace had chosen to trade speed and hydrodynamics for the ability to melt ice rapidly and Jonas was having second thoughts about facing an eighty-foot bull Miocene sperm whale in a cavitating vessel with a top speed of only twenty-three knots. In the end he told his engineer to only convert one of the two subs, leaving himself a “game-day” decision.
The incredible news story coming from the Ross Sea broke on the night of February twenty-first. Every person onboard the McFarland had their computer and iPhone tun
ed in to the story—except for Terry. Having finally seen the monster her son was risking his life to capture, she refused to watch anything more, insisting to her husband that he end this Miocene whale nonsense and order the hopper-dredge to intercept the Tonga.
One major problem: The tanker was located halfway around the continent. If they chose the wrong route and the Lio headed for the Weddell Sea instead of the Amery Ice Shelf as it had in Zach’s “other reality” then they’d never be able to rendezvous with the ship by March third.
Zachary Wallace assured the Taylors that the Liopleurodon’s unexpected appearance and encounter in the Ross Sea was a positive sign. The journey from the Weddell Sea to the Amery Ice Shelf would take five days, that gave them four to determine their course of action.
Privately, Zachary feared what might happen if the Lio remained under the Ross Ice Shelf for an extended period of time. According to his contacts aboard the Tonga, the thickness of the sea ice had muted the tracking device’s signal and Fiesal bin Rashidi’s crew were again operating in the blind.
On February twenty-third the Crown Prince of Dubai held a press conference at the entrance of his nearly-completed resort to announce that over a billion people had now seen the Liopleurodon footage. He predicted the monster—once captured—would draw ten times the number of guests than the Tanaka Institute drew during its last four years harboring Angel and her pups. For the first time the prince permitted news crews to tour Dubai Land’s massive aquariums, allowing them to film Angel’s only remaining captive pup—now a thirty-six-foot long juvenile albino adult. As a special treat, he offered an exclusive glimpse of his Dunkleosteus, a prehistoric fish that dated back 360 million years to the late Devonian period, then concluded his infomercial by revealing that his two ships had entered the Antarctic Circle and were actively tracking the Liopleurodon, although he refused to give out their location. “If you want to know then I suggest you watch this week’s episode of Dubai Land: Sea Monster Quest. It is must-watch television.”
The sonar array remained silent another thirty-six hours, pushing Zachary Wallace’s deadline for the McFarland’s departure to its limits.