Toni chuckled out loud as the Cessna started its descent.
A shrill beeping sound erupted from her flight panel. The hands on her altimeter spun wildly. She peeked at the underside of her wings to see if the pitot tubes had frozen over, but there was no more frost than usual. They registered the atmospheric pressure while the plane was in motion and used it to calculate the altitude above sea level, which, according to her gauges, was plummeting rapidly beneath her. All of the other gauges appeared to be functioning properly, with the exception of the vertical speed indicator, which suggested they were accelerating at a phenomenal rate, almost as though they were in free-fall.
She dipped the wing and looked down.
There was Diomede Village. She would have recognized it anywhere. The problem was that the ocean upon which she intended to land was a hundred feet down a slope that hadn’t been there before.
The doctor said something to her through her headset, but she ignored him and switched her communications over to the Nome tower frequency.
A flash of movement from the corner of her eye.
A silver blur streaked up from the ground toward the plane. Her first thought was that someone had launched a surface-to-air missile from the village, like she’d seen so many times during her two tours in Iraq back in Desert Storm.
Impact from below. The scream of wrenching metal.
The left pontoon whipped across her view and the Cessna suddenly rolled. The port wing sliced through her peripheral vision. She turned to see a broken stub where it had once been. And a pillar of water several hundred feet tall.
“Hang on!” she shouted.
The starboard side was unbalanced and threw the plane into a circling nosedive toward the ocean. The propeller stalled. The water on the windows turned to ice.
Diomede Village sped past. The stream of water erupted straight up from the ground between the helipad and the diesel storage tank. The hundred-foot-tall hydraulic drilling rig the TransBering Railway people used to take core samples and create surface vents for the tunnel cartwheeled down the newly exposed shore toward the receding sea, shedding pipes and shrapnel as it went.
The spin tightened. All Toni saw was a great black-and-white vortex of seawater and ice.
“Mayday! May—!”
A sudden jolt.
Her head snapped forward.
Waves raced up the windows. And then they were submerged. The glass made a cracking sound, and for a second she thought it might hold. By the time she released her harness, she was completely immersed in water so cold it threatened to shut down her body.
She shifted in her seat. Braced her feet against the headrest. Aligned herself with the maw where the windshield had once been as the tail swung downward toward the ocean floor.
A hand closed around her ankle. She kicked it until it released and propelled herself through the frame and past the bent propeller. The plane sank rapidly beneath her into the darkness, taking her passenger with it. The undertow threatened to pull her down, too.
Her chest burned and she fought the instinctive reflex to draw a breath. She wasn’t going to be able to resist much longer.
Toni breached the surface with a gasp. She caught a fleeting glimpse of jagged mountains, where previously there had only been sea, before waves broke over her head.
The current dragged her under. She tried to keep the surface in sight. Her arms were heavy and leaden, her feet numb.
She invested the last of her strength into a final desperate attempt to reach an ice floe on the surface, but her fingers slid from the slick surface.
The last thing she saw was the village, high up on the granite peak, as she was dragged down into oblivion.
V
Zero Plus Eighteen Minutes
10:54:08 a.m. AKST
It looked as though the tide had gone out and forgotten to return. The Cape of Prince Wales shoreline was littered with debris and dead marine life. Vessels of all shapes and sizes had run aground. Stranded seafaring men waved their arms wildly in a vain attempt to get the attention of the coast guard helicopter as it streaked past over the ice-spotted sea.
Petty Officer Third Class Aidan Mitchell had never seen anything like it. The trainers at rescue swimmer school had shown him footage of the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina, but he’d never expected to see anything even remotely close to that kind of utter devastation up here in the frozen north. He donned his diving vest over his orange neoprene dry suit and looked past the pilot through the windshield.
“Where the hell did that come from?” Mitchell asked.
A rocky ridge stood from the ocean like a great stone gate. It ran from one side of the horizon to the other and, as far as he could tell, completely divided the Bering and Chukchi Seas.
“That’s the least of our worries right now,” the copilot said.
The Sikorsky MH-60 Jayhawk flew so low across the water that a V of white spray rose from the surface. The thunder of the blades was deafening. Even with the noise-cancelling headsets and microphones, they had to shout to communicate.
“How far down is that tunnel?” Petty Officer Third Class Dylan Kress asked.
The pilot repeated the question to the command center, then relayed the answer, “Three hundred ninety feet.”
“Through solid rock?” Kress asked.
“I’m glad it’s you going down there and not me,” the pilot said.
“Do we have an established point of ingress?” Mitchell asked.
“Not unless you want to swim all the way in from the mainland.”
Mitchell took off the cans and pulled the full-face diving mask over his head. He watched the land mass rise from the horizon as they approached. It didn’t completely shunt the Bering Strait as it had initially appeared from a distance. Narrow channels of water passed between a seemingly endless string of islands close enough together to swim from one to the next. It looked like the sea level had dropped a good hundred feet. There were reports of flooding coming in from Canada and the Pacific Northwest as fast as they could receive them, but even that kind of displacement didn’t explain where so much water had gone. The submerged tunnel could only hold so much.
The exposed rock was already white with ice and snow. Clouds of powder gusted from the peaks.
“How close do you boys want me to get?” the pilot shouted.
“As long as you drop us over the water, we’ll be fine,” Mitchell said. He hooked the air hose from the dive tank on his back to the mouthpiece adapter and checked the pressure and flow of the hypoxic breathing gas. The trimix gas incorporated helium to help counteract the effects of nitrogen narcosis and stave off high-pressure nervous syndrome.
The chopper slowed and hovered just south of one of the narrow channels. Mitchell stepped right to the edge of the open side door and stared down into the parabolic depression the rotors created on the surface. The last thing he wanted was to land on solid ground or submerged ice from this height.
He clicked on the LED light mounted to his mask and glanced over at Kress.
“Race you to the bottom.”
Mitchell crossed his arms over his chest and stepped out over the nothingness. The wind from the blades buffeted him sideways. He felt a tingling sensation in his lower abdomen, then impact with the water. He was twenty feet down before his momentum slowed. Despite the neoprene and insulating argon gas, the sudden and dramatic drop in temperature momentarily paralyzed him.
A curtain of silt hung in the water. He could barely see Kress kicking his way down into the darkness with his handheld CobraTac navigation and mapping system in front of him. Mitchell swam after him through the settling sediment, which limited the reach of his light and accumulated on his mask. He cleared it and focused on the rugged underwater mountains as they approached. Boulders the size of cars had broken from the submerged cliffs and tumbled down to the sea floor, leaving an avalanche in their wake.
Kress paused, studied the sonar readings on the navigation unit, then turned
and pointed to his right. The silt formed what almost looked like a cyclone, through which Mitchell could see a section where the mountain appeared to have collapsed in upon itself. Giant rocks and sheared metal stood from it like a crown. The slope was strewn with rocks and metallic shrapnel. The body of a man was pinned beneath the rubble, his torso and face alive with crabs.
The current increased as they neared. Mitchell could only imagine how strong it must have been when the tunnel first collapsed. Strong enough to inhale an entire ship, by the looks of it. The vessel had been crumpled like a tin can and crammed into a crevice maybe half its width. Its bow was broken, and it had folded in upon itself in a manner that left little doubt as to the fate of its crew. The wheelhouse was flattened against the deck. Antennae and hoists protruded from the mess like the legs of a stomped spider. There was shattered glass and broken wood everywhere. A ribbon of fuel twirled around the fuel tank.
There was a triangular hole in the hull, fringed with steel that glinted in the light like scalpels. The swirling silt funneled down through it and into darkness so deep it resisted their beams from a distance.
Kress turned and looked at him. Bubbles rose from his regulator and passed his eyes. Mitchell recognized the complete and utter determination inside of them. The message was clear; they were on their own. Choppers from every district would soon converge upon the Bering and Chukchi Seas, performing shallow-water rescues and extractions from disabled ships, but the two of them were the only hope for anyone trapped down inside that tunnel. Whatever air the survivors might have was finite and diminishing by the second.
Mitchell nodded solemnly. Even if they were able to negotiate passage through hundreds of feet of rock and debris, there was a good chance they might not be able to find their way back out. That is, if the entire mountain didn’t come down on them first.
This was what they’d trained for, though. These were the risks they’d accepted. As one of his instructors used to say, “There are old divers and there are bold divers, but there are no old bold divers.”
Mitchell steadied his nerves and swam carefully into the ruined ship behind Kress. The navigation device’s digital display cast an eerie blue glow over the inside of the engine room. Pipes and conduits had been ripped from the walls and formed a veritable maze through which they had to twist and contort their bodies to pass. The engine, generators, pumps, and everything from staircases to bunk beds and refrigeration units had been sucked down into the crevice, nearly blocking their passage. Several bodies were pinned in the rubble. Their hair wavered on the current like kelp. Mitchell tried not to look at their faces.
The sonar guided them through the wreckage and ultimately into a network of fissures in the sandstone that charted their course deeper into the earth. There were points where the passages constricted to such an extent that they could barely squeeze through. Several times Mitchell feared he was stuck, but he detached his dive tank and wriggled through the narrowing behind it. The depth gauge registered 256 feet by the time the passage opened wide enough to allow them to use their flippers. Rocks fell all around them and the sediment was so thick in spots it was like swimming through mud. The tons of rock precariously balanced above them made audible groaning sounds.
They might not have recognized their destination were it not for the framework of the tunnel-boring machine protruding at odd angles from the rocks. The cutting wheel appeared relatively unscathed. It was wedged in the end of the tunnel, standing sentry over the remains of its body, which were nearly invisible beneath tons of granite, migmatite, and concrete.
A hand protruded from the rubble, moving on the gentle current as though waving at them. A hardhat tumbled down a catwalk, miraculously bracing the earthen roof.
The divers split up and swam in opposite directions. Mitchell swam across the rubble using his hands, shining his light through gaps and crevices in search of any sign of life. There were several men pinned under there, but they were beyond his help.
Kress found a pipe and wedged it into the doorway of what looked like a control room of some kind, or at least what was left of it. It was always possible that there was someone inside, treading water with his face thrust into a tiny sliver of air trapped against the ceiling. He pried the door open and revealed an empty room. The men hadn’t even had time to seek cover.
Mitchell flattened his body to the ground and squirmed under the massive drive shaft until he reached the cutting wheel. He tilted his head and shined his beam into the holes through which the pulverized rock passed. The light didn’t terminate against solid stone as he’d expected but rather diffused into a cavern of indeterminate size, where there was room to swim above the fallen rocks. If Mitchell had been trapped down there, that’s exactly where he would have gone.
The gap underneath the chisel array was barely wide enough to accommodate his shoulders. He pulled himself through and into a cavern that reminded him of the cave diving he’d done down in Mexico years ago. The walls and ceiling were coarse and unadorned by any kind of speleothem. They didn’t exhibit any of the same characteristics as the recently opened fissures he and Kress had used for their descent. This was a natural formation.
He swam deeper into the cavern. There were no pockets of air. If any survivors had by some slim miracle made it this far, it was only a matter of time before he found their bodies. Another thirty feet and he’d reach a point beyond which even an experienced diver would be unable to swim without additional air, especially at this depth.
Mitchell squeezed through the narrow gap between the rubble and the earthen roof. This was it. No man could have made it beyond this point. He swept his light through the dark, murky water and was just about to turn around when something caught his eye.
There was a section of the wall that didn’t match the surrounding rock. It was roughly oval in shape and lacked the texture and contour of the sandstone. It was somehow too straight, too smooth. And the color was several shades lighter.
His light constricted on it as he swam closer. The transition wasn’t as seamless as it had looked from a distance. The edges were uneven and ragged, almost as though some foreign material had been stretched across an orifice in the wall. It was fibrous and composed of distinct strands that connected it to the rock in a manner similar to a spider’s web. Only the slightest amount of light passed through it, barely enough to see the vague, dark outline of something on the other side.
Mitchell pressed his hand against it and felt it give. It was almost like cellophane. He pushed harder and it tore straight down the middle, admitting a sliver of light that reached several feet back into the concealed recess. Unlike the cavern, the formation wasn’t natural.
He leaned closer in an attempt to better see what was inside, but the seam was too narrow to grant him a clear view. He took hold of either side, pulled the edges apart, and shined his beam onto—
Mitchell threw himself backward. Bubbles erupted from his regulator. His light cut wildly through the darkness, illuminating the sandstone walls deeper in the cavern. They were positively riddled with identical camouflaged recesses, and the remains concealed within them.
TWO
I
Tulum
Quintana Roo, Mexico
20°12′53″ N, 87°25′44″ W
The Tiburón bobbed on the waves a quarter mile east of the Mexican mainland. Even from this distance, Dr. Brooke Calder could clearly see the carcasses strewn across the rocky shoreline. She felt the kind of complete and utter helplessness that made her want to scream and lash out at everyone nearby. Instead, she stood on the deck of the chartered fishing boat and did her best not to let her graduate students see her cry. She’d spent the better part of the last five years tagging and tracking more than two thousands sharks, groupers, and rays as part of the Caribbean Predators Project, a multidisciplinary effort to better understand the evolving nature of the reef system and identify hot spots threatened by commercial overexploitation and offshore drilling operations.
And now they were all dead.
No one spoke to her, likely because none of them knew what to say. Even the captain, an affable local from Tulum named Esquibel, whose wardrobe consisted exclusively of Speedos and tanning oil, refrained from making his customary jokes and awkward advances. He just sat in the pilot’s chair on the flybridge with his bare feet resting on the wheel, staring off toward the sun rising from the aquamarine sea.
She shielded her emerald eyes from the glare, pulled her auburn hair into a ponytail, and squirmed into her wetsuit, which clung to her lithe form like a second skin.
Her students dutifully followed her instructions without complaint. Calder hadn’t shared her theory with them in so many words, but considering the qualifications necessary to even land an interview, let alone secure one of the rolling, semester-long internships, they had to have a pretty good idea.
Remy Wells, the surfer kid from Huntington Beach via Stanford, had established an uplink to the European Space Agency’s SMOS—Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity—satellite, which monitored circulation of water between the oceans. There were only a handful of anomalies, none of which manifested as anything more than subtle alterations of current and water temperature, but the data wasn’t delivered in real time and might take days to demonstrate what Calder suspected.
Crystal Levin, the brunette from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography with the nasally voice and the short shorts, had collected samples of both surface and deep seawater and was logging the temperature and specific gravity.
Calder was confident she already knew the results, but she needed to see the proof with her own eyes.
She sat on the port gunwale, lowered her mask, and bit down on her regulator. This was probably the moment when she was supposed to say something motivating, but she could think of nothing positive to say, so she leaned backward and fell into the water. It felt cooler than usual, although that could have just been a case of her expectations informing her reality. The reef below would offer more conclusive evidence.
Subterrestrial Page 2