Subterrestrial

by McBride, Michael

  “What about the other three?”

  “We haven’t had time. Even finding our way into this enormous formation took several days of trial and error.”

  “How much longer do you think you’ll have?”

  “That’s the thing, isn’t it? None of us knows. That’s why we decided to bring all of you in. We’re hoping you can help us find whatever life is down here before either the water level returns to normal or the government swoops in and snatches this from us.”

  “So you work for Halversen?”

  “I’m with the coast guard. The Department of Homeland Security, technically. I’m what they call a rescue swimmer. You know, the guy you see on the news hooking people to the winch line of a helicopter in the middle of a hurricane?”

  “How did you end up down here?”

  “Bad luck and timing. That being said, there’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be. I mean, who ever dreamed a place like this existed? And I got to be the first to explore it.”

  The echo of his voice sharpened as they rounded the bend into a narrowing maybe fifteen feet wide. The ledges on the opposite side were far thinner and irregular, nowhere near as accommodating as the one beneath her feet. Where the two sides met, the cavern wall was rounded and smooth, with the exception of random outcroppings shaped like scallop shells, staggered down the escarpment toward the water.

  Mitchell lowered himself to his rear end and dropped down onto the first outcropping with a splash. Each of the semicircular projections was filled with several inches of water, which dripped down into the next in the series like a stone waterfall.

  “These gours are spectacular,” Payton said.

  “Also very fragile,” Duan said. “They form from calcite as the water level drops. Like tide pools in wine glasses.”

  “Then I guess it’s a good thing they don’t have to hold our weight for very long,” Mitchell said. He stepped off the edge, brought his arms to his sides and his feet together, and hit the water with barely a splash. His light faded until it nearly extinguished, then diffused into a bluish glow as he rose to the surface. He breached with a laugh and backstroked toward the edge of the pool. “It’s got to be at least fifty feet deep back here. You won’t even come close to the bottom.”

  Hart lowered herself into the first gour and stepped onto the edge. It cracked beneath her weight and a ribbon of water trickled down the falls.

  “You have to be kidding.”

  “Nothing to it,” Calder said. She didn’t even bother stepping down onto the gour. She leaped away from the wall and splashed down into the water.

  “We’re really doing this, aren’t we?” Hart said.

  “Just keep reminding yourself why you’re here,” Payton said.

  Hart smiled.

  “I signed a fake name on my liability waiver anyway.”

  She took a deep breath and stepped out over the nothingness. Her heart rose into her throat and she barely managed to plug her nose before she hit the cold water and sank into the depths. Everything was a murky shade of bluish-green. Tiny bubbles and clouds of microscopic organisms sparkled in her light. She kicked and swam for the surface, where she could barely see the rippling reflection of the others’ headlamps.

  The moment her mouth cleared the surface, she coughed out a mouthful of fluid that tasted like someone had put out a match in it and swam toward where Mitchell and Calder had already climbed onto limestone riddled with craters.

  A shout behind her preceded a splash. Droplets of water pattered around her. Thyssen, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet since entering the cavern, was the last to jump from the cliff.

  She was just about to crawl onto dry land when she smelled something that reminded her of Tanzania. She’d been following a mother orangutan and her offspring to a stream when she smelled an organic stench that made her stomach turn and heard the buzzing of flies off in the brush. The orangutans must have smelled it, too. The mother swung her child onto her back and tore off through the trees, leaving Hart to follow her nose to the dead rhinoceros. Its horn had been torn right out of its snout and the remainder of the carcass had been left to rot, liquefying from beneath tough hide crawling with black flies. It was a scent she would never forget and one that seemed entirely out of place down here. At least until she saw the dark spatters on the ground and the tarp off to her left. It was weighted down with rocks around the edges, but she could still clearly see the shapes contained underneath it.

  “What’s under there?”

  She strode straight toward the tarp. If they’d found the unclassified primates and killed them, then so help her, she was going to make them wish they’d never been born.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Mitchell said.

  “Oh, yeah? Try and stop me.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Hart kicked aside several of the stones, grabbed the edge of the tarp, and yanked it upward. She covered her mouth and nose and staggered backward.

  “I tried to tell you,” Mitchell said.

  While whatever was under there might once have been living creatures, it was nearly impossible to tell which species. The only thing she could say with any kind of certainty was that whatever they were, they had died badly.

  V

  At first Payton thought they might have been dogs, but their legs were disproportionately short in relation to the overall length of the bodies and the cervical spine lacked the lordotic curvature of an animal accustomed to holding its head upright for extended periods of time. The scraps of pelt were greasy and desiccated. The fur was grayish-black and consisted of bristly guard hairs with a fine undercoat. It was the structure of the feet—or, more precisely, the flippers—that gave away their identity.

  “They’re sea lions,” Calder said.

  “We figure they must have been sucked down here when the caves filled with water,” Mitchell said.

  “That doesn’t explain how they came to be in this state,” Payton said.

  Calder knelt over the mess of carcasses. It was obvious by their arrangement and the patterns of dried blood around them that they’d been dragged to this one spot where they could all be covered up together. There were smeared footprints everywhere. Most had tread like their diving boots, while others were vaguely triangular, but she couldn’t even wager a guess as to which species could have made them. She traced the sloping lengths of several ribs still articulated with the spine.

  “The arched scratches in the cortex suggest a biting motion with a sharp row of teeth. This is the kind of thing you see in the wake of a shark attack.”

  “You think sharks got sucked down here with them?” Hart asked, and quickly looked back at the water in which they’d been immersed mere moments prior.

  “I can’t think of any species of shark capable of attacking them on dry land,” Calder said.

  “It could have gotten them while they were in the water and they somehow managed to crawl up here to die,” Payton said.

  “No. Wounds of this nature and with this kind of prevalence are characteristic of a feeding frenzy. Nothing crawls away from something like that.”

  “Then what could have done this?”

  Calder looked at Thyssen for a long moment before answering.

  “I don’t know.”

  Payton waved away a handful of flies and scrutinized the carcasses. Calder was right; between the ragged edges of the tattered pelt and the deep furrows in the bone, the injuries weren’t consistent with those inflicted by any land animal he could think of, with the possible exception of larger species of crocodilians, but there was no way they could survive for any length of time in this arctic environment. He again stood and looked deeper into the cavern, toward a rock face positively covered with gours.

  He swatted one of the blasted flies away from his ear and was about to head uphill when it hit him.

  “The flies,” he said. “How did they get in here?”

  “Same way as the rest of us, I’m
sure,” Hart said.

  “They smelled these carcasses from all the way up there? Outside? In a storm like that? And then they flew down a quarter-mile shaft full of heavy equipment and navigated that maze to get here?”

  “That’s their sole biological imperative,” Hart said. “You of all people should know that. How do you think they’ve survived relatively unchanged through the eons?”

  Payton turned to Thyssen.

  “What aren’t you telling us?”

  “There’s something you should see,” Thyssen said.

  He nodded to Mitchell, who led them away from the remains and toward a fissure in the wall. It was barely wide enough to allow them to squeeze through sideways. It widened several paces in, although the roof continued to lower until they were forced to crawl. Mitchell shed his pack, rolled onto his back, and used his feet to scoot deeper into the tunnel.

  “Toss me my lighter, would you?” Mitchell said. “It’s in the front pouch, with the medical kit.”

  Payton removed the waterproof emergency lighter and tossed it to Mitchell, who caught it and flipped the lid open in one motion. He clicked the ignition button with his thumb and a blue butane flame bloomed from the housing.

  “Watch this.”

  He brought the flame close to his face and raised it toward the rock above him. The flame bent away from him.

  “Airflow,” Duan said. “That means surface access.”

  Suddenly Payton understood why they’d been flown out there in such a hurry. It wasn’t so much that anyone feared what might happen to these unknown animals down here as much as what might happen if they got out.

  “How much farther can you go?” Payton asked.

  “The crack’s barely wide enough to stick my fingers in.”

  “Show us the tunnels you haven’t explored yet,” Hart said.

  Payton heard the urgency in her voice. She’d recognized the same thing that he had. If there was an extant hominin species down here, it would be entirely unprepared for what the outside world would do to it.

  They backed out of the crevice and ascended the wall of gours. The way they’d formed reminded Payton of the old video game Q*bert. He was careful to step in the center to avoid breaking the delicate edges.

  “Check this out,” Nabahe said from where he perched on a large gour. He held up his palm. A white crab scurried up over his wrist and fell back into the water near his feet. “At least we know we won’t starve down here.”

  “It’s a troglobite,” Duan said. “Sesarmoides jacobsoni. Blind cave crab. It lives near freshwater inlets. It didn’t get washed down here.”

  A ledge overhung the top of the gours and concealed the mouth of a cave maybe three feet tall. The ground was rocky and uneven. The walls were dripping with waxy flowstone and prickled with helictites, calcite growths reminiscent of brambles, which were easily sharp enough to slice through Thermoprene and flesh alike. Their lights illuminated a tunnel leading off to the right. The back of the cave appeared to terminate in a blind recess, at least until Payton was close enough to see the hole in front of it that led straight down like a chimney.

  “I don’t see the third one,” Hart said.

  “It’s near where we swam ashore. Where the stream goes back underground. Even I’m not crazy enough to risk going down there with that current and fifteen minutes worth of air.”

  “So then it’s one of these two,” Calder said, “but which one?”

  “A dome-shaped ceiling is the result of water thrust upward,” Duan said. “Not from the side.”

  “You’re saying the one in the ground will only lead us down into the water, which Mitchell already said he wanted to avoid,” Hart said.

  “Not necessarily,” Payton said. “He’s suggesting that the one on the right might or might not have an outlet, while we know the one on the left leads somewhere. And in places like this, it’s generally safest to take the route of least resistance.”

  He rolled onto his side and shined his light through the orifice to his right. It illuminated a sharp bend maybe six feet in. The thought of squirming through such tight quarters on his stomach held zero appeal. He’d spent enough time in some of the world’s largest caves to understand their unpredictable nature. The fact that these caverns were carved by water meant their course was ultimately plotted by a combination of the force of gravity, the speed of the current, and the composition of the rock. Limestone eroded faster than other types of rock and produced acidic byproducts that further accelerated the process. Judging by the sides of the chute, there was nothing but limestone below them.

  Payton leaned over the opening and listened. He heard a faint whispering sound he attributed to the breathing of the earth, but not the sound of running water.

  “How far down can you see?” Nabahe said.

  “Maybe thirty feet.”

  “But you don’t see the ground?”

  Payton looked back over his shoulder to where Thyssen knelt beside Calder.

  “Tell me you packed climbing gear in these packs.”

  FIVE

  I

  Below Speranza Station

  Bering Sea

  Ten Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska

  65°47′ N, 169°01′ W

  Thyssen repelled down the rope at a speed just shy of free-fall and slowed his momentum as his heels struck the ground. He disengaged the belay device from the rope and flashed his handheld light up the chute twice to signal the others that everything was okay. Even Duan wasn’t as thoroughly versed in the climbing arts as he was, so Thyssen undoubtedly had several minutes alone before the others were again assembled around him in what appeared to be another enormous cavern.

  Thyssen’s footsteps echoed as he advanced. He returned his flashlight to his backpack and shined his headlamp up into the stalactites. A cluster of native brown bats hung from the ceiling. He couldn’t help but smile. Their traditional range didn’t extend this far north, which meant they had to have entered the warrens somewhere to the south near the Gulf of Alaska and found their way through the system of caves. It was just one more shred of evidence supporting his theory, which he’d spent the better part of his life formulating, one that had helped him rise through the ranks of DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—and ultimately landed him lead on the Halversen team responsible for securing the tunnel.

  His grandfather, Jürgen Thyssen, had been an early proponent of the hollow Earth theory—as popularized by William Reed and Marshall Gardner in the late 1930s—during his years at university. That had been during the heyday of the populist Völkisch movement, when the German people chose to believe they were descended from a mystical superior race of Atlanteans worthy of more than the crushing war reparations incurred by their fathers and utilized by their vindictive neighbors to grind them beneath their heels.

  A young and impressionistic Jürgen had been recruited for the Ahnenerbe—the cultural and archeological research arm of the Nazi regime—by Heinrich Himmler himself and ushered from the halls of academia into a world where he was given carte blanche to expound upon the theories laid out for him. The prevailing belief was that the survivors of Atlantis had fled overland to Shambhala in Tibet and from there found their way into the subterranean realm of Agharta, a city hidden in the core of the planet. The Führer knew that finding it would not only endear his subjects to him, it would also give him the magic bullet he needed for the war efforts: a passage through the Earth itself through which he could move his U-boats without resistance.

  While Thyssen’s grandfather had cared nothing for the war, he had embraced the ideologies willingly enough. The very idea of a second world existing inside of his own spoke to him every bit as loudly as the notion that he had descended from a race of gods and kings. It was with the goal of finding Agharta and conclusively proving the truth of the German lineage that he was dispatched for Neuschwabenland, a German settlement on the Antarctic Continent bordering the South Sea. At the time, it was believed that the e
ntrances to Agharta were at the poles beneath the ice, just waiting to be found. After five years on that barren, windswept rock, he returned not with proof of a hollow Earth, but with a series of maps that made most question his sanity. They included underwater sailing instructions with precise angles of ascent and descent at depths of up to 380 meters for a submarine to reach the tore von Agharta, the gates of Agharta.

  By then, Hitler had dropped out of the public eye and many feared him dead. The fall of the fatherland was assured, and the only question that remained was if the Russians would break through the German defenses first and commit the atrocities on them that the Americans, with all of their idealism, wouldn’t. He’d fled to Argentina with other surviving members of the Ahnenerbe, among them an anthropologist with Nordic roots named Martha, who would bear him a son.

  Thyssen’s father, Dieter, had spent his formative years in a German settlement outside of Buenos Aires, where the enthusiasm of the Völkisch movement gave way to the grim realities of poverty and squalor worse than that which was originally protested back home. Many of the people at the settlement were considered war criminals, and any one of their neighbors would sell them out to the Nazi hunters for whatever money they could get. Camaraderie turned to hostility, and the Thyssen family was forced to flee Argentina. After Thyssen’s grandfather spent years working menial jobs to pay for his family’s passage through the Andes Mountains, they settled in Santiago, Chile, where Dieter matriculated at the Universidad Diego Portales, which had a partnership with the American University Abroad Program that allowed him to further his studies in Washington, DC. It was while Dieter was in the United States that Jürgen took his own life, leaving behind a legacy of failure and stacks of maps and notes upon which he’d been working the entire time, unbeknownst to Dieter. During the summers Jürgen had supposedly spent manning the trawlers, he’d found his way onto fishing vessels hailing from the Falklands and secured passage to Antarctica. It was in those footsteps that Dieter embarked upon a quest to both understand his father’s obsession and attempt to posthumously clear his family name of the taint of the mythical Agharta, a journey he couldn’t afford to take without significant financial backing. There was only one entity that had such resources at its disposal.