“But wavelength isn’t the only factor contributing to photosynthesis. You have to consider that photons are a product of heat—like from the sun or by running an electrical current through a tungsten filament—so you have to consider that every color also has a temperature component, measured in kelvins, which is inversely proportional to its wavelength. The longer the wavelength, the higher the temperature, the greater the photosynthetic value. If you figure that on a clear day at the equator the sun transmits light at somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand kelvins and the ocean reflects the blue, as you go deeper the colors with the shortest wavelengths become attenuated by the water, leaving only—”
“Purple,” Mitchell said.
“Exactly. Without violet light, algae don’t photosynthesize. That’s why aquariums housing coral utilize violet light. I’d be willing to wager that trees function in the same way, too. Since they reflect the green spectrum and are adversely affected by infrared radiation, they probably utilize the purple and yellow wavelengths aboveground, too. And since there’s no visible light outside of the purple range, that’s why you can’t tell these trees are green until you shine your white light, with its broad spectrum, onto them.”
“So generations of glowworms have served to keep these extinct trees alive,” Mitchell said.
The implications were astounding. If there were plants, then there were organisms that fed upon them. And if there were lower orders of life, then there had to be predators to control their numbers. It was the natural order.
She thought about the scratches on the bones of the dead primate that had reminded her of the marks on the shells of fossilized nautiloids and looked at Duan’s leg. The bleeding appeared to have slowed, if not stopped. She could still clearly see the pattern of the lacerations, though. She again wondered exactly what the men must have seen back in the cavern where they fell into the river.
“How do you think these plants started growing down here?” Mitchell asked. “It’s not like the ground formed around them.”
“In Hang Sơn Đoòng,” Duan said, “seeds blow down from the forest and take root in the soil.”
Mitchell licked the tip of his index finger and held it up.
“Not a hint of a breeze.”
“The river carried them?”
“Those aren’t the only means of seed dispersal.” Calder saw where Mitchell was going with that line of thought. He’d reached the same conclusion she had. “They can be spread through the feces of—”
A soft crunching sound to her right.
She caught a glimpse of motion from the corner of her eye and turned to see branches settling back into place.
Err-err-err-err-err-err-uhh-uhh-uhh-err.
“Did you hear—?”
“Shh!” Mitchell cut her off.
A crackling sound from her left, like a cautiously placed footstep on the detritus.
By the time she turned, there was nothing there.
The violet light made the shadows beneath the trees and behind the branches impenetrable.
Calder focused on slowing her breathing so she could hear the subtle sounds of the forest. Branches gently swayed ahead of them, as though at the urging of a faint breeze. She could tell by the feel of the sweat dripping down the back of her neck and beading on her brow that there was no air movement whatsoever.
Duan turned toward the source of the movement, raised his hand to his helmet, and clicked on the light. The beam streaked across the cavern and spotlighted the wavering boughs of a giant palm tree.
“I do not see—”
The shrubs in front of him shook and a dark shape tore through the underbrush.
It was upon him before he could scream.
He hit the ground on his back and vanished beneath the shrubs.
“Duan!” Calder shouted.
The bushes shook and parted in the wake of whatever barreled through them. Crashing sounds. Duan’s light cast wild shadows and his screams trailed him into the forest.
Calder sprinted after him. She had to raise her forearms in front of her face to shield it from the branches, which made it even more difficult to see the shaking boughs and shredded detritus marking Duan’s passage. The racket grew farther away by the second. She screamed in frustration and pushed herself even harder—
Her face struck the dirt before she even realized she’d tripped. She pushed herself up and cried out at the sudden, sharp pain in her shoulder.
The trees ahead of her were now still. She couldn’t be certain which direction whatever took Duan had gone, or even if she was still facing in the right direction. She struggled to her feet and staggered forward.
A twig snapped behind her.
She whirled and started swinging before she recognized Mitchell. He caught her by the wrist and pulled her to him before she could wind up for another swing.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s me.”
“Which way did they go?”
“I don’t know. I lost sight—”
His words abruptly stopped and his eyes widened.
“What?”
“You, uh . . . you have . . . right here . . .”
He touched his cheek.
Calder raised her hand to her own face and felt the muddy sludge. She scraped it back toward her ear and flung it off. It was only when she attempted to smear off the rest that she felt it.
The mud was warm.
She looked down and saw it. The standing black fluid on the ground. The spatters on the broad leaves and the trunks.
“Duan,” she whispered.
The smell hit her. It was a metallic scent that lodged itself inside her sinuses and slid, sluglike, down the back of her throat.
There was no doubt in her mind. It was blood.
II
Speranza Station
Bering Sea
Ten Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska
65°47′ N, 169°01′ W
Butler leaped to his feet and kicked over his chair in frustration. It wasn’t so much that everything was spiraling out of control as it was he’d lost control over it. That was his job, to impose order upon chaos, and until today that was exactly what he’d been able to do each and every time he’d set his mind to it. He’d helped engineer the underground neutrino production facility at the Sanford Research Complex in South Dakota and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. While neither had been constructed at such a frenzied pace or under conditions nearly as volatile, they’d been built to withstand nuclear detonations on a scale beyond anything the world had ever witnessed. There was no reason a job like this should have been anywhere near as challenging, especially not with existing tunnels predating construction. Then again, maybe that was the problem. They’d made assumptions based upon their understanding of the strata, rather than bending it to their will.
The MINT underground tracking technology worked exactly as promised, but it was worthless if they were unable to communicate what they saw to the men below, whose com-links worked sporadically at best so far from the nearest signal repeaters. Everything was too rushed. Halversen had expected a miracle and, for the most part, he’d delivered. There were simply too many variables they’d been unprepared to account for. No one had ever attempted a feat of engineering of this magnitude, let alone in such a geologically unstable zone and without anything resembling a proper survey. Whoever gave the green light to the TransBering tunnel had undoubtedly done so while crossing his fingers and holding his breath. Now it was Butler’s mess to clean up, and he wasn’t about to fail.
“Try again,” he said.
Wiley rebooted the communications system for the fifth time and again produced a buzz of static. He glanced back and shook his head. The complete and utter lack of expression on Wiley’s face was maddening. Surely someone incapable of speaking would invest a little effort into learning alternative means of communication. Plus, the way he just stared was more than a little unnerving. When it came to running operations of this nature,
however, there was no one better. Throw in the fact that he’d removed his own tongue after being captured by Taliban insurgents to prevent himself from talking, and he was the perfect choice for a clandestine operation of this nature. Assuming the whole blasted thing didn’t blow up in their faces.
Butler turned away and stared at the satellite images of oceanic salinity. Already the specific gravities in the coastal regions affected by the surge of Arctic water had risen to near-normal levels and the temperature was within a tenth of a degree of seasonal averages. He knew exactly what that meant and understood that his day of reckoning would soon be at hand.
Combined, all of the oceans formed a relatively constant volume of water. While their levels rose and fell as a result of the forces exerted upon them by both the sun and the moon, their combined volume never actually changed. The tides were essentially just water sloshing around as the seas bulged in response to varying levels of gravitational pull. The strength of those forces cycled every twenty-four hours and the rate of their cycles remained largely constant, which meant that regardless of the extremes of high and low tides, the sea level invariably returned to a state of constancy. Such would undoubtedly be the case here, as well.
When the TBM punched through that fault line, it was as though it had pulled the plug on the bottom of the ocean. The sudden downward acceleration of all of that water, coupled with the increase in current through the narrow earthen passageways, caused the water to race outward at a phenomenal rate. In a closed system beholden to external forces, however, that meant the water would eventually lose its inertia and gravity would intercede to restore some semblance of normalcy. A new global sea level would be established, one that differed from the old—if only in a matter of inches—by the amount of seawater that remained underground.
In layman’s terms, all of the water initially forced through the tunnels could only travel so far before it had to come back, which made this the worst possible time for the monitor to his right to light up and the alarm to sound.
“What’s going on?” he asked, but he already knew the answer.
Wiley just stared at him with that infuriating blank expression.
“I’m going already.”
Butler grabbed his jacket and gloves and ran through the adjoining Quonset huts, dressing as he ran. The red lights indicated that Pump 4 had just gone offline, which, in turn, increased the burden on the other three, although he was confident they could handle it. He engineered redundant measures into every project, but that didn’t mean they’d be able to withstand the strain indefinitely.
He’d never seen a unit fail like this, though. Each industrial pump was designed for a flow rate of 2,750 gallons per minute and incorporated a fan-driven evaporation unit, which propelled the water more than five hundred feet out over the sea. Between the four units, they were able to drain the equivalent of an Olympic-size pool every sixty seconds, but they’d only been running at half that volume. With a 25 percent reduction in output and the promise of returning water, however, things were about to get a whole lot tighter than he would have liked.
Butler tugged down his hood and charged out into the elements. The wind staggered him and stole the breath from his lips. It was impossible to tell if it was snowing or if the gusts were just recycling the accumulation. Another twenty strides and he could see the flumes of water projecting out over the bay. Each dispersal unit looked like a cement mixer attached to a hose, which connected it to the back of the fourth building. The shape served to funnel the water into a single pressurized stream that expanded outward into an evaporative mist that turned to snow. Only three of the flumes were visible.
His first thought was that either the evaporation unit or the pipe must have frozen, which would have caused the pump to automatically power down to prevent burning out the motor. At least that’s what he hoped had happened. The farther from the unit itself, the easier the fix. The pressure gauge mounted to the back of the building indicated a complete absence of flow, but he could tell by the relative lack of accumulation on the hose that the heater was still working. The problem had to be inside, presumably with the pump itself.
A crust of ice had formed on the fur fringe of his hood and his tracks were already gone by the time he reached the door. He reminded himself that after this job, he’d be able to write his own ticket. The next assignment he took would be someplace warm like Dubai. That was where the real money was. You didn’t create an oasis in the middle of the desert without a team of brilliant engineers.
The racket inside the hut was noticeably quieter, although the ground still vibrated hard enough to make his teeth chatter. He’d performed a visual inspection of each of the pumps upon returning from the subterranean levels, but according to the logs, they hadn’t been inspected since. While that wasn’t his fault, it was definitely his responsibility. With Martin’s team still in the field and their remaining manpower on the mainland, it appeared as though he was going to have to run the whole blasted installation by himself.
Pump 4 sat dark and silent in the corner. Butler smelled burned oil and fried electrical circuits and detected the slightest hint of smoke near the ceiling. He didn’t have to see the tripped breakers to know that the pump was shot. He did, however, need to figure out why. If there had been a problem with the design of the pump itself, then he had a huge problem on his hands.
The pressure gauges on the wall all read exactly as he expected and the pistons appeared to be in decent repair. The problem had to be somewhere in the intake system, but the pipes appeared patent, at least up there. He followed them across the room to the hole, climbed inside the elevator cage, and went straight to the control console. The motor whirred as it started its descent. He had to stand on the opposite side of the cab to clearly see the water pipes. Each of the four was separated from the others by structural girders and held in place by steel brackets. The corresponding number was printed in blue every ten vertical feet. He watched them pass until something caught his eye and he hurriedly stopped the elevator.
He had to crane his neck to see it, but there it was, clear as day: a rupture in the pipe. The edges were sharp and protruded outward like the skin of a baked potato. The water had still been flowing at sufficiently high pressure when the integrity was compromised. What in the world could have caused—?
There was another puncture maybe five feet below it. And another still below that.
He turned around and saw matching holes drilled into the basalt by the pressurized water.
The pump must have burned itself out trying to compensate for the diminishing water pressure. It had happened so fast, though. Unless all of the punctures occurred at the same time, the fail-safes should have been triggered long before the alarms sounded.
A thud overhead and the entire cab shook.
He grabbed the rail and tried to look upward, but the lights shined directly into his eyes.
A section of the rock must have been weakened by the water and broken from the wall. He needed to patch it before it started a domino effect. This whole thing was getting worse and worse with each passing—
Clack.
He looked up at the roof. It sounded like a pebble had struck the metal, only he hadn’t heard it ping off down the chute.
Clack. Clack-clack.
He whirled to his right. The sounds came from overhead, near the gate. He’d been so preoccupied he’d forgotten to secure the latch.
Clack.
Butler watched helplessly as the gate slowly opened.
“What the—?”
A shadow passed through the gap with such speed that he barely had time to turn away. He lunged for the controls and slapped the button to make it go.
Searing pain in his back.
His screams echoed through the shaft until they abruptly ceased.
The motor continued to whine as the elevator descended into the earth.
III
Below Speranza Station
Bering Sea
T
en Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska
65°47′ N, 169°01′ W
“We have to get out of here.” Calder frantically wiped the blood from her face as though it were acid. “Dear Lord, we have to—”
“Shh!”
Mitchell squeezed her hand to silence her. He heard something, at the very edge of perception, but, for the life of him, he couldn’t hear it well enough to identify it. The glowworms overhead made a constant crackling sound. Cave crickets chirped from somewhere off to his left through the trees, which hoarded impenetrable shadows animated by the swaying of the violet strands on a breeze only they could feel. Droplets of Duan’s blood dripped from the tips of the leaves with a gentle tapping sound.
Plat.
Plat-plat.
Plat.
The branches had stilled, leaving no indication as to where whatever attacked Duan had gone. They couldn’t just abandon him, especially if he had somehow survived and was in desperate need of their help, but there was so much blood . . . so much . . .
Calder drew a shuddering inhalation and blew it out slowly. She held up her hands as though to physically stabilize herself.
“We need to approach this logically,” she whispered. “We’re obviously dealing with a predatory species. What we don’t know is whether it attacked out of fear or in response to its internal feeding mechanism. For all we know, we could have startled it and it responded to the unexpected intrusion in its habitat in an instinctively aggressive manner. I mean, it can’t have ever seen a human being down here before.”
“But it has to have been feeding on something.”
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