Subterrestrial (12 page)

“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.”

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 entrances 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.

Project Paperclip had been a phenomenal success. The relocation of prominent German scientists to America had led to advances in medicine, weaponry, and even space travel. As the descendant of a war criminal with secrets to sell, Dieter was welcomed by the US military complex with open arms. He’d traded his father’s life’s work for a job with the Department of Defense’s fledgling DARPA unit, formed just under a decade prior in response to the Soviets’ surprise launch of
Sputnik
, an advance they attributed to Nazi technology being secreted out of Germany and the catalyst for the burgeoning arms race. The prospect of locating Hitler’s rumored Antarctic staging grounds proved irresistible.

So it was with a team of scientists and soldiers that Dieter set out for the bottom of the earth with his father’s maps as his guide. Using Jürgen’s handwritten notes and a prototype deep-sea submersible, they attempted to travel into the hidden heart of the continent. While they never found the base from which it was believed the Luftwaffe intended to launch its flying saucer program, they did navigate a series of underwater passages that ultimately led them to a series of caverns and what they theorized to be a deep oceanic trench that at one point in time had been rife with volcanic activity. There was no advanced technology to be appropriated, nor did they find the passage into the center of the planet, but they did find his father’s Gates of Agharta: columns erected inside a cave filled with stone chips from primitive tools and other signs of ancient human habitation.

The military and scientific applications were limited to storage and staging, should it ever come to war with South America or Southern Africa, and archeology of questionable value. Dieter, however, recognized what his father had seen so many years before. The presence of artifacts attributed to early man meant that whatever population dwelled down there had to have arrived by means other than sea or land travel. The different pockets of water through which they’d traveled had varying levels of buoyancy, which meant different specific gravities. Despite being at the heart of a frozen sea, the subterranean passages were being fed by different sources, among them warm geothermal springs and fresh water originally attributed to glacial melt, even though the majority of the crew had to be treated for giardia, a diarrhea-causing protozoan flagellate common to mountain springs sullied by deer and elk feces, which until that point had never been diagnosed on the Antarctic continent. Dieter believed that the water had to be coming from somewhere else, and in order to do so, it had to have traveled some great distance underground, either from another continent entirely or through the earth itself. It might not have proved his dead father’s theory, but it was a start.

The maps Dieter and his team created were never made available to the general public, nor were any of those created in subsequent State-funded missions that took him from the lava tubes of Iceland to the Marble Caves of Chile and everywhere in between. And while they explored countless miles of subterranean passages, they never determined which ones were connected or exactly how they were connected. Not even Thyssen, with a two-generation head start, had been able to take the next step until the accident beneath the Bering Sea caused a sudden rise in the water table and variations in salinity, revealing which subterranean features were connected, if not exactly how.

It had been his father, who now served as deputy director of DARPA, who contacted the President directly and facilitated his insertion at the site. The previous administration’s vice president had once served on the board of Halversen and was instrumental in securing no-bid oil contracts in the Middle East and cost-plus deals for defense contracts that resulted in $40 billion in profit. If everything went as planned, this serendipitous disaster would make that look like chump change. Thyssen wasn’t privy to the details of the deal negotiated between Halversen and the powers that be, and he had no desire to find out. In the end, Halversen would get the exclusive and secret contract to expand the tunnels, despite already demonstrating either gross negligence or outright incompetence, and the US government would gain unlimited access to a network of tunnels that would allow it to move military personnel around the globe invisibly and pop up from the ground as though materializing from the ether, thus realizing Hitler’s dream, only on the side of the right.

Thyssen didn’t care about any of that. All he cared about was fulfilling the vision his family had shared for nearly a century, one that had cost his grandfather his homeland, his pride, and his life. This would secure their standing within the same government that had decimated the land of his grandfather’s birth and sent him to live in exile. It was DARPA’s stated mission to create and prevent strategic surprise, and what could possibly be a greater achievement than controlling the entire inside of the planet?

Of course, there was still the variable for which they hadn’t accounted. It was down here in the darkness right that very moment, just waiting for him to find it. And when he did, he’d be able to provide the kind of strategic surprise against which there was no defense, as the people of Diomede Village had already learned.