Vostok (18 page)

Life and death is separated by a moment. When predator meets prey and there is no escape—the fly caught in the spider’s web, the desert mouse stung by the scorpion, the seal suddenly crushed inside the jaws of a great white shark—the end happens in a startling microsecond.

It was as large as its sibling
.

And in that microsecond of clarity, I knew the hyperflexed mouth that suddenly bloomed out of the darkness directly ahead belonged to the adult and not the juveniles. She could have been eighty feet or a hundred. It didn’t matter. The seal doesn’t think about the length of its killer when it’s being eaten; it’s more of a how-did-this-happen moment.

We were swallowed whole—shot right into the creature’s outstretched jaws and down its gullet!

Before we could scream or yell or react, the
Barracuda
was soaring through a river of water down the creature’s throat.

Before we could fathom where we were, we found our vessel being squeezed by internal esophageal muscles that bulged and prodded and clenched the submersible in an attempt to stymie our resistance.

Before we could sanely deal with our insane situation, the Valkyrie lasers scorched the stomach lining and evaporated the creature’s digestive organs—along with blood, arteries, sinew, all of it—as the
Barracuda
exploded out of our would-be killer’s new arse.

The entire journey lasted seconds.

The three of us yelled and laughed and whooped it up, leaving behind thirty tons of writhing, gurgling sushi for the monster’s two orphaned goliaths to consume—Only the creatures ignored their dying parent and came after us.

Ben quickly maneuvered the sub back into the current and accelerated. “I’m pushing thirty knots and can’t seem to lose them. Suggestions?”

Before I could reply we heard a metallic
pop
at the ship’s tailfin.

“We just lost our umbilical cord,” Ming announced.

My gaze shifted nervously from the sonar array to my monitor, the real-time images coming from the
Barracuda
’s aft camera. The night-vision lens had a restricted field of view and showed open water, but my sonar painted the two creatures as they independently swooped in and out from the perimeter, riding the current like dolphins as they gauged how best to attack their fleeing prey without getting seared by our laser’s afterburners.

“Doc, we got a serious problem. Losing the umbilical means we’re self-contained. If I don’t shut down the Valkyries soon, there won’t be enough juice left to make the ascent.”

“Do it.”

Ming’s voice crackled over our headphones. “I think that should be my decision, Zachary.”

“Actually, it’s mine,” Ben said, powering down the lasers.

Sensing the threat was gone, the two beasts grew more aggressive. Surfing the current, they attempted to snatch us in their awful jaws, each attempt inching closer to our hull.

“Doc, I can’t hold them off!”

My mind raced.
They should have backed off by now. Why aren’t they tiring? Oh, hell
. “Ben, get us out of this current. We need to wear them out.”

He pulled back hard on his joystick, bringing us up and out of the river flow.

Propelled by the seventeen-knot current, the two eels shot past us. I picked them up on sonar six hundred yards to the north, registering the disturbance as they left the flow to reengage the hunt.

Ben wasted no time in changing course, taking us on a westerly heading at twenty-five knots.

The creatures pursued us for close to two minutes before the costly expenditure of energy forced them to give up the chase. They faded into white noise as they headed south, no doubt to feed upon the remains of their mother.

“We lost them.”

“Thank God. So that’s what you dealt with in Loch Ness?”

“No, not quite. Ben, we’re on the wrong heading. We need to be on zero-three-seven.”

Ben banked the
Barracuda
hard to starboard, resuming the northeasterly course that would bring us to the extraction point.

Ming’s voice crackled loudly over my headphones. “Zachary, this is incredible beyond our wildest expectations. Did you ever imagine we’d discover such creatures in Vostok?”

Ben mumbled, “If he did, do you think he’d be here?”

Ming ignored him. “Zachary, how could anything so large have survived down here?”

I laid my head back and closed my eyes, my nerves still jumpy. “Humans adapt to new environments by using our brains; animals adapt by evolving anatomically. When Antarctica froze over during the Miocene age, it was a gradual process, not a mass extinction event. Vostok has air and water—”

“And five thousand pounds per square inch of water pressure,” said Ben, who did a double-take, squinting to read his atmospheric pressure gauge. “Correction. Make that thirty-nine hundred pounds of pressure. How’d that happen?”

“It doesn’t matter. Eels are fish, and water pressure doesn’t affect fish. Eels are also hardy creatures. No doubt they’ve become
apex predators in this realm. The question is what else is out there that filled the gap between chemosynthetic bacteria and giant eels. Obviously there are still key pieces of the Vostok ecosystem that we haven’t seen.”

“What good is
seen
without evidence,” Ming quipped. “The videocameras missed everything. No one is going to believe what we discovered if we cannot prove it.”

“We’ve got more pressing problems,” Ben said, ascending the sub until once more we were plowing the lake’s surface. “When we lost our umbilical cord, we not only lost contact with Vostok Command, we lost our main power supply. We’ve got nineteen hours of air left, and at least five of them have to be used during our ascent. That leaves us fourteen hours to locate a section of Vostok where the bottom of the ice sheet and the lake’s surface are within a ship’s length of one another.”

The weight of Ben’s words sunk in. For the next thirty minutes we remained quiet, conserving our air supply while we watched the mist overhead, hoping for an ice ceiling to appear.

Instead, it started to rain.

“Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head,
But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turnin’ red,
Cryin’s not for me …
’Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complainin’
Because I’m free… nothin’s worryin’ me
.”

—B.J. Thomas

It began as scattered droplets and progressed steadily as we advanced on our northeasterly course. The rain, of course, was coming from the ice sheet above our heads. The question was: why was it melting?

“Surface water temperature is forty-nine degrees,” Ming called out. “We must be passing over a geothermal vent field. Captain, take us back down to the bottom. If the vents are there, then we must be in the wrong area.”

Ben dove the sub, and we officially entered the Miocene.

Before I could react to the blizzard of objects appearing on my sonar screen, a swarm of anchovies glittered silver in our lights, whipping themselves into a frenzied six-story tornado.

My heart palpitated a moment later when sonar detected a massive object rising at us from two hundred feet below the surface. Before Ben could swerve out of the way the water was teeming with salmon. Thousands of seven- to eight-foot-long scaly missiles pounded the sub like hail as they raced to dine at the all-you-can-eat anchovy buffet, their upturned mouths widening to reveal gruesome needle-sharp teeth.

We waited until the deluge of fish passed before continuing our descent. The deeper we ventured, the larger the species seemed to be. Albino sunfish reflected our lights like miniature moons, and
tarpon as large as groupers swerved around our craft. A toadfish pressed against the acrylic glass, blocking my forward view. Its large, flat head was as big as a basketball, its wide mouth filled with blunt teeth, its slime-covered body tapering back to a plump belly and fan-like pectoral fins.

Dozens of blips appeared on my sonar screen and in our lights giant stingrays flew past us on majestic twenty-foot wings, the magnificent albino creatures swarming to feed upon a wounded sunfish. One of these not-so-gentle giants swooped in and snatched the toadfish in its vicious bat-like mouth, its pale body pressing against the pod as its sharp triangular teeth skewered its meal. For a nerve-racking moment, the stingray’s wingspan enveloped the
Barracuda
, pitching us hard to port before it swam off.

Ming delighted as she documented our descent. Ben swore. As for me, I could only gaze in wonderment at this preserved time capsule from the past, the marine biologist in me questioning whether these animals represented true Miocene species that existed in Antarctica fifteen million years ago or whether we were looking at anatomical variations that were a direct result of adapting to the extreme conditions of this uniquely isolated environment.

The creative right side of my brain told my left, logical side to shut up and enjoy the show.

The enjoyment, however, turned to trepidation when the first sharks appeared. Using my night-vision glasses, I identified two different species of requiem predators. The first Carcharhinid was a twelve-foot oceanic whitetip. The second brute was a bull shark that was twice the size and girth of the
Barracuda
.

While both of these species had a reputation for following freshwater rivers inland to inhabit lakes, it was still shocking to find these ocean dwellers thriving in Vostok.

Ming called out the temperature as we passed twelve hundred feet. “Fifty-three degrees.”

That settled my shark dilemma. It was not just Antarctica, after all, that had frozen millions of years ago; the oceans
surrounding the continent had also incurred a precarious drop in temperature. A river bleeding a warm-water current into coastal waters would have lured many ocean species.

I shuddered to think what else might be down here.

I got an answer as we passed sixteen hundred feet. A thousand shadows materialized all around us in every direction, becoming bulbous eyes and jaws that unhinged, and bizarre fish with needle-sharp teeth, many of which cast bioluminescent lanterns that dangled before their open mouths like bait. These were Vostok’s deepwater creatures, Miocene mutations forced to adapt to the darkness and cold.

But not cold, for the water temperature was fifty-seven degrees and still rising.

As we descended to twenty-two hundred feet, a gray haze began to appear, chasing away Vostok’s denizens of the deep.

At twenty-four hundred feet, the water temperature had risen to sixty-three degrees.

Forty more feet and I saw the first black smoker.

Hydrothermal vents were first discovered in the Pacific Ocean back in 1977. Since then, they had been found in every ocean as well as in certain rift lakes.

Vostok was just such a lake, formed when East Antarctica’s crustal plates had separated, creating a valley that became the waterway’s basin. The geothermal vents were switched on when cold water began seeping into cracks along the forming lake’s floor. Heated by molten rock in the earth’s mantle, the water mixed with oxygen, magnesium, potassium, and other minerals before being forcibly ejected back into the lake. Once this hot mineral soup met Vostok’s cold, oxygen-rich water, it generated hydrogen sulfide, which in turn fueled bacteria—the foundation of the lake’s chemosynthetic food chain.

Avoiding direct contact with the superheated discharges, Ben gave us a tour of the vent field, a petrified forest of volcanic
chimneys that spewed billowing dark clouds of mineral-laden water, which spawned a thriving subglacial ecosystem. Piled along the base of these vents was a mosh-pit of life—crustaceans and shrimp, clams and anemone—everything white and twice the size of similar species outside of Vostok. Our sub rocked in eighty-nine-degree water as we passed over miles of vent fields, small fish feeding off the spaghetti-like clusters of tubeworms that grew in acre-size clusters.

“All right, Zach, Ming—we’ve taken a look. What say we move on before this mineral water clogs one of the engine’s intake valves?”

Not waiting for our reply, Ben began our ascent as we continued our trek to the northeast.

We had journeyed another three nautical miles when we discovered another missing cog in Vostok’s thriving ecosystem.

Upon reaching a depth of 420 feet, we discovered strands of what appeared to be kelp dangling across our cockpit glass. The higher we rose, the denser the growth, until we were surrounded by thick strands of algae.

As we continued our ascent, sonar revealed the lake’s surface had been replaced by a thick algae mat that carpeted Vostok’s lake for miles.

“This is bizarre,” I said. “A kelp forest is usually rooted to the bottom. This forest is upside down. Its holdfast is growing out of the geothermal soil and algae that has accumulated along the surface.”

Ben kept the
Barracuda
eighty feet beneath the mineralized surface, fearful of the Valkyrie units becoming entwined in long strands of kelp.

Everywhere we looked, there were fish.

Hundreds of Miocene rockfish dominated the shallows, their six-foot-long frames carrying a good hundred pounds. They must have been blind, for they remained unaffected by our exterior lights.
Their thick hides were a bright orange, rendering the inverted vines a Miocene pumpkin patch.

“This is incredible. Ming, I hope you’re getting this. Ming?”

I turned to find her chair spun around as she hovered over the rear instrument panel. “It was recording perfectly until a few moments ago, but now the image is pixelating.”

“It must be that magnetic interference. We’re probably close to the plateau.”

“Good,” Ben said. “Once we cross the plateau we’ll be in the northern basin, and the magnetic interference should pass. Looks like we won’t be getting there along the surface, though. Guess it’s back down to the basement.”

“Wait,” I said. “Are you able to get an atmospheric pressure reading?”

“Give me two minutes.”

Before I could object, Ben had powered up the Valkyries, igniting the kelp strands in front of us. Within seconds we were rising through clear water, the lasers evaporating plants and barbequing fish as they burned a hole through the soil-covered surface.