Vostok (9 page)

“Listen tae yer wife,” the old man gloated.

“Shut yer pie hole, ye old bampot,” Brandy snapped. “Before my husband signs his name tae anything, I’ve a few conditions myself. First off, ye’ll be moving Alban intae the hotel immediately, so’s True can take proper care of him over the next five months.”

“The Crabbit… in my resort… the resort he cursed when we broke ground?” Angus was about to lose it when he saw the look in Brandy’s eyes. “Aye, whitever.”

“Second, when September comes ’round and it’s time for Zachary to go to Antarctica, True goes with him.”

Now it was my best friend who protested. “Me? In tha’ icebox for six months wit’ a bunch of boring old men? Are ye tryin’ tae neuter me, Brandy girl?”

“I’m trying tae neuter that Chinese vixen. Yer there tae prevent any alone time between Zachary and Dr. Liao before they descend intae that lake. So help me God, True MacDonald, if I hear my man so much as sits next tae her at breakfast, I’ll skin the two of ye alive—starting with yer short and curlies.”

August, die she must. The autumn winds blow chilly and cold;
September, I remember. A love once new has now grown old
.

—Simon & Garfunkel, “April Come She Will”

For five months Vostok hung over my existence like a death sentence handed down by an oncologist. It greeted me every morning when I awoke, and it haunted my last thoughts before I succumbed to sleep.

What exactly was I afraid of? Being the anal-retentive left-brained thinker that I was, I mentally cataloged my fears into more easily digestible categories for self-analysis.

Fear of Separation: Six months would be a long time to be separated from my family. William was rapidly passing through infancy into the terrible twos, and each day seemed to introduce us to another facet of his burgeoning personality. I simply couldn’t get enough of him and arranged for my sabbatical from Cambridge to begin in June so I could spend the summer with him and Brandy back in Drumnadrochit.

I had read that Antarctic missions were especially hard on marriages, and mine was already strained. Though we had reconciled, it was painfully obvious that Brandy felt threatened by Ming’s combination of looks and intelligence. Not that my wife wasn’t smart or pretty—she was both. But she lacked a formal education and never had the opportunity to go to college, something Ming and I shared. As spring bled into summer, Brandy grew increasingly more temperamental, actually believing that my father and I had conspired to get her to accept my excursion to Antarctica by using the “infamous Wallace cunning.”

In her own way, Brandy eased my burden. By the time September rolled around I couldn’t wait to get out of earshot of her accusations—not a good way to part.

Was I interested in the exotic Dr. Liao? I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an attraction, but Brandy was still my girl.

Then again, six months was a long time
.

Back to my list.

Claustrophobic Fears: This was the dark cloud that had hung over my existence since I’d drowned and been revived in the Sargasso Sea. Despite Hintzmann’s assurances, the reality was that our three-man submersible would be smaller than the
Massett-6
, the sub that had cracked open at a depth of 4,230 feet.

Imagine taking a twenty-hour road trip without being allowed to stop and stretch. To prepare myself, I created a mini-sub cockpit out of cardboard and sat in it for three- to five-hour stretches. Willy would climb in my lap with his favorite book,
Goodnight Moon
, and we’d read together and fall asleep.

What can’t be simulated are the effects of a trillion-ton frozen ceiling of ice more than two miles thick. To reach Vostok’s frigid waters would require us to plunge down a laser-melted hole that would reseal behind us. The pressure capping our 13,100-foot-deep entry point would generate 4,000 to 5,000 pounds per square inch of pressure on our sub—a pound of pressure for every dollar Angus had been advanced out of
my
paycheck.

Thanks again, Pop
.

Adding to my fear of enclosed spaces was the fact that, save for the sub’s internal displays and external lights, we’d be operating in complete blackness. If the power went out, or if we hit something,
or if something hit us…

That last thought led to my final category of fear: Irrational Fear of the Unexpected. It included encounters with hydrothermal vents that spewed water hot enough to melt the seals on our sub and regressed into alien algae blooms that could clog our engines.
And, of course, there were lake monsters.

Two years had passed since I’d nearly died in the jowls of one monster. Though I seriously doubted anything larger than a slug occupied Vostok’s waters, we would be entering an unexplored subglacial lake one hundred and forty miles
longer
and thirty miles
wider
than Loch Ness, energized by the same geothermal vents that had induced life on our planet 3.8 billion years ago.

Who knew what was down there?

A sane person would have walked away from this potential train wreck. Yet as much as I dreaded the trip, the scientist in me couldn’t wait to explore Vostok.

The more I researched it, the more I realized the lake was a gift to science and scientists throughout the world. To be among the first three humans to venture into its untarnished waters would cement my reputation forever.

Named after the Russian outpost established in East Antarctica in December of 1957, Lake Vostok was first theorized by a Soviet scientist named Peter Kropotkin, who made an aerial observation of an island of flat ice sandwiched around mountainous drifts. Two years later another Russian, Andrey Kapitsa, used seismic soundings to measure the thickness of the ice sheet around Vostok Station and hypothesized the existence of a subglacial lake. Still, few believed the lake could be liquid until the 1970s, when British scientists performing airborne ice-penetrating radar surveys of the plateau declared the unusual readings indicated the presence of liquid freshwater in Vostok’s vast basin. In 1991, a remote-sensing specialist from the United States directed the ERS-1 satellite’s high-frequency array at Vostok, confirming the British surveys.

More of a subterranean cavern than a lake, Vostok was divided into two deep basins by a ridge. The northern basin plunged thirteen thousand feet; the southern basin reached twice that depth. The ridge itself was situated in seven hundred feet of water and, as incredible as it seemed, harbored an island.

The weeks of summer flew by. To my father’s credit, his “monster mania” had resurrected tourism in the Great Glen for at least one more season, turning a potential economic disaster into a windfall. In fact, more tourists visited Loch Ness that summer than any other location in all of the United Kingdom or Europe.

But the “Hero of the Highlands” never apologized to me for his deeds or for the potential dangers associated with my upcoming deployment. And when the day finally came to say goodbye, I refused to see him.

For the hundredth time that summer, I read my infant son his favorite book as I rocked him to sleep in his stroller by the ruins of Urquhart Castle. “
In a great green room, tucked away in bed, is a little bunny. Goodnight room, goodnight moon
… .”

Brandy and I spent that last hour holding hands. Then the taxi arrived and it was time to go. I absorbed one last memory of those green hills, the gray cliff face, and the foam spraying off of the tea-colored waters, and asked my Maker to bring me home again to my wife and child—just not in a box.

True climbed in the back of the cab and slapped me hard on the knee. “So? How soon do ye want to get shitfaced?”

“As soon as we get on the plane.”

Our flight out of Inverness was scheduled to depart at five o’clock on a Sunday evening, beginning the first leg of our journey—a twenty-seven-hour trip that included stops in Birmingham, Paris, Santiago, Puerto Montt, and finally Punta Arenas, Chile. After spending a day recouping in the southernmost city in South America, we would board a seaplane for King George Island, where a cargo plane would be waiting to fly us across the continent to Davis Base in East Antarctica. From there we’d have another day to adjust before flying out to the new bio-dome being erected over Lake Vostok.

Lying back in my first-class seat next to my snoring friend, I closed my eyes and attempted to organize my mental notes on our frozen destination.

At just over eight million square miles, Antarctica was bigger than both Australia and the United States combined, with ninety-seven percent of its land mass covered by an ice sheet that averaged two miles thick. The only continent not to possess an indigenous human population, Antarctica was divided into three distinct sections: its east and west regions and the peninsula.

A short flight for tourists arriving from Chile, the Antarctic Peninsula, nicknamed the “Banana Belt” by snarky scientists, included the South Orkney Islands and South Georgia. The peninsula’s climate was mild compared to the rest of the continent and was home to a myriad of summer wildlife that included seals, whales, birds, and the emperor penguin. The male emperor penguin was the only warm-blooded animal that remained in Antarctica throughout the winter months. Their job: to stay on land and keep their offspring’s egg warm by covering it with a flap of abdominal skin. While the females swam off to warmer waters, the males huddled in groups in sub-zero conditions, often going nine weeks or more without eating.

And here I was complaining about a twenty-hour sub ride.

West Antarctica occupied the landmass below the peninsula and was separated from the larger eastern region by the Transantarctic Mountains, TAM for short. It possessed two immense ice shelves: the Ronne and the Ross, the latter being home to McMurdo Station and its four airfields, owned and operated by the United States.

East Antarctica was the largest of the three regions and spanned two-thirds of the continent. It stretched from the TAM clear to the eastern coastline and encompassed the South Pole. A desert of ice, East Antarctica was the coldest, most desolate location on the planet.

Being in the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica’s spring and
summer, and its extended hours of daylight hours, were the reverse of Scotland, running from October through February. Darkness arrived in March, and the temperatures plunged another forty degrees. The mean annual temperature at our East Antarctica destination was minus fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit. We could hope for summer highs in November and December approaching zero degrees.

The coldest temperature ever measured on Earth was a boneshattering minus 135.8, recorded in East Antarctica… at Russia’s Vostok Station.

After twenty hours in the air, the last plane ride of our first leg of travel touched down at the Presidente Carlos Ibáñez del Campo International Airport in Punta Arenas, Chile, just after seven o’clock in the evening. Exhausted, True and I collected our luggage and stepped outside into the frigid night. A taxi took us to the Blue House, a hostel Ming’s assistant had booked us into for our stay. The moment my head hit the pillow, I passed out. Not even True’s grumbling snores could keep me awake.