Steve Alten - Vostok

Ming screamed over the whistling of the submersible’s aft wings cutting through the air.

Ben yelled, “Hold on!” three times before we finally struck water, our submersible plunging bow-first into Lake Vostok.

The Barracuda plummeted through a blackness that seemed to reach out at us. After what felt like a two-hundred-foot dive, we leveled off, orientated in the pitch by the soft glow of our command console’s lights.

I unlocked my seat and rotated it to face forward.

“Zach, how far did we fall?” Ben asked.

I checked my depth gauge, which was resetting to accommodate our new liquid environment. “According to my instruments, we’re eighty-seven feet beneath the surface of Lake Vostok.”

“That’s not what I asked you. I asked how far we fell . In case you two still haven’t figured it out yet, we weren’t supposed to free fall out of the ice sheet. The ice sheet was supposed to be pressing against the lake’s surface!”

I realized he was right. “Bring us to the surface. Let’s take a look.”

Ben shut down the lasers and powered up the submersible’s engine while Ming tried the radio.

“Vostok Command, this is Dr. Liao. Do you have a fix on our position?”

“ Barracuda , this is Victor Lopez in navigation. It looks like you may have overshot your targeted submergence point. We’re waiting for a satellite pass to track your exact location. ETA is twelve minutes. Keep your lasers on so we can locate your heat signature.”

“Acknowledged. We’ll use the time to collect a water sample.”

“Overshot our targeted submergence point? What the hell does that mean?” Ben ranted as he reactivated the Valkyries, the sub’s exterior lights guiding us to the surface. “If you ask me, it sounds like somebody topside screwed the pooch. My money’s on the dumb Viking.”

“Shut up, Ben.” I watched our bow lights’ beacon cut a path through the clear, dark waters until our nose popped free of the surface.

We were surrounded by a dense fog. I aimed our starboard light overhead, but the beam failed to reach the bottom of the ice sheet. “It’s gotta be up there somewhere.”

“Zach, use the sonar to ping the ceiling.”

“That won’t work.”

“Yes it will. The computer can calculate the distance between the air and the ice by the time it takes the sound waves to hit the ice sheet.”

“Do it, Zach,” Ming chimed in.

I positioned my headphones over my ears, activated the sonar station and pushed the red ACTIVE button, sending a loud ping echoing across the surface in all directions.

The acoustic reflection bounced off the ceiling, and the computer pinpointed the bottom of the ice sheet—112 feet above our heads.

Ben swore from his perch behind me. “A hundred and twelve feet. Houston, we have a major problem.”

“Captain, please calm down. Whatever the problem is, we’ll resolve it.”

“Ming, in order to return to the surface we were simply supposed to activate the lasers and launch bow-up out of the water. As the hole opened Vostok’s water pressure would drive us straight up like a geyser. That entire premise was based on the ice sheet being accessible. A 112-foot ceiling isn’t accessible. Are we supposed to grow wings and fly up to it?”

“Stay calm,” I said, my pulse pounding. “We know the first Valkyrie went down and came right back up. That means the bottom of the ice sheet isn’t uniform.”

“Zachary’s right,” added Ming. “We simply need to locate the first drone’s exit point.”

“All right, Doc, I’m buying what you’re peddling, but riddle me this: if the Barracuda launched from the same starting point as the Valkyrie, then how did we end up here, wherever here is? Something must have altered our trajectory.”

“Agreed, but remember the Valkyrie drone is basically a tethered laser with no variables to account for. The Barracuda ’s trajectory is subject to a thousand possible weight displacements during the descent. Even the three of us leaning to one side could have caused us to deviate miles off course. In a worst-case scenario we can always have Vostok Command send down a second unit so we can track its splashdown. We’ll be fine.”

Ben exhaled a sigh of relief. “I knew there was a reason I brought you along.”

Waves lapped against the Barracuda , rocking us gently. For a long moment the three of us remained quiet, listening to the darkness. A roll of thunder echoed in the distance, the ice sheet rumbling overhead as it inched its way east toward the sea.

If there were a more isolated spot on the planet, I couldn’t imagine where it might be.

After a few minutes, Ming activated her sampling unit and siphoned six ounces of lake water into a collection tube for computer analysis. “Water temperature is thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit.”

Ben tapped his fingers. “Who cares about water temperature? Cold is cold, what did you expect?”

He was annoyed, anxious to hear back from Vostok Command. Defending Ming, I replied, “Water temperature is important because it governs the kinds of organisms that can live in Vostok. The presence of zooplankton and phytoplankton — even insects and fish — all thrive in different temperatures. Chemical reactions generally increase in higher temperatures. The freezing temperature would indicate there are no geothermal vents present in this area. Ming, what about E. coli?”

“Bacteria readings are still processing. Nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations are low, as we would expect. The pH is 7.1, highly conducive for fish.”

“Fish?” Ben forced a laugh. “Hate to tell you, but I don’t see so much as a speck of pond scum, let alone a fish. Seems like your people dropped us into a dead zone.”

“Ben may be right,” I said. “Bacteria count is near zero. Sorry to disappoint you, Ming, but if there are fish in this lake, they aren’t defecating in it.”

“Maybe they’re using a toilet,” I heard Ben mutter.

“ Barracuda , this is Vostok Command. We have acquired your position. You can power down your lasers. As we suspected, your trajectory was altered during your descent.”

“Altered how?” Ben asked.

“We’re still working the numbers, Captain. You were right on target for the first twenty-seven hundred meters. Somewhere around that mark the sub passed through a magnetic anomaly that veered you off-course. The affected area spans a sixty-five-by-forty-seven-mile section of the plateau that separates the lake’s two basins. There was too much interference for us to catch it from up here, and your suit sensors indicate you probably were asleep during the event.”

“How far off course are we?”

“We have you 152 kilometers southwest of your extraction point. That’s about ninety-four miles.”

Ben slapped his palms to the acrylic dome above his head. “Helluva job, amigo . Your team aimed for the moon and landed us in Cleveland. We’re lucky we even hit water.”

Ming smacked the pilot on the back of his head. “Victor, can you pinpoint the source of the anomaly?”

“We’re still working on that. I’m downloading the SAT image to the Barracuda ’s computer. We highlighted your location and the extraction point as references. As you’ll see, you’re in the southern basin, separated from the northern basin by the Vostok ridge. Somewhere along that rise is the source of the anomaly. We suspect the ridge is part of an impact crater from an asteroid. Celestial impacts often magnetize the geology — that’s how they located the crater in the Gulf of Mexico from the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs.”