Steve Alten - Vostok

But I was no longer listening to them, for the emptiness that had occupied our sonar monitor was no longer empty, the vacuum of space replaced by three distinct blips—

— and they were headed our way.

Blee-bloop… blee-bloop… blee-bloop …

It was a freakish sound, almost like a water jug expelling its contents, and when I heard it in my sonar earpiece I nearly passed out from the blood rushing from my head.

Imagine surviving a plane crash, only to find yourself on another commercial jetliner years later hearing the captain announce, “Sorry folks, we just lost one of our engines. Prepare for an emergency landing.” You’d feel your whole body go numb because you know what’s coming, and it’s seriously bad news as you ask yourself, “What the hell am I doing back on a goddamn plane?”

In my case it was a sub, and I knew what was coming because I had heard the blee-bloop sound on sonar in the Sargasso Sea just before I drowned. The Navy guys had named this unknown species “the bloops” because they weren’t whales or sharks or giant squids, and their internal respiratory organs created a bloop sound on sonar. Having survived the encounter, it was my unfortunate fate to discover Nessie to be one of their kind — a predatory fish that had grown very large after becoming trapped in Loch Ness when an aquifer had collapsed, cutting off access to the ocean and her migratory pattern. Thus spawning a legend.

And now we were about to meet her ancient Miocene cousins.

Ben grabbed his headphones. “Where are they?”

“Approaching from the northwest on course two-eight-five. These are big, nasty predators, and we seriously need to leave. Like now!”

“How do you know they’re predators?”

“You read my book. Don’t you hear that bloop sound?”

“No. All I hear is Ming scraping that damn claw along the bottom. Hey, Ming.” He reached over his seat and grabbed her arm, getting her attention. “Zach says we’ve got biologics on sonar.”

“Really? This is incredible. How far away are they? Can we catch up with them? We absolutely need to get them on video.”

“Maybe I’m not explaining this right. These predators are thirty to forty feet long, and they’re stalking us, Ming. Now get that claw docked. Ben, are you driving, or am I?”

“Just tell me a direction.”

I stared at the sonar screen. They’re coming from the northwest. Southeast distances us, only we need to head north to get to the extraction point

The creatures were closing fast, and I couldn’t think.

“Zach?”

“Come about. We’ll let the current take us north. No engines for now; we need to sneak past them. Ming, enough with the damn whale tooth!”

“Give me twenty seconds. I’ve almost got it in the catch basket.”

I turned to Ben for help. “Remember that creature that choked on the croc? You’re about to meet his great-grandkids.”

“To hell with that!” Strapping himself in, Ben turned the sub hard to starboard, spinning the Barracuda ’s bow to the north.

Ming swore in Mandarin. “I lost the tooth!”

“Dock that arm and strap in. Zach, you sure about these lights?”

“Yes— no. Wait. Keep them off for now, but be ready to turn them back on. Everyone quiet. Ming?”

“You wanted me to dock the arm; it’s docked.”

I listened on sonar, my eyes following the bloops. We were going to cross paths any second, only there was no way to know if they had heard us turn into the current.

Eight hundred feet…

The respiratory sounds grew louder. There were three of them, an adult and two gurgling offspring.

Four hundred feet…

They were slowing.

They’re unsure. They can’t detect us with the engines off .

The current swept us closer to where the creatures were circling.

Two hundred feet…

Remembering my night-vision goggles, I reached into a cushioned compartment on the right side of my command center and retrieved them. I placed them over my eyes and the blackness was stripped away, replaced by an olive-green world—

— and a serpent-like creature looming before us that was clearly not my Nessie.

This one was far worse.

It was just as long at thirty to forty feet but far thicker in girth. Its hide was covered in thick slime that reflected our lights from its dark undulating coils. A vertical fin ran the length of its chocolate-brown body to the tip of its tail. The mouth was hideous, rimmed with curved, stiletto-sharp teeth set outside the jaw like the oversized fangs of an Angler fish. The snout was square, its volcano-shaped, pale-pink nostrils opening and closing as it inhaled the current.

Like its modern-day relative, it was a species of giant eel, only it possessed fore-fins — gruesome clawed appendages its ancestors probably once used to climb onto land.

Oh, yeah, and it was electric.

From its gilled neck to its tail, along its flank it possessed bioluminescent cells that generated yellow zaps of electricity, which radiated signals like an alien vessel — a light show, no doubt, designed to mesmerize its prey.

I was already mesmerized in fear. “Ben, full throttle!”

As Ben stamped down on both propeller pedals, I powered on the exterior headlamps and aimed the beams at the creature’s eyes — only I couldn’t find its eyes. In my haste I had accidently powered on the Valkyries, and before I’d realized my error we had shot past the Miocene nightmare’s snapping jaws.

A flash of horizontal lightning revealed the second creature lurking in the darkness off the starboard bow. It was as large as its sibling and appeared to be communicating to it using its bioluminescent cells.

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.