Steve Alten - Vostok

“How do you know all this, Ben?”

“It’s public record.”

“Let me rephrase that. Why do you know all this?”

“I know it because their defense sector is a front for MAJESTIC-12, a tightly wound group of puppet-masters who profit from war and are committed to maintaining the status quo when it comes to our energy supply. Big Oil, Monsanto, the military industrial complex, and a select group of bankers… don’t roll your eyes, Zach. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Discover a new clean-energy source that can free us from fossil fuels and these boys will deny you a patent, steal your technology, and crush you like a bug. There’s a reason they’re funding this little venture, but it has nothing to do with marine biology. Oh, and you can bet the farm it was their GeoEye-1 satellite that pinpointed our location when we splashed down a million miles off-course.”

The satellite … Vostok Command can’t send help unless they know where we are!

Spinning my chair back around to my command console, I powered up the Valkyries, creating a heat signature for their thermal imaging sensors.

Ming and Ben continued wasting our air supply. “My job in organizing this venture, Captain, was to procure enough funds to cover the technological expenses. So what if a defense contractor invested in our mission?”

“Vostok’s huge. Yet somehow you managed to select a splashdown site where the magnetic anomaly is at its strongest?”

“It’s a geological phenomenon. I’m a geophysicist.”

“A geophysicist who recruited Zachary Wallace as a front, to fool the Russians into believing the mission’s aim was to discover new life-forms. Of course, you never said what kind of new life-forms.”

The conversation was getting heated and more than a little weird. Perhaps I might have cared had we not been running out of air.

Thick droplets of water rained down from the ice sheet, dropping out of a dense fog. The river bed twisted up ahead to the right. Beyond that, we’d probably never know.

What if there was water around that bend?

My eyes returned to the gauge monitoring the exterior pressure. How much could the human body handle? The ice sheet was obviously off the scale, but 228 psi— that equated to free diving in about 350 feet of water. The world record for free diving was about 420 feet. I was certainly no diver, but leaving the sub wasn’t about holding my breath, it was about being able to handle the extreme pressures that would be squeezing my ears, sinus cavity, and lungs — something I had faced years earlier when our submersible had suddenly cracked open in the depths of the Sargasso Sea .

If water was out there, could we drag the sub to it before our air cavities ruptured?

I was about to broach the subject with my bickering shipmates when we felt the river bed beneath us rumble.

Silence took the sub. I quickly shut down the Valkyries while Ben extinguished our exterior lights. Huddling in the dark, the three of us searched the landscape using our night-vision goggles.

The reverberations were getting closer, and then a creature appeared over the rise and I forgot all about venturing outside.

It was a Purussaurus , a pregnant female, I surmised from its labored gait. Staking out a sand-covered expanse close to the river bed and less than fifty yards from our sub, the eighteen-ton prehistoric crocodile began digging a hole with her clawed hind feet while her enormous tail swished back and forth, flicking debris in every direction.

Ben backed away from the glass. “Mother of God… I seriously need to be drunk.”

Sand rained across the pod, obscuring our view. I heard Ben offer Ming something. A moment later, he leaned over into my cockpit and passed me an open whiskey bottle. “A gift from your Viking pal. Go on, it’ll make it easier.”

I took a long swig and passed it back to him. “I feel like such an arse. For the first time in my life, I had it all — the girl of my dreams, a son, a prestigious job. Why’d I do it?”

“You’re a scientist; you did it for the work.”

“No, it was my stupid ego. Over three thousand people have climbed Mount Everest, hundreds have been in space, but Vostok — I wanted to be the first, the Neil Armstrong of subglacial lakes, the marine biologist who ventured back in time.”

“I suppose that makes me Buzz Aldrin. Want to know why I took this mission?”

I glanced at the air gauge. “You have fifty-seven minutes, go for it.”

Taking the whiskey again from Ming, he took a long swig. “I’m a fighter pilot. It’s in our blood. My grandfather flew B-29s over Normandy; my dad flew F-16s during Desert Storm. Even my best friend, John Rodsenow, flies test planes for Skunkworks. The Air Force was all I knew.”

The sound of dirt piling up on our hull grew more muffled as our burial deepened. I wanted to scream.

Instead, I grabbed the whiskey from Ben and swallowed until my stomach burned. “Sorry. You were saying?”

“Everything started with my grandfather. After WWII he was transferred to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and OSI, the central investigative agency for the Air Force. Did you know the United States Air Force wasn’t even established until 1947? That was the year an unidentified airborne object crashed on a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico. My grandfather was part of the official investigation, assigned to Project Grudge, which later became Project Blue Book. Data was sent to his office for analysis: reports of sightings, radar signals — all made by reputable people like military pilots and radar techs and police officers. Back then, no one had ever even used the term UFO. OSI kept a lid on everything.”

“Wait,” I said. “Are you seriously talking about UFOs?”

“Says the man who hunted the Loch Ness Monster. Sorry, ‘biologic.’ Wouldn’t want to paint you as a nutjob. May I finish my story?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Ben ignored me and continued. “My father, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Hintzmann, experienced two close encounters. The first happened fourteen months after he retired from piloting jets. At the time, he was training as an aircraft control and warning operator stationed at the 753 rdRadar Squadron at Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan. One night his phones lit up with calls from cops who claimed they were chasing three UFOs from Mackinaw Bridge up I-75. Dad checked his radar and sure enough, there they were.

“There were no written instructions for how to deal with a UFO, so my father called NORAD’s chief of staff, a Major General Todd Coleman. Dad told Coleman there were two inbound B-52s en routed to Kincheloe Air Force Base minutes away from a head-on encountered with three UFOs and asked what he should do. The general ordered the bombers diverted to another AFB; then he told my father that if any reporters or cops asked, he was to tell them there was nothing on radar and to keep everything to himself.

“A few years later, Dad was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. Cool place, Nellis, very high security. It’s the site where my buddy tests highly classified aircraft, designed and built by Lockheed Skunkworks. Anyway, one night around one-thirty in the morning, my father was walking back to his barracks when he noticed a crowd had gathered, everyone watching the northwest sky. Dad looks and sees flashing lights moving at incredible speeds that he estimated to be well over three thousand miles an hour. But here’s what really blew him away — the UFOs would trek across the sky at super-high speeds, then suddenly stop dead and change directions. They were moving and changing directions so quickly that Dad said they were leaving blurs of light in the sky. As he and the others watched, these E.T. vessels aligned with one another to form a circle in the airspace just east of the Groom Lake Flight Test Facility, more commonly known among us alien conspiracy guys as Area 51. The UFOs began rotating in their circle when poof —they suddenly disappeared.