Steve Alten - Vostok

I made it to the rope and immediately started to climb. I was halfway up when the bear-dog revealed itself to be alive, raising its head and upper body off the ice, crying out in pain.

The animal’s hip was broken. Had I delayed my ascent it might have caught me in those sharp canine teeth.

I left it there, howling in the darkness, its cries of pain echoing through the ice tunnel. It was still crying out as I reached the hole in the crevasse.

I paused. Even though the animal had intended to kill me, it was clearly suffering.

How could I just leave it like this?

Easily, I told myself. If you climb back down to put it out of its misery, you’re using up precious energy. Think about William.

I did.

And that’s why I climbed back down.

The bear-dog seemed to sense that I was there to help. It laid its head down, panting in pain.

Trembling, I gripped the axe.

The first blow caused it to spasm.

The second ended its suffering.

The ice tunnel began to reverberate.

I leaped for the rope, a rush of adrenaline driving my arms and legs. I saw ice collapsing around me like a shattering mirror as I pulled myself out of the tunnel and up into the crevasse. Dragging myself to my feet, I swung the axe, burying its blood-covered spike into the rock overhead, climbing up the parallel walls with my boots.

I felt the tunnel collapse beneath me, swallowing the floor of the chasm. I cursed my foolishness, an insane act of kindness toward an animal that had been crippled as it had tried to eat me.

Managing my way out of the fissure, I hoisted my quivering body onto the snow-blanketed mountainslope. Shaking with exhaustion and spent nerves, I retraced my footprints to the remains of the rope and pulled myself up the steep incline through waist-deep snow until I was standing at the base of the mountain. Heading southeast, I set off at a quick pace, my feet numb beneath me.

I covered the distance so fast that I actually passed Ming’s sensory device. It was only after I came upon Ben’s spikeprints that I realized I had gone too far.

I was surprised to come across a second set of boot prints.

Ming? Why had she set off after Ben? Maybe she had been too scared to descend through the fog alone?

I followed the pair of footprints another thirty yards in search of return tracks, but found none.

That was a problem. If they had gone off together and still hadn’t returned, then something had happened to them.

They probably planted Ben’s device together, then found another way back to the sub after the crevasse opened up .

Wanting to believe that, I retraced my steps and descended into the fog bank.

I was fifty paces in, working through three feet of snow and near-zero visibility, when I caught a whiff of something that smelled like rotten eggs.

Sulfur?

I turned away from the scent, diverting down another path, a shortcut that brought me out of the fog. Below were the dark waters of the bay. As I began my descent, I saw the light.

At first I thought it was the Barracuda , only the light was moving, following a course parallel to the shoreline. Removing my backpack, I located the night-vision monocular. Powering it on, I slid my goggles down to my neck and held the lens up to my right eye, zooming in on the light.

It was Ben, and he was dragging something behind him.

Ming?

Tucking the lens in my jacket pocket, I returned the night-vision goggles to my eyes and hurried down the slope, my galloping movements through the snow startling a harem of forty or fifty female sea elephants lazying about the shoreline.

A chorus of belches and burps alerted the male. The ten-ton bull charged out of the shallows, a rolling mass of angry white blubber.

Seeing the beast, Ben ducked behind a boulder.

I stopped running, my heart racing as I found myself confronted by a creature roughly the size of a cement mixer.

The animated mammal pounded its fore flippers in the slush and shook its head, so that its three-foot-long proboscis sprayed me with snot and salty lake water, but the bull never advanced.

Nor did I.

After several bouts of snorting and belching, it rambled off to join its harem.

I met up with Ben, who was kneeling by Ming, checking her pulse as she rested with her back against the rock. “Is she alive?”

“Barely. Let’s get her inside the sub.”

“Ben, you’re bleeding.”

“Huh? It’s nothing. I packed some snow on it. It looks a lot worse than it is. Grab her other arm.”

He tried to lift her as he stood, only to drop to one knee. “Guess I hurt it worse than I thought.”

“Wait here.” I half-dragged, half-carried Ming to the sub. Laying her down, I activated the hatch, then stripped her of her backpack and lifted her into her seat, buckling her in. I tossed her pack in the storage compartment and went back for Ben.

He had stripped off his own pack and was examining his wound. Blood was everywhere, dripping from a jagged six-inch incision along his upper left thigh.

“Looks like you nicked your femoral artery; we need to get a tourniquet on this. How’d you do it?”

“Fell on my climbing axe.”

I shouldered half his weight, hustling him over to the sub, fearing what the scent of his blood might be attracting. He moved to climb inside the middle cockpit, only I stopped him. “You can’t operate the thrusters with one leg. Get in my seat; I’ll man the master control.”

I helped him into the bow cockpit, then foraged through Ming’s backpack to find something to make a tourniquet. Removing her rope, I tied three feet of cord tightly around Ben’s wound, the pain causing him to pass out.

Moving to the bow, I struggled to push the Barracuda backward down the shoreline and into the water. I made it halfway to the waterline before I had to rest.

Leaning against the sub, I looked back and saw the bear-dogs. The adult was sniffing and pawing at the blood-drenched snow, her offspring following the trail toward the sub.

I gripped the bow and pushed.

I could see the charging adult in my peripheral vision as my boots hit water. Another shove and I climbed inside, my feet straddling Ben as the animal struck the sub.

The bow spun in the water.

I fell into the middle seat and managed to seal the dome as the predator stood up on its hind legs and pawed at the acrylic, pushing us into deeper water.

I tried the engine.

No power.

For a second, I panicked; then remembered Vostok Command had us on their override.

The radio crackled. “Vostok Mobile Command to Barracuda . Colonel Vacendak here. Report.”

“Wallace here. Captain Hintzmann’s seriously wounded, and Dr. Liao’s in bad shape. We’re all suffering from exhaustion and hypothermia. Start the engine so I can crank up the heat.”

The sub powered on, sending a rush of cold air pouring out of my vent.

“Dr. Wallace, what happened to the sensory devices? We’re registering Dr. Liao’s and your devices, but Captain Hintzmann’s was never activated.”

“I’ll ask him about it when he comes to. Right now you need to get us to the extraction point before he bleeds to death.”

A moment’s pause. “Dr. Wallace, I’m going to turn you over to Captain Eric Schager. He will pilot you into the northern basin. We’ll have a medical team waiting for you back in the dome.”

“Thank you.” I laid my head back, then peeled off my gloves. Raising my dripping wet left boot, I attempted to unbuckle the straps with my half-frozen fingers.

“Dr. Wallace, this is Captain Schager. I’m tracking your position using our SAT feed, but there are going to be biologics along the way that I can’t see. I’m going to take you out of the bay at five knots just to make sure that whale’s moved on, but don’t go active on sonar.”