Steve Alten - Vostok

While my early years of puberty were chastised by long hours devoted to study and a physical regimen designed to give me a fighting chance on the football field, Brandy’s teen years were spent rudderless and rebellious. Pregnant at sixteen, she found herself abandoned by both her boyfriend and her overbearing father, whose response to his daughter’s loss of innocence was to cast her adrift. Brandy moved into a women’s shelter, miscarried in her fourth month, and spent her remaining years of adolescence in a boarding house run by nuns. Ten years would pass before she spoke to her father again.

When she was nineteen, Brandy met an American stockbroker and accepted his marriage proposal as a passport out of the Highlands. Seven months after the couple had moved to California, Brandy was riding her ten-speed bike on a mountain highway when she was struck from behind by a car. Her injuries were severe and she spent several weeks in intensive care — during which time her husband had an affair. A year later she returned to the Highlands divorced and lonely, with just enough money to purchase a second-hand passenger houseboat from which she eked out a living giving tours of Loch Ness during the warmer months.

Her life changed when she worked winters as a volunteer at the hospital in Inverness.

“Negative energy, Zach. I brought about my own darkness as a wayward teen and attracted negative people to my aura. T’was God’s will that sent me to the hospital on the brink of death, but really I was dyin’ spiritually in a bad marriage, having cast myself from His Light. Volunteering at the hospital in Inverness changed my energy and summoned ye to Drumnadrochit to marry me. It takes a selfless act tae bring one back into God’s heavenly Light.”

Brandy had already gotten into two fistfights with locals who had the bollocks to criticize her husband and his work. Yet as the days of winter grew shorter and the villagers’ desperate hours grew longer, she began to sound more and more like my father.

“Been o’er to the neebs, Zach. There’s bairns bein’ put tae bed hungry. Instead o’ grabbin’ yer daily nips and starin’ at the loch every day, why dinnae ye use that big ol’ brain o’ yers and figure oot a way tae lure another monster into the Ness.”

“We’ve been over this, Brandy. The creature only grew big because she was trapped in Loch Ness and couldn’t return to the Sargasso Sea to spawn. It was a freak situation, one in a million. There’s none like her out there anymore. And even if there was, the tourists flocked to Loch Ness to see a plesiosaur, not a predatory fish that went insane due to hydrocarbon poisoning.”

“Zach, don’t git yer panties in a ball. Ye dinnae have tae lure a real monster; ye could jist claim tae find clues. A few white lies and ye could jumpstart tourism again. Ye could save Drumnadrochit and the other hamlets. Ye’d be a real hero tae yer people.”

“Brandy, I’m a scientist, a respected marine biologist, not a cryptozoologist or some headline seeker feeding fake monster stories to the weekly tabloids. Do you want me to destroy everything that I worked for?”

“There’s wee uns goin’ hungry, Zach. What if it were yer son… yer kin? They’re starving because o’ ye bein’ such a great and respected marine biologist.”

“You’re blaming me? Brandy, the damn thing killed three people!”

“Aye. And far more will go hungry this winter because of yer bravery and brains. But ye can still make things right again.”

“You’ve been talking to Angus.”

“Aye, and he has a plan. But he needs yer help. All ye have tae do is authenticate a monster kill, and the press will do the rest.”

Months of pent-up frustration set my blood to boil. “I won’t do it, Brandy. I can’t do it. It goes against everything I’ve dedicated my life to. My father, on the other hand, has no morals. He’d gamble his own sons’ souls in a poker game with the devil if it meant filling his resort to capacity.”

“And tae whit devil have ye sold yer soul, Zachary Wallace? The one who feeds yer own massive ego?”

That conversation took place in late January. Best friends and lovers, we allowed our desire to be right to overrule our marital vows. Days passed in silence. With each passing week our love grew colder, and the noose of debt around my neck grew tighter, making me resent her even more. My thoughts turning to the previously unthinkable, that maybe Brandy and I were not meant to be together after all.

Without discussing it with my wife, I began contacting private companies and major universities, letting them know I was now fielding offers. By March I had narrowed my choices down to a faculty position at Cambridge University, a research position at Scripps Institute, and an interesting offer from Masao Tanaka at the Tanaka Oceanographic Institute.

Tanaka and I shared a common love for cetaceans. One of the most respected marine biologists in the world, he had constructed a man-made whale lagoon some twenty years ago on the coast of Monterey, California. The idea had been to offer pregnant gray whales migrating south from the Bering Sea a shallow harbor to birth their calves before reaching Baja. Instead, the facility had been sealed off to hold a newborn megalodon pup captured off the coast. Believed to be extinct, megalodon was a sixty-foot prehistoric cousin of the great white. The shark’s pregnant parent had escaped the deep waters of the Mariana Trench after Jonas Taylor, a deep-sea submersible pilot, had dived the abyss with Masao’s son to retrieve an earthquake sensor. The pregnant female had given birth to the pup before being captured and eventually killed (in self-defense) by Jonas. The offspring, an albino named Angel, had grown to monstrous proportions, and for the next four years, the Tanaka Institute had been the most popular tourist destination in the world — until the creature broke free and returned to the trench. That was fifteen years ago, but the megalodon’s scent trail persisted, keeping whales out of the vacated pen. Masao Tanaka was offering me three hundred dollars a week, with free room and board, plus a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus if I could figure out a way to lure whales into his empty lagoon.

Cambridge University’s salary offer wasn’t much higher, but it was guaranteed. And its proximity to the Great Glen would allow me to visit my family on weekends.

But it was the work at Scripps that enticed me the most. I would be set up in my own lab with a staff of my choosing. In addition to a decent salary and benefits package, I would receive thirty percent of any profits generated by my inventions, sharing the patents.

Scripps it was. I would accept their offer and then reach out to Brandy to join me. I would apologize and tell her how much I wanted her in my life, but I would refuse to remain a victim of my circumstances or languish in a loveless marriage. If my happiness and self-worth resided outside the Great Glen, then I needed to follow that road and see where it took me — even if it meant leaving my family.

Then one dreary afternoon in March, I received another offer — one that would change my life and the future of the Highlands forever.

Nessie’s Lair was located on the third floor of my father’s resort. I entered the restaurant at half past one in the afternoon, seeking solitude and a private place to call Professor John Rudman, the director at Scripps who had been recruiting me. The chamber was dark, the only light coming from the floor-to-ceiling windows, which offered a breathtaking view of Loch Ness and the snow-covered peaks of the Monadhliath Mountains rising along the far eastern bank.

It was only eight-thirty in the morning at Scripps. Knowing Professor Rudman usually didn’t get into his office until nine, I flipped open my laptop to check today’s Science Journal .