Steve Alten - Vostok

Now the bull wanted its meal.

I shifted the propeller back to FORWARD and held my breath as the rope went taut, dragging the sub backwards out of the borehole and through the lake on a Nantucket sleigh ride, as the male Livyatan melvillei swallowed my deceased colleagues’ remains whole.

The whale dragged the Barracuda backward into the depths until the nylon rope snapped and cast the sub adrift.

In darkness, kept at bay by the soft glow from my command console, in a quiet violated only by the fading buzz in my damaged ears, I found a moment’s solitude. Exhausted, beaten to the point of surrender, I wondered what more there was to fear. Not death. Death was simply a passing, the process of the soul shedding the burden of flesh and life’s imperfections with all its scars and pains and sorrows.

Death was the great unknown. It was the perpetual fear of dying that made living hard. Vostok had immunized me, for I my head I had died so many times over the last forty hours that my mind’s eye had gone blind to its anticipated horrors.

The sub drifted and so did I, in and out of sleep, until the demands of the flesh said, “Enough! Drink, eat, piss, remove these tight boots from your throbbing feet. Get back into the game, Wallace! God didn’t spare your sorry ass to sit on the sidelines and wax poetic. Find a reason to live.”

Unzipping my coat, I reached inside the breast pocket of my extreme conditions uniform and removed a wallet-size photo of Brandy holding William.

Get back in the game .

Placing the photo on my console, I stripped off the neoprene undergarment, ripping the tiny electrode connections from my skin. Shedding the undergarment meant I’d be losing some body heat when I left the sub, but it was better that the Colonel and his team believe I was dead.

MAJESTIC-12 was one threat. The other, besides my diminishing air supply, was the bull sperm whale. It was still out there, but it had just fed.

If I kept my pace slow and steady…

I redressed in my long johns and every article of extreme weather gear I could find, then I started up the engine. The GPS unit was useless, but by reversing the sub’s last course I was able to plot my way back to the bay with little effort.

I wiped blood from my night-goggle lenses and adjusted them on my face. Then I dived the sub to three hundred feet, set my speed to ten knots, and engaged the auto-pilot.

“Huh?”

Exhaustion and a steady ride had gotten the better of me. I opened my eyes, stunned to find the nose of the Barracuda beached before a restless herd of sea elephants. Having fallen asleep before reaching the plateau, I don’t know how I had managed to cross the Livyatan melvillei nursery without disturbing the females. Perhaps they had been feeding when I had passed through the channel. Perhaps it was divine intervention. But somehow I had made it all the way back to the bay.

Climbing over my seat into the aft compartment, I searched the backpacks for supplies. I had my climbing axe, magnetometer, three flashlights, and, to my surprise, Ben’s sensory device. Leaving the Colonel’s instrument behind, I packed the other items into my bag, along with water, snacks, and the two iPhones. Gingerly sliding my thawed feet into my climbing boots, I zipped up my jacket, secured my facemask and hat, and bound and wrapped every inch of exposed flesh before slipping on my gloves. Ready for the cold, I popped open the cockpit’s hood.

Vostok greeted me with a golfball-sized chunk of hail that splattered across the Barracuda ’s bow.

I dragged, pulled, and pushed the sub out of the water and onto the beach, then resealed the hatch, having decided to leave the bow lights on. Yes, I needed to conserve the batteries, but power was useless if a six-ton sea elephant decided to squat on my submersible as a nest.

Locating Ben’s and Ming’s imprints in the snow, I followed the tracks to the northeast.

The path my deceased companions had used on their return to the sub kept to the coastline as it circled the island around to the east, then south. Though a bit longer, it was far easier to negotiate, and even as I began the ascent up the base of the mountain, the snow accumulation at its worst was only calf-deep. The fog bank was barely intrusive.

What did I expect to find? An ancient spaceship? A gateway to a parallel universe? To be honest, I had no clue. All I knew was that Ben and everyone else in charge of this expedition had gone to great care and expense to access this snow-covered mountain, and I needed to know why.

I had crossed the fissure and had reached the base of the mountain when I remembered the magnetometer. Retrieving it from my backpack, I powered it on.

What in the hell…

The instrument registered 305,000 nanoteslas, a huge jump from the reading I had taken hours earlier on the shoreline with Ben and Ming.

Seeking answers, I pocketed the device and gripped my axe. Approaching an exposed section of rock, I repeatedly struck the volcanic geology with the spiked end of the climbing tool. A dozen whacks and I had chipped away an eight-inch-wide, six-inch-deep divot. Turning on my flashlight, I shined the light upon the hole.

The exposed surface was dark and rough, possibly uniform. It was too hard to tell from the small sample size.

A strange tingling sensation gave me pause just then, and I realized the hairs on the back of my head were rustling beneath my wool hat.

I turned slowly and saw the bear-dog. Having followed my trail through the snow, it was watching me, growling in the darkness, its eyes glowing olive-green in my night-vision lenses.

Seven to ten strides up the slope and it would be on me.

Gripping the axe tightly, I spun around and slammed the spike as high as I could into the rock above my head. I pulled myself up so that the toe of my right boot found the divot, my left hand searching for a ledge as I heaved myself off the ground.

Don’t look back. Just climb!

I managed to dig the cleats of my left boot into the snow-covered rock by my waist and drove the climbing spike higher, pulling myself up and just out of range of the animal’s snapping jaws.

I gasped heavy breaths through my mask and looked down. The predator was standing on its hind legs, clawing at the rock. My muscles were trembling with cold, fear, and fatigue. Balancing on my perch, it was just a matter of time before I’d lose my balance.

Above me awaited a precarious four-story climb up a thirty-degree twisting rock face covered in snow. I doubted I could make it up, but given the choice between the vicious predator and falling to my death, I decided to climb.

Hugging the wall, I wiggled the climbing spike free and struck blindly above my head. Testing the grip, I shifted my weight to my left leg, dug my boot into the snow and pulled myself up another three feet.

Wheezing breaths, rotating grips. Teary eyes blinking, snot freezing cold in my mask. The growls below faded, muted by the snow crunching against my jacket and pants. Where was I going?

Give it up. One last heave away from the mountain and it’ll be over.

My gloved hand found a hole in the packed snow. Glancing over, I saw frozen spike marks, the trail zig-zagging to my left.

Ben’s tracks .

Looking up, I saw something glowing.

Adjusting my course, I assaulted the summit with renewed vigor until I found myself staring at a dark, rough, exposed metal surface displaying ten radiant orbs. Ben had left one of his climbing axes behind when he had fallen. I worked my gloved left hand into its loop and pulled myself up so that I was eye-level with the violet, light positioned at the bottom of the icon.