Steve Alten - Vostok

“You mean, at least until the television special airs.”

“While every aspect of this mission will be documented, there will be no television crews. Nor will there be any published reports, at least for quite some time.”

“I don’t understand. What good is a new discovery if you can’t share it with the world?”

“The discovery will be shared once we have garnered the vast treasures this exploratory mission has to offer. Because the location of the discovery is in Antarctica we cannot prevent other nations and their scientific teams from accessing, exploiting, and contaminating the resource; therefore, we must protect its secrets as long as possible.

“Dr. Wallace, please sign the agreement so that we may speak freely. And if your wife insists upon participating in our discussion, she must also sign. Nothing personal,” she added as she met Brandy’s glare.

I glanced at Brandy. As she liked to say, it was a “shyte or get off the bowl” moment, only it had nothing to do with Liao’s pitch. If Brandy signed the non-disclosure now, it meant she cared enough about our marriage to be concerned where this journey might take me, assuming I was even interested. If, however, she walked out, then our marriage was as good as over.

“Give me the bloody paper.” Using Liao’s pen, she signed the document without reading it and slid it over to me. “It’s your life. Do as ye will.”

I reviewed the agreement and then signed it above Brandy’s signature. “Okay, Dr. Liao, both Wallaces have anted up. Make your pitch.”

“Please, call me Ming. As I said, the discovery is located in Antarctica. What do you know about the continent, other than it’s the coldest, most desolate place on Earth?”

“I know it wasn’t always that way.”

“Correct. Before it was covered by ice, Antarctica was fertile land with lush forests and fresh-water lakes and streams. That was during the Miocene, a period of time that began about twenty-five million years ago. The climate abruptly changed about fifteen million years ago, leaving most of the continent covered with a dome-shaped glacier two-and-a-half miles thick. Gravity is actually pulling the ice into the ocean by way of the continent’s ice shelves. As these ice shelves reach the coastline, their bottom sections hit seawater and melt faster, causing sections of the flow to crack — a natural process known as rifting.

“Global warming has accelerated the process. Last year alone, Antarctic ice sheets lost a combined mass of 355 gigatonnes, which is enough to raise global sea levels by 1.3 millimeters. That may not seem like a lot, but combine that with Greenland’s melting ice sheet, diminishing mountain glaciers, and the polar caps — all multiplied by the present rate of acceleration — and your winter home in sunny Florida may be underwater by the time you are ready to retire.”

“Actually, my wife and I winter here in Drumnadrochit.” I smiled at Brandy, who rolled her eyes.

Liao returned to her briefcase and removed a thick accordion file sealed with a combination lock. “The photos I am about to show you were taken eleven days ago by scientists from Beijing University. The preserved remains of these two creatures were found frozen within a twenty-nine-kilometer-long rift nicknamed Loose Tooth. The fissure is part of the Amery Ice Shelf in East Antarctica.” She quickly maneuvered the lock’s numbers to the correct three-digit sequence and opened the file, removing several glossy color photos, which she laid out before me.

I stared at the objects in the images, particularly at the excavated block of ice flanked by two humans to add the perspective of size.

The flesh on the back of my neck prickled.

“The marine biologist on loan to us could not identify either species, though he believed the animals may have lived during—”

“—the Miocene,” I finished. “This creature here — the one that’s being eaten — I’m reasonably certain it was a giant species of caiman called a Purussaurus .”

Brandy looked perplexed. “Caiman? Ye mean, like a crocodile?”

“Yes, only this one was fifty feet long. Purussaurus remains have been found in the Peruvian Amazon in South America. Two distinct species of Crocodylia were discovered— brasiliensis and mirandai. Purussaurus mirandai had a wider, far more elongated skull that was extremely flat. Its nostrils were unusually large, the openings three feet long. No one seems to know what they were used for.”

Ben glanced at Dr. Ahmed. “Looks like you found your brainiac. Hey, Zach, what do you call the big python that choked trying to eat the pussy-saurus?”

“ Pu-rus-sau-rus . And I have no idea. The biggest snake fossil ever found belonged to Titanoboa , which grew to forty-five feet. But it lived sixty million years ago, and even that monster was too small to go after an adult Purussaurus . Dr. Liao, you say your team found these remains on the Amery Ice Shelf?”

“Yes, but that’s not where this epic battle took place. Dr. Ahmed, please show Dr. Wallace the I.P.R. image.”

Reaching into the file, the Pakistani scientist removed a black-and-white satellite image taken of the Antarctic continent, only without its two-mile-thick ice cap.

“Thanks to the development of radio echo-sounding, reflection seismology, and ice-penetrating radar, we now know what Antarctica’s geology looks like beneath the ice sheet and how the terrain would have appeared millions of years ago. As you can see, Dr. Wallace, the Antarctic landmass possesses more than a hundred and fifty lakes. Think of them as subglacial reservoirs of meltwater. As the ice sheet moves, its flow rate is affected by the level of these lakes, which rise and fall like the locks on the Panama Canal. The meltwater drains into a network of subglacial streams and rivers, which in turn keep the glacier moving out to sea. As the ice sheet passes over a lake, it causes some of its surface water to freeze. Anything caught in this accretion ice becomes part of the ice sheet.”

“Which is how these monsters’ remains came to be discovered in the Loose Tooth rift.”

“Precisely. As the ice sheet moves, its weight compresses gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide downward while raising sediment and other objects caught in its wake. The frozen remains of these two behemoths were squeezed topside as the ice became part of the Amery Ice Shelf. By analyzing the ice attached to the creatures’ remains, we were able to determine the location of their habitat while they were alive.”

“Which is…?”

“Lake Vostok — the largest and deepest body of water on the continent.”

I looked more closely at the satellite image. At one hundred and sixty miles long and fifty miles wide, Vostok was roughly the size of Lake Ontario, only its eleven-hundred-foot depths easily dwarfed those of the Great Lake. My eyes traced a river that appeared to run from Vostok’s northern border to the Amery Ice Shelf. “Dr. Ahmed, how far would these creatures’ remains have had to travel down this river to reach that rift?”

He was ready with the answer. “We calculated the journey to be between eight and nine hundred miles, depending upon what section of Vostok they were in when they engaged in battle. The lake also possesses two islands, so they might have fought on land. We are bringing in a team of paleontologists to inspect the fossils for traces of soil.”

Brandy inspected the satellite image. “Ye say this lake is buried beneath the snow?”

Dr. Ahmed nodded. “Beneath an ice sheet thirteen thousand feet thick. The lake was sealed off approximately fifteen million years ago.”