Circling the tabular berg, we came upon a third color: green.
As glaciers cross the Antarctic continent, their roots crush and absorb minerals from the underlying bedrock. When the ice melts, phytoplankton feeds off the minerals and grows. In turn, krill feed on the phytoplankton, and penguins, seals, and whales feed on the krill.
The Antarctic food chain would not exist without its glaciers.
Hours later, we came across the top of that food chain.
We had been following a pair of minke whales. Thirty feet long, these ten-ton baleen mini-giants were less than half the girth of their rorqual cousins, the humpback and fin whales, and were quite plentiful in Antarctic waters. Ben was keeping us within visual distance of their white underbellies when a dozen blips suddenly popped onto my sonar screen.
Orca.
The wolves of the sea circled the minkes, separating the smaller female from its mate. Two big male orcas remained on the periphery, breaching high in the air to flop hard onto the surface as if to mark the kill zone.
The assaults were carried out by the juvenile killers and a few of the adult females. Over the next forty minutes, we watched from one hundred and seventy feet below the blood-drenched surface as the remaining minke fought to breathe — until one of the big bulls landed on its back in an attempt to drown it.
I turned in my seat and jumped, confronted by a black-and-white monster whose emerging presence occupied the entire starboard side of the acrylic glass. The bull killer whale stared at me as if we were a threat to its pod’s dinner.
The sea became alive with squeals and clicks as the pack’s males echolocated us. A nerve-racking game of cat-and-mouse ensued as the two six-ton predators bumped and prodded the Barracuda with their snouts until we vacated the area.
Dusk came quickly, offering us an opportunity to practice piloting in the dark. Ben engaged the exterior lights while I used the sub’s sonar to guide us west through the shallows of Prydz Bay.
Four hours and twenty minutes after we had tumbled into the sea, the Barracuda leaped out of the water and slid onto the ice. Physically exhausted, Ben and I climbed out of the submersible and into the back of an awaiting snow vehicle while our underwater vessel was loaded onto its trailer.
We continued this training regimen over the next week, alternating our roles until I became a competent pilot. During this time, True occupied his days “recouping” in the company of a Swedish weather technician named Jennie Backman. I was thankful for her distraction.
Then on day eight, we received a radio communiqué from Vostok Dome, and everything changed.
8
Earplugs, bench seating with webbed backs, tiny windows, and a ride that induced hemorrhoids, we were back onboard another C-130 transport, this time bound for our final destination — a minus-forty-degree desert of ice located a thousand miles to the southeast of Prydz Bay.
Vostok. After six months of head games and fears, I was finally on my way. And I was truly excited. Perhaps it was the past week of training with Ben, but my attitude and confidence level had changed. The simple truth was that Vostok really was the holy grail of science, an unexplored frontier that could potentially reveal how life came to be on Earth. For whatever reason, Ben and I had been chosen among thousands of explorers to be its Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and my ego was running wild.
The call from Ming Liao had upped the ante. Something had happened on the first Valkyrie drone launch, an unexpected find. Ming refused to provide any details other than to say that she wanted her two pilots on site immediately.
True was brooding. He had not wanted to leave his new lover. Conversely, I hadn’t thought about my family since arriving at Davis. Part of it was the mental and physical demands of learning how to pilot the submersible; part of it was my own acceptance of the mission.
The gray-haired Russian scientist seated across from True and me had been staring at my face ever since we had taken off. Twenty minutes into the flight, he leaned toward me and shouted over the engine noise, “You are Wallace, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Mikhail Kopilevich, geologist. This will be your first time at Vostok?”
“Yes. What about you?”
He snorted. “Eighteen summers on top of four winters. My first trip from Mirny Station was in winter on supply tractor. It took us entire week to travel thirteen hundred kilometers in minus twenty-five degrees Celsius. You know what is minus twenty-five degrees Celsius?”
“About minus seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit.” I leaned in. “How do you Russian scientists handle such extreme cold?”
He winked. “We know survival secrets.”
“Anything you’d care to share?”
“First, you share something with me. Why does Chinese woman exclude my country from this new field operation? Without Russian Antarctic Expedition there is no Vostok Station. There is no discovery of lake.”
“From what I understand, the coalition scientists involved in this new research station were afraid your team was not adhering to strict contamination protocols. You used Freon and kerosene to lubricate your borehole. Some of these chemicals tainted the bore samples and could have breached the lake.”
The geologist snapped. “We stopped borehole before we reached lake! Vostok is under tremendous pressure. On breakthrough, water will rush up borehole, freeze, and seal chemical fluids.”
“It’s not my expedition, Dr. Kopilevich. I’m simply an invited guest.”
“I think you are more than invited guest, Dr. Wallace. You should know new equipment is developed by St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute to ensure lake remains uncontaminated upon intrusion. Visit our station; I will give you personal tour.”
“Thank you.”
“Consider this gift from new friend.” The Russian reached into his bag and removed a thirty-ounce tub of butter. “When Vostok weather becomes too cold, eat fistful of butter. It will make you warm inside.”
Standing on an ice runway two hours later, I seriously contemplated scooping a mittenful of butter into my mouth.
Vostok greeted us with a punishing forty-mile-an-hour katabatic wind that dropped minus thirty-eight into another realm of cold. It abused our carefully planned layers of Extreme Cold Weather gear and seeped into our bones. It formed snotsicles on my upper lip and pelted my tinted goggles with shards of snow.
Dragging our duffle bags, we waddled like penguins to an awaiting bright red truck as our team of Chinese technicians loaded the crate containing the Barracuda onto a sled.
The Hägglund was a Swedish snow vehicle with cab space for eight passengers and a trailing sled that could tow up to two tons. Powered by a Mercedes turbo diesel engine, the truck rode on four rubber tracks and a loose suspension system that gave us a nauseating herky-jerky ride, made worse by its twelve-mile-an-hour maximum speed.
Forty torturous minutes later, we arrived at the dome.
The structure that housed the expedition was a three-story-high, three-hundred-fifty-foot-in-diameter geodesic dome, its gold-painted roof composed of an array of trianglular panels that were far more stable than the standard rectangular-cut structures. Highly resistant to snow, ice, and wind, the dome needed no internal columns or interior load-bearing walls, and required less power to heat than box architectural designs. Erected using prefabricated components, it could be disassembled if need be and moved quickly, which was a major consideration when taking into account the fact that Vostok’s waters were spread out over 6,060 square miles. Different sections of the lake could produce vastly different discoveries — and life-forms.