He disconnected my support cable, and down I went, dropping through Loch Ness’s frigid waters like an anchor. The beam from my forward light cut through the darkness, revealing a tea-colored world, but everything seemed to be spinning.
“Speak to me, Zachary.”
“Dizzy, I’m just a little dizzy.”
“That’s because yer spinning on yer cable. Look inside yer headpiece. Just below yer lower jaw you’ll see a set of gauges. Check yer compass, it’s in orange. It shows direction and course, sort of like a submarine. Press on your thrusters and come to a complete stop. Then call out yer depth to me.”
“Two hundred thirty feet.”
“Have ye stopped spinning?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now ease off the thrusters and continue descending while callin’ out yer depth.”
“Four-sixty. Five hundred feet. Five-forty—”
“Don’t get cocky. Keep it slow and steady. What do ye see?”
“Not much. Even using my light, visibility’s less than fifteen feet. Outside the beam, the water’s pitch-black. I just passed seven hundred feet. The water temperature’s a chilly thirty-eight degrees, but I’m fine. I can see the bottom. It’s a muddy, flat expanse littered here and there by petrified clumps of Scotch pine. The trees are embedded in the soot, belching streams of gas. Their branches are covered in plankton. They’re reaching out for me like the rotting arms of Loch Ness’s dead…
“Jesus, what am I doing down here?”
“Jesus, Zach, whit are ye doing down there?”
My eyes snapped open, True’s voice beckoning in my ear. “Sorry, I must have fallen asleep. Where are we?”
“Fifty feet from splashdown. Command shut yer sub down half an hour ago. The borehole’s checked out solid above ye. I imagine they’ll be allowing you tae proceed.”
“Ben, wake up. We’re here.” I kicked the back of his seat with my foot. “Ming, you awake?”
She yawned and stretched as our headsets reverberated in our ears. “Barracuda, this is Vostok Command. We’re ready for you to reignite the Valkyrie units. Are you ready to make history?”
Ben responded with a yawn. “Roger that, Vostok Command. Reigniting Valkyrie units on my mark. Three… two… one… ignite.”
“Confirm ignition. Forty feet until splashdown … ”
“Zach, activate our exterior lights.”
“Twenty feet … ”
“Hey, Zach, since you’re in the nose cone, I guess that technically makes you the first man down. Since Ming’s the first woman, where does that leave me?”
“Playing for sloppy seconds, I guess.”
“Ten feet until splashdown. Here we go, people. Eight… five… two … ”
With a final craaaaack the layer of ice beneath us peeled away, and suddenly we were free-falling backward in darkness. My stomach lurched and my heart pounded in my chest as I waited for a splashdown that wasn’t coming.
Ming screamed over the whistling of the submersible’s aft wings cutting through the air.
Ben yelled, “Hold on!” three times before we finally struck water, our submersible plunging bow-first into Lake Vostok.
10
“If you drink too much from a bottle marked ‘poison,’
it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.”
The Barracuda plummeted through a blackness that seemed to reach out at us. After what felt like a two-hundred-foot dive, we leveled off, orientated in the pitch by the soft glow of our command console’s lights.
I unlocked my seat and rotated it to face forward.
“Zach, how far did we fall?” Ben asked.
I checked my depth gauge, which was resetting to accommodate our new liquid environment. “According to my instruments, we’re eighty-seven feet beneath the surface of Lake Vostok.”
“That’s not what I asked you. I asked how far we fell. In case you two still haven’t figured it out yet, we weren’t supposed to free fall out of the ice sheet. The ice sheet was supposed to be pressing against the lake’s surface!”
I realized he was right. “Bring us to the surface. Let’s take a look.”
Ben shut down the lasers and powered up the submersible’s engine while Ming tried the radio.
“Vostok Command, this is Dr. Liao. Do you have a fix on our position?”
“Barracuda, this is Victor Lopez in navigation. It looks like you may have overshot your targeted submergence point. We’re waiting for a satellite pass to track your exact location. ETA is twelve minutes. Keep your lasers on so we can locate your heat signature.”
“Acknowledged. We’ll use the time to collect a water sample.”
“Overshot our targeted submergence point? What the hell does that mean?” Ben ranted as he reactivated the Valkyries, the sub’s exterior lights guiding us to the surface. “If you ask me, it sounds like somebody topside screwed the pooch. My money’s on the dumb Viking.”
“Shut up, Ben.” I watched our bow lights’ beacon cut a path through the clear, dark waters until our nose popped free of the surface.
We were surrounded by a dense fog. I aimed our starboard light overhead, but the beam failed to reach the bottom of the ice sheet. “It’s gotta be up there somewhere.”
“Zach, use the sonar to ping the ceiling.”
“That won’t work.”
“Yes it will. The computer can calculate the distance between the air and the ice by the time it takes the sound waves to hit the ice sheet.”
“Do it, Zach,” Ming chimed in.
I positioned my headphones over my ears, activated the sonar station and pushed the red ACTIVE button, sending a loud ping echoing across the surface in all directions.
The acoustic reflection bounced off the ceiling, and the computer pinpointed the bottom of the ice sheet—112 feet above our heads.
Ben swore from his perch behind me. “A hundred and twelve feet. Houston, we have a major problem.”
“Captain, please calm down. Whatever the problem is, we’ll resolve it.”
“Ming, in order to return to the surface we were simply supposed to activate the lasers and launch bow-up out of the water. As the hole opened Vostok’s water pressure would drive us straight up like a geyser. That entire premise was based on the ice sheet being accessible. A 112-foot ceiling isn’t accessible. Are we supposed to grow wings and fly up to it?”
“Stay calm,” I said, my pulse pounding. “We know the first Valkyrie went down and came right back up. That means the bottom of the ice sheet isn’t uniform.”
“Zachary’s right,” added Ming. “We simply need to locate the first drone’s exit point.”
“All right, Doc, I’m buying what you’re peddling, but riddle me this: if the Barracuda launched from the same starting point as the Valkyrie, then how did we end up here, wherever here is? Something must have altered our trajectory.”
“Agreed, but remember the Valkyrie drone is basically a tethered laser with no variables to account for. The Barracuda’s trajectory is subject to a thousand possible weight displacements during the descent. Even the three of us leaning to one side could have caused us to deviate miles off course. In a worst-case scenario we can always have Vostok Command send down a second unit so we can track its splashdown. We’ll be fine.”