Vostok Read online

  For the next half an hour, we worked our way over unrecognizeable shards of bone and rock that were hardly worth the journey—until the remains of an ancient water creature blanched white in our keel lights.

  Its backbone stretched before our widening eyes, each form-fitted vertebra as large as a bowling ball. I estimated the spine to be forty feet long, and then I saw the size of its skull and the adrenaline started pumping.

  In November of 2008, paleontologists excavating a dried lake bed in Peru had stumbled across the fossilized remains of an undiscovered sea monster that definitely ranked up there as one of Nature’s all-time killers. From the partially preserved skull, teeth, and mandible, they knew the creature had been enormous, as long as sixty feet. The cranium’s curved basin suggested it harbored a spermaceti organ—a series of oil and wax reservoirs separated by connective tissue, theorized to be a resonance chamber used by cetaceans for echolocation.

  The owner appeared to be the ancestor of a sperm whale, with one major anatomical difference—the Miocene killer had possessed a lower jaw that was far wider than that of its modern-day cousin, giving it a bite that rivaled Carcharodon megalodon, its chief competitor.

  After much debate the excited researchers settled on a name for their mammalian monster: Livyatan melvillei, combining the Hebrew spelling for the biblical Leviathan with the surname of Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick. It was a fitting title for an ocean predator that had not only owned one of the most vicious bites in history but also the largest teeth, some of which measured fifteen inches.

  I had no doubt that the skull and jawbone lying twelve feet beneath our keel belonged to this Miocene monster. But why had these ocean-dwelling whales entered Vostok? Had something enticed them to venture upriver into a saltwater lake? Was it a survival instinct, a search for prey… or something else entirely?

  The teeth were enormous, cone-shaped, and twice as long as an ear of corn. Ming quickly located a tooth that had belonged to the beast’s lower jaw and decided she could acquire it using the sub’s claw.

  Ben disagreed. “The current will snap the claw like kindling.”

  “Nonsense. It will hold.”

  “It’s too risky. If it bends you won’t be able to dock the arm. And if you can’t dock it, it will interfere with our ascent. Tell her, Zach.”

  But I was no longer listening to them, for the emptiness that had occupied our sonar monitor was no longer empty, the vacuum of space replaced by three distinct blips—

  —and they were headed our way.

  11

  Blee-bloop… blee-bloop… blee-bloop …

  It was a freakish sound, almost like a water jug expelling its contents, and when I heard it in my sonar earpiece I nearly passed out from the blood rushing from my head.

  Imagine surviving a plane crash, only to find yourself on another commercial jetliner years later hearing the captain announce, “Sorry folks, we just lost one of our engines. Prepare for an emergency landing.” You’d feel your whole body go numb because you know what’s coming, and it’s seriously bad news as you ask yourself, “What the hell am I doing back on a goddamn plane?”

  In my case it was a sub, and I knew what was coming because I had heard the blee-bloop sound on sonar in the Sargasso Sea just before I drowned. The Navy guys had named this unknown species “the bloops” because they weren’t whales or sharks or giant squids, and their internal respiratory organs created a bloop sound on sonar. Having survived the encounter, it was my unfortunate fate to discover Nessie to be one of their kind—a predatory fish that had grown very large after becoming trapped in Loch Ness when an aquifer had collapsed, cutting off access to the ocean and her migratory pattern. Thus spawning a legend.

  And now we were about to meet her ancient Miocene cousins.

  Ben grabbed his headphones. “Where are they?”

  “Approaching from the northwest on course two-eight-five. These are big, nasty predators, and we seriously need to leave. Like now!”

  “How do you know they’re predators?”

  “You read my book. Don’t you hear that bloop sound?”

  “No. All I hear is Ming scraping that damn claw along the bottom. Hey, Ming.” He reached over his seat and grabbed her arm, getting her attention. “Zach says we’ve got biologics on sonar.”

  “Really? This is incredible. How far away are they? Can we catch up with them? We absolutely need to get them on video.”

  “Maybe I’m not explaining this right. These predators are thirty to forty feet long, and they’re stalking us, Ming. Now get that claw docked. Ben, are you driving, or am I?”

  “Just tell me a direction.”

  I stared at the sonar screen. They’re coming from the northwest. Southeast distances us, only we need to head north to get to the extraction point

  The creatures were closing fast, and I couldn’t think.

  “Zach?”

  “Come about. We’ll let the current take us north. No engines for now; we need to sneak past them. Ming, enough with the damn whale tooth!”

  “Give me twenty seconds. I’ve almost got it in the catch basket.”

  I turned to Ben for help. “Remember that creature that choked on the croc? You’re about to meet his great-grandkids.”

  “To hell with that!” Strapping himself in, Ben turned the sub hard to starboard, spinning the Barracuda’s bow to the north.

  Ming swore in Mandarin. “I lost the tooth!”

  “Dock that arm and strap in. Zach, you sure about these lights?”

  “Yes— no. Wait. Keep them off for now, but be ready to turn them back on. Everyone quiet. Ming?”

  “You wanted me to dock the arm; it’s docked.”

  I listened on sonar, my eyes following the bloops. We were going to cross paths any second, only there was no way to know if they had heard us turn into the current.

  Eight hundred feet…

  The respiratory sounds grew louder. There were three of them, an adult and two gurgling offspring.

  Four hundred feet…

  They were slowing.

  They’re unsure. They can’t detect us with the engines off.

  The current swept us closer to where the creatures were circling.

  Two hundred feet…

  Remembering my night-vision goggles, I reached into a cushioned compartment on the right side of my command center and retrieved them. I placed them over my eyes and the blackness was stripped away, replaced by an olive-green world—

  —and a serpent-like creature looming before us that was clearly not my Nessie.

  This one was far worse.

  It was just as long at thirty to forty feet but far thicker in girth. Its hide was covered in thick slime that reflected our lights from its dark undulating coils. A vertical fin ran the length of its chocolate-brown body to the tip of its tail. The mouth was hideous, rimmed with curved, stiletto-sharp teeth set outside the jaw like the oversized fangs of an Angler fish. The snout was square, its volcano-shaped, pale-pink nostrils opening and closing as it inhaled the current.

  Like its modern-day relative, it was a species of giant eel, only it possessed fore-fins—gruesome clawed appendages its ancestors probably once used to climb onto land.

  Oh, yeah, and it was electric.

  From its gilled neck to its tail, along its flank it possessed bioluminescent cells that generated yellow zaps of electricity, which radiated signals like an alien vessel—a light show, no doubt, designed to mesmerize its prey.

  I was already mesmerized in fear. “Ben, full throttle!”

  As Ben stamped down on both propeller pedals, I powered on the exterior headlamps and aimed the beams at the creature’s eyes—only I couldn’t find its eyes. In my haste I had accidently powered on the Valkyries, and before I’d realized my error we had shot past the Miocene nightmare’s snapping jaws.

  A flash of horizontal lightning revealed the second creature lurking in the darkness off the starboard bow. It was as large as its sibling and
appeared to be communicating to it using its bioluminescent cells.

  Life and death is separated by a moment. When predator meets prey and there is no escape—the fly caught in the spider’s web, the desert mouse stung by the scorpion, the seal suddenly crushed inside the jaws of a great white shark—the end happens in a startling microsecond.

  It was as large as its sibling.

  And in that microsecond of clarity, I knew the hyperflexed mouth that suddenly bloomed out of the darkness directly ahead belonged to the adult and not the juveniles. She could have been eighty feet or a hundred. It didn’t matter. The seal doesn’t think about the length of its killer when it’s being eaten; it’s more of a how-did-this-happen moment.

  We were swallowed whole—shot right into the creature’s outstretched jaws and down its gullet!

  Before we could scream or yell or react, the Barracuda was soaring through a river of water down the creature’s throat.

  Before we could fathom where we were, we found our vessel being squeezed by internal esophageal muscles that bulged and prodded and clenched the submersible in an attempt to stymie our resistance.

  Before we could sanely deal with our insane situation, the Valkyrie lasers scorched the stomach lining and evaporated the creature’s digestive organs—along with blood, arteries, sinew, all of it—as the Barracuda exploded out of our would-be killer’s new arse.

  The entire journey lasted seconds.

  The three of us yelled and laughed and whooped it up, leaving behind thirty tons of writhing, gurgling sushi for the monster’s two orphaned goliaths to consume—Only the creatures ignored their dying parent and came after us.

  Ben quickly maneuvered the sub back into the current and accelerated. “I’m pushing thirty knots and can’t seem to lose them. Suggestions?”

  Before I could reply we heard a metallic pop at the ship’s tailfin.

  “We just lost our umbilical cord,” Ming announced.

  My gaze shifted nervously from the sonar array to my monitor, the real-time images coming from the Barracuda’s aft camera. The night-vision lens had a restricted field of view and showed open water, but my sonar painted the two creatures as they independently swooped in and out from the perimeter, riding the current like dolphins as they gauged how best to attack their fleeing prey without getting seared by our laser’s afterburners.

  “Doc, we got a serious problem. Losing the umbilical means we’re self-contained. If I don’t shut down the Valkyries soon, there won’t be enough juice left to make the ascent.”

  “Do it.”

  Ming’s voice crackled over our headphones. “I think that should be my decision, Zachary.”

  “Actually, it’s mine,” Ben said, powering down the lasers.

  Sensing the threat was gone, the two beasts grew more aggressive. Surfing the current, they attempted to snatch us in their awful jaws, each attempt inching closer to our hull.

  “Doc, I can’t hold them off!”

  My mind raced. They should have backed off by now. Why aren’t they tiring? Oh, hell. “Ben, get us out of this current. We need to wear them out.”

  He pulled back hard on his joystick, bringing us up and out of the river flow.

  Propelled by the seventeen-knot current, the two eels shot past us. I picked them up on sonar six hundred yards to the north, registering the disturbance as they left the flow to reengage the hunt.

  Ben wasted no time in changing course, taking us on a westerly heading at twenty-five knots.

  The creatures pursued us for close to two minutes before the costly expenditure of energy forced them to give up the chase. They faded into white noise as they headed south, no doubt to feed upon the remains of their mother.

  “We lost them.”

  “Thank God. So that’s what you dealt with in Loch Ness?”

  “No, not quite. Ben, we’re on the wrong heading. We need to be on zero-three-seven.”

  Ben banked the Barracuda hard to starboard, resuming the northeasterly course that would bring us to the extraction point.

  Ming’s voice crackled loudly over my headphones. “Zachary, this is incredible beyond our wildest expectations. Did you ever imagine we’d discover such creatures in Vostok?”

  Ben mumbled, “If he did, do you think he’d be here?”

  Ming ignored him. “Zachary, how could anything so large have survived down here?”

  I laid my head back and closed my eyes, my nerves still jumpy. “Humans adapt to new environments by using our brains; animals adapt by evolving anatomically. When Antarctica froze over during the Miocene age, it was a gradual process, not a mass extinction event. Vostok has air and water—”

  “And five thousand pounds per square inch of water pressure,” said Ben, who did a double-take, squinting to read his atmospheric pressure gauge. “Correction. Make that thirty-nine hundred pounds of pressure. How’d that happen?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Eels are fish, and water pressure doesn’t affect fish. Eels are also hardy creatures. No doubt they’ve become apex predators in this realm. The question is what else is out there that filled the gap between chemosynthetic bacteria and giant eels. Obviously there are still key pieces of the Vostok ecosystem that we haven’t seen.”

  “What good is seen without evidence,” Ming quipped. “The videocameras missed everything. No one is going to believe what we discovered if we cannot prove it.”

  “We’ve got more pressing problems,” Ben said, ascending the sub until once more we were plowing the lake’s surface. “When we lost our umbilical cord, we not only lost contact with Vostok Command, we lost our main power supply. We’ve got nineteen hours of air left, and at least five of them have to be used during our ascent. That leaves us fourteen hours to locate a section of Vostok where the bottom of the ice sheet and the lake’s surface are within a ship’s length of one another.”

  The weight of Ben’s words sunk in. For the next thirty minutes we remained quiet, conserving our air supply while we watched the mist overhead, hoping for an ice ceiling to appear.

  Instead, it started to rain.

  12

  “Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head,

  But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turnin’ red,

  Cryin’s not for me …

  ’Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complainin’

  Because I’m free… nothin’s worryin’ me.”

  —B.J. Thomas

  It began as scattered droplets and progressed steadily as we advanced on our northeasterly course. The rain, of course, was coming from the ice sheet above our heads. The question was: why was it melting?

  “Surface water temperature is forty-nine degrees,” Ming called out. “We must be passing over a geothermal vent field. Captain, take us back down to the bottom. If the vents are there, then we must be in the wrong area.”

  Ben dove the sub, and we officially entered the Miocene.

  Before I could react to the blizzard of objects appearing on my sonar screen, a swarm of anchovies glittered silver in our lights, whipping themselves into a frenzied six-story tornado.

  My heart palpitated a moment later when sonar detected a massive object rising at us from two hundred feet below the surface. Before Ben could swerve out of the way the water was teeming with salmon. Thousands of seven- to eight-foot-long scaly missiles pounded the sub like hail as they raced to dine at the all-you-can-eat anchovy buffet, their upturned mouths widening to reveal gruesome needle-sharp teeth.

  We waited until the deluge of fish passed before continuing our descent. The deeper we ventured, the larger the species seemed to be. Albino sunfish reflected our lights like miniature moons, and tarpon as large as groupers swerved around our craft. A toadfish pressed against the acrylic glass, blocking my forward view. Its large, flat head was as big as a basketball, its wide mouth filled with blunt teeth, its slime-covered body tapering back to a plump belly and fan-like pectoral fins.

  Dozens of blips appeared on my sonar screen and in our
lights giant stingrays flew past us on majestic twenty-foot wings, the magnificent albino creatures swarming to feed upon a wounded sunfish. One of these not-so-gentle giants swooped in and snatched the toadfish in its vicious bat-like mouth, its pale body pressing against the pod as its sharp triangular teeth skewered its meal. For a nerve-racking moment, the stingray’s wingspan enveloped the Barracuda, pitching us hard to port before it swam off.

  Ming delighted as she documented our descent. Ben swore. As for me, I could only gaze in wonderment at this preserved time capsule from the past, the marine biologist in me questioning whether these animals represented true Miocene species that existed in Antarctica fifteen million years ago or whether we were looking at anatomical variations that were a direct result of adapting to the extreme conditions of this uniquely isolated environment.

  The creative right side of my brain told my left, logical side to shut up and enjoy the show.

  The enjoyment, however, turned to trepidation when the first sharks appeared. Using my night-vision glasses, I identified two different species of requiem predators. The first Carcharhinid was a twelve-foot oceanic whitetip. The second brute was a bull shark that was twice the size and girth of the Barracuda.

  While both of these species had a reputation for following freshwater rivers inland to inhabit lakes, it was still shocking to find these ocean dwellers thriving in Vostok.

  Ming called out the temperature as we passed twelve hundred feet. “Fifty-three degrees.”

  That settled my shark dilemma. It was not just Antarctica, after all, that had frozen millions of years ago; the oceans surrounding the continent had also incurred a precarious drop in temperature. A river bleeding a warm-water current into coastal waters would have lured many ocean species.

  I shuddered to think what else might be down here.

  I got an answer as we passed sixteen hundred feet. A thousand shadows materialized all around us in every direction, becoming bulbous eyes and jaws that unhinged, and bizarre fish with needle-sharp teeth, many of which cast bioluminescent lanterns that dangled before their open mouths like bait. These were Vostok’s deepwater creatures, Miocene mutations forced to adapt to the darkness and cold.