Riggs looked at his fellow SEALs for a moment before he replied.
‘And how often does this chamber flood, do you think?’
Chandler gestured with an oddly casual jab of his thumb to one side, at the pristine walls of the chamber.
‘Look at that ice,’ he said. ‘It’s mirror smooth due to the passage of warmer water polishing its surface on a regular basis. You remember those steps inside the tunnel, the ones that looked hand carved that were created by gradually receding flood water? They were each two or three inches deep — water receding gradually. But the walls were also mirror polished. It’s my guess that this cavern floods perhaps every few days and then the water recedes over a few days, leaving the steps in the ice. There cannot be much warning of a deluge as otherwise no soldier would have been so slow as to be drowned down that tunnel.’
Ethan began looking around them at the cavern system and at the water gushing from the ragged fissure in the east wall of the cavern.
‘The Nazis must have placed a warning system of some kind into the tunnels, or perhaps out here, something to give their soldiers at least a chance of making it inside the base.’
Lieutenant Riggs was about to reply when from the deep black water they heard a thunderous moan shudder through the cavern. Ethan felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise up as he turned instinctively toward the hellish groan, as though the entire base was shifting position and wrending the very metal from which it was built.
Lieutenant Riggs stood up alongside him as Ethan’s eye caught on the black water of the docks before them.
‘Look at that,’ Hannah said as she pointed at the water.
To Ethan’s amazement he saw the water shivering in miraculously symmetrical waves, rippling as though sound were travelling through it, and he realized that it actually was.
‘The water is cavitating,’ Chandler gasped as he observed the phenomenon, raising his voice to be heard above the reverberating moan. ‘Something is emitting enough power to cause all that water to shiver in response.’
The sound slowly died away, fading into the darkness as the rippling water settled down once more.
‘I don’t want to meet what caused that,’ Hannah said as she backed away from the water’s edge a few paces.
Doctor Chandler walked in the opposite direction. ‘I most certainly do,’ he replied. ‘Do you have any idea how much energy was required to achieve that? Any biological form capable of such an emission must be gigantic, far larger than a Blue Whale.’
Lieutenant Riggs turned back to his explosive charges as though nothing had happened but Ethan could sense him thinking fast as he worked.
‘We’ll rig the charges anyway, but we’ll hold off for as long as we can before detonating them. Only if the MJ-12 team breach the entrance do we blow them, understood?’
The SEALs all acknowledged the order as Doctor Chandler turned to his colleague, his features taut with excitement.
‘You said that you found new life down here?’
‘Yes,’ the scientist replied, momentarily distracted by the unearthly moan they had heard coming from beneath the water, his eyes still fixed warily upon the dock. ‘It does not share a genetic code with any known life form in our database.’
That caused even the SEALs to stop working and glance across at Chandler.
‘No known genetic match?’ Chandler echoed.
‘That’s right,’ the scientist replied. ‘It’s a form of life that might not have originated on this planet. It’s exo-biology, an alien life form.’
XXIX
Ethan and Hannah followed Doctor Chandler into the command center and through to a large back room that had once probably been used as a planning or operations center, the room dominated by a large table where Chandler’s scientists had prepared a simple laboratory in the glow of luminous light sticks.
‘How much work have you completed?’ Chandler asked.
‘We have performed nucleic acid sequencing and have deduced the metabolic pathways of the bacteria represented in the flowing water we sampled and, by extension, in the chambers that may lay beyond further inside the glacier,’ the younger man replied. ‘We have already found over a hundred unique gene sequences, ninety per cent or so from bacteria with the rest from Eukarya. Taxonomic classifications are underway for most of the sequences.’
‘And how would you classify what you have found so far?’ Chandler asked urgently.
‘The taxa are similar to organisms previously described from lakes, brackish water, marine environments, soil, glaciers, ice, lake sediments, deep-sea sediments, deep-sea thermal vents, animals and plants. There are multiple sequences both aerobic and anaerobic, psychrophilic, thermophilic, halophilic, alkaliphilic, acidophilic and desiccation-resistant. Autotrophic and heterotrophic organisms are present, including some multicellular eukaryotes.‘
Both Ethan and Hannah stared bug-eyed at the scientists.
‘So, in English, what does that all mean?’ Ethan asked.
Doctor Chandler stared into space for a moment and then he walked past them without another word and back into the command center. Ethan exchanged a glance with Hannah and then followed Chandler into the center to see him staring at the Piri Reis map on the wall there.
‘Let me guess,’ Ethan quipped, ‘you don’t have a clue and you’re just covering up.’
If Chandler heard Ethan, he didn’t respond to it directly.
‘I think I know where the water’s coming from,’ he said finally.
Ethan felt a pulse of excitement. ‘Good. If we can shut it off we’ll prevent the chamber from flooding, right?’
A ghost of a smile flickered across Chandler’s features. ‘You won’t be shutting this flow off, my boy,’ he replied.
‘You wanna start telling us what’s going on?’ Hannah demanded. ‘Y’know, lives on the line and all that?’
Chandler roused himself from his reverie and gestured to the map.
‘This map, as you know, may or may not show Antarctica ice-free. However, we know that the continent was indeed ice free in the distant past and that it was filled with all manner of life including dinosaurs.’
‘I got today’s history lecture,’ Hannah confirmed. ‘Cut to the chase.’
‘Then Antarctica drifted south as a result of natural plate tectonics and became shrouded with ice that is now several miles thick,’ he went on. ‘That means, logically, that biologically preserved material and perhaps species were trapped within and beneath that ice in completely unique environments.’
Ethan glanced at the map on the wall and began to understand where the scientist was going with this.
‘You think that something else has evolved under the ice?’ he suggested.
‘Not something,’ Chandler corrected, ‘but an entirely different and isolated ecosystem, a Lost World of sorts. Antarctica has been frozen beneath an ice sheet for at least fifteen million years, more than enough time for new and novel species to have adapted through natural selection to the conditions encountered beneath the ice.’
Ethan frowned.
‘But how could anything get out if it’s trapped beneath miles of ice?’
Chandler reached up to the map and pointed to a small oval that looked like a lake, drawn on the surface of what was presumed to be Antarctica.
‘Lake Vostok,’ he said finally. ‘It’s a submarine lake, trapped beneath the glaciers of Antarctica for fifteen or more million years. Its water is said to be utterly pristine, totally sealed off from the rest of the world for eons. If biological remains of species made it into the lake before the ice sealed it in, there could be anything lurking down there.’