“Ming, you okay?”
“Zach, forget her. I need your help.”
I laid her down gently on the cockpit’s inverted ceiling and crawled back to Ben’s compartment. “What’s wrong? Are we powerless?”
“If we were powerless, we’d be dead. Hear that humming? That’s our lithium-ion batteries.”
“How long will they last?”
“Longer than us, I’m afraid.” He pointed to the inverted air gauge: 147 minutes.
My limbs began to tremble, fear pushing my mind toward a place that I knew would end badly.
“We’re in a bit of trouble here, Zach. The river left us high and dry on its bank. We need to find a way to maneuver the Barracuda back into the water, then manage our way across this plateau into the northern basin and locate our extraction point. Allowing for a minimum ascension of thirty minutes, we need to accomplish all that, well, pretty damn fast.”
“The river must be close. Maybe we can roll the sub manually, like a log.”
“You’re reading my mind. First things first, we need to retract the Barracuda’s wings. I’m seeing double right now, so maybe you can locate the stabilizer controls on my command console.”
Balancing on my knees, I used the flashlight to search the control panel. “Got it.”
“Beneath — I mean above — the stabilizer are two small T-bars. Pull them toward you and the wings should retract.”
Locating the devices, I gave them each a sharp tug.
A whine of hydraulics joined us in the darkness as the wings retracted, sending the Barracuda barrel-rolling down an embankment.
There was nothing to grab hold of, just dizzying darkness and painful bumps and an elbow to the head that drew stars. With a jarring thud, we stopped, the sub landing right side-up.
Ben and I moaned as we disentangled ourselves in the narrow cockpit. Crawling over his dashboard, I dropped into my leather chair and closed my eyes against the vertigo and a nauseating drop in blood sugar. Feeling for my personal storage area, I removed a bottle of water and a bag of trail mix and ate.
“Zach, use your night glasses. See if you can find the river.”
“We’re in the river,” Ming said, groggily. “The water is gone.”
I searched for the night-vision goggles, put them on, and stared out of the bow at the alien landscape. We were in a gully as wide as a city block, its depths tapering down two stories. The surging rapids had been replaced by a three-foot-deep trough of water, interrupted by patches of volcanic rock and mud.
“Ming’s right, Ben. We’re in the river, but the water’s gone.”
“Gone? How? Where did it go?”
“Vostok has tides,” Ming reminded us. “We left on a full moon. Perhaps we are experiencing the effects of— ”
“Come on, Ming. Full moons don’t cause a fifty-foot drop between high tide and low tide. Tell her, Zach!”
Ben was losing it.
So was I.
My eyes locked on the LED instrument panel before me, hoping to steady the vertigo.
“Zach, what’s your external pressure reading?”
I glanced at the gauge, blinking several times. “This can’t be right. The gauge must have broken when we flipped. I’ve got 228 psi. What could be causing it?”
“It must be it,” Ming muttered.
Ben turned around, suddenly animated. “I knew it! I knew you were MJ-12.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Captain.”
“The hell you don’t. Why don’t you tell Dr. Wallace what’s causing this magnetic interference? After all, that is why we’re here.”
“What’s he talking about, Ming?”
“Nothing. It is simply a theory.”
“A theory… really?”
“Ben, take it easy.”
“No. No, I want to hear about this theory — the theory that funded this expedition. Isn’t that right, Dr. Liao?”
“Ignore him, Zachary. My sponsors funded this historic mission to advance science.”
“Your sponsors, of course. Tell us about your sponsors. Agricola Industries, for instance. Why would a private Canadian firm specializing in tar sand technology invest over half a million dollars in an exploratory mission of a subglacial lake? Doesn’t make much sense until you do a little digging and learn that Agricola was bought out two years ago by ITT. Have you ever heard about ITT, Zach?”
“Why don’t you tell me after we figure a way out of this mess?”
“They’re big in transportation and energy,” Ben said, “but their strength lies in the aerospace and defense sector. This is a company whose CEO met with Adolf Hitler prior to World War II, whose subsidiary owned a twenty-five-percent share of the German aircraft manufacturer that built Luftwaffe fighter planes. To show you how well connected they are, ITT received $27 million in restitution from the United States for damages inflicted upon their Luftwaffe plant as a result of the war. What a set of balls on these guys. They invest in our enemies, then sue America for fighting their German allies. And the bastards win! They were involved in the 1964 CIA coup in Brazil, the 1972 Republican National Convention scandal, the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile, and in 2007 Ming’s sponsor became the first major defense contractor to be convicted of criminal violations of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act when they transferred classified information about laser weapon countermeasures to China.”
“How do you know all this, Ben?”
“It’s public record.”
“Let me rephrase that. Why do you know all this?”
“I know it because their defense sector is a front for MAJESTIC-12, a tightly wound group of puppet-masters who profit from war and are committed to maintaining the status quo when it comes to our energy supply. Big Oil, Monsanto, the military industrial complex, and a select group of bankers… don’t roll your eyes, Zach. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Discover a new clean-energy source that can free us from fossil fuels and these boys will deny you a patent, steal your technology, and crush you like a bug. There’s a reason they’re funding this little venture, but it has nothing to do with marine biology. Oh, and you can bet the farm it was their GeoEye-1 satellite that pinpointed our location when we splashed down a million miles off-course.”
The satellite… Vostok Command can’t send help unless they know where we are!
Spinning my chair back around to my command console, I powered up the Valkyries, creating a heat signature for their thermal imaging sensors.
Ming and Ben continued wasting our air supply. “My job in organizing this venture, Captain, was to procure enough funds to cover the technological expenses. So what if a defense contractor invested in our mission?”
“Vostok’s huge. Yet somehow you managed to select a splashdown site where the magnetic anomaly is at its strongest?”
“It’s a geological phenomenon. I’m a geophysicist.”
“A geophysicist who recruited Zachary Wallace as a front, to fool the Russians into believing the mission’s aim was to discover new life-forms. Of course, you never said what kind of new life-forms.”
The conversation was getting heated and more than a little weird. Perhaps I might have cared had we not been running out of air.
Thick droplets of water rained down from the ice sheet, dropping out of a dense fog. The river bed twisted up ahead to the right. Beyond that, we’d probably never know.
What if there was water around that bend?
My eyes returned to the gauge monitoring the exterior pressure. How much could the human body handle? The ice sheet was obviously off the scale, but 228 psi— that equated to free diving in about 350 feet of water. The world record for free diving was about 420 feet. I was certainly no diver, but leaving the sub wasn’t about holding my breath, it was about being able to handle the extreme pressures that would be squeezing my ears, sinus cavity, and lungs — something I had faced years earlier when our submersible had suddenly cracked open in the depths of the Sargasso Sea.