“If this works”—Jonas looked hard at me—“there won’t be a funeral.”
“And if it doesn’t…? Never mind. C’mon, Zach, let’s get you what you need.”
Angus and I loaded the Manta with climbing equipment, flashlights, and extreme weather gear for two, while Mac stocked the sub with food and water. He wanted to add a few guns, only I stopped him. Violence had already gotten our species into enough trouble with our extraterrestrial visitors. The last thing we needed was to end up in a shootout, fighting over an advanced technology we lacked the morality to use.
Jonas had sobered up by his third cup of coffee. After a final trip to the toilet, he climbed into the port cockpit, lowered the acrylic glass over our heads, and signaled to Cyel Reed to flood the chamber.
Mac’s voice came over the radio. “Jonas, can you hear me okay on this frequency?”
“Yes. Are you in place?”
“We’re en route. What’s your ETA?”
“Twenty minutes, using a biologic pattern.”
“Roger that. Angus and I will be ready.”
The keel doors opened, releasing the Manta into a sun-lit emerald sea. “Jonas, what about the Liopleurodon? Should I go active on sonar?”
“It’s probably dead. If you start pinging, that research ship will know we’re down here.” Jonas kept the sub close to the sea floor, our movements and speed intended to mimic those of a giant manta ray.
We were less than two miles from MJ-12’s surface ship when our sonar monitors began to flicker.
“We’re being jammed. Zach, how close are we to that hole?”
“Six thousand feet. And the Tortuga’s sitting over it like a mother hen.”
“Then what we need is a fox. Mac, you ready to ruffle a few feathers?… Mac, can you hear me?”
The radio spat back static, followed by an unnerving quiet that ended with a crunch as the sub’s belly settled upon the silt-covered sea floor.
“Sonuva bitch, our engines just powered off.” Jonas fought the suddenly rigid controls. “Your pals aren’t playing around this time. Everything’s down — including our life-support system.”
The supertanker Tonga pushed its way south through Prydz Bay at a steady eight knots, her starboard flank hugging the eastern face of the Amery Ice Shelf.
Mac stood on her bridge next to my father, both men’s binoculars focused on the surface ship less than three nautical miles away. The Tortuga’s bow was pointed at the Loose Tooth Rift, her starboard flank exposed.
“Captain, any response from the Manta?”
“Nothing but static, Mr. Mackreides.”
“Shut down your engines. Full reverse. Mr. Al Nahyan, you may begin transmitting the message.”
The radio man spoke with an urgent British accent. “Mayday, mayday. This is the United Arab Emirates research tanker Tonga. Our rudder is badly damaged. We cannot navigate. We strongly advise you to move your ship or risk a collision.”
Mac stared at the steel vessel growing larger in his binoculars. “Angus, I believe it was Robert Burns who once said, ‘No man can tether time or tide. Time is short and the tide is out.’”
Angus grinned. “Those tha’ cannae be counseled cannae be helped.”
“Who said that?”
“My father, before he’d beat my arse with a hickory switch. Jist a wee love tap, he’d say.”
“What say we give MJ-12 a wee love tap?”
We were powerless, our sub lying on the floor of Prydz Bay, weighed down by our two lasers. Silt had buried all but the Valkyries and the top of our cockpit dome. The Tortuga’s keel was just visible in the distance, anchored in 320 feet of water.
We felt the rumble of the steel beast before we saw it, its 300,000 tons displacing the surface while vacuuming up the bottom, its presence causing the ice sheet to reverberate.
Then I saw the 1,100-foot supertanker’s bow converge upon the Tortuga’s starboard flank, and for the second time that morning I prepared to meet my Maker.
The process of slowing a supertanker must be initiated miles in advance using a braking pattern called a slalom, which veers the ship back and forth from starboard to port while her engines run full astern. Mac had either seriously miscalculated Newton’s Law of Conservation of Momentum, or he simply didn’t give a damn.
The prow of the supertanker struck the exposed flank of the Tortuga like a steadily moving train plowing through a double-decker aluminum bus, crushing the starboard infrastructure while its submerged bulb-shaped bow scooped up the vessel’s disfigured hull and carried it away with hardly a drop in speed or forward momentum.
Passageways crumpled. Water blasted through shredded steel plates. Internal pipes and cables ruptured. From Angus and Mac’s perspective, it must have appeared as though the supertanker had bitten off a chunk of the Tortuga’s ribs. From our perspective, it looked like a megalodon had snatched an orca in its jaws and was carrying it off to be consumed.
And then an unseen force swept us off the bottom into the eye of a hurricane.
I squeezed my eyes shut and held on as the vortex created by the two passing ships inhaled us, spinning us end over end toward the supertanker’s propeller shafts, the blades churning in reverse.
Jonas was a rock. Knowing the Tonga’s impact would shut down power to the Tortuga’s sonar array, he focused only on his command console. The moment the lights powered on he jammed the controls hard to port and pulled us away from the spinning blades into a steep dive.
Moments later a submerged wall of ice materialized into view. Jonas quickly honed in on the Loose Tooth Rift’s jagged chasm, which harbored the cavernous opening created nearly six hours earlier by the Tethys.
The borehole was now a clogged artery of white ice. Powering up the Valkyries, Jonas pressed the Manta’s nose to the frozen gauntlet, which quickly liquefied and inhaled us into its dark, widening orifice.
We were on our way.
36
“How puzzling all these changes are!
I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another.”
The sub’s lights illuminated a near-vertical shaft of ice so crystal-clear that Jonas struggled to discern the boundaries of the funnel. After the Manta’s fifth collision with the borehole’s walls, he shut down the exterior lights and relied strictly on the cockpit’s night-vision glass, which generated a view that reminded me of a miniature medical camera plunging down an olive-green esophagus.
After descending nearly six hundred feet, the passage leveled out, depositing us in a shallow sea of meltwater that separated the bottom of the ice sheet above our heads from the floor of Prydz Bay. Squeezed between these two titanic forces, the water pressure within this narrow, seemingly endless cavity registered an eye-popping 12,656 psi, the weight above us muffling everything but the sound of our breathing.
Visibility was limited to an olive-green patch that extended ten to twelve feet in every direction. For several minutes we maintained a snail’s pace through this vast, dark, liquid space, until the overwhelming sensation of claustrophobia sent Jonas fumbling for the lights. He flipped the switch, and our beams illuminated a hidden chamber of breathtaking beauty.