Vostok (5 page)

“Dr. Wallace, please sign the agreement so that we may speak freely. And if your wife insists upon participating in our discussion, she must also sign. Nothing personal,” she added as she met Brandy’s glare.

I glanced at Brandy. As she liked to say, it was a “shyte or get off the bowl” moment, only it had nothing to do with Liao’s pitch. If Brandy signed the non-disclosure now, it meant she cared enough about our marriage to be concerned where this journey might take me, assuming I was even interested. If, however, she walked out, then our marriage was as good as over.

“Give me the bloody paper.” Using Liao’s pen, she signed the document without reading it and slid it over to me. “It’s your life. Do as ye will.”

I reviewed the agreement and then signed it above Brandy’s signature. “Okay, Dr. Liao, both Wallaces have anted up. Make your pitch.”

“Please, call me Ming. As I said, the discovery is located in Antarctica. What do you know about the continent, other than it’s the coldest, most desolate place on Earth?”

“I know it wasn’t always that way.”

“Correct. Before it was covered by ice, Antarctica was fertile land with lush forests and fresh-water lakes and streams. That was during the Miocene, a period of time that began about twenty-five million years ago. The climate abruptly changed about fifteen million years ago, leaving most of the continent covered with a dome-shaped glacier two-and-a-half miles thick. Gravity is actually pulling the ice into the ocean by way of the continent’s ice shelves. As these ice shelves reach the coastline, their bottom sections hit seawater and melt faster, causing sections of the flow to crack—a natural process known as rifting.

“Global warming has accelerated the process. Last year alone, Antarctic ice sheets lost a combined mass of 355 gigatonnes, which is enough to raise global sea levels by 1.3 millimeters. That may not seem like a lot, but combine that with Greenland’s melting ice sheet, diminishing mountain glaciers, and the polar caps—all multiplied by the present rate of acceleration—and your winter home in sunny Florida may be underwater by the time you are ready to retire.”

“Actually, my wife and I winter here in Drumnadrochit.” I smiled at Brandy, who rolled her eyes.

Liao returned to her briefcase and removed a thick accordion file sealed with a combination lock. “The photos I am about to show you were taken eleven days ago by scientists from Beijing University. The preserved remains of these two creatures were found frozen within a twenty-nine-kilometer-long rift nicknamed Loose Tooth. The fissure is part of the Amery Ice Shelf in East Antarctica.” She quickly maneuvered the lock’s numbers to the correct three-digit sequence and opened the file, removing several glossy color photos, which she laid out before me.

I stared at the objects in the images, particularly at the excavated block of ice flanked by two humans to add the perspective of size.

The flesh on the back of my neck prickled.

“The marine biologist on loan to us could not identify either species, though he believed the animals may have lived during—”

“—the Miocene,” I finished. “This creature here—the one that’s being eaten—I’m reasonably certain it was a giant species of caiman called a
Purussaurus
.”

Brandy looked perplexed. “Caiman? Ye mean, like a crocodile?”

“Yes, only this one was fifty feet long.
Purussaurus
remains have been found in the Peruvian Amazon in South America. Two distinct species of Crocodylia were discovered—
brasiliensis
and
mirandai. Purussaurus mirandai
had a wider, far more elongated skull that was extremely flat. Its nostrils were unusually large, the openings three feet long. No one seems to know what they were used for.”

Ben glanced at Dr. Ahmed. “Looks like you found your brainiac. Hey, Zach, what do you call the big python that choked trying to eat the pussy-saurus?”

“
Pu-rus-sau-rus
. And I have no idea. The biggest snake fossil ever found belonged to
Titanoboa
, which grew to forty-five feet. But it lived sixty million years ago, and even that monster was too small to go after an adult
Purussaurus
. Dr. Liao, you say your team found these remains on the Amery Ice Shelf?”

“Yes, but that’s not where this epic battle took place. Dr. Ahmed, please show Dr. Wallace the I.P.R. image.”

Reaching into the file, the Pakistani scientist removed a black-and-white satellite image taken of the Antarctic continent, only without its two-mile-thick ice cap.

“Thanks to the development of radio echo-sounding, reflection seismology, and ice-penetrating radar, we now know what Antarctica’s geology looks like beneath the ice sheet and how the terrain would have appeared millions of years ago. As you can see, Dr. Wallace, the Antarctic landmass possesses more than a hundred and fifty lakes. Think of them as subglacial reservoirs of meltwater. As the ice sheet moves, its flow rate is affected by the level of these lakes, which rise and fall like the locks on the Panama Canal. The meltwater drains into a network of subglacial streams and rivers, which in turn keep the glacier moving out to sea. As the ice sheet passes over a lake, it causes some of its surface water to freeze. Anything caught in this accretion ice becomes part of the ice sheet.”

“Which is how these monsters’ remains came to be discovered in the Loose Tooth rift.”

“Precisely. As the ice sheet moves, its weight compresses gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide downward while raising sediment and other objects caught in its wake. The frozen remains of these two behemoths were squeezed topside as the ice became part of the Amery Ice Shelf. By analyzing the ice attached to the creatures’ remains, we were able to determine the location of their habitat while they were alive.”

“Which is… ?”

“Lake Vostok—the largest and deepest body of water on the continent.”

I looked more closely at the satellite image. At one hundred and sixty miles long and fifty miles wide, Vostok was roughly the size of Lake Ontario, only its eleven-hundred-foot depths easily dwarfed those of the Great Lake. My eyes traced a river that appeared to run from Vostok’s northern border to the Amery Ice Shelf. “Dr. Ahmed, how far would these creatures’ remains have had to travel down this river to reach that rift?”

He was ready with the answer. “We calculated the journey to be between eight and nine hundred miles, depending upon what section of Vostok they were in when they engaged in battle. The lake also possesses two islands, so they might have fought on land. We are bringing in a team of paleontologists to inspect the fossils for traces of soil.”

Brandy inspected the satellite image. “Ye say this lake is buried beneath the snow?”

Dr. Ahmed nodded. “Beneath an ice sheet thirteen thousand feet thick. The lake was sealed off approximately fifteen million years ago.”

“But its waters are frozen… ”

“No, Mrs. Wallace,” Liao replied. “Lake Vostok’s waters are actually quite liquid.”

“That makes no sense. How can a lake remain unfrozen beneath, what… four thousand meters of ice?”

Dr. Liao seemed slightly annoyed at Brandy’s distraction. “The water remains liquid because of two factors: the tremendous pressure generated by the weight of the ice sheet from above and the presence of geothermal vents pumping superheated waters into the bottom of the lake, which may actually be a tectonically active rift.”

Dr. Ahmed pushed back from the table. “Dr. Wallace, Lake Vostok represents a precious, unspoiled time capsule into our past, a fossil-rich water reserve that may still harbor life. This recent discovery has accelerated everyone’s interest in both the government and private sector. The United States has joined China and Australia in a joint effort to develop the means to explore this lost world, while taking every measure to protect its microbial life from contaminants—something the Russians have not taken to heart. With a new budget in excess of a billion dollars, the conversation has changed from developing cleaner methods of deep ice-core drilling to actually sending drones into the lake itself.”

“You didn’t recruit a deep-sea submersible pilot to operate a drone.” I glanced at the shaggy-haired American, who looked more like a graduate student than an engineer. “Mr. McFarland, why don’t you cut through Dr. Ahmed’s politics and tell us how Bill Stone and his team at Stone Aerospace intend on delivering a manned vessel into a lake buried under two-and-a-half miles of ice.”

George McFarland grinned. “As I’m sure you know, Dr. Stone has been developing robotic explorers to access hard-to-reach exotic environments for years. Our focus of late has been the frozen ocean on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, which has an ice sheet twenty times as thick as Antarctica’s. Europa and Vostok present similar technical challenges. First and foremost, we need a far more efficient way to descend through miles of ice while maintaining the integrity of the borehole. The Russians have been pouring kerosene and Freon down their ice shaft, a move that has pissed off the entire international community. Vostok has remained preserved for fifteen million years; the last thing we want to do is introduce toxic chemicals into the habitat.

“Then there’s the issue of hydrostatic pressure created by the
sheer weight of the ice sheet sitting on top of these subglacial bodies of water. Vostok is essentially a massive topographic hollow filled with water that is being squeezed beneath trillions of tons of ice. Think of it as a giant water-filled balloon. Puncture Vostok and water explodes out the exit at five thousand pounds per square inch of pressure. The Russians learned this the hard way when they retracted their last ice core and water blasted up through the borehole, flooding their drill cab with a hundred cubic meters of kerosene.”

McFarland powered on his laptop and turned the monitor to face Brandy and me. On screen was a six-foot-long cylindrical device. “This is Valkyrie, the cryobot we designed for Europa. The vehicle is an autonomous ice-penetrating machine. It is linked by fiber-optic cable to a power source that remains on the surface and is equipped with a high-powered laser that quickly melts the ice ahead of it. The hole then re-freezes behind the cryobot, preventing the pressure from forcing water out of the shaft. To return topside you simply invert the unit and blow ballast, and the capsule melts its way back to the surface, rising up on its own bubble with the hole re-freezing behind it.

“The three-man submersible we’ve designed will be flanked by two Valkyrie lasers. Once the lake is reached, the sub will run autonomously. When it’s time to ascend, the Valkyries will burn a borehole through the ice, raising the sub on a geyser of water created by Lake Vostok’s own internal pressure. Cool, huh?”

I shook my head in amazement. “It’s an incredible feat of engineering, but why a submersible? Why not simply let the Valkyrie unit do its job?”

Dr. Liao appeared irritated by the question. “Why put an astronaut in orbit when a chimpanzee will do? Why put a man on the moon? Lake Vostok is the equivalent of journeying to another world. A robot can collect a few fossils, but it cannot experience the wonderment of exploring an ice sheet from below, nor observe Vostok’s underworld through a scientist’s eyes. Are there dangers? Of course. But we’ve minimized the risks, and I dare say exploring a subglacial lake is far less taxing than rocketing into space. There are
no less than a dozen scientific organizations participating in this venture, with volunteers vying to be among the chosen few to visit this lost world.”

“If that’s the case, why choose me?”

“You have been blessed with the unique ability to see what others have seen and think what nobody has thought. While we’ll have teams of paleobiologists at the camp, none have your field experience or reputation. Who better to resolve what will no doubt be a Rubick’s Cube of fossils and processes—”

“And perhaps a life-form or two,” interjected Dr. Ahmed. “It is my belief that your team will come across bacteria and biologicals that have survived in that isolated environment for millions of years. As Captain Hintzmann mentioned, your participation also helps us procure the necessary funds to expedite this mission—funds from which you shall be well compensated.”

Dr. Liao handed me an envelope. Inside was an offer for a research stipend covering September through February of the coming year. I passed the sheet of paper to Brandy, whose eyes widened at the mid-six-figure salary. “Who do ye have tae murder, then? The Queen, I hope.”

“I’d be gone six months. The way things have been lately, maybe that’s a good thing… .”

Brandy’s eyes teared up. “Go, then. I ken ye want tae. It’s in yer blood as sure as the plaid’s in mine.” She straightened in her seat. “Besides, we need the money.”

For months we had poisoned our arguments with the threat of divorce. Threats are threats until they force you to make a decision. At that moment we both sensed that this was it—we’d either commit to staying together or officially end our marriage with my acceptance of Dr. Soto’s lucrative offer.

Put to the test, neither of us wanted to be without the other.

“Here’s another alternative, Brandy. I was just offered a teaching position at Cambridge University. It’s not nearly as much
money, but at least I’d see you and William on weekends.”