Subterrestrial
Authors: Michael McBride
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2015
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For all of the Scouts who championed this book
Special Thanks to Megan and Ruth at Kindle Press/Kirkus; Paul Goblirsch; Shelley Milligan; Norman Prentiss; Andi Rawson; Justin Robbins; Jeff Strand; Kimberly Yerina: my amazing family; and all of my loyal readers, without whom this book wouldn’t exist.
ONE
I
Bering Strait
Ten Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska
65°47′ N, 169°01′ W
Zero Hour
10:36:13 a.m. AKST
This was the moment of truth.
Del Chamberlain scrutinized the row of monitors above his console in hopes of recognizing some crucial detail he hadn’t seen before. The marine seismic survey had identified an acoustically opaque zone 10.38 miles northwest of the Alaskan coast that a team of geologists speculated was an “area of folding and uplift, most likely as a result of tectonic underthrusting during the early Tertiary period.” In layman’s terms, Del and his crew were about to drill through a nearly vertical fault line and into sedimentary rock of unknown composition.
It was impossible to think clearly over the roar of the tunnel-boring machine, an unstoppable juggernaut that chewed through the oceanic crust at a rate of one hundred feet per day. The rotating cutting wheel was sixty-eight feet in diameter and parted the basalt with a grinding noise he could feel in the roots of his teeth even when the TBM wasn’t running, which was generally only long enough to blow out the high-pressure hoses or lubricate the hydraulic pistons. He could barely hear the shouts of the men loading the arched sections of concrete onto the erector assembly and bolting them to the tunnel walls. The foot-thick, prefabricated rings were the only things preventing them all from being buried alive beneath 390 feet of igneous granite, limestone, and metamorphic gneiss. And the 150 feet of iceberg-covered Bering Sea above that.
At the end of the Last Glacial Maximum twenty thousand years ago, this entire area had been essentially one great mountain range in the middle of the Beringian steppe, which formed a land bridge between Asia and North America. Now, with the exception of the two peaks that gave rise to the Diomede Islands, it was completely submerged beneath the Bering Strait, a fifty-mile passage separating Russia and the United States.
Del had been operating TBMs for more than twenty years, since he first took the helm beneath the English Channel. Back then there had been dials and readouts for every conceivable mechanical function. Now everything was digital, from the sonographic and gravimetric readouts to the guidance system, which consisted of a single monitor with an image of the cutting face superimposed over his computer-plotted course. His primary responsibility was to make sure the crosshairs in the center continuously overlapped and the laser guidance system operated flawlessly. If he were to veer as little as two degrees from their course in any direction, the results would be catastrophic. They could encounter anomalies in the basalt the seismic surveys missed and risk compromising the integrity of the tunnel whether at that very second or decades into the future, when high-speed trains would rocket through at 212 miles per hour.
He couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to spend three days traveling a circuitous route from China to the United States via Russia and Canada when they could simply hop on an airplane. The tunnel was more than large enough for a mere commuter train, though. He figured there was plenty of room for Russian natural gas and Alaskan oil to flow in both directions, hence the willingness of the Halversen Company to foot the $300 billion tab.
Del eyed the fault line on the screen as the TBM’s locational beacon aligned with its leading edge. Their course was positively riddled with fracture lines. Eons ago, this had been a hotbed of volcanic activity as the tectonic plates drawing the continents apart shifted and warred against one another. Although the Bering Strait had cooled to a large degree, they were barely outside the northern rim of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a continuous belt of expanding undersea trenches and volcanic eruptions where the earth seemingly threatened to rip itself apart. Millennia of seismic upheaval, coupled with the rise and fall of the seas as a consequence of multiple ice ages, had made the oceanic crust a patchwork quilt of varying geological strata. The basement sediment could be traced to the Mesozoic era and the underlying mudstone to the Oligocene epoch. The deeper layers were cobbled together from discrete pockets of shale, sandstone, limestone, gneiss, granite, and migmatite, all of which varied significantly in terms of density and the force required by the pistons driving the cutting wheel.
The first three fault lines had all been graceful transitions from granite to gneiss or gneiss to migmatite. And while Del had every reason to expect the same from this fourth fracture line, the fact that he didn’t know exactly what was on the other side made him uneasy.
The seismic survey worked by firing shockwaves from an air gun into the ground, collecting the reflected sound waves in a series of hydrophones, and then interpreting the amplitude and arrival time of the returning waves to determine the depth and composition of the underlying strata. Considering the linear nature of the projected shockwaves, a steep fault interface appeared acoustically opaque; the waves either passed through without interacting with the stone directly or reflected in a vertical or forward direction, which the trailing array of receptors were unable to capture. Chances were they were about to tunnel into a zone of significant folding and uplift, just like the supposed experts claimed. Then again, they could always bore into sandstone housing an aquifer of water or petroleum and find themselves waist deep in fluid that would have to be siphoned to the surface. Worse, they could crash through into delicate limestone, send fracture lines radiating outward through the rock, and bring the whole works down on themselves.
Blueschist and migmatite tumbled from the turning blades and rose up over his head along a series of conveyor belts that carried it to the muck train for removal to the surface. Pebbles pinged from the roof of the control room and the surrounding catwalks. There was a distinct cadence to their patter, like the pulse of some great living being. After so many years burrowing beneath the earth, Del had come to know the sounds as intimately as the beating of his own heart. It was the kind of rhythm the mind tuned out, until it subconsciously recognized that something wasn’t quite right about the sound.
Del stepped out onto the platform and watched the cutting wheel turn in the dim halogen glare. Hydraulic arms swung the concrete arches into place against the stone walls. Men in orange rain slickers and hard hats stood ankle deep in muddy water ten feet below him, bolting the sections together with pneumatic drills.
The TBM stretched off into the darkness behind him, a tangle of metallic rigging and moving parts nearly a tenth of a mile long.
Something was wrong. He could feel it.
The air was heavy, as though the barometric pressure had increased. The intonation of the echoes seemed somehow . . . wrong.
He looked down at his crew. They set down their tools and stared back up at him. He could see it on their dirty faces. They felt it, too.
Again, he glanced behind him. The muck train rumbled down the tracks toward where a fleet of dump trucks waited to ferry their haul ten miles to the southeast and through an earthen maw into the Alaskan darkness. The lights on the catwalk by the portable outhouses flickered.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the locational beacon pass through the fault line and into the blank area of missing data.
The cutting wheel made a loud grinding noise and the platform lurched beneath him. The rocks tumbling from the blades glinted with quartz and feldspar.
“Bloody hell,” Del whispered.
The temperature dropped so quickly that the hairs rose on the back of his neck and arms.
Sandstone grumbled up the screw conveyor, followed by a gravel of smooth limestone.
A stream of water fired through the cutting face with such force that it lifted one of Del’s men from the ground and flung him under the catwalk. The other men fought their way through the rising water toward the source in a desperate attempt to plug it. Another spray staggered them. Another still swept them beneath the rising water.
There was a thunderous cracking sound. Fissures raced through the surrounding stone and concrete rings. The earth dropped beneath him and the TBM canted forward. Del hit the ground on his knees and barely managed to grab the rail before he was thrown off.
Freezing seawater flooded the tunnel a heartbeat before countless tons of rock crushed him.
Zero Plus 20 Seconds
10:36:33 a.m. AKST
The horizon dropped, or at least that’s how it looked to Tyler Hudson. It was hard to see much of anything through the ice-rimed windows of the wheelhouse, especially with the fog and the sea spray firing up from the prow of the F/V
Arctic Stalker
. There was nothing on the radar or sonar. He kept one eye on the bathymetric readings to his right. This was a tricky stretch of sea to navigate. At its deepest point, the Bering Strait was a mere 160 feet deep and in several places was shallow enough to tear through the hull. He needed to keep to the deepest waters while dodging ice floes barreling down from the Chukchi Sea.
The men on the deck below him wore neon yellow slickers, but he could barely see the color through the layer of frost that had formed on them. They hauled massive crab pots from the rough black sea as though their lives depended upon it. Waves crashed over the rails and threatened to sweep them from their feet.
With a sound like a turbine engine, the wind abruptly switched directions and swung the hoist around so fast that his men lost control of the crab pot. It slid across the deck and shattered against the rail, while the men scrambled to find anything resembling traction on the icy deck.
The sea stood still. For one fleeting moment, there were no waves breaking against the prow and the
Arctic Stalker
no longer dove from one trough to the next.