Subterrestrial (6 page)

“I was w-wondering the same t-thing.”

“I might not be qualified to teach geography, but I’ve looked at the globe long enough to know that the only thing out here is ocean and ice.”

“I c-can’t believe people actually live out here.”

“It’s not people we’re out here to find, is it?” She smiled and proffered her hand. “Brooke Calder. Marine biologist.”

He looked at her curiously as he shook her gloved hand. Surely she was being flown out here for an entirely different reason than he was.

“Ahiga Nabahe. Anthropologist.” He shrugged self-consciously. “Retired.”

“Looks like we’re in for a little excitement,” the pilot said. “I’m getting reports of winds coming off the Arctic in the neighborhood of seventy knots.”

Nabahe looked back out the window. All he could see through the blowing snow was a whole lot of nothing.

The man who showed up at his house had told him that various confidentiality agreements prohibited him from disclosing exactly where they were going, but that all would be revealed soon enough, even though Nabahe had signed his name on roughly a hundred legally binding forms that prevented him from so much as hinting that anyone had ever knocked on his door. There should have been alarm bells going off in his head. And there might have been. The problem was his curiosity was more than piqued. After all, the man with the silver hair had shown up with a rubbing nearly identical to his own, only unlike any he’d ever seen before.

It was in a cave below the peak of Baboquivari Mountain on the Tohono O’odham Reservation in Southern Arizona that he had discovered the first one. By then, Nabahe’s eyesight had diminished to such an extent that he could hardly see by the light of both a headlamp and a flashlight, let alone well enough to clearly see the petroglyphs on the walls. He’d taken to grazing his fingertips along the stone while feeling for the telltale indentations and grooves.

The O’odham believed that the sacred cave was where I’itoi, their mischievous creator god, first led their ancestors from the underworld. The pictograms and petroglyphs he’d been following had been created for one simple purpose: to be seen. But what good were pictures to people who dwelled in darkness? In theory, people emerging from the underworld would be every bit as eager to tell their tales as their light-dwelling descendants, only the means by which they did so would be informed by senses other than sight. It only made sense that theirs would be a story told by feel, a relief shaped by subtle gradations in the stone made by smoothing rather than by carving, by polishing instead of painting.

Nabahe’d been so surprised when he detected the first one that he threw himself backward so quickly he tripped over his own feet and hit the ground hard enough to chip a tooth. He’d even apologized to whoever was in there with him for groping his face. It was only when he shined his lights directly onto the wall and realized that he was completely alone inside the cavern that he had understood. What he’d discovered was as clear as day to anyone who traced the walls’ contours with sensitive fingertips, but it was invisible to the naked eye. It wasn’t until he returned with a pencil and paper and created a rubbing of what turned out to be a face, one he knew would haunt him to his dying day, that he was able to show off his findings.

The department chair hadn’t openly mocked him when he displayed his rubbing any more than the editor of the school’s
Journal of Southwest Anthropology
had laughed in his face, yet it wasn’t two months later that he found himself clearing out his office. He hadn’t even been able to publish in any of the lesser-known, more questionable academic journals. As a last resort, he’d been forced to self-publish a book no one bought and post his findings to a website no one visited. Or at least one he’d thought no one visited it until Thyssen knocked on his door.

The chopper banked and Nabahe looked past the woman with the furry hood toward where the horizon alternately appeared from and disappeared into the storm.

“What the Sam Hill is that?” he asked.

“I hope you took your Dramamine,” the pilot said. “Things are about to get dicey.”

Diomede Village

Little Diomede Island

Fifteen Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska

65°45′15″ N, 168°55′15″ W

The Bering Sea broke against the rocky shoreline with a sound that reminded Thyssen of his pulse pounding inside his head. Never in his life had he experienced stillness of this nature.

The majority of the residents had been relocated to the mainland following the disaster. At last count, only 18 of the original 120 year-round residents remained.

Thyssen followed his man around the four hundred thousand–gallon water storage tank and into what passed for the center of town. The generators that had provided the town’s electricity were silent and cold beneath the snow. Drifts had swept over the sides of diesel fuel storage drums the size of interstate tankers. The only tracks on the footpaths between buildings were so fresh that the wind had yet to smooth them over. He stopped and surveyed the village through the blowing snow.

Clouds clung to the invisible crown of the island, the slopes of which were buried beneath boulders of varying sizes and shapes, as though an avalanche had started and then simply stopped. The houses were built right on top of the rocks and balanced on stilts that hardly appeared capable of supporting their weight. They were packed so closely together that were it not for the fading paint and disparate roofing, it would have been impossible to tell one from the next. Wooden stairways wended uphill between them and connected them to what looked like a school and the only building with an actual sign, the Diomede Native Store, which had definitely seen better days.

There was a line of boats to his right, old aluminum numbers with outboard motors, now trapped fifty feet up the rocky shore from sea level. A pair of shoulders and the back of a man’s head protruded from the snow. Feathers blew from the rips in his down jacket. It looked as though he’d been attempting to shove one of the boats down toward the water when he was overcome from behind.

“Walk me through it,” Thyssen said.

“They came up through the vent,” Desmond Martin said. He wore a full snow-camouflage jumpsuit and an M4A1 carbine set to three-round bursts on a sling over his shoulder. “Our best guess is maybe sixteen hours ago. Not long before what passes for dawn. Most of them were still in their beds. Never knew what hit them.”

“Not all of them.”

There was another body under the stairs leading up to the general store. The man had attempted to hide after crawling through the maze of stilts. At least Thyssen thought it was a man. The condition of the remains required a little imagination.

He followed Martin to an aluminum building that was by far the newest structure on the island, if not in the best of repair. The force of the water erupting from the tunnel had blown half of the roof clean off. The walls still stood, although the structure leaned at a fairly severe angle. The warped door was propped beside the slanted doorway against the siding from which a half dozen massive fans protruded. The ductwork inside had been destroyed by the accident, and the emergency pumps sat idly beneath a blanket of snow. The hole in the ground was five feet in diameter and reinforced with concrete rings, much like the ruined tunnel below. Water pipes and ductwork dominated the opening, leaving just enough room for someone to climb down the iron rungs. The grate they’d used to temporarily seal it had been bent upward with enough force to break the brackets and crack the concrete.

Two of his men had taken up post, one on either side of it, their weapons trained down into the darkness from which the sound of sloshing fluid originated. Thyssen leaned over the edge. He could barely make out the black water at the very edge of sight. The rungs leading down to it were crusted with what looked like rust at first glance. It didn’t take long to recognize it for what it truly was.

“How many of them were there?”

“It’s hard to tell. The snow covered whatever tracks they might have left outside and those inside the houses don’t betray their numbers. It could be anywhere from one to a dozen for all we know. You have to bear in mind that we still don’t have any idea what we’re dealing with.”

“Regardless, surely one couldn’t have wiped them out by itself. Especially not before someone raised the alarm.”

“You’ve seen what these things can do.”

Thyssen grunted and headed back out of the station.

“Are we certain no one contacted the mainland?”

“We’d have heard about it by now if they had. Besides, Wiley’s been monitoring all communications to and from the island since we arrived. He’d have been the first to know.”

They couldn’t afford to take any chances, though. Controlling the dissemination of information regarding the disaster in the tunnel had been a nightmare, but something like this was on an entirely different level, probably beyond even his considerable skills. The workers down below had known the risks when they signed on. Their families had been compensated, and for more than just their loss. So far they’d been able to maintain a full media blackout of the aftermath. As far as anyone knew, seismic activity in the Aleutian Trench was responsible for the flooding they’d experienced as far south as New Zealand and the record low tides that had so-called experts baffled, although the steady rise would get the whole subject off the front page soon enough.

All of the shipping had been diverted and consolidated into the deepest channels between the new landmasses, which, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be ordinary icebergs. If anyone looked too hard, Thyssen could just pay some climatologist to put forth the theorem that global warming caused enormous sections to calve from the polar ice caps, float across the Arctic, and lodge in the shallow channel. It was in no one’s best interest for the general public to learn about the new chain of islands that nearly connected the United States and Russia. The thought of the Russian Army simply driving across the ocean and sweeping down to the mainland would cause a panic of historic proportions, but not nearly to the same extent as news of what they’d discovered down there, if it should ever come out.

It was Thyssen’s job to make sure that never happened. There was far more at stake than merely owning the transcontinental flow of natural resources. Their accidental discovery was the ticket to wealth and power beyond any the world had ever known.

He walked around the opposite side of the building and back toward the helipad on the narrow finger of land extending out over the Bering Sea. The back windows of the houses on the other side of the path were shattered. Snow blew into rooms, where it was only now beginning to accumulate on floors sparkling with broken glass. He saw a bed heaped with shredded linens and a tangle of lacerated limbs. The wall above the headboard was spattered with arterial spurts. The footprints leading from the bedroom to the hallway were smeared and impossible to differentiate.

“Most of the houses are like this,” Martin said from behind him. “They came through the windows and were on them before they could even get out of bed. We think the people living higher up must have heard something, but none of them made it very far.”

Thyssen passed a mound of fur that would soon vanish beneath the accumulation. Even the dog hadn’t been able to outrun them.

Once he was within sight of the chopper, he twirled his finger over his head. The rotor whined and slowly started to spin.

“How do you want us to handle this?” Martin asked.

Thyssen turned and looked back at the lifeless island. His stare settled upon the eighty thousand–gallon tank that fueled the generators.

“Make it look like an accident.”

“Fire or brimstone?”

“Give me a crater you can see from space.”

“Brimstone it is.”

Thyssen ducked his head and charged through the blowing snow toward the chopper, which lifted off the moment he closed the door behind him. He put on his headset and spoke into the microphone.

“Patch me through.”

He watched the island fall farther away through the storm and wondered how many people actually knew of its existence here at the edge of the world.

A subtle change in the intonation of the static signaled he was connected to the line he did his best never to call.

“An inconvenience,” he said into the dead air. “That’s all.”

The voice on the other end sounded robotic thanks to the voice modulator.

“
Are you certain?
”

There was a blinding flash from the distant island. Smoke and debris billowed up into the sky. The helicopter bucked and he felt the reverberation of the explosion in his chest.

“Trust me. This is the last you’ll hear of it.”

Speranza Station

Ten Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska

65°47′ N, 169°01′ W

The chopper lurched and juddered as it dropped through the storm. The snowflakes attacked the windshield with such ferocity that Calder barely saw the ground before the runners struck it nearly hard enough to knock the wind out of her. She’d never experienced turbulence like that before and wanted nothing more than to leap from the helicopter and throw herself to the ground, despite what looked like two feet of snow beneath a seamless crust of ice. The rotors whipped the snowflakes into a seemingly impenetrable cloud.

“This is your stop,” the pilot said.

Calder glanced at the man strapped into the back seat beside her. His dark skin had paled considerably. She recognized the expression on his face. It was the same one so many of her newly assigned graduate students wore moments before sprinting toward the gunwale and sharing their lunch with the fish.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“That’s a question I can’t rightly answer, ma’am,” the pilot said.

“Confidentiality?”

“Nope. It’s because we’re sitting on an island that doesn’t exist.”

The door beside her opened and a freezing gust of wind buffeted her with snow. A man in a blue parka offered his gloved hand. His hood was cinched so tightly around his face that all she could clearly see was his nose.