Vostok (12 page)

“True, don’t.”

But True did. He shoved Ben in the chest with both hands—only Ben was too quick. He grabbed the big fella’s wrist and elbow as he dropped to one knee and took out his knees in a ju-jitsu move that sent my friend sprawling headfirst into the sea with a tremendous splash.

The Chinese laughed.

I ran to the edge of the hole as True surfaced, his face pale, his eyes wide in shock as he gasped for breath, his mitten-covered hands unable to grip the edge of the ice to pull himself out.

“Zach… help… me!”

“Give me your hand!”

Ben held me back. “There’s no leverage, he’ll pull you in.” He signaled to the Chinese, who were already attaching a nylon rope to the back of the jeep.

I grabbed the free end and made a quick noose.

Barely able to keep his head above water, True managed to reach one dripping-sleeved arm up to me. I slipped the noose around his wrist and pulled tight.

Seconds later the jeep’s driver moved slowly ahead. The slack tightened and hoisted True up and out of the hole like a sedated walrus.

I stepped over the shivering Scot and untied the line. “Hang in there, buddy, we’ll have you warm in no time.” I helped him up as the Chinese wrapped him with blankets and guided him into the front passenger seat. The driver hit the gas and headed back to Davis Station.

I confronted Ben. “That wasn’t necessary.”

“Learn this now; I’m a survivor. Your friend will be fine, but if he comes after me again with that crazed look in his eye I’ll put him in the hospital for the duration of this mission and it’ll be on your head. Now you wanna take this little girl out for a test drive or not?”

I glanced back at the submersible. The Chinese handlers were opening the sleek machine’s interior pod. “The front seat is mine?”

“Best seat in the house. The first two cockpits have dual controls. The middle console has the master override. It’s easier if you remove your boots before you climb in. Once we crank up the heat, we’ll stow our jackets in back.”

Following his advice, I climbed into the forward cockpit, noticing my bow compartment and grey leather bucket seat were sunk a foot below Ben’s, sort of like the cockpit of an Apache helicopter. Sacrificing warmth for comfort, I removed my jacket and buckled the safety harness so that the dual straps crossed my chest in an X configuration.

“Get in already; I’m freezing my ass off.”

Ben climbed in and hit a control switch to close the hatch. When it sealed, he buckled in and then pointed to a power switch
on my forward dash. “Care to do the honors?”

I removed my mittens and pushed a gloved index finger to the control.

The pump-jet propulsor engine growled to life beneath us. The vents blasted us with cold air, forcing me to use my jacket as a blanket.

“Give it a few minutes. It’ll warm up.” Ben pointed to a joystick attached to my right armrest. “The joystick controls direction, pitch, and yaw. Flip the toggle switch up and the system activates. I have to power mine off to activate yours. There are two foot pedals on the floor. Each controls one of the props.”

He pointed to the center of my dashboard at a sonar array. “Headphones are on that hook by your right knee. Ever use sonar before?”

“Assume I know nothing.”

“Okay, I’ll teach you once we’re moving. Ready to go?”

“That’s it? Isn’t there some kind of checklist you need to go over?”

“What’d you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. Should I buckle these straps dangling by my legs?”

“Seems like a good idea.” I heard him buckle his.

“What about the rest of these controls? I’d like to know how to use them, just in case something happens to you.”

Ben smirked. “What’s going to happen to me down there that isn’t going to happen to you?”

“I don’t know. You could have a stroke. The point is I want to be prepared.”

“That’s the problem with you eggheads; you always have to read the instruction manual before you test drive the car. Me? I prefer to hit the highway and learn on the job.”

Rapping his knuckles on the glass above his head, Ben gave
one of the techs a thumbs-up.

I held on as the four men pushed us toward the freshly carved rectangular hole in the ice. “This is how you’re going to launch us? By pushing us in like… like my father taught me how to swim?”

“Yours did that, too?”

“Oh, geez!” I gripped the seat as we plunged bow-first into the dark blue world, our weight distribution continuing our forward roll into a full somersault as we fell like a sinking dagger.

With a sickening
crunch
, the Lexan dome struck bottom. Naturally buoyant, the sub bounced upward, only to be spun and inhaled by a powerful current that grabbed our inverted vessel and propelled us along the bottom.

I saw ice and then I saw stars as the
Barracuda
plowed bow-first and upside-down into the narrow space between the molar-shaped underside of an iceberg and the silt-covered sea floor.

“Well done,” I said, the blood rushing to my face. “I hope this death trap has a reverse gear.”

“Sit tight, I got this.” Ben tapped the thrusters, attempting to torque us free, only to jam the inverted starboard fin in deeper.

“You’re a maniac. No wonder the Air Force gave you the boot.”

“Hey, you don’t know shit about it, so shut up. And this little setback, it’s all part of the learning process. Get the kinks out. We’ll be out of here in no time.”

“Maybe we can get a tow from a passing flock of penguins?”

“Stop talking and let me think.”

“See, that’s the trouble with you action-types, there’s always time to think
after
you get your big balls caught in a vice.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Butts are for crapping. Answer my question. Does this acrylic coffin have a reverse gear or not?”

“I was going to say you first have to manually reverse the drive shaft.”

“Which I’m guessing you don’t know how to do.”

“It was on the top of my to-do list. There’s a manual in the compartment by your right knee. Make yourself useful.”

I fished the thick booklet out, my head throbbing. “Oh good, it’s in Chinese. What’s Mandarin for dickhead?”

“Screw the reverse gear. I’m powering up the Valkyries.”

My pulse raced. “Have you ever done this before?”

“I haven’t done any of this before. Should I give it the old Ivy League try, or would you prefer to just sit here until our air runs out?”

“Okay, okay. But
listen
first. Don’t try to blast out the Holland tunnel. Just melt enough ice so that we have room to spin around in a tight circle and get out the way we came in.”

“Got it.”

“No, you don’t
got it
! Evaporate too much ice in these conditions and it will create a vacuum effect which could suck us in deeper beneath the iceberg.”

He paused as my words sank in. “Tap it and turn. Got it.”

“Not yet, you don’t. This has to be done simultaneously. One of us works the laser; the other jams one foot pedal down to the floor while turning the joystick hard to the same side. But only just enough to turn us 180 degrees, or we’ll spin right back where we started, only deeper.”

The berg groaned around us, sending the internal pod’s psi readings from green to orange.

“Okay, Zach, which one do you want to do?”

“Give me the laser.”

“I wanted to do the laser.”

“What are you, a five-year-old? We need you to steer the damn sub. Now show me how to use the Valkyrie.”

He pointed to an instrument panel on the center console. “The red light means the unit’s powering up. When it turns green, engage the lasers by pressing these two buttons. Press them again to stop the beams.”

I activated the fuel cells and waited, the blood rushing to my head, sweat dripping down my neck into my scalp. “Okay, it’s green. You ready?”

“Yeah. Wait, quick question. If we’re upside down and I want to turn us counterclockwise—”

“Tap your left foot on the throttle and follow it with your joystick.”

“Which is now on my right, right?”

“Right. I mean, yes.”

“Okay, we blast on three. One… two … ”

I stole a quick glance at the starboard Valkyrie, its business end glowing red.

“Three!”

I pressed both buttons. The sea boiled in a veil of orange bubbles as we spun hard seventy degrees counterclockwise and jammed, the wounded iceberg groaning above our feet. We continued firing and throttling until our field of vision yielded deep blue again.

The submersible leaped into the void. Ben executed a quick semi-barrel roll, which returned our world right-side up, then stabilized our yaw by extending the vessel’s pectoral fins.

For several moments we simply laid our heads back and breathed as the sub rose slowly in neutral.

We both jumped as the acrylic dome above our heads collided with a ceiling of sea ice.

“Want to teach me how to use the sonar now, or would you rather wait until you plow us into a wall of glacial ice?”

For the next forty minutes, Ben taught me how to distinguish
objects in the sea using active and passive sonar, as well as how to comprehend the sub’s fuel gauge, battery range, and life-support system readings.

Finally feeling more like a copilot than a passenger, I called out obstacles on sonar while Ben steered us through a frozen labyrinth.

What was it like to dive the Antarctic sea in a submersible? In a word: breathtaking. The extreme cold was an exotic entity of nature that affected everything around us. As sea ice, it formed a seemingly endless ceiling that resembled an overcast December sky, its thicker patches dark and gray, its thinner veils streaked in bolts of neon-blue sunlight. Brine channels hung surreally from the frozen surface like hollow stalactites, their tubular openings bleeding liquid saline into the clear blue underworld.

Below us, bright pink starfish and clumps of anchor ice that resembled crystal tumbleweeds spotted a silt-brown bottom. Every so often a sea urchin or a rock would seem to defy gravity and rise from the sea floor, shanghaied to a glob of ice whose buoyancy would pin it to the ceiling.

Touching the inside surface of the acrylic pod, I could feel the penetrating cold held at bay by technology. Listening to the sea, we heard strange chirping sounds, the mating calls of Weddell seals mixed with the rumblings of grounded icebergs. In the coming weeks the sea ice would crack open and release these masses from a winter’s purgatory, and their roots would plow the bottom as they flowed out of Prydz Bay, ripping out long gashes that would create new havens for marine life.

Leaving the bay, we headed out to the open ocean. The sea ice dissipated, and our surroundings became liquid blue. Pinging the area, I detected something immense floating on the surface a mile to the east. It was a tabular berg, the largest type of iceberg. Formed when large portions of an ice shelf break off and drift free, these glacier-like ice sheets can span several square miles, their sheer white cliffs towering hundreds of feet above the surface and
reaching a thousand feet below.

Ben surfaced the sub so that we could take a look. The berg was a plateau of ice as big as three aircraft carriers, its waterline ringed by a turquoise lagoon, an effect created by its submerged alabaster mass. A twenty-foot ledge, forged by lapping waves, hung over the surface.

The face of the berg was mesmerizing—a two-hundred-foot-high curl that resembled a tidal wave frozen in time. Dark blue ice rose from the sea to form its textured vortex, melding into glistening clear ice capped by its snow-covered lip.

Antarctic clear ice was the oldest ice on the continent, its presence on the tabular berg tracing back to the glacier that calved it into Prydz Bay. Over eons, tons of snowfall had accumulated and had been compressed on the glacier. Air bubbles trapped in the ice were squeezed out, rendering the ice as clear as crystal and as old as half a million years.

The blue ice was a phenomenon associated with melting and re-freezing, a process that forced out trapped air, allowing the blue color in the visible light spectrum to pass through while blocking the red color.

Circling the tabular berg, we came upon a third color: green.

As glaciers cross the Antarctic continent, their roots crush and absorb minerals from the underlying bedrock. When the ice melts, phytoplankton feeds off the minerals and grows. In turn, krill feed on the phytoplankton, and penguins, seals, and whales feed on the krill.

The Antarctic food chain would not exist without its glaciers.

Hours later, we came across the top of that food chain.

We had been following a pair of minke whales. Thirty feet long, these ten-ton baleen mini-giants were less than half the girth of their rorqual cousins, the humpback and fin whales, and were quite plentiful in Antarctic waters. Ben was keeping us within visual distance of their white underbellies when a dozen blips suddenly
popped onto my sonar screen.

Orca
.

The wolves of the sea circled the minkes, separating the smaller female from its mate. Two big male orcas remained on the periphery, breaching high in the air to flop hard onto the surface as if to mark the kill zone.

The assaults were carried out by the juvenile killers and a few of the adult females. Over the next forty minutes, we watched from one hundred and seventy feet below the blood-drenched surface as the remaining minke fought to breathe—until one of the big bulls landed on its back in an attempt to drown it.

I turned in my seat and jumped, confronted by a black-and-white monster whose emerging presence occupied the entire starboard side of the acrylic glass. The bull killer whale stared at me as if we were a threat to its pod’s dinner.

The sea became alive with squeals and clicks as the pack’s males echolocated us. A nerve-racking game of cat-and-mouse ensued as the two six-ton predators bumped and prodded the
Barracuda
with their snouts until we vacated the area.

Dusk came quickly, offering us an opportunity to practice piloting in the dark. Ben engaged the exterior lights while I used the sub’s sonar to guide us west through the shallows of Prydz Bay.