Subterrestrial (37 page)

He’d managed to dig a hole large enough to accommodate all of them and used the excavated snow to erect a windbreak, but it wasn’t nearly enough. Even the Thermoprene would buy them only so much time. If they weren’t rescued soon, they were going to die right there. After everything they’d endured, it would be a maddeningly ironic fate.

A cloud of steam hung over them before rising high enough to be whisked away by the screaming wind. Payton felt his breath freezing to his face and his bare skin cracking.

The primates huddled together for warmth. Their sparse fur was crisp with ice and their wrinkled, translucent skin was a pale shade of blue, through which he could see the black vessels of their circulatory system. Those amazing animals had survived conditions that would have exterminated most other forms of life only to wind up freezing to death in the snow. Here he was, inches from what could very well be the missing link in human evolution, the Holy Grail of the biological sciences, and he could do little more than watch them die.

Like everything else they’ve touched, humans had sentenced these animals to extinction. A tunnel drilled by arrogance and financed by greed would ultimately cause the eradication of an unknown number of species that were old before
Homo sapiens
took their first steps on two legs. And then there was the tragic loss of nearly their entire team. Payton suppressed the memories of their smiles as they set out upon the exploration of a lifetime; of his longtime friend Duan, whose fate he feared he might never know; of the creatures that would be waiting down there for whoever came to look for them. He needed to warn them before it was too late, even if it was his last act on this earth.

“Stay with me, Emily.”

His teeth chattered so badly he could barely understand his own words.

Ice knitted her eyelashes and clung to the tip of her nose. The snow that had melted from her hair mere minutes ago was now beginning to accumulate. Her eyes moved beneath her closed lids. She managed to open them a crack and whisper something he couldn’t hear before closing them again.

One of them had to survive.

Payton peeled off his tattered wetsuit and wrapped it around her as best he could. The cold stung his bare skin, which he could almost feel dying inward from the superficial layers.

He slid Hart closer to the snow-covered primates. They no longer cringed away from him or screeched when he neared. They were barely able to open their eyes wide enough to acknowledge his presence.

Payton brushed the snow from their fur and hoped it bought them a few more minutes of life. Already one of the smaller ones had toppled to its side. The snow drifted into its open mouth.

“You have to keep moving.”

He shook the largest male, the one with the gashes all over his chest. He merely grunted and wrapped his trembling arms around himself.

They didn’t have much time left. None of them did. It had to be twenty below, even without the wind chill, which cut right through him when he scrambled out of the pit. Every snowflake felt like a needle lancing through his flesh, every gust of wind a sheet of sandpaper raking across his skin. He shouted and staggered toward the shoreline. The black waves beat against the breakers a dozen feet out, forming bizarre ice creations that jutted into the sky like dead trees. The clouds were low enough to touch and concealed the dark sky, which barely produced enough light to reflect off the ice-rimed talus.

The rocks were flat, their edges sharp. The corners cut his fingers, but he could no longer feel them. The crust on the snow was strong enough to support his weight. He walked back and forth, retrieving armloads from the shore and tromping back into the deep accumulation, where he arranged them to form words he hoped were large enough to be seen from the air. The snow began to stick to the frozen stones and his bare skin. His thoughts grew sluggish, and he had to repeat the words so he wouldn’t lose them to the darkness closing in from his peripheral vision.

Do not go down
. . .

Payton didn’t know he had fallen until he opened his eyes and found them packed with snow. He was barely able to raise his head high enough to get a breath of air he hadn’t already breathed. He couldn’t feel his arms or his legs. Couldn’t seem to make them work.

A rumbling sound separated from the thunder of the Bering Sea bludgeoning the breakers. It was a physical sensation he felt as much as heard. Like his pulse, only faster. Stronger.

The wind tossed a blanket of snow over him. He used the last of his reserves to roll toward the sound. A vicious gale lashed his face with blowing snow. He strained to break the ice sealing his lashes and saw a dark shape settle to the rocks on the shoreline. Shadows burst from the sides and converged upon him.

“Others . . .” he said, but the darkness consumed him before he could finish his thought.

Speranza Station

Bering Sea

Ten Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska

65°47′ N, 169°01′ W

Three Days Later

Calder swam through the tunnels with an array of lights mounted to her shoulders. Six LED spotlights shined ahead of her and on each side. They penetrated every nook and cranny and frightened off every species that had survived the darkness and the flooding, which was fine by her. There had been no sightings of the creatures for more than forty-eight hours, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still down there somewhere. After all, they’d already demonstrated their remarkable ability to adapt.

Regardless, they still swam in teams—one researcher, one rescue diver, and one Navy SEAL—and they never strayed more than a hundred yards from any of the surface-access chutes cored through the rock, at the top of which were monitoring stations staffed around the clock. Seemingly every agency had staked a claim to the underground passageways, although DARPA ran point. The bottom line was that they were beneath sovereign US soil and the government had every intention of utilizing the warrens to the greatest financial and tactical advantage.

Calder didn’t care about the politics or the military applications. She’d signed their nondisclosure agreements and every other piece of paper they’d thrust into her face. She didn’t care about studying the habitat or even the predators themselves. All she cared about was finding out what had happened to Mitchell. He’d saved her life, and if there was the slightest chance that he might still be alive, she owed it to him to do the same, although each passing second brought her closer to having to accept the certainty that he was dead.

They’d recovered the remains of Minh Duan, Ahiga Nabahe, Reinhard Thyssen and the Halversen contingent, and thirteen residents of Diomede Village, but those of Petty Officer Third Class Aidan Mitchell hadn’t been among them. He was an experienced rescue swimmer and fearless to a fault; if there was any way he could have survived the attack, then she had every confidence that he would have. She tried not to think about the cloud of blood bursting from the crevice or correlate it to how much the human body could hold. The fact that he hadn’t been folded into the holes in that awful corridor with the rest of them gave her hope. The cook on a sunken Nigerian tugboat had survived for three days in a small pocket of air inside the wreckage at the bottom of the Gulf of Guinea. If he could do it, then so could Mitchell.

“We’re nearing the barricade,” her SEAL escort said through the speakers inside her helmet. His name was Ryan, although she didn’t know if that was his first or last name. “We’ll have to try a different branch.”

“Let’s take it all the way to the end,” she said.

“We’ve deployed three sorties down here already.”

“What if it were you down here?”

The SEAL said nothing.

The tunnels leading eastward toward Russia had been collapsed and reinforced with concrete within hours of her rescue, while those to the west had been sealed off by iron gates that could be opened once the creatures were contained. The problem was that there were so many tunnels with so many branches, they could never be certain of sealing them all. They’d lost a dozen men during construction and managed to kill two of the creatures, which were surely being dissected right down to the molecular level in a secret facility somewhere. Dieter Thyssen, the deputy director of DARPA, coordinated the mission in person from Speranza Station. He believed that if any of them still remained down there, they would have revealed themselves by now. Three days was a long time to go without food, especially with so many people swimming through their hunting grounds.

Calder knew that arguing with him was a waste of breath. Like her, he had a personal stake that allowed his emotions to cloud his judgment. It was undoubtedly those same emotions that swayed him to allow her to stay for as long as she had, while the other survivors had been whisked away the moment they’d been physically stabilized, and she didn’t have the slightest clue as to where they’d been taken.

Seismic monitoring stations on the mainland had detected the detonation of the fail-safes and in under an hour there had been coast guard choppers braving the storm in search of survivors. She’d emerged into the charred remains of the station, the front half of which was still actively burning. The flames had kept her warm until the first chopper thundered overhead. She’d waved it down on the makeshift helipad, where she did her best not to see the pink discoloration all over the snow or the dimples in the accumulation where the wind had attempted to conceal the creatures’ tracks. She’d held onto that egg sac until she was safely aboard the national security cutter
Ramsdell
, and then had happily given it to the first person who would take it.

The days since her rescue had passed in a blur. Her debriefing had helped the powers that be to generate a functional map that allowed them to expeditiously secure the warrens. She slept in two-hour shifts and spent every waking moment down here searching for Mitchell.

They had found no other nests, but they had found several other corridors designed to serve as incubating chambers, where they’d disinterred prehistoric remains dating to sixty-five million years BCE from the walls. They also discovered a cavern that served almost like an elephant burial ground, where the creatures had crawled off to die amid the primitive trees so their decomposing remains would fertilize the soil. Their bones had been compared to nearly every species of dinosaur ever unearthed. It was determined that they most closely resembled the fossilized remains of
Troodon asiamericanus
, which thrived during the Cretaceous Period nearly seventy million years ago, long before modern human’s ancestors crossed the Bering Plateau.

Their working theory was that the Troodons were driven underground by the decreasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which, at the time, were six times higher than current levels and approximately the same as one would expect to find in a cavern hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface. It was the most logical explanation for how the creatures had survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which exterminated the majority of non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and large marine reptiles, and created a predatory vacuum in their absence. They had one of the largest cranial vaults of any species of dinosaur, a trait that correlated directly with intelligence. Calder imagined it was their intellect as much as their instincts that allowed them to endure countless millennia in the darkness.

Her lighting array illuminated a smooth concrete slab reminiscent of a dam. It was five feet thick, reinforced with steel beams, and completely sealed off the back half of the cavern. The elder Thyssen had bragged that it could withstand a nuclear detonation. She’d merely reminded him that the forces of men were predictable, while forces of nature were by their very nature as unpredictable as they were impossible to contain.

Calder stopped and swept her beams across the stalactite-riddled roof and down walls dripping with flowstone. She did the same thing again, only slower. She needed to make sure she didn’t miss the opening to a single passage, no matter how small.

Her coast guard escort gently took her by the upper arm. She turned and saw the compassion on his face. His name was Francis and he’d served with Mitchell. He’d made her a solemn vow that he would stay down here with her until they found his fellow rescue swimmer.

Calder nodded and blew out a long breath. More time wasted.

She started to turn around and abruptly stopped. There was a shadow near the base of the wall. Or at least what looked like a shadow, only it hadn’t moved with her light.

“Do you guys see that?” she asked.

“See what?” Ryan said.

She swam away from them and took a circuitous route so she could see behind a limestone formation reminiscent of a giant fist. The shadows fled from her light and revealed an oval-shaped hole in the limestone, abutting the barricade. The edges were rough and scored by sharp, rounded implements. The concrete had been sunken three feet into the ground. The hole was even deeper and revealed a tunnel underneath the concrete.

Calder shined her forward-facing beams down into the tunnel, which extended farther than she could see. Like she’d told Thyssen, the forces of nature were impossible to contain.

She started to swim into the hole, but Ryan caught her and pulled her backward.

“I’ll take point.”

He collapsed the armatures of his side lights and dove into the hole with a single graceful swish of his legs. She shared a nervous glance with Francis, then followed the SEAL through the tunnel. The rock all around her was scored with the marks of talons and teeth. The creatures had carved their way to freedom using anything and everything at their disposal. She hesitated to imagine their frenzied efforts, but they’d had plenty of practice carving the holes where they entombed their prey.

Ryan was floating in the middle of the adjacent cavern when she emerged. His lights traveled across the far wall, illuminating the mouths of several irregular orifices in the limestone. He glanced back only long enough to make sure she was still behind him before swimming toward them. There was no immediate indication as to which way the creatures might have gone. Not that it really mattered. If there was a way of reaching the surface, she firmly believed the creatures would find it.