Subterrestrial (7 page)

“Dr. Calder. Mr. Nabahe,” he said. “Allow me to be the first to welcome you to Speranza Station.”

Calder took his hand and hopped down into the accumulation. Behind her, the Bering Sea crashed against the breakers. She could barely see the rugged peak of the island through the clouds.

Another man lowered his head against the rotor wash and unloaded their bags. In one motion, he hefted them from the cargo hold and charged toward a row of Quonset huts so covered with snow they were nearly invisible.

“I think it’s about time someone told us where we are.”

“I’ll be more than happy to explain once we’re inside and out of this infernal storm,” the man who welcomed them said. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind following me . . .”

They’d barely started walking when the chopper lifted from the makeshift helipad. The wind from the blades shoved them forward and filled the air with so much snow that Calder couldn’t see. By the time they reached the leftmost building, the sound of the chopper was lost to the screaming wind.

The man struggled to open the door against the gale and the snow that had drifted across it since he last opened it mere minutes ago. She brushed past him and into the domed interior. There were no windows or interior walls. The corrugated aluminum had been hurriedly framed, blown full of insulation, and sealed behind silver reflective sheeting. A large table dominated the center of the room. There had to be a dozen computer monitors on top of it and a radio from which bursts of static crackled. At the back was an industrial gas furnace, which fed the maze of ductwork overhead. The air blowing from it felt positively divine.

“Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Chase Butler. Mr. Thyssen had planned to personally greet you when you arrived, but he’s regrettably been detained. He asked that I pass along his most sincere apologies and his gratitude for dropping everything in your busy lives to join us here. With any luck, he’ll catch up with us soon enough.”

Calder recognized the SMOS satellite feed on one of the monitors, only the color scale had been modified to highlight dozens of different areas in red. At a glance she could see they corresponded to the zones of decreased salinity she’d already identified.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for breezing through the grand tour, but we have a limited window of opportunity and we can’t afford to waste any time. I have a hunch you didn’t come all this way to see our little home away from home, anyway.”

“Why the rush?” Nabahe asked.

“You’ll understand soon enough.”

The man who’d taken their bags emerged from the narrow corridor connecting the huts and assumed his position at the table without so much as a sideways glance.

“This chatterbox here is Kellen Wiley. It’s his job to maintain contact with the outside world and keep this facility running, neither of which is an especially easy task on this rock. He’s the one holding your metaphorical lifeline to the surface.”

“And what do you do, Mr. Butler?” Calder asked.

“Please. Call me Chase. I’m the senior project engineer. Geoengineer, actually. I’m in charge of everything down below.”

“Down below?” Nabahe said.

“In due time.”

Nabahe opened his mouth to protest, but Butler cut him off.

“Trust me. Nothing I say can prepare you for what you’re about to see.”

Butler gestured for everyone to follow him. He had to duck to pass through the corridor between buildings. The adjacent Quonset hut had the same heater and ductwork, but those were the only similarities. It reminded Calder of a military barracks, only with the illusion of privacy. The space had been curtained off into stalls, each of which housed a bunk bed with a standing bureau at either end. Most of the bunks appeared occupied. Some were made and others weren’t. Her bag was on the bottom bunk of the second partition to her right.

“I’d love to let you unpack your belongings and settle in, but I’m afraid we simply don’t have that kind of time.”

“How many people are stationed here?” Nabahe asked.

“Including the two of you, there are fifteen of us in all.”

“Where is everyone?” Calder asked.

In response, Butler guided them through another short corridor and into a third building.

“In here you’ll find the kitchen and rec room, although it would surprise me if you saw this place again anytime soon. We have a TV and a Blu-ray player over there by the couches and a foosball table in the corner. The Wi-Fi is spotty at best, but it’s the best you’re going to find out here, so if you need to contact anyone, now’s the time to do it. There’s no signal at all where we’re going.”

On the opposite side of the hut was an open-style kitchen that looked like it had been borrowed from a restaurant. It had a walk-in freezer and refrigerator and dry storage on wire racks. Sacks of flour, grains, and beans were stacked nearly to the ceiling. The stove had a dozen burners and a carbon-scored griddle. There was an eating bar with stainless steel warming units and three ordinary foldout cafeteria tables with benches on either side. Two men and a woman drinking coffee from mismatched mugs sat at the table farthest from them. They couldn’t have been there very long, judging by the puddles around their boots.

“All of our specialists in one place at the same time,” Butler said. “Trust me when I say that making this happen was a logistical nightmare.”

He laughed in the easy, confident manner of a man accustomed to doing so for an audience.

“Where are my manners? In my excitement I nearly blew right past the introductions. Dr. Brooke Calder, marine biologist for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Ahiga Nabahe, the sociocultural anthropologist responsible for discovering the first of what we like to call around here The Watchers.”

From the corner of her eye, Calder caught Nabahe look curiously at Butler.

“And over here we have our old-timers.” Butler smiled. “You guys have been here what? Half an hour now?”

“Almost.” The woman at the other table wore a red parka, cargo pants, and her long blonde hair in a ponytail. The expression on her face was more carefully guarded than the tone of her voice. “And you still haven’t shown us what we flew halfway around the world to see.”

Butler chuckled.

Calder understood the woman’s frustration; she’d only been here for a few minutes and already she was running low on patience.

“This is Dr. Emily Hart, one of the foremost primatologists in the field; Dr. Trey Payton, an evolutionary anthropologist from the Johann Brandt Institute in Chicago; and Dr. Minh Duan, a world-renowned speleologist whose addition to our expedition was a fortunate stroke of serendipity.”

Calder looked from one face to the next in an effort to piece together the logic behind assembling a team composed of experts with such narrow and disparate areas of expertise.

“I see you’ve all been formally introduced,” a voice she recognized immediately said from behind her. “Shall we get right down to it then?”

A fourth Quonset hut had been erected lengthwise behind the first three. They had to pass through a sealed door and walk the length of a corridor lined with security cameras to reach it. The ground vibrated from the masses of equipment running inside, the racket from which was positively deafening. Thyssen had to shout to be heard over it.

“These pumps run day and night. There’s still a significant amount of water down there and we see more and more returning every day as the water table attempts to reestablish a state of equilibrium.” He continued deeper into the dim room, past panels with digital readouts and pressure gauges. “There’s a higher concentration of carbon dioxide down there, so we have to use compressors to force surface air through these tubes and into the cavern. Even then, safety protocol dictates you carry a personal breathing apparatus at all times. Those gasses can build up in toxic levels before you know it.”

The noise made it hard to think. Payton was doing his best to process all of the information being hurled at him in such a short amount of time, while inside he was bouncing around like a kid on Christmas morning. Somewhere beneath his feet was the environment Thyssen had claimed was capable of supporting higher orders of life. The prospect of being one of the first to explore it was exhilarating. It was all he could do to resist the urge to shove through the others and sprint toward the cage suspended above the gaping earthen maw at the far end of the room, around which the building had been erected.

“These generators supply power to the entire station,” Butler shouted. “We have enough fuel in storage tanks outside to power them for more than a year, although we anticipate a considerable increase in usage once we’re able to run power lines all the way down there. Until we’re confident we have the flooding under control, we don’t want to risk, you know . . . Z
zzzt
!”

The others looked as overwhelmed as Payton felt. Their combined specialties painted a picture that made his heart race. The problem was that none of them seemed to know exactly what was down there. They’d each been given just enough information to stimulate their professional curiosity. He’d hardly begun discussing it with Dr. Hart when the others arrived. She said Thyssen had shown her a picture for which she could think of no rational explanation. While she hadn’t gone into detail, she did say that if she was right, they were potentially dealing with a previously unclassified primate with transitional traits. Transitional, meaning not one species or another, but somewhere in between. That was his stock in trade, physical adaptation in the midst of the process of evolving. If there really were such remains down there, then the coming days would undoubtedly be the most exciting of his life.

“And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the moment you’ve been waiting for.” Thyssen pulled open the cage door and stepped inside. It was eight feet deep and three feet wide. An orange girder reminiscent of a construction crane ran straight up the right side, along with cables for both support and power. A handwritten sign had been affixed to one of the posts:
LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE!

“What does that sign mean?” Calder asked.

“Our crew has an interesting sense of humor.”

“It’s Italian,” Hart said. “From Dante’s
The Divine Comedy
. It means ‘abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ It’s the inscription over the gates of hell.”

“Interesting being a subjective term, I suppose,” Thyssen said.

Payton ducked inside and made room for the others. The floor was solid steel and painted blue to match the framework. Butler stepped to the side into a small control room about the size of a phone booth and positioned himself in front of a simplistic console that featured two buttons—one red and one green—and a joystick. Butler caught Payton looking.

“The controls are designed so that even an engineer can figure them out.”

His laughter echoed from inside the earth as the cage slowly descended.

“This elevator will take us all the way to the bottom at a rate of one hundred eighteen feet per minute,” Thyssen said. “While that may not sound all that slow, trust me, this will feel like the longest four minutes of your lives.”

The rock on both sides was smooth at first, but they rapidly reached sections reinforced by concrete, rebar, and gigantic metal rings. Pebbles pinged from the roof, although from where they originated was anyone’s guess. The only light came from the dim halogen tubes in the ceiling fixture and the spotlights mounted underneath the platform, which cast an eerie bronze glare down the shaft.

Payton watched the patchwork earth pass with growing unease as he chiseled a white crust of evaporated salt from the grate with his thumbnail. He alleviated the pressure building behind his ears with a yawn. He was only peripherally aware of Butler’s voice as the man detailed how they established the shaft in a matter of days following the accidental collapse of the tunnel by the TBM. The way he described the events culminating in the deaths of the entire crew was almost nonchalant and was punctuated by nervous laughter.

“We try not to dwell on it,” Butler said. “We just keep reminding ourselves that the greatest knowledge often comes at the highest cost.”

“Why wasn’t any of this on the news?” Nabahe asked.

“So far we’ve been able to contain the situation,” Thyssen said.

“An accident responsible for the deaths of eighteen people is more than just a ‘situation.’ I won’t be party to any kind of cover-up.”

“Nor will anyone ask you to be. The government is well aware of what happened here and is assisting us in our efforts to fully evaluate the extent of our position. You have to understand that our proximity to the Russian border makes our predicament considerably more . . . delicate. An international incident is in no one’s best interests.”

“All politics aside,” Payton said, “if what we’re about to see down here is as amazing as we’ve been led to believe, the entire world deserves to know.”

“And it will.” Thyssen looked away from them and through the window above the console. “When it’s ready.”

The way he said it gave Payton a tingling sensation in the pit of his stomach. What could possibly be down here that the world wasn’t ready to see? For the first time he wondered if it was possible that the “higher orders of life” weren’t quite as ancient as he’d assumed.

An enormous cavern opened beneath their feet. The sound of the motor changed and took on a flat intonation. Payton watched the walls of the chute fall away. The spotlights diffused into a space so large they barely limned the damp sandstone walls. Portable lighting arrays had been erected in a ring around the machinations of the elevator. The rubble had been cleared from the center of the cavern and restrained behind chain-link fencing. A channel had been cut into the ground to funnel the water into a retaining pond, from which a pipe ran back up through the shaft. Others snaked along the ground deeper into the tunnel, following the course of the large inflatable tube through which the surface air flowed.

“This is an epikarst zone,” Duan said. “The sandstone roof does not erode like the limestone floor. It is a very stable system. Like Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.”