Subterrestrial (16 page)

“Can you hear me?” Thyssen shouted.

They stood in silence marred by the dripping of condensation.

Plip . . . plip . . . plip . . .

“There are only two signals,” Payton said. He thought of Duan and felt a pang of guilt for having involved him.

Thyssen looked back, his face hidden by the blinding light on his helmet.

“All the more reason not to waste any more time, wouldn’t you say?”

Thyssen splashed into the darkness, the aura of his light constricting around him. The churning sound of his footsteps echoed from the confines.

Payton started after him, but Nabahe stepped in his way and placed his hand against Payton’s chest.

“I don’t like this.”

“You and me both. He’s right, though. We can’t risk losing their signals again. And there are only two of them. If something happened to one of us, we’d want the others to come after us, wouldn’t we?”

Nabahe looked away and let his arm fall to his side. He reluctantly nodded his head.

“Can’t you feel it, though?” he whispered.

Payton didn’t reply for fear of losing his resolve. He sloshed past Nabahe and followed Thyssen’s silhouette into the narrowing crevice.

The ground became increasingly uneven. He had to brace his hands against the walls on each side to keep from rolling his ankles on the slick rocks. Not that the walls were much better. The slime of archaea came off on his hands and formed a sloppy paste seemingly no amount of wiping on his suit could remove.

The water grew uncomfortably warm and the steam stung his eyes. Thyssen became a vague silhouette ahead of him. The water level rose past his knees and to his thighs. Before he knew it, he was in past his waist and sweating beneath his suit, which did a much better job of holding in the heat than letting it out. He didn’t realize the ceiling was lowering until he hit his head and was forced to walk in a crouch. The warmth bubbled up from beneath him and made the surface choppy. He lowered his chin into the water and immediately regretted it, but there was barely enough room to keep the rest of his head out.

Thyssen’s light dimmed and diffused into the water. Payton knew exactly what that meant and was unsurprised when he found the passage blocked by the lowering stone roof. Thyssen’s light faded and then extinguished, leaving the pool once more dark. Payton looked back at the others, whose beams shined up at the stone overhead in an effort to keep their faces out of the water.

“I’ll go first,” Payton said. “If I’m not back in five minutes—”

“We’re not splitting up,” Hart said. “Just promise me that once we find the others, you’ll help me track down that primate.”

Payton stared at her for a long moment. The almost pleading tone in her voice was at odds with the tough facade she tried to project.

“You have my word.”

He drew a deep breath, lowered his head into the hot water, and swam toward where he’d last seen Thyssen’s light.

Below Speranza Station

Bering Sea

Ten Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska

65°47′ N, 169°01′ W

It was like a jungle somehow encapsulated in the center of the earth, right down to the humidity and the smell of the moldering detritus. Despite spending so much time diving in the Mexican cenotes, Calder never suspected anything even remotely like this could exist, and yet here she was, rubbing the proof between her fingers. The fern fronds separated and fell to the ground, leaving her fingertips damp.

“How can any of this grow down here without light?” Mitchell said.

And then it hit her.

“These plants are just like the algae on coral reefs.”

“They couldn’t survive for any length of time underwater,” Mitchell said. “Look at them. The leaves are all withered. The flooding nearly killed them.”

“It’s not about the water,” she said. “It’s about the light.”

“You’re suggesting these plants are growing by the light of these . . . glowworms?”

“Think about it. Light’s a form of electromagnetic radiation, photons produced by a superheated source. The sun emits an entire spectrum of radiation, from ultraviolet to infrared, neither of which is visible to the naked eye. The visible range lies somewhere in between, at wavelengths between 380 and 780 nanometers. We perceive these photons as color. Everything from violet and blue to yellow and red. All of the colors of the rainbow.”

“This is not like Hang Sơn Đoòng,” Duan said. “There is no hole to let in the sun.”

“And plants need the sun to live,” Mitchell said. “They can’t photosynthesize without it.”

“Don’t confuse the sun’s light with the radiation it emits,” Calder said. “Every photon it produces is a physical quantity of energy that has to travel across space and pass through our atmosphere, which subtly alters its wavelength and frequency. Even the most minor variations result in different shades of coloration. What we see as white light is actually a combination of all of those different wavelengths, and what we perceive as color is an object reflecting that particular wavelength while absorbing all of the others. Take my hair. It’s auburn because it reflects the photons in the red range of approximately six hundred ninety nanometers.”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but these gobs of snot are only producing purple light,” Mitchell said.

“You’re missing the point,” Calder said. “For one thing, trees don’t need light in the green spectrum. They reflect it.”

“So now you’re a marine biologist and a botanist?”

“Funny.” She smirked. “No, but I’m an expert on the food webs of tropical reefs. At their most basic level, they’re built upon the photosynthesis of algae, which forms a symbiotic relationship with coral polyps, and the phytoplankton that serve as the basic nutrients for increasingly larger species of aquatic life. Without them there would be no crustaceans to feed the groupers. No groupers to feed the sharks. Don’t you see? The ocean reflects photons in the blue range. Especially in tropical waters, where reefs thrive. So if those wavelengths are reflected, you’re left with photons in the purple, yellow, orange, and red range. Infrared light can be deadly to such sensitive aquatic organisms, as can light with shorter wavelengths in the red spectrum, leaving us with a viable photosynthetic range of three wavelengths—purple, yellow, and orange—of which violet is the longest.

“But wavelength isn’t the only factor contributing to photosynthesis. You have to consider that photons are a product of heat—like from the sun or by running an electrical current through a tungsten filament—so you have to consider that every color also has a temperature component, measured in kelvins, which is inversely proportional to its wavelength. The longer the wavelength, the higher the temperature, the greater the photosynthetic value. If you figure that on a clear day at the equator the sun transmits light at somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand kelvins and the ocean reflects the blue, as you go deeper the colors with the shortest wavelengths become attenuated by the water, leaving only—”

“Purple,” Mitchell said.

“Exactly. Without violet light, algae don’t photosynthesize. That’s why aquariums housing coral utilize violet light. I’d be willing to wager that trees function in the same way, too. Since they reflect the green spectrum and are adversely affected by infrared radiation, they probably utilize the purple and yellow wavelengths aboveground, too. And since there’s no visible light outside of the purple range, that’s why you can’t tell these trees are green until you shine your white light, with its broad spectrum, onto them.”

“So generations of glowworms have served to keep these extinct trees alive,” Mitchell said.

The implications were astounding. If there were plants, then there were organisms that fed upon them. And if there were lower orders of life, then there had to be predators to control their numbers. It was the natural order.

She thought about the scratches on the bones of the dead primate that had reminded her of the marks on the shells of fossilized nautiloids and looked at Duan’s leg. The bleeding appeared to have slowed, if not stopped. She could still clearly see the pattern of the lacerations, though. She again wondered exactly what the men must have seen back in the cavern where they fell into the river.

“How do you think these plants started growing down here?” Mitchell asked. “It’s not like the ground formed around them.”

“In Hang Sơn Đoòng,” Duan said, “seeds blow down from the forest and take root in the soil.”

Mitchell licked the tip of his index finger and held it up.

“Not a hint of a breeze.”

“The river carried them?”

“Those aren’t the only means of seed dispersal.” Calder saw where Mitchell was going with that line of thought. He’d reached the same conclusion she had. “They can be spread through the feces of—”

A soft crunching sound to her right.

She caught a glimpse of motion from the corner of her eye and turned to see branches settling back into place.

Err-err-err-err-err-err-uhh-uhh-uhh-err
.

“Did you hear—?”

“Shh!” Mitchell cut her off.

A crackling sound from her left, like a cautiously placed footstep on the detritus.

By the time she turned, there was nothing there.

The violet light made the shadows beneath the trees and behind the branches impenetrable.

Calder focused on slowing her breathing so she could hear the subtle sounds of the forest. Branches gently swayed ahead of them, as though at the urging of a faint breeze. She could tell by the feel of the sweat dripping down the back of her neck and beading on her brow that there was no air movement whatsoever.

Duan turned toward the source of the movement, raised his hand to his helmet, and clicked on the light. The beam streaked across the cavern and spotlighted the wavering boughs of a giant palm tree.

“I do not see—”

The shrubs in front of him shook and a dark shape tore through the underbrush.

It was upon him before he could scream.

He hit the ground on his back and vanished beneath the shrubs.

“Duan!” Calder shouted.

The bushes shook and parted in the wake of whatever barreled through them. Crashing sounds. Duan’s light cast wild shadows and his screams trailed him into the forest.

Calder sprinted after him. She had to raise her forearms in front of her face to shield it from the branches, which made it even more difficult to see the shaking boughs and shredded detritus marking Duan’s passage. The racket grew farther away by the second. She screamed in frustration and pushed herself even harder—

Her face struck the dirt before she even realized she’d tripped. She pushed herself up and cried out at the sudden, sharp pain in her shoulder.

The trees ahead of her were now still. She couldn’t be certain which direction whatever took Duan had gone, or even if she was still facing in the right direction. She struggled to her feet and staggered forward.

A twig snapped behind her.

She whirled and started swinging before she recognized Mitchell. He caught her by the wrist and pulled her to him before she could wind up for another swing.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s me.”

“Which way did they go?”

“I don’t know. I lost sight—”

His words abruptly stopped and his eyes widened.

“What?”

“You, uh . . . you have . . . right here . . .”

He touched his cheek.

Calder raised her hand to her own face and felt the muddy sludge. She scraped it back toward her ear and flung it off. It was only when she attempted to smear off the rest that she felt it.

The mud was warm.

She looked down and saw it. The standing black fluid on the ground. The spatters on the broad leaves and the trunks.

“Duan,” she whispered.

The smell hit her. It was a metallic scent that lodged itself inside her sinuses and slid, sluglike, down the back of her throat.

There was no doubt in her mind. It was blood.

Speranza Station

Bering Sea

Ten Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska

65°47′ N, 169°01′ W

Butler leaped to his feet and kicked over his chair in frustration. It wasn’t so much that everything was spiraling out of control as it was he’d lost control over it. That was his job, to impose order upon chaos, and until today that was exactly what he’d been able to do each and every time he’d set his mind to it. He’d helped engineer the underground neutrino production facility at the Sanford Research Complex in South Dakota and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. While neither had been constructed at such a frenzied pace or under conditions nearly as volatile, they’d been built to withstand nuclear detonations on a scale beyond anything the world had ever witnessed. There was no reason a job like this should have been anywhere near as challenging, especially not with existing tunnels predating construction. Then again, maybe that was the problem. They’d made assumptions based upon their understanding of the strata, rather than bending it to their will.

The MINT underground tracking technology worked exactly as promised, but it was worthless if they were unable to communicate what they saw to the men below, whose com-links worked sporadically at best so far from the nearest signal repeaters. Everything was too rushed. Halversen had expected a miracle and, for the most part, he’d delivered. There were simply too many variables they’d been unprepared to account for. No one had ever attempted a feat of engineering of this magnitude, let alone in such a geologically unstable zone and without anything resembling a proper survey. Whoever gave the green light to the TransBering tunnel had undoubtedly done so while crossing his fingers and holding his breath. Now it was Butler’s mess to clean up, and he wasn’t about to fail.

“Try again,” he said.

Wiley rebooted the communications system for the fifth time and again produced a buzz of static. He glanced back and shook his head. The complete and utter lack of expression on Wiley’s face was maddening. Surely someone incapable of speaking would invest a little effort into learning alternative means of communication. Plus, the way he just stared was more than a little unnerving. When it came to running operations of this nature, however, there was no one better. Throw in the fact that he’d removed his own tongue after being captured by Taliban insurgents to prevent himself from talking, and he was the perfect choice for a clandestine operation of this nature. Assuming the whole blasted thing didn’t blow up in their faces.