Subterrestrial (8 page)

“I assure you, Dr. Duan, this is unlike anything you’ve ever seen.”

The elevator settled to the ground beside a metal platform. The clanging of their footsteps as they disembarked echoed far off into the distance. The sound of blowing air and running water provided a constant, grating hum.

Butler opened the first in a row of freestanding cabinets, inside of which were a good dozen diving helmets with a single halogen lens built into them like a cyclopean eye. He stepped aside so each of them could take one and opened the second cabinet. It was filled with black Thermoprene diving suits arranged by size. The adjacent cabinet housed a good number of what looked like miniature scuba tanks attached to harnesses and face masks.

“These will give you roughly fifteen minutes of compressed air, which isn’t a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, but a whole lot better than nothing. Besides, trying to get through some of these fissures with a full thirty-pound SCBA on your back just isn’t going to happen. This little tank weighs less than five pounds and sits right here on your hip. Just clip the belt around your waist and the strap over your shoulder like this. The mask hangs over here, on the opposite hip. All you need to do is slip it over your head, connect it to the tubing, and crank this knob.” He demonstrated with a hiss of air. “Easy as that.”

“Now, I believe it’s high time I showed you what you’ve come here to see,” Thyssen said, and struck off into the cavern.

“This is where I bid you adieu,” Butler said. “Someone has to do the grunt work while you guys have all the fun.”

He returned to the elevator and, with a clatter of metal and an electric hum, ascended back toward the surface.

Payton glanced at Duan, who stared up at the ceiling with an expression of sheer wonder, and couldn’t help but smile.

“Is it everything you hoped it would be?”

“They mapped three hundred seventy miles of passages in Mammoth Cave. How many do you think are down here?”

Payton clapped him on the shoulder and belted himself into the harness of his breathing apparatus. His headlamp shined on the backs of the others, casting their long shadows across the damp stone ahead of them. They reminded him of tourists the way they looked everywhere but where they were going.

“Over there is where the TBM first broke through,” Thyssen said. “You can tell by these erosion marks that there was approximately four feet of running water bisecting the cavern.”

“What kind?” Calder asked.

“Freshwater, we believe, although it’s impossible to tell for sure. The structural destabilization and sudden change in pressure were ultimately responsible for flooding the entire cavern with seawater. We’ve stabilized the fracture zone, but the water is still coming in as fast as we can pump it back out.”

“Is this safe?” Nabahe asked. “I mean, what’s keeping this whole place from coming down on our heads?”

Thyssen stopped and turned to face him.

“I am,” he said in a voice that brooked no argument. Payton saw a hint of fire in the man’s expression that hadn’t been there before. It disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

Thyssen resumed walking and guided them into a much narrower section. The ceiling was significantly lower and piles of earth still remained, shoved aside just far enough to form a narrow passage through which they were forced to use their hands to climb. Payton’s helmet scraped the sandstone as he squeezed through and picked his way down the opposite side of the treacherous slope. Lengths of bent and sheared metal stood from the rocks. He wondered about their origin; surely they couldn’t have all come from the TBM. One piece almost looked like the propeller of a small plane.

A bank of battery-powered lights had been erected in the middle of the narrow corridor and in such a way that they spotlighted both walls, revealing deep recesses in the rock. It wasn’t until he was nearly on top of the first one that he saw the dark shape crammed into the back. The brittle fur standing from the desiccated pelt. The blanched, partially articulated skeletal remains. And the malformed primate skull unlike any he had ever seen before.

Hart pushed past the others and stood in the mouth of the recess. She realized she wasn’t breathing and gasped for air. As though from somewhere far away, she watched her trembling hand reach inside and trace the contours of the skull.

The facial architecture was strikingly similar to both bonobos and chimpanzees, at least from the maxillae down. The upper jaw featured large canine teeth and molars lacking the specialization of other apes and worn down by grinding, which suggested an omnivorous diet. The lower jaw was disarticulated and rested on its empty rib cage. The cranial vault was disproportionately large and oddly shaped. It was elongated and tapered to a blunted point, almost like a bike helmet, or the hominin remains discovered in Paracas, Peru.

It was the orbital sockets that caught her attention. They were extraordinarily shallow, not nearly deep enough to accommodate even an average-size globe.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“We were hoping you might be able to tell us,” Thyssen said.

Hart could only shake her head in disbelief as she scrutinized the remains.

The rib cage was significantly less conical in shape than most primates’, which theoretically meant much shorter intestines in the abdomen and a diet consisting of a larger ratio of animal to plant matter. That theoretically fit with the larger brain, as digestion wouldn’t have monopolized the blood flow, freeing up more for the remainder of the body. The lordotic curvature of the cervical and lumbar spines, in conjunction with the broad iliac flare, wide acetabular distance, and ninety-degree pubic arch defined its posture as upright. The bowed formation of the knees and highly developed greater trochanters indicated primarily bipedal locomotion, which was confirmed by the relative length of the femurs to the humeri. There was even a slight arch in the feet, despite the valgus positioning of the great toe, which was utilized for grasping and climbing.

In her mind, she saw a taller version of a bonobo with a cone-shaped skull and a sloped face reminiscent of a gorilla’s, although its proportions were much closer to those of a human than any primate she’d ever seen.

“It’s amazing. Have you been able to date the remains?”

“Radiocarbon dating won’t work,” Payton said.

“Why not?”

“Because the results are unreliable on a specimen like this.”

“You’re suggesting it’s too well preserved?”

“I’m suggesting it hasn’t been preserved long enough.”

Hart looked at Payton and watched the smile form on his face.

“Are you saying what I think you are?”

“Based on the incomplete disarticulation, the color and texture of the bone, and the presence of adipocere on the rock, I would guess this specimen couldn’t be much more than fifty years old.”

She studied the expression on his face. There was no hint of deception. In fact, he appeared nearly as excited as she was. She rounded on Thyssen.

“If this is a hoax, you’d better tell me now, or so help me—”

“This is why you’re here, Dr. Hart. This is beyond our admittedly limited expertise.”

She held up her hand to shield her eyes from the lights. The rock walls were honeycombed with nearly identical recesses, all of them filled with carcasses in varying stages of articulation and decomposition. The pelts were shriveled and the fur had been bleached white by age.

The truth hit her like an uppercut. These remains hadn’t found their way into these recesses by accident. They were burials, interments like those in the tunnels beneath Paris. These animals had been deliberately placed here with a certain level of care. Even bonobos, for all their empathy and intelligence, were incapable of such a feat. She’d witnessed them fighting off keepers who attempted to remove a deceased animal from the preserve, but this was an expression of respect and mourning beyond even their considerable cognitive abilities and devotion to their family units. It was a practice in the animal kingdom reserved almost exclusively for
Homo sapiens
.

And if there were burials, that could mean only one thing. Some number of individuals had to have survived in order to bury them.

Her heart was beating so hard and fast she could barely speak. She took Thyssen by the shoulders and looked him dead in the eyes.

“Have you found any living specimens?”

“Not yet,” he said. “
Yet
being the operative word.”

Her head was spinning. The notion that this species had somehow adapted to life down here in the darkness was almost too fantastic to believe. There were so many questions racing through her head that she couldn’t seem to focus on a single one. How had they survived? What did they eat? How did they get down here in the first place? Where did they fall on the evolutionary tree?

She looked back at the remains in an effort to regain her composure. Before traveling to the Congo to live among the bonobos, she’d spent considerable time researching orangutans in the rain forests of Sumatra. They were two entirely different species, and yet she’d assimilated herself into their communities almost effortlessly. If there was anyone on this planet able to decipher their behavior patterns and potentially find them, it was she.

“Where do I start?”

“That’s the problem,” Thyssen said. “We don’t know. Everywhere we look there’s another tunnel leading in a different direction. Some of them are dry, but the majority remain flooded. There simply aren’t enough of us to explore every little nook and cranny, which is why we brought you all here. If those things are truly still alive down here somewhere, then you’re our best hope of finding them.”

“What’s in it for you?” Nabahe asked. “A corporation like Halversen doesn’t do anything out of the goodness of its heart.”

Thyssen’s eyes were hidden in the shadows beneath the brim of his helmet.

“Let me be blunt, Mr. Nabahe. The Halversen Company has invested an ungodly amount of capital into building a tunnel connecting North America and Asia. From a business perspective, its motives aren’t entirely altruistic, I grant you, but neither are they heartless. It anticipates making billions of dollars annually not merely by utilizing its rail system to decrease the cost of shipping consumer goods; it intends to corner the global energy market by owning the pipelines that bring US oil to Russia and China, and Russian natural gas to North America. With so much at stake, it would be easy enough to just let the chips fall where they may, but corporate leadership sees this as an opportunity to make a positive impact on science and publicly affirm its commitment to the environment.”

“So this is all about PR? They’re worried the international media’s going to eat them alive.”

“Even if it were, does that change anything? Regardless of the motivation, is not the end result still the same?”

“What do you intend to do with them if we find them?” Hart asked.

“Relocate them. We’ve already begun preliminary negotiations involving the long-term lease of land we believe would be suitable as a substitute habitat.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler to leave this place like you found it and just build a bridge?” Payton asked. “Turn this into a preserve.”

“There are logistical concerns that make overland travel infeasible.”

“Namely the logistics of leasing foreign land for a private enterprise,” Nabahe said.

“I was thinking more of the geography and the weather, but you’re right, there are certain financial considerations that are impossible to ignore.”

“What assurances can you provide that none of these animals will be harmed in any way?” Hart asked.

“Any that you require. The company’s legal staff has been authorized to draft any agreement that meets your specifications, not limited to creating a conservancy to ensure the humane and ethical relocation and reestablishment of this species in a location of your choice.”

Hart looked from Thyssen to Payton to Nabahe, who stared blankly off into space as though lost in contemplation.

“When do we start?”

“I’ve taken the liberty of having supplies prepared for you. I hope you don’t mind.”

“You mean right now?”

Peak #13

Bering Sea

4.6 Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska

65°13′ N, 168°47′ W

They called it Great White Island not because of the height of its central peak or the fact that it was covered with snow and ice, but rather because from a distance it looked like the dorsal fin of its namesake shark breaking the rough black waves. Martin didn’t believe in romanticizing such things. The way he saw it, this was just another in a string of ugly stone protrusions in the middle of these desolate ice fields. From the sea to the sky, everything was either black, white, or gray. He understood why most towns up here were dry; it wouldn’t take much diminishment of a guy’s inhibitions to give in to the urge to wrap his lips around the barrel of a shotgun.

He shielded his eyes from the blowing snow and stared to the south, where the horizon was smudged with black smoke rising from the Kookooligit volcanic fields on St. Lawrence Island. So far, the seismic activity along the northern perimeter of the Pacific Ring of Fire had been fairly minimal and had yet to result in any major eruptions, but that didn’t mean half of the scientific community wasn’t floating around the Aleutian Islands waiting for something to happen, while the Red Cross and other humanitarian aid agencies readied themselves for another disaster on the scale of Fukushima.

The eastern rim was stable, at least for the time being. Let the media swarm and forecast a fiery Armageddon. It kept them away from the real story: the thirty-one subterranean passages from which seawater with a specific gravity similar to that of the Bering Sea spontaneously gushed forth. Halversen’s team had done a miraculous job of keeping a lid on the TransBering disaster so far, but at the rate the water was returning and the seas were rising, they wouldn’t be able to contain it forever. The Halversen contingent couldn’t allow that to happen, at least not until they had a grasp on the one variable for which they couldn’t seem to account.