Authors: Michael McBride
Hudson reached for the two-way handset but hesitated. He had no idea what he intended to say. In all of his years fishing these seas, he’d never seen anything like this.
The beam from the lighthouse diffused into the fog. as the cliffs of Guard Island, off the coast of Wales, Alaska, materialized from the mist to the northeast. Their eroded granite slopes were lined with snow. They seemed to grow taller before his very eyes. The sea fell away, revealing black cliffs that hadn’t seen the light of day in thousands of years.
Impact from behind. His head snapped back. Waves crashed over the stern and lifted the bow from the water. He tumbled over his pilot’s chair. Crab pots slid down the deck and struck the wheelhouse hard enough to crack the windows.
The prow dove, sending the broken crab pots and his flailing men skittering across the slick planks. Hudson was thrown once more over his chair and against the instrumentation. When he pushed himself up, he was staring straight down the deck and into a maelstrom of ice floes and white caps. His men, broken and screaming, careened into the waiting sea.
A wall of water struck the ship from the starboard side and nearly capsized her. Hudson left his feet and banged his head on something hard. He saw stars and his mouth filled with blood. The ship rolled back. He grabbed the pilot’s chair and used it to pull himself to his feet.
Waves raced past on both sides, only they were flowing in the wrong direction, buffeting the
Arctic Stalker
from behind. The fishing vessel accelerated and swung around sideways toward what looked like a sheer cliff formed from the Bering Sea itself. It plummeted helplessly toward a great whirlpool and the mountains rising from beneath the ocean.
Hudson drew a breath as the
Arctic Stalker
capsized. Chunks of ice and frigid water exploded through the glass and filled the wheelhouse before he could scream.
Zero Plus 30 Seconds
10:36:43 a.m. AKST
Ron Garrison focused on the pinprick of light ahead and stood on the gas. A chaos of voices filled the cab of the Peterbilt tri-axle heavy hauler. Their terror became increasingly palpable as one by one they were silenced.
He wasn’t going to make it.
The ground positively shook. The wheel vibrated in his hands. The distant light from the outside world shivered.
It was only a 3 percent grade, yet with sixteen tons of rock in the trailer, he might as well have been trying to drive straight up a wall. He had a Cummins 460-horsepower engine under the hood, and still he was helpless as he watched the speedometer drop from thirty to twenty-five.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the headlights of the tractor-trailer behind him extinguish. He knew damn well what that meant.
He wasn’t going to make it.
Water spread across the ground in front of him, reflecting his headlights. The egress grew larger ahead of him, but it was still too far away. Another glance at the side mirror revealed the reflection of his taillights from the wall of water bearing down on him from behind. The few operational floodgates hadn’t even slowed it.
The cab bucked and the seatbelt bit into his chest. He had to swerve to keep the trailer from jackknifing across the tunnel. Frothing waves rushed past either side of the cab and outpaced him toward the exit. The front wheels left the ground as the floodwaters shoved the trailer forward and filled the bed.
The engine made a high-pitched whining sound, and then all he could hear was the roar of the water.
He wasn’t going to make it.
Frigid water poured through the seam around the door, covering the floorboards. He was barely able to keep his foot on the gas. Foamy spray spattered his side windows and spurted his shoulder from somewhere behind him. It rose up over his headlights and the tunnel darkened. If his engine submerged, it would stall and he’d be dead in the water. Literally.
Ron bellowed at the top of his lungs.
The water lifted the trailer and hurled the entire truck ahead of it. The steering wheel spun in his grasp. The tires lost contact with the concrete. An icy wave poured down his back and the side windows cracked. The hood disappeared beneath the churning waves. The truck accelerated at a staggering rate, even as the cab filled with water.
He wasn’t going to make it.
The egress sped toward him, growing larger and larger, while the outside light simultaneously dimmed and diffused into the water.
And then he was through it.
The sky opened up before his eyes, a gray smear of fog and storm clouds. He caught a glimpse of the earthmovers and construction vehicles on both sides of the orifice. The white shacks and construction mobile homes fell away below him. The cab inverted. He felt a sensation of weightlessness, then of falling.
The water cleared just long enough to reveal the snow-blanketed tundra rising to meet him seconds before sixteen tons of gravel flattened the cab.
Zero Plus Forty-Five Seconds
10:36:58 a.m. AKST
The Cessna 172 Skyhawk seaplane banked through the fog concealing Little Diomede Island. The lone settlement, Diomede Village, was a cluster of weather-beaten dwellings perched on the western shore of the barren rock. There were just over a hundred people living on the island, the majority of them subsisting on the petty wages of the dying mining and whaling industries.
Toni Sarich had made this flight from Nome more times than she could count, and yet the sense of utter desolation never failed to astound her. The people here lived within shouting distance of Big Diomede Island, the Russian settlement just on the other side of the International Date Line, and only saw the sun maybe a handful of days every year. She could think of nothing more depressing than living in one of those old shacks on the cold gray granite and doing little more than watching the snow fall and waiting to die.
She saw the expression form on the face of the man behind her when he caught his first glimpse of the island through the mist. Like all of the other physicians she’d delivered to Little Diomede through the years, he’d signed on to man the clinic for six months. He hadn’t even set foot on that frozen rock and already he was counting down the days until she picked him up again.
Toni chuckled out loud as the Cessna started its descent.
A shrill beeping sound erupted from her flight panel. The hands on her altimeter spun wildly. She peeked at the underside of her wings to see if the pitot tubes had frozen over, but there was no more frost than usual. They registered the atmospheric pressure while the plane was in motion and used it to calculate the altitude above sea level, which, according to her gauges, was plummeting rapidly beneath her. All of the other gauges appeared to be functioning properly, with the exception of the vertical speed indicator, which suggested they were accelerating at a phenomenal rate, almost as though they were in free-fall.
She dipped the wing and looked down.
There was Diomede Village. She would have recognized it anywhere. The problem was that the ocean upon which she intended to land was a hundred feet down a slope that hadn’t been there before.
The doctor said something to her through her headset, but she ignored him and switched her communications over to the Nome tower frequency.
A flash of movement from the corner of her eye.
A silver blur streaked up from the ground toward the plane. Her first thought was that someone had launched a surface-to-air missile from the village, like she’d seen so many times during her two tours in Iraq back in Desert Storm.
Impact from below. The scream of wrenching metal.
The left pontoon whipped across her view and the Cessna suddenly rolled. The port wing sliced through her peripheral vision. She turned to see a broken stub where it had once been. And a pillar of water several hundred feet tall.
“Hang on!” she shouted.
The starboard side was unbalanced and threw the plane into a circling nosedive toward the ocean. The propeller stalled. The water on the windows turned to ice.
Diomede Village sped past. The stream of water erupted straight up from the ground between the helipad and the diesel storage tank. The hundred-foot-tall hydraulic drilling rig the TransBering Railway people used to take core samples and create surface vents for the tunnel cartwheeled down the newly exposed shore toward the receding sea, shedding pipes and shrapnel as it went.
The spin tightened. All Toni saw was a great black-and-white vortex of seawater and ice.
“Mayday! May—!”
A sudden jolt.
Her head snapped forward.
Waves raced up the windows. And then they were submerged. The glass made a cracking sound, and for a second she thought it might hold. By the time she released her harness, she was completely immersed in water so cold it threatened to shut down her body.
She shifted in her seat. Braced her feet against the headrest. Aligned herself with the maw where the windshield had once been as the tail swung downward toward the ocean floor.
A hand closed around her ankle. She kicked it until it released and propelled herself through the frame and past the bent propeller. The plane sank rapidly beneath her into the darkness, taking her passenger with it. The undertow threatened to pull her down, too.
Her chest burned and she fought the instinctive reflex to draw a breath. She wasn’t going to be able to resist much longer.
Toni breached the surface with a gasp. She caught a fleeting glimpse of jagged mountains, where previously there had only been sea, before waves broke over her head.
The current dragged her under. She tried to keep the surface in sight. Her arms were heavy and leaden, her feet numb.
She invested the last of her strength into a final desperate attempt to reach an ice floe on the surface, but her fingers slid from the slick surface.
The last thing she saw was the village, high up on the granite peak, as she was dragged down into oblivion.
Zero Plus Eighteen Minutes
10:54:08 a.m. AKST
It looked as though the tide had gone out and forgotten to return. The Cape of Prince Wales shoreline was littered with debris and dead marine life. Vessels of all shapes and sizes had run aground. Stranded seafaring men waved their arms wildly in a vain attempt to get the attention of the coast guard helicopter as it streaked past over the ice-spotted sea.
Petty Officer Third Class Aidan Mitchell had never seen anything like it. The trainers at rescue swimmer school had shown him footage of the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina, but he’d never expected to see anything even remotely close to that kind of utter devastation up here in the frozen north. He donned his diving vest over his orange neoprene dry suit and looked past the pilot through the windshield.
“Where the hell did that come from?” Mitchell asked.
A rocky ridge stood from the ocean like a great stone gate. It ran from one side of the horizon to the other and, as far as he could tell, completely divided the Bering and Chukchi Seas.
“That’s the least of our worries right now,” the copilot said.
The Sikorsky MH-60 Jayhawk flew so low across the water that a
V
of white spray rose from the surface. The thunder of the blades was deafening. Even with the noise-cancelling headsets and microphones, they had to shout to communicate.
“How far down is that tunnel?” Petty Officer Third Class Dylan Kress asked.
The pilot repeated the question to the command center, then relayed the answer, “Three hundred ninety feet.”
“Through solid rock?” Kress asked.
“I’m glad it’s you going down there and not me,” the pilot said.
“Do we have an established point of ingress?” Mitchell asked.
“Not unless you want to swim all the way in from the mainland.”
Mitchell took off the cans and pulled the full-face diving mask over his head. He watched the land mass rise from the horizon as they approached. It didn’t completely shunt the Bering Strait as it had initially appeared from a distance. Narrow channels of water passed between a seemingly endless string of islands close enough together to swim from one to the next. It looked like the sea level had dropped a good hundred feet. There were reports of flooding coming in from Canada and the Pacific Northwest as fast as they could receive them, but even that kind of displacement didn’t explain where so much water had gone. The submerged tunnel could only hold so much.
The exposed rock was already white with ice and snow. Clouds of powder gusted from the peaks.
“How close do you boys want me to get?” the pilot shouted.
“As long as you drop us over the water, we’ll be fine,” Mitchell said. He hooked the air hose from the dive tank on his back to the mouthpiece adapter and checked the pressure and flow of the hypoxic breathing gas. The trimix gas incorporated helium to help counteract the effects of nitrogen narcosis and stave off high-pressure nervous syndrome.
The chopper slowed and hovered just south of one of the narrow channels. Mitchell stepped right to the edge of the open side door and stared down into the parabolic depression the rotors created on the surface. The last thing he wanted was to land on solid ground or submerged ice from this height.
He clicked on the LED light mounted to his mask and glanced over at Kress.
“Race you to the bottom.”
Mitchell crossed his arms over his chest and stepped out over the nothingness. The wind from the blades buffeted him sideways. He felt a tingling sensation in his lower abdomen, then impact with the water. He was twenty feet down before his momentum slowed. Despite the neoprene and insulating argon gas, the sudden and dramatic drop in temperature momentarily paralyzed him.
A curtain of silt hung in the water. He could barely see Kress kicking his way down into the darkness with his handheld CobraTac navigation and mapping system in front of him. Mitchell swam after him through the settling sediment, which limited the reach of his light and accumulated on his mask. He cleared it and focused on the rugged underwater mountains as they approached. Boulders the size of cars had broken from the submerged cliffs and tumbled down to the sea floor, leaving an avalanche in their wake.