Chapters (42)
- BENEATH THE DARK ICE
- Table of Contents
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Epilogue
- One
- Two
- Three
They were slowing and Alex decided he had to set another ambush for the creature. He needed to give them some more time. Just as he was about to disappear into the dark he heard Monica call. She had found a rift in the cave—a huge, jagged tear in the black wall with a hint of an earthen smell coming from within on the slight breeze.
Aimee used the deep earth sonar as Alex had taught her and came up with a reading of half a mile before it encountered a bend or obstruction. There was still a good deal of airflow originating from the narrow cleft so the odds were it wasn’t a dead end.
“Looks fairly new, maybe even under twenty thousand years—that’s just a few seconds on the geo-clock. This place must still be active to a degree and I can’t be sure it will be safe for us.” Monica was giving her professional speleological view of the dangers involved but they were not in any normal caving scenario.
Without a second thought, Alex just shouted one word. “In!”
Monica then Matt followed by Aimee entered the ten-foot-wide rift. Alex hung back for a few extra seconds and surveyed the entrance—it looked far too narrow for the creature to fold itself into, but without its shell or any discernible skeletal mass he couldn’t be sure exactly what it was capable of. Nevertheless, he guessed it would send one or more of its tentacle clubs into the crack to try to hook them out using the vicious talons embedded in their tips.
They were no more than a hundred paces into the rift when Alex became aware of a cessation of air movement. Without alerting the team and without slowing them, he stopped and stared intently into the dark, using all his senses to try to determine the cause of the change in air density. Though he could not see outside the rift, he could sense that a large presence had blocked the entrance they had just come through. The orthocone was trying to squeeze its enormous bulk into the small crack in the cave wall. There was a groaning and some debris rained down on the group. Monica paused and held up her hand to stop, fearing that it was their footsteps that were setting off some sort of small earth tremor, but Alex overrode the instruction and urged them on. He alone knew that the creature was trying to widen the fissure in the wall.