As Evans watches, the center of the maelstrom suddenly bottoms out, exposing a blinding sphere of light that blazes upward like an emerald sun from within the fractured sea floor.

“Protect your eyes—”

“Lieutenant, two objects rising out of the funnel!”

“What?” Evans turns to face his radar operator. “How large?”

“Big. Twice the size of the LAMPS.”

The pilot pulls back on the joystick—as two dark, winged objects soar out of the funnel. The faceless mechanisms rise up along either side of the Seasprite—the lieutenant catching a quick glimpse of a glowing amber disk—as the joystick goes limp in his hand.

“Oh, shit, we’ve stalled—”

“Engines off-line, Lieutenant. Everything’s dead!”

Evans registers a sickening feeling as the airship drops from the sky. A bone-jarring jolt—as the chopper strikes the maelstrom’s wall. The rotors shear off, the cockpit’s windshield shatters as the copter is slung around the vertical column of water as if caught in a blender. Centrifugal force pins Evans sideways in his seat, his screams drowned out by the tumultuous roar that fills his ears.

The world spins out of control as the funnel engulfs the LAMPS.

The last thing Lieutenant Johnathan Evans feels is the strange sensation of his vertebrae popping beneath a suffocating embrace, as if his body is being crushed within a giant trash compactor.

DECEMBER 8, 2012
GUNUNG MULU NATIONAL PARK
SARAWAK, FEDERATION OF MALAYSIA.

5:32 A.M. MALAYSIAN TIME (13 HOURS LATER)

Sarawak, situated on the northwest coast of Borneo, is the largest state in the Federation of Malaysia. Gunung Mulu, the largest national park in the state, covers 340 square miles, its landscape dominated by three mountains—the Gunung Mulu, the Gunung Benarat, and the Gunung Api.

The Gunung Api is a mountain formed out of limestone, a geology that not only dominates the entire state of Sarawak, but also its neighboring island of Irian Jaya/Papua New Guinea, and nearly all of southern Malaysia. The weathering of this limestone landscape by the slightly acid rainwater has led to remarkable surface sculptures and underground formations.

Midway up the side of Mount Api, pointing skyward like a field of jagged stalagmites, is a petrified forest of razor-sharp, silver-gray limestone pinnacles, some of which tower more than 150 feet above the rain forest. Below ground, hollowed out from the limestone geology by subterranean rivers, lies a labyrinth containing more than four hundred miles of underworld caverns, representing the largest limestone cave system in the world.

Honolulu graduate student Wade Tokumine has been studying the Sarawak caves for three months, collecting data as part of his master’s thesis concerning the stability of the world’s underground karst volumes. Karst is a topography created through the chemical weathering of limestone geology containing at least eighty percent calcium carbonate. Sarawak’s network of subterranean passages are composed entirely of this vast network of karst.