Inside it was dark, but they could easily make out the huge cylinder that protruded from the earth. There was a three-foot access panel flush with the skin of the communication silo. Inside it was a feat of engineering mastery, as the long tube stretched down thousands of feet to the subterranean sea below. The six foot bore hole was then lined with pre-made tubing that was a ribbed design to allow flexibility so the whole pathway could move as the surrounding geology breathed and flexed with every tremor, quake, or seismic shudder the earth could muster in these parts.

Inside the access panel there were thousands of feet of fiber-optic threads, plus a type of hydraulic dumb-water to transport any urgently-required materials to below ground. The communication buoy and support package was gone, now thousands of feet below, mute and patiently waiting for its guests to arrive.

One of the men waited at the door, holding it open a crack, and keeping an eye on the silent village, while the other dropped to one knee shrugged off his backpack and removed a loaf of bread-sized package. He removed a waterproof wrapping and then set to working on some dials and buttons. Immediately, a blinking green light went red, and a digital readout began to count down. He stood, and placed the package inside the shaft, letting it drop into the dark.

“Let’s go.”

They were out the door and sprinting to the tree line, retracing their steps for another hundred feet, before the deep thump of the explosion shook some early snow from tree branches down onto their heads.

One grinned to the other. “Sorry Mr Mironov, no letters from home today, Da?”

The other laughed. “We need to hurry. Fifty miles to our next target, in Sheslay Canada – and now they know we’re here.”

They began to sprint back to their pickup point. One paused to look back. Behind them, a column of orange erupted from the roof of the small building sending a mushroom cloud of vaporized fiber-optic cables and plastic into the air. He grinned again, and ran harder.

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 15

“Now at three thousand feet.” Yegor’s voice was deep and calm as ever, despite the intermittent sound of metal popping and groaning under immense pressure.

Jack ignored it; he knew the sounds a submersible made in deep water, and nothing he heard worried him in the slightest. Hours back, he had switched off the ring of halogens around the window, and they rarely saw any luminescent life forms appear out of the darkness. Dmitry reported the odd anomaly on the sonar, but whatever they were, they never came close enough to concern them

“Wow, this is deep,”’ Greg said. “Bottom of the ocean stuff.”

“Nyet, far from it,” Yegor said, without turning. “Now we are approximately at a level that is usual bottom of continental shelf. Long way down to real ocean bottom.”