Ben flipped the toggle switch on his joystick, regaining control of the Barracuda. “Is that it, then, Vacendak? One dive and Dr. Wallace and I are done?”

“We’ll be asking you to complete one last task before your ascent, otherwise we want to analyze the discoveries you’ve made and determine the safest course of action before we send another team down there. Obviously, no one anticipated such an active food chain in Vostok; we’ll have to reevaluate the mission. For now, just sit back and leave the driving to us.”

“It’s all yours, pal.” Locating the master switch, Ben flipped open the plastic cap and pressed the button. Seconds later, our joysticks and foot pedals synchronized as Vacendak’s team took control, accelerating the sub along the surface.

My night-vision goggles revealed our river had settled into a relatively calm waterway. According to our GPS feed from Vostok Mobile Command, the tributary would flow to the northeast, where it would drain into its far larger parent river.

The riparian zone we were moving along was similar to a shoreline one might find in Tibet’s Mekong River, a barren stretch of volcanic rock that served as a flood plain during Vostok’s mysterious high tide. Vegetation was almost non-existent, limited to an occasional patch of Matgrass, a brown meter-tall weed that fed off trace chemicals in the water. Other than that, the Miocene plateau was desolate; more of a drainage area than an ecosystem save, of course, for the birthing zone of its giant prehistoric reptilian population.

After twenty minutes, moonscape-like features rose gradually from the river to meet the valley’s watershed, a stretch of volcanic rock six stories high, the flat snow-covered plateaus created by the faulting and rifting occurring beneath East Antarctica. The ice sheet hung less than thirty feet above these mountain tops and its proximity dropped the valley’s exterior temperatures well below freezing.

The thermostat would continue to drop as we distanced ourselves from the geothermally heated waters in the southern basin.

Ben tapped me on the shoulder, his index finger over his lips, indicating that I shouldn’t talk. He handed me an instruction booklet where he had written a message in pen:

Colonel Vacendak is MJ-12. He’s guiding us to the E.T.

I took the pen and booklet and wrote: Suggestions?

Ben responded: MJ-12 wants info, not eyewitnesses. Trust no one, including ML.

An hour later, the tributary merged with its parent river, and the landscape changed radically.

The waterway was several miles wide, its depths dropping more than 740 feet—as deep as Loch Ness. It was this body of water the Russians and Japanese must have analyzed when they had taken readings of the plateau. The river’s dark waters ran a bone-chilling twenty-nine degrees, and snow covered the shoreline as far as my night-vision glasses allowed me to see.