At first I thought it was the Barracuda, only the light was moving, following a course parallel to the shoreline. Removing my backpack, I located the night-vision monocular. Powering it on, I slid my goggles down to my neck and held the lens up to my right eye, zooming in on the light.

It was Ben, and he was dragging something behind him.

Ming?

Tucking the lens in my jacket pocket, I returned the night-vision goggles to my eyes and hurried down the slope, my galloping movements through the snow startling a harem of forty or fifty female sea elephants lazying about the shoreline.

A chorus of belches and burps alerted the male. The ten-ton bull charged out of the shallows, a rolling mass of angry white blubber.

Seeing the beast, Ben ducked behind a boulder.

I stopped running, my heart racing as I found myself confronted by a creature roughly the size of a cement mixer.

The animated mammal pounded its fore flippers in the slush and shook its head, so that its three-foot-long proboscis sprayed me with snot and salty lake water, but the bull never advanced.

Nor did I.

After several bouts of snorting and belching, it rambled off to join its harem.

I met up with Ben, who was kneeling by Ming, checking her pulse as she rested with her back against the rock. “Is she alive?”

“Barely. Let’s get her inside the sub.”

“Ben, you’re bleeding.”

“Huh? It’s nothing. I packed some snow on it. It looks a lot worse than it is. Grab her other arm.”

He tried to lift her as he stood, only to drop to one knee. “Guess I hurt it worse than I thought.”

“Wait here.” I half-dragged, half-carried Ming to the sub. Laying her down, I activated the hatch, then stripped her of her backpack and lifted her into her seat, buckling her in. I tossed her pack in the storage compartment and went back for Ben.

He had stripped off his own pack and was examining his wound. Blood was everywhere, dripping from a jagged six-inch incision along his upper left thigh.

“Looks like you nicked your femoral artery; we need to get a tourniquet on this. How’d you do it?”

“Fell on my climbing axe.”

I shouldered half his weight, hustling him over to the sub, fearing what the scent of his blood might be attracting. He moved to climb inside the middle cockpit, only I stopped him. “You can’t operate the thrusters with one leg. Get in my seat; I’ll man the master control.”

I helped him into the bow cockpit, then foraged through Ming’s backpack to find something to make a tourniquet. Removing her rope, I tied three feet of cord tightly around Ben’s wound, the pain causing him to pass out.