I shifted the propeller back to FORWARD and held my breath as the rope went taut, dragging the sub backwards out of the borehole and through the lake on a Nantucket sleigh ride, as the male Livyatan melvillei swallowed my deceased colleagues’ remains whole.

23

“Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass…
It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.”

—Vivian Greene

The whale dragged the Barracuda backward into the depths until the nylon rope snapped and cast the sub adrift.

In darkness, kept at bay by the soft glow from my command console, in a quiet violated only by the fading buzz in my damaged ears, I found a moment’s solitude. Exhausted, beaten to the point of surrender, I wondered what more there was to fear. Not death. Death was simply a passing, the process of the soul shedding the burden of flesh and life’s imperfections with all its scars and pains and sorrows.

Death was the great unknown. It was the perpetual fear of dying that made living hard. Vostok had immunized me, for I my head I had died so many times over the last forty hours that my mind’s eye had gone blind to its anticipated horrors.

The sub drifted and so did I, in and out of sleep, until the demands of the flesh said, “Enough! Drink, eat, piss, remove these tight boots from your throbbing feet. Get back into the game, Wallace! God didn’t spare your sorry ass to sit on the sidelines and wax poetic. Find a reason to live.”

Unzipping my coat, I reached inside the breast pocket of my extreme conditions uniform and removed a wallet-size photo of Brandy holding William.

Get back in the game.

Placing the photo on my console, I stripped off the neoprene undergarment, ripping the tiny electrode connections from my skin. Shedding the undergarment meant I’d be losing some body heat when I left the sub, but it was better that the Colonel and his team believe I was dead.

MAJESTIC-12 was one threat. The other, besides my diminishing air supply, was the bull sperm whale. It was still out there, but it had just fed.

If I kept my pace slow and steady…

I redressed in my long johns and every article of extreme weather gear I could find, then I started up the engine. The GPS unit was useless, but by reversing the sub’s last course I was able to plot my way back to the bay with little effort.

I wiped blood from my night-goggle lenses and adjusted them on my face. Then I dived the sub to three hundred feet, set my speed to ten knots, and engaged the auto-pilot.

“Huh?”