Thirty minutes later I rode the elevator up to ground level with my armed escort. A wave of early-morning Nevada heat greeted me as we entered a “scoot and hide” hangar the size of six football fields. Beneath the high roof I could see a slice of red rock, the mountains concealing the rising sun. To the west rose a cluster of radar antennas. To the north a building meant to resemble a mess hall was flanked by several antiquated housing facilities, and farther down the road, by a perimeter fence, stood a guard house.

The surface facilities were there for window dressing because Area 51 conducted most of its business deep underground.

Two long tarmac runways, constructed on a dry lake bed, ran parallel to the hangar. My escort led me to a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, an immense military transport that dwarfed everything else under the roof. Painted in green camouflage, the plane—nicknamed FRED (Fucking Ridiculous Environmental Disaster) by its crew—had twelve internal wing tanks and was equipped for aerial refueling. The T-shaped tail towered three stories overhead, its nose and aft loading docks lowered open to receive its payload.

The payload was a thirty-seven-foot submarine named the Tethys, the very ship described to me seven years earlier by Ben Hintzmann. She had been named after the Titan goddess of freshwater rivers and streams, and the ancient sea that harbored prehistoric life 200 million years ago. The vessel had been designed for one purpose: to access Lake Vostok by traveling beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet through a network of subglacial rivers.

To accomplish this, the sub housed two ice-melting elements in its reinforced, chisel-shaped bow. The first was a Europa-class Valkyrie laser. Like the two Valkyries that had been mounted on the Barracuda, it was designed specifically for Jupiter’s frozen moon. The E-class, however, was three times the diameter of its predecessor and was powered by a nuclear reactor.

To help the sixty-three-ton ship’s twin engines propel the Tethys through the ice, the sub had been equipped with a bow and flat bottom composed of a calcium isotope, the plates of which could be superheated to temperatures exceeding fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The end result was a dagger-shaped vessel that melted ice like a hot knife through butter, keeping the submarine hydroplaning toward its target.

Technicians loaded the ship aboard the transport and secured it in chains. I boarded through the open nose to the forward passenger section, where seventy-two business-class seats were set in eighteen rows facing the rear of the aircraft. The plane was empty, the sub’s crew still finishing breakfast. The guard stopped me at the third row and motioned for me to occupy a window seat while he took the aisle. Reclining the chair, I closed my eyes and tried to settle my nerves.