“There’s a species of Miocene sperm whale inhabiting Vostok. Ever hear of Livyatan melvillei?”

“That whale with the big teeth and the lower jaw of an orca? Damn it, Zachary. Why didn’t you mention this to me before?”

“I didn’t think they could follow the river this far from Vostok. Once we were in the lake, I figured you’d be able to outmaneuver them in the Manta.”

“Not with these lasers strapped to our wings—Geez! There it is.”

A dark mass appeared in our starboard headlight’s periphery some two hundred yards ahead. Jonas was about to make an evasive maneuver when we both realized something was wrong. The whale’s movements seemed erratic, the tip of the creature’s box-shaped head scraping the bottom of the ice sheet. As we halved the distance, we could see the fluke hanging motionless below the leviathan’s body.

It wasn’t swimming; it was dead. The current was propelling its carcass along.

Jonas banked into a tight turn and brought us up beside the whale. Along its right flank was a fresh wound scorched ashen-gray, a twelve-foot-wide crater of blubber corresponding to the approximate dimensions of the bow of Colonel Vacendak’s submarine.

The next twenty-seven hours were maddening—the equivalent of flying from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia, and back again, in heavy turbulence, while being forced to remain seated. Under its best behavior, the subglacial river ran deep over stretches of flat bottom. Under the worst conditions, it was a twisting vortex with rapids that caught the Manta’s wings and threatened to flip us head-over-tail—which happened twice, the last time sending us tumbling like a pinwheel a half-mile back from whence we’d come.

Then there were gaps where the river simply stopped flowing, walled off by a dam of ice. The first time this happened left us both disoriented and unnerved, and too mentally exhausted to reason. A twenty-minute yelling match ensued, after which we decided to shut down the engines and get some much-needed sleep.

The thought of having another out-of-body experience didn’t bother me as much as it did Jonas. The last thing he wanted was to awaken beneath the Antarctic ice sheet next to my cold, lifeless corpse. Not that a part of him didn’t want to strangle me, but I was no good to him dead. And so he kept vigil until he was convinced I had entered R.E.M. sleep.

Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Brandy woke me.