We both smiled, but there was a look in my friend’s eyes that I’d not soon forget. It was the same look of worry I had seen moments before he launched me into the depths of Loch Ness.

Ming was a combination of nervous and giddy. Before settling into her cockpit, she offered each of us a yellow pill. “It’s just a little something to relax you. After all, there’s nothing for us to do during the descent, which will take hours.”

Having still not fully recovered from the Valium, I passed.

Ben pocketed his.

The three of us went through our checklists with the Mission Control techs while a small crowd gathered outside the gantry fencing. At 10:05 a.m. we received clearance to launch. We rotated our seats one hundred and eighty degrees to face astern.

Our pod’s hatch was sealed, causing my heart to flutter. A moment later the gantry activated, rotating the harness vertically so that the Barracuda’s nose was pointed at the ice, placing us on our backs like astronauts launching into Hell. We adjusted our harnesses, tightening any slack.

“This is Vostok Command. Captain Hintzmann, you have clearance to activate your Valkyrie lasers.”

“Roger that, Vostok Command. Activating Valkyrie units on my count: Three… two… one… activate.”

The two tubes on either side of the sub ignited, the lasers’ heat reflecting crimson against the ice, which was already steaming. We dropped two feet, then two feet more so that we were now ground level. Then we slipped beneath the ice, continuing a rough, herky-jerky descent as the frozen surface crackled and screamed in protest beneath the intense heat.

A borehole gradually opened beneath us. The melt and drop averaged four to six feet every ten to twenty seconds with an occasional stomach-wrenching drop into free fall.

I turned in my seat to take a look below. The ice bled like a fading sunset, slush splattering against the cockpit windshield. Every once in a while a dark pocket would open and we’d drop twenty feet, only to stop suddenly, the jolt absorbed by our cushioned bucket seats.

I checked our depth gauge after thirty minutes: 1,029 feet.

Vostok was 13,100 feet beneath the ice. At our present rate of descent, we wouldn’t reach the lake for another seven and a half hours.

Ben’s voice came over my headset. “How are you holding up?”

“I’ll need some aspirin before this journey’s through. How’s Ming?”

“Sleeping like a baby. I meant to ask you; Dr. Ahmed claimed there was air in Vostok—how is that possible?”