Free Vostok by Steve Alten Page A

the presence of liquid freshwater in Vostok’s vast basin. In 1991, a remote-sensing specialist from the United States directed the ERS-1 satellite’s high-frequency array at Vostok, confirming the British surveys.
    More of a subterranean cavern than a lake, Vostok was divided into two deep basins by a ridge. The northern basin plunged thirteen thousand feet; the southern basin reached twice that depth. The ridge itself was situated in seven hundred feet of water and, as incredible as it seemed, harbored an island.

    The weeks of summer flew by. To my father’s credit, his “monster mania” had resurrected tourism in the Great Glen for at least one more season, turning a potential economic disaster into a windfall. In fact, more tourists visited Loch Ness that summer than any other location in all of the United Kingdom or Europe.
    But the “Hero of the Highlands” never apologized to me for his deeds or for the potential dangers associated with my upcoming deployment. And when the day finally came to say goodbye, I refused to see him.
    For the hundredth time that summer, I read my infant son his favorite book as I rocked him to sleep in his stroller by the ruins of Urquhart Castle. “
In a great green room, tucked away in bed, is a little bunny. Goodnight room, goodnight moon
… .”
    Brandy and I spent that last hour holding hands. Then the taxi arrived and it was time to go. I absorbed one last memory of those green hills, the gray cliff face, and the foam spraying off of the tea-colored waters, and asked my Maker to bring me home again to my wife and child—just not in a box.
    True climbed in the back of the cab and slapped me hard on the knee. “So? How soon do ye want to get shitfaced?”
    “As soon as we get on the plane.”

    Our flight out of Inverness was scheduled to depart at five o’clock on a Sunday evening, beginning the first leg of our journey—a twenty-seven-hour trip that included stops in Birmingham, Paris, Santiago, Puerto Montt, and finally Punta Arenas, Chile. After spending a day recouping in the southernmost city in South America, we would board a seaplane for King George Island, where a cargo plane would be waiting to fly us across the continent to Davis Base in East Antarctica. From there we’d have another day to adjust before flying out to the new bio-dome being erected over Lake Vostok.
    Lying back in my first-class seat next to my snoring friend, I closed my eyes and attempted to organize my mental notes on our frozen destination.
    At just over eight million square miles, Antarctica was bigger than both Australia and the United States combined, with ninety-seven percent of its land mass covered by an ice sheet that averaged two miles thick. The only continent not to possess an indigenous human population, Antarctica was divided into three distinct sections: its east and west regions and the peninsula.
    A short flight for tourists arriving from Chile, the Antarctic Peninsula, nicknamed the “Banana Belt” by snarky scientists, included the South Orkney Islands and South Georgia. The peninsula’s climate was mild compared to the rest of the continent and was home to a myriad of summer wildlife that included seals, whales, birds, and the emperor penguin. The male emperor penguin was the only warm-blooded animal that remained in Antarctica throughout the winter months. Their job: to stay on land and keep their offspring’s egg warm by covering it with a flap of abdominal skin. While the females swam off to warmer waters, the males huddled in groups in sub-zero conditions, often going nine weeks or more without eating.
    And here I was complaining about a twenty-hour sub ride.
    West Antarctica occupied the landmass below the peninsula and was separated from the larger eastern region by the Transantarctic Mountains, TAM for short. It possessed two immense ice shelves: the Ronne and the Ross, the latter being home to McMurdo Station and its four airfields, owned and operated by the