RICHARDS

Queen Maud Land, Antarctica Modern day: January 13 — 8 months ago

The wind howled and assaulted the command trailer with snow that sounded more like sleet against the steel siding. What little Hollis Richards could see through the frost fractals on the window roiled with flakes that shifted direction with each violent gust. The Cessna ski plane that brought him here from McMurdo Station was somewhere out there beyond the veritable armada of red Kress transport vehicles and Delta heavy haulers, each of them the size of a Winnebago with wheels as tall as a full-grown man. The single-prop plane had barely reached the camp before being overtaken by the storm, which the pilot had tried to use as an excuse not to fly. At least until Richards made him an offer he couldn't refuse. There was no way that he was going to wait so much as a single minute longer.

It had taken four days, operating around the clock, for the hot-water drill to bore through two miles of solid ice to reach a lake roughly the size of the Puget Sound, which had been sealed off from the outside world for an estimated quarter of a million years. They only had another twelve hours before the hole closed on them again, so they didn't have a second to waste. They needed to evaluate all of the water samples and sediment cores before they lost the ability to replenish them. It wasn't the cost that made the logistics of the operation so prohibitive. The problem was transporting tens of thousands of gallons of purified water across an entire continent during what passed for summer in Antarctica. They couldn't just fire antifreeze into the ice cap and risk contaminating the entire site, like the Russians did with Lake Vostok.

Richards pulled up a chair beside Dr. Max Friden, who worked his magic on the scanning electron microscope and made a blurry image appear on the monitor between them. The microbiologist tweaked the focus until the magnified sample of the sediment became clear. The contrast appeared in shades of gray and at first reminded Richards of the surface of the moon.

"Tell me you see something," Richards said. His voice positively trembled with excitement.

"If there's anything here, I'll find it."

The microscope crept slowly across the slide.

"Well, well, well. What do we have here?" Friden said.

Richards leaned closer to the monitor, but nothing jumped out at him.

"Right there." Friden tapped the screen with his index finger. "Give me a second. Let me see if I can ... zoom ... in ..." The image momentarily blurred before resolving once more. "There."

Richards leaned onto his elbows and stared at what looked like a gob of spit stuck to the bark of a birch tree.

"Pretty freaking amazing, right?" Friden said.

"What is it?"

"That, my friend, is the execution of the bonus clause in my contract." The microbiologist leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. "What you're looking at is a bacterium. A living, breathing microscopic creature. Well, it really isn't, either. We killed it when we prepared the slide and it's a single-celled organism, so it can't really breathe, but you get the gist."

"What kind?"

"No one knows exactly how many species of bacteria there are, but our best estimate suggests a minimum of 36,000 ..."

Richards smiled patiently. He might have been the spitting image of his father, from his piercing blue eyes to his thick white hair and goatee, but fortunately that was all he'd inherited from his old man. He could thank his mother — God rest her soul — for his temperament.

Friden pushed his glasses higher on his slender nose. The thick lenses magnified his brown eyes.

"I don't know," the microbiologist said. "I haven't seen anything quite like it before."

Richards beamed and clapped him on the shoulder.

"That's exactly what I wanted to hear. Now find me something I can work with."

Richards's handheld transceiver crackled. He snatched it from the edge of the desk and already had one arm in his jacket when he spoke into it.

"Talk to me."

"We have eyes," the man on the other end of the connection said.

Richards's heart leapt into his throat, rendering him momentarily speechless.

"Don't go any farther until I get there."

He popped the seal on the door and clattered down the steps into the accumulation. The raging wind battered him sideways. He pulled up his fur-fringed hood, lowered his head, and staggered blindly toward the adjacent big red trailer, which didn't appear from the blowing snow until it was within arm's reach. The door opened as he ascended the icy stairs.

"You've got to see this," Will Connor said, and practically dragged him into the cabin. The former Navy SEAL was more than his personal assistant. He was his right-hand man, his bodyguard, and, most important, the only person in the world he trusted implicitly. The truth was he was also the closest thing Richards had to a friend.

The entire trailer was filled with monitors and electronic components fed by an external gas generator, which made the floor vibrate and provided a constant background thrum. The interior smelled of stale coffee, body odor, and an earthy dampness that brought to mind memories of the root cellar at his childhood home in Kansas, even the most fleeting memories of which required swift and forceful repression.

Connor pulled back a chair at the console for Richards, who sat beside a man he'd met only briefly two years ago, when his team of geologists first identified the topographical features suggesting the presence of a large body of water beneath the polar ice cap and he'd only just opened negotiations with the government of Norway for the land lease. Ron Dreger was the lead driller for the team from Advanced Mining Solutions, the company responsible for the feats of engineering that had brought Richards to the bottom of the Earth and the brink of realizing his lifelong dream.

The monitor above him featured a circular image of a white tube that darkened to blue at the very end.

"What you're looking at is the view from the fiber-optic camera two miles beneath our...