Chapter 77 - The Descent into Devil's Throat
We scrambled off the launch onto the shelf ice of Isle Royale, our crampons biting into the slick surface as we clawed our way up the granite bluffs.
The air was fifty degrees below zero with the windchill, biting through our clothes like venom. Every breath burned our lungs, but none of us slowed down. Ahead of us, hidden beneath a grove of wind-twisted tamarack pines, stood the rusted ruins of an 1880s mine hoist building.
Captain Halloway threw his shoulder against the rusted sheet-metal door. It gave way with a screech of agony, revealing a circular concrete shaft descending straight into the black heart of the island.
A cold, sulfurous draft poured up from the depths, accompanied by the distant, rhythmic thumping of industrial hydraulic pumps.
"The dry dock is already cycling," Marilyn called out, shining her tactical light down the endless spiral iron staircase. "Arthur’s sub has docked in the lower chamber. He’s draining the basin!"
We began our descent.
Down and down we went, eight hundred feet into the Precambrian basalt beneath the floor of Lake Superior. The air grew progressively warmer, heavy with moisture and the sharp tang of copper ore and ozone. Water seeped through the fissures in the rock, dripping constantly onto our helmets and shoulders.
At the bottom of the shaft, the staircase opened into a colossal subterranean chamber carved from solid black stone.
The scale of the excavation took my breath away. It was an underground cathedral, easily two football fields in length, illuminated by flickering industrial fluorescent tubes mounted to the granite ceiling. In the center of the chamber lay a deep concrete basin. Inside it, the yellow submersible sat resting on heavy timber chocks, its hatch open, water still cascading off its hull into the drainage gutters.
Beyond the basin, set into the far wall of the cavern, stood a colossal vault door made of polished nickel-steel, eight feet thick and twenty feet in diameter.
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Above the door, forged in massive iron lettering, was a single designation: **VAULT ZERO - 1968**.
And standing before the vault's dual-lock control console, wearing a soot-stained survival suit, was Arthur Vance.
