After restoring the block of ice to the mouth of the cave, she radioed George Cabot that she was ready to come up. In a few moments, the power winch began cranking and she was on her way.
Although it was past seven in the morning, there was no hint of daylight on the surface. Since her descent, the wind had died to a low moan, but it was still snowing.
She heard a dog barking in the distance as she made her way to the operations tent. The cries were deep and cadenced, and repeated every few seconds. It had to be Hancock’s Alsatian.
Inside the tent, Sir Dorian was slumped next to the bank of space heaters, almost hidden under a mound of thermal blankets. His eyes were dull and unfocused. Jensen was helping him swallow some pills with a mug of water. Macaulay and Hancock were standing at the communications array, sipping coffee.
“Hap found something a little while ago,” said Hancock. “You may be able to help us identify it.”
He started to lead her out of the tent, when Hjalmar Jensen and Doc Callaghan stepped into his path. Jensen had an anxious look on his face.
“Sir Dorian has had some kind of heart attack or stroke. I believe he needs to be hospitalized as soon as possible.”
“I agree,” said Doc Callaghan. “His symptoms are consistent with an ischemic stroke in which an artery to the brain is blocked. With a blocked artery, the neurons can’t make enough energy. At some point, the brain will stop working.”
“We’ll fly him out on the Bell transport as soon as we get back,” said Hancock.
Outside the tent, he climbed onto a snowmobile and motioned for Lexy to join him. Macaulay followed on a separate machine as they crossed the compound and traveled out onto the dark ice field. Lexy noticed they were following the path of the heavy-duty fire hose that was used to pump meltwater out of the shafts.
Reaching the ice crevasse where the hose terminated, Hancock stopped his machine and got off. Someone had mounted a battery-powered floodlight on a steel tripod that faced down into it. A member of the expedition team was standing at the edge, holding the excited Alsatian at the end of a leash.
“Hap smelled it and came out here to investigate,” said Hancock.
Stepping forward, Lexy looked over the edge of the crevasse. The body of a man was lying facedown about halfway down the slope. He had been stripped naked and his body had a bluish tint from the subzero cold. His head was frozen into the surface of the ice. She couldn’t recognize it through the milky glaze.
“In another hour, the corpse would have been covered by snow and ice melt,” said Hancock.
“We think the hose pump was still running when they got him out here,” said Macaulay. “It froze around his head after they were finished.”
“There is only one identifiable mark on his body,” said Hancock. “It’s a tattoo.”
Lexy stepped closer to the body. The torso looked like a male manikin in a department store window. There was a tattoo on the right cheek of the man’s buttocks.
“It’s Rob Falconer,” she said.
“How do you know for sure?” asked Macaulay.
“The tattoo . . . is in Sanskrit.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s not important,” she said, her teeth beginning to chatter.
“Let me be the judge of that,” said Hancock.
She hesitated a few moments before glancing up at Macaulay.
“It’s Sanskrit for the name Alexandra.”
FIFTEEN
22 November
Base Hancock One
Greenland Ice Cap
The lights in the operations tent suddenly came on, and Lexy heard a ragged cheer from the men at the other end of the compound. A few minutes later, George Cabot came in to report that they had patched enough power together from the two smaller generators to operate the space heaters.
“It was meant to look like an accident, but someone purposely turned the big Kohler generator into junk,” he said. “Pretty ingenious, actually. He used the oil-overflow valve to empty a gallon of engine oil out of the machine into a plastic container and then poured a gallon or so of kerosene into the oil reservoir to replace it. It probably took a half hour or so for the bearings to burn up and the engine to seize. By then he was well enough away. I found the container of engine oil behind the tent.”
Macaulay was staring at the array of communications equipment on the far wall. The two fixed radio ground stations, high modularity units with frequency-hopping waveforms designed for use in warships and armed service installations, had provided them with a direct link to any receiving station in the world. They were still dark.
“Don’t tell me . . . ,” groaned Hancock as Cabot went over to the array.
After examining the switching controls and interface modules on the two rigs, he said, “Everything looks fine here.”
Kneeling down, he crawled behind the heavy gauge steel table that supported the units, and disappeared behind it. A minute later, he crawled back out and climbed to his feet, holding what looked like a large plastic hypodermic syringe.
“Two hundred thousand dollars of radio circuitry went shit to bed from this thing,” he said disgustedly in his down-east twang. “Take a sniff.”
Macaulay held it up to his nose.
“Acid?”
“Exactly,” said Cabot. “He used this syringe to remove the sulfuric acid from one of our deep cycle batteries and then injected it through the ventilators into the backs of the radios. It fried all the circuits.”
“What is that thing?” asked Macaulay.
“I think it’s a cake decorator,” said Lexy, “for putting on icing.”
“Where’s the cook?” demanded Hancock.
When he arrived a few minutes later, Thorwald, the Norwegian cook, was shown what had been used to destroy the radio array.
“We have this in the kitchen equipment . . . of course,” he said, seemingly perplexed. “I don’t know how it got here.”
Hancock made his next decisions without delay.
“George, I want every inch of that Bell transport helicopter checked for possible sabotage. Put a guard on it when you’re finished.”
“Done,” said Cabot, heading across the ops tent.
Turning to Macaulay, he said, “It will be light soon, Steve—at least for a couple hours. That should give you time to fly up to Kulusuk and bring back the spare radio unit. While you’re there, call the Anschutz security director in Dallas and tell him we need a fully armed security team up here right away. Contract it out to whoever can get here the fastest. I don’t care what the price quote is.”
“What about Falconer?” asked Macaulay.
“I’m tempted to send his body back with you,” said Hancock, “but I’m not going to tamper with a crime scene. The police authority in Greenland is up in Nuuk. Radio them what happened. I’m sure they’ll want to send an investigator and a forensic team down here. In the meantime, we won’t touch anything.”
“His body will be covered with a foot or two of ice by then,” said Doc Callaghan.
“That’s their problem.”
Thirty minutes later, the transport helicopter had been thoroughly checked by the ground crew and warmed up on the landing pad. The wind had temporarily died, and there was a hint of dawn in the eastern sky.
“The ship is clean,” said Cabot to Macaulay. “I personally checked every square inch.”
“Thanks, George,” said Macaulay.
“Bring back the cavalry, Steve,” said Hancock with a wry grin.
Shaking hands, they watched as Sir Dorian was carried on a makeshift litter from the operations tent to the landing pad. Hjalmar Jensen, Lexy, and Callaghan walked together behind him.
When they arrived at the helicopter pad, Sir Dorian was still conscious.
“Sorry to be a bloody bother,” he said to Hancock wit
h a parting attempt at a grin. “Please do the responsible thing with this discovery, Mr. Hancock. It deserves no less.”
“After what’s happened, I now share your view,” said Hancock as the archaeologist was carried into the chopper and his litter was strapped to the steel deck beneath the rotor and transmission housing. Lexy and Hjalmar Jensen went aboard to give him a brief final farewell, and Jensen set Sir Dorian’s kit bag next to his litter on the deck.
“I look forward to seeing you again in London, Sir Dorian,” said Lexy as Doc Callaghan administered a sedative to relax him during the flight.
Hancock and the others stood at the edge of the landing pad as Steve Macaulay gently lifted the big chopper into the air. Lexy was waving at him cheerily, and he raised his hand to acknowledge her before heading north toward Kulusuk.
SIXTEEN
23 November
Greenland Ice Cap
Macaulay leveled off at an altitude of one thousand feet and advanced the speed to one hundred twenty miles per hour. The two Pratt & Whitney Twin-Pac turboshaft engines were running with their familiar, throaty roar. With no air turbulence ahead of him and nearly two miles of visibility, he would see the runway lights at Kulusuk in about fifteen minutes.
He was grateful to Cabot for thoroughly checking the bird. Macaulay had never fully trusted helicopters. He was a fighter pilot. He trusted wings. He had survived several crashes in the air force because the wings had allowed him to glide long enough to safely eject from the stricken planes.
When he was assembling Hancock’s fleet of corporate aircraft a few years earlier, Macaulay had made sure all the company helicopters were modified with crash-attenuating seats that would compress downward under any serious impact. It limited the potential g loads on the crew and would protect their vulnerable necks and backs. He had also insisted on the installation of doors and windows that could be jettisoned, as well as self-sealing fuel tanks to reduce the chances of fire after a crash.
As he flew on across the desolate ice cap, his mind kept wandering back to all the events that had taken place over the previous twenty-four hours. Obviously, someone was desperate enough to kill in order to bring the recovery effort to a halt.
It was impossible to believe that one of the twelve original members of the expedition could be responsible for murder and sabotage, but a few of them were new to the team, including Thorwald, the Norwegian cook, and two native Inuit who were part of the maintenance crew.
If it wasn’t a member of the expedition team, that left the four archaeologists as suspects. But Falconer was dead, and Macaulay refused to believe that Lexy could be involved. That left Hjalmar Jensen and Sir Dorian Bond.
He remembered Sir Dorian’s passionate appeal to John Lee that he must halt his plans to remove the Norsemen from the deep cave. It struck him that the old Englishman could be feigning illness, and might be heading back to alert someone in the outside world to what they had found.
Macaulay turned to look back at him.
His eyes were closed and he appeared to be asleep. In any event, the straps that secured the litter to the steel deck would keep him immobilized until they reached Kulusuk.
He was checking the instrument gauges a few moments later when the explosion suddenly detonated behind him. He felt the first wave of searing heat as it ripped through the cockpit, walloping the back of his flight helmet with shards of metal and plastic, and smashing the windshield. Only the steel-reinforced pilot’s seat saved him from the deadly blast.
He turned to glance back at the source of the explosion. The blast area appeared to be centered underneath the rotors and the transmission housing. With the transmission housing immobilized, the rotor blades no longer received the power to rotate.
They were going in.
He watched in horror as Sir Dorian, still strapped to the litter, burst into flames. His shock of gray hair was on fire, along with the blankets covering his body. There was no way to save him.
None of the safety features he had added would make any difference if the rate of descent was unsurvivable. He was dropping at nearly forty feet per second, and he had to slow the rate down by getting the rotors turning in auto rotation. If he could stabilize the bird for a few seconds, natural airflow alone would provide enough energy to turn the rotors and allow a relatively controlled descent. The minimum altitude threshold for auto rotation was about four hundred feet, and he hoped he was still above it.
He had about ten seconds to prepare for the crash. The flames were licking close to the cockpit, and he could feel the intensity of the heat through his boots on the steel flight deck. He put on his thermal gloves to protect his hands.
Looking up, he saw that the rotors had stopped and the ship was now in free fall.
Reaching to his left, he pulled the handle that jettisoned the cabin window next to the pilot’s seat. The pilot’s seat was also equipped with a five-point safety harness that had a single-release mechanism. When he felt the helicopter skids first begin to impact the ice, he would pull the release on the safety harness and attempt his escape.
When the helicopter slammed into the frozen ice cap, Macaulay was blinded by an eruption of brilliant magnesium-white light. Surrounded by a geyser of flames, he could hear the agonizing shriek of tortured metal as the ship began to rupture around him. Ten seconds later, the flames found one of the perforated gas tanks and the Bell 412EP jet helicopter exploded in a fiery ball.
SEVENTEEN
23 November
Base Hancock One
Greenland Ice Cap
From inside the modular fiberglass latrine at the far edge of the compound, Lexy paused while brushing her teeth as the rumbling roar of an approaching helicopter grew ever louder.
Her first thought was that it might be Steve returning from Kulusuk. But he had left the camp only an hour earlier. It seemed unlikely he could be returning so quickly unless he had run into a problem.
Sitting at the desk in his sleeping tent, John Lee Hancock knew from the pitch of the jet engines that it wasn’t Steve. As the rumble grew louder, he quickly realized there was more than one helicopter. His initial thought was that they might be the police officials dispatched from Nuuk.
George Cabot watched them coming in low above the ice, not more than fifty feet up in the air, and flying from due east. In the pale morning light, he couldn’t see any markings on the ships. Cabot was thinking about turning on the landing lights until he saw that one of them looked like a military attack helicopter. The other two were transports.
With radio communications out, there was no way to contact them as they flew a direct course to the base camp. When they arrived over the team’s landing pad, the pilots of the transports turned on the four powerful searchlights that were mounted to the bellies of each ship, lighting up the whole compound. While the smaller attack helicopter continued circling the camp, the two transports began their descent.
Hancock stood with his Alsatian at the opening of his tent to observe their arrival. He saw that the ships were painted gloss white to blend in with the icy landscape. He recognized all three as military aircraft manufactured by Eurocopter. None of them displayed the internationally required markings and numbers.
Who are these bastards? he wondered, his mind racing. What are they doing here? Had they come to rob him of his discovery? He watched five members of his expedition team, including Doc Callaghan, approach the edge of the landing pad as the two transports touched down.
* * *
The first man to step out of the helicopters was the mission commander. Tall and slender with coarse-grained blond hair, he had luminescent, reflective blue eyes and a trained, always-serious face. His name was Joachim Halvorsen, but they called him the Lynx.
A former veteran of the elite Norwegian Special Forces, he took infinite care with each and every detail of an operation. Preliminary intelligence for this mission had been mi
nimal, and his roving eyes were already taking in the configuration of the camp, each tent and outbuilding, every man in sight.
He was always planning for the unexpected, the steps he would immediately take if anyone offered resistance or threatened the success of the mission. Two hundred feet above him, the third helicopter continued to circle the camp, ready to intercept anyone who escaped the cordon.
Like the fourteen commandos who emerged from the two transports behind him, the Lynx was dressed in a white thermal winter suit and lightweight, bulletproof armor. He carried a Czech-made Skorpion Evo III submachine gun, a 9 mm Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol, and a belt with extra magazines for both.
The rotor blades slowly came to a stop.
“Raise your hands and you will not be harmed,” he shouted over the dying whine of the helicopter engines.
Four of the five men at the landing pad raised their hands. The fifth, Doc Callaghan, demanded angrily, “You have no right to threaten us with weapons. We are here at the invitation of . . .”
The Lynx shot him in the head. He fell to the ice.
Thorwald, the Norwegian chef, had come out of the cook tent to see what was happening. Seeing Doc Callaghan fall, he knew he had to defend himself. In the cook tent, he had a selection of lethal knives. He had become an expert with them during his own military service.
The Lynx saw him move out of the corner of his eye, and estimated the distance at twenty meters. In one smooth motion, the submachine gun was at his shoulder, and he squeezed off a single round. It took Thorwald in the chest, killing him instantly.
Hearing the first shot, Lexy had gone to the door of the latrine and cracked it open in time to see Thorwald killed. As she watched, the blond killer issued orders to the other men in the unit. One of them began herding the first four prisoners toward the elevator cage at the top of the ice shaft. The others began fanning out across the compound.
* * *
George Cabot had known they were trouble from the moment he saw the three ships coming in. Before they landed, he had headed straight to the open-ended shelter that housed the expedition’s snowmobiles.
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