Crusader Gold

by David Gibbins

  “Tabular bergs of this size are pretty rare in the Arctic,” Inuva said. “We think it’s atmospheric warming again, resulting in the glacier receding to a point where larger fractures occur. It’s the biggest berg I’ve seen here in my lifetime.”

  “Why hasn’t it broken up?” Costas said.

  “It’s had one major calving event, where you can see that smooth face,”

  Macleod said. “But the core’s unusually compact, solid glacial ice you’d crack only with explosives. It’s ideal for us. That face calved back to the core ice, so it’s relatively safe to work under. If you look closely you’ll see the drilling team in a couple of Zodiac inflatable boats out there now.”

  “I don’t understand it.” Jeremy had been quietly absorbing everything since arriving on the ship, but had now recovered his normal inquisitiveness. “What’s to stop that thing tumbling over and crushing them?”

  “That’s where the conditions really work in our favour,” Macleod said enthusiastically. “Without the pressure of the ice tongue behind them, bergs trapped on the sill are a lot safer to work on. The glacier itself is way too dangerous for coring, especially now that it’s flowing at such a rate. Bergs floating down the fjord are out of the question because they’re moving, and once they’re beyond the fjord they’re not only moving but are more liable to tumble. So a relatively fresh berg trapped on the sill is ideal for us. It’s a unique opportunity, but the window is closing fast.”

  “How long has it been there?” Jack said.

  “About three months. Lanowski’s run a simulation that shows it processing down the fjord and jamming against the threshold. Any chance of seeing it?”

  “You’ll be lucky.” Lanowski muttered irritably to himself as he tapped a sequence of keys, and then visibly relaxed. “Finally.”

  The screen displayed a 3-D isometric simulation of the fjord, with the glacier at one end and the arc of the threshold at the other. The berg was shown perched perilously on the sill, its vast bulk underwater now visible but with the seabed dropping off to even greater depths on either side.

  “You can see the scour channel,” Inuva said. “That groove in the seabed leading up the threshold. As they grind along the bottom, the bergs pulverize the seabed, crushing everything to powder. It creates a sterile biotope, devoid of life. But the sampling we’ve been able to do here shows something else, that it actually benefits the diversification of species, allowing life to regenerate like a forest after a fire. And there are other pluses. James said you saw a berg calving as you flew in. Each time that happens, the upwelling brings up a host of nutrients. These were incredibly rich fishing grounds for my ancestors.”

  “A biologist,” Lanowski muttered. “Just what we need.”

  Inuva glared at Lanowski, and Jack quickly moved on. “How stable is that thing?”

  “I created a simulation of ice conditions in the fjord over the planned period of the project, from two weeks ago ending tomorrow.” Lanowski said. “Everything’s happened exactly as I predicted. This should give you an idea of what we’re looking at.” He pressed a key and they watched as the screen sped through several dozen images on the same backdrop, showing the glacier receding alarmingly and a procession of bergs tipping over the threshold.

  “A few years ago that would have been a whole season. Now it’s two weeks.”

  Lanowski pushed up his glasses and peered rheumily at Jack. “At the moment, the berg’s fine. There’s diurnal fluctuation in the grounding line, of course, about three metres as the tide goes up and down, and eventually the abrasion will knock off enough ice at the bottom to unbalance the berg. Right now the worst-case scenario is a major calving event, losing a lot more ice underwater than above, making the berg top-heavy. Then, say at high tide, we get an earthquake, or a storm, or ice from the glacier coming down the fjord and pressing from behind. That could push the berg against the sill and topple it.”

  “What are the odds?”

  “We’re not predicting any big ice coming down the fjord for at least a few days.

  An earthquake’s pretty well out of the question. A storm’s a possibility. There’s a local freak storm that could affect water movement against the threshold.”

  “A piteraq,” Inuva said quietly.

  “A what?” Costas asked.

  “A piteraq. Caused as cold air tumbles down the ice cap and meets the warmer air of the sea.”

  “Of course. James mentioned it as we flew in.”

  Lanowski ignored them and carried on. “But there haven’t been any storms of the magnitude needed for almost seventy years. The last one recorded was in 1938.”

  “What about calving?” Jack said.

  “That’s where the simulation runs dry,” Lanowski said. “I just can’t predict it.” He looked at the floor in consternation, as if the limitations of science were his own personal failing, then relaxed his shoulders and gave Jack a defeated look. “All I can say is that the chances increase with the summer heat, especially now with the twenty-four-hour Arctic summer daylight. Forty-eight hours down the road I’ll be recommending that all work at the berg cease and advising the captain to reposition Seaquest II at least two miles farther offshore.”

  Macleod turned to Jack with a sense of urgency in his expression. “All the more reason for us to get on.” He nodded thanks to Inuva, handing her a two-way radio from the command chair, which she took out of earshot through the side door on to the deck wing. “While Inuva sets up the final part of your tour, I think we’re ready to show you what this is really all about.” He tried and failed to catch Lanowski’s attention, then led them to a workstation on the other side of the room where a large man in a checked shirt and jeans was positioning a long metal tube like an oversize map case.

  “Don Cheney, senior glaciologist from NASA,” Macleod said. “Don, show us what you’ve got.”

  They quickly shook hands and stood behind the table and computer monitor.

  Cheney carefully pulled out an inner cylinder partway from the case, a transparent plastic tube about three feet long and six inches in diameter, and laid it on the table in front of them. He sat down at the workstation and leaned forward on his elbows, tapping the tube with a pencil and speaking in a low Texan drawl.

  “For anyone who hasn’t seen one, this is an ice core,” he began. “Came out of that berg yesterday. Mostly glacial ice, the cloudy-looking stuff with tiny bubbles in it, but also bands of clearer blue meltwater ice. We’ve got one meltwater band with modern contaminants in it, atmospheric hydrocarbons from factory and engine emissions. Some time in the last century that glacier opened up, then snapped shut pretty quickly. It happens. We’ve traced the fracture line up to the surface of the berg, the one relatively weak point in the core.”

  “We thought of using explosives to crack the berg along that line, then pretty quickly ditched the idea,” Macleod said. “It would probably have destroyed what we’ve found.”

  “Which is?” Costas asked.

  Cheney drew the tube about two feet farther out of the casing and pointed at it.

  “We were about to pull the corer out yesterday and wind down the project, but then one of my NASA guys spotted this.”

  The final part of the core was totally different from the bands of ice, a mass of black and brown fibrous material about eighteen inches long.

  “It’s nothing to do with seabed sediment this time,” Macleod said.

  “It’s wood!” Costas exclaimed.

  “Correct. Embedded in an ice layer about a thousand years old, from another sealed-up crevasse. The structure’s very compacted, and some of it even looks carbonized, whether through burning or decay we can’t tell yet. But we think we’ve got about a thirty-year tree-ring sequence. I had another core from the same spot air-freighted back to Cornwall in the Embraer that brought you in this morning. We should have the results from the IMU dendrochronology lab this evening.”

  “It couldn’t be a local tree trunk,” Costas said, shakin
g his head. “There’s no tree this big growing anywhere in Greenland, let alone finding its way on top of the ice cap.”

  Macleod eyes Cheney keenly. “Don, show them the scan.”

  Cheney nodded and swivelled the workstation monitor so they could all see it clearly. He tapped a command and an image like an ultrasound scan appeared on the screen, with bands and patches in different shades of grey that flickered in and out of focus.

  “A high-resolution still taken from the sonar,” Cheney drawled. “It shows the upper part of the berg, just behind that calved front. The shades of grey are mainly differences in density between glacial ice formed during the Quaternary and ice formed by meltwater. But there’s something else in there, and it’s big.”

  He tapped a key, and another scan appeared on the screen, this time dominated by a darker mass in the centre. He scrolled slowly through a series of stills taken at different angles as the sonar moved from the side to the top of the glacier. At the final still Jack nearly dropped his coffee mug in amazement.

  “You must be kidding,” he whispered.

  “It’s the real deal,” Macleod said. “I told you about the wood on the phone yesterday, but we only just realised what this image was when we processed the data a few hours ago. We’ve run the sonar over the berg again this morning, and each vertical scan gives this identical image.”

  “My God,” Costas said. “It looks like a ship!”

  “We can’t see what else it could be. It’s about twenty metres long, wide-beamed with a symmetrical stem and stern. From the horizontal scan it looks flattened, probably no surprise under all that ice.”

  “That halo you see around it is frozen meltwater, surrounding the thing like a cocoon,” Cheney said. “It’s the weirdest damn thing you ever saw.”

  “Maybe it was on fire when it got embedded in the ice,” Jeremy said quietly.

  “Yeah, right,” Cheney replied. “Whatever it is, I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  “You sure the wood came from there?” Jack’s eyes remained fixed on the image as he spoke.

  “Absolutely,” Macleod said. “Dead centre. The keel, if that’s what it is.”

  “And it’s a thousand years old?”

  “The frozen meltwater around it is a thousand years old, yes,” Macleod replied.

  “Then we may have the first ever Viking longship discovered in the western hemisphere,” Jack said, his heart pounding with excitement. “I’d hoped against hope for this when you told me about the wood. This could be fantastic, one of the most amazing shipwreck finds ever.”

  “I told you I was right to get you here,” Costas said.

  “The Inuit natives here didn’t build wooden ships, and there’s no other design from Europe at that date that looks like this,” Jack said. “It makes total historical sense with the Norse settlement of Greenland at that period. But how a vessel could have ended up in a glacier, formed miles inland, is completely beyond me.”

  “One reason we need to take a closer look,” Macleod said suggestively.

  “Let me see.” Costas stroked his stubble and leaned over Cheney, peering at the scale on the scan. “That’s about three hundred metres into the berg from that calved front and about fifty metres below present sea level, right? I’d guess the core would be pretty solid against tunnel collapse, but we’d want to go in underwater to avoid introducing air pockets into the berg.”

  “Our thinking exactly.”

  “What are the risks?” Jack said. “I mean, the odds against collapse?”

  “Lanowski’s the man for simulations, and he’s pretty well said it all,” Macleod replied. “All I can add is that it’s now or never. Once that thing’s rolled over the threshold and is out at sea, there’s no chance. Everything’s in place; we just need your go-ahead.”

  “Thank God I don’t have life insurance,” Jack murmured. “Imagine trying to sell this one to your broker.”

  “It’s probably no more dangerous than diving inside an active volcano,” Costas said ruefully.

  “No. You can’t. It’s crazy.” Maria’s face froze in horror as she realised what they were planning, and she looked from one to the other for some sign that it was all just a joke. Jack grimaced apologetically at her and then cast a familiar gleam at Costas, who gave him a crooked smile in return.

  “Okay. That’s good enough for me.” Macleod glanced at Inuva, who had returned the radio receiver and was waiting patiently behind them. “While the team at the berg are getting your gear into position, we’re taking a quick trip ashore.”

  7

  AN HOUR LATER THE MIGHTY FORM OF THE ICEBERG loomed before them, a jagged wall of white cut by bands of translucent blue and green. Jack zipped up his orange survival suit and adjusted his life jacket, glancing back at the sleek lines of Seaquest II receding in their wake. Beside him Maria tightened her grip on the safety line, and Macleod cast her a reassuring glance from the opposite pontoon.

  “It’s a wee bit of a roller-coaster ride, but Henrik here’s an expert. He’s been playing in these waters all his life.”

  The Danish crewman grinned and stood up in front of the Evinrude 120

  outboard, holding the line of the painter taut in one hand and the throttle in the other. He began to drive the Zodiac like a chariot through the slew of brash that covered the sea, effortlessly swinging the big engine from side to side to avoid the growlers that lurked treacherously just below the surface. After five minutes of weaving through the ice debris they reached a pair of red buoys, the entrance to a floating boom that kept a large area in front of the berg free of ice. As they slowly drove the last few hundred metres, they watched a pair of men ascend the huge face in front of them using crampons and ice axes, their forms diminutive against the vast bulk of the berg. Already they could feel the cold radiating off the ice, a chill aura that sent a shiver through Maria. She had insisted on joining them on the trip to the berg, but now she felt unnerved, as if she had strayed too far into a world beyond her experience.

  “It’s like a living thing,” she said. “Almost like it’s breathing.”

  “The cold exhalation actually shows it’s melting, and fast,” Macleod said. “Soon even the calved face in front of us is going to be too dangerous to work.”

  They drew up alongside a floating dock about twenty metres off the berg, the bobbing form of an Aquapod submersible visible on one side and two Zodiacs on the other. A twisted mass of cable was being lowered through the dock into the sea, and a group of men stood by wearing black IMU E-suits, all-environment dry suits that would prolong their survival even in these frigid waters should something go wrong. After a few moments the cable halted and a familiar form disengaged himself from the group with a wave.

  “Good work, guys. I’ve done all I can here.”

  With an agility belying his stout frame, Costas crossed the platform and on to the Zodiac, landing with a crash on the floorboards in front of Jack. He had preceded them to the berg by half an hour, and had clearly been on overdrive.

  He staggered up and stripped his E-suit down to the waist, sat down and cooled off for a moment, then slipped on the orange windbreaker and life jacket passed to him by the crewman.

  “I’m good to go.”

  The crewman pushed the Zodiac off and swung it back towards the line of the boom, driving slowly out to sea and then veering right once they had passed the buoys at the entrance. Five minutes later, the boom now out of sight and the northern edge of the berg behind them, Macleod motioned the crewman to drive a short way into the fjord and then ease back on the throttle and cut the engine.

  With the roar of the outboard gone everything suddenly seemed preternaturally still, an illusion of serenity, as if by crossing over the underwater threshold they had entered a fantasy world of ice, had become one with the towering crystal palaces that surrounded them.

  “Don’t be deluded,” Macleod said. “There are titanic forces at work here.”

  As if on cue the silence
was rent by a tremendous bang, followed by a percussive shockwave through the air and an immense rushing sound as a wall of ice slid off the glacier far away on the edge of the ice cap. The noise seemed to resonate off all the bergs trapped in the fjord, an eerie chorus of competing echoes that seemed to pummel the Zodiac from every direction and then trailed off like a long sigh. In the unearthly silence that followed, the bergs around them seemed even more awesome, their own stature more puny and impotent.

  “The sea’s often this placid in the summer,” the crewman said. “But it’s also the most active time for the glacier. And the warmer it gets down here, the more likely you are to get a clash with the cold air coming off the ice cap. It can happen very quickly.”

  He pointed up the fjord to the eastern horizon, to a band of sky over the ice that could have been dark blue or dark grey, but their attention quickly shifted to a growler the size of a car just ahead of them. It had suddenly begun to rock from side to side, an alarming sight that seemed to defy reason on the glassy sea.

  Soon it rocked more and more aggressively and then tumbled over, revealing a surface sculpted smooth and sending a ripple coursing out into the fjord. The brash surged around them like a slurry of broken glass, and other growlers reared up uncomfortably close out of the depths.

  “That was frightening,” Maria exclaimed.

  “You haven’t seen anything yet,” Macleod replied. “When a big berg rolls, you might not feel much out here, but a ten-metre tidal wave can hit the shore. You don’t want to go beachcombing around here.”

  “Don’t speak too soon,” Costas said. “We want our berg to stay nice and quiet for at least the next twenty-four hours.”

  Jack gazed back at the creaking mass of ice and then down the fjord towards the glacier. Outside the threshold the bergs seemed to glide majestically towards the open sea, but inside it was as if they were inchoate, shackled and straining to go, their jagged edges still raw and fresh from the violence of their birth. The power of the place was all the more awesome because so much of it was invisible, convulsions of energy that pulsed unseen through the depths each time a slab of ice fell into the sea, a steady unleashing of force seen like this nowhere else on earth. For Jack it was a new measure of human frailty in the face of nature, an envelope he seemed to be stretching farther and farther with each new project.