Crusader Gold

by David Gibbins

  “One of the good guys,” Costas murmured.

  “None of the conspirators was a saint,” Macleod replied. “Künzl had been one of the most effective Panzer commanders in the Afrika Korps and had plenty of Allied blood on his hands. He knew about the racial policies of the Nazis from his Ahnenerbe days and had apparently done nothing. But he detested Hitler and wanted the war finished before it destroyed Germany. If you look at the other man in that picture you can see where Künzl’s loathing for the Nazis came from.”

  Kangia suddenly began to speak, the soft clicking tones filling the tent as if a gentle wind were ruffling the sealskins. He reached out for the photograph and Costas handed it to him, and they watched as he jabbed his finger at the image of the taller man. Inuva leaned over intently as the old man spoke and then looked back at the others.

  “Three days into the expedition they’d reached the edge of the ice cap, due east from here, and found a way up the ice to the top. After a day of hauling the sledges across the ice they were suddenly pinned down by a piteraq, a windstorm.”

  Kangia heard his daughter repeat the Greenlandic word and suddenly became animated, the shadows of his arms arching high against the tent wall as he gesticulated in the flickering firelight.

  “It was a ferocious storm, the worst my father had ever seen,” Inuva said. “The expedition was at the northern edge of the glacier, where a tributary ice stream begins to flow towards the fjord. The two Germans insisted on crossing on to the glacier and seeking shelter behind an ice ridge, one of the undulations where the glacier had buckled. But the Greenlanders refused, knowing it was too dangerous, and braved it out with their dogs on the exposed ice cap, huddled behind their sleds.”

  The old man put his fists together, pulled them apart while making a cracking sound and then spoke again to his daughter. “There was a mighty noise,” she translated. “The glacier had pulled apart and the Germans had disappeared into it. I, Kangia, was the only one courageous enough to crawl through the wind to the edge of the crevasse, where I looked down through the swirling snow and saw an incredible sight.”

  The old man had been following his daughter’s intonations and nodding emphatically, but suddenly he coughed painfully and lay back on the pile of furs, his face grey and drawn.

  “He has not got long now.” Inuva gently caressed her father’s arm and then looked up apologetically at Macleod. “I think it might be time for you to go.”

  Macleod nodded slowly and began to get up, but the old man held out a wavering arm and spoke once more, his words almost inaudible. His daughter leaned close and then translated again.

  “It was far below, as deep as the icebergs in the fjord are high.” Macleod sat back down as she spoke. “At the bottom of the crevasse was the prow of a ship, curving up to a fearsome face, its timbers blackened and old. I, Kangia, knew what it was as soon as I saw it. Legend passed down told of giants sheathed in steel, Kablunat, who arrived from across the sea and set one of their great ships alight on the ice. I, Kangia, heard the story as a boy from my grandfather, inside this very tent circle.” The old man stopped and coughed, and Inuva looked at the others. “Our Inuit ancestors, the Thule, arrived here from the Canadian Arctic to settle about eight hundred years ago, after the native people who lived here before had died out. But Thule hunters had already been coming here before that and had encountered the bearded giants who lived in stone houses in the south of Greenland. My ancestors called them Kablunat.”

  “My God,” Jack whispered. “A ship in the ice. It couldn’t be.”

  “Wait. There’s more.” Inuva held her hand up and listened again as the old man spoke. “The ice began to move beneath me,” she translated. “I, Kangia, threw down a rope and hauled up the two men. The crevasse closed with a crash just as they came out. The ship had disappeared in the ice. The piteraq continued for many days and we returned to Ilulissat. That was the end of the expedition. The Germans sailed away and we never saw them again.”

  The old man reached under the blankets Inuva had laid over him and pulled out a package wrapped in white sealskin. With trembling hands he held it out.

  Macleod took it from him, bowing his head gravely as he did so. In full view of the old man he passed it on to Jack, who cradled the soft leather in his hands and looked questioningly at Macleod.

  “This is why you had to come in person,” Macleod said. “When I spoke to Kangia two days ago he said he had an object he wished to pass on. I told him you were our boss, and he said only you could receive it from him.”

  Jack looked at the old man and bowed his head solemnly, then carefully began to unwrap the package. Maria and Costas shifted closer for a better view as the folds of sealskin fell away.

  Maria gasped, her face pale with excitement. “It’s a runestone!”

  The object was a polished slab of dark green a little longer than Jack’s hand, roughly squared at the corners and with a flat upper surface. Crudely inscribed on it were three lines of runes, several of the symbols immediately recognisable to Jack as he angled it towards the light.

  “It’s fantastic,” Maria murmured. “The runes are Old Norse, no doubt about it.

  There are some odd symbols and I don’t recognize the words, but Jeremy should be able to help.”

  “My father told me the story but never showed this to me,” Inuva murmured.

  “There’s one just like this in the museum at Upernavik, about a hundred miles north of here, found on a remote burial cairn at a place called Kingigtorssuaq.

  It’s the most famous Viking find in Greenland, the most northerly runestone ever discovered in the Arctic.”

  “Wait till you hear where this one came from,” Macleod said. “When Kangia rescued Künzl and the other German from the crevasse they were struggling over something, but the smaller man slipped and nearly lost his hold. Kangia had seen him slash at the other man with a knife but drop it into the crevasse. He was in a fury about something else he’d lost, but with the storm raging it became a matter of life and death to get them out and the struggle was forgotten. Before they left the ice cap Künzl gave this stone to Kangia for safekeeping. He said it came from the ship in the ice. Künzl apparently told the Nazi he’d dropped it in the crevasse, but the smaller man suspected he still had it and was rifling through his belongings in the night. Künzl told Kangia it was a sacred stone, that he must never let the other man know he had it. Kangia loathed the Nazi and was only too happy to oblige.”

  “Künzl must have translated it,” Maria murmured. “He was the best runologist of his day, an expert in all the Norse scripts. In those few desperate moments in the crevasse he must have read something that made him determined never to let it fall into the hands of his despised SS colleagues in the Ahnenerbe.”

  “Künzl told Kangia that if he was unable to return to Greenland Kangia must keep the stone secret for the rest of his life, and only pass it on to another who in his heart he could trust. The war sealed Künzl’s fate, and now you are that man.”

  While the others were talking, Kangia’s arm had fallen back over his chest and he had begun to breathe in shallow rasps, his eyes half closed and staring at the ceiling. Inuva turned and looked at them with urgency in her expression. “Now it is truly time.”

  Macleod nodded and they all got up to leave, ducking in single file under the flap at the entrance to the tent. Jack remained to the last, and before going he turned back and knelt down beside the old man, talking quietly to him and then saying a few words to his daughter. He touched Kangia’s hand before getting up and following Maria out into the bleak ruins of the old settlement.

  “What did you say to him?” Maria asked.

  “I wished him and his dogs godspeed across the ice, wherever their journey should take them. I told him that he had been right to pass on his treasure to us, that we would hold his trust sacred.”

  Inuva appeared at the tent flap to bid them farewell.

  “What will happen to him?” Maria asked, her vo
ice soft.

  “After the shaman comes we will help him to the high cliff overlooking the fjord, to the place we call Kællingekløften. We will leave him there, and tomorrow he will be gone.”

  “You mean suicide?” Maria said in a hushed voice.

  “At Kællingekløften we gather every year to watch the sun appear for the first time over the glacier after the weeks of winter darkness, and at that same place those who are tired of life leap into the icy depths of the fjord to join the spirit world. It is the traditional way. My father has finished here now and is eager to go on his next journey.”

  She lowered her eyes and backed into the tent, closing the flap behind her. High up on a crag a dog raised its head to the west and howled, and then strained on its chain as it saw them, flattening its head like a hyena and baring its teeth in a snarl. Maria shuddered and pulled her coat around her, drawing closer to Jack as they made their way down the rocky path towards the sea.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “An ancient Norse legend.” She paused as they negotiated a boggy patch. “The dread wolf Fenrir, one of a monstrous brood produced by a giantess, brother of the world-serpent Jormungard and the creature Hel, guardian of the dead. Odin heard a prophecy that the wolf and his kin would one day destroy the gods, so he chained Fenrir to a rock. Thar liggr hann til ragnarøks, there he waits till Ragnarøk, till the final showdown at the end of the world, when he will wreak his vengeance on the gods.”

  “It’s a sled dog, not a wolf,” Jack said.

  “I know. It’s irrational.” Maria glanced back at the distant figure of the dog and turned quickly back to the path. “But I feel as if we’ve reached the edge of that world of myth, a threshold between the world the Vikings knew and a world that even their gods couldn’t control. The Vikings who came here must have felt the same, a sense of foreboding as they looked over the icy sea to the west, wondering whether the horizon held riches and a new life or the nightmare of Ragnarøk. It’s as if we’re being warned, that others have been this way before us and not returned.”

  Jack put his arm around Maria and gave her a reassuring hug. “I take it as a good sign. If Fenrir is here, then we must be on the right track.” He smiled and passed her the swaddled package he had been given by the old man. “Anyway, ancient legends will have to wait for a while. You’ve got your work cut out for you. The sooner we can have a translation of these runes, the better.”

  “The Greenland Norse saw those storms, you know, the piteraqs,” Maria said.

  “There’s a haunting fragment from a poem called Norδrsetudrápa about these northern hunting lands. It goes something like: Strong blasts from the white mountain walls wove the waters, and the daughters of the waves, frost-nurtured, tore the fabric asunder, rejoicing in the storm. It’s virtually the only writing to survive from Norse Greenland, preserved in an Icelandic saga.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jack said. “We’ll be careful.”

  A few minutes later they reached the shoreline and clambered into the waiting Zodiac. It was early evening now, but in the perpetual sunlight of the Arctic summer it was impossible to gauge the time of day, an effect Jack found vaguely disorientating. After he had helped Maria over the bow and they were all settled again on the inflatable pontoons, Macleod gave the crewman a signal and the Evinrude roared into life. They zipped up their survival suits and donned their life jackets as the crewman reversed out and then swung round the bay in a wide arc, the propeller churning up the brash as he searched for a passage between the floating slabs of ice. As they rounded the promontory at the head of the fjord the iceberg came dramatically into view, dwarfing the flotilla of Zodiacs that were drawn up alongside it laden with equipment and technicians. Costas anxiously scanned the scene as they sped towards Seaquest II, then visibly relaxed and looked over at Jack. He gave a thumbs-up signal and then shouted against the engine and the wind, his words lost but the excited refrain familiar to Jack over the years: “Time to kit up.”

  8

  ALL SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL. WE’RE GOOD TO GO.”

  Costas flipped aside his microphone headset and grinned at Jack. Outside the Plexiglas dome they could see the two crewmen on the platform release the tethering lines, and the Aquapod began to bob uncomfortably on the surface as it drifted towards the iceberg. Costas quickly activated the water jets and reversed the submersible back to their descent position. It was nearly midnight, but in the continuous sun the dome had begun to heat up, and Jack reached down for the temperature control on his E-suit.

  “Don’t adjust it too much.” Costas wiped the beads of sweat off his forehead.

  “We’ll cool down rapidly as soon as we’re submerged.”

  The bustle of activity on the platform as they departed now seemed to belong to another place and time, and they listened as the last of the Zodiacs carrying the crewmen sped out of the danger zone and back towards Seaquest II. They were almost on their own now, their final human contact awaiting in the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle nestled against the berg thirty metres below.

  Costas tightened his straps, scanned the instrument panel and gripped the controls. With its bubble dome and tubular ballast tanks on either side, the two-man Aquapod was not unlike a small helicopter, an impression enhanced by the multidirectional water-jet propulsion system which gave it even greater agility than its counterpart in the air.

  “You can wave goodbye to the surface now,” Costas said.

  “At least it’ll still be daylight when we return,” Jack murmured. “That’s something to look forward to.”

  Costas opened up the ballast tanks and a geyser of water erupted on either side of the Aquapod, settling to a bubbling ferment as the submersible slowly trimmed down in the water and became negatively buoyant. For a few moments as the sea level rose up the dome in front of them they were looking at two worlds, both awesome in their magnitude. Above them was the towering form of the iceberg, familiar now yet still breathtaking, its hues of green and blue refracted through the flecks of brash that plastered the dome. Below them was a world as different as outer space, a place nature never intended them to broach.

  The Arctic waters were astonishingly clear, with visibility extending a hundred metres or more in every direction, and the sheer wall of the berg dropped below them as far as they could see into the frigid depths of the fjord. It was a stupefying sight, and for a few moments they stared in stunned silence as the dome slipped under the surface.

  “Holy shit!” Costas exclaimed suddenly. “Taking evasive action!”

  Costas gunned the main thruster and swung the Aquapod down towards the berg. Out of the corner of his eye Jack could see what Costas had sensed just in time, a rhythmic commotion in the water from within the fjord, a slow-motion whirling that was advancing relentlessly towards them. The deeper they dropped the larger it loomed, like some nightmare tormentor from which there was no escape. Jack fleetingly remembered Maria’s warning about the wolf Fenrir and the edge of the world, about forces even the gods could not control. They jetted down until they were nearly vertical, plummeting straight into the blackness of the abyss.

  “Brace yourself!” Costas yelled.

  A scything wall of white suddenly appeared out of the tumult, an apparition that bore down on them with horrifying speed and then swept past the front of the dome with inches to spare. They were jolted violently to one side. Costas fought to keep the Aquapod from spiralling out of control, then righted the submersible and brought it to a standstill. Above them they caught a glimpse of the giant slab of ice as it tumbled towards the open sea, swirling away until nothing but a mist of bubbles was left to mark its progress.

  “That was close,” Costas said.

  “I thought all this was supposed to end six months ago,” Jack said plaintively. “A quiet life of contemplation, tending the garden and writing my memoirs.”

  “Yeah, right,” Costas replied. “Anyway, we needed some excitement to kick-start the adrenaline for what we’re doing next.”
/>
  Now that the water was calm again they looked around, and both men fell silent.

  They had plummeted to a depth of nearly a hundred metres, and the DSRV was now far above them, with two divers just visible outside and silvery trails of bubbles cascading up the ice towards the surface. The immense face of the berg filled the view in front of them, at this depth all colour lost except blue. It had a surreal tint, an azure glow that made it loom at them like a mirage. They could see huge concavities where the current had eroded the ice away, and a vast skid mark of sediment and rock fragments where the berg had scraped against the side of the fjord. And below them, far below, barely discernible in the darkness, they could just make out a sepulchral landscape of boulders and undulations, a shadowy ridge that dropped off into an infinity of blackness on either side. It was a savaged and rutted seascape, pulverized by ice, and they knew it was one of the most dangerous places in all the oceans.

  “The threshold of the icefjord,” Jack murmured. “We must be the first people ever to see it.”

  “Awesome,” Costas whispered.

  “Not a place I want to go,” Jack replied.

  “Roger that.” Costas turned his attention to the instrument panel and injected a blast of air into the buoyancy chambers, bringing the Aquapod towards the berg until it was directly under the DSRV. “Ben, this is Aquapod One, safe and sound.

  We’ll be with you in five minutes. Out.”

  The Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle from Seaquest II featured a small internal dock, an open pool that allowed the dome of an Aquapod to rise into a chamber at the rear of the submersible. As Jack looked up at the belly of the DSRV, he watched the dock door slide open and saw the wavering form of a figure staring down at them from inside the chamber. Two divers appeared on either side of the Aquapod and hooked on four anchoring cables that slowly drew them up. As they broke surface and the dome opened up inside the cramped space, they were met by the welcoming face of Ben Kershaw, a former Royal Marine who had been at the centre of the action in the Black Sea six months before and had recently taken over as chief security officer on Seaquest II. Jack reached out and took the hand proffered to help him up, then shook it warmly once he was on the narrow gangway that ringed the dock.