The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  “Good to go?”

  “Good to go.”

  9

  The man in the black cassock walked confidently towards the main entrance of the Apostolic Palace, his trappings as a Jesuit priest in keeping with the other applicants milling around the doorway. He had left the crowd in St. Peter’s behind him and had already passed the first security cordon at the bronze doors leading off from the square. Now he was approaching the very heart of the Vatican, the headquarters of the College of Cardinals, the hub from which the Holy See exerted its influence far beyond Rome to every corner of the globe.

  Ahead of him two Swiss guards stood resplendent in their finery with halberds crossed in front of the door, an image that could have been straight from the Renaissance except for the Heckler amp; Koch submachine guns slung discreetly over their backs. An officer of the guard took the Jesuit’s ID and proceeded to scrutinise him, comparing the black beard and expressionless eyes with the photo on the card. Despite the heat of the early summer, the face was pale and pinched, but it was a scholarly visage all too common inside the closeted walls of the Vatican. The officer turned to a secretary beside him, and they checked the level of authorisation on a palm computer. The officer grunted in surprise and immediately handed the Jesuit back his card.

  “You are free to enter.”

  The guards raised their weapons and the Jesuit passed through, avoiding the usual body search and metal detector. He walked straight along a wide corridor on the ground floor, then turned left at the end and continued until he came to the ornate door of a private chapel, its entrance marked by trays of dedicatory candles on either side. He knocked once and pushed the door open. In the candlelit gloom he saw another man kneeling before the simple altar at the far end of the chapel. The man crossed himself and stood, then turned towards the door. He was tall and aquiline, with white hair, and he wore the full episcopal vestments of a cardinal, with a gold cross hanging in front of his scarlet cassock. He had the benign, ageless face of one who had spent many years in holy orders, but with a hard edge to his eyes. It was an expression appropriate for a man such as he, a man whose ambition had brought him to the very threshold of supreme power in the Catholic Church.

  “Eminence.” The Jesuit bowed slightly, then closed the door behind him.

  “Monsignor.”

  The two men spoke in English, the Jesuit with a clipped drawl that could have been South African, the cardinal with a hint of north European in his accent.

  “He is here?”

  “The second one present at the opening of the chamber. We suspected, and he confessed. The Holy See has techniques of persuasion refined over the centuries.”

  “And the other?”

  “He is your next task.”

  The Jesuit walked forward and knelt in front of the cardinal. The cardinal quickly drew off the holy ring from the middle finger of his right hand and replaced it with another, a heavier, flat-faced ring that glinted in the candlelight as he held it out. The Jesuit took his hand and kissed the ring, closing his eyes as his lips brushed the familiar shape, and with his other hand felt his own ring hanging round his neck under his cassock. He stood, made the sign of the cross and backed reverently towards the door, then stopped for a moment and held up his right hand towards the cardinal, whispering words in a language that sounded unearthly, words never before uttered in this holy place, and which seemed to blaspheme against all that it stood for.

  “Hann til ragnaroks.”

  The Jesuit closed the door of the chapel behind him and walked down the long corridor, his footsteps echoing off the walls of the palace. He emerged into an open courtyard, raising his hands in prayer as two officials passed, then made his way towards an unassuming entrance along the other side. The bells of St. Peter’s suddenly began to boom across the still air of the city, asserting the sovereignty of the Holy See as they had done since the dying days of the Roman Empire. Above him the walls of the courtyard framed the sky, two huge birds of prey circling far overhead, and he could hear the dull rumble of the city outside. He ducked through the entrance and looked quickly behind him, then gathered up his cassock and mounted the stairway to the first floor. The corridor ahead was lined with statues, bulletin boards and posters advertising exhibits, but was empty of people, today being a holiday for the museum staff. The Jesuit reached a door with a light on inside, just where he had been told it would be, and saw the word CONSERVATORI above the lintel.

  He paused, not out of hesitation but to relish the moment. In the shadows he stood with his head bowed, his fists clenched. Sixty-five years earlier his forefathers had failed to breach these walls, had stopped short of taking the Vatican in their triumphal sweep through Rome. Now he would make amends, he would make his mark. He unclenched his left hand and raised it to his face, drawing his index finger down the ragged scar that pulsated beneath his beard, pressing it hard until he flinched in pain. He slipped his left hand back under his cassock and with his other hand knocked three times on the door.

  “Enter,” a muffled voice said in Italian.

  The Jesuit pushed the door open and closed it behind him. The room was crammed with books and manuscripts, with a computer workstation at the far end. In the foreground was a fragmentary stone relief sculpture on a pedestal, and in front of it sat a middle-aged man in jeans and a casual shirt, hunched over a notebook.

  “Monsignor.” The man finished what he was writing and looked up, his expression alert and intelligent. “I had not expected to be interrupted today. What can I do for you?”

  “You are the chief conservator?” The Jesuit spoke in Italian.

  “I am.”

  “You were present at the discovery of the secret chamber in the Arch of Titus, along with Father O’Connor?”

  The other man suddenly looked deflated, and tossed his notebook on the floor. “Now everyone seems to know. We kept it secret for the good of the Church. I wish we had never found it.”

  “So do I.”

  The silenced Beretta coughed twice and the conservator jerked back on his stool, an expression of horrified surprise on his face. He tottered over and fell heavily to the floor, coming to rest with his arm splayed awkwardly over his front, his eyes wide open and uncomprehending in death. The Jesuit pulled his left hand out of his cassock and slowly raised it to his face. He drew his finger down the scar on his cheek, again and again, as hard as he could, grimacing with pleasure as he watched the blood seep from the man’s chest and pool on the cold stone slabs beneath him.

  There would be more.

  “Activating ice probe now.”

  Costas turned to Jack as he spoke through the intercom, and the two men gave each other the okay sign. For about the fifth time Jack cast a critical eye over Costas’ equipment. Once they shed the umbilical they would be absolutely reliant on their breathing systems and on each other, with no bail-out option, no emergency escape route to the surface. The IMU equipment was state of the art, with a rock-solid computer system which took the job of calculating their breathing mix and ascent rate entirely out of their hands. It had been tested in conditions of extreme heat six months before inside a submerged volcano, but this was the first time it had been deployed in water that was as cold as it could be without turning to ice.

  “Take up your position.”

  Jack swung in from where he had been hanging by one hand and gripped the metal bar beside Costas. They were like two climbers on a vast ice wall, dwarfed by the immensity of the berg. Below them the ice dropped off hundreds of metres into the abyss, where the slope of the threshold sheered off to unimaginable depths, to a place of freezing blackness no human had ever dared enter.

  “There’s only one safety drill,” Costas said. “Any sign of movement in the ice and we switch to trimix. If this baby rolls off the threshold we’re going down. Remember, the trimix gives us breathable gas to one hundred and twenty metres. That should at least give us some margin.”

  Jack gave another okay sign and checked the t
hree hoses which fed into the ports in his helmet. In truth he and Costas both knew their safety drill was a forlorn hope. If the berg moved off the threshold, the vast bulk of it would slip underwater, its base plunging hundreds of feet. If the movement of the ice didn’t crush them, the pressure of a sudden descent into the abyss would kill them instantly.

  Jack shut his mind to the possibility and focussed on the outlandish device in front of them. They had just opened up the protective cage that cradled the probe against the berg, and attached the radio buoy which they planned to release to the surface once they re-emerged. The probe was already wedged partway into the ice, having been put in position earlier by the pair of divers they had seen from the Aquapod. Directly abutting the ice was a metal ring two metres in diameter, the width of the tunnel the machine would bore. The tunnel would be just wide enough for the two of them to follow on side by side, with little room to spare. The superheated element in the tube was complemented by an array of microwave and laser cutters emanating from the main body of the device, a metre-wide cylindrical canister directly in front of them. A small but powerful water jet would funnel the newly melted water away and propel the device forward. On the rear face above the guide rail a waterproof LED screen glowed a vivid green.

  “We’ll keep the power line attached to the DSRV as long as we can, as well as the fibre-optic cable,” Costas said. “Normally the DSRV pilot would be able to see everything we see on the screen, but before the DSRV moves off we’ll have to disengage the power line and run the probe from the internal battery.” He adjusted a large dial below the screen, then turned and peered at Jack through his mask, remembering the debilitating effect of the gunshot wound that had nearly ended his friend’s life on a very different dive, deep in the Black Sea six months before. “You okay?”

  “This new E-suit heating system is working wonders,” Jack replied simply.

  “Without the coil the water in the tunnel would actually be below zero,” Costas said cheerfully. “It’s fresh water, from the glacier, so it freezes more quickly than salt water. We’d be ice before you could say scotch on the rocks.”

  “Thanks for the thought.” Jack looked down with some scepticism at the coil, a wavering tendril of microfilaments hanging below them. It would be paid out from the device as they went in, and keep the newly melted water from freezing up again and entombing them inside the berg.

  “It should work,” Costas added. “In theory.”

  “Let me guess. I won’t even say it.”

  Costas’ eyes glinted at Jack as he reached up to his shoulder and pressed the external channel on his communications console. “Ben, we’re on our way. Estimated time of arrival at the ten-metre disengagement depth, twenty minutes. Out.”

  Jack watched beneath his fins as their entry hole into the berg receded far below, a shimmering patch of blue obscured by the swirl of heated microfilaments that trailed behind them. Twisting down the centre was the battery cable and the umbilical bringing in their nitrox and sucking out their exhaust, their lifeline to the world outside. Jack raised his head and watched in fascination as the borer carved a perfectly smooth tunnel through the ice, proceeding upwards at a 45-degree angle at a rate of more than two metres per minute. He had no sense of the water temperature in his E-suit, but the changing thermostat readout on his environmental regulator reflected the blast of warm water that was being ejected from the borer and driving the machine into the ice. Ahead of them their lamps lit up the wall of the tunnel, a dazzling spectacle of white, yet Jack knew that without artificial light they would be entering a world of total blackness, hemmed in on all sides by an unimaginable thickness of ice which had blocked out the last vestiges of the sun’s rays far above them.

  “Okay,” Costas said. “We’ve reached ten metres external water depth. I’m going to level out and disengage.”

  Costas adjusted the heat output controls on the panel in front of him, easing off on the lower elements so the borer would melt more ice above and gradually become horizontal. Jack watched their progress on the LED screen, a 3-D isometric image of the berg identical to the one Lanowski had shown them earlier that day. The image had been generated by the surface team using ultra-high-frequency sonar, created from thousands of data points where the sound waves had met differential resistance from frozen cracks and fissures in the berg. Lanowski had plotted a best-fit point of entry and route to minimise the chance of following a frozen meltwater fissure and rupturing the berg, and so far his plot had held true. The ice they had passed through had all been the cloudy white ice of the glacier, as hard as rock, formed a hundred thousand years ago in the depths of the Ice Age.

  Costas reopened the external channel on his intercom receiver. “Ben, this is Costas. Do you receive me, over?”

  “Costas, this is DSRV, we receive you loud and clear, over.”

  “We’ve reached the disengagement point, over.”

  “Roger that. We’ve got you on screen as long as you’re hooked up. Be advised, we have a meteorology warning from the captain of Seaquest II. There’s some thermal disturbance on the edge of the ice cap, a cold air mass moving in from the east. It may be nothing significant, but the captain’s pulling back another mile from the fjord as a safety precaution. You have the option to abort. Over.”

  Costas and Jack looked at each other through their visors. “We’re carrying on,” Costas replied. “We’re only fifty metres from our target, and we’re not going to hang around. We’ll be out of here within the hour. But you must leave now. Over.”

  “Roger that. Send up the radio buoy when you’re clear of the berg and we’ll pick you up. Standing by to receive umbilical. Over.”

  Costas flipped a switch on the control panel in front of him and pulled out the power cord from the ice-borer. For an alarming moment the device went dead, and Jack could almost see the water around him beginning to freeze up. Then the LED screen and forward light array reactivated as the battery came on line, and the water began to shimmer again.

  The two men turned towards each other in the narrow confines of the ice tunnel, their visors only inches apart. Costas talked them through the procedure they had practised repeatedly before leaving the DSRV, each man visually checking the other as they worked methodically through the steps.

  “Engage rebreather.”

  Jack copied Costas and opened the outlet valve of the rebreather on his chest, then turned the knob under his helmet that activated the flow of gas into the silicon rubber skirt that sealed over his nose and mouth. The first lungful of oxygen sent a tingle down his arms and legs, an invigorating effect he relished every time they used rebreathers. He grasped the umbilical hose with his right hand and with his other hand closed the nitrox port on his helmet, his body wedged awkwardly on his elbows against the wall of the tunnel and pressed up against Costas.

  “Disengage umbilical.”

  Simultaneously the two men pulled the nitrox hoses from their helmets and dropped them to the floor of the tunnel, and Costas released the power cable he had been holding. As they sucked on their rebreathers they watched the coiled mass of the umbilical slither off behind them and disappear over the bend in the tunnel, dropping down their entry route towards the open sea. The microfilament tendrils keeping the tunnel liquid wavered and undulated as if they had been caught in a breeze, then gradually became more stable, spreading out over the entire width of the tunnel.

  “Ben, we’re disengaged. We’ll be out of communication range once we hit that mass of meltwater ice. Looking forward to a hot brew when you return. Over.”

  “Roger that. Good luck. Out.”

  They were now completely cut off from the outside, dependent solely on each other and the array of equipment that festooned their bodies. As Jack watched the umbilical disappear he had felt a pang of unease, a warning sign of his secret vulnerability as a diver, the lurking claustrophobia he constantly fought to suppress. Years before he had nearly died in a submerged mine shaft, his life saved only by buddy-bre
athing with Costas, and the trauma had been reawakened in the labyrinth of Atlantis, when his wound had left him weakened and exposed. He knew Costas was aware of his battle, and the unspoken bond between the two men was a source of strength. Jack gripped the guide rail behind the probe and forced himself to concentrate on the excitement ahead.

  “We’re dead on target,” Costas said. “Check out the screen.”

  Directly in front of them the LED display showed an anomalous form, the image created by the sonar data points around the mass of meltwater in the heart of the berg that had mystified Cheney and the NASA team. Even the ultra-high-frequency sonar had failed to penetrate further, and from this angle there was no sense of the extraordinary shape which had been so clear from the vertical sonar images. In the centre of the dark mass was a red cross-hair where the ice-corer had picked up the timber sample, and slightly above it a green cross-hair which marked their objective.

  “Remember, we’re taking pictures, grabbing anything we can, then leaving,” Costas said. “No time for science today.”

  “For once I’m with you,” Jack said. “Now we’ve got the tree-ring date, all I need is to confirm what it is and prove its origin. A couple more wood samples and we’re out of there.”

  “While you’re doing that I’ll use the probe to melt a pool above the target zone, just wide enough to turn this baby round and head for home. I can already taste that brew Ben’s got going for us.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  The two men hung side by side behind the rail as Costas reactivated the heating element, and seconds later it began to carve out the tunnel towards the target zone. The borer was now an autonomous vehicle, free of any tether to the outside world. It was drawing them along like a slow-motion underwater scooter, pressing farther and farther into the heart of the berg. Costas concentrated on keeping them above the ten-metre threshold for oxygen toxicity. As they progressed onwards Jack experienced a rush of elation, as if the oxygen and the adrenaline he had needed to overcome his anxiety had filled him with an overwhelming exhilaration. The tiny bubbles that gave the ice its milky opacity were fizzing in the meltwater, and he suddenly realised that the only life-sustaining properties around them had been released from the depths of the Ice Age. The air was the same as that breathed by their most distant human ancestors, hunter-gatherers who had roamed the edge of the ice sheets thousands of years before civilisation. Jack had known he would feel a frisson of excitement as their objective neared, but this was an unexpected sensation, the extraordinary feeling of swimming through a tunnel in time that would be impossible to experience anywhere else on earth.