The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  “Now!” Jack took five deep breaths, then yanked the umblical. Simultaneously Costas released his hose and backpack. With Jack’s left arm on Costas’ shoulder, they began to swim determinedly upwards, taking wide, hard strokes with their fins, Jack still clutching the axe in his right hand. For a few moments he felt fine, his bloodstream brimming with oxygen, and he remembered to breathe out as he ascended. Then the effort of their escape began to take its toll, and he felt the first niggle of discomfort. They were rising steadily, a metre every couple of seconds, but they were still more than twenty metres from the surface. Any letup in their finning and they would be dragged back down again. Jack started to suck on empty, his lungs instinctively heaving for more air, drawing the last dregs out of his helmet.

  His legs, starved of oxygen, began to falter. He was beginning to black out, overwhelmed by exhaustion. He was not going to make it. He stopped clawing his way upwards, and in a last conscious act struggled to free himself from Costas’ grip, seeing his friend still going strong, desperate to give him some chance of reaching the surface alive.

  Suddenly he felt an odd sensation, a jolting weightlessness. He had stopped finning but was still being impelled upwards. He was dimly aware that the berg had stopped moving. By instinct he found the dump valve to release air from his suit and stop himself from rocketing upwards. Then he was on the surface, blinded by the light. He unlocked his helmet and ripped it off, gasping over and over again in the cold fresh air, his entire being focussed on replenishing his life force. As soon as he could, he swivelled round and scanned the waves, shielding his eyes against the glare. After a few anxious seconds he caught sight of a tousled head bobbing in the waves about ten feet away.

  “You okay?” he gasped.

  “Well, at least that little swim solved our decompression issue.” Costas’ voice sounded strange after the intercom, adenoidal with the cold. He was facing away from Jack, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings, completely focussed on two gauges that he was holding out of the water. “But there’s a small discrepancy in the readouts. It’s incredibly annoying. I need to do a little tinkering.”

  Jack managed a small smile. He leaned his head far back, letting the evening sunshine play on his face. He could hear the helicopter above him and heard the splash as the rescue diver dropped into the sea. He cracked open one eye and saw the glinting golden blade in the waves beside him, the prize he had refused to let go. Suddenly their extraordinary discovery in the berg came flooding back, and a burst of adrenaline rushed through him. He shut his eyes, his mind now coursing with excitement. A wave washed over him, a cleansing jolt of cold that left lines of salt water trickling over his lips. It tasted good.

  11

  That’s some ice axe you’ve got there.”

  “Wait till you hear what else we found.”

  James Macleod had just finished applying a compress to the gash in Jack’s leg. His E-suit was slick with fresh blood, but the compress staunched the bleeding. Jack leaned back against the bulkhead, his face streaked with fatigue, and adjusted his flight helmet and headset. Between talking he was breathing deeply on the oxygen regulator that had been passed to him as soon as he had been winched into the cargo bay of the Lynx.

  “You don’t want to hear the odds Lanowski calculated against your survival.”

  “No, I don’t.” Jack was utterly exhausted, but felt he had to keep talking to tell them what had happened.

  “When the piteraq hit we were completely shut down. Inuva told us they could be bad, but I had no idea what we were up against. Couldn’t even get the chopper out of the hangar. It was terrifying, like banshees screaming above us.”

  “We saw it from the crevasse.”

  “When the berg rolled, all hell let loose. The displacement wave washed right up the shore and swept away the tent where we met Kangia. The local shaman was still there. As soon as we get you back on board Seaquest II the chopper’s out on a search, but it’s pretty hopeless.”

  “Inuva?” Jack said.

  “She’s okay. She was with Lanowski on board.”

  Macleod broke off to help the crewman acting as loadmaster to haul another dripping form through the open cargo door. Seconds later Costas was strapped into the seat beside Jack, pulling on his flight helmet and sucking gratefully at the oxygen regulator that had been handed to him.

  “You okay?” Jack asked.

  Costas sucked a few more times and then lowered the regulator, giving Jack a doleful look.

  “Oh. Let me guess.” Jack looked back with exaggerated sympathy. “Your ice probe.”

  “Months of research and development,” Costas said sadly. “And that was the only prototype. I’ll have to build the next one entirely from scratch.”

  “No hurry as far as I’m concerned,” Jack said. “I think I’ve just ticked diving inside icebergs off my list.” He turned back to Macleod. “What was your contingency plan?”

  “When we saw that the berg had rolled three hundred and sixty degrees we thought there was a chance. Lanoswki remembered the old crevasse above the longship. It was all his idea, modelling the likely rupture line, even calculating the explosive charge we’d need to blow it open.”

  “You’ve got to hand it to the guy,” Costas murmured.

  “So that’s what Ben was doing,” Jack said.

  Macleod nodded. “Ben volunteered to take the charge down. He tried half a dozen times, but he couldn’t get close enough to the crack. The wind was buffeting us and we had to fight to keep the chopper on station. Then he saw you inside the crevasse. He was trying to feed the cable in when the berg began to roll again.”

  “You guys are heroes,” Costas said.

  Macleod shook his head and smiled. “We’re just the shuttle service. I don’t know how you did it.”

  At that moment the loadmaster hauled a third figure through the door and secured the winch hook to its davit. Ben ripped off his face mask and looked anxiously at Jack and Costas. He gave them a diver’s okay sign, and they responded in kind.

  “Okay, Andy.” Macleod slapped the bulkhead behind the pilot’s seat. “We need to get out of here before that thing finishes its roll. We’re good to go.”

  “Roger that.”

  The others strapped themselves into the seats at the rear of the cargo bay. As the helicopter pitched forward and shuddered up to full power Costas jerked his hand to the axe lying across Jack’s legs. “By the way, thanks for saving me from the deep freeze.”

  “I owed you. I seem to remember a little help a while ago inside a volcano.”

  Costas looked warmly at his friend and nodded, his face suddenly lined with fatigue. Jack slumped back against the seat and breathed deeply from the regulator, feeling reinvigorated with every breath, knowing that the oxygen was cleansing his system of excess nitrogen. To his right he could see the immense form of the berg, seemingly as solid as a mountain, and to his left the sparkling shape of Seaquest II, far out in the bay. He was swept by the feeling of elation he had experienced upon surfacing. For months since their return from the Black Sea he had been nagged by a secret uncertainty, that the prize no longer justified the risk, that he had lost his edge. Now he knew he was back where he belonged. He shut his eyes and fell instantly into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  “My apologies,” Lanowski said. “I didn’t count on a storm.”

  “You gave us every warning,” Jack replied. “It was my call.”

  Jack and Costas were sitting on the foredeck of Seaquest II, slumped against the port railing where the helicopter had winched them down with Macleod a few minutes before. The ship was maintaining position in Disko Bay about a mile west of the fjord entrance, and Jack could see the tip of the iceberg beyond the starboard railing opposite them. Even at this distance it was an awesome sight. He and Costas had been extraordinarily lucky that the berg had rolled a full 360 degrees, that the huge force of the storm had tumbled it back to its upright position and left it perched precariously on the outer rim o
f the threshold. The next time it rolled it would flip over and stay that way, crushing any remaining air pockets beneath hundreds of metres of freezing seawater.

  Lanowski had been the first of the scientific team to reach them on the foredeck, joining the crew members who had guided down the helicopter winch and were now helping Jack and Costas to peel off their E-suits. They were quickly joined by Maria, whose look of relief turned to concern as she saw the blood on Jack’s thigh. The ship’s doctor was already on the scene, cutting away the bandage and spraying coagulant into the gash.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks.” Jack winced as the medic applied a suture, then held up a bloody spear of ice. “Nature provided her own cold compress.”

  “You were lucky,” the medic said. “It just missed the femoral artery.”

  “It’s fantastic.” Lanowski was shaking his head and chuckling to himself, in a world of his own. “While you were away Inuva and I worked out where the 1930s expedition must have found the ship in the ice cap. Now I should be able to use my glacier-flow quotient to work out where the Vikings dragged the ship on to the ice for the funeral pyre. One of the tributary fjords to the north of Ilulissat, I’d say, where the ice cap is more accessible from the sea.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and peered at Jack. “Having such a closely datable horizon inside that berg is the greatest discovery of the whole expedition. It should provide independent corroboration for my flow theory, the first time we’ll be sure of the rate of ice discharge over the last thousand years. Well worth your efforts. Congratulations!”

  “We’ve just found a Viking longship, man,” Costas said in exasperation. “One of the most sensational archaeological discoveries of all time. A little more exciting than the rate of glacial ice flow.”

  Lanowski looked at him with unseeing eyes, his mind already far away in a world of figures and equations. He pulled out a pocket calculator and began furiously tapping at the keys, occasionally looking up and muttering under his breath. Costas shook his head in disbelief as the ungainly figure shuffled off without another word towards the deckhouse computer room.

  “Talk about a one-track mind.”

  “But a brilliant one.” Jack grinned at the dripping form of his friend. “That’s why we’re a team. I couldn’t do all that math.”

  Jeremy appeared beside Maria, and she nudged him forward in front of Jack.

  “We’ve translated the runestone that Kangia gave you, the one the Germans found in the crevasse,” he said diffidently.

  “Brilliant. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”

  “It’s west Norse, eleventh century, quite distinct from the runes used in England and Denmark at that time.”

  “And?”

  “His name was Halfdan.”

  “We know. A veteran of the Varangian Guard in Constantinople.” Jack raised the object that had been resting on his knees, and Jeremy suddenly recognised it for what it was. He stared agape as Jack pointed to the runic inscription on the axe blade.

  “Holy shit.” Jeremy suddenly forgot his restraint. “They’re identical to the Halfdan runes at Hagia Sofia in Istanbul.”

  “He’s our man.”

  “Tall guy, early middle age, long yellow hair and beard,” Costas interjected. “A little weatherworn and charred at the edges, but otherwise in pretty good shape for a guy who hasn’t moved for a thousand years. We’ve just met him, halfway to Valhalla.”

  “Huh?”

  Costas jerked his thumb towards the entrance of the fjord. “Inside the berg. He’s on ice. We were over the central burial chamber when it rolled. The funeral pyre must have been extinguished when the ship fell into the ice, and the flames only licked at the edges. My guess is that runestone was resting on his body.”

  A crewman pushed past the others and handed Jack a piece of paper. He quickly read it and then stared into the distance, a smile flickering across his face. “I knew it!”

  “What?” Costas asked.

  “A hunch I had before our dive. A pretty wild hunch, so I didn’t share it. You remember the dendro date for the ship timbers, 1040 plus or minus ten years? For some reason all I could think about was Harald Hardrada’s escape from Constantinople. If the sagas are correct, it took place very close to that median date, in 1042.”

  “And?”

  “I asked the IMU lab to run a comparison between the timber fragments we got from the chain in Constantinople and the wood Macleod’s ice-corer brought up from the longship. The full checklist, species identification, tree-ring characteristics, fibre and cellulose specs.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s not just the same species, Norwegian oak,” Jack said excitedly. “It’s incredible. It’s actually from the same tree. Planks cut radially from the same trunk.”

  “Whoa. Steady on there.” Costas held one hand in front of him, trying to marshal his thoughts. “Let me get this straight. You’re suggesting that one of the ships Harald Hardrada used to escape from Constantinople with the princess and the treasure is the same ship we’ve just seen trapped in an iceberg off Greenland?”

  Jack gave his friend an odd look and then started to nod.

  “Of course.” Costas suddenly snapped his fingers and stared back at Jack. “The repair work on the hull.” He looked up at the others. “We found a section of planking which had been expertly replaced near the bow. It’s in the photographs. I assumed it was collision damage with ice or rock, but it’s exactly where the ship might have driven up against the chain across the harbour when they fled Constantinople.” He shook his head in disbelief and turned to Jack. “So if this is one of Harald’s ships, where’s the treasure?”

  “They’re not exactly going to have put it in a funeral pyre,” Jack said. “And we don’t know the date when this happened. The Halfdan we saw was an older man, and he could have sailed here years after their Constantinople adventure, maybe seeking a new life for himself in the Greenland settlement. By then Harald would have been king of Norway and the treasure of his Varangian days secure in his stronghold at Trondheim.”

  There was a percussive boom from the direction of the fjord, followed by an immense falling sound that reverberated across the still waters. Another giant slab of ice had calved off the iceberg, dropping out of sight into the depths and then emerging again like a surfacing whale to bob out into the bay.

  “What about the longship?” Macleod jerked his head at the iceberg, a sense of urgency in his voice. “We haven’t got much time now. It’d be risky to go close again, but we could try another sonar scan.”

  Jack lifted the axe from where it rested on his knees, twisting it until the sunlight sparkled off the gilding on the blade. He stared at it pensively for a moment and then looked at Maria, knowing they were both remembering their visit to the old Inuit the day before and her apprehension about Fenrir, the Norse wolf-god on the carved prow they now knew had been the spirit guardian of the longship.

  “I took hundreds of pictures,” Jack replied. “Enough for a full photogrammetric reconstruction. There’s no way anyone’s going near that berg again. When we found Halfdan he was partway to Valhalla. I think we should let him finish his voyage.”

  “What about the axe?”

  Jack weighed the haft again in his hands. “I’ll look upon Mjollnir as a loan,” he said. “It got Halfdan through all those wars alongside Harald Hardrada, and it’s got us through a few scrapes. It’s still got what the Vikings called battle-luck. Something tells me those old Norse gods are willing us on, and this is one of the best clues we’ve got. If Halfdan still had his treasured battle-axe from his days in Constantinople, then who knows what else the Vikings could have brought out here.”

  “That reminds me.” Costas suddenly jerked upright and reached into the hip pocket of his E-suit. “I pulled this out of the ice just before things went haywire down there. I’d completely forgotten.” He extracted the object and they could see it was another weapon, a dagger the size of a small hunting knife with a gleaming steel blade
and a decorative handle. As he held it up and the blade glinted, the crew members who had been milling on the deck converged around the group, and there was a collective gasp of amazement.

  “Let me take a closer look at that.” Macleod said. “Something’s not right.”

  As Costas passed it over they could see what had caught Macleod’s eye, and their astonishment turned to disbelief.

  “A swastika,” one of the crew exclaimed.

  Macleod turned the dagger over in his hands. “Just as I thought,” he murmured. “They did find the longship. Look at the pommel. A skull and crossbones, the death’s-head symbol. This is a Nazi dagger, a weapon carried only by a sworn member of the SS.”

  There was a stunned silence and then the woman in the crew spoke again, quietly. “Could someone explain how a Nazi dagger got on a Viking longship inside an iceberg off Greenland?”

  Macleod handed the dagger back to Costas and looked at Jack. “I think it’s time we told the crew the whole story.”

  At that moment there was a sudden lurch in the deck, an unusual sensation in a ship with a state-of-the-art dynamic stabilizing system. The sea remained dead calm and covered with a steely grey mist after the storm. Then someone shouted from the starboard railing. “It’s the berg! She’s rolling!”

  Everyone except Jack and Costas converged on the opposite railing to watch the mouth of the fjord. Even though it was more than a mile away, the spectacle was awesome, a breathtaking display of a force of nature no human agency could ever control. Through the mist they saw the huge front face of the berg drop off the underwater threshold and roll over the edge, the jagged eruptions of ice from the top of the glacier replaced by smooth undulations sculpted by the sea and streaked with black from the threshold. As the berg stabilised, Jack and Costas knew that the longship was now lost forever in the abyss, its fallen warrior destined to sail south along the old Viking sea route to the New World and find his eternal resting place as the berg melted far out in the Atlantic. It had nearly been their tomb too, and Jack found himself gripping the axe hard as he and Costas rested against the bulwark, suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion, and watched the berg float majestically towards the open sea.