The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  Jack noticed Maria and Jeremy having a heated discussion, as if she were trying to persuade him of something, and then they detached themselves from the group beside the starboard railing and made their way back across the foredeck. Macleod joined them, and Jack peered up at Jeremy as they approached.

  “You haven’t told us what the rest of the runestone says.”

  “I was coming to that.” Jeremy pulled a palm computer out of his pocket, activated the screen and cleared his throat. “Prepare to be amazed.”

  “Go on.”

  “There are five lines of runes altogether, scratched into the quartz slate by one hand. As I said, they’re Norse and eleventh century, consistent with our warrior being the same Halfdan who scratched his name into Hagia Sofia in Constantinople.”

  “Well, what does it say?”

  Jeremy cleared his throat again. “I’ve had to add some connectives to make sense of it, but here’s the gist: Halfdan died here of wounds received in the battle against the King of England near Yorvik. Halfdan will fight again for Odin at Ragnarok. Harald Sigurdsson his king made these runes the winter after the battle. The Wolf takes Halfdan to Valhalla. The Eagle sails west for Vinland.”

  There was a stunned silence. “Harald Sigurdsson,” Jack gasped. “That’s Harald Hardrada.”

  “The Mappa Mundi inscription from Hereford suggests he was out here,” Maria said. “Now we know for sure.”

  Jeremy nodded. “The Wolf must be the name of the ship in the ice. The Eagle, the other ship, sailed on for Vinland. That’s the name of the Viking settlement in Newfoundland, the site at L’Ause aux Meadows, the farthest Viking outpost in the west and the only one known in North America.”

  “Wait a minute.” Jack’s mind was suddenly reeling in astonishment. “Yorvik was the Viking name for the city of York, seven miles west of Stamford Bridge. The battle can only be Stamford Bridge in 1066, between King Harold Godwinson of England and King Harald Hardrada of Norway.”

  “Correct.”

  “But Harald Hardrada died at Stamford Bridge.”

  “So the history books tell us,” Jeremy replied quietly. “But remember there’s no firsthand account of the battle. The events of that year were completely eclipsed by the Norman Conquest, and the Norman annals were hardly likely to extol an English victory. Most of what we know comes from a brief mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and from the Heimskringla, the semi-mythical history of the kings of Norway written in Iceland almost two centuries later. The copy of the Chronicle we found in the Hereford library mentions it, but only in a few lines.”

  “Plenty of scope for omission, even a cover-up,” Costas murmured.

  “My God.” Jack slumped back against the railing, his face dripping with seawater and sweat. “So Harald Hardrada survived Stamford Bridge. That changes everything. Somehow he and his remaining warriors made it out here, in the same two ships he had used to escape from Constantinople twenty years before. Remember the treasure of Michelgard, that incredible reference on the Hereford map? Harald must have had his treasure with him when he went to England, ready for a triumphal procession through York and London that never happened. Instead he sailed off after the defeat, taking it with him and his surviving followers far to the west, seeking a new land beyond the edge of the Viking world.” Jack lifted Halfdan’s axe in his hands, then gave a tired but jubilant smile. “I think we’ve just had another piece of battle-luck. I knew I was right to come out here.”

  “You might like to have this then.” Costas had reached into the inner pocket of his E-suit lying nearby, and pulled out a small nodule of ice. “I was sure I’d dropped this when the berg rolled, so I didn’t mention it. I found it loose above the burial chamber, near that Nazi dagger.”

  He handed the dripping object to Jack, who rolled it in his fingers and then passed it to Maria. A lustrous gold band protruded from one side of the ice, and Maria eyed it closely. “It’s a finger-ring, a Viking design,” she murmured. “Twisted gold, like a miniature arm-ring or neck-torque. But I’ve never seen one with a signet like this.” She clasped the ice in the warmth of her palm and then began rubbing it, gradually revealing the gold beneath. After a few moments she held it up to the sunlight. “I can see the surface of the signet. It’s got an impressed design. It’s…” Her voice trailed off, then she regained her composure. “Jack, tell me I’m not seeing things.”

  She passed the ring over and Jack stared through the ice that still clung to the signet. The form beneath wavered, but the outline was unmistakable.

  “The menorah.”

  Jack stared at the seven-branched shape, his heart racing. Something amazing was happening. First the ship in the ice had proved to be Viking, the funerary vessel of a Varangian warrior. A man who would have served with Harald Hardrada, whose last journey to the far side of the world took place in one of the very vessels Hardrada had used to break free from Constantinople, a ship which had sailed across the Golden Horn on the very spot where Jack and Costas had stood aboard Sea Venture only days previously. And now this, an extraordinary link to the greatest lost treasure of antiquity, something Jack assumed had disappeared forever after Stamford Bridge.

  “Don’t get your hopes up yet,” Costas said quietly. “This might not be all it seems.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Costas had sidled up alongside and was peering inside the ring, at the interior face of the signet. “As Maria said, tell me I’m not seeing things.”

  Jack flipped the ring over and let out a gasp. It was a shape as old and familiar as the menorah, but this version of it could only be modern. They had been looking at it on the dagger only minutes before. It was a swastika.

  Jack looked up slowly, his elation replaced by blank puzzlement. Maria glanced at him and then turned to Jeremy, her face set. “The time is now,” she said to the young man firmly. She squatted down between Jack and Costas while Jeremy remained standing, fidgeting slightly and looking paler than usual.

  “Jack,” Maria said quietly, “about that Nazi expedition. There’s more you need to know. There are forces at play here far darker than we could ever have imagined. Jeremy’s got something to tell you.”

  12

  Maria and Jeremy led Jack and Costas through the imposing west entrance of Iona Abbey and down the worn flagstones of the nave. It was cool inside, a refreshing break from the tepid summer air outside, and the east window above the altar bathed the interior in a rich light. Standing off to one side was a tall, blond man gazing contemplatively at the window, his arms folded across his chest and one hand on his chin. When he saw Jack he seemed to know who he was and pointed towards the doorway opposite him. Jack nodded in acknowledgement and followed the others through a low stone entrance into the open courtyard of the cloister beyond.

  “Father O’Connor is waiting for us,” Jeremy said. “He’s a long-standing member of the Iona community, and he has a room in the north range where he retreats for research and writing when he can get away from the Vatican.”

  “Do we trust this guy?” Costas said, his voice sounding loud in the cloister. “I mean, he’s a bit of an unknown quantity.”

  Maria stopped and turned sharply on him. “You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust him.”

  “Okay.” Costas saw Jack gesturing at him to back off. “Sorry. It’s just a hell of a long way to come.”

  “He insisted that we meet him here.” Maria’s voice was still curt, and she stopped and took out her cellphone. “I’ll join you. I’ve got to make an urgent call. Jeremy knows the way.”

  That morning they had flown in the IMU Embraer from Greenland to Glasgow in Scotland, and then taken the waiting helicopter one hundred miles northwest to the island of Mull. It had only been twenty-four hours since Jack and Costas had escaped from the perils of the iceberg, and both men had slept soundly most of the way. On Mull they had joined the well-worn pilgrim route to the holy isle of Iona, taking the ferry across the narrow channel to Port Ronain, then walking
up through the village to the abbey buildings in their setting of meadows with the sparkling blue sea beyond. As they gazed at the abbey Jeremy had explained that a building had stood on this spot since the time St. Columba arrived from Ireland almost fifteen hundred years before, had survived Viking raids, the Reformation and abandonment, and was now once again a thriving monastery and one of the holiest sites in the British Isles.

  They passed along the sunlit alley of the cloister to another small door and ascended a wooden staircase to an attic corridor with windows overlooking the abbey. Jeremy knocked on a door and a moment later they heard the clatter of a bolt being unlatched and a chain withdrawn.

  “Gentlemen. Welcome.” Father O’Connor ushered them in, then locked the door again behind him. He had discarded his Jesuit cassock in favour of the plain brown robe of a monk, and with his cropped white hair and the simple wooden cross hanging on his chest he seemed straight out of the Middle Ages. He looked pale and worn, older than when they had seen him a few days before in Cornwall. The room was small, piled high with books and papers, and they could see where O’Connor had been working at a laptop on a desk in the corner. They picked their way across the floor and sat down on wooden chairs arranged in a semi-circle in front of the desk. Above the small fireplace opposite, Jack recognized a scaled-down reproduction of the Hereford Mappa Mundi. Propped up beside it he could see a scanned copy of the exemplar for the map Jeremy and Maria had found in the sealed-off staircase in Hereford Cathedral, showing the extraordinary image of the New World in the lower left corner.

  “Let’s get straight to the point,” O’Connor said. “It’s been a long journey.”

  “Thank you,” Jack said. He opened the bag he had been carrying and took out the Nazi dagger and the gold ring with the menorah symbol, and placed them on the desk in front of O’Connor. The older man glanced at the objects and flinched slightly, averting his eyes. But then he looked up, staring at Jack.

  “First let me apologize to Jeremy for the burden I placed on him. I took him into my confidence over a year ago, when he first came to study the early runic inscriptions on Iona. I had been seeking a younger colleague, a scholar who could carry on the flame. I swore him to secrecy, but told him when we met in Cornwall that the time might come when we would need to reveal everything to you. Even Maria knew nothing until yesterday.”

  “Whatever it is, you could have told us when we discussed the Mappa Mundi and the menorah,” Jack said testily.

  “I had to be sure of you. Believe me, I am on your side and we have a common enemy.”

  “I’m not aware of any enemy.”

  O’Connor shifted on his chair, stared distastefully at the objects in front of him and then leaned forward on his elbows. “We’ll begin with the Nazis. As you’ve probably guessed, you’re not the first ones to hunt for the menorah.”

  “I never did buy the idea that we were,” Costas said cheerfully. “Stuff like that doesn’t happen. Someone, somewhere will have been searching for it. People never forget lost treasure.”

  O’Connor smiled thinly and then turned grim. “It’s not as straightforward as it seems. And it’s not a game. The best way to show you what we’re up against is to tell you something about the characters on that Ahnenerbe expedition in 1938.”

  “We know about Kunzl, but we’re still trying to identify the one with the armband.” Relaxing slightly, Jack took out copies of the photographs Kangia had given him and tossed them on the desk.

  “I can help here,” O’Connor said quietly. “Ever since the scandal over Pope Pius XII’s failure to condemn the Nazis during the Second World War, the Vatican has been particularly sensitive on this issue. I’ve recently taken over as Vatican spokesman on the Holocaust. Officially we liaise with Jewish groups and apprehend surviving war criminals. Unfortunately most of those who escaped punishment are now dead, but we still try to tie up loose ends for the sake of history.”

  “I can’t imagine any of them making it past St. Peter,” Costas said grimly.

  “God will make the final judgement,” O’Connor replied. “But most assuredly there is a special place in hell for those who murder children.”

  There was a knock on the door, and O’Connor got up and stared through the spy hole before unlatching it and letting Maria in. She sat down in the empty chair beside Jack and they looked expectantly at her.

  She was pale, distracted. “I was right,” she said. “I’ve just spoken to an old friend who works for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.” Jack suddenly remembered Maria’s Jewish background, her father’s Sephardic roots. “Our Nazi was a failed student at Heidelberg, with delusions of being a famous anthropologist. He joined the SS in 1933. After the Ahnenerbe expedition he volunteered for the SS-Totenkopfverbande, the death’s-head units. The ones who ran the concentration camps. His name was Andrius Reksnys.”

  “Not German?” Jack asked.

  “Lithuanian,” she replied.

  “There were plenty outside the Fatherland willing to heed Himmler’s call,” O’Connor said. Maria’s cellphone chirped, and she looked apologetically at them and quickly slipped out of the door. O’Connor tapped his laptop and clicked through a series of websites. “I know this man,” he said quietly. “Here he is.”

  He swivelled the screen so they could see and read from a scanned document, translating from German.

  The Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service, Berlin, 5 November 1941

  55 copies

  (51st copy)

  OPERATIONAL SITUATION REPORT USSR NO. 129a

  Einsatzgruppe D

  Location: Nikolayev, Ukraine

  Addendum to Report No. 129 concerning the activity of the Einsatzkommandos in freeing places of Jews and finishing off partisan groups. SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Andrius Reksnys personally executed 341 Jews. Revised total for the last two weeks: 32,108.

  “Einsatzgruppen.” O’Connor forced out the word with revulsion. “Himmler’s mobile death squads. Responsible for murdering over a million Soviet Jews, among others.”

  “How did this monster escape prosecution?” Jack asked.

  “Usual story.” There was an edge of anger to O’Connor’s voice. “Shockingly few of the Einsatzkommandos were ever brought to justice. In the final Russian onslaught in 1945, Reksnys disguised himself as a Wehrmacht private and fled west, to surrender to the British. There were suspicions during his interrogation but nothing concrete. On his release in 1947, now named Schmidt, he recovered his son from an orphanage and went to Australia. Together they made a fortune mining opals near Darwin. Then in the mid-60s he sold his operation without warning and disappeared.”

  “And the son?” Jack said. “Surely he was too young to have been in the war.”

  “Pieter Reksnys was six years old in 1941,” O’Connor replied. “But there’s an eyewitness account from a Jewish survivor at the Einsatzgruppen trial, at Nuremberg in 1947, that spoke of a boy in Hitler Youth uniform accompanying Sturmbannfuhrer Reksnys in his work. It’s a chilling account, one of the worst of the trial. Apparently the boy loaded his father’s Luger between each batch of executions, even carried out some himself. It was this account that eventually made the connection when Interpol became involved in the 1990s, and led to Andrius and Pieter Reksnys being tracked down to Mexico, where the son ran a drugs and antiquities cartel. He’s now in his early seventies, and is still there.”

  “Why so long?” Costas said incredulously. “Why did it take so long to identify them?”

  “Contrary to the Hollywood version, chasing down Nazi war criminals was never a priority in the West after the late 1940s,” O’Connor replied. “The main intelligence agencies-the CIA, the British SIS-were completely wrapped up in Cold War espionage. They knew all about Eichmann and Mengele and the other Nazis who had escaped to South and Central America, but few thought they posed a threat. Only the Israelis put serious efforts to bringing any of them to justice.”

  “And now we reap the rewards,” Costas muttered.


  “Not entirely.” O’Connor opened a drawer and placed a plastic sleeve with a photograph on the table. “You probably won’t remember this. A footnote in the newspapers about eight years ago, but actually the highest-profile Nazi death since Eichmann.”

  The picture was a shocking image of a dead man lying on his back in a pool of blood, his eyes and mouth wide open and his face contorted with pain. He was an old man, wearing a dark suit, with his right arm flung over his front; visible through the smear of blood was a red armband with a black swastika.

  “He wore that armband in the privacy of his own home,” O’Connor said. “An unreconstructed Nazi to the end. In case you haven’t guessed, that’s Andrius Reksnys. He was shot in the stomach to ensure a slow death, to give him time to be really frightened of where he was going next.”

  “Mossad?” Costas asked.

  “There is liaison with the Israelis,” O’Connor replied quietly. “But this was an independent operation.”

  “What are you saying?”

  O’Connor’s face was blank. He spoke coldly. “Andrius Reksnys was a henchman of the devil. All the efforts of international law had failed to bring him to account. He deserved to face the judgement of humanity, as well as God.”

  “Are you saying the Vatican runs a hit squad?” Costas said incredulously.

  “The Holy See is not just a spiritual beacon,” O’Connor said. “For centuries our survival has depended on strength in the world of men, on the power to persuade the unwilling to submit to God. Look at my own order, the Jesuits. Or the Crusades. Or the Inquisition. For centuries the Vatican has overseen the most successful covert intelligence network in the world, and has never shrunk from using it.”