Crusader Gold (17 page)

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-breathing 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.

“This is it.” Suddenly the white ice ahead of the borer gave way to a wall of ice as clear as glass, refracted deep blue as their headlamps shone into it.

“Meltwater ice,” Costas said. “It’s the first we’ve encountered. This must be from one of those crevasses in the glacier Lanowski was on about.”

He drove the probe forward another two metres until the clear ice was all round them, and then came to a halt. As the swirl from the water jet subsided, Jack realised they were over a dark mass just beneath the ice, and he could see it curving off to either side through the blue haze. He sank down to the floor of the tunnel for a closer look, his headlamp pressed directly against the ice.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“What is it?” Costas released his hold on the probe and dropped down beside him, their bodies up against each other in the narrow space.

“Timbers,” Jack said excitedly. “A huge mass of them. It’s the side of a boat, a wooden ship. I can see rivets, rows of rusted iron rivets along planks. And the planks are overlapping, clinker-built. That does it. We’ve got ourselves a Viking longship.”

“Awesome,” Costas said, his eyes glinting through his mask at Jack. “And they’re black, carbonized, just like the sample they analysed from the ice core. There’s charring across this whole section of timber. This boat burned.”

“A burning ship on the ice,” Jack murmured. “Remember Kangia, his story of the ancient Inuit legend?”

“It explains the clear ice that cocoons this thing, the image they got with the sonar,” Costas said. “It’s not just meltwater from a crevasse that filled up and froze. I think this boat was burning when it sank into the ice. The ice and snow falling on the timbers must have put the fire out pretty quickly, but not before the heat melted this cavity in the glacier.”

“Before we pull out I want to get some sense of the dimensions,” Jack said.

“The target point’s eight metres ahead. That should give you what you need.

Once there I’m turning straight back.”

Moments later Costas came to a halt again. The edge of a huge blackened timber had appeared on the left side of the tunnel, and he adjusted the course of the probe to avoid colliding with it. As they passed alongside they could see that it curved upwards, and was superbly carved with writhing animal forms and abstract interlinked shapes in a wide strip along the edge.

“Urnes style,” Jack said excitedly. “Thank God Maria gave me a refresher course on Viking art last night. I’m certain this is Norwegian, a new style developed around the mid-eleventh century.” He rolled over and looked up through the ice where the timber extended above them. “It’s the stem post. Take a look at that.”

Costas aimed his headlamp through the ice at the top of the timber. He let out a low whistle through his regulator as he saw the carving at the top, a dark shape frozen in the ice at the limit of their visibility, a snarling head with flattened ears that protruded at least a metre in front of the curved prow of the ship.

“It must be Fenrir, the wolf-god,” Jack said in hushed tones, remembering Maria again. “He seems to be the guardian of this place.”

As they flipped back over and progressed slowly forward, a fabulous image unfolded beneath them, as if they were floating over a full-scale diorama of a shipwreck in a museum exhibit. The image was stunningly clear, and on either side they could see for at least five metres until the ice became too blue. Some sections of timber were remarkably intact, others charred and crushed by the ice that must have fallen on the hull before the meltwater froze up and protected it.

Jack took photographs continuously with the digital camera integrated into his helmet, murmuring the technical descriptions into the audiotape as each new element of ship structure came into view.

“It’s classic west Scandinavian construction, completely consistent with the eleventh century,” he said after a few minutes. “More a deep-hulled, broad-beamed sailing vessel than the Hollywood image of a longship, but then you wouldn’t have wanted an oared warship out here. They were fine for skimming the waves at high speed and landing raiding parties, but they had a low sheerline and swamped easily in heavy seas. You wanted a ship that could transport people and supplies across the north Atlantic, sometimes spending weeks at sea.”

“It’s been repaired,” Costas said, staring through the ice. “There’s a section near the bow where planks have been replaced, where the carpentry looks different.

Maybe they hit an iceberg. And look, there’s an oar.”

“It’s a steering oar, a side rudder,” Jack said, looking down at the perfectly preserved oar on the warped deck planking beneath them. “The Vikings didn’t have fixed rudders, so a broad oar was attached to the stern of the ship. It looks like this one was stowed inboard deliberately, near the bow, not the stern. This ship wasn’t at sea when it went down. And there’s more. Take a look at that. It’s incredible.”

As they passed beyond the bow area they began to see shapes that were not timbers, but items which seemed to have been arranged in a pile leading up to a dark structure in the centre of the hull where the mast-step should have been.

There were amorphous masses clearly identifiable as skins and furs, with wooden platters and utensils placed alongside. Costas quickly adjusted the setting as the ice-borer narrowly missed the top of a large pottery jar that lay shattered over the middle of the furs.

“An amphora.” Jack picked up a rim shard which had come out in the meltwater and stowed it in his E-suit. “An east Mediterranean wine amphora, of the Byzantine period. In Greenland. It’s bizarre.”

“I guess they had to keep warm in those cold Arctic nights,” Costas said.

“Anyway, I thought the Vikings were beer-drinkers.”

“Some of them were pretty widely travelled, remember, and must have picked up foreign habits.” Jack’s mind was racing, and he was beginning to think the unthinkable. “I may be wrong, but I’m wondering…” At that moment another object appeared inside the tunnel meltwater beneath them, a long wooden shaft with its head still embedded in the ice. Costas stopped the water jet to give the element time to melt more ice around the object, and Jack carefully drew it out and held it in the narrow space between them.