David Gibbins - The Crusader's gold

“It’s the real deal,” Macleod said. “I told you about the wood on the phone yesterday, but we only just realised what this image was when we processed the data a few hours ago. We’ve run the sonar over the berg again this morning, and each vertical scan gives this identical image.”

“My God,” Costas said. “It looks like a ship!”

“We can’t see what else it could be. It’s about twenty metres long, wide-beamed with a symmetrical stem and stern. From the horizontal scan it looks flattened, probably no surprise under all that ice.”

“That halo you see around it is frozen meltwater, surrounding the thing like a cocoon,” Cheney said. “It’s the weirdest damn thing you ever saw.”

“Maybe it was on fire when it got embedded in the ice,” Jeremy said quietly.

“Yeah, right,” Cheney replied. “Whatever it is, I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“You sure the wood came from there?” Jack’s eyes remained fixed on the image as he spoke.

“Absolutely,” Macleod said. “Dead centre. The keel, if that’s what it is.”

“And it’s a thousand years old?”

“The frozen meltwater around it is a thousand years old, yes,” Macleod replied.

“Then we may have the first ever Viking longship discovered in the western hemisphere,” Jack said, his heart pounding with excitement. “I’d hoped against hope for this when you told me about the wood. This could be fantastic, one of the most amazing shipwreck finds ever.”

“I told you I was right to get you here,” Costas said.

“The Inuit natives here didn’t build wooden ships, and there’s no other design from Europe at that date that looks like this,” Jack said. “It makes total historical sense with the Norse settlement of Greenland at that period. But how a vessel could have ended up in a glacier, formed miles inland, is completely beyond me.”

“One reason we need to take a closer look,” Macleod said suggestively.

“Let me see.” Costas stroked his stubble and leaned over Cheney, peering at the scale on the scan. “That’s about three hundred metres into the berg from that calved front and about fifty metres below present sea level, right? I’d guess the core would be pretty solid against tunnel collapse, but we’d want to go in underwater to avoid introducing air pockets into the berg.”

“Our thinking exactly.”

“What are the risks?” Jack said. “I mean, the odds against collapse?”

“Lanowski’s the man for simulations, and he’s pretty well said it all,” Macleod replied. “All I can add is that it’s now or never. Once that thing’s rolled over the threshold and is out at sea, there’s no chance. Everything’s in place; we just need your go-ahead.”

“Thank God I don’t have life insurance,” Jack murmured. “Imagine trying to sell this one to your broker.”

“It’s probably no more dangerous than diving inside an active volcano,” Costas said ruefully.

“No. You can’t. It’s crazy.” Maria’s face froze in horror as she realised what they were planning, and she looked from one to the other for some sign that it was all just a joke. Jack grimaced apologetically at her and then cast a familiar gleam at Costas, who gave him a crooked smile in return.

“Okay. That’s good enough for me.” Macleod glanced at Inuva, who had returned the radio receiver and was waiting patiently behind them. “While the team at the berg are getting your gear into position, we’re taking a quick trip ashore.”

An hour later the mighty form of the iceberg loomed before them, a jagged wall of white cut by bands of translucent blue and green. Jack zipped up his orange survival suit and adjusted his life jacket, glancing back at the sleek lines of Seaquest II receding in their wake. Beside him Maria tightened her grip on the safety line, and Macleod cast her a reassuring glance from the opposite pontoon.

“It’s a wee bit of a roller-coaster ride, but Henrik here’s an expert. He’s been playing in these waters all his life.”

The Danish crewman grinned and stood up in front of the Evinrude 120 outboard, holding the line of the painter taut in one hand and the throttle in the other. He began to drive the Zodiac like a chariot through the slew of brash that covered the sea, effortlessly swinging the big engine from side to side to avoid the growlers that lurked treacherously just below the surface. After five minutes of weaving through the ice debris they reached a pair of red buoys, the entrance to a floating boom that kept a large area in front of the berg free of ice. As they slowly drove the last few hundred metres, they watched a pair of men ascend the huge face in front of them using crampons and ice axes, their forms diminutive against the vast bulk of the berg. Already they could feel the cold radiating off the ice, a chill aura that sent a shiver through Maria. She had insisted on joining them on the trip to the berg, but now she felt unnerved, as if she had strayed too far into a world beyond her experience.

“It’s like a living thing,” she said. “Almost like it’s breathing.”

“The cold exhalation actually shows it’s melting, and fast,” Macleod said. “Soon even the calved face in front of us is going to be too dangerous to work.”

They drew up alongside a floating dock about twenty metres off the berg, the bobbing form of an Aquapod submersible visible on one side and two Zodiacs on the other. A twisted mass of cable was being lowered through the dock into the sea, and a group of men stood by wearing black IMU E-suits, all-environment dry suits that would prolong their survival even in these frigid waters should something go wrong. After a few moments the cable halted and a familiar form disengaged himself from the group with a wave.

“Good work, guys. I’ve done all I can here.”

With an agility belying his stout frame, Costas crossed the platform and on to the Zodiac, landing with a crash on the floorboards in front of Jack. He had preceded them to the berg by half an hour, and had clearly been on overdrive. He staggered up and stripped his E-suit down to the waist, sat down and cooled off for a moment, then slipped on the orange windbreaker and life jacket passed to him by the crewman.

“I’m good to go.”

The crewman pushed the Zodiac off and swung it back towards the line of the boom, driving slowly out to sea and then veering right once they had passed the buoys at the entrance. Five minutes later, the boom now out of sight and the northern edge of the berg behind them, Macleod motioned the crewman to drive a short way into the fjord and then ease back on the throttle and cut the engine. With the roar of the outboard gone everything suddenly seemed preternaturally still, an illusion of serenity, as if by crossing over the underwater threshold they had entered a fantasy world of ice, had become one with the towering crystal palaces that surrounded them.

“Don’t be deluded,” Macleod said. “There are titanic forces at work here.”

As if on cue the silence was rent by a tremendous bang, followed by a percussive shockwave through the air and an immense rushing sound as a wall of ice slid off the glacier far away on the edge of the ice cap. The noise seemed to resonate off all the bergs trapped in the fjord, an eerie chorus of competing echoes that seemed to pummel the Zodiac from every direction and then trailed off like a long sigh. In the unearthly silence that followed, the bergs around them seemed even more awesome, their own stature more puny and impotent.

“The sea’s often this placid in the summer,” the crewman said. “But it’s also the most active time for the glacier. And the warmer it gets down here, the more likely you are to get a clash with the cold air coming off the ice cap. It can happen very quickly.”