David Gibbins - The Crusader's gold

“I’m holding on to you,” Jack said, his breath coming in short gasps. “If you go down, I’m going with you.”

Costas disconnected his rebreather and it dropped out of sight. With his left hand he flipped the quick-release on his backpack and held it in place, and with his right hand he found the disconnect to the hose under his helmet. Already they were plummeting down, sucked deeper and deeper by the rolling iceberg, their chances receding with every metre they dropped into the abyss.

“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.

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.