David Gibbins - The Crusader's gold

“That was for my grandfather,” the voice whispered. “O’Connor was conscious when I cut out his lungs. He knew what was happening. The blood feud is finished. Now it is time for me to claim my prize.”

He kicked her legs from under her and dragged her back towards the door. The last thing she felt was the throbbing pain in her cheek, her own blood mingling with O’Connor’s. Then there was blackness.

Jack skillfully manoeuvred the Zodiac towards shore, allowing the boat to slide down under its own weight into each trough and then gunning the engine until it stood at the crest of the next wave. Above them the sky was flecked with high, fast-moving clouds heading south, and they were buffeted by a strong onshore wind which had been gathering strength all morning, raising a rapid swell. The air had the same pellucid quality they had seen in the Arctic, but even the wind could not disguise the burning intensity of the sun as it bore down on them, the glare blinding to their unaccustomed eyes. Behind them the breakers over the reef-girt shallows underlined the sleek form of Seaquest II, which was maintaining position over deep water a mile offshore.

For Jack it was exhilarating to feel the spray of the sea again, after five days cooped up during the long voyage south from Newfoundland along the eastern seaboard of the United States and into the Caribbean. It was the same wherever he was, in the Arctic, on the Golden Horn, by the shore of Iona or Great Sacred Isle, an uplifting in his soul he felt every time he tasted the sea. He stood up, his left hand holding the throttle and his right hand holding the painter line from the bow, and motioned for the other two to slide forward and get ready. Just before entering the surf he killed the outboard and swung it up on its pinions. Costas and Jeremy leapt into the water on either side, holding the Zodiac against the surge and return of the breakers until it was pushed into an eddy beside a sandbar. They swung it round until the bow pointed into the waves and waited while Jack threw out the anchor. Once they saw he had things under control, they waded ashore, their black IMU wetsuits dripping with the warm seawater and their hair matted with spray.

They were on a low, narrow beach backed by a continuous line of thorny jungle, the twisted trunks and strewn fragments of dead coral and driftwood testament to the severe hurricane damage of the year before.

“Xerophytic scrub,” Jeremy panted. “Welcome to the Yucatan. Not really rain forest up here at all, but jungle in the true sense of the word.”

“Wasteland, you mean.” Costas ventured a few feet into the tangled undergrowth, then backed out quickly, irritably brushing a spider’s web and midges from his face. “Give me the Caribbean over Greenland any day, but how a civilisation could have developed here is beyond me.”

“The key to the whole Maya thing was fresh water.” Jeremy led Costas along the beach until they came to the source of the sandbar, a channel of extraordinarily clear water about three metres wide that cut through the jungle and flowed into the sea. “The place is riddled with it. Some of these rivers come underground through amazing cave systems that originate far inland. I should be able to show you later on today.”

“You’ve spent time here?”

“Student field trips. Sweating in the jungle, measuring overgrown ruins, getting eaten alive.”

“You should learn to dive,” Costas said drily.

“That’s what Jack’s been telling me. He says you’re an advanced technical diving instructor, one of the best. Maybe when this is all over.”

“A pleasure. Just don’t get any ideas about diving inside icebergs.”

“I’ll leave the thrill-seeking to you guys.” Jeremy grinned. “I’d be in it purely for the archaeology.”

“What was that place again, the Maya name on the runestone with my friend under the cairn?” Costas wiped away the sweat that was beginning to trickle down his face.

“Uukil-Abnal,” Jeremy replied. “The name in the eleventh century for Chichen Itza, the most famous archaeological site in the Yucatan. A fantastic overgrown city sticking out of the jungle. Pyramids and all that. I think that’s our next stop.”

Jack came up after having anchored the Zodiac in the surf, and they began stripping their wetsuits to their waists.

“Nice beach,” Costas commented. “But a little desolate.”

“Cortes came here in 1519,” Jack replied. “But the conquistadors took one look and bypassed this place completely. They didn’t conquer the interior of the Yucatan until years later.”

“I can see why.” Costas struggled out of the top of his wetsuit, then flinched as a gust of wind blasted sand against him. “So you think Harald Hardrada was here?”

“Lanowski did a best-fit calculation for where the longship might have made landfall after being swept across by a summer north-westerly from the Florida Keys,” Jack said. “We chose this particular spot because of the river. The Vikings would have been desperate for fresh water, and they would have been able to draw up their longship in the creek. Also the edge of the river’s a likely place for a Maya track into the interior.”

“This may even have been a Maya beach landing, a harbour,” Jeremy added. “Most of the major Maya sites are well away from the sea, but they were pretty competent seafarers. I’ve seen paintings showing large war canoes, easily the size of a Norse longship.”

“Not exactly what Harald and his men were hoping for,” Costas said.

“If they were apprehensive about the Scraelings, these guys down here would have had them shaking in their breeches, fearless Viking warriors or not,” Jeremy replied. “The Vikings may have dreamt about that final showdown at Ragnarok, but once they saw the reality of what they were up against, they might have had second thoughts.”

“Probably no choice by this stage,” Jack said. “Their ship would have been a wreck after the voyage, and they would have been starving. They were committed to ending it all here. My guess is they would have set off into the jungle.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Costas said. “That character Pieter Reksnys. The Nazi’s son, Loki’s father. Didn’t he end up in Mexico too?”

“Apparently when O’Connor was a Jesuit missionary in Central America in the 1960s, he knew all about Reksnys’ whereabouts.” Jack raised his hand to his eyes, shielding them from the glare of the sun. “But O’Connor was keeping a low profile, so he avoided an encounter. There was a price on his head in the felag even then. Apparently, when Andrius Reksnys and his son sold their opal mine in Australia they moved first to Costa Rica. It was a haven for Nazis on the run. Then when the Nazi hunt began to die down in the late 1960s, Reksnys senior moved back to Europe, to the remote castle in the Obersaltzburg where he was gunned down five years ago.”

“The dead old man in the newspaper photo, with the swastika armband.”

“Right.”

“O’Connor say anything more about that?”

“Not when I spoke to him,” Jack said. “He won’t reveal who they used, and we don’t need to know. Maybe he’ll change his mind. But he said no regrets. I think he felt it was his duty as a former member of the felag to make amends and see that justice caught up with Reksnys.”

“Fair enough.”

“The younger Reksnys, Pieter, the one who’d helped his father Andrius with those SS executions, had more than enough money to retire and devote himself to providing his own son with the same twisted view of the world. But like a lot of these characters he couldn’t keep his fingers out of organised crime, especially in this neck of the woods, where virtually anything goes.”