Crusader Gold

19

Jack hit the water with a resounding splash, the echo resonating off the walls of the cavern. Costas had preceded him and was already carrying out an underwater recce, the arc of light from his headlamp visible off to one side. Jack quickly released the carabiner on the rope and gave it a tug. The rope began to jerk upwards, and Jack followed the glint of metal from the carabiner as it rose up the thin shaft of light to the hole in the limestone ceiling almost twenty metres above. He and Costas had silently kitted up in the ancient chamber a few minutes before, donning the equipment Reksnys had ordered them to bring from Seaquest II. Jack had refused to divulge any of his thoughts about the wall-painting, and Maria had remained obstinately silent in the corner of the chamber even after the tape had been ripped away from her mouth.

Jack was convinced that the scene with the menorah showed the Well of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza, not this place. Yet all the indications were that Reksnys was right to think that the tunnel ahead of them held some clue to Harald Hardrada’s last stand. The location of the temple above the cavern, the depiction of the jungle battle with the river running beneath it, local Maya tradition.

There had been no chance to make contact with the security team, who had been on standby since he and Costas had left in the Zodiac two hours before. Jack knew the Lynx was in the air somewhere offshore, but Ben could do nothing until Jack and Costas found some way of radioing in their co-ordinates and confirming that the situation with Maria was safe enough for an intervention. Jack had given Maria a reassuring look just before he donned his helmet, had been cool and collected as Loki had winched him down the hole. But his mind was in a tumult at the prospect of what might lie ahead, desperately running through the possibilities if they were to return empty-handed. At the moment the options were few, and they were not good.

Costas’ voice came through the intercom. “There’s an underground river running through the bottom of this chamber, about eight metres beneath you. The current’s pretty vicious. Not exactly recommended cave diving conditions.”

“Roger that,” Jack replied, floating on the surface and following the sweep of light below that marked Costas’ progress. He tested his buoyancy compensator and ran a systems check on the computer that controlled his gas supply. They were wearing semi-closed circuit rebreathers, variable mixed-gas systems that enabled them to go to greater depths than either pure oxygen or air would allow. It was a precaution, as they had no expectation that the cave system would exceed the thirty-metre maximum typical of the Yucatan cenotes.

“Remind me about this calcium carbonate stuff,” Jack said.

Costas surfaced beside him, inflating the buoyancy wings on his backpack and adjusting the intercom on his helmet. “Dissolved limestone,” he said. “During the Ice Age, everything here was above water. That’s when the stalagmites and stalactites that are now underwater formed. Then at the end of the Ice Age, the sea level rose and the caves flooded. Leave something above water in one of these caverns, and it’ll get encased in stone. Drop it in the water, and it’ll stay good as new. We’re in fresh water down to about fifteen metres, when you hit salt water.”

Jack looked up at the thin shaft of light streaming in from the ceiling above, to the ugly face he could just make out peering down at them. The rope and sling that had been used to winch them down had now been pulled up again, to await their return. He thought of Maria, and took a deep breath from his rebreather. He gave an okay signal to Costas. “Right. Let’s get going.” They dumped air from their wings and dropped beneath the surface, Jack following Costas just above the current. It was cooler than the sea, justifying their full wetsuits, but refreshing after the torrid heat above. They both wore triple headlamps on their helmets, and the beams revealed an awesome scene as they panned them around. Stalagmites reared up from the base of the cave in clusters, overlying caves and grottoes. The water was crystal clear, as clear as Jack had ever seen, flickering with pastel colours. They dropped down and rode the back of the current, their arms outstretched and their fins extended behind to keep them stable. Seconds later they swept under an overhang into a dark tunnel, leaving the gloomy light of the entrance chamber behind.

“When it’s not raining, this tunnel’s partly above water,” Costas said. “You can see the waterline on the walls beside us, with fresh calcium formations above it. It looks like there’d normally be enough space for a small canoe or raft.”

Costas took out a pencil-size lightstick, cracked it to mix the chemicals and then dropped it into a fissure. Jack watched the green glow disappear behind him, and Costas took out half a dozen more. “I’m assuming we’ll want to come back this way,” he said. “The current’s weak near the ceiling, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

Jack rolled over and saw a canopy of rock with none of the telltale ripples from air pockets. They had come at least two hundred metres from the entrance, maybe more. “Any guesses how much farther?” he said.

“I reckon we’re looking for another chamber, somewhere accessible from the entrance chamber. If this tunnel dips below the waterline, we’re on the wrong track.” As Costas spoke, the passageway began to do exactly the opposite, rising up and opening out, and their beams reflected off the underside of a water pool that spread out above them as far as they could see. “Hey presto.”

They surfaced and looked around, awestruck. They were inside another huge cavern, at least fifty metres across, extending in a great dome that reached up to the jungle floor. It was how Jack imagined the sacred cenote at Chichen Itza had once looked, before the limestone ceiling collapsed. Unlike the entrance chamber, this one was pitch dark, with no visible opening to the surface. They swam slowly across the pool, their lights reflecting off fantastic shapes that dazzled them like sculptures in ice. Stalagmites rose out of the depths like sub-sea volcanic vents, some of them joining stalactites to form continuous columns like the pillars of some great cathedral. They could see the force of nature still at work, rainwater seeping through the limestone ceiling and spattering on the exposed formations, adding another sheen of minerals in a process that had begun thousands of years before human history first touched this place.

In the centre was an island, one that seemed to have been created entirely from calcium accretion. The surface was a bizarre array of shapes which looked like some fantasy citadel. Huge tendrils hung down over it from high above, the fossilised roots of long-dead trees.

As the slope up to the island became visible, Costas dropped down to the bottom, about eight metres below. Suddenly he seemed to be swimming sideways, and Jack saw him grab a stalagmite and pull himself up the slope until the current had released him and he could swim free again.

“That was frightening.” Costas stopped about five metres below Jack, and was catching his breath. “You’d never be able to swim against that. Take a look to your right and you can see where it goes.”

Jack peered across to a point directly opposite the entrance tunnel. He could see a shimmering disturbance where the underwater river swept through the chamber, exiting under an overhang near the base of the cavern about twenty metres away. It was a black hole, a forbidding place with no sign of natural light farther on. Jack realized how close he had come to losing Costas. He closed his eyes and swore to himself. As so often in diving it was the casual decision, the deceptively benign conditions, that nearly had fatal consequences. Jack had not given a second’s thought to Costas’ decision to drop down, yet the danger was as great as any they had faced in the iceberg, or back in the tunnels of Atlantis. And in cave diving there was rarely a second chance, no going back on a wrong move.

“Jack, I’ve found something.” Costas was a little farther upslope, but his upper body was wedged in a fissure. Jack sank down beside him, keeping a wary eye on the current a few metres away. Costas emerged in a cloud of silt and pressed an object at Jack. “Get a hold of that.”

It was a human jawbone. A small one, a child’s. It was brown with age, but perfectly preserved. Costas held the rest of the skull towards him, and Jack could see the eye sockets, the lines where the bones of the cranium had not yet fused. “They’re everywhere,” Costas said. “Hundreds of them.” Jack looked around. Lying in the silt, piled at the base of stalagmites, grimacing out from under overhangs: skulls, limb bones, ribs. He reached into the silt and pulled out a small jade pendant, shaped like the gaping jaw of some mythical beast, like the image of the underworld on the wall painting in the temple. He glanced through the translucent waters at the dark hole where the river disappeared, and felt a sudden chill of certainty.

“Human sacrifice,” he said. “The Toltecs must have lowered themselves and their victims through the hole in the ceiling just as we were, then paddled through into this chamber. This was the edge of their underworld, the closest they could get. When the current was strong, after a storm, they could have thrown their victims into the very maw of the underworld, watched them sucked into that black hole and out of earthly existence. This must have been the ultimate place of sacrifice.”

“We don’t seem to be able to get away from that,” Costas muttered. “I’m beginning to yearn for Vikings again.”

“You may just be in luck.”

“What do you mean?”

“Upslope, about three metres. At the edge of the island.”

It was another skull, larger than the others, with different wear on the teeth. It had been badly crushed, as if the victim had suffered a terrific blow to the face. But it was not the skull that had excited Jack’s interest. It was what it was wearing.

A gilded metal helmet, cone-shaped, with a long nose-guard.

Jack’s heart began to race. He wafted the bottom, raising clouds of silt. Maya pots, intact. More human bones. A shining disc, gold, covered with glyphs. A handle protruding from a gully, covered in gilt wire. A sword handle. Beside it a long wooden haft, a glint of metal at the end.

With mounting excitement Jack drew himself out of the water, Costas beside him. Both men quickly doffed their rebreathers and fins and stashed them on the edge. With their helmets removed they could hear the noise of the cavern, water dripping on the pool, the whoosh of bat wings, eerie sounds magnified and distorted by echo. They clambered up on to a level platform and surveyed the underground island. It was about ten metres in diameter, rising to a cone in the middle, covered in slick accretion. The centre was a gigantic single stalagmite, growing from the cavern floor beneath the ceiling where the fall of leached calcium had been greatest. Around it were stalagmites that had formed more recently as the shape of the ceiling had changed, some of them beneath the calcified tree roots which hung over them in a fantastic shroud.

Jack was carrying a torch, and he swept the beam over the island before placing his hand on the stalagmite nearest to them. It was a peculiar shape, almost seeming to curve above them, on the face of it no more extraordinary than anything else they were seeing around them.

“My God.” Jack’s voice was resonant, echoing.

“What is it?”

Jack stumbled back a few steps, then shone his torch up the stalagmite. He remembered what Jeremy had suggested when they had last spoken. His voice was taut with amazement. “Remember our longship in the ice?”

Costas followed his gaze, puzzled, and then gasped. The top of the stalagmite was a bulbous shape that extended out from the curve. They were looking at the prow of a Viking ship, the details of its surface lost under a millennium of accretion but the shape unmistakable. It was an astonishing sight.

“They must have carried it with them from the longship,” Jack murmured. “Erected it here, a last battle standard.” He shone the torch at the bulbous form on top. “The Eagle.”

“Look on either side,” Costas exclaimed. “I could be wrong, but I think it’s a shield wall.”

Jack saw a line of concretion about a metre high extended in an arc, facing the entrance to the cavern. Costas was right. The ridge was undulating with striking regularity, made up of identical semi-circles each about the width of a man. Three on one side of the stem-post, four on the other. They looked as if they had been iced over. Below them were long, square shapes that could have been timbers, perhaps crossbeams salvaged from the ship. Jack remembered Jeremy telling him about Viking defences built from ship’s timbers. He looked over the wall, to the space behind where the defenders would have made their stand. It was the most astonishing sight of all. Against the rampart was the spectral shape of a man, propped up on his back, limbs spread out. It had been a skeleton, but was covered with such a thick layer of accretion that it seemed to be fleshed out again, like one of the plaster shapes of Roman bodies from Pompeii.

It was wearing a helmet. The conical shape, the nose-guard, just discernible in the accretion. There was a shield, emerging at an angle as if it had been mauled. He had been tall, at least Jack’s height.

Jack stared, transfixed.

Could it be him?

Jack leaned back on the fossilised shield wall, his voice hoarse with emotion. “On the wall-painting, that river below the jungle battle. I think that’s where we are now. And I think this was where the final drama was played out. Harald Hardrada’s last stand.”

“You think the enemy in the painting really were Vikings?”

“The image of the menorah clinches it.”

“So this was as far as Harald got from the sea.”

“Let’s imagine a dozen of them, not many more,” Jack said. “The size of the vanquished army on the painting was probably an exaggeration, a way of making the victory seem greater.” He paused, marshalling his thoughts. “They make their way inland with everything they can bring, their weapons and armour, their treasure, what they can easily salvage and carry from the ship to build a shelter. Much like Cortes and his tiny band of conquistadors hundreds of years later, only with no intention of ever returning.”

“Then they bump into the locals.”

“The Maya are dazzled, think they’re gods, saviours arrived to rescue them from the Toltecs. But word inevitably spreads to the Toltecs, to the overlord in Chichen Itza. He dispatches an army, there’s a desperate battle in the jungle. The few survivors seek a refuge, a final stronghold. The Alamo, Rorke’s Drift in the British Zulu War. In the Yucatan, if that’s what you want, you go underground. They discover the jungle temple, maybe they’re directed here by the Maya. They make their way down the sacrificial route. They light their way with burning torches, maybe burn their timbers on the island. Viking warriors fully girded for battle, ready to defend their shield wall at the edge of the world, wreathed in fire. But I doubt whether the Toltecs would have been daunted. Once the Toltecs find out and follow them, it’s only a matter of time before they’re overwhelmed.”

“I hope for their sake none of them was taken prisoner.”

“The only one we know about is your friend from L’Anse aux Meadows. Probably a retainer, a servant.

Jeremy told me the Toltecs sometimes took enemy servants as their own slaves, a way of stamping their dominance on the vanquished. You saw it on the wall-painting. Maybe he was a turncoat. Some of the Vikings would have been half crazed, starving. Maybe he told the Toltecs about this place. Maybe his escape years later and voyage back to L’Anse aux Meadows was some kind of atonement. We’ll never know. But he wasn’t the only one to survive. Judging by the painting, several of Harald’s warriors suffered the ultimate horror, taken to Chichen Itza for sacrifice.”

“With the menorah.”

Jack suddenly remembered the breathtaking image they had seen on the painting, the fiery radiance. “Reksnys is wrong. I’m convinced the menorah isn’t here. The Toltecs may have left the Viking weapons here as some kind of offering, but I think they took the menorah with them from the battle site. We know the Toltecs didn’t offer all of Harald’s treasure to the gods, because we have those two coins incorporated in the jade pendant from L’Anse aux Meadows.”

“Which leaves us with a problem.”

“Reksnys is going to be disappointed.”

“We can’t go back empty-handed,” Costas said. “At best we’d be buying time, but probably not much of it. Chances are we’d be back down that hole again, dead before we hit the water. As Reksnys himself said, Maria was only saved on a whim. As soon as he finds out we don’t have the menorah, he’ll get bored. These people are always like that.” He looked at Jack. “He’ll let his son’s temper run its course.”

“They might try to follow us down here.”

“Loki might. There were a couple of old scuba rigs, gear Reksnys brought along before the chance came to use us, and Loki could easily follow the trail of lightsticks through the tunnel. But if he reaches the stage of going after us like that, he’ll be in a rage. That’d be curtains for Maria.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“We don’t have any choice.”

“These underground river systems always come up somewhere,” Costas said ruefully. “But it could be miles.”

“Could be less.”

Five minutes later they sat fully kitted up in the shallows, their helmet lights switched back on. Their voices sounded tinny and distant throught the intercom after the resonance of the chamber. Costas finished a final check on Jack’s rebreather, then looked at him intently through his visor. “You up for this?”

“All other options are closed. There’s no other exit from the cavern.”

“Okay. We’re looking for natural light, any hint. It’s just after five a.m., so should be dawn pretty soon. We’ll let the current take us. At least we can be sure that’ll come out somewhere. Good to go?”

“Good to go.”

They slipped into the water and dropped down towards the darkness. Once they had made the decision, Jack had not allowed himself to think beyond the practicalities of what they were doing. A few minutes earlier this had seemed like certain death, a one-way express that had nearly finished Costas. Now they were choosing to take it. He stared at the gaping blackness of the tunnel ahead. His mind was blank to the possibility of failure. This place had all the ingredients of his worst nightmare, and the only way to fight the fear was to keep focused. He thought of Maria.

Suddenly they were dragged into the current. Jack was flipped over and struggled to right himself, fleetingly aware of huge speed, of luminous stalagmites appearing and disappearing like giant white sentinels on either side. Then they were in the tunnel, twisting round a bend, blackness all around. The tunnel seemed to meander and turn like a living beast, seeking out a route among the calcite obstructions. They were completely at the mercy of the current, trusting the flow to keep them from crashing into the limestone walls on either side. Jack forced his head forward until his body was in line with the tunnel, Costas to his left, and they both extended their arms in a desperate attempt to use their hands as foils. Bulbous shapes appeared out of nowhere, caught in the beam of their headlamps, then vanished behind them with only inches to spare. Suddenly Jack was aware of a fork ahead, a widening in the tunnel divided by a column, a white pillar they were hurtling towards at terrifying speed.

“The right-hand tunnel!” Costas yelled. “I can see light!”

Jack swerved his hands to the right, craning his body to follow the main flow of the current. It was no use. At the last second he pulled his hands in violently to avoid smashing into the column and they tumbled into the left-hand tunnel, a narrowing pit of darkness with smooth walls like an ice chute. Jack bounced off Costas and felt an excruciating jolt in his thigh, from his injury in the ice. For a terrifying moment he was back inside the berg. “Wrong turn,” Costas yelled. Jack clutched him, could see his face behind his visor, frantic. “This is a side channel. “The main channel was flowing up towards the surface. I saw light.”

The current in the channel began to eddy, then slowed down. Even so it was impossible to swim against, and they were being pulled down inexorably. They clawed at the walls, to no avail. Suddenly everything was distorted, hazy, something Jack had last seen in the icefjord where the freshwater runoff from the glacier had formed a layer above the seawater. The water was shimmering, oily, the change in refraction caused by salinity throwing his senses into disarray. He began to feel disorientated.

“Shit,” Costas exclaimed. “That was the halocline. We’re below sea level.”

It was as if they had passed through into another dimension, into some darker world. The calcium formations were gone now, and the view ahead was bleak, forbidding. The intense, directional beam of light seemed to narrow the shaft, increasing Jack’s unease. The tunnel was elliptical, about five metres across, but the ceiling had lowered and a deep bed of gravel rose up from the floor. They were still going down, their lights boring a hole into the darkness. “Forty metres depth,” Costas said. “The Yucatan cave systems bottom out at about fifty metres, maximum. We’ve got to be going back up soon.” Jack looked at his depth gauge. Forty-six metres. Fifty-two metres. The ceiling and the floor had almost converged, and they were wedged in now, burrowing in the gravel to make space. Then they came to a standstill in a cloud of silt. Jack aimed his headlamp into the slit ahead, a crack only inches above the gravel. It was a dead end. They were trapped.

Costas heaved himself back beside Jack, his rebreather clunking against the ceiling and his body grinding through the gravel. “Something’s not right,” he said. “We were being pulled down by a current, and that’s got to go somewhere. And this gravel pile curves down at the sides, shaped by water movement. There has to be an outlet.”

He pushed himself down the right side of the gravel pile, into a narrow channel at the bottom, and pulled himself ahead until only his fins were showing. Jack closed his eyes, then opened them again, concentrating on little things, like the shape of a fossil in the limestone a few inches from his face. He looked down again to where Costas had disappeared. He could see that the crevasse was free of silt. Swept clear by the current. Costas was right.

“Jack. Follow me.” He did as Costas instructed, digging his hands into the gravel and heaving himself down the side of the tunnel. He felt the flow of water, saw light ahead. “It goes up,” Costas said excitedly. Jack followed slowly, squeezing through a boulder choke. There was hardly any room to move, and he was reduced to wriggling, his rebreather pack clanging against the stone walls. The tunnel beyond was narrower still, like a drainage pipe, smooth and rounded where the current had worn it down but only about three feet in diameter. Jack had never been in a space so narrow. It was beyond claustrophobic. There was no way they could go back, with the current pressing against them, and any blockage in the tunnel now would seal their fate. Costas’ fins were a few feet ahead of him. Jack checked his depth gauge, remained focussed. He stared at the rock inches from his face, then at his depth gauge. Forty-one metres. Thirty-seven metres. They were ascending, slowly but surely. Then the tunnel took a sharp turn upwards and they were in a chamber, a vast space filled with shadowy forms, great columns that towered upwards like white-robed giants, beckoning them up from the underworld. Far above, Jack could see a shimmer of green, distinct from the white beams of their headlights. He closed his eyes again, a wave of relief coursing through him, his heart pounding not with fear but with exhilaration. He rose beside Costas through the chamber, the water so clear that they seemed suspended in midair like figures from some scene of apotheosis. Then they were at the top of the cavern, only ten metres beneath the surface of the water, butting up against a crack in the rock where they could see the light of dawn shining through.

It was not over yet. The crack was a narrow squeeze, barely wide enough for one of them. There was no other exit from the chamber.

“Why does this always seem to happen when I dive with you?” Costas said. “Next time let’s do some open-water diving for a change.”

“If there is a next time.” Jack looked into the black chasm yawning below, then back up into the crack. He could see foliage, the wavering forms of trees overhanging the surface of the water. His heart was still pounding, but no longer with excitement. This was a ridiculous place to die.

“We’ll have to swim for it.” Costas said. “You go first.”

“No way. You’ll have the tighter squeeze, and I can help push you through.”

Costas unstrapped his rebreather and dangled it down beside him. He pulled himself as far as he could into the fissure, about two metres above Jack, then ripped off his helmet and dropped the rig. It went plummeting past Jack, disappearing into the darkness below. Jack pulled himself behind Costas and pushed up against his legs. Nothing happened. Suddenly he felt helpless, appalled that he might watch his friend die only a few metres from the surface, holding his legs. Then Costas kicked hard and erupted upwards. Jack paused to regain his breath, unbuckled his harness and dangled it beside him, took five deep breaths and then ripped off his helmet and dropped the rig. He heaved himself up through the rock, his eyes open to the blurry haze of daylight through the water, and pulled himself through. Another kick of his fins and he surfaced in a slurry of green algae, in a small pool sheltered by fronds of undergrowth.

Costas was panting on the edge of the pool, looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He wiped the slime off his face, submerged his head and shook it violently, then reared up out of the water and offered Jack a hand. “You might want to do the same. Don’t want to terrify the natives.”

After Jack was out and shaking himself off, Costas reached into the top of his wetsuit and extracted a slim metallic device, about the size of a pocket calculator. He tapped the front and pulled out an aerial, bringing the device to his ear.

“Sometimes you’re a surprising bag of tricks,” Jack panted.

“Combined GPS beacon and two-way radio,” Costas said. “All I need to do now is activate the mayday button and Ben’ll have us pinpointed. I can try to establish a radio link and talk to him when we know what the situation is.”

They had surfaced beside a rough jungle track. It was still raining, alternately drizzling and pouring. Costas activated the compass on his device and quickly took a bearing. Ten minutes later they crept up the limestone dome that covered the cenote and approached the overgrown temple. The jeep that had brought them was at the end of the track. Jack saw a boy, a local Maya, playing on the road, but he had not spotted them. They stealthily rounded the building and each took one side of the entrance, their backs flat to the wall, listening. They could hear nothing. Jack could taste the salt of his sweat joining the water on his face. He looked at Costas, nodded. They sidled into the chamber, keeping to the shadows, straining their eyes into the candlelit gloom. There was no sign of Maria or Loki. The only occupant was a man sitting with his back to them on a diving tank, cleaning a pistol. Jack gestured to Costas and returned to the entrance, vigilant. Costas crept up behind Reksnys and put his arm round his throat, clamping his mouth. The pistol dropped with a clatter. Costas drew the man close and spoke with a snarl.

“Now. Where were we?”