Crusader Gold

6

The man in the prison cell slowly raised his head and listened hard for any signs of life, but heard nothing. He had heard nothing but the sounds of his jailers for more than five years now. He closed his eyes and breathed in slow and deep, immune to the aroma of feces and urine and vomit that had long ago impregnated the fabric of the prison. He had been sent to serve out his sentence in his grandfather’s homeland, in an empty prison left over from the Gulag, saving them the trouble of putting him in solitary confinement. But sensory deprivation held no fear for him, his training having taught him to exclude the reality of confinement and live in a world of his own creation. He slowly bent his head from side to side and then leaned again over the chessboard, the only indulgence he had asked of his captors. He lowered his elbows to the table and raised his hands together in their fingerless mitts, rubbing them against the damp chill that pervaded the cell all year round. For the thousandth time he reached down and picked up a little white pawn, shaped like a Viking warrior with chain mail and a shield, and placed it in front of the Christian king.

“Checkmate,” he said quietly.

He leaned back on his stool with the exaggerated slowness of a man whose tiniest movements have become his main preoccupation, his way of filling the solitary hours of yet another day. He lifted his left hand slowly to his face and drew his index finger along the scar that ran from his eye socket to his lower jaw, testing himself against the pain he felt every time. From his jaw he moved his hand to the wall beside him and began to trace his finger along the lines of incised graffiti, his hourly ritual, quietly reciting the words like a scholar with a holy text. “Paul Kruger,” he murmured. “Hauptsturmfuhrer, Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. Kurt Hausser, Sturmbannfuhrer, Panzergrenadier-Division Das Reich. Otto Lehmann, Brigadefuhrer, Panzer-Division Wiking.” He knew the names by heart, names of the true heroes of the Great Patriotic War, crusaders in the struggle against the East, the captured survivors of Kharkov and Kursk and countless other battles, sent by the Russians to this cell more than half a century ago, their last stop before the squalid execution chamber at the end of the corridor. Names like his grandfather’s. Only his grandfather had been luckier, for a while.

He shut his eyes and raised his hand to the jagged runes that cut across the names, knowing exactly where to place his two fingers to draw them down, then up, then down, lines so deeply carved that the Soviet guards had given up trying to erase them decades ago. They were the graffiti he liked to trace his fingers over best, the symbol of his grandfather’s order, Schutzstaffel, the SS. He dropped his hand slowly as his fingers fell away from the lines and pressed his ear against the clammy wall, feeling he was truly communing with the knights of the past, brothers in arms who had left their last imprint on this wall to give him strength, to guide him in his quest to find their holiest treasure, to put to rest all who had gone before him and failed.

“Anton Poellner.” The prisoner emerged from a well of blackness as the voice spoke loudly through the slot in the door. He pushed himself upright as the bolts were drawn and the door clanged open. An official in a peaked cap stood between two guards, silhouetted against the harshly lit corridor behind.

“Anton Poellner.” The official repeated his name, and the man in the cell held his hand up against the glare before slowly replying in English.

“What do you want?”

“By order of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” the official said, speaking in Lithuanian. “Case number IT-99-37b, the Prosecutor of the Tribunal against Anton Poellner, former paid mercenary of the Bosnian Serb Army. Indicted under Article 7 on the basis of individual criminal responsibility, for genocide and crimes against humanity.” The man paused, then raised a document he had been carrying. “Under the amnesty convention signed last year in The Hague, your case came up for review in the Appeals Chamber.” The official lowered the paper and spoke with obvious distaste. “You are free to go.”

He snapped his fingers and the two guards heaved the man to his feet, throwing an old Soviet greatcoat around him as they did so. The man blinked furiously against the light as they shoved him through the cell door, then shackled his feet for the last time and jostled him down the corridor. He was the final occupant of a condemned prison, and as the echoes of his chains resounded through the empty cells it was as if the ghosts of the past were urging him on, knowing he was their last hope that any would escape.

At the final door they unshackled his feet and thrust him wordlessly into the outside world. It was drizzling and unseasonably cold for early summer, but the man raised his pallid face upwards and smiled as the rain coursed over his skin. He picked up the duffel bag that had been dropped beside him and began to walk slowly towards the open outer gate and the road beyond, falling into the easy stride of a man accustomed to route marches. Outside the gate he shouldered the bag and thrust his hands into the greatcoat pockets, waiting for the car he knew would come. Minutes later a dark Mercedes rolled out of the shadows, its rear passenger door swinging open as it stopped in front of him. Without looking once at the prison he stooped down and got in.

“Welcome back,” a voice said in English from the front seat. “Your instructions.”

An envelope was thrust into his hand as the car drove away. The man felt the sheaf of papers inside, but first reached in and pulled out an object lying loose at the bottom. It was a golden ring, lustrous with age, and as he raised it he felt his lips brush against the symbol as they had done since childhood, a symbol so different from the one in his prison cell yet so familiar. He slipped the ring over the index finger of his right hand and pulled out the sheaf of papers. On top of them was a newspaper image imprinted in his brain for more than five years now, showing an old man with a swastika armband lying in a pool of blood. He looked at the dead face and then out at the lowering sky, and whispered to himself: “Payback time.”

“There she is now,” Jack said excitedly. “It’s the first time I’ve seen her on the open sea. It’s like meeting a long-lost friend, born again.”

Seaquest II had been commissioned only three months before, and the west Greenland ice-core project was her first official outing as a deep-sea research vessel of the International Maritime University. Ever since her predecessor had been lost in the Black Sea six months ago, Jack had been determined to find a replacement, and had decided to rename a vessel already on the stocks for IMU in the yards in Finland. Whereas the original Seaquest and her sister ship Sea Venture had been derived from the Akademik-class Russian research vessel, designed originally for acoustic submarine surveillance during the Cold War, Seaquest II was an entirely new concept planned from scratch to IMU specifications. Her state-of-the-art navigational features included a dynamic positioning system, using lateral thrusters and ballast control to maintain stability in virtually any sea conditions-vital for position-keeping and search tracking as well as to maintain a level platform for laboratory work. She could launch remote-operated vehicles and submersibles, using either deck cranes or an internal docking berth which allowed underwater egress. Like all IMU vessels she had a defensive capability, with a gun pod retracted below the foredeck. And, crucial for polar research, the ice-strengthened hull allowed her to plough through the shattered sea ice which choked the coastal waters north of the Arctic Circle even in early summer.

Jack was still casting a critical eye over her deck arrangements as the Lynx bounced on to the helipad and the rotors shuddered to a halt. While the awaiting crewmen secured the undercarriage to the deck, Jack eased off his helmet and released his seat belt harness. The sun was burning off the sea mist and ahead of him he could see the entire length of the superstructure, gleaming white in the pellucid Arctic light. He was in his element again, and his excitement showed as he leaned back and grinned at Maria and Jeremy. “Welcome to Seaquest II. This is where the fun really begins.”

James Macleod led them directly from the helipad through the hangar entrance and down a steep gangway into the bowels of the ship. They were joined by Costas, who had been winched down from the US Air Force Chinook fifteen minutes before and had been busy uncrating his cargo on the stern deck. He looked as if he needed about a week’s sleep, but with his sleeves rolled up on his burly forearms and fresh smears of grease on his beloved overalls, it was clear he was not going to waste a moment getting the equipment operational.

They reached the lower deck and Macleod ushered them through an open door into a brightly lit lecture room, gesturing for them to stand beside a projector screen to the right of the door. Ranged in front of them on plastic chairs was a motley group of about thirty men and women, some talking intently among themselves and others hunched over laptops and sheaves of printouts. They all looked up as Macleod entered, and Jack could see several bearded blond men with the Danish flag on their parkas, a couple of native Greenlander faces, and a number of men and women wearing the navy blue sweaters of the US Air Force. He nodded courteously to a man in the front row splayed languidly on his chair and stroking his sideburns, so lost in thought that he failed to catch Jack’s gesture. Lanowski was a brilliantly adaptive engineer who had been indispensable to IMU since they had poached him from MIT, but he had a manner calculated to irritate almost everyone who came into contact with him.

“People, you should all be familiar with Jack Howard, my colleague at IMU. At least from the TV news.” Jack looked distinctly uncomfortable, and Macleod gestured to the other three. “Dr. Maria de Montijo and her graduate student Jeremy Haverstock from Oxford, though he’s originally from the States. Costas you already know.”

They gazed with evident curiosity at Jack, a face familiar even to those who did not know him personally. Costas grinned at a few old friends, several of whom had got to know him very well when he had attended the project briefing several weeks previously at the IMU campus in Cornwall.

“We’re an international team, as you can see,” Macleod said to Jack. “Officially the project’s a collaboration with NASA and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, and there are also a couple of guys from the International Ice Patrol. We’re all doing our own thing, glaciology, biology, palaeoclimatology, but we’re pooling basic resources. IMU provides the research vessel, NASA the satellite imagery and GSDG the aerial photography and laser altitude measurements. A lot of the work’s just monitoring, making sure the ice conditions are safe enough for us to get the samples we need. With the summer melt almost in full swing we’re working against the clock. I wanted you here for a quick meet and greet. Any questions for this group now, fire away.”

“I don’t want to detain anyone, so just a few,” Jack said. “The Greenland ice cap, the inland ice. Can we have a swift rundown on its age and significance?”

“Most of it dates from the last two hundred and fifty years, and most of the ice at Ilulissat is from the last hundred thousand years,” Lanowski said, brushing his shoulder-length hair from his face. “It’s an outstanding survival from the last glaciation of the Quaternary.”

“Meaning?” Maria asked.

“Meaning the Ice Age we all know about, the one that ended ten thousand years ago when the ice sheets receded,” Lanowski explained, sighing impatiently. “Quaternary is a geologic term encompassing the recent Ice Age, beginning about one-point-eight million years ago, encompassing many episodes of advance and retraction in the ice. We’ve been in one of those warm spells for the last ten thousand years.”

“So what makes Greenland so special?”

“There are plenty of glaciers around the world dating from the Ice Age, and of course there are the polar ice caps,” Macleod said. “But the Greenland ice cap is the last remnant of the continental ice sheets that covered the northern hemisphere until ten thousand years ago. It’s a fantastic window into the past, as exciting to me as any of your archaeological discoveries.”

“Which brings us to why you’re here,” Jack said.

“It’s still early days, but the results are very promising,” one of the Danish scientists said. “We’re mostly looking at air bubbles trapped in the ice as it formed, preserving a detailed record of atmospheric conditions in the Ice Age. The calving front is now exposing areas of ice formed very recently, in a cold snap just prior to the Great Melt ten thousand years ago. It’s an unparalleled opportunity, the first time any research like this has been possible.”

“Global warming has its uses,” Costas remarked wryly.

“We can’t turn back the clock now, so we may as well get all the science out of it we can,” the Dane replied.

“One question,” Maria said. “You wouldn’t get me going anywhere near that calving front we just saw on the glacier. How do you get your samples?”

“We drill cores, just like a sedimentologist or an oil prospector on land,” Macleod said. “Each band of ice represents a cold spell, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years. It’s a bit like dendrochronology, tree-ring dating.” Macleod turned and looked intently at Jack. “Which brings me to why you’re here.”

“I’m still baffled,” Maria persisted. “You’ve still got to get close up to the ice to drill a core.”

“All will be revealed.” Macleod beamed at her and started towards the door, nodding his thanks to the assembled group and turning to Jack. “Follow me.”

Seaquest II was marginally smaller than her predecessor, more economical on space to maximise fuel efficiency and endurance, but with a displacement of a little over seven thousand tons she was still one of the largest research vessels afloat, and it took them a good five minutes to reach the upper accommodation deck. Without stopping Macleod pointed at a line of cabins with their names pinned on the doors, their bags already visible inside. At the end of the corridor they walked into a room that occupied the entire forward end of the accommodation block, directly below the navigation room and wheelhouse. The layout had been Jack’s idea, providing a dedicated control and observation room for project staff, avoiding the problems of sharing bridge space with crew which they had recently experienced on Sea Venture in the Golden Horn. The room had a director’s chair set on a dais in the centre, a duplicate of the bridge radar screen, four computer workstations arranged in an arc radiating from the dais and viewing seats with high-powered scopes set up against the window, a continuous sloping screen that wrapped around the front and sides of the room. With the mist now lifted completely it gave them a dazzling view of the sea to the west, a deep blue expanse dotted with fragments of white, the low form of Disko Island just visible off the starboard bow and the Canadian shore of the Davis Strait somewhere beyond the horizon.

They had been followed from the lower deck by the shambling form of Lanowksi and by one of the Greenlander scientists, an Inuit woman of striking appearance who pointed to the coffee machine as they entered the room. Macleod grunted, then nodded and proceeded to pour them each a drink and hand round steaming mugs. Jack shook hands with the captain, a former Canadian navy officer who had spent a lifetime carrying out maritime patrols from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, who had bounded down the stairs from the bridge to greet them. Jack would have time later to do the full rounds of the crew, many of them old friends and veterans of the first Seaquest, people with whom he shared a special bond.

The Greenlander woman sat down beside Lanowski at the computer workstation on the right-hand side of the room, positioning her laptop on the available corner of the desk and stacking her papers and books neatly on the floor to give the others space to stand. From the body language it was clearly an uneasy alliance, with Lanowski hunched directly in front of the main workstation screen surrounded by his papers, making no concession for her.

“I knew I should have brought my own hardware,” Lanowski grumbled. “Someone should have given these things a trial run before they installed them. I may as well crunch the numbers by hand.”

Jack raised his eyes at the woman and she forced a smile. “I’m interested in seabed biology; Lanowski does the simulations,” she said. “James paired us at the beginning of the project.”

She cast Macleod a malevolent glare, and he quickly turned to the others. “I’m sorry. I should have introduced you. This is Dr. Inuva Nannansuit, with the Geological Survey. She’s a native of Ilulissat, the town on the headland, so she grew up with the glacier in her backyard. She’s been a fantastic addition to the team.”

“So what have we got?” Jack said.

“It’s behind the stern, but the captain’s swinging the ship round to give us a broadside view to starboard. It’ll be a few minutes yet. We’re using the dynamic positioning system, as we don’t want water movement from the main screws to disturb what you’re about to see.”

“That berg out by the island, dead ahead of us now,” Maria said, pointing towards the ship’s bow. “It’s got a streak of black on the top. Is that ancient sediment from the glacier?”

“Well spotted, but no,” Macleod said. “If you look at the berg, it’s smooth and rounded, like a sculpture, quite different from the jagged and fissured bergs we saw when we flew over the fjord.”

“It must have rolled,” Costas said.

“Correct. We watched it happen last night. One of the most awesome sights you can imagine, a quarter of a million tons of ice doing a somersault in the water. You don’t want to be anywhere near one of those babies when that happens.”

“Of course,” Maria exclaimed. “That smear is from the sea floor!”

“Exactly. When we arrived two weeks ago that berg was butted up against the threshold on the north side of the fjord, but we already knew from side-scan sonar that the submerged part had become eroded and lost much of its mass. It was only a matter of days before it would roll, and we kept well clear. Some of the bergs make it out that way, others get pushed upright over the sill. You can always tell from whether they look like Henry Moore sculptures or Disneyland ice castles.”

“You mean like that one,” Jack said.

They followed his gaze to starboard as a vast wall of ice came into view, about a quarter of a mile distant and clearly taller than the superstructure of the ship. It had the same contorted and jagged face as the front of the glacier, riven with veins of deep blue where meltwater had frozen inside crevasses, except for a wide flat area in the middle where it sloped down smoothly from the summit. The berg was immense, at least a quarter of a mile across, and blocked a large stretch of the entrance to the fjord along the line of the underwater threshold.

They stared in awe until Macleod broke the silence. “Remember, three-quarters of that thing’s underwater. You’re looking at a cubic kilometre and a half of frozen water, at least a million and a half tons.”

Costas let out a low whistle. “That’d keep all the bars in the world in ice well into the next century.”

“A single day’s outlet from this glacier would be enough to supply New York with water for a year. Twenty million tons a day. We’re talking global impact here.”

“Tabular bergs of this size are pretty rare in the Arctic,” Inuva said. “We think it’s atmospheric warming again, resulting in the glacier receding to a point where larger fractures occur. It’s the biggest berg I’ve seen here in my lifetime.”

“Why hasn’t it broken up?” Costas said.

“It’s had one major calving event, where you can see that smooth face,” Macleod said. “But the core’s unusually compact, solid glacial ice you’d crack only with explosives. It’s ideal for us. That face calved back to the core ice, so it’s relatively safe to work under. If you look closely you’ll see the drilling team in a couple of Zodiac inflatable boats out there now.”

“I don’t understand it.” Jeremy had been quietly absorbing everything since arriving on the ship, but had now recovered his normal inquisitiveness. “What’s to stop that thing tumbling over and crushing them?”

“That’s where the conditions really work in our favour,” Macleod said enthusiastically. “Without the pressure of the ice tongue behind them, bergs trapped on the sill are a lot safer to work on. The glacier itself is way too dangerous for coring, especially now that it’s flowing at such a rate. Bergs floating down the fjord are out of the question because they’re moving, and once they’re beyond the fjord they’re not only moving but are more liable to tumble. So a relatively fresh berg trapped on the sill is ideal for us. It’s a unique opportunity, but the window is closing fast.”

“How long has it been there?” Jack said.

“About three months. Lanowski’s run a simulation that shows it processing down the fjord and jamming against the threshold. Any chance of seeing it?”

“You’ll be lucky.” Lanowski muttered irritably to himself as he tapped a sequence of keys, and then visibly relaxed. “Finally.”

The screen displayed a 3-D isometric simulation of the fjord, with the glacier at one end and the arc of the threshold at the other. The berg was shown perched perilously on the sill, its vast bulk underwater now visible but with the seabed dropping off to even greater depths on either side.

“You can see the scour channel,” Inuva said. “That groove in the seabed leading up the threshold. As they grind along the bottom, the bergs pulverize the seabed, crushing everything to powder. It creates a sterile biotope, devoid of life. But the sampling we’ve been able to do here shows something else, that it actually benefits the diversification of species, allowing life to regenerate like a forest after a fire. And there are other pluses. James said you saw a berg calving as you flew in. Each time that happens, the upwelling brings up a host of nutrients. These were incredibly rich fishing grounds for my ancestors.”

“A biologist,” Lanowski muttered. “Just what we need.”

Inuva glared at Lanowski, and Jack quickly moved on. “How stable is that thing?”

“I created a simulation of ice conditions in the fjord over the planned period of the project, from two weeks ago ending tomorrow.” Lanowski said. “Everything’s happened exactly as I predicted. This should give you an idea of what we’re looking at.” He pressed a key and they watched as the screen sped through several dozen images on the same backdrop, showing the glacier receding alarmingly and a procession of bergs tipping over the threshold.

“A few years ago that would have been a whole season. Now it’s two weeks.” Lanowski pushed up his glasses and peered rheumily at Jack. “At the moment, the berg’s fine. There’s diurnal fluctuation in the grounding line, of course, about three metres as the tide goes up and down, and eventually the abrasion will knock off enough ice at the bottom to unbalance the berg. Right now the worst-case scenario is a major calving event, losing a lot more ice underwater than above, making the berg top-heavy. Then, say at high tide, we get an earthquake, or a storm, or ice from the glacier coming down the fjord and pressing from behind. That could push the berg against the sill and topple it.”

“What are the odds?”

“We’re not predicting any big ice coming down the fjord for at least a few days. An earthquake’s pretty well out of the question. A storm’s a possibility. There’s a local freak storm that could affect water movement against the threshold.”

“A piteraq,” Inuva said quietly.

“A what?” Costas asked.

“A piteraq. Caused as cold air tumbles down the ice cap and meets the warmer air of the sea.”

“Of course. James mentioned it as we flew in.”

Lanowski ignored them and carried on. “But there haven’t been any storms of the magnitude needed for almost seventy years. The last one recorded was in 1938.”

“What about calving?” Jack said.

“That’s where the simulation runs dry,” Lanowski said. “I just can’t predict it.” He looked at the floor in consternation, as if the limitations of science were his own personal failing, then relaxed his shoulders and gave Jack a defeated look. “All I can say is that the chances increase with the summer heat, especially now with the twenty-four-hour Arctic summer daylight. Forty-eight hours down the road I’ll be recommending that all work at the berg cease and advising the captain to reposition Seaquest II at least two miles farther offshore.”

Macleod turned to Jack with a sense of urgency in his expression. “All the more reason for us to get on.” He nodded thanks to Inuva, handing her a two-way radio from the command chair, which she took out of earshot through the side door on to the deck wing. “While Inuva sets up the final part of your tour, I think we’re ready to show you what this is really all about.” He tried and failed to catch Lanowski’s attention, then led them to a workstation on the other side of the room where a large man in a checked shirt and jeans was positioning a long metal tube like an oversize map case.

“Don Cheney, senior glaciologist from NASA,” Macleod said. “Don, show us what you’ve got.”

They quickly shook hands and stood behind the table and computer monitor. Cheney carefully pulled out an inner cylinder partway from the case, a transparent plastic tube about three feet long and six inches in diameter, and laid it on the table in front of them. He sat down at the workstation and leaned forward on his elbows, tapping the tube with a pencil and speaking in a low Texan drawl.

“For anyone who hasn’t seen one, this is an ice core,” he began. “Came out of that berg yesterday. Mostly glacial ice, the cloudy-looking stuff with tiny bubbles in it, but also bands of clearer blue meltwater ice. We’ve got one meltwater band with modern contaminants in it, atmospheric hydrocarbons from factory and engine emissions. Some time in the last century that glacier opened up, then snapped shut pretty quickly. It happens. We’ve traced the fracture line up to the surface of the berg, the one relatively weak point in the core.”

“We thought of using explosives to crack the berg along that line, then pretty quickly ditched the idea,” Macleod said. “It would probably have destroyed what we’ve found.”

“Which is?” Costas asked.

Cheney drew the tube about two feet farther out of the casing and pointed at it. “We were about to pull the corer out yesterday and wind down the project, but then one of my NASA guys spotted this.”

The final part of the core was totally different from the bands of ice, a mass of black and brown fibrous material about eighteen inches long.

“It’s nothing to do with seabed sediment this time,” Macleod said.

“It’s wood!” Costas exclaimed.

“Correct. Embedded in an ice layer about a thousand years old, from another sealed-up crevasse. The structure’s very compacted, and some of it even looks carbonized, whether through burning or decay we can’t tell yet. But we think we’ve got about a thirty-year tree-ring sequence. I had another core from the same spot air-freighted back to Cornwall in the Embraer that brought you in this morning. We should have the results from the IMU dendrochronology lab this evening.”

“It couldn’t be a local tree trunk,” Costas said, shaking his head. “There’s no tree this big growing anywhere in Greenland, let alone finding its way on top of the ice cap.”

Macleod eyes Cheney keenly. “Don, show them the scan.”

Cheney nodded and swivelled the workstation monitor so they could all see it clearly. He tapped a command and an image like an ultrasound scan appeared on the screen, with bands and patches in different shades of grey that flickered in and out of focus.

“A high-resolution still taken from the sonar,” Cheney drawled. “It shows the upper part of the berg, just behind that calved front. The shades of grey are mainly differences in density between glacial ice formed during the Quaternary and ice formed by meltwater. But there’s something else in there, and it’s big.”

He tapped a key, and another scan appeared on the screen, this time dominated by a darker mass in the centre. He scrolled slowly through a series of stills taken at different angles as the sonar moved from the side to the top of the glacier. At the final still Jack nearly dropped his coffee mug in amazement.

“You must be kidding,” he whispered.

“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.”