Crusader Gold

8

All systems operational. We’regood to go.”

Costas flipped aside his microphone headset and grinned at Jack. Outside the Plexiglas dome they could see the two crewmen on the platform release the tethering lines, and the Aquapod began to bob uncomfortably on the surface as it drifted towards the iceberg. Costas quickly activated the water jets and reversed the submersible back to their descent position. It was nearly midnight, but in the continuous sun the dome had begun to heat up, and Jack reached down for the temperature control on his E-suit.

“Don’t adjust it too much.” Costas wiped the beads of sweat off his forehead. “We’ll cool down rapidly as soon as we’re submerged.”

The bustle of activity on the platform as they departed now seemed to belong to another place and time, and they listened as the last of the Zodiacs carrying the crewmen sped out of the danger zone and back towards Seaquest II. They were almost on their own now, their final human contact awaiting in the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle nestled against the berg thirty metres below. Costas tightened his straps, scanned the instrument panel and gripped the controls. With its bubble dome and tubular ballast tanks on either side, the two-man Aquapod was not unlike a small helicopter, an impression enhanced by the multidirectional water-jet propulsion system which gave it even greater agility than its counterpart in the air.

“You can wave goodbye to the surface now,” Costas said.

“At least it’ll still be daylight when we return,” Jack murmured. “That’s something to look forward to.”

Costas opened up the ballast tanks and a geyser of water erupted on either side of the Aquapod, settling to a bubbling ferment as the submersible slowly trimmed down in the water and became negatively buoyant. For a few moments as the sea level rose up the dome in front of them they were looking at two worlds, both awesome in their magnitude. Above them was the towering form of the iceberg, familiar now yet still breathtaking, its hues of green and blue refracted through the flecks of brash that plastered the dome. Below them was a world as different as outer space, a place nature never intended them to broach. The Arctic waters were astonishingly clear, with visibility extending a hundred metres or more in every direction, and the sheer wall of the berg dropped below them as far as they could see into the frigid depths of the fjord. It was a stupefying sight, and for a few moments they stared in stunned silence as the dome slipped under the surface.

“Holy shit!” Costas exclaimed suddenly. “Taking evasive action!”

Costas gunned the main thruster and swung the Aquapod down towards the berg. Out of the corner of his eye Jack could see what Costas had sensed just in time, a rhythmic commotion in the water from within the fjord, a slow-motion whirling that was advancing relentlessly towards them. The deeper they dropped the larger it loomed, like some nightmare tormentor from which there was no escape. Jack fleetingly remembered Maria’s warning about the wolf Fenrir and the edge of the world, about forces even the gods could not control. They jetted down until they were nearly vertical, plummeting straight into the blackness of the abyss.

“Brace yourself!” Costas yelled.

A scything wall of white suddenly appeared out of the tumult, an apparition that bore down on them with horrifying speed and then swept past the front of the dome with inches to spare. They were jolted violently to one side. Costas fought to keep the Aquapod from spiralling out of control, then righted the submersible and brought it to a standstill. Above them they caught a glimpse of the giant slab of ice as it tumbled towards the open sea, swirling away until nothing but a mist of bubbles was left to mark its progress.

“That was close,” Costas said.

“I thought all this was supposed to end six months ago,” Jack said plaintively. “A quiet life of contemplation, tending the garden and writing my memoirs.”

“Yeah, right,” Costas replied. “Anyway, we needed some excitement to kick-start the adrenaline for what we’re doing next.”

Now that the water was calm again they looked around, and both men fell silent. They had plummeted to a depth of nearly a hundred metres, and the DSRV was now far above them, with two divers just visible outside and silvery trails of bubbles cascading up the ice towards the surface. The immense face of the berg filled the view in front of them, at this depth all colour lost except blue. It had a surreal tint, an azure glow that made it loom at them like a mirage. They could see huge concavities where the current had eroded the ice away, and a vast skid mark of sediment and rock fragments where the berg had scraped against the side of the fjord. And below them, far below, barely discernible in the darkness, they could just make out a sepulchral landscape of boulders and undulations, a shadowy ridge that dropped off into an infinity of blackness on either side. It was a savaged and rutted seascape, pulverized by ice, and they knew it was one of the most dangerous places in all the oceans.

“The threshold of the icefjord,” Jack murmured. “We must be the first people ever to see it.”

“Awesome,” Costas whispered.

“Not a place I want to go,” Jack replied.

“Roger that.” Costas turned his attention to the instrument panel and injected a blast of air into the buoyancy chambers, bringing the Aquapod towards the berg until it was directly under the DSRV. “Ben, this is Aquapod One, safe and sound. We’ll be with you in five minutes. Out.”

The Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle from Seaquest II featured a small internal dock, an open pool that allowed the dome of an Aquapod to rise into a chamber at the rear of the submersible. As Jack looked up at the belly of the DSRV, he watched the dock door slide open and saw the wavering form of a figure staring down at them from inside the chamber. Two divers appeared on either side of the Aquapod and hooked on four anchoring cables that slowly drew them up. As they broke surface and the dome opened up inside the cramped space, they were met by the welcoming face of Ben Kershaw, a former Royal Marine who had been at the centre of the action in the Black Sea six months before and had recently taken over as chief security officer on Seaquest II. Jack reached out and took the hand proffered to help him up, then shook it warmly once he was on the narrow gangway that ringed the dock.

“Thought it’d be a while before I saw you back inside a submarine.”

“All in a day’s work.” Ben looked serious. “Everything okay?”

“A small brush with a growler.”

“We noticed. We thought you were goners. The fjord’s become more active in the last twenty-four hours, with more big chunks of ice like that calving off the glacier.”

“I want you away from here as soon as we’re gone,” Jack said.

“What happens if you need to bail out?”

Jack was firm. “We can surface and fire a flare. We’ve got the radio buoy. I don’t want anyone in the danger zone if this berg shifts. I want the DSRV back at the ship. We’ve had too much loss already over the last year, and I don’t want to put anyone else’s life on the line.”

“What about me?” Costas gave Jack a look of mock indignation as he lurched out of the Aquapod and crouched down beside them.

“Oh, you’re expendable. You should know that by now.”

“Yeah, there’s always Lanowski to take my place.”

Jack grimaced and the two other men laughed, a noticeable easing of the tension they had all felt. “Okay, point taken. I promise I’ll look after you like a father. Now let’s get this show on the road.”

Jack followed Ben through the bulkhead hatch that divided the docking chamber from the main compartment of the DSRV, his tall frame stooped almost double in the confined space. Around the floor ring where the DSRV could dock with a stricken submarine were two identical arrangements of diving equipment, and Costas stooped down behind them to do a quick inventory. Jack followed Ben a few feet farther to the command station at the front of the submersible, and Costas joined them moments later. They nodded to the crewman who was sitting in the pilot’s chair, a battery of monitors and instrument panels in front of him, then squatted down on either side of Ben behind the navigation console as he activated the screen.

“We’ve plotted a best-fit route,” Ben said. “Ideally we’d have you go in shallower, but we’re protected here by a ridge in the ice from any calving off the berg. We’ll put you in breathing nitrox, which will give you a longer bottom time than air at thirty metres.”

“Umbilical?” Jack said.

“Right. We’ll hook you up to the cylinders in the DSRV. That way you’ll conserve the gas you’re carrying with you.”

“It’s crucial we avoid exhausting gas inside the berg,” Jack said. “Lanowski was clear on that one.”

“Have no fear,” Costas interjected. “A little gizmo I’ve been playing with at HQ. There’s no problem with exhaust when you dive down into a wreck, right? You can prevent it pooling and damaging whatever you’re diving into by putting it through a tube that’s buoyed upwards, venting the exhaust above the wreck. The difficulty comes the other way, when you’re going up into a structure from below.”

“You pump it out.”

“Right. We’ll be hooked up to two hoses, one bringing us the nitrox and the other extracting the exhaust and venting it outside the berg. Not sure how it’s going to behave in the cold.” Costas rubbed his hands in anticipation. “Should be fun to try.”

“Let me guess. You haven’t tested it yet.”

“You don’t get icebergs in the English Channel.”

Jack turned from Costas and pointed at the screen, which showed an isometric computer simulation of the DSRV against the iceberg, with a dotted red line running up at a 45-degree angle from the DSRV and then levelling to a horizontal line that ended at a dark mass near the centre of the berg. “I take it we reach ten metres below sea level as quickly as we can, then ditch the umbilical and switch to rebreathers.”

“Correct,” Ben replied. “We’d love to kit you out with the latest IMU closed-circuit mixed-gas rebreathers, but there’s too much danger of freezing and too much to go wrong. This is one time when the old technology is best. You’ve got our tried and tested semi-closed rebreathers, with an oxygen-nitrox mix configured to give you maximum endurance at that depth. The carbon dioxide will be absorbed but not the nitrogen, so there will be a buildup in the counterlung that you’ll need to vent. But the nitrox fraction is small, and that shouldn’t happen till you’re out of the berg again. You won’t be producing any exhaust inside.”

“Just make sure you stay above ten metres,” Costas added. “We’ll be breathing over eighty per cent oxygen, and the mix becomes toxic at that pressure. Stray any deeper and you won’t know about it, you’ll convulse and be gone.”

“You’ll have the standard trimix package in the cylinder consoles on your backs, giving breathable mixes down to one hundred and twenty metres,” Ben said. “The regulators have an antifreeze cap on the first stage, so should be safe. But that’s an open-circuit system, producing exhalation inside the berg. Strictly for emergencies.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Now tell me about your ice-borer. Nothing technical, I just want to know how to drive the thing.”

Twenty minutes later Jack and Costas sat kitted up on either side of the docking pool, like divers preparing to go through a hole in the ice. The Aquapod had been driven away ten minutes earlier by the two divers who had assisted them into the dock. Now the only crew members remaining were Ben and the pilot, and they had already begun finalising systems checks in preparation for departure.

“We’ll be here until you drop the umbilical,” Ben said. “Then you’re on your own.”

Jack nodded as he sat festooned with diving equipment, his dark hair tousled where he had tried on his helmet. Opposite him Costas ballooned as he struggled to control the inflator on his E-suit, and Jack tried to suppress a smile at his friend’s appearance. Over their E-suits both men wore compact rebreathers slung like small rucksacks on their chests, and on their backs were streamlined yellow consoles containing three high-pressure cylinders with oxygen, nitrogen and helium, as well as integrated weights.

Ben finished his second complete check through all their equipment and then squatted beside the pool between the two men. “I have to level with you, Jack. It’s my obligation as security chief. Those timbers could just be some old whaler’s boat. The risk might just be too high.”

“I know where you’re coming from, Ben, and I appreciate it,” Jack said. “But it’s a calculated risk. We can laugh at Lanowski, but I trust his judgement on this one.”

“Okay, it’s your call.” Ben glanced at Costas, who nodded firmly at him. Without further discussion Jack and Costas put on their yellow Kevlar helmets, and Ben went to each in turn locking the neck seals, activating the twin headlamps on either side and checking that the rebreather and trimix feeds were in place. Jack and Costas pulled on their gloves and checked that the watertight seals were secure, then pressed the temperature control consoles on their shoulders to ensure that the chemical heat connection to their hands was functional. Finally they pulled on their fins, disturbing the wisps of mist that swirled off the frigid pool as it met the warm air of the compartment. Just as they were about to flip down their visors, the face of the other crewman appeared through the hatch.

“Message from Seaquest II. For you, Jack. Something to do with tree rings.”

“Read it to us, will you?” Jack said.

The crewman knelt down and held up a printout. “From IMU Dendrochronology Lab, 0212 GMT. Ilulissat Fjord wood sample is Scandinavian oak, possibly Norwegian. Extensive carbonization present from burning. Match to north-west European tree-ring sequence indicates felling date of AD 1040 plus or minus ten years.”

“Yes!” Jack punched his gloved hand into the air. “There’s your answer. I knew it in my gut all along. This could be one of the archaeological finds of the century.”

Looking down at the water, Jack pursed his lips, then gazed across at Costas with a gleam in his eye. He was looking forward to seeing the surface above them and the sunlight as they dropped out of the DSRV, a respite from the niggling sense of claustrophobia he always felt, but now he was itching to get inside the berg and probe its secrets. He reached down and picked up the umbilical that was coiled by his side, the twin hoses twisted together as a single mass, and plugged it into the remaining open port below the chin of his helmet. He watched as Costas did the same, then the two men clamped shut their visors and switched on the intercom. Jack eased himself off the bench and sat with his legs suspended over the abyss, the astonishing clarity of the water making him feel like a parachutist about to exit an aircraft. He and Costas were already in a world apart, their intercom audible only to each other. Jack gave an okay signal to Ben and a thumbs-down to indicate he was descending, and then looked at Costas.

“Good to go?”

“Good to go.”