Sacred Stone

3

IN CONTRAST TO the warmth and conviviality aboard the Oregon, the scene at the remote camp near Mount Forel just north of the Arctic Circle in Greenland was more subdued. Outside the cave the wind howled and the temperature was ten degrees below zero without accounting for the windchill factor. This was the ninety-first day of the expedition, and the thrill and excitement had long since worn off. John Ackerman was tired, discouraged and all alone with his bitter thoughts of defeat.

Ackerman was working toward his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his current surroundings were as far removed from his familiar desert as an underwater seamount to a parrot. The three helpers from the university had gone home as soon as the semester had ended and replacements were not due to arrive for another two weeks. Truth be told, Ackerman should have taken a break himself, but he was a man possessed by a dream.

Ever since that first moment when he had located the obscure reference to the Cave of the Gods when writing his doctoral thesis about Eric the Red, he had been compelled to find the caves before anyone else. Maybe the entire affair was just a myth, Ackerman thought, but if it existed he wanted his name and not some usurper’s to be associated with the find.

He stirred the can of beans on the metal stove that sat under the tent he had erected near the mouth of the cave. He was sure from the description he had translated that this was the cave Eric the Red had mentioned on his deathbed, but despite months of effort he had yet to get farther than the seemingly solid wall twenty feet to the rear. He and the others had examined every inch of the walls and floor of the cavern but they had found nothing. The cave itself appeared man-made, and yet Ackerman was not sure.

Seeing the beans were warming properly, he peeked outside to make sure the antenna for his satellite telephone had not been blown over in the wind. Finding it secure, he returned inside and checked his e-mail. Ackerman had forgotten today was Christmas, but the holiday greetings from friends and family reminded him. As he answered the messages, the sadness inside him grew. Here it was a festive day, when most Americans would be with family and friends, and he was in the middle of nowhere, alone and chasing a dream he no longer truly believed existed.

Slowly, the sadness turned to anger. Forgetting about the beans, he grabbed a Coleman lantern from the table and walked to the far end of the cave. There he stood, fuming and cursing under his breath at the course of actions that had led him to a distant and cold wasteland on this the holiest of nights. All his microscopic examinations and careful dusting with paintbrushes had yielded nothing.

There was nothing here—it was all a wash. Tomorrow he’d start packing up the camp, put the tent and supplies on the sled behind the snowmobile, then as soon as the weather cleared enough he’d make the run for the nearest town, Angmagssalik, some one hundred miles away.

The Cave of the Gods would remain a myth.

Seized by a growing anger, he shouted a curse and swung the fuel-filled lantern in an arc, then let go of the handle when it was pointed at the ceiling. The lantern flew through the air and smashed into the rock roof of the cave. The glass bulb shattered and burning liquid gas spilled onto the ceiling and down. Then suddenly, as if by magic, the flames reversed as they were sucked into the cracks overhead. The remaining burning fuel was drawn inside four cracks that formed a square.

The roof of the cave, Ackerman thought, we never searched the roof of the cave.

Trotting back to the front of the cave, he opened a wooden crate and removed the thin aluminum tubes they had used to lay out a grid on the floor of the cave for the detailed archaeological examination. Disassembled now, they were each four feet long. Rooting around in a nylon supply bag, Ackerman found some duct tape and wrapped it around the tubes until he had a staff twelve feet in length. Grasping the tube like a javelin, he quickly walked back into the cave.

The broken lantern was lying on the floor still burning, the metal body dented and the glass globe missing, but it was still spewing light. He stared up at the roof and saw that the smoke from the now-burned-out fuel had left a barely visible outline of a square.

Lining the pole up on one side, Ackerman slowly pushed.

The thin stone covering that formed the hatch had been constructed with angled sides. As soon as Ackerman applied pressure, it slid on ancient wooden dowels until it opened like a greased shutter on a finely crafted window.

Then, once the hatch was opened, a walrus-skin-woven ladder dropped down.

Ackerman stood still in amazement. Then he extinguished the still-burning Coleman, walked back to the front of the tent and noticed the beans boiling over. He removed them from the stove, then found a flashlight, basic supplies in case he became stuck, a rope and a digital camera. He walked back to the ladder to climb toward his destiny.

Once through the opening, it was like Ackerman had climbed into an attic. Here was the true cave. The one he and the students had examined so closely was merely a carefully constructed ruse. Shining the light, Ackerman walked in the same direction as the opening in the cave below. At about the same distance as where the one underneath led out, Ackerman found a pile of rocks arranged to appear as if it were a natural landslide. Later he could clear the rocks away and peer out over the frozen wasteland, but for now, and for the last several centuries, the rock slide had protected the secrets.

The ruse had tricked Ackerman, just as it was designed to do.

Turning away from the rock slide, Ackerman carefully bypassed the hole in the floor, then stopped and dropped one end of the rope to the floor. Carefully playing out the line, he headed down the corridor carrying the flashlight above his head.

The walls were adorned with pictographs of men hunting, beasts slain and ships on journeys to faraway lands. It was obvious to Ackerman that many men for many years had toiled inside the cavern. The cave widened and the light caught openings where, well preserved by the cold, furs and hides lay upon sleeping pallets stacked one atop the other. They had been hacked from the rock and dirt as ancient bunk beds for miners. He followed a passage alongside the sleeping area that featured several short offshoots from the main cave toward an area darkened by cooking fires. Long, rough-hewn tables, brought into the cave in pieces and assembled on site, filled a dining hall with high ceilings. Sweeping the light, Ackerman could see whale-oil reservoirs with wicks built into the walls for light.

There was easily seating for a hundred men.

Ackerman sniffed the air and found it fresh. In fact, there was the slightest of breezes. He began to theorize that Eric the Red’s men must have figured out how to bore vent holes and create a flow-through system to rid the cave of bad air and odors. Farther past the dining hall was a small room with angled rock troughs against the walls. The troughs were filled with steaming water. Knowing these were crude toilets but figuring over a thousand years had passed, Ackerman dipped his finger into the water. The temperature was hot. They must have located a geothermal stream and diverted it, Ackerman thought. A few feet farther ahead, just past the crude toilets, a large pool sat elevated and spilled down into the troughs. The baths.

Past the baths, Ackerman headed down a narrow passage whose walls had been smoothed and adorned with geometric designs etched into the rock and dyed red and yellow and green. Ahead was an opening framed by carefully selected decorative stones.

Ackerman walked through the opening into a large chamber.

From what he could see the walls were round and smooth. The floor of the chamber was fitted with flat rocks to form an almost perfectly level floor. Geodes and crystals hung from the ceiling like chandeliers. Ackerman reached down and adjusted his flashlight. Then he stood up, raised the light over his head and gasped in awe.

Flowing up from the center of the room was a platform where a gray orb sat on display.

The geodes and crystals hanging from the ceiling scattered light from the flashlight into thousands of rainbows that spilled around the room like a spinning disco ball. Ackerman exhaled and the sound was magnified.

Stepping up to the chest-high platform, he stared at the orb.

“Meteorite,” he said aloud.

Then he removed the digital camera and began to document the scene.

After climbing back down the ladder, he retrieved a Geiger counter and a book on metal analysis and tried to determine the orb’s composition. He soon figured it out.

AN HOUR LATER, back down from the upper cave, Ackerman assembled the digital images and readings from the Geiger counter into an e-mail package. After spending another hour composing a glowing press release about himself and including that in the message, he sent the e-mail to his benefactor for approval.

Then he sat back to bask in his glory and await a reply.

AT THE ECHELON monitoring station outside London near Chatham, most of the world’s communications were recorded. A joint English–United States operation, Echelon had received a fair share of scrutiny from the press on both sides of the pond. Quite simply Echelon was nothing more or less than a massive eavesdropping apparatus that snagged worldwide communications and ran them through a computer for review. Certain words were flagged so that if they appeared, it triggered the message to be spit out for review by a human. Then the flagged message passed up a chain of command until it was forwarded to the proper intelligence service or ignored as unimportant.

Ackerman’s e-mail from Greenland passed up to a satellite before being relayed back to the United States. On its way back to earth, Echelon snagged the message and ran it through its computer. There was a word in the message that triggered a review.

In time the message would pass along the chain of command from England across the ocean on a secure line to the National Security Agency in Maryland, then on to the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.

But there was a traitor inside Echelon, so the review went to more than one location.

Inside the cave on Mount Forel, John Ackerman was living a fantasy life in his mind. He’d already pictured himself on the covers of most of the archaeology magazines; now he was formulating an acceptance speech for what, in his mind at least, was something akin to the Academy Awards of archaeology.

This find was huge, like the modern-day opening of a pyramid, like finding an untouched, perfectly preserved shipwreck. Magazine articles, books, television shows loomed. If Ackerman played his cards right, he could ride this find into a lifelong career. He could become the acknowledged grandmaster of archaeology, the man the media always called for comment. He could become a celebrity—and nowadays that was a career in and of itself. With just a little manipulation, the name John Ackerman would be synonymous with great discovery.

Then his computer chirped to report an incoming message.

The message was succinct.

Don’t tell anyone yet. We need more proof before the announcement. I’m sending a man up there to check it out. He will arrive in a day or two. Just continue documenting the find. Super work, John. But mum’s the word.

At first reading Ackerman was irritated by the message. Then he reflected and was able to convince himself that his benefactor was probably taking the time to build a media storm for the find. Maybe he was planning to give one of the major networks an exclusive and needed time to set up the interview. Maybe he was planning a simultaneous blitz of magazines, newspapers and television.

Soon Ackerman was awash with these thoughts and his ego started to run wild.

The larger the shower of publicity, the greater his future fame.

For Ackerman, ego tinged with self-aggrandizing would prove a deadly combination.