Valhalla

by Robert J. Mrazek

  He was right.

  EIGHT

  20 November

  Kulusuk Airfield

  Ost Greenland

  Dawn was creeping past the curtains of her compartment porthole when Lexy heard a light knock at the door. It slowly opened, and the Eurasian girl’s face appeared around the edge.

  “We’ll be landing in thirty minutes. Do you wish to have breakfast with General Macaulay?”

  She could smell fresh coffee brewing and discovered she was hungry again.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  She dressed in the same combination of clothing she always wore in the field, loose-fitting corduroys, a Scotch plaid flannel shirt, and rubber-soled leather hunting boots.

  “You’re going to need to ramp up your winter gear when we get there,” said Macaulay when she joined him at the breakfast table. He was enjoying a western omelet with coffee and orange juice, and she ordered the same.

  “I’ve checked in by radio with our base camp on the ice cap. Your three colleagues have already arrived,” he told her. “It’s blowing a gale there, but I’m hoping we can make it over in one of the team helicopters.”

  * * *

  Gazing through the windows at the endless landscape of ice and rock, Lexy felt a deep sense of isolation at the enormity of it all. Some of her ancestors had come here more than a thousand years ago.

  Macaulay had followed her eyes.

  “In some places the ice is two miles deep,” he said. “Who knows how many secrets it holds?”

  Toward the horizon, she saw the jagged edge of a gigantic iceberg floating calmly on a slate gray sea. It almost looked big enough to land on. As the Learjet slowly descended toward the desolate coast, they passed over a small Inuit settlement. The simple huts were gaily painted in red, blue, and yellow. Near the settlement, a man was running behind a dogsled.

  A few minutes later, they landed on a long, ice-bordered runway.

  “Welcome to Kulusuk,” said Macaulay. “In its glory days, this place was part of the old DEW Line radar defense system for providing an early warning of a Soviet attack. It’s fallen on hard times since we pulled out.”

  A small cluster of ramshackle old buildings flanked the landing strip. A Bell 412EP jet transport helicopter was parked on one apron near two twin-engine planes, all of them bearing the logo of Anschutz International. As soon as the engines were turned off, she could hear the howling wind.

  “The weather may look rugged to you, but I can fly the Bell in this,” said Macaulay. “Before we leave, you’ll need to put on some warmer gear. There’s plenty of it inside the Kulusuk Four Seasons over there.”

  They stepped off the plane into fierce, gusting wind. Ice particles lashed Lexy’s face as Macaulay led her to the largest of the frame buildings. Inside the foyer, the moan of the wind was barely diminished. The waiting room smelled of frying bacon.

  “Steve!” came an anguished cry from the small barroom across the lobby.

  “Oh no,” groaned Macaulay as Melissa came rushing toward him.

  “Thank God,” she said, wrapping herself in his arms in a cloud of bourbon. “I’ve got to get out of here, Steve. The sun barely rises in this place and then it is night again. You have to tell J.L. that if he doesn’t want me here anymore, I need the Lear to fly me back to Dallas.”

  “I’ll tell him,” said Macaulay.

  “Seriously, I think I’m going to die here, honey,” she said, tears beginning to stream down her milkmaid cheeks. “He loves that goddamn dog of his more than me.”

  Melissa’s eyes focused on Lexy.

  “Who is she?” she demanded.

  “Dr. Vaughan is an archaeologist,” said Macaulay. “I’m flying her out to the base camp.”

  “Why does she get to go and not me?”

  “It’s important, Melissa.”

  “She’s J.L’s new one, isn’t she?”

  “No,” he said firmly.

  “Don’t leave me here, Steve. I swear I can’t take it anymore.”

  “I told you I’ll talk to J.L.,” he said. “Just hang on a bit longer.”

  He led Lexy up the stairs to find the winter gear.

  “What was that all about?” she asked while putting on a thermal suit over her clothes.

  “How would you like a brand-new Porsche Carrera 911?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Inside joke,” he said. “John Lee enjoys the company of beautiful women and he appreciates having them available, which isn’t that often when he’s feeling the high adventure like this one. Anyway, he usually treats them to a new Porsche.”

  “I see.”

  Ten minutes later, they were outside again and heading for the Bell 412EP jet helicopter. It was the team’s principal transport chopper. Hancock’s ground crew had completed its flight inspection and warmed up the two Pratt & Whitney engines for him.

  It was a dual-control ship and Macaulay motioned Lexy into the copilot’s seat. She could already feel it rocking back and forth from heavy wind gusts before they were even off the ground.

  “Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “It’s going to be bumpy, but the trip will only take about fifteen minutes unless we run into a serious snow squall.”

  It ended up taking thirty, and she was airsick most of the way. The combination of updrafts and downdrafts was vicious. One moment they were rocketing upward and the next careening wildly down. For the first time in her life, she understood the meaning of having her heart in her throat.

  She felt her first tremor of actual fear when they hit the snow squall. It was a total whiteout, and she lost all sense of their position in relation to the mountain range they were approaching. It was bad enough to be flying through milk, but then they would hit another wind gust and be plunging down again. She clutched the steel frame of her cushioned seat and held on.

  Whenever she glanced at Macaulay, he appeared oblivious to it all, remaining calm and seemingly relaxed as he maneuvered the big helicopter through the treacherous air.

  When they finally emerged from the squall, she saw that they were approaching a small tent city on the ice cap. Macaulay brought them down onto a helicopter pad ringed with landing lights.

  “You did well,” he said after shutting down the engines. “Not a fun ride in that soup.”

  Lexy didn’t say anything. She was grateful that she hadn’t thrown up all over the cockpit. Still queasy, she climbed out of the helicopter and followed him to the largest tent in the complex.

  Inside, a dozen men were scattered around tables full of electronic equipment. One was standing in front of a briefing board. The others sat at tables deployed in a rough circle around two diesel space heaters. They all turned to look at the new arrivals.

  “The code breaker is here,” one of them called out.

  It was Rob Falconer.

  NINE

  20 November

  Base Hancock One

  Greenland Ice Cap

  John Lee Hancock stood up from the head table and walked toward her.

  “I’m John Lee,” he said, shaking her hand.

  Lexy hadn’t known what to expect, but she was mildly surprised to discover he was shorter than she was, with salt-and-pepper hair brushed straight back above his blunt, clean-shaven face. His dark brown eyes were hooded and intense.

  “Forgive me for saying so, but you look a bit under the weather,” he said without releasing her hand. “Can I offer you a bracer?”

  “I’m all right . . . really,” she said, “but yes, I’d welcome one.”

  Still not letting go of her hand, he led her over to one of the tables, where an open bottle sat beside a tray of glasses. It had an old-style label, and she could read the words Old Forester above his fingers as he poured an inch of it into a glass. She took the dark, smoky elixir down in one long swallow. I
t had an astonishingly mellow taste.

  “Very restorative,” she said, smiling.

  A man approached her from the other side.

  “I believe we met in London three years ago,” he said.

  She turned to see Sir Dorian St. George Bond, his distinguished face still crowned by the familiar shock of unruly silver hair. At eighty, he was still a giant in the archaeological field, the man who had followed Howard Carter into Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, and had then blazed a new archaeological trail with his treatises on the secrets of early Norse navigation methods.

  “Thank you for remembering me,” she said.

  “You delivered a brilliant paper that day.”

  When she had last seen him, Sir Dorian had been strong and erect. His gray eyes still glinted with intelligence, but the dark patches under them looked like bruises. He had shed at least fifty pounds and become gaunt. She wondered why he would risk his health to be there.

  Hjalmar Jensen replaced Sir Dorian in the small queue that had formed to greet her. The fifty-year-old Norwegian anthropologist had studied at Oxford and been part of the team that discovered the Homeric location of Troy, south of the Dardanelles. Now a leading expert in Neanderthal biology as well as European evolution, he had been the first to extract DNA from ancient Scandinavian human fossils.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Dr. Vaughan,” he said, welcoming her with an engaging smile and a clipped Norwegian accent. “Like Sir Dorian, I have been quite impressed with your work.”

  With rimless metal spectacles perched on his little nose, he reminded her of Mr. Rogers from the TV program she had enjoyed as a child. The Norwegian gave way to Rob Falconer.

  Strong and compact, with the build of a downhill racer, Rob still had the same shoulder-length raven hair, black-bearded face, and striking eyes the color of pale amber. They were as arrogant as she remembered.

  “I need no introduction to this archaeologist,” he said with the familiar South Carolina drawl.

  After getting his doctorate at Berkeley, Rob had specialized in underwater archaeology and earned international fame after finding the remains of the Ottawa River encampment of Henry Hudson, whose mutinous crew had set him adrift on his final voyage.

  Lexy had fallen in love with him after they met in Mesopotamia during the summer of her senior year at Harvard. He was very different from the often humorless archaeologists she had known. Rob was wildly irreverent, confiding in her that he was pursuing “the Indiana Jones branch of archaeology.”

  “We were a great team,” said Falconer to the others. “I still don’t know why she chose to abandon me.”

  They had lived together for two months. She practically worshipped him until he hacked into her computer one night and stole her thesis on twelfth-century dotted runes to complete his own doctoral work. She had wanted to expose him, but her mentor, Barnaby Finchem, advised her to let it go.

  “It would only be ugly and inconclusive,” he had told her. “Don’t worry. You’ll make your mark.”

  “We shared a very small tent,” Falconer went on. “Maybe I snored.”

  Lexy watched Macaulay’s eyes harden as Hancock asked everyone to take a chair, and then stood facing them in front of the banks of computers and communications equipment.

  When they were settled near the space heaters, Hancock’s white Alsatian wandered over to Jensen. Turning in an ever-tightening circle, the dog curled up at his feet. The Norwegian reached down to stroke him behind the ears.

  “You have a way with dogs, Professor Jensen,” said Hancock, clearly impressed. “Old Hap rarely cottons to anyone except me.”

  Jensen smiled as he continued petting him.

  “I only wish I had the same power with the opposite sex,” he said.

  “Now that you have all arrived,” said Hancock, “we’re ready to make our first descent to the Viking ship and the cave below it. You should know that you are here for one purpose, and that is to provide me with your insights and conclusions after viewing what I’ve discovered down there. There will be ample rewards for all of you, both professionally and financially. I’m well aware that archaeology does not generate the same returns as oil and gas drilling.”

  He was trying his best to sound self-deprecating.

  “Here are your ground rules,” he continued. “Security is paramount at this stage. You will understand why when you see what’s down there. There will be no note taking, no journals, no pens and pencils. You will not bring a camera or a cell phone or an electronic device of any kind. You will touch nothing after we’re down there unless I give you permission to do so.”

  “What are we allowed to do?” asked Falconer.

  “Observe,” replied Hancock caustically. “You’re being paid to observe.”

  Looking around the operations tent, Lexy could see that the members of Hancock’s expedition team were almost out on their feet. The strain of whatever they had undertaken in the previous days and weeks could be read in the gray pallor of their faces and reddened eyes.

  “You will each have to agree to a brief body search before we put on the thermal suits to go down,” said Hancock. “If you are not comfortable with that, tell me now and we’ll fly you out of here right away.”

  No one said anything.

  “We’ll spend about thirty minutes down there after making the descent. We’re concerned about the infusion of too much heat into one of the discovery sites, so instead of floodlighting, you will be restricted to high-powered flashlights.”

  He turned to a briefing board and pointed at a sketch of the two ice shafts.

  “The first part of the descent will be in an elevator cage. There’s room for all of us in it. The second shaft is nearly four hundred feet deeper and we’ll be going down one at a time using a power hoist. You’ll stand in foot stirrups and just hold on to the chain until you hit bottom. The second shaft is only three feet in diameter. I hope none of you is claustrophobic.”

  Lexy felt her stomach lurch. She thought about speaking up, to say that she was sick with apprehension at the thought of ever being confined in a small space. At the age of ten, she had fallen through the rotting boards that covered an abandoned well at her grandparents’ farm. It had taken them ten hours to find her, and she had spent an excruciating night floating in the slimy water at the bottom, getting through it only by shutting her eyes and pretending she was in their bathtub at home.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but saw that the others had accepted the news with calmness, if not excitement. As the only woman, she didn’t want to be conspicuous in admitting her fears.

  “I’ll be going down first,” said Hancock. “The rest of you will follow at intervals of ten feet. The order of descent will be me, Sir Dorian, then Falconer, Professor Jensen, Dr. Vaughan, and last General Macaulay.”

  Macaulay met the archaeologists in the mess tent one by one to conduct a brief body search, after which they put on thermal clothing and rejoined Hancock. Falconer was the only one who gave him a problem. He insisted on bringing his pocket journal with him, claiming he was worried the others would steal it. When Macaulay gave him the option of staying behind, he turned the journal over.

  Lexy was the last one.

  “Just go ahead and get dressed,” said Macaulay when she arrived. “I’ve got to trust somebody around here.”

  It was snowing again as they entered the elevator cage and began their first descent. This won’t be too hard after all, Lexy thought as they dropped slowly through the large well-lit shaft.

  Thirty minutes later, they reached the March Hare cavern.

  The huge, empty ice cavity remained brilliantly lit, like a movie set of Santa’s workshop in a Disney movie. The gnomish George Cabot was waiting for them at the power rig over the smaller shaft.

  Macaulay ordered him to start the power winch, and it began making a loud clanking noise,
like a ship’s anchor chain dropping to a seabed. Wasting no time, Hancock stepped into the first set of stirrups. A few moments later, he disappeared down the hole.

  Cabot halted the movement of the chain after ten feet and attached the second set of stirrups. Sir Dorian got into them without a problem, but his hands were too weak to maintain his hold on the chain. He gave up after two tries.

  “Strap me to the bloody thing,” he said urgently.

  Cabot found a length of towline and ran it around Sir Dorian’s chest twice before securing the line with a sailor’s hitch. He started the winch again, and the octogenarian slid down into the darkness, barely fitting through the hole. Falconer and Jensen assumed the next two positions on the chain without further problem.

  Then it was Lexy’s turn. She felt the first bolt of terror when she walked over to stand above the little hole. Closing her eyes, she forced herself to remember that something incredibly important was waiting for her down there, something she had waited most of her life to see. When she opened her eyes again, the hole seemed to have shrunk even farther.

  “I’m not sure . . . ,” she began.

  “What the hell is going on up there?” Hancock shouted from fifty feet below them.

  Macaulay saw her distress.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said reassuringly. “Just envision yourself going down a dark well.”

  “That’s . . . the problem,” she said.

  “All right, we’ll go down together,” he said.

  He had Cabot attach a second set of stirrups just below the first one, and Macaulay stepped into them.

  “Come here,” he said.

  “Odin save us,” said Lexy, stepping into the upper stirrups. Hancock reached out to wrap her in his arms and motioned to Cabot to start the winch. The clanking began again and they dropped downward.

  “Sweet move, General,” Cabot called out to Macaulay as they disappeared from view.

  Twenty minutes into the descent, she began imagining that the black wall of ice was closing in on them, and started shivering uncontrollably. Putting her arms around his back, she drew Macaulay closer.