Out of the wind’s fury, in the shelter of the covered bridge, the Marquess Antoinette Celeste de Villiers said a silent prayer of thanksgiving for the first successful stage of phase one.
In spite of the black leather coat she was wearing and the multiple layers of clothing underneath, she couldn’t stop shivering. She envied the heartiness of Bjorklund, who had gone out to the open section of the bridge dressed only in his uniform jacket and a light woolen sweater.
“Congratulations, Captain. You and your crew have done superbly once again,” she said upon his return. “They are on their way.”
“Where are they going, if I might ask?” said Bjorklund.
“To do God’s work,” replied de Villiers.
Bjorklund knew better than to press her further.
A steward carrying mugs of hot cocoa arrived on the bridge, and de Villiers sipped hers while gazing out at the dark horizon. Her seventy-two exemplars were heading to every continent, from China to the Middle East, Europe to the United States. As soon as they completed the first phase, the teams would reassemble in Oslo to prepare for phase two.
She had taken the time to meet each of the two-man teams for a few minutes in her private cabin, telling them they should feel honored and humbled to have been chosen for the sacred mission.
“The serum you are carrying in these canisters will forever change the world. Guard it with your lives, and follow your orders to the letter when you arrive at your destination,” she told them, her voice almost choked with passion.
Standing on the lower deck near the landing pad, Per Larsen watched the last helicopter disappear into the gloom before stepping back inside and following the passageway to the maintenance section and the compartment of the supervisor.
He found him sitting in his office chair, massaging his swollen ankles. Petty Officer Van Loon was in his fifties and had come out of retirement from the Dutch navy to join the crew. Seeing Dr. Larsen, he immediately stood to attention.
“Please sit,” said Larsen, forcing a smile. “Attend to your ankles.”
“What can I do for you, Doctor?” he asked.
“I need to do a few personal chores,” said Larsen.
“We would be honored to help you,” he said.
“I would simply ask for the loan of one of your toolboxes.”
“A toolbox?” he asked, confused.
“The ones your men carry,” said Larsen, “equipped with basic tools.”
“Allow me to send one of my technicians to assist you,” said Van Loon. “Any one of them would be grateful for the opportunity.”
“My own work has been accomplished for the time being, and I would enjoy the chance to putter with my hands on a small project,” said Larsen. “Do you understand?”
“I think so,” said Van Loon.
Putting his shoes back on, he led the scientist into the supply section and pulled out one of the red stainless steel toolboxes from a storage cabinet. He placed it on the countertop and opened it.
“Is this everything you need?” he asked.
The top two trays held screwdrivers, pliers, spanners, and assorted screws and nails. The remaining space contained a cordless drill motor, pipe wrenches, sealers, glues, glazing compound, and lubricants.
“It will do perfectly,” said Larsen, replacing the trays and fastening the top.
When he had left, Van Loon went back to his office, still pondering the visit. The scientists he had met aboard the ship all struck him as peculiar to say the least, but if Dr. Larsen needed a repair in the lab complex, he was supposed to request it through him.
Every action aboard the Leitstern was undertaken within a strict set of procedures. Orders were orders. He pulled out his hand transceiver and punched in the number for the third officer.
FIFTY-SIX
6 December
Monhegan Island
Maine
From the grimy windows of Chris’s fish shack, Macaulay and Lexy looked out at the raging surf hammering the tip of Manana. Although it was well past dawn, the sky was still murky. The air temperature had risen above the freezing point as the storm drew nearer, and the snow had turned back to driving rain.
“At least we’ll be able to see what’s on the ground over there,” said Lexy.
“Yeah, but if the wind grows much stronger, it will be impossible to row over,” he said.
Chris had pointed his fish shack out to them before dropping them at the wharf. Located along a shingle of beach, it was the size of a large garden shed and had a peaked roof and cedar-shake siding. Inside, it was furnished with a bed, an eating table, and two chairs. There was no bathroom and the shack was unheated. It was very cold.
A few photographs were pinned to the walls, one showing Chris in early boyhood, standing with a woman who might have been his mother. Otherwise, the space was crammed with fishing gear and landscaping tools.
To get warm, Lexy had removed her boots, gotten into the bed, and pulled his two quilts over her. Looking up at the decaying wood under the shingled roof, she counted a dozen separate leaks. Under the larger ones, Chris had arranged pots and bowls to collect the rainwater.
A brindle cat emerged from the piles of gear and jumped up on the bed.
“Do you think he actually lives here, Steve?”
“If he does, he must really love this island,” said Macaulay, removing his boots and joining her under the quilts.
“Why wouldn’t he allow us to pay him?”
“Money obviously isn’t important to him.”
He slid his arm around her back and pulled her close to him. The cat slowly curled up in the hollow between their legs.
“In the summer, this place probably rents for a thousand dollars a week,” he said as the cat lifted its head and began cleaning its front paws.
When Chris came in a few minutes later, the booming wind slammed the door shut behind him. Taking them in, he grinned apologetically and said, “Sorry, but we have to go. The wind has swung around to the north.”
They put their foul-weather gear back on and joined him outside. Chris had hauled his skiff up to the edge of the beach and waves were crashing into it. He told Lexy to sit in the bow and Macaulay to take the stern. Grabbing the oars, he launched the skiff and climbed into the center seat.
On the bottom of the boat lay a coiled rope ladder, a pick, shovel, coils of rope, and two long iron bars, along with several waterproof lanterns. Chris handed Macaulay a zipped watertight satchel that contained the Sten gun and extra magazines.
“I’m going to need you both to bail,” he shouted. “It’s going to be wicked out there.”
Once past the stone breakwater, the skiff began bobbing like a cork. The sea rose to less than six inches below the gunwales, and it sloshed in from both sides as the skiff pitched and rolled.
Lexy and Macaulay kept filling their bailing buckets and heaving the water over the side, but the sea appeared to be winning the contest. As the icy water reached her ankles, Lexy kept her head down, not wanting to look ahead at what still awaited them.
Staring forward from the stern, Macaulay doubted they would make it across without capsizing. It was testament to the big man’s strength and rowing prowess that he was maintaining any headway at all against the wind and waves, literally dragging them through the water.
A small wooden pier at the northern tip of Manana slowly materialized out of the shadows as Chris pulled closer. With the roiling sea lashing the shoreline, the pier jetty was barely out of the water.
As the bow of the skiff drew near the first pilings, Macaulay saw they were dangerously close to being driven straight into the seaweed-covered rock precipice that surrounded it.
At the last moment, Chris reversed direction with one of the oars and turned the skiff broadside to the end of the pier. With amazing agility for a big man, he leaped onto the pi
er and hauled the skiff out of the sea with them still inside.
After tying off the painter to one of the wooden stanchions, Chris began unloading. Dividing the tools and equipment between the three of them, he began climbing the cross members of a narrow-gauge cable car track that he said had once connected the dock with the abandoned coast guard station at the southern end of the island.
A hundred yards up the steep slope, they came to a utility shed that housed an old rotating drum of rusty cable once used to power the car. The shed door was missing, but they were able to gain temporary shelter from the driving rain by kneeling inside.
“We’re almost directly above the remains of Ray’s shacks,” said Chris. “There’s nothing left down there but a few piles of debris.”
“What we’re searching for is probably covered by all this undergrowth,” said Lexy, looking at the low-growing scrub.
“It’s trailing yew,” said Chris. “Very tough . . . Grows everywhere on the island.”
Remembering the shaded area in the sunrise painting up at the museum, Macaulay proposed that they start at the bottom of the slope near the southern tip of the island and work their way back across the slope to the north end.
He and Chris would stand four feet apart and use the iron bars as probes to penetrate the undergrowth along the search line. Lexy would go ahead of them, looking for any hint in the oncoming terrain of a horizontal slab of rock.
“If the slab is about five feet square, we should hit it with one of the pole ends,” said Macaulay.
They moved out across the slope on the first search pattern, driving the poles into the earth at five-foot intervals and moving on. There was bedrock just below the surface almost everywhere. In some places it was two feet down; in others less than a foot. At no point did they find any bedrock that was horizontal.
They finished the first pass.
After moving higher up the slope, they headed back along the next pattern. At one point, Macaulay looked down at the pewter sea. It was now crashing into the north face of Manana with ten-foot-high waves. There would be no chance to row back now. They were stuck there for the duration of the storm.
The craggy ridge of the slope was steep and forbidding. It was also treacherous, with small fissures in the rock ledge from which thickets of gorse grew out of the dirt-filled crevasses and hid the sharp edges underneath.
Lexy fell more than once as she led the way. Macaulay found it tough going even in his hiking boots, and he wondered how Chris was able to manage barefoot, but the Finn navigated the uneven terrain like a mountain goat.
An hour later, they halted the search and took shelter again inside the abandoned utility shed. Chris had brought along a pint of Southern Comfort and they each downed a restorative.
“I think we’ve covered about half the shaded area,” said Macaulay.
“It could be anywhere,” said a discouraged Lexy. “Maybe it isn’t even here.”
The rain and wind came harder as they resumed the search higher up the slope. Halfway across the fourth search line, they came to three large mounds of debris, the ruins of Ray Phillips’s small complex. One of the mounds was considerably larger than the other two.
“That was the one he lived in,” said Chris.
Evidence of the fire that destroyed them could be seen in several charred roofing timbers. All of it had been exposed to the elements ever since. Sheets of corrugated tin lay alongside the timbers, along with a rusting woodstove and various bits of furniture.
They continued on until they reached the southern end of the search sector, and then climbed the slope to begin working their way back again.
“Only two more passes,” Macaulay called out to Lexy as she scanned the ground ahead of her.
They were halfway across the seventh and final pass, when Lexy glanced down the slope and again noticed the rubble piles from the hermit’s shacks. She suddenly remembered the photograph she had seen up in the museum of its interior, with the straw mattress, the side table, the radio, and the kerosene lamp.
“The hermit’s bed,” she called out, as if experiencing a revelation.
“What about it?” asked Chris.
“I saw a photograph of it in the museum,” she said, striding back to him. “It was a straw mattress. What did it rest on?”
He shared the same revelation.
“It was on a pedestal,” he said as the rain ran in rivulets down his smiling face. “A flat stone pedestal.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
6 December
Manana Island
Maine
It took fifteen minutes to clear the rubble from the largest mound. Underneath the debris pile, there was solid bedrock. The driving rain helped to sluice away the remaining waste fragments from the pedestal of the hermit’s bed.
Lexy began a closer examination of it on her hands and knees. The first seam she followed ran horizontally and was barely detectable from the natural rock formation above it. It followed a generally straight course and was almost as long as she was tall, maybe six inches over five feet.
It then met a cross seam that also ran in a generally straight, but slightly bowed line perpendicular to the first one. She concluded that the bowed section could have resulted from trimming by the Norse stonecutters to meld it to the surrounding declivity.
Her excitement gradually increased as she followed the third seam. It ran parallel to the first one. By now she was sure that the veins could not have been formed naturally.
“Well?” asked Macaulay as she stood up.
“I think we’ve found it,” said Lexy, trying to remain calm.
While she continued studying the rest of the slab, Chris began gathering small boulders and flat rocks from the other debris piles. He dumped them near the upper edge of the pedestal.
“What are you doing?” asked Macaulay.
“Finding shelter from the storm,” he answered cryptically.
Kneeling halfway along the top edge of the slab, he located the seam with his fingers and inserted a three-inch-wide steel chisel into the tiny fissure. Picking up an iron mallet, he pounded the head of the chisel, sending stone chips flying into the air. The loud clunking noise was carried away on the wind.
Without pause, the big Finn kept raising the mallet and slamming it down until a noticeable gap began to appear between the edge of the slab and the surrounding natural formation. He stopped when he reached a depth of four inches and crouched down for a closer look.
“Not there yet,” he said, resuming his work.
At a depth of six inches, he pounded the head of the chisel once more and it disappeared into a void. He stood up and went over to retrieve one of the iron bars. After positioning a large flat rock next to the gap, he inserted the flat end of the bar into the crevasse below it.
“I could use a hand here,” he said to Macaulay, who joined him at the other end of the bar.
Together, they bore their weight down on the bar. The top end of the slab rose slowly but steadily until it cleared the surrounding formation by several inches. By then the bar was almost parallel to the ground.
“Slide a rock under each end of the slab,” said Chris to Lexy.
She found two rocks that matched the height of the opening and slid them under the edges. When Chris removed the iron bar from the gap, the slab remained clear.
Chris picked up an even-larger flat stone to use as a new fulcrum. In successive stages, they raised the slab six inches, then a foot, and finally two. Macaulay shined his flashlight into the black opening.
“I can’t see the bottom,” he said, “but it seems to slope downward.”
Chris grabbed one of the coils of rope and anchored one end of it to the slab. He dropped the rest down the opening.
“Who goes first?” he asked.
“I will,” said Lexy, but first giving Chris a brisk kiss on th
e mouth. “Thank you,” she said into his rain-soaked face.
He smiled at Macaulay as if he had just won the Nobel Prize.
Chris handed her one of the yellow battery-powered lanterns before she slid off the edge of the slab and into the tunnel. As Macaulay had thought, it descended in a steep sloping direction.
Once inside, she saw it was a natural fissure in the rock formation, with an irregular opening of roughly three by four feet. She lowered herself carefully along the jagged edges. After about twelve feet, the trajectory of the tunnel leveled off and then began to rise slightly.
She crawled forward with the lantern held high ahead of her.
The passageway continued on for another ten feet before it headed downward again, the opening growing gradually larger. Her heart began to race as she saw the narrow black void slowly expand into what appeared to be a large catacomb.
“Are you all right?” shouted Macaulay. “We can’t see your light.”
“Yes, it’s here,” she shouted back. “Bring the other lanterns and the tools.”
Almost too excited to breathe, she stood up and took a step forward. The floor of the catacomb felt spongy under her boots, and there was a rank smell of decomposition in the air as she raised the lantern to further illuminate the chamber.
Suddenly, something slashed wildly into her hair, and the darkness around her was choked with a dense multitude of fluttering wings. She ripped away the membranous creature trapped near her ear and saw it was a brown bat.
As the furious flapping threatened to overwhelm her, she dropped the lantern and raised her hands to protect her eyes and face. Falling forward, she lay on the stone floor, their wild cries ringing in her ears.
The horrible flapping noise slowly faded away. She realized there had to be another aperture into the catacomb because they had disappeared without ever entering the passage she had taken to reach it.
Macaulay found her lying on the floor, the dead bat lying beside her. A few remnants of the colony were still affixed to their perches in the crevasses of the walls, pulsing silently in the light of the new lanterns.
Valhalla Page 26