Crusader Gold

by David Gibbins

  “Lanowski did a best-fit calculation for where the longship might have made landfall after being swept across by a summer north-westerly from the Florida Keys,” Jack said. “We chose this particular spot because of the river. The Vikings would have been desperate for fresh water, and they would have been able to draw up their longship in the creek. Also the edge of the river’s a likely place for a Maya track into the interior.”

  “This may even have been a Maya beach landing, a harbour,” Jeremy added.

  “Most of the major Maya sites are well away from the sea, but they were pretty competent seafarers. I’ve seen paintings showing large war canoes, easily the size of a Norse longship.”

  “Not exactly what Harald and his men were hoping for,” Costas said.

  “If they were apprehensive about the Scraelings, these guys down here would have had them shaking in their breeches, fearless Viking warriors or not,”

  Jeremy replied. “The Vikings may have dreamt about that final showdown at Ragnarøk, but once they saw the reality of what they were up against, they might have had second thoughts.”

  “Probably no choice by this stage,” Jack said. “Their ship would have been a wreck after the voyage, and they would have been starving. They were committed to ending it all here. My guess is they would have set off into the jungle.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask,” Costas said. “That character Pieter Reksnys. The Nazi’s son, Loki’s father. Didn’t he end up in Mexico too?”

  “Apparently when O’Connor was a Jesuit missionary in Central America in the 1960s, he knew all about Reksnys’ whereabouts.” Jack raised his hand to his eyes, shielding them from the glare of the sun. “But O’Connor was keeping a low profile, so he avoided an encounter. There was a price on his head in the félag even then. Apparently, when Andrius Reksnys and his son sold their opal mine in Australia they moved first to Costa Rica. It was a haven for Nazis on the run.

  Then when the Nazi hunt began to die down in the late 1960s, Reksnys senior moved back to Europe, to the remote castle in the Obersaltzburg where he was gunned down five years ago.”

  “The dead old man in the newspaper photo, with the swastika armband.”

  “Right.”

  “O’Connor say anything more about that?”

  “Not when I spoke to him,” Jack said. “He won’t reveal who they used, and we don’t need to know. Maybe he’ll change his mind. But he said no regrets. I think he felt it was his duty as a former member of the félag to make amends and see that justice caught up with Reksnys.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “The younger Reksnys, Pieter, the one who’d helped his father Andrius with those SS executions, had more than enough money to retire and devote himself to providing his own son with the same twisted view of the world. But like a lot of these characters he couldn’t keep his fingers out of organised crime, especially in this neck of the woods, where virtually anything goes.”

  “Drugs? Guns?” Costas said.

  “He dabbled in them, but he came to focus more and more on the antiquities’

  black market, eventually to the exclusion of everything else. It became his obsession, and was immensely lucrative. From the 1960s there was huge demand in America and Europe for Mesoamerican antiquities, for decorated pottery, gold, jade, stone carvings. According to O’Connor, Reksnys had his eye on the Yucatán even before it began to open up to foreign investors.”

  “He’s here?” Costas said, looking out into the jungle. “Right under our very noses?”

  “This place was like an untapped gold mine. Even now the Mexican authorities have huge problems policing the area, especially in the tracts of jungle owned by foreigners like Reksnys. And just like the mafia who run the tourist industry, guys like Reksnys have plenty of connections among the politicos and the police.

  It’s as corrupt as hell down here. There are literally hundreds of uncharted Maya sites dotting the jungle, to be picked over at leisure if the few honest police and the archaeologists can be kept at bay.”

  “Any idea where Reksnys operates?”

  “He’s very elusive, lives barricaded away. But we know he owns a large area of jungle in the north Yucatán, between the coast where we are now and the inland site of Chichén Itzá.”

  Costas whistled. “Seems an incredible coincidence.”

  “There’s no way the félag could have made the connection with the Yucatán, except by pure guesswork. The only clue to this place we have is that jade pendant from L’Anse aux Meadows, and there’s no evidence anyone found it before us. But if there is something here, if Harald and his men truly got here, then Reksnys may have come across it by pure chance. He’s probably got more people working for him than there are archaeologists in the whole of the Yucatán. My hope is that if we do come up with anything, it’s in one of the policed archaeological zones and not out here in the wilderness.”

  “So the menorah would be right up his street,” Costas murmured. “Not just as a sacred artefact for the félag, but from a professional point of view. He’d know exactly how to market it to the highest bidder.”

  “That’s the one thing that really scares O’Connor. And remember we’re not just talking private collectors. Once again the world would have to contend with a Nazi influencing the course of Jewish history.”

  “How’s Maria getting along?”

  Jack lightened up for a moment. “Kicking herself for missing the L’Anse aux Meadows excitement, but planning to join us here unless we draw a blank. I’d be very pleased to see her away from Iona.”

  “And back with us.”

  “Too many males around here.”

  “You know she’s close to Father O’Connor.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean very close.”

  “I know.” Jack paused. “I think it began after that conference in Oxford, before they showed us the Mappa Mundi.”

  “Something else that malignant force in the Vatican could hold against him.”

  “O’Connor’s been walking a tightrope in more ways than one. But Maria was always very discreet.” Jack paused again and looked down. “Anyway, she’s one of my oldest friends. I knew her even before I had the dubious honour of meeting you.”

  “It was destiny,” Costas said. “Where would you be without my technical backup? I’ve never come across anyone more hopeless with computers. And I’d be stuck inside some windowless prison in Silicon Valley, earning tons of money but having no fun.” He swatted a mosquito from his neck, then ducked his head as the wind blew up a swirl of sand that hit them like a blast from a furnace. “No icebergs, no beach holidays.”

  “And no murderous psychopath on your trail,” Jack replied. “I just hope to God O’Connor gets to Interpol before Loki gets to him.”

  “What’s your fallback if everything goes belly-up?”

  Jack gave Costas a harrowed look as they and Jeremy began to push the Zodiac back into the surf. “I don’t have one.”

  Three hours later, after a jolting ride along a jungle track, they came to the entrance to Chichén Itzá, some sixty kilometres inland from the beach. The ruins of the ancient city covered a vast area, though only the central precinct had been cleared of jungle and restored. Grey limestone structures reared above the tree canopy ahead, but Jack knew that all round them lay ruins submerged in the undergrowth that had entombed the city in the centuries since its abandonment. Some of the images seemed startlingly familiar, pyramids and colonnaded temples, but others were not: sacrificial platforms, terrifying hybrid animal and human sculptures, images that seemed from another planet. It was eerie, as if something were not quite right, as if they were entering a film set of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia where some attempt had been made at historical accuracy, but much had been left to the imagination of a designer rooted in some particularly lurid science fiction.

  Jack was in the front seat of the four-wheel drive provided for them by the Mexican archaeological authorities, and as he opened the d
oor he was greeted by an official who ushered them into the site. A few days earlier an earth tremor had caused concern about the stability of the ancient structures, and the site had been closed off to tourists while an evaluation was carried out. Jack thanked the official and found a shady place to unfold his map. He was joined by Costas.

  They were wearing shorts, T-shirts and jungle boots, but the summer heat was overwhelming and Costas was already dripping with sweat.

  “Thinking fondly of our iceberg?” Jack asked, with some amusement.

  “No way.” Costas puffed himself up, but looked doleful and hot under his panama hat. “Remember, I’m Greek? Heat’s in the blood.”

  “Right.”

  Jeremy walked over to them after talking in Spanish with the official, and pointed out a route on the map. “I was forced to spend a summer here as an undergraduate on a field training project, before I saw the light,” he said ruefully. “I’ll try to give a balanced account, but I have to tell you this place gave me nightmares. The Vikings were therapy after this.”

  “What kind of time period are we looking at?” Costas asked.

  “The Maya were one of the great early civilisations, as you know,” Jeremy said.

  “They flourished here around AD 300 to 900, that’s from about the end of the Roman Empire to the Viking age. But by the mid-eleventh century this place was ruled by the Toltecs, a warrior caste from the north. The Maya were still here, but they became the underclass, enslaved and brutalized. The Toltecs swept into the Yucatán around the time Harald was doing his stint in the Varangian Guard.

  A lot of what you see here isn’t Maya but dates from the Toltec period.”

  They trudged along the path under the canopy of the jungle, passing the occasional iguana and a band of ring-tailed monkeys, their chattering competing with the raucous shrieks of toucans and evil-looking blackbirds. The heat was staggering, far more humid than Jack had experienced at archaeological sites in the Mediterranean, and he struggled to imagine people living normal lives in a place so far from the ameliorating effects of the sea. After a few minutes they came out into a wide grassy precinct surrounded by colossal stone buildings. It was an extraordinary sight, the quintessential image of ancient Mesoamerican civilization, dominated by an imposing temple that rose in stepped tiers like a pyramid.

  “Don’t try to tell me these people weren’t influenced by the Egyptians,” Costas said, wiping the sweat from his face.

  “That’s the Kukulkan Pyramid, the focal point of Chichén Itzá.” Jeremy led them past the pyramid as he talked. “But that building over there is where most of the sacrifices took place,” he said. “The Temple of the Warriors. You can see the stone altar at the top where the living victims were tied down and had their hearts ripped out.”

  “Delightful.” Costas grunted. “But I thought all that kind of stuff was exaggerated by the Spanish.”

  “Nope.” Jeremy led them to the north side of the precinct, past a structure where Jack saw a carved stone glyph that looked strikingly familiar. Jeremy saw him hesitate and called back. “The eagle-god. It’s exactly the same as the jade pendant from L’Anse aux Meadows. I’m sure it came from here.” He stopped beside the next building, a wide stone platform about his height, and waited for the other two to catch up. “You asked about sacrifice. This one’s my favourite.

  It’s called the Tzompantli, the platform of the Skulls. The rotting heads of enemies were exhibited here, and just in case you needed reminding they were carved round the platform edge.” They saw that the sides of the platform were covered with hundreds of leering skulls, their jaws gaping and eyes wide open in terror and anguish. “To cap it all, you have to imagine that all the buildings here, the pyramid and the Temple of the Warriors, this platform, were painted red.”

  “With human blood, I assume.” Costas traced his finger over one of the skulls and grimaced. “I know we had our bad episodes—the Roman Colosseum, the Spanish Inquisition and all that—but genocide and mass murder were never institutionalised, never part of our way of life. For these people it was normal.

  You’re born here, you get sacrificed. There was something deeply dysfunctional about this society.”

  “The Maya had quite a lot going for them,” Jeremy replied cautiously. “Amazing architecture and art, phenomenal economic organisation. States that would easily have vied with the early city-states of the Near East.”

  “Four thousand years before the Maya,” Jack said.

  “And the Maya had no bronze,” Costas added.

  “Or iron, or wheels.”

  “Right.” Jeremy smiled wryly. “This society was the pinnacle of what was going on in the Americas before the Spanish conquest. But everything went apeshit when the Toltecs showed up. They were the horror warriors of ancient Mesoamerica, the SS of their day. Everything you’ve heard about the Aztecs, those accounts of mass human sacrifice recorded by the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, magnify that several times and put it back five hundred years. Imagine the heart of darkness, apocalypse now, this is the place. The Maya themselves weren’t exactly averse to human sacrifice, but when the Toltecs arrived they turned this place into a death camp.”

  “No wonder Reksnys settled here,” Costas murmured. “He would have felt right at home.”

  “The fact is, for medieval Europeans this place would have been their vision of hell,” Jack said. “For the Vikings it would have exceeded their worst nightmares about the end of the world, about Ragnarøk. For any prisoner brought here it would have been a one-way ticket to Dante’s Inferno.”

  “There’s something else I want you to see,” Jeremy said, walking briskly on.

  “Follow me.” They passed the Platform of the Skulls and out of the central precinct, and then followed Jeremy along a wide processional way that led down a shallow gradient and through the jungle to the north. After about two hundred metres they scrambled down an irregular rocky slope and stood on the edge of an eroded platform. In front of them was a vast sinkhole, some fifty metres across and twenty metres deep, its rim overhung with lush greenery and the limestone walls receding inwards through a series of striated ledges. The pool at the bottom was a putrid green, covered with a dense layer of algae and fallen vegetation. There was no access point to the water, and they could see that for anyone unfortunate enough to slip off the platform there would be no escape.

  “The Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichén Itzá,” Jack murmured. “I’ve always wanted to see this.”

  “Cenote?” Costas said.

  “A Spanish word, from the Mayan dzonot, meaning ‘sacred well, well of sacrifice,’” Jeremy explained. “I was telling you about it on the beach. The whole of the Yucatán was once a coral reef, then it became a limestone plateau during the Ice Age when the sea level lowered. Over millions of years rainwater percolated into the limestone and created a huge labyrinth of caves and tunnels, filled with stalagtites and stalagmites. Then at the end of the Ice Age, eight thousand years ago, the sea level rose again and the system flooded. Caves with ceilings that remained above water eventually collapsed, creating sinkholes like this one.”

  “What about the earth tremors?”

  “We’re just south of a huge meteorite impact site, the Chicxulub crater, which underlies much of the north Yucatán.”

  “The one that wiped out the dinosaurs?” Costas said, looking around him with mock alarm. “Anything bad that didn’t happen here?”

  Jeremy grinned. “The dinosaur disaster’s true. The rim is marked by a ring of cenotes, many of them collapsed into sinkholes. Nobody really knows why, but the crater underneath has some kind of de-stabilising effect on the limestone.”

  “A cave-diver’s paradise.”

  “It’s incredible,” Jeremy enthused. “Divers have explored systems fifty, a hundred kilometres long. Some of them are underwater rivers that run out into the sea. Below the slime it’s crystal clear, like swimming in an aquarium filled with spectacular calcite formations. But it�
�s also lethal. It put me off learning to dive when I was here as a student. More divers have died here than almost anywhere else in the world.”

  “The Toltecs would have approved,” Jack said.

  “Let me guess,” Costas said. “They sacrificed humans here as well.”

  “The Well of Sacrifice was first dredged for artefacts in the 1930s, but then in the 1950s it was one of the first archaeological sites to be explored using scuba equipment,” Jack replied. “There have been other expeditions. Cousteau came here. The deepest deposits are still unexplored, but masses of artefacts have come up—pottery vessels, gold, jade. Almost all of it was thrown into the well intact, ritually deposited. And they found human skeletons. Hundreds of them.”

  “It’s the same story all over the Yucatán,” Jeremy added. “Cenotes were the source of fresh water for the Maya, but also entrances to the underworld. They sacrificed warriors, maidens, children. That little building over there is the temazcal, a kind of sauna where victims were ritually purified. The stone ledges we’ve just come down were spectator seating, where the Toltec elite could sit and watch.”

  “I guess variety is the spice of life,” Costas murmured distastefully. “Once you’ve seen a few thousand hearts ripped out back there at the temple, you might want a change of scene.”

  An official appeared sweating and panting behind them on the processional way, waving a cellphone and beckoning for Jeremy to take it. Jeremy hesitated, knowing that he had been mistaken for the leader. He looked towards Jack, who smiled and gestured for him to go. As Jeremy clambered up with the official to find higher ground for better reception, Jack turned back and peered over the edge of the platform. The pool looked strangely benign, but for a moment his breath tightened as he felt the terror of the victims a thousand years ago poised at the edge of the underworld.

  “You say there’s still stuff down there.” Costas wiped the sheen of sweat from his face, then looked questioningly at Jack.

  “Most of the artefacts and bones higher up have been lifted, but there are still deeply buried deposits where you might find heavier objects.”