Crusader Gold

by David Gibbins

  “He’s taken the news very badly,” Macleod murmured.

  “He revered O’Connor,” Jack said quietly. “And Maria’s his mentor. For someone like him, that’s like pulling the rug out from under your life.”

  “He’s got us now,” Macleod replied.

  “He’s a good guy,” said Jack.

  Costas had been tapping at the workstation next to Jeremy, and leaned back on his chair as they looked over. “Jack. Something to look forward to. I’ve jumped the gun and been in touch with the IMU guy for the Caribbean, Jim Hales out of Grand Cayman. You know he’s an old pal of mine from the US Navy submersibles research lab. He was straight on to Mexico City and they’ve given us the go-ahead for Chichén Itzá. Amazing how that guy clears the red tape. Any time you want to talk setting up a project in that cenote, I’ve got the contact numbers.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Jack caught Costas’ eye, and knew they both sensed the need to keep positive, to look ahead. “I’ll put first claim on the sub-bottom borer after the Golden Horn’s done. Jeremy, you in on this?”

  Jeremy looked at them, pale and distracted. “Huh? If Maria will let me.” He suddenly checked himself, and the room went silent.

  “She will,” Jack said firmly.

  Jeremy tried hard to keep a brave face. “Anyway, I’m not sure if the Well of Sacrifice is where I want to do my first open-water dive.”

  “Don’t worry.” Costas stretched his hand over and placed it on Jeremy’s back.

  “We’ll do some coral first.”

  A red light began flashing in the centre of the room. Ben looked at Jack, his face deadly serious. “To the bridge.” The two men quickly made their way out of the control room and up the stairway, followed by Costas. The captain was busily engaged with the chief officer at the binnacle but immediately gestured to the chart room. “Priority message on the security channel.” Ben was first in the room and snatched up the radio receiver, talking quickly and then putting it down.

  “That was IMU HQ. There’s been an email message. It’s directed us to a secure site and given us a password.”

  Costas was already seated at the computer beside the chart table. “Okay. We’re on line. Address?” Ben read it out and Costas tapped the keyboard. “Password?”

  Ben hesitated, then glanced at Jack. “Menorah.”

  Costas let out a low whistle. “Well, that gives the game away.”

  Jack’s knuckles were white as he gripped Costas’ chair, and his voice was hoarse. “We guessed who we were up against. This confirms it.”

  “It’s addressed to you, Jack.” Costas leaned aside to let Jack read the short email that had appeared on the screen.

  To: Jack Howard

  You and Kazantzakis will arrive by Zodiac at 2300 this evening at the beach landing point you visited this morning. Bring cave diving equipment. You will blindfold yourselves and await our arrival. Any attempt to involve security or make contact with an outside body and your colleague will be executed.

  “Maria’s alive,” Jack breathed. “Thank God.”

  “The beach landing point,” Ben murmured. “Doesn’t surprise me they knew where we were. Probably the Mexican police. If it’s Reksnys, he’ll have prying eyes everywhere along this coast.”

  “And cave gear,” Costas murmured. “What the hell’s that all about? I’m not going cave diving while it’s raining. All the air pockets will flood.”

  “They must have found something,” Jack said.

  “That password?”

  “I truly hope not.”

  “Maria’s somewhere here, near us,” Ben said. “They must have flown her in from Iona. Reksnys has a private jet, and his own runway in the jungle. It’s one of the few things you can’t disguise from satellite surveillance. And he must have known Seaquest II was on the way here even before they hit Iona.”

  “My guess is the hit was a one-man show,” Jack said bleakly.

  “Loki.”

  “We’ve been sent a photo. Better prepare ourselves.” Costas clicked on an attachment below the message, and a picture began to download. It had been taken with a flash inside some kind of chamber with an irregular stone floor and old walls covered in green growth. As the image opened they could see a figure slumped on the floor, a woman. It was horrifying, an image of torture, the kind of image that leaked out of Iraq and untold Third World hellholes. She was filthy, wearing a clinging T-shirt partly ripped open over her breasts. Her dark hair was matted to her neck, and her arms were streaked with green from the floor. She had been trying to look at the camera but had flinched in the flash. Her eyes were puffed up and closed, her mouth flecked with white, and she had an ugly abrasion over her cheekbone which was oozing blood and pus.

  Jack felt a lurching shock of recognition. “Maria.” He felt physically sick. His hands slipped off the back of the chair and he sat down heavily on the bench beside it. As he looked at the image again, his horror turned to anger, to seething rage.

  The captain appeared at the door. “Message from Iona. There’s a police forensics guy who’s been allowed to talk to us.” He saw the screen, faltered.

  “Coming.” Jack’s voice was cold, emotionless.

  Ten minutes later Jack was back in the control room. It was empty except for Jeremy; Macleod and Lanowski had left for the bridge deck a few minutes before. Jeremy was still at his screen, working quietly, printing images from the web and bookmarking pages of Toltec art. Above him the window was flecked with the first lashings of rain, and Jack could see that the weather was deteriorating rapidly. He paused, feeling utterly drained from what he had just heard, looked again at Jeremy, then made his way through the consoles. He did not know how to break the news. He pulled up a chair and flipped it round to sit with his back to the window, then looked intently at Jeremy’s images.

  “Good work,” he said quietly. “I could never have interpreted this stuff. I didn’t do Mesoamerican archaeology like you.”

  “I’ve made one really interesting discovery.” Jeremy passed Jack a sheet of paper. “You remember the ancient Aztec prophecy about the return of the god-king Quetzalcoatl? When the Spanish arrived in Tenochtitlán in central Mexico in 1519, the emperor Moctezuma thought Cortés was Quetzalcoatl. It’s one reason the Spanish conquest happened so quickly.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, Quetzalcoatl was a Toltec, a semi-legendary king. According to Aztec legend at the time of Moctezuma, he’d been exiled from their kingdom five centuries before, and promised to return from the land of the rising sun.”

  “Five centuries before,” Jack mused. “That puts it in the eleventh century, smack in our period.”

  “Right. The land of the rising sun, due east from the Aztec heartland in the vale of Mexico, was almost certainly the Yucatán peninsula. There’s some historical corroboration for this, because that’s about the time the Toltecs invaded Chichén Itzá.”

  Jack looked hard at Jeremy, began to speak, then decided to let him carry on.

  “It gets really intriguing when you look at the Maya sources,” Jeremy said.

  “What we know of the final years of the Maya comes mainly from the Books of Chilam Balam, the Jaguar Prophet, mostly written down by local scribes in the Latin alphabet after the Spanish conquest. The books were hidden away and jealously guarded. Each one relates to a different community in the north Yucatán, a bit like the Norse sagas in Iceland. One of the most extraordinary prophecies concerns the arrival of bearded men from the east.”

  “Bearded men?”

  “You follow me? A lot of scholars have dismissed this as a later embellishment.

  Some of the books weren’t written down until the eighteenth or even nineteenth century. But another book’s just come to light, in the Vatican archives in Rome, of all places. It looks like the earliest of them all, partly written in Maya script, apparently confiscated by the first Jesuit missionaries in the Yucatán in the sixteenth century. It contains the legends and prophecies of the Maya commun
ity north of Chichén Itzá. There’s the same story of bearded men, but with a twist. In this one they have a king, and he fights a great battle with the oppressors of the Maya, presumably the Toltecs. Then he disappears into the underworld, and the Maya await his return. It may be the origin of the Quezalcoatl prophecy of the Aztecs, except in the Maya story he’s called Wukub Kaqix, the monstrous bird-diety, the eagle-god.”

  Jack glanced at a picture of the jade pendant pinned beside the monitor. “Pretty standard image around here.”

  “But also the name of Harald Hardrada’s ship, the Eagle. In the Norse sagas there are some hints that when the Vikings burnt their boats, went to war with no intention of returning, they sometimes cut off the stems of the ships and carried them forward like battle standards. It was a signal that they would fight to the death, that they were on a one-way trip to Valhalla. It was a way of striking fear into the hearts of their enemies. Maybe that’s what happened here, and the local Maya saw it.”

  “Fantastic. This is fantastic, Jeremy. This is just what we’re looking for.” Jack suddenly leaned forward and put his head in his hands, all pretence at bonhomie gone. He could keep it from Jeremy no longer. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. We’ve had news from Iona.”

  “I know.” Jeremy spoke softly, and put down the book he had been holding.

  Jack gazed up at him. He looked a world older than the ebullient graduate student he had first met the week before. “I knew from the moment I heard O’Connor had been murdered. He spoke of it, prepared me for it. I know what happened in Iona.” Jeremy paused, tried to speak, then the words came out as a hoarse whisper. “The blood-eagle.”

  18

  IT WAS WELL PAST MIDNIGHT, PROBABLY PUSHING ONE in the morning. It had already been dark when Jack and Costas had slipped away from Seaquest II and driven the Zodiac ashore, reaching the beach rendezvous point well before the appointed time. All Jack could hear now was the incessant drumming of the rain, the sound rising in a crescendo and falling again as each downpour swept over them. The humidity was stifling. He knew he was in a small vehicle, a four-wheel drive by the sound of it, hunched in the backseat beside Costas. For what seemed an eternity but was probably only half an hour they had been jostling and bouncing along a rough track, heading somewhere into the jungle from the beach. The injury to Jack’s thigh was throbbing. They had followed their instructions scrupulously and waited blindfolded beside the Zodiac with their diving equipment. Their captor had come without a word, bustling them into the vehicle without revealing anything about himself, about where they were going.

  It was unnerving, but Jack felt reassured having Costas bumping along beside him cursing every rut and pothole.

  Ever since receiving the email ultimatum Jack had known they would be on their own, that they would have to follow the word of Maria’s captors and trust to luck. Whatever was in store for them, it seemed a fair certainty that it involved diving. And with the route they were now taking, somewhere inland seemed likely. Cenotes, underground rivers. The rain was beginning to prey on Jack’s mind. With a storm like this, the floodwaters could be dangerously high, filling underground caverns with water. And this close to the sea, the freshwater currents that honeycombed the Yucatán could be treacherously strong, sucking the rainwater through the labyrinth of limestone channels and out to sea.

  The vehicle ground to a halt and Jack snapped back to reality. He was pulled out of the door and led across uneven ground, slipping and sliding on wet vegetation. The rain was torrential, pounding his senses. Then he was inside some kind of shelter, out of the rain but steaming hot. Costas bumped up behind him, and he heard their gear being offloaded. Then he was pushed forward again. His blindfold was ripped off, leaving him blinking and reeling. Duct tape was crudely slapped round his wrists. He was somewhere gloomy, candlelit. He saw Costas a few feet to his left, and a man in front of them. Jack immediately knew who it was. Pieter Reksnys was the spitting image of his father Andrius, the man Jack had seen in the photo of the SS Ahnenerbe team in Greenland, the picture Kangia had given Macleod.

  Kangia. The icefjord. It all seemed a million miles away, back beyond some boundary they had crossed to come here, to a place where hell and its demons suddenly seemed far more than just a medieval nightmare.

  Jack looked around. They were in a room, a stone chamber, maybe an old church. It was hot as a boiler-house, and Jack was dripping sweat. The ceiling was high, corbelled. There was a circular hole in the floor. The wall beside him was painted, vivid flickers of colour revealed in the candlelight.

  Then he saw Maria.

  He had tried to prepare himself, gazed at the emailed photograph before they left Seaquest II, but the reality was still shocking. She was sitting against the wall opposite the mural, groggy, swaying slightly, her legs drawn up and her wrists taped together. Her mouth was duct-taped. Her face was streaked and swollen, and her cheek had a raw welt across it. Their eyes met.

  Jack tried to control his anger. “Did he do that to you?”

  Maria looked at him imploringly, then shook her head, motioning to somewhere behind Jack. He turned round and saw the only other person in the room, the man who had picked them up from the beach. It had to be Loki. The same slicked-back hair, the spare, mean features, the washed-out eyes. Like father, like son. Loki grinned as he saw Jack looking at him, turned to the light, drew one finger hard down his cheek. Then Jack remembered O’Connor’s description.

  The scar.

  Costas had been staring aghast at Maria, and he suddenly lunged towards Loki.

  The response was terrifyingly supple, quick and fluid like a hunting animal. Loki had Costas in a half-nelson and was pulling his head up and sideways, raising him effortlessly off the floor despite Costas’ greater weight.

  “Release him.” Jack heard Reksnys’ voice for the first time, harsh, grating, an undefinable accent with a hint of east European. Loki obeyed his father and pushed Costas away. Jack stared at Loki. This was the ruthless killer described by O’Connor, an independent operator who relished working alone, yet he was totally subservient to his father. Rage was not his only weakness.

  Costas picked himself up, grimacing with distaste, wiping his shoulder where Loki had held him ostentatiously. Loki sneered and slunk back to lurk in the far corner of the chamber. Reksnys pulled out a pistol, instantly recognisable to Jack as a Nazi-era Luger, and aimed it at Maria’s legs.

  “First one knee, then the other. Then I work my way up.” His voice had an ugly edge to it. “Or you cease being foolish.”

  At first there was no reaction from Costas, then a surly nod. Maria had gone sheet white at the sight of the pistol, and was staring at it in a daze.

  Reksnys turned to Jack. “I want you to study that wall-painting. Closely.”

  Jack looked at him stone-faced. Then he looked at Maria, who nodded weakly, mumbling through the tape over her mouth, encouraging him. He gave Reksnys a look of contempt and then turned to the mural.

  It was two-dimensional, without depth. It had once been a dazzling explosion of colour, deep browns, reds and greens on a yellow and blue background. He immediately grasped the narrative sequence, the victors and the vanquished. To the right he saw a melée of boats, elaborately attired warriors with sloped foreheads, paddled vessels with symmetrical endposts. One vessel with a square sail, different warriors.

  A square sail.

  The next scene was a ferocious jungle battle. Some of the fighting was aboveground, some in a fast-flowing river, seemingly belowground. Mutilated bodies lay everywhere. The victors carried atlatls, spear-throwers, and square shields with the figure of a war god. They were led by an eagle-warrior, a muscular giant wearing an eagle mask with a staring eye, with wings on his back and huge tearing talons on his feet. His warriors wore jaguar-skin headdresses, anklets and wristlets, heavy jade necklaces and earrings. They fought with clubs, and fell on their victims with enraged, terrifying eyes. Their opponents had round, red shields, different headgea
r, different weapons.

  Jack peered at the weapons again, then looked at Maria out of the corner of his eye. She must have been transfixed by this scene, stared at it as she lay on the floor before they arrived. She must have seen what he had just seen. She nodded at him, almost imperceptibly. She had seen it. He turned back.

  Now he understood.

  Jack betrayed nothing in his expression. He moved on, to the left. Captives were on the ground, some lying on their backs, some kneeling. Some were shackled, men not attired as warriors, captured servants being led off as personal slaves by each of the victorious warriors. Jack thought of the Viking skeleton at L’Anse aux Meadows, of the man who had somehow made the trek three thousand miles north, who almost made it back to his own world. This was the nightmare he was escaping from.

  The next scene dominated the painting. Jack saw hideous images of death, of mutilation. On top of a terraced platform stood a priest-king, wearing the mask of the eagle-god. He was passing sentence on those taken in the battle. On the lower step were captives being tortured, having their fingernails ripped out. A few steps up a prisoner raised his hands in vain for mercy, and another was splayed on the steps, fainting, bleeding profusely from his fingers. At the top a priest plunged a knife into the chest of a victim, gouging out his heart, his soul ascending heavenward from the altar in a bloody trail. A severed head rested on a bed of leaves, and others tumbled in a cascade of blood down the steps. All around were fires, flaming pyres of incense. The ritual was not restricted to the hapless prisoners of war. Below a skull-faced deity, Toltec warriors offered their own blood from self-inflicted wounds, gushing out all over their bodies. On a stone table beside the king were three richly bedecked women, shaven-headed, being offered a bloodletting implement by a servant. One woman was drawing a thorn-studded rope through a hole in her tongue. Beside her a nobleman was doing the same, through his penis.