Jack was carrying a torch, and he swept the beam over the island before placing his hand on the stalagmite nearest to them. It was a peculiar shape, almost seeming to curve above them, on the face of it no more extraordinary than anything else they were seeing around them.
“My God.” Jack’s voice was resonant, echoing.
“What is it?”
Jack stumbled back a few steps, then shone his torch up the stalagmite. He remembered what Jeremy had suggested when they had last spoken. His voice was taut with amazement. “Remember our longship in the ice?”
Costas followed his gaze, puzzled, and then gasped. The top of the stalagmite was a bulbous shape that extended out from the curve. They were looking at the prow of a Viking ship, the details of its surface lost under a millennium of accretion but the shape unmistakable. It was an astonishing sight.
“They must have carried it with them from the longship,” Jack murmured.
“Erected it here, a last battle standard.” He shone the torch at the bulbous form on top. “The Eagle.”
“Look on either side,” Costas exclaimed. “I could be wrong, but I think it’s a shield wall.”
Jack saw a line of concretion about a metre high extended in an arc, facing the entrance to the cavern. Costas was right. The ridge was undulating with striking regularity, made up of identical semi-circles each about the width of a man.
Three on one side of the stem-post, four on the other. They looked as if they had been iced over. Below them were long, square shapes that could have been timbers, perhaps crossbeams salvaged from the ship. Jack remembered Jeremy telling him about Viking defences built from ship’s timbers. He looked over the wall, to the space behind where the defenders would have made their stand. It was the most astonishing sight of all. Against the rampart was the spectral shape of a man, propped up on his back, limbs spread out. It had been a skeleton, but was covered with such a thick layer of accretion that it seemed to be fleshed out again, like one of the plaster shapes of Roman bodies from Pompeii.
It was wearing a helmet. The conical shape, the nose-guard, just discernible in the accretion. There was a shield, emerging at an angle as if it had been mauled. He had been tall, at least Jack’s height.
Jack stared, transfixed.
Could it be him?
Jack leaned back on the fossilised shield wall, his voice hoarse with emotion. “On the wall-painting, that river below the jungle battle. I think that’s where we are now. And I think this was where the final drama was played out. Harald Hardrada’s last stand.”
“You think the enemy in the painting really were Vikings?”
“The image of the menorah clinches it.”
“So this was as far as Harald got from the sea.”
“Let’s imagine a dozen of them, not many more,” Jack said. “The size of the vanquished army on the painting was probably an exaggeration, a way of making the victory seem greater.” He paused, marshalling his thoughts. “They make their way inland with everything they can bring, their weapons and armour, their treasure, what they can easily salvage and carry from the ship to build a shelter. Much like Cortés and his tiny band of conquistadors hundreds of years later, only with no intention of ever returning.”
“Then they bump into the locals.”
“The Maya are dazzled, think they’re gods, saviours arrived to rescue them from the Toltecs. But word inevitably spreads to the Toltecs, to the overlord in Chichén Itzá. He dispatches an army, there’s a desperate battle in the jungle.
The few survivors seek a refuge, a final stronghold. The Alamo, Rorke’s Drift in the British Zulu War. In the Yucatán, if that’s what you want, you go underground. They discover the jungle temple, maybe they’re directed here by the Maya. They make their way down the sacrificial route. They light their way with burning torches, maybe burn their timbers on the island. Viking warriors fully girded for battle, ready to defend their shield wall at the edge of the world, wreathed in fire. But I doubt whether the Toltecs would have been daunted.
Once the Toltecs find out and follow them, it’s only a matter of time before they’re overwhelmed.”
“I hope for their sake none of them was taken prisoner.”
“The only one we know about is your friend from L’Anse aux Meadows. Probably a retainer, a servant.
Jeremy told me the Toltecs sometimes took enemy servants as their own slaves, a way of stamping their dominance on the vanquished. You saw it on the wall-painting. Maybe he was a turncoat. Some of the Vikings would have been half crazed, starving. Maybe he told the Toltecs about this place. Maybe his escape years later and voyage back to L’Anse aux Meadows was some kind of atonement. We’ll never know. But he wasn’t the only one to survive. Judging by the painting, several of Harald’s warriors suffered the ultimate horror, taken to Chichén Itzá for sacrifice.”
“With the menorah.”
Jack suddenly remembered the breathtaking image they had seen on the painting, the fiery radiance. “Reksnys is wrong. I’m convinced the menorah isn’t here. The Toltecs may have left the Viking weapons here as some kind of offering, but I think they took the menorah with them from the battle site. We know the Toltecs didn’t offer all of Harald’s treasure to the gods, because we have those two coins incorporated in the jade pendant from L’Anse aux Meadows.”
“Which leaves us with a problem.”
“Reksnys is going to be disappointed.”
“We can’t go back empty-handed,” Costas said. “At best we’d be buying time, but probably not much of it. Chances are we’d be back down that hole again, dead before we hit the water. As Reksnys himself said, Maria was only saved on a whim. As soon as he finds out we don’t have the menorah, he’ll get bored.
These people are always like that.” He looked at Jack. “He’ll let his son’s temper run its course.”
“They might try to follow us down here.”
“Loki might. There were a couple of old scuba rigs, gear Reksnys brought along before the chance came to use us, and Loki could easily follow the trail of lightsticks through the tunnel. But if he reaches the stage of going after us like that, he’ll be in a rage. That’d be curtains for Maria.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“We don’t have any choice.”
“These underground river systems always come up somewhere,” Costas said ruefully. “But it could be miles.”
“Could be less.”
Five minutes later they sat fully kitted up in the shallows, their helmet lights switched back on. Their voices sounded tinny and distant throught the intercom after the resonance of the chamber. Costas finished a final check on Jack’s rebreather, then looked at him intently through his visor. “You up for this?”
“All other options are closed. There’s no other exit from the cavern.”
“Okay. We’re looking for natural light, any hint. It’s just after five a.m., so should be dawn pretty soon. We’ll let the current take us. At least we can be sure that’ll come out somewhere. Good to go?”
“Good to go.”
They slipped into the water and dropped down towards the darkness. Once they had made the decision, Jack had not allowed himself to think beyond the practicalities of what they were doing. A few minutes earlier this had seemed like certain death, a one-way express that had nearly finished Costas. Now they were choosing to take it. He stared at the gaping blackness of the tunnel ahead.
His mind was blank to the possibility of failure. This place had all the ingredients of his worst nightmare, and the only way to fight the fear was to keep focused.
He thought of Maria.
Suddenly they were dragged into the current. Jack was flipped over and struggled to right himself, fleetingly aware of huge speed, of luminous stalagmites appearing and disappearing like giant white sentinels on either side.
Then they were in the tunnel, twisting round a bend, blackness all around. The tunnel seemed to meander and turn like a living beast, seeking out
a route among the calcite obstructions. They were completely at the mercy of the current, trusting the flow to keep them from crashing into the limestone walls on either side. Jack forced his head forward until his body was in line with the tunnel, Costas to his left, and they both extended their arms in a desperate attempt to use their hands as foils. Bulbous shapes appeared out of nowhere, caught in the beam of their headlamps, then vanished behind them with only inches to spare. Suddenly Jack was aware of a fork ahead, a widening in the tunnel divided by a column, a white pillar they were hurtling towards at terrifying speed.
“The right-hand tunnel!” Costas yelled. “I can see light!”
Jack swerved his hands to the right, craning his body to follow the main flow of the current. It was no use. At the last second he pulled his hands in violently to avoid smashing into the column and they tumbled into the left-hand tunnel, a narrowing pit of darkness with smooth walls like an ice chute. Jack bounced off Costas and felt an excruciating jolt in his thigh, from his injury in the ice. For a terrifying moment he was back inside the berg. “Wrong turn,” Costas yelled.
Jack clutched him, could see his face behind his visor, frantic. “This is a side channel. “The main channel was flowing up towards the surface. I saw light.”
The current in the channel began to eddy, then slowed down. Even so it was impossible to swim against, and they were being pulled down inexorably. They clawed at the walls, to no avail. Suddenly everything was distorted, hazy, something Jack had last seen in the icefjord where the freshwater runoff from the glacier had formed a layer above the seawater. The water was shimmering, oily, the change in refraction caused by salinity throwing his senses into disarray.
He began to feel disorientated.
“Shit,” Costas exclaimed. “That was the halocline. We’re below sea level.”
It was as if they had passed through into another dimension, into some darker world. The calcium formations were gone now, and the view ahead was bleak, forbidding. The intense, directional beam of light seemed to narrow the shaft, increasing Jack’s unease. The tunnel was elliptical, about five metres across, but the ceiling had lowered and a deep bed of gravel rose up from the floor. They were still going down, their lights boring a hole into the darkness. “Forty metres depth,” Costas said. “The Yucatán cave systems bottom out at about fifty metres, maximum. We’ve got to be going back up soon.” Jack looked at his depth gauge. Forty-six metres. Fifty-two metres. The ceiling and the floor had almost converged, and they were wedged in now, burrowing in the gravel to make space. Then they came to a standstill in a cloud of silt. Jack aimed his headlamp into the slit ahead, a crack only inches above the gravel. It was a dead end. They were trapped.
Costas heaved himself back beside Jack, his rebreather clunking against the ceiling and his body grinding through the gravel. “Something’s not right,” he said. “We were being pulled down by a current, and that’s got to go somewhere.
And this gravel pile curves down at the sides, shaped by water movement. There has to be an outlet.”
He pushed himself down the right side of the gravel pile, into a narrow channel at the bottom, and pulled himself ahead until only his fins were showing. Jack closed his eyes, then opened them again, concentrating on little things, like the shape of a fossil in the limestone a few inches from his face. He looked down again to where Costas had disappeared. He could see that the crevasse was free of silt. Swept clear by the current. Costas was right.
“Jack. Follow me.” He did as Costas instructed, digging his hands into the gravel and heaving himself down the side of the tunnel. He felt the flow of water, saw light ahead. “It goes up,” Costas said excitedly. Jack followed slowly, squeezing through a boulder choke. There was hardly any room to move, and he was reduced to wriggling, his rebreather pack clanging against the stone walls. The tunnel beyond was narrower still, like a drainage pipe, smooth and rounded where the current had worn it down but only about three feet in diameter. Jack had never been in a space so narrow. It was beyond claustrophobic. There was no way they could go back, with the current pressing against them, and any blockage in the tunnel now would seal their fate. Costas’ fins were a few feet ahead of him. Jack checked his depth gauge, remained focussed. He stared at the rock inches from his face, then at his depth gauge. Forty-one metres. Thirty-seven metres. They were ascending, slowly but surely. Then the tunnel took a sharp turn upwards and they were in a chamber, a vast space filled with shadowy forms, great columns that towered upwards like white-robed giants, beckoning them up from the underworld. Far above, Jack could see a shimmer of green, distinct from the white beams of their headlights. He closed his eyes again, a wave of relief coursing through him, his heart pounding not with fear but with exhilaration. He rose beside Costas through the chamber, the water so clear that they seemed suspended in midair like figures from some scene of apotheosis. Then they were at the top of the cavern, only ten metres beneath the surface of the water, butting up against a crack in the rock where they could see the light of dawn shining through.
It was not over yet. The crack was a narrow squeeze, barely wide enough for one of them. There was no other exit from the chamber.
“Why does this always seem to happen when I dive with you?” Costas said.
“Next time let’s do some open-water diving for a change.”
“If there is a next time.” Jack looked into the black chasm yawning below, then back up into the crack. He could see foliage, the wavering forms of trees overhanging the surface of the water. His heart was still pounding, but no longer with excitement. This was a ridiculous place to die.
“We’ll have to swim for it.” Costas said. “You go first.”
“No way. You’ll have the tighter squeeze, and I can help push you through.”
Costas unstrapped his rebreather and dangled it down beside him. He pulled himself as far as he could into the fissure, about two metres above Jack, then ripped off his helmet and dropped the rig. It went plummeting past Jack, disappearing into the darkness below. Jack pulled himself behind Costas and pushed up against his legs. Nothing happened. Suddenly he felt helpless, appalled that he might watch his friend die only a few metres from the surface, holding his legs. Then Costas kicked hard and erupted upwards. Jack paused to regain his breath, unbuckled his harness and dangled it beside him, took five deep breaths and then ripped off his helmet and dropped the rig. He heaved himself up through the rock, his eyes open to the blurry haze of daylight through the water, and pulled himself through. Another kick of his fins and he surfaced in a slurry of green algae, in a small pool sheltered by fronds of undergrowth.
Costas was panting on the edge of the pool, looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He wiped the slime off his face, submerged his head and shook it violently, then reared up out of the water and offered Jack a hand. “You might want to do the same. Don’t want to terrify the natives.”
After Jack was out and shaking himself off, Costas reached into the top of his wetsuit and extracted a slim metallic device, about the size of a pocket calculator. He tapped the front and pulled out an aerial, bringing the device to his ear.
“Sometimes you’re a surprising bag of tricks,” Jack panted.
“Combined GPS beacon and two-way radio,” Costas said. “All I need to do now is activate the mayday button and Ben’ll have us pinpointed. I can try to establish a radio link and talk to him when we know what the situation is.”
They had surfaced beside a rough jungle track. It was still raining, alternately drizzling and pouring. Costas activated the compass on his device and quickly took a bearing. Ten minutes later they crept up the limestone dome that covered the cenote and approached the overgrown temple. The jeep that had brought them was at the end of the track. Jack saw a boy, a local Maya, playing on the road, but he had not spotted them. They stealthily rounded the building and each took one side of the entrance, their backs flat to the wall, listening. They could hear nothing. Jack could taste the salt of his sweat
joining the water on his face. He looked at Costas, nodded. They sidled into the chamber, keeping to the shadows, straining their eyes into the candlelit gloom. There was no sign of Maria or Loki. The only occupant was a man sitting with his back to them on a diving tank, cleaning a pistol. Jack gestured to Costas and returned to the entrance, vigilant. Costas crept up behind Reksnys and put his arm round his throat, clamping his mouth. The pistol dropped with a clatter. Costas drew the man close and spoke with a snarl.
“Now. Where were we?”
20
TWENTY MINUTES LATER THE NOISE OF RAIN was drowned out by the shuddering roar of the Lynx as it came to a hover overhead, sweeping the jungle floor with its downdraught. Two men were winched down through the dense foliage, followed by a red first-aid crate. Once they were safely on the ground, the Lynx tipped forward and disappeared back into the cloud. Jack ran over from where he had been sheltering to pull the box from the undergrowth and then scrambled over to help Ben.
“We didn’t know what to expect,” Ben shouted above the downpour, holstering the pistol he had been holding at the ready. “When Costas radioed in the GPS
co-ordinates we were only about three miles from you, flying a search pattern just off the coast. The cover story was an aerial survey for archaeological remains offshore. Jeremy came along as the only archaeologist on board. And because he insisted. You don’t want to fly uninvited into Mexican airspace bristling with weapons, especially at night, so it’s only me and my Glock. But now we’ve found you, the Lynx has gone back for a full security team and we’ve contacted the local police.”
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