The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  “We’re coming over the icefjord now. Take a look out to port and you’ll see the tips of icebergs through the mist.”

  James Macleod took his hand momentarily off the cyclic and pointed past Jack at the jagged pinnacles of white that appeared like peaks of distant mountains through the clouds. In the passenger compartment behind them, Maria and Jeremy leaned forward to follow his gaze. With the three-hour time difference from England it was still early morning, and the sun had yet to burn off the sea mist caused as the cold air tumbled off the ice cap and met the warmer air rising from the sea. In the summer sun it was actually warmer at three thousand feet than on the surface of the ice cap, but even so the temperature was a few degrees below zero and they all wore fully insulated flight suits as well as helmets, a precaution against turbulence as the helicopter encountered thermal updraughts over exposed land and water along the coastline.

  “We’ve got fifteen minutes until the helipad’s clear. Time for a quick sightseeing tour.”

  Macleod had met them on the tarmac at Kangerlussuaq and had escorted them straight to the waiting Lynx helicopter. It had taken them just under an hour to fly due north to the Ilulissat icefjord, on Greenland’s west coast, almost a hundred and sixty miles north of the Arctic Circle. They had been following a heavy Chinook transport helicopter, based out of the remaining US air base in Greenland at Thule, a welcome part of the US government’s contribution to the IMU project. Costas had decided to fly in the Chinook to oversee the transfer of his equipment, and Jack could imagine the other man’s gnawing anxiety as he sat in the loading bay watching the fruit of months of labour suspended in a cargo net above the void. Now Jack and Macleod watched as the Chinook descended into the sea mist at the head of the fjord.

  “This is where the iceberg came from that sank the Titanic,” Macleod said, his thick Glaswegian brogue enhanced by the intercom. “It’s one of the fastest-moving glacial ice streams in the world.” He swung the helicopter round to the east, facing inland, and flew at maximum speed for a few minutes until they had cleared the mist and could see the Greenland ice cap rising ahead of them in a vast stark dome. “The Ilulissat glacier’s the main pressure outlet for the ice cap, where the glacier flows down to discharge ice into the sea. You can see where the ice floe begins now.”

  Macleod worked the controls and swung the Lynx in a wide arc back towards the sea. As they peered out they could see where the seamless undulations of the ice cap began to fracture and crenellate, forming a corrugated flow that seemed to ripple off towards the west.

  “Believe it or not, that thing’s flowing at an incredible rate, almost eight miles a year,” Macleod said. “The crevasses are caused by the pressure of the glacier as it moves against the bedrock, in places almost three thousand feet below. It’s like a river flowing through rapids. And now for the fun part.”

  He dipped the nose of the helicopter and they were suddenly hurtling towards the glacier, its fractured surface looming up at them in gigantic folds and fissures. At what seemed like the last moment Macleod levelled out, and almost immediately they were enveloped in sea mist, the glacier only fleetingly visible as the rotor swirled away the mist to reveal patches of white and yawning crevasses of deep blue.

  “We’re actually more than five hundred feet above the glacier,” Macleod reassured them. “Remember how huge those features are.” For a few minutes he flew by instruments alone as they continued to hurtle through the mist, and then he eased back on the cyclic and dropped down until the altimeter read only two hundred and fifty feet above sea level. “Here we are.”

  As he brought the Lynx to a hover the mist parted and a spectacular image materialised before their eyes. It was a vast wall of ice, towering almost as high as the helicopter and extending on either side as far as they could see. Rather than a sheer face of compacted ice, it was a fragmented mass of towers and canyons, fissured with streaks of blue where meltwater had flowed down from the surface and frozen again. The whole mass looked unbelievably fragile and precarious, as if the slightest nudge would bring it all cascading down.

  “The leading edge of the glacier,” Macleod announced. “Or rather the mass of icebergs that have sheared off it and jammed up the head of the fjord. The edge of the glacier itself is more than five nautical miles east of us towards the ice cap, back the way we came.”

  “It’s awesome.” Jeremy’s voice came cracking over the intercom, and for once he seemed at a loss for words. “So this is where the North Atlantic icebergs come from?”

  “Ninety per cent of them,” Macleod replied. “Twenty billion tons every year, enough to affect global sea levels. That wall of ice may seem pretty static, but it’s sped up recently and is actually moving towards us at nearly fifteen feet an hour. Some of the large bergs will be pushed out more or less intact, but almost all of them calve, producing smaller bergs and vicious little slabs called growlers. Almost ten thousand big bergs make it out of the fjord every year into Disko Bay. They process anti-clockwise with the current around Baffin Bay and then float as far south as the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and as far east as Iceland.”

  “One of them’s calving now,” Jack said suddenly.

  Without warning a vast slab of ice had cracked off the precipice immediately in front of them, the wrenching noise audible even above the din of the helicopter’s rotor. The slab of ice slipped straight down into the water and disappeared completely, then erupted upwards almost to its full height before settling down again, bobbing up and down until only a jagged pinnacle was visible above the slurry of ice fragments in front of the bergs.

  “I see what they mean about icebergs being mostly underwater,” Jeremy said, his tone still awestruck. “The bigger ones must scrape along the bottom of the fjord.”

  “That’s exactly what happens. Sometimes they drag along the sea floor, sometimes they tumble over.” Macleod flipped down a small video screen from the cockpit ceiling and tapped a keyboard, revealing an image of the fjord bathymetry.

  Jack whistled. “Pretty deep.”

  “Over three thousand feet.”

  “That underwater ridge on the image, across the mouth of the fjord,” Jack said. “I assume that’s where the ice tongue reached its maximum extent?”

  “The Danes who settled here in the eighteenth century called it Isfjeldsbanken, the threshold,” Macleod replied. “A huge sill of sediment bulldozed by the glacier. The tip of the threshold’s only about six hundred feet deep, so the bigger bergs get stuck on it. Until recently it marked the edge of the ice tongue, the congestion of bergs that choked the fjord.”

  “But now the breakup occurs several miles closer to the ice cap, where we are now?”

  “Correct.” Macleod tapped the screen and another image appeared, a satellite photo of the fjord. “Courtesy of NASA, a composite image from the Landsat satellite. The sequence of red lines across the fjord shows the retreat of the calving front of the glacier between 2001 and 2005. At the same time the glacier has accelerated dramatically, almost doubling its velocity. And airborne laser altimetry measurements have shown a thinning of the glacier by up to fifty feet a year.”

  “Global warming,” Jeremy said.

  “Bad news for the environment, but good news for us.” Macleod snapped the screen closed and re-engaged the cyclic, pulling the helicopter round on a westward bearing and flying through the mist away from the ice face. “Bad news because it suggests global warming has a more dramatic effect on the ice cap than many have feared. Good news because it allows us to work in the fjord itself, to carry out research that’s never before been possible.”

  “And now we’re into summer,” Jack said. “I’m assuming that increases the rate of calving and ice disintegration along the glacier front?”

  “That’s why I wanted you here now,” Macleod replied. “A few more days and we’re closing shop. We’re working on the edge in more ways than one.”

  Twenty minutes later he eased back on the cyclic and the Lynx began to descend o
ver the jagged line of icebergs near the head of the fjord. Jack’s heart began to pound as he saw a ship’s superstructure appear out of the mist to seaward. Macleod reached over to the ship-to-shore intercom, but before pressing engage he turned and looked at Jack.

  “And now it’s time to let you know why I dragged you halfway round the world to this place.”

  6

  The man in the prison cell slowly raised his head and listened hard for any signs of life, but heard nothing. He had heard nothing but the sounds of his jailers for more than five years now. He closed his eyes and breathed in slow and deep, immune to the aroma of feces and urine and vomit that had long ago impregnated the fabric of the prison. He had been sent to serve out his sentence in his grandfather’s homeland, in an empty prison left over from the Gulag, saving them the trouble of putting him in solitary confinement. But sensory deprivation held no fear for him, his training having taught him to exclude the reality of confinement and live in a world of his own creation. He slowly bent his head from side to side and then leaned again over the chessboard, the only indulgence he had asked of his captors. He lowered his elbows to the table and raised his hands together in their fingerless mitts, rubbing them against the damp chill that pervaded the cell all year round. For the thousandth time he reached down and picked up a little white pawn, shaped like a Viking warrior with chain mail and a shield, and placed it in front of the Christian king.

  “Checkmate,” he said quietly.

  He leaned back on his stool with the exaggerated slowness of a man whose tiniest movements have become his main preoccupation, his way of filling the solitary hours of yet another day. He lifted his left hand slowly to his face and drew his index finger along the scar that ran from his eye socket to his lower jaw, testing himself against the pain he felt every time. From his jaw he moved his hand to the wall beside him and began to trace his finger along the lines of incised graffiti, his hourly ritual, quietly reciting the words like a scholar with a holy text. “Paul Kruger,” he murmured. “Hauptsturmfuhrer, Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. Kurt Hausser, Sturmbannfuhrer, Panzergrenadier-Division Das Reich. Otto Lehmann, Brigadefuhrer, Panzer-Division Wiking.” He knew the names by heart, names of the true heroes of the Great Patriotic War, crusaders in the struggle against the East, the captured survivors of Kharkov and Kursk and countless other battles, sent by the Russians to this cell more than half a century ago, their last stop before the squalid execution chamber at the end of the corridor. Names like his grandfather’s. Only his grandfather had been luckier, for a while.

  He shut his eyes and raised his hand to the jagged runes that cut across the names, knowing exactly where to place his two fingers to draw them down, then up, then down, lines so deeply carved that the Soviet guards had given up trying to erase them decades ago. They were the graffiti he liked to trace his fingers over best, the symbol of his grandfather’s order, Schutzstaffel, the SS. He dropped his hand slowly as his fingers fell away from the lines and pressed his ear against the clammy wall, feeling he was truly communing with the knights of the past, brothers in arms who had left their last imprint on this wall to give him strength, to guide him in his quest to find their holiest treasure, to put to rest all who had gone before him and failed.

  “Anton Poellner.” The prisoner emerged from a well of blackness as the voice spoke loudly through the slot in the door. He pushed himself upright as the bolts were drawn and the door clanged open. An official in a peaked cap stood between two guards, silhouetted against the harshly lit corridor behind.

  “Anton Poellner.” The official repeated his name, and the man in the cell held his hand up against the glare before slowly replying in English.

  “What do you want?”

  “By order of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” the official said, speaking in Lithuanian. “Case number IT-99-37b, the Prosecutor of the Tribunal against Anton Poellner, former paid mercenary of the Bosnian Serb Army. Indicted under Article 7 on the basis of individual criminal responsibility, for genocide and crimes against humanity.” The man paused, then raised a document he had been carrying. “Under the amnesty convention signed last year in The Hague, your case came up for review in the Appeals Chamber.” The official lowered the paper and spoke with obvious distaste. “You are free to go.”

  He snapped his fingers and the two guards heaved the man to his feet, throwing an old Soviet greatcoat around him as they did so. The man blinked furiously against the light as they shoved him through the cell door, then shackled his feet for the last time and jostled him down the corridor. He was the final occupant of a condemned prison, and as the echoes of his chains resounded through the empty cells it was as if the ghosts of the past were urging him on, knowing he was their last hope that any would escape.

  At the final door they unshackled his feet and thrust him wordlessly into the outside world. It was drizzling and unseasonably cold for early summer, but the man raised his pallid face upwards and smiled as the rain coursed over his skin. He picked up the duffel bag that had been dropped beside him and began to walk slowly towards the open outer gate and the road beyond, falling into the easy stride of a man accustomed to route marches. Outside the gate he shouldered the bag and thrust his hands into the greatcoat pockets, waiting for the car he knew would come. Minutes later a dark Mercedes rolled out of the shadows, its rear passenger door swinging open as it stopped in front of him. Without looking once at the prison he stooped down and got in.

  “Welcome back,” a voice said in English from the front seat. “Your instructions.”

  An envelope was thrust into his hand as the car drove away. The man felt the sheaf of papers inside, but first reached in and pulled out an object lying loose at the bottom. It was a golden ring, lustrous with age, and as he raised it he felt his lips brush against the symbol as they had done since childhood, a symbol so different from the one in his prison cell yet so familiar. He slipped the ring over the index finger of his right hand and pulled out the sheaf of papers. On top of them was a newspaper image imprinted in his brain for more than five years now, showing an old man with a swastika armband lying in a pool of blood. He looked at the dead face and then out at the lowering sky, and whispered to himself: “Payback time.”

  “There she is now,” Jack said excitedly. “It’s the first time I’ve seen her on the open sea. It’s like meeting a long-lost friend, born again.”

  Seaquest II had been commissioned only three months before, and the west Greenland ice-core project was her first official outing as a deep-sea research vessel of the International Maritime University. Ever since her predecessor had been lost in the Black Sea six months ago, Jack had been determined to find a replacement, and had decided to rename a vessel already on the stocks for IMU in the yards in Finland. Whereas the original Seaquest and her sister ship Sea Venture had been derived from the Akademik-class Russian research vessel, designed originally for acoustic submarine surveillance during the Cold War, Seaquest II was an entirely new concept planned from scratch to IMU specifications. Her state-of-the-art navigational features included a dynamic positioning system, using lateral thrusters and ballast control to maintain stability in virtually any sea conditions-vital for position-keeping and search tracking as well as to maintain a level platform for laboratory work. She could launch remote-operated vehicles and submersibles, using either deck cranes or an internal docking berth which allowed underwater egress. Like all IMU vessels she had a defensive capability, with a gun pod retracted below the foredeck. And, crucial for polar research, the ice-strengthened hull allowed her to plough through the shattered sea ice which choked the coastal waters north of the Arctic Circle even in early summer.

  Jack was still casting a critical eye over her deck arrangements as the Lynx bounced on to the helipad and the rotors shuddered to a halt. While the awaiting crewmen secured the undercarriage to the deck, Jack eased off his helmet and released his seat belt harness. The sun was burning off the sea mist and ahead of him he
could see the entire length of the superstructure, gleaming white in the pellucid Arctic light. He was in his element again, and his excitement showed as he leaned back and grinned at Maria and Jeremy. “Welcome to Seaquest II. This is where the fun really begins.”

  James Macleod led them directly from the helipad through the hangar entrance and down a steep gangway into the bowels of the ship. They were joined by Costas, who had been winched down from the US Air Force Chinook fifteen minutes before and had been busy uncrating his cargo on the stern deck. He looked as if he needed about a week’s sleep, but with his sleeves rolled up on his burly forearms and fresh smears of grease on his beloved overalls, it was clear he was not going to waste a moment getting the equipment operational.

  They reached the lower deck and Macleod ushered them through an open door into a brightly lit lecture room, gesturing for them to stand beside a projector screen to the right of the door. Ranged in front of them on plastic chairs was a motley group of about thirty men and women, some talking intently among themselves and others hunched over laptops and sheaves of printouts. They all looked up as Macleod entered, and Jack could see several bearded blond men with the Danish flag on their parkas, a couple of native Greenlander faces, and a number of men and women wearing the navy blue sweaters of the US Air Force. He nodded courteously to a man in the front row splayed languidly on his chair and stroking his sideburns, so lost in thought that he failed to catch Jack’s gesture. Lanowski was a brilliantly adaptive engineer who had been indispensable to IMU since they had poached him from MIT, but he had a manner calculated to irritate almost everyone who came into contact with him.