inner cylinder partway from the case, a transparent plastic tube about three feet long and six inches in diameter, and laid it on the table in front of them. He sat down at the workstation and leaned forward on his elbows, tapping the tube with a pencil and speaking in a low Texan drawl.
“For anyone who hasn’t seen one, this is an ice core,” he began. “Came out of that berg yesterday. Mostly glacial ice, the cloudy-looking stuff with tiny bubbles in it, but also bands of clearer blue meltwater ice. We’ve got one meltwater band with modern contaminants in it, atmospheric hydrocarbons from factory and engine emissions. Some time in the last century that glacier opened up, then snapped shut pretty quickly. It happens. We’ve traced the fracture line up to the surface of the berg, the one relatively weak point in the core.”
“We thought of using explosives to crack the berg along that line, then pretty quickly ditched the idea,” Macleod said. “It would probably have destroyed what we’ve found.”
“Which is?” Costas asked.
Cheney drew the tube about two feet farther out of the casing and pointed at it. “We were about to pull the corer out yesterday and wind down the project, but then one of my NASA guys spotted this.”
The final part of the core was totally different from the bands of ice, a mass of black and brown fibrous material about eighteen inches long.
“It’s nothing to do with seabed sediment this time,” Macleod said.
“It’s wood!” Costas exclaimed.
“Correct. Embedded in an ice layer about a thousand years old, from another sealed-up crevasse. The structure’s very compacted, and some of it even looks carbonized, whether through burning or decay we can’t tell yet. But we think we’ve got about a thirty-year tree-ring sequence. I had another core from the same spot air- freighted back to Cornwall in the Embraer that brought you in this morning. We should have the results from the IMU dendrochronology lab this evening.”
“It couldn’t be a local tree trunk,” Costas said, shaking his head. “There’s no tree this big growing anywhere in Greenland, let alone finding its way on top of the ice cap.”
Macleod eyes Cheney keenly. “Don, show them the scan.”
Cheney nodded and swivelled the workstation monitor so they could all see it clearly. He tapped a command and an image like an ultrasound scan appeared on the screen, with bands and patches in different shades of grey that flickered in and out of focus.
“A high-resolution still taken from the sonar,” Cheney drawled. “It shows the upper part of the berg, just behind that calved front. The shades of grey are mainly differences in density between glacial ice formed during the Quaternary and ice formed by meltwater. But there’s something else in there, and it’s big.”
He tapped a key, and another scan appeared on the screen, this time dominated by a darker mass in the centre. He scrolled slowly through a series of stills taken at different angles as the sonar moved from the side to the top of the glacier. At the final still Jack nearly dropped his coffee mug in amazement.
“You must be kidding,” he whispered.
“It’s the real deal,” Macleod said. “I told you about the wood on the phone yesterday, but we only just realised what this image was when we processed the data a few hours ago. We’ve run the sonar over the berg again this morning, and each vertical scan gives this identical image.”
“My God,” Costas said. “It looks like a ship!”
“We can’t see what else it could be. It’s about twenty metres long, wide-beamed with a symmetrical stem and stern. From the horizontal scan it looks flattened, probably no surprise under all that ice.”
“That halo you see around it is frozen meltwater, surrounding the thing like a cocoon,” Cheney said. “It’s the weirdest damn thing you ever saw.”
“Maybe it was on fire when it got embedded in the ice,” Jeremy said quietly.
“Yeah, right,” Cheney replied. “Whatever it is, I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“You sure the wood came from there?” Jack’s eyes remained fixed on the image as he spoke.
“Absolutely,” Macleod said. “Dead centre. The keel, if that’s what it is.”
“And it’s a thousand years old?”
“The frozen meltwater around it is a thousand years old, yes,” Macleod replied.
“Then we may have the first ever Viking longship discovered in the western hemisphere,” Jack said, his heart pounding with excitement. “I’d hoped against hope for this when you told me about the wood. This could be fantastic, one of the most amazing shipwreck finds ever.”
“I told you I was right to get you here,” Costas said.
“The Inuit natives here didn’t build wooden ships, and there’s no other design from Europe at that date that looks like this,” Jack said. “It makes total historical sense with the Norse settlement of Greenland at that period. But how a vessel could have ended up in a glacier, formed miles inland, is completely beyond me.”
“One reason we need to take a closer look,” Macleod said suggestively.
“Let me see.” Costas stroked his stubble and leaned over Cheney, peering at the scale on the scan. “That’s about three hundred metres into the berg from that calved front and about fifty metres below present sea level, right? I’d guess the core would be pretty solid against tunnel collapse, but we’d want to go in underwater to avoid introducing air pockets into the berg.”
“Our thinking exactly.”
“What are the risks?” Jack said. “I mean, the odds against collapse?”
“Lanowski’s the man for simulations, and he’s pretty well said it all,” Macleod replied. “All I can add is that it’s now or never. Once that thing’s rolled over the threshold and is out at sea, there’s no chance. Everything’s in place; we just need your go-ahead.”
“Thank God I don’t have life insurance,” Jack murmured. “Imagine trying to sell this one to your broker.”
“It’s probably no more dangerous than diving inside an active volcano,” Costas said ruefully.
“No. You can’t. It’s crazy.” Maria’s face froze in horror as she realised what they were planning, and she looked from one to the other for some sign that it was all just a joke. Jack grimaced apologetically at her and then cast a familiar gleam at Costas, who gave him a crooked smile in return.
“Okay. That’s good enough for me.” Macleod glanced at Inuva, who had returned the radio receiver and was waiting patiently behind them. “While the team at the berg are getting your gear into position, we’re taking a quick trip ashore.”
7
An hour later the mighty form of the iceberg loomed before them, a jagged wall of white cut by bands of translucent blue and green. Jack zipped up his orange survival suit and adjusted his life jacket, glancing back at the sleek lines of Seaquest II receding in their wake. Beside him Maria tightened her grip on the safety line, and Macleod cast her a reassuring glance from the opposite pontoon.
“It’s a wee bit of a roller-coaster ride, but Henrik here’s an expert. He’s been playing in these waters all his life.”
The Danish crewman grinned and stood up in front of the Evinrude 120 outboard, holding the line of the painter taut in one hand and the throttle in the other. He began to drive the Zodiac like a chariot through the slew of brash that covered the sea, effortlessly swinging the big engine from side to side to avoid the growlers that lurked treacherously just below the surface. After five minutes of weaving through the ice debris they reached a pair of red buoys, the entrance to a floating boom that kept a large area in front of the berg free of ice. As they slowly drove the last few hundred metres, they watched a pair of men ascend the huge face in front of them using crampons and ice axes, their forms diminutive against the vast bulk of the berg. Already they could feel the cold radiating off the ice, a chill aura that sent a shiver through Maria. She had insisted on joining them on the trip to the berg, but now she felt unnerved, as if she had strayed too far into a world beyond her experience.
“It’s like a living thing,” she said. “Almost like it’s breathing.”
“The cold exhalation actually shows it’s melting, and fast,” Macleod said. “Soon even the calved face in front of us is going to be too dangerous to work.”
They drew up alongside a floating dock about twenty metres off the berg, the bobbing form of an Aquapod submersible visible on one side and two Zodiacs on the other. A twisted mass of cable was being lowered through
