11
That’s some ice axe you’ve got there.”
“Wait till you hear what else we found.”
James Macleod had just finished applying a compress to the gash in Jack’s leg. His E-suit was slick with fresh blood, but the compress staunched the bleeding. Jack leaned back against the bulkhead, his face streaked with fatigue, and adjusted his flight helmet and headset. Between talking he was breathing deeply on the oxygen regulator that had been passed to him as soon as he had been winched into the cargo bay of the Lynx.
“You don’t want to hear the odds Lanowski calculated against your survival.”
“No, I don’t.” Jack was utterly exhausted, but felt he had to keep talking to tell them what had happened.
“When the piteraq hit we were completely shut down. Inuva told us they could be bad, but I had no idea what we were up against. Couldn’t even get the chopper out of the hangar. It was terrifying, like banshees screaming above us.”
“We saw it from the crevasse.”
“When the berg rolled, all hell let loose. The displacement wave washed right up the shore and swept away the tent where we met Kangia. The local shaman was still there. As soon as we get you back on board Seaquest II the chopper’s out on a search, but it’s pretty hopeless.”
“Inuva?” Jack said.
“She’s okay. She was with Lanowski on board.”
Macleod broke off to help the crewman acting as loadmaster to haul another dripping form through the open cargo door. Seconds later Costas was strapped into the seat beside Jack, pulling on his flight helmet and sucking gratefully at the oxygen regulator that had been handed to him.
“You okay?” Jack asked.
Costas sucked a few more times and then lowered the regulator, giving Jack a doleful look.
“Oh. Let me guess.” Jack looked back with exaggerated sympathy. “Your ice probe.”
“Months of research and development,” Costas said sadly. “And that was the only prototype. I’ll have to build the next one entirely from scratch.”
“No hurry as far as I’m concerned,” Jack said. “I think I’ve just ticked diving inside icebergs off my list.” He turned back to Macleod. “What was your contingency plan?”
“When we saw that the berg had rolled three hundred and sixty degrees we thought there was a chance. Lanoswki remembered the old crevasse above the longship. It was all his idea, modelling the likely rupture line, even calculating the explosive charge we’d need to blow it open.”
“You’ve got to hand it to the guy,” Costas murmured.
“So that’s what Ben was doing,” Jack said.
Macleod nodded. “Ben volunteered to take the charge down. He tried half a dozen times, but he couldn’t get close enough to the crack. The wind was buffeting us and we had to fight to keep the chopper on station. Then he saw you inside the crevasse. He was trying to feed the cable in when the berg began to roll again.”
“You guys are heroes,” Costas said.
Macleod shook his head and smiled. “We’re just the shuttle service. I don’t know how you did it.”
At that moment the loadmaster hauled a third figure through the door and secured the winch hook to its davit. Ben ripped off his face mask and looked anxiously at Jack and Costas. He gave them a diver’s okay sign, and they responded in kind.
“Okay, Andy.” Macleod slapped the bulkhead behind the pilot’s seat. “We need to get out of here before that thing finishes its roll. We’re good to go.”
“Roger that.”
The others strapped themselves into the seats at the rear of the cargo bay. As the helicopter pitched forward and shuddered up to full power Costas jerked his hand to the axe lying across Jack’s legs. “By the way, thanks for saving me from the deep freeze.”
“I owed you. I seem to remember a little help a while ago inside a volcano.”
Costas looked warmly at his friend and nodded, his face suddenly lined with fatigue. Jack slumped back against the seat and breathed deeply from the regulator, feeling reinvigorated with every breath, knowing that the oxygen was cleansing his system of excess nitrogen. To his right he could see the immense form of the berg, seemingly as solid as a mountain, and to his left the sparkling shape of Seaquest II, far out in the bay. He was swept by the feeling of elation he had experienced upon surfacing. For months since their return from the Black Sea he had been nagged by a secret uncertainty, that the prize no longer justified the risk, that he had lost his edge. Now he knew he was back where he belonged. He shut his eyes and fell instantly into a deep and dreamless sleep.
“My apologies,” Lanowski said. “I didn’t count on a storm.”
“You gave us every warning,” Jack replied. “It was my call.”
Jack and Costas were sitting on the foredeck of Seaquest II, slumped against the port railing where the helicopter had winched them down with Macleod a few minutes before. The ship was maintaining position in Disko Bay about a mile west of the fjord entrance, and Jack could see the tip of the iceberg beyond the starboard railing opposite them. Even at this distance it was an awesome sight. He and Costas had been extraordinarily lucky that the berg had rolled a full 360 degrees, that the huge force of the storm had tumbled it back to its upright position and left it perched precariously on the outer rim of the threshold. The next time it rolled it would flip over and stay that way, crushing any remaining air pockets beneath hundreds of metres of freezing seawater.
Lanowski had been the first of the scientific team to reach them on the foredeck, joining the crew members who had guided down the helicopter winch and were now helping Jack and Costas to peel off their E-suits. They were quickly joined by Maria, whose look of relief turned to concern as she saw the blood on Jack’s thigh. The ship’s doctor was already on the scene, cutting away the bandage and spraying coagulant into the gash.
“It’s not as bad as it looks.” Jack winced as the medic applied a suture, then held up a bloody spear of ice. “Nature provided her own cold compress.”
“You were lucky,” the medic said. “It just missed the femoral artery.”
“It’s fantastic.” Lanowski was shaking his head and chuckling to himself, in a world of his own. “While you were away Inuva and I worked out where the 1930s expedition must have found the ship in the ice cap. Now I should be able to use my glacier-flow quotient to work out where the Vikings dragged the ship on to the ice for the funeral pyre. One of the tributary fjords to the north of Ilulissat, I’d say, where the ice cap is more accessible from the sea.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and peered at Jack. “Having such a closely datable horizon inside that berg is the greatest discovery of the whole expedition. It should provide independent corroboration for my flow theory, the first time we’ll be sure of the rate of ice discharge over the last thousand years. Well worth your efforts. Congratulations!”
“We’ve just found a Viking longship, man,” Costas said in exasperation. “One of the most sensational archaeological discoveries of all time. A little more exciting than the rate of glacial ice flow.”
Lanowski looked at him with unseeing eyes, his mind already far away in a world of figures and equations. He pulled out a pocket calculator and began furiously tapping at the keys, occasionally looking up and muttering under his breath. Costas shook his head in disbelief as the ungainly figure shuffled off without another word towards the deckhouse computer room.
“Talk about a one-track mind.”
“But a brilliant one.” Jack grinned at the dripping form of his friend. “That’s why we’re a team. I couldn’t do all that math.”
Jeremy appeared beside Maria, and she nudged him forward in front of Jack.
“We’ve translated the runestone that Kangia gave you, the one the Germans found in the crevasse,” he said diffidently.
“Brilliant. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
