Valhalla (6 page)

21 November
Base Hancock One
Greenland Ice Cap

They emerged from the elevator rig into the violent grasp of another storm.

“Temperature's dropping again,” shouted Macaulay to Hancock above the blast of arctic wind that forced them to bend over almost double as they crossed the small snow-packed compound.

Inside the operations tent, two members of the communications team were slumped asleep in front of the bank of radio and telecommunications equipment. Another was watching a download of
The Shawshank Redemption
on his laptop while he waited for messages.

Lexy went straight to the stainless steel coffeemaker. Macaulay joined her there.

“You deciphered some of it, didn't you?” he said. “I can see the excitement in your face.”

“Is it that obvious?” she asked.

The others joined them for coffee. Hancock laced his mug with a big dollop of Armagnac. Sir Dorian poured only the brandy into his own. Above them, the roof of the tent shuddered and swayed from the power of the wind.

“So, what have we learned so far?” asked Hancock as they all moved closer to the tent's space heaters.

Sir Dorian spoke first. It was clear to Lexy that the trip to the cave had severely sapped his strength. She could see the pain behind his eyes as he took a long swig of brandy.

“I'm confident that carbon dating will confirm that the men in that cave have lain there since the early eleventh century,” he said.

“Were you able to read any of the markings?” Hancock asked Lexy.

“The first rune symbols in the saga recorded a date,” she responded. “The year 1016.”

Her statement was met with stunned silence.

“I was also able to translate two other small sections at the edges of the text. They included the words,
Leifr
,
Vinland
, and
the
hallowed place
.”

A look of astonishment registered on Jensen's face.

“If that's true . . . ,” he began, and then stopped.

“If what's true?” asked Hancock.

“Perhaps a little history is in order,” said Sir Dorian, looking at Hancock. “In the year of our Lord 982, the Viking Erik the Red, who was looked upon by many as a deity and who had been banished from Iceland over a blood feud, came to this desolate place and called it
Greenland. The year 982 is the first indisputable date of European arrival in American history.”

“You mean the far north,” said Hancock.

“Call it what you will,” said Sir Dorian. “It's no farther from here to the American mainland than the Bahamas archipelago was when Columbus arrived there on his way to America five hundred years later.”

“But Columbus got to our mainland first,” asserted Hancock.

“Perhaps,” said Jensen.

“After Erik the Red explored these waters,” resumed Sir Dorian, “he built a settlement on the southwest coast of Greenland near Cape Farewell. Then he went back to Iceland and organized a fleet of ships to bring hundreds more settlers to his new paradise.”

“But that was thirty years before our stonecutter made those markings down there,” said Hancock.

“Correct,” said Sir Dorian. “My point is that those first settlers, and the thousands who followed, quickly discovered there was no timber to build homes for their families or shelters for their livestock. The winters were fearsome, as you will discover if we stay here much longer. They yearned to explore farther south to warmer climes.”

As if to confirm his argument, one of the tent poles buttressing the roof suddenly snapped off with a loud crack. In now-obvious pain, Sir Dorian winced as he tried to settle comfortably in his chair. Another swallow of Armagnac temporarily restored his spirits.

“Which brings us to Leif the Lucky, Leif Eriksson, the son of Erik the Red,” he continued. “Dr. Vaughan told us that she found the letters L-E-I-F-R among the rune
markings in the cave.
Leifr
is the old Norse spelling of the anglicized Leif.”

“Maybe there was more than one Leif,” said Hancock. “The name had to be pretty common in Norway and Iceland.”

“No,” said Sir Dorian. “In conjunction with the date of 1016 and the few other words Dr. Vaughan translated, we're dealing with a Norse deity here, possibly his last expedition.”

“What do we really know about him?” asked Macaulay. “The truth—not the legend.”

“He was born in 980,” said Sir Dorian. “At just nineteen, he sailed across the North Atlantic from Greenland to Norway, almost two thousand miles, in a small open boat. No one had ever done it. He was the finest navigator of his age.”

“How did they navigate a thousand years ago?”

“The early Norse explorers had no way to plot longitude,” said Sir Dorian, “but they learned how to determine latitude by using primitive sun shadow boards that had a pin in the center surrounded by concentric circles. It was crude but effective. I wouldn't be surprised if we found one in the ship down there.”

“It doesn't sound very exact,” said Hancock.

“It was exact enough for them to make it all the way to the Volga River in Russia and the Nile in Egypt,” said Falconer.

“Eriksson was twenty-three years old when he led a sailing expedition south of Greenland and discovered a place that he called Vinland,” said Sir Dorian. “According to the Flateyjarbock . . .”

“The what?” asked Hancock.

“The Flateyjarbock or Flatey book,” said Sir Dorian, “is a medieval manuscript in which the most significant Norse events are recorded, like the discoveries of new lands. It includes descriptions of Vinland.”

“So where is it?” asked Hancock.

“No one knows for sure,” said Lexy. “In the sagas, it was described as a place where salmon teemed in the rivers and there were many species of wild game. Grapes grew there in great abundance. The Norsemen were fond of wine.”

Sir Dorian's eyes momentarily flashed.

“The natural grapevine was quite rare in Nova Scotia and even as far south as Maine and New Hampshire,” he added. “However, it did grow in abundance along the shoreline of Massachusetts.”

“You're saying you believe that Vinland was Massachusetts?” asked Hancock.

“There is no proof of it,” said Sir Dorian, “or you Americans would be celebrating Leif Eriksson Day every year. What we do have is a good idea of Eriksson's sailing course, which is described twice in the sagas. It records that he was traveling southwest for two days from Markland, or Nova Scotia as we now know it, before he sighted land. He could easily have traveled three hundred miles in those two days and nights. At that point, he recorded sailing westward between a large island and a cape to reach the place where he spent the winter. Only two places fit that description—the Cape Cod Peninsula and Nantucket.”

“Hell, he might have run into a storm over those two days. It could have been a hundred miles,” said Hancock,
unconvinced, as two members of the expedition team made temporary repairs to the roof of the tent.

“One more point,” said Sir Dorian. “Eriksson and his men spent a winter in Vinland. They cut down trees to build houses, and stacked a large number of cut logs to bring back to Greenland, where there were no trees. But when spring came, Eriksson left without them. We can only assume that he expected to return.”

“Then why didn't he?” asked Hancock.

“When he returned to Greenland, his father, Erik the Red, had died,” said Jensen. “Fever broke out in the settlements. Leif became their leader. In any event, there is no record of him ever going back.”

“That's all you've got?” asked Hancock, obviously disappointed.

“Unfortunately, there is no hard evidence,” concluded Lexy.

“Unless it's five hundred feet below us,” said Rob Falconer.

In the ensuing silence, another brutal gust of wind split open the northern end of the tent wall and knocked over the metal stand holding the coffeemaker. One of the team members grabbed a canvas tarp and headed out into the darkness.

“Do we know when Eriksson died?” asked Macaulay.

“We know that he was still alive in 1015,” said Jensen, the expert in Norse genealogy. “There is no mention of his death in the sagas.”

“What do you think the stonecutter meant when he wrote about the hallowed place?” asked Hancock. “Could it be Valhalla . . . the home of the Norse gods?”

“I think the saga will tell us that he is in the hallowed place,” said Lexy.

“Who is there?” asked Hancock.

“Leif Eriksson,” she said.

“On what basis do you assume that?” he asked.

She hadn't really thought about it up to that moment. It had simply occurred to her. Perhaps it was something she had absorbed down there without even noticing it. There was no reasonable basis for the conclusion.

“Call it instinct,” she said.

“We will hopefully find the answer to that and many other questions when we have translated the rest of the stonecutter's markings,” said Sir Dorian.

“All right,” said Hancock. “We're going to have to move fast. Tonight, we'll bring the Norsemen up in body bags and put them in cold storage to prevent further decomposition until we arrange for a transport with freezer units. After that, we'll collect their tools, weapons, and other personal belongings, cataloguing everything we find before crating it all to ship back to Texas. While that's being done, Dr. Vaughan will go down to the cave and begin translating the rest of the rune markings on the stone. We need to bring that up with special care. Another team can clear the ice away from the Viking ship. We obviously can't raise it right now, but it may have valuable items in the hold.”

“Mr. Hancock,” Sir Dorian interrupted, his voice rising, “I must protest. . . .”

“I'll also need recommendations on the laboratories that are best equipped to do scientific and medical research on a fully preserved thousand-year-old man,” went
on Hancock. “The Texas Aggies will kiss my ass to get one of those guys.”

Macaulay stood up from his chair.

“J.L.,” he said, “take a minute to think this through. Our team is exhausted. Just look around. They're out on their feet.”

Hancock glanced at the men napping in front of the communications bank.

“A week from now, we'll be in total darkness, Steve,” said Hancock.

“The United States Air Force ran a war up here for four years in the dead of winter,” said Macaulay. “We can work up here for as long as it takes. If we push the guys too hard, there's going to be an accident or worse.”

“Okay,” Hancock finally conceded. “We'll all get a good night's sleep and get started in the morning.”

Sir Dorian wasn't finished. He stood over Hancock, his mottled cheeks flushed with anger.

“I must strongly advocate that you do not take these precipitous actions,” he said. “This could be one of the most important archaeological and scientific finds in history. It deserves far more careful planning than you have suggested.”

“Thank you for your opinion, Sir Dorian,” said Hancock, “but we're quite experienced in these matters.”

“But you can return with your team in a few months and do these things in the spring with all the necessary protocols,” came back the old man.

Hancock laughed. “Do you think we'll be able to keep this discovery a secret for the next four months? Half the countries in the world will find a way to claim ownership of everything we discovered down there. Just be grateful
it was the Hancock team that found it. We know what to do.”

“You must not do this,” said Sir Dorian, looking to the other archaeologists for support.

“Mr. Hancock,” began Jensen, “I must confess that Sir Dorian makes a reasonable point. Depending on what's written in those rune markings, this could be a find worthy of Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings. You just can't pack it all up and cart it off to Texas.”

“Why not Texas?” said Hancock. “Do I need to remind you and Sir Dorian that the British Museum in London is crammed with artifacts looted from ancient civilizations all over the world? Dallas will make just as good a destination for this find.”

Privately, Lexy supported Sir Dorian. To ransack the cave was almost sacrilegious to her, but the reality of modern archaeology was that there were no longer any sacred canons. On most of the major digs in which she had participated, there had been brutal rivalries between archaeologists over who would win the glory and where the objects would go.

She was about to speak, when Hancock stood up and said, “We're done here. I'm going to bed.”

Returning to her own tent, Lexy saw that the temperature was still dropping. Although the space heater was turned to its highest setting, her breath was condensing in the light of the gas lantern. The bottle of water she had left on the stand next to her cot was frozen solid.

It took her ten minutes to thaw the moisture inside her mummy bag by drying it over the space heater. Before she crawled in to get warm, she placed her flashlight
inside it, clipped her doeskin-lined gloves to the leather cord strung above the cot, and turned off the lantern.

She slowly fell asleep to the wail of the wind and the constant hum of the diesel generator that powered most of the camp complex. Later, she dreamed she was in the belly of a great spacecraft sailing through the trackless universe.

21 November
Schloss Falkenberg
Koblenz, Germany

After he finished listening to the voice message recorded on the secure phone in his private study, Johannes Prinz Karl Erich Maria von Falkenberg, the ninth prince in the succession of the royal house of Falkenberg, was overcome with emotion.

As he gazed out the arched window facing the north parapet of his castle above the Rhine River, tears of unalloyed joy slowly began coursing down his pale cheeks. For several minutes, he continued to watch the soft, wet snow falling gently on the outer battlements, the scene illuminated by floodlights emplaced along the gorge that surrounded the shield walls.

The neo-Romanesque castle, rising majestically above the great river, stood at the pinnacle of a deep gorge. Through the centuries, it had withstood sieges and attacks by the French, the Italians, and most recently the
Americans at the end of the Second World War. Since 1215, it had been the ancestral home of the royal house of Falkenberg.

Prince von Falkenberg's personal staff had retired many hours earlier, and the private study was silent except for the crackling of the log fire in the immense stone grate. Above the marble mantelpiece, his late wife, Ingrid, gazed down at him from an oil painting commissioned shortly after their wedding.

He shook his head again in wonder. The news was simply astonishing, and he made a silent prayer in gratitude for still being alive to witness its potential impact on the world.

Holder of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross for his heroism as a young panzer group commander on the Russian front, he had survived the war's horrors only to come home to the destruction by Allied bombers of most of his family's industrial holdings, and the rape and murder of his wife, Ingrid, and their three daughters at his estate in Koenigsberg by marauding Russian troops in 1945.

Only his fervent unwavering faith had sustained him through those times. It had been the root of his being since he was a boy, and the only true cause he had ever worshipped. He and his family had shared only contempt for Hitler and his henchmen.

Never remarrying, he had spent many decades restoring his family fortune before regaining his place as one of the richest men in Germany. At ninety-five, he was still slender and fit, with a full head of pomaded white hair and a thin aquiline nose.

Putting on a blue Chinese silk brocade robe over his
silk pajamas, he sat down at his desk and recorded the key elements of the telephone message on a sheet of monogrammed notepaper, before adding a complete set of instructions. When finished, he rang for his personal manservant, Steiger.

“Please awaken Ernst,” he said to Steiger when he appeared a few minutes later. “I want this message encrypted and sent to Sorensen in Reykjavik immediately. Mark it urgent.”

“At once, Herr Hauptmann,” he said, referring to von Falkenberg's wartime rank.

During the Battles of Kursk in Russia in 1943, Steiger had saved the prince's life during a machine gun attack, and come back to Germany minus his right leg and left hand. Unable to work, he had been reduced to begging on the bomb-ravaged streets of Berlin. Von Falkenberg had tracked him down after the war and offered him a place in his personal household as long as he lived.

Leaving the prince's private study with the handwritten message, Steiger wondered what could have possibly happened to restore such a beatific smile to the Hauptmann's face after so many years of total impassivity.