“C’mon, Nelson. I wouldn’t exactly consider your assessment to be unbiased. Allied Global Mining signs your paychecks.”
Elena studied the geologist anew. When she had been introduced to Conrad Nelson, he had made no mention of being employed by a mining company.
“And who funds your grant, Mac?” Nelson countered. “A consortium of environmental groups. That surely has no impact on your evaluation.”
“Data is data.”
“Really? Data can’t be skewed? It can’t be manipulated to support a biased position?”
“Of course, it can.”
Nelson sat straighter, clearly believing he’d made his point, but his opponent wasn’t done.
“I’ve seen AGM do it all the time,” MacNab finished.
Nelson raised a middle finger. “Then evaluate this.”
“Hmm, looks to me like you’re admitting I’m number one.”
Nelson scoffed and lowered his arm. “Like I warned you, data can be misinterpreted.”
The fog bank suddenly brightened around them and shredded to either side, revealing what lay ahead.
Nelson made his final point. “Look over there. Tell me we’re running out of glacier anytime soon.”
A hundred yards away the world ended in a wall of ice. The front of the glacier stretched as far as the eye could see. Its shattered face looked like the fortifications of a frozen castle, with hoar-frost encrusted parapets and crumbling towers. The morning sunlight fractured against its surface, revealing a spectrum running from the palest blue to a menacing blackness. Even the air scintillated with tiny ice particles, glittering and flashing as they approached.
“It’s massive,” Elena said, though the word failed to capture the breadth of the monster.
Mac’s smile widened. “Aye. Helheim stretches four miles wide and runs over a hundred miles inland. In places, the ice is over a mile deep. It’s one of the largest glaciers draining into the North Atlantic.”
“Yet, here it still stands,” Nelson said. “As it will for centuries.”
“Not when Greenland is losing three hundred gigatons of ice every year.”
“Doesn’t mean anything. Greenland’s ice sheet has ebbed and flowed. From one ice age to another.”
Elena tuned out the rest of their argument, especially as it grew more technical. Despite the ongoing debate, she sensed these two men were not enemies. Clearly the two enjoyed their sparring. It took a rare soul to survive this harsh place, which likely forged a commonality of spirit and ruggedness that bonded everyone, including these two scientists on opposite sides of the divide on climate change.
Instead, she turned her attention to her surroundings. She studied the silent bergs filling the channel. The skiff’s pilot—an Inuit elder with a leathery round face and unreadable black eyes—expertly navigated them through the maze, while puffing on an ivory pipe, giving each berg a wide berth. She soon discovered why. As one seemingly tiny iceberg capsized, flipping fully over, swinging up a massive shelf of ice, revealing how much of its true mass lurked beneath the blue-black surface. If they’d been near the berg at the time, it would have taken out their boat.
It was a reminder of the hidden dangers here.
Even the glacier’s name hinted at the threat.
“Helheim . . .” she mumbled. “The realm of Hel.”
Mac heard her. “Exactly. The glacier was named after the Viking’s World of the Dead.”
“Who gave it that name?”
Nelson blew out a heavy breath. “Who knows? Probably some Nordic researcher with a sardonic sense of humor and a love of Norse mythology.”
“I think the source goes back much further,” Mac said. “The Inuit believe some glaciers are malignant. Passing warnings from one generation to another. Helheim is one such place. They believe this glacier is home to the Tuurngaq, which means ‘killing spirit.’ Their version of demons.”
Their pilot removed his pipe, spat into the sea, and mumbled a warning. “No use that name.”
Apparently, such superstitions had not fully died away.
Mac lowered his voice. “I’ll wager those old stories were the true source for someone choosing to name this glacier Helheim.”
Elena searched around and asked the question nagging at her since she climbed aboard the boat. “Where exactly are we going?”
Mac pointed to a black arch in the ice wall. They were close enough now to make out an opening, a shadowy rift cut into the glacier face. It was framed in azure ice that seemed to glow from within.
“Last week, a large berg calved off there, exposing a huge meltwater channel.”
She noted a stream running out of the rift, strong enough to push back the floating icy sludge that rimmed the bottom of the glacier. As they approached, the metal sides of the boat sliced through the loose broken ice with a scream of knives on steel. It set her teeth on edge. A new coldness settled into her bones as she suddenly recognized the trajectory of their boat and the lack of any beach in sight.
“Are . . . are we going to travel inside the glacier?” she asked.
Mac nodded. “Straight into the heart of Helheim.”
In other words, down to the World of the Dead.
9:54 A.M.
Douglas MacNab kept wary watch on his passenger as they approached the face of the glacier. He cast sidelong glances back at Dr. Cargill, noting how much paler her countenance had grown, how her fingers had tightened on the boat’s gunwale.
Hang in there, kid. It’ll be worth it.
When he had first been told an archaeologist—a woman—was coming to Greenland from Egypt, he hadn’t known what to expect. He vacillated between picturing a female Indiana Jones and some bespectacled academic who would prove to be ill-fitted for such a harsh landscape. He assessed the reality to be somewhere in between. The woman was plainly overwhelmed, but she did not balk. Past the trepidation in her eyes, he recognized a stubborn curiosity.
He also hadn’t expected someone so pretty. She was not overly curvaceous or photoshopped polished. Her form was lithe, but muscular, her lips full, her high cheeks rosy in the cold. Small lines crinkled the corners of her eyes, maybe from too much squinting into a desert sun or maybe from long hours of academic reading. Either way, it gave her a studious look, like a stern schoolteacher. He also found himself unduly fascinated by the lock of ice-blond hair poking out from the edge of her woolen cap.
“Mac, eyes forward,” Nelson warned him. “Unless you want us to run into a submerged berg.”
Mac stiffened and turned fully forward, both to hide the heat rising to his face and to peer into the depths ahead of their skiff. The blue waters had turned a murky brown due to the silty melt of the glacier.
He returned to his job in the bow, watching for any hidden dangers, both in the waters below and across the surrounding calving face. But he knew John Okalik, their Inuit pilot, had a far sharper eye when it came to reading the ice. The native had been plying these treacherous waters since he was a boy, nearly five decades. And his family for generations before that.
Still, Mac kept a closer eye as they drew up to the mouth of the meltwater opening. It stretched ten yards across and climbed twice as high. Another steel-sided boat came into view. It was tucked to one side and roped in place via ice stakes pounded into the wall. Two men sat there with huge-barreled rifles in their laps.