John stood up at the stern and chatted quickly with the pair, relatives of his, which pretty much defined everyone from the village of Tasiilaq.
As they spoke, Mac looked back and forth, trying to follow the conversation. He was somewhat fluent in Kalaallisut, the main Inuit language of Greenland, but the men here were using the dialect of their local tribe, the Tunumiit.
Their pilot finally settled back to his seat by the tiller.
“So, John, we’re good?” Mac asked.
“My cousins say yes. River still open.”
John goosed the motor and slipped past the other boat to enter the meltwater channel. The grumble of the outboard amplified in the enclosed space as the skiff fought the current.
Mac noted Elena staring back at the shrinking arch of sunlight—and at the armed pair. “Why the guards?” she asked. “Do we have to worry about polar bears swimming out there?”
It was a reasonable guess. There remained a persistent threat of those giant white carnivores, especially with their astounding ability to swim long distances—though the shrinking Arctic ice pack was straining even their considerable ability.
“Not bears,” Mac answered her. “Once we get to the site, you’ll understand.”
“Where—?”
“It’s not much farther,” he promised. “And I think it’s best you see it without any expectations.” He glanced to Nelson. “It’s how we discovered it. I came in here three days ago with Nelson, mostly for the adventure of it, but also to better understand what’s going on underneath Helheim’s frozen white face. Drilling out mile-deep cores and analyzing the ancient gasses trapped in the old ice can only give you so much information. Here was a rare chance to travel to the source, to the heart of the glacier.”
Nelson spoke as he struggled to open his watertight pack. “I came along to take samples at this depth, searching for any mineral treasures ground up by this massive ice shovel carving its way across the face of Greenland.”
“What’s even out here?” Elena asked him.
Nelson grunted as he finally tugged open the wax-sealed zipper. “Greenland’s true wealth lies not in the amount of freshwater trapped as ice, but what is hiding beneath it. A cornucopia of untapped riches. Gold, diamonds and rubies, huge veins of copper and nickel. Rare earth elements. It promises to be a huge boon to Greenland and those that live here.”
“Not to mention filling the deep pockets of AGM,” Mac added pointedly.
Nelson dismissed this with a derisive snort as he extracted a handheld device and set about calibrating it.
Elena turned her attention to the tunnel. The blue ice grew ever darker as they continued deeper. “How far does this tunnel go?”
“All the way to the rocky coastline,” Mac said. “We’re traveling through a tongue of ice that extends three-quarters of a mile out from the shore.”
10:02 A.M.
Oh, god . . .
Elena’s breathing grew heavier with this news. She tried to imagine the weight of ice above her head, remembering Mac’s description of a berg the size of lower Manhattan calving off this glacier.
What if that happened while we’re inside here?
It eventually became so dark Mac switched on a light at the bow of the boat, casting a beam far down the tunnel, igniting the ice to a bluish glow, revealing darker veins within, like some ancient map, marking traceries of mineral deposits scoured from the distant coast.
She took a deep breath, doing her best to calm her nerves. While she had no problem crawling her way into tombs, this was different. Ice was everywhere. She tasted it on her tongue, drew it in with every breath. It encircled her completely. She was inside the ice; the ice was inside her.
Finally, a glow appeared out of the darkness, beyond the reach of the bow lamp.
Mac glanced back to her, confirming what she hoped. “We’re almost there.”
With a final whine of the motor, the skiff rode up the river to where blue ice ended in an archway of black rock. The meltwater channel continued farther, flowing down a series of cascades formed of broken stones and ice. But a single battery-powered lamp pole marked the end of their journey, a lone lighthouse in a frozen world.
Elena gasped at the sight illuminated before her. It was as if this lighthouse had lured a ship to this cold harbor.
“This is impossible,” she managed to eke out.
John angled their skiff to an eddy at the side of the river, where Mac roped their bow to a stake screwed into the ice wall.
Elena stood up, balancing herself, oblivious to the dangers of the icy waters. She craned her neck to take in the breadth of the huge wooden ship, its keel and planks turned black with age.
“How could this be here?” she mumbled.
Mac helped her from the boat to a spit of wet rock. “If I had to guess, the sailors sought shelter in what was once a sea cave.” He waved an arm to the black rock that hung over their heads. “They must have gotten trapped here, become frozen in place, until eventually the ice swallowed them completely.”
“How long ago was that?” Elena asked.
“From the age of the ice,” Nelson said, as he climbed out to join them, “we estimate it was shipwrecked around the ninth century.”
Mac stared back at her. “Everyone thought Christopher Columbus discovered the New World in 1492. Then he lost that title when it was discovered the Vikings had settled in Greenland and northern Canada in the late tenth century.”
“If you’re correct about the age, it would mean this ship landed a full century earlier,” Elena said. “And this is no Viking ship.”
“That’s what we thought, too, but we’re no experts.”
Nelson nodded. “That’s why you’re here.”
Elena now understood. While she had a dual degree in paleoanthropology and archaeology, her specialty was in nautical archaeology. It was why she was picked to unearth the Egyptian port city swallowed by the Mediterranean. Her field of interest was in pushing back the date when humankind first dared to ply the seas. She remained endlessly fascinated by such endeavors and the engineering history behind each advancement. It was a passion likely instilled in her as a girl, when she and her father used to sail each summer off Martha’s Vineyard. She still cherished those childhood memories, those rare moments when the two could spend quality time together. Even in college, she had been part of her university’s crew team, rowing scull to an Ivy League championship.
“Any guesses as to where this ship came from?” Mac asked.
“I don’t have to guess.” She headed toward the exposed stern of the boat. The forward bow was still encased in ice. “Look at how the sheathing planks are stitched together. Even the bindings are coconut rope. It’s all a very characteristic design.”
“Did you say coconut?”
She nodded and stepped toward where a pair of masts had broken long ago and now stuck out of the cave like two flags. The torn remnants of their sails were still preserved. “Those two lateen sails . . . they’re made of palm-leaf matting.”
Nelson frowned. “Coconut and palm leaves. So definitely not Vikings.”
“No, this is a Sambuk. One of the largest dhows of the Arab world. This one appears to even have a deck up there, which makes it one of the rare oceanic merchant vessels of the Arab world.”