“With the menorah.”
Jack suddenly remembered the breathtaking image they had seen on the painting, the fiery radiance. “Reksnys is wrong. I’m convinced the menorah isn’t here. The Toltecs may have left the Viking weapons here as some kind of offering, but I think they took the menorah with them from the battle site. We know the Toltecs didn’t offer all of Harald’s treasure to the gods, because we have those two coins incorporated in the jade pendant from L’Anse aux Meadows.”
“Which leaves us with a problem.”
“Reksnys is going to be disappointed.”
“We can’t go back empty-handed,” Costas said. “At best we’d be buying time, but probably not much of it. Chances are we’d be back down that hole again, dead before we hit the water. As Reksnys himself said, Maria was only saved on a whim. As soon as he finds out we don’t have the menorah, he’ll get bored. These people are always like that.” He looked at Jack. “He’ll let his son’s temper run its course.”
“They might try to follow us down here.”
“Loki might. There were a couple of old scuba rigs, gear Reksnys brought along before the chance came to use us, and Loki could easily follow the trail of lightsticks through the tunnel. But if he reaches the stage of going after us like that, he’ll be in a rage. That’d be curtains for Maria.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“We don’t have any choice.”
“These underground river systems always come up somewhere,” Costas said ruefully. “But it could be miles.”
“Could be less.”
Five minutes later they sat fully kitted up in the shallows, their helmet lights switched back on. Their voices sounded tinny and distant throught the intercom after the resonance of the chamber. Costas finished a final check on Jack’s rebreather, then looked at him intently through his visor. “You up for this?”
“All other options are closed. There’s no other exit from the cavern.”
“Okay. We’re looking for natural light, any hint. It’s just after five a.m., so should be dawn pretty soon. We’ll let the current take us. At least we can be sure that’ll come out somewhere. Good to go?”
“Good to go.”
They slipped into the water and dropped down towards the darkness. Once they had made the decision, Jack had not allowed himself to think beyond the practicalities of what they were doing. A few minutes earlier this had seemed like certain death, a one-way express that had nearly finished Costas. Now they were choosing to take it. He stared at the gaping blackness of the tunnel ahead. His mind was blank to the possibility of failure. This place had all the ingredients of his worst nightmare, and the only way to fight the fear was to keep focused. He thought of Maria.
Suddenly they were dragged into the current. Jack was flipped over and struggled to right himself, fleetingly aware of huge speed, of luminous stalagmites appearing and disappearing like giant white sentinels on either side. Then they were in the tunnel, twisting round a bend, blackness all around. The tunnel seemed to meander and turn like a living beast, seeking out a route among the calcite obstructions. They were completely at the mercy of the current, trusting the flow to keep them from crashing into the limestone walls on either side. Jack forced his head forward until his body was in line with the tunnel, Costas to his left, and they both extended their arms in a desperate attempt to use their hands as foils. Bulbous shapes appeared out of nowhere, caught in the beam of their headlamps, then vanished behind them with only inches to spare. Suddenly Jack was aware of a fork ahead, a widening in the tunnel divided by a column, a white pillar they were hurtling towards at terrifying speed.
“The right-hand tunnel!” Costas yelled. “I can see light!”
Jack swerved his hands to the right, craning his body to follow the main flow of the current. It was no use. At the last second he pulled his hands in violently to avoid smashing into the column and they tumbled into the left-hand tunnel, a narrowing pit of darkness with smooth walls like an ice chute. Jack bounced off Costas and felt an excruciating jolt in his thigh, from his injury in the ice. For a terrifying moment he was back inside the berg. “Wrong turn,” Costas yelled. Jack clutched him, could see his face behind his visor, frantic. “This is a side channel. “The main channel was flowing up towards the surface. I saw light.”
The current in the channel began to eddy, then slowed down. Even so it was impossible to swim against, and they were being pulled down inexorably. They clawed at the walls, to no avail. Suddenly everything was distorted, hazy, something Jack had last seen in the icefjord where the freshwater runoff from the glacier had formed a layer above the seawater. The water was shimmering, oily, the change in refraction caused by salinity throwing his senses into disarray. He began to feel disorientated.
“Shit,” Costas exclaimed. “That was the halocline. We’re below sea level.”
It was as if they had passed through into another dimension, into some darker world. The calcium formations were gone now, and the view ahead was bleak, forbidding. The intense, directional beam of light seemed to narrow the shaft, increasing Jack’s unease. The tunnel was elliptical, about five metres across, but the ceiling had lowered and a deep bed of gravel rose up from the floor. They were still going down, their lights boring a hole into the darkness. “Forty metres depth,” Costas said. “The Yucatan cave systems bottom out at about fifty metres, maximum. We’ve got to be going back up soon.” Jack looked at his depth gauge. Forty-six metres. Fifty-two metres. The ceiling and the floor had almost converged, and they were wedged in now, burrowing in the gravel to make space. Then they came to a standstill in a cloud of silt. Jack aimed his headlamp into the slit ahead, a crack only inches above the gravel. It was a dead end. They were trapped.
Costas heaved himself back beside Jack, his rebreather clunking against the ceiling and his body grinding through the gravel. “Something’s not right,” he said. “We were being pulled down by a current, and that’s got to go somewhere. And this gravel pile curves down at the sides, shaped by water movement. There has to be an outlet.”
He pushed himself down the right side of the gravel pile, into a narrow channel at the bottom, and pulled himself ahead until only his fins were showing. Jack closed his eyes, then opened them again, concentrating on little things, like the shape of a fossil in the limestone a few inches from his face. He looked down again to where Costas had disappeared. He could see that the crevasse was free of silt. Swept clear by the current. Costas was right.
“Jack. Follow me.” He did as Costas instructed, digging his hands into the gravel and heaving himself down the side of the tunnel. He felt the flow of water, saw light ahead. “It goes up,” Costas said excitedly. Jack followed slowly, squeezing through a boulder choke. There was hardly any room to move, and he was reduced to wriggling, his rebreather pack clanging against the stone walls. The tunnel beyond was narrower still, like a drainage pipe, smooth and rounded where the current had worn it down but only about three feet in diameter. Jack had never been in a space so narrow. It was beyond claustrophobic. There was no way they could go back, with the current pressing against them, and any blockage in the tunnel now would seal their fate. Costas’ fins were a few feet ahead of him. Jack checked his depth gauge, remained focussed. He stared at the rock inches from his face, then at his depth gauge. Forty-one metres. Thirty-seven metres. They were ascending, slowly but surely. Then the tunnel took a sharp turn upwards and they were in a chamber, a vast space filled with shadowy forms, great columns that towered upwards like white-robed giants, beckoning them up from the underworld. Far above, Jack could see a shimmer of green, distinct from the white beams of their headlights. He closed his eyes again, a wave of relief coursing through him, his heart pounding not with fear but with exhilaration. He rose beside Costas through the chamber, the water so clear that they seemed suspended in midair like figures from some scene of apotheosis. Then they were at the top of the cavern, only ten metres beneath the surface of the water, butting up against a crack in the rock where they could see the light of dawn shining through.