Rob Jones
The Curse of Medusa
For Snowdrop
PROLOGUE
Max Henriksen tightened the hood of his Parka and stamped his feet against the hard Arctic snow. It was a vain attempt to warm up, but he did it all the same.
He sighed and scanned the bleak horizon. This was one hell of a place to build a listening station, but what the National Security Agency wanted, the National Security Agency generally got.
He watched with growing impatience as Frank Laurie began to lower the hollow drill-head into the hole in the ice. It had gotten stuck somewhere a few thousand feet below the surface and the young scientist from New Jersey was now attempting to lubricate the process with some drilling fluid. He wasn’t making a very good job of it.
“It’s not budging, Max,” he said.
Max scratched his beard. “What’s the depth?”
“Seven thousand feet.”
“Let me get a look in there, kid,” Martinez said, moving Laurie aside and pushing his way to the drill. Like Henriksen, Tony Martinez wasn’t a scientist, but part of the NSA team assigned to scout the area for its suitability as a listening station. “You’ve got no strength in you. Let a real man do the job.”
He laughed heartily as he began to rotate the drill barrel in an attempt to move the cutters into the ice again, but his laughter faded when he realized the drill wasn’t going any deeper.
“This ain’t right, Max,” he said. “Should be nothing down there but ice and water. Am I right, Laurie?”
Laurie nodded, equally perplexed. “Nothing but ice and water.”
Henriksen frowned. “Then let’s see if we can drill around it.”
It took them the best part of the day to work out where the drill head could penetrate at that depth and where it couldn’t. They worked out whatever was blocking their way was no more than a couple of square feet.
“I for one want to know just what the hell is down there,” Henriksen said.
The others agreed, and three hours later they were hoisting the mystery object up through the small tunnel made by the various attempts with the core driller.
Henriksen saw it first — a blackened object about the size of a small TV set.
“What the hell…?” Martinez said. “That thing look man-made to you, Max?”
Henriksen nodded grimly. It did look man-made to him.
When they got it to the surface, it was encrusted in ancient ice and hard to see, but clearly some kind of chest.
“This is freaking me out, Max,” Martinez said.
“Me too,” Laurie said, taking a few steps back.
Max unhooked it from the hoist and laid it in the snow. A storm was rising now and the freezing air was filling with snow once again.
Henriksen stared in wonder. “Well, I’ll be damned…”
“It looks Greek,” Martinez said.
“What the hell is a metal chest covered in Greek letters doing buried at this level in the Arctic ice?” Laurie said, scratching his head. “Ice at this depth is thousands of years old.”
Henriksen frowned as he studied the intricate carvings on the lid of the chest. They looked older than time itself, and someone had carved them with the greatest of care. “Thule,” he said in wonder, barely above a whisper.
Martinez looked over at the station commander. “Huh?”
“Thule,” Henriksen repeated. “It’s all I can think of.”
Anxiety crept into Laurie’s voice. “Yeah, I heard you the first time, Max. But what does it mean?”
Henriksen rubbed his gloved hands together. “Thule? I’ll tell you when we’re in the warm — come on.”
They collected their ice core equipment and trudged back through the thick snow to their research station, dragging the heavy box behind them with lines from a dog sledding harness.
Inside, the electric fire whined almost as loud as the wind howling over the communications aerials on top of the building. Laurie hung his gloves up to dry while Martinez made coffee.
Henriksen simply couldn’t take his eyes off the chest. Now it was warm and they were out of the wind he could get a good look at it for the first time. On closer inspection it was made mostly of wood — a heavy hardwood like walnut maybe — but the edge clamps and handles were made of something resembling iron. He could see that once there had been leather straps but they had almost completely degraded and they crumbled away in his hands when he touched them.
Laurie handed him a hot mug of coffee. “So tell me about this Thule thing.”
Max looked up, startled by the interruption. “Thule was a place first written about by the ancient Greek geographer Pytheas. He described it as a location in the far north of Europe, but most scholars generally agree it was nothing more than a myth.”
“Until now,” Martinez said, staring at the box.
“Maybe…” Henriksen rubbed his eyes and ran his hands over the box again. He tentatively pulled on one of the drawbolts but it was locked by something — he looked closer and saw they had been nailed down.
“Someone seriously didn’t want this thing opened,” he muttered.
“Hey — don’t mess with it, Max,” Laurie said quietly. “We don’t know what’s in it, and… and I’m pretty sure it’s not our place to find out.”
Henriksen didn’t agree. He was a government man, and more than that he was in the NSA. As far as he was concerned, whatever was inside this chest could represent some kind of national security threat to the United States.
“Martinez — get me a hammer and chisel.”
“You got it, boss.”
The tall New Yorker returned a moment later with the tools and handed them to Henriksen.
The station commander concentrated hard on the chest as he lined up the cutting edge of the chisel, rested it gently on the top of one of the hasps and tapped the handle of the chisel with the hammer’s face.
He’d expected some resistance, but all that time in the ice had weakened the metal and it fell apart immediately, crumbling into black dust on the table top at the base of the chest.
“One down, one to go,” Henriksen said.
Laurie looked at the other two men and took another step back from the table.
“I’m not sure about this at all…” he said, his voice drifting into the chilly air of the cabin.
“Just calm down, kid,” Martinez said, “It’s just a chest.”
Henriksen’s concentration didn’t break as he raised the chisel to the second hasp and repeated the exercise, popping it open and leaving another small pile of degraded metal on the table top.
“Well… that should just about do it,” he said, laying the tools beside the ancient black box.
He raised his hands to the chest and began to open the lid.
“Listen, Max…” Laurie said, his voice wobbling. “Whoever put that thing down there did it for a reason, and I bet it was a real good one, too. Maybe we should call the government or something?”
Martinez laughed and ignored the growing anxiety in the younger man’s voice.
“We are the government, son,” Henriksen said, without lifting his eyes from the chest. Then he opened the lid and stared inside. A look of confusion crossed his face.
“What the hell..?”
Martinez joined him and looked inside. “Excuse my high-school French, but what the fuck is that?”
“I have no idea.”
Henriksen put his arms inside the chest and pulled out a strange, black box covered in more writing and secured with a leather strap. He pulled on the strap and it broke in his hands — another example of the deterioration caused by the extreme cold over such a long period of time.
“Max, please…”