‘Jean, been a while.’
The two men hugged and back-slapped, the sound drew attention from a few onlookers.
‘Did I hear you right; you want to fly out? Where exactly?’
‘You know Captain Skanks, Sea Eagle captain?’
‘Yes done some supply runs with him.’
‘Well he found this in an iceberg.’
Jacob showed a still shot on his PDA, the ship’s hull circled in red.
‘And he found this? Have you called him?’
‘No answer, you got any contacts?’
Jean moved out of the wind and into the shelter of the hanger office. The mechanic continued to work on a Sea King helicopter, Jacob noticed a twin prop otter and another helicopter at the back. All the aircraft were in the same colours, Haeberli Air emblazoned on the side.
Jean returned fifteen minutes later, his face conveying what Jacob had suspected.
‘I called a friend in the Ice patrol. Sea Eagle is not at last reported position. The ice patrol did a flyover of the iceberg, and there are no ships within range of it. ’
‘You and I both know a supply tug can only disappear one way.’
‘Yes. They have tried to trigger the emergency beacon on board remotely, but it does not work, and the GPS tag that was dropped onto the iceberg is floating miles away.’
‘Okay we really have to get out there.’
‘I will take the Sea King, if there are survivors we can pick them up.’
Jacob knew it was a big if, even in survival suits the water temperature would kill you in hours. Without one, much less.
In less than thirty minutes they were airborne, wearing protective standard survival suits. The bulky orange clothing was awkward, but had saved Jean and Jacobs’s lives when they ditched in the Arctic some years earlier. Jacob was up linking his laptop to the satellite feed and accessing more material from the Sea Eagle UAV feed. He looked at the hull of the ship, knowing that for anything to survive the crushing pressure of ice was unusual but not unheard of.
Some years before Jacob had been involved with salvaging a World War 2 bomber in a Greenland ice sheet. After three years of work it flew again, with the original engines. He knew nothing was impossible.
The Sea King was being buffeted by a strong headwind, driven in by an approaching storm front. Jean called Jacob over his headset, ‘Jacob there is something on the radar, small aircraft circling.’ Jacob moved up and grabbed some binoculars, after scanning the sky he saw what he expected. ‘That’s the UAV from the Sea Eagle. If it loses signal it will loiter until given new commands.’
‘How long will it circle for?’
‘Until it runs out of fuel, we never designed it with the base station sinking below it. Is it going to cause a problem?’
‘No it has a wide circle and slow speed, we can move around it. Can you get control over it?’
‘I will call the institute, see if they can override it and send it back to St Johns.’
While Jacob made calls, Jean brought the Sea King into a hover near the iceberg.
‘Jacob pop the door.’
With safety line attached, Jacob slid the heavy side door open and the freezing Atlantic wind chilled his exposed skin. The hull of the ship was just a hundred feet away. He could see detail and brought his binoculars up for a closer look. The section protruding out was the stern, squared off and very wide, not like a European ship. He knew of a few expeditions that had ventured to the far north, but they were in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries.
‘Jean I am going to need some samples from this ship.’
‘Jacob I brought you here to look for survivors and check this iceberg out. We both know that the coastguard would have found them by now.’
‘I will check it out, in person.’
‘You want me to put you on an unstable iceberg, in water that can kill you, with a storm front bearing down on us?’
‘You know when you put it like that it sounds dangerous.’
‘My friend, I promised your late wife that I would take care of you. What would your family think if I let you do this?’
Jacob paused, remembering the pictures in his wallet. ‘I only have one member of my family left. My son Archer and I have no idea where he is.’
‘Sorry to hear that Jacob but this is madness even for you.’
‘As I remember you have been a little wild in your past.’
‘Now don’t pull that…’
‘I will be quick, I promise. I just need an uplink to the institute and fifteen minutes.’
Jean checked his weather radar, ‘Twenty minutes and then I am pulling you out.’
Jacob gave Jean the thumbs up, but he knew these twenty minutes may be the last he had if something went wrong.
FIVE
Christophe Laurent didn’t realize that his fiancé had cut him off, and was still joking with her. An assistant pointed out the transmission had ceased. Laurent threw down the headset, muttering something unpleasant in French, before returning to his make shift desk. His tolerance of anyone ignoring him was zero, as his team knew all too well.
Three times in the past month he had flown into a rage for people not following his instructions to the specificity that he felt was required. They may only have altered the order of events minimally, and he would shout and rant within a few centimeters of their faces, spittle cascading across them. In truth nobody in camp liked Christophe Laurent, but they tolerated him to get access to this dig; a Spanish ship buried in river silt in the Ecuador jungle. According to the ground penetrating radar scans the ship was intact, and as the river had changed course many times since the initial burial, the silt had sealed it for eternity.
They had arrived two months before, following a tsunami, one that had originated near Hawaii, and hit the sparsely populated Ecuadorian coastline. Katherine had been employed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (N.O.A.A.) based in North America, to survey damaged and possible changes in coastline following the event. During the survey she spotted a structure buried in the jungle. Upon further investigation on her own, she found a ship over three hundred feet long. She contacted N.O.A.A. to see if any ships were reported missing, none were. Then called her friend Jacob Mathias at the Elements Institute, to enquire if any ships had been lost or reported missing in that area. There was no record of any ships missing, ever, so she sent her results to Jacob and that was it for her.
The team now assembled had discovered a wooden-hulled ship, suspected to be Spanish in origin, and from the sand and silt deposits it was buried by a tsunami. The level of silt and mixture of debris within it indicated that the ship had been near the shore, and the approaching waves had pushed it inland, tearing up most of the trees and plants in the process. The ship was buried in the river bed the silt held in suspension in the water above it, settled forming a protective coating and shielding the wooden hull from deterioration. Similar to the Mary Rose in England, Henry VIII flagship, buried for three hundred years.
Laurent was the best in his field, but a maverick in every sense, willing to bend, avoid or just break rules to achieve his goals. He had once drugged a customs officer in Mexico, just to smuggle a ceremonial dagger into the United States. This was not looked upon favorably by his benefactors of the time, and they fired him. The only reason he was on this job, was his connections within the Ecuador government, allowing him the permissions to excavate in exchange for information on damage from the tsunami and of course any finds he made.
Laurent was brilliant and instinctive, but unfortunately he knew it, all too well. He exploited that fact with the head of the Elements Institute, Jacob Mathias. There was an uncertain truce, like the Korean cease fire agreement, neither side completely sure of the others intentions or motivations.