Matt came out to oversee the lowering of his charge into the frigid depths. ‘All right, start bringing him down,’ he called, once he was sure the submersible was well clear of the hole’s edges. ‘Gently now.’
The crane operator said something in Norwegian with a long-suffering tone, prompting laughter from his countrymen. Tova, who had strolled on to the ice with the unconcerned air of someone well used to the potential dangers, giggled. ‘He said, “No, I thought I would drop it straight in,”’ she told the Australian, who was not amused.
The ROV began its leisurely descent. Eddie walked out on to the lake to watch; Nina, still nervous about being on the ice, hesitantly followed. A stiff wind blowing down the lake made her shiver. Even though the sky was fairly clear and the sun was shining, it was still bitterly cold. She looked along the opposite shore. Nothing but snow-draped trees for miles in either direction. For the first time, the isolation of the location really struck her. If anything unexpected happened, they were a long way from help.
She tried to shake off the unsettling feeling as Matt called out, ‘Okay, ease off! Release the cable!’ Nelson was in the water. Everyone gathered around the hole to watch as he unwound a cable from a relay box he had placed on the ice, then hopped on to the submersible’s back and screwed it tightly into a connector. ‘Control line,’ he explained as he returned to the ice. The relay box was linked via another cable to the remote controls in the tent. ‘The spool’s on the sub rather than the surface, so if the water freezes over, the line won’t snag.’
‘How long’s the line?’ Nina asked.
‘Long enough, don’t you worry!’ He crouched to check the connection on the box, then stood, satisfied. ‘Okay! I just need to run the diagnostics, then we’re good to go.’ An apologetic smile. ‘Afraid that’s where the boring part starts. No telling how long it’ll take before the search turns anything up.’
‘We are not far from where the old records said the Viking site was found,’ said Tova. ‘That is the most likely place for the runestone to be.’
‘Well, if we find it in the first five minutes that’s all well and good. All the same, you might want to have a Sudoku app on your phones.’ He started back to the shore.
The others followed, the crane truck crawling along behind them. ‘If there’s a chance he might find it pretty quick,’ said Eddie, ‘we’d better get the diving gear ready just in case. No point wasting time standing around when it’s this bloody nippy.’
‘I was planning on sitting in the truck where it’s warm rather than standing out in the cold,’ Nina replied with a smile. ‘But are you sure you want to go down there? Peder and Mathias can handle it — that’s why I brought them.’
‘I’ve dived in worse than this,’ he said, shrugging. ‘And the more hands we have down there, the quicker we’ll get the thing to the surface. It gets dark pretty early this time of year — it’ll be a pain in the arse if we have to leave and come back tomorrow to start all over again.’
‘You have not been on many archaeological digs, have you, Eddie?’ Tova asked, amused. ‘They usually take days, or even weeks. I think working for the IHA has made you think things always happen very quickly!’
Nina grinned. ‘I’d love to have a nice long, slow, good old-fashioned dig in the dirt sometime,’ she said, prompting an earnest shake of the head from her husband, ‘but yeah, things do often tend to race away when the IHA’s involved. Hopefully not this time, though.’
They reached the shore. While Matt went to the tent, Nina joined Eddie and the two divers as they checked their gear. They would not be wearing standard wetsuits, but insulated double-layer drysuits better suited to the frigid conditions. ‘Sure you don’t want to come down and see the thing first-hand?’ Eddie joked to the two women, waggling the neoprene arms of his suit at them.
‘Oh no, no,’ was Tova’s emphatic reply. ‘I am not a good swimmer. And I do not like the cold.’
‘But you live in Sweden,’ Nina pointed out.
‘Yes, and it is beautiful — in the summer!’
‘There needs to be more archaeology on tropical islands,’ said Eddie. ‘You’re in charge of the IHA, Nina — sort it out.’ He checked the pressure on his gas cylinder: nitrox, a mix with much higher oxygen content than normal air. ‘Okay, this is all set.’ Peder and Mathias confirmed that their own diving gear was ready for use. ‘Now we just need to find the thing.’
‘That’s up to Matt,’ Nina said. They went to the tent. ‘Is everything ready?’ she asked, entering the little shelter.
‘Keep that closed, will ya?’ the Australian complained. ‘It’s bloody freezing in here!’ He had a halogen heat lamp hooked up to the same portable generator powering his equipment, but was still huddled up tightly in his cold-weather gear. ‘But yeah, Nelson’s ready to go.’
‘Great. Do your thing.’
Matt regarded a map on a laptop, then checked another window on the screen before working the controls. A monitor showed the view from one of the ROV’s cameras; the glare of the sky quickly disappeared as the machine submerged. ‘Okay, I’ve switched on the MAD. I’ll take him to the middle of the lake and start a radial search to cover the area you said was the most likely place to find this old village. If nothing turns up, I’ll switch to a grid and move out from there.’
‘Sounds good.’ Nina watched a symbol slowly move across the map, then regarded the view from the on-board camera. The diffuse light coming through the ice was already fading to darkness as the submersible descended. ‘Let’s see what’s down there.’
‘If there is anything,’ Eddie added from behind her.
She couldn’t help thinking from his tone that he was almost hoping there was not.
The first hour of the search passed slowly, and fruitlessly.
The readings from the MAD turned out to be a source of frustration for the uninitiated. Within minutes, there was excitement as something distorted the background magnetic field enough to trigger an alert — but Matt dismissed it almost immediately as nothing more than a piece of inert metal rather than an actual magnetic source, and was proven correct when he took Nelson in to investigate. The sub’s floodlights fell upon nothing more than a rusting boat anchor. Further signals turned out to be equally disappointing: a corroded car door, a piece of unidentifiable scrap. ‘Told you to bring an app,’ Matt told Nina after the fourth false alarm.
She was half wishing she did have something to pass the time, but all the same there was something oddly fascinating about the slowly changing view from beneath the surface. The valley had been as full of trees as the surrounding hills before it was flooded, and their remains were still there, standing in their hundreds like decaying grave markers. It was an eerie sight.
Eddie was less impressed. ‘Bollocks to this,’ he said, retreating from the tent. ‘I’m going for a walk. Give me a shout if anything interesting turns up.’
Nothing did for the next hour. The Yorkshireman eventually returned to find the view on the monitor little changed. ‘Found any more buckets?’ he asked.
‘Enough to open a bait shop,’ Nina replied, stifling a yawn. ‘And some bits of boats, something that looked like an engine…’