Valhalla Rising (51 page)

M
arlys Kaiser stepped from her kitchen onto the porch as she heard the thumping sound of a helicopter approaching her farm outside Monticello, Minnesota. Her house was typical of most midwestern farm structures: a wooden frame and siding, a chimney that rose from the living room through the upstairs bedroom and a peaked roof with two gables. Across a broad grassy lawn stood a red barn in pristine condition. The property had once been a working dairy farm, but now the barn was her office and the three hundred acres of wheat, corn and sunflowers were sharecropped and sold on the market. Behind the farm, the land dropped down a sloping bank to the shoreline of Bertram Lake. The blue-green waters were surrounded by trees, and the shallow water around the edges was filled with lily pads. Bertram was popular with fishermen, who drove up from Minneapolis because it was stocked regularly with bluegill, sunfish, pike and bass. It also had a large school of bullhead that began biting after sunset.

Marlys shielded her eyes from the early-morning sun in the east as a turquoise helicopter with the black letters NUMA painted on the sides dipped over the roof of the barn and hovered for a few moments above the yard, before settling its landing wheels into the grass. The whine of the twin turbines died away, and the rotor blades slowly drifted to a stop. A door opened and a ladder was dropped whose lower rung ended just above the ground.

Marlys stepped forward as a young woman with light brown hair that glimmered under the sun stepped from inside, followed by a short, stocky man with curly black hair who looked distinctly Italian. Then came a tall man with dark wavy hair and a craggy face etched with a broad smile. He walked across the yard in a direct manner that reminded her of her departed husband. As he came nearer, she found herself looking into the greenest eyes she had ever seen.

“Mrs. Kaiser?” he said softly. “My name is Dirk Pitt. I talked to you last night about flying from Washington and meeting with you.”

“I didn’t expect you so soon.”

“We flew by jet to a NUMA research station on Lake Superior in Duluth late last night. Then we borrowed their helicopter and flew on toward Monticello.”

“I see you had no problem finding the place.”

“Your directions were right on the money.” Pitt turned and introduced Al and Kelly.

Marlys gave Kelly a motherly hug. “Elmore Egan’s daughter. This is a thrill. I’m so happy to meet you. Your father and I were great friends.”

“I know,” said Kelly, smiling. “He often talked about you.”

She looked from one face to the other. “Have you had breakfast?”

“We haven’t eaten since leaving Washington,” Pitt answered truthfully.

“I’ll have eggs, bacon and pancakes ready in twenty minutes,” Marlys said warmly. “Why don’t you folks take a stroll and check out the fields and lake?”

“Do you work the farm alone?” asked Kelly.

“Oh, my dear, no. I sharecrop with a neighbor. He pays me a percentage after the crops are sold at current market prices, which is all too low nowadays.”

“Judging from the gate to the pasture across the road, the access door into the lower level of the barn and the hayloft above, you used to run a dairy herd.”

“You’re very observant, Mr. Pitt. My husband was a dairy farmer most of his life. You must have had a little experience yourself.”

“I spent a summer on my uncle’s farm in Iowa. I got so I could squeeze my fingers in sequence to squirt the milk in a pail, but I never got the hang of actually pulling it out.”

Marlys laughed. “I’ll give a shout when the coffee’s on.”

Pitt, Giordino and Kelly walked along the fields and then down to a boat dock, where they borrowed one of the boats Marlys rented to fishermen, and with Pitt manning the oars they rowed out on the lake. They were just returning when Marlys shouted from the porch.

As they gathered around the table in the quaint country kitchen, Kelly said, “This is very kind of you, Mrs. Kaiser.”

“Marlys. Please think of me as an old family friend.”

They engaged in small talk during the meal, discussing everything from the weather to lake fishing to the tough economy facing farmers across the country. Only after the dishes were cleared, with Giordino’s able assistance in loading the dishwasher, did the talk turn to rune stones.

“Father never explained his interest in rune stone inscriptions,” said Kelly. “Mother and I went along on his excursions to find them, but we were more interested in the fun of camping and hiking than searching for old rocks with writing on them.”

“Dr. Egan’s library was filled with books on Vikings but didn’t have any of his notes and reports,” added Pitt.

“Norsemen, Mr. Pitt,” Marlys corrected him. “
Viking
is a term for sea-roving raiders, who were fearless and fierce in battle. Centuries later, they probably would have been called pirates or buccaneers. The Viking age was launched when they raided the Lindisfarne monastery in England in 793. They came out of the north like ghosts, raping and pillaging Scotland and England until William the Conqueror, a Norman whose ancestors were Norse, won the battle of Hastings and became King of England. From 800 on, Viking fleets roamed throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Their reign was short, and their power faded by the thirteenth century. Their final episode was written when the last of them left Greenland in 1450.”

“Any idea why so many Norse rune stones have been found around the Midwest?” inquired Giordino.

“Norse sagas, especially those from Iceland, tell of the seafaring people and inhabitants of Iceland and Greenland who tried to colonize the northeast coast of the United States between 1000 and 1015
A.D.
We must assume they launched expeditions of exploration into our heartland.”

“But the only hard evidence that they came to North America is their settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland,” said Pitt.

“If they sailed and set up colonies in France, Russia, England, Ireland and the far reaches of the Mediterranean,” Marlys argued, “it stands to reason they could easily have entered middle America down the St. Lawrence River or around Florida, into the Gulf and up the Mississippi. They could have used the inland river water systems to explore vast regions of the country.”

“As indicated by the stones with runic inscriptions they left behind,” offered Giordino.

“Not just by Norsemen,” said Marlys. “Numerous people from the Old World visited the Americans before Leif Eriksson and Christopher Columbus. Ancient seafarers of many cultures sailed across the Atlantic and explored our shores. We’ve found stones with inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Cypriot script, Nubian letters and numerals, Carthaginian Punic script, and Iberian Ogam. Well over two hundred stones inscribed with the Ogam alphabet, which was used mostly by the Celts of Scotland, Ireland and Iberia, have been found and translated. The landscape is littered with stones carved with scripts that have yet to be identified. Early peoples may have traveled on our home grounds as far back as four thousand years ago.” She paused for effect. “And the alphabetic inscriptions are only the half of it.”

Kelly stared in disbelief. “There’s more?”

“The petroglyphs,” Pitt guessed.

“The petroglyphs,” Marlys echoed, with a nod of her head. “There are hundreds of recorded examples of carved images in stone of ships, animals, gods and goddesses. There are faces with beards that look identical to those from ancient Greece; heads of people that are nearly identical to those carved around the Mediterranean in classic times. Birds in flight are big favorites, as are horses and boats. There are even petroglyphs of animals that are foreign to the Americas, such as rhinos, elephants and lions. A great number of the images are astronomical, showing stars and constellations, whose positions in the stone correlate with positions in the sky thousands of years ago.”

“As I told you over the phone,” said Pitt, “we are investigating Kelly’s father’s fascination with a series of rune stones he discovered and studied fifteen years ago.”

Marlys looked up at the ceiling for a moment, recalling. “Dr. Egan’s studies concerned a series of thirty-five rune-stone inscriptions that told of a group of Norsemen who explored the Midwest in 1035
A.D.
I recall he was obsessed with the inscriptions in the hope they would lead him to a cave. Where? I have no idea.”

“Do you have any records of them?”

Marlys clapped her hands. “This is your lucky day. Come out to my office in the barn where I have them filed away.”

W
hat was once a barn built for a dairy herd had been converted into a giant office. The hayloft was gone and the high ceiling was open. Rows of library-style bookshelves took up half the space. A huge square table sat in the center of the room, with a cutaway entry to the middle where Marlys worked behind a pair of computers. The table was piled with photographs, folders, books and bound reports. There was an expansive monitor beyond the desk. Beneath it were shelves containing videotapes and discs. The old wooden plank floor was worn smooth and still showed nicks and dents from the hooves of the cows when they entered and exited during milking. Through a doorway a laboratory could be seen, the walls and floors of which looked to be coated with white dust.

One side of the spacious room was filled with artifacts, ceramic bowls shaped into pots, human heads and figures and animals. Several were creative interpretations of almost comical humans in strange and sometimes contorted positions. At least a hundred smaller unidentifiable artifacts were preserved in a great glass case. Pitt was particularly taken by several stone masks, very similar to those he’d seen in museums in Athens, Greece. None could have been carved by American Indians depicting members of their own tribe. All the bas-reliefs were images of men with curly beards, an interesting phenomenon since the native inhabitants of North, Central and South America were lucky in never having to shave.

“These were all found in the United States?” asked Pitt.

“Discovered in every state from Colorado to Oklahoma to Georgia.”

“And the artifacts?”

“Mostly tools, with a few ancient coins and weapons for good measure.”

“You have an amazing collection.”

“Everything you see goes to a university archive and museum when I pass on.”

“Remarkable that so many ancient people came this way,” said Kelly in awe.

“Our ancestors were just as curious as we are about what’s over the horizon.” Marlys swept her arm at chairs and a sofa as she searched the bookcases. “Make yourselves comfortable while I look for the records of the inscriptions that interested your father.” After less than a minute, she found what she was looking for and pulled out two thick reports in metal binders and carried them over to the desk. One held over a hundred photographs, and the other was bulky with papers.

She laid down a photograph of a large inscribed rock, with Marlys standing next to it for perspective. “This is the Bertram Stone, found on the other side of the lake by a hunter in 1933.” Then she went to a tall cabinet and removed what looked like a white plaster cast. “I usually shoot photos after highlighting the inscriptions with talcum powder or chalk. But if possible, I paint on several layers of liquid latex. After it dries, I transport it to my lab and make a mold with wet plaster. When that dries, I reproduce it on a blueprint machine and highlight the indented images or script. Letters and symbols then show up in the eroded stone that were not visible to the naked eye.”

Pitt stared at the twiglike markings. “A few of the letters are the same as our current alphabet.”

“The script is a combination of the old Germanic Futhark alphabet and the later Scandinavian Futhork. The first used twenty-four runes or letters, the second, sixteen. The origin of runic script is lost in time. There is a slight similarity to ancient Greek and Latin, but scholars think the basic runic alphabet originated in the first century with Germanic cultures who linked it with the Teutonic language of the time. By the third century, it had migrated into the Nordic countries.”

“How do you know the writing on the stone isn’t fake?” The question came from Giordino, a worldly skeptic.

“A number of reasons,” Marlys answered sweetly. “One, police forgery experts have examined several of the stones and unanimously agreed that the carved inscriptions were made by the same hand. All characteristics are identical. Two, who would travel two thousand miles around the country carving runic inscriptions about a Norse exploration expedition if it never happened? For what purpose? Also, if they were fake, they were made by someone who was a master of the language and alphabet, as attested to by modern experts on runology who found no incorrect variations in the letters. Three, the Bertram Rune Stone was first discovered, according to local historians, by a tribe of the Ojibways, who told early settlers about it in 1820. It was next recorded by French fur trappers. It seems extremely unlikely that someone else carved the stones long before the area was settled. And finally, four, although carbon-dating analysis only works with organic materials and not with stone, the only method to judge aging is to study the amount of erosion on the rock over the years. The weathering of the inscriptions and the hardness of the stone as exposed to the elements can give an approximate time of antiquity when the letters were carved. Judging from the wear and tear on the rock from wind, rain and snow, they were dated between 1000 and 1150
A.D.
, which seems reasonable.”

“Have any artifacts been found in or around the stones?” Giordino pursued.

“Nothing that has survived the years of exposure.”

“Not unusual,” said Pitt. “Few if any artifacts ever turned up along Coronado’s trail centuries after his trek from Mexico as far as Kansas.”

“Here’s the million-dollar question,” Giordino asked Marlys. “What does the stone say?”

Marlys took a CD disc and inserted it in her terminal. In a moment the letters, highlighted on the mold cast from the liquid latex, were revealed in great detail on the monitor. There were four lines of almost 140 letters.