“Worth a try,” Eddie replied, preparing himself. When the heat of the fire caused the round to cook off and explode, he had to be ready to take his only chance.
When it cooked off. Any moment now …
Nothing happened. He glanced at the fire. The glinting brass case was visible amid the flames, but the blaze wasn’t hot enough to ignite it.
The other fires were rising higher, though. Smoke billowed up into the vaulted ceiling. Hoyt suppressed a cough. “Think we need to get moving, boss.”
“I think so too,” Lock replied. Covering Eddie with his gun, he backed down the steps of the dais. The soldiers of fortune followed his example. “Get Dr. Wilde out of here.”
Nina’s captors hauled her toward the doors. “You bastards!” she yelled.
“What about these assholes?” asked Hoyt, indicating Eddie, Kagan, and Berkeley.
“Shoot them,” Lock decided. Berkeley moaned in fear.
“No!” cried Nina as the mercs raised their guns—but then she was dragged out of the great hall, her shouts lost beneath the growing crackle of the fires.
Eddie helplessly watched her go, then looked back at the cartridge. It was now barely visible within the fire, but still hadn’t exploded—and might never do so. “If we leave them alive in here,” Lock continued, “they might find a way out if part of the roof collapses.”
“I ain’t complainin’,” said Hoyt. He raised his gun. “Okay, Chase! I spent three years in a Vietnamese jail ’cause of you. But now, it’s finally payback time.”
Eddie tensed—
Crack!
The cartridge detonated, kicking up a shower of sparks and burning straw—and the mercenary nearest to Eddie screamed as the .45-caliber bullet tore into the back of his calf.
Everyone whirled to face the unexpected threat—
Eddie sprang up like a runner off the starting blocks and charged across the dais. The mercenaries’ weapons whipped back around to track him, but he had already hurled himself off the platform and dived behind one of the overturned tables.
Hoyt opened fire, his men following suit. Bullets ripped into the thick wood. Eddie shielded his face as splinters stabbed at him—but the 5.7mm rounds from the mercenaries’ P90s struggled to penetrate the dense oak planks. “Go around it, get him!” Lock yelled.
Kagan grabbed Berkeley and hauled him into cover behind a throne as one of Hoyt’s men ran to the table. Eddie searched for anything he could use as a weapon—
He found plenty.
The merc reached the table, ready to shoot the figure hunched behind it—only to find that his quarry was ready for him.
A rusty ax hacked deep into his shin, breaking bone. The man screeched in agony, gun forgotten as his injured leg gave way and he collapsed to his knees. Eddie yanked the ax back—and struck again, slashing the ancient weapon across his throat. A jet of blood sprayed across the stone floor as the merc toppled, the wound gaping like a second mouth beneath his chin.
“Jesus fuck!” Hoyt yelled as Eddie snatched up the dying man’s P90 and ducked back into cover. “Take him down, shoot that motherfucker!”
Lock hurriedly retreated from the clamor of automatic fire as the other men opened up on full auto. This time, wood was no match for the onslaught. “Shit!” Eddie yelped as he dropped flat, the old table juddering as ragged chunks were ripped from it. His shelter would last only a couple more seconds—
Another sound filled the room—a deep, dangerous crack from above.
The fire had reached the roof beams. One of them sheared in two with a noise like a shotgun blast, golden shields jolting loose around it and clanging to the stone floor. Earth and stones cascaded down after them, a mercenary reeling as he was struck on the shoulder. Another beam, flames licking hungrily up its length, broke free from the apex of the vaulted ceiling and swung down to pound a bench into matchwood. The shooting stopped as the gunmen scattered.
“Get out, get out!” yelled Lock. “The whole place is coming down!”
“What about Chase and the others?” Hoyt demanded. “They’re still alive!”
“Just make sure nobody gets out the front entrance!” Covering his mouth and nostrils with his sleeve, Lock ran from the great hall.
Hoyt glared at the table shielding Eddie, then reluctantly followed his boss. “Everybody out!” he shouted, firing a few last rounds to make sure the Englishman didn’t dare raise his head to shoot back. Dragging the wounded man with them, the others hurried after him.
Eddie peered around the table to see the last of the mercenaries leaving the chamber. He jumped up. “Kagan! Are you okay?”
The Russian rose from behind the thrones, Berkeley emerging fearfully after him. “My shoulder is hurt,” he said through gritted teeth, “but I will live.”
“Not for long if we don’t get out of here.” Eddie flinched back as a hunk of burning wood dropped from above and smashed on the dais. The smoke was getting thicker, rasping at the back of his throat. “Come on.”
“But they’ll be waiting for us!” Berkeley objected, before coughing.
“You want to stay in here?” Eddie started for the exit—then veered off to recover his Wildey. “Not losing this one too,” he said on Kagan’s quizzical look. “Nina’d never shut up about it.” He set off again. The Russian collected a flashlight and followed.
“Wait, wait!” Berkeley yelped, hurriedly reversing direction.
“What the fuck are you doing?” demanded Eddie. Another ominous crack and a shower of dirt from above warned him that the roof was about to collapse.
“My tablet!” The American picked up the broken computer, shaking out the shards of broken glass.
“What? It’s buggered!”
“The screen’s broken—but we can still recover the memory!” Berkeley replied as he also scooped up the discarded sun compass, then raced after Eddie. “It’s got the directions to the site on Baffin Island! They can still be translated.”
Eddie was about to ask him why he cared, but decided there were more important concerns. A clutch of shields clashed to the floor like oversized cymbals as other burning roof beams gave way. He weaved around the wreckage, slowing to let Berkeley catch up. “Come on, fucking leg it!”
He looked back—and realized as Berkeley overtook him that he would be the last person ever to see the great hall of Valhalla. Hidden for more than a thousand years, destroyed in minutes. The entire chamber was now ablaze as the fire greedily swallowed tinder-dry fuel. Flames rose around the dais, the three thrones and the runestones behind them disappearing into the smoke.
But there was no time for regrets—and besides, he told himself as he turned away, that was Nina’s department, not his. He had tried to keep his promise to Natalia by stopping anyone from ever finding this place, and failed. Now his only hope was to prevent Lock and Hoyt from escaping with what they had discovered.
And above that, he had to save his wife.
He shoved Berkeley through the doors as a massive splintering crack shook the entire hall. The backbone of the great vaulted ceiling had broken. The roof sagged, shedding a cascade of golden shields into the swelling fires—then the middle of the long room was crushed by a giant hammer blow of falling soil and trees. A searing wind blew smoke and cinders through the doors as Kagan and Eddie struggled to shut them.
They finally closed with a thud. More loud crashes came from inside the hall, shaking the walls. Eddie staggered back, eyes stinging. “Bloody hell!” he said between coughs. “Guess the Vikings didn’t have a god of sprinkler systems.”
Kagan groaned as he pulled the wooden shard out of his shoulder. Blood oozed from the tear in his coat. “How are we going to get out? They will be watching the gate.”
“I think I know a way,” said Eddie. “Give me the torch.” He holstered the Wildey, then, with the P90 in one hand and Kagan’s flashlight in the other, he jogged down the passage and cautiously looked around the corner.
There were no torch beams in sight, and
under the circumstances he doubted that any of the mercenaries were lurking in side rooms to ambush them. A quick sweep with his light revealed smoke swirling through cracks in the wall. The stones were not flammable, but the same couldn’t be said about the beams bracing them. “Okay, it’s clear.”
He hurried down the long corridor, the others behind him. The smoke thickened as they approached the far end; a section of wall had partially collapsed where falling rubble in the main hall had piled up behind it. “My God,” said Berkeley in dismay. “The whole place is going to come down. We’ve lost everything!”
“Your mates got the only thing they came here for,” Eddie said, checking the next turn. Again nobody was waiting for them—though there was a glow of daylight coming from the passage leading to the death-gate.
“They’re not my ‘mates,’ ” Berkeley snapped back. “They used me—they were going to kill me!”
“They still might if you don’t keep your voice down.” Eddie weaved through the hanging tree roots and advanced to the intersection, Kagan and Berkeley following. With greater caution than before, he peered around the corner at the gate.
The mercenary team’s entrance had been literally explosive. The two lead-sheathed doors were ripped open as if someone had punched through a sheet of aluminum foil, mangled metal curled back from the edges of a ragged hole. Broken wood littered the floor. But Eddie was only concerned about what was outside. He squinted against the glare of sunlight on snow, eyes adjusting to reveal figures in the cutting. “They’re waiting for us. Definitely can’t get out that—”
“Chase, look out!” Berkeley yelped, suddenly shoving him into the open. Eddie whirled, the torch raised like a club—the thought flashed through his mind that the renegade archaeologist was betraying him to regain favor with Lock—but then he saw both the other men jumping clear as the ceiling beams above them sagged, then snapped. Hard-packed earth spewed down where they had been standing, a section of the stone wall toppling into the passage.
“Run!” shouted Kagan as another beam split with a whipcrack sound. Eddie needed no further prompting. The trio rushed across the intersection—and bullets smacked against the wall behind them as one of the mercenaries spotted movement in the shadows.
The gunfire ceased as they reached cover on the other side, but more sounds of tormented wood came from overhead. “Don’t stop!” Eddie yelled. “Keep going!”
“This is a dead end!” Kagan objected.
“No, there might be a way out—if we can get to it!” He shone the light forward. The next corner was just ahead—
The ceiling behind them completely gave way. Hundreds of tons of frozen soil and ash roots plunged into the empty space, the shock of the impact kicking flagstones up from the ground and sending all three men tumbling. Blinding dust swallowed them.
“Whoa!” said Hoyt, shielding his eyes from flying grit as a dark cloud belched out of the entrance. Above it, an ash tree swayed before falling with a savage crackle of breaking branches. Others thrashed wildly as the entire top of the barrow sagged. “God damn! The whole place just caved in.”
Lock watched from farther away, mercenaries guarding the zip-cuffed Nina and Tova behind him. “I don’t think anyone’ll be getting out of there. And nobody else will find the runestones before we get to Baffin Island, that’s for sure.”
Nina stared at the sight in horror. Smoke began to gush from the heart of the broken mound. “Oh my God. Eddie …”
Lock turned to her with an obnoxious smile. “May I be the first to say sorry for your loss, Dr. Wilde. But,” he went on, seeing her expression change to fury, “it seems appropriate, somehow. Valhalla is the last resting place for heroic warriors, and Chase was that if nothing else.”
“You’re givin’ him too much credit,” said Hoyt, joining them. “Guy was an asshole.” Nina fixed him with a glare of hatred, but was filled with too much rage and grief to speak.
“All right,” Lock said, addressing his men, “let’s get back to the trucks. Dr. Skilfinger, I hope you don’t suffer from travel sickness, because you’re going to get right to work on translating the runes. Otherwise, Dr. Wilde will be joining her husband in the land of the honored dead.”
“You are a monster,” Tova snapped bitterly. “Nina, I am so, so sorry.” Again Nina was too overcome with emotion to answer. All she could do was look back at the remains of Valhalla as the mercenaries led her away into the snowy forest.
28
Inside the ruins, there was nothing but darkness. Silence had descended, the roar of flames snuffed by tons of earth. Everything was still, no movement, no sound …
“Buggeration and fuckery!”
Eddie stood, shaking off soil and broken wood. His head throbbed where part of the fallen ceiling had struck him, and he had acquired an entirely new collection of bruises all over his body. But he was alive.
And sightless. There was a moment of near-panic at the thought that he was blind, but he quickly overcame it when he realized he had simply lost the torch. He crouched and swept the floor with his hands, soon finding the plastic casing, but a sad little tinkle of glass told him that he wouldn’t be getting any more use from it.
The air was thick with dust, caking his lips. “Kagan?” he said, suppressing a cough. “Where are you?”
“I am here,” the Russian rasped from somewhere to his right.
“Are you okay?”
A pause as the other man sat up with a grunt. “I am not worse than I was,” he concluded.
“That’s about the best we could hope for, I suppose. Berkeley?”
“Chase?” came the quavering reply from the darkness. “Oh my God, we’re trapped! The entire roof must have come down! The air—there won’t be enough air!”
“Don’t wet yourself,” Eddie told him, closing his eyes for several seconds before opening them again. He slowly turned on the spot, picking out indistinct shapes in one direction. “We’re in a passage that’d already collapsed, we found it when we came in.”
“And how’s that going to help us? That just means we’re doubly trapped!”
“If I could see you, I would fucking slap you right now,” Eddie said with a sigh as he carefully advanced toward the dim light. “There was a dead eagle; if it got in, there must be a way out. We’ve just got to find it.” He felt stone slabs give way to dirt underfoot; he had reached the cave-in. The light was coming from above, a faint blue-gray wash that he realized was being filtered through a layer of snow. “I think I can see it.” He scrabbled to the top of the irregular slope.
There was indeed a hole, as he had thought. It was less than a foot wide, but as his eyes adjusted he saw that its sides appeared to be loosely packed earth. He scraped experimentally at the opening. Some small stones came away, but most of the soil was frozen. “Don’t suppose anyone packed a pickax, did they?”
“Can’t you get through?” Berkeley asked, worried again.
“Should be able to, but it’ll take a fair bit of work.” The thought that every moment he was stuck in Valhalla saw Nina and Tova being taken farther away was at the forefront of his mind. “Pass me the torch, I might be able to chip the— No, wait, forget that,” he said, reaching into his coat. “I’ve got something better.”
He took out the Wildey. “You are going to shoot your way out?” the dubious Kagan asked.
“I like the idea, but no.” He took his spare magazine from the holster strap and loaded it to ensure dirt couldn’t clog the feed, then turned the hefty weapon around and began to hack away at the soil with the grip. “Nina always said she couldn’t see the point of having a gun like this. Shame—if she was here I could gloat at her.”
“Smug superiority, the perfect building block for a marriage,” said Berkeley sarcastically.
“Works, doesn’t it? I don’t see any wedding ring on your finger.” Eddie kept up the attack with his makeshift pick. Larger chunks broke away, the bottom of the hole widening. “Okay, let me see if I can reach up …”
He stretched his arm through the opening, fingertips exploring its sides. He found hard stones, cold soil … then felt a sudden chill. A quick scrape, and he withdrew his hand to find ice crystals encrusting his fingernails. “I reached snow,” he told the others. “The hole can’t be that deep—we can get out!” With renewed vigor he raised the Wildey again and resumed his assault.
The trek through the forest to the waiting vehicles took about fifteen minutes. “Come on, hurry up,” Lock called impatiently to his men, some of whom had been slowed by carrying their injured comrades. “Ragnarök’s waiting for us.”
“You know Ragnarök’s an event and not a place, right?” Nina said.
“Pedantry will get you nowhere, Dr. Wilde,” he replied as he went to one of the trio of four-by-fours. The large Volvo XC90 SUV had been converted to an all-terrain vehicle; its wheels were mounted on a roof rack, replaced by compact Mattracks caterpillar track units fitted to each of the hubs. “Hoyt, you come with me—make sure Dr. Skilfinger stays out of trouble.”
Hoyt pulled Tova with him to the off-roader. “What about her?” he said, nodding at Nina.
“Better that we keep them apart. I’m sure she’d spend every minute of the journey trying to convince Dr. Skilfinger not to translate the runes.”
“We could just gag and hog-tie her, then throw her in the trunk.”
“Try it, and I’ll bite your damn fingers off,” Nina growled.
“Just put her in one of the other SUVs,” Lock said impatiently. “I want to get out of here. The sooner we leave Sweden, the sooner we can find the eitr.” He opened the Volvo’s door and climbed into the driver’s seat.
“Treynor, Tarnowski, keep an eye on Red,” Hoyt ordered two of his men, gesturing for them to put Nina in the back of the second four-by-four. “Wake, you drive ’em. Wounded go in the other SUV, everyone else packs up and grabs a vehicle. We’re moving out.”
The mercenaries divided among the various transports. The still of the forest was soon shattered by first the rasp of the snowmobiles, then the piercing buzz of the two icerunners as their propellers wound up to full speed. Lock was first to move; Nina gave Tova a last despairing glance through the window as his XC90 set off, then her own SUV pulled away behind it.