The Valhalla Prophecy

  Eddie crossed back to the table and picked up the sun compass. “There’s nothing on this?” he asked, angling it toward the overhead lights to pick out the lines etched into its surface.

  “Just the navigational markings,” Berkeley told him.

  “The ones that brought us here.”

  Nina cocked her head toward her husband. His words hadn’t been a flat statement of fact, but almost a question. “What is it?”

  Eddie turned the compass over in his hands. “One side brought us here,” he said, “and the other one, that would have directed the Vikings to the place the Russians nuked back in 1961, right?” He tapped the flip side of the dark stone disk, which had its own set of inscribed lines.

  “Yes; what about it?” said Berkeley.

  “Well, they wouldn’t have had both compasses with them, would they? They didn’t know which of the two sites was going to be where Ragnarök kicked off—that was the whole reason for them splitting into two forces. So each group”—he dug his fingernails into the thin gap around the edge of the linked disks—“would only have had one compass.”

  He strained—and the two pieces popped apart as he overcame the magnetic force clamping them together.

  Nina took one of the disks and examined its newly revealed face. She realized she had never actually done so before; there had not been time when she’d separated the two halves at Valhalla, and since then they had remained locked together for ease of handling. There were markings upon it, but far less complex than on the other side. “Logan, look at this,” she said, showing it to the other archaeologist. “These might be pictographs!”

  Berkeley almost snatched it from her. “Let me see.” He ran a fingertip lightly over the group of etched lines, then flipped the compass back over to compare its position with what was on the other side. “Wow, my God. If I’m reading it right, this might represent a landmark on the journey around Greenland.” His gaze flicked back and forth between the disk and the text on the screen. “They had the compass to give them an indication of their latitude, but this is a way they could confirm they’d reached the right place.”

  “Kind of like ‘turn left at this mountain’?” suggested Eddie.

  “Yes, exactly!” He peered more closely at the back of the compass. “I think you’re right, Nina—these are pictograms. They’ve very crude, but they don’t need to show anything more than the most general features. These look like two islands, for example.” He tapped one of the angular little illustrations.

  “So which one represents our three mountains?” Nina asked. She took back the disk, Berkeley relinquishing it with reluctance. “If the islands are a landmark in Greenland, they should appear next in the sequence. So … these.”

  She pointed at a pictogram. It was little more than a set of upward-pointing chevrons, two small and one large, but she could tell how they would relate to real features of Baffin Island’s landscape. The small markings were spaced apart with a curving line that could represent the coastline between them, while the larger was positioned above. “To me, this looks like two mountains on either side of a bay, with a bigger one behind them, farther inland. What do you think?”

  “Fits the bill,” said Eddie, examining the markings. He gave Berkeley a mocking look. “You had these things all this time, and you didn’t think to flip ’em over and see what was on the other side?”

  The American narrowed his eyes in annoyance. “I did check both compasses, as a matter of fact. But since I didn’t know the significance of the other markings, I can hardly be faulted for not picking up on them. There were usually more pressing matters to think about. Like trying to get out of a burning building!”

  “This does not matter,” said Kagan, his impatience returning. “What does matter is that we now know what we are looking for.” He went to one of the ship’s internal telephones and made a brief call in Russian, then turned back to the group. “If Dr. Berkeley’s work is correct and the eitr pit is at sixty-eight degrees north, we should reach the area in eleven or twelve hours. I have told the captain to bring us closer to the coast so we can watch for the three mountains.”

  Eddie looked at his watch. “It’ll be dark well before we get there. You’re not planning to head out across the Arctic in the middle of the night, are you?”

  Kagan smiled. “I want to find the eitr pit before Lock and his people, but I am not that crazy. We will need to see where we are going—I do not want to fall into the pit! No, we will wait until daylight before we land.”

  “In that case,” said Berkeley, standing, “I’m going to have dinner and go to bed. I want a proper night’s sleep before I go trekking across the wilds of Canada.”

  “That’s the first good idea you’ve had since this whole thing started,” said Eddie. He ignored Berkeley’s glare, instead looking at Nina. “You want to get some rest?”

  There was hesitancy behind the question. Berkeley didn’t notice, but Kagan picked up on it, giving the couple a quizzical twitch of his eyebrows. Nina knew full well what Eddie meant, though.

  The time had come to answer the question they had both been avoiding.

  “Yeah,” she said quietly. “Yeah, I think that’s … a good idea.”

  “In that case,” said Kagan, “I will see you before first light tomorrow. If you want to eat, the captain has arranged for the mess to be open for you.”

  “Thanks,” said Eddie. He headed for the door, Nina joining him. “So, bunk beds,” he said. The cabin they had been assigned was far too small for a double bed, and was a tight squeeze even for bunks, making the average prison cell seem spacious. “Kind of limits what we can do—although I suppose there’s the potential to try something acrobatic.”

  Nina smiled. “Sleep’ll be enough for tonight.” A pause. “And some talking, I think.”

  “Yeah, I think so too.” He let out a heavy breath as they headed through the ship’s passageways.

  Neither spoke again until they reached the compact cabin. Eddie shut the door, then gestured for Nina to take a chair before folding himself to sit on the lower bunk. “Well, then,” she said, feeling suddenly awkward. There was a very obvious question to ask, the words almost screaming inside her head—did you murder Natalia?—but she couldn’t voice it. Instead, she asked: “What Hoyt said, about you and Natalia in Vietnam—what actually happened?”

  Eddie took a long breath before replying. “Hoyt’s boss, Lock—he was behind everything. He set up the job in Vietnam by pretending to be Natalia’s dad, and he planted Hoyt in our team as his inside man. They wanted to get hold of the Russian research on Natalia’s DNA, and keep her for themselves. I stopped them from getting either of them—I burned the research.”

  “And what about Natalia?” Seconds passed without an answer. “Eddie?” she prompted.

  Another sighing breath. “Remember that I told you in Russia how Natalia was infected by the eitr?”

  “Yes, her grandfather poisoned her grandmother with it.” The thought that a person could do something so utterly reckless and immoral—no, outright evil—in the name of science chilled her.

  “Natalia knew about it, and had sort of accepted it; it’s why she was in Vietnam in the first place, trying to help kids with birth defects from Agent Orange. And she was also a pacifist. Not just in a wishy-washy ooh-war-is-bad kind of way like a lot of people who’ve never actually seen it for real, but totally against any kind of weapon of mass destruction, and willing to sacrifice herself for what she believed. So when she found out someone might be able to make the same stuff that was slowly killing her from her own DNA and turn it into a WMD, well …”

  His silence let Nina reach her own conclusions. “She … she asked you to kill her? To stop them from using her DNA to re-create the eitr?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “That’s the promise you made to her, isn’t it? To make sure they couldn’t turn her body into a weapon?”

  “Yeah,” he said again. “She thought that no matter where
she went, sooner or later either the Russians or Lock’s people would find her and take what they wanted. She wasn’t willing to let that happen.” He looked down at the floor. “She told me to kill her. She begged me to kill her.”

  “And you … you actually did it?”

  “I did what she asked me to do.”

  “Jesus, Eddie!” Nina exclaimed, shocked by the revelation even as it confirmed her fears. “Hoyt wasn’t lying? You killed her?”

  “You wanted to know what happened in Vietnam,” Eddie said, voice flat. “There you go. I made a promise to Natalia, and I kept it.”

  A lengthy silence filled the room. He looked up at her. “Are you okay?”

  “Am I okay?” she echoed in disbelief. “I don’t … God, Eddie, I have no idea what to say. I don’t even know what to think. I never—I never thought you could do something like that. Even if Natalia asked you to do it, and you were doing it to stop Lock from getting hold of a horrible weapon … my God. I really don’t …”

  Her voice trailed away as the full enormity of what she had learned sank in. Whatever the justification, even though Natalia had begged him to do it … her husband had killed an innocent young woman. The thought filled her head, tendrils winding deeply into six years of memories. Everything he had done since their first meeting would now be recolored by that knowledge …

  “Nina?” She blinked in surprise, finding him regarding her gloomily. “So …”

  She stood. “I don’t know how to take this, Eddie. I don’t even know if I can.” The walls of the already claustrophobic little room seemed to be inching inward. She took a deep breath, trying to empty her mind. “Okay. Okay. Right now, I don’t want to deal with this. We’ve got a mission we need to complete first. Once that’s done … I don’t know. We’ll see. For the moment, I just want to go to bed and try to forget what you just told me, at least for tonight.”

  Eddie looked deflated. “Okay. Nina, if Thor’s Hammer works and we neutralize the eitr, I’ll tell you—”

  She held up a hand. “I don’t want to hear any more, Eddie. Please. I’m not sure if I can take it.”

  A mournful nod, then he got up. “You want the bottom bed?” he asked, gesturing at the lower bunk.

  “Yeah, thanks.” There should not have been enough space in the cabin even with Eddie pressing back against the wall for her to pass without touching him, but somehow she managed it. Like the two halves of the sun compass, it was as if they could no longer approach each other without an invisible force driving them apart.

  Nina’s sleep was fitful at best, the rocking of the ship and the constant rumble of machinery rousing her all too frequently. But while she eventually tuned out these distractions, an insistent banging on the cabin door was something she could not ignore. “What?” she called blearily.

  “I think we are there” came Kagan’s muffled voice from outside. “Come to the bridge.”

  That snapped her to full wakefulness. “I’ll be right there.” She sat up in the bed—only to knock her forehead on the underside of Eddie’s bunk. “Ow! Goddammit.”

  “That’s one way to wake up,” said Eddie as he switched on a light and hopped down to the floor.

  “What time is it?”

  “Too bloody early.” His backside was right beside Nina as she swung her legs from the bed. She reached up to give it a playful swat—only for her hand to flinch back almost of its own accord as she remembered what he had told her the previous night. Subdued, she rose and got dressed, again managing not to make contact with her husband even in the confined space.

  They made their way up to the research vessel’s bridge to find Kagan and Berkeley already there. Nina frowned as she peered through the windows to see … absolutely nothing. “It’s pitch black.” Even coming out of winter, at such a high latitude the nights were still very long.

  “Yes,” said Kagan, with a faint smile, “but the ship has radar and night-vision equipment.” He picked up a set of image-intensifier goggles and switched them on. “Wear these.”

  Nina donned the goggles, squinting as she refocused on the glowing green image inside the lenses. The coastline was now clearly visible, even the extremely dim illumination of an overcast night more than enough for the device to amplify. “What do you see?” Eddie asked.

  “I see … what we’re looking for,” she replied. “I think.”

  Three mountains were visible, two flanking a small craggy bay with a third, somewhat taller, rising beyond them. Judging distance was hard through the goggles, but the largest of the three peaks was clearly some way inland. The land before it was a crumpled blanket of ridges and troughs, the covering of snow only broken by patches of almost sheer rock. There was not a trace of vegetation.

  She passed the goggles to Eddie. “Logan, let me see the compass.”

  Berkeley did so. “Hurry up, Chase, I want a look,” he complained as the Englishman surveyed the scene. “Does it match the pictogram?”

  Nina compared the green-tinted view in her mind with what was inscribed on the disk. The little pictogram was massively simplified, but it did indeed closely resemble the island’s topography. “Yeah, it does. Two mountains beside a bay, and a bigger one behind them.”

  Kagan spoke to the captain. “We are just past sixty-eight degrees north,” he told the others. “The Vikings were very good navigators.”

  “If this is the right place,” said Eddie, handing the goggles to Berkeley. “It’s a pretty close match, though.”

  “The island is called Nektaluk,” the Russian said, going to the bridge’s plotting table and pointing it out on a chart. It was one of a ragged group of islands off the main coast, none marked with any signs of human habitation. “I used the satellite link to get information about it, but apart from its name and position, I could find nothing.” With a faint smile, he added: “It does not even have a Wikipedia page.”

  Eddie regarded the map. “So it’s twelve miles of bugger-all, then.”

  “Except maybe for a pit full of the most toxic substance on earth,” said Nina, joining him. The map’s contour lines showed the highest point on Nektaluk Island as around 550 meters above sea level; she did some rapid mental arithmetic to convert the figure to eighteen hundred feet. Depending on whose definition was being used, that was not even tall enough to qualify as a mountain in many countries—but in this case, it was the opinion of the ancient Vikings that counted. They had climbed a path up its slopes to find the site of the battle that would decide the fate of the world.

  And now, more than a thousand years later, she was about to follow in their footsteps.

  31

  Dawn crept sluggishly over the island as the Akademik Rozhkov moved closer to shore to send out its boats. Even when full daylight finally arrived, the sun taking its languid time to rise this far north, the day was far from bright; clouds still covered the entire sky.

  The weather was unlikely to improve. Nina looked ahead as the rigid inflatable boat carrying the expedition members approached the barren shore. The distant mountain’s peak was barely visible, shrouded by the low-hanging clouds, and there were swathes of bleak mist lower down its slopes. The entire vista was a flat, dreary monochrome, not one single patch of color to break the monotony of white snow and gray rock.

  “Could be worse,” said Eddie from beside her. “At least it’s not raining.”

  “I’m sure it’ll find a way,” she replied. Even wrapped in far thicker clothing than she had worn on the search for Valhalla in Sweden, she was still desperately cold.

  “It will not take us long to reach the pit,” said Kagan determinedly, gesturing toward a second RIB off to one side. This was a larger craft, carrying the team’s equipment—most prominently two of their four snowmobiles. “We travel, what? Ten or eleven kilometers?” He looked to Berkeley for confirmation; the American nodded. “All we have to do is follow the route from the runes of Valhalla, then locate the pit—and deliver Thor’s Hammer.”

  He glanced down. B
etween his feet was a case made of high-impact plastic, inside which was the steel canister containing the biological counter-agent. “Once the eitr is neutralized, then all this is over. We can return home.”

  “There are still a lot of ifs, though,” said Nina. “If Thor’s Hammer works. If the pit is there. If we’ve translated the runes correctly. Hell, if this is even the right island!”

  “You needn’t worry about the translation,” said Berkeley snippily. “I’ve done my job.”

  “If you hadn’t done your ‘job,’ we wouldn’t all be here at the arse-end of the world,” Eddie reminded him. “But it looks like we’re in the right place. Question is, have Hoyt and Lock made Tova tell ’em where it is too?”

  “They would have had less leverage without me,” said Nina.

  Kagan shook his head. “That will not matter. With so much at stake, they will do whatever they have to. They will have found other ways to force her to translate the runes.”

  The rest of the short voyage continued in gloomy silence until the boat reached the shore. The four Russian soldiers jumped out on Kagan’s order, hauling the RIB onto the shingle so the rest of its passengers could disembark and unload their gear. While they were doing so, the soldiers splashed through the breaking waves to the second boat and carefully carried the snowmobiles to the miserable beach. The vehicles had been partially disassembled for transport; the men began to put them back together as the boat turned back to the Rozhkov for the second pair.

  “Are these guys any good, then?” Eddie asked Kagan, regarding the four younger men. “Where did you get ’em?”

  “They are members of Unit 201,” Kagan replied. “Fortunately, they were away from the bunker on training. I called them back for this mission.”

  “Why do I get the feeling they’re the only members of Unit 201 left that you could call back?” asked Nina. Kagan gave her a pained look but said nothing.