Berkeley was astounded by the sight. “I can see why the Vikings thought they’d found a giant snake!”
“Not just one,” said Nina, equally amazed.
Jabbing up at them from below were numerous thick columns, twisting around the edges of the shaft and crisscrossing it like bridges, all intertwined like a knot of serpents. It took a moment for her to realize what they were: crystals. She had seen pictures of crystal caves from all over the world; one of the largest was in Mexico, a great underground cavern filled with massive natural spans weighing dozens of tons. But this was on another scale entirely. The crystals were not the milky white of selenite, but instead a menacing, oily black covered by a scabrous pattern resembling snake scales. “That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen the bookmarks on Eddie’s laptop.”
Even with some idea of what to expect, Kagan was still as awed as the others. “They are formed from the eitr,” he explained as they continued the descent. “The Academician told me what the Soviet scientists learned about them. They are constantly growing—they rise by several centimeters each week. At Novaya Zemlya, most were cleared to make room for ladders, but new ones soon grew to replace them.”
Nina regarded one of the crystals as they approached. Its upper end had broken off, leaving jagged obsidian shards. “They look pretty fragile. I’m surprised they’ve managed to get this high without collapsing under their own weight.”
“They are weakened by the cold air at the top. But inside the pit, they are strong enough to take a man’s weight.”
Eddie looked down. “Yeah, I was afraid you were going to say that.”
They reached the foot of the slope, the shaft dropping away vertically. The ropes led to the top of a particularly large crystal, which stretched across the full width of the shaft at a steep angle. It was about five feet in diameter—but its octagonal cross section made the flat part of its upper surface considerably narrower.
“So,” continued the Yorkshireman, “we’ve got to scoot along that all the way to the bloody bottom?”
“Lock and his people managed it,” said Nina. All the same, she felt queasy looking over the edge. She couldn’t see the base of the shaft, her view obstructed by the jagged, multilayered lattice of crystals, but she could tell it was a long way down. “Even if they can take our weight, is it safe to touch them if they’re made from eitr?”
“The crystal form is harmless,” said Kagan. “Okay, not harmless, but it will only kill you if you eat it. It is poisonous, but not a mutagen.”
“Good job I wasn’t planning on laying out a picnic,” said Eddie. He held his breath as Kagan put both feet on the crystal ledge and let go of the rope. There was a visible change in the surface, the black scales turning a stressed gray under his weight, but it showed no signs of imminent collapse. “All right. So how do we get down?”
The Russian surveyed the route. “We follow Lock and his men. Look, they have left footprints.” He pointed out scuffs and scrapes along the structure. “If they got to the bottom, so can we.”
“Yeah, but how many of them fell off on the way down?” said Berkeley.
“Hopefully all of ’em,” Eddie said. Still holding the rope, he leaned out over the drop for a better look. “Normally I’d say we should go across each crystal one by one so they don’t break, but since we’re on the atomic fucking clock, we’ll have to go in convoy.” He drew back and checked his watch. “Shit, it’s taken us nearly three minutes just to get down this far.”
“Then we must move faster,” said Kagan firmly. Bringing up his arms for balance, he started down the sloping crystal. Maslov let him get clear, then stepped down after him. The black span creaked faintly underfoot.
Eddie winced, but once the soldier had moved on after Kagan, he followed them. The surface took his weight, but with an unsettling sense of compression, like a layer of thick linoleum rather than the rigid structure it appeared to be. That slight flexibility explained how the crystals had not cracked apart as they coiled around the walls of the shaft, he supposed. But the scales at least provided grip, making his descent less unsteady than he had expected. Ahead, Kagan reached the far side of the pit and clambered down to another bridge below. “Okay, Nina, come on.”
She reluctantly let go of the rope and followed her husband. The facet along the crystal’s top was wide enough to take her feet, but was tilted at a slight horizontal angle in addition to sloping downward, making it tricky to negotiate. Maslov reached the lower end and climbed down after Kagan; Nina looked back at Berkeley. “Logan? You coming?”
“Yes, this makes it so easy,” he grumbled, holding up the heavy stainless-steel container by its carrying handle.
She gave him an apologetic look. “Okay, if I reach back, we can share the weight between us.”
“Nina, let Ivan behind him do that,” said Eddie, but she had already paused and stretched out her arm to the other archaeologist. Berkeley held out the canister, and she took hold of it. “Berkeley, if she falls because of you, you’re following her down with a fucking bullet in your head!”
“Eddie, it’s okay,” Nina assured him before regarding Berkeley again. “Isn’t it, Logan?”
“For God’s sake,” he grumbled as he edged down the crystal. “There are enough ways I might get killed today without adding your psychotic husband to the list. I want to get out of here as much as you do—and I don’t want to do that only to have a nuclear bomb land on my head!”
“Okay, all right, point taken!” She kept moving, the container suspended between them.
Eddie reached the bottom, waiting until he was sure Nina was progressing without trouble before climbing down after the two Russians. Kagan was already on the next leg of the descent, the crystal crossing below even steeper than the first. “Hey, there’s a light down there,” said the Yorkshireman, pointing.
“Yes, I saw it,” Kagan replied. The diffuse daylight from the top of the shaft quickly faded into darkness below, but there was an eerie blue-white glow among the black shards. “Lock and Hoyt must have brought it.”
“Nice of ’em.” He stared at the light as he waited for the soldier to move clear. “Know what this reminds me of? It’s like we’re inside a giant game of KerPlunk.”
“With us as the marbles,” Nina said nervously.
Eddie helped her down, then Berkeley passed Thor’s Hammer to her before descending himself. Pravdin followed him as the Englishman started across the next ledge. “We’ve only got twenty-five minutes left,” he warned.
That spurred everyone to move faster. Kagan hopped across to another descending crystal bridge and led the way downward. Before long the source of the strange light was revealed. A translucent balloon about four feet in diameter had been propped between two crystals, glowing from within and casting a surprising amount of light over its surroundings. “Now, here’s your KerPlunk marble,” said Eddie, prodding it as he passed. The inflated sphere was made of the same tough latex as weather balloons. “Must have a bunch of LEDs inside.”
“There are more below,” reported Kagan.
Nina peered over the edge, seeing additional pools of light farther down the shaft. “Can you see the bottom yet?”
“No, not yet. The pit in Novaya Zemlya was almost a hundred meters deep. I hope this is not much deeper.”
“Yeah, so do I!” The air was becoming uncomfortably hot, forcing her to pull down the zipper of her coat in an attempt to keep cool.
They pressed on, zigzagging downward. As well as the giant crystals worming up the shaft, smaller ones grew from the walls, stabbing outward like glass spear points. Others hung like stalactites beneath the sloping slabs. Kagan leaned warily to avoid a particularly large example, then issued a warning as he saw something below. “Be careful. Some of the crystals have cracks. I do not know if they will support us.”
Eddie saw what he meant. He guessed that a piece had broken from a crystal higher up and hit one of the bridges as it fell. Ragged stress lines
ran through the black surface like lightning bolts, visible even in the low light. Unfortunately, it was the only obvious way to continue the descent. “Which way did Lock’s lot go? Did they risk crossing it?”
“It is hard to see. Wait …” A short pause, then: “No, they dropped down the other side.” Kagan stepped across to the damaged span, the fractured crystal letting out a faint but alarming creak, then lowered himself to another below it. “Okay, it is safe.”
Eddie looked back at the two scientists. “You okay?”
“Just about,” said Berkeley, rubbing sweat from his forehead.
“I didn’t mean you. Nina?”
“Surviving,” she told him. “This damn thing gets really heavy after a while, though.” She raised the steel canister.
“Pass it down,” Eddie told her. “I’ll carry it—I’ll get Kagan’s other guy to give me a hand. Can’t be much—”
“Quiet!” Kagan whispered. “I can hear them.”
Everyone fell silent. Eddie advanced as quickly as he dared to join the two Russians, who were crouched on a jagged black outcrop. More of the illuminated globes were visible below—and for the first time he glimpsed the bottom of the pit.
The source of the eitr. He could only see a small slice of it through the maze of crystals, but that was enough to reveal a glutinous, light-sucking ooze. It slowly shimmered and rippled in the globes’ unnatural glow, as if simmering from a heat source below.
Voices reached him. “It’s Hoyt,” he rumbled. “Lock, too.”
“If they are still here, then they have not yet taken a sample of eitr,” said Kagan. “We can stop them.” He brought up his AK-12.
Eddie did the same with his Wildey, but while he could see movement between the crystals, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to get a clear shot. “Arse. I can’t get a good angle from up here. We’ll have to go lower.”
Kagan nodded, surveying the confusing network of black shards below. “There,” he said, pointing at a particular section of crystal. It was the widest they had seen, a hulking hexagonal pillar wedged almost horizontally across the shaft as if toppled by a giant. “We will be able to take them out before they even know we are here.” He signaled for the rest of the group to advance.
“Not sure if it’s safe,” Eddie said dubiously. The wash of light from a globe above revealed stress lines in the great structure.
“It will have to be. We are running out of time.”
The Englishman couldn’t disagree—the cruise missile was now little more than twenty minutes away. “Okay, go on. Nina, stay where you are.”
“No,” Kagan insisted as he climbed down. “We must get Thor’s Hammer to the eitr as soon as we can, and we still have to return to the surface to call off the missile. We cannot wait.” He added something in Russian to the soldier at the rear, who tried to squeeze past Nina and Berkeley, but there was not enough room. “Dr. Wilde, come down.”
Against his better judgment, Eddie nodded to his wife. “Oh boy,” she said, gingerly climbing to the outcrop.
Kagan completed his descent to the bridge and, gun at the ready, made his way across. Eddie followed, then Maslov. The Englishman reached the bridge’s center and looked down—and at last saw clearly what lay at the bottom of the pit.
The shaft widened out into a roughly hemispherical chamber about 150 feet across, the rock encrusted in black condensates. Hundreds of jagged crystal stalactites hung down from above, turning the space into an obsidian torture chamber. The heat was sickening, the stinging in the party’s nostrils almost physically painful.
The source of it all filled the bottom of the cavern, lit by more illuminated globes bobbing on its surface.
The eitr pit.
A lake of malevolent primordial ooze churned slowly below, large bubbles swelling at its heart. The great crystal columns rose at all angles from the glistening slime. Some were crowded out, forced against the walls and ceiling only to crumble and shatter as they pressed against unyielding rock, while others stretched up as if in competition to reach the daylight high above. The eitr swirled lazily around their bases—but it was not stirred merely by a heat source below. There was a definite current, a flow heading from one side of the pool to the other. The black poison was briefly surfacing before continuing its journey through the earth’s coiling subterranean channels.
But all that was of less concern to Eddie than the people inside the chamber. Lock, Hoyt, and their team had descended almost to the surface of the foul lake, using the crystals as walkways. As Tova had warned, there were six other men with them. All were armed, this time with SIG 516 assault rifles rather than submachine guns; after what had happened in Norway and at Valhalla, Hoyt was taking absolutely no chances of being outgunned.
They were not expecting an attack, though. Instead, all eyes were on the man closest to the lake. Unsurprisingly, Hoyt and Lock had delegated the dangerous task of actually obtaining a sample of eitr to an underling. The mercenary, wearing protective yellow haz-mat overalls and a filter mask over his face, was kneeling on a sloping slab of black crystal just a foot above the rippling oil. In front of him was a steel canister closely resembling the one containing Thor’s Hammer, its hinged lid open. The man was operating a pump, carefully sucking up eitr through a snake-like metal hose and depositing it in the container.
Which was almost full.
Lock was twenty feet away, higher up. “How much longer?” he called impatiently.
“Almost done,” the pump operator replied, voice muffled.
“About time. I want this stuff back in our lab by the end of the day.”
Hoyt, farther back, held in a cough. “Sooner we get out of here, the better. We’re probably gettin’ cancer just breathing this shit.”
“Volkov told the CIA it was harmless,” said Lock.
“Yeah, but that was in the ’60s, and they said cigarettes were harmless back then too.” He coughed again, then retreated up one of the spars.
Lock ignored him, watching the cylinder fill up with an expression of near-awe. “The Vikings were right,” he said, almost to himself. “Life and death in one substance.” The awe turned to expectant greed. “And we control it …”
Kagan made a sound of angry disgust, then glanced back across the bridge. Nina and Berkeley had found enough room to let Pravdin past, and the Russian was now moving to join the other three armed men. “We will need to take them out quickly,” he told Eddie in a low voice. “Can you hit them from here with that?” He glanced at the Wildey.
“Piece of piss, mate,” Eddie replied. “Hoyt’s mine, though. That bastard’s finally going down.” He lined up his weapon on the oblivious American.
“When I say,” Kagan ordered. “We must get them all at once.”
The Englishman reluctantly held his finger off the trigger. “You’ll need to be fast—you’ve got to get two of ’em each before they can react.”
“We will,” Kagan assured him. The officer issued rapid instructions, then took aim with his own weapon. “We have our targets—we will fire on three. Are you ready?”
“Yeah,” Eddie replied. Below, Hoyt hopped across to another ledge. The Wildey tracked him.
The second soldier finally reached the rest of the team, readying his AK-12. He nodded to Kagan. “Okay,” said the Russian. “One, two—”
A loud bang echoed around the shaft—but it was not a gunshot.
Eddie felt the crossing jolt beneath him. “Shit!” he gasped, instantly realizing what had happened. Pravdin’s arrival had put too much weight on the unsupported middle of the bridge—and the stress lines were now becoming fractures. Below, Hoyt looked up in surprise at the unexpected sound. “Move, get off the—”
The crystal sheared apart.
34
Eddie was already moving, about to dive for safety—but Kagan blocked his way, his accumulated injuries making him fractionally slower to respond. The crystal span fell, taking them with it.
Pravdin had realized the danger
. He leapt back at the ledge on which Nina and Berkeley were standing—
And fell short.
He clawed desperately at the side of the protruding outcrop. His fingertips found purchase on the scales—only for them to crumble under his weight. The soldier fell with a horrible scream, the sound abruptly cut off as he smashed against another crystal bridge below and tumbled into the eitr, kicking up a viscid splash and a cloud of steam as the black ooze swallowed him.
The other men on the collapsing bridge barely fared better. The great chunk of crystal beneath Eddie and Kagan pulverized a narrower structure as it dropped, the impact slowing its fall—and throwing the Russian clear to land heavily atop a steep ledge on the shaft’s side.
Eddie was also sent flying, plunging past Kagan to crash down on a lower crystalline span. He skidded across it, just barely clamping his left hand around a protruding spike in time to stop himself from going over the edge. Maslov landed beside him with a pained cry. Shattered chunks of the demolished bridge pounded both men.
The chaos continued below. “Jesus Christ!” yelled Hoyt as the huge crystal block plummeted into the cavern, disintegrating more black spires in a glass-shattering cacophony as it fell. He ducked behind one of the larger columns as shrapnel scythed past.
One of his men was not so quick to react, looking up in shock at the noise—
The falling slab hammered him flat. The crystal he was using as a walkway exploded into pieces, splashing back into the eitr from which it had been formed. The broken bridge rolled over, demolishing more spars and black stalagmites and crunching over the tops of spikes growing just beneath the lake’s surface before coming to rest in a nest of rubble.
Nina watched in horror. “Eddie!” she cried, darting to the edge of the outcrop to see him sprawled precariously thirty feet below. It was hard to be sure in the pale light of the globes, but it seemed possible to climb down and circumnavigate the shaft’s outer wall in a spiral to reach him. “Hold on, I’m com—”