“We’ve gotten information about the bandits’ area of operations,” said Sullivan, “and narrowed their location down to a few square kilometers.” He crossed to a large map taped to one wall, and pointed out a particular section. “It’s about eighty klicks west of Da Nang, so we’ll take Highway 49 to a point north of the target area, then head south. We’ll have to search, but it seems these jokers have been operating with free rein for some time. If they’re not worried about being tracked down, they shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
“So what do we do when we find them?” asked Castille.
Hoyt grinned coldly. “I’ve got a few things in mind.”
Sullivan raised a warning finger. “We use lethal force only as a last resort, understood? Our number one priority is to recover the prisoners safely. Considering Vietnam’s past, they really don’t like having groups of Westerners marching through the jungle shooting people, even if they are bandits. If they decide to crack down, they could make it hell for us to get out of the country. Trust me, I did it the hard way back in ’73, and it was not fun.”
Chase took a closer look at the map. The area Sullivan had indicated was hilly, judging from the contour lines, and there were few signs of civilization nearby. “Is it just jungle out there?”
Sullivan nodded. “There are some small villages along the main river valleys, but past them it’s pretty much solid all the way to the border, and beyond. We’re not far south of the old DMZ, so this whole part of the country got ripped apart during the war. It’s been left to recover ever since.”
“A good place to hide,” said Castille dolefully.
“We’ll find them,” Sullivan assured him. “So here’s the drill. A local friend of mine, Thuc, will take us in and out. From the drop point, we start a search. Once we find the hostages, we rescue them—minimum force unless absolutely necessary, remember—and take them to an extraction point on this river”—he pointed at a thin blue line on the map—“where Thuc will be waiting with a boat. That should be the quickest way to get them back to the highway. From there, we return to Da Nang. Job done.”
“What about gear?” asked Lomax.
“I’ve got a good man with access to weapons and equipment. He’s on his way over right now. In the meantime—” He handed out larger-scale maps of the target area, already marked with the drop and extraction points. “—familiarize yourself with the terrain. Mr. Lock, you don’t need to stay around if you don’t want to.”
“Thanks,” said Lock, “but I’d like to see. My daughter’s out there, remember.”
Sullivan nodded, then began a more detailed briefing. Chase paid close attention; having served in Vietnam during the war as a young NZSAS officer, the Antipodean’s firsthand knowledge of the jungle would be invaluable. Hoyt, meanwhile, was more occupied with rolling a new cigarette.
After twenty minutes, they were interrupted by a knock on the door. Sullivan opened it. To Chase’s surprise, the man who entered was another familiar face. “Jesus, if it isn’t Eddie Chase!” he said after greeting Sullivan. “And Hugo Castille too. Christ, we’re only a couple short of a full Afghanistan reunion.”
“Bluey!” cried Chase. “Fucking hell, you were the last person I expected to see. What’re you doing here, you farty old bastard?”
“Supplying this sheep-shagger and the rest of you drongos with guns and gear,” said Bob “Bluey” Jackson, giving Sullivan a cheery nod. “So, Sully, you roped Eddie and Hugo into this? Well, they’ll get the job done, even if they are a right pair of wankers.”
“As Edward would say, ‘Fuck off, you wombat-shagging twat,’ ” Castille grinningly responded in a very poor imitation of Chase’s Yorkshire accent. The Australian waggled his bushy eyebrows in amusement. “Are you coming with us?”
Bluey shook his head. “Fuck no, mate. I’ve been living here for a bit now; last thing I want to do is get into trouble with the local wallopers. And the girlfriend’d kill me!”
“Amazed anyone’d have you,” said Chase.
“Me too, sometimes! She’s a lovely girl—well, a bit loud, but she keeps me in check. We’re planning to move back to Oz together. Immigration paperwork might be a pain, but she’s got some tricks.” A knowing smile, then he saw Sullivan’s growing impatience. “Anyway, Sully, I brought your gear. The guns’re all forty-sevens; a bit scruffy, but I checked ’em and they’re in decent nick.”
Sullivan nodded. “What about radios?”
“Got you a set of Motorola walkie-talkies and headsets. On the old side, but they work fine. New batteries in all of ’em.”
“Good. Thanks for this, Bluey. Where is everything?”
“In my van,” said the Australian. “It’s all boxed up, so you won’t get any stickybeaks freaking out when you unload it. When’re you setting off?”
“As soon as Thuc arrives with his minibus.” Sullivan turned to the others. “Is everyone ready to move?”
“Just let me take a piss first and I’m good to go,” Chase replied.
Sullivan gave him a weary look. “Mac warned me that you were like this … Everyone else set?”
The remaining mercenaries confirmed their readiness. “Let’s get started,” said Hoyt.
“Good luck,” Lock said to Sullivan. “I’ll be waiting to hear from you. Bring my daughter back safely.”
“We’ll find her,” the New Zealander replied. He glanced past Lock at the French windows, peering out at the sky over the ocean. “Oh, a heads-up,” he said, turning back to his team. “The weather forecast says there’s a tropical storm due to make landfall this evening, with a chance it might become a typhoon by then. Even though we’ll be farther inland, we’re still going to get wet. Hopefully Bluey remembered to pack some rain gear.”
“Sod this, then,” Chase said. “I’m off back to England!”
That produced muted chuckles in the group, which were cut short when the phone rang. Sullivan answered it. “That’s our ride,” he said as he hung up.
The men filed out of the room, back into the stifling heat of the Vietnamese day. “Here we go, then,” Chase said to the Belgian. “Back into action.”
“Are you ready for it?” Castille asked quietly.
“Yeah,” Chase replied.
He hoped he was telling the truth.
5
Sweden
Nina stared at her laptop, even after multiple viewings not quite able to believe what she was witnessing.
Seretse had shown her a still image in New York; this was the full version, footage from a security camera. Because it had been watching a neighboring building rather than the museum itself, the robbers were almost incidental, tucked away in one corner. Had their van been parked ten feet to the right, it was unlikely that any of their faces would even have been captured in frame.
But one had. And she knew it well.
“Logan Berkeley,” she said to herself, shaking her head. “What the hell are you doing?”
Eddie, reclining beside her in the airliner’s business-class cabin, raised his head to glare at the screen. “Never did like that tosser, even before what he did in Egypt. You should have punched him harder. And whatever Seretse said, he’s not part of the IHA anymore. He got fired when he was arrested.”
“When he was convicted,” Nina corrected, even as she spoke wondering why she was giving her former colleague—and rival—any benefit of the doubt. Dr. Logan Berkeley had been in charge of an excavation in Cairo, opening up the long-lost Hall of Records hidden beneath the Great Sphinx of Giza. After Nina beat him to it, on live television to boot, the enraged and humiliated Berkeley took a payoff from a cult to locate an even greater prize, the legendary Pyramid of Osiris. It wasn’t until the pyramid was plundered and the cult leader murdered by his own psychotic brother that Berkeley realized he had thrown in his lot with the wrong people, but by then it was too late to repent; according to Seretse, he had only been released from an Egyptian prison a few months earlier.
“Whatever. He’s
still a complete cockwipe. And now he’s involved in robbery and murder.”
“So it seems,” said Nina, with a small sigh. “I just don’t understand why.”
Eddie smiled sardonically. “A year in an Egyptian nick’s probably enough to turn anyone into a nutter.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I mean, why steal the runestone at all?” She tabbed to another application, the photograph of the monolith filling her screen. “All the text on it’s already been translated by experts, so there’s nothing new that anyone could get from it in person. And except for the inset”—she indicated the circle of darker stone set into the face of the monolith—“there’s nothing unusual about the runestone physically. It’s just a block of granite.”
“So there could be something special about that thing.” Eddie also pointed at the inset. “There are some markings on it—maybe it’s a map.”
“Well, hopefully we’ll find out more from Dr. Skilfinger.”
“Ha! We’re meeting a Bond villain?”
“I’m sure she’s one of the good guys. At least, I hope so!” They both grinned. “She’s the person who found the runestone in the first place, and has been researching it ever since. If anyone knows what it is, she will.”
Eddie leaned over to peer out of the porthole. A snowy, tree-covered landscape slid past below. “So, this is Sweden, eh? Never actually been here before.”
“I’m kind of surprised,” said Nina. “I thought you’d been everywhere.”
“Norway, Finland, and Denmark, yeah, but I somehow missed this one. Still, I think I know everything I need to about it. IKEA, Volvo, high-quality porn, ABBA, girls with dragon tattoos.” Another, more lecherous grin. “All I have to do is drink loads of coffee, eat lots of open-faced sandwiches, and be blandly heroic, and I’ll get to have no-strings-attached sex with every woman I meet.”
“You will not,” Nina told him firmly, then they both laughed. “I’m pretty sure there’s more to the country than that, though.”
“Well, obviously. There’s also meatballs, the Swedish Chef …”
“Okay,” she said with a smile as the pilot announced that the plane was making its final approach to Stockholm Arlanda Airport, “if any Swede asks what you think of their country, it’d probably be a good idea if you just said, ‘It’s very nice.’ Otherwise they might rethink their neutrality policy.”
Ninety minutes later, their United Nations diplomatic visas having whisked them through customs, Nina and Eddie arrived at the Swedish National Museum of Antiquities in Stockholm, after a brief detour to a hotel to drop off their luggage. Despite the snow blanketing the countryside, the capital’s streets were impressively clear, traffic moving at a brisk pace. “We should hire these guys to plow the streets of Manhattan,” said Nina.
“We should get ’em to do the whole of bloody England,” Eddie countered as he climbed out of the taxi. “One flake of snow and the entire country falls apart.”
Nina paid the driver and joined him. The museum was a large, pale beige block abutting a triangular plaza on a broad tree-lined boulevard, banners advertising its current exhibits adorning its façade. Vikings featured prominently upon them. She regarded the bearded warriors. “I guess they know what sells …”
They trotted across the chilly plaza to the main entrance, finding a member of the staff and asking for Dr. Skilfinger. They were expected; the rapid clacking of high heels barely a minute later heralded the arrival of their hostess. “Dr. Wilde, hello!” said the tall, slender blonde, her flustered air suggesting that she had hurried from the far side of the museum to meet them. “I’m Tova, Tova Skilfinger. It’s a great honor and pleasure to meet you.” Though she had a strong accent, her English was perfect.
“It’s good to meet you too, Dr. Skilfinger,” Nina replied as they shook hands.
“Please, Dr. Wilde, call me Tova.”
“Then call me Nina.”
“Agreed.” Tova beamed at her. Nina guessed she was in her late forties or early fifties, but age had not diminished the Swedish historian’s striking looks. Her hair was held up in a loose bun, all her snugly fitting clothing black. “I have been following your work for several years—you could say I am something of a fan.” She blushed faintly.
Nina did the same. “Thank you. This is my husband, Eddie Chase.”
“Good to meet you,” said Eddie.
Tova shook his hand. “And you. Have you come straight from the airport?”
“More or less,” Nina told her. “I wanted to talk to you about the runestone as soon as we arrived.”
“We can do that in my office—I have all my notes ready for you. Please, this way.” They started down the hall. “The reason I said I am a fan of yours is that your work allowed me to rethink my own, and look at it from a new perspective.”
“How so?” asked Nina.
“Well, although I am primarily a historian, I also have a great interest in Old Norse mythology—though there are few people in Sweden who have not!” She smiled. “Your discovery of Atlantis in particular, but also other finds such as King Arthur’s tomb and El Dorado, caused a resurgence of euhemeristic theory.”
“Yoo-hoo who?” said Eddie.
“Euhemerus was an ancient Greek scholar,” Nina told him. “He had the idea that myths and legends were derived from actual historical events, which were exaggerated and distorted over time. Early Christians used it as a way to explain away and discredit what they saw as pagan gods.”
“It is an important part of the Prose Edda,” added Tova. Seeing the Englishman’s questioning look, she continued: “One of the most important texts about Norse mythology. It was written in the thirteenth century by an Icelandic poet and historian called Snorri Sturluson. He was a Christian, so he used the Edda to promote his belief that the ancient Norse deities—like Odin and Thor—were once kings, who aroused such devotion in life that cults formed to honor them after death. Over time, their stories turned them into gods.”
“Clever,” said Nina. “It meant that he got to preserve the pre-Christian mythology of his people, while debunking it at the same time.”
“But people like that were actually right, weren’t they?” Eddie said. “After all, we discovered Atlantis, and a lot of what the myths said turned out to be true. And we know Hercules was a real bloke and not a god, ’cause we found his tomb.”
“Which led me to change my approach to my work,” said Tova as they entered a new section of the museum: the Viking exhibition. Cabinets of Norse artifacts and re-creations of scenes of Viking life lined the long, softly lit hall. “By applying euhemeristic principles to my earlier research, on the theory that they might contain some amount of truth rather than being purely myth, I was able to work out the location of the Valhalla Runestone.” She paused by one of the exhibits. “It was a runestone much like this that gave me the clues, actually.”
Nina examined the display. This stone was considerably smaller than the one she had seen in the photograph, only about two feet tall. An elaborate carving of what appeared to be a snake encircled the outer edge of the roughly triangular stone, runes etched along its length like patterns of scales. The serpent’s elongated head snapped at an ax-wielding man at the center of the image. “That’s a representation of Thor at Ragnarök, I’m guessing.”
Tova nodded, then set off again. “The stone I was working from described a location where the Norse gods met to settle conflicts between tribes. It had of course long been considered a myth, but I thought: What if it was true? The runes named people and places, some of which were historical rather than mythological, so I researched all of them too. When I put everything together, they pointed to a place near Gamla Uppsala, called Iarlsta—a site that had been excavated in the past, but was not considered very important. I was able to arrange a new dig, and deeper down we found the remains of a much more ancient settlement. And in that … we discovered the Valhalla Runestone.”
“A big find,” said Nina.
Tova nodded a
ppreciatively. “Thank you—though not as big as Atlantis! But it did prove that applying euhemeristic principles to Old Norse finds had the potential for even greater discoveries. And when I translated the runes on the stone, I realized where this could lead.”
“From the name of the runestone, I’m guessing Valhalla?” suggested Eddie.
“Yes,” Tova replied. “The great hall where the warriors chosen by Odin awaited the call to the final battle.”
She led them through a side exit and down a corridor, unlocking a door at its end. Her expression became more solemn. “This is the lab from where the runestone was stolen,” she said. “The security guard, Arvid … he was shot in there.” She pointed out a doorway marked with yellow-and-black police tape.
A much larger set of double doors occupied the rear wall, daylight visible through small windows set into them. “That’s where they took the stone out of the building?” said Eddie.
“Yes. The runestone was so large and heavy, it could only come in through a service entrance.”
Nina surveyed the scene. The bench on which the stone had been laid was at the room’s center, the white cloth crumpled on the floor beside it. “The police have examined everything?”
“Yes, but they did not find anything useful.” Tova’s face fell further. “There were no fingerprints or DNA evidence. The robbers were very professional.”
“We might have a lead, though,” Nina told her. The Swede was surprised; clearly she had not been told about Berkeley’s appearance on camera. “But we still don’t know why they wanted to steal the runestone, so hopefully you can tell us something that’ll explain it.”