Operation Norway

- 19 -

The dark front arrived at almost the same time as backup arrived. A score of armed men preceded two tanks that lumbered into the parking area. Banks recognized them — they were originally German, the Leopard 2A4NL model; he guessed the Norwegians, like many other countries, had taken advantage when the Germans sold off old stock during an upgrade. They might indeed be old stock but Banks knew from experience that they packed a punch in their 120mm cannons that could penetrate two feet of steel and as backup to that, they each had twin-mounted 7.62mm machine guns with almost five thousand rounds of ammo.

“Now we’re talking,” Wiggins said as the two tanks lined up at Olsen’s directive to aim at the garage doors.

“Wait,” Larsen shouted. “You’ll bring the whole building down. All my research…”

“You should have thought of that earlier,” Olsen replied, “and saved us all a lot of trouble.”

Before Larsen could make any further protest, Olsen gave the order to fire.

The twin booms of the big guns almost deafened the soldiers. The shells went straight and true into the gaping maw of the garage entrance and a second later, a blast of heat and concussion almost knocked them off their feet. Every window above them blew out at once, glass shattering in a wave all across the parking lot. The garage doorway fell in on itself with a muffled thump and another blast of heat and debris. The main building above the underground garage slumped alarmingly to the north side then decided to stay up.

Olsen waited until the debris started to settle then waved his men forward.

“Wait,” Banks said, striding up to the Norwegian captain’s side. “We dropped a cave on one of these fuckers up in the hills and it crawled out without a scratch on it. You should take this slowly.” He turned to Davies. “Do you have any of yon sedative at hand?”

Davies reached inside his flak jacket and brought out four syringes.

“We’re going to need more,” Banks said to Olsen. The Norwegian captain nodded and went over to Larsen.

“Sedatives,” he said brusquely. “A lot of sedatives. We need them now.”

“Why are you asking me?” the doctor said. He looked like he’d rather be anywhere else but there.

Olsen got into his face.

“I’m asking you because this is your mess.”

The conversation switched to Norwegian, too fast for Banks to follow, but by the look on Olsen’s face, he knew it wasn’t good news. He had that confirmed when the captain turned away from the doctor and came back towards the waiting soldiers.

“He doesn’t have any,” Olsen said. “What there is of it is still down in the lab. If we want it, we’ll have to go and get it.” He looked Banks in the eye. “You have no obligation to us here, Captain. But I could use all the help I can get.”

Banks smiled.

“That’s okay. We owe you for the beer and pizza anyway. Lead on.”

Banks had Davies distribute the four syringes, one to each member of the squad.

“Save these for McCallum if you can,” he said. “I’d still like to get yon old soldier home, or at least give him some peace. But don’t do anything daft and don’t get dead. This is just another sanitation mission like the other one.”

“Can I blow something to fuck, Cap?” Wiggins asked. “I’ve got enough C4 in the rucksack here to bring the rest of the building down.”

“I’ll let you know if it comes to that,” Banks replied. “In the meantime, we follow Olsen’s lead; we’re on his patch and it’s his call.”

Olsen was already leading his men towards the rubble around what had been the garage entrance. Banks and S-Squad brought up the rear as they scrambled through the wreckage and debris.

There were no lights inside what remained of the garage — rubble lay strewn across the floor, making walking a precarious process. The roof had collapsed in three different places, bringing down more debris and a tangle of sparking electrical wiring. In one spot what looked to be most of a library had fallen through the floor, its contents reduced to scrap paper and busted shelving. All of the soldiers, both Norwegian and Scots, switched on the lights on their rifles. They stepped warily, moving deeper inside and found what was left of a troll several paces in.

It was one of the more encrusted ones. The skin was more like hard rock, thickly crusted green with a hairy moss that gave it a shaggy look. Its head was lying at far too great an angle to its barrel chest, and pale, watery fluid lay all around in the rubble under its body, but it still tried to raise itself at their approach only to fall back with a crash on the debris. It moaned piteously then roared in rage before slumping to the floor. Olsen stepped up and put three shots into its left eye. There were no exit wounds but the eye exploded outward in a shower of black, viscous material down Olsen’s torso, then there was only a dead troll at his feet, all life flown from it.

“Top tip,” Wiggins said. “Shoot the fuckers in the eye. Works for me.”

Banks was hoping they would find the rest of the trolls in similar dire straits in the garage but the one Olsen shot was the only one to be seen. Either the remainder had managed to avoid the tank assault, or they were buried under some of the extensive rubble.

Either way, they’ll have to be found.

But it looked like Olsen agreed with Banks that the first priority must be to procure more sedative. The Norwegian captain set six men to checking the rubble in case more fallen trolls were trapped there then led the rest of them quickly across the garage floor, picking their way through the debris, heading for the corridor down to the bunker.

The red throbbing panic lights were still pulsating overhead. The walls of the corridor had been bashed and dented in places, and again Banks’ imagination showed him basketball-sized fists, pounding in frustration and rage, rock on rock until one or the other had to give way. The main facility door had been completely torn out of the wall and lay flat on the floor of the corridor — they had to step up eighteen inches onto it to cross over down into the bunker.

Olsen’s first thought was for the men that Larsen had trapped inside the facility. There were six of them but they were long past saving, having been grossly mutilated and torn in the trolls’ frenzy — they could only hope that the Halon gas had killed the men before the atrocities were committed. There were no trolls. The banks of computers, servers, and laboratory equipment had been completely trashed, leaving behind no more than broken circuit boards, torn cabling, and cabinets whose metal casings were bent and battered into unrecognizable pieces. The only trolls present in the facility — a dozen of them — were the ones who had not woken from slumber and were still encased in the rock walls of their cells.

“Too old, or too tired to wake,” Olsen said.

“Or just too dead. We can only hope,” Wiggins replied.

A search for sedative gave them at least one good thing to come out of the carnage. They found an unbroken bottle in the wreckage of a cupboard and a search for syringes was also successful, meaning that by the time they were ready to move out again, every man present carried at least one dose of sedative with him.

“Aye, very nice,” Wiggins said. “But where the fuck have the big hard buggers got to? It’s not as if they can disguise themselves much.”

They got the answer to that when they returned back up the corridor to the garage area. One of the six men Olsen had left above came over to talk to the captain and led everybody to the north side of the garage. The roof had fallen in completely and it had brought down with it what looked to have been at one time to be a group of students who hadn’t had time — or had been too stupid — to vacate the building when the alarms went off. Now they would never be late for a lecture again; the trolls had found them and they were merely discarded food, their limbs and guts strewn and scattered, white bones showing signs of having been chewed on. Several of Olsen’s men lost their lunches off to one side but the S-Squad had seen it before, up in the hills — the only difference here was that these were new kills.

“You still want to save that big hard bugger, Cap?” Wiggins said softly.

Banks didn’t answer — he wasn’t sure anymore and he was saved from speaking by a yell from a soldier on top of the rubble, who was looking out northwest across the city.

“They went this way.”