The Valhalla Prophecy

17

‘So, how long are you planning to ignore me?’ asked Eddie.

Nina refused to turn her head towards him, keeping her gaze fixed on the dawn-lit steppes of southern Russia as they rolled past far below the small business jet. ‘I’m not ignoring you. I’m just so mad at you right now that if I looked at you, I might have trouble stopping myself from punching you in your goddamn lying face.’ She jabbed an angry finger at the man on the other side of the cabin. ‘How long have you been working with your Russian friend over there?’

‘He’s not my friend,’ Eddie insisted, exasperated. ‘The only reason I was working with him was because… I had to.’

‘You had to,’ she echoed sarcastically. ‘You had to let him go after he tried to kidnap Tova.’ The Swede, who was in the row of seats behind them, sleepily raised her head at the mention of her name. ‘You had to try to sabotage the expedition. You had to plant a goddamn bomb on the runestone!’ She finally looked round at her husband as her voice rose to a shout. ‘And you still won’t tell me why you had to do all of this? Why not, Eddie? Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?’

The conflict was clear in his voice. ‘Because… because I made a promise. I told you, I can’t say any more.’

‘But I can,’ said the Russian.

It had taken considerable cajoling by Eddie to persuade Nina and Tova that the Russian was not a threat, but neither woman was willing to trust their mysterious — and until now taciturn — benefactor. At the lake, he had radioed for a helicopter of his own to fly Nina, Eddie and Tova away from the scene of the battle, though Nina had insisted that he also alert the Norwegian authorities so Matt and the other survivors could be taken to safety. A jet waiting at a small airport had then flown into the night to deliver them to a destination deep inside the vast former communist country.

Beyond that, however, he had not been forthcoming with further information. ‘So, you’ve decided to talk now?’ Nina said. ‘Why?’

He smiled. ‘I do not like it when a husband and wife fight. It reminds me too much of my parents. So. What do you want to know?’

She eyed him coldly. ‘Everything. Starting with: who the hell are you?’

He straightened, giving her a salute. ‘I am Colonel Grigory Alekseyevich Kagan, commander of operations for Sekcija dvesti odin — or as it is called in English, Unit 201.’

‘And just what is Unit 201?’

‘On a normal day, if I told you I would have to kill you. It is a state secret. Today, though… I believe that you need to know. So I will tell you, and not kill you.’ Another sly grin. ‘For now.’

Nina was not amused. ‘So? Get on with it.’

Kagan turned to Eddie. ‘She is impatient, yes? Red hair, it is like fire in a woman. I like it.’

‘Just tell her, Yuri,’ the Englishman grumbled.

‘Grigory. As you wish.’ He looked back at Nina. ‘Unit 201 was created during the Cold War. It is a biological counter-warfare agency.’

‘Counter-warfare?’ said Nina.

‘Yes. Over fifty years ago, the Soviet Union discovered something deep within the earth, a poisonous substance — something first found more than a thousand years earlier by the Vikings.’ Nina and Tova, now fully awake, exchanged surprised glances. ‘At the time, the Soviet leaders thought to turn it into a weapon. That was a mistake. As they found out, it was too terrible to use, ever. So Unit 201 was created to make sure that no one ever did. It worked on ways to deal with the substance, but it was also authorised to take… direct action.’

Nina’s eyes narrowed. ‘Direct action like killing anybody who might find more of it?’ Behind her, Tova stiffened in resurgent fear.

Kagan shook his head firmly. ‘We are not murderers. We would not have killed you, Dr Skilfinger. But our enemies had already stolen the runestone, and your research. They would use them to find the second runestone, and from there, Valhalla. We could not allow that to happen, so our intention was to use what you had learned to find and destroy the second stone before they reached it. My apologies.’

Nina was already making connections. ‘According to the text on the runestone, the Vikings would only travel to Valhalla to prepare for Ragnarök — the final battle. The end of the world.’

‘It will be the end of the world if our enemies find it,’ said Kagan, nodding.

‘But who are your enemies?’ asked Tova.

‘I am afraid, Dr Wilde, that they are from your country,’ the Russian told Nina, who reacted with shock. ‘In 1961, a Russian scientist tried to defect to America, taking this terrible weapon with him.’

‘Natalia’s grandfather,’ Eddie said quietly. Kagan nodded again.

Nina regarded her husband quizzically. ‘Who’s Natalia?’

Kagan answered for him when it became clear he was unwilling to reply. ‘A young woman, an innocent. Eight years ago, we learned that the Americans had taken an interest in her. Her DNA, her very blood, could give them what they needed to recreate this scientist’s work. We found her in Vietnam—’

‘You kidnapped her,’ Eddie cut in. ‘And all the people with her.’

‘We had to do it. We could not let the Americans get her. Our plan was to use her DNA to create a neutralising agent. She and the others would then have been released — the story would be that the Vietnamese police had rescued them. But then,’ he gave Eddie a sharp look, ‘you and your mercenary friends interfered.’

‘We were hired to find them,’ Eddie told Nina. ‘Me and Hugo, and some others.’

‘But you did not know who had hired you, did you?’ Kagan clucked his tongue. ‘Or that one of your team was a spy working for our enemies. And because of that, two of Unit 201’s best scientists were killed, their research destroyed. And an innocent woman—’

Eddie interrupted again, much more forcefully. ‘I know what happened.’

The pilot’s voice came from a loudspeaker. Kagan listened, then told the other passengers: ‘We will be landing soon. The Academician will explain everything.’

‘Good,’ said Nina, peering back out of the window. The snowy landscape was indeed getting closer. ‘It’s about damn time somebody gave me a proper answer.’ She directed this last at Eddie, who looked apologetic, but still said nothing.

Before long, the plane crossed over a wide river with towns on both sides, descending towards a long runway beyond the settlement on the east bank. Their destination was not inviting. The surrounding land was a flat expanse of frozen marshes, criss-crossed by concrete taxiways. As the business jet landed and slowed, Nina saw lines of parked aircraft: large, lumbering old beasts whose brutally functional designs, very different from the sleek modernism she associated with American military aircraft, gave them an almost alien feel.

Eddie looked past her. ‘It’s Engels airbase.’

Kagan reacted with suspicion. ‘How do you know that?’

‘’Cause Russia’s only got two active nuclear bomber bases, and the other one’s way, waaaay over in the far east.’ He indicated some of the planes, these ones long and menacing jets resembling winged hypodermic syringes rather than the hulking turboprops they had just passed. ‘And the Tu-160 is a nuclear bomber.’

‘You know a lot about the Russian military, Mr Chase.’

Eddie grinned. ‘Part of my old job. We never knew when we might be sent to blow up all your planes, so we had to be prepared.’

‘You will not be blowing any of them up today,’ said Kagan sourly.

Nina sighed. ‘Oh God. Someone always has to tempt fate, don’t they?’ Her husband’s grin widened, while the Russian’s expression became even more disapproving.

The jet trundled along the taxiways, finally powering down outside a squat concrete blockhouse with a rack of large metal tanks along one of its side walls. The travellers disembarked. Nina couldn’t read the Cyrillic text painted on the side of the grim and ugly building, but numbers were the same in Russian and English: 201. ‘Follow me,’ said Kagan, leading the group towards a broad and very solid-looking set of sliding metal doors.

Three uniformed men came out to meet them, the leader — a stocky officer with dark hair and a rather feeble moustache — engaging Kagan in a brief and somewhat agitated conversation in Russian. The commander made a dismissive gesture before turning to his guests. ‘This is Captain Slavin,’ he announced. ‘He is in charge of security here at the bunker.’

Eddie frowned at the new arrival. ‘I remember him. He was in Vietnam.’ It was the man who had encountered him and Hoyt in the cabin. The look of surprise on Slavin’s face told the Yorkshireman that the recognition was mutual.

‘He was,’ Kagan confirmed. ‘But he has found that his place is standing guard rather than intelligence work. Is that not right, Kolzak Iakovich?’

There was a condescending tone to his words, which Slavin did not appreciate. However, he did not rise to the bait. ‘Sir, Academician Eisenhov waits for you and your guests,’ he said instead, his English rendered almost comical by his placing of emphasis on the wrong syllables.

Nina held in her amusement, but Eddie couldn’t resist. ‘Thank you ve-ry much, we’re look-ing! forward to meet-ing! him.’

Slavin scowled and gestured towards the doors. ‘This way.’ He re-entered the building, his two subordinates marching behind him.

Tova hesitated; Kagan gave her a reassuring smile. ‘It is all right. Please?’ She reluctantly followed the three men into the bunker, Nina and Eddie behind her. They found themselves in a large steel-walled elevator. Nina shivered at the sight of a biohazard warning symbol, a claw-like trefoil of black on yellow, with a long and stern warning sign beneath it. Kagan came in after them and pushed a button. The doors closed, shutting out the cold daylight with a deep clang. There was a distant rumble of machinery building up to speed, then the elevator jolted and began its descent.

‘How deep down are we going?’ Nina asked.

‘The facility is thirty metres underground,’ Kagan replied. ‘It is designed so that in an emergency, it can be completely sealed off from the surface. And if necessary, sterilised.’

Eddie regarded him dubiously. ‘What do you mean, sterilised?’

The Russian indicated the warning sign. ‘If there is a biohazard alert, any contaminated section of the bunker can be locked down and everything in it incinerated by acetylene jets. You saw the gas tanks outside the bunker.’

‘Have you ever had to do that?’ Nina asked, nervously scanning the elevator’s ceiling for said jets.

‘Not here,’ replied Kagan. ‘But there was once an… incident, in another place. It is why Unit 201 was created — to make sure it never happened again.’

The elevator came to a stop. The heavy inner doors rumbled open again, another equally thick set parting beyond them. Unlike the weathered barrier on the surface, these were polished metal. The walls and floor of the area past them were covered by stark white tiles. Slavin’s boot heels clicked on them as he stepped out. ‘The Academician is in his office,’ he announced, ushering everyone out.

‘There’s your gas jets,’ Eddie said quietly as he and Nina emerged into a wide lobby area. She followed his gaze to see a squat black dome in one corner of the ceiling. Other domes overlooked the rest of the bunker’s interior, covering every square inch.

Slavin led them down a broad central passage. There were rooms on each side, all accessed via thick metal sliding doors. Some had windows; Nina glanced in as they passed to see various laboratories, though only a couple were in active use. The occupants gave the new arrivals curious looks from behind goggles and hazmat suits. More doors obstructed the corridor itself every few dozen metres, the Russian officer using a keycard to open them. As well as the panel for the card lock, each door also had another control board containing a lever behind a glass shutter, ominously bordered by yellow and black warning stripes and marked with the biohazard symbol. She realised the latter system’s function: anyone activating it would seal the section behind them and fill it with fire.

Side passages branched off between the laboratories, but the group continued along the main corridor until they reached its end. The last door was, incongruously, made of dark, thickly varnished old wood rather than metal. Slavin knocked respectfully upon it. A muffled reply came from within. He opened it and stood back to let the others through.

Even with the out-of-place door as prior warning, Nina was still taken aback by the room they entered. It was much warmer than the bunker outside, almost stifling. Far from the harsh, sterile tiling of the rest of the facility, this was panelled in wood, overstacked bookshelves occupying much of the wall space. Soft music came from a portable CD player; she belatedly recognised it as Frank Sinatra’s ‘The Best Is Yet To Come’. Small potted plants were dotted seemingly at random on tables and shelves. There was a musty scent, one that immediately brought back memories of academia, of libraries and lectures.

The room’s occupant perfectly matched his surroundings. The old man was seated in a well-worn wing-back chair, a little round table by its right arm bearing a steaming cup of tea. His suit was slightly too large for his age-shrunk frame, giving him an oddly childlike appearance. She guessed him to be well into his eighties. One of his eyes was milky, but the other was still a piercing blue.

Kagan spoke to him in Russian. The old man nodded, then waved a gnarled hand at the other chairs facing him. ‘Please, sit,’ Kagan told the visitors.

Eddie waited for Nina and Tova to do so before joining them. ‘Nice place,’ he said. ‘Love how it totally matches the decor outside. Bit hot, mind.’

Their elderly host chuckled throatily. ‘When you are as old as me, you too will keep your room hot!’ His command of English prompted an exchange of surprised looks from his guests. He spoke in Russian; Slavin’s two men departed, though the captain stayed in the room, watching the three Westerners balefully. ‘Dr Wilde, Dr Skilfinger, Mr Chase: I am Academician Dmitri Prokopiyevich Eisenhov, the director of Unit 201. I have to admit that my feelings are mixed about meeting you, but I am glad that Grigory Alekseyevich,’ he waved a finger towards Kagan, ‘was able to bring you here alive and well.’

‘Not everyone in my team was so lucky,’ Nina said, anger over events at the lake returning. ‘Nobody is giving me straight answers about what the hell is going on. I think it’s time that changed.’ She looked directly at Eddie as she spoke; he shifted uncomfortably.

Eisenhov nodded. ‘You are right. It is time, Dr Wilde.’ He switched off the music, then leaned back. ‘In the Cold War, the Soviet Union chose to use Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic as a test site for nuclear bombs. To prepare, they surveyed the islands. They found something.’ His one clear eye turned towards Tova. ‘A Viking runestone, marking a deep cave. It held a warning of what was found inside.’

‘A warning of what?’ Tova asked, intrigued.

Eisenhov spoke in Russian to Kagan, who went to a filing cabinet and took out a folder. He handed it to the old man. ‘Of death,’ said Eisenhov, extracting a large and yellowed photograph. ‘Of the end of the world.’

He held out the photo. Tova took it, the two women examining the image. Bleak, treeless tundra stretched away into the distance behind a rocky hole in the ground, nothing but blackness visible within. In front of the sinister chasm was a runestone, much like the one from the bottom of the Norwegian lake.

‘We in Russia know of the Norse legends,’ Eisenhov went on. ‘The Vikings are part of our history too. But we did not believe there was any truth to their stories of gods and monsters — until we explored the pit.’

Tova peered intently at the photo, but it was too grainy for her to make out any details on the runestone. ‘I cannot read what it says…’

‘I can tell you,’ said Eisenhov. ‘They say the pit is the home of Jörmungandr — the Midgard Serpent.’ At the group’s surprise, he continued: ‘And it is, in a way. I once saw it with my own eyes, a long time ago. It is not a real serpent, but I know why the Vikings would think it was. It was an impressive — and frightening — sight. But it is not the serpent of which we should be afraid. It is its venom.’

‘The eitr,’ said Eddie. As in Stockholm, what now felt like an age ago, Nina was surprised by his knowledge — though now her feelings were also spiked with anger that he had been keeping secrets from her.

‘The eitr, yes,’ Eisenhov echoed. ‘A black liquid, just as the legends said. A terrible poison. There was a vast reserve beneath the earth, a river flowing underneath the surface to… we did not know where. It was too dangerous to explore, and we did not have the technology to follow it. But we knew from the runestone that the Vikings found another place where it emerged. They believed that when Ragnarök came, the serpent would emerge from one of these pits. The Viking warriors would divide into two armies, so that wherever Jörmungandr emerged, they would be waiting.’

‘So the Vikings found two sources of the eitr,’ said Nina, ‘and you discovered one of them in the Cold War. But why is it so dangerous? You say it’s a poison, but humans have come up with some pretty horrible poisons of their own. How is this any worse?’

‘If you had seen what it can do,’ the old Russian replied with a sad sigh, ‘you would not ask that question. I have seen. It has been over fifty years, but the nightmares have not gone away.’

His sincerity sent a chill through Nina, but she still had to know more. ‘So what can it do? What is it?’

To her shock, it was Eddie who gave her an answer. ‘It’s a mutagen. If it doesn’t kill you, it attacks your DNA, changing it. Like a cancer. Natalia, the woman I rescued in Vietnam? Her grandfather was experimenting with it. He deliberately infected her grandmother with it, while she was pregnant. It caused tumours that killed her grandmother, then her mother.’ His tone became even more grim. ‘And it would’ve eventually killed her too.’

‘Serafim Zernebogovich Volkov,’ said Eisenhov, spitting out the name. ‘A traitor and a monster. If he had lived, his name would be as cursed as Mengele. He tried to take the eitr and his work to your country.’ His gaze snapped almost accusingly back to Nina. ‘It was only by luck that he was stopped. He chose the wrong day to return to Novaya Zemlya.’

‘What happened to him?’ Tova asked.

‘Ever heard of the Tsar Bomb?’ said Eddie. Both women shook their heads. ‘Biggest H-bomb in history.’

‘What’s that got to do with— Oh,’ Nina said, realising. ‘Nuclear test site. Right.’

Eisenhov made a satisfied sound. ‘Khrushchev ordered the activation of what became known as the Tsar Protocol. The bomb was dropped on the thirtieth of October 1961, completely obliterating everything on the ground and sealing the pit for ever. Nobody will ever be able to open it again.’

Nina was still astounded. ‘Using a hydrogen bomb, though? That sounds like overkill.’

‘You would not say that if you had seen what I have seen,’ Eisenhov replied.

‘Which was what?’

He did not answer straight away, as if summoning up the resolve to speak. ‘Two months before the Tsar Protocol was activated,’ he said at last, ‘a sample of eitr was being transported to a missile testing site. There was an accident on the way. The eitr was spilled in a civilian area. It had… terrible effects. On people, but also on animals, plants, even insects — anything living. Most of the people who were exposed died within days, or even hours.’ He paused, moistening his dry lips with his tongue. ‘They were the lucky ones. Those who survived…’

‘What happened to them?’ Nina demanded, after Eisenhov said nothing for several seconds.

He took a long, slow breath, then opened the folder again. ‘You may not want to see these pictures. They have been a state secret for half a century, seen only by those at the highest levels of government. All the men who saw them… wished they had not. But they understood at once why Khrushchev ordered the pit to be obliterated. Even at the height of the Cold War, no Russian ever again suggested using eitr as a weapon. Do you still want to see them?’

‘No,’ whispered Tova. ‘I do not.’

‘I don’t want to either,’ said Nina. ‘But… I think I have to. If this is an IHA matter, a global security threat, I’ve got to know what we’re dealing with.’

Eisenhov nodded. ‘You are a brave woman, Dr Wilde. Very well. But remember that I warned you.’ He reached forward again to hand several photographs to her.

Eddie leaned closer to look as she turned them over. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

Nina couldn’t even speak as she stared at the first picture, horror and revulsion freezing any words in her throat. The image showed the upper body of a man lying on the ground, contorted in unimaginable agony at the moment of his death.

The cause was obvious. Parts of his face and neck appeared almost to have exploded from the inside, vile cancerous growths within the flesh having swollen to burst through his skin before themselves rupturing into oozing, diseased slurry. Bloodstains soaking through his clothing showed that the terrifying contagion had spread throughout his whole body.

Eisenhov’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. ‘Exposure to more than a mere few millilitres of the eitr causes DNA to mutate and grow uncontrollably. The effect begins almost immediately. Death was the result in every case.’

Nina forced herself to talk. ‘And in smaller doses?’

‘There are pictures.’

She reluctantly looked at the next photograph, afraid of what it would show her.

Her fears were justified.

Eddie closed his eyes, shaking his head. ‘Shit,’ he whispered.

The picture showed a woman in a hospital bed, ugly lumps on her skin revealing that she too had been contaminated by the eitr. Her abdomen was covered in blood from a deep longitudinal incision — a Caesarean section, the umbilical cord still connected to the just-birthed child.

A child that was barely recognisable as human.

Nina fought the urge to vomit. The baby’s limbs were hideously malformed, one leg a withered, twisted stump, an arm bloated and covered with tumours and pustules. Ribs pushed through skin, a length of some intestinal organ hanging limply out of a hole beneath the distended stomach. But most appalling of all was the face, a gelatinous mass of twisted features trying to scream without a mouth, the one visible eye bulging in anguish…

The pictures slipped from her shaking hands to the floor as she squeezed her own eyes tightly shut, unable to bear the sight any more.

‘It did not live for long,’ said Eisenhov in a quiet, saddened voice. ‘Fortunately.’

Tova gasped in horror as she glimpsed the fallen photographs, hurriedly looking away. Nina tried to speak again. ‘Wh—’ Her mouth had gone bone-dry. ‘What… what about the mother?’ she finally managed to say.

‘She died soon after,’ the Russian told her. ‘The child was born a month after she was exposed to the eitr. Only a few drops, but it was enough to do that to her, and to turn her baby into a monster.’

‘It’s not a monster,’ Eddie said angrily. ‘It was still a baby. It didn’t ask to be born like that. You did it, with your fucking experiments!’

‘Experiments that we knew had to be stopped and never restarted,’ Eisenhov replied, contrition clear even beneath his mask of stoicism. He gestured to Kagan, who collected the photographs. ‘Every kind of life in the area of the accident was affected. In the smaller forms, plants and insects, mutations spread quickly. Most died, but some survived long enough to breed — and passed down further mutations to the next generation. We saw that there was a danger of the contamination spreading beyond the quarantine zone. So the entire area was… sterilised.’ He glanced up at the ceiling. Another of the domes lurked beside a light fitting.

‘You killed everything?’ Nina asked. Eisenhov nodded. ‘Including people?’

‘It had to be done,’ he said, sickened. ‘And may God have mercy on us. But we could not let the mutations spread. When Khrushchev learned what had happened, he immediately ordered all research on the eitr to be destroyed. Even the hydrogen bomb is not so terrible a weapon as the poison from inside the earth itself.’

‘The blood of Jörmungandr,’ said Tova. ‘The poison of the Midgard Serpent.’

‘So the legend’s true, in a way,’ Nina realised. ‘The eitr brings life, or at least changes it — maybe it was even responsible for kick-starting evolution billions of years ago by causing mutations on a massive scale.’ She knew from her discoveries at Atlantis that a meteor had brought life to the primordial Earth — but the eitr might have been what caused that life to explode into endless new forms. All birthed from poison, just as the Norse legends said. She looked at Eddie. ‘That’s what this girl’s grandfather was trying to do, wasn’t it? Take control of evolution, try to force it down the paths he wanted?’

‘Volkov!’ Again Eisenhov practically spat the name. ‘The man was insane — experimenting on his own wife and child! And when Khrushchev ended the project, he tried to sell his work to the Americans.’

‘But you nuked him first,’ said Eddie. ‘Good.’

‘Yes. He burned for his greed, and now he burns in hell, where he belongs.’ Kagan returned the photographs to the old man, who put them back in the folder and closed it. ‘But once we had seen for ourselves the terrible things that eitr could do if unleashed on the world,’ Eisenhov continued, ‘we knew we had to make sure that never happened. So Unit 201 was created.’

‘To find a way to neutralise it?’ asked Nina.

‘That is one of our purposes, yes,’ Kagan told her. ‘Our scientists have created chemicals that may work.’

‘May?’ Eddie repeated. ‘That doesn’t sound too hopeful.’

‘There is a problem,’ said Eisenhov. ‘We have no way to test our theories — because we have no eitr to test them upon! All the samples were incinerated, and the pit was sealed by the Tsar Bomba. Khrushchev was right to stop the experiments, yes, but he went further — he ordered everything destroyed. And we were too quick to obey.’ He shook his head. ‘If we had kept some of the research, we would have precious information that could have helped us. Instead, we had to recreate everything from memory alone. And even after fifty years, and now with computers and genetic sequencing to help us, we do not know if that is enough.’

Kagan eyed Eddie. ‘But if we had found someone who had been contaminated by eitr, a person whose DNA we could test and compare to an uninfected sample…’

Eddie jabbed a finger at him. ‘Don’t you even fucking start.’

Nina looked between the two men. ‘What?’

‘He means Natalia — and he’s going to blame me for them not getting what they were after!’

‘If you had not interfered eight years ago,’ said Kagan, ‘we would have let her go, and returned here with everything we needed.’

Eddie jumped to his feet. ‘Maybe if you’d just fucking asked her, instead of acting like spooks and coming up with some fake kidnapping bullshit, she would have let you take a blood sample!’

Eisenhov raised a hand, speaking sharply to Kagan before addressing the others. ‘Enough, please. What is done is done. We cannot change it — we can only try to correct our mistakes. And to stop others from making the same ones.’

‘Which is Unit 201’s other purpose, right?’ said Nina. ‘You knew from the runestone at the test site that there’s another source of eitr out there, somewhere. So you’ve been trying to find it — before anyone else does.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Eisenhov replied. ‘But we have not been successful. The runes said that the Vikings reached the pit on Novaya Zemlya from Valhalla — but they did not say where Valhalla was.’

‘But the two runestones that Hoyt’s nicked do,’ Eddie pointed out. ‘And Berkeley’s translating them. He took longer than Tova to work out that the second stone was under the lake — but he got there eventually.’

‘We must find Valhalla,’ Kagan insisted. ‘We must destroy the eitr before the Americans reach it.’

‘And what if your anti-eitr doesn’t work?’ asked Nina.

A change in Eisenhov’s attitude caught the attention of all three visitors, the old man stiffening in his chair. He took in a deep, slow breath, considering his next words very carefully. ‘If it does not,’ he said, ‘then Unit 201 has failed. If that happens, the military takes over.’ He looked up, his gaze aimed not at the ceiling but the sprawling airbase thirty metres above.

‘Meaning what?’ said Eddie. The sudden tension in his voice suggested to Nina that he already had a horrible idea of the answer.

‘The Tsar Protocol was never rescinded,’ Eisenhov told the group. ‘It remains active to this day. The Soviet Union had several secret… doomsday programmes. After it fell, Russia maintained them. The Tsar Protocol was one.’

Despite the heat, Nina felt an icy cold run through her body. ‘Wait — if you find the other pit, and you can’t neutralise the eitr… you’ll nuke it?’

Eisenhov nodded solemnly. ‘Wherever it may be. Even if it is in the United States — even if it is in Washington itself. That is the Tsar Protocol. Nobody can be allowed to control the eitr. It must be destroyed. No matter what.’

Tova stared at him, wide-eyed. ‘That is insane,’ she whispered.

Nina saw that Slavin, standing quietly by the door, had a similarly shocked expression. Knowledge of the Tsar Protocol had clearly been limited only to the highest-ranking members of Unit 201. He spoke urgently, gesturing towards the exit to indicate that he should leave, but Eisenhov shook his head. He replied to the younger man, then addressed the Westerners. ‘Kolzak Iakovich thinks that what I have just told you is, how do you say, above his security clearance,’ he said. ‘But I need every possible idea for how to deal with this situation. I do not want the Tsar Protocol to be activated again. But if we fail…’ He let his grim words hang in the air.

‘You’re willing to risk war — an all-out nuclear war — over this?’ Nina said, appalled.

Eisenhov held up the folder. ‘You have seen what eitr can do, and this was only a small amount. Can you imagine it unleashed over an entire civilian population? Those who do not die will be left as monsters, their children cursed for generation upon generation. Nobody must ever be allowed to possess such a terrible thing. Nobody.’

‘But if we find the second pit and destroy the eitr, that does not need to happen,’ said Kagan.

‘So long as your gunk does what it’s supposed to,’ Eddie pointed out.

Eisenhov spoke in Russian, and Kagan helped him stand. The old man shuffled to one of the bookcases. He reached under a shelf, groping for a moment, then there was a soft click followed by the hum of an electric motor. The entire bookcase retreated backwards and slid sideways out of sight behind the wooden panels to reveal a gleaming metal safe door set into the steel wall.

Eddie nodded in approval. ‘We need one of those at home,’ he told Nina. ‘Good place to keep all our porn.’

‘All your porn, I think you mean,’ she replied.

‘Yeah. Yours wouldn’t fit in something that small.’

‘I don’t have any porn,’ she insisted. But the exchange had eased her tension, slightly. She watched as Eisenhov placed one palm flat against a black glass panel: a handprint scanner. A soft chime sounded. The elderly Russian then squinted at a keypad in a recess, moving in front of it to block the view of the room’s other occupants as he tapped in a code. Another chime — then a deep metallic thunk came from within the door as thick locking bars retracted, and it slowly swung open.

Inside were numerous files and metal containers marked with Cyrillic text. Eisenhov reached for one of them, a steel cylinder roughly a foot high and eight inches in diameter. The metal was clearly thick; it was a strain for him to lift. He held it by its curved carrying handle and turned to face his audience. ‘This is our best hope,’ he said. ‘Its official name is Article 3472, but we call it “Thor’s Hammer”. In Viking legend, Thor killed the great serpent. If we are right, this will do the same to the eitr.’

Tova looked uncomfortable. ‘I do not want to sound negative, but Thor also died. Jörmungandr’s poison — the eitr — killed him.’

‘Then I hope we do better,’ said Kagan.

Nina regarded the cylinder. ‘So what does Thor’s Hammer actually do?’

‘It is a chemical compound,’ Eisenhov explained, ‘that should neutralise the eitr completely. Once introduced into the source, it will break down the mutagenic agents and make them harmless. It is,’ he searched for the right English word, ‘an autocatalytic reaction. Once it begins, it will spread through the eitr until it is all destroyed. If, as we believed at Novaya Zemlya, there are underground channels through which the eitr flows, then if they are all connected it may wipe out all the eitr in the world. We do not know — but we can hope.’

‘So when you find the other pit, you just pour that stuff in, and foosh! All done?’ said Eddie. ‘Sounds easy enough.’

‘Not quite,’ Kagan told him.

‘Yeah, it never bloody is.’

‘Thor’s Hammer is as deadly as eitr,’ said Eisenhov. ‘We are using a poison to destroy a poison. It must be handled with great care. If it touches you, it will kill you.’

‘Thanks for the heads-up,’ said Nina in a scathing tone. ‘But none of this matters if you can’t find the second pit, does it?’

‘Which is why I asked Grigory Alekseyevich,’ the old man nodded at Kagan, ‘to bring you here. We need your help. Now that our enemies — your enemies too — have both runestones, they will sooner or later find Valhalla — and when they do, they will find the second Ragnarök pit. You are our only hope of stopping them. If we do not, then… the Tsar Protocol will be activated. And the world will be thrown into war.’

‘Will you help us?’ Kagan asked.

Nina looked at her companions. ‘Do we have a choice?’

‘We should help ’em,’ said Eddie firmly. ‘I don’t want Hoyt or anyone like him getting hold of that shit. Because they’re the kind of people who’d actually use it.’ His expression became sorrowful. ‘I saw what Agent Orange did in Vietnam, and that was nothing compared to this stuff. And I saw what that did to Natalia. I made her a promise — that I’d do everything I could to stop anyone from carrying on with her grandfather’s work. And,’ he went on, managing a faint smile, ‘you know how I like to keep my promises.’

Kagan was not impressed. ‘If you had not made that promise, we would not be in this situation. Unit 201 would have done what it went to Vietnam to do — and Natalia would still be alive.’

‘I don’t need any fucking lectures from you,’ Eddie snapped back at him — then his expression suddenly changed from anger to dawning realisation. ‘Wait a minute…’

‘What?’ Nina asked.

Her husband was silent for a moment, thinking. Then: ‘You went to Vietnam,’ he said to Kagan. ‘Unit 201 went to Vietnam specifically to get hold of Natalia in a way that meant nobody’d suspect you were involved, right?’

‘That is right,’ Kagan replied, uncertain where the shift of direction was leading.

‘So how did you know she was there?’

‘Through intelligence reports,’ said Eisenhov. ‘The Americans had become interested in finding Volkov’s granddaughter. We realised there was only one possible reason why they would do that, so we resolved to act first. The Vietnamese secret police helped us locate her — though we did not tell them why we wanted to do so, of course.’

‘But if the Americans knew about Natalia already, they could have picked her up any time — she lived in Germany, it’s a US ally. It would have been a lot easier for them to operate there than in Vietnam… but it was the other way round for you. So they waited until she was in a country that was one of your allies — somewhere you could get away with kidnapping her.’

Kagan’s next words were wary. ‘You are leading somewhere, Chase. What are you saying?’

‘Hoyt told me that his people deliberately fed you information to get you out of Russia — out of here.’ Eddie gestured at the bunker’s walls. ‘But if Unit 201 is so secret, how did they know who to feed it to? Who gave the information to you?’

‘The intelligence officer—’ Kagan began, before abruptly breaking off and whirling to face Slavin. ‘The information came through you! What was its source?’

Slavin blinked, wide-eyed and perspiring. ‘The source…’ he began, before reverting to Russian and delivering a halting explanation. Neither Kagan nor Eisenhov appeared convinced.

‘Hoyt let you live,’ Eddie continued, also rounding on Slavin. ‘He shot the scientist in Natalia’s cabin, but when you came in, he let you go. He already knew you, didn’t he? You’re a fucking mole!’

‘Sookin syn!’ snarled Kagan. His hand darted into his jacket to draw a gun.

Slavin was faster, snatching the pistol from his uniform’s holster. He pointed it at Kagan—

‘Nyet!’ cried Eisenhov, stepping forward — as Slavin fired.

The bullet hit the old man in the chest. He convulsed, face filled with shock, then sagged to his knees before crumpling on to his front. The steel cylinder dropped from his hand and rolled across the floor before coming to rest near the shocked Nina’s feet.

‘Yes, I was working for the Americans,’ said Slavin, almost panting with barely contained panic. He glanced at the fallen container. ‘I still am — and now I will give them Thor’s Hammer!’