The Valhalla Prophecy

30

Nina was cold again, a frigid wind biting at her face, but at least now she could warm up simply by going back inside the ship.

All that was stopping her was the question she knew she had to ask her husband… and the answer she was afraid to hear.

The RV Akademik Rozhkov was a 3,000-ton Russian oceanographic survey vessel, which to the surprise — and suspicion — of its crew had been abruptly ordered to divert from its task in the North Atlantic and sent into the Davis Strait between the two great frozen wastes of Greenland and Baffin Island. It had received new passengers by helicopter: Nina, Eddie, Kagan and Berkeley, as well as a small contingent of men who, while dressed in civilian clothes, were clearly members of some military unit, all being of similar age, build, haircut and taciturn disposition.

The escapees from Valhalla had eventually made it back to Blixtholm to call for the helicopter to return and pick them up, learning while they were there that Lock and his team had done exactly the same thing. So they knew they were not far behind Tova’s kidnappers. The difference was that Lock could travel to Baffin Island directly using Xeniteq’s resources, while Kagan had flat-out refused to allow Nina to do the same via the IHA, for fear that a leak would alert the Americans to their progress. Instead, they had been forced to arrange to use Russian resources via the Kremlin, slowing proceedings considerably.

But now they were on their way, and getting closer. Berkeley’s translation, rapidly completed once the picture of the runes was recovered from the damaged tablet, had allowed them to track the route the Vikings had taken from Valhalla downriver to the coast, and then around southern Scandinavia to a jumping-off point in western Norway. From there, the ancient mariners had travelled in legs to the Shetland Islands, the Faroes and Iceland, and then on to Greenland. The final steps of the journey were now the critical part: exactly where had the Vikings made landfall on Helluland to reach the eitr pit?

The sky was completely overcast, darkening the day still further as the hidden sun descended. Beneath the clouds, the Baffin coastline was visible off to the west, a line of almost unbroken white rising above the leaden horizon. Nina gazed at it, then drew a deep breath before heading inside. She also had questions to ask of Berkeley, and was as concerned about their answers as she was about whatever Eddie might tell her. Her fear of the latter was that it could change the way she looked at her husband, perhaps for ever. The former could get her killed.

Her, and many others.

She made her way down to one of the survey vessel’s labs, which had been assigned to the team. The four Russian soldiers were in a group in one corner, playing cards and swapping what she suspected were obscene jokes. Kagan sat close to Berkeley, watching with bored impatience as the archaeologist repeatedly read through his notes and checked the translation on a laptop. Eddie, meanwhile, sat slightly apart from the others, looking up as she entered and nodding in greeting, but not saying anything. He too knew that the question was coming, but was equally reluctant to face it.

Berkeley saved them from it, for now. ‘You look cold,’ he said.

Nina rubbed at her cheeks, which had gone numb even from the brief exposure to the chill. ‘Well, it is sub-zero outside. Fahrenheit and Celsius.’

‘I can’t say I’m surprised.’ He turned the laptop towards her as she sat down beside him. ‘If the translation is correct, then based on the directions it gives, we’ll be making landfall above the Arctic Circle.’

‘You’ve pinpointed where we’re going?’

He looked faintly uncomfortable. ‘Well… pinpointed is a little too precise. I used the sun compass to work out the latitudes the Vikings would have been aiming for, but it’s only accurate to one or two degrees, which could give us anything up to two hundred miles of coastline to choose from. And I can’t even be entirely sure that I’m reading it correctly, as the Norsemen never left clear instructions. I mean, there are still plenty of historians who would dispute that it’s even a navigational instrument at all.’

‘Let us hope you are right and they are wrong,’ said Kagan, unimpressed.

‘Well, I usually am right,’ Berkeley replied airily.

Nina gave him a stern look. ‘Except when it comes to picking sides.’

‘All right, all right!’ he protested. ‘So, yes, I’ve made some… less than ideal choices. But I did my time for that business in Egypt, and I’m helping you fix things now, aren’t I?’

‘Some results would be nice first. What have you got?’

He glowered, but turned back to the laptop. One side of the screen showed the image of the runes in Valhalla; the other, the computer-generated translation of the text, below which was a more refined version edited by Berkeley himself. He pointed out a section. ‘This part here told the Vikings, once they’d rounded the southern tip of Greenland and turned north along its western coast, to travel to two islands at a latitude that I think works out at around sixty-eight degrees north. They then sail due west across the Davis Strait to a large island.’ He frowned slightly. ‘The runes are phrased rather oddly, but as far as I can tell I haven’t made any mistakes in translation. They say something like “You will see three mountains that you will recognise”, but I haven’t been able to find any indication of why they would recognise them.’

‘Something in Valhalla?’ Nina wondered. ‘A picture, or a map?’

‘Maybe, but I didn’t see anything, and nor did Kagan or your husband. Anyway, from there the description of the route is the same kind of thing as on the two runestones in Scandinavia. Find a landmark, go in a certain direction, et cetera. I don’t think the place we’re looking for can be more than seven or eight miles from the coast.’

‘Tell her about the wolf,’ said Eddie, speaking for the first time.

Nina detected an undercurrent of concern in his words. ‘What about the wolf?’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Berkeley dismissively. ‘Viking poetic licence, I’m sure.’

‘The other runes were pretty literal — the lake of lightning, the shimmering bridge, all that,’ said the Englishman, rising from his chair to join them. ‘It might mean something here too. Tell her.’

Berkeley blew out an irritated sigh. ‘Okay, okay. One part of the route is called “the vale of the wolf” — the wolf being, specifically, Fenrir.’

‘As in “right there on the side of the bad guys at Ragnarök” Fenrir?’ said Nina. ‘That Fenrir?’

‘The one and the same. Son of Loki and brother of Jörmungandr, biter-off of Tyr’s hand… and the killer of Odin.’

Eddie raised his eyebrows. ‘He took out Odin? I thought he was supposed to be the hardest of all the Norse gods.’

‘He was, but Fenrir still killed him. Swallowed him whole, according to the myth.’

‘Must have been one bloody huge wolf.’

‘Well, you’ve heard of the Big Bad Wolf, haven’t you?’ said Nina with a smile. She took a closer look at the screen. Assuming Berkeley’s translations were correct, it was hard to see any other interpretation of the ancient text. ‘So you go through the vale of Fenrir, up a mountain to the plain of Vigrid… and that’s where you find the lair of the Midgard Serpent?’

Berkeley nodded. ‘That part of the route was fairly straightforward to translate.’

‘Lock and Hoyt will have forced Dr Skilfinger to translate it by now,’ said Kagan. ‘They could be ahead of us already.’

‘Only if they know exactly where to land,’ said Nina. ‘We haven’t figured that out yet, and we’re working from the same information.’

‘They might not need to,’ Eddie said. ‘They’ve got the directions, and all the descriptions and clues about what they’re looking out for on the way. Stick that into a computer with a good enough landscape map, and it might be able to work out the endpoint. I mean,’ he gestured at the laptop, ‘we already know from the runes that it’s on an island, and if it’s at least seven miles long and has three mountains, that narrows down the places you need to check.’

Nina gave Kagan a pointed look. ‘The IHA database could have told us all that.’

The Russian shook his head. ‘We cannot risk anyone else finding the source of the eitr.’ He glanced at a sturdy metal safe on one side of the lab. Inside was the steel cylinder containing the substance that Unit 201 hoped would neutralise the eitr: Thor’s Hammer. ‘Not until we have destroyed it.’

‘Just hope that stuff works,’ said Eddie. ‘I think the Canadians’ll be pretty pissed off about the alternative.’

‘What alternative?’ Berkeley asked.

‘It will not come to that,’ Kagan said firmly. ‘Academician Eisenhov worked for decades to create Thor’s Hammer, so it will work. It must work.’

‘We still need to know where to pour it,’ Eddie said. He went to a large map of Baffin Island taped to one wall. ‘So, where do we land?’

‘Near three mountains,’ said Nina. ‘But which three?’

‘We also have a terrain database,’ Kagan told her. ‘We could use that and look for features along the coast that match.’

‘Half the bloody coast’s got mountains, though,’ said Eddie, running a finger down the heavily contoured map.

Nina looked back at the laptop. ‘The runes say the Vikings would recognise the three mountains. From where?’

‘Maybe they resemble a mountain range in Sweden,’ Berkeley suggested.

‘I don’t know — the warriors fighting at Ragnarök were called from tribes all over Scandinavia. For the mountains to be ones they would all recognise, they’d have to be near Valhalla, as it’s the only place they would congregate. But I don’t remember any particularly distinctive mountains nearby.’

Eddie crossed back to the table and picked up the sun compass. ‘There’s nothing on this?’ he asked, angling it towards 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 towards 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 flipside of the dark stone disc, 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 discs, ‘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 discs and examined its newly revealed face. She realised 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 to 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 disc 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 disc, 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 recreate 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 recoloured 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 inwards. 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 neutralise 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! God damn it.’

‘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 still pitch black.’ At such a high latitude in winter, the nights were 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 to what was inscribed on the disc. 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 metres above sea level; she did some rapid mental arithmetic to convert the figure to 1,800 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, over a thousand years later, she was about to follow in their footsteps.