The Valhalla Prophecy

6

‘Welcome to the jungle!’ sang Chase tunelessly as the mercenary team began their trek.

They were some fifty miles west of Da Nang, Sullivan’s local contact having driven them from the city to their drop-off point in an elderly Volkswagen minibus. The road they took was marked on the map as a major highway, though Chase considered it no more than a country lane by British standards. But it was paved, so the journey was relatively straightforward — even if Vietnamese traffic discipline was far looser than anything in Europe.

The minibus had turned south off the highway on to a dirt track, heading through a small village and continuing on as rough farmland gave way first to scrub, then actual jungle. Once they entered the dense woodland, it did not take long before the track petered out entirely. After checking their surroundings to make sure they were not being observed, the team armed up with the gear Bluey had provided. The weapons were AK-47s, almost certainly dating back to the Vietnam War, but Chase found that the Australian had been as good as his word. The rifles were still in working order.

The rest of the gear was also as promised. Once everyone was kitted out, the VW departed, heading back north. Hoyt watched it go as he lit another cigarette. Sullivan checked a map, then directed his men deeper into the jungle.

‘If our info’s right,’ said the New Zealander as he took the lead, ‘we should go five or six klicks before we get into our bandits’ area of operations. But watch out before then, eh? We don’t want to run into any sentries.’

‘If that storm reaches us, it could make them hard to spot,’ Castille said.

‘Could work for us, though,’ Chase countered. ‘It’ll give us some cover too, and if it’s pissing it down, the bad guys’ll want to stay in the dry.’ He peered up through the overhanging canopy. The weather had definitely started to turn, the sweltering tropical heat falling as the sky clouded over and the wind picked up. The storm was due to make landfall in a couple of hours; if it continued along its predicted course, the worst of it would strike them about an hour later. ‘But yeah, I’ll keep my eyes open.’

They continued south, Sullivan checking the map every so often. The terrain was rough and crumpled with hardly a flat piece of ground to be found. The jungle itself also slowed their progress; there were no paths, so thick undergrowth frequently needed to be hacked through. All the team members had been on missions in similar conditions, accepting the strenuous nature of their progress with weary shrugs.

There was something about this particular jungle that set it apart from the others Chase had traversed, however. It was impossible to escape a constant sense of foreboding — a feeling that death was all around them. Part of the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail had run through the region during the war, feeding North Vietnamese troops and supplies into the South, and as a result the whole area had been subjected to massive herbicidal assaults by American forces to kill the vegetation and strip away their enemies’ cover. Even though the environment had recovered to an extent after over three decades, dead trees still lurked all around, rotting monuments to chemical warfare. The Englishman was the first to admit that he was not burdened with an overactive imagination, but there was still something unsettling about the poisoned land.

After two hours, the light had dropped considerably, and not just because evening was approaching. ‘Wind’s really pickin’ up,’ said Lomax. Heavy clouds roiled ominously above. ‘Storm’ll be on us soon, I reckon.’

‘Looks that way,’ Sullivan replied. ‘I’d say we’ve got no more than ten minutes before the rain hits us. You might want to put on your gear now.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Chase, shrugging off his pack and taking out a hooded nylon poncho with a mottled green camouflage pattern. ‘Although if the storm’s turned into a typhoon, we’ll get wet no matter what.’

‘I will take a little dryness over none at all,’ said Castille, donning his own poncho before taking a plastic bag from his pack.

Chase sighed. ‘What weird fucking fruit’ve you got now, Hugo?’

Sullivan retreated, making a face. ‘It’d better not be a durian. They smell like a chimp’s arse.’

‘Ah, you people,’ said Castille with cheery disdain. ‘You never want to discover new tastes. No, it is not a durian. It is a longan.’ The Belgian took one of the brown spheres from the bag and squeezed it to split the shell, revealing the pale, almost eyeball-like fruit within. He popped it in his mouth and chewed. ‘Delicious.’

‘I’ll stick with Golden Delicious,’ Chase told him, producing a mocking snort from his friend.

Rios checked his map. ‘If the bandits are in this area, where will they be?’

The others joined him. ‘If they’re stupid,’ said Hoyt, ‘they’ll be in this valley here.’ He pointed it out. ‘It’s flat ground, so it’d be easy for them to make camp — but they’ll have boxed themselves in.’

‘I doubt we’ll be that lucky,’ Sullivan told him. ‘If they know the jungle, which I imagine they do, they’d know somewhere like that would flood in typhoon season. But…’ He ran his finger across the map from the valley to an area above its steep western side. ‘That would be a better choice. The ground’s fairly level, it’s defensible — but there are avenues of escape if they need them.’

Chase examined his own map. ‘If we come in from this big hill to the north-west, that gives us higher ground and a better vantage point.’

‘If that is where they are at all,’ Castille pointed out.

Sullivan surveyed the location. ‘If they’ve got prisoners, they’ll have to secure them somewhere, so they can’t just bivvy down and be ready to move at a moment’s notice. They’ll need space for an actual camp.’ His eyes flicked over other possibilities. ‘That’s as good a place as any. If they’re not there, then we just continue the search — but it’s our most likely target.’

Hoyt hefted his AK-47. ‘Good. Then let’s go in there and get ’em.’

‘Minimum force,’ Sullivan reminded him sternly. ‘I want this to be easy in, easy out if we can manage it.’

‘You’re the boss,’ said the American mildly, though he kept his gun raised.

Chase took a compass bearing. ‘That way,’ he said, pointing south-east. ‘About a mile. It’ll be dark by the time we get there, though.’

Castille peered unhappily up at the swaying trees. ‘The storm will have reached us, too.’

‘All the more reason to stop talking and start walking,’ said Sullivan. ‘Okay, let’s move.’

The rain began soon after.

Even beneath the tree cover, it was a deluge. The rising winds tore through the canopy, exposing the ground beneath to the torrential fall. Soil turned to mud, the thick, cloying sludge clinging to the team’s boots with every step. The last daylight had faded too, turning the jungle almost pitch black. Even though their eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness, the mercenaries were forced to slow even further, each footfall perilous on the uneven ground.

Crossing a slope, Chase almost stumbled where a rivulet of running water had loosened the topsoil. He held in an obscenity, mindful of the need for stealth. ‘Are you okay?’ Castille whispered from behind him, holding up one hand to warn the others to stop.

‘Yeah,’ Chase replied. ‘Watch your step, there’s a lot of water coming down the hill.’

‘If it gets much worse, there could be a mudslide,’ Sullivan warned. ‘Everyone stay close to those large rocks down there.’ He pointed at a line of rain-slicked shapes below their current path.

Chase was about to move again when he caught a flicker of movement in the distance. He raised his hand, this gesture signalling potential danger. The other men immediately crouched, drawing their weapons. ‘What is it?’ hissed Castille.

‘Saw something.’ The Englishman shielded his eyes from the rain, watching the site of the movement intently. He spotted nothing but the vague shapes of trees swaying in the darkness for several seconds… then it reappeared.

A light. Faint, but in the black of the jungle it stood out like a beacon. It bobbed between the trees, then vanished again, obscured by the trunks.

Chase didn’t need to see any more. The only person who would be strolling through the jungle at night with a typhoon bearing down on them was a sentry. ‘It’s a torch,’ he whispered as Sullivan moved up to join him. ‘We’ve found them.’

The news sent a crackle of electricity through the group. They had been alert before; now they were fully focused, ready for action. Hoyt spat out his damp cigarette and crushed it under his boot. ‘Okay,’ said Sullivan at another glimpse of torchlight, ‘he’s about two hundred metres away. We’ll stay on this level and move in to one hundred for a better look. We don’t get any closer until we’ve got an idea of how many there are — and where they are. Spread out to five-metre spacing. Eddie, lead on.’

Chase slung his rifle over his shoulder and crouched, almost on all fours as he began his cautious advance. Castille waited until a gap had opened up between them, then followed. The other men picked up the trail one by one after him, Hoyt at the rear.

By the time Chase had covered roughly half the hundred metres, he had already spotted further signs of life. The torch definitely belonged to a sentry, trudging back and forth along a curving path. There was at least one other sentry farther away, forming a perimeter. Within the circle, more lights were revealed as he got closer. Diffuse glows gradually took on the form of several tents with lamps inside, and a lantern hung at the entrance to another shelter.

He stopped a hundred metres from the camp. Beyond the tents was some sort of building, a boxy cabin. Reflected light picked out the rain running in sheets down its slab-like sides. A faint glowing rectangle marked a window in one wall. It didn’t seem to be a bunker left over from the war; it looked more like a caravan or shipping container.

He had more immediate concerns than the mystery structure, however. The two sentries were still slogging around the perimeter, and as he watched, a man emerged from one of the smaller tents and scurried across the camp to enter the largest of the shelters. The guards were not the only bandits still awake.

The other mercenaries reached him. Chase gave them a brief summary of his observations. ‘No idea what that cabin is, mind,’ he concluded.

Sullivan took out a pair of binoculars and scanned the camp. ‘Can’t see a damn thing in all this rain,’ he muttered. ‘The small tents, I’d say you could get three, maybe four men in each of them at a squeeze. The big one… ten, or more.’

‘So we’re looking at, what, up to thirty guys?’ said Lomax unhappily.

The New Zealander shook his head. ‘I doubt it. The hostages are probably being held in the big tent — it’d be a lot easier to keep them all together in one place. So that’s eight people accounted for already.’

‘Still twenty-two against six. I don’t like those odds.’

‘We’ve got surprise on our side,’ Hoyt pointed out. ‘We could take most of ’em out before they even knew we were here. If we had to,’ he added, as Sullivan frowned at him.

‘If the aid workers are in the big tent, I think we can get to ’em without being seen.’ Chase pointed at a patch of darkness between the shelters and the path the first sentry was following. ‘If we timed it right, we could hide in the bushes and get across the perimeter when that guy’s heading away from us, then sneak right up behind the tents.’

‘Has he followed the same route every time?’ Castille asked.

‘Since I’ve been watching him, yeah. He’s probably made a path and doesn’t want to move off it in the dark.’

Rios bit his lip. ‘We need to be sure where the hostages are. If we go in, and they are not where we think…’

‘I know,’ said Sullivan. ‘We need a better idea of how many other guys we’re dealing with, too. Somebody’ll have to take a closer look.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Hoyt at once.

Sullivan regarded him with an unreadable expression, then shook his head. ‘Eddie, Mac told me you’ve got recent experience in jungle infiltration and hostage extraction work. Correct?’

‘If two years ago counts as recent, then yeah,’ Chase replied.

‘Think you can get in closer without being seen?’

He gave the encampment another look, judging distances, paths of approach and exit, the movements of the sentries… ‘Yeah. I can do it.’

‘Good man,’ said Sullivan. ‘Hugo, you’re with me — we’ll move down to those rocks there and cover him. The rest of you, stay here and keep watch.’

Lomax, Rios and Hoyt all nodded, then spread out to positions where they could observe what was happening below — and maintain a clear line of fire. The other three men moved carefully down the slope to the rocks. Castille and Sullivan stopped, watching the tents, as Chase prepared to advance. ‘Good luck,’ Sullivan whispered.

‘Fight to the end, Edward,’ added Castille.

‘Always do,’ Chase replied, nodding to his friend before dropping low and moving into the undergrowth. A brief look back; the two men were little more than shadows from a distance of just fifteen feet, the three higher up the slope practically invisible in the darkness and rain. Hiding from the bandits would not be a problem.

Nor would locating them. The man on patrol was making no attempt to conceal himself, the light of his torch standing out clearly, nor was he being all that attentive to his surroundings. The beam spent far more time aimed at the ground ahead of him than sweeping the jungle. Nevertheless, Chase froze once he got close to the approaching sentry’s route.

From his hiding place, lying beneath the drooping branches of a large plant, he watched the man as he passed twenty feet away. The bandit was wearing a long rain cape and a wide-brimmed khaki hat, water streaming off both. From the glimpse of his expression in the torchlight, he was not at all happy to have been assigned sentry duty.

The light also glinted off his shouldered weapon. A Kalashnikov, no surprise there…

But a surprise to Chase was the particular type of Kalashnikov. His SAS training had taught him to identify weapons at a glance, and this one’s short barrel revealed it as an AKS-74U, a cut-down version of the AKS-74 assault rifle. It was designed for mobility and easy concealment rather than range and stopping power, and was generally only issued to special forces units. Not the kind of thing normally found in the hands of a jungle bandit. He would have expected something like his own far older AK-47.

He put the thought to the back of his mind as he watched the sentry trudge away, waiting until he was out of sight behind the trees before moving. The man’s patrol route was clear to see, squishy footprints in the mud leading in both directions. Chase raised his head to confirm that the bandit was still retreating, then stood and hopped over the path, keeping his own telltale prints as far from the track as he could. Then he dropped low again and resumed his advance.

Moving slowly and silently, it took him almost five cautious minutes to reach the camp. He peered over a mouldering log. Six tents; five small, one large, two of the small ones unlit. Even over the drumming of raindrops on the canvas he could hear the low murmur of conversation. Shadows shifted in some of the shelters, their occupants rendered on the fabric as magic lantern displays.

Chase remained still, gathering intelligence. At least six men in the smaller tents, plus however many were inside the two without lights. The big tent was harder to judge, but he estimated no fewer than another six people within. Assuming that the aid workers were being held together under guard, that made a minimum of nine bandits: six in the small tents, one man watching the hostages, plus the two sentries.

There was still the mysterious cabin to consider, though. It was definitely not a wartime leftover. The structure was a block some fifteen feet to a side, standing clear of the ground on supports resembling a helicopter’s skids. The window he had seen earlier turned out to be set into a door, a slatted blind on the other side of the glass. On the roof was what looked like a satellite dish, and even over the rain and wind he could hear the flat rattle of a generator. The encampment was more than a mere hideout.

Movement caught his attention. The front flap of one of the small tents opened, a man emerging and jogging to the nearer of the two unlit shelters. He said something in Vietnamese. After a few seconds, a light came on inside, someone replying.

That now made at least ten enemies, but Chase had registered that this man was also armed with an AKS-74U. One uncommon weapon might have been happenstance, but two? He didn’t buy it. Either someone had issued them to the bandits…

Or they weren’t bandits at all.

The man finished his discussion, then hurried back to his tent. Chase remained still for a long moment before setting off again. Whatever was going on, he still had an objective: locate the prisoners. He crawled over the log towards the largest tent.

There were two small polythene windows in the side nearest to him. He crept up and peered through the transparent plastic.

Hooded figures, hands tied behind them, sat or lay upon blankets, unmoving. The aid workers. A Vietnamese man was on a small stool by the entrance, with a second guard at the other end of the tent. Both were armed with 74Us.

He took a headcount. Seven prisoners. So where was number eight?

The noise of the generator suggested a possibility.

Chase slunk back into the undergrowth, then started on a circuitous route around the camp towards the structure. He had covered about two thirds of the distance when movement prompted him to freeze. Three people came out of a tent, and headed for the cabin. All wore nylon ponchos and hats, though these were baseball caps rather than the round-brimmed cloth kind of the bandits. With their heads down and their backs to the lights, he couldn’t see their faces.

He could hear their voices, though. And they were not speaking in Vietnamese.

Russians? He only knew a few phrases of the language, but the accents and intonations sounded familiar. What the hell were they doing here?

The figures crossed to the hut and went inside. Chase caught a brief glimpse of the interior, but the flash of stark white paint and stainless steel told him nothing. He edged closer. After a few minutes, the door reopened and the three men emerged. This time, he saw their faces. Definitely not Vietnamese.

One was in his fifties with a reddish beard, another a stocky man in his late twenties with a thin and untidy attempt at a moustache. He was engaged in discussion with the third Russian. Chase didn’t know what they were saying, but one thing was clear from their attitudes alone: the last man was very much in charge. The tallest of the three, he looked to be around Chase’s age, in his early thirties, with angular features and a hard, pale-eyed gaze, which he turned dismissively on his younger companion at some unappreciated suggestion. Cowed, the man with the moustache fell into sullen silence.

The Englishman waited for them to return to the tents before moving again. Before long, he reached the cabin. He sidled along its wall and climbed the metal steps to the door.

He gently tried the handle. It turned. Readying his gun, Chase opened the door and quickly slipped inside.

He’d had no idea what to expect, but what he found still came as a shock.

A glass partition wall divided the cabin. The narrow section in which he stood had the feel of a viewing gallery, where people could observe what was happening on the other side.

Medical experiments.

He had found the last prisoner. He recognised the young blonde from the picture Lock had shown him as Natalia Pöltl, the American’s daughter. She was asleep — drugged, he saw, a number of intravenous drips running into her bare arms. There were bruises on her skin where more needles had been inserted. She was wearing only a white surgical gown, which appeared to have been made specifically for her; a flap over her abdomen was secured by a Velcro strip, the bulge of dressings beneath it. Stark blue-white light from a circular lamp cluster illuminated her from above, pinning her like an animal on a taxidermist’s table.

Filled with a growing sense of revulsion, Chase surveyed the rest of the chamber. A large stainless-steel cabinet in one corner resembled a fridge; for storing samples? Another corner was home to a small steel washbasin, glass-fronted cases alongside it containing glinting surgical equipment and flasks of chemicals. A laptop computer sat atop a small chest of drawers near the head of the operating table.

Whatever was going on, it was obvious that this was no random kidnapping by bandits. Someone had gone to a great deal of effort to get their hands on Natalia.

But finding out why would have to wait. Natalia was not the only prisoner. His first priority was to make his way back to Sullivan so that the team could plan the rescue.

Fighting every instinct to free the young woman and take her to safety, Chase turned and opened the door a crack. The torrential rain was still keeping her captors in their tents. ‘I’ll be back for you soon,’ he promised the sleeping figure as he slipped outside.