Thor Meets Captain America

1

Loki’s dwarf rolled its eyes and moaned pitifully as the sub levelled off at periscope depth. With stubby fingers the gnarled, neckless creature pulled at its yellow-stained beard and stared up at the creaking pipes.

A thing of dark forest depths and hidden caves, Chris Turing thought as he watched the dwarf. It wasn’t meant for this place.

Only men would choose such a way to die, in a leaking steel coffin, on a hopeless attempt to blow up Valhalla.

But then, it wasn’t like Loki’s dwarf had been given any choice in being here.

Why, Chris wondered suddenly—not for the first time. Why do such creatures exist? Wasn’t evil doing well enough in the world before they came to help it along?

The submarine’s engines rumbled and Chris shrugged aside the thought. Even imagining a world without Aesir and their servants in it was by now as hard as remembering a time without war.

Chris sat strapped in his crash seat—he could hear the swishing of icy Baltic water just behind the tissue-thin bulkhead—and watched the gnome huddle atop a crate of hydrogen bomb parts. It drew its clublike feet up away from the sloshing brine on the deck, scrunching higher on the black box. Another moan escaped the dwarf as the Razorfin’s periscope went up, and more water gurgled in through the pressure relief lines.

Major Marlowe looked up from the assault rifle he was reassembling for the thirtieth time. “What’s eating the damn dwarf now?” the marine officer asked.

Chris shook his head. “Search me. The fact that he’s out of his element, maybe? After all, the ancient Norse thought of the deep as a place for sunken boats and fishes.”

“I thought you were some sort of expert on the Aesir. And you aren’t even sure why the thing is foaming at the mouth like that?”

Chris could only shrug and repeat himself. “I said I don’t know. Why don’t you go over and ask him yourself?”

Marlowe gave Chris a sour glance, as if to say that he didn’t much care for the joke. “Sidle up to that stench and ask Loki’s damn dwarf to explain its feelings? Hmmph. I’d rather spit in an Aesir’s eye.”

From his left, Chris’s assistant, Zap O’Leary leaned out and grinned at Marlowe. “Dig it, dad-dyo,” O’Leary said to the marine. “There’s an Aes over by the scope, dope. Be my guest. Write him runes in his spitoon.” The eccentric technician gestured over toward the navy men, clustered around the sub’s periscope. Next to the Skipper stood a hulking figure clad in furs and leather, towering over the submariners.

Marlowe blinked back at O’Leary in bewilderment. The marine did not seem offended as much as confused. “What did he say?” he asked Chris.

Chris wished he weren’t seated between the two. “Zap suggests that you test it by spitting in Loki’s eye.”

Marlowe grimaced. O’Leary might as well have suggested he stick his hand into a scram-jet engine. At that moment one of the marines crammed into the passageway behind them made the mistake of dropping a cartridge into the foul leak-water underfoot. Marlowe vented his frustration on the poor grunt in richly inventive profanity.

The dwarf moaned again, hugging his knees against the straps holding him onto the hermetically sealed crate.

Wherever they’re from, they aren’t used to submarines, Chris thought. And these so-called dwarves sure don’t like water.

Chris wondered how Loki had managed to persuade this one to come along on this suicide mission.

Probably threatened to turn him into a toad, he speculated. I wouldn’t put it past Loki.

It was a desperate venture they were engaged in. In late 1962 there was very little time left for what remained of the Alliance against Nazism. If anything at all could be done this autumn, to stave off the inevitable, it would be worth the gamble.

Even Loki—bearlike, nearly invulnerable, and always booming forth laughter that sent chills down human spines—had betrayed nerves earlier, as the Razorfin dropped from the belly of a screaming bomber, sending their stomachs whirling as the arrow-sub plummeted like a great stone into Neptune’s icy embrace.

Chris had to admit that he would have been sick, had that brief, seemingly endless fall lasted any longer. The crash and shriek of tortured metal when they hit was almost a relief, after that.

And anything seemed an improvement over the long, screeching trip over the pole, skirting Nazi missiles, skimming mountains and gray waters in lurching zigs and zags, helplessly listening, strapped into place, as the airmen swooped their flying coffins hither and yon… praying that the enemy’s Aesir masters weren’t patrolling that section of the north that night…

Of twenty sub carriers sent out together from Baffin Island, only six had made it all the way to the waters between Sweden and Finland. And both Cetus and Tigerfish had broken up on impact with the water, tearing like ripped sardine cans and spilling their hapless crews into freezing death.

Only four subs left, Chris thought.

Still, he reminded himself. Our chances may be slim, but those poor pilots are the real heroes. He doubted even one of the crews would make it across dark, deadly Europe to Tehran and safety.

“Captain Turing!”

Chris looked up as the Skipper called his name. Commander Lewis had lowered the periscope and moved over to the chart table.

“Be right with you, Commander.” Chris unstrapped and stepped down into the brine.

“Tell ’em we’re savin’ our own hooch for ourselves,” O’Leary advised him, sotto voice. “Good pot is to rare to share.”

“Shut up, fool.” Marlowe growled. Chris ignored both of them as he sloshed forward. The Skipper awaited him, standing beside their “friendly advisor,” the alien creature calling himself Loki.

I’ve known Loki for years, Chris thought. I’ve fought alongside him against his Aesir brothers… and still he scares the living hell out of me every time I look at him.

Towering over everyone else, Loki regarded Chris enigmatically with fierce black eyes. The “god of tricks” looked very much like a man, albeit an unnaturally large and powerful one. But those eyes belied the impression of humanity. Chris had spent enough time with Loki, since the renegade Aesir defected to the allied side, to have learned to avoid looking into them whenever possible.

“Sir,” he said, nodding to Commander Lewis and the bearded Aesir. “I take it we’re approaching point Y?”

“That’s correct,” the Skipper said. “We’ll be there in about twenty minutes, barring anything unforeseen.”

Lewis seemed to have aged over the last twenty hours. The young sub commander knew that his squadron wasn’t the only thing considered expendable in this operation. Several thousand miles to the west, the better part of what remained of the United States Surface Navy was engaged hopelessly for one reason only—to distract the Kriegsmarine and the SS and especially a certain “god of the sea” away from the Baltic and Operation Ragnarok. Loki’s cousin Tyr wasn’t very potent against submarines, but unless his attention was drawn elsewhere, he could make life hell for them when their tiny force tried to land.

So tonight, instead, he would be making hell for American and Canadian and Mexican sailors, far away.

Chris shied away from thinking about it. Too many boys were going to their deaths off Labrador, just to keep one alien creature occupied while four subs tried to sneak in through the back door.

“Thank you. I’d better tell Marlowe and my demolition team.” He turned to go, but was stopped by an outsized hand on his arm, holding him gently but with steel-like adamancy.

“Thou must know something more,” the being called Loki said in a low, resonant voice. Impossibly white teeth shone in that gleaming smile above Chris. “Thou wilt have a passenger in going ashore.”

Chris blinked. The plan had been for only his team and their commando escort… Then he saw the pallor of dread on the Commander Lewis’s face—deeper than any mere fear of death.

Chris turned back to stare at the fur-clad giant. “You…” he breathed.

Loki nodded. “That is correct. There will be a slight change in plans. I will not accompany the undersea vessels, as they attempt to break out through the Skagerak. I will go ashore with thee, instead, to Gotland.”

Chris kept his face blank. In all honesty, there was no way this side of Heaven that he or Lewis or anybody else could stop this creature from doing anything it wanted to do. One way or the other, the Allies were about to lose their only Aesir friend in the long war against the Nazi plague.

If the word “friend” ever really described Loki— who had appeared one day on the tarmac of a Scottish airfield during the final evacuation of Britain, accompanied by eight small, bearded beings carrying boxes—who led them up to the nearest amazed officer to imperiously commandeer the Prime Minister’s personal plane to take him the rest of the way to America.

Perhaps an armored battalion might have stopped him. Battle reports had proven that Aesir could be killed, if you were real lucky, and pounded one hard and fast enough. But when the local commander realized what was happening, he had decided to take a chance.

Loki had proven his worth over and over again since that day ten years ago.

Until now, that is.

“If you insist,” he told the Aes.

“I do. It is my will.”

“Then I’ll go explain it to Major Marlowe. Excuse me please.”

He backed away a few meters first, then turned to go. As he sloshed away, that glittering stare seemed to follow him, past the moaning dwarf, past O’Leary’s ever-sardonic smile, down the narrow, dank passageway lined with strapped-in Marines, all the way to the sabot launching tubes.

Voices were hushed. All the young men spoke English, but only half were North Americans. Their shoulder patches—Free French, Free Russian, Free Irish, German Christian—were muted in the dim light, but the mixed accents were unmistakable, as well as the way they stroked their weapons and the gleam Chris caught sight of in several pairs of eyes.

These were the sort that volunteered for suicide missions, the type—common in the world after thirteen years of horrible war—that had little or nothing left to lose.

Major Marlowe had come back to supervise the loading of the landing boats. He did not take Chris’s news well.

“Loki wants to come along? To Gotland?” He spat. “The bastard’s a spy. I knew it all the time!”

Chris shook his head. “He’s helped us in a hundred ways, John. Why, just by accompanying Ike to Tokyo, and convincing the Japanese…”

“Big deal! We’d already beaten the Japs!” The big marine clenched his fist, hard. “Like we’d have crushed Hitler, if these monsters hadn’t arrived, like Satan’s curse, out of nowhere.

“And now he’s lived among us for ten years, observing our methods, our tactics, and our technology, the only real advantage we had left!”

Chris grimaced. How could he explain it to Marlowe? The Marine officer had never been to Tehran, as Chris had, only last year. Marlowe had never seen the capital city of Israel-Iran, America’s greatest and most stalwart ally, bulwark of the East.

There, in dozens of armed settlements along the east bank of the Euphrates, Chris had met fierce men and women who bore on their arms tattooed numbers from Treblinka, Dachau, Auschwitz. He had heard their story of how, one hopeless night under barbed wire and the stench of chimneys, the starving, doomed masses had looked up to see a strange vapor fall from the sky. Unbelieving, death-starkened eyes had stared in wonderment as the mists gathered and coalesced into something that seemed almost solid.

Out of that eerie fog, a bridge of many colors formed… a rainbow arch climbing, apparently without end, out of the places of horror into a moonless night. And from the heights, each doomed man and woman saw a dark-eyed figure on a flying horse ride down. They felt him whisper to them inside their minds.

Come, children, while your tormenters blink unbelievingly in my web of the mind. Come, all, over my bridge to safety, before my cousins descrie my treason.

When they sank to their knees, or rocked in thankful prayer, the figure only snorted in derision. His voice hissed within their heads.

Do not mistake me for your God, who left you here to die! I cannot explain that One’s absence to you, or His plan in all this. The All-Father is a mystery even to Great Odin!

Know only that I will take you to safety now, such as there may be in this world. But only if you hurry! Come, and be grateful later, if you must!

Down to the camps, to bleak ghettoes, to a city under siege—the bridges formed in a single night, and with dawn were gone like vapor or a dream. Two million people, the old, the lame, women, children, the slaves of Hitler’s war factories, climbed those paths—for there was no other choice—and found themselves transported to a desert land, by the banks of an ancient river.

They arrived just in time to take up hasty arms and save a British Army fleeing the wreckage of Egypt and Palestine. They fused with the astonished Persians, and with refugees from crippled Russia, and together they built a new nation out of chaos.

That was why Loki appeared on the tarmac in Scotland, shortly after that night of miracles. He could not return to Europe, for the fury of his Aesir kin would be savage. In returning to Gotland, today, he was certainly in as much peril as the commandos.

“No, Marlowe. Loki’s not a spy. I haven’t any idea what on God’s green Earth he is. But I’d bet my life he’s not a spy.”