Tomb of Odin

Chapter 25

Just before nightfall over the Gulf of Finland the police and coroner pulled out of Osmussaar, unaware that Sam, Nina, and Purdue were still traversing the island to the farthest edge from the location of the lighthouse. Thomas and his men had traveled to the island by boat, so obviously Purdue decided to use their vessel to return to Helsinki. On his tablet he searched the island for moored vessels and found only three by the time the sun began to fade. One of those had to be the vacant boat their pursuers used.

“How will we know which one it is?” Nina asked.

“It doesn’t matter, really,” Sam replied, looking at the snapshots he took of the crude etching in the wall paint. “When we find an empty boat with fur everywhere, you know, cat hair, dog hair, ape shit, we’ll know it’s theirs.” He loved playing with Nina’s yeti theory, especially now that he had seen these men firsthand and agreed that the famous yeti sightings were precisely what they resembled.

“What do you think is happening back there, Purdue? Is there a way your tablet could log into some satellite camera and show us if the coppers discovered the bodies in the lighthouse yet?” Nina asked Purdue as they reached the last few yards of the island’s landmass. Two fishing boats were moored there, both unattended.

“They must have found them by now,” Sam reckoned, and he jogged ahead to the light blue boat nearest to them. On the side, in cursive white, it said Kullervo. A bit farther away there was somewhat larger trawler called Tuonelan Joutsen, a red and white fiberglass boat with twin engines fixed to the stern. Under the name it was written in Russian as well.

“Either way we have to get off this island. And we have to match Nina’s underground railroad theory with the inscription on the wall. What was the exact line again?” Nina asked.

“It said, ‘to the Grave of Odin will no compass yield. But his Wisdom lies beneath where the white eye looks.’ Once we find where the white eye looks from the three clues on the symbol, we’ll know to dig under it,” Purdue affirmed.

“But for now we have to get a ride out,” Sam said, leaping up on the blue boat.

“Why not the better, faster boat?” Purdue asked Sam, as the journalist checked the controls of the small blue trawler.

“We don’t want to be conspicuous,” Sam explained.

“We don’t want to be slow either, Sam,” Purdue contested. “At least if we are going to get chased, we had better have the best kind of horsepower.”

“I’m with Purdue,” Nina stated categorically. “And while we cruise back to the Finnish coast we can figure out where to go next to find Odin’s grave. I want to get out of Scandinavia altogether.

“We have to get out now,” Purdue said, looking down on his tablet’s screen at the approaching weather system. “There is a storm coming in over the Gulf.”

“Let’s go then,” Sam agreed, jumping off the smaller fishing trawler and heading for the larger vessel with Nina and Purdue.

“According to this map we should head for Hanko, a port town to the west of Helsinki. It’s the only way we can get onto the mainland without questions about the ownership of this boat and what we were doing on the island where they just found several bodies,” Nina supposed. With Purdue behind the wheel they braved the rising waves and darkening skies over the Gulf of Finland toward Hanko.

Nina and Sam had a look at the details on the scratchy emblem they photographed on the interior wall of the light room at the lighthouse. As they held on every now and then, thrown by the erratic weaving of the vessel over doldrums of cold gray water, Purdue and Sam prepared for the next trip with discussions on which route to take to quickly get to Helsinki’s airport. If those enormous killers could find Nina, anyone else could be on their trail as the three of them fled, not to mention that the boat they had stolen would soon be sighted by authorities. For once the wet weather and dangerous waters were on their side, making it difficult to identify and pursue them.

“Looking at the stuff on the Triple Horn, boys, and, I have to say, it is child’s play to decipher,” Nina smiled. Her fear for being caught by either the police or Thomas and whoever would aid him was overshadowed by her excitement of unraveling the clues about the pictures.

“That’s wonderful news, Dr. Gould,” Purdue grinned, pouring them some wine he found in the bar fridge. “And what have you discovered then?”

“This sigil here,” she pointed to the one Purdue could not place before, “is the Valknut. Three triangles interwoven, it is much like the Triple Horn, which mainly represents Odin and his penchant for wisdom and poetry. But the Valknut is more widely used as far as I know.”

“Nevertheless, what matters is that it represents Odin, which is what we are after,” Sam nodded. “So, what does this one say? Hiid?”

“Right, that must be the name of a place in Finland? It’s double-vowel usage sure looks Finnish,” she guessed.

“That sounds awfully familiar to me. I know that abbreviation. Let me see,” Purdue offered. He punched in the word to see what his tablet would yield. “Of course! HIID is the Harvard Institute for International Development! That makes sense.”

“Cambridge, Massachusetts?” Nina marveled. She frowned, “How would they have anything to do with Nazi prisoners of war?”

“What we are looking for is below that, isn’t it? It is supposed to be under HIID, not the institute itself,” Purdue explained. “Any takes on the other marker, love?”

“This is obviously coordinates,” she remarked. “But I have to concede that my geometry or map reading savvy is meager at best.”

“Let me have a look,” Sam said, coming to join Nina at the bolted-down table.

She pointed out, “46 degrees, southwest. That much I can figure out, but… where and what…” Nina gestured wildly with her hands to show her ineptitude with a roll of her eyes.

“That, I assume, would be 46 degrees southwest from the lighthouse, but how far away?” Sam contemplated, resting his chin on his hand.

He pulled out a folded map and some nautical navigational gear next to Purdue where he stood piloting the boat, surveying the droplets that started to patter on the vessel. Sam and Nina opened the world map and used a sextant to determine the bearing from the lighthouse to wherever direction the oversimplified clue pointed. Nothing was certain, not with Josef’s ham-fisted approach to nautical navigation or geography in general. But it was clear that the measurement did not point to HIID in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“For fuck’s sake!” Nina seethed after the umpteenth attempt at figuring out the real clue on the careless indication. “I give up. I just don’t see what he is trying to say here.”

Sam had another glass of wine and shook his head, “Purdue, can you find a parallel line between Massachusetts and the lighthouse that could have something to do with Odin?” He gave his question some thought, “Jesus, it even sounds nonsensical!”

Nina frowned at both of them and said, “Seriously? HIID in Cambridge wasn’t around when all this was set up. How in the—”

“Who are you?” an unfamiliar voice cut through their discussion with a firm tone of reprimand. The three jumped at the sight of the woman who stood at the entrance of the cockpit, dressed in a bikini and a man’s loose shirt. She was small, like Nina, and about the same age, but she had blonde hair and huge green eyes that accentuated the freckles on her nose. In her hand she held a flare gun pointed at Purdue, who promptly raised his hands in surrender.

“What are you doing on my boat?” she shouted.

“Um, we thought the boat was empty,” Sam tried.

“So you stole it?” she raged. “You just steal things in Scotland too?”

“How do you know where we are from?” Purdue smiled charmingly, but his suave nature had no effect on the stranger.

“Your accents, your choice of words… good God, you might as well be wearing kilts!” she shouted with a frown that only made her look cute instead of threatening.

“Is this your boat, madam?” Nina asked. “Sorry, we had to get off Osmussaar. Our lives were in danger.”

“They are in danger now, girly!” she warned Nina.

Nina got up from her chair.

“Oh, shit,” Purdue and Sam said in unison.

“Stay where you are,” the woman snapped at Nina.

“Listen, we just want to get back to the coast of Finland and then we’ll leave you alone,” Nina explained, surprisingly keeping her feisty fighting spirit well subdued.

“I’m not Finnish! I don’t want to go to Finland! I was diving at Neugrund. I took a sleeping pill to help me sleep and was going to return to Tallinn when I woke up, you creeps!” she hissed. The diminutive blonde was not threatening at all, but she was clearly upset, as she rightly should have been, at finding hijackers stealing her boat.

“I tell you what, madam,” Purdue smiled cordially, taking note to move in a docile manner, “I will reimburse you for this detour if you allow us to take your boat to Hanko.”

“Yeah, right,” she scoffed.

Nina slapped Sam. He was totally spellbound by the lady’s physique, as her shirt lifted in the gusts and showed off her body, that he had to be jolted back to reality. He looked at Nina with a boyish shrug, reluctantly provoking a smile from her.

“No, really,” Purdue insisted. “All I need is your banking details and I will transfer the money from my tablet in the next five minutes.”

Nina and Sam stared at her while Purdue smiled uncomfortably, all waiting for her to make a decision. Her eyes jumped from the pretty, dark-eyed woman to the sexy, fair-haired man who was trying to buy her. She ignored the smug dark-haired man at the table. He annoyed her for some reason.

“Okay,” she said. Relieved, they sighed.

“I’ll transfer your funds right now,” Purdue said.

“Your names?” she asked as she sat down next to where Nina had reclaimed her seat.

They introduced themselves by first name.

“Why don’t you have your own boat?” she asked Nina.

“We did,” Nina told the stranger, “but he left us behind on Osmussaar and we had to get to Finland or we would miss our flight.”

“I’m Marleen,” she told Nina. With a much calmer demeanor the woman gave Purdue her banking details and he transferred an amount to her that she looked very pleased with.

“Good?” he asked.

“Good,” she smiled.

They were now reaching the last quarter of the trip between Osmussaar and Hanko, a good three-hour trip, give or take, based on the weather.

“What is this?” Marleen asked Nina, the only person she seemed to trust of the three. It was a positive sign, because women would get more from each other without the constant war of the sexes getting in the way — and Nina knew this.

“I’m struggling. I have no idea what ‘hiid’ refers to, because the calculations are completely off,” Nina lamented, playing on Marleen’s pity. “Of course, the men have no idea.”

Marleen looked at the three clues.

“You are looking for what?” she asked.

“Just looking for what this means,” Nina played her charade down the middle. She did not let the men hear her, since she did not agree with Purdue about the abbreviation.

“Funny thing, about ‘hiid,’” Marleen smiled, looking a bit silly. “In my language it means ‘giant.’ The person that wrote this was Estonian?”

“He was Polish,” Nina smiled. “But he lived in Finland, so maybe he knew Estonian?”

“Very possible. And very possibly he meant ‘giant,’” Marleen said proudly. “An abbreviation would be in capitals, no?”

“Do you hear that fellas?” Nina smiled with a wink. “It means ‘giant.’”

“Well done, ladies!” Sam smiled, frowning amusedly at Purdue who just shrugged and chuckled.

Purdue and Sam were counting on Nina to explain her findings as soon as they were safely on Finnish soil in Hanko.