Valhalla Gold

PROLOGUE

The Mi’kmaq Cultural Museum was a tiny clapboard building perched on the jagged granite cliffs of eastern Newfoundland. The Mi’kmaq were a proud First Nations band and had lived in the Maritime Provinces of eastern Canada for thousands of years. Along with other museums scattered across the Maritimes, this modest building housed what few archaeological treasures remained of the tribe.

Far below, the savage rising swell of the Atlantic powered against the rocks and sprayed sea foam dozens of feet into the cold air. The wind was cutting up from the Grand Banks, some of the most plentiful fishing grounds on Earth and it looked like another short summer was reaching its end.

Bill Smith turned his back on the view, unlocked the main entrance and shuffled inside. He had been the curator since the place opened fifteen years ago, and was rarely overworked, but he was proud of his partial Mi’kmaq heritage and spent his days organizing cultural events and studying the language of his forefathers.

He watched the sun struggle to break through a split in the thickening cloud out on the horizon and returned to his work in the museum. He was in the middle of renumbering a collection of arrowheads recently discovered by archaeologists in the Gros Morne National Park.

Irritated that some were named incorrectly, he was shaking his head and sighing when he heard the sound of a helicopter’s rotors somewhere above the museum. He frowned and set down the arrowheads before walking to the window. The only chopper that came around these parts was the Bell 412 Griffin, a twin-engined affair used by the Canadian Coast Guard, but that was painted red with a white stripe on the side. This one was a dull gray and much bigger. It looked almost military.

He opened the front door and stood on the top of the steps, putting his hands in his pockets to keep them out of the cold. Why anyone would be landing a helicopter that size right outside his little museum was anyone’s guess. He already had a bad feeling about it and was starting to consider if he should call the local police when the chopper’s chunky rubber tires touched down with a gentle crunch on the gravel outside the museum. He sucked on his asthma inhaler and grew more anxious.

The side door swung open and a man in a cheap suit emerged. Behind him another man and a woman both in paramilitary fatigues jumped out. Both the military personnel were carrying submachine guns over their shoulders. Bill took a step back toward the door, but didn’t break eye contact with them. As they drew closer, he saw the paramilitary man had a tattoo of a flaming grenade on his neck. Like the woman, he was wearing a dirty green-colored beret.

The man in the suit told the others to wait and jogged up the wooden steps toward the entrance. “Mr Smith, I presume?” He held out his hand to shake.

Bill Smith nodded, but declined the handshake.

“I’m Dr Nate Derby — we spoke on the phone.”

Bill looked at Derby and then peered suspiciously over his shoulder at the people behind him. He had spoken to Dr Derby on the phone a few days ago and they had arranged a meeting to discuss something that had bothered the old curator for all of his life. The academic seemed trustworthy and had promised to keep it to himself, but now he saw he’d been wrong to trust him and was struggling to understand why this man would need a military helicopter to make the visit. He raised his chin in the direction of the people standing further back with the weapons. “I thought we agreed this was just between us?”

Dr Derby gave an awkward shrug of the shoulders. “I’m sorry, sir. But after our conversation I talked to some colleagues.”

“What do you need an army for?”

The paramilitary man stepped up. “We’re here on behalf of the Canadian Government.”

Maybe Derby seemed normal enough, but Bill thought there was something not quite right about this other man. While he could write off the French accent to him being Québécois, the unmarked chopper and grenade tattoo made him doubt these paramilitaries were representing the Canadian Government. What they were doing accompanying Dr Derby up here bothered him greatly.

“You got any ID?” he asked, trying to hide his nerves.

“We don’t carry ID, sir. We’re Special Ops.”

Bill frowned. “What about you, Dr Derby?”

Derby smiled. “Sure.” He pulled out an ID from the Memorial University of Newfoundland and flashed it in his face. “Department of Archaeology.”

Smith eyed the laminated badge. It looked genuine enough. “You can come in as we arranged, but not these guys.”

Derby looked out to sea for a second and then fixed his eyes back on Bill. “I’m afraid I can’t agree to that, Mr Smith. We believe you have something vital to national security policy in this building.”

“You guys are kidding right?” He offered a laugh but he saw things were getting out of control.

“Please, Mr Smith — open the door.”

“And what if I don’t? What if I call the police?”

The man with the grenade tattoo gave a wicked smirk and lifted the submachine gun from his shoulder. “You think you can get to the telephone before I can squeeze this trigger?”

Whoever the hell they were, Bill thought, it wasn’t Government, and Derby had obviously lied to him on the phone about keeping things between the two of them. He thought about backing into the door and slamming it in their faces, but his five years in the Royal Newfoundland Regiment told him what those guns would do to the wood and vinyl clapboard siding of the museum. It would look like a sieve in less than twenty seconds, and so would he.

Grenade Tattoo stepped closer. “So, you show us where they are, then, oui?”

The casual reference to they told Bill all he had to know. They all knew why they were here, and there was no point in playing games. Derby had breached his trust.

Looking at the menacing muzzle of the submachine gun in the man’s gloved hands, Bill offered a reluctant nod and opened the door. As they trampled up the steps and dragged mud and grit into the small museum, his mind filled with terror as he finally realized they weren’t going to let him live through this. He had seen their faces. He knew what they wanted from him.

They wanted evidence of the Invisible One.

Or what was left of him — he who dwelt by the lake in ancient times and could not be seen — the great warrior who walked among enemy tribes like a ghost. Now they wanted his power, and it was all his fault. He had opened an ancient secret to the world to satisfy his own curiosity. Until his call to Derby, only he knew about the precious objects — the secret passed to him by his father on his deathbed. He had only ever told one other living soul, and he knew she would never betray him. No, what would unfold would be on his conscience alone.

“I don’t suppose it’s worth me denying they’re here?” he asked, trying to sound calm.

A humorless shake of the head was the response. “No, and stop trying to play for time. Take us to them right now, or…” Grenade Tattoo cocked the gun and pointed it at his chest.

Derby looked almost as nervous as Bill felt, and he wondered if the academic was also being coerced. Either way, the old curator understood what he had to do. He shuffled slowly through the museum until he reached the back room — a nondescript state of affairs with three cases of ancient fishing tools. He stopped and pushed one of the cases away from the wall. Beneath it was a loose floorboard which the old man manipulated out with his leathery fingertips.

The intruders drew closer around him, forming a small circle as he leaned over the hole.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not a gun down here.”

No response.

Bill pulled out a tin box and blew a thick layer of dust off the lid. “What you want is in here, and may God forgive me for what I have done today.” The look of disgust he gave Nate Derby was worth a thousand words.

He opened the box and in a second pulled an old Smith & Wesson on the men. He aimed it at the man with the tattoo and fired.

Nothing happened.

Bill looked down at the jammed gun with horror on his face.

They all laughed, and Grenade Tattoo knocked the weapon from his hand. It landed with a loud smack on the floorboards.

“Now, we do it my way,” Grenade Tattoo said, and struck Bill in the face with the butt of his submachine gun.

The old man staggered backwards, knocking over one of the cases and sending old fishing hooks all over the floor.

“No, wait!” Derby shouted. “We agreed no one would get harmed.”

“Shut up!” The woman shouted. She blew a large purple bubblegum bubble and it popped all over her lips.

Bill spat out a wad of blood as he staggered back to his feet. “All right… all right. What you are looking for is in there.” He pointed a shaking hand to a grille on the wall which was used to pull warm return-air from the small room and send it back to the furnace downstairs. His long-planned feint had failed to save what he had protected for most of his life.

Grenade Tattoo ordered the woman forward. She scowled at Smith as she walked past him, raised her machine pistol and blasted the grille and a good chunk of the plasterboard surrounding it to oblivion.

“Get it, old man,” Grenade Tattoo commanded. “Any more tricks and you’re dead.”

Bill Smith put his hand in the hole and pulled out a small leather bag which he handed to the woman. She snatched it from his trembling hand and passed it back to Grenade Tattoo.

He opened it at once and whistled in awe. Several long moments passed as the man with the grenade tattoo stared at the tiny beads now in his hand, barely able to believe what he was seeing — or more accurately what he wasn’t seeing. Instead of seeing his palm, he was looking at the floorboards of the museum directly beneath it. It looked like he had a hole in his hand. He smiled and shook his head gently in wonder as he tried to make sense of what his eyes were telling him.

Smith wheezed as his asthma began to worsen. “If you’re on the trail of the Invisible One, it will lead only to your painful deaths.”

Grenade Tattoo ignored him and continued to stare at the strange beads, utterly fixated. Without looking at Bill Smith, he raised his machine pistol and fired a burst of bullets into him, tearing his chest apart and smashing him back into the shredded plasterboard behind him. He slumped slowly to the floor stone cold dead, leaving a trail of his blood smeared down the wall behind him as he went.

Derby staggered back in horror, unable to believe what his eyes had just seen. “What the hell did you do that for?”

“For the same reason I’m going to do this.” He raised his pistol and aimed it at Derby’s heart.

“What are you doing? Wait, please… don’t shoot! We agreed…”

Grenade Tattoo fired twice and Derby crumpled to the floor beside Bill Smith.

“All right, we’re out of here,” he said.

The woman put her boot on Bill’s blood-soaked chest to tighten one of the straps and then picked up her gun. She blew another cherry-flavored bubble and giggled. “Back to the chopper!” she screamed.

Both of them left the museum, their boots crunching on the broken glass and Mi’kmaq artefacts as they went. Outside, the rotors began to whir faster as the pilot powered up ready for takeoff.

A storm was blowing in off the Atlantic as they climbed inside the chopper, and a heavy rainfall began just as they lifted off the ground and spun the airborne machine around. Seconds later the mighty helicopter was blowing the old clapboard museum into matchwood with liberal use of the M230 Chain Gun mounted on its chin turret.

Moments later the building was ablaze, and the helicopter disappeared up into the thick gray clouds, gone forever.