Valhalla Gold

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Kiruna was Sweden’s most northerly town, nestled on the eastern slopes of Haukavaara Hill between the Kalix and Torne rivers. This place was deep in Lapland, nearly a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, even further north than Reykjavik, and that meant short, breezy summers and winters that were a serious test of human endurance. From the end of May until mid-July, the sun never set up here, and this meant that from early mid-December until New Year’s Day it never rose either, plunging the entire population into a three week-long night.

The flight had been sombre. Hawke, like everyone else on board had thoughts crushing down on his mind. Vincent Reno was still unconscious, and now the mysterious spectre of Ragnarök was jostling for space alongside golden oldies like the men who had murdered his wife, Liz. With every sleepless night that passed, her death moved one day further away from his present-day life, but the pain never receded. The anguish he felt was kept alive by the thought of her killers getting away with their crimes and waking up to a new day every day to draw breath and live life while Liz was in her grave.

Their names were etched on his mind indelibly. James Matheson and Alfredo Lazaro. The former was no less than the British Foreign Secretary — mighty, distant and while easily found he was totally untouchable. The latter was a Cuban assassin known as the Spider. He moved in the world’s filthiest shadows and Hawke didn’t have the first idea how to track him down. One day, he swore, both men would pay the ultimate price for their crimes.

Glancing at Lea on the seat beside him, he saw she too was being tortured by something. Her brow was furrowed and she was staring with dry, unblinking eyes into the glass of whisky in her lap.

“Are you okay?” he asked quietly.

“It’s about my Dad,” Lea said. She sounded even more worried than she looked.

“I know how tough this must all be.”

“Why the hell was he writing in that weird script, Joe? What did he know that he never told me?”

Hawke knew he had to tread carefully. He knew no more about this than anyone else, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to say the wrong thing and upset her or worse still worry her unnecessarily. “I can’t answer that, Lea. All I can say is whatever the reason is, we’ll find out, but you need to ask yourself if you really want to know.”

She looked at him with anxious eyes. “What do you mean?”

He gave a shallow shrug. “I don’t know… it’s just that everything we’ve uncovered so far seems to drag us further down the rabbit hole, that’s all.”

“And I’m Alice, is that what you’re saying?”

Hawke smiled. “I think you might be, but you’re not alone.” He squeezed her hand in his and clenched his teeth. He hated seeing her like this, but he knew she wouldn’t stop until she knew the truth not only about her father’s death, but about his life, too.

Lea glanced out of the window before replying. “I just wish I knew what was going on, Joe. I’ve been racking my mind, worrying about so much… I could just about get my head around the fact Dad was researching something to do with Norse mythology. The fact he worked as a doctor and devoted his life to helping people made it easier to understand why he’d been looking into ideas surrounding Mengloth — she was the goddess of healing, you know?”

Hawke nodded. “I do, but only thanks to your ex-husband.”

Lea gave a polite smile. “And what was the other one — Eir — the goddess of medicine or something. And there’s Frigg as well — now I know she was Odin’s wife and the mother of Thor, but it doesn’t make any of this more cogent up here, you know?” She tapped her temple with her index finger.

“I know.”

“I was freaked out enough that Dad was involved in this all before, but at least it all made some kind of sense. Maybe he’d discovered something to do with those goddesses that would help people — I don’t know, but now… there’s no reason why Dad should be able to write in that script, Joe. I thought he’d found it, or copied it — not that he’d written in it! Gunnar called it the script of the gods!”

Hawke put his arm around her shoulders and gave a comforting squeeze. He had no idea why Dr. Henry Donovan was able to write in that strange, ancient script and even less how he knew about the raiding parties and their mysterious, ancient loot. Maybe it was simply that he had somehow taught himself how to do it to facilitate his research, or perhaps the real reason was something neither of them wanted to contemplate.

He yawned and snatched a glance out of the window. The flight had been a tense one, but a breath-taking display of the northern lights illuminated the sky and reminded them what they were fighting for. Now the tops of some high-drifting cirrus were a bright green color. It was calm up here, he thought, but the kind of calm that came before a storm.

Lea looked with a vague interest from the window as the private jet descended through a bank of heavy stratocumulus. The engines were reduced to idle now, and the flaps fully extended. They would be on the ground in minutes.

But what they would find there worried her more than ever. She knew Hawke was trying to help, but he couldn’t begin to understand what she was really feeling. She had been on so many missions like this she had lost count of them all, but this one was different. Like her last journey to Ireland, this one felt personal. It was personal, she supposed — instead of simply hunting down ancient relics and seeking a long-obscured truth about the world, she was now faced with the unsettling prospect that her father was somehow involved.

Now, as she gazed down at the bleak landscape of Swedish Lapland — the zone where taiga slowly turned to tundra, her mind turned inwards to face the terrible fact that maybe her father really was part of this after all. How else could he have known how to write in the ancient pre-Runic script?

Her thoughts grew darker still. If he had been involved with the mysterious Athanatoi, what was the nature of the relationship? Did it involve her? Why had he never told anyone about the truth? It felt like her mind was on fire, and when she finally alighted on the subject of his death, it all got too much. Had he really been killed by the Athanatoi? Who was the man in black?

Her thoughts were disrupted by the squeal of the tires on the tarmac of Kiruna Airport and the roar of the reverse thrusters. Seconds later they were walking through the modest airport and stepping out into a chilly Lapland evening.

“Is this supposed to be summer?” Scarlet said with a sneer.

They climbed into a hired truck — another Hilux as specified by Hawke — and wasted no time in driving west along the 870 toward Kebnekaise. The drive was peaceful and offered a rare moment of relaxation to the team. They had been on the go since landing in the Florida Keys but despite their fatigue they knew the stakes were too high to risk taking their foot off the pedal now.

Outside, the Swedish taiga drifted past in a gentle blur of olive greens and sepia brown, and above them a pure blue Arctic sky poured the day’s last sunshine into the hired car and added to the soporific feeling induced by the long, straight road. Pure lakes coasted past them as they pushed on along pine-flanked roads in pursuit of the truth, whatever it may be.

Far on the southern horizon Scarlet saw a lone property, surrounded by a jumble of outbuildings and what looked like a barn.

“Can’t believe anyone would live out here,” she said dismissively. “You’d have to be bloody certifiable.” As she spoke she slapped at a mosquito that had somehow slipped into the car.

“I don’t know about that,” Hawke said. “It kind of appeals to me in a strange way. I thought the same thing back in Iceland.”

“But then you’re certifiable,” Scarlet said. “So that sort of proves my point.”

Hawke turned briefly to Lea, keeping his eyes on the road. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You like it up here?”

“Are you kidding? I’d go bloody crazy in a place like this.”

“Ah,” Hawke said, and pressed on.

They reached the base of Kebnekaise in late evening, although the position of the sun made it feel much earlier. In the tranquil, fading sunlight they unpacked their weapons, climbing rope and flashlights from the trunk of the Hilux and for a few moments took in the landscape.

So this was the legendary Midgard — the Middle Earth where Thor had fought the World Serpent and died after killing him. Today, it was a ragged range of dark mountains rising from a plain of stubby brown and yellow grass and pitted marshland, but there was still something genuinely awesome about the place. Running along the horizon to the southeast was a line of birch and poplar trees, and scattered around in patches running away to the west were wild strawberries and cloudberries. They would grow thicker in the boreal forest a few hundred meters to their right, but these were some strays.

“So that’s our peak right there,” Ryan said, twisting a map around and placing a compass against it. “If my orienteering skills are correct, and of course they are, we have only a short hike until we reach the base of our mountain and then it’s not much further from there to the lake in question!”

“Your orienteering skills are not correct,” Hawke said, taking the map and twisting it around in Ryan’s hands before pointing at the horizon. “That way is north, not over there.”

Ryan looked sheepishly at the former SBS man for a second but moved along with a grin and a shrug of the shoulders. “Ah…”

“It’s absolutely fantastic!” Victoria said, changing the subject. She moved closer to the mountains, utterly spellbound. “I had no idea.”

“Come on, let’s get on with it,” Scarlet said. “I doubt there’s a decent bar anywhere around here so the sooner we get back to Kiruna the better, even if it was about as lively as a morgue there.”

They picked up their kit and stepped off of the road and into the taiga. Hawke was immediately reminded of old times, not just of the SBS and their punishing training programs but of his childhood too — like the time they went hiking on Dartmoor and he and his sister played hide and seek around Birch Tor. Those days seemed impossibly far away now and when he recalled them it almost felt as if he were imagining someone else’s childhood and not his own.

“Whatcha thinking about?”

He turned and saw Lea had caught up with him and linked her arm through his.

He smiled, looked over at the sun and replied: “I was just thinking about how much I’d like a cold beer.”

“Don’t! You sound like Scarlet Bloody Sloane. I swear if she ever gets shot she’s going to bleed vodka.”

“I doubt that would happen.”

“Which bit?”

“Getting shot, of course… because she’d definitely bleed vodka.”

To the west, the sun momentarily dipped behind the ridgeline and lit the tops of the mountains and the few, light clouds a faint pink color. High above and behind them they saw some pale stars sparkling in the east, and the air took on a decidedly chilly feel despite the late summer month. This was about as isolated as Europe got — cool, distant and far from life.

“It’s bloody freezing around these parts,” Ryan said with a shiver.

“Don’t be such a baby,” Scarlet said.

“I agree with Ryan,” Victoria said, with a sideways glance at Scarlet. “It is rather chilly here, but then one would expect that at this latitude.”

“Yes, I suppose one would,” Scarlet said.

Hawke and Lea shared a private smile, and they pushed on.

By the time they arrived at the canyon at the base of the mountain the sun had sunk ever lower and darkened the ridgeline of the mountain ranges around them. Up here, the latitude was so high that the time before sunset — what photographers called the golden hour — could last for much longer than sixty minutes, and that was the case tonight. It felt like it had been sunset for hours by the time they finally reached the rocks that they had been seeking, and there, stretching out beyond them in the purple, dusky haze, was the lake.

Hawke stepped up. “Right, here’s where we have to get our hands dirty. If Alex and Ryan are right, somewhere around the shoreline of this lake is a concealed entrance to a tunnel. You only have to look at the place to know it probably hasn’t been touched for thousands of years, so let’s get looking.”

They worked their way around the shoreline, the ridges of the Kebnekaise massif looming above their heads as they went. Twilight lasted forever up here, so they had light to work with even if it was subdued, but it was over an hour before they found what they were looking for.

“You think this is it?” Lea asked.

Hawke took a step back and nodded his head. “Our best chance yet.”

He was looking at a jumble of rocks, some up to ten feet high, that to the casual observer looked random, but he thought otherwise. A large flat rock at the front looked like it had been placed there a very long time ago with the specific intention of concealing something.

“Let’s get it out the way then,” he said flatly.

“It must weigh ten tons!” Ryan said.

Hawke grinned. “Which is why I’ve brought along a decent quantity of military-grade C-4 in my picnic basket.”

Hawke pulled the explosive from his backpack and weighed it in his hand.

“Oh my goodness!” Victoria said, taking a step back.

“Don’t panic, darling,” Scarlet said. “It’s not dangerous until we detonate it with a shockwave.”

Hawke took a few seconds to evaluate the best areas to place the explosives, and then inserted the blasting caps. He dusted his hands down.

“You really like this bit, don’t you?” Lea said.

“Well…”

Ryan rolled his eyes.

They took cover and Hawke detonated the C-4. The explosion was heavy and loud, and blasted the thin upper end of the flat rock to oblivion. When the dust settled Hawke was the first to his feet and after briefly checking his work he gave the others the order to come up the embankment and join him with the equipment.

It was time to go inside the mountain.

Álvaro Sala lowered the binoculars and handed them to Leon Smets who was standing a yard to his left. Although they were wrapped in kid leather gloves, he rubbed his hands together for warmth. It was much warmer in Andorra at this time of year, but that wouldn’t stop him taking what was rightfully his.

Less than a kilometer to the west the Donovan girl and her friends had recently disappeared into a ravine on the south slopes of the Kebnekaise massif. It looked like they were planning an ascent via the eastern route, but not to any real altitude since their equipment was limited.

Tracking down their aircraft to Bromma airport hadn’t been the hardest challenge of his life, and tracking it on live radar was a simple facility on any handheld device. Perhaps they should have switched off their transponder, but such things were frowned upon by the authorities and would have generated an enormous security response.

Either way, he and the surviving members of his team had landed at Kiruna less than twenty minutes after the ECHO Gulfstream, and now not only would they lead them directly to the tomb and the location of Thor’s Hammer, but they would also pay for killing Deprez and putting Dasha Vetrov on life support.

Now, a hefty explosion rang out down the valley to the south and sent clouds of willow grouse and gray herons bursting into the air.

“They’re going inside the mountain,” Smets said. He spat on the gorse and sniffed deeply.

Sala gave him a look of disgust. “Of course they are, but they still have no idea what they’re looking for.”

Smets smirked and nodded his head in agreement.

“If they’re like everyone else then they probably think they’re looking for a hammer.”

“Or a Tesla Coil, perhaps?” Smets said, his face breaking into a malevolent smirk.

“Or a Tesla Coil… Ha!” Sala laughed and shook his head in disbelief before turning back from the ridge. He walked back toward the line of pick-up trucks parked up roughly at the eastern edge of the range.

Yes, perhaps they thought they were looking for a Tesla Coil, but whatever it was they were seeking they wouldn’t live to find out the truth, and even if they did they wouldn’t live long enough to enjoy it.

Sala shouted at the men hanging around and smoking cigarettes. “Into the trucks! We’re going inside the Kebnekaise!”