Valhalla Gold

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Hawke led the team into the cave, and if they thought outside was cold, it was nothing compared to in here. The cramped cavern was icy and damp and their breath bloomed out before them with each exhalation.

“Place is like a bloody meat freezer.”

“It’s a cave inside the Arctic Circle, Cairo. What did you expect?”

“I meant Scandinavia.”

“Now that’s just offensive,” Lea said.

Ryan sighed. “Ladies, if it’s going to be handbags at dawn can it at least wait until we’ve found the tomb?”

Lea and Scarlet turned and faced him. “What was that, Ryan?” they said in perfect unison.

Ryan looked at them both, noting the expression on their faces. “I was just saying that we have a lot of work to do and thank mercy you’re both here to help.”

They shuffled deeper inside until reaching a narrow split in the floor of the tunnel which disappeared into darkness and didn’t exactly look like it promised safe passage.

Ryan peered over the edge and squinted. “Anyone got a glow-stick?”

Hawke fired one up and dropped it into the crack. They watched it tumble down, striking the sides of the shaft as it went. It hit the bottom with a gently thumping sound and a cloud of powdery dust puffed out around it.

“Mind the gap,” Scarlet said.

Hawke raised an eyebrow. “Looks like our next stop.”

They dropped rappel lines over the rocky ledge and began to descend into the abyss with Hawke in the lead, another glow stick in his hand.

He hit the bottom and after releasing himself from the line he gave the others the signal to come down.

“This is all terribly exciting,” Victoria said, eliciting an eye-roll from Scarlet.

They started down the vertical surface of the rock-face, working their way down into the depths of the vast mountain above them. Victoria was last, helped down by Scarlet, and when she touched down on the cavern floor they were all ready for the next stage.

At the far end of this lower cave was another tunnel partially obscured by a series of impressive stalagmites and stalactites.

Scarlet stared at them as she released her rappel line and checked her pistol.

“Yes, Cairo,” Ryan said, glancing at her. “They do look phallic, don’t they?”

She sighed. “I was thinking they were vaguely redolent of a set of jaws but if yours looks like any of those then I pity the poor borscht woman.”

“Her name’s Maria,” Ryan said with a disapproving sideways glance.

They moved cautiously through the cave and then through what Scarlet had described as a set of jaws until they found themselves staring into a twisting, ever-narrowing tunnel. The frozen darkness of the place was not something Lea would forget in a hurry, and for a second she wondered if her father had ever been down here.

No, she told herself. Stop being so stupid. Okay, so she now knew her father was mixed up in all of this somehow, but she couldn’t let her thoughts run away with themselves like this. Her thoughts ran fast, after all, and usually to the darkest of places. It was hard sometimes to pull them back… like taming so many horses. Whatever her father had known about all of this, how could he ever possibly have been down in this place?

She joined Hawke at the front and looked at his face as he moved fearlessly into the darkness. His strong profile and unshaven jaw were now lit an eerie green in the light of the glow-stick.

He turned to her. “What is it?”

“You just look kind of spooky,” she said with a quick smile.

“Do I?”

“Chemiluminescence will do that for a man,” Ryan said from behind her. “Even a rugged daredevil like Joe here.”

“I wonder what you would look like with a glow stick up your arse, Ryan?” Scarlet said, tipping her head back and pretending to visualize the spectacle.

“I’d like to see you try!” Ryan said. “No wait, that didn’t come out right.”

“Look at the walls!” Victoria said quietly. She ran her hand along the rock. “The carving at the entrance looked manual, but these tramlines here suggest some sort of machinery.”

“Machinery?” Ryan asked. “Are you sure?”

Victoria took a step back from the wall and nodded. “Almost certain — in fact the lower part here looks like it’s constituted of rectilinear stone blocks cut to size by high-precision cutting tools.”

Hawke frowned. “Modern stuff?”

“Sounds mad but yes,” Victoria said.

“Ryan?”

Ryan weighed it up. “The temple complex at Pumapunku in Bolivia has attracted a lot of conspiracy theories for the same reason — high-precision engineering of stonework around fifteen hundred years old that many people say must have been done by a higher intelligence. The thing is the theories are highly questionable because the stone there is a mix of red sandstone and andesite, both of which are conducive to precision carving by hand.”

“But this isn’t sandstone,” Victoria said. “This is granite.”

Ryan tipped his head to one side and stared at the tunnel wall for a moment, silent and perplexed. “Granite… yes. Odd.”

They descended the declining tunnel until they reached the inner chamber. Immediately the atmosphere changed and they felt the temperature drop again.

“This must be it!” Ryan said.

“It can’t be,” Victoria said in a whisper. Her eyes crawled over the cavern, lit low by the flickering glow sticks. “Thor’s tomb?”

“Got it in one,” Hawke said. “Now let’s see where the old boy’s hiding out.”

Ryan clicked his teeth and shook his head gently. “Blasphemous mockery of the gods is not a good idea, Joe.”

Hawke said nothing as they progressed into the tomb complex, but Lea was starting to think Ryan might have a point. The place reminded her of what she had seen in Kefalonia when they’d discovered the vault of Poseidon. Ancient motifs were carved into the chamber walls, there were faded renderings of Thor on the floor tiles and a bewildering array of weapons was stacked up in piles wherever she looked. Yet this place seemed different from Poseidon’s tomb. It felt more military.

She heard Scarlet whisper a few feet behind her. “Take look at this place!”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Victoria said, running her hands over the smooth, painted walls. “Apart from some deterioration in the paint pigments it’s like they just finished it yesterday.”

They saw Thor’s sarcophagus and moved toward it, their flashlights illuminating the dust they’d kicked up as they walked through the frozen chamber.

Lea’s breath formed into a thick cloud in front of her face. “It’s all very similar to the Poseidon tomb. That’s bothering me.”

“It definitely raises a few questions,” said Hawke. “Not only were none of these legends supposed to exist in the first place, but their mythologies all grew up thousands of miles apart from each other.”

The sarcophagus was a similar shape and size to Poseidon’s, but it didn’t stop there — leaning against the base of the pedestal was a stone shield covered in carved letters — the same letters they had seen back in Kefalonia.

“Looks like Thor went on holiday to Greece,” Hawke said.

“Or maybe Poseidon took a visit up here to see the northern lights or something like that?” Scarlet said, lowering her voice in the sombre atmosphere.

“Or something like that,” Lea said, turning over the shield with the tip of her boot. It clattered to the floor with startling volume in the icy silence of the tomb.

Hawke frowned. “I don’t think it was just Poseidon who came here — don’t forget this is pretty much where the NSA found Medusa’s head back in the sixties. Why am I getting the feeling we’re just not getting something about all of this?”

“Beats me,” Scarlet said with a sigh. She shone her flashlight over the sarcophagus for a second and then swept the beam around the chamber. It illuminated rows of swords and axes. “We’re certainly not getting any bloody treasure out of it, that’s for sure. I mean look at this place — it’s like an ancient arsenal but where’s the loot?”

“Yes, but look at all these weapons!” Ryan said. “I’ve never seen so many swords in all my life.”

“Leave them alone, boy,” Scarlet said. “They’re not Fisher Price.”

“And check this out!” Ryan said, lifting a leather belt studded with gold and emeralds from the floor. He blew the dust off it and strapped it around his waist.

Scarlet raised an eyebrow. “What is this — professional wrestling?”

“Get lost, Scarlet.”

“What would your wrestling name be? What about Big Mummy?”

“Leave it, Cairo,” Hawke said. He turned to Ryan. “It’s not a wrestling belt, obviously — but what is it?”

A look of recognition spread on Victoria’s face. “I know! It’s the megingjörð.”

Ryan beamed, barely able to contain himself. “I know!”

Scarlet sighed. “Well that clears that up. Shall we move on and look for some gold?”

“Just wait where you are, Cairo.” Hawke looked at Ryan and Victoria. “In English please, for the rest of us.”

“Sorry!” Ryan said with excitement. “This is Thor’s magical power-belt, the megingjörð!”

“Then take it off, Ryan!” Lea said.

“Yeah, better stop pissing about, mate.”

“One hates to be a clock-watcher,” Victoria said, pointing at the sarcophagus. “But oughtn’t we get on and take a look in that thing or not?”

Lea saw Hawke glance at her and then at the others. “That’s what we do, so… yeah.”

It took longer than they thought to prise the lid off the sarcophagus, even with the climbing ropes and crow bars they had brought with them from the plane’s hold. After tying off the massive, stone lid and making sure it was secure, they took a tentative step forward toward the gaping black hole in front of them.

“Well…” Lea said with a casual resigned tone usually reserved for the most banal of observations. “That’s Thor’s corpse, all right.”

“Thank God it’s so cold in here,” Hawke said quietly. “Or it might have thawed out by now.”

Lea laughed, but Scarlet was less amused. “Oh please,” she said. “That was not funny in the least.”

“I thought it was,” Lea said.

“You’d laugh at anything. You married Ryan after all.”

Lea ignored her and joined Hawke as he leaned over the edge of the sarcophagus with a flashlight in his hand. There was certainly a mummified corpse inside but more interesting than that was the unmistakable shape of what could only be a hammer, a heavy, square anvil of a thing on a thick wooden handle. Beside it was a rolled-up scroll of parchment which Hawke gently picked up and looked at under the bright beam of the flashlight.

“Bloody hell!” Hawke said. “Check this out.”

With the greatest of care, he broke open the wax seal with a gentle snap and unfurled the scroll. “Lea — take a picture of this thing right now. We don’t want a repeat of the castillo.”

Lea snapped an image of the unfurled scroll. It was covered in spidery letters that made zero sense to her, but she recognized some of them from what she had seen on the axe handle so she was confident Alex and Ryan could get something out of it.

She slipped her phone back inside her pocket and peered inside the sarcophagus, looking once again at the hammer. She’d read about the Mighty Hammer of Thor many times since flying out of Elysium, and could hardly believe she was actually looking at it. It looked small just like any regular war hammer, but some said it could level mountains. She glanced up at the cavern roof and hoped nothing like that was going to happen today.

Hawke smiled. “I think this might be just what we’re looking for!”

“But unfortunately it is also what I am looking for.”

Lea spun around and saw a silhouette looming in the entrance to the tunnel. A flickering torch was backlighting the mystery figure, and then to her right she saw another silhouette emerge from the damp gloom. Then a third, a fourth and a fifth as armed gunmen scrambled into the tomb.

Álvaro Sala stepped into the gleam of the glow sticks. He was wearing a black roll neck, dark blue navy camo trousers and a pair of chunky black boots and had one hand casually in a pocket as if he were perusing antiques.

“Sala!”

“We meet again” he said.

“Oh, please,” Scarlet muttered.

Sala moved into the center of the tomb, a crazed sparkle in his eyes. “You managed to make more trouble for me in Stockholm after extricating yourselves from the snake pit back at my château. I’m impressed. Even the great Viking chieftain Ragnar Lodbrok lost his life when he was thrown into a snake pit, and yet you survived.”

Lea took a step forward. “Go to hell!”

“Many would say I am already in hell. But I digress — I have been waiting for this moment a long time. Drop your weapons.”

Lea looked at the man. His long hair was tied back in a tight pony tail and he looked drawn and sick. A few paces behind him was Leon Smets, the man they had fought back in Andorra, the man who had pulled the trap door and sent them falling into Sala’s vile snake pit.

Sala looked at each one of them, his eyes lingering on Victoria Hamilton-Talbot for just a second too long, Lea thought. He started to speak to her but was stopped when Hawke broke the silence.

“What do you want, Sala?” he asked with palpable disgust.

Lea glanced once more at the hammer.

Sala’s response was wordless but clear to everyone. He held out his arm, pointed at the old scroll and made the “give me” gesture with his right hand.

Lea frowned. “You don’t want the hammer?”

“A hammer is a hammer. Give me the scroll.”

Hawke looked at him with hatred and Lea hoped he wasn’t about to do anything stupid. They were outnumbered and trapped in a mountain’s cave complex high up in the Arctic Circle. To say no one would hear them scream was an understatement.

But he didn’t. Instead, the Englishman reluctantly lowered the scroll to the dusty floor and kicked it across the tiles. It came to a stop at Sala’s steel toecap boots, and without taking his eyes off Hawke, the Andorran stooped down to pick it up.

His eyes sparkled with delight and he nodded his head with self-importance as his eyes crawled all over the ancient text. “This is the final piece of the puzzle. You have no idea how long I have been seeking the treasures this poem will lead me to!”

“I thought you were trying to find Thor’s Hammer, Sala?” Lea said. “It’s right here!”

Sala stepped closer and turned slowly to face Lea. “Yes, I see the resemblance at once… you are certainly Henry’s daughter.”

Lea looked shocked at the casual, first name reference to her father. “What are you talking about? What did you mean when you talked about killing him back in Andorra?”

Sala grinned. “It’s true I never knew him, but in a way… I knew of him, and for a very long time indeed. We had certain things in common.”

“My father would have nothing in common with a snake like you, Sala!”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really! My father was a healer — he spent his life helping people. He wasn’t like you. I’ve seen your idea of helping people.”

Sala’s hand held the rolled-up parchment tighter, like a baton. “Your father was a fool. He wanted the treasures of the healing goddesses so he could use them to save humankind. This is why he sought the Hammer so tirelessly, and this is why he was killed. I, however seek a different kind of treasure — every weapon ever used by the gods!”

Now Lea understood what all this was about. Weapons and war. “And that’s what your little scroll is for?”

“The scroll will lead me to my destiny, yes!”

Scarlet snorted. “I’m starting to wonder if madness is contagious.”

Sala ignored her, but ordered Smets and some men forward.

“Get your hands up. It’s time to prove your mortality — especially you, Donovan. You led me quite the merry dance all over Ireland… and yet you still brought me here to my destiny. A shame you will not be alive to see me fulfil it.” He turned to Smets. “Take them down that tunnel and shoot them dead.”

The Belgian mercenary laughed as he marched them to their execution. Lea turned to look over her shoulder as they left the tomb, and saw Sala mumbling to himself as he stared at the scroll once more, totally ignoring the hammer in the sarcophagus.