Valhalla Gold

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Hawke crossed the bridge by the waterfalls and sprinted for the tunnel leading to the subs. Smets could wait, because right now the priority was stopping the treacherous Victoria. He knew she was planning on taking the Triton back to the shore where presumably the plan was to catch up with Trond and tell him the rest of them had been killed. That didn’t leave him much time to stop her.

If she got away in the Triton and somehow destroyed their mini-sub on the way out, it could block the exit tunnel and they would be trapped. Underwater cave systems like these had viciously strong currents and there was a reason why cave diving was considered a potentially deadly sport. He knew even he would have a seriously hard job getting out of this one, never mind Lea and Scarlet. A badly wounded Ryan Bale stood no chance at all.

He reached the other end of the tunnel a few moments later, and was just in time to see Victoria Hamilton-Talbot sprinting across the cave toward the subs. The Triton packed with gold was at the far end, but the mini-sub packed with C4 was closer and when he opened fire on her she had no choice. Desperate for cover and with the Triton another thirty seconds’ sprint away she clambered inside the explosive-laden mini-sub. She had obviously decided to cut her losses and try to escape with her life, leaving both the gold and her lover behind to face oblivion.

Charming, he thought.

He drew his gun and fired single-burst shots at the woman as she retreated inside the vessel, carefully avoiding striking the sub. She saw him and didn’t hesitate to return fire, blasting her gun in his direction.

Bullets whistled past his head and smashed into the cave wall behind him. He dived to the gritty floor, softening his landing with a classic parkour break-fall roll. Using his shoulder to redirect his forward momentum he pivoted over and came to a stop on the other side of the tunnel behind the cover of an enormous boulder.

He rubbed the dirt from his eyes and ducked as she fired another burst of bullets at him. He didn’t know how he was going to do it, but he had to take her out of the game.

Lea frantically ran toward Eir’s Hall. She had seen enough bullet wounds in her time to know Ryan’s were fatal, at least from any conventional medical point of view. His only chance was if she could find something from this weird world of the gods like the elixir that had saved her life in Ethiopia. She knew Sala had sent the apples back to the Migaloo but with no idea what they would do to Ryan’s mortal physiology she decided to trust her father instead.

Hurriedly, she burst into the small chamber and started searching for anything she could think of that might be able to help Ryan. Her father was a good man — she knew it in her heart — and if he had researched Eir in her capacity as the goddess of medicine and healing she knew there must be something in here that could help Ryan.

She flicked her phone and desperately scanned through the uploaded copies of her father’s research files. Somewhere in here she knew she would find the answer. Scrolling past the unsettling reference by her dad to the Athanatoi, she navigated to the section on Eir. Her eyes crawled over the words as she wildly sought a way to save her former husband’s life.

Scarlet held Ryan’s head in her lap as he continued to bleed out over the dusty, ancient flagstones of Valhalla. His face was ashen now, and covered in a thin veil of sweat.

He struggled to speak through the rapid, shallow breaths caused by his failing heart. “I knew I’d get you one day, Cairo.”

For once, Scarlet Sloane couldn’t think of anything to say. She was watching a valued member of the team die in her arms, but it was more than that. Ryan was young — he had his whole life ahead of him.

“Stay with me, Ryan.”

“Why, are you going somewhere?”

She laughed, and hoped its fraudulence wasn’t obvious to Ryan. “Not me, you tit. I’m talking to you so you don’t go and do something stupid like croak in my arms.”

“Hey Scarlet,” Ryan said, his voice weak now. “What did Arnold Schwarzenegger say when a man made from spaghetti served him coffee?”

“Stop talking Ryan — for once in your life.”

“Pasta barista, baby!”

Scarlet looked at him stony-faced. “You don’t say things like that in public, do you?”

Ryan coughed some blood and gripped her hand. “I’m scared, Cairo.”

“No need, Ryan. We’re going to get you through this. Lea’s on the case and you trust her, right?”

“As long as there’s no cooking involved, then yes.”

“That’s the spirit.”

She noticed he was starting to pass out and she gently tapped the side of his face. “Stay with me, Ryan. Lea’s almost here.”

She looked over her shoulder but saw Lea was nowhere in sight. She had no idea where she was or what she was doing — she could have been shot and killed by Smets or Victoria for all she knew — but she had to keep Ryan alive as long as possible. “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Rich’s place in the country?”

“He has a place in the country?”

“Sure — just outside Oxford.”

“A little two-up, two-down affair, no doubt?”

“A little more than that. It’s got fifteen bedrooms and it’s set on ninety acres.”

Ryan began wheezing. “He’s not one to do things by half, is he?”

“I only ever went there once. It was when he was thinking about recruiting me to ECHO.”

“So just after the last Ice Age?”

“Do you want to hear this story or not?”

“Sorry…” more coughing.

“He’d just had a terrific row with the Prime Minister because they’d decided to cut his department over in MI5. His valet accidentally backed my Jag over his topiary peacock — you wouldn’t think a box hedge could make such a mess of a color-coded fender.”

“Was he angry?”

“Not nearly enough — he said it was barely a scratch.”

“I meant about the cuts to his department, Scarlet.”

Scarlet knew what he meant, and smiled. Making jokes in tough times was what she did best, but this was testing her to the limits. She looked at her watch and then back up to Ryan’s cold, clammy face. He was running out of time fast.

Hawke kept up the assault, his bullets ricocheting off the sub’s hatch and flying into the roof of the cave with a gentle thud. In response, Victoria emptied her magazine at him, firing wildly until the bullets were gone, and then she slammed shut the hatch and began to turn the wheel to secure the airlock.

With no longer any danger of getting shot, Hawke sprinted for the sub which had now begun to move slowly away from the lake’s shore and out into the middle of the water.

He launched himself from the shore’s edge and leaped with all his might at the mini-sub, slamming into its smooth exterior and sliding down the hull casing toward the icy water. He reached out with his arms for anything that would arrest his fall but the hull was perfectly hydrodynamic so he continued his slide.

He scrambled diagonally across the casing with a view to using the bow planes as a foot rest, and it worked. He came to a stop on the large, metal plane and caught his breath. Inside the mini-sub he saw Victoria’s face lit low in the orange glow of the internal lights. A fiendish smile crossed her lips when she saw how he had saved himself and she instantly moved to the controls.

Seconds later the bow planes tipped forward, presenting the former Commando with two problems. The first being his footrest was now at a sharp angle and much harder to cling to, and the second being that the sub was diving under the water.

He knew he had only seconds left before she took the mini-sub beneath the waves and then she would be gone forever. At the front of the sub now, he was able to walk up the shallower degree of the bow casing and run up to the safety of the deck. Inside, Victoria looked panicked and speeded up the dive, but it was too late.

Hawke was now on the central portion of the sub’s deck and climbing up what passed for a conning tower on the mini-sub. He began to unwind the airlock wheel and then he opened the hatch. With the freezing water now up to his knees, he dropped down inside the sub to find Victoria waiting for him.

She was turning in her chair at the controls and pointing a gun at him in the cramped space. All around he could see the C4 he had positioned but without the detonation device it was of no more use than modelling clay — and the device was in Scarlet’s hands.

The sub continued to dive but Hawke realized with some degree of relief that the gun in her hand was the same SIG Sauer P226 she had used to keep him pinned down on the shore. He decided to gamble that she couldn’t possibly have reloaded it while she was diving the sub, and lunged forward.

She squeezed the SIG’s trigger, but nothing more happened than classic dry firing as the hammer struck the empty chamber.

“Allow me,” he said, knocking the gun from her hand. He bent over and picked it up.

She frowned. “I always thought you had a disarming personality. Listen — there’s no need for us fight each other. What do you say to us getting out of here together? I can be very accommodating.”

She leaned forward and ran her hands up his arms. Moving closer now, she parted her lips and tried to kiss him.

Hawke pushed her away with the tip of his forefinger and scowled.

“Sorry, but I have a long-standing policy never to date shits who shoot my friends.”

Crestfallen, she flounced back to her chair, but then snatched up a spanner and took a chunky swipe at Hawke. He ducked and the heavy tool struck the air-conditioning controls with a loud clang.

Hawke reacted in a heartbeat and rammed the butt of the pistol into her face, knocking her back into her chair. She righted her balance and wiped the blood from her mouth.

“You should never hit a lady!”

“Thanks. When I see a lady I’ll be sure not to hit her.”

Before she could reply, he turned the pressurization system on and smashed the controls to pieces with his butt of the SIG. With the C4 option unavailable, and no rounds left in the gun he had only one choice. “You shot a very good friend of mine. I don’t let things like that pass.”

“What are you doing?” she asked, her eyes wide with fear as the realization of her fate stretched over her like a dusk shadow.

Hawke picked up the spanner she had tried to kill him with and tested its weight and length in his hand. “At least we get to find out how you react under some real pressure. Goodbye, Victoria.”

He climbed out of the sub and swung the hatch down, jamming it shut with the spanner. Then he jumped into the water and swam back to the shore. Behind him, just as the mini-sub sank beneath the waves he heard an enormously deep explosion as the pressure inside it reached its maximum level and detonated the vessel.

Without looking back, he sprinted back along the tunnel toward Ryan and Scarlet.

Lea ran her eyes over the tiny iPhone screen and muttered a thank you to her father. She was looking at a scanned and uploaded image of a pencil sketch her dad had made decades earlier. It was a flower, with delicate apple-white petals and a thin fern-green stem. Beneath the drawing were the words: Eirflower & the healing ritual.

She had no clue what an Eirflower was, but she knew Eir was the goddess of medicine and she liked the sound of a healing ritual. By the time she got to the small chamber she knew what she was looking for.

Eir’s Hall turned out to be a modest affair but no different from the other chambers and halls they had seen since their arrival in Valhalla. There was a statue of the goddess at the far end, looming peacefully above a generous hoard of belongings and tributes. It was surrounded at its base by a ring of green and white candles, unlit and standing silent sentry in the ecclesiastical reverence of the icy chamber.

Acutely aware that Ryan’s time was rapidly running out, Lea began her search for the magical Eirflower. She had only her father’s rough sketch to go on, and fighting back the urge to ask how he knew of its existence, she moved with speed and diligence through the articles strewn around the chamber.

She lifted a bag of silver coins from its place on the floor beside the statue, sure that she had uncovered the resting place of the ancient flower. She found nothing but dust and continued her search.

Lea grew more anxious with each passing second as she rummaged around the chamber in the gloom. Everything in here was lit a ghostly green color by the glow stick she had placed at the pedestal of Eir’s statue. There was no danger of it burning out — it was brand new and would last for hours — but the idea of Leon Smets creeping up behind her in the dark was a persistent fear she couldn’t shake off.

She checked her watch and knew that time was running out fast. She had seen the gunshot wounds when Scarlet had lifted Ryan’s t-shirt, torn into his stomach in three savage punch-holes. She had watched men bleed to death in the desert in her time in the army and had a pretty good idea that Ryan was on borrowed time.

Then, in the green luminescent glow of the stick, she lifted an enormous golden feast plate to find a low, wooden chest tucked out of sight around the rear of the statue. She lifted the lid and the chest creaked open like an old Brigantine weathering a vicious squall, but inside she found what she was looking for.