Valhalla

by Robert J. Mrazek

  His mind raced to come up with a plan.

  He would have to haul her, which meant fashioning a crude litter. He looked down at Hap. The Alsatian sure looked the part of a sled dog. Hopefully, he was still a product of his ancient lineage. Together, they might be able to pull Lexy a long way.

  He trained the flashlight across what had once been the base camp. There was nothing to be seen above the scarred ice. He would have to make the litter out of the plastic tarpaulin.

  In the beam of the flashlight, he glimpsed the end of a length of the nylon rope that had been used to stake the top edges of the tarp to the surface ice. Scraping away more ice chips and snow, he used his jackknife to cut off several lengths of rope.

  It took him ten minutes to splice the lengths into two crude harness lines, one for the dog’s chest and one for his own. After that, he freed up a section of the tarp that was about six feet square, and cut it loose.

  By then, Lexy had lost consciousness again. She finally responded to the sound of his voice after he briefly uncovered her face and shouted to her above the rising wind.

  “I’m going to wrap you in a kind of blanket. If you need anything, just call out.”

  He thought about giving her his woolen head mask. It covered everything but the eyes and mouth, but he knew he would need it on the journey. He made her swallow another pull of Jack Daniel’s before strapping her thermal hood close to her cheeks and shielding her exposed face again with the scarf. Placing her arms on her chest, he wrapped her twice in the plastic tarp, using lengths of nylon cord to secure her inside it.

  He planned to tow her on her back, with her head and upper body raised toward him. He would take the lead with the longer harness line, and the dog would hopefully follow in tandem with the shorter line. If they could find a good rhythm, their combined strength might give them a chance to make it.

  After placing one of the harnesses loosely around the dog’s chest, he attached the end of the rope to one of the metal grommets on the top edge of the tarp. Because Hap’s body was so much closer to the ground, Macaulay cut the dog’s harness line shorter. Macaulay brought his own line up tight against his armpits and then connected the end of it to a second grommet on the tarp.

  They were ready to go. Before leaving, he took a few moments to stand silent in tribute to John Lee Hancock and the rest of them. He had seen death in many forms, but it had always been in combat. This was different. This was a massacre. He silently vowed that when it was all over, he would come back to this desolate place.

  Macaulay checked his proposed compass heading on the wristwatch and took his first few steps forward. Without a hint of any verbal command, the Alsatian moved out behind him.

  A problem quickly developed when Hap kept lunging forward to pass Macaulay, his ancestry apparently demanding that he be allowed to break trail. Macaulay considered allowing the dog to haul the litter by himself, but he was sure it would be too heavy a strain for the long haul. After a few minutes, the dog seemed to understand that they were a team and slowed to a steady walk beside him.

  They had gone no more than a few hundred yards when the gale hit with a vengeance, slashing down from the north and hitting them from the left side as they slowly moved southeast. Every few minutes, Macaulay had to check the compass heading to make sure they were still moving in the right direction.

  He tried to take his mind off their desperate situation by focusing on everything that had happened. It was hard to imagine John Lee dead. He had been a force of nature, larger than life in every way, capable of cutting corners to get what he wanted, but with a deep capacity for kindness and generosity in so many other ways. With John Lee, the loyalty went both ways. Macaulay would miss him like a brother. He would make Jensen and the others pay for what they had done. But first he had to survive.

  After an hour, he stopped to rest, sitting down on the edge of an ice shelf and turning his back to the wind. The dog nestled close to him. He removed the flask of Jack Daniel’s from his thermal suit and took a small slug to revive himself.

  Taking off his right glove, he slid his fingers through the layers of plastic and found Lexy’s carotid artery under her left jaw. Her skin was still unnaturally cold, but he could feel a pulse.

  He checked the time. It was five in the morning. They would see the first hint of dawn in about four hours. After that, there would be an hour or so of light to find a settlement—if they made it that far.

  The temperature had risen to five below zero, which at least gave them a chance. Typically, it fell to thirty below at night, which they never could have survived in combination with the merciless wind.

  They moved out again. The landscape slowly changed. What had been a relatively flat shelf gave way to irregular ridges and ripples in the ice. Macaulay recognized the new terrain as sastrugi, a phenomenon caused by wind erosion and deposition that created stark and often-jagged irregularities in the ice.

  It made for much harder going, with the surface now undulating between sharp depressions and overhanging masses like frozen sand dunes. It felt like being on an alien planet a million miles from Earth.

  At six o’clock, the wind shifted and began blowing from the east, directly into his face, biting his eyes and lips. He could only lower his head and keep going, his senses now reduced to small numb signals as he listened to the many moods of the wind. It was like a living creature, one moment issuing a shriek, then a lament of agony.

  Stung by the ice particles, he closed his eyes. A fleeting image of Diana flashed across his mind. It was one from the good years, the early years, when every day they spent together was one of discovery and deepening love. More images followed. Diana in her stunning maillot at the officers’ club pool at Travis. Standing proudly at the entrance hall to her first exhibition at the Art Students League in Manhattan. The glorious night of lovemaking in which they conceived their baby.

  Trudging forward, he couldn’t erase the next images: the memory of being at Walter Reed when she was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis; the searing image of her face after losing their unborn child; and the day she went permanently blind. His final mental image was of John Lee when he took Macaulay aside at Al Kharj during the lull before Desert Storm to tell him that Diana had taken her life at the assisted living facility where they had put her.

  He felt the familiar surge of crushing guilt at not having been there for her. With her. Guilt for all the times he had made her cry. The birthdays he had missed because he was overseas. If he had been more sensitive, he could have resigned his commission. He could have found a way to avoid going overseas. He could have done a lot of things. But he didn’t. And she had died alone.

  Later on, he found his comfort in the hope that she had forgiven him, and that she was watching over him like some kind of guardian angel, protecting him from harm. He sent up a silent prayer that she was at peace in heaven.

  “I’m still here, Diana,” he said out loud, the sound carried away by the wind.

  On and on they went, Macaulay bent over, one step at a time on his trembling legs. Each breath was like a torch in his throat, as if he were strangling. He no longer thought of anything else, not of Diana or John Lee or home or warmth or food or lovemaking, nothing but the next step, the next depression, the next rise in the ice.

  He now had an all-consuming desire to sleep, the fervent urge to rest his aching muscles by simply lying down in the soft and inviting snow. But to lie down was to fall asleep. To fall asleep was to die. In an hour, the ice surface above them would become a hard shield. A few hours after that, there would be no trace of them left.

  At one point, his feet went out from under him on a frozen dune and he fell hard on his back. Rolling over, he found himself sobbing in frustration, the tears freezing on his cheeks.

  Stay here and rest, an inner voice began singing out to him. It was a sultry and welcoming voice. Stay here a
nd rest. You’ve done enough. Only the dog’s persistent nuzzling at his head forced him to get up again.

  They moved on.

  Wrapped inside the plastic tarp, Lexy was largely oblivious to their desperate journey. Her brain seemed anesthetized, a relief actually, the spark of reason slowly diminishing, her eyes shut behind the woolen scarf wrapped around her face.

  She found herself dreaming of the nine worlds of the Norse gods, Asgard, the home of Odin’s Valhalla, and Einherjar, where the souls of the greatest warriors lay in paradise, each of them selected by the Valkyries. And Yggdrasil, the world tree, with its roots being eaten by the serpent Nidhogg. The form of Nidhogg took shape in her fevered mind. He was the blond killer.

  Ice began crystallizing on Macaulay’s eyelids, and he feared he could go snow-blind. If he did, even temporarily, there would be no way to find a settlement along the coast. He could only keep moving like a staggering drunk. Each minute seemed like an hour. An hour became like an interminable day.

  Macaulay periodically checked the big Alsatian. The magnificent animal hadn’t flagged once as they struggled on for mile after mile, but when he started making low whimpering noises, Macaulay stopped to examine him.

  In the glow of the flashlight, he saw that the rope had lacerated the dog’s chest, and he was bleeding through his white fur in several places. Macaulay cut a section of the plastic tarp away from the base of the litter and wrapped it several times around the dog’s chest to cushion the impact of the rope.

  They moved on.

  The wind-driven snow particles had felt like bee stings, finding tiny paths to penetrate the apertures around the eyes and mouth of his woolen face mask, pricking the exposed skin like tiny needles until it finally went numb. There was no way to know how close he was to frostbite, with the possibility of losing his nose or lips. He needed to massage the affected skin to get the blood flowing again, but that was impossible.

  He began to notice fissures in the crust of the rippled ice. Although he didn’t want to exhaust the batteries in the pocket flashlight, he needed its feeble illumination to pick his way through them.

  By eight o’clock, he was reduced to counting steps in the unrelenting darkness. He would lurch forward a few, stagger a few more, count off twenty, and then start again. He wasn’t sure he was even counting properly, but it kept him going.

  At eight thirty, the snow suddenly stopped and the wind began to die. One moment it was driving hard into his face; the next it had disappeared. He checked the temperature gauge on his watch. Plus five degrees Fahrenheit. Almost a sauna.

  In thirty minutes there would be light.

  He was sure they had to be somewhere near the coast. With the arrival of dawn, they would have an hour or so of daylight to find help before the darkness descended again.

  His first awareness of the new threat began when the Alsatian began to growl menacingly. Groggy with exhaustion, Macaulay wondered what might have caused it, when he heard a yelping cry come out of the gloom ahead of them. It was quickly followed by another one off to the left. Macaulay stopped.

  Hap continued to growl, staring forward into the darkness. When Macaulay tracked the flashlight beam from left to right, he saw a momentary glimpse of movement that disappeared in the shadows.

  It was a wolf. He knew that wolves often traveled the ice cap in packs. In winter, they usually stayed near the coast, where they could prey on pets and small livestock near the Inuit settlements. It struck him that they might be near a settlement.

  There were at least two of them, maybe three, and they were circling closer as the yelping continued. As soon as Macaulay released Hap from his harness, the dog adopted a rigid stance, his nose twitching with anticipation.

  A moment later, he bolted off. Macaulay tried to track his flight with the flashlight, but the Alsatian quickly outdistanced its range. Macaulay counted to fifteen before the first raucous sounds of the fight reached him across the ice.

  He could hear the ferocity of Hap’s savage howling, punctuated by the enraged cries of animals engaged in deadly battle, the low, guttural snarls from Hap and the higher-pitched cries from one of the wolves.

  Macaulay removed the harness from his chest, pulled out his jackknife, and jogged through the murky gloom to the sounds of the struggle. Drawing closer, he heard a loud snapping of jaws, followed by a cry of pain. The yelping became frenzied, then frantic.

  He could see the shadowy forms of three animals thrashing about together, separating briefly before charging at one another again, and baring their teeth as they sought to inflict a fatal wound.

  One of the wolves had been hurt. Macaulay watched as it sought to escape, finally dropping to the ground in the midst of its flight, its throat torn open, but still alive, glaring up at him, fangs exposed.

  Ahead, the bitter struggle continued, with the Alsatian and the second wolf each seeking advantage as they alternately charged and withdrew. Macaulay staggered toward them, hoping he could get there in time to help.

  Hap suddenly dropped to the ice, continuing to fight from his back as the other wolf loomed over him, his jaws slashing at the dog’s throat. Macaulay was about to strike the wolf with his knife, when Hap cried out in agony. Sensing Macaulay’s presence, the wolf released the dog’s throat from its jaws and loped off.

  Hap was lying on his side, the blood flowing from wounds at his throat, chest, and legs slowly turning the snow red beneath his body. Macaulay began stroking his ears, remembering the first time he had ever seen him.

  They had been driving across Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, when Hancock had seen the dog run out of the darkness into the road, where a car hit him.

  One of his front legs was broken, and the Alsatian was trying to drag himself away. Hancock stopped the car, picked him up in his arms, and drove him to a veterinarian’s office to have the leg set. After that, they had become inseparable.

  Hap stopped breathing.

  Dawn slowly rose in the east, illuminating the landscape around him. In the distance, Macaulay could see the ocean, dark and forbidding. He scanned the shoreline from north to south. Black rock formations covered the vista as far as he could see.

  He had only an hour or so to find help before darkness fell again. Plodding back to the litter, he picked up the rope harness and placed it around his chest. He could go north or south along the shoreline. The decision was easy.

  In his near delirium, he decided to walk south toward the warmth of the Florida Keys. As he dragged the litter over the new snow, he remembered visiting Hemingway’s home, remembered the cats, dozens of them.

  There was no indication that humans had ever visited this part of the world. His initial optimism gave way to despair as he saw the light begin to fade in the western sky.

  That was when he saw their salvation, a small shack, not much larger than an outhouse, sitting back on a stone promontory above a shale beach, its weather-beaten clapboards scarred from endless battering of the wind.

  It was one of the survival huts sprinkled along the rugged coast for lost mariners. Well, he was lost all right, even if he wasn’t a mariner. Cutting open the plastic tarp, he picked Lexy up in his arms and carried her to the shack.

  The door was unlocked. He shoved it open and lurched inside.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  25 November

  Washington, DC

  White House Situation Room

  Jessica Birdwell, the deputy Homeland Security adviser assigned to the White House, held up her access pass to the security camera mounted above the faux walnut steel security door, and listened for the signal that unlocked it.

  Stepping through the doorway, she followed the underground passage leading to the smallest of the three soundproof situation rooms in the intelligence management center beneath the West Wing.

  Her boss, Ira Dusenberry, the deputy assistant national security adviser to t
he president, was already there, talking to one of the duty officers on the watch team. A copy of the president’s morning book, which contained the latest compendium of incidents with potential national security implications, was spread out on the conference table next to Dusenberry’s ever-present mug of black coffee.

  “Morning, Jess,” he said as she opened her briefcase, removed her Apple MacBook Pro, and turned it on.

  At thirty-six, Dusenberry had thinning brown hair and a blunt, good-humored face. Short and thickset, he had the shoulders of a sumo wrestler and an even broader expanse of waist.

  He had just participated in the morning briefing of the president, and was giving the duty officer an update on the priority issues that needed careful monitoring. His eyes remained focused on Jessica.

  Tall and slender with dark gold hair, she was wearing a white blouse and charcoal skirt that enhanced her wide-set blue eyes. As always, she seemed serious and intent, not unfriendly, but polite and reserved. Not for the first time, he wondered if she had a lover.

  “Addison just called to say he is on the way,” he said after dismissing the duty officer.

  “What’s the emergency?” she asked.

  “I think we should wait for Ad,” he said, sipping his coffee.

  “Anything new in the morning book?” she asked.

  “The same tired litany of iniquity, peccancy, and evildoing,” he said with his familiar sarcasm. “The Russians are tracking a rogue army colonel with access to fissionable material who’s on his way to Iran. There’s another bombing threat in Jakarta, a fledgling shoe bomber in Greece, a shadowy group that is working to isolate the autoimmune gene and wipe out the African race, Chinese hackers who have created an invasive virus to wreck our most secret codes, a scheme to poison the water supply in Southern California, and a terrorist plot to kidnap both a liberal and a conservative television talk show host and hold them for ransom.”