The Valhalla Prophecy_A Novel

by Andy McDermott

  ‘If this is the right place,’ said Eddie, handing the goggles to Berkeley. ‘It’s a pretty close match, though.’

  ‘The island is called Nektaluk,’ the Russian said, going to the bridge’s plotting table and pointing it out on a chart. It was one of a ragged group of islands off the main coast, none marked with any signs of human habitation. ‘I used the satellite link to get information about it, but apart from its name and position, I could find nothing.’ With a faint smile, he added: ‘It does not even have a Wikipedia page.’

  Eddie regarded the map. ‘So it’s twelve miles of bugger-all, then.’

  ‘Except maybe for a pit full of the most toxic substance on earth,’ said Nina, joining him. The map’s contour lines showed the highest point on Nektaluk island as around 550 metres above sea level; she did some rapid mental arithmetic to convert the figure to 1,800 feet. Depending on whose definition was being used, that was not even tall enough to qualify as a mountain in many countries – but in this case, it was the opinion of the ancient Vikings that counted. They had climbed a path up its slopes to find the site of the battle that would decide the fate of the world.

  And now, over a thousand years later, she was about to follow in their footsteps.

  31

  Dawn crept sluggishly over the island as the Akademik Rozhkov moved closer to shore to send out its boats. Even when full daylight finally arrived, the sun taking its languid time to rise this far north, the day was far from bright; clouds still covered the entire sky.

  The weather was unlikely to improve. Nina looked ahead as the rigid inflatable boat carrying the expedition members approached the barren shore. The distant mountain’s peak was barely visible, shrouded by the low-hanging clouds, and there were swathes of bleak mist lower down its slopes. The entire vista was a flat, dreary monochrome, not one single patch of colour to break the monotony of white snow and grey rock.

  ‘Could be worse,’ said Eddie from beside her. ‘At least it’s not raining.’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll find a way,’ she replied. Even wrapped in far thicker clothing than she had worn on the search for Valhalla in Sweden, she was still desperately cold.

  ‘It will not take us long to reach the pit,’ said Kagan determinedly, gesturing towards a second RIB off to one side. This was a larger craft, carrying the team’s equipment – most prominently two of their four snowmobiles. ‘We travel, what? Ten or eleven kilometres?’ He looked to Berkeley for confirmation; the American nodded. ‘All we have to do is follow the route from the runes of Valhalla, then locate the pit – and deliver Thor’s Hammer.’

  He glanced down. Between his feet was a case made of high-impact plastic, inside which was the steel canister containing the biological counter-agent. ‘Once the eitr is neutralised, then all this is over. We can return home.’

  ‘There are still a lot of ifs, though,’ said Nina. ‘If Thor’s Hammer works. If the pit is there. If we’ve translated the runes correctly. Hell, if this is even the right island!’

  ‘You needn’t worry about the translation,’ said Berkeley snippily. ‘I’ve done my job.’

  ‘If you hadn’t done your “job”, we wouldn’t all be here at the arse-end of the world,’ Eddie reminded him. ‘But it looks like we’re in the right place. Question is, have Hoyt and Lock made Tova tell ’em where it is too?’

  ‘They would have had less leverage without me,’ said Nina.

  Kagan shook his head. ‘That will not matter. With so much at stake, they will do whatever they have to. They will have found other ways to force her to translate the runes.’

  The rest of the short voyage continued in gloomy silence until the boat reached the shore. The four Russian soldiers jumped out on Kagan’s order, hauling the RIB on to the shingle so the rest of its passengers could disembark and unload their gear. While they were doing so, the soldiers splashed through the breaking waves to the second boat and carefully carried the snowmobiles to the miserable beach. The vehicles had been partially disassembled for transport; the men began to put them back together as the boat turned back to the Rozhkov for the second pair.

  ‘Are these guys any good, then?’ Eddie asked Kagan, regarding the four younger men. ‘Where did you get ’em?’

  ‘They are members of Unit 201,’ Kagan replied. ‘Fortunately, they were away from the bunker on training. I called them back for this mission.’

  ‘Why do I get the feeling they’re the only members of Unit 201 left that you could call back?’ asked Nina. Kagan gave her a pained look, but said nothing.

  The second boat returned with the other snowmobiles fifteen minutes later. Berkeley used the time to reread his notes, occasionally glancing up towards the distant mountain. ‘Do you know which way we need to go?’ said Nina.

  ‘I think so,’ he answered. ‘I’m having to work a little to put myself into their mindset.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet,’ said Eddie. ‘“Tough Viking warrior” isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind when I look at you.’

  Berkeley huffed, then continued: ‘But I think I’ve figured it out. We need to go north-west, up that hill.’ He pointed inland. ‘At the top, we should see a landmark they called “the shield stone”. Hopefully it’ll be obvious what it is.’

  ‘At least we won’t have to walk,’ said Nina, looking around as the soldiers waded to the returning boat to unload the snowmobiles. The hillside in question started out shallow as it rose away from the beach, but quickly became steeper. However, she was sure the vehicles could handle the climb. ‘What about after that?’

  ‘From this shield stone we go along the top of a ridge, and then at the other end we have to cross through the vale of Fenrir. I still have no idea what that means, exactly – I just hope we’ll know it when we see it.’ He consulted his notes again. ‘As long as we can find the landmarks, I don’t think we’ll have any trouble following the route. It’s not as if there are any trees to block our view.’

  ‘There’s fog, though,’ said Eddie. The wallowing clouds were still hanging over the summit, turning the mountain’s peak into a vague shadow amongst the endless grey, and some of the banks lower down had spread. ‘Looks pretty thick. We’ll need to stick close together if we go into that lot.’

  ‘We will manage,’ Kagan assured him. He turned to watch his men bringing the last pieces of cargo from the boat. ‘We will be ready to move out in a few minutes, once they have put together the snowmobiles. Are you all ready?’

  ‘I’m set,’ said Nina.

  ‘Me too,’ Eddie said. ‘Standing around on a freezing cold beach isn’t my idea of fun. Too many flashbacks to my SAS training.’

  Kagan was amused. ‘SAS, pah! Cold like this? This is just an ordinary day for every Russian soldier.’

  ‘Oh God, don’t set him off,’ Nina begged, seeing that her husband’s pride in his former service was about to demand satisfaction. ‘Once he starts ranting about how much better the SAS is than anyone else, he never shuts up.’

  ‘Then I will not listen to him,’ the Russian said with a smirk, moving to join the soldiers.

  ‘Cheeky bugger,’ Eddie grumbled. Nina laughed.

  It did not take long for the snowmobiles to be assembled and loaded. The drivers took their places, then engines roared to life in unison. Each vehicle carried two people; the four Russian troopers took a pair of snowmobiles between them, Berkeley rode pillion with Kagan, while Nina straddled the last machine behind Eddie. A moment’s hesitation, then she put her arms around his waist.

  She looked over his shoulder at the terrain ahead. The sight filled her with an odd sense of dread. Even though the journey would in theory be little different from the ride upriver in Sweden, the towering evergreens there had been an omnipresent reminder that life could thrive even in the cold. Here, though, there was nothing but bleak and barren rock and snow. A dead land.

  Berkeley pointed up the hill. ‘That way!’ Kagan set off, kicking up a spray of snow behind the snowmobile’s broad rubber track.
The soldiers followed.

  Eddie gave the case containing Thor’s Hammer, secured to the back of Kagan’s snowmobile, a dubious look. ‘If we find the pit and that stuff doesn’t do what it says on the tin, then what happens?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nina replied. ‘But I get the feeling Kagan’s got a contingency plan. He just hasn’t told us about it.’

  ‘Yeah, I got that feeling too.’ He opened his coat and drew his Wildey, giving it a rather theatrical check before returning it to its holster. ‘Good thing I brought a contingency of my own.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have left that ridiculous thing in Valhalla?’ Nina sighed, shaking her head. ‘Why do you need something so damn huge?’

  ‘If you shoot something with it, it stays down,’ Eddie said as he revved the engine and set off.

  ‘Like what? A polar bear?’ She meant it as a joke, but suddenly realised they were indeed in the domain of the giant Arctic predators. ‘Wait, you don’t think we’ll run into any polar bears, do you?’ she said, nervously scanning her surroundings.

  ‘Just being prepared,’ said Eddie with a grin. He caught up with Kagan’s snowmobile, and the team began the climb towards the waiting mountain.

  It took ten minutes for the expedition to reach the top of the first slope. Once there, Berkeley batted furiously on Kagan’s shoulder for him to stop. The Russian halted, the others drawing up alongside. ‘There, over there,’ exclaimed the archaeologist, pointing.

  Off to one side was a large flat boulder, tilted at a shallow angle. ‘The shield stone?’ Nina wondered. The rock was roughly circular, and did indeed bear a resemblance to a traditional Viking shield.

  ‘It fits the description, yeah,’ Berkeley replied. He fumbled his notes from a pocket with a gloved hand and studied them, then looked around. ‘There should be a long ridge leading up toward the mountain.’

  ‘That way,’ said Eddie. He indicated a snow-covered rise leading higher, curling lines of wind-whipped snow gusting off its exposed top. ‘We’ll need to watch out, the sides are pretty steep.’

  Nina tried to survey the terrain above, but the ridge faded into a grey haze of fog. ‘Well, we know from the Vikings’ route that there’s a valley up there somewhere. Hopefully it won’t be too—’ She saw Kagan straighten in his seat, alert as a watchdog. ‘What?’

  ‘Stop your engine,’ the Russian told Eddie, issuing the same order in his native language to his men. The snowmobiles fell silent. ‘I hear something.’

  There was indeed a low rumbling noise at the lower limits of hearing. Everyone looked for the source. One of the soldiers spoke in excited Russian and gestured to the south. Low-hanging clouds obscured much of the view, but the sound was clearly getting louder.

  ‘A helicopter!’ Kagan snapped. ‘It is Lock, it must be!’ He swore in Russian.

  ‘We don’t know that for sure,’ said Berkeley, though with little conviction.

  Eddie was more certain. ‘Who else would it be? They made Tova translate the runes, and they figured out where to go the same way we did. Arse chives! They’re going to get there before us!’

  ‘Even if they fly directly to the pit, they will be only a few kilometres ahead of us,’ Kagan insisted. ‘Come on! We must go.’

  He set off again, Berkeley yelping and clinging on tightly with the sudden acceleration. Eddie glared in the direction of the unseen aircraft, then followed. ‘See? Good job I brought my gun after all,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘And a good job they brought those.’ Amongst the equipment on the back of the soldiers’ vehicles was a set of AK-12s: the most modern iteration of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, which despite the addition of tactical rails and polymer parts replacing wood was still instantly recognisable as a direct descendant of the venerable Soviet weapon.

  ‘And I was worried about polar bears,’ Nina moaned.

  ‘Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll crash in the fog,’ Eddie said, before immediately shrugging in resignation. ‘No, I don’t think so either.’

  ‘How long will it take us to get there?’

  ‘No idea – we don’t even know exactly where we’re going.’ He looked up at the mountain, which rose ominously above the fog bank at the higher end of the ridge. ‘We’ve probably got another four or five miles to go. If the weather gets worse . . .’

  He let the worrying statement hang. Nina also chose to keep her worries to herself, instead concentrating on holding on to her husband as the snowmobiles swept past the flat rock and began their ascent.

  The wind bit savagely at the riders as they climbed the exposed ridge. Nina tried to imagine what the trek would have been like for the Vikings, limited to walking pace and with only animal furs to keep out the cold. After the long sea voyage all the way across the Atlantic, the Norse warriors would surely have suffered losses even before reaching the battle.

  And when they got there . . . what were they expecting to fight at Ragnarök? The thought had been at the back of her mind for some time. Eisenhov had said in Russia that whatever was waiting inside the pit was not a real serpent, but it clearly resembled one enough for the Vikings to believe it was a great monster. They had fought it once before, when the men who had later been transformed by legend into gods, like Odin and Thor, had perished.

  So what was waiting for them on the mountain now?

  She considered asking Kagan what else he knew about the Soviet experiments, but he had pulled ahead, the narrowing ridge forcing the snowmobiles to drop into single file and space out to avoid the wakes of snow kicked up by the vehicles ahead. The crosswind picked up as they climbed. ‘Fuck, that’s nippy,’ Eddie muttered, hunching lower over the handlebars.

  ‘You’re not kidding,’ said Nina. ‘She felt almost as cold as in Sweden – after getting out of the river. ‘At least it can’t be as windy at the top, if there’s fog up there.’

  Eddie looked up the ridge again. The bank of obscuring mist was slowly spilling over the lip of the flatter ground at the top, tendrils at its edge being snatched away by gusts blowing across the mountain’s face. But most of the looming grey mass remained squatting in place ahead of them, penned in by rocky slopes on each side. ‘Don’t like the look of that, but there isn’t a way around it. We’ll never get the snowmobiles up those cliffs.’

  ‘We have to go through it to follow the directions on the runes,’ Nina reminded him. ‘If we’re on the right track, that’ll be the vale of Fenrir.’

  ‘Wolf Valley, eh? Bet you’re really glad I brought my gun now, eh?’ He gave her a brief grin, then returned his attention to the task of guiding the snowmobile up the steepening ridge.

  Several more minutes brought the team to the top. The landscape ahead vanished into a pale nothingness, mist shrouding everything. Kagan again signalled for everyone to halt and stop their engines. Silence descended. ‘I cannot hear the helicopter,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t hear anything,’ said Eddie. They were now mostly sheltered from the wind by the valley’s sides. Any other sounds seemed to be swallowed by the fog.

  ‘If they have found the pit and landed, we must catch them before they leave. Dr Berkeley, where do the runes say we must go?’

  Berkeley checked his notes again. ‘Through the vale of Fenrir, then there’s a rock formation they called “the broken finger” pointing up the mountain. We follow that until we get to a plain they called Vigrid – “the place of battle”. If this pit exists, that’s where it is. Just a couple more miles.’

  ‘Then we must move as fast as we can.’ Kagan restarted his engine.

  ‘Careful in the fog,’ Eddie warned. ‘If you hit a boulder at fifty miles an hour, you’ll be fucked.’

  ‘We know what we are doing,’ the Russian told him tersely. He shouted orders to his men, then set off again, considerably faster on the flat than during the climb. The four soldiers followed at equally high speed.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Eddie growled as he restarted his own vehicle. ‘If he flips his snowmobile and breaks open his jar of evil crap
. . .’

  ‘Try not to drive through the puddle,’ said Nina, cringing at the thought.

  They entered the valley. The fog quickly enveloped them, first sapping all colour from the other vehicles and their riders, then leaching away detail to reduce them to nothing more than silhouettes. Even these soon faded – not solely because the fog was getting thicker, but because they were pulling away. ‘They’re going too bloody fast,’ complained Eddie as he eased back the throttle, then made a small but urgent course change to avoid a football-sized rock that materialised in his path. ‘See? If I’d hit that, it might have tipped us over or even ripped off the front ski.’

  ‘You’ve still got your lightning reactions,’ Nina assured him. ‘Although those Russian guys are probably even faster. I mean, they are about twenty years younger than you . . .’

  ‘Tchah!’ He made a rude gesture, then looked at the snow ahead. ‘What the fuck are they doing?’ he said as he saw the weaving skein of treaded ruts split apart into three separate tracks. ‘They’re spreading out. They won’t be able to see each other.’

  ‘I can hardly see them now.’ Nina squinted into the fog, experiencing an unsettling moment of disorientation as she realised it was now so dense that it had blotted out all points of reference, stranding her inside a featureless grey void. ‘No, wait – I can’t see them now! Damn, I thought it was London that was supposed to have all the pea-soupers?’

  ‘Nah, London just stinks of diesel,’ said Eddie. He peered ahead, but the other snowmobiles were completely lost to sight, even the rasp of their engines muted. Reducing speed still further, he picked one of the three diverging tracks and followed it. ‘Hope whoever this is has a clue where they’re going . . .’

  They both strained to see through the surrounding nothingness. The ground became indistinct a mere twenty feet away, the blank snow making the effect even worse. Occasionally it seemed that there were dim shapes at the very fringe of visibility, but they vanished the moment they were focused upon.

  Nina stiffened in her seat at a dull noise from somewhere ahead. ‘What was that?’