Assignment - Black Viking

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Are you ready?” Elgiva called.

  “Let’s go.”

  “You must follow in each step I take. If one of us goes into the sea, it is the end for that one, you understand? The water is too cold to survive in, for more than a few seconds. You must all be very careful.”

  He was grateful for her calm tone. He had not known, two days ago, how remarkable a woman she truly was.

  They left the shelter of the cliff with reluctance and crossed the snow-swept beach toward the jumbled ice that marked the Walk. The ice cakes had formed a kind of jetty, based on the shoal under the surface of the sea, and the breakers smashed and foamed over its sides with desperate fury, as if enraged that they should challenge the sea’s power. The first dozen paces were relatively easy. Elgiva led them down the center of the ice pack.

  They used the rope to steady themselves. Now and then one of them slipped and stumbled to his knees. The air was filled with spray that froze on their coats as they went on. Fortunately, the wind at their backs pushed them onward as if anxious to help them to their end.

  In moments, the dark cliff they had descended was wiped from sight. The world was neither land nor sea, but a confusion of tumbled ice and snow that shook and groaned and creaked against the power of the waves that broke against the windward edge. Durell felt a long slab of ice shift under his weight and slide to one side. He jumped away just in time, was checked by the rope that tied him to Elgiva ahead and Mario behind. His booted foot went out from under him and caught in a crack between the huge ice boulders. For a dreadful instant he felt a pressure as if he were caught in a giant nutcracker. Then the block of ice slid the other way and went down the slope onto the thinner, flatter ice that covered the sea to leeward. He got up, feeling a twinge of pain in his ankle. Elgiva’s gloved hands steadied him.

  “Are you all right?”

  “We’ll go on.”

  “It is not much farther.”

  “I do not see any end to it.”

  She said: “It cannot be far. We must be halfway across now.”

  But she didn’t sound too sure of herself.

  The mainland was out of sight, and there seemed to be nothing ahead but the gray turbulence of the storm and the trembling bridge of ice along which they crawled. Young Gino now kept urging his uncle on; but Elgiva paid attention to nothing .but her carefully chosen footsteps.

  At last she halted.

  “There. There it is.”

  There was a darker shadow ahead in the wind and snow. It was a small island at the end of the Walk, a craggy rock that loomed like the black prow of a ship plunging in the spume and spray that dashed against it. Astonishingly, a light burned high above, where Durell glimpsed a square house like a concrete bunker through a rift in the blowing curtains of snow. But when he started forward, anxious to get off the ice jetty, Elgiva put a snow-crusted glove on his arm and checked him.

  “The gods laughed at us. We cannot get across.”

  She pointed to the ice bridge just ahead, between them and the island shore of Skelleftsvik. The tides and the wind had eroded the jumbled ice that had supported them this far. The ice ahead was thin and flat, showing a darkness under it that betrayed a swift channel current that forced its way between the mainland and the island. Elgiva shook her hooded head and brushed snow from her goggles.

  “It will not support us!” she shouted.

  Durell shrugged. “We must get across. I’ll try it first.”

  “If you go through the ice, you know what it means?”

  He nodded. “It must be done.”

  He waited for the struggling Gino and Mario to join them, then rearranged their safety lines so that he was in the lead. He felt an inner shiver as he contemplated the fragile ice ahead. He could almost see the black, freezing water beneath. But beyond, in the gloom, there was a rocky ledge bearded with ice, and then steps that went up out of sight toward that single light that beckoned as his goal. He had no love for the risk. He had been warned often enough by K Section’s analysts that his survival factor had long run out. But he could not turn back now. There was a wildness in this storm that no man had ever seen before. It had to be checked. He had come a hard, long way to this point. He had to go on.

  He gave Mario and Gino quick instructions, then turned to where Elgiva studied the ice. It was a stretch of about sixty feet, shrouded now and then by mist and snow that blotted out the island. Only the light held steady.

  Elgiva turned her back to the wind and took off her goggles. Her eyes were shining and mysterious, filled with an exaltation that reflected her sympathy with the elements. Something else was there—a kind of wonder as she considered Durell’s tall figure, a salute in the way she touched his arm.

  “Keep to the right, where the current has piled the ice a bit together. It will be thicker there.”

  “When I’m partly across,” Durell shouted in her ear, “Send Gino and Mario after me. You come last.”

  She nodded. She had the serenity of a pagan priestess. “Be lucky,” she said.

  He clambered down among the jagged ice boulders and stepped out upon the flat, snow-blown ice. The wind was stronger, pushing him toward the thin edge where the sea boiled against the ice. His footing was uncertain, trembling under him. He forged ahead quickly. He had to fight an impulse to run ahead in blind panic to reach the shore. That could only mean complete disaster. Each step had to be calculated. And yet the quaking ice underfoot mocked the care he took. Nothing would matter, if the delicate balance of pressures between ice and sea suddenly shifted. He gained twenty feet, then thirty. He heard a thin, cracking sound that filled him with sudden dread. He gave himself no time to think. He quickened his pace carefully. When he was past the halfway mark, he turned and waved to the three dim figures waiting behind him. Mario and Gino began to follow, stepping like blind men, with painful caution. It would not do, Durell thought. They had to be quicker. The trembling under his feet grew more insistent by the moment.

  He cupped his gloved hands and shouted to them. “Come along now, Elgiva!”

  The woman moved at once to obey. Durell turned and went on. He was not far from the shore now. The light in the house above showed him the way. The splintered remains of a wooden pier showed up ahead, the planks chewed up by the pressures of the ice. He reached for a timber, felt his glove slip on the ice that coated it, and with another effort hauled himself off the ice bridge to the solidity of Skelleftsvik’s rocky shore.

  But when at last, gasping, he looked back, he saw only two figures left on the Walk.

  Mario’s chunky form had vanished.

  The wind was demoniacal, cutting at the knitted mask over his face, hurling ice spicules at his goggles and blinding him. Durell stepped back to the Walk. He saw the slender Gino waving both arms, and then snow intervened and there was nothing to be seen. He swore grimly and started back. He could not abandon them. Then the wind slackened and visibility improved. He saw Gino flat on his stomach, reaching into a black gap in the thin ice. If Mario had fallen into the sea, there was no chance . . .

  Durell broke into a run, heedless of the quaking ice under him. Elgiva waved for him to go back. But he could not go back. Gino’s sullen resentment of discipline, his false bravado because of his father’s imprisonment, had not made the boy untrustworthy, after all. He could have left Mario through cowardice, instead of trying to save him. But before he could reach them, he saw Gino rise, hauling backward, and after him came a dark form, the chunky figure of his uncle. The boy had stepped out on a drifting ice floe to help the older man recover the main bridge. It had been a dreadful risk. Durell saw Mario stagger and fall to his knees and then he was with them again, helping the Sicilian up.

  “I was careless,” Mario gasped. “It was stupid of me. You should not have come after me, boy.”

  Gino looked surprised at himself. “I didn’t stop to think, Uncle Mario.”

  “You were very brave. And foolish. But it is the kind of foolishness that may make a
man out of you.”

  “He’s a man now,” Durell said.

  Gino sneered. “I don’t need nothin’ from you. The old guy was about to hit the water. Anybody’d have—” “All right, Gino. Your uncle is grateful. So am I. Get your rifle and let’s get off this jelly.”

  There wasn’t much time left. The ice that had broken off under Mario’s weight was only a warning of things to come. There were other cracking sounds all around them as the pressure of the tide and the wind began to break up the thin bridge to Skelleftsvik. Durell took Elgiva’s hand and they ran for the shore.

  As they jumped for the rocks beyond the broken pier, there came a sharper roar behind them, a scream as if from some monster animal, and there came a rush of

  seas and a tumbling, twisting, breaking of ice. A small black tidal wave poured through the gap broken at last by the wind.

  They were cut off from the mainland now.

  24

  THEY rested in the lee of a stone fence buried in the snow drifts. The island was not more than a mile across, Elgiva said, but it supported several small farms whose houses were dark and abandoned, their dark red shapes distorted by the long snowdrifts over them. There was road up to the concrete laboratory, defined by the lumpy drifts beside it. Durell thumped his arms against his sides to renew circulation. Mario and Gino talked in Italian, in low tones distorted by the screaming wind. The older man put his arm around the boy’s shoulder and hugged him, and Gino said something and started to draw away, then nodded and patted his uncle’s arm.

  Elgiva touched Durell. “Look down there.”

  The wind had died for the moment. The sudden silence left an iron ringing in his ears. Below the bunker on the other side of the hill they had climbed was a small cove, and something dark and whale-shaped lay there, canted a little as if the bow had grounded on the snow-covered beach.

  It was a submarine of Russian design. It was the submarine Durell had been looking for.

  He stood up in the strange stillness. The Arctic midnight was filled with silently falling snow. It was as if the sea itself was momentarily calmed by an omnipotent hand outstretched from the eerie gloom above.

  There was no movement on the sub’s deck or the narrow, winged sail. In the lull, he made out the familiar mountings of rocket launchers, fore and aft; but they were not the large size of Polaris-type missiles. He wondered where the crew might be. If they had occupied the bunker lab, his chances were relatively hopeless. They would be tough and desperate, confounded by the monstrous elements they had unleashed, filled with panic—-and therefore all the more dangerous.

  “Is that the Chinese U-boat?” Elgiva asked.

  “It’s the one they stole from the USSR, according to Colonel Smurov.”

  “What are those strange fittings on the deck?”

  “Rocket launchers. But they’re small. Perhaps good only for atmospheric weather testing . . .” Durell paused. He did not know what system Professor Peter Gustaffson had devised for his weather control. He felt a sudden rage, a desire to blow up and destroy that mechanism down there. It was an ultimate threat to all mankind. It was the inevitable end of a mad course of toying with infinite destruction. The H-bombs, the space race, the secret and dreadful germ warfare vats—and now the tampering with environment, threatening more destruction than any of them. There was no limit to man’s diabolical inventiveness in using good for evil, in choosing death over life.

  “You’re shivering,” Elgiva murmured. “We must move on. It will kill us to rest here much longer.”

  He stood up. “You’re right. You’re a remarkable woman, do you know that?”

  “I am only a poet,” she said. “And perhaps not a very good one, after all. I dream of the past, and the awful future lies before us while I hide from it.”

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  He signaled to Mario and Gino, and they stood up and dusted snow from their rifles. Elgiva reached for her own weapon, but he checked her and took the rifle from her. He could see only her eyes through her woolen face mask. They widened as he kept the rifle from her gloved hand. “Just one more thing, Elgiva.”

  “What is it?”

  “Before we go on—”

  “Don’t you trust me with the gun? I am an excellent shot.”

  “I don’t doubt that. Back in Saltsjobaden, at your house outside Stockholm, you proved you were a good shot, indeed.”

  Her eyes went blank. “I do not understand—”

  “But you do. You shot Colonel Traskin, didn’t you?” She turned her head and looked at Mario and Gino, who were crouched behind the shelter of the stone wall. Then she looked up at the blockhouse laboratory on the crest of the snow-clad hill above. She was very still.

  “How do you know?” she asked quietly. “It is a terrible thing that you suggest—”

  “It’s not a suggestion. It’s fact. Elgiva, you killed Colonel Traskin to make Smurov suspicious of me. Why?”

  “How can you be so sure?” she insisted.

  “Traskin was killed by one shot. You showed us the broken window and said the bullet came from outside, on the beach. True, the window was broken; and only one bullet had killed Traskin. But I found another slug in the woodwork of your room there. I dug it out. Olsen, our man in Stockholm, has it. I’m sure it will match up with a gun you own, which Olsen has been ordered to find. So you fired two shots. One, the first, killed Colonel Traskin. Then you ran outside, fired through the window on the beach, and then went in again and claimed that an unknown assassin had killed Traskin.”

  Her head under the fur-trimmed hood turned this way and that, as if seeking refuge from his implacable words. He wished he could see her face under her ski mask. Her shoulders lifted and fell, in a gesture of resignation. He told himself to be very careful. She was a brilliant and unpredictable woman.

  “Why did you do it, Elgiva?” he asked.

  There was a distant roaring far off in the gray darkness, a sound of rising wind approaching them at hurricane speed.

  “I had to.” She took off her goggles to look at him. Her eyes were clear and brilliant. “Traskin told me they would never let Peter go. Even if they found him and took him from the Chinese, they would not give him back to me. And they would make me serve them as a guide. Can you understand how I felt? Traskin was a scientist, too. His superiors in Moscow wanted Peter, just as much as your people in Washington would like to have him. No, don’t deny it. You’re all cruel, dedicated to violence, to war and rivalry, whatever the cost to mankind. And I love Peter. He never wanted anything like this.” She lifted an arm toward the sound of the approaching wind. “It is the end of everything. Man has climbed up from the ravages of nature for thousands of years. And poor Peter has given man the weapon with which to commit suicide. Raw nature will win and laugh over our graves, and end all poetry and beauty.”

  “But you killed him,” Durell insisted.

  “He and Smurov—they wanted to take me with them. Without you, of course. North, by plane, to this place. To show them the way, as I’ve shown the way to you.”

  “Traskin was a quiet man.”

  “But obedient. He took orders. He did as he was told. Nothing I said could change his mind. He tried to force me to leave the house with him. It was his gun I used. I pretended to be willing to go along, and when he relaxed a bit, I grabbed at the gun and it—it went off. I did just as you described. I pretended someone had shot Traskin from the beach, and hid his gun.”

  “Yes. It had to be you, Elgiva. Everyone else was accounted for, at another place in Stockholm. There was no one else. And the bullet I dug from your wall clinched it.”

  She put on her goggles again and her head lifted in defiance. “What will you do to me now, here in this place? We are all doomed, after this is finished.”

  “You can help me to save Peter,” he said.

  “For your Pentagon to pick his brains and use the invention he created to destroy the world?”

  “No. You can have him back
again.”

  “Your superiors would not permit it.”

  “I’ll arrange it. I promise.”

  “I do not believe you. I know the sort of man you are. But I have no choice, I suppose. I’ve gone too far along this road with you.”

  “Just trust me,” he said. “Now let’s get on.”

  The wind struck at them like the vicious swipe of a wild animal’s paw, enraged that they might escape its brute power. Ice hissed and rattled along the crusted snow beside the road. In an instant, the house was wiped from sight, and the dark air was filled with a blinding horizontal spray of murderous crystals that slanted through their face masks and stung and froze their cheeks, caked on their goggles, and made their hands numb on the weapons they carried. Durell looked back once, but there was nothing to see along the Walk. Nobody could follow them or give them help. They were cut off as effectively as if they had landed on the moon.

  If it hadn’t been for the single, lighted window on the hilltop, they would have been lost in that instant. Durell pulled Elgiva up the hill after him, and felt the tug on his life rope as Mario and Gino struggled after them. It was not more than a hundred yards, but it seemed to take forever. He did not think they could make it. The storm was more furious than ever. But they had to make it. There was no hope of return now.

  Just before they reached the building, he handed Elgiva her rifle. She held it in both hands, her head turned toward him. She looked like something carved from ice and snow.

  Then she nodded stiffly and he went up to the door of the concrete building.

  The door opened as Durell approached.

  25

  THE MAN was tall and slender, with the Mongol cheekbones and flat face of a northern Chinese. His thick black hair was shot through with mature gray, and he wore dark-rimmed glasses over somber, if startled, intelligent eyes. The bitter wind and snow shook him as he stared at them. Behind him, two shorter, chunkier men in high-throated black naval uniforms trimmed with black