Assignment - Black Viking

by Edward S. Aarons

  He narrowly missed another savage heel stamping down to crush his throat. Olaf looked dark and enormous, towering over him. The man’s teeth gleamed in a tight grin. His yellow eyes were tigerish. Durell tried to get to his feet and Olaf kicked him again. He rolled away under a table, toward the console. A chair came into his grip as one of the white-smocked technicians scrambled hastily away. He hurled the chair at Olaf, but Olaf ducked and it crashed into some of the machinery. Sparks flew. The icy wind had begun to roar down through the broken ceiling window. Rolling again, he saw Gino’s olive face at the skylight, snow blowing in around him. Gino had his rifle ready, but his young eyes were uncertain.

  “We finish it this time, Cajun,” Olaf grunted. “You are too late.”

  “You can’t stop the storm with that rocket,” Durell gasped. He was on his haunches, eyes wary, watching the technicians gathered across the room. They were unarmed. But the sailors from the sub had weapons, and would use them if Olaf so directed them. But Olaf still grinned, taking pleasure in a personal resolution of their enmity.

  “We do not stop the storm,” Olaf said. “We make certain it goes on. Then our job is done. I have decided.”

  “That’s not what Dr. Tsung wants.”

  “Tsung is a coward, afraid of what he has created. But I fear nothing. It is the end for you, Cajun.”

  Durell saved his breath. Behind the giant Olaf, he saw Sigrid stir, a slim figure near the sparking machinery. Her face was very pale, as white as the snow that blew down from the broken skylight.

  “Olaf, listen to me,” she whispered.

  He did not turn his head. His eyes watched Durell. “Tell your boy to jump down now. Don’t wait.”

  Olaf had a heavy PPSH in his hand.

  “Gino?” Durell called. “Did you hear him?”

  Gino’s face disappeared from the broken skylight. Olaf grinned. “The boy is foolish. He will die up there when the rocket is flown.”

  “Gino!” Durell called again.

  The wind howled at the broken glass and cut itself into thin slivers of sound that fell into the big room. It grew colder inside by the minute. The lights flickered, turned blue and dim, then brightened again.

  Sigrid spoke in a thin, rapid voice. “Olaf, I have pleaded with you before, I told you that for the sake of our old love, of everything between us, you must give this up and help my father to live.”

  “Be quiet,” Olaf grunted.

  “I will not. I never thought you would shoot me. I have been asleep all these years. A foolish girl. A stupid girl.” She took a step closer to the machinery, where Durell had thrown the chair. “You must not kill Durell. You must not fire the rocket. Listen to me, Olaf. I beg of you.” Her words were a desperate prayer. The technicians, gathered in a knot at the far end of the room, watched with wondering, Oriental faces. Durell did not dare move as he looked into the dark muzzle of Olaf’s gun. The man’s eyes glared with a wild determination to follow his end toward destruction. Nothing could stop him. Sigrid’s plea was hopeless.

  Then Gino’s rifle suddenly blasted the stillness.

  Durell caught the movement of the boy’s head in the skylight just an instant before Olaf. He threw himself to the right as Olaf's gun smashed a bullet at him, then spun to his feet and charged the dark, massive figure. Sigrid screamed and hurled herself forward and Olaf back-handed her to the floor. She lay there like a broken doll. Gino’s rifle crashed again, and Olaf suddenly lurched, then spun with feline speed through the door toward the rocket trolley.

  Gino leaped lightly down from the roof.

  “Cover them,” Durell snapped, indicating the frightened technicians. Then he dived after Olaf.

  Iron stairs rang under his heels. He had snatched up his rifle as it lay beside Sigrid, and his mind had filled with a dark fury as he saw the girl’s inert body. He did not know if Olaf had killed her or not. No time to think of her now. He came to the end of the steps.

  High and anxious voices, shouted commands, echoed down the dripping concrete corridor ahead. Lights in wire cages cast an eerie blue glow. The storm raging overhead was soundless at this depth. A wild-eyed sailor plunged from a doorway. Durell shot from the hip and saw concrete chip and spray above the man’s head. The sailor backed away, against others trying to follow. Durell slammed a steel door against them, made it secure with a quick drop of a bar, and looked down the corridor after Olaf. Machinery whined and hummed. He went on, more cautiously now, up a steel ladder to a small gallery. As he came through the door, a shot spattered on the wall beside him. He went on through with a rush, saw Olaf struggling alone to manipulate wheels and buttons that hoisted the needle-nosed rocket to an opening in the concrete silo overhead.

  “Hold it, Olaf!”

  The big man darted behind the missile, fired wildly. Durell jumped from the gallery after him. He heard a loud ticking, a humming, and desperately threw switches and punched buttons whose operation he did not know. Something sparked and sputtered inside the missile. He heard a door slam and a gust of Arctic air blew into the silo.

  Olaf had plunged out into the storm.

  Durell ran to the door and opened it. The wind blew the hood back from his head and clamped icy fingers on his face. For a moment he could see nothing in the unnatural, raging tempest. But he heard another dim shot and turned through the snow heaped up outside the doorway; he headed left, where the roar of breakers at the foot of the cliff competed with the wild keening of the wind.

  The gray gloom of sub-Arctic dawn was shot through with reflecting curtains of snow that caught the glow of light from inside the bunker. Ice glared underfoot. Durell hunkered down behind a snow-capped rock, searching for Olaf. He could not spot him. But the shot had come from above the ice-bound cove where the submarine was moored. Another hour, and the ice would trap the vessel there forever, bound in glittering chains that no human power could break. Durell ran and slid toward the edge of the cliff.

  “Durell!”

  Olaf’s heavy voice crashed through the tumult of the 'Storm. Durell felt dismay as he realized it came from the left and behind him. Olaf had maneuvered to get Durell between himself and the cliff. His form bulked darkly in the swirling snow, plunging in a charge that would sweep Durell over and down into the abyss.

  Durell squeezed the trigger of his rifle. But nothing happened. Ice had frozen it. Apparently the same thing had happened to Olaf’s pistol. It hurtled through the air at Durell’s head, and he ducked just in time. It vanished into the void behind him.

  “It is too late for all of us, Durell!”

  Durell threw his rifle at him. Olaf slapped it aside as if it were a twig. He grinned in his dark beard, and his eyes were alive with malevolence. His arms came wide to grip Durell in a deadly embrace that would drive him over the cliff to his doom.

  The man’s breath puffed hotly in his face.

  “If I must go, all the world goes with me,” Olaf gasped. “And you go first, understand?”

  The man’s strength was enormous. Durell tried to slip from his grip, but his footing gave on the icy rock and Olaf lifted him and shoved him hard toward the edge of the cliff. For an instant, the snow and sky and open hatch of the missile silo gyrated wildly in his vision. Then his boot caught and held and he staggered to the left, grabbing at Olaf’s arm to haul the big man abruptly forward. Olaf yelled, fell, and slid toward the edge of the cliff.

  And a gun cracked dimly through the storm.

  Sigrid was at the silo opening, a rifle in her hand. Olaf half rose, and Durell yelled at Sigrid to hold her fire. He wanted Olaf alive. But as Olaf stood, a sudden wild burst of wind roared over Skelleftsvik, and struck him like the flat of a board. For two seconds Durell, too, was blown helplessly toward the cliff. Then he caught a tiny outcrop of frozen shrubbery and clung to it desperately while the insane wind beat at him. His ears were deafened by its uncanny rage. There was nothing left in the world but that final cyclonic blast that leveled snow and ice with its force.

  Whe
n it ended, Olaf was gone, swept over the edge of the cliff. Sigrid ran toward Durell, her arms wide to keep her balance.

  “Get down!” he shouted. “Down!”

  She did not hear. When she came within reach, he grabbed her and pulled her into the lee of the rock outcrop at the edge of the cliff.

  “The missile!” he yelled. “I aborted the flight—pulled all the switches—it’ll go any minute—”

  Then the explosion came.

  Inside the silo, there was a dull rumbling that lasted for one long breath. Then the earth shook and a sheet of flame and a cloud of smoke enveloped them, tom by the wind.

  It was like the end of the world.

  27

  FOR SIX hours the storm continued to rage.

  No one knew if it would ever end.

  Durell had no time to think about it. Sigrid was badly hurt, and her father, Professor Peter, had to be saved. The silo and part of the laboratory was wrecked by the rocket explosion, but the rest of the solid bunker had suffered little damage except for the fires that put the computers out of operation. The submarine crew had suffered some casualties, but Elgiva and Gino and Mario were unhurt.

  While the wind still howled, a crude bridge was thrown across the gap in the Walk and Dr. Eric was brought to Skelleftsvik. He began operating at once on his brother Peter. The outcome was still in doubt when the wind suddenly died.

  The silence halted everything.

  Durell lifted exhausted eyes to the concrete ceiling. The others also raised their heads in stunned, mute surprise. Durell went to one of the bunker ports to look out. The light was brighter. The snow had stopped. The world was a dazzling, crystalline expanse of snow and ragged, spume-tossed sea. Mist crawled along the shore, and he was dimly surprised to see how near the mainland the island really was. The effort to cross the Walk had made the way seem endless. But now he could see the Gustaffson house across the cove, and the white hull of the Vesper was still safe in the lee of the cliff over there.

  A single shaft of sunlight pierced the wild clouds and moved like a searchlight across the sea. It shone in his face briefly, and held in its brief moment of brightness the warmth and promise of spring.

  “Perhaps,” Dr. Tsung said wearily, “it would have ended by itself, anyway. We cannot know. It seemed to us that we had started a chain reaction in the atmosphere that nothing could halt. We were desperate. Professor Peter told us, before he fell into his coma, that only a revision of the mechanism and a change in formula for the rocket charge in the atmosphere might reverse the weather process. So we came here. But it was too late, for Peter was unconscious. And I did not know what to do.”

  Elgiva came from the operating room, stripping off rubber gloves. She had been assisting Eric. Her face was pale, and her eyes lacked the sureness they once had.

  “No man knows what the ancient gods intended,” she said quietly. “Evil men will always seek the road to power and death. Olaf is gone. Maybe Peter will die, too. But what happened will never take place here again. Not through Peter or through you, Dr. Tsung. The explosion of the missile destroyed everything Peter had designed over many years. His process for manipulating climate is gone.”

  Tsung said hesitantly: “If he recovers, he may rebuild it—”

  “No.” Elgiva shook her head. “He will never be the same again. Even if he recovers from the operation, he will not have the capacity to work that he had before. His knowledge will be dead. I would rather that Peter died today, than to see it survive and have him used as you and your masters used him, Dr. Tsung.”

  Twenty minutes later, there was the sound of the first plane overhead. It was a Swedish Dragon attack jet, and it was followed by the drone of heavier planes, and then the breathy chop of helicopters. Durell put on his heavy coat and went outside.

  The sun was shining.

  He blinked in the glare that reflected off the ice-coated world. Water dripped, ran, gurgled and chuckled as it melted off the ice-encrusted, smoke-blackened bunker. He drew a long, slow breath. They might all have died after he pulled the switches that aborted the flight and exploded the missile. But if Olaf had succeeded, then the added charge he had tried to send up might have truly tipped the balance between life and death for everyone.

  He stood quietly watching parachutes blossom against the ragged, blown edges of the clouds that fled northward, like the tattered remains of a dark and hostile army. Then he walked toward the big Viking house that Eric had built. Men were already working on the Vesper, restoring the spars that had been damaged by the storm.

  “Hey, Mr. Durell?”

  Gino ran after him, his young face eager and excited. Durell waited for the boy.

  “You did fine, Gino. I want to thank you.”

  “Listen, my uncle Mario says I can go back to the States, if you sponsor me. He says I wouldn’t have to worry about my pop being in jail, if you say a good word for me—see, like I could study, maybe, and use the money Pop gave me to get a job like yours. Could I do that, Mr. Durell?”

  “It would take some years in college. But why not? I’ll talk to General McFee about you.”

  He walked on, alone.

  The sun grew brighter and warmer. He began to think about the reports he had to write for McFee. By the time he reached Eric’s house, climbing the steep cliff above the Vesper’s mooring, Swedish paratroopers were scattering all over Skelleftsvik, boarding the nuclear sub that lay half-aground in the cove below the bunker. There would be international recriminations, he supposed, and a certain amount of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get the vessel returned to the USSR. Peking would deny it all, of course. But Dr. Tsung seemed ready to talk his head off. But that was not his job. His work was finished—almost finished, he thought.

  The great hall of the Viking house was crowded with armed officers and men from the Swedish paratroop company that had air-dropped as soon as the storm abated. Baron Uccelatti signaled him from a comer of the room and Durell joined the urbane Palermitan nobleman.

  “You look tired, my friend,” said Uccelatti, “but at least you are alive. When we heard the explosion, I feared for you.” As always, Uccelatti was quiet and calm. His smile was amused. “I have considered our mutual debts, Cajun, and I think we are both paid off. Square, eh?”

  “I couldn’t pay you enough, baróne,” said Durell. “But I’m not finished yet.”

  “You have much red tape now, eh?”

  “More than enough to untangle.”

  “I am thinking—there is so much confusion here—if we slip out in the Vesper, they would have much trouble getting us back. We could go down the Baltic in Finnish waters. You must decide now. Naturally, you must report soon at Stockholm. For myself, I shall go on to Helsinki. I do not wish worldwide publicity, you understand.”

  “No more than I,” Durell said. “But I must consult with Sigrid.”

  “She is already aboard, awaiting your arrival.” Uccelatti laughed. “She agrees that a quiet day or two would do you both much good.”

  True enough, Durell thought. There might be temporary arrest if he stayed, endless questions. His job demanded a first report to General McFee. It would be awkward to answer questions right now to the Swedish military. Sooner or later, he would have to. But there was no hurry. “Let’s go,” he said quietly.

  An hour later the Vesper was under full sail, boiling east and south along the Lapland coast for Finnish waters. They had set out openly, and when a young Swedish trooper ran to halt them, Baron Uccelatti had used his most aristocratic manner to confuse the guard, blandly stating he had official authority to proceed to Stockholm. Sigrid had flashed cards and documents that made the officer hesitate, biting his Up, and then trudge back up the hill to question his headquarters by radio. By the time the first helicopter came beating overhead with wild signals for them to return, they had reached Finnish territorial seas and nothing could be done to stop them.

  Ice still floated, shimmering blue and white in the restless sea. But the last cloud
s had vanished as if by a miracle—a man-made miracle, Durell thought grimly, one they could all gladly forget. The sun felt warm and friendly again.

  He went below to find Sigrid. She was not in her cabin.

  He turned to his own, and she was there in his bunk, studying the miniaturized transistor radio he’d never had occasion to use. It occurred to him that Sigrid never stopped working. He would have to call General McFee on that special wavelength now. Or soon. He looked at Sigrid, took the radio from her, decided it could wait.

  “Angry man,” she murmured.

  “I’m not angry, Sigrid.”

  “You look so—”

  “Annoyed?”

  She turned her blue eyes upward. The Vesper moved easily through the unsettled sea. The Sicilian crew moved happily on deck at their work, glad to be heading south again to more familiar waters.

  “I have been thinking of Olaf,” Sigrid said. “You were always right, of course. He was a dreadful man. I thought I was in love with him. I thought he loved me, too. I never dreamed he would let Papa die—”

  “Your father will live,” Durell said.

  “Yes. And I shall see him later, when this is all finished and things are quiet again and I can tell him how sorry I am that I doubted him and believed, to the end, that Olaf would help us if I could only convince him—” Durell smiled. “Take it easy, Sigrid.”

  “I am nervous,” she said.

  “You? That’s not like you.”

  “I hate apologies.”

  “None are needed.”

  “Yes. And I hate this work. I am not really of a temperament to continue in it. Not after I so misjudged Olaf.” She shuddered violently. “I might have killed us all. Killed you, and Papa—and the whole world.” She turned on his bunk, and he could not help but be aware of the smooth, lithe curve of her hip and thigh. She propped her chin in her hand, wincing as her shoulder wound sent a pang through her. It was only a flesh wound; but it was uncomfortable enough, Durell thought. But she was young and strong and scarcely aware of it. There were bruises on her tanned face, where Olaf’s fist had cruelly beaten her. One comer of her mouth was slightly puffed. Somehow, it only served to make her look more appealing. She watched him with great, innocent eyes that glistened with unshed tears. “I’ve been such a fool, darling man. Sam, would you leave your work and stay in Stockholm with me?”