by Rob Jones
“What did he mean by that?”
“He was just winding you up,” Scarlet said. “He’s obviously a total tossrag.”
Hawke knew it was more than that, and by the sound of her voice, so did Lea, but now was not the time. “Listen, I presume you have a lighter about your person, Cairo?”
“C’est une bonne idée,” Vincent said. “I can hear that damned snake moving around in the straw.”
Scarlet’s reply came a second later when Hawke heard the rotation of a sparkwheel and Scarlet’s face was suddenly in front of him, amber in the glow of the tiny butane flame. “Bien sûr,” she said with a cat-like glance at Vincent.
“I knew I could rely on you.”
“Just call me Zippo,” she said, looking at Lea with a smug grin.
“Like Zippo the clown or Zippo the climbing monkey?” Lea said.
“All right, let’s just get on,” said Hawke, interrupting Scarlet’s reply before it left her lips. “We need to find a way…”
His words were stopped by a strange grating noise which had begun to fill the small cavern.
“What the hell is that?” Scarlet asked.
Vincent frowned. “Sounds like metal scraping against rock.”
“No – something’s moving,” Scarlet said.
Lea stared at the floor. “She’s right! The floor’s moving.”
Hawke realized they were right – the floor was moving. It was almost imperceptible, but slowly he was moving closer to the wall behind him. Worse, he realized Vincent and Scarlet seemed to be moving away from him and Lea at the same time.
“Get this straw out of the way!” he shouted, and began to kick the straw matting away with his boot.
The others did the same but soon wished they hadn’t. Beneath the straw was a metal grated floor that was divided in two and joined in the center. Now, the two halves were retracting toward their separate sides of the cavern, and beneath the grating was a deep pit of snakes sliding over one another in a mass of hissing, slithering tangles.
“Oh – it’s my lifelong dream!” Scarlet’s words were heavy with sarcasm.
“So when the grated floor is fully retracted,” Lea said slowly, “we’ve got nowhere to go but down. Have I got this right?”
Hawke looked grim. “Yes.”
The snake Sala had dropped into the cavern slid down over the edge of the grating and joined the others.
“Not digging this one, Joe,” Lea said.
“I’m not exactly cock-a-hoop over it, either.”
Vincent frowned. “Translation, please.”
“He says let’s get the fuck out of here,” Scarlet said.
The floor continued to slide back into the walls. Now, Hawke and Lea were divided from Scarlet and Vincent by almost a yard.
Hawke strained his eyes around the dimly lit cavern. If the grated floor was retracting like this then it must mean the walls weren’t particularly thick. Sala’s goons wouldn’t have been able to carve the retraction slits into them otherwise, and that gave him hope.
“This isn’t a natural cavern,” he said. “This whole thing is man-made.”
“You think?” Lea said. “Looks pretty realistic to me.”
“Looks realistic, sure, but looks can be deceiving.”
Scarlet sighed. “Ain’t that the truth.”
“I noticed it on the way down – the chute was obviously man-made, and I think all of this is too.”
The floor continued to push back. Now they were on ledges just a few inches wide.
“These grates can’t be rolling back into solid rock,” Hawke continued. “Also, think about where we are – we fell thirty feet from Sala’s study but that was on the top floor. This can’t be the bedrock. This whole place is artificial and if you ask me these walls are fake. It’s just some hideous theater where Sala can watch his victims die.”
As he spoke, he turned on the ledge and pulled out his gun. He aimed it at the rock above Scarlet’s head and fired.
She ducked and the bullet blasted a hole through the rock.
“Thanks for the warning, darling!”
“My pleasure, Cairo.”
“But it worked!” said Lea.
“So get shooting!” Hawke screamed.
They got busy emptying their magazines into the rock face, which they quickly realized was as Hawke had surmised – totally fake and built out of some kind of plaster. Seconds later the holes were big enough to climb through, and they made their way out of the pit with seconds to spare as the floor fully retracted with a heavy thud.
They were now standing on opposite sides of Sala’s killing room and saw it was just as Hawke had described – nothing more than a set made for killing people. It was housed inside what looked like the furnace room.
“That was a close one,” Lea said.
“You can say that again,” Scarlet said. “Just as well we sent Ryan down with Victoria or there’d be a shortage of Huggies in Andorra for the next week and half.”
Vincent frowned. “Why don’t you talk in English?!”
“It’s not worth translating, Vincent,” Hawke said, scowling at Scarlet.
“So what now?” Lea said.
Hawke clenched his jaw. “We need to get this axe back to base because it looks like Sala has a head start on us.”
He scanned the room and saw two doors. One led to a set of metal steps going up to the house, but the other opened out onto stone steps carved out of rock.
“That’s the real bedrock down there,” Hawke said. “Not like Sala’s theater. I say we see where this takes us – we have no idea how many men he’s left up in the main house.”
They made their way down the steps and quickly found themselves in a series of tunnels carved into the rock deep at the base of the château.
“Your Zippo is required again, Cairo.”
Scarlet fired her lighter up and joined Hawke at the front.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. We have to get out of here, darlings and it’s this way! I see light!”
Scarlet led the way in the gloom using only her lighter for illumination, and they made their way along the carved rock tunnel until reaching another small cavern, only this time it was the real thing. Ahead of them they saw the unmistakable sight of moonlight in a narrow fissure in the rock face outside. Hawke estimated they were halfway between Sala’s morbidly theatrical snake pit and freedom.
“I think we’re almost there,” he said.
But then they turned the corner and a terrible vision of torture and suffering met their eyes.
“What the hell is that?” Scarlet said, horrified.
Vincent recoiled in shock.
Hawke looked at the far wall in the cavern and saw what had once been a man was now strung up on the slimy rock face. They moved slowly over to him and by the light of Scarlet’s Zippo they were able now to see something that horrified all of them. It was obviously a human skeleton, but pieces of flesh were hanging from parts of the frame here and there, and what looked like a desiccated heart was snagged on the bottom of a badly deteriorated rib cage. In a hideous kind of grim mockery, there were still two shoes on its feet and above its head was a strange apparatus involving a bowl and a burned out candle was in a lantern on a nearby table.
“That’s not nice at all,” Lea said, covering her mouth.
Vincent made the sign of the cross. “Mon dieu…”
Hawke leaned in closer, the terrifying decayed corpse flickering in the warm glow of the lighter flame. “You know what I’m thinking?”
“That at least he died with his boots on?” Scarlet said.
Hawke gave her a look. “No, funnily enough I was not thinking that.”
“Then do enlighten us.”
Lea spoke next, her voice trembling in the damp cave. “I think I know what you’re thinking, Joe.”
“Oh, someone just tell me!” Scarlet said.
Lea spoke next. “That what’s left of this guy has more than a passi
ng resemblance to what old Maxim Vetrov ended up looking like.”
Hawke nodded grimly.
That is exactly what he was thinking.
“And what do we make of that?” Scarlet said. “That we’re looking at the corpse of someone who tried to take the elixir?”
Hawke shook his head. “I’m not sure of anything anymore. All I know is we need to get the other half of this axe before Álvaro Sala gets his grubby hands on it. If this is how he treats people now, just imagine what he’ll do when he gets hold of whatever power’s lurking in Thor’s tomb. His hammer alone could have unimaginable powers.”
And with that sobering thought, they made their way out onto the mountainside and called the chopper up from El Serrat.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Stockholm
After clearing customs at Bromma Stockholm Airport the ECHO team, plus Vincent and Victoria jumped into a hired Toyota Hilux and drove east to the city as fast as they could. It was a little before morning rush hour and Hawke was surprised by the easy flow of the traffic as they left Kungsholmen and crossed the bridge by the famous Town Hall on their way into central Stockholm.
Joe Hawke slowed the Hilux and looked suspiciously along the Centralbron which snaked away to the south. It divided the main island of Gamla stan, or Old Town, and the small ‘Knights’ Islet’ known to locals as Riddarholmen. He knew there was little chance of finding Sala in a city of this size, but there was a good chance he was somewhere in the vicinity of the history museum.
They passed the Sheraton on Tegelbacken and spent a tense few moments at some red lights opposite the Aftonbladet tabloid newspaper building. The view to their right overlooked the harbor, and was framed by the famous Riddarholm Church, the burial place of the Swedish monarchs.
Beyond that the impressive prospect of Södermalm stretched up into the gray Scandinavian sky. Closer to their truck, a young woman opened up a small café on the ground floor of the Aftonbladet building and set out some chairs and tables, promising another day of cinnamon buns and fika to an unsuspecting citizenry. It was a beautiful scene, but after letting Sala and the repulsive Smets slip through their fingers back in Andorra, Hawke was more on-edge than usual.
The lights turned green and he rolled the Hilux gently forward in the traffic until he was a few yards from the rear fender of a metropolitan bus trundling east on Fredsgatan. The bus stopped outside a department store and Hawke overtook it and emerged from the side street into Gustav Adolfs torg, a smart public square named after Gustav II, the 17th king who established Sweden as a major European power after winning the Thirty Years War. Hawke glanced momentarily at the statue of the old king, high on his horse and pointing his sword imperiously at the kungliga, or Royal Palace at the other end of the Norrbro bridge.
“Hope all this still standing when we fly out,” Scarlet mused.
They drove around the square’s roundabout, passing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Royal Opera building before making their way along Strömgatan and passing into Östermalm. This was Stockholm’s answer to London’s Mayfair or New York’s SoHo, and boasted the most expensive property prices in the whole of Sweden. It was also where the Swedish History Museum was located, and after parking up in a side street to the south of the museum, Hawke and the others emerged into the Stockholm summer drizzle and crossed the street.
They headed toward the entrance, a modest affair beneath a sign which read HISTORISKA MUSEET when they heard the sound of a single gunshot and then a woman’s desperate scream.
Hawke looked at the others. “We’re too late!”
Scarlet unceremoniously yanked a gun from her jacket. “So let’s get in there, Tonto!”
They slipped through the entrance and quickly worked out the scream had come from the Viking History section. No one was surprised about that, and they ran there as fast as they could in stark contrast to the hundreds of members of the public who were running for the exits.
A security alarm began to trill loudly down all of the corridors and outside Hawke heard the faint and familiar sound of police sirens. “Things are about to get lively here – we have to hurry.”
They ran up a flight of stairs and along another short corridor before reaching the Viking History section, but when they got there what they saw chilled them. A man in a museum uniform was lying dead on the floor and another man was holding a terrified woman in a similar uniform hostage with a knife at her throat. Marcus Deprez and Dasha Vetrov were standing behind him. Hawke could still see the gash on his temple where he had struck him with the shoe back in Andorra.
“Where’s your organ grinder?” Hawke asked, noticing no sign of either Sala or Smets.
“No closer,” Deprez said. “Or my man here will tear open her throat.”
Victoria took a step back and gasped in horror, but Ryan put his hand on her shoulder to calm her. “Take it easy – it’s just a bluff.”
Dasha blew a large purple bubble. It popped in her mouth and then she spat the wad of gum on the polished tiled floor before sliding a fresh piece in her mouth. She spoke in rapid Russian.
“She says,” Deprez drawled, “that you killed her brother and she will torture you to death for it.”
Hawke didn’t reply, but carefully weighed the situation up. Deprez was standing next to a display of Viking weapons, specifically a large stainless steel and glass case holding axe handles.
“Tell her it’s a date,” Hawke said.
Deprez said nothing but pulled a gun from his pocket and put the butt of the weapon through the top of the case. He smashed the glass into hundreds of razor-sharp shards. “You let me leave with this or we’ll kill her.”
He put his hand in the case and pulled out the other fragment of the Axe of Baldr. It was without a doubt the other half of the one Ryan had in the bag slung over his shoulder.
“Just let the woman go and we’ll talk,” Hawke said.
“I know who you are – Hawke and Donovan… When you’re dead I will shit on your graves,” Deprez hissed.
“Shit on your graves!” repeated the goon holding the knife.
Dasha laughed and blew another bubble with the gum in her mouth.
“Language, please!” Scarlet said, feigning disgust. “There are ladies present, not to mention Ryan.”
“I’m standing right here and still she says it,” Ryan said, deflated.
Deprez focussed on Hawke. “Drop your weapons.”
Hawke and the others did as they were told. He crouched slowly and put his gun on the floor before standing back up with his hands raised in the air. The next thing he knew, the goon was staggering back from the woman with a knife in his neck. Hawke turned and saw Scarlet had thrown the knife she kept on her belt.
Deprez and Dasha had the axe and turned on their heels and ran while the hostage screamed and scampered away. Lea and Vincent took off after them while Hawke stormed forward and drove a tightly clenched fist into the wounded goon’s stomach.
The man wheezed hard and doubled over, giving Hawke time to bring up his knee and grab the back of the man’s head at the same time. Driving his knee up and pulling his head down simultaneously, he tested the hypothesis about immovable objects and unstoppable forces. The conclusion came in the form of a severe crunching sound as his nose splattered all over his face and showered Hawke’s knee in a thick coating of blood.
Hawke pulled the man’s head back up by the ears and slammed his fist into his broken face, once again hitting the nose. The goon howled in pain as he stumbled back a few steps, but Hawke had finished playing and after propelling a well-aimed kick into the Belgian thug’s groin he ended the game with another savage roundhouse punch to his lower jaw. He sent him flying back into one of the display cases where he landed with smack and slid to the floor unconscious in a shower of broken glass and antique pottery.
Hawke watched with amusement as the dust settled and an old Viking chamber pot slid onto his head.
“That’ll teach him to be a potty mouth,”
Scarlet said, pulling her knife from his neck and wiping it clean on his shoulder.
Hawke ignored it, and reloaded his gun. Further down the exhibition room Vincent and Deprez were out of sight but Lea was fighting with Dasha.
Hawke, Scarlet and Ryan ran towards her with a confused Victoria a step behind, but it turned out there was no need for the heroics. Before they got anywhere near the fight, Lea had snatched up one of the many fine examples of Dane Axes and incapacitated the Russian woman with it, swinging the light, carbon steel blade in a sweeping arc at her stomach.
Dasha Vetrov leaped back to avoid being cut in half, giving Lea time to bring the other end of the heavy oak haft across into her face at speed, breaking her jaw and knocking her out. She collapsed on the floor in a heap and Lea leaned casually on the axe’s long, wooden handle. “And you stay there too, ya grubby little pox!”
Hawke arched an eyebrow as he stared at the unconscious woman. “I see she didn’t make the cut.”
Lea rolled her eyes. “Is that the best you can some up with?”
“Well, axe a silly question and…”
“Just stop it. Right. Now.”
“Gotcha – come on, it’s time to split.”
“I mean it, Joe. You’re just not funny. We’ve been through this before.”
“Just because she couldn’t handle your charms, don’t take it out on me.”
“Cut it out,” she said with a sideways glance.
“Sorry – ah! Now you see the fun we can have, at last!”
Their banter was cut short by the sound of gunfire in the next room, and they ran forward to find Vincent Reno bleeding out on the floor. Deprez had shot him and he was down.
Victoria screamed and covered her mouth in shock.
“Jesus!” Scarlet said, kneeling beside the Frenchman. “We need an ambulance!”
Lea pulled out her phone and it was then Hawke saw Deprez, lurking at the rear of the room beside the fire exit. He could easily have exploited the disarray to escape but instead he raised his gun and aimed at a disoriented Victoria.
Before Hawke could even call out, Deprez fired the weapon.
