by Matthew Rief
“Like hell. Where—”
“No time to explain.”
The skepticism and anger toward Jason that was plastered across the man’s face had softened, replaced by a hearty resolve to get them both out of there. “What am I supposed to do?”
Jason pointed at the axe. “One of them gets close, pretend they’re a block of ice.”
With no more time to chitchat, Jason crawled along the back of the remaining planks holding up along the ship’s bow. Taking post against the damaged port gunwale, he shifted into a crouch and moved as silently as possible in the shadows, knowing that every movement was amplified in the narrow confines of the cave.
“Where the fuck are they?” one of the men grunted in a strong Russian accent.
“Come out, come out,” a Latino man said, grinning as he aimed his rifle.
Judging by the way the men moved and held their weapons, Jason could tell right away they were well trained, hardened soldiers. Ex-special-forces types from all over the world. Guns for hire. Whoever they were up against, whoever was pulling the strings at the top, they had deep pockets and good connections.
Creeping along the end of the damaged planks, Jason looked back and saw that one of their unwanted visitors was moving dangerously close to Ragnar’s position.
Now or never, Jason thought as he crouched under what little remained of the ship.
With the trailing guy separated from the others, Jason holstered his Glock, wanting to go for a stealth approach. He reached for his knife and closed in on the trailing soldier, popping out just as his prey appeared. Before the man could take aim or utter a sound, Jason covered his mouth with one hand and stabbed his knife through the guy’s heart. Holding his shaking victim tight, Jason stepped back and tried to lower him down quietly. His foot slipping on the ice, Jason was forced to use his left hand to catch himself against the rock. The dying man let out a wail, and the three others spun and took aim.
Releasing the mercenary and dropping back, Jason dove behind the cover as bullets pelted the wood, bursting splinters as the hiss of suppressed rounds filled the air. Jason snatched his Glock and took aim between the planks, firing off cover fire before planting onto a knee and sending a well-aimed round into the nearest guy’s shoulder.
As Jason dropped back again, he watched as one of the attackers closed in on Ragnar. Catching the guy off guard, Ragnar reared back his climbing tool and struck the guy in the leg, stabbing the sharpened tip clear through his calf and causing him to topple over.
When Jason looked up to see the others, the guy he’d hit in the shoulder appeared two feet in front of him, having made a mad dash across the chamber. He vaulted over the wood and smashed into Jason, tackling him to the ground and throwing a punch into his face as they rolled past the bow of the ship and to the edge of the drop-off.
With the flowing glacial melt rushing below, Jason bashed the man’s head into the ice, withdrew his knife, and stabbed it through the guy’s Kevlar vest. Shoving his skewered adversary aside, Jason snatched the man’s sidearm and jumped to his feet. He took aim across the cave as the last standing soldier grabbed Ragnar from behind and placed his gun into the Icelander’s back.
“Drop the gun, asshole!” the man shouted.
Jason kept his aim locked on the guy, hoping for a brief lapse in judgment and a target to bury his chambered round.
“I don’t know who the hell you are, but you’re wasting your damn time. I promise you this, pissing off the General will only make life worse for you. Now, drop the gun before I riddle this man with bullets.”
Jason’s gaze shifted momentarily to Ragnar. The hardened, experienced man was all resolution. He’d faced death before, time and time again, and like Jason, wasn’t one to be intimidated or back down. A commotion echoed from the entrance into the cave, the sounds of more men heading their way.
The man smiled. “Backup has arrived. Now, drop the—”
Ragnar bent down while simultaneously driving his leg up, then slammed his boot into the man’s foot. He grunted and lurched back, giving Jason the opening he needed. Jason flexed his trigger finger, screaming a 9mm round into the guy’s neck. But their attacker managed to fire off a round as well, shooting Ragnar in the back as he fell backward and writhed, his blood flowing out onto the ice.
Ragnar tumbled and slipped toward the edge. Seeing the man struggle and begin to fall, Jason holstered his weapon and rushed to him, grabbing hold of the Icelander and managing to stop their momentum by gripping the loose climbing tool and jamming it into the ice. He dangled over the edge for a moment and caught a brief glimpse of three more men storming into the chamber.
The man Ragnar stabbed in the leg lurched to his feet, removed his sidearm, and shouted at Jason in a Korean accent. “You’re dead now, idiot!”
Before the angered man could raise his weapon, the tip of the axe Jason held onto cracked through the ice, and he and Ragnar plummeted into the dark, torrential abyss.
SEVEN
The man stared over the barrel of his gun, watching as Jason and Ragnar flew over the edge and splashed into the water.
“Idiot,” he spat, his lips forming a cruel smile. “I would’ve happily put him out of his misery with a bullet to the head. But now . . . now he will suffocate in the freezing, dark depths.”
He stood at the edge for a few seconds more, savoring the mental image of his opponents falling to a freezing death. As his adrenaline from the scuffle faded, he felt a deep pain resonating up his leg. Blood dripped out from the wound, splattering against the white. Brushing off the pain, he quickly wrapped up the gash using part of his undershirt.
“Forget about them, Haan,” a man with a thick black beard and a tattoo beside his left eye said. He stomped into the chamber and gazed upon the remnants of the Viking shipwreck. “Focus on what we came here for.”
The tough Korean lowered his pistol and turned around, shooting daggers at the hired help. “Don’t forget who’s in charge here, Tank. You do what I say. Not the other way around.”
The mercenary stared Haan down for a moment, then relented.
Focusing beyond the gun-for-hire toward the other members of the unit, Haan motioned for a rail-skinny Asian to meet him near the middle. They both knelt down, and Haan cracked open the hardcase, revealing the three samples.
“Looks like they already did the work for us,” Haan said, eyeing the blood in the vials. “Are they usable, Doctor?”
The frail man grabbed one of the samples with a gloved hand and examined it carefully by the light of his flashlight. After repeating the process with the other two, he secured them back in their foam cutouts. “The containers are structurally sound. I don’t see any need to obtain more samples.” He eyed the mass of rocks, ice, and timbers beside him. There was no sign of the frozen Viking corpse that had been used to obtain the blood.
“This is it, huh?” Tank said, stomping towards them and glaring at the vials. “This is why we’ve traveled to the middle of fucking nowhere?”
“You catch this virus, and you’ll find out exactly why they are more than worth the trouble,” the doctor said. “Keep your bloody masks on. All of you.”
The mercenary kept his gaze on the samples. “What is it, Jong?”
“We don’t know, but we’ll find out. Regardless, it’s the most powerful virus we’ve heard of in quite some time.”
“And you’re being given five years pay to help us obtain it and bring it safely out of the country,” Haan said. “That should be good enough for you.” He slid off his backpack and removed three blocks of gray substances, each tightly packed in plastic and rigged to a detonation mechanism. Stowing the hardcase in the space, he rose to his feet, shouldered the bag, and took one more look toward the edge of the cliff. He smiled again, believing their mission was destined to succeed and that nobody would stand in their way.
Haan turned to fa
ce the others.
“That’s it?” the mercenary said.
Haan nodded. “Now we just clean up the crime scene.” Grabbing the three blocks, he set them alongside the wreck and dead bodies. “Like I said . . . my boss detests loose ends.”
The four surviving men trekked back out through the narrow cave. Winding for half a mile in the darkness, they eventually reached the tall chamber with a waterfall splashing down in the middle.
Haan smiled as he eyed the rope dangling down to the ground. If only our prey had known they were paving the way for us, he thought.
After rappelling down one at a time, Haan took one more look up at the dark cave. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew a device with an antenna and a capped switch. “No loose ends,” he said again, thumbing off the cover and clicking the switch. A muffled rumble echoed through the cave, and Haan smiled as he imagined the three incendiary devices bursting into flames and scorching everything flammable in the cavern.
EIGHT
Jason barely managed to suck in a breath before splashing into frigid water. The powerful current swallowed him whole, covering him in sheer darkness and chaos. Tumbling wildly, Jason held on to Ragnar’s forearm with all his strength as the raging water carried them under the glacier.
He had no control over his movements, his body being thrown around like a rag doll, and he was unable to tell up from down in the vortex. He couldn’t think or do anything besides hold on as the bitter cold caused his mind and body to go into full survival mode.
Despairing words jumped into his hazy mind. This is it. There’s no surviving this.
The sub-glacial river could continue on for miles, giving neither Jason nor Ragnar any hope of coming out alive. Feeling his lungs begin to throb, Jason opened his eyes but saw only blackness as the water raged on, jostling their bodies and slamming them against the occasional sharp turn.
As his consciousness faded and the end drew near, Jason spotted a faint glow up ahead. Unable to tell whether it was real or just a figment of his imagination, he held on to Ragnar and tried his best to kick toward the light. It came up in a flash, the rushing chute shoving him against a slab of ice. His upper body rose out of the water for a split second. Reaching high with his free arm, he wedged himself against the rock with all the strength he could muster, gasped out the air from his lungs, and took in two breaths. His body shaking and numb, and his mind disoriented from the extreme cold, Jason held on and tried to take in another breath. But the water was too strong, and it pried him from the rock and dragged him back into the abyss.
Holding onto Ragnar with all his remaining strength and feeling his consciousness fade again, Jason knew that soon it would all be over. If they didn’t get out of the water fast, they’d die of hypothermia.
In the confusion of the tumultuous rapids, Jason’s mind took him back to his training at Tenth Circle. Glimpses flashed back. Never-ending workouts. Grueling beatings. Hours spent in frigid waters, forced to stay submerged until they passed out. Kept in the cold until their extremities went numb, then dragged out and pitted against a slew of well-rested instructors who wailed on them relentlessly, holding nothing back.
The purpose of the training was to push trainees to the very limits of human capabilities—to physical and mental extremes—to weed out the weak, and to push and push until only the strongest, toughest, most-determined warriors remained.
Jostling back and forth, the two rose from the sloshing water once more. As Ragnar struggled for air, a deep rumble resonated ahead of them. The current carrying them both back under, they free-fell off a ten-foot waterfall, twisting and turning in the bubbly whitewater. Jerked around another sharp bend just after they landed, Ragnar slipped free from Jason’s right hand, and the two were quickly separated in the chaos.
As Jason’s lungs began to throb again, he spotted another light up ahead, this one brighter. Soon, the light was overwhelming, and the mighty river spat Jason out over a lagoon. Falling twenty feet, he spun wildly before being splashing into the crystal-clear body of water. Sinking deep, Jason squinted briefly, the cold biting his eyeballs.
With the surface ahead of him, Jason kicked with all he had, his aching, overexerted body protesting as he willed himself skyward. Exhaling, he broke free, bursting out into the open and gasping for precious air. Catching his breath and blinking away the confusion, he wiped the water from his face and checked his body to make sure nothing had broken during the numbing wild ride under the glacier.
How in the hell did I survive that?
He patted himself down and was amazed to find his handgun still secured in its holster. Shaking and on the verge of hypothermia, Jason scanned the water around him. The lagoon was a night-and-day shift from the underground torrent that had tossed him around then spat him out. Seeing a beach nearby, he kicked for the rocky shoreline and then crawled up onto the snow, still panting to get precious oxygen into his depleted bloodstream. Though much calmer than the sub-glacial river, steady winds and dark clouds had closed in since Jason had entered the caves alongside Ragnar.
The Icelandic guide jumped into his mind, and Jason turned around, sweeping frantically for any sign of him. Thirty yards down the shoreline, he spotted the man’s body curled up along the snow-covered beach. Forcing himself to move, Jason stumbled down the bank and kneeled beside the Icelander. Blood blossomed from his coat as Jason turned him over. His face was turning blue, his eyes were big and wild, and his breathing erratic.
“I’m gone,” he managed to get out between shaky breaths. “Leave . . . me . . .”
With unsteady hands, Jason unzipped Ragnar’s jacket and pulled up his undershirt. He’d been shot in the hip, the bullet having punched through at the base of his oblique, and he’d already lost a substantial amount of blood. The injury wasn’t generally life-threatening under normal circumstances, but they were in anything but normal circumstances.
Jason patted his clothes, but his sat phone and radio were both gone. He peered around the lagoon, but there was no sign of life. Feeling a rush of resolve as he thought about their attackers back in the cave, Jason went to work patching up Ragnar’s wound.
“What . . . are you doing? You’re dead if—”
“I’m not leaving you.” Jason gazed at the man intensely. “We’re getting out of this. Understand?”
Jason was no stranger to overwhelming odds. He’d faced them time and time again. They may have been done for. Death may have been inevitable. But if he was going to meet his end, Jason would do so with nothing left in the tank and with no option unexhausted.
Zipping the Icelander’s jacket back up, Jason climbed up a nearby boulder for a better perspective of their surroundings. He had a near 180-degree view of the glacier and the edge of the mountains, though the thick sheets of falling snow made it impossible to see anything clearly. Trying his best to remember the map he’d looked at hours earlier while traveling up the Morsa River with Alejandra, he reasoned that they were roughly eight miles from the nearest road.
Can’t make it that far, he thought, fighting back the chill facing off against his body’s core temperature.
He focused along the lake but couldn’t see far through the white haze of the snowdrifts that were growing more intense with each passing second. At the rate the storm was building, he soon wouldn’t be able to see his hand in front of his face. One direction or another, one thing was certain: they needed to move.
Jason jumped back down and grabbed hold of Ragnar. “You need to stand up. I can help you, but you need to—”
“Leave me!” Ragnar barked again. “I’ll be dead soon and—”
Jason punched him in the shoulder, causing the man to wince and sneer.
“I thought Icelanders were supposed to be tough,” Jason yelled. “Descendants of the fearless warriors of Norse mythology.” He paused, chattering his teeth and fighting back against the bitter cold taking over his body.
“You’re . . . You’re nothing but a weak—”
Ragnar interrupted Jason with a punch of his own, pounding his knuckles into the American’s side. Jason rolled with it, snatched Ragnar by his wrist, then leaned back and helped the man to his feet. He nearly toppled over, but Jason helped him keep his balance as blood slowly flowed back to his limbs, allowing him to walk with help.
“That’s more like it,” Jason said, placing an arm under the guide’s shoulder.
They trudged along the bank of the lagoon, having to dig deep for every movement.
“One step at a time,” Jason began to chant, and Ragnar soon joined in.
So long as they were breathing, so long as their hearts were still pumping blood, they still had a chance.
Pushing up a rise, Jason interjected his chant with a resounding, “Hope isn’t lost until I say it is.”
As they forced themselves up to the crest of the hill, the snow picked up even more, and black clouds washed over the landscape. Covering his face from the brunt of Mother Nature’s fury, Jason noticed something strange about the hazy white to his left. Down along the other side of the rise, the clouds seemed to lift up from the earth and join in with the passing flurries. Rubbing his eyes to make sure his mind wasn’t playing tricks, Jason realized it was the runoff from a natural hot spring.
A wave of fresh vigor sprouted from deep within his soul. Iceland was well known for its hot springs, the geothermally heated groundwater emerging all over the volcanic landscape.
“Hold on for two more minutes, Ragnar,” Jason said, willing them down the other side of the slope.
The Icelander’s legs gave out just as they reached the bottom, and Jason had to drag the man and heave him onto the warm rocks surrounding the spring. A wave of warm steam gusted against Jason’s face, sending a revitalizing rush across his body. The warmth was indescribable. As much as he wanted to heat Ragnar’s body as quickly as possible, he knew that, given his state, a plunge in the sweltering hot spring could prove fatal. Ragnar was suffering from hypothermia—there was no doubt in Jason’s mind. The fact that the experienced guide was still breathing was miraculous in and of itself, but the rapid change in temperature could cause drastically irregular heartbeats, potentially resulting in a heart attack.
