And with perfect recklessness, Drake cut through a gap between the rear end of a Land Rover and the front of a Dodge RAM and fell among the bad guys. Hayden chased as best she could. The Englishman must have been in contact with Alicia and Mai for they now appeared, wraith-like assassins, tearing through the enemy like a blade through flesh.
As the sun set behind the nearby mountains, fire and hate and determination, fervor and heroism lit up the encroaching dark with all the glory of a colossal firework display.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Drake fired twice, then slid beneath a man’s return fire and swept his legs. Before that man hit the dirt, Drake shot another and was back on his feet, jabbing stiffened fingers into someone’s neck and then leaping feet first toward the next, connecting hard, knocking the man’s weapon aside as it bucked and sprayed bullets into the air. Ahead, the pieces were being hastily thrown aboard, the pilot already shuffling the collective. Men leaned out of every available space, rifles poised.
Drake stopped in despair. They were about to spray indiscriminately, killing everything that moved just to safeguard their getaway.
They’re terrorists, he thought, as he screamed “Down!” and threw himself headlong just as they opened fire.
Hayden heard Drake’s warning, but half a second too late. Her knife wound screamed as she tried to twist violently in a new direction, slowing her movements just enough. That bastard Boudreau would be the death of her yet. The nightmare sound ruptured the air and scything death sped towards her but, in the blink of an eye, something like a mountain stepped between her and obliteration.
Kinimaka! Her partner of three years jerked and spasmed as bullets took him in the chest, knocking him backward into her. His blood sprayed back into her face in a terrible cloud. Hayden collapsed with Kinimaka on top of her and began to scream.
Drake stayed prone, aimed his rifle and potted a couple of terrorist guards. Then he saw the rest being slammed from behind—Torsten Dahl had arrived, hitting hard from the back, throwing them out of the open doors face-first or into the bulkheads with a bone-cracking smash. Soon, the chopper was empty except for the pilot, and Dahl gestured severely at him to close the machine down.
Drake turned immediately to check out the screams he knew were coming from Hayden. At first, he couldn’t see her, but then saw Mai and Alicia drop beside a huge bulk and felt his heart sink.
Oh no. It was Mano. Was Gates’ CIA liaison underneath him? Had he taken a bullet for Hayden?
He dashed to help, momentarily putting the pieces behind his friends’ welfare. Dead terrorist bodies lay all around them. He took hold of Kinimaka with Mai and Alicia and heaved the dead weight to one side. Drake glimpsed the Hawaiian’s bloodied face and shredded field-jacket before his eyes fell on Hayden.
The CIA agent held her side in agony, but her eyes were filled with tears of grief and red streaks lined her cheeks.
“He saved me. . .” she blubbered. “M...Mano saved. . .”
Alicia was the first to sink to her knees in the muck around Hayden and place a hand of sympathy and support on her shoulder. “He loved you,” she said. “He told me. That man would’ve done anything for you.”
Drake wondered why he’d never seen it. Most likely because he’d been preoccupied with his own terrors of late and not given much thought to the wellbeing of everyone else. Now, across the body of Mano Kinimaka, he locked eyes with Mai and tried to communicate that he wanted to give their connection a chance.
The Japanese girl smiled tiredly, eyes drifting away across the battlefield.
Drake looked too. Plumes of black smoke belched toward the sky to mark downed choppers and demolished cars. A few helicopters managed to escape and hammered toward the last red gold vestiges of the dying sun. The dark shapes of many men lay scattered and heaped across the grass, the nearby road, and the blood-soaked hillside down which he had led the charge. Friend and foe were indistinguishable in the half-light. He saw the distinct figure of Sam and two of the man’s SAS comrades trudging toward them, guns resting across their shoulders. The battle, it seemed, was won.
The eight pieces had been captured by the good guys. The world was safe.
It was all over. Two months of blood and hell and it had come to this—the loneliness of a battlefield, the horror and loss of its aftermath, the bittersweet happiness that most of his friends had survived.
Where was Ben? Where were Karin and Gates?
He couldn’t see them. But then their familiar shapes emerged from the mist drifting about Sam and his boys, along with at least another half-dozen men.
A deep cough came from nearby, so harsh it sounded to his ears like the cocking of a rifle. He twisted quickly, saw only Dahl still shouting at the pilot to shut down, and frowned. What had made that coughing sound?
And then the body of Mano Kinimaka shuddered, and the big man opened his eyes, staring into the skies and spitting blood from his mouth. “Shit, man.” He coughed. “Felt like a Kalua pig hit me at full force.”
Drake’s mouth dropped open in shock. Alicia was at his side in a heartbeat, ripping the Hawaiian’s jacket off.
“The Kevlar took it all.” She said in a matter-of-fact way. “He’s bleeding from a few small nicks around his arms.” She grabbed Kinimaka’s face between her small but deadly hands. “You big, lucky, beautiful bastard, you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a jacket take so many shots.”
Drake grinned and rushed to help Hayden—broken and delirious at the sound of her friend’s voice—crawl to his side. It felt good to see them embrace and he sat for a moment, spirits rising as the moon emerged from behind a cloud.
It was almost Christmas day, 2012.
Ben and Karin finally arrived, the young man staring down at his girlfriend with a look that said he hadn’t the slightest notion of what to do. “I didn’t want to mention this before,” he said at last, “but today is the twenty-first which, according to the Mayans and some other cultures, was supposed to be the end of the world.” He shrugged. “But what did they know?”
Silence followed his words, a silence broken only by Hayden’s low chatter with Kinimaka and Alicia’s insatiable chatting with the SAS guys.
And then the terrible clatter of a machine pistol on full-auto shattered the stillness, bullets pinging off metal and whizzing through the air. Drake turned in time to see Dahl take a dive off the helicopter, landing alive but dazed, and then saw a figure pull itself up through the far door, still firing at random whilst shouting at the pilot to take off.
“Lift off or I’ll blow your fucking head to bits!”
For the second time in five minutes, Drake’s mouth literally dropped open. The chopper lifted quickly, the SAS men fastest to react, but unable to shoot it down as it swooped low and flew off rapidly into the clouds.
“The Norseman!” Dahl cried. “I thought you were watching him!”
No one replied. Drake closed his eyes for a brief moment and then dragged his tired body once more to its feet.
“I know exactly where he’s going.” He ran quickly towards a discarded RPG launcher, but Dahl stopped him with a hard look.
“What?” Drake said. “He needs stopping fast. He’s got the pieces of Odin aboard.”
“What he needs.” Dahl strode past them all, a resolute hatred etched into his features. “Is an Apache Attack Helicopter driven right up his arse.”
The mad Swede stopped to open the door of said machine before boosting himself up. “And that’s exactly what I’m going to give him.”
*****
The Norseman tried to calm his racing heart. The pounding adrenalin made him want to blast the pilot to bits, but he comforted himself with the reality that he could do that later anyway. For now, the man would take him wherever he wanted to go—and that was straight to Singen, where Cayman was waiting.
“Is there a radio in here?” he asked, gesturing with the machine-pistol. His finger jerked reflexively, almost depressing the trigger. The arm of a dead
terrorist flopped against his back, making his flesh crawl. One of the pieces of Odin—the carving of the Spear—toppled onto the floor with a thud. The others shifted raggedly, as if testing his resolve. A quiver of fear raced the length of his spine.
The pilot passed him a sat-phone. “Unexpected,” the Norseman said in surprise, “but welcome.” He quickly keyed in Cayman’s number and waited.
*****
Russell Cayman, on any other mission, would long since have tried every avenue to contact his unusually absent bosses. But on this assignment, he had embraced something wholly unfamiliar. A weird feeling had taken hold—the previously unknown emotion of homecoming. Never had he felt so happy, so welcome, or experienced such a sense of belonging.
To the other men, of course, it was just a tomb, a lonely place filled with creepy noises and old bones and dusty coffins. But loneliness had always been his best friend, his happy place, and to know he now shared it with the bodies of the most depraved and powerful beings that had ever existed—much like himself—filled Cayman’s empty heart with the nearest thing he would ever know to love and belonging.
As was his habit lately, he had cleared all his men out of the tomb and then climbed eagerly into the crypt of the Goddess, Kali, found his spot among her hard, outsize bones and settled his head. Eyes open he would lie there, imagining her hand creeping around his waist in the dark, her claw-like fingers rubbing the nape of his neck, and those rotted lips whispering into his ear.
“Sleep now,” she would whisper. “Sleep, my boy.”
His chest would fill with love and he would whisper to the eternal darkness just two words. “Yes, Momma.”
The breeze blowing past his face was her glorious, fetid breath. The rustling in the darkness was her bones rearranging and adjusting. The faint tickle of spidery feet on his upraised cheek was the fall of her lustrous hair. The distant chatter of rats and other things was the jealous arguments of Gods, begging for their turn with her.
Which they never got. Cayman was Kali’s own, her favorite, her best boy.
But Cayman was not so crazy as to think his real-life bosses would leave him to his great dream, no—they would want to shatter it with their expensive hobnailed boots. So he left his mobile phone outside the niche, and when it started to ring just as Kali’s soft whisperings were lulling him to sleep, Cayman’s head jerked up in guilt and shock and defiance.
Bastards! They would pay for this.
Hurriedly, he exited the crypt and snatched it up. “Yes?”
“This is the Norseman. Where on earth were you?”
So now they rebuked him even when he forced himself out of the perfect dream to take their call. “Tied up.”
“Excuse me?”
“I answered as soon as I was able.”
“Look, never mind that now. Much has happened. The Shadow Elite are no more.”
Cayman was momentarily surprised, his interest piqued. “And what of the tomb?”
“You are allowed to sound a bit despondent about it, Cayman. It’s fine to show your feelings. We made you what you are today. I imagine that makes us some sort of parent figure to you?”
“Yes, sir, it does.” Cayman imagined slicing the Norseman’s face off with some ancient bits of metal he had found in Kali’s tomb.
“Well, I’m sorry to say I’m the only one left. Our friends have perished.”
Cayman emitted what he thought amounted to a regretful sigh. “Where are you now? Should we seal the tomb forever?” Joy snared his heart.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m on my way to you now with the pieces beside me. We’ll show the world that we still mean business. That is what we will do.”
Cayman sensed more. “And?”
“And that tenacious bastard Drake is but a few minutes behind me with some of his cohorts. You must be ready for me, Cayman. Men at arms. Guns prepped. Tomb organized. We won’t have long to implement our plan.”
Cayman smiled down the phone. “Oh, I’ll be ready, sir.”
*****
Drake was happy to be behind Dahl as he piloted the big Apache through the oily air. The thudding of the heavy rotors was like music to his ears, Dinorock to the power of ten. The instrument array gleamed and flashed with the promise of unlimited weaponry. Dahl handed him a pair of ear mufflers.
“Fuck that,” Drake said. “I’m savoring the sound and every second of being inside this machine.”
Dahl laughed and clicked something on the side of his own headphones. He had pondered for a few moments before deciding to contact Olle Akerman.
“Ja?”
“It’s me again, Olle.”
“Ah. You again. Still not dead? I have my eye on your wife, you know. Such a pretty lady.”
“Not quite dead, no. We’re chasing the pieces of Odin, my friend. Do you have anything that might help us?”
“I’d say—go faster. Does that help?”
“Olle—”
“Ja. Ja. I know. Well, do you see now? Do you remember the words that I spoke? ‘The sequence of events will reveal all of the God’s secrets and mankind’s decision to save or destroy itself.’ Odin’s much vaunted Day of Reckoning has arrived.”
“Ragnarok?”
“Yes. Odin avoided his own Ragnarok to fight in a future which he may have seen using the time-travel devices. Now it’s up to you to see us through this one.”
“Anything about the pieces?” Drake asked.
“I know this,” Akerman said. “The pieces are key. Not just ‘the key.’ But key. See the difference?”
“Meaning?”
“Whilst trying to translate some of the old Akkadian, the so-called God language, I began to wonder why some of the logograms referring to the word ‘key’ were represented not only by pictures of the eight pieces, but also by diagrams showing the center of a great city. I now believe it means the pieces are the most important part. Steal, destroy or even break just one piece and the rest won’t work. The device itself will never work without them.”
Dahl pushed the four-bladed twin-engine attack chopper a little faster. “That’s what I wanted to hear.”
Akerman’s last words were lost in static. “Unless we discover another way to start the weapon. . .”
Drake watched the war-machine in motion, studied the flashing keypads, spinning dials, toggles surrounded by red and black plastic. Dahl flicked several switches to prime the laser-guided Hellfire missiles, but essentially, these were back-up. The black shark had more armaments than you could shake an enormous stick at. What Dahl really wanted to use was the IHADSS—the Integrated Helmet and Display Sighting System—the system that could slave the helicopters 30mm chain gun to his helmet display, making the gun track and fire in accord with its wearer’s head movements.
Right now Dahl’s sights were on the helicopter that held the Norseman.
“Ready to end this?” The Swede brought the Apache swooping nearer, engine roaring, seeming to hover like a giant deadly fly, its “eyes” the weapon pods, its “feet” Stinger and Sidewinder missiles.
Drake sighed. “So, so ready.”
Dahl let loose all hell and the Norseman’s helicopter exploded in an immense fireball, bits of metal and fragments of ancient artifact and pieces of the Norseman spearing the air in every direction. The boom echoed through the mountains and chased the recently vanished sun below the silver-lit horizon.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Russell Cayman heard the loud static crackle as he prepared to end the call. A second before that, he thought he might have heard the Norseman scream.
An interesting sound.
Carefully, he replaced the phone to his ear. He spoke a few words. He waited. Tried again. After ten minutes, he killed the call and redialed.
Nothing but an empty void. Almost as if there was nothing there. Cayman’s lips twitched into a smile. The Norseman was dead. Drake, or someone else, had taken the old bastard out. It was over.
Cayman was free!
For n
ow, he thought. If Drake had indeed won the day, then he would send in the wolves to raid the tomb—and soon. It took Cayman just a few moments to realize there was nothing he could do about that. Not even if he kept the Shadow Elite’s demise to himself and told the men to keep fighting. The authorities possessed the might to eventually prevail.
Excitement galvanized him. Quickly, he cast about, saw a discarded holdall lying in the middle of the floor below and hurried down to collect it. Within minutes he had hastened back up the stairs to Kali’s tomb and was struggling to open the great lid, employing as much force as possible. The heavy concrete slab grinded like the cracking of the earth, but before his strength gave out, he managed to widen the gap a little more.
Within minutes he had filled the holdall with Kali’s bones. The larger ones, he had to snap, but he was sure the Goddess wouldn’t mind—she’d been dead a long time. With the job done, he stood back from the tomb, taking it all in one last time, and felt the sharp sting of tears at the corners of his eyes.
The home he’d never had.
But he was used to moving on. All his life he’d being shipped from home to home, school to school, agency to agency—just a matter of exchanging one battlefield for the next. And he’d always been ready to kill to protect his temporary sanctuary. He hefted the bones of Kali now and walked out of the tomb of the gods without looking back again. It was time to disappear for a while.
A new chapter in his life had just opened up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Mano Kinimaka had already proposed a Hawaiian Christmas, so when the big man decided to spend his recovery time over there, the entire team followed. Only a few days after beating the terrorists and the Norseman in battle, they found themselves put up by a grateful American government at a fancy hotel overlooking Waikiki Beach.
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