“You two, go first. Be snappy, for God’s sake.”
“And on your way up,” Parnevik commented, “be especially aware of your surroundings. We don’t want to miss the artefact.”
“Don’t be a tit, Parnevik.” Dahl was beside himself with apprehension. Drake had never seen him like this before. “The last two of us will check as we go,” he said, staring at Drake. “That’s you and me.”
Again the videophone squawked and went dead. Dahl shook it as if he was trying to throttle it. “Made by the damned Yanks, no doubt.”
It took three minutes for the first pair to reach ground level. Then another three for the second pair. Drake thought about everything that could happen in six minutes — a veritable lifetime of experience or nothing at all. For him it was the latter. Nothing but creaking clay, the groan of shifting rock, the rasp of chance deciding to reward him with life or death.
The floor below the first symbol they found gave way. There was no warning; it was as if the floor just gave up the ghost and tumbled into oblivion. Drake climbed as far up the well as he could. He balanced on its sides, rather than on the fragile cavern floor. Dahl hugged the other side of the well, gripping a length of green twine with both hands, the ring on his wedding finger reflecting Drake’s helmet light.
Drake kept his gaze upwards, searching for any sturdy lengths of twine they could attach to their harnesses. Then he heard Dahl shout: “Shit!” and glanced down just in time to see the videophone cartwheel end over end in wicked slow-mo, before hitting the cavern floor with a crunch.
Weakened, the hardpan gave way, dropping into the black pit like Drake’s old dreams of starting a family. A gale wooshed up to meet them, murky air set free, rustling with unspeakable darkness from a place where blind things crouched and slithered.
And looking down into that pit of nameless shadow, Drake rediscovered his childhood belief in monsters.
There was a faint slithering noise and a line came flapping from above. Drake grabbed it gratefully and attached it to his harness. Dahl did the same, looking equally white, and they both clicked their respective buttons.
Drake watched the altimeter click by. He studied his half of the well, whilst Dahl replicated him on the other side. Several times they stopped and swayed forward to make a closer inspection, but each time they found nothing. One hundred feet passed, and then ninety. Drake scraped his hands bloody, but found nothing. On they went, now passing fifty feet, and then Drake saw an absence of light, a dullness that just ate the light he threw towards it.
A wide plank of wood, jagged around its edges, untouched by damp or mould. Drake could see carvings on its surface, and it took him a while to angle his helmet properly.
But when he did….
Eyes. The symbolic representation of Odin’s eyes, carved into wood and left here… by whom?
By Odin himself? Millennia ago? By Heidi? Was that more, or less, believable?
Dahl cast an anxious glance below. “For all our sakes, Drake, don’t drop it.”
THIRTY-THREE
Drake emerged from Mimir’s Well holding the wooden tablet aloft like a trophy. Before he could utter a word, he was plucked roughly out of his harness and thrown to the ground.
“Hey, steady on — ” He looked up into the barrel of a HK dream-machine, one of the new ones. He rolled slightly, and saw dead and dying soldiers lying on the grass — Delta, SGG, SAS — and beyond them Kennedy, kneeling with a gun held to her head.
Saw Ben being forced to stand upright in a choke hold, Alicia Myles’ merciless hands tight around his neck. Drake’s heart almost broke when he saw Ben still clutched his mobile in his hand. Clinging on ‘til the last gasp….
“Let the Brit stand,” the Canadian, Colby Taylor, came into Drake’s eye-line. “Let him watch his friends die — proof that I can take all his Pieces away before I take his life.”
Drake let the fire of battle infuse his limbs. “You prove only that this place is as stated in the damn guide book — that it is a land of monsters.”
“How poetic,” the billionaire chortled. “And true. Give me the Eyes.” He held his hands out like a child asking for more. A mercenary handed over the depiction of Odin’s Eyes. “Good. This’ll do. Now where’s your plane, Drake? I want your Pieces, and then to get out of this crap-hole.”
“You won’t get anywhere without the Shield,” Drake said… the first thing that came into his head. “And then figure out how it becomes the map to Ragnarok.”
“Fool,” Taylor laughed nastily. “The only reason we’re here today and not twenty years ago is because the Shield’s only just been found. I’m sure you already know that though. Are you trying to slow me down? Think I’ll slip up and give you another chance? Well, Mr Drake, let me tell you. She…” he pointed at Alicia, “she doesn’t slip up. She’s. . hard ass gold, that’s what she is!”
Drake watched as his ex-colleague throttled Ben to death. “She’ll sell you out to the highest bidder.”
“I am the highest bidder you washed-up piece of shit.”
And by a stroke of providence, someone used that moment to fire a bullet. The report echoed loudly, cracking through the woods. One of Taylor’s mercenaries collapsed with a new third eye, instantly dead.
Colby Taylor looked incredulous for a second. He stared as if Bryan Adams had just jumped out of the woods and launched into ‘Summer of ‘69’. His eyes became saucers. Then one of his mercenaries crashed into him, knocking him to the ground, the mercenary bleeding, screaming and thrashing as he died. Drake was beside them in a heartbeat as lead shredded the air above.
Everything happened at once. Kennedy slammed her body upwards. The top of her skull connected so solidly with the chin of the guard covering her that he didn’t even know what happened. Instant lights out.
A barrage of bullets flew back and forth; the mercs caught out in the open were decimated.
Torsten Dahl found freedom when the mercenary holding him lost three-quarters of his head to a third echoing rifle shot. The SGG commander crab-walked to Professor Parnevik’s side and started dragging the old man towards a bunch of scrub.
Drake’s first thought was for Ben. As he prepared to make a desperate bid, disbelief jolted him like a thousand-watt electromagnetic pulse. Alicia had thrown the boy aside and was advancing on Drake himself. All of a sudden, a pistol appeared in her hand; didn’t matter which one. She was equally deadly with both.
She raised it, centred on him.
Drake held his hands apart in a confused gesture. Why?
Her smile was gleeful in the way of a demon discovering virgin meat in a lair it thought long since expended.
She squeezed the trigger. Drake flinched, expecting the heat and then the numbness and then the pain, but his mind’s eye caught up with his brain, and he saw she’d switched her aim at the last instant… and pumped three bullets into the mercenary covering Colby Taylor’s indignant form. Taking no chances.
Two SAS soldiers and two Delta Marines had survived. The SAS had grabbed Ben and were dragging him away. What remained of the Delta team geared up to return fire into the nearby stand of trees.
More shots rang out. A Delta guy twisted and fell. The other scrambled away on his belly to where Wells had fallen on the other side of Mimir’s Well. Wells’ prone body twitched as the American dragged him away, proof of life.
The next few minutes happened in a blur. Alicia cried out in anger and leapt after the American soldier. When he turned and confronted her with his fists she stopped for a second.