“Thank you. I’d better tell Marlowe and my demolition team.” He turned to go, but was stopped by an outsized hand on his arm, holding him gently but with steel-like adamancy.
“Thou must know something more,” the being called Loki said in a low, resonant voice. Impossibly white teeth shone in that gleaming smile above Chris. “Thou wilt have a passenger in going ashore.”
Chris blinked. The plan had been for only his team and their commando escort… Then he saw the pallor of dread on the Commander Lewis’s face—deeper than any mere fear of death.
Chris turned back to stare at the fur-clad giant. “You…” he breathed.
Loki nodded. “That is correct. There will be a slight change in plans. I will not accompany the undersea vessels, as they attempt to break out through the Skagerak. I will go ashore with thee, instead, to Gotland.”
Chris kept his face blank. In all honesty, there was no way this side of Heaven that he or Lewis or anybody else could stop this creature from doing anything it wanted to do. One way or the other, the Allies were about to lose their only Aesir friend in the long war against the Nazi plague.
If the word “friend” ever really described Loki— who had appeared one day on the tarmac of a Scottish airfield during the final evacuation of Britain, accompanied by eight small, bearded beings carrying boxes—who led them up to the nearest amazed officer to imperiously commandeer the Prime Minister’s personal plane to take him the rest of the way to America.
Perhaps an armored battalion might have stopped him. Battle reports had proven that Aesir could be killed, if you were real lucky, and pounded one hard and fast enough. But when the local commander realized what was happening, he had decided to take a chance.
Loki had proven his worth over and over again since that day ten years ago.
Until now, that is.
“If you insist,” he told the Aes.
“I do. It is my will.”
“Then I’ll go explain it to Major Marlowe. Excuse me please.”
He backed away a few meters first, then turned to go. As he sloshed away, that glittering stare seemed to follow him, past the moaning dwarf, past O’Leary’s ever-sardonic smile, down the narrow, dank passageway lined with strapped-in Marines, all the way to the sabot launching tubes.
Voices were hushed. All the young men spoke English, but only half were North Americans. Their shoulder patches—Free French, Free Russian, Free Irish, German Christian—were muted in the dim light, but the mixed accents were unmistakable, as well as the way they stroked their weapons and the gleam Chris caught sight of in several pairs of eyes.
These were the sort that volunteered for suicide missions, the type—common in the world after thirteen years of horrible war—that had little or nothing left to lose.
Major Marlowe had come back to supervise the loading of the landing boats. He did not take Chris’s news well.
“Loki wants to come along? To Gotland?” He spat. “The bastard’s a spy. I knew it all the time!”
Chris shook his head. “He’s helped us in a hundred ways, John. Why, just by accompanying Ike to Tokyo, and convincing the Japanese…”
“Big deal! We’d already beaten the Japs!” The big marine clenched his fist, hard. “Like we’d have crushed Hitler, if these monsters hadn’t arrived, like Satan’s curse, out of nowhere.
“And now he’s lived among us for ten years, observing our methods, our tactics, and our technology, the only real advantage we had left!”
Chris grimaced. How could he explain it to Marlowe? The Marine officer had never been to Tehran, as Chris had, only last year. Marlowe had never seen the capital city of Israel-Iran, America’s greatest and most stalwart ally, bulwark of the East.
There, in dozens of armed settlements along the east bank of the Euphrates, Chris had met fierce men and women who bore on their arms tattooed numbers from Treblinka, Dachau, Auschwitz. He had heard their story of how, one hopeless night under barbed wire and the stench of chimneys, the starving, doomed masses had looked up to see a strange vapor fall from the sky. Unbelieving, death-starkened eyes had stared in wonderment as the mists gathered and coalesced into something that seemed almost solid.
Out of that eerie fog, a bridge of many colors formed… a rainbow arch climbing, apparently without end, out of the places of horror into a moonless night. And from the heights, each doomed man and woman saw a dark-eyed figure on a flying horse ride down. They felt him whisper to them inside their minds.
Come, children, while your tormenters blink unbelievingly in my web of the mind. Come, all, over my bridge to safety, before my cousins descrie my treason.
When they sank to their knees, or rocked in thankful prayer, the figure only snorted in derision. His voice hissed within their heads.
Do not mistake me for your God, who left you here to die! I cannot explain that One’s absence to you, or His plan in all this. The All-Father is a mystery even to Great Odin!
Know only that I will take you to safety now, such as there may be in this world. But only if you hurry! Come, and be grateful later, if you must!
Down to the camps, to bleak ghettoes, to a city under siege—the bridges formed in a single night, and with dawn were gone like vapor or a dream. Two million people, the old, the lame, women, children, the slaves of Hitler’s war factories, climbed those paths—for there was no other choice—and found themselves transported to a desert land, by the banks of an ancient river.
They arrived just in time to take up hasty arms and save a British Army fleeing the wreckage of Egypt and Palestine. They fused with the astonished Persians, and with refugees from crippled Russia, and together they built a new nation out of chaos.
That was why Loki appeared on the tarmac in Scotland, shortly after that night of miracles. He could not return to Europe, for the fury of his Aesir kin would be savage. In returning to Gotland, today, he was certainly in as much peril as the commandos.
“No, Marlowe. Loki’s not a spy. I haven’t any idea what on God’s green Earth he is. But I’d bet my life he’s not a spy.”
2
The sabots gurgled and rocked as they shot free of the submarine and bobbed to the surface of the cold sea. The outer shells broke away, and the sailors dipped their oars. The men all took their first breath of clean air in more than a day.
Loki’s dwarf seemed little relieved. He looked across the dark waters to the west, where the thin, reddish line of sunset outlined the hills of a great Baltic island, and muttered gutterally in a language like nothing Earthly.
Which was only natural. Like most Americans, Chris was convinced that these beings were as much the ancient Norse gods—recalled into the modern world—as he was Sandy Koufax, or that they didn’t play baseball in Brooklyn.
Aliens—that was the official line… the story broadcast by Allied Radio all through the Americas and Japan and what remained of Free Asia. Creatures from the stars had arrived, as in those stories by Chester Nimitz, the famous science fiction author.
It wasn’t hard to imagine why they might want to be looked on as gods. And it explained why they had chosen to side with the Nazis. After all, the ruse would not have worked in the West where, no matter how great their guests’ powers, Euro-American scientists would have probed and queried and people would have asked questions.