It took about twenty minutes to gain the top of the grassy knoll. When Drake reached it, Ben was already sitting down in the grass.
“Where’s the picnic hamper, Crusty?”
“Left it on your buggy.” He looked around. Up here, the view was breathtaking, endless green rolling fields, hills and streams everywhere, and purple mountains in the distance. They could see the village of Gamla Upsalla spreading out to the city boundaries of new Upsalla.
Kennedy stated the obvious. “So I’m just gonna say something that’s been bothering me for a while. If this is Odin’s mound, and it hides the World Tree — which would be a killer discovery — why hasn’t anyone found it before? Why would we find it now?”
“That one’s easy.” Ben was tying back his unruly locks. “No one has thought to look before. Until the Shield was discovered a month ago, this was all a dusty legend. Myth. And it wasn’t easy connecting the Spear to the World Tree — now called Yggdrasil almost universally — and then to Odin’s brief nine days there.”
“And—” Drake interjected, “this tree ain’t gonna be easy to find, if it exists. They won’t have wanted any old bastard stumbling on to it.”
Now Drake’s mobile started to ring. He glanced at Ben in mock seriousness as he picked it out of his backpack. “Jesus. I’m starting to feel like you.”
“Wells?”
“Ten man team at your disposal. Just say the word.”
Drake swallowed his surprise. “Ten man. That’s a big team.” A ten man SAS team could take out the President in his oval office, and still find time to star in the new Lady Gaga video before heading home for tea.
“Big stakes, so I hear. This thing’s escalating by the hour.”
“It is?”
“Governments never change, Drake. Slow to start, and then eager to bulldoze their way in, but scared to finish. If it’s any consolation though, it’s not the biggest thing going on in the world at the moment.”
Wells’ statement was designed to be tackled like a lion tackles a zebra and Drake didn’t disappoint. “Like what?”
“The boffins at NASA just confirmed the existence of a new super-volcano. And…” Wells actually sounded apprehensive, “it’s active.”
“What?”
“Slightly active. Slightly. But, think, the first thing you imagine when you mention a super-volcano is—”
“- the end of the planet,” Drake finished, his throat suddenly dry. The coincidence was that Drake had now heard that phrase twice in as many days. He watched Ben and Kennedy tracing the mound’s circumference, kicking grass, and felt a deep-rooted fear like nothing he’d ever experienced.
“Where is it?” he asked.
Wells laughed. “Not far, Drake. Near where they found that Shield of yours. It’s in Iceland.”
Drake was about to bite for the second time, when Ben shouted, “Found something!” in a high-pitched voice that showed his naivety, as it travelled far and wide.
“Gotta go.” Drake raced over to Ben, casting about as best he could. Kennedy was also looking around, but the only activity they could see was in the village.
“Keep it down, mate. Whatcha got?”
“These.” Ben dropped to his knees, and brushed away tangles of grass to reveal a stone slab about the size of an A4 piece of paper. “They line the entire perimeter of the mound, every few feet, in rows from the top to about halfway down. Must be hundreds of them.”
Drake peered closer. The stone’s face was badly weathered, but had been partially protected by the over-growing grass. Its surface bore some kind of marking.
“Runic inscriptions I think they’re called,” Ben said. “Viking symbols.”
“How the hell do you know?”
He grinned. “On the plane I checked out the shield’s markings. These are similar. Just ask Google.”
“Kid says there are hundreds,” Kennedy drawled, looking around the steep, grassy hillside. “So what? Doesn’t help.”
“Kid says it might do,” Ben said. “We need to find the runes associated with what we are seeking. The rune for spear. The rune for tree. And the rune for — “
“Odin,” Kennedy finished.
Drake had an idea. “I’m betting we can use line of sight. We all need to see each other to know it’s worked, right?”
“Soldier’s logic,” Kennedy laughed. “But worth a try, I guess.”
Drake was itching to ask her about ‘cop’s logic but time was slipping away. Other factions were coming and surprisingly absent, even now. They all started kicking the grass from each stone, scurrying around the green knoll. At first it was a thankless task. Drake made out symbols that looked like shields, crossbows, a donkey, a longboat, then — a spear!
“Got one.” His low pitched voice carried to the other two, and no further. He sat down with his back-pack and organized the supplies they’d bought during their taxi ride through Upsalla. Torches, a big flashlight, matches, water, a couple of knives he’d told Ben were for clearing debris. He’d received an I’m not that bloody gullible look, but their need was more imperative than Ben’s unease right now.
“Tree.” Kennedy fell to her knees, scraping at the stone.
It took Ben ten more stressful minutes to find something. He paused, then retraced his recent steps. “Remember what I said about how Tolkien based Gandalf on Odin?” He tapped the stone with his foot. “Well, that’s Gandalf. Even has a staff. Hey!”
Drake watched him carefully. He had heard a grinding sound, like heavy shutters rasping open.
“Did you cause that by stepping on the stone?” He asked carefully.
“Think so.”
They all looked at each other, expressions flickering from excitement, to worry, to fear, and then, as one, they stepped forward.
Drake’s stone gave slightly. He heard that same grinding sound. The earth in front of the stone sank, and then the depression ran away around the mound like a turbo-charged snake.
Ben shouted: “There’s something here.”
Drake and Kennedy tracked around the sunken earth to where he stood. He was crouching down, peering into a crack in the ground. “Some kind of tunnel.”
Drake brandished a torch. “Time to grow a pair, people,” he said. “Follow me.”
The moment they were out of sight, two radically different forces started to mobilise. The Germans, content until now to lay low in the sleepy town of Gamla Upsalla, geared up and started to follow in Drake’s footsteps.
The other force, a contingent of troops from the Swedish Army’s Elite Forces — the Sarskilda Skyddsgrupen or SSG — continued to watch the Germans, and discussed the odd complication proposed by the three civilians who had just descended into the pit.
They would need to be fully debriefed. By any means necessary.
That is, if they survived what was about to come.
TEN
Drake stooped. The dark passageway had started as a crawl-hole, and was now less than six feet high. The ceiling was rock and dirt, and riddled with big, dangling loops of over-growing grass they had to chop out of the way.
Like tackling a jungle, Drake mused. Only underground.
Some of the tougher vines, he noticed, had already been hacked apart. A shaft of unease ran through him.