“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.