Eddie did the same with his Wildey, but while he could see movement between the crystals, he knew that he would be unable to get a clear shot. ‘Arse. I can’t get a good angle from up here. We’ll have to go lower.’
Kagan nodded, surveying the confusing network of black shards below. ‘There,’ he said, pointing at a particular section of crystal. It was the widest they had seen, a hulking hexagonal pillar wedged almost horizontally across the shaft as if toppled by a giant. ‘We will be able to take them out before they even know we are here.’ He signalled for the rest of the group to advance.
‘Not sure if it’s safe,’ Eddie said dubiously. The wash of light from a globe above revealed stress lines in the great structure.
‘It will have to be. We are running out of time.’
The Englishman couldn’t disagree — the cruise missile was now little more than twenty minutes away. ‘Okay, go on. Nina, stay where you are.’
‘No,’ Kagan insisted as he climbed down. ‘We must get Thor’s Hammer to the eitr as soon as we can, and we still have to return to the surface to call off the missile. We cannot wait.’ He added something in Russian to the soldier at the rear, who tried to squeeze past Nina and Berkeley, but there was not enough room. ‘Dr Wilde, come down.’
Against his better judgement, Eddie nodded to his wife. ‘Oh boy,’ she said, gingerly climbing to the outcrop.
Kagan completed his descent to the bridge and, gun at the ready, made his way across. Eddie followed, then Maslov. The Englishman reached the bridge’s centre and looked down — and at last saw clearly what lay at the bottom of the pit.
The shaft widened out into a roughly hemispherical chamber about a hundred and fifty feet across, the rock encrusted in black condensates. Hundreds of jagged crystal stalactites hung down from above, turning the space into an obsidian torture chamber. The heat was sickening, the stinging in the party’s nostrils almost physically painful.
The source of it all filled the bottom of the cavern, lit by more illuminated globes bobbing on its surface.
The eitr pit.
A lake of malevolent primordial ooze churned slowly below, large bubbles swelling at its heart. The great crystal columns rose at all angles from the glistening slime. Some were crowded out, forced against the walls and ceiling only to crumble and shatter as they pressed against unyielding rock, while others stretched up as if in competition to reach the daylight high above. The eitr swirled lazily around their bases — but it was not stirred merely by a heat source below. There was a definite current, a flow heading from one side of the pool to the other. The black poison was briefly surfacing before continuing its journey through the earth’s coiling subterranean channels.
But all that was of less concern to Eddie than the people inside the chamber. Lock, Hoyt and their team had descended almost to the surface of the foul lake, using the crystals as walkways. As Tova had warned, there were six other men with them. All were armed, this time with SIG 516 assault rifles rather than sub-machine guns; after what had happened in Norway and at Valhalla, Hoyt was taking absolutely no chances of being outgunned.
They were not expecting an attack, though. Instead, all eyes were on the man closest to the lake. Unsurprisingly, Hoyt and Lock had delegated the dangerous task of actually obtaining a sample of eitr to an underling. The mercenary, wearing protective yellow hazmat overalls and a filter mask over his face, was kneeling on a sloping slab of black crystal just a foot above the rippling oil. In front of him was a metal canister closely resembling the one containing Thor’s Hammer, its hinged lid open. The man was operating a pump, carefully sucking up eitr through a snake-like metal hose and depositing it in the container.
Which was almost full.
Lock was twenty feet away, higher up. ‘How much longer?’ he called impatiently.
‘Almost done,’ the pump operator replied, voice muffled.
‘About time. I want this stuff back in our lab by the end of the day.’
Hoyt, further back, held in a cough. ‘Sooner we get out of here, the better. We’re probably gettin’ cancer just breathing this shit.’
‘Volkov told the CIA it was harmless,’ said Lock.
‘Yeah, but that was in the sixties, and they said cigarettes were harmless back then too.’ He coughed again, then retreated up one of the spars.
Lock ignored him, watching the cylinder fill up with an expression of near awe. ‘The Vikings were right,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Life and death in one substance.’ The awe turned to expectant greed. ‘And we control it…’
Kagan made a sound of angry disgust, then glanced back across the bridge. Nina and Berkeley had found enough room to let Pravdin past, and the Russian was now moving to join the other three armed men. ‘We will need to take them out quickly,’ he told Eddie in a low voice. ‘Can you hit them from here with that?’ He glanced at the Wildey.
‘Piece of piss, mate,’ Eddie replied. ‘Hoyt’s mine, though. That bastard’s finally going down.’ He lined up his weapon on the oblivious American.
‘When I say,’ Kagan ordered. ‘We must get them all at once.’
The Englishman reluctantly held his finger off the trigger. ‘You’ll need to be fast — you’ve got to get two of ’em each before they can react.’
‘We will,’ Kagan assured him. The officer issued rapid instructions, then took aim with his own weapon. ‘We have our targets — we will fire on three. Are you ready?’
‘Yeah,’ Eddie replied. Below, Hoyt hopped across to another ledge. The Wildey tracked him.
The second soldier finally reached the rest of the team, readying his AK-12. He nodded to Kagan. ‘Okay,’ said the Russian. ‘One, two—’
A loud bang echoed around the shaft — but it was not a gunshot.
Eddie felt the crossing jolt beneath him. ‘Shit!’ he gasped, instantly realising what had happened. Pravdin’s arrival had put too much weight on the unsupported middle of the bridge — and the stress lines were now becoming fractures. Below, Hoyt looked up in surprise at the unexpected sound. ‘Move, get off the—’
The crystal sheared apart.
34
Eddie was already moving, about to dive for safety — but Kagan blocked his way, his accumulated injuries making him fractionally slower to respond. The crystal span fell, taking them with it.
Pravdin had realised the danger. He leapt back at the ledge on which Nina and Berkeley were standing—
And fell short.
He clawed desperately at the side of the protruding outcrop. His fingertips found purchase on the scales — only for them to crumble under his weight. The soldier fell with a horrible scream, the sound abruptly cut off as he smashed against another crystal bridge below and tumbled into the eitr, kicking up a viscid splash and a cloud of steam as the black ooze swallowed him.
The other men on the collapsing bridge fared only slightly better. The great chunk of crystal beneath Eddie and Kagan pulverised a narrower structure as it dropped, the impact slowing its fall — and throwing the Russian clear to land heavily atop a steep ledge on the shaft’s side.
Eddie was also sent flying, plunging past Kagan to crash down on a lower crystalline span. He skidded across it, just barely clamping his left hand around a protruding spike in time to stop himself from going over the edge. Maslov landed beside him with a pained cry. Shattered chunks of the demolished bridge pounded both men.
The chaos continued below. ‘Jesus Christ!’ yelled Hoyt as the huge crystal block plummeted into the cavern, disintegrating more black spires in a glass-shattering cacophony as it fell. He ducked behind one of the larger columns as shrapnel scythed past.