Nina was cold again, a frigid wind biting at her face, but at least now she could warm up simply by going back inside the ship.
All that was stopping her was the question she knew she had to ask her husband… and the answer she was afraid to hear.
The RV Akademik Rozhkov was a 3,000-ton Russian oceanographic survey vessel, which to the surprise — and suspicion — of its crew had been abruptly ordered to divert from its task in the North Atlantic and sent into the Davis Strait between the two great frozen wastes of Greenland and Baffin Island. It had received new passengers by helicopter: Nina, Eddie, Kagan and Berkeley, as well as a small contingent of men who, while dressed in civilian clothes, were clearly members of some military unit, all being of similar age, build, haircut and taciturn disposition.
The escapees from Valhalla had eventually made it back to Blixtholm to call for the helicopter to return and pick them up, learning while they were there that Lock and his team had done exactly the same thing. So they knew they were not far behind Tova’s kidnappers. The difference was that Lock could travel to Baffin Island directly using Xeniteq’s resources, while Kagan had flat-out refused to allow Nina to do the same via the IHA, for fear that a leak would alert the Americans to their progress. Instead, they had been forced to arrange to use Russian resources via the Kremlin, slowing proceedings considerably.
But now they were on their way, and getting closer. Berkeley’s translation, rapidly completed once the picture of the runes was recovered from the damaged tablet, had allowed them to track the route the Vikings had taken from Valhalla downriver to the coast, and then around southern Scandinavia to a jumping-off point in western Norway. From there, the ancient mariners had travelled in legs to the Shetland Islands, the Faroes and Iceland, and then on to Greenland. The final steps of the journey were now the critical part: exactly where had the Vikings made landfall on Helluland to reach the eitr pit?
The sky was completely overcast, darkening the day still further as the hidden sun descended. Beneath the clouds, the Baffin coastline was visible off to the west, a line of almost unbroken white rising above the leaden horizon. Nina gazed at it, then drew a deep breath before heading inside. She also had questions to ask of Berkeley, and was as concerned about their answers as she was about whatever Eddie might tell her. Her fear of the latter was that it could change the way she looked at her husband, perhaps for ever. The former could get her killed.
Her, and many others.
She made her way down to one of the survey vessel’s labs, which had been assigned to the team. The four Russian soldiers were in a group in one corner, playing cards and swapping what she suspected were obscene jokes. Kagan sat close to Berkeley, watching with bored impatience as the archaeologist repeatedly read through his notes and checked the translation on a laptop. Eddie, meanwhile, sat slightly apart from the others, looking up as she entered and nodding in greeting, but not saying anything. He too knew that the question was coming, but was equally reluctant to face it.
Berkeley saved them from it, for now. ‘You look cold,’ he said.
Nina rubbed at her cheeks, which had gone numb even from the brief exposure to the chill. ‘Well, it is sub-zero outside. Fahrenheit and Celsius.’
‘I can’t say I’m surprised.’ He turned the laptop towards her as she sat down beside him. ‘If the translation is correct, then based on the directions it gives, we’ll be making landfall above the Arctic Circle.’
‘You’ve pinpointed where we’re going?’
He looked faintly uncomfortable. ‘Well… pinpointed is a little too precise. I used the sun compass to work out the latitudes the Vikings would have been aiming for, but it’s only accurate to one or two degrees, which could give us anything up to two hundred miles of coastline to choose from. And I can’t even be entirely sure that I’m reading it correctly, as the Norsemen never left clear instructions. I mean, there are still plenty of historians who would dispute that it’s even a navigational instrument at all.’
‘Let us hope you are right and they are wrong,’ said Kagan, unimpressed.
‘Well, I usually am right,’ Berkeley replied airily.
Nina gave him a stern look. ‘Except when it comes to picking sides.’
‘All right, all right!’ he protested. ‘So, yes, I’ve made some… less than ideal choices. But I did my time for that business in Egypt, and I’m helping you fix things now, aren’t I?’
‘Some results would be nice first. What have you got?’
He glowered, but turned back to the laptop. One side of the screen showed the image of the runes in Valhalla; the other, the computer-generated translation of the text, below which was a more refined version edited by Berkeley himself. He pointed out a section. ‘This part here told the Vikings, once they’d rounded the southern tip of Greenland and turned north along its western coast, to travel to two islands at a latitude that I think works out at around sixty-eight degrees north. They then sail due west across the Davis Strait to a large island.’ He frowned slightly. ‘The runes are phrased rather oddly, but as far as I can tell I haven’t made any mistakes in translation. They say something like “You will see three mountains that you will recognise”, but I haven’t been able to find any indication of why they would recognise them.’
‘Something in Valhalla?’ Nina wondered. ‘A picture, or a map?’
‘Maybe, but I didn’t see anything, and nor did Kagan or your husband. Anyway, from there the description of the route is the same kind of thing as on the two runestones in Scandinavia. Find a landmark, go in a certain direction, et cetera. I don’t think the place we’re looking for can be more than seven or eight miles from the coast.’
‘Tell her about the wolf,’ said Eddie, speaking for the first time.
Nina detected an undercurrent of concern in his words. ‘What about the wolf?’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Berkeley dismissively. ‘Viking poetic licence, I’m sure.’
‘The other runes were pretty literal — the lake of lightning, the shimmering bridge, all that,’ said the Englishman, rising from his chair to join them. ‘It might mean something here too. Tell her.’
Berkeley blew out an irritated sigh. ‘Okay, okay. One part of the route is called “the vale of the wolf” — the wolf being, specifically, Fenrir.’
‘As in “right there on the side of the bad guys at Ragnarök” Fenrir?’ said Nina. ‘That Fenrir?’
‘The one and the same. Son of Loki and brother of Jörmungandr, biter-off of Tyr’s hand… and the killer of Odin.’
Eddie raised his eyebrows. ‘He took out Odin? I thought he was supposed to be the hardest of all the Norse gods.’
‘He was, but Fenrir still killed him. Swallowed him whole, according to the myth.’
‘Must have been one bloody huge wolf.’
‘Well, you’ve heard of the Big Bad Wolf, haven’t you?’ said Nina with a smile. She took a closer look at the screen. Assuming Berkeley’s translations were correct, it was hard to see any other interpretation of the ancient text. ‘So you go through the vale of Fenrir, up a mountain to the plain of Vigrid… and that’s where you find the lair of the Midgard Serpent?’
Berkeley nodded. ‘That part of the route was fairly straightforward to translate.’
‘Lock and Hoyt will have forced Dr Skilfinger to translate it by now,’ said Kagan. ‘They could be ahead of us already.’
‘Only if they know exactly where to land,’ said Nina. ‘We haven’t figured that out yet, and we’re working from the same information.’
‘They might not need to,’ Eddie said. ‘They’ve got the directions, and all the descriptions and clues about what they’re looking out for on the way. Stick that into a computer with a good enough landscape map, and it might be able to work out the endpoint. I mean,’ he gestured at the laptop, ‘we already know from the runes that it’s on an island, and if it’s at least seven miles long and has three mountains, that narrows down the places you need to check.’