She looked over his shoulder at the terrain ahead. The sight filled her with an odd sense of dread. Even though the journey would in theory be little different from the ride upriver in Sweden, the towering evergreens there had been an omnipresent reminder that life could thrive even in the cold. Here, though, there was nothing but bleak and barren rock and snow. A dead land.
Berkeley pointed up the hill. ‘That way!’ Kagan set off, kicking up a spray of snow behind the snowmobile’s broad rubber track. The soldiers followed.
Eddie gave the case containing Thor’s Hammer, secured to the back of Kagan’s snowmobile, a dubious look. ‘If we find the pit and that stuff doesn’t do what it says on the tin, then what happens?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nina replied. ‘But I get the feeling Kagan’s got a contingency plan. He just hasn’t told us about it.’
‘Yeah, I got that feeling too.’ He opened his coat and drew his Wildey, giving it a rather theatrical check before returning it to its holster. ‘Good thing I brought a contingency of my own.’
‘Couldn’t you have left that ridiculous thing in Valhalla?’ Nina sighed, shaking her head. ‘Why do you need something so damn huge?’
‘If you shoot something with it, it stays down,’ Eddie said as he revved the engine and set off.
‘Like what? A polar bear?’ She meant it as a joke, but suddenly realised they were indeed in the domain of the giant Arctic predators. ‘Wait, you don’t think we’ll run into any polar bears, do you?’ she said, nervously scanning her surroundings.
‘Just being prepared,’ said Eddie with a grin. He caught up with Kagan’s snowmobile, and the team began the climb towards the waiting mountain.
It took ten minutes for the expedition to reach the top of the first slope. Once there, Berkeley batted furiously on Kagan’s shoulder for him to stop. The Russian halted, the others drawing up alongside. ‘There, over there,’ exclaimed the archaeologist, pointing.
Off to one side was a large flat boulder, tilted at a shallow angle. ‘The shield stone?’ Nina wondered. The rock was roughly circular, and did indeed bear a resemblance to a traditional Viking shield.
‘It fits the description, yeah,’ Berkeley replied. He fumbled his notes from a pocket with a gloved hand and studied them, then looked around. ‘There should be a long ridge leading up toward the mountain.’
‘That way,’ said Eddie. He indicated a snow-covered rise leading higher, curling lines of wind-whipped snow gusting off its exposed top. ‘We’ll need to watch out, the sides are pretty steep.’
Nina tried to survey the terrain above, but the ridge faded into a grey haze of fog. ‘Well, we know from the Vikings’ route that there’s a valley up there somewhere. Hopefully it won’t be too—’ She saw Kagan straighten in his seat, alert as a watchdog. ‘What?’
‘Stop your engine,’ the Russian told Eddie, issuing the same order in his native language to his men. The snowmobiles fell silent. ‘I hear something.’
There was indeed a low rumbling noise at the lower limits of hearing. Everyone looked for the source. One of the soldiers spoke in excited Russian and gestured to the south. Low-hanging clouds obscured much of the view, but the sound was clearly getting louder.
‘A helicopter!’ Kagan snapped. ‘It is Lock, it must be!’ He swore in Russian.
‘We don’t know that for sure,’ said Berkeley, though with little conviction.
Eddie was more certain. ‘Who else would it be? They made Tova translate the runes, and they figured out where to go the same way we did. Arse chives! They’re going to get there before us!’
‘Even if they fly directly to the pit, they will be only a few kilometres ahead of us,’ Kagan insisted. ‘Come on! We must go.’
He set off again, Berkeley yelping and clinging on tightly with the sudden acceleration. Eddie glared in the direction of the unseen aircraft, then followed. ‘See? Good job I brought my gun after all,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘And a good job they brought those.’ Amongst the equipment on the back of the soldiers’ vehicles was a set of AK-12s: the most modern iteration of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, which despite the addition of tactical rails and polymer parts replacing wood was still instantly recognisable as a direct descendant of the venerable Soviet weapon.
‘And I was worried about polar bears,’ Nina moaned.
‘Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll crash in the fog,’ Eddie said, before immediately shrugging in resignation. ‘No, I don’t think so either.’
‘How long will it take us to get there?’
‘No idea — we don’t even know exactly where we’re going.’ He looked up at the mountain, which rose ominously above the fog bank at the higher end of the ridge. ‘We’ve probably got another four or five miles to go. If the weather gets worse…’
He let the worrying statement hang. Nina also chose to keep her worries to herself, instead concentrating on holding on to her husband as the snowmobiles swept past the flat rock and began their ascent.
The wind bit savagely at the riders as they climbed the exposed ridge. Nina tried to imagine what the trek would have been like for the Vikings, limited to walking pace and with only animal furs to keep out the cold. After the long sea voyage all the way across the Atlantic, the Norse warriors would surely have suffered losses even before reaching the battle.
And when they got there… what were they expecting to fight at Ragnarök? The thought had been at the back of her mind for some time. Eisenhov had said in Russia that whatever was waiting inside the pit was not a real serpent, but it clearly resembled one enough for the Vikings to believe it was a great monster. They had fought it once before, when the men who had later been transformed by legend into gods, like Odin and Thor, had perished.
So what was waiting for them on the mountain now?
She considered asking Kagan what else he knew about the Soviet experiments, but he had pulled ahead, the narrowing ridge forcing the snowmobiles to drop into single file and space out to avoid the wakes of snow kicked up by the vehicles ahead. The crosswind picked up as they climbed. ‘Fuck, that’s nippy,’ Eddie muttered, hunching lower over the handlebars.
‘You’re not kidding,’ said Nina. ‘She felt almost as cold as in Sweden — after getting out of the river. ‘At least it can’t be as windy at the top, if there’s fog up there.’
Eddie looked up the ridge again. The bank of obscuring mist was slowly spilling over the lip of the flatter ground at the top, tendrils at its edge being snatched away by gusts blowing across the mountain’s face. But most of the looming grey mass remained squatting in place ahead of them, penned in by rocky slopes on each side. ‘Don’t like the look of that, but there isn’t a way around it. We’ll never get the snowmobiles up those cliffs.’
‘We have to go through it to follow the directions on the runes,’ Nina reminded him. ‘If we’re on the right track, that’ll be the vale of Fenrir.’
‘Wolf Valley, eh? Bet you’re really glad I brought my gun now, eh?’ He gave her a brief grin, then returned his attention to the task of guiding the snowmobile up the steepening ridge.
Several more minutes brought the team to the top. The landscape ahead vanished into a pale nothingness, mist shrouding everything. Kagan again signalled for everyone to halt and stop their engines. Silence descended. ‘I cannot hear the helicopter,’ he said.
‘Can’t hear anything,’ said Eddie. They were now mostly sheltered from the wind by the valley’s sides. Any other sounds seemed to be swallowed by the fog.