Hawke put his arm around her shoulders and gave a comforting squeeze. He had no idea why Dr. Henry Donovan was able to write in that strange, ancient script and even less how he knew about the raiding parties and their mysterious, ancient loot. Maybe it was simply that he had somehow taught himself how to do it to facilitate his research, or perhaps the real reason was something neither of them wanted to contemplate.
He yawned and snatched a glance out of the window. The flight had been a tense one, but a breath-taking display of the northern lights illuminated the sky and reminded them what they were fighting for. Now the tops of some high-drifting cirrus were a bright green color. It was calm up here, he thought, but the kind of calm that came before a storm.
Lea looked with a vague interest from the window as the private jet descended through a bank of heavy stratocumulus. The engines were reduced to idle now, and the flaps fully extended. They would be on the ground in minutes.
But what they would find there worried her more than ever. She knew Hawke was trying to help, but he couldn’t begin to understand what she was really feeling. She had been on so many missions like this she had lost count of them all, but this one was different. Like her last journey to Ireland, this one felt personal. It was personal, she supposed — instead of simply hunting down ancient relics and seeking a long-obscured truth about the world, she was now faced with the unsettling prospect that her father was somehow involved.
Now, as she gazed down at the bleak landscape of Swedish Lapland — the zone where taiga slowly turned to tundra, her mind turned inwards to face the terrible fact that maybe her father really was part of this after all. How else could he have known how to write in the ancient pre-Runic script?
Her thoughts grew darker still. If he had been involved with the mysterious Athanatoi, what was the nature of the relationship? Did it involve her? Why had he never told anyone about the truth? It felt like her mind was on fire, and when she finally alighted on the subject of his death, it all got too much. Had he really been killed by the Athanatoi? Who was the man in black?
Her thoughts were disrupted by the squeal of the tires on the tarmac of Kiruna Airport and the roar of the reverse thrusters. Seconds later they were walking through the modest airport and stepping out into a chilly Lapland evening.
“Is this supposed to be summer?” Scarlet said with a sneer.
They climbed into a hired truck — another Hilux as specified by Hawke — and wasted no time in driving west along the 870 toward Kebnekaise. The drive was peaceful and offered a rare moment of relaxation to the team. They had been on the go since landing in the Florida Keys but despite their fatigue they knew the stakes were too high to risk taking their foot off the pedal now.
Outside, the Swedish taiga drifted past in a gentle blur of olive greens and sepia brown, and above them a pure blue Arctic sky poured the day’s last sunshine into the hired car and added to the soporific feeling induced by the long, straight road. Pure lakes coasted past them as they pushed on along pine-flanked roads in pursuit of the truth, whatever it may be.
Far on the southern horizon Scarlet saw a lone property, surrounded by a jumble of outbuildings and what looked like a barn.
“Can’t believe anyone would live out here,” she said dismissively. “You’d have to be bloody certifiable.” As she spoke she slapped at a mosquito that had somehow slipped into the car.
“I don’t know about that,” Hawke said. “It kind of appeals to me in a strange way. I thought the same thing back in Iceland.”
“But then you’re certifiable,” Scarlet said. “So that sort of proves my point.”
Hawke turned briefly to Lea, keeping his eyes on the road. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You like it up here?”
“Are you kidding? I’d go bloody crazy in a place like this.”
“Ah,” Hawke said, and pressed on.
They reached the base of Kebnekaise in late evening, although the position of the sun made it feel much earlier. In the tranquil, fading sunlight they unpacked their weapons, climbing rope and flashlights from the trunk of the Hilux and for a few moments took in the landscape.
So this was the legendary Midgard — the Middle Earth where Thor had fought the World Serpent and died after killing him. Today, it was a ragged range of dark mountains rising from a plain of stubby brown and yellow grass and pitted marshland, but there was still something genuinely awesome about the place. Running along the horizon to the southeast was a line of birch and poplar trees, and scattered around in patches running away to the west were wild strawberries and cloudberries. They would grow thicker in the boreal forest a few hundred meters to their right, but these were some strays.
“So that’s our peak right there,” Ryan said, twisting a map around and placing a compass against it. “If my orienteering skills are correct, and of course they are, we have only a short hike until we reach the base of our mountain and then it’s not much further from there to the lake in question!”
“Your orienteering skills are not correct,” Hawke said, taking the map and twisting it around in Ryan’s hands before pointing at the horizon. “That way is north, not over there.”
Ryan looked sheepishly at the former SBS man for a second but moved along with a grin and a shrug of the shoulders. “Ah…”
“It’s absolutely fantastic!” Victoria said, changing the subject. She moved closer to the mountains, utterly spellbound. “I had no idea.”
“Come on, let’s get on with it,” Scarlet said. “I doubt there’s a decent bar anywhere around here so the sooner we get back to Kiruna the better, even if it was about as lively as a morgue there.”
They picked up their kit and stepped off of the road and into the taiga. Hawke was immediately reminded of old times, not just of the SBS and their punishing training programs but of his childhood too — like the time they went hiking on Dartmoor and he and his sister played hide and seek around Birch Tor. Those days seemed impossibly far away now and when he recalled them it almost felt as if he were imagining someone else’s childhood and not his own.
“Whatcha thinking about?”
He turned and saw Lea had caught up with him and linked her arm through his.
He smiled, looked over at the sun and replied: “I was just thinking about how much I’d like a cold beer.”
“Don’t! You sound like Scarlet Bloody Sloane. I swear if she ever gets shot she’s going to bleed vodka.”
“I doubt that would happen.”
“Which bit?”
“Getting shot, of course… because she’d definitely bleed vodka.”
To the west, the sun momentarily dipped behind the ridgeline and lit the tops of the mountains and the few, light clouds a faint pink color. High above and behind them they saw some pale stars sparkling in the east, and the air took on a decidedly chilly feel despite the late summer month. This was about as isolated as Europe got — cool, distant and far from life.
“It’s bloody freezing around these parts,” Ryan said with a shiver.
“Don’t be such a baby,” Scarlet said.
“I agree with Ryan,” Victoria said, with a sideways glance at Scarlet. “It is rather chilly here, but then one would expect that at this latitude.”
“Yes, I suppose one would,” Scarlet said.
Hawke and Lea shared a private smile, and they pushed on.
By the time they arrived at the canyon at the base of the mountain the sun had sunk ever lower and darkened the ridgeline of the mountain ranges around them. Up here, the latitude was so high that the time before sunset — what photographers called the golden hour — could last for much longer than sixty minutes, and that was the case tonight. It felt like it had been sunset for hours by the time they finally reached the rocks that they had been seeking, and there, stretching out beyond them in the purple, dusky haze, was the lake.