The Bones Of Odin (Matt Drake 1) (9 page)

Horrifyingly real. They were facing a countdown to the end of the world.

ELEVEN

THE PIT OF THE WORLD TREE, SWEDEN

Drake didn’t stand on ceremony. He grabbed the Spear and headed back the way he’d come. Through the freezing stream, down the crumbling stairs. He switched the flashlight off half-way, and slowed as utter darkness enveloped him.

Faint beams of light swept the entrance below.

He kept going. It wasn’t over yet. He’d long since learned that, more often than not, the man who thought overlong in combat was the man who never made it home.

He stopped dead on the last step, then crept into the passageway’s deeper darkness. The Germans were close now, almost at the end of the ledge, but their flashlights would only pick him out as another shadow at this range. He skipped across the passage, hugged the wall, and started for the slope that led to the base of the Viking ships.

A man’s voice snapped: “See that! Look sharp, Stevie Wonder!” The voice surprised him, carrying the deep twang of the American South.

Dammit.
The eagle-eyed bastard had seen him - or at least a moving shadow - something he wouldn’t have thought possible in this gloom. He ran faster. A shot rang out, striking rock close to where he’d just been.

A shadowy figure leaned out over the ledge - probably the American. “There’s a path down there among the ships. Get your dicks movin’ ‘fore I stick ‘em down your lazy throats.”

Damn. The Yank had seen the hidden path.

Harsh, arrogant, superior. One of the Germans said: “Fuck you, Milo,” and then squeaked as he was manhandled bodily down the slope.

Drake thanked his lucky stars. He was on the man in a second, smashing his vocal chords and twisting his neck with an audible crack before anyone else could follow.

Drake raised the German’s gun - a Heckler and Koch MG4 - and fired a few rounds. One man’s head exploded.

Ah, yes, he thought. Still better at shooting a gun than a camera.

“Canadians!”
was the concurring series of hisses.

Drake smiled at the furious whispers. Let them think that.

Without any more dalliance he sprinted along the path as fast as he dared. Ben and Kennedy were ahead, and needed his protection. He’d sworn to get them out of this alive, and he wouldn’t let them down.

At his back, the Germans were proceeding down the slope with caution. He fired off a few rounds to keep them busy, and started counting ships.

Four, six, eleven.

The pathway grew precarious, but finally levelled out. At one point it thinned so drastically that anyone over fifteen stone would probably break a rib squeezing between timbers, but it widened again as he counted the sixteenth ship.

The vessels loomed above him, ancient, intimidating, smelling of old bark and mould. A fleeting movement caught his attention and he glanced left to see a figure that could only be this new guy Milo
sprinting
back along the narrow ledge which most humans could barely walk along. Drake didn’t even have time to fire - the American was moving so fast.

Damn! Why’d he have to be so good? The only other person Drake knew – apart from himself - who could perform such a feat was Alicia Myles.

Landed myself in the middle of an approaching
Gladiator
competition here . . .

He leapt forward, past the ships now, using his momentum to bounce from step to step, almost free-running from random mounds to deep clefts, and angle-jumping off the sandy walls. Even using the ships’ flexible timbers to gain momentum between jumps.

“Wait!”

The disembodied voice floated from ahead. He paused, seeing Kennedy’s vague shape, relieved to hear that American drawl. “Follow me,” he cried, knowing he couldn’t let Milo beat him to the end of the passage. They could be pinned down for hours.

He broke past the final ship at a break-neck run, Ben and Kennedy lagging in his wake, just as Milo leapt off the ledge and cut past the front of the very same ship. Drake tackled him around the waist, making sure he landed heavily on his sternum.

He wasted a second flinging the gun towards Kennedy.

Whilst the gun was still in mid-flight, Milo scissor-kicked and twisted loose, flipped over onto his hands, and was up abruptly facing him.

He snarled: “Matt Drake, the one and only. Been lookin’ forward to this,
pal.”

He struck with elbows and fists. Drake caught multiple blows on his arms, wincing as he backed up. This guy knew him, but who the hell was
he
? An old faceless enemy? A shadow-ghost from a dark SAS past? Milo was in close and happy to stay there. Drake’s peripheral vision noted the knife at the American’s waistband, just waiting for a distraction.

He caught a vicious kick on his own instep.

Behind him he could hear the first clumsy movements of the advancing German force. They were just a few ships back.

Ben and Kennedy watched in amazement. Kennedy had the machine-gun raised.

Drake feinted one way, then twisted the other, spinning away from Milo’s vicious leg-breaker. Kennedy fired her shot, kicking up dirt an inch from Milo’s foot.

Drake grinned as he moved away, made as if to pet a dog. “Stay,” he said mockingly. “There’s a good boy.”

Kennedy fired another warning shot. Drake turned and ran past them, caught Ben’s arm, and pulled as the young man turned automatically towards the crumbling staircase.

“No!” Drake shouted. “They’ll pick us off one by one.”

Ben looked aghast. “
Where else?”

Drake shrugged disarmingly. “Where’d you think?”

He headed straight for the World Tree.

TWELVE

THE WORLD TREE, SWEDEN

And up they went. Drake had gambled that the World Tree was so old and strong that its limbs would be plentiful and sturdy. Once you accepted you were climbing a tree that was literally
upside down,
the physics hardly mattered at all.

“Just like being a boy again,” Drake egged Ben on, urging him faster without causing panic. “Shouldn’t be a problem for you, Blakey. You okay, Kennedy?”

The New Yorker climbed last, keeping the gun trained below her. Luckily, the World Tree’s extensive symmetry of branches and leaves concealed their progress.

“I’ve climbed a few stalks in my time,” she said light-heartedly.

Ben laughed. Good sign. Drake thanked Kennedy silently, starting to feel even better about having her along.

Damn, he thought. He’d almost added:
on this mission.
Back to the old vernacular in less than a week.

Drake climbed from branch to branch, ever upward, sitting or standing astride one branch whilst reaching for the next. The progress was quick, which meant their upper-body strength lasted longer than expected. Even so, about halfway up Drake noticed Ben was flagging.

“Tweenie getting tired?” he asked, and saw an immediate doubling of the effort. Every so often, Kennedy cracked off a bullet down through the branches. Twice, they managed to make out the stone staircase rising beside them, and saw no sign of pursuers.

Voices echoes up to them.
“Englishman - Matt Drake.”
The ex-SAS soldier heard once, the voice distorted by a thick German accent that his sixth sense told him had to be the man in white. The man he’d seen twice now accepting stolen artefacts.

Another time he heard:
“SRT dropout.”
The drawl was Milo’s, exposing his past, revealing the unit they kept secret even
within
the SAS.
Who in God’s name was this guy?

Shots splintered the heavy boughs. Drake called a pause to resettle the rucksack with its shifting treasure inside, then spied the wide branch he’d been aiming for. The one that reached almost to the place on the staircase where they’d rested earlier.

“Out there,” he motioned to Ben. “Straddle the branch and move, . . .fast!”

They would be exposed for about two minutes. Subtracting surprise and reaction time that still left over a minute of extreme danger.

Ben broke cover first, Drake and Kennedy a second after, all bouncing on their hands and haunches along the branch towards the staircase. When they were spotted, Kennedy bought them precious seconds by firing off a fusillade of lead, punching holes through at least one unlucky tomb-raider.

And now they saw that Milo had indeed sent a team running up the staircase. Five men. And the team was fast. They would reach the end of the branch before Ben would!
Shit! They didn’t stand a chance.

Ben saw it too, and faltered. Drake shouted in his ear: “
Never give up! Never!”

Kennedy squeezed the trigger again. Two men fell: one flying off into the pit, the other clutching his side and screaming. She squeezed it once more, and then Drake heard the mag run dry.

Two Germans were left, but now stood facing them, weapons ready. Drake set his face hard. They had lost the race.

“Shoot them down!” Milo’s voice echoed up. “We’ll search through the scraps down here.”

“
Nein!”
The thick German accent rang out again. “
Der Spear! Der Spear!”

The gun barrels didn’t waver. One of the Germans taunted: “Crawl, little pigeons. Come here.”

Ben moved slowly. Drake could see his shoulders shaking. “Trust me,” he whispered into his friend’s ear, and coiled every muscle. He would leap just as Ben reached the end of the bough, his only play was to attack and use his skill-set.

“I still have a knife,” Kennedy murmured.

Drake nodded.

Ben reached the end of the bough. The Germans waited calmly.

Drake started to rise.

Then, in a blur, the Germans flew to the side as if hit by a torpedo. Their bodies, ragged and bloody, slammed off the wall and rebounded wetly down into the pit, cart-wheeling.

A few metres above the bough, where the stairs curved, a massive contingent of men stood, bearing heavy arms. One held a still-smoking AK-5 assault rifle in his hands.

“The Swedish,” Drake recognised the armament as that typically used by the Swedish military.

Louder, he said: “About bloody time.”

THIRTEEN

MILITARY BASE, SWEDEN

The room they ended up in - a Spartan twelve-by-twelve with a desk and an ice-rimmed window - took Drake back a few years.

“Relax,” he tapped Ben’s white knuckles. “Standard military bunker, this place. I’ve seen worse hotel rooms, mate, believe me.”

“I’ve been in worse
apartments.
” Kennedy seemed at her ease, the cop training at work.

“Another boyfriend’s?” Drake raised an eyebrow.

“Sure. Why?”

“Oh, nothing.” Drake counted past ten on his fingers, then looked down as if to start using his toes.

Ben managed a thin smile.

“Listen, Ben, I grant you it was hairy at first but you saw that Swedish guy make the calls. We’re good. Anyway, we need to hang out a bit. We’re knackered.”

The door opened, and their host, a well-built Swede with blonde hair and a hard-as-nails gaze that’d make even Shrek turn white, clipped across the concrete floor. When they’d been captured, and Drake had carefully explained who they were and what they were doing, this man had introduced himself as Torsten Dahl, and had then withdrawn to the far side of his chopper to make a few calls.

“Matt Drake,” he said. “Kennedy Moore. And Ben Blake. The Swedish government has no quarrel with you . . .”

Drake was disturbed by the accent which wasn’t at all Swedish. “You go to one of them shiny-arse schools, Dahl? Eton, or some such?”

“Shiny-arse?”

“Schools that promote their officers through lineage,
money,
and
breeding.
Whilst saying
fuck you
to skills, proficiency, and enthusiasm.”

“I imagine I did.” Dahl’s tone was even.

“Great. Well . . . if that’s all . . .”

Dahl held up a hand, whilst Ben gave Drake an aggrieved look. “Stop being a tit, Matt. Just because
you’re
a coarse Yorkshire peasant doesn’t mean the rest of us are all Royal
inbreds
, does it?”

Drake blinked at his lodger in shock. Kennedy made a ‘roll with it’ motion. It occurred to him then that Ben had found something in this mission that had truly hooked him and wanted more.

Dahl said: “I’d appreciate a sharing of knowledge, friends. I really would.”

Drake was all for sharing, but
knowledge was power
as they say, and he was trying to figure a way to enlist the Swedish Government’s help here.

Ben was already warning up to his tale of the Nine Pieces of Odin and the Tomb of the Gods, when Drake interrupted.

“Look,” he said. “Me and the kid here, and now maybe the
gronk,
are eight-inch headlines on some kind of Kill List . . .”

“I’m no
gronk
, you English asshole.” Kennedy half rose to her feet.

“Impressed you know the word.” Drake lowered his eyes. “Sorry. It’s the lingo. It never leaves you.” He flashed back to Alyson’s parting words:
you’ll always be SAS.

He studied his hands, still scarred from tussling with Milo and climbing the World Tree, and thought about his quick and true reactions over the last few days.

How right she’d been.

“What’s a
gronk?
” Ben wondered.

Dahl sat on a hard metal chair and clomped his heavy boots down on the table. “A female who . . . umm . . . ‘enjoys the company of servicemen.’” he said, diplomatically.

“My own description would have been a little
coarser
,” Drake glanced at Ben, then said: “The Kill List. The Germans want us dead for crimes un-committed. How can you help, Dahl?”

The Swede didn’t answer for a while, just stared out the icy window into the snow-blanched landscape and beyond, at crumbling cliffs that stood desolate and alone against a wild ocean.