James Lovegrove - The Age Of Odin (36 page)

With all four of the lads pulling on me, they started to make some headway, and soon most of my body was back on the ramp. Cy thumped at Suttung's fingers hard as he knew how, but couldn't dislodge his grip. In fact it only made those talons sink in deeper. The blood was now streaking out over my boot, flecking the frost giant's arm and face.

One final heave, and I was safely in the cargo bay once more.

Unfortunately, so was my hanger-on. Suttung got one thigh over the lip of the ramp, then rolled himself the rest of the way in. He was up on his feet and raging in no time. He grabbed Backdoor by the head and threw him the length of the cabin. Backdoor collided with a bank of seats and went down hard. Then Suttung drew a weapon from the waistband of his armour, another of those fucking ice tomahawks. He lashed out at Cy with it, and the kid got a forearm up in the nick of time, which saved him from having a trapezoid-shaped blade embedded deep in his noggin. The downside was that his arm was slashed open clean to the bone. He fell, hissing through his teeth, clutching the wound.

Suttung made a big mistake in hurting Cy, for two reasons. First, I was fond of Cy and it pissed me off. Second, it meant he'd stepped close to where I happened to be lying. So close that I was able to scissor my legs around his ankle, twist, and bring him crashing to his knees.

I hadn't thought this one through too brilliantly, though, since he turned his attention on me. The tomahawk was up, poised, and Suttung's grin said he was looking forward to burying the hatchet with Gid Coxall - and not in a good way.

Then an Irish-accented voice said, "Hello there, frostie. You like cold? How about some dry ice?"

Paddy had the Chinook's fire extinguisher in his hands, and he sprayed the contents full-on into Suttung's ugly mug. Carbon dioxide jetted out from the nozzle in clouds, and Suttung shrieked. The stuff went in his mouth, up his nose, into his eyes, and he reeled backwards, frantically rubbing at his face with both forearms. Paddy gave him no quarter. Kept blasting away with the fire extinguisher. Driving him back towards the ramp.

I scrambled on all fours to help. Suttung teetered on the end of the ramp. His eyes were bloodshot and streaming. He was choking, flailing.

I gave his legs a good shunt, and all at once there was no more frost giant filling the cargo doorway. There was just a vista of Jotunheim, glinting ice fields, Utgard receding on the horizon, and the sounds of hammering wind and a falling, fading scream.

Forty-Five

Sleipnir
doubled back and we picked up the Valkyries and their snowmobiles some two kilometres outside Utgard - a safe distance, and not far, in fact, from the splash of mangled red fur and flesh that had been Suttung. Then we began the journey home.

Five soldiers slouched together in sullen silence. Cy's arm was bandaged up, a nifty piece of field dressing courtesy of Paddy, and he had been fed some ace painkillers from the Wokka's first aid kit. He looked grey but okay. Backdoor was suffering from mild concussion but joked that it was only his head so no vital organs had been damaged. I'd staunched the bleeding from the gashes in my leg. We sat there and avoided one another's gazes. Each of the others wore a face like a slapped cock, and I'd no doubt I did too.

Someone had to skewer the sour mood. Guess who elected himself to do it.

"Well," I said, "that all went swimmingly, didn't it?" Which won a couple of weak smiles and not much else.

"Might as well get this over with," I went on. "What happened? Any idea? Somebody? Anybody?"

Shrugs.

"Come on, one of you must have seen
something
. Who fired first? Why? What at?"

"It was Chops, I think," Cy volunteered. "Not sure, but he was behind me and that's where the shooting started."

"Weren't you taking the rear?" I asked Backdoor.

He nodded. It was noteworthy that neither he nor anyone else sniggered at the phrase "taking the rear." Nothing, right now, was very funny.

"So you'd have been following Chops. Was it him? Did he open fire?"

"I don't know, Gid. I really don't. I wasn't looking his way when it all kicked off. First I knew about it was a couple of frosties were on the deck and so was Chops. It happened that fast. At a push, my guess would be a frostie made a move on Chops and he retaliated."

"Why would one of them do that, though?" I said. "They had specific instructions to leave us alone and not hurt us."

"Yeah, but you know how they was on the way in," said Cy. "All nudging us and giving it attitude and everything. Maybe one of them forgot what Bergelmir said and went back to how they was behaving beforehand, only he took the aggro too far and Chopsticks hit back. We was all on edge, bruv. I mean, Bergelmir, he'd been talking about executing the lot of us not ten minutes earlier."

The others echoed this with a round of disgruntled grunts. I'd not earned myself any Brownie points with the way things had gone in the citadel. Although I'd been able to pull our fat from the fire, the lads weren't happy that our fat had been anywhere near a fire in the first place. I couldn't blame them for that.

"No question, I take full responsibility for this mess," I told them. "My plan, my fuck-up. I just want to find out why things went south, so we can avoid a repeat in future."

"Maybe Chopsticks got careless," Baz offered. "Maybe his safety was off and he stumbled and pulled the trigger by mistake."

I shook my head. "I didn't know him as well as any of you did, but that doesn't strike me as like him. Chops was always measured and cautious. What's more, he'd know better than to march with his finger inside the trigger guard."

"Would he? He were only Territorial, after all. Saturday night soldier."

"Still."

"And accidents happen."

"And if guns are involved they're usually tragic accidents. Somehow, though, I just can't buy this as one of those."

"Maybe," said Paddy in a conciliatory tone, "we should chalk it up to experience and move on. What's done is done. Rehashing it isn't going to change anything and certainly won't bring Chopsticks back. I'll miss the lad because he was just about the only one around here with a bit of culture, unlike the rest of you philistine, pig-ignorant shites. But he's gone, and we should start coming to terms with that."

"And our chances of bringing the frosties onside have been scuppered too," I said bitterly. "We lost a man
and
screwed the mission, so you'll forgive me if I can't put it behind me quite yet, Pads."

"That's your prerogative. All I'm saying is, we're alive at least, even though it was touch-and-go back there for a while. That's worth remembering. It wasn't a total disaster."

"Irish eyes keep smiling, eh? Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and all that."

"Those are meaningless insults, Gid, and with respect, fuck you."

"Fuck you too, Paddy."

That was the end of that conversation, and
Sleipnir
carried on to Asgard with some very surly and irritable passengers in its hold.

The thing was, an idea had started flitting around in my mind. It was a moth in the dark, flapping against me with its wings, and I kept batting it away but it kept blundering back, and I didn't like it. I didn't like the fact that it was even there, that some crack or chink that shouldn't have existed had allowed it to enter my headspace.

A single word, faintly whispering, bristling with unease.

Sabotage
.

Forty-Six

I dreamed I was in the car again. Back in that fucking Vauxhall Astra. Alone. Upside down. Cold. Numb. So numb, I felt I was floating. I didn't have a body any more, I'd slipped free of it and was just this shapeless entity called Gideon Coxall, an insubstantial thing in the darkness.

Then there was light.

It filled the tunnel Abortion had dug in the snow, highlighting every scoop and groove his hands had left. Bluish, coming from outside, it wavered, now bright, now less so.

A torch?

No. A mobile. The glow from a phone screen. Held in someone's hand. Someone who was approaching. Abortion. Had to be.

Maybe he'd found help. Maybe he'd got a phone signal and was coming to tell me the ambulance was on its way. Better yet, a search and rescue helicopter to airlift us the fuck out of here.

I tried to say his name but I didn't have a throat that worked properly. Didn't have a throat at all, it felt like.

The blue light brightened, whitened, rapidly. The end of the tunnel became a flaring dazzle that I couldn't look at any more.

I shut my eyes and opened them and I was in my bunk bed in Asgard. Around me were a couple of dozen men, snoring, snorting, turning over on creaky springs, mumbling in their sleep. A cabin full of slumbering bodies, restless and writhing.

Soldiers - a breed who seldom slept soundly. Always unconsciously keeping an ear out for the enemy... or else grappling with nightmares.

Forty-Seven

We were now on a countdown to a deadline, it seemed. Mrs Keener's visit to the UK drew nearer day by day. Huginn and Muninn flew out over Midgard and sent Odin images of the preparations for her arrival. Odin spoke of city streets being cordoned off for security purposes, the Stars and Stripes being hung out on public buildings, and strenuous debate in the House of Commons over the wisdom and validity of asking her to come at all.

Prime Minister Clasen defended his decision on the grounds that Britain's business ties with the US remained strong, even if politically there were disagreements between the two countries. Besides, wouldn't it be better and more meaningful if he was able to challenge Mrs Keener on diplomatic issues face to face rather than via webcam?

Privately, in Cabinet - the ravens eavesdropped on a window ledge outside Number 10 - Clasen expressed misgivings about the visit, seeming to imply that rather than being invited, the President had more or less invited herself and he had been too intimidated to refuse. Mrs Keener was about to gatecrash, and she probably wasn't even bringing a decent bottle of plonk.

Protestors against American foreign policy were organising mass rallies, although the cops were going to see to it that they didn't get within a placard's throw of Whitehall or any of the other destinations on the presidential itinerary. Hence the street closures. Meanwhile, the TV channels were lobbying for interviews, although so far Mrs Keener's aides had turned down all the journalistic hard cases like Paxman and Dimbleby and approved on-air face time with only Alan Titchmarsh and Adrian Chiles. Real heavyweights who didn't flinch from asking the tough questions like, "What's your favourite colour?"

Our own preparations consisted of drilling like bastards, then drilling again, and then, when we'd had enough of drilling, drilling some more. In my spare time, such as it was, I went out in
Sleipnir
with the drawling RAFfer pilots and we scouted Asgard's borders looking for likely ingress points. Odin put the trolls on subsistence rations to make them less dopey and more aggressive, and it worked, although two of them became so hungry they had a fight and tore off and ate parts of each other, and had to be put down. The Valkyries, for their part, went about on their snowmobiles caching supplies and ammunition in various strategically useful places, mostly near the intersections between Asgard and the other worlds.

Either an attack was coming or it wasn't. Either Loki was going to make his move or he wasn't. That choice was his. Ours was whether to be caught with our knickers around our ankles or not, and we definitely wanted to avoid the "not" option.

I was still pissed off about the frost giants and losing Chopsticks, and I might have betrayed these feelings once or twice. For instance, when Bragi proposed reciting a poem about our recent trip to Jotunheim, and I told him he could stick his poem up his arse and shove that stupid beard of his up there too while he was at it. And another time, when Thor made some joke about being excluded from the mission to Utgard, saying it couldn't surely have gone any worse if he
had
accompanied us and had just started killing jotuns indiscriminately as soon as he arrived.

I suggested where he should shove his hammer - a similar place, funnily enough, to where I felt Bragi's poem and beard belonged - and Thor looked all set to deck me, and would have if Paddy hadn't played United Nations and got between us and told Thor to go easy on me because I was taking Chopsticks's death very personally. Thor backed down, grumbling, and said that at least his visit to the gnomes had been a success and he'd brought back something of value rather than leaving a corpse behind. At which point I tried to deck
him
, and it took a combined Herculean effort from Paddy, Cy and Baz to keep me from doing so.

The last person I'd have expected to take me aside for a friendly "what's the matter?" chat was Freya Njorthasdottir. But that was exactly who did, on the eve of Mrs Keener's arrival.

Of course she didn't put a gentle arm round my shoulder and suggest we go for a drink. That wouldn't have been very Freya-like. Instead she came at me out of nowhere, thrust a hunting rifle into my hands - a bolt-action Lee-Enfield with fibreglass stock and thick rubber recoil pad - and loped off into the woods without a backward glance. It took me a moment to realise that, since she was carrying a hunting rifle as well, this meant she wanted me to go with her. At first I thought she was simply dropping a not too subtle hint.
Here's a loaded firearm. Go do the decent thing
.