The Valhalla Prophecy (31 page)

“The eitr,” said Eddie. As in Stockholm, what now felt like an age ago, Nina was surprised by his knowledge—
though now her feelings were also spiked with anger that he had been keeping secrets from her.

“The eitr, yes,” Eisenhov echoed. “A black liquid, just as the legends said. A terrible poison. There was a vast reserve beneath the earth, a river flowing underneath the surface to … we did not know where. It was too dangerous to explore, and we did not have the technology to follow it. But we knew from the runestone that the Vikings found another place where it emerged. They believed that when Ragnarök came, the serpent would emerge from one of these pits. The Viking warriors would divide into two armies, so that wherever Jörmungandr emerged, they would be waiting.”

“So the Vikings found two sources of the eitr,” said Nina, “and you discovered one of them in the Cold War. But why is it so dangerous? You say it’s a poison, but humans have come up with some pretty horrible poisons of their own. How is this any worse?”

“If you had seen what it can do,” the old Russian replied with a sad sigh, “you would not ask that question. I
have
seen. It has been more than fifty years, but the nightmares have not gone away.”

His sincerity sent a chill through Nina, but she still had to know more. “So what can it do? What
is
it?”

To her shock, it was Eddie who gave her an answer. “It’s a mutagen. If it doesn’t kill you, it attacks your DNA, changing it. Like a cancer. Natalia, the woman I rescued in Vietnam? Her grandfather was experimenting with it. He deliberately infected her grandmother with it, while she was pregnant. It caused tumors that killed her grandmother, then her mother.” His tone became even more grim. “And it would’ve eventually killed Natalia too.”

“Serafim Zernebogovich Volkov,” said Eisenhov, spitting out the name. “A traitor and a monster. If he had lived, his name would be as cursed as Mengele. He tried to take the eitr and his work to your country.” His gaze snapped almost accusingly back to Nina. “It was only by luck that he was stopped. He chose the wrong day to return to Novaya Zemlya.”

“What happened to him?” Tova asked.

“Ever heard of the Tsar Bomb?” said Eddie. Both women shook their heads. “Biggest H-bomb in history.”

“What’s that got to do with—
Oh
,” Nina said, realizing. “Nuclear test site. Right.”

Eisenhov made a satisfied sound. “Khrushchev ordered the activation of what became known as the Tsar Protocol. The bomb was dropped on the thirtieth of October 1961, completely obliterating everything on the ground and sealing the pit forever. Nobody will ever be able to open it again.”

Nina was still astounded. “Using a hydrogen bomb, though? That sounds like overkill.”

“You would not say that if you had seen what I have seen,” Eisenhov replied.

“Which was what?”

He did not answer straight away, as if summoning up the resolve to speak. “Two months before the Tsar Protocol was activated,” he said at last, “a sample of eitr was being transported to a missile testing site. There was an accident on the way. The eitr was spilled in a civilian area. It had … terrible effects. On people, but also on animals, plants, even insects—anything living. Most of the people who were exposed died within days, or even hours.” He paused, moistening his dry lips with his tongue. “They were the lucky ones. Those who survived …”

“What happened to them?” Nina demanded, after Eisenhov said nothing for several seconds.

He took a long, slow breath, then opened the folder again. “You may not want to see these pictures. They have been a state secret for half a century, seen only by those at the highest levels of government. All the men who saw them … wished they had not. But they understood at once why Khrushchev ordered the pit to be obliterated. Even at the height of the Cold War, no Russian ever again suggested using eitr as a weapon. Do you still want to see them?”

“No,” whispered Tova. “I do not.”

“I don’t want to either,” said Nina. “But … I think I
have
to. If this is an IHA matter, a global security threat, I’ve got to know what we’re dealing with.”

Eisenhov nodded. “You are a brave woman, Dr. Wilde. Very well. But remember that I warned you.” He reached forward again to hand several photographs to her.

Eddie leaned closer to look as she turned them over. “Oh Jesus.”

Nina couldn’t even speak as she stared at the first picture, horror and revulsion freezing any words in her throat. The image showed the upper body of a man lying on the ground, contorted in unimaginable agony at the moment of his death.

The cause was obvious. Parts of his face and neck appeared almost to have exploded from the inside, vile cancerous growths within the flesh having swollen to burst through his skin before themselves rupturing into oozing, diseased slurry. Bloodstains soaking through his clothing showed that the terrifying contagion had spread throughout his whole body.

Eisenhov’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. “Exposure to more than a few milliliters of eitr causes DNA to mutate and grow uncontrollably. The effect begins almost immediately. Death was the result in every case.”

Nina forced herself to talk. “And in smaller doses?”

“There are pictures.”

She reluctantly looked at the next photograph, afraid of what it would show her.

Her fears were justified.

Eddie closed his eyes, shaking his head. “Shit,” he whispered.

The picture showed a woman in a hospital bed, ugly lumps on her skin revealing that she too had been contaminated by the eitr. Her abdomen was covered in blood from a deep longitudinal incision—a Caesarean section, the umbilical cord still connected to the just-birthed child.

A child that was barely recognizable as human.

Nina fought the urge to vomit. The baby’s limbs were hideously malformed, one leg a withered, twisted stump,
an arm bloated and covered with tumors and pustules. Ribs pushed through skin, a length of some intestinal organ hanging limply out of a hole beneath the distended stomach. But most appalling of all was the face, a gelatinous mass of twisted features trying to scream without a mouth, the one visible eye bulging in anguish …

The pictures slipped from her shaking hands to the floor as she squeezed her own eyes tightly shut, unable to bear the sight anymore.

“It did not live for long,” said Eisenhov in a quiet, saddened voice. “Fortunately.”

Tova gasped in horror as she glimpsed the fallen photographs, hurriedly looking away. Nina tried to speak again. “Wh—” Her mouth had gone bone-dry. “What … what about the mother?” she finally managed to say.

“She died soon after,” the Russian told her. “The child was born a month after she was exposed to the eitr. Only a few drops, but it was enough to do that to her, and to turn her baby into a monster.”

“It’s not a monster,” Eddie said angrily. “It was still a baby. It didn’t ask to be born like that.
You
did it, with your fucking experiments!”

“Experiments that we knew had to be stopped and never restarted,” Eisenhov replied, contrition clear even beneath his mask of stoicism. He gestured to Kagan, who collected the photographs. “Every kind of life in the area of the accident was affected. In the smaller forms, plants and insects, mutations spread quickly. Most died, but some survived long enough to breed—and passed down further mutations to the next generation. We saw that there was a danger of the contamination spreading beyond the quarantine zone. So the entire area was … sterilized.” He glanced up at the ceiling. Another of the domes lurked beside a light fitting.

“You killed everything?” Nina asked. Eisenhov nodded. “Including people?”

“It had to be done,” he said, sickened. “And may God have mercy on us. But we could not let the mutations
spread. When Khrushchev learned what had happened, he immediately ordered all research on the eitr to be destroyed. Even the hydrogen bomb is not so terrible a weapon as the poison from inside the earth itself.”

“The blood of Jörmungandr,” said Tova. “The poison of the Midgard Serpent.”

“So the legend’s true, in a way,” Nina realized. “The eitr brings life, or at least changes it—maybe it was even responsible for kick-starting evolution billions of years ago by causing mutations on a massive scale.” She knew from her discoveries at Atlantis that a meteor had brought life to the primordial earth—but the eitr might have been what caused that life to explode into endless new forms. All birthed from poison, just as the Norse legends said. She looked at Eddie. “That’s what this girl’s grandfather was trying to do, wasn’t it? Take
control
of evolution, try to force it down the paths he wanted?”

“Volkov!” Again Eisenhov practically spat the name. “The man was insane—experimenting on his own wife and child! And when Khrushchev ended the project, he tried to sell his work to the Americans.”

“But you nuked him first,” said Eddie. “Good.”

“Yes. He burned for his greed, and now he burns in hell, where he belongs.” Kagan returned the photographs to the old man, who put them back in the folder and closed it. “But once we had seen for ourselves the terrible things that eitr could do if unleashed on the world,” Eisenhov continued, “we knew we had to make sure that never happened. So Unit 201 was created.”

“To find a way to neutralize it?” asked Nina.

“That is one of our purposes, yes,” Kagan told her. “Our scientists have created chemicals that may work.”

“May?” Eddie repeated. “That doesn’t sound too hopeful.”

“There is a problem,” said Eisenhov. “We have no way to test our theories—because we have no eitr to test them upon! All the samples were incinerated, and the pit was sealed by the Tsar Bomba. Khrushchev was right
to stop the experiments, yes, but he went farther—he ordered everything destroyed. And we were too quick to obey.” He shook his head. “If we had kept some of the research, we would have precious information that could have helped us. Instead, we had to re-create everything from memory alone. And even after fifty years, and now with computers and genetic sequencing to help us, we do not know if that is enough.”

Kagan eyed Eddie. “But if we had found someone who had been contaminated by eitr, a person whose DNA we could test and compare with an uninfected sample …”

Eddie jabbed a finger at him. “Don’t you even fucking start.”

Nina looked between the two men. “What?”

“He means Natalia—and he’s going to blame
me
for them not getting what they were after!”

“If you had not interfered eight years ago,” said Kagan, “we would have let her go, and returned here with everything we needed.”

Eddie jumped to his feet. “Maybe if you’d just fucking
asked
her, instead of acting like spooks and coming up with some fake kidnapping bullshit, she would have let you take a blood sample!”

Eisenhov raised a hand, speaking sharply to Kagan before addressing the others. “Enough, please. What is done is done. We cannot change it—we can only try to correct our mistakes. And to stop others from making the same ones.”

“Which is Unit 201’s
other
purpose, right?” said Nina. “You knew from the runestone at the test site that there’s another source of eitr out there, somewhere. So you’ve been trying to find it—before anyone else does.”

“Yes, yes,” Eisenhov replied. “But we have not been successful. The runes said that the Vikings reached the pit on Novaya Zemlya from Valhalla—but they did not say where Valhalla was.”

“But the two runestones that Hoyt’s nicked do,” Eddie pointed out. “And Berkeley’s translating them.
He took longer than Tova to work out that the second stone was under the lake—but he got there eventually.”

“We must find Valhalla,” Kagan insisted. “We must destroy the eitr before the Americans reach it.”

“And what if your anti-eitr doesn’t work?” asked Nina.

A change in Eisenhov’s attitude caught the attention of all three visitors, the old man stiffening in his chair. He took in a deep, slow breath, considering his next words very carefully. “If it does not,” he said, “then Unit 201 has failed. If that happens, the military takes over.” He looked up, his gaze apparently aimed not at the ceiling but the sprawling air base thirty meters above.

“Meaning what?” said Eddie. The sudden tension in his voice suggested to Nina that he already had a horrible idea of the answer.

“The Tsar Protocol was never rescinded,” Eisenhov told the group. “It remains active to this day. The Soviet Union had several secret … doomsday programs. After it fell, Russia maintained them. The Tsar Protocol was one.”

Despite the heat, Nina felt an icy cold run through her body. “Wait—if you find the other pit, and you can’t neutralize the eitr … you’ll
nuke
it?”

Eisenhov nodded solemnly. “Wherever it may be. Even if it is in the United States—even if it is in Washington itself. That is the Tsar Protocol. Nobody can be allowed to control the eitr. It
must
be destroyed. No matter what.”

Tova stared at him, wide-eyed. “That is insane,” she whispered.

Nina saw that Slavin, standing quietly by the door, had a similarly shocked expression. Knowledge of the Tsar Protocol had clearly been limited to the highest-ranking members of Unit 201. He spoke urgently, gesturing toward the exit to indicate that he should leave, but Eisenhov shook his head. He replied to the younger man, then addressed the Westerners. “Kolzak Iakovich thinks that what I have just told you is, how do you say,
above his security clearance,” he said. “But I need every possible idea for how to deal with this situation. I do not want the Tsar Protocol to be activated again. But if we fail …” He let his grim words hang in the air.

“You’re willing to risk war—an all-out nuclear war—over this?” Nina said, appalled.

Eisenhov held up the folder. “You have seen what eitr can do, and this was only a small amount. Can you imagine it unleashed over an entire civilian population? Those who do not die will be left as monsters, their children cursed for generation upon generation. Nobody must ever be allowed to possess such a terrible thing.
Nobody
.”