The Bones Of Odin (Matt Drake 1) (27 page)

To enhance his
collection.

The man was deranged beyond even what Drake and the rest of the human race had credited him for. He was laughing maniacally even now and when Drake raised his eyes he saw Frey had not moved an inch, but stood solidly upright as the exploding mountain fizzed around him.

Alicia left Wells and stumbled to Frey’s side, even her crazy composure slipping a little. Beyond them Professor Parnevik, Ben and Kennedy had been shielded by the walls of Odin’s niche. Hayden was flat out, motionless. Had she come all this way to die in fiery madness? Wells knelt to one side, clutching his stomach.

The helicopter drifted closer, its motor screaming. Frey raised a machine pistol and gestured everyone back from Odin’s massive sarcophagus. A brief burst reinforced his request, bullets clanging and scattering off priceless gold Viking relics in the form of shields, swords, breastplates and horned helmets. Gold coins, shifted by the chain of events, began to rain down from the shelves like Times Square confetti.

Frey waved the chopper in.

Drake got to his knees. “You move that coffin, you risk the entire world!” he screamed, his voice barely audible above the heavy thud of rotor blades.

“Don’t be a wimp!” Frey shouted back, his face twisted like that of an evil clown strung out on heroin. “Admit it, Drake. I beat you!”

“It’s not about winning!” Drake cried back, but now the chopper was directly overhead and he couldn’t even hear himself speak. He watched as Frey guided it in, spraying bullets at a whim as he waved his hands. Drake prayed that his friends wouldn’t catch a stray round.

The German had lost it. Being this close to his lifelong obsession had simply cracked him up.

Dahl was beside him now. They watched Frey and Alicia guide the heavy chains lower and lower until finally they looped them around both ends of the sarcophagus. Frey made sure they were secure.

The helicopter took the weight. Nothing happened.

Frey shrieked into his handset. The helicopter tried again, this time its engines roaring like an infuriated dinosaur. The chains took the weight and there was a distinct cracking sound, the noise of rock being shattered.

Odin’s coffin shifted.

“
This is our last chance!
” Dahl screamed into Drake’s ear. “
We go for the chopper! With Milo’s gun!”

Drake ran the scenario. They might destroy the chopper and save the Tomb. But Ben and Kennedy, along with Hayden and Parnevik, would surely die.

“There’s no time!”
Dahl was shouting.
“It’s this or Apocalypse!”

The Swede leapt for Milo’s weapon. Drake squeezed his eyes shut as agony pierced his heart. His eyes fell on Ben and Kennedy, and the agony of decision twisted noose-like inside him. Lose with one hand, lose with the other. And then he decided he just couldn’t let Dahl do it. Could he sacrifice two friends to save the world?

No.

He leap-frogged forward just as Dahl began rummaging through Milo’s clothing. The Swede stumbled back in surprise as Milo launched his body upright, the American hunched in agony but mobile, and limping towards the edge of the platform. Towards one of the rappel lines.

Drake paused in shock. The helicopter’s engines shrieked once more and an unholy crack of noise filled the cavern. In another moment, Odin’s outsize sarcophagus shifted and pulled free of its moorings, swinging alarmingly towards Drake and the edge of the platform, tons of swinging death.

“Noooo!”
Dahl’s cry echoed Parnevik’s.

There was a shriek, a crazy shriek like a vent-hole being superheated, a sound like all the demons in Hell being burned alive. From the newly uncovered hole beneath Odin’s Tomb a blast of sulphuric air shot up.

Frey and Alicia lunged away, narrowly missing being burned alive as they clambered atop the swinging coffin. Frey shouted:
“
Do not come after us, Drake! I have insurance!” then seemed to get an idea, a vouchsafe of security. He shouted at Drake’s companions: “Now!
Follow the coffin or you die!”
Frey encouraged them by waving his machine-pistol, and they had no choice but to edge around the column of steam.

Dahl turned haunted eyes on Drake. “We have to stop it,” he said beseechingly. “For . . . for my children.”

Drake had no answer other than to nod. Of course. He followed the SGG Commander, carefully skirting the swinging Sarcophagus that passed above them, their grinning enemies safely on top and his companions following its trajectory from the other side.

Covered by the weapon and the whim of a maniac.

Drake reached the rent in the rock floor. The steam was a scalding, writhing tower. Untouchable. Drake closed in as far as he could before turning around to watch their enemies’ progress.

Hayden had stayed flat out on the ground, feigning unconsciousness. Now she sat up and shrugged out of the straps that secured Odin’s Shield to her back. “What can I do?”

Drake gave her a momentary glance. “The CIA got any contingency plans to shut down a Supervolcano?”

The pretty ‘secretary’ looked momentarily abashed before shaking her head. “Only the obvious. Stick a German down the vent pipe.” She flung off the Shield with a cry of relief. All three of them watched it roll on its rim like a noisy coin.

Had they failed?

The pressure escaping from the pipe increased as the volcano gathered force. “Once the chain reaction starts,” Dahl said. “We won’t be able to shut it down. We have to do this
now!”

Drake’s eyes were momentarily drawn to the Shield as it flipped noisily around its rim. Its
rim.
The words leapt out at him as if they’d been written in fire.

Heaven and Hell are but a temporary ignorance,

It is the Immortal Soul that sways towards Right or Wrong.

“Plan B,” he said. “Remember Odin’s curse? Didn’t seem relevant did it? Nowhere to fit it in, right? Well, maybe it’s this.”

“Odin’s curse is a way to save the world?” Dahl questioned.

“Or damn it,” Drake said. “Depending on who’s deciding. That’s the answer. The person who places the Shield must have a pure soul. It’s the trap of traps. We’re already ignorant because we removed the Tomb. If we fail, the world dies.”

“How did the curse go?” Hayden, looking none the worse for wear for her rough stint in enemy hands, stared at the steam vent as if might eat her alive.

Drake recited the curse as he picked up the Shield and held it out before him. Dahl stood and watched him as he walked towards the hissing vent. “The moment you touch that steam with that Shield it’s going to get ripped right out of your hands.”

Then, with a sound like a herd of animals trapped in a burning forest, another steam vent spewed forth from below, the piercing shriek of its eruption almost deafening. A sulphuric stench was now beginning to thicken the air, turning it into a toxic miasma. The mountain’s faint rumblings, for so long their constant companion, had become more like thunder now. To Drake it seemed like the very walls were shaking.

“Newsflash, Dahl. Plan B is in effect. For future reference that means I don’t know what the hell else to do.”

“No future for you,” Dahl took the other side of the Shield. “Or me.”

Together they shuffled up to the steam vent. Shale began sliding down the rock-face beside them. A shriek and a roar like nothing Drake had ever heard crashed up from the endless depths of the abyss.

“The Supervolcano’s coming!” Hayden shouted. “Shut it off!”

*****

Unseen by Drake or Dahl or even Abel Frey, the famous Icelandic mountain called
Eyjafjallajokul
- until now content to emit gentle grey plumes and terrorise air traffic - suddenly exploded around its rim. It would soon be seen on Sky News, and on the BBC, and later on You Tube by stunned millions - the fiery tongues of a thousand dragons igniting a firestorm in the sky. At the same time two other Icelandic volcanoes detonated, their tops blowing off like champagne corks under pressure. It was reported, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that Armageddon had come.

Only the chosen few knew how close it really was.

*****

Unseen, and never to be known, the heroes battled in the dark depths of the mountain. Drake and Dahl
attacked
the discharging steam vent with the Shield, using the round object to deflect the steam into the nearby void as they positioned it directly above the hole left by the removal of Odin’s Tomb.

“Hurry!” Dahl struggled to hold the Shield in place. Drake felt his arms shaking with the effort of pushing against the primordial strength of the mountain. “I just wanna know what in hell this thing’s made of!”

“Whatever!” Hayden tried to steady them by anchoring their legs and pushing with all her might. “Just shove the fucker inside!”

Dahl lunged, launching himself atop the hole. If the Shield had missed, or moved even slightly, he would have been instantly evaporated, but their aim was true and the principal Piece slotted neatly in the man-made gap beneath the Tomb of Odin.

An elaborate trap, devised hundreds and thousands of centuries ago. By Gods.

The Trap of Traps!

“The greatest ancient trap the modern world has even known.” Dahl fell to his knees. “The one that could end it.”

Drake watched as the Shield seemed to thin out as it absorbed the great pressure shooting up from below. It flattened and moulded itself around the edges of the gap and took on an obsidian composition. Permanent. Never to be removed.

“Thank God.”

Job done, he took a moment before returning his attention back to Frey. Horror filled his heart beyond anything he could imagine, even now.

The chopper was rising, straining to hold the weight of Odin’s coffin which swung gently beneath it. Both Frey and Alicia sat atop the coffin, hands wrapped firmly around the harness that secured it to the helicopter.

But Ben, Kennedy, and Professor Parnevik were hanging from three of the other rappel lines dangling beneath the chopper, no doubt coerced there at gun point whilst Drake struggled to save the planet.

They were hanging over the void, swaying as the helicopter rose, being kidnapped right from under Drake’s nose.

“Nooooo!”

And, incredibly, he ran - a lone man, sprinting with an energy born of rage and loss and love - a man who launched himself out over the bottomless pit and into black space, shouting for what was being taken away from him and grasping desperately for one of the swinging lines as he fell.

FORTY

THE TOMB OF THE GODS

Drake’s world stopped with his leap in the dark - endless void above, bottomless pit below - three inches of swinging rope his only saviour. His mind was serene; he was doing this for his friends. For no other reason but to save them.

Selfless.

His fingers brushed the rope and
failed to close!

His body, at last affected by gravity, began to plummet. At the last second his flailing left hand closed over a rope that was longer than the rest and gripped with reflexive venom.

His fall arrested, he brought both hands around to grip it and closed his eyes to still his rapidly beating heart. From somewhere above came raucous applause. Alicia venting her sarcasm.

“That what Wells used to mean by
show your mettle?
Always wondered what that crazy fossil meant!”#

Drake looked up, acutely aware of the pit beckoning below, feeling vertigo like never before. But his muscles were fired by new-found strength and adrenalin, and most of the old fire was back in him now, dying to be unleashed.

He climbed the rope, hand above hand, gripping it with his knees, moving fast. Frey was waving his machine-pistol and laughing as he took careful aim, but then Hayden shouted from Odin’s Tomb. Drake saw her standing there, aiming Wells’ gun at Frey - the old Commander slumped next to her but still breathing, thank God.

Hayden half-rolled the gun at Frey. “Let him climb!”

The chopper was still hovering, its pilot unsure of his orders. Frey hesitated, snarling - a child parted from its favourite toy. “Okay.
Hundin!
Bitch! I should have dropped you out the damn plane!”

Drake smirked when he heard Hayden’s reply. “Yeah, I get that a lot.”

Kennedy, Ben, and Parnevik were staring wide-eyed at the proceedings, hardly daring to draw breath.

“Go get him!” Frey then screamed at Alicia. “Hand to hand. Get him and let’s go. The bitch won’t shoot you. She’s
government issue.
”

Drake gulped as Alicia leapt off the sarcophagus and grabbed a parallel rope to Drake’s, but even so found time to glance at Ben, gauging how the boy was reacting to the revelation about Hayden’s status.

Ben, if anything, looked at her with more fondness.

Alicia scooted down the rope like a monkey, soon level with Drake. She faced him, perfect face full of malice.

“I
can
swing both ways.” She leapt into the air, feet first, drawing a graceful arch in the gloom, totally airborne for a moment. Then her feet connected solidly with Drake’s breastbone and she whiplashed her body forward, briefly grabbing his own rope before swinging off it onto the next.

“Fuckin’
baboon,
” Drake muttered, his chest on fire, his grip weak.

Alicia used her momentum to swing around the rope, legs levelled at chest height, and crashed into his belly. Drake managed to swing to the right to lessen the blow, but still felt his ribs bruise.

He snarled at her, compartmentalised the hurt, and climbed higher. A glint entered her eyes, along with a new respect.

“At last,” she breathed. “You’re back. Now we’ll see who’s best.”

She shuffled up the rope, confidence radiating from her every move. With a single leap she bypassed Drake’s own rope, and again used her momentum to come back on the return swing, legs aiming this time for his head.