Ragnarok (32 page)

FIFTY-FIVE

Fenris Kystby, Norway

4 November, 0100 Hrs

ANNA BECK SHOT out of the sky at 700 mph, in a speed dive. The great thing was, she didn’t feel the effects of the jump on her body beyond the sensation of falling—no wind resistance or lack of oxygen. She was plummeting to the Earth from a temporarily retrofitted and recommissioned SR-71 Blackbird, from an altitude of 80,000 feet.

Even in a spacesuit, she wouldn’t have wanted to do a high-altitude low-opening (HALO) jump from such a height. But she had something much better than a spacesuit: the high-altitude, low-opening personnel orbital deployment vehicle—or HALOPOD. Resembling a very skinny egg of heat-resistant ceramic, titanium and reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC), which gave the nose of it the same black-snout look that the space shuttle had, the pod was a tiny capsule for a human to ride in. It was nose heavy, and had no motor, so it was basically a bomb.

With a human payload.

Inside the pod, Beck was cushioned in impact foam and a harness that barely allowed her to breathe. The pod performed one duty only. It protected the HALO jumper from the extremes of atmospheric heat. When she hit an altitude of 15,000 feet, the pod would deploy its own parachute, which would jolt her speed down to a reasonable pace. She had had to sit in a special oxygen chamber with Black Six for hours before the drop, on board the SR-71, while they traveled over the Atlantic. Six was now in his own pod, dropping a hundred feet away from Beck. But she couldn’t see him. She couldn’t see anything. The HALOPOD had no windows. Even if it did, it was the middle of the night in the high altitude Arctic sky. It was just as dark outside the pod as it was inside. She had only one thing to look at.

She eyed the digital altimeter on the inside of her black helmet’s faceplate, inches from her eye. The red LED numbers whirred in a countdown. 30,000 feet. Her speed was 753 mph.
A new world record
, she thought. Although she realized that was only compared to known and recorded feats. That the US Air Force still had commissioned and fully functional SR-71s was news to her, and she had never heard of the HALOPOD either. She wondered how many records had been covertly broken and never reported.

She didn’t mind the drop. It was strange to fall for so long, but she was packed in so tightly that she was comfortable. All she had to do was wait. 20,000 feet.

At 15,000 feet, the HALOPOD deployed its parachute and the unpowered vehicle jolted to what felt like a stop in mid air. Beck felt her stomach attempt to crawl out of her throat, but then her mind was on other things. The pod hissed around her. Then small charges set in a seam around the egg vertically, detonated, shooting the two elongated halves of the pod safely away from Beck’s body, and leaving her free falling again.

Now free to move her limbs, Beck pulled her arms from her sides and spread her legs, tearing open the Velcro that had kept her limbs glued to her sides. Between her armpits and her legs, the parachute fabric of the wingsuit’s wings deployed, giving her the ability to glide in her second descent. The wings scooped the air, and Beck pulled her left arm in a few degrees, adjusting her trajectory. She could see Black Six ahead of her in the distance, spinning in his yaw axis, because of the lack of any vertical stabilizer on his wingsuit.

Amateur
, she thought.
So much for the sexy secret agent
.

As she watched, Black Six, simply pulled his legs and arms together to get out of the spin, and after a second or so, his body repositioned in a straight vertical plunge. He moved his arms and legs out again to scoop the air with his wingsuit, and this time, his movements were perfect.

Huh
, Beck thought.
Nice recovery
.

Beck dipped and dove down a little lower and closer to Black Six, then leveled out again. It wasn’t as dark as she had expected it would be at this time of night. She couldn’t see any auroras, but the sky was a deep blue in places and black in others. The net effect was that visibility was far better than she could have hoped.

The counter in her faceplate kept speeding down and as it reached 5000 feet, she readied herself for the end of her flight. At 4000 feet, she moved her hand toward the pull ring for her parachute. She was supposed to pull at 3000 feet, but when she reached it, she saw that Black Six hadn’t pulled his chute yet. She wanted to fall longer than him. She didn’t know why she felt competitive toward the man she had only met earlier that day, but she did.

2000 feet and he still hadn’t pulled his chute.

At 1000 feet she almost chickened out, but she saw his parachute start to deploy. She gave herself ‘one Mississippi’ and then pulled her cord. Her parachute yanked her descent into a slow fall. The sky was clear, the stars shone brightly and from the harness of her parachute, Anna Beck began examining the snow-covered ground of her landing site. But then she thought she saw something and she blinked to clear her eyes. She stared at the snow below her, squinting to see if she could spot it again. Movement. Lots of movement.

As she came down to within 100 feet of the snow-covered hillside, she heard Black Six’s terrified whisper in her earpiece, breaking the radio silence they were supposed to observe.

“Mother of God, there must be a hundred of them.”

He was right. Tearing through the snow 70 feet below her, in the direct path of her landing, there was a small crowd of about ten dire wolves, swarming in one location, jostling and fighting for a spot at the center and being repeatedly shoved back. The other ninety or so streaked through the snowdrifts and tried to get to the crowd from several directions. When Beck got to 50 feet, she thought the dire wolves were fighting, like in a schoolyard brawl.

At thirty feet, she recognized the combatant at the core of the brawl, punching, kicking, flinging and cussing out one dire wolf after another.

“Damn,” she said. “That’s Queen.”

FIFTY-SIX

Over the Arctic Ocean

4 November, 0100 Hrs (Norway Local Time)

THE
PERSEPHONE
RACED through the night sky, ripping a sonic boom over the northern coast of Greenland. Deep Blue sat back in his chair at a computer desk and rubbed his eyes. While he had given up being President of the United States, he found it difficult to give up some of the perks. As President he had been spoiled by the office furniture aboard Air Force One. When he had stepped down, he made sure to kit out the
Crescent
with a luxurious office, complete with all the computing power he would ever need as Deep Blue.

But the Air Force’s
Persephone
, the similarly designed ship he rode in now, was more utilitarian. It had bunks for sleeping and cargo-net type chairs for sitting in. The desk he sat at now was a small modular one that Aleman had gotten the White security team to carry aboard. His chair was a cheap office chair from Staples with no armrests. Plus, the ship had a smell to it. A smell he would always associate with the military after his days as a Ranger. Sweat, dirt, rubbing alcohol…and something else he couldn’t place. That odd
something else
was always around in every military space he had ever been in, whether buildings, ground vehicles, ships or planes. Over time, he had come to think it was the smell of impending death.

He leaned back in the feeble chair a little further, and twisted his back to get comfortable. Lewis Aleman sat across the room from him at a similar desk with two laptops and a tablet computer arrayed on the small particleboard desk. Deep Blue had tried to get the man to take some sleep, but he had claimed insomnia. Looking at Aleman now, he could believe it. The man had changed into white BDUs like everyone else, and he had showered and shaved, which Deep Blue hadn’t bothered to do, but he looked exhausted. Aleman looked more alert than anyone else at this point. Only a few of the others aboard were even awake. Matt Carrack remained awake, while his men slept in the bunks. Even King was asleep.

He looked back at Aleman and sighed. “Anything new?”

“Packers are doing okay.”

Deep Blue chuckled. “You’re a Green Bay fan?”

“No, I could care less about football.” Now it was Aleman’s turn to smile. But the smile spoke volumes on how grim the situation was. “But you wanted to know what was new. Most of what I’ve been seeing here indicates that the basic problem I told you about—the world ending soon from being turned into Swiss cheese by the portals—hasn’t changed.”

“What’s our timeframe look like?” Deep Blue tried to sound unconcerned, like he was asking about the weather. But he had hired Aleman because the man was smarter than anyone he had ever known. He was unlikely to be fooled.

“Two to four days, but probably closer to the two.” Aleman’s face was grim, all traces of smiles and jocularity gone.

“What? Why? What’s happened?” Deep Blue sat up straight in his chair. If he had felt sleepy before, he was wide-awake now.

“Seismic activity around the world suggests the existence of portals that we’re not seeing. You saw for yourself that some are opening far above the surface of the Earth.”

“Oh God, inside the Earth.” Deep Blue shook his head. “How deep?”

“No way to know, but a portal in the wrong place could set off massive earthquakes, floods or worst-case scenario, a mega-volcano like the one in Yellowstone park. If that happened, we wouldn’t have to wait for the portals to finish chewing up the planet.”

Deep Blue could see that Aleman wasn’t quite done. “What else?”

“Well, going with the theory that whatever is causing the portal in Norway to stabilize is of human origin, there must be some kind of a receptor. Possibly in the shape of a bowl or a cage. Something that would regulate the size of the portal. Contain it. We won’t know what that is until we get there. Also, if the thing is being powered locally, it would take one hell of an energy source too. With that in mind, I checked Arctic satellite scans for the last few weeks, and looked for heat sources. Rook’s little town of Fenris Kystby has a huge power plant on the edge of town. I’m guessing that’s the target. The
Crescent
is due to rendezvous with us over the Svalbard Archipelago, before we get to the mainland. They’re still carrying the nuclear device the UK was going to provide to Bishop and Knight. Their man got there just before Black One was ready to leave. I think if we can’t shut this thing down on the ground, we have the
Crescent
nuke the site, destroying the stabilization mech-anism and the power plant all in one go.”

Deep Blue looked at Aleman for a minute before he spoke. “This is crazy.” Aleman looked down at the laptop screen as if his idea had been ridiculed. “No, no. It’s a solid contingency plan. Let’s just hope we don’t have to resort to it. I’m not sure the Norwegians would ever forgive us.”

“I’m not sure the Norwegians aren’t behind this.”

Deep Blue laughed hard. Aleman joined in with him.

FIFTY-SEVEN

Fenris Kystby, Norway, 4 November, 0100 Hrs

ROOK ACTIVATED THE LED backlight on his wristwatch and saw that it was just after one in the morning local time—he’d been down in the pit with the dead for hours.

“Fuckity McFuck Sauce,” Rook hissed through his teeth, not for the first time.

He understood that the pheromones from the big energy doorway were controlling Asya the same way the other scientists working for Fossen had been. He also realized that she must have been fighting the pheromone control to some degree. She had given him the little LED flashlight and told him to hold it tightly. He just wished she had been able to stop herself from kicking him down into this hellhole.

He sat on the heap of dead dire wolves and fondled the little plastic light in his hand. He didn’t activate it. He had already seen the pit and the bodies. He had scoured every part of the pit looking for a way out. He had tried scaling the walls too, but his bulk was all wrong for delicate rock climbing, and his center of gravity didn’t help. Every time he got a few feet up from the pile of mashed dire wolf corpses, he would fall off the wall, landing in the spongy mass. The last time he had cracked his head on the side of the pit, too, and that had put an end to any further climbing attempts.

He sat on the pile with his back against one of the lumpy walls. His head hurt, he was ravenously hungry and his mood was as dark as it ever got. Fossen was up there, opening a freeway for monsters from the outer limits to come destroy the world. Rook’s team was on the other side of the planet. He was trapped and helpless.

And Queen was up there somewhere.

Where are you, Zelda? Has that bastard controlled you like Asya? Did you run into a dire wolf? Are you lost?

Rook had done a lot of thinking on Queen during his time in Norway. He knew he had feelings for her. Couldn’t deny that any longer. She was smart, bad ass tough, trustworthy and looked good slathered in head-to-toe mud.

He smiled at the memory of the two of them, covered in mud for camouflage, hiding in a tree from a bunch of human-Neanderthal hybrids. Good times. He’d been on the receiving end of Queen’s fury that day, too, when she’d mistaken his muddy form for the enemy. But today was different. When he hung up that phone and turned around to see Queen...the look in her eyes. She was hurt.
Queen
was hurt. And he’d done the hurting. He regretted it, but it also confirmed what he suspected.

His growing affection was mutual.

Of course, all the affection in the world did diddly-squat for him right now.

He growled in frustration until his voice was hoarse. Then he heard a scraping noise on the other side of the pit. Something sliding.

Sonovabitch, what now?

He pressed the button on the little LED flashlight and the scene was suddenly as bright as day in the blue-white light. The grayish-white skins of the piled-high genetically engineered dire wolf pups were everywhere. He saw nothing that might have caused sound. Nothing—