The Valhalla Prophecy (21 page)

He gave them to her. She looked uncertain, but hunger won out and she split open one of the small round fruits to test the pale flesh inside. “Oh! This is good.” She devoured it and spat out the black stone before giving Chase a sheepish look. “Sorry. I am usually more polite …”

He grinned. “Don’t worry about being polite around me, love. But those are okay?”

“Yes, I have had them before, in one of the villages. I just had not seen them growing on a tree.”

“If you like ’em, then tuck in. I might even try one myself. Once you’re full, I mean—you need to eat more than I do.”

Natalia opened another longan, nibbling at it with more decorum. “Thank you.”

“No problem. All right, let’s find a way out of here.”

He set off, heading north. Natalia followed, still eating.

Although Chase knew they were going in the right direction to reach the rendezvous, he was not sure of their actual position. He took out the map, but it was little help; no landmarks were visible through the dense jungle. “We need to get to higher ground,” he said. The ground to the northeast rose up a slope. “If I can see the landscape, I can figure out where we are.”

Natalia peered with interest at the map. “The camp where you rescued me—where was it?”

He pointed it out. “About here.”

“Let me see.” She took the map and examined it more closely. “I know this place!” she said excitedly, tapping on a small black square marked with Vietnamese text. “This is Ly Quang—the village where we were working before we were … before we were taken.” Her tone became more somber. “We were driving from it when they stopped our bus.”

Chase saw that the village was about two kilometers northeast of the camp, another few kilometers south of the highway. “You got friends there?”

“Yes, yes! We were there for four days. We helped them—we gave them medical treatment, vaccinations.”

“Anyone there have a phone?”

“There is one telephone, yes.”

He silently debated the options. Sullivan had given him an emergency number; it would, hopefully, allow him to contact their Vietnamese driver, who had a satellite phone. If he reached Thuc, he could find out the status of the rest of the team and the hostages, arrange to be picked up—and warn Sullivan about Hoyt.

The danger was that the kidnappers would also know about the village. It would be an obvious place to search for the fugitives … or lie in wait for them.

“We’ll try to get there,” he decided. The benefits outweighed the risks; reaching a phone would save them a longer trek to the rendezvous point, and he was confident he could spot an ambush. “We just need to work out how.”

“Do you know where we are now?”

He waved a finger over the area east of the camp. “Here, somewhere.”

Natalia regarded the map again, then indicated a spot south of the village. “There is a tower on the top of a hill,” she said thoughtfully. “It is from the war, the Americans built it. The people in Ly Quang told me about it. You can see it from the village—it is quite high. If we can see it too …”

“We’ll know where we are,” Chase finished. He put away the map, then turned to her. “How’s your foot?”

“I am good, thank you.” She lifted her bandaged foot to examine it, pale skin almost hidden by dirt. “It is …” She searched for the English word. “Sore. But I will be okay.”

“Good. If you have any trouble, tell me.”

“Thank you,” she said again. Chase smiled, and they started up the hill. “Mr. Chase …”

“Eddie. Call me Eddie.”

“Okay. Eddie.” A coy grin, which quickly faded. “Last night, you said my father sent you?”

“Yeah. Me and some other guys were hired to rescue you and your friends.”

“You are soldiers?”

“Used to be. We’re mercenaries, technically. But the good kind.” The thought of Hoyt darkened his expression. “Mostly.”

Natalia was too concerned with her own thoughts to notice. “He does not know any soldiers, or mercenaries—and he does not have a lot of money. How did he afford to do this?”

“I dunno. But he’s waiting for you in Da Nang.”

Her face lit up. “He is here?”

“Yeah. And I’ll get you to him. That’s a promise. Once we’re out of this bloody jungle, that is.”

They continued up the slope. Chase checked for any signs that their pursuers were nearby, but there were none, just the constant drone and flutter of insects and the calls of birds. Even though it was still early in the day, the heat was already rising. “You told me the people
who took me were Russians,” said Natalia, also thinking about her former captors. “Do you know what they were doing to me?”

“No,” he admitted. “They had you drugged, and they were taking blood samples. But I don’t know what they were looking for, or why they were doing it.” He glanced at her; the fearful expression, though veiled, had returned. “Do you know?”

She clearly did, or at least had an idea, but it was equally obvious that she remained unwilling to discuss it. “If you don’t want to tell me, that’s not a problem,” Chase went on, giving her a reassuring smile. “My job’s to get you to somewhere safe, that’s all.”

Her only reply was a quiet “Thank you.” Deciding to let her talk again when she was ready, Chase plodded on up the steepening hill.

Before long, brighter daylight flared through the jungle canopy to the north. He angled toward it. The slope flattened out. Ahead, the ground dropped steeply away to reveal the lush green carpet of the rain forest spread out below. The hill was not high, but it was enough to clear the tops of all but the tallest trees.

He took out the map again. Now that he could see the lay of the land, it would not take long to work out their position. However, Natalia had already found a way to speed up the process. “Look, over there!” she said, pointing to the northeast. Chase advanced until he had a clearer view and followed her gaze. There was a higher hilltop around three quarters of a mile away. A spindly tower rose from its summit. He guessed that it had been a radio mast. Decades of neglect had taken their toll: The top was crooked and missing parts of its gridwork. “The village is about a kilometer from there,” she continued.

He quickly translated the view to the map’s two-dimensional grid. “Okay, that puts us here,” he said, tapping the paper. “If we go, let’s see … east across the top of this hill and then follow it down, we can go ’round the bottom of the hill with the tower and head north to the village.”

“Wouldn’t it be quicker to get to this road?” Natalia asked, indicating a thin line running southeast from Ly Quang.

“Yeah, but I want to stay in the jungle until I’m sure it’s safe. The bad guys’ll still be looking for us.”

Her face fell. “Oh. Yes, I see.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” he said, trying to perk her up. “Once we reach the phone, my friends’ll be able to come and get us.”

“What about
my
friends? Will they be safe?”

“They’re probably on their way to Da Nang already. Those people at the camp looked like they were only coming after us.”

That produced mixed emotions. “I hope they got away, but … that is not good for us, if they want me so badly, is it?”

“I’ll do everything I can to get you back to your dad,” he assured the young woman. “And the quicker we start moving, the sooner that’ll be.”

They set off across the hilltop. “You do not like to keep still, do you, Eddie?” said Natalia with a half smile.

“Sitting around on my arse has never been my thing,” he said, amused. “I like to
do
stuff, you know? Feel like I’m actually accomplishing something.”

“I know exactly that feeling,” she replied. “It is one of the reasons why I came to Vietnam—to make a difference, to help. The people in this part of the country are very poor; they cannot afford even simple medicines and vaccinations that can save lives—and there are also aftereffects of the war, even now.” She gestured in the direction of the radio tower, hidden again behind trees as they began to descend the other side of the hill. “The stupid fight between the East and the West brought nothing but misery to the people caught in it. I wanted to do something to make up for it.”

Chase gave her a curious look. “Sounds like you take it personally.” He couldn’t imagine why; she only appeared to be in her early twenties, barely old enough to remember the end of the Cold War.

Natalia shook her head. “Not me, but my family. Some of them were involved in things that … I do not like.” She fell silent again.

He decided to let her stay quiet for now. The hill became steeper. He used the rifle as a makeshift walking stick, helping the young blonde down the slippery slope with his other hand.

It took several minutes for them to reach flatter ground. “That is better,” Natalia said with a sigh. She wiped caked mud off one foot, then set off through the trees.

“Hold on,” Chase told her as he took out the map. “Let me see where we are.”

“If we go north now, we will get to the hill with the tower,” she countered as she kept walking. “Then if we go around it, we will reach the road, no?”

“I know, but I want to take the quickest route.” He used his watch’s hour hand in relation to the direction of the sun to locate north. “Okay, so … that way.” He pointed.

Almost directly at Natalia. “You see? I was right all along,” she said, smiling. Chase shot her a sardonic grin and started after her. “I told you, I have been here for four months. I have learned some—”

Click!

The sound was metallic, not the crackle of breaking wood.

“Freeze!”
Chase yelled, trained instinct sending him diving to the ground even before the cry fully left his lips. “Don’t move! Whatever you do,
do not move
!”

A muted sound of pain escaped through Natalia’s clenched teeth. She had started to lift her foot—but froze on his shout, forcing herself to hold still. Chase raised his head. Something was poking through the mud and rotten leaves, grubby metal visible beneath the young woman’s sole.

Three narrow prongs jutting up from a dull green cylinder. The trigger and fuse assembly of a land mine.

“Stay still, stay
very
still,” Chase warned. He put
down the gun, then crawled toward her. He recognized the particular type of weapon as he drew closer: an American M16A2 “Bouncing Betty.” Hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of similar mines had been laid during the Vietnam War, strewn throughout the jungles to hinder and kill the Vietcong.

Many were still there. And still deadly.

Suddenly sweating, and not from the rising heat, Chase reached Natalia and examined the weapon. His SAS training had included mine defusal; the Bouncing Betty had been one of the types covered. He knew that, in theory, he could render it harmless fairly simply.

In theory.

In tropical conditions, an M16A2 had a life expectancy of twelve years. The Vietnam War had ended in 1975, so even if this particular mine had been laid on the very last day of the conflict, it was nineteen years beyond that. Time might have rendered it inert, moving parts rusted and clogged with mud, its explosive charge of tetryl broken down by microbes in the soil.

Or … it could have become so unstable that a hard jolt would detonate it.

Natalia whimpered again, from pain rather than fear. One of the prongs was digging deeply into her foot. There was no blood, so it had not broken the skin, but she didn’t dare pull away. “What is it?” she whispered.

Chase looked up at her. “Natalia, I need you to stay calm, and keep very still. Okay? Promise me you’ll do that.”

“I will,” she managed to say.

“Good.” He kept his gaze locked on hers. “You’ve stepped on a land mine. Keep calm, stay calm,” he added as she tensed. “It’s not working properly, otherwise it would have already gone off. It’s called a Bouncing Betty—it’s meant to spring up in the air and explode after someone steps on it, but even if they keep their foot on it, it’ll still blow up. This one hasn’t, so the fuse is probably jammed ’cause it’s so old. But if you move your foot, it might still go off—unless I defuse it.”

“Can—can you do that?” Her voice was trembling.

“Yeah. I can. I know it hurts, but stay still.” He finally broke eye contact, bringing his head right up to the mine and gently blowing damp leaves away from the fuse.

A small metal ring protruded from its side. If the weapon had been rigged to explode when a trip wire was pulled, the line would run through the ring, but there was no sign of one. That meant it was pressure-detonated. Natalia’s footstep had triggered it—and now her weight was all that was holding it in check.

But was it a dud … or would any movement finally set it off?

He didn’t know. All he could do was try to recall his training. “Okay,” he said, speaking as much to keep Natalia’s mind occupied as to focus his own thoughts, “I know how to defuse it. There’s a little hole where the safety pin went.” With great care, he used the tip of his smallest finger to brush dirt away from the fuse assembly, revealing a small circular opening in the side of a metal protrusion between the three prongs. “I’ll need to put something in it.”

A twig? No, too thick. It would have to be a piece of wire or something similar, but where would he find one in the middle of the jungle? There was nothing in his gear—

Wait—there was. The radio headset. Its connecting plug was too large to fit the hole, but the wire itself …

“Keep still, I’m going to get up for a minute,” he warned. Natalia nodded. Chase moved back, then carefully rose to his knees. He pulled off the headset and used his thumb and forefinger to give the plastic-sheathed wire an experimental crimp. It seemed to hold its new shape.

With a nod of reassurance to the German, he took out his Swiss Army knife and unfolded the scissors to snip a short length of wire. He then got back down on his belly to begin his work.

Right away he saw there was going to be a problem. “Natalia, I need you to keep still,” he said. Her foot—
no, her whole body—was quivering. The prongs flexed under her weight.

“I’m trying,” she said, voice strained. “But my foot is hurting—and my leg is shaking. I cannot stop it.”

“All right, okay. Er … where are you from?”