Valhalla (8 page)

22 November
Base Hancock One
Greenland Ice Cap

The lights in the operations tent suddenly came on, and Lexy heard a ragged cheer from the men at the other end of the compound. A few minutes later, George Cabot came in to report that they had patched enough power together from the two smaller generators to operate the space heaters.

“It was meant to look like an accident, but someone purposely turned the big Kohler generator into junk,” he said. “Pretty ingenious, actually. He used the oil-overflow valve to empty a gallon of engine oil out of the machine into a plastic container and then poured a gallon or so of kerosene into the oil reservoir to replace it. It probably took a half hour or so for the bearings to burn up and the engine to seize. By then he was well enough away. I found the container of engine oil behind the tent.”

Macaulay was staring at the array of communications
equipment on the far wall. The two fixed radio ground stations, high modularity units with frequency-hopping waveforms designed for use in warships and armed service installations, had provided them with a direct link to any receiving station in the world. They were still dark.

“Don't tell me . . . ,” groaned Hancock as Cabot went over to the array.

After examining the switching controls and interface modules on the two rigs, he said, “Everything looks fine here.”

Kneeling down, he crawled behind the heavy gauge steel table that supported the units, and disappeared behind it. A minute later, he crawled back out and climbed to his feet, holding what looked like a large plastic hypodermic syringe.

“Two hundred thousand dollars of radio circuitry went shit to bed from this thing,” he said disgustedly in his down-east twang. “Take a sniff.”

Macaulay held it up to his nose.

“Acid?”

“Exactly,” said Cabot. “He used this syringe to remove the sulfuric acid from one of our deep cycle batteries and then injected it through the ventilators into the backs of the radios. It fried all the circuits.”

“What is that thing?” asked Macaulay.

“I think it's a cake decorator,” said Lexy, “for putting on icing.”

“Where's the cook?” demanded Hancock.

When he arrived a few minutes later, Thorwald, the Norwegian cook, was shown what had been used to destroy the radio array.

“We have this in the kitchen equipment . . . of course,”
he said, seemingly perplexed. “I don't know how it got here.”

Hancock made his next decisions without delay.

“George, I want every inch of that Bell transport helicopter checked for possible sabotage. Put a guard on it when you're finished.”

“Done,” said Cabot, heading across the ops tent.

Turning to Macaulay, he said, “It will be light soon, Steve—at least for a couple hours. That should give you time to fly up to Kulusuk and bring back the spare radio unit. While you're there, call the Anschutz security director in Dallas and tell him we need a fully armed security team up here right away. Contract it out to whoever can get here the fastest. I don't care what the price quote is.”

“What about Falconer?” asked Macaulay.

“I'm tempted to send his body back with you,” said Hancock, “but I'm not going to tamper with a crime scene. The police authority in Greenland is up in Nuuk. Radio them what happened. I'm sure they'll want to send an investigator and a forensic team down here. In the meantime, we won't touch anything.”

“His body will be covered with a foot or two of ice by then,” said Doc Callaghan.

“That's their problem.”

Thirty minutes later, the transport helicopter had been thoroughly checked by the ground crew and warmed up on the landing pad. The wind had temporarily died, and there was a hint of dawn in the eastern sky.

“The ship is clean,” said Cabot to Macaulay. “I personally checked every square inch.”

“Thanks, George,” said Macaulay.

“Bring back the cavalry, Steve,” said Hancock with a wry grin.

Shaking hands, they watched as Sir Dorian was carried on a makeshift litter from the operations tent to the landing pad. Hjalmar Jensen, Lexy, and Callaghan walked together behind him.

When they arrived at the helicopter pad, Sir Dorian was still conscious.

“Sorry to be a bloody bother,” he said to Hancock with a parting attempt at a grin. “Please do the responsible thing with this discovery, Mr. Hancock. It deserves no less.”

“After what's happened, I now share your view,” said Hancock as the archaeologist was carried into the chopper and his litter was strapped to the steel deck beneath the rotor and transmission housing. Lexy and Hjalmar Jensen went aboard to give him a brief final farewell, and Jensen set Sir Dorian's kit bag next to his litter on the deck.

“I look forward to seeing you again in London, Sir Dorian,” said Lexy as Doc Callaghan administered a sedative to relax him during the flight.

Hancock and the others stood at the edge of the landing pad as Steve Macaulay gently lifted the big chopper into the air. Lexy was waving at him cheerily, and he raised his hand to acknowledge her before heading north toward Kulusuk.

23 November
Greenland Ice Cap

Macaulay leveled off at an altitude of one thousand feet and advanced the speed to one hundred twenty miles per hour. The two Pratt & Whitney Twin-Pac turboshaft engines were running with their familiar, throaty roar. With no air turbulence ahead of him and nearly two miles of visibility, he would see the runway lights at Kulusuk in about fifteen minutes.

He was grateful to Cabot for thoroughly checking the bird. Macaulay had never fully trusted helicopters. He was a fighter pilot. He trusted wings. He had survived several crashes in the air force because the wings had allowed him to glide long enough to safely eject from the stricken planes.

When he was assembling Hancock's fleet of corporate aircraft a few years earlier, Macaulay had made sure all the company helicopters were modified with crash-attenuating seats that would compress downward under any serious
impact. It limited the potential g loads on the crew and would protect their vulnerable necks and backs. He had also insisted on the installation of doors and windows that could be jettisoned, as well as self-sealing fuel tanks to reduce the chances of fire after a crash.

As he flew on across the desolate ice cap, his mind kept wandering back to all the events that had taken place over the previous twenty-four hours. Obviously, someone was desperate enough to kill in order to bring the recovery effort to a halt.

It was impossible to believe that one of the twelve original members of the expedition could be responsible for murder and sabotage, but a few of them were new to the team, including Thorwald, the Norwegian cook, and two native Inuit who were part of the maintenance crew.

If it wasn't a member of the expedition team, that left the four archaeologists as suspects. But Falconer was dead, and Macaulay refused to believe that Lexy could be involved. That left Hjalmar Jensen and Sir Dorian Bond.

He remembered Sir Dorian's passionate appeal to John Lee that he must halt his plans to remove the Norsemen from the deep cave. It struck him that the old Englishman could be feigning illness, and might be heading back to alert someone in the outside world to what they had found.

Macaulay turned to look back at him.

His eyes were closed and he appeared to be asleep. In any event, the straps that secured the litter to the steel deck would keep him immobilized until they reached Kulusuk.

He was checking the instrument gauges a few moments later when the explosion suddenly detonated
behind him. He felt the first wave of searing heat as it ripped through the cockpit, walloping the back of his flight helmet with shards of metal and plastic, and smashing the windshield. Only the steel-reinforced pilot's seat saved him from the deadly blast.

He turned to glance back at the source of the explosion. The blast area appeared to be centered underneath the rotors and the transmission housing. With the transmission housing immobilized, the rotor blades no longer received the power to rotate.

They were going in.

He watched in horror as Sir Dorian, still strapped to the litter, burst into flames. His shock of gray hair was on fire, along with the blankets covering his body. There was no way to save him.

None of the safety features he had added would make any difference if the rate of descent was unsurvivable. He was dropping at nearly forty feet per second, and he had to slow the rate down by getting the rotors turning in auto rotation. If he could stabilize the bird for a few seconds, natural airflow alone would provide enough energy to turn the rotors and allow a relatively controlled descent. The minimum altitude threshold for auto rotation was about four hundred feet, and he hoped he was still above it.

He had about ten seconds to prepare for the crash. The flames were licking close to the cockpit, and he could feel the intensity of the heat through his boots on the steel flight deck. He put on his thermal gloves to protect his hands.

Looking up, he saw that the rotors had stopped and the ship was now in free fall.

Reaching to his left, he pulled the handle that jettisoned the cabin window next to the pilot's seat. The pilot's seat was also equipped with a five-point safety harness that had a single-release mechanism. When he felt the helicopter skids first begin to impact the ice, he would pull the release on the safety harness and attempt his escape.

When the helicopter slammed into the frozen ice cap, Macaulay was blinded by an eruption of brilliant magnesium-white light. Surrounded by a geyser of flames, he could hear the agonizing shriek of tortured metal as the ship began to rupture around him. Ten seconds later, the flames found one of the perforated gas tanks and the Bell 412EP jet helicopter exploded in a fiery ball.

23 November
Base Hancock One
Greenland Ice Cap

From inside the modular fiberglass latrine at the far edge of the compound, Lexy paused while brushing her teeth as the rumbling roar of an approaching helicopter grew ever louder.

Her first thought was that it might be Steve returning from Kulusuk. But he had left the camp only an hour earlier. It seemed unlikely he could be returning so quickly unless he had run into a problem.

Sitting at the desk in his sleeping tent, John Lee Hancock knew from the pitch of the jet engines that it wasn't Steve. As the rumble grew louder, he quickly realized there was more than one helicopter. His initial thought was that they might be the police officials dispatched from Nuuk.

George Cabot watched them coming in low above the ice, not more than fifty feet up in the air, and flying from
due east. In the pale morning light, he couldn't see any markings on the ships. Cabot was thinking about turning on the landing lights until he saw that one of them looked like a military attack helicopter. The other two were transports.

With radio communications out, there was no way to contact them as they flew a direct course to the base camp. When they arrived over the team's landing pad, the pilots of the transports turned on the four powerful searchlights that were mounted to the bellies of each ship, lighting up the whole compound. While the smaller attack helicopter continued circling the camp, the two transports began their descent.

Hancock stood with his Alsatian at the opening of his tent to observe their arrival. He saw that the ships were painted gloss white to blend in with the icy landscape. He recognized all three as military aircraft manufactured by Eurocopter. None of them displayed the internationally required markings and numbers.

Who are these bastards? he wondered, his mind racing. What are they doing here? Had they come to rob him of his discovery? He watched five members of his expedition team, including Doc Callaghan, approach the edge of the landing pad as the two transports touched down.

*   *   *

The first man to step out of the helicopters was the mission commander. Tall and slender with coarse-grained blond hair, he had luminescent, reflective blue eyes and a trained, always-serious face. His name was Joachim Halvorsen, but they called him the Lynx.

A former veteran of the elite Norwegian Special
Forces, he took infinite care with each and every detail of an operation. Preliminary intelligence for this mission had been minimal, and his roving eyes were already taking in the configuration of the camp, each tent and outbuilding, every man in sight.

He was always planning for the unexpected, the steps he would immediately take if anyone offered resistance or threatened the success of the mission. Two hundred feet above him, the third helicopter continued to circle the camp, ready to intercept anyone who escaped the cordon.

Like the fourteen commandos who emerged from the two transports behind him, the Lynx was dressed in a white thermal winter suit and lightweight, bulletproof armor. He carried a Czech-made Skorpion Evo III submachine gun, a 9 mm Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol, and a belt with extra magazines for both.

The rotor blades slowly came to a stop.

“Raise your hands and you will not be harmed,” he shouted over the dying whine of the helicopter engines.

Four of the five men at the landing pad raised their hands. The fifth, Doc Callaghan, demanded angrily, “You have no right to threaten us with weapons. We are here at the invitation of . . .”

The Lynx shot him in the head. He fell to the ice.

Thorwald, the Norwegian chef, had come out of the cook tent to see what was happening. Seeing Doc Callaghan fall, he knew he had to defend himself. In the cook tent, he had a selection of lethal knives. He had become an expert with them during his own military service.

The Lynx saw him move out of the corner of his eye, and estimated the distance at twenty meters. In one smooth motion, the submachine gun was at his shoulder,
and he squeezed off a single round. It took Thorwald in the chest, killing him instantly.

Hearing the first shot, Lexy had gone to the door of the latrine and cracked it open in time to see Thorwald killed. As she watched, the blond killer issued orders to the other men in the unit. One of them began herding the first four prisoners toward the elevator cage at the top of the ice shaft. The others began fanning out across the compound.

*   *   *

George Cabot had known they were trouble from the moment he saw the three ships coming in. Before they landed, he had headed straight to the open-ended shelter that housed the expedition's snowmobiles.

After hearing the first two shots, he ran to the Arctic Cats. They were the fastest snowmobiles in camp and could reach a speed of a hundred miles per hour. That wouldn't be enough to outrun an attack helicopter, but there were plenty of ice fissures and natural caves out on the ice cap where it might be possible to hide. Anything was better than dying like a trapped animal. He started the engine on the white one, hoping it might blend in better with the pallid landscape in the feeble morning light.

A moment later, he was racing out of the tent at the edge of the compound, heading east toward the coast. For more than a minute, the attack helicopter appeared to take no notice of him. By then, he was streaking across the ice toward exactly the kind of depression that could provide him with a temporary hiding place. A snow squall was coming in the distance that would make it even harder to find him. He was home free.

Racing up the ascending ice shelf at breakneck speed, he reached the top and launched the snowmobile over the wide depression, sailing out for ten meters before the Arctic Cat came down with a heavy thud on the ice floor.

He could hear the attack helicopter coming as he slowly braked the snowmobile to a halt under the concave wall above the depression. It was just the kind of protective barrier he needed until visibility disappeared under the snow squall.

He suddenly felt the ice floor begin to shift underneath him.

With mounting awareness, he realized that he wasn't in a natural depression at all. He had landed on an unstable ice bridge. A few moments later, the tenuous bridge began to give way under the weight of the Arctic Cat.

“Oh shit,” Cabot muttered as he plummeted soundlessly down through space into a chasm that seemed to have no bottom.