Ragnarok Read online

“What’s the alternative to panic?”

  “Swallow some concrete—harden up,” He offered unhelpfully.

  “I’ll recommend that next time I speak to the President,” she replied.

  And then she looked out the window again, and the ocean seemed to have turned. The long lines of swell, that only a few minutes ago seemed to be leaving the coast, were now marching in file in the same direction that they were traveling—toward it.

  Chapter 4

  Viking ship, East of Vinland, Labrador Sea

  9th May 1027

  Latitude: 47°30'26"N

  Longitude: 50°21'41"W

  The wind had dropped since sunrise and the men were at the oars, pulling steadily toward where the sun had risen earlier on the distant horizon.

  As it approached its noon zenith, the warmth of the oncoming summer sun made for a pleasant passage in the open boat.

  Ráðúlfr Júrgson shrugged his leather cape off and stood a moment at the stjornborði, the tiller oar in his hand.

  He arched his aging back, and a lifetime at the oar rattled down his spine with that wash of relief that always made a magnificent day feel even better.

  He’d been at the stjornborði, starboard side, on the oar conning the vessel for most of the morning.

  “Gansi…” he called to his son. “Ok vagn er flýgr,” he said and the men laughed heartily.

  Roughly translated from his native Norse, it suggested that this was supposed to be a chariot on the sea, not a plodding cart. He indicated to his son to replace him at the tiller oar, and stepped to the lad’s rowing seat.

  “We pull this clinker home,” his voice rumbled out through his greying beard and the men at the oars raised their energy to match his vigor.

  Raol was now in his sunset years, a man of vast experience and respect. He’d led this group out so many lives ago; so many lives lost to the skræling… the savages in the new lands.

  The last skirmish when the moon was full was a final straw. They had sat in negotiations for two days straight, deciding the course.

  It was a decision taken at a hastily assembled outdoor meeting called a thing in the Norse tongue, held on the plains under an open sky. It harkened back to the original plains of Þingvellir, or “Thing Fields” incepted in 930 AD, almost a century ago.

  Two larger boats holding the women and children had been with them until sunset the night before, when Thor had brought the storm upon them.

  Dawn found them all alone on a sea still angry, running confused and lumpy with small waves formed by the wind. The prow of their longboat, taller than a tall man, bit deeply into the onrushing swell as each rolled by relentlessly toward the shore, two days rowing behind them, where the sun would set.

  It had been six winters since he and his men had seen other men of his tribe. His sentence had been three winters, so that he would be welcomed when they made landfall in Iceland again in the coming months.

  He was not a particularly violent man. He had killed in anger, yes, he reminisced. But it was only an ending of trouble, not a making of it.

  Small hounds yap and nip, but when a big one retaliates… even with restraint there were going to be consequences, no?

  These were the memories that filled his mind as he fell into the rhythm.

  It was his misfortune to have a knack for killing when the red mist of his anger came down. It was not an emotion-driven violence, just a brutally calculating capacity to end a situation when it became unavoidable.

  And he was grateful that advancing age was slowly taking the keen edge off the very sharp capacity for violence that lived in him. He smiled at that. He wanted to be a gentle man.

  In the place they were leaving, he had learned restraint. It was filled only with dark-skinned savages and their strange and treacherous ways. How he had let them be when he could have done worse.

  But then, there were a lot of them. A multitude. And, as it was for his great uncle before him, certainly more than his small band of Norsemen could handle.

  This was silent work. Happy effort paid to the oars.

  He smiled to himself, enjoying the feel of the wooden oar in his hands, the trancelike rhythm that would arise in the coming hours as his gnarled and brutally powerful hands would labor, hauling what remained of them and their scant possessions back to civilization.

  There, once more, he would have his bride.

  Ragna.

  A woman of distinction.

  He had left her there, not wanting to risk her life on a dangerous journey—the same one his great uncle was reputed to have taken a generation before.

  He looked now to his son at the tiller. The boy carried her features, and his too.

  Gansi had become a man in the six years since he too had helped to pull this craft following the sun, so many winters ago at the banishment. The boy, then standing only to his shoulder, just in the first flush of his coming manhood, was smooth of face and lanky.

  Now he wore a light beard of manhood, his frame filled out to an impressive cut; narrow at the hip and soaring to the shoulders.

  Overhead the gulls flew, evidence that their craft was still in coastal waters and within flying range of the land that they were leaving. His experienced eye picked up the run of chop reflecting from that land, coming out with them counter to the incoming racks of swells built up in the storm that Thor had sent to test them.

  He squinted now at the sun, majestic in the crisp blue sky.

  He sighed with pleasure, the hypnotic rhythm of the oar in his hand beginning to work its magic.

  It was at that instant that Odin struck.

  For reasons unknown, Odin slapped every man from his seat and pummeled him from within; each feeling their organs slam back and forth within their frames.

  It was a flash seen not by the eyes nor heard by the ear. A body blow deep inside, and each man looked to his fellow in bewilderment, then all faces turned in their terror to Raol.

  In that wink of time, the sea had changed her state, the orderly swell running landward was gone—up into the sky and down low the whole ocean seemed to slop.

  The men were silent, looking to Raol for guidance, still lying off their seats, too terrified to challenge the gods and crawl back.

  Above and all about them towered an ethereal swirling rainbow of ghostly colors. It had the appearance of an aurora.

  In the silence, Raol came to his haunches, crouching over the centerline with one hand balancing against the oar, the other held in half salute, palm toward the deck. It said for the men to remain still and silent.

  They obeyed.

  Slowly he began a sweep, his eyes scrutinizing everything to the horizon, probing the circuit about them—flatness in every direction but for the vast swooping movement that the whole ocean had adopted.

  His lad hung on the tiller. His backside down on the deck.

  Raol nodded to him and his son’s startled eyes warmed as the chill of fear left him. His father had matters in hand.

  “Slowly…” Raol’s voice rumbled quietly to every part of the boat. “…Very slowly, back to your seats.”

  And the men obeyed, as many of them as the digits on both his hands and feet.

  “What happened, father,” Gansi ventured in lowered tones.

  “Odin…” his father spoke, his senses still prickling with attention for any minute clue to the truth. “Last night Thor, today Odin,” he cautiously ventured.

  “Be… because we ran?”

  Raol rounded on his son, “Hush! We turned away because we were outnumbered. We are not fools. Our business was done there.”

  There was silence again in the boat, only the slosh of some water within the boat and the peculiar suck and plop of the overlapping clinker boards playing the ratcheting tune of a washing board repeatedly dipped into that vast ocean.

  And then the swells once more arrived, towering and marching abreast away from the coast, something Raol had never seen before.

  More worried looks went round the c
rew like a gust blowing over a field of wheat.

  The men looked left and right and could see down long canyons of wave-troughs that ran to the horizon on each side. They rode up and over mountain after mountain of water, each delivering a stomach-fluttering swoop into a cavernous trough.

  “There!” Dúlf pointed into the sky, and such was the shock in his voice that every man aboard jerked his head to squint toward the sun, not yet at its full height.

  Directly overhead, Odin was at work once more, tracing with his finger a line on the roof of the sky right past the bright orb.

  They watched in rapt amazement as the god’s finger left a long trail that stretched from the far horizon of their intended destination, toward the direction from which they had just rowed.

  “Father?” Gansi was the first to speak, deep uncertainty in his voice.

  Raol looked to his son and tried to hide the fear he felt knotting his gut, knowing he could not conceal his rising terror. So, without answering, he gazed back at the judgment above and what it portended.

  With those squinting eyes he could see the very tip of Odin’s finger right there, touching the roof of the sky, drawing a long thin cloud behind it that stretched back to the distant horizon where the sun rose.

  Two dozen years before, Raol’s great uncle, Leif Ericson, son of Erik the Red on his mother’s side, had also been banished, then discovered and abandoned Vinland.

  He too had been driven off by the natives.

  Now, the declaration in the sky above was obvious.

  Odin was decreeing that his people dare not run again from a fight, and Raol knew that even if it cost them their last man, the gods insisted that they must go back to finish their business with the savages.

  “Bring her about,” Raol rumbled. “We take an oath, Odin…” he threw his hands wide and open, palms to that finger in the sky, “to avenge.”

  And the long pull on the oars began.

  Not long after, and the ocean went still, and then they seemed to cross a threshold where the swell turned and once more ran as it should, back toward the coast, assisting as it now ran with them, tipping their stern toward the sky and letting them surf small runs.

  Gansi was smiling now, creases like crescents framing the sides of his mouth. His young face so like his father’s, his deadly temperament too.

  He enjoys a scrap too much for his own good, Raol thought as he pulled on in silence.

  Sporadic hushed conversations between the men punctuated the mounting tension for what lay ahead.

  They would not make land this nightfall, but one more visit from the sun and they would be ashore by the following dusk.

  Within a short time, a wind started to rise, blowing on their stern in their direction… their direction and the direction of the finger lines that Odin kept drawing for them across the sky.

  Much as Raol had been looking forward to the row, he welcomed their square-rigged sail drawn up the single mast.

  With these favorable conditions, his boat came almost onto the plane, the wind driving them down the rising chop, and the chop in turn lending them speeds to hold pace with the swells.

  At this pace, they could make landfall near dawn. Odin had brought the wind, and it pleased Raol to know that his God would now be smiling on them.

  Chapter 5

  DARPA, Arlington, Virginia

  Thursday, 19 August

  Latitude: 38°52'43"N

  Longitude: 77°6'31"W

  The media storm had continued for two straight days. By now, both China and Russia had landed on the side of North Korea, putting the crosshairs of their spy satellites on the precise location in the Southern Ocean where the rig had been.

  Every indication pointed to that spot.

  Spy satellites had picked up the two high-energy laser pulses and all seismic readings converged with their epicenters on that point.

  It had conspiracy theorists working overtime.

  Every harebrained idea ever conceived reintroduced into the public domain with assertive conviction: Edgar Cayce, Mayan Prophesy revivals, crystal and star alignments, comings and goings of various planetary bodies through unhelpful ‘retrogrades’.

  The Bermuda or Devils’ Triangle and numerology were implicated, leading to strange conclusions. The Book of Revelations, Kabbalah, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead screamed for legitimacy.

  Obscure groups trotted out versions of ‘pyramid power’, tangled and garbled interpretations of myths from every culture vied for the limelight.

  The Pope blessed multitudes and held hands with the Chief Rabbi. Islam prepared for an escalation of Jihad.

  Hypothesis dragging Tesla’s HAARP project into the fray were dusted off and gaining ascendency with new and enthusiastic adherents.

  The churches of America’s Bible Belt had also done record business in the ensuing days while televangelists scored unheard of ratings.

  And all the while, DARPA remained unscathed and out of the spotlight.

  The shock of the backfired experiment at DARPA was only surpassed by the missing rig. It was gone. Utterly evaporated. Not a trace of it left.

  A US Submarine and Navy Wasp-Class amphibious assault ship were both on point and a remotely operated camera platform, a ROV, was down on the sea floor at the site.

  A Russian MiG-31 was buzzing the area and a ship thought to be a Russian Admiral Gorshkov-class frigate was inbound on the radar, topping its maximum thirty-one knots.

  It would arrive within two hours and the Americans launched an MH-60 Seahawk chopper to secure the area and two of their eight Harrier Jump Jets to identify and buzz the Russian spotter and inbound frigate.

  All was unfolding on the monitors at DARPA’s Situation Control Room.

  The facility was secured with two Marines armed with live Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. This debriefing was in deadly earnest, its secrecy watertight.

  Only the innermost clutch of the scientists, military strategists and top brass were inside the sealed room or patched in through secure video conferencing.

  The list was small but illustrious: The President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Assistant Commanding General of the Joint Special Operations Command, Deputy National Security Advisor, an Air Force brigadier general, and the Director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center.

  “The Australians are demanding to know what precisely it is we are up to. They’re threatening to divulge what we have told them at the Security Council,” Lincoln O’Dowd, Director of Operations detailed.

  “The situation is extremely delicate,” the Secretary of State confirmed. “My line has exploded with my G8 counterparts not accepting that it is a North Korean instigation. I think we’re going to have to make some form of disclosure.”

  The President was nodding, “Can we keep the Russians at bay till we’ve done a bottom survey?”

  He posed the question directly at the Air Force brigadier.

  The brigadier looked at the Secretary of Defense as he answered, “That depends on our appetite to go hot… Can we do it technically? Yes. The MiG can outrun our Harriers, but we can send the frigate down to that rig before the MiG can react… But we all know where that leads…”

  Worried glances went around the room.

  “The question is, quite how curious are the Russians? How far will they push? Can we disclose enough to have your counterpart pull them back?”

  He posed his question to the Secretary of State.

  She puffed her cheeks and her hand came up to her face, thumb and forefinger pressing the tension out of her jaw.

  “I don’t think they’re going to back down that easily,” she submitted. “China’s in a froth, North Korea is rattling its sabre, France is on the bandwagon… Even Britain is making demands. They have a whiff of something. My Canadian counterpart is asking pressing questions. Questions about their own east coast. About anomalies that coincided with our test. About… uhhmm. Well… the two missing jetliners t
hat seem to be connected to this event. They were ninety-seven and eighty-four miles to the east of Newfoundland, and they’re gone without a trace, simply winked off the radar.”

  The Admiral of the Fleet confirmed that the Canadians had asked for assistance.

  Just then, the General of the Joint Special Operations held up his hand. “I have Captain Andres of the USS Iwo Jima on video feed. Let me first paint a sitrep. The test was performed on the Southeast Indian Ridge. The site was chosen because adjacent water depths are down to the five-thousand-meter range. The Ridge is half that, offering the possibility of anchor points. Captain?”

  The Captain remained silent, looking in the camera and out from the monitors at the various locations tuned in.

  “Captain…?” the President prompted. “You have something for us?”

  “Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen… I… I’m afraid not. Or nothing specific…” he hesitated. “We’ve found something and have a visual but it makes no sense, sir.”

  “You do not have the rig, yes or no?” The General cut directly to the issue.

  “I’m afraid, sir… we’re not certain. We have run over an area of ninety square miles and picked up nothing but two of its four anchors. The ROV is on the location now with images, sir… And we see something, but we are not sure what it is. We are sending a magnetometer down on a second ROV.”

  “The magnetometer identifies metals,” the General clarified. “But, I don’t understand, Captain. You either have it on visuals or you don’t. Which is it?”

  “We have the anchors on visual, General… they are the anchors, no question…. But…”

  “I’m sorry Captain, this line is clear, but you are not. Confirm. You do or you do not have the rig? Is the rig attached to the anchors, yes or no?”

  “Well… y… yes, General. Yes, it is.”

  “Then where lies the problem, Captain?”

  “It’s corroded, sir. The rig. The anchors are bright and new. Pristine. The rig, or what’s left of it still attached to the anchors, is… well… encrusted. The geometry’s there, but it… it’s canted over, half buried in silt and completely obscured with sea life.”