The mega-tank had left a tremendous swathe of devastation behind it, a clear-felled path through the forest as wide as an A-road. This led the eye straight to the tank itself. Moonlight and its own running lights outlined it amid the trees. In shape, it was basically a rectangle with outcurving flanks. There were projecting structures at each corner — gun turrets, swivel-mounted and fitted with multiple-barrelled rotary cannons. I'd not been able to see those from ground level when Freya and I first encountered the tank. There was also a pod perched at the front like a head on a neck, shape of a flattened sphere. The control cab, if I didn't miss my guess.
A pair of searchlights beamed forward from the cab. On top of it rose a pair of triangular fins. I couldn't figure out what those were there for.
"Are they, like, ears?" Cy wondered.
That was how they looked to me. "Some kind of radar array?" I suggested.
Backdoor agreed. "They're curved. Could well be parabolic antennae."
"No," said Odin. "Purely decorative. Ears."
"How do you know?"
"I know, Gid, because this mechanical beast is a representation of a real, living beast. In much the same way that those so-called tanksuits purported to be jotuns and fire demons, here we have a man-made mimicry of a creature known to all in Asgard. My blood brother has been having fun. What we are looking at is Fenrir."
"Fenrir?"
"Those 'ears' confirm it. It's meant to be Fenrir. The giant wolf. The devourer. One-time scourge of the Aesir. We captured and muzzled him a long time ago. My son Tyr permanently wedged his maw open with a sword — and lost a hand in the process. As far as I know, the real Fenrir is still chained to a rock in far Muspelheim."
"And Loki's come up with his own version."
"Rather than go to the trouble of freeing the original and releasing him upon us, he has manufactured this instead."
"A high-tech stand-in," I said. "Well, nice to know, but it doesn't alter the plan. In fact, I think I'd prefer to take on a big-arse tank that looks like a wolf than a big-arse proper wolf. It's slower, for one thing."
"It's also training its guns on us," Baz warned.
Jensen had spotted this himself. His voice came over the intercom. "We're about to take incoming. Evasive action. Hang on tight!"
We grabbed onto whatever we could — seats, bulkheads, the webbing on the walls. Next instant, there was the judder of heavy calibre fire from below. Flashes of tracer fire lit up the Wokka's interior.
Sleipnir pirouetted gracelessly. A few bullets raked the hull. One shattered a porthole.
"Fuck fuck fuckfuckfuck," I breathed as broken glass flew.
The engines bawled, the entire chopper groaned and shuddered from stem to stern, as Jensen poured on the speed and threw us into a steep climb. We clung on for dear life as the cargo bay canted, rapidly reaching 45? from horizontal and getting closer to perpendicular by the second. He was trying to present Fenrir's gunners with as narrow a profile as possible, and at the same time shrinking the size of the target with distance. The comfort and safety of his passengers was a minor consideration. Getting the Wokka out of range of the rotary cannons was the prime directive. If the six of us stayed intact in the interim — bonus.
Soon Sleipnir was near vertical, straining hard against gravity. All at once Paddy lost his grip and started slithering down the bay. He'd have broken an ankle colliding with the closed cargo ramp if Baz hadn't managed to catch him by the arm as he tumbled past. The rest of us kept ourselves attached, though we were dangling around like demented marionettes.
Finally the tracers stopped their mad strobing around us. Jensen powered down a fraction and levelled Sleipnir out.
"All okay?" he asked over the intercom, before adding one of those typically droll RAF apologies. "Sorry for shaking you up like that, but crisis situation, you understand."
A quick glance round showed me no one was injured. Paddy was massaging a sprained shoulder, but winked to say no harm done. I went forward and popped my head into the cockpit.
"Good job, fellas."
"If we go in again, Coxall, those guns are going to rip us to shreds," Jensen said. "This ship isn't built for dogfighting. She handles like a brick shithouse, and even the best pilots can't do anything about that."
"And we are the best pilots," Flying Officer Thwaite chipped in.
"Of course you are," I told him. "And with a cock-duster 'tache like yours, I bet you're pretty popular with the boys down the nightclub, too."
Thwaite's eyeballs bulged in indignation.
"Now," I went on, ignoring his splutters, "we are going in again and you are getting us over and onto that fucking tank. Thor should be running the trolls in any moment. They're our diversion. The tankies will be so busy with them, they won't be concentrating on us. That's the big idea so let's make it happen, shall we?"
Thwaite looked fit to deck me. Jensen, on the other hand, just eyed his instrumentation, glanced out the windscreen, and gave a grim nod.
"Roger that," he said. "We can do this."
"But — "
He cut his co-pilot off. "We can do this."
I clapped them both on the helmet and went back aft.
Guiding Sleipnir into position ought to be relatively straightforward.
Abseiling safely onto Fenrir's back without getting massacred by those rotary cannons — now that was going to be the tricky part.
Fifty-Three
Thor and his brothers held up their end of things just fine. They freed a dozen trolls from the pens and chivvied them in Fenrir's direction. The trolls would normally have turned on the Aesir the moment they had a chance, but the looming mega-tank was bigger, noisier, scarier, altogether more of a threat. So they focused their aggression on it instead.
Fenrir had just broken through the treeline when the trolls attacked. I saw them swarm around it and start clambering on. One of them managed to haul himself onto a gun turret and immediately received a blast full in the face. At a hundred rounds per second, the rotary cannon didn't leave much of his head behind. His decapitated body slumped back to earth.
This did nothing to deter the other trolls. Soon they were all over Fenrir's sides, hammering and battering with their fists and yowling in gruff indignation. One of them, still on the ground, attempted to stop the mega-tank by grabbing hold of one of its caterpillar tracks. His hands got drawn into the mechanism. His arms swiftly followed. Between them, wheels and track munched up the troll all the way to the shoulders. He stumbled back, screeching horribly, the stumps of his arms spouting blood by the gallon.
More trolls died, chewed to pieces by the rotary cannons as they were scaling Fenrir. This approach wasn't serving them well, and the remainder of them saw sense and leapt off to fetch weapons. These included tree trunks and boulders. They mounted a fresh assault, frothing and gibbering in their fury as they battered away at the tank.
A female, shrewder than the rest, took a big, pointed rock and jammed it between two wheels. Next instant, a gun turret flayed her to shreds, but she'd achieved what she set out to. Fenrir slewed round as one caterpillar track seized up while the other continued turning. The driver braked, then began rocking the tank back and forth in the hope of jolting the obstruction loose.
While he was doing this, Sleipnir came down from overhead, descending plumb-line vertical, at speed. The cargo ramp was out like a cheeky kid's tongue, and me and my squad, with Odin, were poised on the tip of it. Climbing ropes hitched us to the Wokka's interior, looped through karabiners attached to harnesses around our waists. We had gloves on our hands and dogged determination on our faces.
"Ready?" I yelled.
Some nods. A couple of thumbs raised.
"You sure you still want to do this?" I asked Odin.
"No," he said, white hair whipping about like mad under the brim of his hat.
"Feel free to bail."
"Never."
"But you're not even packing."
"I'll cope. I'm more resourceful t
han I may appear."
Sleipnir slowed to a halt ten metres above Fenrir.
"Go!" I cried out. "Go! Go! Go!"
We unspooled the free ends of our ropes behind us and launched ourselves backwards off the ramp. Friction-braking with our hands, we touched down five seconds later. Sleipnir was already rising even as we unclipped our ropes. Jensen wasn't hanging about. The Chinook was a big, tasty target — even more so than the trolls — and Fenrir's gunners weren't slow to cotton on to that fact. All four turrets erupted around us, firing upwards as Sleipnir beat an extremely hasty retreat. The helicopter rode brilliant, sinuous columns of tracer into the sky.
The gunners might have hit it, too, if Fenrir's driver hadn't been trying so hard to dislodge the boulder. The mega-tank jerked and lurched, throwing off their aim, and also throwing us off-balance. It wouldn't be long, I thought, before the rock was worked free and Fenrir was able to resume its course towards the castle.
And, now that I was actually on top of the tank, I could see that it had a pair of stubby forward-facing gun barrels emerging to either side of the control cab. Each was tipped with a hollow, breezeblock-like muzzle brake, suggesting the barrels were much longer than they appeared, if they needed recoil compensation. Probably they telescoped out when firing commenced. The bore was 125 millimetres, give or take. Serious artillery. Fenrir could lob shells that would make mincemeat of the castle's defenders and rubble of the castle itself.
Time to shit or get off the pot.
"Baz! Backdoor! Stick some plastique on that control cab, see if you can't make a hole in it and scramble this thing's brains. The gun turrets have got limited a range of traverse so they don't accidentally open up on each other. We're in a kind of blind spot here, but for fuck's sake watch out for them anyway."
I turned to the others.
"You three, on me. There's what looks like a hatch back that-a-way, near the rear. I want to be through it in the next ten seconds."
I was bossing Odin about as if he was just one of the team, but I didn't really notice I was doing it and he didn't seem to mind. He scrambled across Fenrir with the rest of us, pretty spry for an old geezer. Somehow, through everything, that hat of his was staying put, still shading his absent eye. Must be a godly talent, I thought, the ability to keep a hat on at all times, in all circumstances. Either that or the thing was glued in place.
What had appeared to be a personnel hatch proved to be just that, when we got to it, and eminently blowable. Paddy wedged a blob of C-4 under its lip, inserted the detonator, unreeled the wire, and lay down flat with the priming assembly in his hands. Cy, Odin and I joined him on our bellies, and I invited Odin to clamp his hands over his ears. Backdoor triggered the explosive.
The whump! was deep and satisfying, and it was barely finished before I was back on my feet and sprinting for the hatch. The lid had flipped open on its hinges, what had been a plain domed disc of steel now a blackened, twistily fanlike thing. I fired a couple of shots with my Minimi down into the hatchway just in case there happened to be anyone immediately below. Then I pounced onto the ladder inside and slid down it, hands and feet on the uprights rather than the rungs, in time-honoured windowcleaner style.
I was in a narrow axial passageway, same dimensions as a coffin stood on end. Everything was lit blood-red by battle stations lighting. The passageway ran the length of Fenrir, with paired crawlspace tunnels leading off, two ahead, two behind. Access to the gun turrets. A second ladder awaited at the far end, going up the "neck" into the control cab, and also down. To the engine room, was my guess.
Odin appeared beside me, then Cy and Paddy.
"In, we're fucking in," Cy breathed. "We done it, man."
"Not yet," I cautioned. "We haven't done anything 'til the bastard stops rolling."
"It in't rolling right now, bruv."
Famous last fucking words. That very moment, Fenrir gave an almighty lurch, and suddenly was moving freely once more. The rock was gone and the driver had full control back. I felt the tank pivoting on its axis and pictured those twin artillery barrels being brought to bear on the castle and the lines of defence around it. The gun turrets were still rattling away, too, slaughtering trolls.
There was a shallow rise ahead. We had three minutes, I estimated, maybe less, before this travelling nightmare crested that and had the castle bang in its sights.
Fifty-Four
The good news was that the forward ladder did, indeed, go down into the engine room.
The bad news?
Fenrir wasn't just an all-terrain assault vehicle.
It was a bloody troop transport as well.
Next door to the engine room there was a hold containing fifty-plus American mercs, all tooled up and ready for some action.
How did we find this out?
Because the bastards were lying in wait for us.
They knew we were aboard. They knew we'd breached the roof hatch. They knew which way we'd be likely to head.
And no sooner had we arrived at the engine room than they laid into us.
They rushed in via a short passageway in single file, carrying Ka-Bar knives with 7-inch matt-black blades, which they brandished as they greeted us with cries of "Hostiles!" and "Kick their asses!" and "Hoo-ah!"
Five of them were in the confined space of the engine room with us before we got our shit together to respond. There was every chance they would have obliterated us, too, if they'd only decided to sneak up on us rather than go for the gung-ho, yelling-their-heads-off option.
My simple solution to the problem was to let them have it with the Minimi. The difference between us and them, at that moment, was that Fenrir was their ride and they had no desire to damage it. Hence the knives, a prudent precaution. Us? We didn't care. Damaging was what we were there to do, one way or another. It didn't much matter how.
The five went down, victims of a mixture of overconfidence (theirs) and ruthlessness (mine). Others behind them backed off down the passageway, suddenly appreciating the fact that we had little to lose and they had lots. I heard some frantic debate as they retreated, stuff about bringing knives to a motherfucking gun fight, and what were they supposed to do now, huh?
We couldn't allow them time to come up with an answer.
"Paddy. Cy." I pointed to two diesel turbines the size of Transit vans. They were churning away deafeningly as they bullied Fenrir along. "You know the drill. Fifteen-second fuses. When you're done setting the charges, follow me out."
"Which way you going?" Cy asked.
"Which way do you bloody think? Through the septics. There's got to be an exit at the back for them to pile out of during an assault. That's our way out too. I make a hole through them. You follow."
"All on your own?"
I unhooked a couple of grenades from my belt. "Nope. I'll have some help from Mr and Mrs Pineapple here."
"And me," Odin added.
I was through second-guessing his participation, through querying his combat readiness. He wanted in? Fine by me. I'd no idea how much cop he'd be in a scrap, but hey ho, the more the merrier.
Three steps into the passageway, Odin said, "Gid, my ravens."
"What about them?"
"Someone must look after them, feed them."
"You're worried about your birds at a time like this?"
"If I don't survive…"
"Let's not go there, eh?"
"And Frigga. I want you to tell her — "
"Listen, Odin," I said firmly. "If you're not getting out of this alive, then I'm definitely not. So I'm not about to start promising to tell anyone anything. There's no point."
"I've been a poor husband."
"She knows that. She also knows you love her anyway. Poor husband? I wrote the book on it. But at least you and her are still together, unlike me and Gen. You stuck it through. That counts for a great deal. Now, there's a fuckload of mercs about twenty feet away from here, and every second we spend having this heart-to-heart is another second we give them t
o figure out how to deal with us. So let's forget the what-ifs and focus on the right-nows, yeah?"
"Blunt as ever, Gid," Odin said. "And in your own fashion, wise."
"Cheers."
I turned with a grenade in each hand and plinked out both pins with my thumbs, keeping the striker levers nice and flat with my fingers. Loki's men had withdrawn behind a steel door ahead. They'd gone quiet, which to me said they were braced to launch a counterattack. Charging down the passageway with guns blazing, two-by-two formation, one of each pair shooting high, the other low — that would be how I'd tackle it, in their position. Small arms rather than anything high velocity. Trying their utmost to keep casualties high and collateral damage to a minimum. Make each bullet count and for fuck's sake don't hole the engines.
Sure enough, the door swung open and two pistols poked out. High and low, just like I'd predicted. The men holding them emerged as I lobbed the grenades along the passageway and in through the doorway. I grabbed Odin and hurled him and myself to the floor.
"Oh fu — " one of the Americans managed to get out, and "Holy Mother of — " the other.
Then: Boom! Boom!
The near-simultaneous detonations of two frag-mentation grenades in a confined metallic space. Like gigantic gongs being rung in Hell.
Before the smoke had even begun to clear I was inside the hold, Minimi to shoulder. Odin was hard on my heels, and I briefly wondered what he was going to do, seeing as he was bare-handed. His problem, not mine.
The grenades had killed over half of the Yanks outright, injured plenty more, and stunned the rest. There were maybe a dozen left who were battle-worthy. They staggered to their feet as Odin and I burst in, and while they were groping for their sidearms I began putting them down with the Minimi. Nice and surgical.
But I couldn't neutralise every one of our opponents before return fire became a reality. Pistols started to spark, and I took shelter behind a heap of sprawled bodies.
I signalled to Odin to join me behind my gory barricade. He didn't see. Admittedly I was on his blind side, but it appeared he had his own tactic for handling the enemy fire, and that was to run straight into it.
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