Ragnarok

by Michael Smorenburg

  She’d bided her time, carefully watching the action, looking for an opportunity. When that opportunity eventually came, she’d moved with all the stealth and speed she could muster and snatched the phone.

  One of the men had seen her withdrawing, but she’d gone directly to the delirious man and, making a show of attending to him, she’d slipped her phone under the blankets.

  As soon as there was enough of a gap, she’d pressed the on button and moments later felt the signature vibrations of the phone logging onto the network and various incoming messages silently registering.

  Just before the drone’s appearance, she’d managed to whisper two short cries for help into the messaging app. She sincerely hoped they would not be too cryptic, but she’d dared not spend more time on it.

  Now, most of the men disappeared toward the beach, and through the night she heard heavy sounds and then a crunching roar as if a large wooden barrel was being rolled a short distance. It was the boat being righted.

  She snuck a look at her mobile and saw that both of her voice messages to her father had double green checkmarks—they’d been read.

  “Thank God,” she said under her breath.

  It was a costly mistake.

  “Hvað er hún að gera?!!”

  One of the men nearby had spotted her and in an instant, he’d shot across the distance.

  She couldn’t hide it—the bright screen grinned through the makeshift hemp blanket like a neon light.

  The man had her wrist in an iron grip and pried the phone from her hand.

  Two then three men gathered round.

  The man holding the phone gripped it gingerly with the tips of his fingers.

  ***

  “What is that thing?” Raol demanded of Tegan.

  She was cowering from his wrath, as he loomed over her.

  The phone had buzzed with some remote update in the man’s hand and he’d dropped it in the dirt as if it had attacked him.

  It lay, glowing face upturned, illuminating the ferocious faces surrounding Tegan like some nightmarish movie full of ghouls.

  She was whimpering incoherent responses and Raol took his dagger out.

  He grabbed her by the hair and yanked her to her knees, exposing her throat.

  The cold steel touched her at the left side where her carotid artery bulged at the surface, pumping terror.

  “I swear to you…” he spoke in a voice too calm for the moment. His movements too practiced to be the first time.

  “Do it!” Raol’s brother, Ótta, urged. “Cut its head off. Be done with her. She is a witch, sent to bring division between us. Sent to call the skræling down on us.”

  The screen dimmed, preparing to hibernate, black and dormant.

  Raol pushed the phone through the dirt toward Tegan.

  “Show me what this thing is!” he ordered the woman.

  Tegan interpreted his actions, and with her hair still stretched out, she reached her fingertips toward the phone and brought it on with her fingerprint placed on the reader.

  The phone immediately illuminated to gasps from the men who suddenly drew back.

  The knife pressed in that instant of its own accord to the slicing point at her throat and Tegan winced at its sting.

  Raol realized it and reduced the pressure.

  “What is it?!” he demanded again. “What does it do?”

  It was obvious to him that it had life. That the screen was purposefully divided into images and hieroglyphs that must communicate something.

  “Show me!” he barked at her. “I swear it, wench. Show me this magic now or I will slice your head off.”

  With trembling fingers, Tegan tapped at the screen dancing in her other hand, and the image snapped to a new layout.

  Another round of gasps emitted from the men and more of them appeared, drawn back from the beach like moths to the strange illumination in the bush of their encampment.

  The screen displayed a mosaic of tiny images, each with a hieroglyph below.

  Tegan tapped one of them and the screen flipped once again to just images, images of landscapes and people.

  Raol squinted at the screen.

  “She has paintings in there,” he recounted what he saw, just as Tegan tapped one of them and its tiny size filled the whole screen. Her finger flicked across the screen and a different image appeared, then another and another.

  The men were all eyes—eyes on the screen and eyes on one another in disbelief.

  Raol’s grip on Tegan’s hair relaxed just a moment, the forced and painful facelift she’d been getting returned her appearance to normal, but the icy dagger remained against her skin.

  Raol was now controlling the pace that Tegan flicked through the pictures with minute tugs of her hair.

  Then she made the perfectly detailed paintings disappear and brought up a new screen again, the very first one that this thing had shown when she’d first illuminated it.

  She tapped one of the images and then a little block, and her own voice came out of the machine, as if she were casting it into the small box without her lips moving.

  Raol struck her across the face so that the lit thing went flying through the air. As it landed, one of his men hit it with an axe, cleaving it in two.

  The light went out and the scene was plunged into near darkness. Slowly eyes started adjusting from the bright light to the glow from the flickering small fire.

  “I warned you,” Ótta announced triumphantly. “This is a witch and that thing has a life. She has put herself inside there… her face and her voice.”

  Raol went over and poked at the cloven glass and metal. The life was gone, they had successfully killed it.

  He came back to the woman and took her jaw in his rough hand, turning her face to stare at her in the dancing light of the fire.

  “What are you,” he asked, his gut twisting, knowing that she was not his wife but had taken her likeness. And with that likeness, he dared not do what he knew needed doing.

  He wondered if the men would still respect him for not removing her head when it was clear that was the only course of action to take.

  Perhaps, he thought, I should just leave her unguarded long enough and one of the men will do that dirty work for me.

  ***

  Things had changed.

  Her hands were now bound behind her back, her feet trussed together, and she was left lying on her side in the dirt as the men made ready to depart.

  Small groups of them came up to the camp and disappeared down to the shore carrying with them the scant few possessions they had.

  She was beyond tears and self-pity. She felt like a husk of her former self, adrift on some crazy furious ocean of improbability and terror.

  The side of her face had ballooned where Raol had struck her, and she could swear he’d loosened her teeth along that side of her jaw.

  She seemed to have lost his protection, and that terrified her.

  He’d almost lost interest in her, leaving her alone and unattended as he had not done since her capture more than two days ago.

  The sun would soon rise on her third day of captivity—if it rose for her, she reminded herself.

  What could she have done differently, she asked herself?

  Her fault was being too curious to see if her message had been delivered. From there on out, the rest was inevitable.

  She was already starting to identify with her captors, understanding their predicament and empathetic to their terror. They too were victims in this deadly game, not intending malice toward her or anyone, but trying to survive a role pre-ordained by fate.

  It’ll make a hell of a story! she consoled herself. If I get out alive, she had to admit.

  So many ifs….

  Had her dad understood her message? Had he complied? Were they going to send in Seal Team Six, or would it be guns blazing with the local Sherriff’s department?

  The drone was a good sign. They were being more delicate than she’d thought they might
.

  Were they watching her now from some satellite?

  It was a wild thought, one Pete would be sure to have an opinion on.

  Then again, she despaired, Pete wasn’t talking to her anymore it seemed.

  Chapter 21

  Argentia Air Base, Newfoundland

  Latitude: 47°18'11"N

  Longitude: 53°59'30"W

  The strings Pete had pulled in the hours after the emergency call came in were a lot more substantial than mere string, and the vigor with which he’d pulled on them went far beyond a tug.

  These were cables and he’d yanked them with everything he had.

  At the other end of those lines were select members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  The action was within Canadian waters, but the instigation had clearly been American. The situation was global and it needed to be above Top Secret.

  Diplomatic lines buzzed and assurances were delivered.

  The Canadian government stood down their local police and an uplink was established from the Biscayan Cove Peninsula, rapidly cordoned off by the military.

  Pete had been in Nevada when the call had come in.

  After a prickly discussion with Daxton Cronner, who’d remained skittish and suspicious throughout, the urgency of the developing situation had bought him a ride on the new F-35 fighter jet he’d so longed for. But his gut had been in such a knot on the way in that he’d barely appreciated the thrill of it.

  Three hours later, the jet streaked out of the sky with special clearance to land at Naval Station Argentia, where a horde of top military and political brass were rapidly assembling, flown in from DC and elsewhere.

  Argentia was sixty miles west-southwest of the target area, on the other side of the Newfoundland peninsula.

  It was the closest airfield to the operation and could barely accommodate the incoming air traffic.

  A local TV station had picked up on the activity and was asking uncomfortable live questions on the wire, until they mysteriously went silent on the matter just after midnight and never touched on it again.

  Air traffic over the area was diverted and ships from both the Canadian Coast Guard and Navy were dispatched to patrol the waters in a tight grid just south of the cape.

  A spy drone began high altitude observations and the first of its images came to life on the hastily set-up command post in the airfield’s hanger; guards packing live heat were posted in a cordon around it.

  “Who is this guy?” the Admiral taking charge of the operation asked of the Captain of Operations.

  “He’s the whistleblower. His fiancé is down there in the thick of it,” the Captain assured the Admiral.

  “And that qualifies him to be in on a mission like this?”

  “He’s a Lockheed man. He’s got the clearance.”

  “What can he add?”

  “Trust.”

  “From?”

  “The girl. If nothing else, we have to isolate her from the action. He will know how she thinks. She’ll listen to him.”

  The Captain broke away and walked over to Pete.

  “Problems?”

  “The brass aren’t thrilled you’re here. They want a tight lid on this.”

  “I already know what’s goin’ on. They’re better off with me as an insider… or they’d have to eliminate me anyway.”

  “The thought’s crossed their mind.”

  “Charmin’. What now?”

  “They’re bringing a sub in. It’s a backstop. The Seals are going in with a pincer, stealth mode chopper on point already; an F470 CRRC closing as we speak.”

  “Inflatable?”

  “Yeah, sorry. Planes are your thing. CRRC inflatable, Combat Rubber Raiding Craft. Super silent.”

  “Whadda they know?” Pete asked.

  “There are 21 bodies. One’s a much smaller heat signature than the rest, no doubt your, uhhmm.”

  “Tegan, yes.” Pete’s gut twisted. He’d called her his fiancé and strangely it just felt right. He was keeping it objective; the military folks wouldn’t appreciate too much hype.

  “And a patient. Guy down, doesn’t move at all. They stretchered him down to their boat about six minutes ago. Seems they’re making haste to evacuate.”

  “You gonna take them on the sea?”

  “It’s the better option.”

  “And Tegan?”

  “She’s loaded aboard.”

  “Shit,” Pete spat it with real anguish.

  “I don’t think you’ll want to watch this,” the Captain advised.

  “I’m a big boy,” Pete assured.

  “It’s kicking off,” the Captain glanced up at the screen and started moving toward a better vantage point.

  Pete heard his heart pounding in his ears, his tongue felt like the sole of an old leather boot and his throat had a lump like a tennis ball restricting his breathing. It felt like trying to suck air through a straw. His hands were wet and the reek of adrenaline stained his armpits.

  There was an eerie silence in the room.

  Present were perhaps two dozen personnel, most in military garb, and two surgeons representing the hastily prepared field hospital being erected on Bell Island, sixty miles closer to the action, and ten miles from it.

  From above, the thermal camera showed the land as an icy deep purple wrapped around a bay of electric blue water. The longboat was a ghost, almost indiscernible in temperature from the water it floated on. The twenty-one bodies in it were bright green and yellow jewels of heat seated in rows.

  From his discussion with Daxton and the briefing ahead of this operation, Pete knew what he was looking at, but could barely believe it to be true.

  These were men at the oars, seated and ready to pull out beyond the bay, directly into the waiting trap.

  Around the rim of the cliff and in the river valley were stationed other orange and green jewels.

  These were the sharp shooters, the snipers already silently in position. They had been on point for some time already and well insulated, so that their heat signature was fading toward the ambient temperature of the surrounding terrain.

  A mile off the shore lay a long sleek naval strike craft, the heat signature from its quietly ticking engine glowing on the screen like a bonfire.

  The Combat Rubber Raiding Craft was patrolling a quarter mile beyond the mouth of the bay. Aboard, lying flat, were a dozen men gripping their weapons, their engine also lit with an incandescent glow.

  Above the scene but far below the drone shooting this footage, flew the RAH-66 Comanche stealth helicopter armed with enough firepower to reduce the longboat to matchwood at the flick of a switch.

  “Alright people, we have a go. Stand by.” The Operations Chief in charge spoke clearly and confidently.

  His message would be repeated in every earpiece of every one of those little lit men along the cliffs, the men in the rubber boat, the bridge of the strike craft and the cockpit of the chopper.

  The men at the oars were starting to rock in unison and the apparition that was their longboat’s outline began to slide away from the small beach and out toward the headlands that guarded their sanctuary.

  The man stretchered into the boat lay amidships, curled up protectively like a fetus.

  Near the stern, near the man at the steering oar, crouched a small and helpless-looking figure.

  That would be Tegan, Pete knew.

  He wanted so badly to reach into that monitor, into the scene from a skyhook above, and snatch her out of the midst of the coming mayhem. But that was absurd.

  This was reality.

  This was a sea battle like no other has ever been.

  Cutthroats reputed to fear nothing against a technology they couldn’t hope to imagine.

  “Start moving in down the river,” the order was given, and a small band of bright yellows assembled at the river’s head began a swift descent through the darkness.

  On one of the monitors, filmed by a night-vision helmet, the scene played out as
the battle group picked their way down through dense foliage to a small cliff that they quickly abseiled over.

  Another monitor was a feed from one of the divers aboard the inflatable craft just offshore. That night vision image was shot from a low angle with wave action coming between the helmet cam and the mouth to the bay nestled between the cliffs.

  At that moment the first sight of the longboat from this sea-level perspective came into view; rows of men pulling in unison at their oars.

  Pete swallowed hard. It was show-time.

  It was hard to decide which monitor to watch.

  Yet another monitor was at the headland, showing footage shot through a scope, the deadly cross at its center tracking the man’s temple as he leaned on the tiller oar. The shot was close enough to show the female’s waiflike form close by.

  “Everybody hold stations. I have a count for you… we anticipate contact in forty-five… I repeat… four-five… seconds.”

  “Oh, just grrrrrrrreat,” Pete found himself saying under his breath, a feeling of doom knotting his belly.

  It was one thing selling this kind of hardware, quite another seeing it running hot… especially with someone he was too scared to love down on the anvil when the hammer was about to drop.

  Chapter 22

  Viking Encampment, near Biscayan Cove

  Latitude: 47°48'08"N

  Longitude: 52°48'21"W

  The chill of the autumn night had seeped like ice water through the marrow of Tegan’s bones. The ache of it traced her skeleton within. Her ribs felt like they’d been staved in.

  Certainly, the flu bug she was suffering from didn’t help. The wet conditions—wet clothes, wet sand and now wet deck—was misery personified.

  She felt the weakness of an invalid; tiredness at the cellular level. Lack of sleep, no food, and terror had almost sapped her of her will to go on trying.

  But now the adrenaline of the moment was pumping her wide-awake, preparing her to endure whatever tribulation lay ahead.

  She was fleeing into the inky black of the night onto an icy ocean strewn with icebergs not very far to the north, held captive by a gang of men who should have been dead a thousand years before.

  The whole ludicrous absurdity of it almost made her want to laugh.