Assignment - Black Viking (15 page)

Durell let his voice trail off as he heard a new sound through the roar of the storm. Above the howling and thunder of the unnatural tempest, there came a more normal sound, and somehow it held more dread than the others. It was the break of surf on a reef, dead ahead.

He clung to the rail, peering ahead. He could see nothing. The snow and icy wind blinded him.

“Gino!” he shouted. The boy appeared at his shoulder. Ice whitened his thick black hair. “Gino, go forward and look for land.”

“I take orders from the 
baróne
, not from you.” The boy was afraid. “You ain’t the captain. When I’m twenty-one, my pop promised me—”

“You’ll never see tomorrow,” Durell promised grimly. Gino hesitated, then cocked his head to study the seas. The
Vesper’s
bow fell off, lifted with cakes of ice sliding across her deck. Her engine labored steadily. Gino suddenly bobbed his head and ran and slid forward. Snow cut him off from sight, then he reappeared, clinging to the bow lifeline.

“Keep her steady!” Durell shouted to the helmsman.

A cloaked figure appeared on deck. It was Elgiva. Her hair streamed wildly in the wind. Snow swiftly whitened the dark cloak. She ran toward Durell, shouting something he could not hear. The
Vesper
shuddered and heeled far over. A stay parted with a wild metallic twanging.

“There!” Elgiva cried. “Look there!”

Something huge and monstrous loomed like some prehistoric sea beast rising from the stormy deep. Jagged rocks and cliffs came and went as if a curtain had been raised and then lowered again. The seas boiled. The helmsman yelled as he lost the wheel again. Durell jumped for it and risked a broken hand as he seized the spokes and righted the staggering vessel. A sea broke over him.

He fell, and someone grabbed his arm to save him. It was Elgiva. She pointed again.

“There!” she called again. “And there!”

The rocks had sprung up all around them. Now a high cliff loomed in the mists and vapors. Broken ice chunked against the
Vesper’s
bruised sides. Durell heard Gino cry a warning and he spun the wheel to starboard. The ship did not want to respond. She was tired from the storm’s battering. Her head did not come up for an agonizing moment. The sea fell away and exposed a long line of rocks like teeth in a dragon’s mouth. Splinters of wood broke off and flew away in the wind. The sail snapped with a booming sound and the heavy canvas flapped away like a pterodactyl’s leathery wings seeking refuge from the elements.

Gino screamed from the bow, and Durell forced the reluctant bow to port this time. But it was useless. A sense of doom filled him. There were rocks and shoals everywhere, and the thunder of tormented seas on every side.

Elgiva suddenly covered her face with her hands. “We are lost!”

“Call on your pagan gods for a miracle!” Durell shouted at her.

She lifted her head in resentment, and then, looking beyond him, her eyes widened and she pointed with a trembling finger.

“There!”

It was an illusion, Durell thought. A mockery to his senses.

“Look!” Elgiva cried. “Follow them!”

Out of the maelstrom there came a shape, wiped out for a moment by the snow, then reappearing again. Tossed and heaved and spun about and driven under, it came on stubbornly, like something seen in a dream.

Oars flashed and shields hung at her sides, and the dragon’s head at her bow dipped and lifted, mouth red and gaping, eyes aglare.

It was an ancient Viking ship.

HER RED sail was brailed to her stubby mast, but the oarsmen bent their broad backs to the sweeps and drove her steadily on. High on her stern, a giant figure in a horned helmet and wolfskin tunic lifted a strong arm and beckoned to the
Vesper
. Durell turned the wheel to follow. The schooner shivered and broke through the seas. With a shouted command, the giant armored man in the longship turned his craft around and drove straight toward what seemed to be a deadly barrier of white-foamed rock. Durell gritted his teeth and held the wheel steady. Elgiva stood beside him with clasped hands, a look of ecstasy on her face.

“It is Eric! Is he not magnificent? He must have seen us from the shore!”

Durell had no time to wonder at the appearance of this antique dream that should have vanished a thousand years ago. It took all his strength to make the Vesper follow the flashing oars and ice-crusted shields of the longship. For a time he did not think he would make it. The seas, gathering ice, the wind and driving snow, the ghostly visibility, all combined to drive them toward death. Drenched with sweat under his coat, he somehow managed to wrench the wheel this way and that, following the irregular course of the other vessel. Sigrid came on deck, and Uccelatti, and they stared at the Viking warship and shouted to each other, but their words were tossed away by the howling wind.

There was land on every side now, looming black and white with snow, sometimes towering above the ship’s masts, sometimes low and shoaled, seething with wild combers. Durell followed blindly. There was no other choice. Elgiva stood beside him as if in a trance, ignoring the seas that broke over them, enraptured by the danger.

Then abruptly the seas calmed and they were in the lee of a towering cliff that sheltered them from the wind. There was a dark beach ahead, covered with broken ice and snow, and a concrete dock that had withstood the wild storm. The Viking ship drove smoothly on up to the beach, and the men at the oars shipped their sweeps smartly and leaped out to haul the long vessel out of the water. Durell brought the Vesper to the dock, straining to see through the snow that fell from leaden skies. Every muscle quivered with exhaustion from the effort he had made. The landing left much to be desired, but quick hands took the line that Gino threw from the bow. Elgiva tossed the stern line ashore. The longship’s crew were quick, and Durell now saw that except for the bearded giant in the stern, they wore conventional coats and sweaters and woolen ski caps that protected their faces, but which gave them a grotesque eerie look in the knitted designs that concealed everything but their eyes and mouths.

“
Tak
, Eric!” Elgiva cried. She ran from Durell and stepped ashore on the concrete dock. “Eric,
tak!
”

The bearded man swept the poetess up in his arms. Durell drew a deep, uncertain breath.

They had arrived at Skelleftsvik.

“There is room for all,” said Dr. Eric Gustaffson. “And you are all welcome.”

A roaring fire in a great stone hearth warmed them. A kind of darkness had fallen during the mile-long trek through snow-burdened pine forests, along a path that twisted up from the steep slopes that formed the sheltered cove. They had gathered finally in a huge timbered hall that was a replica of a chieftain’s council room in olden days, Durell thought. The pine logs snapped and crackled on the rough hearth. Hanging on the planked walls, which looked as if they had been reproduced from ship’s timbers, were banners, spars and masts, helmets and swords and round embossed shields, gleaming red and iron-gray in the firelight. Big trestle tables were set with food by the Lapp women who appeared silently, their heads in woolen shawls, to serve their grinning, half-frozen men. Durell and the
Vesper’s
crew stood a little apart from these, a barrier of language and custom separating the Mediterraneans from these people of the far North.

“You must forgive me,” said Dr. Eric Gustaffson. “People say I am childish, dressing in this armor now and then, pretending I am a Viking chief. I restored this house and built the
Red Wing
, which guided you here. But it suits my fancy. By profession I am a surgeon, but by avocation, my heart is in the past, as my dearest Elgiva well knows.”

“How did you find us in the storm?” Durell asked. “My lookouts spotted you. You were about to go ashore on the Walk. So we went to help you.” Dr. Eric grinned in his huge red beard and shrugged, flexing his powerful shoulders. “And, after all, one expected you.” “How is that?”

“The elements have gone wild, like a berserker. It is my poor brother’s doing, of course. And the local police were here yesterday to question me and ask if I had seen Peter. But I have not seen him yet.”

“Do you expect to?”

“He needs me; and I shall go to him.”

“Then you’ve heard from him?”

“Not directly. But he is nearby. And very ill. They told me that he may be dying.”

“Who told you this?” Durell persisted.

“The men who came ashore two days ago. Curious people. Frightened, but with a savage and cold ferocity. So sure of themselves, but not yet sure of me. They told me about poor Peter. I expect his condition has grown worse since then.” The big man turned and hugged Sigrid. “And you, too, child of my brother—you were expected, too. Do you still play your games for the government? And you still resent my dearest Elgiva, I see. Come, stop pouting and smile.”

Sigrid looked reluctant, but did as her uncle suggested. She looked thoughtful and distracted.

Steaming mugs of coffee were brought by the Lapp women and served at the trestle tables. Uccelatti came to Durell with a worried look on his handsome face.

“This time, my dear Cajun, you have led me into a nightmare from which I think I can never recover. I do hope you understand what is happening here. I do not.” 

“I expect to learn what I need,” Durell told him. “You look homesick, 
baróne
.”

“I am. What was to be a leisurely pleasure cruise has turned into—well, how can one describe it? I feel that none of us will ever see a warm sun again.”

“If we don’t, no one ever will,” Durell said. He turned to Dr. Gustaffson. The big, red-haired man had sympathetic blue eyes. Eric said: “You must not judge my country by what you see tonight. At this season, spring is normally everywhere, and the wild flowers bloom. It is soft and pleasant, and all the red farmhouses stand out in the long hours of sunlight.”

“But now it’s different,” Durell said grimly. “And you know why.”

The man had a wide brow under his shock of red hair, a generous mouth, and eyes that had a professional look of measuring and understanding. “Sigrid whispers that I am not to trust you. She says you are an American agent and you will kill my brother, if you must, in order to stop his weather machine.”

“I never told her that.”

“But you are capable of such a thing. I could not allow it. Whatever Peter’s faults may be—”

“What he has done must be undone. How long can you survive here if this weather continues? And it will continue, and grow worse, and the winter will bury you under a hundred feet of ice.”

“Yes, I have thought of all this. Come with me, please. My men—they are simple Lapp farmers and herders, as you see—some of them understand English and it would not be wise to have them hear your words.” Dr. Eric paused and looked across the room. “Shall we take him with us to our conference?”

Durell glanced at Colonel Smurov. The KGB man sat alone at a long table, hulking and suspicious. His Tartar face was like the moon. He looked incongruous in his dark overcoat and double-breasted suit. His eyes darted this way and that, observing them all, and he showed plain contempt for the artifacts that Eric had hung about his great hall.

Eric did not wait for a reply. “Yes, we will take the Muscovite, too. It is only fair. His interest here may be even greater than yours, although it is plain he remembers with resentment the past centuries when we Varingians looted and fought our way all the way down the Volga to the capital of the Emperor of Byzantium.”

“We live in a different world now, Doctor.”

“Yes, yes. You may be right. Come with me, and summon your Russian friend, too.”

Dr. Gustaffson’s paneled study was in sharp contrast with the antique reproduction of a Viking council hall. It was modern and warm, with an Oriental rug over wide, polished plank floors that smelled of lemon oil. There was an oval Danish desk and chairs with foam-rubber seats, a medical cabinet and a small examining and operating room visible through a partly open doorway. Outside, the wind howled and piled snow above the windowsills. A darkness that was not a true darkness lurked beyond, cutting off a view of the turbulent, maddened sea. Gustaffson poured brandy for Durell and Smurov and waved them to seats. Smurov remained standing. Durell sat down, but kept himself ready.

“You see, gentlemen, I am not quite so mad as to rely entirely on ancient comforts. I have a generator for power and heat. If you had been here yesterday, we could have telephoned to Stockholm or Moscow or Washington. But the lines went out last night. Perhaps it was the storm. Or perhaps the men who brought me word about my brother are responsible for our isolation. It is only an inconvenience.”

“Have you a radio?” Smurov growled.

“Yes, in the room beyond the dispensary.”

“I must radio to Moscow for instructions.” The Colonel looked at Durell. “Much has happened that was not anticipated.”

“In a moment.” Gustaffson’s huge figure made the cozy study seem small. His thick brush of red hair almost grazed the low ceiling. “Am I to take it that you gentlemen are competing with each other?”

“We work together,” Smurov grunted. “Like a donkey and a camel yoked to the same cart. It does not work very well.”

“The radio,” Gustaffson said, “is our only communication with the outside. No other ship can get in. My little extravagance, the longship, is only a cockleshell. And your schooner can never leave this cove unless the weather changes. I must tell you, gentlemen, that I am empowered by my government to place you both under arrest. The police were here two days ago, looking for you, and warned me about you. They were due to return yesterday, but did not. My Lapps tell me that all the roads are buried under many feet of snow. The situation is very grave for the local people. Desperate, I should say. Another few days of this storm, and there may be hundreds of casualties.”

“Thousands,” Durell said. “A new Ice Age. What you see so far is only the beginning.”

Gustaffson slowly nodded. “Yes, I agree.”

“And do you agree that it must be stopped?”