The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (24 page)

“Stig!” The second call gave him the momentum to move.

The dock didn’t rise and fall this close to land, less even than the seventy-second floor of the London Shard in a high wind, which made his second and third steps easier. Three yards farther, he stepped over a black rubber coupling that linked his platform with the rest of the wood planks.

A sudden pitch sent him lurching for a handhold. The shoreside boards were fixed to solid footings, but the wood past the rubber linkage bobbed freely, using the pilings for guides, not anchors. The slap of each wave was amplified by the motion under his feet. Arms out, he stumbled toward the tallest, thickest post. The wood was sticky with tar paint and rough where splinters protruded, but unlike the boards, the pole didn’t move.

* * *

Beneath his wool coat and silk scarf, sweat drenched his evening clothes. He’d pushed to find Nora and Robbie a lifeboat, then fought against the desperate press to return to these passages. He could take the place of a mortal at the boilers, help keep the power for the wireless and the lights operating and give one more soul a chance.

His own soul, if the brethren’s eternal burden had left them any, could use a positive balance.

He shook his arms from his coat and left it where it fell. He wouldn’t need it in the boiler room and it would weigh him down when he ended, as they all must, in the water.

In the corner of his vision, he caught a flash of color at the stairs and whirled. “Who’s there? You must abandon ship!”

A boy in a navy peacoat, red scarf looped from his neck, stepped out of the stairwell.

“Robbie!” Lights flickered off, then on again, a sign the boilers were failing and the great ship’s power would soon be gone, hope of radio assistance ended, but Stig recognized the small figure. The ticking fear that had filled his chest since he’d felt the lurch over an hour ago exploded with the sight of the brown hair, identical to his mother’s. His white nightshirt collar was visible under his dark coat lapels, a sign of youth and vulnerability that cut deeper than any knife. “Robbie.” This time the name sounded like a plea.

“I want to help you.” The thirteen-year-old’s voice cracked. “I’m a man too.”

Six years ago Robbie’s mother had asked Stig for help, and then become his partner, bringing him a son he’d never have known on his own.

“I put you on a lifeboat.” Centuries ago he’d understood that the ability to father a child had been stolen along with the ability to die, but looking at the son of his heart, the boy he’d raised with Nora, he died for the first time.

“I— I—” Robbie’s face was ghostly under the swinging light bulb, and he looked afraid. “I gave my seat to a woman with a baby.”

This boy was nobler than he had ever been.

“You are a fine man, Robbie.” His throat closed after the words, but his heart continued to yell at the heavens, no, no and no.

* * *

“Stig.” Fingers dug into his shoulder, the pressure yanking him a century forward to a heaving dock. “No boat down there,” Wulf said.

Around him was all of the cold, but none of the glassy smooth water of the first time he’d lost his heart to the sea. His mind still saw the pale face, more perfect than carved marble. His own true son’s ice-coated lashes had glittered like diamonds. While he’d waited for the lights of the Carpathia to arrive, he’d promised himself Robbie slept. Robbie breathed. Robbie was only exhausted, not frozen in his arms. “He’s dead. Because of me.”

“Christina’s not dead yet.” Wulf slapped a plastic box of white candies at his chest. “Take these.”

He clutched the box without releasing his other hand from the piling. The small container rattled, sounding almost chipper. “What for?”

“My wife lives off those mints. If I’m the one who has to sit with you, I’d rather not revisit Thai eggplant for the next three hours.”

Stig realized his throat and sinuses burned with the acid aftermath of vomit. No denying it, the dock wasn’t the only thing that had heaved. He was the butt of jokes, a seasick Viking, and he wasn’t even on board. “I hate boats.”

“And they hate you back, my friend.” Wulf slung his arm around Stig’s shoulders and guided him farther from land. “They definitely hate you.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Twisting on the free-swinging rope ladder came as a relief after surfing the crashing waves in the black rubber raft. Stig clambered higher, hands and feet moving, last man to board. He didn’t care about the weight of his protective vest and weapons as long as he could leave that bobbing black cork tied far below.

The last storm clouds masked the moon and the only illumination was the lights the platform was required to show to warn mariners and aircraft. Ten more feet, and he’d reach the metal staircase that linked levels of the oil platform. Exterior stairs were a break-and-enter man’s free-pint night at the pub.

He swung his leg over the railing, then both feet hit the solid metal of the fixed-drill platform. The cold sea bitch could moan with greed, but she wasn’t having any of them yet. He wouldn’t think about their getaway.

Draycott covered the upper stairs while Wulf handed Luc the weapons and night vision headgear he’d carried to spare the old man the weight. At this point they’d divide into two groups and rendezvous here to leave the rig, if they got that far. Stig’s partners took on the sharp green outlines of enhanced thermal images. He could see even the handle and hinges of the door in front of him. One bonus of working with Wulf, he always brought top-notch equipment.

The plan was for Wulf to cross the exposed deck and search the buildings with the crew quarters, setting timed charges as he moved. Because the well itself was capped, they gambled that they could destroy the superstructure without significant environmental damage. Speed wasn’t as key in tight spaces, so Stig and the slower elements of the team would comb the lower interior for Christina. Luc would place more charges with the explosives Stig carried. All timed for ninety minutes.

Ninety minutes to find their needle and topple the haystack.

The outside door wasn’t locked, probably because asking a man to stand in the lashing wind and find the right key was like making a daily offering of shiny metal to the nine wave maidens. Inside, the welcome warmth didn’t relax his tension. Somewhere in this complex they could expect Leif, Halvdan and whoever the rogue Vikings hired for extra muscle.

The rig’s former operators had hung a fire map and floor plan on the wall. Both the west and east ends showed large rooms that occupied the width of the platform. The exterior stairs weren’t centered on the structure, so Stig, Luc and Draycott stood closer to the western room. Two parallel hallways connected the ends and bracketed a central core. The core contained a series of technical spaces labeled for uses like metering, gas compressors and water injection pumps. Stig’s team could make a complete circuit of this level, but only if they passed through the large rooms to reach the other hall.

He signaled to go left, because that side of the rig was closer.

The corridor ended at a door. Luc made an opening gesture and pointed to himself, then pointed to Stig’s chest and waved his fingers like goodbye.

As soon as Luc pulled the door, Stig went through with his body low and weapon high, completely different from Geoffrey Morrison, but circumstances had revived his dormant skills. The thief was once again a hunter.

The room held nothing except debris typical in a long-unused space, dead flies, paper scraps and a broken chair. Of course Christina wasn’t behind the first door. Life didn’t unfold that tidily.

Stig forced himself to wait with the others as Luc placed charges along the short west wall. Seventy-four minutes remained to rescue Christina.

They passed through the second door into the parallel hall, still alert, still no trouble. In the rear, Draycott handled his weapon with familiarity, while Luc teetered between them, grinning like a truffle pig. This close, the smell of lemon cough drops was as subtle as a Jubilee procession, but a hacking announcement of their presence would reach even farther.

“The only place that should be this tight and easy is a woman,” Luc muttered behind Stig.

To the Belgian’s description of their unchallenged exploration, Stig silently added
and hot
. In contrast to the blowing cold of a North Sea storm, the hallway must be eighty degrees. Their waterproof insulated layers created a personal sauna, and the heat produced vivid green imagery on their monoculars.

The farther they penetrated into the structure’s core, the hotter the air grew, and with it, the feeling that they must be on the right path. Leif was spending money to heat the east part of this metal box, which meant he had something he wanted to keep warm—and that was probably where the key occupants, voluntary and involuntary, waited.

The hall ran past numbered solid steel fire doors and ended in a larger door, the one that led to the east room of the structure. Sixty-five minutes remained.

His night vision gear showed him the sweat pouring off both old men. Luc pointed to a door sporting a sign with a red flame indicating flammables. Then he made a gesture with one hand rapidly flung upward.

Yes.
Stig nodded and handed the almost empty pack of explosives to the master and crept to the door at the end of the hall. It drew him as much as it repelled him. The metal walls were warm to the touch and the heat amplified the odor. It wasn’t the damp smell that one would expect at sea, not like a basement or moldy cardboard. Rather it was a dry, hot rot, like groceries locked in a car boot in summer. He couldn’t identify the smell, but the warnings pounding with the tempo of his heart grew stronger and faster.
Leave,
each beat urged
.

He steadied himself with a hand on the metal wall. The panels were as warm as the sweat-slicked grip of his revolver, waking memories of the first time his hand had brushed a hot wall.

Heated stone pressed on all sides, stealing his air. A fire-drake was not like the edge of a man’s sword; an ancient wyrm might be stronger than the spell cast by Grendel. He would drop the golden goblet at the edge of the wyrmhordan and flee to the sea-foam.

“Luc’s done,” Draycott hissed.

Stench of hot death or not, neither
draca
nor
wyrm
lurked behind the door Stig approached. Its window resembled a porthole, double-thick discolored glass marred by spider-web cracks. He eased along the wall to avoid being seen from inside.

The odor stung his eyes until he blinked, but it couldn’t be a fire-breathing flying lizard of the old school. The hoard-guardian he’d awakened that day in the barrow was dead fifteen hundred years, killed by Beowulf at the same moment wyrm poison had entered their leader’s body. Centuries later, Jurik had defeated the last of the great lizards. Images of His Saintliness with his lance gutting the wee beastie peppered England, Denmark and everywhere else that revered the story of saintly sainted Saint George, immortal do-gooder and pain in the sanctimonious arse.

Fetid air came from the other side of that door, but he’d rowed the raft here from the damn trawler and only puked twice, so if he didn’t want to end slobbering over man-milk from Loki’s tit, he had to look.

Lit by a few weak hanging lights, the large space appeared to be empty except for a pile of wooden packing pallets stacked like a hut in the corner.

He flattened his cheek on the doorframe and raised to his toes to broaden his field of vision. A cage occupied the middle of the room. Too small for a person to stand, nevertheless a person was in it, curled with her head on her knees and her tangled dark hair concealing her arms.

Christina.

* * *

The surge of excitement at clearing a hostile building filled Wulf with purpose. The rig hadn’t pumped for almost a decade, since Black and Swan had won the contract to decommission platforms in the tapped-out oil field. After the drug operation he and his team had exposed last year destroyed the large logistics contractor, operations like this were left in limbo. Although apparently not in such limbo that they went uninhabited. He’d found a half-dozen mercenaries-cum-maintenance men, a cook and a few scientist-types in their bunks. The two men who’d tried to fight had become eligible for disability payments, and the rest were flex-cuffed and gagged on their floors.

He’d reached the last room on the top level. Popped the door, burst in, rifle sweep from left to right, no hostiles,
clear.

Then he froze. The room was unoccupied, not empty. Jars filled a shelf unit along a wall.

He saw what waited for those like him if they forgot how to be human. Fear, loss, revulsion, even hatred, those were human emotions that no one sought, but they marked a man as one who felt. One who could still feel. The display of jars reminded him that his brethren could lose their connection with humanity and cross the line. No matter what the immortals looked like on the surface, without feeling they could out-monster the one who had infected them.

His thumb flicked the selector switch to full auto and he lifted his weapon’s muzzle, one imperative and only one thrumming in his blood. Destroy the jars. Destroy the pain those arms represented, destroy all they’d cut from his brother’s soul each time they’d taken an arm.

No.
He shook as he fought the urge to release his anger with a blast of rounds. No time. Not the noise, not the damage and subsequent repair of his own body from ricochets, he had to finish the mission. Find, then destroy.

The next bolt of realization staggered him as much as a physical round to his protective vest when he processed the implication of jars that didn’t hold his brother’s arm. He’d had medic training in Special Forces and his wife was a doctor. He recognized a heart, lungs, liver and intestines immersed in the clear fluid.

Ivar hadn’t lost body organs during his captivity, only his arm and tongue and the skin experiments conducted on his back.

There was another prisoner.

His wife was an obsessive doctor and researcher who forgot to eat unless he delivered lasagna to the lab and whose cheeks flushed when she talked about fluorescent dye markers, but she sure as hell wouldn’t do this shit, not with anything bigger than a flatworm.

New plan. Instead of cutting loose the two scientists he’d left bound at the end of the hall and giving them a chance before the rig blew, they were going to lead him to their experimental prisoner.

Even marching the men into the North Sea would be merciful compared to what had created this collection.

* * *

The increase in the volume of overhead hissing alerted Christina to raise her head, but she didn’t shift from the exact middle of the cage, the only space where the tongues couldn’t reach.

The man she’d dreamed of seeing and feared seeing, prayed to see and prayed not to see, was coming through the right-hand door holding a serious-looking automatic weapon.
Stig.

“It’s a trap!” she screamed, the worst thing she could do to agitate the beasts, but Stig was exposed. “Run! It’s a trap for you!”

“Please tell me something less obvious.” He advanced ten feet into the room, stepping around a watermelon-sized pile of dung as if it wasn’t there. “Like how to open that nasty little cage.”

“Get out of here,
go!
” She could sink into his wordy ways and stay for weeks, listening, but she was safe and he wasn’t. “There are—” Luc and Thomas appeared behind Stig, their lined faces black with paint and similar single-eye goggles on their foreheads. “Komodo—”

She knew the moment Stig saw the eight-foot-long lizard creep from its den in the corner. She didn’t have to look at it to picture how its scaled head swung left to right while its forked gray tongue flicked over the floor.

“I’m safe here!” She gripped the bars of her cage, trying to rattle the metal and jar the men from their startled trances. “You have to get out!”

Leif had released a pig into the room yesterday.

Luc snapped out of his freeze first. He raised his gun to shoot the dragon, but Thomas reached around him and jerked at the barrel. “Metal walls, ricochet, etcetera. Hold your fire at this distance, please.”

“Holy shit on top of the mountain,” Luc said. “That is one mean-looking son of a bitch. I’m staying this distance.”

“I don’t think that decision is up to us,” Stig said as the Komodo crept closer, curved claws clicking like knives chopping on a counter while its tongue flicked left and right, left and right, to a beat that differed from the clanking on the overhead pipes and ducts.

“They’re fast.” She pitched her voice slightly louder than a whisper to avoid riling the small ones at the ceiling. “They lunge at movement.”

“They?” Stig and Luc spoke at the same time.

“There are—” Sobs built in her throat. All the work she’d done to hold herself together through this horror was about to break down. “Two adults. And several little ones.”

“We’re three.” Luc was always practical. “And we have guns.”

“But neither claws nor scales,” Stig added. “I think the beasts have us beat. Gentlemen, I will move forward to attract the treasure-guardian, if you will please extract Christina and depart.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll catch up.”

“The young drop from the ceiling,” she warned.

“
Now
you mention the chance of rain, when it’s too late to bring brollies.” Stig walked toward the Komodo, moving with the sinuously exaggerated hip and shoulder sways of a cartoon snake charmer, his weapon swaying as well. The lizard’s pointed head reflected Stig’s left-to-right moves.

She watched too, and then Thomas was at the cage, white-faced and sweaty as he pulled a small spool of what looked like plastic-coated cable from his pack. She scanned the ceiling for movement while he looped the cable twice around the lock. Because the little Komodos that crawled overhead were audible but not visible, they were scarier than the big one that lived in the plywood cave in the corner or the medium-sized one that Leif kept leashed.

“Cover your head and ears.” Thomas pressed a pistol almost directly against the cord, angling the barrel away from both of them, and tucked his head into his inner elbow. “This is going to blow.”

The noise of the shot was louder than in Paddington, but this time she had her fingers deep in her ears.