The Valhalla Prophecy (25 page)

Their arrival had already attracted attention. Everyone seemed genuinely pleased to see Natalia, even if their reactions to her traveling companion were more uncertain. Chase made a point of shouldering the AK across his back out of easy reach, though he kept hold of the mine—which encouraged the villagers to keep their distance. After sharing greetings with everyone, the German had a brief discussion with one of the men, then turned to Chase in disappointment. “He says the telephone is not working. The storm took down the line—it could be days before it is repaired.”

“Arse chives,” he muttered, looking down at the Bouncing Betty. “They won’t be able to call anyone to
deal with this either. What do they normally do with mines if they find ’em?”

Another rapid conversation. She smiled at the Englishman. “They usually go to a safe distance and throw stones at them until they explode. They think you are crazy for carrying one all this way.”

“Christ, you try to do a good deed … So what do I do with this?”

“There is a place by the river where you can leave it,” she told him after getting an answer. “They will make sure nobody goes near it.” A young man, beaming broadly despite missing several teeth, stepped forward. “Thanh will take you. You can leave the gun there too.”

Chase was less happy about that, but nevertheless went with the smiling youth to deposit the weapons among some rocks, taking the detonator from his backpack and leaving it beside the mine. By the time he returned, the reunion had moved into one of the houses. A middle-aged woman signaled for him and his guide to come inside.

“You weren’t kidding about having friends here,” he said on entering. Natalia sat on a rug, older villagers looking on with amusement as several laughing children clung to her. One boy had a crude prosthetic leg below the knee. The young German had replaced her filthy medical gown with a donated wraparound skirt and a faded T-shirt bearing the logo of some Vietnamese product he didn’t recognize, as well as a pair of sandals.

“I wanted to work with children,” she replied, grinning. Then the smile faded. “And when I heard what had happened here, that made me want to help them even more.”

“What
did
happen?”

Natalia spoke to two of the women, gesturing toward Chase. They regarded him with suspicion, but a plea eventually drew reluctant nods. “I told them you are English, not American,” she said. “The people here, they … they try to forgive for the war, but it is hard.”

“Is it something to do with the land mines?” he asked.

A deep sadness crossed her face. “Worse than that.”
She spoke to each of the children, managing to pluck them off her one by one before standing. “I will show you.” One of the women rose as well. “But I have to warn you, it is …” She paused, searching for the correct word. “Upsetting.”

Unsure what to expect, Chase followed them out of the little house to the building where the telephone line terminated. The Vietnamese woman opened the screen door and called out, getting a reply from someone inside.

They entered. Insects flitted around an electric light hanging from the ceiling; he heard the flat puttering of a small generator somewhere outside. A woman in her thirties, pretty but tired far beyond her years, greeted them. A curtained doorway led to an adjoining room. The sound of a softly crying child came from beyond it.

The woman pulled aside the curtain. Natalia gave Chase a look of both warning and apology. “Please, do not be afraid, or … disgusted. They are children, they have done nothing to deserve this. The people here do everything they can to help them.”

“What happened to them?” Chase asked.

Natalia stepped through the doorway and nodded for him to follow. “Come and see.”

He hesitated, then entered the next room with her.

What he saw would haunt him for the rest of his life.

There were five beds, each occupied by a child. Their ages ranged from around three years to twelve.

All were terribly, cruelly deformed.

Chase now knew why Natalia had issued her warning. His first response to the sight was an instinctive revulsion—followed at once by shame at his own feelings, then sadness as he realized the extent of their suffering. One child had stunted arms and a hugely swollen, lopsided head, dark eyes peering pitiably out from an unnaturally wide expanse of skin. Another’s jaw was only partially formed, a gaping hole in her cheek exposing gums and the twisted roots of teeth. The youngest of them had no limbs at all, just gnarled stumps. Her entire skull was stretched almost to a point, eyes bulging,
her small chest rising and falling rapidly as she struggled to draw in each breath.

“Jesus,” he whispered, a shiver coursing through him despite the heat. He had witnessed plenty of death in his military career, bodies smashed and mangled in horrifying ways, but the knowledge that these figures were still very much alive made their injuries—he wasn’t even sure that was the right word—all the more disturbing.

Natalia went to each bed in turn. The children recognized her, responding with sounds of delight. She smiled back, hugging and caressing, speaking softly in Vietnamese. The woman who had come with them spoke; Chase didn’t understand her words, but could tell from her tone that she was expressing gratitude.

“We brought them things for the children,” Natalia explained. “Medicines, mosquito nets, food, toys …” She gestured at a doll on a small table beside one of the beds. A photograph was pinned to the wall above; it showed the young German hugging the little girl in the bed, who was clutching the plastic figure. “We gave them as much as we could, though it was still not enough. There is never enough,” she added sadly.

The Englishman suspected that he knew the cause, but felt compelled to ask all the same. “What happened to them?”

“Chemical warfare. Agent Orange.” Chase nodded; he had been right. “The Americans dumped millions of liters of poison on the jungle during the war, without caring for a moment what effect it would have on the people who lived there. Or even their own soldiers. The children of American troops have suffered deformities and cancers because of what their fathers were exposed to … but nothing like this. The poison is still in the ground, in the water and plants, everywhere. And the children are paying for it, even after all this time.”

“I’m sorry.” It was all he could say. He could barely begin to imagine the horror and heartbreak the parents must have been through when their children were born.

She looked up at him, tears in her eyes. “This is why
I came here, to help children like this. There are many more in other villages in this part of the country. I wanted to do as much as I could for them. I
had
to.”

Chase sensed an almost confessional tone to her words. “Why?”

She looked away, gently touching the head of the smallest child. “Because … because I am a part of what happened to them.” Before he could ask what she meant, she went on: “And because I am
one
of them.”

She stood and turned, pulling up the T-shirt to expose the left side of her torso to him. In the jungle, the gown had covered what lay beneath; now he got a clear, chilling view. A twisted scar ran from below her armpit almost to her waist, smaller branches lancing off it around her chest and back. “I had tumors removed,” Natalia said, seeing his shock. She pulled the shirt back down. “The doctors did not know what caused them. But I did.”

She said good-bye to the children, then spoke briefly to the Vietnamese women before going back outside. Chase went with her, blinking in the bright sunlight. “What was it?”

She did not answer the question at first, wiping her eyes as they wandered through the little village. “My mother had the same tumors. So did my grandmother. They both died from them. I will too.”

“You don’t know that,” said Chase, unsettled by her matter-of-fact acceptance.

“Yes,” she sighed. “I do. It is my family’s curse, and the reason why I must never have children of my own—because they will suffer it too.”

“What do you mean, your curse?”

There was a makeshift bench by one building, a plank supported by two old oil drums. Natalia took a seat, then beckoned him to join her. “My grandfather was a man named Serafim Volkov,” she began as he sat and put his pack down under the bench. “He was Russian, a scientist in the Cold War. He was going to defect to the West with my grandmother, but died before he got out of Russia.”

Chase nodded. “Yeah, you said.”

“He gave my grandmother a letter, to be opened only if he did not escape. She told my mother that she did not open it for over a year, in the hope that he was still alive. When at last she did, she thought it would tell of his love for her and his hopes that their child would have a better life in a new country.” She paused, taking a mournful breath. “It did not.”

“What
did
it talk about?”

“His work. What he had been doing for the Soviet Union—and what he planned to sell to the Americans. He was creating weapons. Awful, terrible weapons.”

“Chemical warfare?”

“Yes. And biological too—the difference is sometimes small. That was true of what he had created.” A pause as she shook her head. “No, that is the wrong word. He did not create it. He … 
exploited
it. It was something the Russians had found.”

“What kind of thing?”

Another pause. Natalia stared silently at the ground before finally looking back at him. “Do you know anything about Norse mythology, Eddie?”

“You mean like Vikings?” he asked, surprised by the change of subject. “Not really. I never paid much attention in history class.”

“I did. My mother encouraged it, especially to do with Norse legends. I did not know why until just before she died. But there is a substance in their myth called eitr. It is a black liquid, a deadly poison … and it is also the source of life.”

He frowned at the contradiction. “How does that work?”

“In the myth, there was a sea of eitr, and from the drops of a splash rose the first giant, Ymir. From him came all other life. But the eitr remained, still a poison, hidden beneath the ground.” Her expression became grave. “The Russians found it. There was a Viking runestone in the Arctic at the entrance to a pit full of eitr. My grandfather wrote the first lines of the runes in his letter; they told how the Vikings had traveled from Valhalla
across a rainbow bridge and through a lake of lightning to fight a giant monster and prevent the end of the world.”

“You mean the legend’s
real
?”

“No—not really. I do not believe there were giants and gods and serpents that circled the whole of the earth—the blood of the serpent was eitr, and in their legends it was what killed Thor. But it is based on something that
was
real. The eitr was deadly, but it also had … other effects. My grandfather discovered them. He was trying to turn the eitr into a weapon the Soviet Union could use against the West, but began his own experiments—which he was going to take to America.” Each word seemed to weigh her down a little more. Chase realized that something awful was coming. “What sort of experiments?” he prompted.

“Human experiments,” she whispered. “On my grandmother. He used her to see what eitr would do to a living person—and her unborn child.”

“Shit,” he said, shocked. “He actually poisoned his own wife? While she was pregnant?”

“He was an evil, evil man.” A new tear ran down her cheek. “I am ashamed that I have anything to do with him.”

“It’s not your fault. But why did he do it?”

She raised her head. “The eitr is not just a poison, even though according to his letter just a few drops on the skin can kill a person—they tested it on prisoners.” Utter disgust and loathing twisted her features for a moment. “In smaller amounts, it is a … a
mutagen
is I think the English word. It causes mutations in DNA, sometimes huge. My grandfather believed these mutations could be controlled to create a new breed of human. Supermen, a master race.” Another expression of revulsion, this time at the connections to her own country’s past. “The Soviets only cared about turning the eitr into a weapon, so he continued his work in secret. After testing on animals, he put a tiny amount into my grandmother’s food to see the effect it would have on people.”

“And it gave her cancer?”

“And eventually killed her. But because it caused mutations at a genetic level, they were passed down to my mother while she was still in the womb—and then to me.” She looked down at her side, one hand tracing the line of the scar. “The tumors appeared when I was sixteen. They almost killed me—I was in hospital for half a year. By the time I came out, my mother was suffering from them too. But with her, the doctors could not risk removing them; they were too advanced. All I could do was—was watch her die.” She sniffed, wiping her eyes again. “I am sorry, it is still hard to talk about.”

“That’s okay,” said Chase, with deep sympathy. He had been through the same terrible experience with his own mother.

“Thank you. Oh …” She released a long, sighing breath, then looked around as the child with the prosthetic leg hobbled up and hugged her tightly, chattering and laughing in Vietnamese. Natalia managed a smile, giving the excitable boy a kiss on the forehead before sending him back to his mother. Another sigh. “I love children, I do. But I can never have any of my own—it is too dangerous. That is my family’s curse, Eddie. My grandfather poisoned us forever.”

“Christ. I’m sorry. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to find out.”

“My grandmother gave the letter to my mother on her deathbed, telling her the truth about how they had come to Germany,” Natalia continued. “The CIA was supposed to take her out of Russia, first to West Germany and then on to America. But when my grandfather did not make it, they abandoned my grandmother. She had to make her own life in a new country. Which she did—until the eitr at last killed her. My mother kept the letter, but did not tell me about it. Until she too was on her deathbed.”

“If she’d told someone what was causing the tumors, couldn’t they have done something about them?”