Valhalla Gold (Joe Hawke Book 5) Read online

  Victoria offered a shallow nod and looked away for a moment. Lea thought she looked scared. “More specifically then, Nate kept talking to me about Thor’s Hammer – you’ve all heard of Thor’s Hammer, I presume?”

  “Of course,” Ryan said. “Every man and his dog’s heard of Thor’s Hammer – but that might not extend to Joe, of course.”

  “I know what Thor’s Hammer is, Rupert.”

  “Hey! I thought I was safely out of Rupert territory? What happened to mate?”

  “If you behave like a Rupert, you get called Rupert. Easy.”

  “What’s this all about, Victoria?” Lea said, interrupting the banter. “What would a professor of Atlantic Canadian archaeology have to do with Thor’s Hammer?”

  Ryan leaned back and folded his arms behind his head. “I would have thought that was obvious.”

  Hawke sighed and shook his head. “What did I just say about acting like a Rupert, Rupert?”

  Lea rolled her eyes. “Guys, please.”

  “Obvious to some, maybe,” Victoria said curtly with a glance to Ryan. “As some of you may know, the Vikings had a long history with Atlantic Canada, specifically the L’Anse aux Meadows site on the northern coast of Newfoundland. Archaeologists discovered the site in 1960 and our research dates it to at least the year 1000 AD, making Viking settlement in North America well over a thousand years old.”

  “It’s what they call Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact,” Ryan said chirpily.

  “I’m impressed,” Victoria said.

  “Thanks, babe,” Ryan said with a wink.

  Victoria looked with horror at the man in the Batman t-shirt.

  Hawke rolled his eyes. “Ignore it, Vikki… and please continue.”

  “As I say, Nate started talking to me about Thor recently, so I began to research it as well, on the side. I got particularly interested in Valhalla, but then I realized that there were other agencies involved.”

  Hawke frowned. “What do you mean, other agencies?”

  “I don’t know, but Nate wasn’t working alone. I think he got mixed up with others.”

  Victoria continued but Lea walked slowly to the French doors and stepped out on the deck. There was a ceiling fan out here on one of the roof beams, but it wasn’t switched on and without the gentle whir of the blades she instantly felt the heat of the day move up her neck and over her face.

  As Victoria meandered meekly through her story, Lea took a second to scan the area for any trouble. All that bothered her was a single yacht a few hundred meters out to sea – it looked like a big one worth at least a couple of mill, but that wasn’t such a surprise around here, she guessed.

  Further along the coast to the south she saw what looked like a Seabreacher X partially obscured by a scraggy line of mangroves. It was moored to a private jetty at the bottom of a property to the south of the resort – which also made sense. She and Hawke had seen a program on the TV about them recently and they were somewhere around the fifty K mark. If the TV program was right, they went through the sea like a torpedo and could even submerge for short durations, allowing you to see underwater through the acrylic canopy. Boys and their toys, she thought, and returned to the air-conditioned room behind her.

  “All quiet on the Eastern Front?” Hawke asked.

  “I think so… there’s a nice Seabreacher out there I know you’ll want to check out.”

  “A Seabreacher?” Hawke asked with interest.

  “One of the neighbors owns it,” Victoria said dismissively. “Makes a bloody noise half the time going up and down outside my house. Anyway, very recently,” she continued, “we’ve been able to study the latest satellite images of the Province and they’ve revealed a real treasure further south on Point Rosee.”

  Scarlet downed her vodka and leaned forward in her seat. “Treasure, you say?”

  Victoria nodded vehemently. “Oh yes, absolutely. Point Rosee is a peninsula on the southern coast of the Province and these new satellite images are strongly hinting at human social activity in the region. It’s incredibly exciting.”

  Scarlet sighed and poured another vodka. “But no gold?”

  Victoria looked confused. “Gold?”

  “And ignore that, too,” Lea said, taking a seat. “What has all of this got to do with Nate’s death and Thor?”

  Victoria sighed and tied her hair back with a small band. She looked lost. “I really don’t know… I guess I’m just wondering if Nate found something up in Newfoundland that relates in some way to Thor’s Hammer – he mentioned something to do with a Tesla coil – does that mean anything to anyone?”

  Ryan stared at her, the blood running from his face. He had lost Sophie Durand fighting against people who wanted to destroy Tokyo with a Tesla device.

  Lea saw the change in his expression. “Ry – are you okay?”

  “I’m fine… Many people have surmised that Thor’s Hammer might have been an ancient doomsday weapon that operated somehow like a modern Tesla coil, but nothing’s ever been proved. I for one am sceptical about it.”

  Victoria looked glum. “I can’t know or be sure what Nate was researching – but it’s certainly what he was starting to talk about more and more. I’m no scientist but as I say, he did mention to me something about a Tesla Coil.”

  Ryan leaned forward. “Did he elaborate at all?”

  “Just that Thor’s Hammer wasn’t actually a reference to a hammer at all, not as we see it anyway. He claimed it was more like what today we’d call a Tesla Coil. I’m not even sure what one of those is to be honest.”

  “It’s a type of induction coil which generates alternating high-frequency currents.” Ryan frowned, aware that everyone in the room was now staring in his direction in hope of a better explanation. “It’s very dangerous.”

  “Sounds like it,” Victoria said.

  “But so was Thor’s Hammer,” Ryan said. “Mjölnir, using the Old Norse word to describe it, was one of the most terrifying weapons in Norse mythology. In fact I’d say it was probably up there with Poseidon’s trident.”

  “This is all sounding very dangerous,” Scarlet said, sipping the vodka. “Which is just great.”

  Victoria sighed again. She looked desolate. “But what has any of this got to do with why Nate was killed in Newfoundland?”

  Ryan’s eyes widened. “Maybe it’s got something to do with Thor crossing the ocean thousands of years ago and winding up in Canada, like the Vikings did?”

  “It can’t be…” Victoria said in almost a whisper. “Thor was a mythological figure! Obviously he couldn’t have existed…”

  “Obviously,” Scarlet said quietly. The vodka glass raised to her lips obscured her eye-roll from Victoria.

  “But then again,” Victoria continued, beginning to sob, “Nate was an extremely accomplished and highly respected archaeologist. If he was talking about Thor and this hammer all the time then maybe – just maybe there’s something to it after all.”

  “That’s a good theory,” Lea said, steering Victoria away from the subject. “I’m no expert when it comes to archaeology, but if you say Nate was onto something then that’s good enough for me.”

  Victoria looked up at Lea and the others and dried her eyes, smearing mascara on her cheeks. “Do you mean it?”

  Lea nodded and rubbed her shoulder. “Of course.”

  “So you don’t think I’m insane?”

  “We’ve heard a lot worse,” Hawke said. “Believe me.”

  Lea shot him a quick, covert shut up look and handed Victoria a handkerchief.

  “Thank goodness for that,” she said, pulling herself together again. She swivelled in her chair and hit the play button on her answer-phone. “Because I got a call yesterday and I know I’m not imagining this.”

  The room was suddenly filled with a man’s low, gravelly voice as the message on the machine played: “Lady Victoria… you talk to anyone about Dr Derby and you get the same treatment he got. Keep your mouth shut.”

 
Victoria jumped in her seat as the line disconnected violently. “Damn thing gets me every time!” she said, almost in a whimper. “I must have listened to it a hundred times since it came in yesterday just to make sure I’m not going mad and imagining it.”

  Hawke frowned. “You’re definitely not imagining it, Vikki.” He turned to the others. “Any ideas?”

  “French, obviously,” Scarlet said.

  Ryan snorted. “Hardly – that’s a Belgian accent.”

  Lea felt herself grow cold. Now she knew this could be no coincidence and that she had to tell the others the details of what she’d found in Ireland.

  “Lea?” Hawke asked. “What’s the matter?”

  “That voice… it sounds exactly like the voices of the men who tried to kidnap me in Ireland.”

  Victoria sighed. “Well, whoever they are, I know they must have killed Nate and I know it had something to do with this Thor business.”

  “Whatever’s going on,” Hawke said, “we need to get to Newfoundland and see if we can make sense of what happened to Nate. Hopefully we can find a lead up there and then we might be able to work out what happened to him and get to the bottom of this Thor stuff. If we’re talking about some kind of ancient doomsday weapon we can’t waste time.”

  Victoria nodded her head “All right, in that case I think we need…”

  She stopped talking and her face froze into a rictus of fear. She pointed at the open doors and screamed.

  Within the space of a second the tranquillity of the beach hut was turned upside down as the boat Lea had spied earlier passed along the seashore at the end of the garden. Then a number of heavily armed gunmen on the deck fired submachine guns at the property.

  “Get down!” Hawke yelled.

  “Bastards are doing a drive-by shooting in a frigging motor yacht!” Ryan shouted.

  All around them bullets drilled into the luxury room and tore the place to pieces.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hawke hit the floor in a heartbeat, and then immediately scanned the room to check on everyone else. Lea was already behind the cover of the sofa and she was returning fire in no uncertain terms, but Victoria looked like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights, so Hawke dived for her and grappled her to the floor with his arms tight around her waist. Lea caught the move in the corner of her eye but said nothing. Everyone else followed suit as the first wave of bullets tore over their heads and wrecked the rear wall.

  On the other side of the room, Scarlet had dived for cover and grappled Ryan to the floor with her arms around his waist. They landed with a crash on the mahogany floorboards, and Ryan yelled out as Scarlet fell down on top of him. “If you want me all you have to do is ask,” he said, putting his arms around her waist.

  “Gross,” she said “I just saved your life and that’s what you’re thinking about? I hate to break it to you, boy, but I see you in approximately the same way a praying mantis sees a fly.”

  “Roger that,” Ryan said glumly.

  “Or not, in your case,” she replied.

  Hawke peered over a shredded sofa and saw the speed boat had turned around in a sharp arc and was pulling up to the jetty at the bottom of the garden.

  “We’ve got to get out here!” he shouted. “We’re out-manned and out-gunned, and not even I am that good.”

  Lea shook her head and sighed. “If you were a Mr Man you’d be Mr Modest, I reckon.”

  Hawke gave her a sarcastic grin and told everyone to stay calm, but Victoria began to panic and scrambled closer to Lea by the door.

  “They’re trying to kill me!” she screamed, and ducked down behind Lea with her head in her hands. “I need to get out of here!”

  “Just take it easy,” Hawke said as he unloaded a second magazine through the Louvre windows. He tried to calm her but between the answer-phone message and this attack she could hardly be called paranoid. Someone out there obviously wanted her dead and it had to be connected to Nate Derby’s murder in Canada, but now his focus was on the vicious assault approaching from the waterline.

  Outside the boat had now moored on the pier and the gunmen were making their way through the garden, using the lush tropical undergrowth for cover. Hawke counted four of them including a woman with a crew cut, and the way they moved made him think they were ex-Special Forces of some kind. As they got closer, he recognized a tattoo of a burning grenade on one of the men’s necks – the same as the one he had seen on Reaper, which could mean only one thing.

  Now, he and the rest of the team returned fire as Victoria grew more hysterical.

  “They’ve come to kill me! You have to stop them!”

  The assault team in the garden split into two groups, with three of them remaining in the original assault position while the woman disappeared from view.

  “Where has she gone?” Scarlet said. “The woman’s disappeared.”

  “They’re opening a second front somewhere!” Hawke said, ducking again to avoid taking a bullet. It traced over him and smashed into the wall sending plaster puffing up into the air.

  In the chaos of the fire-fight, Lea yelled: “I’ll find her!”

  “Where are you going?” Victoria said, panicking. “You can’t leave me alone!”

  “Just stay here with the others while I make sure the kitchen’s clear!”

  Before Lea could make another move, Victoria panicked and bolted for the kitchen door. Hawke cursed, guessing her intention was to try and escape out the front but that was exactly where the woman with the crew cut had gone to create the second front in their assault.

  Lea stayed low and made a move toward the kitchen to try and stop Victoria but she was through the door in a second. If the assault team really were thinking of a pincer movement and coming in through the kitchen, Victoria would be in a lot of trouble.

  Hawke picked off another of the men in the garden, sending him spinning around into the shrubbery where he got tangled and ended up hanging there like a macabre scarecrow. The SBS man nodded in appreciation of his work when he heard Ryan shouting from across the room.

  “Er… guys!”

  “What is it, Ryan?” Scarlet shouted. “If you want someone to change your nappy I’m afraid the grown-ups are rather busy at the moment and if you…” She stopped talking when she saw the look on his face. “Ryan?”

  Ryan said nothing, but raised a hand and pointed over Scarlet’s shoulder.

  Hawke turned to see someone holding Victoria hostage. It was the woman he had seen in the garden with the crew cut. She was tall with a powerful athletic body and a thin, jagged scar ran from the corner of her mouth and snaked away behind her left ear. She blew a large purple bubblegum bubble which popped and she pulled it back into her mouth. Whoever she was, she was holding a knife to Victoria Hamilton-Talbot’s slender throat. The serrated blade pushed into the soft flesh and started to draw blood.

  Then she spoke. “All of you – drop your weapons or she dies, right in front of you.”

  Hawke watched an expression of total fear color Victoria’s face as he processed the woman’s accent. It sounded Russian, he considered – maybe a southern dialect. He hated to give the order, but he knew had no choice. “Do as she says!”

  Scarlet spoke next. “All right, just take it easy, darling,” she said, never taking her eyes off the woman. “I’m going to climb away from the geek and stand up, with my hands above my head – I’m not armed.”

  The woman peered at Ryan for a second before giving Scarlet a slow nod of approval to stand up.

  Scarlet moved away from Ryan, hands up to show she was unarmed, and made her way slowly into the center of the room.

  Hawke studied the woman carefully as she spoke and measured up the threat: left-handed, Russian accent, and a coldness in her eyes that reminded him of someone he had met before.

  Then she screamed another order. “All of you, guns down! I won’t tell you again.”

  Hawke cursed inwardly, but gently set his gun down on the floorboards. “Just le
t her go and tell us what you want.”

  Before he finished speaking, the sole surviving gunman from the garden stepped casually through the rear doors and stood in the center of the room. This was the man with the tattoo of a burning grenade on his neck. He too was tall but sported slicked-back hair and had a solid, prominent nose. He spoke in rapid French to the woman holding Victoria and then looked down at Hawke on the floor.

  “Could this be the mighty Joe Hawke?” he said.

  “Right first time,” Hawke said sourly. “And who are you?”

  With no warning, the man kicked Hawke in the face and sent him flying back into the upturned drinks cabinet. “My name is Leon Smets and never forget it.”

  Hawke wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and crawled back up to his knees. He noticed the yacht at the bottom of the garden was slipping out of view to the south of the resort.

  Smets surveyed the small group for a few seconds and nodded with appreciation. His dark eyes settled menacingly on Victoria. “Are you Donovan?”

  She shook her head.

  “Where is Donovan?” he said, looking around at the others, all kneeling on the floor. “Give me her or this woman dies right in front of you.” He nodded dismissively at Victoria who was still trembling in the woman’s grip.

  Hawke knew what Lea had to do. He knew she couldn’t watch an innocent woman die to protect herself, but why Smets could possibly want her and not Victoria was a mystery to him.

  Lea turned her face up to Smets and spoke. “I’m Lea Donovan… what do you want with me?”

  He grabbed her by the hair and yanked her to her feet. “You know what we want. Come with me, and no more fucking questions.” His voice was cold and emotionless.

  Hawke reached out to her as she passed but they all knew she had no choice but to surrender. That hunting knife was pushing deeper into Victoria’s throat and the woman holding it looked like she wanted to kill her more than she wanted to take her next breath.

  When Lea was beside Smets, the former Foreign Legion man gave a nod to the woman and she pushed Victoria away. Smets put his gun in the small of Lea’s back as Victoria gasped with a strange mix of relief and horror. She tumbled to the floor beside Hawke.