The Age Of Odin

Finally the tracers stopped their mad strobing around us. Jensen powered down a fraction and levelled Sleipnir out.

'All okay?' he asked over the intercom, before adding one of those typically droll RAF apologies. 'Sorry for shaking you up like that, but crisis situation, you understand.'

A quick glance round showed me no one was injured. Paddy was massaging a sprained shoulder, but winked to say no harm done. I went forward and popped my head into the cockpit.

'Good job, fellas.'

'If we go in again, Coxall, those guns are going to rip us to shreds,' Jensen said. 'This ship isn't built for dogfighting. She handles like a brick shithouse, and even the best pilots can't do anything about that.'

'And we are the best pilots,' Flying Officer Thwaite chipped in.

'Of course you are,' I told him. 'And with a cock-duster 'tache like yours, I bet you're pretty popular with the boys down the nightclub, too.'

Thwaite's eyeballs bulged in indignation.

'Now,' I went on, ignoring his splutters, 'we are going in again and you are getting us over and onto that fucking tank. Thor should be running the trolls in any moment. They're our diversion. The tankies will be so busy with them, they won't be concentrating on us. That's the big idea so let's make it happen, shall we?'

Thwaite looked fit to deck me. Jensen, on the other hand, just eyed his instrumentation, glanced out the windscreen, and gave a grim nod.

'Roger that,' he said. 'We can do this.'

'But — '

He cut his co-pilot off. 'We can do this.'

I clapped them both on the helmet and went back aft.

Guiding Sleipnir into position ought to be relatively straightforward.

Abseiling safely onto Fenrir's back without getting massacred by those rotary cannons — now that was going to be the tricky part.

Fifty-Three

Thor and his brothers held up their end of things just fine. They freed a dozen trolls from the pens and chivvied them in Fenrir's direction. The trolls would normally have turned on the Aesir the moment they had a chance, but the looming mega-tank was bigger, noisier, scarier, altogether more of a threat. So they focused their aggression on it instead.

Fenrir had just broken through the treeline when the trolls attacked. I saw them swarm around it and start clambering on. One of them managed to haul himself onto a gun turret and immediately received a blast full in the face. At a hundred rounds per second, the rotary cannon didn't leave much of his head behind. His decapitated body slumped back to earth.

This did nothing to deter the other trolls. Soon they were all over Fenrir's sides, hammering and battering with their fists and yowling in gruff indignation. One of them, still on the ground, attempted to stop the mega-tank by grabbing hold of one of its caterpillar tracks. His hands got drawn into the mechanism. His arms swiftly followed. Between them, wheels and track munched up the troll all the way to the shoulders. He stumbled back, screeching horribly, the stumps of his arms spouting blood by the gallon.

More trolls died, chewed to pieces by the rotary cannons as they were scaling Fenrir. This approach wasn't serving them well, and the remainder of them saw sense and leapt off to fetch weapons. These included tree trunks and boulders. They mounted a fresh assault, frothing and gibbering in their fury as they battered away at the tank.

A female, shrewder than the rest, took a big, pointed rock and jammed it between two wheels. Next instant, a gun turret flayed her to shreds, but she'd achieved what she set out to. Fenrir slewed round as one caterpillar track seized up while the other continued turning. The driver braked, then began rocking the tank back and forth in the hope of jolting the obstruction loose.

While he was doing this, Sleipnir came down from overhead, descending plumb-line vertical, at speed. The cargo ramp was out like a cheeky kid's tongue, and me and my squad, with Odin, were poised on the tip of it. Climbing ropes hitched us to the Wokka's interior, looped through karabiners attached to harnesses around our waists. We had gloves on our hands and dogged determination on our faces.

'Ready?' I yelled.

Some nods. A couple of thumbs raised.

'You sure you still want to do this?' I asked Odin.

'No,' he said, white hair whipping about like mad under the brim of his hat.

'Feel free to bail.'

'Never.'

'But you're not even packing.'

'I'll cope. I'm more resourceful than I may appear.'

Sleipnir slowed to a halt ten metres above Fenrir.

'Go!' I cried out. 'Go! Go! Go!'

We unspooled the free ends of our ropes behind us and launched ourselves backwards off the ramp. Friction-braking with our hands, we touched down five seconds later. Sleipnir was already rising even as we unclipped our ropes. Jensen wasn't hanging about. The Chinook was a big, tasty target — even more so than the trolls — and Fenrir's gunners weren't slow to cotton on to that fact. All four turrets erupted around us, firing upwards as Sleipnir beat an extremely hasty retreat. The helicopter rode brilliant, sinuous columns of tracer into the sky.

The gunners might have hit it, too, if Fenrir's driver hadn't been trying so hard to dislodge the boulder. The mega-tank jerked and lurched, throwing off their aim, and also throwing us off-balance. It wouldn't be long, I thought, before the rock was worked free and Fenrir was able to resume its course towards the castle.

And, now that I was actually on top of the tank, I could see that it had a pair of stubby forward-facing gun barrels emerging to either side of the control cab. Each was tipped with a hollow, breezeblock-like muzzle brake, suggesting the barrels were much longer than they appeared, if they needed recoil compensation. Probably they telescoped out when firing commenced. The bore was 125 millimetres, give or take. Serious artillery. Fenrir could lob shells that would make mincemeat of the castle's defenders and rubble of the castle itself.

Time to shit or get off the pot.

'Baz! Backdoor! Stick some plastique on that control cab, see if you can't make a hole in it and scramble this thing's brains. The gun turrets have got limited a range of traverse so they don't accidentally open up on each other. We're in a kind of blind spot here, but for fuck's sake watch out for them anyway.'

I turned to the others.

'You three, on me. There's what looks like a hatch back that-a-way, near the rear. I want to be through it in the next ten seconds.'

I was bossing Odin about as if he was just one of the team, but I didn't really notice I was doing it and he didn't seem to mind. He scrambled across Fenrir with the rest of us, pretty spry for an old geezer. Somehow, through everything, that hat of his was staying put, still shading his absent eye. Must be a godly talent, I thought, the ability to keep a hat on at all times, in all circumstances. Either that or the thing was glued in place.

What had appeared to be a personnel hatch proved to be just that, when we got to it, and eminently blowable. Paddy wedged a blob of C-4 under its lip, inserted the detonator, unreeled the wire, and lay down flat with the priming assembly in his hands. Cy, Odin and I joined him on our bellies, and I invited Odin to clamp his hands over his ears. Backdoor triggered the explosive.

The whump! was deep and satisfying, and it was barely finished before I was back