THIRTY-FOUR
Monday, 11:44 P.M., Helsinki
The StarLifter landed on a remote runway at the comer of the Helsinki airport, and Major Aho was there to meet it. The tall weight lifter introduced himself in fluent English to Lieutenant Colonel Squires as “a token, blackhaired Lapp” in the military. As the representative of Defense Minister Niskanen, he said he had specific instructions to give the Americans whatever they needed.
As they stood in the open door of the aircraft, the cold wind swirling in from the dark night, Squires told him the only thing he wanted was to close the door and wait for the II-76T.
“I understand,” said Aho, whose sonorous voice, like his carriage, had great dignity.
Leaving an aide behind to work as a liaison with the ground crew, Aho waited while Private George accepted and tendered a round of good-luck wishes, then escorted him to a waiting car. Both men sat in the back.
“Have you ever been to Finland, Private George?” Aho asked.
“Sir,” said the soldier, “until I joined the Army, I’d never been out of Lubbock, Texas. After I joined, I never got out of Virginia till now. I wasn’t around for the first mission. On the second mission, to Philadelphia, I was sick. On the third mission, to Korea, I got myself bumped by a General.”
“In life as in chess, king takes pawn.” Major Aho smiled. “At least you’ll be making up for it this time out. You get to visit two countries.”
George returned his smile. There was a priestly benevolence to the Major’s expression and a softness in his fair eyes that George had never seen in a military officer. But beneath Aho’s tight brown uniform, George also saw muscle definition he’d never seen, except in bodybuilding competitions on cable TV.
“But you’re fortunate,” said the Major. “The Viking men believed that a foreign warrior who came to Finland first, in peace, is invincible in battle.”
“Only the men believed that, sir?”
Aho sighed. “It was a different world, Private. And -you haven’t met your partner, is that correct?”
“That’s correct, sir, though I’m looking forward to it,” George said diplomatically. In fact, she worried him. He had read the dossier that was faxed to the plane and wasn’t at all sure he was ready for a civilian barnstormer.
“I wouldn’t say this to her,” Aho said, leaning toward him conspiratorially, “but Viking society was always about warrior men. Each man carried an axe, a dagger, and a sword on his person at all times, and wore garments of fox or beaver or even squirrel that left one arm free, his fighting arm. Each woman wore a box on either breast, made of iron, copper, silver, or gold, indicating the wealth of her husband. She also wore a neck ring to show her subservience to him. We had a bit of a row in the schools years ago about how to teach the history of these people.” He settled back into his seat. “You can’t offend women, you can’t offend the British who were victims of the Vikings, you can’t offend the Christians who were killed by the heathens-heathens who didn’t want to see their cultures destroyed like those of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Lombards, and Alamanni. Fortunately, accuracy won over political expedience. Can you imagine being ashamed of a history such as ours?”
“No, sir,” George said, then looked out at the starry night sky. It was the same sky the Vikings had looked at-in awe or fear? George wondered. He couldn’t imagine that the Vikings were afraid of anything but dishonor. His own training, like the training of Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta unit or the Russian spetsnaz, emphasized attitude as well as physical skills: not just twenty-hour marches with a fifty-five-pound rucksack to keep you in shape, but the belief that while death is fast, failure stays with you for a lifetime. And George believed that utterly.
Still, he couldn’t deny that he felt a lot better when he “overdressed”: wearing a hip pouch stuffed with flash grenades, a Kevlar bulletproof vest with lapel daggers for hand-to-hand combat, his Leyland and Birmingham respirator, and carrying a few spare 9mm magazines. Instead, in his rucksack, he had AN/PVS-7A night-vision goggles, an AN/PAS-7 thermal viewer to see hidden objects by the heat they generated, and his Heckler & Koch MP5SD3 with a collapsing stock and integral silencer-even the bolt noise was absorbed by rubber buffers-which, used with subsonic ammunition, couldn’t be heard fifteen feet away. And his passport. He had that too. That was the exit strategy Darrell McCaskey had come up with.
“I don’t think your ancestors did anything like what we’re doing, though, sir,” George said, trying not to let the details distract him. He turned away from the sprawling beauty of the Milky Way as the car entered the city proper and turned onto the main boulevard, the Pohjoesplanadi, the Northern Esplanade, which runs east and west through the center of the city. “I mean, it would’ve been kind of difficult to sneak a Viking with three weapons and a homed helmet into another country unnoticed.”
“True,” said Aho, “nor did they want to sneak in. They believed in panicking the countryside as they approached their target, forcing local officials to deal with domestic unrest as well as the invaders.”
“And here we are, sir, coming by mini-sub,” George said.
“We call them midget marauders,” said Aho. “A little more gung-ho, don’t you think?”
“Yes, sir,” George said as they stopped in front of the majestic, sprawling Presidential Palace, which was built for the Russian Czars who ruled the city starting in 1812. after fires burned down the wooden buildings that Queen Christina of Sweden had built there over the previous two centuries. Aho led the private through a side entrance.
The Palace was quiet at this hour. After presenting his credentials to a guard, Aho greeted several members of the skeletal night staff, then took George to a small office at the far end of a narrow, dimly lighted corridor. Beside the six-panel door was a bronze plaque that said Defense Minister. Aho used two keys to let them in.
“Minister Niskanen has several offices in the city,” said Aho. “He uses this one when he is on good terms with the President. He is not using it now.” The Major grinned and said quietly, “There’s something else that’s changed. In the days of generals like Halfdan or Olaf Tryggvason, or monarchs like Knut or Svein Forkbeard, leaders didn’t take disagreements to a parliament or con- gress or the press. They put a slave girl up against the wall, threw axes at her, and the man who hit her lost. Then everyone went back to drinking and the dispute was forgotten. ”
“I can see where that wouldn’t work today, sir,” George noted.
“Oh, it would work,” Aho said. “It just wouldn’t be very popular. ”
A light was on, and George saw a woman standing behind the desk, leaning on her rigid arms and looking down at a map. She was slight, with large, blue eyes framed by short-cropped dirty-blond hair. Her mouth was small and her lips naturally ruddy, her nose was strong and ended in a little upturn, and her skin was extremely pale with a faint smattering of freckles on her cheeks. She was dressed in a black jumpsuit.
“Ms. James,” said Aho as he shut the door and doffed his hat, “Private George.”
“Glad to meet you, ma’am,” George said, smiling at her as he put down his rucksack.
Peggy looked up briefly, then resumed examining her map. “Good evening, Private,” she said. “You look like you’re about fifteen.”
Her clipped accent and brusque manner reminded George of a young Bette Davis. “Fifteen and a half,” he said, walking toward the desk. “If you mean neck size.”
She looked up. “And you’re a comedian.
“I have many talents, ma’am,” he said. Still smiling, George leapt on the desk, his feet straddling the map; in the same quick move, he’d snatched up a letter opener and put the blade to Peggy’s throat. “I’ve also been trained to kill, quickly and silently.”
Their eyes locked, and almost at once George realized that that had been a mistake. She’d done it to distract him as she brought her rigid forearms together hard on either side of his wrist. The letter opener clattered to the desktop and, a moment later, she swung her stiff right leg across the map, kicking his legs out from under him. As he fell to his side, she grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him to the floor, dropping him on his back and putting her foot on his neck.
“Just make sure,” she said, “that if you plan to kill, you do so without the speech. All right?”
“All right,” he said, kicking up with both feet so that he was momentarily resting on his shoulder blades. Locking his ankles around Peggy’s neck, he pulled her down and flipped her onto her back. “Though I’ll make an exception this time.”