So tonight, instead, he would be far away making hell for American and Canadian and Mexican sailors.

  Chris shied away from thinking about it. Too many boys were going to their deaths off Labrador, just to keep one alien creature occupied while four subs tried to sneak in through the back door.

  “Thank you. I’d better tell Major Marlowe and my demolition team.”

  He turned to go, but was stopped by an outsized hand on his shoulder, holding him gently but with steely adamancy.

  “Thou must know something more,” the being called Loki said in a low, resonant voice. Impossibly white teeth shone in his gleaming smile.

  “Thou wilt have a passenger in going ashore.”

  Chris blinked. The plan had been for only his team and their commando escort… Then he saw the pallor of dread on Commander Lewis’ face deeper than any mere fear of death.

  Chris turned back to stare at the fur-clad giant. “You…” he exhaled.

  Loki nodded. “A small change in plans. I will not accompany the undersea vessels, as they attempt to break out through the Skagerrak. I will go ashore with thee, instead, to Gotland.”

  Chris kept his face blank. In all honesty, there was no way this side of Heaven that he or Lewis could stop this creature from doing whatever it wanted. One way or the other, the Allies were about to lose their only Aesir friend in the long war against the Nazi plague.

  If the word “friend” ever really described Loki, who had appeared one day on the tarmac of a Scottish airfield during the final evacuation of Britain, accompanied by eight small, bearded beings carrying boxes. He had led them up to the nearest amazed officer and imperiously commandeered the prime minister’s personal plane to take him the rest of the way to America.

  Perhaps an armored battalion might have stopped him. Combat reports proved that Aesir could be killed, if you were very lucky, pounding one hard and fast enough. But when the local commander realized what was happening, he decided to take a chance.

  Loki had proven his worth many times, since that day ten years ago.

  Till now, that is.

  “If you insist.” He told the Aes.

  “I do. It is my will.”

  “Then I’ll go explain it to Marlowe. Excuse me, please.”

  He backed away a few meters first, then turned to go.

  As he sloshed away, that glittering stare seemed to follow him, past the moaning dwarf, past O’Leary’s ever-sardonic smile, down the narrow, dank passageway lined with strapped-in marines, all the way to the sabot launching tubes.

  Voices were hushed. All the young men spoke English, but only half were North Americans. Their shoulder patches—Free French, Free Russian, Free Irish, German Christian—were muted in the dim light, but the mixed accents were unmistakable, as well as the way they stroked their weapons and the gleam Chris caught sight of in several pairs of eyes.

  These were the sort that volunteered for suicide missions, the type common in the world after twenty-three years of horrible war—that had little or nothing left to lose.

  Major Marlowe had come back to supervise the loading of the landing boats. He did not take Chris’s news well.

  “Loki wants to come along? To Gotland?” He spat. “The bastard’s a spy. I knew it all the time!”

  Chris shook his head. “He’s helped us a hundred ways, John. Why, just by accompanying Ike to Tokyo, and convincing the Japanese—”

  “Big deal! We’d already beaten the Japs!” The big Marine clenched his fist, hard. “Like we’d have crushed Hitler, if these monsters hadn’t arrived, like Satan’s curse, out of nowhere.

  “And now he’s lived among us for ten years, observing our methods, our tactics and technology, the only real advantage we had left!”

  Chris grimaced. How could he explain it to Marlowe? The Marine officer had never visited Tehran, as Chris did last year. Marlowe had never seen the capital city of Israel-Iran, America’s greatest and most stalwart ally, bulwark of the East.

  There, in dozens of armed settlements along the east bank of the Euphrates, Chris had met fierce men and women who bore on their arms tattooed numbers from Treblinka, Dachau, Auschwitz. He heard their stories of how, one hopeless night under barbed wire and the stench of chimneys, the starving, doomed masses looked up to see a strange vapor fall from the sky. Unbelieving, death-starkened eyes had stared in wonderment as the mist gathered, coalescing into something almost solid.

  Out of that eerie fog, a bridge of many colors formed…a rainbow arch climbing, apparently without end, out of those places of horror into a moonless night. And from the heights, each doomed man and woman saw a dark-eyed figure on a flying horse. They felt him whisper inside their minds.

  Come, children, while your tormenters blink and stammer in my web of the mind. Come, all, over my bridge to safety. Before my cousins descry my treason.

  When they sank to their knees, or rocked in thankful prayer, the figure only snorted derisively. His voice hissed within their heads.

  Do not mistake me for your God, who left you here to die! I cannot explain that One’s absence to you, or His plan in all this. The All-Father is a mystery even to Great Odin!

  Know only that I will take you to safety now, such as there may be in this world. But only hurry! Be grateful later, if you must, but come!

  Down to the camps, to bleak ghettos, to a city under siege, bridges formed in a single night, and vanished with dawn like vapor or a dream. Two million people, the old, the lame, women, children, the slaves of Hitler’s war factories, climbed those paths—for there was no other choice—and found themselves transported to a desert land, by the banks of an ancient river, arriving just in time to take up hasty arms and save a British Army fleeing the wreckage of Egypt and Palestine. They fused with the astonished Persians, and refugees from crippled Russia, to build a new nation out of chaos.

  After that night of miracles, Loki could not return to Europe. For the fury of his Aesir kin would be savage. Returning to Gotland, he was in as much peril as the commandos.

  “No, Marlowe, you’re wrong. I haven’t any idea what on God’s green Earth he is. But I’d bet my life Loki’s not a spy.”

  * * *

  2

  The sabots gurgled and rocked, shooting free of the submarine and then bobbing to the surface of a frigid sea. Outer shells broke away and sailors dipped their oars. Men gratefully took their first breath of clean air in more than a day.

  The dwarf seemed little relieved. Staring across dark waters to the west, where a reddish line of sunset outlined a great Baltic island, the creature muttered in a guttural language like nothing Earthly.

  Which seemed natural. Like most Americans, Chris was convinced that these beings were as much the ancient Norse gods—recalled into the modern world—as he was Sandy Koufax, or that the Dodgers didn’t play in Brooklyn.

  Aliens—that was the official line. The story broadcast by Allied Radio all through the Americas and Japan and what remained of Free Asia. Creatures from the stars had arrived, like in those stories by Chester Nimitz, the famous science fiction author.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine why they might want to be seen as gods. And it explained why they chose to side with the Nazis. The ruse wouldn’t have worked in the West. No matter how great their guests’ powers, Euro-American scientists would have probed and queried. People would have asked questions.

  But in the Teutonic madness of Nazism, the “Aesir” found fertile ground.

  Chris had read captured German SS documents. Even back in the thirties and early forties, before the arrival of the Aesir, they were filled with mumbo jumbo and mysticism—stuff about ice moons falling from the sky and the romantic spirit of the Aryan super race. In a Nazi-conquered world the Aesir would be gods indeed. Like the logic of a rat or a hyena, Chris could see the aliens’ reasons for choosing that side, God damn them.

  Silhouettes of pines outlined hilltops, serrating the western sky. Two lead boats were crammed with marines, assigned to take the beach and move inland. Meanwhile, navy teams would prepare the boats for a getaway…as if anyone thought that would really happen.

  The last two craft held Chris’s demolition team.

  Loki knelt on one knee at the prow of Chris’s boat, staring ahead with glittering eyes. Dark as he was, he looked like something straight out of a Viking saga.

  Good verisimilitude, Chris thought. Or maybe the creatures actually believed they were who they said were. All Chris knew for certain was that they had to be defeated, or for humanity there would be nothing but darkness, from now on.

  He checked his watch and looked up at the sky, scanning for starry openings in the clouds.

  Yes, there it was. The Satellite. Riding Newton’s wings more than two hundred miles up, circling the globe every ninety minutes.

  When it first appeared, the Nazis had gone into paroxysms, proclaiming it an astrological portent. For some unknown bureaucratic reason, officials in the Pentagon sat on the secret until half the world believed Goebbels’ propaganda. Then, at last, Washington revealed the truth. That American space-argonauts were circling the Earth. For two months the world had seemed turned around. This new technological wonder would be more important than the atom bomb, many thought.

  Then the invasion of Canada began.

  Chris turned his mind away from what was happening now, out in the Atlantic. He wished he had one of those new laser communicators, so he could tell the men up in the Satellite how things were progressing down here. But the light amplification devices were so secret, the Chiefs of Staff had refused to allow any to be taken into the enemy’s heartland.

  Surely the Nazis were working on a way to shoot down the Satellite. No one knew why, with aliens to help them, the enemy let their early lead in rocketry slip so badly.

  Perhaps they can’t operate in space anymore…like they haven’t been able to crush our submarine forces.

  But does that make sense? How could aliens lose the ability to destroy such a crude spacecraft?

  Chris shook his head.

  Not that it matters much. Tonight the Atlantic fleet is dying. This winter, we’ll be forced to use our biggest bombs to hold the line in Canada…wrecking the continent even if we slow them down.

  He looked at the figure in the boat’s prow.

  How can cleverness or industry or courage prevail against such power?

  Those fur-covered shoulders were passive now. Loki had admitted to being one of the weakest of these “gods.” But Chris had seen him tear down buildings with his bare hands.

  “Loki,” he said quietly.

  As often as not, the Aes would ignore any human who spoke to him without leave. But this time the dark-haired figure turned and regarded Chris. Loki’s expression was not warm, but he did smile.

  “Thou art troubled, youngling. I spy it in thy heart.”

  He seemed to peer into Chris.

  “It is not fear, I am glad to see, but only a great perplexity.”

  Fitting their assumed roles as the fabled lords of Valhalla, courage was the one human attribute most honored by the Aesir. Even by the god of trickery and treachery.

  “Thank you, Loki.” Chris nodded respectfully. You could’ve fooled me. I thought I was scared spitless!

  Loki’s eyes were pools glittering with starlight.

  “On this fateful eve, it is meet to grant a brave worm a boon. Therefore I will favor thee, mortal. Ask three questions. These will Loki answer truthfully, by his very life.”

  Chris blinked, for the moment stricken speechless. He was unprepared for anything like this! Everyone from President Marshall and Admiral Heinlein on down to the lowliest Brazilian draftee had hungered for answers. Imperious and aloof, their one Aesir ally had doled out hints and clues, had helped to foil Nazi schemes and slow the implacable enemy advance, but he never made a promise like this.

  Chris felt O’Leary tense behind him, trying to seem invisible in order to be allowed to stay and listen. For once the beatnik’s mouth stayed firmly shut.

  Pine forests loomed above them as the boat entered shallows out of the evening wind. He could smell the dark forest. There was so little time! Chris groped for a question.

  “I… Who are you, and where did you come from?”

  Loki closed his eyes. When he opened them, the black orbs were filled with dark sadness.

  “Out of the body of Ymir, slain by Odin, poured the Sea

  “Gripping the body of Ymir, Yggdrasil, the great tree.

  “Sprung from salt and frost, the Aesir, tremble Earth!

  “Born of Giant and man, Loki, bringer of mirth.”

  The creature stared at Chris.

  “This has always been my home,” he said. And Chris knew that he meant the Earth. “I remember ages and everything spoken of in Eddas—from the chaining of Fenris to the lies of Skrymnir. And yet…”

  Loki’s voice was faintly puzzled, even hushed.

  “And yet there is something about those memories…something laid over, as lichen lies upon the frost.”

  He shook himself. “In truth, I cannot say for certain that I am older than thee, child-man.”

  Loki’s massive shoulders shrugged.

  “But make haste with your next question. We are approaching the Gathering Place. They will be here and we must stop them from their scheming, if it is not already too late.”

  Reminded suddenly of the present, Chris looked up at the wilderness looming all around them on the shadowed hillsides.

  “Are you sure about this plan—taking on so many of the Aesir in one place?”

  Loki smiled. And Chris realized at once why. Like some idiot out of a fairy tale, he had squandered a question in a silly quest for comfort! But reassurance was not one of Loki’s strong suits.

  “No, I am not sure, impertinent mortal!”

  Loki laughed and the rowing sailors briefly lost their stride as they looked up at the ironic, savage sound. “Think thou that only men may win honor by daring all against death? Here does Loki show his courage, to face Odin’s spear and Thor’s hammer if he must, tonight!” He turned and shook a ham-sized fist toward the west. The dwarf whimpered and crouched beside his master.

  Chris saw that the marines had already landed. Major Marlowe made quick hand gestures, sending the first skirmishers fanning out into the forest. The second row of boats shipped oars and were carried by momentum toward the gravelly shore.

  He hurried to take advantage of the remaining time.

  “Loki. What is happening in Africa?”

  Since ’49 the Dark Continent had been dark indeed. From Tunis to the Cape of Good Hope, fires burned, and rumors of horror flowed.

  Loki whispered softly.

  “Surtur must needs have a home, before the time of raging.

  “There, in torment, men cry out, screaming for an ending.”

  The giant shook his great head. “In Africa and on the great plains of Russia, terrible magics are being made, and terrible woe.”

  Back in Israel-Iran Chris had seen some of the refugees—Blacks and high-cheeked Slavs—lucky escapees who had fled the fires in time. Even they had not been able to tell what was happening in the interior. Only people who had seen the earlier horrors—whose arms bore stenciled numbers from the first wave of chimney camps—would imagine what was happening in the silent continents. And those fierce men and women kept their silence.

  It struck Chris that Loki did not seem to speak out of pity, but matter-of-factly, as if he thought a mistake were being made, but not any particular evil.

  “Terrible magics…” Chris repeated. And suddenly he had a thought. “You mean the purpose isn’t only to slaughter people? That something else is going on, as well? Is it related to the reason why you saved those people from the first camps? Was something being done to them?”

  Chris had a sense that there was something important here. Something ultimately crucial. But Loki smiled, holding up three fingers.

  “No more questions. It is time.”

  They scraped bottom. Sailors leapt out into the icy water to drag the boat up to the rocky shore. Shortly, Chris was busy supervising the unloading of their supplies, but his mind was a turmoil.

  Loki was hiding something, laughing at him for having come so close and yet missing the target. There was more to this venture, tonight, than an attempt to kill a few alien gods.

  High in the dark forest canopy, a crow cawed scratchily. The dwarf, laden under enough boxes to crush a man, rolled its eyes and moaned softly, but Loki seemed not to notice.

  “Reet freaking hideaway, daddyo,” O’Leary muttered as he helped Chris shoulder the bomb’s fuse mechanism. “A heavy-duty scene.”

  “Right,” Chris answered, feeling sure he understood the beatnik this time. “A heavy-duty scene.”

  They set out, following the faint blazings laid by their marine scouts.

  As they climbed a narrow trail from the beach, Chris felt a growing sense of anticipation…a feeling of being, right then, at the navel of the world. For well or ill, this place was where the fate of the world hung. He could think of no better end than to sear this island clean of all life. If that meant standing beside the bomb and triggering it himself, well, few men ever had a chance to trade their lives so well.

  They were deep under the forest canopy now. Chris caught sight of flickering movements under the trees, marine flankers guarding them and their precious cargo. According to prewar maps, they had only to top one rise, then another. From that prominence, any place to plant the bomb would do quite nicely. Valhalla would evaporate in flame.

  Chris started to turn, to look back at Loki…but at that moment the night erupted with light. Flares popped and fitted and floated slowly through the branches on tiny parachutes. Men dove for cover as tracer bullets sent their shadows fleeing. There was a sudden gunfire up ahead, and loud concussions. Men screamed.

  Chris sought cover behind a towering fire as mortars began pounding the forest around him. From high up the hillside—even over the explosions—they heard booming laughter.