The Valhalla Prophecy Read Free

Durnovtsev waited until the insectile lenses were secure before donning his own. Day turned to night, the instruments barely visible through the tinted glass.
    But he knew that the sky would become much brighter very soon.

    Volkov stared up at the clouds again. Even over the sound of the dogs, he could now hear the bomber. The rumbling drone was subtly different, though. A Doppler shift; the aircraft was moving away from him.
    He shook off a vague sense of unease. Whatever theplane was doing, it could have nothing to do with him—or the reason he was here. He touched the steel cylinder’s case, making sure it was secured in place. It was. Reassured, he looked back as the sled crested a rise. The blackened remains of the facility stood out against the snow, the entrance to the pit an ominous yawning mouth. The runestone was a single broken tooth at its edge.
    There was no sentiment as Volkov regarded his former workplace for the last time. What mattered above all else was the work itself; what he had discovered, and where it could lead.
    He turned his back on the scene, a small smile rising. With the sample in his possession and a new life awaiting in the United States, that work would continue.

    “Thirty seconds to detonation!” Durnovtsev barked into the intercom. “All crew, brace for blast!”
    He pulled his seat belt straps as tight as they would go before clenching his hands back around the controls. The compass was an indiscernible shadow through the goggles, but holding the Tupolev on course was about to be the least of his concerns.
    The ground controller continued the countdown. Twenty seconds. Ten. A last look around at the other crew in the cockpit. Dark shapes regarded him with impenetrable black eyes. One of the men in the seats behind him was holding a small cine camera, its lens pointed over Durnovtsev’s shoulder at the front windows. The pilot gave him a brief nod, trying to dismiss the thought that it might be the last time anyone ever saw his face, then looked ahead once more.
    Five seconds. Four. Three—
    Even through the heavily tinted goggles, the sky suddenly became as bright as the sun.

    Volkov checked his watch: eleven thirty-two. The dogs were making better time on the return trip to the boat, perhaps as eager as he was to get off the bleak island—
    The leaden gray clouds turned pure white.
    A flash lit the landscape from high above, its reflection from the snow blinding. Steam rose around the sled, the bitter cold dispelled by a searing heat …
    Volkov’s last thought was one of horrified realization—the bomber
had
been on a mission—before he and everything for miles around vanished in an unimaginable fire.

    The Tsar Bomba detonated two and a half miles above the ground. Durnovtsev had done his job with great skill; even with the inherent inaccuracy of a parachute-dropped weapon, it was within half a mile of its target.
    But a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb did not need to be precise.
    The nuclear fireball, more than two miles across, was as hot as the sun’s core. It never reached the ground, its own rapidly expanding shock wave bouncing back up off the surface to deflect it. But its flash alone, racing outward at the speed of light, was enough to melt rock and vaporize anything lesser in a fraction of a second. Behind it came the blast, a wall of superheated air compressed so hard that it was practically solid. What little survived the flash was obliterated moments later.
    The Tu-95 was almost thirty miles from Ground Zero when the bomb exploded. Even inside the plane, its crew felt a sudden heat as high-energy radiation, X-rays and gamma rays, passed through the aircraft—and their bodies. Sparks flashed around the cabin, the nuclear burst’s electromagnetic pulse surging through the bomber’s wiring. Durnovtsev heard an unearthly squeal in his headphones as their little loudspeaker converted the electrical overload into sound.
    The brightness outside faded, but Durnovtsev