The Age Of Odin

Fifty

The first incursion came the next morning. A hit-and-run. No contact, no casualties. They took out one of our ammo dumps, situated near an intersection with Svartalfheim.

We inspected the damage — Thor's team, with Huginn and Muninn monitoring for Odin. Nothing much to see, just a smoking crater and a few strewn, charred trees that had once been a copse.

"C-Four plastic explosive," Backdoor opined. "About twenty pounds of it."

"No shit, Sherlock," I said. "And here was I thinking those trees fell over all by themselves."

"They must have been conducting surveillance from across the way," said Paddy, gazing towards Svartalfheim. "Saw the Valkyries stash the ammo. Marked the spot for future reference."

"Is this state-the-fucking-obvious week or what?" I snapped. I turned and eyed the undulating barren badlands of Svartalfheim, wondering if Loki's commandos were still out there somewhere. Bedded down in black camo gear and watching us through binoculars. And chortling.

"The gnomes," I said to Thor. "I thought they were on our side. Friends of Asgard."

"The gnomes are nobody's friend," he replied. "They do business with whomever wishes to do business with them but they owe allegiance to none but themselves."

"So how come they've given safe passage to Loki's troops?"

"They haven't," said Huginn and Muninn in tandem, speaking in Odin's voice from their perch on Thor's shoulders. "What you must understand is that the gnomes dwell perpetually underground. Sunlight turns them to stone, so they daren't venture up onto the surface. Even starlight makes them unwell. Their home is their caverns."

"Meaning anyone can wander across their world if they want to."

The ravens gave a synchronised nod. "The terrain above is no man's land, yes. The gnomes have no use for it, and care little who crosses it. Enter their caverns unannounced and unbidden — that is a different story. Then you'll find yourself facing red-hot pokers and tongs, wielded by some very irate little beings."

"Who have no respect for one's dignity," Thor said, rubbing his buttock in memory of some wound inflicted once upon a time.

"Then we need to patrol this crossing-point," I said. "We site a round-the-clock watch here."

"You think they'll come over again?" said Cy.

"Maybe not. It was a precision strike, a one-off. If I were them I wouldn't hit the same place a second time. But they're not me. They're probably a lot swankier and cockier than me, and they might think if they've got away with it once they can get away with it again, and come in deeper this time. Let's play on that. Let's give them an incentive. Commit a dozen men, and one of Odin's sons — Vali, say — with one of the special pieces of kit the gnomes made for us. Let's see how that pans out."

It panned out pretty well — for us. Two days later the commando unit sneaked in over the border again, at dawn. We'd set up the appearance of basic guard duty near the intersection, a pair of two-man tents whose occupants kept watch on four-hour rotating shifts, not varying their routine one iota. Loki's men tiptoed through the grey light, combat knives drawn. Throat-slashing was on their minds. Easy kills.

Then they were strafed with gunfire from a secondary encampment hidden on high ground further into our territory, and while they were scrambling to their fall-back positions Vali came stomping onto the scene.

The gnomes had provided us a half-dozen suits of armour made of iron, according to the specifications I'd provided. These were no match for the enemy's tanksuits in terms of firepower, mainly because they had none, but they were at least their equal in bulk and density. Each of the contraptions weighed an ounce or so shy of a ton and stood nine feet from boot to head, with a barrel body some fifteen feet in circumference. Only a warrior god could wear one. Only a warrior god had the strength to move the legs with his legs and manipulate the arms with his arms.

Vali, strapped inside the armour, bore down on the startled commandos. They rattled away at him with submachine guns but couldn't put a dent in his inch-thick ironclad hide. Then he was on top of them and started side-swiping them with the armour's fists, which were solid, cannonball-like clubs. Bodies flew. Skulls were crushed.

The remaining commandos saw sense and beat a hasty retreat towards Svartalfheim, but treetop snipers picked them off as they ran. Not one of them made it safely out of range.

"And that, ladies and gentlemen," I said, from an obs post overlooking the kill zone, "is how you do that."

It was a good start. We'd field-tested the gnome-built armour and it worked. Slow and clunky, but it did the trick. And we'd convincingly repulsed a covert attack. Score one for the home side.

But other cross-border raids came from Niflheim and Muspelheim. Commandos darted in and blew shit up. Our painstakingly laid ammo dumps went up in smoke one after another, and there were low-level skirmishes all round the perimeter of Asgard, often costing us lives. We were being pinpricked left, right and centre. We could sustain it for the time being, and gave back as good as we got. But it was obvious this repeated harrying was all part of a softening-up process, designed to wear down our reserves little by little, and our resolve.

One thing we learned about the bad guys. With any we killed, inspection of the bodies consistently revealed no uniform insignia and no dogtags. These, then, weren't legit soldiers; they were mercs. We weren't fighting GI Joe but Blackwater or ArmorGroup or some other private military contractor, and somehow that made it better. Rather than being ordinary, straight-arrow, regular-army types who'd enlisted with the noble intention to defend their homeland, these were men who'd signed on the dotted line specifically to take part in war. Just like us. Level playing field, as it were. Each side as dirty as the other.

The siege wore on, and what really got on my tits was that, being as it was a siege, we had no real way of taking the fight to the enemy. We could only react, not act. A full-on assault by Loki would have been something we could deal with directly — meet and grapple with — and it was surely coming. Until then, we were perpetually on the back foot, fending off and playing catch-up. Not my idea of fun.

Meanwhile Odin, in spare moments, was following events in Midgard via raven-cam. Mrs Keener's state visit was turning out to be a surprising success. It was a charm offensive of epic proportions, the President glad-handing and back-slapping and generally winning round her UK detractors. The London protest march coincided with her first chat-show appearance, and that may have accounted for the low turnout on the streets of the capital. The organisers surmised that people had stayed home to watch her on TV so that they could fuel themselves with indignation and come out afterwards all fired up and ready to demonstrate.

They must have been disappointed, then, when a second London protest march, hastily scheduled for the next day, was even more poorly attended than the first. The public, it seemed, didn't dislike Mrs Keener as much as it had been assumed they did. After having seen her on telly, where she'd defended her policies, dismissed the climate doomsayers and their fears about the neverending winter, and gone on at length about her family and her love of the Good Lord Jesus, they were coming to the conclusion that she really wasn't as bad as everyone made out. And with each subsequent interview broadcast, British opinion of her rose. This had the result that, when she began a tour of the regions, the marches intended to dovetail with her itinerary never materialised. They had to be called off due to lack of interest.

The papers even started talking about a "Keener effect." One editorial described her as "an all too rare ray of sunshine" and another "an antidote to the dismalness of the times." Even The Guardian admitted she had a certain something.

It drove me into a frenzy to hear Odin report all this.

"She's Loki!" I yelled. "Fucking Loki! Why doesn't anyone see through her? I thought only Yanks were gullible, but us lot are just as bad. Worse, even. We shouldn't be falling for any of this guff. Are we not British? Naturally cynical? Don't we laugh when we see sincerity and Christian faith?"

Not any more, it seemed. Not in these dark, difficult days. Mrs Keener was offering hope and simple answers, something Clasen had been failing to do. Loki had honed his craft over centuries of misleading and hoodwinking the Aesir and Vanir. Frightened mortals were easy marks for him.

"And thus his might increases," Odin said. "In the guise of President Keener he makes them love him, or fear him, and are not love and fear both forms of reverence? Are they not both the prostration of the lesser before the greater? He said it himself — he has billions under his thumb now, either through intimidation or enthralment. They celebrate him. They speak of his deeds, and whether approvingly or not doesn't matter, as long as they're speaking of him at all. Their words augment him. He becomes more puissant with every mention, more energised, capable of ever greater, ever bolder feats of wickedness and mayhem. He feeds off their expressions of adulation and detestation. Millions of your countrymen, Gid, are adding further to his stores of power."

"Simply by feeling strongly about him and talking about it?"

"It's a kind of worship. As his reputation grows, so does his divinity."

"Gods are stories, Bragi told me."

"And my blood brother's tale is now being retold millions of times a day," Odin said with a sad, sage shake of the head. "He is on countless mortal tongues. Not realising it, they imbue him with significance whenever they praise Mrs Keener, or criticise her. They lend him their belief and that enhances the myth of him and armours him. Oh, it's a grand deceit he's practised this time, a hoax of unparalleled proportions. I almost admire him for it."

"Personally, it makes me wish I could have another crack at killing him."

"That is not your role, Gid. You are a hero."

"Isn't it the hero's job to take down the archvillain?"

"Sometimes," said Odin. "But sometimes the hero is simply the man who makes the right decisions. He enables what should be to be."

The phony war lasted another four days or so. The guerrilla-style sorties became more frequent and nudged further and further into Asgardian turf. We were stretched thin trying to cover and defend so many of the intersections at once. Our troops were getting tired and discouraged, and the major assault hadn't even started yet. Loki had us chasing around all the time, shoring up our forces at each intersection, repelling attacks. Barely did we have a chance to catch our breath before we had to tackle the next incursion somewhere else along the borderlands.

Physically it was gruelling. Psychologically, too. Relationships within the ranks began to fragment. In my own squad, Paddy and Backdoor were getting on each other's nerves, and Cy and Backdoor as well. Backdoor, in fact, was pissing just about everybody off, even mild-mannered, affable Baz. A bit of needling and ribbing was par for the course in army life, but in Backdoor's case the name-calling had started to take on an edge. He flung "bog-trotter" at Paddy twice and got away with it the first time but not the second. It was the way he said it, more than anything, that put the Irishman's back up. The "fucking" he stuck in front of it the second time didn't help.

They'd have come to blows if I hadn't stepped in and managed to pacify them. I even persuaded them to shake hands manfully. This was for their benefit but also for the benefit of everyone else in our cabin. There was a score of spectators to this bedtime fracas, keen to see a punch-up. None of that shit, I was telling them. Not on my watch.

It happened again the very next morning during the wee small hours. Me and the team — minus Thor, who'd drunk too much the previous evening and couldn't be got out of his bed for love nor money — were yomping towards a Niflheim intersection. That was where, according to Heimdall's ultra-sharp ears, yet another raid was about to take place. It was our turn to take care of it.

Backdoor was whingeing about lack of sleep and the futility of seeing off one attack only to have to deal with another one a few hours later somewhere different. I was about to tell him to stow it but Cy got in before me.

"Will you just put a fucking sock in it, all right?" he hissed.

Backdoor retorted using the most unpardonable word for a black person there is. Cy, understandably, went ballistic and laid into him. I let him give Backdoor a pasting for a little while, because the fucker deserved it. But when I weighed in and hauled Cy off, what did the kid do but turn round and lamp me.

That could not stand. I lamped him back, then while he was reeling I grabbed him and put him into a compliance hold. Wristlock, twisting the hand round, followed by rotation of the entire arm. This forced him down onto his knees, head bent. I put a knee in the small of his back for good measure. He writhed but couldn't get free. All he could do in his helplessness was swear at me. I bellowed at him to shut the fuck up, then launched into a big long rant about everybody not arguing, not sniping at one another, not using racial slurs of any kind, just keeping all their shit in one bucket and pulling together and playing as a team, because if this was what we were like now, imagine how bad it could get when the proper fighting started.

"So stop bitching, start behaving like you were born with some balls, all of you," I finished off, "or else!"

We continued on our way in silence. I'd asserted my authority and felt I'd made my point, but I was still fuming inside. We shouldn't be in-fighting and falling to pieces. That was exactly what Loki wanted.

And once more, suspicion was flitting through my mind. We had an infiltrator, an agent-fucking-provocateur in our midst. And I was growing more and more certain that I knew who it was.

One good thing came of the incident. When the enemy emerged from the mists of Niflheim, we were all so keyed up that we didn't hesitate. We gave them what-for, venting our frustrations in a hail of bullets. Bastards didn't know what hit them. We roared like lions as we fired, and I was roaring loudest of all.