BRUGES

The city of Bruges in Belgium, like several other cities in northern Europe that take pride in the beauty of their canals, calls itself the “Venice of the North.” It has no need for comparisons, for Bruges has a singular beauty of its own.

Bruges was founded in the seventh century as a Viking settlement and named “Brucken,” which means The Landing Place. It was fortified in the ninth century and three hundred years later became the greatest port of northern Europe, the chief entrepot of the Hanseatic League. Today it is the capital of West Flanders. Its port is silted up and it is nine miles from the North Sea coast. Its charm now is due to its baroque Flemish houses, quiet canals, the Minne-water, called the “Lake of Love,” and its medieval Gothic buildings that include the Cloth Hall, with its famous carillon, the Baguinage convent, and the art collections that attract daily busloads of tourists.

Here and there one can still spot the strain of Viking blood from the wild Norsemen who roared down from Scandinavia with bloody swords, screaming oaths, for arson, robbery, and rape.

This spring there were very few tourists. The weather was most unseasonable. It was cold. Ice remained in the canals. Some gloomily said that summer would never come. . . .

1

DURELL crossed the deck of the Vesper with a long, impatient stride, nodded to the bored Sicilian crewmen lounging and watching the guests turn blue in their bikinis, and went below. His eyes were angry. His mouth was stubborn. He went through the luxurious main salon like a gust of cold wind, forged down the corridor to his stateroom, and yanked open the door and looked at the girl on his bunk.

“Get out of there,” Durell said.

“Sam, darling—”

“I won’t ask you again.”

“Sweetest man, I was doing nothing!”

“So you say.”

“Why are you so suspicious and unfriendly?”

“Why are you so interested in my gear?”

“But I wasn’t, angelic man—”

“Sigrid, where did you get my gun?”

“I found it.”

“Don’t point it at me, or—”

“Darling, you are so intriguing!”

The gun went off.

Its blast was shattering in the narrow confines of the cabin. A hair to the left, and Durell would have dropped with a bullet in his brain.

The girl’s mouth made a circle of dismay. She held the weapon in both hands and pretended to keep her blue eyes squeezed tightly shut when she fired at him, but he caught the glint of mischief in her eyes—or was it a gleam of exultation?—when she squeezed the trigger.

He dived across the cabin at her. She wore only a vestigial black bikini laced at the sides, and her long,

wheat-white hair swung heavily as she tried to avoid him. But she did not try very hard. His shoulder slammed across her flat belly and bowled her backward into the bunk again, and his gun rattled on the teakwood deck and slid away toward the door. Her arms and legs snaked up and pinioned him in a sudden, lustful embrace.

“Sam, darling . . .”

“Sigrid, you bitch.”

“I’m sorry I frightened you.”

“You tried to kill me.”

“Oh, no, not really!”

She laughed in his face. He put his forearm across her throat and squeezed a little, leaning his weight on her. He had to check himself to keep from going all the way. His reflexes in the face of attack were too quick, too instinctive.

The laughter and the smile faded from her lovely face. She made a little gurgling sound and tried to escape. She was strong, and he wanted her to try. She gave herself away by the expertise of her struggle. She almost succeeded, and she was professional about it. A darkness clouded her Viking eyes. Sigrid Bjornson was not just a girl having fun. She was in the business.

Satisfied, he eased up a little, and she drew a great shuddering breath that lifted her proud breasts in challenge toward him. He drew back. She could be more dangerous that way, Durell decided.

“Sam, I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“It’s all right.”

“No, I didn’t mean—I was just joking—”

“So was I,” he said.

“Yes, of course.” She rubbed her throat and looked upward, where footsteps ran along the deck and someone yelled to find out who had fired a shot and why. A hubbub of voices came from the main salon of the schooner Vesper. “Oh, dear. Shall we say it was an accident?”

“Of course.” His dark eyes mocked her.

“But it was, darling!”

“If you insist.”

“You are the most aggravating man!”

“I’m glad.”

“And such a—a Puritan.”

“My acquired heritage."

“And I thought you were French—”

“Not French. Cajun. From the Louisiana bayous, where the Acadians came when they were chased out of Canada by the English. But I went to school in New England, anyway, and so I became a Puritan, too.”

“You Americans,” Sigrid sighed, and she rubbed her throat with a strong and shaking hand.

The schooner Vesper, home port Palermo, Sicily, was named after that island’s twelfth-century rebels, who fought against foreign rule and later fled to the hills for a life of banditry that has its echoes still. The Vesper was a hundred and twenty feet of pleasure yacht, all white and teak and shining brass, owned by Baron Ugo Uccelatti, who owed Durell a favor or two. They had been two weeks cruising out of the Mediterranean through the Gibraltar straits toward the famous yachting waters off the Netherlands. She carried a competent crew of ten, including a new captain named Olaf Jannsen, flown across the Channel from London when the former captain took ill and failed to show up for his duties at Ostend. The guest passengers were a mixed bag, a collection of bored Riviera loungers with their consorts of long-limbed, shapely, and complaisant girls whose wardrobes consisted mainly of abbreviated swimsuits or, often enough, nothing at all.

It was late in May, but the weather failed to keep the promise of the season. It was miserable.

Durell still did not know how Sigrid Bjornson happened to come aboard, shortly after the arrival of the new captain, Jannsen. Baron Uccelatti was more than casual about his guests, particularly when they looked like Sigrid.

She was different in one respect from the others. She was tall and shapely, but not as free as the other girls, and she had a quiet, mischievous intelligence and competence that immediately impressed Durell. It was his business to notice someone like Sigrid. In Durell’s work, you never took anything for granted or at face value. It could cost you your life. And a few moments ago, it almost had.

Sigrid remained on his bunk while he calmed down the excited inquiries from the others aboard the Vesper. He told them the gunshot was an accident, that no one was hurt. Sigrid wryly rubbed her throat. When all was quiet again, he closed the door and turned back to her, and saw that she had shed her bikini and was waiting for him.

“No dice,” he said.

“Dice?”

“We don’t play.”

“Donjt you like me?”

“I love you, Sigrid.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“But I want to know why you searched my cabin and why you just tried to kill me.”

She pouted. “Oh, Sam.”

“Put on your clothes.”

“Look at me!”

“I’m looking,” he said.

“How can you—?”

“It’s easy. I’m too nervous.”

“Are you a coward?”

“I’m cautious. You live longer that way.”

She grinned. “I could make you die happy.”

“No doubt. But not today.”

When she stood up, she was only inches shorter than he, and Durell was a tall man. She was magnificent. A Norse goddess, pagan and wild, filled with a golden passion. But behind her smooth white brow and great blue eyes, there was a cool brain ticking. Under that gorgeous tawny tan there was a heart as cold as the ice of Lapland. He wasn’t sure of this, and he had to restrain the gambling instincts instilled in him by his old Grandpa Jonathan, who had been one of the last of the Mississippi riverboat gamblers. But he would have bet on it.

He decided to let it go. To push it further would be to reveal too much, perhaps give her what she had come to his cabin to find out.

He picked up his gun and closed his suitcase and watched her wriggle provocatively back into her bikini. The swimsuit didn’t seem to make much difference.

Durell was a sub-chief in field operations for K Section of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had been in the business for a long time. Sometimes he thought it had been for too long, considering the charts on his lowering survival factor. He did not like to think back to some of the jobs he’d done in various dark and dangerous corners of the world. But his work had become a way of life with him. He could no more fit into the calm normalcy of the everyday world now than he could forget to check every room he entered for hidden microphones, turn a corner and expect the worst, regard every man and woman he met as a potential hazard. He was not altogether happy with what he had become. He had strong, lithe gambler’s hands that could kill with a rolled newspaper, a pin, the pressure of a knuckle on a vital neural center. He had been forced to use these methods on occasion. Now and then he wished for a way out, but even if General Dickinson McFee, head of K Section’s troubleshooting operations, had permitted it, the dossiers held on him at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, at KGB headquarters in Moscow, or in Peiping’s L-5 Group files, promised him neither a long and happy life, nor an easy retirement.

He had been resting since his last assignment, enjoying his status as a guest aboard Baron Uccelatti’s Vesper, but his time for relaxation had ended. Yesterday he’d gotten the message. And ten minutes later, Sigrid Bjornson had come aboard.

Durell sighed. His dark blue eyes looked almost black as he regarded Sigrid’s golden figure. He felt a momentary regret, glimpsed his dark hair touched with gray in the cabin mirror, and pushed the thought of her from his mind with reluctant determination. He had only half an hour, and he was already dressed in his usual dark suit, white button-down shirt, and charcoal knitted necktie. He looked tall and big and somehow ominous, but he moved with an easy grace, light on his feet, deft with his hands as he checked his gun, wallet, pen, wristwatch and change. Sigrid, still pouting, watched every move he made.

“You look angry and dangerous, darling.”

“Coming from you, that’s the pot calling the kettle black—to coin a phrase.”

“What is it, Sam? Can’t I come with you?”

“No. Just amuse yourself.”

“How, marvelous man?”

“You can look through my luggage to your heart’s content after I’m gone.”

2

THE conference was to be held at the chateau of the Count Lemo^ne, off in the hop fields not far from Bruges. Durell did not know the site until, following orders, he checked into the Black Swan Inn overlooking a picturesque canal lined with copper beeches and willows, near the crowds of tourists in the Marktgasse. His room had four small windows with diamond-shaped panes of old violet glass. The walls were whitewashed, the ceilings timbered with black beams. The bed was enormous, with a heavy goose-down quilt neatly folded at its foot. A sight-seeing canal boat puttered by under the medieval windows. Nothing could have seemed more serene.

Then the telephone rang.

“Durell?” a man said.

“Here.”

“Brussels Central. What time is it?”

He looked at his watch. It was just ten o’clock in the morning. He said: “It’s past four.”

“On the dot?”

“Six past four. Why all the spook business? I’ve got the code.”

“Fine. Then here are your directions. Carry them out at once. Priority Red.”

“Red?”

“Nothing less. Here we go.”

So it was serious. More than serious. Durell hung up a moment later, frowning. A car horn blew discreetly in the narrow street below. The light seemed dim in the room, as if the offshore fog had thickened on this May morning. There was a chilly bite to the air. He told himself it was his imagination, and he left the room and the Black Swan Inn, using the small gray Mercedes sedan and silent driver who took him to his destination twenty minutes later.

The flat fields of Flanders stretched in every direction into the mists, crisscrossed precisely by roads and canals. Signs for Stella Artois beer flashed by—the Belgians were great beer-drinkers—and the fields of hops from which the brews were made were neat rectangles of green under a sky that looked stormy now. Durell asked the driver- in English where they were going. The man spoke only Flemish, but he caught the name of Count Lemogne.

“Count Lemogne,” Durell said in French, “lived during the Third Crusade. He was a great butcher.”

“This is his descendant, sir,” the driver returned in his own language. “A most respected businessman.”

“Well, that’s progress,” Durell retorted.

The place was a baroque manor house in the Flemish style, tall and almost spectral against the uncertain skies that lowered above the flat fields. A row of cypress trees bent in the damp wind that blew from the Channel. The sun was altogether gone, and it began to rain as the driver pulled through ornate iron gates and into a cobbled courtyard where a dozen other cars were parked.

“Upstairs, sir, in the main hall,” the driver said.

“Thank you.”

He was prepared for something big, but the collection of men gathered in the long, narrow chamber, fitted out as a board conference room, both startled and appalled him. He checked off faces rapidly; some he knew by sight, others he had long ago memorized from photographs. The chief Residents of every major European capital had been called here from their Centrals. Hanning of London; Georges of Paris; Klemath from Vienna and Freeman from Oslo; and a dozen others. There was a Japanese gentleman he did not know; Courbel from the Surete; a military Englishman from M-6. And General Dickinson McFee, slim and small and eternally gray, surprisingly pried out of his office in Washington.

It was rare for McFee to leave No. 20 Annapolis Street, K Section’s headquarters. Rarer still for him to come to Europe. And unheard-of for McFee ever to look troubled or concerned. But he looked worried now.

“Take a seat over there, Cajun,” McFee said quietly through the hubbub of voices. “Have a drink. You may need one. Just listen and absorb. We’ll work out the specific job for you later.”

“It looks like a gathering of Gaulish tribes. Is it the bomb?” Durell asked.

“Worse.”

“What could be worse?”

“You’ll see. Listen and learn.”

“General, if it’s a team job—”

“You’ll have your own assignment. Better have that drink.”

Count Lemogne was a tall, gracious man with thick gray hair and black-rimmed intellectual glasses. There were no servants in the room, and the members of this unprecedented conference helped themselves to refreshments from cut-glass and silver decanters on a massive oaken sideboard against the paneled wall. The heavy draperies were drawn, and the room was artificially lighted. At one end of the chamber were posted world maps, charts, graphs, and placards filled with statistics. Durell ignored the liquor and sat down, out of habit, with his back to the wall, choosing a high-backed, uncomfortable Spanish chair that must have dated back to the Duke of Alba’s regime.

They were talking about the weather.

It might have been the ordinary polite and aimless preamble to more serious business. But it was not.

The weather was their business.

“ . . . weather modification control,” a lecturer was saying. He had a pointer and tapped the world chart on the wall. He was American, a Madison-Avenue type, and he might have been discussing sales graphs and a new advertising campaign. “The National Science Foundation has given diligent attention to the manner in which man can now tamper with his environment, gentlemen. Our Special Commission has given grave attention to the advances now known to be possible in controlling our climate, attempting to estimate the political, legal, economic, and biological results of WMC—weather modification control. The implications are enormous. To the layman, they might be considered terrifying, if such control is attempted and then lost. The world as we know it could be changed in ways that make the consequences of atomic power seem minuscule by comparison.”

He tapped the chart.

“The seas could be frozen or the polar caps melted. The Sahara could be made to bloom and our rich Midwestern wheat and corn fields turned into sand deserts. Ultimately, the entire planet can be affected. The public knows, of course, about cloud seeding and such operational techniques as the dissipation of low-temperature fogs over limited areas such as airports and highways. To the best of our knowledge at the Foundation, however, research and capability have not gone much beyond this. But we have recent evidence that someone—somewhere— has made an enormous leap forward, so to speak.”

The silence of the listeners was broken by a low murmuring that expressed doubt, astonishment, and outrage. Durell looked at General McFee. The small gray man sat beside him, his walking stick against his thigh. That stick was a potential arsenal, Durell knew, constructed by the gimmick boys in K Section’s lab. There was a white phosphorus bomb, a gun, miniaturized tape recorder, a two-way transistor radio, a knife, all built into the innocent-looking blackthorn. Durell wondered if McFee ever expected to use it. He did not doubt that the General could, if needed.

Against the rising murmur of questions that lifted against him, the lecturer began to answer questions, citing specific recent phenomena of the weather that had brought about this unusual conference in the Flemish hop fields. It turned out that Count Lemogne was an expert in meteorology. Several other representatives were equally adept in the field.

Count Lemogne stood up and graciously asked for attention. His voice was quiet and cultivated, but under his composed mien there was a dark shadow, a sober and imperative concern that commanded silence.

“Gentlemen, it was pure chance that we became aware of what has been happening. An attentive and curious clerk in the Brussels weather station chose to carry out an experimental analysis of recent weather phenomena that had attracted his attention. First, on the island of Tahataha, in the Pacific South Seas, it rained for forty days and forty nights.” The Count smiled deprecatingly. “The Melanesians there considered the downpour historic, unprecedented, and most fearful. It was not the season for rain. It ruined the copra crop, ended fishing, rotted clothing and houses, and corroded their souls. The water fell with a sullen and malignant monotony. Tahataha is not an important island, as world affairs go. No one paid attention to it except the Paris bankers who held notes on the copra plantations, some of which were ruined.

“One week after that curious storm ended, a typhoon swept up out of the China Sea, skirted the Ryukyu Islands, sank seven fishing boats and two coastal freighters, and wiped out the Japanese village of Konitsu. The tempest had a furious and strange power. Forty-two men, women, and children were killed. The International Red Cross sent aid. The survivors said that the storm was impossible. You see, it was not the season for typhoons, gentlemen.

“In India, shortly thereafter, there was a delay of three weeks before the seasonal rains ended, and the fields remained untillable. It was also much colder than usual. The crops failed and special American aid in wheat shipments had to be sent to stave off a calamitous famine.

“Other incidents, gentlemen, involved the disappearance of the P & O liner Burma Queen off the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean; an invasion of gigantic waterspouts noted by a Russian trawler fleet; and extraordinary tornadoes along the Gulf Coast of the United States.

“Somewhat more recently, some of you will recall the cataclysmic freezing spell in Rome and northern Italy.

Three weeks ago, on the first of May, a caravan in the deep Sahara east of Marrakesh reported a six-inch snowfall where no man had ever seen snow before.

“Now, then.” Count Lemogne paused. “Our man in the Brussels weather station idled away his time by constructing this chart you see, indicating the dates and types of unusual weather afflictions in different global localities. Its significance suddenly struck him, and I know all of you see it too.”

“The track of a ship,” Durell said quietly to McFee. “On a round-the-world cruise.”

“A submarine, Samuel,” McFee said. “Perhaps nuclear-powered.”

“Soviet?”

“We’ll have a private talk later.”

“Not ours, I hope?”

“No, not ours.”

“Has anyone projected a future course?”

“It’s been extrapolated for the Baltic or Arctic Ocean,” McFee said softly. “That’s where it is now.”

“It’s a big area.”

McFee said: “The winter hasn’t ended in northern Scandinavia. The cold has been escalating. From all projections, it doesn’t look as if it’s ever going to end.”

“I haven’t read anything about that.”

“It’s been kept quiet.”

“But that could mean—”

“Doomsday,” McFee said. “Come with me.”

3

THEY sat in a quiet little study in a wing overlooking the courtyard where the cars were parked. The conference continued, lost in speculation and argument and some attempts at denial. McFee seemed to be quite at home in Count Lemogne’s manor, and Durell revised his opinion as to how often the little general left his sanctuary at No. 20 Annapolis Street in Washington. He watched McFee twirl a huge globe that dated back to the seventeenth century. The study was lined with books and furnished with a polished kidney desk, a rich Sarouk carpet over Belgian blocks in the floor, and tall windows against which the rain beat with solemn intensity. Durell started to wonder about the sudden rain, and then reminded himself that the weather in Flanders, subject to North Sea winds, was notoriously changeable. It didn’t have to mean anything.

“Sir,” he began.

“Yes, Samuel?”

“It’s a big operation, right?”

“Bigger than any we’ve had before.”

“Rallying all the forces from all our Centrals in Europe means a complicated web of teams on the job, right?” “You will work on this alone. Or almost alone.” McFee fixed him with a gray stare. “I know you place little reliance on teamwork, Samuel. Or perhaps it’s because you are too sensitive to the loss of members of such teams. You need have no fears. You can only kill yourself on this one.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“No need for irony. It’s quite serious.”

“Where am I going, sir?”

“Scandinavia.”

“That’s big enough.”

“You’ll have a specific target. I’ve spoken to Baron Uccelatti. He’ll take you there, on the Vesper. Ostensibly, a pleasure and yachting cruise to northern waters in the Baltic Sea.”

“Some of that is restricted area. The KGB won’t like it.” McFee tapped his walking stick on the dark red Belgian tiles. “You’ll be working with them, Samuel.”

Durell stood up. “The Russians? Are you making me a pigeon, sir?”

“They asked for you, Samuel.”

“I’ll bet. They’d like to have me. Since when—?” “You can understand,” McFee said quietly, “the gravity of the world situation when I tell you that K Section and the Soviet intelligence organs have had two conferences in Geneva on joint operations to track down this vessel I mentioned.”

“But if it’s not ours and not theirs—”

“We don’t know whose it is.”

“No one else in the world could work this weather control.”

“We don’t know,” McFee said again. “It’s up to you to find out.”

“With a KGB man?”

“You may have to go into Soviet territory.”

“And wind up frozen with the mammoths in Siberia?”

“That remains to be seen.”

“Sir, I respectfully suggest—”

“You arc not permitted to decline this assignment.” Durell sat down again. He wished for a cigarette, but McFee refused permission to smoke in his presence. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. You always had a choice. You were a paid employee, and under certain circumstances, you had the option to quit. No one ever had, but it was there in the fine print of the annual contracts he signed. He felt a quick resentment of McFee’s implication, and quashed it, aware of a fine tremor along all his nerves. McFee had to be under enormous pressure to make such a statement, to give him no alternative.

Not that he seriously considered refusal. He waited quietly in the elaborate room, surrounded by Count Lemogne’s books, with the view of the hop fields turning dull gray in the rain beyond the tall, elegant windows.

He said finally: “What exactly am I supposed to do?” McFee tapped the huge globe that stood next to the desk. His walking stick made Durell even more nervous. “We have to find that weather modification ship. We’re sure it’s a sub. Aerial reconnaissance can’t turn it up. It’s somewhere up there, perhaps in the Arctic, perhaps in the Baltic, just off the coasts of Norway and Finland.”

“What’s the matter with our nuclear sub fleet?”

McFee looked grim. “They are conducting a search, Samuel. They’ll help you. You’ll get a special-frequency radio to call them by, if needed.”

“And do I get a dog team and learn to yell at them in Lappish, or whatever they speak up there?”

“This is not a time for levity, Samuel.”

“Sorry, sir. But I just don’t think—”

“If you would exercise a little more patience, and control that Cajun temperament of yours, you will have enough to think about. As I said, the weather up there has begun to act most unnaturally. Every extrapolation from our computers indicates the presence of an artificial disturbing factor up there. It must be the submarine. It is affecting RSFSR territory as well as the rest of northern Scandinavia. Hence the request, however extraordinary, for cooperation from your opposite numbers at Dzerzhinsky Square.”

“How and where do we get together?”

“It will be arranged in Stockholm, when Baron Uccelatti puts you ashore there. The Vesper will continue to be at your disposal afterward as a cover. The Swedish Intelligence units from their Desk Five will also be at your disposal. One of their people is due here now, at any moment.” McFee looked at his gold watch and turned to contemplate the big world globe. “There are some leads. Some time ago—eight months, to be exact—one of the world’s foremost meteorological experts, and an advanced experimenter in weather modification control, vanished. A man named Professor Peter Gustaffson. An old and aristocratic family, Samuel. His disappearance did not create too much stir, I must confess. We were at fault there.”

“Any data on it?”

McFee sighed. “He was traveling in the Far East at the time. It was believed that he was the victim of petty thugs.”

Durell was sober. “Where did it happen?”

“Professor Gustaffson vanished in Hong Kong.”

“And now you think the Chicoms—?”

“We don’t think anything—yet. Naturally, we have no means of learning what Peiping thinks. But if the Soviets deny all this, to the point of being willing to join forces with us, then it leaves the Chinese as our best possibility, Samuel.”

“It’s hard to believe, sir. They don’t have the techniques—”

McFee said sharply: “We continually underestimate the dragon, Samuel. Simply because in the major portion of our lifetime, China has been asleep, a huge and weakened giant. Today it is awake. You know Chinese history. Expansionist, powerful, enormous, swallowing everything. The cycle has been resumed since Mao Tse-tung took power. Chinese inventiveness and technology were often far ahead of the Western world. It is not too much to believe that, given incentive and resources—such as the brains of Professor Gustaffson—they have evolved this new technique to disrupt the climates of the world.” “And I’m to find Gustaffson. The trail is cold. It’s had eight months to cool off.”

“It is a starting point. Don’t belittle it. You will be given more details later.” Again McFee looked at his watch. “Your Swedish co-agent will be here any moment. You will be more fully briefed then.”

“I’d rather work alone.”

“I told you, you have no choice.” McFee’s smile was thin, gray, and fleeting. “Judging from your past performances, Samuel, you will have no objection to her.”

“Her?”

There was a knock on the door. “Here she is now.” McFee turned. “Come in, please.”

The door opened and Sigrid Bjornson entered. She smiled warmly at Durell.

“Hello, surprised man.”

4

IT WAS still raining, but there was blue sky to the west, beyond the flat fields and canals that stretched to the North Sea. Durell dismissed the gray Mercedes in the Marktgasse of Bruges and walked with Sigrid to one

of the awning-protected cafes that faced the carillon, which promptly began to chime the noon hour with all of its forty-seven bells. The place seemed safe enough, with its swarming tourists and parked tour buses in the big square. Belgian provincial flags flapped or drooped colorfully in the center of the square.

“Time for lunch,” he explained.

“Hungry man, you seem angry with me,” Sigrid murmured.

“You could have told me who you are.”

“But I had to make sure of your identity.”

“And did you, by searching my cabin?”

“Not exactly. But you fitted our dossier we have on you, at Desk Five.”

“I think I’ll join the Swedish Intelligence,” he said. “I didn’t know they had people like you working in it.”

“Then you do like me?”

“I’m still quivering from the cabin episode.”

“You lie so nicely.” She gave him a gamin smile. “Now let us eat and I will explain just what we are to do.” Sigrid was easily the most gorgeous creature Durell had seen in a long time. She wore a gray suit of soft light wool that clung lovingly to her body, hugging every provocative curve. Her high heels brought her proud blonde head almost to the level of Durell’s. She had done her long hair into a braided coronet that gave her a regal look and made every man who passed by turn for a second glance and an envious look at Durell. She carried a large leather shoulder bag that made him wonder just what unpleasant surprises might be in it, however.

He ordered ham and mushroom omelettes and beer for both of them, and she ate in ravenous silence, using up several minutes while he scanned the passersby. Nothing seemed suspicious. The drizzle ended and the sun came out to shine gloriously on the medieval baroque gilt of the Cloth Hall.

“We start, of course,” she began abruptly, “with Professor Peter Gustaffson. Uncle Eric and Uncle Peter—”

“Hold it. Uncle Peter?”

“Yes. ‘Bjornson’ is my code name. My real name is Gustaffson. That is why I am assigned to work on this with you. Uncle Eric and Uncle Peter are my father’s brothers. Neither ever married. Peter is the scientist interested in weather, Eric is a doctor who works up in Lapland and is interested in archaeology.” She paused and grimaced. “Eric is a bit strange.”

“How, strange?”

“He is interested in only old things. In Scandinavian myths, legends, and history. Too much, they say. He would like to turn the clock back and pretend he is a Viking of a thousand years ago. But he is quite harmless, if a little terrifying at times.”

“And where are these uncles of yours?”

“Well, Peter disappeared, as you know. Eric and he lived on the Baltic coast up north. A dismal and not very interesting land in winter. But Eric insists he can best recreate the world of the first millennium there.” “Charming,” Durell said.

“We will go there, to Skelleftsvik, after Stockholm, to learn more about Uncle Peter’s disappearance. They say we must hurry—the weather up north is disastrous, just now. When we get there, you must not be surprised at anything Eric does. He has reconstructed an old Viking home, where he lives, and even has a Viking ship and swords and shields—oh, it is harmless enough, but sometimes a little—barbaric.”

“Does Eric know we’re coming?”

“No.”

“Do you think Peter Gustaffson is still alive?”

Her blue eyes grew sober. “Well, that is the whole thing. No one heard anything from him for months. Then Uncle Eric got a letter from him. It was not postmarked; it was delivered by hand. A man from the far North came down to deliver it, a trapper and fur hunter in Lapland. It was in Peter’s handwriting, and it simply told him— Eric—not to worry about him, that he was safe and well and—busy.”

“ ‘Busy.’ ” Durell met her serious eyes. “Did Peter say with what?”

“No.”

“And how did this trapper get the message?”

“He said he met some men on the ice—they were lost, he thought, and he wanted to help them, but they drove him off. But one of them came after him—it was snowing, and the one who came after him was not seen by the others—and gave him the letter.”

“Was there anything in it besides simple good wishes and ‘I’m-well, wish-you-were-here?’ sort of thing?”

Sigrid said: “It ended with ‘God forgive me.’ ”

Durell was silent.

Then he asked: “Did this trapper say anything more about the others in the party on the ice?”

“Yes.” Sigrid drank her coffee, paused a moment, then looked up at Durell. “He said they were all Chinese.”

They walked back to the Black Swan Inn along the banks of the Minnewater, under the copper beeches reflected in the still surface of the Lake of Love. It was peaceful and sunny now, the air a sudden soft caress perfumed by springtime flowers growing in their beds near the Baguinage. The Minnewater was a calm and reflective ornament for Bruges, a place for swans and willows and the ornate facades of Flemish houses in the distance. Cathedral bells rang softly as the sun sent warm shafts of light through the newly budded leaves of the beech trees.

“My superiors at Desk Five,” Sigrid said suddenly, “are most disturbed. We have our traditional neutrality to maintain, and the balance of our relations with the Soviet Union is always subject to sudden and unpredictable pressures. It was with great reluctance that they assigned me to work with you on this strange matter. . . . Do you believe that?”

“That, and about the weather?”

“Yes. All this sense of impending catastrophe, this brooding feeling that was so contagious among those men at the conference—intelligent, rational men whose judgment is respected everywhere. It seems so—-so unreal.” “The phenomena need to be explained. Was your Uncle Peter so advanced in his research that his brain could be picked to achieve such a thing?”

“He is a genius,” Sigrid replied simply. “And I wonder why you speak of him as if he were dead.”

“Do you think he is, Sigrid? After all, there is the letter you say was received. It could be phony.”

“I don’t know. I cannot think of it as possible—that Peter is dead. We Swedes tend to be too morbid, you know. It would be just too terrible to contemplate, if such a disaster came about.”

He took her arm as they turned toward his inn along the bank of the canal. “Maybe we can uncover something between us to cheer us up,” he grinned.

She nodded abstractedly. “Do we go back to the Vesper now?”

“As soon as I check some things at the inn. McFee ordered some special equipment put there for me—a radio, to be exact. I’ll pick it up, and then we’ll go.”

The narrow street bordering the canal was quiet and empty. The Flemish houses cast placid reflections in the still waters. The lobby with its, hand-carved desk and paneled walls was empty. A smell of cigar smoke lingered briefly in the air, and Durell wondered about it with one part of his mind as he followed Sigrid’s magnificent figure up the dark, heavy staircase to his room. He thought he heard footsteps moving softly somewhere in the back of the rambling, complicated old house, but he wasn’t sure.

Sigrid stood to one side as he put his key into the ornate bronze latch.

The moment the lock clicked, the world dissolved in a blast of red flame and thunderous, explosive noise.

5

SIGRID’S scream echoed through the ringing in Durell’s ears. He picked himself up from the landing. He felt a pain in his chest as if someone had taken a plank and slammed it across his body. He examined himself for blood and wounds, and saw Sigrid rush toward him from the other side of the shattered doorway.

“Are you all right, darling?”

“I think so.”

“What was it? I mean—”

“A bomb. Set for me. Stand back.”

He had escaped the full force of the blast, but every muscle in his body vibrated in reaction. Anger and chagrin mingled in him as he drew his gun and plunged through the smoking, broken doorway. The lovely diamond-paned windows of his room were bulging and shattered. He heard shouts and running feet below, but he ignored them. He’d had nothing in the room, but it had been thoroughly searched. The bomb, powerful as it was, could not have opened the drawers and doors of the heavy wardrobe chest against the plastered wall. He saw the small radio McFee had ordered left for him against contingencies in the North. It was wrapped in plain brown paper, tied with a string. He picked it up gingerly. It was not another boobytrap. Then he went to the window and looked down at the narrow street and the canal beyond.

A man was running away under the trees there. Durell swung abruptly and bumped into Sigrid. “Come along.”

“What is it?”

“Our bomber. Let’s go.”

“Darling, you look awful. Your clothes—”

“I feel awful. Hurry.”

He went down the stairs three at a time. The girl’s heels clattered behind him. The fat Flemish host of the Black Swan Inn, wearing a cook’s apron, barred his way with waving hands and a spate of excited questions. Durell shoved him aside and plunged outdoors with Sigrid. Anger roweled him, spurred him to more speed.

His chest ached and his left arm tingled. The street in front of the inn was empty except for some cars parked diagonally on the brick sidewalk. He ran along the front of the inn and charged down a narrow slot to the canal. By the time he turned the corner, however, the man who had been running away was gone.

He did not check his speed. He had not seen the man’s face, and had only a vague impression of a stout body and dumpy legs in a brown sack suit. He ran under a row of copper beech trees, dodged the parked cars, and came to the next street. A flicker of brown caught his eye. But the blank wall of a church made a dead end here. Durell glimpsed a white, strained face, open-mouthed, turned his way. Then the man darted to the left, down a small alley. Durell followed. Sigrid’s sharp, clattering heels were close behind him.

The bell of a police car clanged near the inn. Shadows flickered in the alley. Puffy white clouds sailed in the serene blue sky. Another canal, another bridge, showed at the end of the alley. The running man in the brown sack suit was almost to the bridge when Durell fired. He heard an echo to his shot as Sigrid, who had somehow managed to get a gun from her black shoulder bag, shot at the fugitive, too.

He never knew which bullet found its mark.

The man suddenly lifted on his toes like a ballet dancer, his face a pale moon of astonishment. Durell had aimed high, as a warning, in case he had mistaken his quarry.

But the fugitive suddenly spun toward the bridge rail and reached for it as if to clamber up on it. His hand went to his mouth and he chewed violently, his face convulsed. Then he grabbed his throat. He was choking to death when Durell caught up with him.

“Who is he?” Sigrid panted.

Durell had never seen him before. The man drew up his knees in a foetal position, shaking and jerking. He had taken a poison pill that worked with implacable speed. His eyes rolled and his lips were skinned back to bare all his teeth. He was about forty, bald, and he could have passed for any stolid citizen of Flanders.

“He’s dead,” Sigrid whispered.

Durell checked the bullet wound. It was high in the shoulder, hardly mortal. It was rare, he thought, for an agent to actually follow orders to the point of choosing suicide instead of capture. A remorseless terror of reprisal had to be built up for this to take place. He felt angry and frustrated.

“Watch the streets,” he told Sigrid.

The canal nearby gleamed peacefully in the warm sunlight. Swans floated under the bridge. The voices of a choir lifted dimly in the air from a nearby convent.

The face was meaningless, anonymous. Durell, whose memory was capable of almost total recall, could not place it in the files he often pored over in K Section’s archives. He searched the dead man’s pockets. They were empty. The labels were from the Bon Marche, Brussels’ big department store. The suit was new, but it was probably a cash sale and impossible to trace.

“Let’s get out of here,” he told the girl.

“Do we just—just leave him here?”

“He wouldn’t be an ornament aboard the Vesper.”

The yacht was moored off the pleasure beaches at Ostend, and the guests were taking advantage of the warm sunshine to swim and sun themselves on the polished teak deck. Durell had checked out the tiny radio transmitter McFee had left for him. It was the size of a pack of cigarettes, operating on only one microwave frequency. He wondered when he might have to use it to summon an American nuclear submarine to the Arctic wastes.

Up on deck, Sigrid had donned her bikini again and sprawled like something out of a Viking saga near the bow. A radio played American jazz, and some guests were dancing while others splashed about the float that the crew had obligingly lowered for them. There was a general blanket of laughter, music, and amorous murmurings as Durell made his way forward toward the Swedish girl.

“Sir? Mr. Durell?”

It was the new captain, Olaf Jannsen. He touched his white cap respectfully.

“What is it, Olaf?”

“I just wondered, sir, if you and Miss Gustaffson were leaving with the others. Baron Uccelatti has ordered a float plane to take those who wish to go over to London. You can be flown anywhere you like, compliments of the Baron, sir, if you do not wish to proceed with the cruise.”

Durell looked at the dark-haired giant. Olaf had a Swedish accent, despite his jet-black hair. He was a handsome man, not more than thirty, with a weathered seaman’s face and a web of lines at the corners of his pale

brown eyes. His face was brutal, despite the courteous smile. Although Jannsen spoke to him, his brown eyes flicked twice to the remarkable figure of Sigrid sunning herself nearby.

“We’re staying aboard, Olaf.”

“You and Miss Gustaffson? But I thought—”

“What is it? You seem disappointed.”

“No, sir, not at all. I merely understood that all the guests would leave tonight.”

“Well, we’re going on to Stockholm with the Baron.” Something flickered behind the hard lines of Jannsen’s face, then was erased by an expression of bland service. Durell walked on to join Sigrid.

“He’s so handsome,” Sigrid sighed.

“Olaf can’t keep his eyes off you.”

“A Black Viking. Most unusual.”

“Hardly black.”

“I meant his hair. His eyes. Uncle Eric—the one who does so much research on the sagas and the edda of our people—ran across several old runes that referred to a Black Viking. An outcast, doomed to sail the seas forever —Uncle Eric takes such tales seriously. Once, when I was a little girl, he read the poem to me, in the old tongue. It was frightening, to sit there by the great fire, with all those old helmets and shields shining on the stone walls, and hear him recite the tale. I wonder if Olaf is he?”

“What happened to the man in the poem?”

“After many cycles of years, the Black Viking returned to the Northland and, in revenge for his exile, he destroyed everything with fire and sword, then vanished into the ice.” Sigrid spoke soberly. “Then the winter came and lasted forever after.”

“Prophetic, do you think?”

“Strangely coincidental. Are you thinking as I do, thoughtful man?”

“I’m wondering how someone knew I checked into the Black Swan after I left the boat this morning.”

“You were followed, foolish man.”

“Yes. And by someone from the Vesper.”

She rolled over on her hip. Her dark lashes veiled her blue, innocent eyes. “And who could it be?”

“You, perhaps.”

“Yes, I already knew of your meeting. But you’re wrong, darling, and that is the truth.”

“Then Captain Jannsen, your Black Viking, is the next best candidate.”

“Why? Are you jealous because you know I find him fascinating? Truly, he may be a living Norse legend. But then, this makes him more interesting, since we Swedes are morbid and attracted to doom and death.”

“It was an expert job of tailing. You’re capable of it, Sigrid. But I like Jannsen for the job.”

“Why?”

“He came aboard only when the former captain failed to return from Brighton two days ago, when we anchored there. Valetti reported sick, but no one saw him again, did they? Then Jannsen showed up so conveniently to take his place.”

“I like the way you think, darling. You have such a nasty, suspicious mind.”

“You live longer that way.”

She moved her leg and her toes caressed him and her smile was a secret behind her thick pale hair. “But danger can sometimes be most attractive.”

“Yes, when you keep your eyes open.” He stood up. “I think I’ll fly to London tonight. I’ll be back in the morning, before we sail for Stockholm.”

“May I go with you?”

“It would be nice, but too distracting.”

“Buy me something in London, dearest man?”

“Of course. What is it?”

“Some foul-weather gear. I think we’ll need it.”

6

BARON UCCELATTI said: “I am desolate, Sam. Everyone leaves us, except you and Miss Gustaffson. If it were anyone else, I would refuse to sail my Vesper into the Baltic. But you say your business requires the cruise, and since I owe you much for past favors, it is little enough that I can do.”

“It will be dangerous, you understand.”

“And most lonely, without all our young ladies. Such a bore. Danger may be welcome.”

Uccelatti had the fine outward graces of Palermitan nobility. Not long ago, Durell had helped to save his position as second-in-command of the Fratelli della Notte in Sicily. In some circles, Uccelatti might be regarded as the ultimate refinement of a modern criminal—a gracious, cosmopolitan façade hiding connections with dubious international “business” cartels that sheltered the gains from syndicate operations. Behind this façade, Uccelatti had a quick and deadly mind. His background did not trouble Durell. In his business, you used the tools at hand, and Uccelatti was like a fine stiletto. Their respect for each other was mutual. The Baron had even helped save his life on a recent assignment that took Durell to Sicily, and their friendship overcame their separate backgrounds.

“Poor Pietro Valetti,” the Baron said quietly. “You truly think something serious has happened to him?” “Yes, if Captain Jannsen, who took his place, is the ringer I’m looking for.”

“But I had a telephone call from Valetti himself. I sensed nothing out of the ordinary. He was ill, he had virus pneumonia, he said—”

“I’ll check it out.”

“The Witherton Circle Hospital, he told me. But I hope you are wrong, Sam.”

“I don’t,” Durell said. “I like to know the face of my enemies.”

Durell was picked up at London Airport by Tony Drum, from London Control, in a Jaguar that seemed a bit ostentatious. It was a fine night. The stars shone, and the moon was a benign silver disk in the quiet sky. It occurred to him that he was getting too weather-conscious.

“I could have done this for you by telephone, Cajun,” Drum said. He was a tidy young man with fastidious manners. “It seems a fairly routine check-out. But we’re rather shorthanded. Everyone is off, including the Chief, to somewhere on the Continent.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Are you in on it, too?”

“You ask a lot of questions, Tony.”

“Oh. Sorry. Right-o.”

There was no record of a patient named Valetti suffering from pneumonia at the Witherton Circle Hospital. No one answering the Sicilian’s description was there.

“What now?” Tony Drum asked.

“We find him.”

“Coo. Rather a job, in all of merry England.”

“Not too hard. Let’s go to Brighton.”

“Right now?”

“If it doesn’t strain your Jaguar too much.”

Three hours later, he found Valetti.

It was in the Brighton morgue.

The constable in charge accepted Tony Drum’s credentials and took them, yawning, to view the body. It was past three o’clock in the morning. Valetti had been a swarthy, stocky man, devoted to Uccelatti almost all his life. There was surprise stamped on his dark, dead face. “Where did you find him, Constable?” Durell asked. “On the beach, sir, under the pier, by some young people—cyclists, they were, having themselves a bash in the dark. Another hour, and the tide would have washed him away. A simple robbery and mugging, we think.” The constable sighed. “Usual blunt instrument did it. Do you want to talk to the youngsters who found him?”

“No. I’ve got enough. No idea who did it?”

“Not yet, sir. We’re working on it.”

“Good. Keep at it,” Durell said.

The constable covered the dead man’s face again.

The Vesper seemed lonely and empty when he returned across the Channel, two hours after dawn. The Riviera-type guests had all left, some resentful, others chagrined. The schooner was ready to sail. Uccelatti’s crew were all tough seamen, devoted to the Baron, members of the Fratelli della Notte. If they resented Captain Jannsen’s curt commands, they gave no sign of it. They obeyed orders and kept their silence.

Durell’s eyes were scratchy from lack of sleep as he told Uccelatti what he had discovered. Sigrid joined them in the Baron’s cabin, yawning behind pink fingers, looking flushed and rosy from her night’s rest.

“So you were right.” Uccelatti was shocked and angry. “Jannsen killed my captain to create a vacant post aboard that he could fill. What do you want done with him?” “Nothing,” Durell said sharply. “We keep Olaf with us.”

“But that could be most dangerous.”

“We know who Olaf is,” Durell explained. “But we don’t know the people he works for. Being warned about him, we’re one up on him. All we need do is keep a weather eye on him and see where he leads us.”

“You cannot tell me about your mission, Sam?”

“Not yet. Maybe never. But you’ll know all that’s needed, when the time conies.”

“I trust you, and that is enough. But it is difficult for me to leave Jannsen unpunished.”

“He won’t be,” Durell promised grimly. “You can count on that.”

VISBY

THE island of Gotland is in the Baltic Sea off the southeast shores of Sweden. The county of Gotland comprises the main islands of Gotland, Faro, Kailso, Sando and others, consisting of a few hills, steep coasts, and limestone plateaus. Principal industries are cement-making, sugar-refining, and tourism.

Vishy is the county seat, an important port and a popular resort. Ancient remains indicate that Visby was populated since the Stone Age, and was a significant pagan religious center, and then became one of the chief towns of the Hanseatic League. Roman, Arabic, and Anglo-Saxon evidence still remains to indicate its importance.

After conquest by the Swedish king Magnus Ladulas, and devastation by the Danes in 1362, Visby became a pirate stronghold that terrorized the Baltic for two centuries.

Visby is the only town in northern Europe still completely circled by its medieval walls.

There are strong indications that in the years 600 b.c. to 300 b.c., Gotland was almost depopulated by a period of extreme and intense cold.

7

“TERRIBLE man,” said Sigrid.

“Hmmm?”

“You work so hard.”

“Hmm.”

“Look at me, Sam.”

“I’m busy.”

“Is it so important, darling?”

“You should know.”

“Are those your orders?”

“They will be, when I decode it.”

“How many radio messages did you receive?”

“Just this one. It’s enough.”

“What does it say?”

“You should know,” he said again. He looked up. “You’ve got the radio man wrapped around your pinkie.” She giggled. “I just asked about the weather.”

“I know.”

“It’s going to be bad, isn’t it?”

“Worse than you can guess.”

“I can feel it already, darling.”

“Are you a good sailor?”

Sigrid was annoyed. “I am a daughter of Vikings. What did you tell Uccelatti?”

“None of your business.”

“Irritating man, are we not partners?”

“That remains to be seen.”

The Vesper groaned and plunged her sleek spoon bow into the cold Baltic seas. The wind keened bitterly in her stays; her elastic timbers creaked and worked in the violence. Yesterday they had traversed the Skagerrak and Kattegat around Denmark, made the passage through Hanobuktern and then set a course northeast-by-north for Gotland. From the moment the schooner entered the Baltic Sea, everything changed.

Durell finished decoding McFee’s radio instructions and stared at the five lines for a minute or two, committing them to memory, then struck a match and burned the yellow paper in the ashtray. The smoke was acrid in the close, chilled air of his cabin. When there was nothing but ashes left, he took a pencil and crushed them into black powder and then opened the porthole and let the bickering wind snatch what was left into the darkly blowing air. Spray dashed in his face, and he slammed the porthole shut. It was as if an intangible creature of black wind and shivering ice had momentarily struggled into his cabin. “It’s very unnatural,” Sigrid said.

“That’s why we’re here.”

She sat on his bunk, long legs curled under her rounded hip. She wore ski pants that were skin-tight and a heavy knitted sweater of pink, blue, and white wool. Her pale hair was skinned tightly back from her oval face, and knotted in a sleek bun at the nape of her neck. It made her look oddly vulnerable, but he didn’t think she was. “Are you angry with me, darling?” she asked.

“No.”

“But you don’t trust me!”

“No.”

“I have shown you my credentials. Desk Five, SIS, Stockholm, No. 456. You checked it out yourself.”

“It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

She was angry. “If you do not trust me, Sam, how can we work together?”

“We’ll see how things break.”

“Hateful man. I know we are going to Visby.”

“I know you know.”

“Why do we stop there?”

“I’m sure you’ll find out.”

The Vesper suddenly shuddered as a violent sea took her amidships. Durell looked at his watch. It was only mid-afternoon, but the sky was dark and they had not seen the sun all day.

The deck fell away erratically under his feet. Rain thundered as if released from a waterfall, savage and incessant. It had rained like that since he awoke that morning, with a primitive force he’d never seen before. Coupled with the rain was the wind, blowing directly from ahead. It was a breath from the Arctic ice cap, and now and then ice pellets rattled on the teak deck of the Vesper. The Sicilian crew grumbled all day about the cold. But they were good men, peculiarly fitted to Uccelatti’s needs.

His thoughts touched on the Palermitan Baron. Quietly and with no publicity, Uccelatti was one of Europe’s wealthiest men. The fact that his business interests merely covered the disposition of spoils accumulated by the Sicilian underground fraternity was an item filed securely away in K Section’s dossier files at No. 20 Annapolis Street in Washington. Under his suave facade, Ugo Uccelatti was a man of dark steel, with command over a thousand members of the underground organization he ran. His criminal activities were of little concern either to Durell or General McFee. In Durell’s business, you often found yourself bunked in with strange bedfellows.

In some matters, he would not trust Ugo; but in this he knew that the Baron would be at his complete disposal without questions or interference. It would have been simpler, of course, to fly directly to Stockholm and take the ferry plane run by LIN to Visby. But McFee had ordered him to use the Vesper, and now that he’d received more detailed instructions by radio, he knew why.

“Sam, darling?”

Again Sigrid broke into his thoughts. She stood up from the bunk, worrying a corner of her ripe mouth with her strong, white teeth. “Sam, is this weather a part of it all?”

“I should think so.”

“It’s never been like this here, at this time of the year. It makes me feel creepy. And scared.”

“Me, too,” he said.

“I do not think anything ever frightens you, Sam.” “Some things do. You do.”

“Are you finished with the code?”

“Yes.”

“What kind do you people use?”

“It’s a forty-two group phase that changes with the calendar.”

“Committed to memory?”

“Long ago.”

“Then it’s an old code?”

“Standard. But quite secure. Changes with the date.” “When did you last get refresher training, darling?”

He looked up at her. “You’re very inquisitive, Sigrid. And you shouldn’t be. Even if we’re to work together, our departments are different and—”

Something had happened to the Vesper’s engine.

The, powerful diesel had sent regular, assured thuds through the laboring vessel all day, assisted only by a storm trysail rigged at dawn by the black-haired Olaf. The pulse of the engine was something you took for granted, like the beat of your own heart. But now it faltered, almost died, picked up, faltered again—and stopped. Sigrid’s face drained of color. “What happened?”

“Are you really a good sailor?”

“Yes, but—”

“Go up on deck and give them a hand. Hurry!”

She obeyed in the crisis without question, for which he was grateful. He plunged for the cabin door ahead of her, aware of angry shouts from the engine room in Sicilian dialect. Footsteps ran on deck. A man screamed. The shrill sound was cut off by the sudden thunder of a giant sea breaking over the schooner. The Vesper, helpless without her engine, heeled far over and lay shuddering, broadside to the wind.

Sigrid vanished up the ladder to the deck. When she opened the hatch, salt water gushed down into the cabin corridor on Durell. He shoved away from a leaning bulkhead and ran for the engine room.

Ugo Uccelatti was in the corridor. The Baron looked pale under his smooth olive skin. “There is a block in the fuel line,” he said. “My men are already working on it. Have you been on deck lately?”

“No. We’re only minutes from rendezvous, you know.” “My dear Sam.” Sweat shone on Uccelatti’s handsome face. “I do not question what you do. I have put myself and my people and my vessel at your disposal. But this is madness. A rendezvous now is impossible.”

“Those are my order, Ugo.”

“So I understand. I know what it is, to obey blindly. But it is folly now, and the Russians—”

“I’ll need two good men when I go ashore,” Durell broke in.

“If you get ashore. If any of us gets ashore.”

“You are free to withdraw, baróne, at the first opportunity. You have been more than kind already.”

“No, no. You are too quick in temper. I only mean I fail to see the possibility of success in this rendezvous.” “You’re probably right. Can I have two men?”

“I shall choose them for you myself.”

“Good. Let’s look at the engine.”

The diesel plant that powered the Vesper was dark and bulky in the neat engine room. Emergency lights glowed in the bulkhead above the dead engine. Three of the Vesper’s tough Sicilian crewmen were hunched over the silent machinery, working with wrenches at a swift, efficient pace. Durell watched them for a moment. His features were impassive.

“An accident?” he asked quietly.

One of the engineers looked up. He was only a boy, not yet twenty, with a quick, dark face and alert, almond eyes the color of onyx. The face was round and babyish; the eyes were those of a disillusioned old man.

“No, dad. It was grunched.” The boy grinned. “But we’ll have the line clean in ten minutes.”

“Make it five. Ten minutes is too much.”

“Miracles don’t happen up here, dad. Only in dear old Sicily.”

Durell stared at the boy. His mouth was shaped in an insolent grin as he wiped his hand on a fistful of waste cotton. “You’re American?” Durell asked.

“I’m Ginelli’s son.”

“Is that supposed to mean anything?”

“You don’t read the headlines, do you, dad?”

“Watch your mouth,” Durell said. “Or I’ll shut it for you.”

“I take orders from the baróne, not from you.” Uccelatti spoke sharply. “You take orders from Signor Durell. You are not polite, Gino.”

The boy subsided, but his words were caustic. “A thousand pardons, baróne.”

“I’ll take him with me,” Durell decided. “Pick another man to come along, Ugo.”

“But Signor Sam, this Gino is the son of Joseph Ginelli. You must have heard of him. The vice-lord of Chicago. He was sentenced to life imprisonment last year. We took the boy home with us.” Home was Sicily to Uccelatti, of course. “He is not a good boy. He is with us to learn discipline, from me and his uncle.”

“Is his uncle aboard?”

“Yes, naturally. Damone.”

“I’ll take the uncle, then, with the boy.”

Gino’s eyes were big and dark. “Where are we going?” “To learn a few things. Are you sure the fuel line wasn’t plugged accidentally, Gino?”

The boy extended a greasy hand. “Sand in the oil. From a fire bucket. It didn’t just fall in, dad.”

Durell turned and left the engine room. Ugo followed at his heels. The Baron said, “It must be Olaf. I told you it was dangerous to leave him aboard as captain, after what you discovered about him.”

“He may have outsmarted himself,” Durell said. He checked his watch. “It’s time for me to go on deck. They’ll be looking for me.”

“If they are here.”

“They’ll be here,” Durell said. “The KGB wouldn’t miss an appointment with me.”

8

THE wind blew harder. It had a cold bite, as if from the fangs of hell. The driving rain blinded him when he stepped out on deck. He could see nothing for a moment. Except for the cold, he might have been in one of those sudden spring storms that swept the Gulf when he had sailed as a boy. The seas were enormous, slate-green, capped with foam as if from the mouth of a ravening beast.

A heavy trysail had been rigged to keep the Vesper into the wind. Without her engine, however, she drifted inexorably toward a high, storm-raddled shore, just visible to the east. Durell stared at the land for a long moment. Curtains of rain, driven almost horizontal by the wind, obscured the view. The sea broke over the bow and ran hissing over his feet and ankles and spilled over the starboard rail. There were two figures aft, at the wheel. One was Sigrid. She had lost her oilskin cap, and her long pale hair streamed wildly in the gusts. She looked elated, even enraptured, as she fought the storm, an elemental pose to her body that took her back a thousand years to pagan Viking ancestors. Beside her, big and even more primitive, was Olaf Jannsen, the new skipper. They both stood in the luxurious, but sea-soaked, cockpit. Sigrid shouted something to the black-haired man, but the wind snatched away her words. Their closeness as they fought the wheel together made Durell feel uneasy.

Then a ship’s horn blared wildly from somewhere forward. Durell moved to the bow, trying to pierce the murk over the sea. The flying spray made it difficult to know where water and sky merged. The horn blared again. He looked at his watch. They were right on time.

He could not see the other boat for a moment. The stinging rain drenched him to the skin. He bent his knees and clung to a stay to give his body spring that matched the lurching of the Vesper. A long comber smoked out of the north, gray-green, foam-flecked, the cap torn to shreds by the wind. The schooner lifted, shuddering. The storm sail flapped with a sound like a cannon shot. Then Durell saw the other vessel at last.

She was a trawler, flying no flag, with a sleek cutter bow and a mass of radar equipment sprouting like mathematical twigs from her mast. A small knot of men lined her rail. The drag booms had been secured and the trawler smashed heavily through the sea, impervious to the storm’s violence. They were headed on a collision course.

Durell glanced again at the nearby land. That would be Visby, he guessed, that former home of rapacious pirates. But there was another sort of pirate abroad on the seas today.

Spray stung his eyes again. The trawler’s horn boomed again, across the bridge of wind. A great mechanical voice rasped a question. He could not understand the words. The voice held notes of query, alarm, and anger.

He turned abruptly and shouted astern.

“Sheer off!”

The two figures at the wheel were locked in struggle. Olaf raised a massive hand and Sigrid went down out of sight. The Vesper maintained her collision course. Durell cursed the folly of the men who sat at warm, snug desks and ordered this. Fear clutched at his belly. Sigrid scrambled up and plunged at the giant Olaf again. He gave her a casual swipe of his big arm and she went down again.

There was no time to watch further. A blast of wind swung the Vesper’s bow and she plunged sickeningly. Durell’s fingers slipped on the wet steel stay. His flesh was cut by the wire, but there was no pain. Then another giant sea lifted high above his head and, rising on it, inexorably bearing down upon them, was the gray trawler. The next moment he felt as if his body were broken in two by the smashing force of the sea that fell upon him.

The world became a dark, furious tumble of surging water that carried him helplessly from the bow. He lost all sense of orientation for a moment. Something slammed across his back. He seized the lashed boom that had checked his slide across the deck. The water pushed and pulled at him and drained away. He looked for the trawler.

Its monstrous voice, raucous with alarm, shouted through the wind and rain.

“Durell!”

His name blared on the wind, amplified and distorted. He wiped rain from his face and strained to see the men on the other vessel. The two boats were only yards apart now. They were waving, their slickered arms moving in semaphoric signals. Another sea lifted the Vesper and made her slide away, and Durell turned to shout at Olaf.

Sigrid had risen from the cockpit where she had fallen moments ago. She held something wet and black in her hand. Her long hair streamed in the dark wind. Olaf swung the wheel and turned the Vesper again toward the trawler, as if to crash the fisherman, and Sigrid swung the bar of iron she held and brought it down on the giant’s head. Durell ran, sliding through the water pouring over the deck. He knew he would be too late, but he had to try. Olaf fell back, arms outflung, fingers crooked as if to grab support from the wind. A sea broke over the stern and swallowed him. He was erased from sight as Durell tumbled into the cockpit.

“Sigrid, what—!”

She stood with feet apart, riding the wild motion of the schooner. Her wet face was turned to the rail. Her blue eyes were wild, feral, her nostrils flaring with a strange lust.

Olaf had gone over the side.

“Do you see him?” she whimpered.

“He’s gone.”

“No, no, he must still be alive.”

“Not in that sea.”

“He will swim ashore. He is the Black Viking, and the sea is his home—”

“Sigrid, stop that nonsense.”

“He must be alive!” she shrieked. “I didn’t want to kill him!”

Durell snatched the marlin spike from her hand. She stood as if of stone, her eyes blind, staring at the tumult of the sea. He pulled her back into the safety of the cockpit as another comber broke over them. The schooner sank laboriously under the weight of dark green water. Durell grabbed desperately at the wheel. The trawler was alongside. There came a grating, splintering sound. He heard his name again, bellowing from the other’s mechanical speaker. Through the rain he saw the face of the man who called to him.

He knew the face.

Then a gust of rain erased it. The trawler’s bow turned and its great steel shape surged off into the gloom. A single searchlight played on him as he stood in the cockpit. Then it spanned the foaming seas between the two vessels. Durell thought he saw Olaf Jannsen’s arm lift from the wild waves. But he knew he had to be mistaken. No man could stay afloat in that enraged element.

The trawler vanished.

“Sam, help me . . .”

He did not look at the girl for another moment. The face he had seen aboard the trawler haunted him. Finally he turned to Sigrid. She had fallen on a splintered piece of rail that the storm had flung into the cockpit. Her face was white with pain, and her mouth was shaped in a meaningless smile.

“It—it is too silly—”

“What happened to you?”

“I had to do it. He was going to kill me.”

“Olaf is no loss. He tried to crash us.”

“Sam, help me up. The splinters—”

He took her wet hand. The schooner rolled in the wind. He could not see the trawler now, but the lights on the island shore were nearer in the evening gloom. Some men came tumbling up from the hatch and he felt the deck vibrate suddenly as the engine started again. The first to reach him was the boy, Gino, whose eyes were still insolent.

“You having trouble, dad?”

“Take the wheel,” Durell said shortly. “We’re going in.” “Man, like everything is a mess up here.” The youngster surveyed the deck’s wreckage with awe. “How’s the lady?”

“Shut your mouth and take the wheel.”

Sigrid whimpered with pain when he helped her up. “Where does it hurt?” Durell asked.

“Where do you think the splinters are?”

He managed a crooked grin. “I’m good at taking out splinters.”

Her eyes were resentful as he made her strip off her wet clothes in his cabin. The schooner moved easier now, under power, in the lee of a small promontory of Gotland Island. As if satisfied with the damage, the storm suddenly lessened, but the rain continued to thunder down. It was almost dark. The only light in the cabin was the small lamp over his bunk, gleaming on the girl’s golden body as she lay there on her stomach.

“This is going to hurt,” he said.

She was angry. “Funny man.”

“I apologize. I didn’t mean to set you down on a mess of splinters.”

Her firm buttocks quivered as he applied antiseptic from a medical kit to her dozen wounds. “Hold still.” She turned her face away, buried it in the crook of her arm. “I am so humiliated.”

“It’s better than being in the sea with Olaf.”

She shuddered. “I did not mean to kill him. He slipped on the wet dock. He was trying to wreck us—”

“Yes. I know. Is he the first man you ever killed in your job, Sigrid?”

She did not reply.

“Sigrid, answer me.”

“What I have done is my business. But Olaf—”

“Just what did he mean to you?”

“Nothing. He was a stranger.”

“Are you sure?”

“He tried to wreck us, did he not? Why did he do that?”

“If we knew the answer, we’d know a lot more than we know now. Hold still again.” He plucked out one of the splinters with tweezers and she whimpered, wriggled, and settled down again. He wished he could see her face. He had the feeling that the noises she made were at variance with a small secret smile she hid in her arm. He pulled out a second splinter. “You haven’t told me all you know about the late Olaf Jannsen, sweetheart.”

“And you didn’t tell me about that Russian trawler. It was Russian, was it not?”

“Yes.”

“You were to meet someone aboard her?”

“Yes.”

“What will you do now?”

“Make other arrangements. You have a nasty one right here.” He touched her, and she wriggled again. He wondered if she were being deliberately provocative. “Did you see the man who called my name?”

“No, Sam.”

“He’s called the Muzhik, in our files. He’s the best assassin the KGB has in their list of bully boys.”

“Are you supposed to work with him?”

“Those are my orders.”

“Oh, Sam, I don’t like this. I’m frightened.”

“You’ll be all right.”

“No, I mean—the storm, and everything. It’s all so unnatural.” She shivered. “There’s so little we can do.”

“We haven’t begun yet. Hold still, please.”

“Must you take so long?”

“Three more to go. Who did Olaf really work for, Sigrid? He’s dead now. You can tell me, can’t you? Was it Russian counterespionage?”

“I don’t know. Honestly.”

“Or did he take orders from Peking?”

“I don’t know, Sam! He’s dead. Drowned. He couldn’t possibly swim ashore to Visby, could he?” She seemed obsessed by the idea.

“You and I,” he said, “must work with these Russians. I’d hoped for answers from Olaf. I thought we had time. It’s too bad he’s gone now.”

“He was the Black Viking,” she whispered. “He just isn’t dead. I know.”

Durell changed the subject. “Sigrid, tell me about your Uncle Peter, the meteorologist. Did you know him well? See him often?”

“Often enough. He’s a strange man. Always at his experiments. He started with silver-iodide crystals, to seed clouds to make rain. He talked about rain in the Gobi Desert, the Sahara, the Negev. He said he could feed all the starving peoples of the world.”

“How successful was he?”

“He made it rain,” she said flatly.

“But silver-iodide is a hit-or-miss method.”

“He found another chemical. And he used rockets instead of seeding by airplane.”

“Did he make public announcements of his discoveries?”

“No, he was never satisfied. He became very secretive, and talked of saving the world. He often lectured me on my duties as a citizen of the world.”

“Sigrid, did he defect to Russia, or China?”

“Not Russia. He hated the Russians.”

“Peking, then?”

“Inquisitive man! How could he do that? I don’t really want to talk about my uncle.”

“He’s the key. And he’s vanished.”

“I don’t know how it happened. I wasn’t there. He— he just disappeared.”

“Weren’t you even curious about it? After all, he’s your father’s brother.” When she was silent, he said, “What about your father, anyway? Where is he? What does he do?”

She said nothing.

“Answer me, Sigrid.”

She said angrily: “My father is dead. How long will you be with those splinters? I’m so cold!”

“Then there were just your two uncles up there? Peter and Eric?”

“Yes. Please hurry.”

“We’ll have to pick up some thread, find out what really happened, learn if Professor Peter really has done all these things to the world’s weather.”

“Peter is a gentle man. He wouldn’t make these storms!” she snapped.

“Perhaps not willingly. He may be working under duress.”

He took out the last splinter, applied antiseptic, and shaped small, neat bandages over the girl’s firm muscles. Her injuries were more to the spirit than to the flesh. He slapped her casually and stood up, his eyes dark with thoughts that had nothing to do with the girl. She rolled over on her hip and drew up a blanket to cover her nakedness.

“Sam, darling, I really am frightened. If men can create this storm and change the weather all over the world—what will happen to us all?”

Her deep dismay seemed genuine enough. He did not want to admit his own disquiet. Perhaps the storm was a coincidence. Perhaps. It might not have anything to do with the theories of those troubled men in Bruges. No sane man would tamper with the world’s weather like this. The threat loomed greater than the nuclear cloud that lowered in the minds of all men. There had to be a rational explanation for what he had seen and heard back in Flanders.

On the other hand, he might not be dealing with anything sane. It was too early to tell. He held only a few threads in his grip, and he did not know where they might lead. To speculate on it now was a waste of time and energy.

The rain had eased. There was a normal drizzle on the deck overhead. He took dry clothes from his locker and dressed, aware of the girl’s big eyes watching him.

“Are you really going ashore now?” she asked.

“For an hour or two.”

“But what has Visby to do with our job?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”

She was annoyed. “You are supposed to tell me what you are doing. Will you be meeting this man—this one you called the Muzhik?”

The girl looked at him. He could not tell what went on behind her blue eyes. She looked like a child, with her damp hair in delicate tendrils about her face. When he had finished dressing, she said: “Take me with you, Sam.”

“No.”

“But are we not partners?”

“I wish I knew,” he said.

“Impossible man!” she snapped.

He went out.

9

A LINJEFLYG plane from Stockholm flew low overhead, shaking the night air. Its lights blinked briefly through the thick overcast that followed the storm. A white fog had rolled in from the Baltic, and felt colder than the wind that had blown earlier. The early evening of this northern latitude still clung to a lingering, pearly daylight that glowed through the blowing mists.

The walled town of Visby, pearl of Gotland, showed its crown of towers and battlements as Durell came on deck. Fishing boats were tucked neatly into the harbor. He searched for the gray trawler, but did not see it and didn’t expect to. One of the car-ferries from Vastervik was nosing from its berth. Normally, it would be crowded with Swedish and Danish tourists at this time of year. But nothing was normal now. The town huddled in upon itself, silent and resentful of the unseasonable weather. Once it had been a proud, cruel place of bloody war and greedy trade. Now it depended on cement factories and tourists for economic health. The bathing beaches, with their bizarre rock formations, the steep cliffs, the pagan graves that attracted the sightseers were all but deserted.

“Signor Durell, these are the two men you asked for. Gino, and his uncle, Mario Ginelli.” Uccelatti’s voice was troubled. “I have given them arms, as you requested. But if you expect difficulties—”

“No more than usual. Thank you, baróne.”

He nodded to the youth, Gino, whose defiant eyes hid the pain of his background and his father’s imprisonment in Chicago. The uncle was a squat, thick-shouldered peasant from Sicily’s mountains, quiet, patient, dangerous. He shook hands with the older man, noting Mario’s gray hair and seamed, olive face, the hard calluses on his hand.

“Everyone else stays aboard, baróne. I hope to be back in two hours.”

Uccelatti was sober. “And if not?”

“Then your part of the job is done, and you can sail back to sunny Italy.”

“You would not wish us to look for you?”

“It wouldn’t be of much use.”

All over the Vesper’s deck, the Baron’s crew was busy repairing the storm’s damage. The port officials of Visby had paid a brief, perfunctory visit, coming and going in only minutes. Two Volvo taxis waited, idling on the dock nearby.

Durell went ashore with the two Sicilians. Mario was accustomed to silent obedience, and he ruled the rebellious nephew with an iron hand. The first taxi-driver started his engine as they approached. Church bells from Visby’s spires tolled mournfully through the fog. The dim headlights of the taxi made rainbow aureoles in the mist. “Mr. Durell?”

“Yes. Did Olsen send you?”

“I have wait an hour. Please to get in.”

“What do we do, dad?” Gino asked. He had a full red mouth and curly black hair, and would have been considered pretty, except for his dangerous eyes. He had the build of a fine welterweight. “Do we just tag along? We don’t speak the lingo, and Uncle Mario and me don’t exactly like it up here, anyway.”

“Be still, boy,” Mario rumbled. “The man will tell you what he desires of us. But it is true, we do not speak the language, Signor Durell.”

“Just use the other taxi and follow me.”

“You gave us guns,” Mario said. His peasant’s eyes were cruel and inscrutable. “If you have enemies here, they are our enemies, too. The baróne has so ordered it.”

“Cops and robbers,” the boy sneered.

Without warning, the older man hit him backhanded, a sound like an axe striking a slab of beef. Gino sprawled wildly on the dock and came up like a cat, wiping blood from his mouth. His breath hissed. “Uncle Mario, my father wouldn’t like the way you treat me.”

“Your father, who is my brother, was a fool and a criminal. He is in jail. One can be brave as a bandit, but one does not make money from women and drugs. Your father was worse than a fool.”

“Shut up! Shut up!” the boy cried. “Don’t talk about him like that!”

“You will face the truth and be a man, or you will die before we see Sicily again,” the older man said gravely. “And you will obey orders.”

The Snackgarsbaden Hotel was deluxe, a few miles out of Visby on a panoramic coastal site only minutes from the old town. Durell had only a glimpse of Visby’s famous walls through the fog. Everywhere, shop windows in the narrow streets looked empty and forlorn because of the lack of tourists. An orchestra in the hotel’s dining room played to only a handful of glum guests. The mist moved over the rosebeds and hid the bathing beach and pool in the darkness.

At the desk, Durell asked for Herr Ole Olsen and went up to his room. Olsen was a gaunt Swede born in Minnesota; he had thin yellow hair plastered down on a long, bald head. His manner was that of an undertaker. He had returned to Stockholm as an import agent for Swedish furniture, and remained there after the war. K Section had recruited him and made him Stockholm Resident, a post he’d held efficiently for the past ten years.

They shook hands gravely.

“I’m glad you made it, Sam,” Olsen said. “Be seated,

please. I have some bourbon for you. Was it very bad out there?”

“Bad enough.”

Olsen shook his head. “But it never storms like this here, at this time of the year.”

“That’s why I’m here,” said Durell.

Olsen lifted mournful brows. “Is there any truth in the story I got?” He paused. “No, I will not ask. Everyone here is talking about the weather, Sam.”

“And somebody’s done something about it at last, to change the old maxim,” Durell returned. “And McFee thinks the somebody is Professor Peter Gustaffson.”

“Yes, I’ve looked into it. I will give you all cooperation, as ordered. But I find it hard to accept or believe. Such things are simply not possible.”

“You’d better believe it. Is there any ice in the Gulf of Bothnia?”

“Some, they say. It should have gone out by now. Spring is very late this year.”

“Spring may not come at all, unless we find Gustaffson and learn what he’s up to.”

“I’ve asked the Swedish people about him, but they don’t have much. Or aren’t talking. I can’t tell you where to start, Sam. I have nothing to go on. Hasn’t that girl, Sigrid, explained this to you?”

“She talks very little, too.”

“She had a quarrel with her father, of course.”

“Her father?” Durell asked.

“Professor Peter. He’s her father.” Olsen lifted his shaggy brows again. “Didn’t you know?”

“She just told me her father was dead.”

Olsen frowned. “I wonder why she did that?”

“Maybe she’s a congenital liar. Maybe she’s working on orders from Desk Five. Maybe not. I can’t figure her, as yet. She has something private going in this, but maybe that’s because she’s somewhat personally involved, seeing her uncle—I mean, her father—may be responsible for all this. On the other hand, the Swedes usually act to preserve their neutrality. We’ll just have to play out the cards and see who takes the pot.”

“It’s no gambling game, Cajun,” Olsen warned.

Durell lit one of his rare cigarettes. “What did you dig up on Olaf Jannsen? Sigrid knocked him overboard, but she seems to regret it.”

Olsen unlocked a briefcase and tossed several photographs and dossiers on the bed. “It’s all in there. He worked one time for Professor Peter, in Uphaevn. That’s the Gustaffson home, where the two brothers lived. Near the Ume River valley. Beautiful country, normally. But I hear it’s still socked in with late snow.”

“Olaf worked for Sigrid’s father?”

“Didn’t she tell you that, either?”

Durell thought angrily of the tall, golden girl, of picking splinters from her firm rump. “She skipped a lot of things. She knew him before, then. What else?”

“She was engaged to marry Olaf before he went East. Olaf worked for both brothers. He was the son of a local fisherman, a college graduate, a dedicated sailor. Dr. Eric, who is interested in archaeology as a sideline to his medical practice, is a noted ‘character,’ you might say. Olaf helped Eric build and sail his Viking boats. All that was before Olaf went to the Orient, two years ago. Hong Kong. A round-the-world cruise on a Swedish yacht. He was skipper and jumped ship and vanished in Hong Kong. I’ve requested British M.6 for data they might have from Hong Kong Security. The people he worked for had to get another captain. It’s a reasonable premise that Jannsen cut across the border into Red China and stayed there for about six months.”

“And he simply returned with no explanation?”

Olaf pointed lugubriously at the dossiers. “He never worked for the Gustaffson brothers again. He broke his engagement to Sigrid and never saw her again, either.” “The beautiful bitch,” Durell murmured. “Ole, Jannsen killed the captain of the Vesper, just to get aboard the schooner. Sigrid never let on that she knew him. So Olaf knew about the Bruges meeting even before I was summoned there. But who told him? Sigrid? Or is he following orders he received during his stay in Peking?”

“You’re jumping to conclusions, Cajun.”

“I’m jumping in the dark,” Durell complained. “It’s curiouser and curiouser. I missed my contact with the Russians this afternoon, thanks to the storm. Was a backup arrangement made?”

“Stockholm has instructions for you.” Olsen’s serious expression didn’t change. “They’re terribly nervous. It’s as unhappy a situation for your Soviet counterpart as it is for you, I suspect, having to work together.”

“If it isn’t all a smoke screen to throw us off.”

“No, they’re as anxious to settle this weather disturbance as we are. They’ll act in good faith, we think. You won’t miss them in Stockholm tomorrow.”

Durell put out his cigarette. The cold mist rolled over the hotel grounds beyond the window. The sound of the surf was muffled, and dim, plaintive music came from the orchestra in the hotel dining room.

“We can’t plan,” Olsen said suddenly, “beyond your meeting with your Russian KGB friends. But while you’re here at Visby, you might visit Elgiva Neilsen.”

Durell turned. “The famous Swedish poetess?”

“Yes. She lives in a house here on the channel across from Faro. Not far. An hour’s drive, in the fog.”

“Didn’t she win a Nobel prize a year ago—?”

“She’s the one. A most unusual woman. A great friend of the two Gustaffsons. I telephoned her that you were coming to visit her tonight.”

“How can she help?” Durell asked.

“I don’t know,” Olsen admitted. “But she might fill in some details of Peter’s disappearance. She may even know where he is. Professor Gustaffson is the key to this matter; if we find him, we find the weather-making machine. And we find the people who are working it.”

“Simpler said than done.”

“See Elgiva,” Olsen said. “The Swedish Sappho. She’s a most remarkable personality.”

“I’ll bet,” Durell said.

10

HE FELT all alone in the world, moving through the fog. Bells tolled, and the white glare of a lighthouse beam revolved atop the high cliffs the road —followed. He took the taxi he’d kept waiting, and the cab with Gino and Mario followed obediently. There are no speed limits in Sweden, and the driver, knowing the road, barreled through the darkness at a wild rate. Durell did not check him. He was worried about Olsen’s tension, but Olsen was reliable enough, and maybe the general disquiet was contagious. And he felt an unease himself that had nothing to do with the Stockholm Resident. The job he had to do was bizarre, and so were the people in it; there were too many threads he had to unravel before he could see a pattern in the web.

They flashed through the tiny villages of Lummelunda and then Irevik, where the coast was carved by ages of erosion into uncanny rock formations like giant pagan stelae thrust up from the sea. The caves of Lummelunda, he knew, with their weird, sea-carved shapes, had given rise among these island folk to innumerable folk tales and songs. Tonight, the dark and the mist added to the feeling of primitive isolation, where anything might be possible.

Beyond Irevik, the road turned east to Farosund. The driver followed dark lanes that twisted across wide moors, marked here and there by old stone towers, a lighted window in a farmhouse, a glimpse of a sheep pasture, then a wild and rocky hillside where the sea thundered below, at work on its eternal rock sculpture.

At last the driver took his heavy foot off the gas pedal and pointed through the white mist ahead.

“Miss Elgiva’s place. The road ends here.”

Durell saw nothing through the fog, and said so.

“There is a dip in the clifftop,” the driver said. “The house is sheltered from the wind, just above the sea. But one must walk the rest of the way from this place.”

“All right.”

Durell got out as the second car halted behind them. He, looked through the window at the peasant face of Mario Ginelli and the sullen handsomeness of his nephew.

“Wait here. I’ll send the other taxi back.”

“Si, signore,” said Mario.

The boy said: “It’s a waste of time. This is the end of nowhere.”

“Be quiet, Gino. Must I always have my hand ready to teach you manners?”

The boy was still truculent. “How long we got to freeze out here?”

“Until I come back. I don’t expect trouble, but if you hear a shot, come running. If anybody has followed us, take them. Stop them. And one of you must let me know.”

“We understand,” said Mario.

Durell struck off along the lane that curved north toward Farosund. White fence posts guided him through the mist, and the thunder of the sea shook the ground underfoot. In a moment, the waiting car was swallowed by the unearthly white fog. Durell wondered if Olsen had sent him on a wild-goose chase, and decided simply to play it by ear.

In five minutes he saw the lights of the house, a modem glass-and-stone aerie perched on the lip of the cliff above the sea. Through the huge windows he could see a cheerful fire on the granite hearth. The house was not large, and consisted mainly of one big room and a gallery at one end that probably contained the sleeping quarters. It was a solitary hideout, built cleverly to conform with the irregular cliffs and grottoes of the area.

The door stood open.

“Please come in,” a woman said.

The voice was deep and throaty, with a quality of dark music in it. Durell paused on the threshold.

“Come in, Mr. Durell. I am expecting you. Mr. Olsen phoned to say you were coming. I do not welcome you, because you are not welcome. But since you are here, I will give you some time, which is the most precious gift of all.”

He saw her then, seated in a sling chair to the right of the foyer. The house was cold, as if the chill mist had crept into it; the fire, for all its crackle and glow, did nothing to help.

“Do not step any farther,” the woman said. “This house is private, and I resent intrusions.”

“Miss Elgiva Neilsen?”

“I am she. What do you want of me?”

She did not rise or offer to shake hands or even take her huge, dilated eyes from the fire. Durell felt a little catch in his throat as he regarded her. He had rarely seen a woman more beautiful, and yet he knew at once she was untouchable, a thing of the spirit, remote from the reach of ordinary men. She was in her late twenties; her face was gaunt, with fine bones under pale skin, but her mouth was rich and wide, and her figure, glimpsed under the folds of her dark cloak, promised a voluptuous contrast to her thin, angular face. Under the cloak she wore velvet slacks, a blue denim shirt; her feet were bare, and they looked practical, not overly large, but firm and evenly callused and somewhat grimed by dark granitic sand. She saw him notice them and her generous mouth might have smiled, but he wasn’t sure.

“I walk a great deal on the cliffs and beaches. It helps with my poems. Have you read my poetry, Mr. Durell?” “Some,” he said.

“And as an American, what did you think of them?” “Do Americans think differently than others?”

“Ah, you are sensitive. So unusual. But did you not find my wording—archaic?”

“You evoke a time long past and long dead.”

“The glory never dies,” she said firmly. “We are chained to the past, to the sea roads, the wind and the stars, to the blood of our ancestors.”

“The Vikings shed plenty of blood.”

She ignored his comment. “And did you understand the kennings, the ancient figures of speech? The art of skaldic verse is lost today. Some say my poems are not distinguishable from those of Ari Thorgilsson’s Landnamabok, or the skald Snori Sturluson. Have you read the Heimskringla, Mr. Durell? Or the Starlunga saga?” She did not wait for his reply. “The language is one of metaphorical compounds, and requires explanation to comprehend the poetry.” She smiled wryly. “They have called me a modern skald, a bard who is closer to the past of nine centuries ago than to the world of today. Perhaps so. Perhaps the world was better then.”

“I doubt it, Miss Neilsen.”

“Everyone calls me Elgiva.”

“Elgiva was the wife of Sweyn Forkbeard,” Durell said quietly. “And he was a man with much blood on his hands, too, long ago.”

“Call me Elgiva.” She smiled again. “And come walk with me. I love to walk in the mists.” When he hesitated, she added, “There is no danger. I know every step of the way.”

She stood up and walked out without looking to see if he followed. Durell had no choice but to go after her. The impact of her strange personality did not lessen when they left the house. He was acutely aware of her; she emanated a tingling aura. Her walk was a smooth, gliding motion, her legs invisible under the cloak she now tightened about her. She lifted her face to the fog and said, “Come, follow me,” and went down a flight of steps to the stony beach.

A half light lingered in the southern sky even at this hour, due to their northern latitude. It came through the mists over Faro Sound to make the night oddly luminescent, as if the rocky beach were touched with phosphorus. The steps twisted steeply down to the water’s edge. The sea thundered and filled the air with the sharp iodine smell of salt and kelp. Durell’s eyes adjusted quickly to the uncertain gloom. The combers raced toward the beach in white smoky lines, like charging stallions.

“This way, Mr. Durell.” Elgiva’s voice was vibrant, alive. She pushed back the hood on her cape and shook her long hair free. It was pale brown, like the amber that once brought trade from the Mediterranean through the savage Germanic tribes to the civilizations of the North. Her eyes were almost the same color, but there was a mystic, impassioned light in them. “This is my favorite walk.”

“Do you stay in Gotland much of the year?”

“I write here. I walk, I think, I dream. They call me a witch, locally. Elgiva the Witch.” Her throaty laugh was a bubble that broke in her long throat. Her bare feet moved over the porous stones of the beach without noting their roughness. “But I go to Stockholm now and then. It is necessary, when I finish writing, and must return to the twentieth century, so to speak. They accuse me of awful things when I release myself from the mood of the skalds. They call me a bad woman. In Sweden, that is difficult to achieve, for women here are equal in ah ways, Mr. Durell. But when it is over, I always come back here. I am happiest in this place.”

“Are you happy now?” he asked quietly.

“Such a typically American question!”

“I was thinking of Professor Peter Gustaffson, who has been missing for some months.”

“Ah, yes.”

“You know I have been sent to look for him?”

“He is not here, of course.”

“I didn’t expect him to be. But I wonder if you’ve heard from him. You were a good friend of Peter’s.” “And Doctor Eric, too,” she said bluntly. “I loved them both.” She paused. “They were both my lovers, Mr. Durell. Both wonderful men, whom I adore, each in a different way.”

“I’m more interested in Professor Peter’s weather modification control experiments.”

“Yes, there are rumors—things have been so strong— so wonderful—"

“Wonderful?”

“I do not mind winter. It is part of me. I feel united with a storm of wind and snow and ice.” She paused. “It is serious, about Peter?”

Olsen had not said how much this woman could be told. He wondered if she really meant it when she said she’d been the mistress of both men. They came to a place on the beach where the sea had carved a great bowl of rock out of the cliff. The dark salt water surged and bellowed and then sucked out of the crevice with a long, angry sigh. A narrow ledge led them around the bowl to a cave entrance, where she paused.

“This is the place, according to legend, where a great battle was fought, and they say that far inside this cave are the bones of Viking warriors who were buried here. But no one has ever found them. Eric and I often explored here. It smells of the age of heroes and mighty deeds. Eric and I have much in common, loving the past. But Peter was the man I usually preferred. He dreamed of creating the olden days, in fact.”

“How do you mean?”

“It was a world of ice and snow and bitter wind, and men had to be strong to survive. They had to be giants.” “Peter wanted to bring back that world?”

“You sound incredulous.”

“I am.”

“Peter thought that if he could change our climate, we would all be better for it. Warm air thins a man’s blood, makes him effete, weak, languid. Only in the cold, conquering nature, has man developed to his highest peak.” “It’s a matter of opinion,” Durell murmured. “Was Peter serious?”

“He made it his life’s work.”

“And was he successful?”

“He told me so, the last time I spoke to him.”

“When was that? And where?”

She faced the dark sea, her amber hair agleam with drops of salt spray. The night mists shrouded the clifftop and cut them off from all the rest of the world.

“What will you do to him, if you find him?”

“We’re not sure he’s responsible for what has happened.” Durell told her briefly what was known and suspected. Elgiva listened attentively, with a small smile. She was strikingly elemental, and he could understand why the local people thought of her as a witch. “We don’t even know if Professor Peter is alive. If so, we think he must be an unwilling captive of people who use his genius for political ends.”

“But you do not understand dear Peter at all,” she murmured. “He is a dreamer, yes, and a most impractical man in everything but his scientific achievements. He has nothing to do with politics. He shuns the world of today.”

“He uses today’s technology to tamper with the balance of the earth’s climate. We’re sure of this. It’s too dangerous to be allowed to go on. Surely you understand this, Elgiva.”

“I am like Peter,” she said flatly.

He stared. “Does that mean you refuse to help?”

“Why should I?” she asked. “I want nothing to do with it.”

“You say you love him.”

“It is not a love you could understand, however.”

“Do you want him to die?” Durell asked.

“Would you kill him?”

“If I must. If there is no other way.”

“I see.” She turned abruptly and descended to the ledge which circled the sea pool. The ocean exploded with thunder all around them. “I felt this in you at once, Mr. Durell. You are not a man of this world, either.”

“I’m very much of this world.”

“An American agent,” she mused. “And very strong, with a strength of the olden times. Yes, you would kill Peter, if you had to. I believe you.”

“But I don’t want to. I want to save him. He’s in danger, a prisoner of those who use his climate control techniques for political purposes.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“Have you heard from him recently?” he insisted.

“Not for many months. I had a letter—She shrugged. “It was from the East. He was touring the Orient. He was to confer in Manila with Pacific meteorologists.”

“And he vanished from there?”

“I have not heard from him since.”

“Elgiva, he was kidnapped.”

Again she was silent, staring at the seething maelstrom twenty feet below the ledge. “Peter and Eric and I had this dream. You could not comprehend it.”

“Perhaps I do.” His voice went savage. “You three are a little mad, trying to retreat into the past to escape the problems of today. You write of ancient times and call yourself a skald. But the old bards are dead. They served a purpose in their day. Now Peter works to recreate a world of ice that existed mainly in pagan myths, and dreams of giants with bloody swords. And Eric is wrapped in the past, too, with his archaeology and recreation of Viking days. All three of you only seek escape.”

She slapped him with furious strength. Her amber eyes blazed. She said something in Swedish and turned sharply, her cloak swirling about her. Durell caught her arm and flung her back against the cliff wall.

“Elgiva, Peter is in danger. Accept it and show you believe in what you say, and help me.”

“I will not help you to trap Peter! You lie to me! Go away! I have heard enough of your schemes! Your people want Peter to use him for your own ends—”

“We just want him to stop doing what he’s doing to the weather. It’s time you all gave up the past and lived in today’s world.”

Elgiva tried to strike him again. Her angular face was twisted in the mist. Durell caught her arm and forced it down. She struggled against him, her body rich and strong.

“Help me find Peter,” he said harshly. “Come with me, if you like. You’ll see for yourself—”

The sound of the shot checked him.

He heard a thin ripping sound, and Elgiva fell away toward the seething, wild pool below.

11

HER CLOAK saved her. Durell caught its wide flap and for a heart-stopping instant he held her as if in a sling over the abyss. Another shot cracked through the fog. Stone chipped off the ledge and stung his face and hands. He had no time to look for the source of the attack. For another moment he held Elgiva Neilsen over the brink and stared deep into her wide eyes. There was no fear in her. He couldn’t guess what turbulent thoughts possessed her. The sea thundered, bursting about them with a shower of cold spray, bellowing as if for a sacrifice.

Then he pulled her in. She fell against him, then flung herself swiftly away and flattened against the wall of the ledge, arms wide against the rough limestone.

Her face was white. “What happened?”

Durell tried to see through the fog. “Somebody up there doesn’t like us,” he said wryly. “We were shot at. Twice, so far. Were you hit?”

“No. No, I’m all right. But who would shoot at you like this?”

“Maybe you were the target, Elgiva.”

She looked confused. “Are we trapped here?”

“Maybe. Stay where you are.”

“You seem pleased by this.”

“It means the trail is getting warm at last. It means you know something that can help me.”

“But I do not. I truly do not.”

He edged away, looking for a place where he could see to the top of the cliff. The sea turned the pool at their feet into a thundering cauldron again. He took advantage of the noise to take a few more steps to the right.

The gun cracked again. It sounded thin and far away in the ocean’s roaring. The bullet made a thin splatting sound against the ledge at his feet. He searched again for the sniper. In the strange, pearly light, he thought he saw something stir in the sky above. His gun was in his hand. He fired once, but he knew it was not effective. Yet the movement stopped, and he couldn’t tell if it was a man up there, or just another of the grotesque rock formations created by millennia of winds and seas.

“Elgiva!”

“Yes,” she replied quietly.

“Do you know another way back up to your house?” “It is difficult, especially in this poor light—”

“We’re cut off from the way we came down.” He wondered angrily where Mario and Gino might be. He had taken them along for just this contingency. He reached for Elgiva’s hand. It was cold, but strong. “Let’s go.”

She led him around the pool, toward the cave. The mouth of the hole yawned with dank blackness. Durell thought he heard the scrape of a shoe on the cliff above, but he could not be sure, nor could he tell how many people were up there. Beyond the cave entrance, Elgiva took his hand again and pulled him after her.

“It is difficult for a stranger here.” She was calm, considering her narrow escape from death. He felt a twinge of admiration for her. She surely wasn’t accustomed to being ambushed and shot at. “Just follow me, Mr. Durell.”

She climbed by slow and painful handholds and waited for him in the gloom to take each grip as she released it. There were tall, monumental crags of upright stone, carved by the sea far back in geological ages. Then she stopped.

“We are just below the top. Listen.”

Garbled voices came through the mist. Again, Durell wondered what had happened to his two Vesper crewmen. Then abruptly there was another shot, and a woman screamed.

It was Sigrid.

There was no time to guess what was happening. With his head just above the lip of the cliff, he saw the muzzle flame as it was fired again. He moved Elgiva aside, clambered over the top, and ran for the spot.

Boulders were strewn among the rough grasses that grew here. At a vague distance through the fog, he saw the lights of Elgiva’s house. Then the world took on a blinding radiance as a navigation light across Faro channel shone his way. He felt as if a spotlight had been thrown upon him. He threw up an arm to shield his eyes from the glare. Every particle of mist caught the dazzling brightness to reflect it a thousand times over.

“Sam, look out!”

It was Sigrid again.

Another shot followed on the heels of her warning. Durell felt a snap of air as the bullet winged by. He threw himself forward toward an outcrop of stone. A man yelled in triumph. Another replied with a grumble of words he could not understand. It was not Swedish. Footsteps came toward him through the grass. He tightened his grip on the gun. The fog distorted sight and sound. The swinging probe of the searchlight across the channel vanished, and he blinked to adjust his eyes to the lesser glare of the fog.

“Sam? Sam, over here!”

Sigrid’s words echoed all around him. He looked back and saw Elgiva sheltered behind a small pinnacle of wind-carved rock. A shadow moved, distorting the radiance of the fog. As Durell rose, another shot cracked, but he ran forward, saw a figure rise before him, and fired twice, aiming at the belly. The man slammed backward, hands splayed out. Another man made a sound like a neighing horse and went reeling toward the edge of the cliff. Clutching his stomach, he blasted a series of shots inland, toward something Durell could not see. He fired again, and the man vanished as if seized by an invisible, giant hand, swept from the edge of the cliff. He made no sound as he fell.

Durell ran toward the house. Another figure intervened. He almost shot Sigrid before he recognized her.

“Foolish man!” she gasped.

She held a knife, and it had blood on it. She had used it on the second man. Her long, pale hair glistened with the fog. She wore a seaman’s jacket and a jaunty beret.

“Are you all right, darling man?” she asked.

“I had two men here—Mario and Gino, from the yacht—”

“I sent them back to the boat,” she said.

“You sent them away?”

“I told them you had ordered it.”

He controlled his anger. “Why?”

“I wanted to prove something to you. I know you’ve had strange thoughts about me. I know you don’t trust me. But I saved your life, you see.”

“You weren’t needed,” he said shortly.

She pouted. “You need me more than you think. Those men would have killed you. If they had killed Elgiva, I wouldn’t care; but you are precious to me, cruel Cajun. I like you so much better alive.”

Durell took her knife and threw it away. She did not resist. He did not put down his gun. He did not know what to make of her. Her relief at finding him seemed genuine enough.

“Who were those people?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Foreigners. I do not know their language. But I heard them move toward the cliff after I sent Mario and the boy back to Visby, so I followed, after making sure Elgiva’s house was empty. Oh, I hate that woman! You made a mistake, appealing to her. Did Olsen suggest it?”

“You know a lot that you shouldn’t know,” he said grimly. “Come with me.”

But Sigrid hung back. “We must return to the boat. I don’t want to meet that woman. Don’t be angry with me, darling man. Of course I know all about Olsen. Desk Five knows and tolerates him. Although Sweden must be officially neutral, that is no reason why we should blind ourselves to what is going on.”

He wanted to shake her in his frustration. But her face looked innocent of all guile. Nothing she had said made him feel easier about her, but he had orders to work with her. He turned away to examine the man he had shot.

The face was alien to this Scandinavian island of tall blonds. The cheekbones were high, the eyes faintly slanted, the moustache drooping. The clothes had no labels. Aside from a Luger, the dead man had no identification. The face had a definite Tartar cast, a hint of deep Asia in its broad contours. Such a man might have ridden west with the hordes of Genghis Khan centuries ago.

The body was a problem. In Durell’s business, you worked quietly, without attracting public attention. A police spotlight on these events, especially on a woman of such renown as Elgiva Nielsen, might end all hope of contacting his Soviet counterpart. On the other hand, he could not be sure who had sent these men after him. They were simply hired hands, gunmen. It was the mind and brain and plan behind them that he had to identify.

Sigrid made a small sound of distaste.

Elgiva approached them with her gliding, graceful walk, wrapped tightly in her dark cloak.

He knew at once that there was an implacable hostility between these two women. Yet the younger Sigrid immediately smiled with apparently complete and sincere pleasure.

“Elgiva, dear, I am so happy you are safe!”

The other’s smile matched Sigrid’s, and they pressed their cheeks together briefly in greeting. “I do not understand what happened. Why should anyone wish to kill me?”

“Maybe it was just Sam they were after.”

Elgiva turned her great amber eyes to Durell. “Does this have to do with Peter and Eric? What we discussed?” “I’m sure it has,” he returned.

“And little Sigrid? Her work is peculiar. Is it the same

as yours, Mr. Durell?”

“Somewhat. We’re working to find Peter and bring him home.” He turned to Sigrid. “Why did you say Professor Peter is your uncle? I know he’s your father.”

She bit her lip. “I am sorry. It just seemed better not to seem so close to this problem—”

“Sigrid often tells strange lies,” Elgiva said coolly. “She is a very strange child.”

“Elgiva, you never liked me, but that is not reason for you to—"

Their claws were showing. Durell intervened. “Let’s get inside. Elgiva, I’m sure you want to help us now. You didn’t believe how serious it was before. Peter is in grave danger. He’s a prisoner, and his machinery for weather control is being used by enemies of all society, against all humanity. Surely you see this now.”

“I will not go with Sigrid,” Elgiva said.

“Then fly to Stockholm with me, in the morning. Sigrid will join us there later in the day.”

Sigrid started to protest, then pressed her lips together angrily. “It’s all your fault, Elgiva. You filled Daddy with idealistic nonsense, until he saw the world in the same distorted perspective you show it in your silly, old-fashioned poetry. They say you are a witch, and I believe it. You hypnotized poor Daddy and you want to marry him. But you never shall, I promise you that!”

It was a side of Sigrid that she had not shown before. Under her calm voice was an icy contempt. But her words defeated her own purpose. Elgiva stiffened, her face paled.

She tucked her hand in Durell’s arm and watched Sigrid’s hostile reaction to the possessive gesture.

“You do not want me along, Sigrid?”

“Stay here and spin your foolish tales of the olden days. You’ve done enough harm.”

“But I think I shall accompany Mr. Durell. In Stockholm I shall decide just what to do.”

Sigrid bit her lip in exasperation. “Do not trust her, gullible man. She will bewitch you, too.”

“Maybe I’d like it,” Durell said.

12

OLE OLSEN had gone into Visby, according to the desk clerk at the Snacksgarsbaden Hotel. Durell knew he had a small furniture shop on one of the town’s old streets, for sales to Visby tourists. It was part of Olsen’s cover, and there seemed nothing unusual about his going there.

He needed Olsen’s help in disposing of the Tartar’s body and covering up the affair at Elgiva’s isolated house. Explanations to the police would be awkward. There were enough rumors in the world about the weather. If the public knew of the great official concern, there could easily be panic.

He dismissed his taxi and used Elgiva’s Mercedes for the foggy drive back into town. It was not a comfortable trip. Elgiva drove, and he sat between her and Sigrid. Both women maintained a stony silence. He had explained to Elgiva that the isolation of her house made it dangerous for her to stay there; and after Sigrid minimized the danger, Elgiva perversely agreed to obey all of Durell’s orders. Sigrid ground her teeth and was silent.

It was after ten, and true nightfall had come over the Baltic at last. Most of the shops in the cobbled streets

of the walled town were shuttered for the night. Tourists were in rare supply these days.

Durell told Elgiva to park around the corner in an alley that led downhill toward one of Visby’s battlements. He was reluctant to leave the two women alone together, and decided it could do no harm to take them with him. They maintained a silent truce as they walked toward the shop.

The small display window in the medieval building was dark and partly curtained. Polished modern mahogany chairs were glimpsed inside. But Durell saw no lights within.

“Your resident agent is not here,” Sigrid said.

“He is. Ole wouldn’t get out of touch tonight.”

He led the way down a dark alley to the back entrance. A cat ran across their path and leaped over a wooden fence. Sigrid shrank back for a moment.

“Perhaps he has gone to the Vesper.”

Elgiva spoke coldly. “If you are anxious to go, then leave us. Your blood is not that of a true Viking woman. I will stay with Durell.”

“Oh, you talk such nonsense, darling.” Sigrid went with them to the back door of the furniture shop.

A dim light shone inside. The wide service door was locked. Durell frowned. Visby, a town marked by many churches, suddenly came awake with the sound of old church bells tolling in the misty air. The iron clanging was just what he needed. He found a slat of wood near the door, wedged it between the two panels, and shoved against the bolt. There came a snapping sound, drowned out by the carillon. Something clattered to the floor inside, and the door swung open.

Sigrid started forward. He caught her arm. “Stand back.”

“I am not afraid!” she retorted.

“Well, I am.” He was a cautious man, and he knew better than to ignore his hunches or the technique of IPE—Illegal, Perilous Entry. He moved in at a fast crouch, his gun at hip level cocked up at an angle that would hit a man in the lower abdomen if he had to fire. His leg grazed a crate, he turned left, and then paused. There were dark geometric shapes of crated furniture stacked to the ceiling, and a smell of wood shavings and steel nails. The nails glittered on the plank floor where they had been strewn to trap the unwary. He was grateful for his caution.

“What is it?” Sigrid called softly.

“Stay where you are. Both of you.”

A door stood open at the far end of the storage room, the source of light he had seen outside. He moved around a wood-working bench cluttered with mahogany shavings and a partly built modern chair, then used his technique on the second door.

Nothing happened.

He followed a corridor to a flight of old wooden steps that creaked no matter how carefully he placed his feet. Sigrid came in behind him, disobeying his orders, and he halted, anger in him. Sigrid raised a great many questions in his mind. Before all this was over, he thought tiredly, he might have to kill her.

Someone breathed with a deep, irregular effort in a room at the far end of the upper hall. He could see a modern desk, an aluminum pole lamp, a corner of a splashy op art painting on the wall. The breathing halted. There was silence. Then it began again.

“Ole?” he called softly.

It began to rain again, a sullen drumming on the roof just overhead. Through the sound came a grunt, a gasp, a dragging noise. Durell went into the office.

“Ole?”

The Stockholm agent was trying to crawl from behind the desk where he had fallen. His narrow, bald head gleamed in the light. His eyes were odd crescents, tilted up to look at him. His mouth was a jagged red smear with broken teeth above his lantern jaw.

Durell walked around him, not touching him, and opened a door behind the desk, checked a lavatory, found nothing inside, then crossed to a door opposite and checked the coat closet. Nothing. Ole was alone with his torment. Durell dropped to one knee beside the man. Olsen now lay with his face against the Oriental rug.

“This is Sam,” Durell said. “What happened?”

“He came—surprised me—too old for this sort of— thing now, Cajun—”

“Who was it?”

“Big fellow—silent—just beat me—”

“You’re not shot?”

“Don’t—think so—”

Durell straightened. His eyes were dark. “I’ll get you a doctor, Ole.”

“Wait.”

Thick blood came from Olsen’s broken mouth. He grunted each time he breathed, and Durell suspected several broken ribs. One hand looked crushed, as if a brutal boot had stepped on it.

“I called—Stockholm—about Miss Sigrid. Professor Peter’s daughter. She was—in Hong Kong with him— when he vanished—”

“Good.”

“But so was—so was Elgiva.”

“All right, Ole. I’ll get you to a hospital.”

“Sam, he—the man—still here, somewhere—”

Durell straightened, knees loose, his hand up with the gun. Sigrid and Elgiva spoke in whispers at the head of the stairway behind him. He felt surrounded by intangible dangers. He did not know friend from enemy. Ole shuddered and lay still. His cadaverous figure and face made him look corpse-like in the dim office light. The rain grew heavier, drumming over any other sounds in the old house. Then Sigrid screamed.

There came a sudden clattering rush of heavy feet in the corridor, moving away toward the stairs and the girls. Durell dove for the office door. A dim shape loomed in the stairwell. The man had been hiding near the front of the house, in one of the storage rooms. A rectangle of darkness showed where a hatch was open in the attic ceiling. He had been up there, most of the time.

Durell cursed and spun toward the stair rail. He saw Sigrid falling, bowled over by the man’s downward rush. Elgiva was flattened against the yellow-painted wall. The man’s broad back was strong and familiar.

“Hold it!” he called.

The man leaped the last eight steps, arms wide for

balance, and jumped for the back exit. Durell squeezed off one shot. The man fell to his knees with a thump that shook the house, then, incredibly, stood up again. He turned his head to look back up at Durell. His lips were skinned back in a savage grin.

It was Olaf Jannsen. Olaf, whom Sigrid had hurled to his death in the stormy sea off the deck of the Vesper.

Durell jumped after him, but he knew he was too late. Olaf vanished into the alley, running through the night. Durell went as far as the back door. The rain hid everything. He drew a thin breath. It was incredible that Olaf had survived his plunge into the Baltic and managed to swim ashore to Visby. But he had to believe the evidence of his own eyes.

He turned back to the two women on the stairs. Sigrid sat on the lowest step, her face uplifted to him.

“Sam, was it—was it really Olaf?”

“It was,” he said shortly.

She buried her face in her hands and began to cry.

STOCKHOLM

The Town Hall is its trademark. The city lies on the eastern shores of Lake Maleren, twisting on peninsulas and islands that give it a unique air of spaciousness. It was originally settled in the tenth century, on Staden Island, by warlike Varangians. In medieval times, they extended their influence into Russia as far down the Volga as the ancient Byzantine Empire, where many Varangians served as elite bodyguards for the Emperor there.

Stockholm is a showcase of Swedish cleanliness, efficiency, and the “Middle Way” of constitutional monarchy. The city has spacious squares, green parks, and wide boulevards. The modem buildings are in harmony with the Swedish seventeenth-century baroque of the medieval section known as the “City between the Bridges.” The channels and bays are dotted with small white steamers that use the waterways as alternate transportation to swift, modern buses and subways.

There are long hours of daylight in the spring. The climate in May is normally much the same as in New England. The temperature ranges from a low of 40° to a high of 57°, with an average of 49°. The days of rain average 12.

Despite the security of one of the world’s most highly developed welfare states, Sweden has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

13

THE sun was shining.

But the wind blew with irregular ferocity from the north, ruffling the channels and bays, pinning the yachts in their basins near the tall, clean apartment buildings across from Stockholm’s Old Town. Near the Riddarsholm Church, where Sweden’s ancient kings are entombed, was a sprawling complex of glass and concrete hospital wards served by helicopter ambulances on the roofs. The hospital was so big that the nurses rode to and from their wards on bicycles. The helicopters were not flying today. The nurses had difficulty balancing on the bicycles because of their flapping capes torn by the strong gale winds.

It was four in the afternoon when Durell left the hospital. He had flown via Linjeflyg from Visby to Stockholm’s new airport, Arlanda, with Olsen, Sigrid, and Elgiva. A doctor had pronounced Ole in reasonable condition to travel, but recommended a week under strict medical care. The flight across the Gsterjon and up Sweden’s coast took only forty-five minutes, and an ambulance met them to take Olsen from Arlanda.

The Vesper, following from Visby, was due to dock that evening. The storm damage proved to be easily repaired in Visby’s competent boatyards.

Durell spent an hour with Olsen at the hospital, with one of Ole’s young men from Stockholm Central. Ole’s assistant was Mark Talmage, a button-down-collar, tidy Princeton type. Talmage carried the usual fine attaché case cluttered with folders, dossiers, and flimsied orders in quadruplicate. Durell surveyed the snowfall of douments with distaste.

“You meet your counterparts at Skansen Park,” Talmage said briskly. “That’s the open-air museum. Do you know the place, sir?”

Durell nodded. “I was there some time ago.”

“They’ve gone to a lot of trouble to arrange the meet. They believe in all the routine precautions.” Talmage wore black-rimmed glasses and he pushed them up on his snub young nose. “They seem to distrust you, Mr. Durell.”

“I don’t exactly regard them as Snow Whites, either,” Durell said.

“Well, then. They were most disappointed at the failure to rendezvous off Visby.”

“It was stupid,” Durell said. “Who arranged it?” Talmage flushed. “I did, sir. It seemed that they wanted it that way.”

“And they still insist on using the Vesper?”

“Yes, sir. General McFee is setting up an HQ at Bruges, cooperating with elements of other national security units, to coordinate the operation. The KGB in Moscow, Colonel Metroff, has approved all of this. But he feels that time is of the essence.”

“To coin a phrase,” Durell said.

Talmage flushed again. His voice was resentful. “Sir, I have been directed to brief you and I’m trying to make it clear—”

“All right. Let Ole talk for a moment.”

They moved back to the hospital bed. Sunlight poured through the wide window into the sterile room. Outside, the gorgeous nurses careened along the walks on their bicycles. The wind seemed stronger. Ole’s injuries consisted of four broken ribs, a suspected rupture of the spleen, which had the doctors considerably worried, and his smashed mouth. His gaunt face was mottled, one eye was covered with a bandage, and he looked terrible. When Durell returned to the bed, Olsen spit a swab from his mouth and nodded.

“Mark, don’t tangle with the Cajun,” he told Talmage. “You’re not familiar with field operations.”

“But I’ve been ordered—”

“Forget it.” Olsen gave Durell one of his rare smiles. It hurt him to do so. “Thanks for pulling Olaf off my back last night, Sam.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t screw him to the wall for you.” Durell sighed. “But I’ll make up for it, Ole.”

“Do that. But be careful. He’s enormously strong. It was frightening, frankly.”

“What did he want of you, anyway?”

“I never found out. He just walked in and swung. Like a madman, Cajun. However.” Olsen worked a tongue around his battered mouth. “My wife never thought I was handsome, but now—” He paused again. “What have you done about Sigrid?”

“She’s at her uncle’s apartment for the moment.” “You think it wise to let her run loose?”

“It’s her town and her country.” Durell shrugged. “No matter what I think of her—and it’s plenty—I can’t very well chain her to my wrist, Ole.”

“She checks with Swedish Security as absolutely reliable, Sam. Nothing in her dossier to worry about.”

“It’s what’s in her mind that worries me. She’s playing a game of her own, and lying every inch of the way.” “Because her father is involved? What about Elgiva? Has she told you anything useful?”

“She may be only a reluctant bystander. A remarkable woman, though. She offers another way to skin a cat.” “Handle her with care,” Olsen warned. “Elgiva is a world personality. Where is she now? Not with Sigrid, I hope.”

“Waiting at my hotel. She has an appointment with her publisher.”

Olsen had tired rapidly. He lifted one hand, signaling Mark Talmage to go on. The young man adjusted his thick glasses, cleared his throat, and spoke briskly.

“The main matter, sir, is the meeting with the men from KGB. Since Moscow made a direct contact with Washington, using the utmost frankness in the problem, our orders are to cooperate fully. They are very much concerned. There have been thoughts that this may be a bluff, to distract us from the truth. That is, the Russians may be behind the weather control apparatus themselves, and wish to throw us off-guard for as long as possible. It is a factor that must always be considered.”

“Thank you,” Durell said dryly. “I’ll keep it in mind.” Talmage pushed up his glasses again. “We have reports from our weather satellites in north-south orb;t of considerable climatic disturbances in the heart of the Ukrainian wheat fields. These occurred at the time of similar disturbances in North Africa, when it was assumed that a vessel of some sort had penetrated the Mediterranean and caused these unusual effects. But there was great damage to the Soviet agricultural output in this—ah, breadbasket —in the Ukraine. Their concern may be genuine.”

Talmage riffled documents in his attache case, spilled a small avalanche on the sterile hospital floor, and stooped to pick them up.

“We do not know, of course, the source of your recent harassment, Mr. Durell. There is nothing out of the ordinary with the young lady, Sigrid, except for her trip to Hong Kong with her father, when he disappeared. As for Olaf Jannsen, he is a complete cipher in our files. But General McFee requests that I remind you, sir, to take all precautions when meeting with and cooperating with the Soviets in the Gulf of Bothnia. You are to remember that our national interest and security problems come first.”

Durell bit off his reply.

“Since your search for the weather control ship,” Talmage added, “will range near the Finnish shore and perhaps take you across Lapland to the Arctic, you may have to use RSFSR resources. Hence, the agreement to work with the Russians. I have their arrangements here.” Talmage shook more papers free. “Please follow the outlined instructions exactly according to the timetable.”

Durell crumpled the papers into his pocket, making Talmage wince. “Do you know,” Durell said quietly, “I have a red tab on my file at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“It means I’m to be eliminated, one way or another. Wiped. Zapped. Killed. Any time. Anywhere.” He paused. “Have they put a moratorium on that detail?”

“Nothing was said—”

“I’ll bet not.” Durell turned to Olsen. “Do I have to go on with this charade, Ole? You know me. You know I prefer to work alone.”

“Afraid you just have to follow orders, Cajun,” Olsen whispered. “McFee stipulated it.”

“So I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t?”

“It looks that way.”

Durell stood up. “Give me the dossiers on these two KGB men I’m to meet at Skansen Park. When is the time for it?”

Talmage looked at his complex Omega. “In one hour and twelve minutes, precisely.”

“I’ll look over the dossiers on the way then.”

“Good luck, Sam,” Olsen said softly.

Durell looked at the ruin of Ole’s face. “I’ll need it.”

14

THE dossiers had been typed on blue flimsy, on an Olympia typewriter, and followed K Section’s usual form:

CLASSIFIED A A—File Gamma 254/D—INT. 6

SOURCES 56, Dr. 7689, G-6 Epsilon 25_

SUBJECT: SMUROV, Nazar Antonovich No. 07249, Military 098222, Lt. Col. Missile Troops, candidate member Central Committee CPSU, commanded artillery 2nd Ukrainian Front under General Vatutin, recruited by GRU 1946, member Committee International Industrial Exchange, recruited by KGB 1952, posted Budapest, Ankara, Conakry, Mexico City. (See File Gamma 254/D12 history of above rezident intelligence activity. Age: 48

Born peasant stock Armenia, no known secondary education, attended 1st Kiev Artillery School, grad-

uated Frunze Academy and Military Diplomatic Academy.

Status: Special Group Commander, Blue Section, KGB Directorate. Promoted to Colonel April, 1960.

Operational Cover: Expert, CUE (see above) for State Committee for Industrial Research.

Father: Unknown.

Mother: Smurova, Vera Bokarovna, died 1950.

Marital Status: Two marriages—one divorce, one suicide.

Children: Unknown.

Party Record: Komsomol 1935-1938, Party Card No. 02009296.

Awards: Order of Fatherland War, 1st Class; Order of Red Banner; Order of Red Star, six Medals.

Durell skipped down to the narrowly typed paragraphs below the data to the material under the heading of “Comments and Appreciation.”

“Colonel Nazar Antonovich Smurov is known to have headed Blue Section of KGB. These personnel were once described by Marshall Ivan Tyudenko, Deputy Chief of the Fourth Directorate of the GRU, in a suppressed article in Pravda, as “scum and hooligans, professional murderers and assassins.” Under Smurov, the Blue Section developed a domestic as well as international apparatus for the “elimination of political opposition.” Smurov is believed responsible directly for disappearance and/or death of two members of our Rome Central, Kalborn in Ankara, and Greta Dineson in Copenhagen. His personal life is marked by two marriages (see Gamma 254/D-sub H file) and a weakness for very young women and an Armenian liquor, starka. Blunt, aggressive, uncouth. Known to be shunned by co-officers of other departments and barred from Desk Two at KGB HQ. His most common nickname is ‘The Muzhik.’

“See photographs appended.”

The two snapshots were blurred. The one taken from an official pass inscribed State Committee for Industrial Research was the better, showing both ears, as required.

One snapshot had a Vienna background, the Rathaus. It showed a blunt, blocky man in a wide-brimmed felt hat and double-breasted overcoat getting out of a black limousine. The profile was fiat and angry. The second snapshot showed a man in a rather old-fashioned bathing suit on a beach—Durell guessed it would be one of the USSR state resorts on the Black Sea, near Odessa— surrounded by three young women in the Russian version of bikinis. The round, dark peasant face was smiling, like that of a frog that has just swallowed an exceptionally tasty fly. The eyes were slitted, squinting into the sun. Despite the smile, the mouth was the cruelest Durell had ever seen.

The official photograph from the ID card was better, but washed out. It was a Tartar’s face. It was the face he had seen dimly through the storm on the trawler off Visby. And this was one of the men he was supposed to work with.

Durell turned to the second dossier. It made him feel a little better, but not much. He knew the second man. Another colonel, but not from KGB’s Blue Section. Vladimir Ivanovich Traskin had a distinguished war record at the Stalingrad front and afterward had taught artillery and missile technique at the Frunze Academy. After the war he had commanded a missile brigade in the Lvov oblast at Shklo Yar, then was posted to the Yauer IRBM firing range with its impact area in Poland. In 1962 he was posted to the nuclear warhead missile troop center in the far North, above the Arctic Circle, at Novaya Zemblya, for six months, and had gone on inspection tours to the other nuclear missile Arctic areas of Franz Josef Island and Vorkuta.

Colonel Traskin was of a different stamp from the Muzhik. He was tall and distinguished, with a professorial air, and a carefully trimmed beard. He was addicted to writing poetry and novellas as a hobby, and had a reputation as a naturalist specializing in Arctic fauna. He was married, with two sons also in the Army, and had kept himself aloof from the bitter internecine official strife among the hierarchy of the CPSU, although he had been a member, after the usual terms in the Komsomol and Party, for seven years. It was somewhat like hitching a lamb to a hyena, Durell thought, for Traskin to be Colonel Smurov’s partner. He knew they would instinctively detest each other; Smurov would have contempt and suspicion for Traskin’s intellect, and Traskin would view with aloof distaste Smurov’s vulgarities. Durell filed away the thought as something that might be useful in the near future.

15

THE WIND still rubbed like a polishing cloth over the hard blue sky above Stockholm as Durell left the hospital and headed for Skansen Park. He phoned for a taxi, and when it came told the driver to cross Staden Island and turn right beyond the National Museum onto the Strandvagen. Overhead, two Swedish Air Force Dragon jets, the most versatile fighter and attack planes in the West, bore across the blue sky. They turned east across the islands toward the resort of Saltsjobaden, and before they were out of sight they swung north again as if to cover the Finnish island of Aland that lay not far off the coast. The wind whipped away the Dragon contrails in seconds.

Some hardy tourists, advised by the TTF, the Tourist information Bureau, were crowded on a little white steamer doing the “Under the Bridges” routine. The boat splashed and struggled against the wind that make cold-looking whitecaps in the harbor. Durell looked across to where the Vesper was due to berth. The schooner hadn’t appeared, and few of the yachts moored there had ventured into the wind.

Skansen Park was a unique outdoor museum on a hilltop overlooking the waterways of Stockholm. It contained restaurants, historical exhibits, a zoo that specialized in Scandinavian fauna such as wolf, bear, hazel hen, reindeer, cranes, and ptarmigan. Near the Norska Museum was the Vasavarvet, where the Royal Flagship Vasa was displayed after having been salvaged from the bottom of the sea, where she had lain in the mud for three hundred years. The wind was bitterly cold. Not many people moved about on the exposed hilltop, although the restaurants and kiosks had a reasonable patronage. Children ran along the paths to the zoo. Durell dismissed his taxi and walked to the shore opposite the Skepps Holmen where the ancient Vasa was displayed.

Flags were streaming, for some reason or other, and the wind was busy chewing the bunting to shreds. One of the streamers to Drottningholm, site of the King’s summer palace, moved crabwise against the tide. Durell found a path bordered by tulips and walked under beech trees to a small refreshment kiosk. The tall spars of the ancient sailing warship loomed high above the budding tree limbs.

He bought coffee and looked at his watch. He was precisely on time. A governess with three blond, cherubic children was eating ice cream, there were three tall men in unsmiling conversation, with topcoats whipped about their legs, two girls who immediately eyed Durell speculatively—and no sign of the Muzhik or Colonel Traskin.

He went inside the glass-enclosed booth and sipped his coffee at a table where he could see the path that led down to the Vasa exhibit. The old warship was still being worked on to restore hex former gilded splendor. Workmen had rigged a scaffold on the lee side and were caulking her planks. The sounds of their mallets came as small muffled thuds.

“Herr Durell?”

A small boy stood at his table. Durell nodded. The boy pointed. “Your friends, sir, they wait over there. They sent me to tell you.”

“Thank you.”

He went out into the wind again, down the path where the boy had pointed. A statue of a grotesquely stout woman stared from her reclining position over the choppy channels. Two men stood regarding the modern sculpture with disapproval. It seemed safe enough. No one else was near. But Durell felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather when he met the Muzhik’s eyes.

“So you are the Cajun,” Smurov said thickly. His small cruel eyes regarded Durell as if he were a prime slab of beef in the butcher’s shop. “You came alone?” He spoke English with an atrocious accent.

“According to agreement,” Durell said.

They did not shake hands. Durell did not offer to. Smurov was thick-lipped, and built like a beer barrel, with heavy hands hanging loosely at his sides. Durell was not deceived by the man’s apparent clumsiness. He knew that Smurov could move with lightning speed and massive strength, if necessary. The Muzhik’s eyes gave plain evidence of his hatred. Then he smiled, a grimace like a crocodile’s yawn. “You know my associate, Colonel Vladimir Ivanovich Traskin?”

“I have heard of him, of course.”

The second man was tall, with a sensitive face, intelligent eyes; he looked uneasy beside Smurov. There was tension evident between the two Russians, bearing out Durell’s estimate of their partnership.

Traskin offered his hand. Durell took it. Smurov rasped, “Comrade Colonel Traskin does not know you, Cajun, as I do.”

“And I know you, Muzhik,” Durell said.

Smurov’s face went blank. Traskin spoke in a cultivated Oxford accent. “Gentlemen, we are here together concerned with a problem of common interest. Our orders are to put aside the past and cooperate with each other.” Durell said to Smurov: “Is it possible?”

“I am obedient,” Smurov said. “But I am not a fool. I do not trust you. At any other time and place—”

“Yes.” Traskin intervened again. “But the situation is different. We are allies, as in the Fatherland War.”

“We shall see,” said Smurov.

“Shall we move out of the wind?” Durell suggested. Traskin said smoothly, “We could drink to our bargain —-and discuss the—ah—weather, yes?”

They fell in on either side of Durell. He did not object. There was a large restaurant, heavily patronized by visitors to the zoo, up the hill near the center of the park. A table waited for them, and Smurov ordered starka. Traskin chose aquavit and Durell managed to get American bourbon.

“Skál," Durell said.

“Skál,” Traskin replied, and smiled gently.

Smurov downed his liquor with a greedy gulp, then leaned over the table and breathed onions at Durell. There was a quiet murmur of voices around the smorgasbord table, shafts of sunlight from the high windows that yielded a magnificent view of Stockholm’s Old Town and wide boulevards and modern apartments. Smurov spread some papers on the table. They were typewritten in Russian.

“We will get right to work. These are the latest reports from our Moscow Bureau on meteorological phenomena in the North.”

“And what do you hear from Nova Zemblya?” Durell asked quietly.

Both men stiffened. “That is restricted matter.”

“It’s in the heart of the affected area. Do you pick and choose the information we share? We ought to settle the ground rules now,” Durell said.

“Nova Zemblya is a sensitive area.”

“It’s where you have nuclear missile bases,” Durell said. “Let’s not be stupid about it. Are they in serious trouble up there?”

Traskin spoke with a professorial air. “As much trouble as your Polaris submarines are having on their Arctic patrol stations, Gospodin Durell. The storms raging there are terrifying. This weather in the Baltic is the merest shadow of what is occurring above the Arctic circle. Rumors of this weather are seeping down through Scandinavia and into Moscow, too. But as yet they are only rumors. The people are not too alarmed. But we face a new Ice Age, if it continues. A disaster for all civilized peoples.”

Durell leaned back a little. “Thank you, Colonel. If we’re not honest with each other now, there’s no sense in going on as a team. Even less sense in going on separately and in rivalry with each other.”

Traskin nodded his intelligent head. “I appreciate your attitude.”

Smurov grunted. “But I am in command here, and I make the decisions.”

Durell smiled. “You elected yourself?”

“Those are my orders.”

“But not mine,” Durell said.

Smurov’s big hand made a fist on the table. “One of us must be in command, Cajun.”

“We can form a committee. It’s more democratic.” “But in a military operation of this kind—”

“We don’t know it’s military. We’re after a ship, or sub, that has weather control equipment. One thing that has been overlooked is the continuing disturbances up in the Arctic and across Lapland. Until now, the phenomena that occurred in the Pacific and Africa and the Mediterranean have been of short duration. Experimental, it seems. Now we have a continuous dislocation of weather patterns that seems permanent. We can suggest two reasons for it. Either it is deliberate, or the mechanism has gone out of control and the enemy, whoever they are, have created a monster they can no longer command.”

“We know who the enemy is,” Smurov growled. “Those salt-eared Chinese.”

“Your comrades of the CPR?” Durell pretended mock astonishment. “I am surprised to hear you speak so of your allies.”

Traskin said: “Comrade Colonel Smurov uses a phrase that was common many years ago, in the days of the Czar, when rivalry was usual between Russia and the Chinese.”

“And history has made a full circle?”

Smurov downed his starka with a noisy belch. His flat Tartar’s face was red. “They have a vessel up there. A submarine. We have searched for it, and made two contacts.”

“Yes,” Durell said, admitting nothing.

Smurov’s eyes were wet slits. “They have escaped us so far. But we know their operating area. They are trapped. As a matter of fact, I complained to the committee that our expedition was pure foolishness. We do not need you, Cajun. And we cannot trust you. This cooperation is a ridiculous matter. I begged the military to decide it.”

“The Gulf of Bothnia isn’t Soviet waters.”

“In a matter so grave,” Traskin suggested, “we cannot allow petty sovereign jealousies to delay us.”

“Then why did you come to me?” Durell asked. Smurov belched again. “You have this yacht.”

“Not mine, exactly.”

“No matter. It is at your command. And we can all use it. It is a question of stealing up on this submarine under sail, you understand, so no sound detection equipment can warn the enemy of our approach.”

“Under sail? The Gulf is still iced up.”

“The ice went out,” Traskin said. “But now it returns. In a week, it may be impossible. That is why we must work quickly.” He was making every effort to smooth over the quick and irrevocable enmity between Durell and Smurov. “We could use a vessel of our own, of course, but then there is the matter of Professor Peter Gustaffson, who created all this in the first place. We need you, Mr. Durell, to go ashore to his house in Lapland and examine his equipment, to look over anything useful there. Perhaps it will give us a clue as to the method he developed to control the weather. We have made representations to the Swedish government in this matter, but they have refused us, due to their traditional neutrality.”

“Stupid,” Smurov grunted.

“But we understand that you, Mr. Durell, have full authority to investigate that area and, indeed, have been working with the professor’s daughter to that end.” Durell did not tell them he hadn’t gotten far.

“We have reason to believe,” Traskin continued, “that the presence of the weather machine and the sub in that area is not an accident. It is close to Gustaffson’s home, which he shares with his brother Eric, the archaeologist.” Traskin smiled gently. “We do our homework, too, you see.”

Durell stood up. “I don’t see why I need you, then. All I need is Swedish Security to cooperate with me.”

“They will not do so,” Smurov rasped. “Sit down, comrade Cajun. We must not attract attention here. You need us, never fear. And we need you.” The admission was reluctant.

“Tell me how.”

“Swedish Intelligence denies all responsibility for what is happening,” Traskin said. “Perhaps they fear world opinion of their role in this impending catastrophe. Perhaps they rely on their own resources. Whatever the reason, although they assigned Miss Sigrid to work with you, they proceed independently of our efforts. It poses a wasteful rivalry. But that is often the way with international problems.” Traskin shrugged his narrow shoulders. His eyes were fixed urgently on Durell.

“Don’t you suppose,” Durell suggested, “that the Swedes have already checked Gustaffson’s papers and laboratory?”

“Yes, but we wish to see it for ourselves.”

Durell sat down again, blue eyes dark with thought. “A thing as big as a weather modification control system that really works on a scale as huge as Gustaffson’s can change the face of the world. Let’s be honest. Whoever has WMC for themselves can dictate to every man on earth, to every government, to every continent. It can be used for good—or for evil. It can be used selfishly, regardless of the cost to neighbors. Am I correct?”

Both men stared silently at him.

“The Swedes want it. They can claim it for themselves, with some justification, since it was devised by Peter Gustaffson. We want it, too. And the USSR wants it.” Traskin coughed. Smurov’s eyes glittered. Durell felt a chill deep within his bones. The full enormity of the stakes hit him like a shock wave. The whole picture became clearer. The future of the world was at stake. Ordinary morality did not exist here. No laws covered this emergency. Perhaps Gustaffson, having created his machine, had early realized the significance of what he had created. He had not been able to bring himself to destroy it until, perhaps through gullible idealism, he fell into the hands of amoral and power-hungry men who had no scruples

about using it for world hegemony. Now it was too late to pretend that Pandora’s box had not been opened.

Traskin was silent. Smurov continued to stare. Durell leaned forward and spoke quietly.

“All the cards on the table, right?”

“Yes,” Smurov said. “We have a peasant’s saying— ‘The rabbit does not see the snare under the tops of the grain in the field.’ ”

“True. We have to work together. Those are our orders. But when and if we find the weather machine—

“There will be no problem,” Smurov said. He spoke with all the heavy smoothness of an asphalt roller. “It has all been decided higher up. We are not to concern ourselves with that.”

“We must. For instance, you haven’t gotten any cooperation from Swedish Intelligence. They’re stubborn. In fact, I’d guess you’ve been forbidden to go north, right?”

“There have been petty obstacles—”

“So you need me and my boat,” Durell stated.

“It will be convenient.”

“I must admit,” Durell said, “I’ve found some peculiar obstacles in my way, too. Who else is hunting for Gustaffson?”

Traskin smiled sadly. “Almost everyone, my dear Durell. The British are here, a bit clumsily. The French, of course, pour la gloire. An Egyptian mission. And several Chinese.”

“Is it to be a free-for-all, then?” Durell asked.

“One moment.” Traskin spoke sharply now. “Have you permission to go north, gospodin?”

“As far as I know. I’m saddled with a Swedish agent. She thinks I don’t realize how much she’s interfered with me. But as long as I know, it will be all right.”

“And your orders—afterward?”

“I don’t have any,” Durell said truthfully.

Both Russians stared at him in disbelief.

“It is an impasse,” Traskin said softly.

“Not necessarily. We can work together, up to the point where someone gets greedy. No use dropping the bone into the river just because we see its reflection in the water,” Durell said.

“That is a Russian proverb,” Smurov said. “But if we go together, I am in command.”

“No. It will be a joint committee,” Durell insisted.

“We are in a race, gentlemen. Others will manage to get through the Swedish security net and try for the prize. We’d do best to get there first. To quarrel now would defeat our ends. I’m sure Colonel Traskin agrees.”

“That is so.” Traskin turned to Smurov. “You see, we must cooperate with the American.”

“But he is tricky, he is dangerous!”

“I got rid of two of your assassins once,” Durell conceded, then added, “In exchange for Freeman, whom your hooligans killed in Budapest.”

“He was an imperialist spy!” Smurov snapped. His face was red and sweaty. He drank more starka and slammed the glass down, breathing heavily. “We need not pretend with each other, Durell. We have looked for each other for a long, long time.”

“And now our hands are tied,” Durell said softly. “We’re harnessed together, whether we like it or not. The goal is too important to quarrel about it before we get there.”

“But afterward—-”

“Yes, afterward,” Durell said quietly. “Afterward, we shall see.”

16

HE PHONED for a taxi and gave Sigrid’s address to the driver, leaving the KGB men in the Skansen restaurant. It was past five o’clock. The sun was still high in the wind-broomed sky. It seemed colder. The taxi skirted the Central Station and the new triple-leveled business center at Sergenstorg and the elegant shops of

Hotorcity, where motor traffic was banned in favor of garden terraces and pedestrian promenades. Sigrid’s apartment was near the new suburban district of Vallingby, with its ultra-modern skyscraper flats and cultural centers. Traffic proceeded smoothly on the fine boulevards. Durell picked up a tail, a black Volvo that persisted in the rear. But at Brommaplan the Volvo vanished.

A little farther on he asked his driver to stop and telephoned Ole Olsen at the hospital. Talmage answered. “Ole is sleeping, sir. Can I do anything for you?”

“Can you see if the Vesper has come in from Visby?” Durell asked.

“One moment.” There was a pause. “Yes, sir. At the berth we reserved for her.”

“Then get the message to Baron Uccelatti to expect two guests. Our KGB friends. And we sail at ten tonight.” “Mr. Durell, there has been some difficulty about clearance papers for the schooner.”

“I’m not surprised. Straighten it out, Mark.”

“It’s not that easy. There have been inquiries into the documents carried by Uccelatti’s crew—”

“Do what you can. And change that departure time. We’ll sail at eight.”

“Mr. Durell. Did you know that Miss Elgiva has checked out of her hotel? One of our people covered it. She has a summer house at the resort of Saltsjobaden. She’s gone there. We made no attempt to stop her, but—”

“Good thing.”

“Don’t you want her aboard the Vesper, sir?”

“She’ll be there. Are our KGB friends covered, too?” “Yes, sir. Last report, they left the Skansen restaurant in their own car. They’re being adequately followed.” “You’re learning, Mark.” Durell hung up.

Sigrid’s apartment, which was really her Uncle Eric’s, was part of a huge garden complex that stood like sugar cubes in the glittering afternoon sun. It was a peaceful scene. Golden-haired mothers and bouncing children moved and played in the recreation areas. The shops were bright and busy. Nobody seemed troubled by the weather. A thin haze tarnished the blue sky, and the wind now and then came in irregular puffs, sometimes very strong, then dying abruptly for a few minutes of unnatural calm.

Durell ran his finger down the directory to find the Gustaffson apartment. It was on the top floor, a garden affair with a terrace, one of the best. He took a scented, silent elevator and got out in an octagonal foyer that served only this one apartment. The foyer was ornamented with a tall, narrow medieval tapestry, a Chinese ceramic dog that stood three feet high, and two round, iron Viking shields, pitted with age, that flanked the first doorway.

Durell smelled cigar smoke.

He checked his hand on the bell. A glass portal to the left opened onto the terrace. He found it unlocked and stepped out into the sunlight. The view of Stockholm was magnificent. The wind slammed against him, bitterly cold. The sky looked peculiar. He heard a soft snatch of Sibelius from inside the apartment. Tall windows formed a glass façade, but they were all heavily curtained; he could not see inside. The terrace was ornamented with glass sculpture, some potted plants, modern sling chairs. Two empty glasses stood on a red formica table. A cigar rested in an ashtray. He touched the ash with his fingertip. It was cold. He did not think Sigrid followed her Danish sisters by smoking cigars.

He could hear nothing inside except for the recorded music. Big double doors indicated the entrance into the apartment. He felt exposed on the terrace, like a fly on a lump of sugar. It was a long way down to the gardens where the children played. The double doors had bronze lever handles. He tried one carefully. His shadow fell against the curtains, but it could not be helped, and when the handle clicked down, he moved in fast.

He was expected.

Something whirred through the air with a murderous sound, and an iron tooth grazed his cheek as he dropped down and out of the way. It was shadowed in the room, with the curtains drawn. There was movement to his left, another whirring, a leap of something dark. Durell jumped for his life. He saw the tall shadow of a man swinging an incredible weapon—a medieval battle mace, an iron-spiked ball at the end of a heavy chain, fastened to an iron handle. The iron ball hissed above his head and the momentum threw the big man off balance for a moment. Durell backed away, on his toes, reaching for his gun. “Olaf?”

The ball whirred over the man’s hand.

“Keep your hands down, Mr. Durell.”

“What are you doing here?”

A grin, a flash of strong teeth. “Visiting Sigrid.”

“Is she here?”

“Asleep. A pity to waken her.”

Durell started to call, then checked himself. He felt his breath coming too fast, and watched the whirling, vicious weapon intently. Olaf was an expert with it. He had only to let it fly, and he’d never get the gun from his pocket.

“Put that away, Olaf.” His voice sounded odd in his own ears. “It’s time we had a long talk.”

The big, black-haired man grinned and stood with his feet slightly spread for balance, his strong arms uplifted as he continued to whirl the mace with a deceptively lazy swing. His handsome face looked distorted in the dim light. He wore a black singlet and tight khaki slacks that bulged with the musculature of his powerful legs. His thick hair looped over his flat forehead.

“Olaf, who are you working for?”

“It does not matter to you now. Nothing will matter for you now, will it?”

“Did you send those men after me on Visby?”

“If you must know, yes. You are a cool one, Mr. Durell.” The mace whirled a few inches closer. “I have my duty to do, even if I regret it. You are a worthy opponent. But you are too sure of yourself, perhaps. How did you find your Russian friends, by the way?”

“They know all about you, Olaf.”

“Indeed. Do you count on them to avenge you?”

“I’m not that foolish. But I count on your being reasonable.”

“A pity. Do you know the term ‘berserker,’ Mr. Durell? I am a berserker. A Viking filled with the lust for blood. Your blood.”

Durell felt sweat trickle down his back. The whirling iron ball came closer, almost grazed his face. He turned his head instinctively aside, and Olaf laughed. Beyond his dark figure, Durell saw that the apartment was like a museum, cluttered with Viking weapons, swords and shields and strange faded pennants on ancient iron spears. The furniture, too, was massive and crude, of dark and heavy wood carved with pagan designs. His cheek touched cold iron as his head was forced against the wall by the approaching mace. The iron ball sang as Olaf spun it slightly higher above his head. The strange light in his eyes brightened. . . .

Durell reached up and tore the buckler from the wall. It was heavy, a round shield with a grotesque spike protruding from the center. He dropped to one knee as Olaf grunted and swung the mace; then he came up fast, shielding his head with the buckler, and the full impact of Olaf’s blow hit the shield with a shattering, clanging noise.

He thought his arm had broken.

The chain that held the whirling iron ball snapped against the edge of Durell’s shield. The ball flew across the room and thudded heavily against the wall. Olaf laughed and stepped lightly back, biting his lower lip. He threw the handle of the mace at Durell, and that, too, clanged harmlessly against the shield. Durell leaped after him, but his arm felt numb, and he was not quick enough. Olaf got a heavy, double-edged sword down from the wall.

“It is like the olden days. You have no chance, Durell. I am expert with these weapons. As a boy, I was employed by Sigrid’s Uncle Eric, who has a passion to recreate the past. He taught me the art of these weapons. You should die quietly, instead of annoying me this way.”

“You talk too much,” Durell said.

And he leaped for the other’s sword.

Olaf gripped the sword in both of his big hands and, grinning, slashed at Durell’s shield. The clang of iron was deafening in the room. Durell slipped on a throw rug on the polished floor and Olaf gave an ancient battle cry and raised his sword to prepare for a blow that would split Durell’s skull. Durell kicked him in the groin. Letting go of the shield, he rolled on one hip and came up with fingers rigid and rammed them into the man’s plexus. Olaf went white. Durell hit him with his left, again with his right. The sword slashed down viciously and pinned itself in the wooden floor. Splinters of oak flew. The big man staggered. Durell picked up the shield and slammed it against the strong, dark head. Olaf’s eyes turned into pale crescents. He stumbled across the room and went down on his knees, very slowly, his body twitching, like a slaughtered animal that does not know it is dead.

Durell stood up slowly. His legs trembled. He knew he had been closer to death than ever before. He walked toward Olaf Jannsen. The man’s head was bleeding copiously. But he still breathed, although his eyes were open and unseeing.

There came a sound from somewhere else in the apartment. Durell turned and walked down a long hall.

“Olaf? My Viking, it is you?”

Sigrid’s voice was sharp with alarm. Durell threw open a bedroom door and stood looking at the blonde girl.

She sat on the edge of a huge bed, about to rise, and she was stark naked again.

17

“MANIACAL man,” Sigrid said.

She had that indefinable look of a woman who has just been loved. Her long hair was tumbled about her smooth, golden shoulders; her eyes were dazed. She fumbled a silken pink sheet up about her hips, and for a moment she looked bewildered and at a loss.

Durell stood with his feet slightly spread, looking down at her. She was very beautiful and appealing.

“It didn’t take you long,” he said wryly.

“What—what do you mean?”

“You didn’t waste any time getting together with Olaf, as soon as you got back to Stockholm.”

“Oh.”

“Is he your lover?”

“Is that any of your business?”

“I think it is.”

“Are you jealous, poor Sam?”

“I just want to know.”

“He wanted to kill you?”

Durell nodded. “He tried hard enough.”

“Is he—what did you do to him?”

“Put him away for a bit. He called himself a berserker. What’s the matter with you people? You try to live in a time long gone, as if you could recreate the bloody Vikings in yourselves. Why is Olaf so anxious to kill me?” Sigrid said abruptly, “I want to see him.” She stood up, using the sheet to cover herself. Durell let her take a few steps to the door, then shoved her hard, back to the bed. She fell and bounced. She had long, wonderful legs. “I must see him! I think you killed him!”

“I might do that,” Durell said.

“You wouldn’t dare—!”

“I would. Believe me. Tell me all about it, Sigrid. Otherwise, his life isn’t worth a plugged nickel. I have no sentiment about a man who comes after me with a mace and a sword.”

She looked astonished. “Did Olaf do that? He used to practice with them, hour after hour, with Uncle Eric. He was very good. And you beat him?”

“I beat him.”

“Olaf is the Black Viking. I told you. He’s a legend come to life. The Black One, who comes with the ice and storms, the wind and the sleet. He brings death wherever he goes. One must be kind to him—or else.”

“You seem to have been kind enough.”

“I think I love him. He is crazy about me, nasty Sam.” “He was crazy to kill you, back on the Vesper.”

“That was a mistake,” she said thoughtfully. “Anyway, I knew he could swim ashore. I told him to go. I told him he was foolish to try to stop you from going north. I said that nothing could stop you. Perhaps I said the wrong things. I told Olaf you were a better man than he.”

She looked at him carefully through lowered lashes. It was very appealing, and very false.

“Go on,” he said. “Tell me about Olaf.”

“We were children together. He spent a lot of time with Papa and Uncle Eric, up north. Eric loved him. Papa wasn’t so sure, and didn’t trust him. It was Eric who first called him the Black Viking. They spent their time talking of the olden days, the dreams of empire and glory. Olaf and I became lovers when I was fourteen.” She looked demure. “Does that make you jealous? I want to see him now. I want to know what you’ve done to him.”

Durell barred her way. “Who does Olaf work for? He’s not in your security department, is he?”

“Oh, no. Olaf couldn’t stand the discipline. He used to be a submarine officer in our Navy. He was cashiered for disobedience. That was typical of him. He was too young to have been in World War II, but his father was a Nazi sympathizer, and Olaf always felt that was a stigma. He came to live with us, and then he went away on ships and became an adventurer, a smuggler, everywhere in the world. He lived in Hong Kong. He was there when Papa went there and disappeared.”

“It figures,” Durell said dryly.

“Olaf had nothing to do with that!” she snapped.

“How can you be sure?”

“He told me about it.”

“Just what did he tell you?”

“That’s confidential material,” she said quietly. “Swedish security data?”

“I’m not permitted to tell.”

“Your people don’t really want me to go north, do they? They don’t want anyone up there, really. They want your father’s machine for themselves.”

“Why not?” She was defiant. “After all, Papa is of this country.”

“I thought he might be with Peking now. How many other national agencies are after this thing?”

“Everyone. Greedy, lustful, dreaming of power. They

dream of making rain in the Sahara, of flooding enemy seaports by melting the icecaps; they dream of making droughts to starve their enemies. It’s beastly. If Papa only realized what he’s done!”

“Where do you fit into it?” he asked.

“I have my job to do. May I get dressed?”

He nodded. “You’re supposed to cooperate with me.” “True. Up to a point.”

“Where does the point exist?”

“I cannot say. I have not been told.”

“All right.” Putting questions to Sigrid was like punching into soft taffy. She was sticky and tricky and her answers were shapeless, pulled out of proportion by her personal motivations. He turned away. “Get some clothes on. I’ll have a chat with Olaf. It’s time I got some answers from him.”

The black-haired man was on his hands and knees on the floor, shaking his head in confusion. Durell walked toward him. Olaf’s eyes were crescents of pure hatred, his big shoulders hunched as he pushed his weight upward.

“Sit with your back to the wall,” Durell said. He held his gun and stood a safe distance away. “We’ll have a few minutes of question and answer now.”

“I have nothing to say,” Olaf growled.

“You have plenty, and you’ll say it.”

“What more can you do to me? Kill me? I am not afraid of death.”

“I know that. But I could turn you over to the police. Interpol has an all-points out for you, for the murder of Uccelatti’s captain in Brighton. It’s been checked out. We found his body. You killed him, didn’t you?”

Jannsen breathed heavily, his enormous chest expanding, then falling. He said nothing.

“You were anxious to get aboard the Vesper, right?” Durell continued. “Who gave you your orders?”

“I will answer no questions.”

“Who do you work for? The Chinese Reds?”

“You are mad.”

“You know where the WMC submarine is. You’re getting your orders by radio from them, right?”

“I don’t know what you talk about.”

“I’m discussing weather modification control. Professor Peter’s machine, the one that’s making everybody talk about the weather. It’s in a Chinese sub up in the Gulf of Bothnia, isn’t it?”

Jannsen was silent.

“And they put you ashore so you could get aboard the Vesper and become one of the crew members?” Jannsen’s mouth was a cruel, adamant line.

“You helped talk Sigrid’s father into going over to Red China,” Durell said, “when you met him in Hong Kong. You helped the submarine get set up with the mechanism for controlling weather. You were aboard on this shake-down cruise, until you went ashore secretly in England to take care of Uccelatti’s captain. It’s easy to guess that somebody, in one of the agencies at Bruges, is a defector, a spy, a traitor, and sent you our plans by radio.”

“You spin a clever web, Mr. Durell.”

“It just makes sense. And you’ll confirm it. I won’t mind killing you, if I have to. I owe you a few lumps.”

“I shake with fear,” the big man sneered.

“And I’ll shake answers out of you. Why did the sub get itself bottled up in the Gulf of Bothnia? It will never get out now, you know. The Baltic is closed. The Russians, the NATO fleet, are all on patrol. The Skaggerak and Kattegat are closed. The Kiel Canal is impossible. There’s no place for your people to go. It was a stupid thing, to go up there to the Lapland coast.”

Olaf twitched his shoulders. He touched his bloody mouth. When he moved his legs, he winced from the pain in his groin where Durell had managed to kick him.

Durell said: “I’ll tell you what I think, Olaf. Your submarine had to go up into that bottleneck. And the only thing that could draw your people there is Professor Gustaffson’s house there—and laboratory, probably— because you need something from Professor Peter’s lab. Some piece of machinery, perhaps. You know the coast, you know the land, you know the house. It all adds up.” Something stirred in the other’s glittering eyes. Then the stare became blank and emotionless. But Durell knew he had hit something.

“Until now,” he went on, “the weather experiments you made in other parts of the world during your cruise from China were all brief and reasonably managed. But what is happening here is different. It shows no sign of control. It goes on and on, and it’s getting worse. That isn’t what Peking wants, is it? So something has gone wrong.”

“You make wild guesses, Durell,” Olaf muttered. “Your machinery went out of whack. And Professor Peter can only fix it if he gets some equipment out of his house in Lapland, right? That’s why the sub had to go up into the bottleneck, where we can get at it and destroy it.” “You’ll never—” Olaf began, then checked himself and bit his lip.

At that moment, Sigrid screamed in the bedroom.

18

THE SOUND was sharp and shrill, a quick yelp of terror, and it was enough to distract Durell for a fatal moment. When he turned his head, Olaf moved. The man had enormous recuperative powers. He came at Durell with a quick rush, his head down like a charging bull. But Olaf was not aiming at Durell. He drove for the apartment door instead, moving at incredible speed. Durell spun, lifted his gun, then checked himself. A shot in this apartment would bring all of the Stockholm police down around his head. The damage would be irreparable. And Olaf knew it.

The door slammed in his face. Durell yanked at it a second later, leaped out into the private foyer. The elevator was still there. The doors hissed shut in his face. The indicator spun downward.

There was no hope of chasing him. He stood for a moment, swearing softly. Anger built up in him. He turned on his heel and walked back to Sigrid’s bedroom.

She had stopped screaming.

She was dressed in a soft gray jersey that clung to her

beautiful body. She looked almost more naked than

before. She was calmly putting orange lipstick on her

mouth, and her back was toward him as she faced the mirror.

“What was it, Sigrid?” he asked harshly.

“Nothing. I was silly. I thought I saw a man on the terrace, peeping in at me.”

“You’re lying.”

She laughed. “Did Olaf leave?”

“He got away, thanks to you.”

“I’m glad.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I told you, he loves me. And you were asking all sorts of bad questions.”

He wanted to slap her. “And getting bad answers.”

She shrugged. “Do you want to beat me, angry man? Go ahead. I am strong. But Olaf is gone now. He is safe.”

“He’ll try to kill you again.”

“I can handle him. He loves me,” she said again.

“Why do you want him free? He’s the enemy. He helped to kidnap your father; he’s been running that submarine; and he’s stopped at nothing so far to check us.” She spoke gravely. “People are more important than things. Friends are more important than ideologies. Lovers are more important than the struggle for world power.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

She turned suddenly, and her great eyes were filled with tears. “Olaf is a part of me, don’t you understand? Maybe the bad part, yes. I don’t know. But we were childhood friends, adolescent sweethearts. No one in the world knows me as Olaf knows me. We have shared secrets since we were children. We have the same memories, the same past. Who else could be closer to me?”

“He’s a murderer,” Durell said flatly. “He’s killed senselessly, killed innocent men. He’ll kill again.”

“But Olaf—”

She halted as the telephone rang.

Durell picked it up. He kept Sigrid in view, blocking her way out of the bedroom. It was Ole Olsen.

“Cajun? Glad I caught up with you. I’ve been phoning all over Stockholm for you. Young Mark Talmage is in a funk.”

“What is it?”

“The Vesper came in. But the port authorities won’t let her sail out again. They’ve wrapped her in a snarl of red tape. It’s obstructive, and it’s apparent that one department here doesn’t know what the other is doing. I’ve told Baron Uccelatti to take the boat to Saltsjobaden. That’s where Elgiva’s house is, you know?”

“I know.”

“Elgiva is definitely there. As soon as it’s dark, the Vesper will move out. Uccelatti says he can handle the customs guard on the schooner. You’ll have to pick up the Vesper and Elgiva at Saltsjobaden.”

“Why is Talmage in a funk?”

“Well, Miss Elgiva has been trying to reach you. She tried your hotel and here, at the hospital. You told her about me, I gather.”

“Yes.”

“A good thing. Anyway, she got me here and asked for you. I convinced her she could tell me her troubles.”

“What troubles?”

“It seems that your KGB friend—Colonel Traskin, not the Muzhik—greatly admired Elgiva’s poetry. He went out there to see her.”

“Without Smurov?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’d like a private talk with him.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible now, Cajun. Traskin is dead. He’s been murdered. In Elgiva’s living room.”

Durell shoved Sigrid roughly ahead of him. She stumbled, and he followed her, and closed the door. In forty minutes they were through the city and at Elgiva’s house.

It stood on the beach, a small replica of a fisherman’s home, painted red as they usually were, in sharp contrast to Elgiva’s ultra-modem house at Visby. It was small, simple, and rustic. In the gloom of evening, the resort town and beaches looked dreary and deserted. The weather had changed again. The burnished sky had clouded over as the sun set, and now the wind came with a different note, whooping and keening in argument with the uneasy surf. Now and then a spit of rain darkened the sand and the roofs of other houses nearby.

Sigrid tried to look dignified, but she was frightened and uneasy. “Do not be so cruel, angry man.”

“You’ve used up all my patience, Sigrid.”

“I had nothing to do with this!”

“We’ll see.”

Mark Talmage came to the door as they entered. His young face was pale. His Ivy League manner had been pulled out of shape in the past hour.

“Glad you’re here, sir. God, it’s an awful mess. We must reorient the whole program.”

“Stop jittering. Where is Elgiva?”

“She’s here.”

“Keep your eye on this one,” Durell said, indicating Sigrid.

Elgiva looked as serene and remote as the night before. She came into the little “parlor” with her smooth, gliding walk and held out a hand to Durell. Her fingers were warm and friendly and held his a fraction longer than necessary. Her great eyes were filled with mystery.

“I am so happy you came. He was such a nice man. He wanted me to autograph one of my books of poetry. That was all. And then—”

“Where is Traskin?”

“In the back.”

Talmage stuttered. “I—I had to move him, sir. She insisted. Miss Elgiva, I mean.”

Durell looked at him. “You got here quickly.”

“Yes, sir. I hope I did the right thing.”

“Right enough.”

Durell had forced Sigrid to drive here, in a car she had produced which she claimed belonged to her Uncle Eric. It was a Mercedes convertible, and he had parked it in the lane beyond a picket fence smothered with roses. Durell listened to the wind rise outside and felt a sense of doom and despair.

“We haven’t much time,” he murmured.

“This way,” Talmage said anxiously. “I have no idea what we can do. The Russians will be suspicious now—”

“Be quiet,” Durell said.

Elgiva tucked her hand in his arm as he walked down a short corridor to an old-fashioned, brick-floored kitchen. Colonel Vladimir Traskin’s body lay there. His fine, intellectual face carried a look of surprise that death had come to him this way. There was a single drop of blood on his beard, and a small patch of it on his white shirt, where the bullet had gone into his back and burst his heart and come out the chest. Durell went through the man’s pockets with swift efficiency. He found a CPSU card, other identity documents, and no weapons. He breathed out angrily through his nose.

“How did it happen?” he asked Elgiva.

The tall, fair-skinned woman looked distant; her voice was calm and controlled. “He simply knocked on the door and asked for me. He told me who he was and said it would be a privilege if he could talk to me for a short time.”

“What did he want to talk about?”

“My work, of course. He had read everything I’ve written. It was most flattering. He knew my poems from memory, and understood them very well, I thought.” “How long was he here?”

“No more than twenty minutes, before it happened.”

“And just what did happen?”

“I’m not certain. He was at the window, talking. He was a fine man. Essentially gentle, I think. And there came a shot from the beach. He simply—fell. That’s all there was.”

“You didn’t see who had shot him?”

“There was no one out there,” she said quietly. “The shot broke the window. The glass is still on the floor there. But the wind was blowing the sand, and it was quite dark.” She shook her proud head. “No, I saw nothing.”

“He said nothing about expecting danger?”

She met his hard gaze. “Why should he?”

“You didn’t notice anything strange about him?”

“Mr. Durell, I had just arrived here myself. This house of mine was closed all winter. I came here to look it over and turned on the furnace and water. I am accustomed to doing these things myself. I had just finished and settled everything when he arrived. Perhaps he took the electric train and walked from the station. I did not expect him. He had to introduce himself, since I did not know him.”

“But who knew you were coming here?”

“I assume that you did. Or one of your people.” “Nobody in my group mentioned you to Traskin.”

“Then I cannot explain how he found me.”

Mark Talmage said: “Perhaps he followed Miss Elgiva, sir. It’s possible. And someone followed him.”

Durell looked at Sigrid. It hadn’t been she, nor could it have been Olaf. He felt frustrated. He thought of Colonel Smurov, the Muzhik. There would be hell to pay. Smurov would be furious, in a murderous rage, suspicious of everything. He would demand an explanation.

Durell turned to Talmage. “Does Smurov know of our change of plans about the Vesper?”

“Yes, sir. He’s coming here.” Talmage shot his cuffs and consulted his fancy Omega. “In twenty minutes.” Smurov might have arrived earlier, Durell thought grimly. No telling what wheels revolved within the KGB hierarchy. Smurov wanted to command. Perhaps he resented being teamed with the quieter, more sophisticated Traskin. Maybe Smurov wanted it this way. But he could only guess at the answers now. And guesses weren’t good enough.

Colonel Traskin’s body was heavier than he expected. Talmage and Durell carried him while Elgiva opened the kitchen door. Sigrid walked silently alongside. Wind and rain hammered them as they went outside. The nearest house was some fifty yards away. It seemed empty. A low board fence divided the properties. Beyond the other house was a small marina, with motorboats and a few fishing trawlers that heaved restlessly at their moorings. The Vesper was due in there. Durell heard a curious sound, and realized that Talmage’s teeth were chattering. There were lights in other houses down the beach, and now two men came out in raincoats and stood on the distant dock. But they did not seem to be examining any of the boats there.

He had to break open the door of the next vacant house. The sound seemed loud, but he knew the wind would snatch it away. With the house in between, he could not see the men on the dock. And they could not see him and his grim burden, either.

It took five minutes to cache Traskin’s body in the empty house. Durell hoped it would be some time before the authorities or the owner happened by. When he stepped outside again, he had made up his mind.

The Vesper came ghosting out of the rain ten minutes later, for which he was grateful. She drove out of the gloom with her sails furled, like a graceful white gull in the gathering night. Navigation lights blinked along the channels and outer banks of the Maleren archipelago. All about were little islands, sandbars, the gleam and glitter of houses and restaurants forlornly trying to evoke business in the face of the unnatural season.

The two men on the dock had vanished.

Durell herded Sigrid and Elgiva aboard, where they were greeted urbanely by Baron Uccelatti. The Baron had a hard time concealing his worry from Durell.

“You are certain it is feasible to go north? The authorities and the barometer seem to agree that it will be most dangerous.”

“No help for it. They won’t let me fly, certainly.”

“But their patrol vessels—”

“We’ll pray for luck in the weather. It may help us, instead of working against us.”

Sigrid halted abruptly. “I do not think I will go with you, after all. I will not share a cabin with Elgiva.” “There are other cabins. You have no choice.”

“But my people haven’t given me clearance to go farther—”

“You have it from me. Elgiva?”

The poetess nodded. “I will go with you. It seems that the old gods still drive us wherever they choose.”

“Good. You’re being very sensible.”

Sigrid was angry. “But why should she go along? Maybe she killed Traskin! How can you be sure?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” Durell said.

“And will you go without Colonel Smurov? It was not in your arrangement to double-cross and desert him.”

“Can’t be helped,” said Durell. “And we’re better off without him.”

Uccelatti coughed. He was distressed. “I am sorry, Cajun. Colonel Smurov is already aboard. He arrived at the Vesper before we left Stockholm.”

19

SMUROV sat like an Asiatic warlord in a shadowed corner of the main salon. He wore a lined raincoat and a broad-brimmed fedora, rather than Oriental robes and turban, but his Tartar features were those of a suspicious Mongol separated from his horde. He showed caution and suspicion, but no fear. But something glittered in Colonel Smurov’s slitted eyes. Durell could not be sure what it was, but he thought there was a gleam of triumph behind the speculative look of the man.

“We do not sail without comrade Traskin,” Smurov grunted.

“But he’s dead.” Durell quietly flicked a finger at the PPSH gun Smurov fondled in his lap. “And you can put that away. If you hold us up by waiting for a dead man, we’ll be here forever. The Swedish authorities will be along soon enough.”

“Who killed him?” Smurov asked.

“We don’t know.”

“He was soft, an intellectual, given to seeing two sides to every question, like a solicitor. The legal mind can be fatal in our business. One should see only black or white, or one is lost.”

“Then Traskin is lost,” Durell said. “And we sail without him. And without you, if you like.”

“Oh, no.” Smurov’s thick lips smiled, but his eyes were bleak. “Where you go, I must go, until we settle both our public and private differences.”

Durell turned. “Baron? Smurov won’t use that gun. Tell your men to cast off.”

“I must advise you that the weather reports—”

“We must go now, or not at all,” Durell insisted. Uccelatti shrugged in resignation. “As you wish.”

“One moment,” Smurov said softly.

He stirred in the shadowed corner of the luxurious cabin. There was an aura about him like a tangible smell, a darkness, an evil. The Vesper pitched restlessly at the dock. Somewhere a bell buoy clanged in the thrust of the wind. Uccelatti had sent some crewmen to block off the small pier where they were tied up. Colonel Smurov cocked his round, bristled head as if listening for something.

“A moment,” he said again. “I feel you do not want me with you, Durell. You think you do not need me. But you have orders to cooperate with me.”

Durell waited.

“And you do not disobey orders, eh?”

“I might,” Durell said. “Push me, and we’ll see.”

“Ah. You pretend anger. It covers your guilt for the murder of my countryman.”

“Maybe you killed him, Smurov. I wouldn’t put it past you. I know your main weapon. You use fear better than the gun in your lap. You lay about you with terror to keep everyone at their distance. It keeps you safe. It holds your power. But no one here is afraid of you. You can come or go, as you like. I’d prefer that you go.”

“But if I killed you now,” Smurov said heavily, “I would be justified. My superiors would listen to me, if I told them how you murdered poor Traskin.”

“We didn’t kill him,” Durell said.

“Then who did? Someone killed the poor fool. Yes, Traskin was a fool, and often troubled by the things we do to survive against your imperialist schemes. So he was careless.” Smurov shrugged again. “Very well. He

was a nuisance to me. It is not my fault he has been eliminated. And it leaves me with a free hand.”

“To do what?”

Smurov gave him a cold, reptilian stare. “You will know when the time comes, Gospodin Durell.”

“Don’t threaten me,” Durell said softly.

“I shall sail with you. I give you permission. We will leave now,” Smurov said.

“Thanks for nothing.”

“But I shall remember Traskin. I will remind you of him again, when our work is finished.”

LAPLAND

Beyond the shores of the Bootenviken, that last arm of the Baltic Sea that reaches up to the Arctic Circle, the sun never sets from May to mid-July. Sweden has introduced trains, plane service, and fine highways into this region that once was accessible only to the most daring and the Laplanders who live there with theii reindeer herds and indigenous economy.

The lure of iron ore at Kiruna, the glacial peaks and remote snow-clad valleys and tundras, attract tourists in increasing numbers to this unreal world, to ski and to view the spectacular mining operations at Luossavaara.

Southward, the Ume River valley leads through the beautiful university town of Ume a on the coast. Cars and buses go through the highlands to Mo in Rana on an Atlantic fjord in Norway. Farming homesteads are found even up in the mountains.

In winter, the Gulf of Bothnia is iced over from shore to shore. By May, in normal weather, the seas are open again for the short summer season.

20

THE Vesper shuddered and shook cakes of ice off her bow as she plunged into the green sea. Rime shrouded her rigging and masts, and stiffened the storm trysail that steadied her against the gale winds that blew now from the north, now from the east, in disconcerting and irregular cycles. The helmsman had to be relieved every hour. The Sicilian crew, accustomed to the mild Mediterranean, suffered bitterly from the cold. Now and then the world was blotted out by swirling snowstorms that roared down to envelop them in an icy white grip.

Durell used a lifeline to work his way below. It was evening of the second day out of Stockholm, and the weather proved a mixed blessing. The Vesper’s spoon bow was capable of riding over and smashing the occasional ice floe they met. And the overcast, the driving sleet and lowering cyclonic clouds and general gloom effectively hid them from the Swedish Dragon jets that risked destruction to hunt for them. Now and then the howl of the wind was mixed with the boom of the jets as they came in low for the search; but although they heard the planes several times, they were not seen, and the Vesper continued undiscovered.

He estimated another hour to their destination. But this was difficult to judge, since they hadn’t seen the sun since they left Saltsjobaden. The lingering twilight at this latitude made it difficult to judge if it was day or night. An eerie whiteness prevailed, a combination of driving snow and the half-gloom of the Arctic daylight.

They had made a landfall in the Kvarkin, off the island of Holmon, and adjusted course by dead reckoning. But they might be an hour from the village of Skelleftsvik, or almost upon it. Durell worked forward to the bow lookout, ordered him to stay sharp, and went below.

He was grateful for the warmth of the cabins. He exchanged a few words with Baron Uccelatti, working at charts that were useless without a look at the sun. The Palermitan nobleman was pale and strained. Durell went to Sigrid’s cabin, knocked, and entered without waiting for a reply.

She looked at him with sullen eyes. “I have nothing more to say to you, Sam. You are taking us all to destruction. The voyage is one of suicide.”

“That should suit your Swedish temperament,” he said. “Have you anything to drink?”

“Only your bourbon. Most of the liquor was smashed in the last gale. Help yourself.”

He poured a stiff three fingers, bracing himself against the lift and pitch and plunge of the laboring vessel. He kept ducking his head to keep from scraping against the cabin ceiling. The girl huddled in a blanket on her bunk, her long hair loose about her shoulders. Her mouth was sulky.

“What’s bugging you now?” he asked.

“You do not know this coast. You. are blind and foolish, filled with rage against defeat. You will not admit that you are defeated.”

“If men have made this storm,” he said, “then they must be made to end it.”

“You blame my father, do you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you think it is all his fault, through some quixotic, idealistic belief. And you are the hard-headed American engaged in fighting the Cold War. You hold my father in contempt.”

“I didn’t say that, either. You’re simply projecting your own thoughts on me, Sigrid.”

She turned away. “Leave me alone,” she whispered. “I feel miserable enough.”

“I promise you,” he said gently, “if your father is alive, we’ll find him and get him back.”

“Suppose he does not wish to come back?”

“I’m sure he didn’t want this. If he’s the man you say he is, he didn’t intend his weather machine to freeze and destroy so many innocent people.”

“But if you find him, what will you do to him?” “That depends on many things. One thing is certain, we mustn’t let Smurov get him.”

“That man frightens me.”

“He frightens me, too,” Durell admitted. “He’s very sure of himself. He has power behind him, and he’s not far from his own borders. He can call for help whenever he feels the time is right. But something else is bothering you, isn’t it, Sigrid?”

She looked at him. “Perceptive man.”

“Are you worried about Olaf? You do love him?”

“I don’t know. I am attached to him, a part of him, since we were children. Yes, I suppose I love him.”

“But he’s a bit mad. He called it himself—a berserker.” “He would never hurt me.”

“Sigrid, if he must, he’ll kill you.”

She turned her head away. The Vesper shuddered as an exceptional sea broke over her. She heeled far to port and took a long time to right herself. Ice scraped along her stout planks. Nothing could be seen through the cabin ports. Durell sat on the bunk beside the girl.

“Sigrid, be honest with me. Don’t you think that Olaf will kill you, if you get in his way?”

“I cannot believe it. We are such old friends, and we have shared so much together. . . .” She turned in sudden anger. “It is you, strange man, who brought this trouble with you. Everything was clear until you came along. I cannot understand myself. My duty to my job struggles with my feelings for Olaf. And I cannot understand you, either.”

She clasped her hands behind his neck and looked long into his eyes. Then she abruptly released him and shook her head; her long, pale hair swayed. “No, I do not know myself. How can I do my work and love Olaf, too?” “Perhaps you don’t care much about either of them,” he said gently.

“I am confused. My duty must go against both you and Olaf.”

“Can you tell me what your orders are, exactly?”

“It is for—no, I cannot say.”

“Have you kept your people informed of what you’re doing? Are those planes from your Air Force? Are they hunting us?”

“Some of them,” she admitted.

“And the others?”

“Russian, I suppose.” She looked miserable at the thought, then abruptly took another tack. “Have you talked to Elgiva today?”

“Only briefly, at lunch.”

“She loves my father, too. But she is so strange—such a witch. She offers something to all men. Love, to my father; a kinship of spirit to Uncle Eric, with her infatuation for old things of the pagan world. In those days she would have been a priestess, I think, cutting the hearts out of quivering, living sacrifices.”

“She’s not as bad as all that.”

“Why do you suppose she came on this insane voyage? We will all die, you know. The storm will destroy us. It will be impossible to get into Skelleftsvik.”

“Why do you say that?”

She shrugged. “One must know the coast intimately, as I do, or we shall be wrecked on the coast and thrown into this icy sea.”

“We’re almost there. Will you help pilot us in?”

She thought about it for a long time. Then she said, “No, I am afraid. I do not want the responsibility.”

He went to see Elgiva. She was drinking coffee in the salon and trying to read, although the schooner pitched so extremely he could not see how she could concentrate. Sigrid’s image of a priestess was not dispelled by the way Elgiva looked. There was something unearthly in her amber eyes that met his gaze, a fanatic joy in the storm that imperiled them all. She closed the book, but kept a finger in her place. Her eyes were speculative as Durell sat down beside her.

“And how is that devoted and impossible child, Sigrid?” she asked softly.

“Confused,” he said.

“So she has always been. It is a question of being in love with her own father. She resents me and any other woman who approaches him. And she holds up every other man to an unhappy comparison.” Elgiva sighed. “She could ruin us all.”

“Not if you help us,” Durell said.

Her eyes widened. “My dear Durell, what could I do?” “The waters here are tricky. The storm makes it worse. Sigrid won’t help to guide us in. But you’ve been here many times before. Perhaps you can do it.”

“I write poetry,” she said coldly. “I am not a sailor.” “But you know this shore. You’ve walked along it and explored it intimately.”

“Only in the sunlight, and in peaceful weather. Not in this—this darkness of the gods.”

“The gods didn’t make this weather. Peter Gustaffson did it. And I don’t think he can stop it now. So we’ve got to find him and help him, or it’s the end for everybody.”

“Perhaps the gods use Peter as their weapon against an insane mankind.”

“We can’t know that,” he said seriously. “So we must do all we can. You can help now, Elgiva. Come on deck with me.”

“No,” she said. “If we die, we die.”

“And let Peter die, too?”

“He does as he wishes.”

“If that were true, your attitude would be justified. But I don’t think so. I think he’s being forced into it.”

She considered this, then shook her head. “No, I cannot help you. I know nothing about navigation.”

“You could try,” he said urgently. “You know some of the dangers along this coast.”

“There is the Walk,” she said. “A shoal from the shore to Skelleftsvik Island. The Gustaffson house is on the mainland, but Eric built a Viking council house on the island. One can wade there, at certain times. If you are not careful, we will go aground on that sandbar.”

“Good,” he said. “Thank you.”

She opened her book and continued to read.

No land was in sight. It was neither night nor day. A gray light filled with swirling curtains of snow from the north and the east filled the world. Huge chunks of ice lifted and fell in the wild green seas. The clouds hung low, swirling, tumbling like dirty gray blankets tossed in the sky. Durell searched all the quarters of the compass, his eyes narrowed against the bitter cut of the wind. To port, he thought he saw a dark mass that might be land; but when he looked again, there was only thick snow and jumbled ice heaving on the sea. The wind moaned in the rigging and the trysail came over with a thunderous snap as the helmsman lost the wheel. Durell jumped to help him before the Vesper broached. The water pouring over the deck gripped him eagerly, anxious to pull him down into its dark, insane depths.

He knew from the chart that there were numberless islands scattered off this coast. How could he be sure which was Skelleftsvik? It seemed futile. The elements were too wild and strong. At any moment, the Vesper might come down on a rock and split apart, lose her masts, or have her laboring engine fail. Then the sea would win and the end would come quickly for them all.

Movement caught his eye from the cabin hatch. Two men burst out of it, struggling. One was Smurov. The other was the youngster, Gino Ginelli. Smurov’s barrellike body was astonishingly quick; his foot kicked the boy in the chest. Gino tumbled down the ladder again and Smurov stood hunched, watching him. Then the Russian turned and lurched through the snow toward the wheel. Durell left the lifeline to check him.

“What is it, Colonel?” he shouted.

Smurov looked cruel and angry. “It is nothing to do with you, gospodin. I used the radio. The stupid boy tried to stop me.”

Durell stared into the other’s slitted eyes. “You called for reinforcements?”

“I had to make my report.”

“You’re a fool. Either we all get out, or none of us will survive.”

“We shall see who survives, and who dies.”

Durell swung to the hatchway. Gino was crawling stubbornly up on deck again. Durell checked him with a firm but gentle hand. The boy’s face was ashen under his dark skin.

“That son of a bitchin’—”

“Did he get his message off?” Durell asked.

“Yeah. He slugged me.” Gino rubbed the back of his black hair in wonderment. “I’ll zap him, the crazy bastard. I’ll wait until I get my chance—”

“You’ll do nothing. Go below and ask one of the women to take care of you. . .

Durell let his voice trail off as he heard a new sound through the roar of the storm. Above the howling and thunder of the unnatural tempest, there came a more normal sound, and somehow it held more dread than the others. It was the break of surf on a reef, dead ahead.

He clung to the rail, peering ahead. He could see nothing. The snow and icy wind blinded him.

“Gino!” he shouted. The boy appeared at his shoulder. Ice whitened his thick black hair. “Gino, go forward and look for land.”

“I take orders from the baróne, not from you.” The boy was afraid. “You ain’t the captain. When I’m twenty-one, my pop promised me—”

“You’ll never see tomorrow,” Durell promised grimly. Gino hesitated, then cocked his head to study the seas. The Vesper’s bow fell off, lifted with cakes of ice sliding across her deck. Her engine labored steadily. Gino suddenly bobbed his head and ran and slid forward. Snow cut him off from sight, then he reappeared, clinging to the bow lifeline.

“Keep her steady!” Durell shouted to the helmsman.

A cloaked figure appeared on deck. It was Elgiva. Her hair streamed wildly in the wind. Snow swiftly whitened the dark cloak. She ran toward Durell, shouting something he could not hear. The Vesper shuddered and heeled far over. A stay parted with a wild metallic twanging.

“There!” Elgiva cried. “Look there!”

Something huge and monstrous loomed like some prehistoric sea beast rising from the stormy deep. Jagged rocks and cliffs came and went as if a curtain had been raised and then lowered again. The seas boiled. The helmsman yelled as he lost the wheel again. Durell jumped for it and risked a broken hand as he seized the spokes and righted the staggering vessel. A sea broke over him.

He fell, and someone grabbed his arm to save him. It was Elgiva. She pointed again.

“There!” she called again. “And there!”

The rocks had sprung up all around them. Now a high cliff loomed in the mists and vapors. Broken ice chunked against the Vesper’s bruised sides. Durell heard Gino cry a warning and he spun the wheel to starboard. The ship did not want to respond. She was tired from the storm’s battering. Her head did not come up for an agonizing moment. The sea fell away and exposed a long line of rocks like teeth in a dragon’s mouth. Splinters of wood broke off and flew away in the wind. The sail snapped with a booming sound and the heavy canvas flapped away like a pterodactyl’s leathery wings seeking refuge from the elements.

Gino screamed from the bow, and Durell forced the reluctant bow to port this time. But it was useless. A sense of doom filled him. There were rocks and shoals everywhere, and the thunder of tormented seas on every side.

Elgiva suddenly covered her face with her hands. “We are lost!”

“Call on your pagan gods for a miracle!” Durell shouted at her.

She lifted her head in resentment, and then, looking beyond him, her eyes widened and she pointed with a trembling finger.

“There!”

It was an illusion, Durell thought. A mockery to his senses.

“Look!” Elgiva cried. “Follow them!”

Out of the maelstrom there came a shape, wiped out for a moment by the snow, then reappearing again. Tossed and heaved and spun about and driven under, it came on stubbornly, like something seen in a dream.

Oars flashed and shields hung at her sides, and the dragon’s head at her bow dipped and lifted, mouth red and gaping, eyes aglare.

It was an ancient Viking ship.

21

HER RED sail was brailed to her stubby mast, but the oarsmen bent their broad backs to the sweeps and drove her steadily on. High on her stern, a giant figure in a horned helmet and wolfskin tunic lifted a strong arm and beckoned to the Vesper. Durell turned the wheel to follow. The schooner shivered and broke through the seas. With a shouted command, the giant armored man in the longship turned his craft around and drove straight toward what seemed to be a deadly barrier of white-foamed rock. Durell gritted his teeth and held the wheel steady. Elgiva stood beside him with clasped hands, a look of ecstasy on her face.

“It is Eric! Is he not magnificent? He must have seen us from the shore!”

Durell had no time to wonder at the appearance of this antique dream that should have vanished a thousand years ago. It took all his strength to make the Vesper follow the flashing oars and ice-crusted shields of the longship. For a time he did not think he would make it. The seas, gathering ice, the wind and driving snow, the ghostly visibility, all combined to drive them toward death. Drenched with sweat under his coat, he somehow managed to wrench the wheel this way and that, following the irregular course of the other vessel. Sigrid came on deck, and Uccelatti, and they stared at the Viking warship and shouted to each other, but their words were tossed away by the howling wind.

There was land on every side now, looming black and white with snow, sometimes towering above the ship’s masts, sometimes low and shoaled, seething with wild combers. Durell followed blindly. There was no other choice. Elgiva stood beside him as if in a trance, ignoring the seas that broke over them, enraptured by the danger.

Then abruptly the seas calmed and they were in the lee of a towering cliff that sheltered them from the wind. There was a dark beach ahead, covered with broken ice and snow, and a concrete dock that had withstood the wild storm. The Viking ship drove smoothly on up to the beach, and the men at the oars shipped their sweeps smartly and leaped out to haul the long vessel out of the water. Durell brought the Vesper to the dock, straining to see through the snow that fell from leaden skies. Every muscle quivered with exhaustion from the effort he had made. The landing left much to be desired, but quick hands took the line that Gino threw from the bow. Elgiva tossed the stern line ashore. The longship’s crew were quick, and Durell now saw that except for the bearded giant in the stern, they wore conventional coats and sweaters and woolen ski caps that protected their faces, but which gave them a grotesque eerie look in the knitted designs that concealed everything but their eyes and mouths.

“Tak, Eric!” Elgiva cried. She ran from Durell and stepped ashore on the concrete dock. “Eric, tak!”

The bearded man swept the poetess up in his arms. Durell drew a deep, uncertain breath.

They had arrived at Skelleftsvik.

“There is room for all,” said Dr. Eric Gustaffson. “And you are all welcome.”

A roaring fire in a great stone hearth warmed them. A kind of darkness had fallen during the mile-long trek through snow-burdened pine forests, along a path that twisted up from the steep slopes that formed the sheltered cove. They had gathered finally in a huge timbered hall that was a replica of a chieftain’s council room in olden days, Durell thought. The pine logs snapped and crackled on the rough hearth. Hanging on the planked walls, which looked as if they had been reproduced from ship’s timbers, were banners, spars and masts, helmets and swords and round embossed shields, gleaming red and iron-gray in the firelight. Big trestle tables were set with food by the Lapp women who appeared silently, their heads in woolen shawls, to serve their grinning, half-frozen men. Durell and the Vesper’s crew stood a little apart from these, a barrier of language and custom separating the Mediterraneans from these people of the far North.

“You must forgive me,” said Dr. Eric Gustaffson. “People say I am childish, dressing in this armor now and then, pretending I am a Viking chief. I restored this house and built the Red Wing, which guided you here. But it suits my fancy. By profession I am a surgeon, but by avocation, my heart is in the past, as my dearest Elgiva well knows.”

“How did you find us in the storm?” Durell asked. “My lookouts spotted you. You were about to go ashore on the Walk. So we went to help you.” Dr. Eric grinned in his huge red beard and shrugged, flexing his powerful shoulders. “And, after all, one expected you.” “How is that?”

“The elements have gone wild, like a berserker. It is my poor brother’s doing, of course. And the local police were here yesterday to question me and ask if I had seen Peter. But I have not seen him yet.”

“Do you expect to?”

“He needs me; and I shall go to him.”

“Then you’ve heard from him?”

“Not directly. But he is nearby. And very ill. They told me that he may be dying.”

“Who told you this?” Durell persisted.

“The men who came ashore two days ago. Curious people. Frightened, but with a savage and cold ferocity. So sure of themselves, but not yet sure of me. They told me about poor Peter. I expect his condition has grown worse since then.” The big man turned and hugged Sigrid. “And you, too, child of my brother—you were expected, too. Do you still play your games for the government? And you still resent my dearest Elgiva, I see. Come, stop pouting and smile.”

Sigrid looked reluctant, but did as her uncle suggested. She looked thoughtful and distracted.

Steaming mugs of coffee were brought by the Lapp women and served at the trestle tables. Uccelatti came to Durell with a worried look on his handsome face.

“This time, my dear Cajun, you have led me into a nightmare from which I think I can never recover. I do hope you understand what is happening here. I do not.”

“I expect to learn what I need,” Durell told him. “You look homesick, baróne.”

“I am. What was to be a leisurely pleasure cruise has turned into—well, how can one describe it? I feel that none of us will ever see a warm sun again.”

“If we don’t, no one ever will,” Durell said. He turned to Dr. Gustaffson. The big, red-haired man had sympathetic blue eyes. Eric said: “You must not judge my country by what you see tonight. At this season, spring is normally everywhere, and the wild flowers bloom. It is soft and pleasant, and all the red farmhouses stand out in the long hours of sunlight.”

“But now it’s different,” Durell said grimly. “And you know why.”

The man had a wide brow under his shock of red hair, a generous mouth, and eyes that had a professional look of measuring and understanding. “Sigrid whispers that I am not to trust you. She says you are an American agent and you will kill my brother, if you must, in order to stop his weather machine.”

“I never told her that.”

“But you are capable of such a thing. I could not allow it. Whatever Peter’s faults may be—”

“What he has done must be undone. How long can you survive here if this weather continues? And it will continue, and grow worse, and the winter will bury you under a hundred feet of ice.”

“Yes, I have thought of all this. Come with me, please. My men—they are simple Lapp farmers and herders, as you see—some of them understand English and it would not be wise to have them hear your words.” Dr. Eric paused and looked across the room. “Shall we take him with us to our conference?”

Durell glanced at Colonel Smurov. The KGB man sat alone at a long table, hulking and suspicious. His Tartar face was like the moon. He looked incongruous in his dark overcoat and double-breasted suit. His eyes darted this way and that, observing them all, and he showed plain contempt for the artifacts that Eric had hung about his great hall.

Eric did not wait for a reply. “Yes, we will take the Muscovite, too. It is only fair. His interest here may be even greater than yours, although it is plain he remembers with resentment the past centuries when we Varingians looted and fought our way all the way down the Volga to the capital of the Emperor of Byzantium.”

“We live in a different world now, Doctor.”

“Yes, yes. You may be right. Come with me, and summon your Russian friend, too.”

Dr. Gustaffson’s paneled study was in sharp contrast with the antique reproduction of a Viking council hall. It was modern and warm, with an Oriental rug over wide, polished plank floors that smelled of lemon oil. There was an oval Danish desk and chairs with foam-rubber seats, a medical cabinet and a small examining and operating room visible through a partly open doorway. Outside, the wind howled and piled snow above the windowsills. A darkness that was not a true darkness lurked beyond, cutting off a view of the turbulent, maddened sea. Gustaffson poured brandy for Durell and Smurov and waved them to seats. Smurov remained standing. Durell sat down, but kept himself ready.

“You see, gentlemen, I am not quite so mad as to rely entirely on ancient comforts. I have a generator for power and heat. If you had been here yesterday, we could have telephoned to Stockholm or Moscow or Washington. But the lines went out last night. Perhaps it was the storm. Or perhaps the men who brought me word about my brother are responsible for our isolation. It is only an inconvenience.”

“Have you a radio?” Smurov growled.

“Yes, in the room beyond the dispensary.”

“I must radio to Moscow for instructions.” The Colonel looked at Durell. “Much has happened that was not anticipated.”

“In a moment.” Gustaffson’s huge figure made the cozy study seem small. His thick brush of red hair almost grazed the low ceiling. “Am I to take it that you gentlemen are competing with each other?”

“We work together,” Smurov grunted. “Like a donkey and a camel yoked to the same cart. It does not work very well.”

“The radio,” Gustaffson said, “is our only communication with the outside. No other ship can get in. My little extravagance, the longship, is only a cockleshell. And your schooner can never leave this cove unless the weather changes. I must tell you, gentlemen, that I am empowered by my government to place you both under arrest. The police were here two days ago, looking for you, and warned me about you. They were due to return yesterday, but did not. My Lapps tell me that all the roads are buried under many feet of snow. The situation is very grave for the local people. Desperate, I should say. Another few days of this storm, and there may be hundreds of casualties.”

“Thousands,” Durell said. “A new Ice Age. What you see so far is only the beginning.”

Gustaffson slowly nodded. “Yes, I agree.”

“And do you agree that it must be stopped?”

“If man so controls the elements—yes.”

“Your brother Peter can.”

“So those men said.”

“Teh me about them again.”

“They came.” Dr. Eric shrugged. “They have brought my brother near here. On a vessel, a submarine. They say he is ill. I know he suffers from an aneurism. He will die unless I can reach him and operate. They are to come back for me tonight.”

“Who are they?”

“A Chinese gentleman, a Dr. Lin Pi Tsung. I understand he is the foremost meteorologist for the Chinese People’s Republic. My brother Peter was in communication with him on scientific matters for many years.”

“But Dr. Lin wasn’t alone, was he?”

“No, he had sailors with him. Also Chinese.”

“In uniform?”

“Not exactly. They wanted to see my brother’s laboratory, where he developed his weather control devices.”

“Is that laboratory here?” Durell asked.

“No, it is on Skelleftsvik proper—the island. A mile away.” Gustaffson smiled with grim weariness. “It might as well be on the moon, gentlemen. No one could get across the Walk to reach that building now.”

Smurov rumbled: “But we must go there at once.” “Impossible,” the doctor said. “I could not ask my people to take the longship out again. And your schooner could never make it. Accept my word for it.”

“Then we just wait?” Smurov sounded ugly. His keglike body leaned forward. “We did not come all this way simply to wait, Dr. Gustaffson. We must reach your brother and take his machine and stop this storm. And I must recover the submarine—” He paused and looked angrily at Durell.

Durell said tiredly: “So the sub is one of yours, after all?”

“They took it by piracy, a year back.” The admission came reluctantly from Smurov. Then he spoke more quickly, as if it were no longer of importance. “It was when certain fools in Moscow—since eliminated—believed we could overlook our traditional enmity with those on our Siberian borders. It was one of our first nuclear-powered boats. Better than yours, Americanski.”

“Naturally,” Durell said dryly.

“It was on a so-called goodwill tour.” Smurov spat on the polished teak floors. “For one reason or another, the Chinese found excuses to keep it in harbor, and finally they simply seized it.”

“And now it’s here,” Durell said.

“Perhaps. Yes. With Professor Peter and his weather machine aboard. Let us be frank, eh? We guess what has happened. The machine is out of order. The weather goes from bad to worse. And Professor Gustaffson is too ill to repair the damage. They lie on the bottom of the Baltic and do not know what to do. So they come here for help —from the laboratory and from this doctor brother of Peter’s. We have arrived in time. And it is now time for me to insist on our agreement. I will now take command.” “I never agreed to that.” Durell spoke mildly, but his blue eyes turned abruptly black. Smurov’s big hands were deep in the pockets of his dark coat.

“Your agreement was never necessary,” said Smurov. “You are no longer needed.”

He drew his gun. He was no faster than Durell, whose own weapon leaped into his hand with a life all its own. But then Durell checked himself. Smurov had not pointed his gun at him. Its black muzzle was aimed squarely at the giant Eric’s head.

Smurov’s wide mouth grinned like a frog’s. “If you shoot me, gospodin, I can still kill Dr. Eric. He is the only man who can save Peter, eh? If Eric goes, then Peter goes—without surgery—and all is lost for everyone.” “Muzhik, you wouldn’t dare.”

“I have dared much more in my time. Now you will listen to my proposal?”

Durell saw death in Smurov’s narrow eyes. The man’s smile was meaningless, exposing a steel tooth. He looked at Eric. The surgeon stood in frozen surprise behind his polished desk, as if he understood nothing of what was happening.

“And what is your proposal?” Durell said.

“I am in command,” Smurov repeated. “I shall use the radio Dr. Eric so kindly mentioned. And we shall have a small invasion. Oh, only temporary,” he added quickly. “We shall occupy this area and take back the submarine that belongs to us. Our brave Soviet parachutists can drop here, if I give them a signal to home in on.”

“It could be suicide,” Durell suggested.

“For some, but others would survive to do the needed work. The submarine, after all, belongs to the Soviet Union. So we merely take back what is ours.”

“Along with everything in it?”

“The weather equipment, yes.”

And Smurov laughed.

Durell lowered his gun.

22

DR. ERIC led them into the radio room. There were comfortable leather chairs, a large chart indicating world-wide amateur radio stations he had contacted in the past, and a powerful transmitter. Beyond the windows, the storm screamed like a frustrated animal. The snow was deeper. A gray darkness had settled over the world.

Smurov waved Durell and Eric impatiently against the wall. He seemed supremely confident. He heaved a deep sigh of satisfaction as he studied the equipment, and snapped switches with a familiarity that bespoke excellent training, which did not surprise Durell.

“You are being reasonable,” the KGB man said. “I am grateful. Your dossier mentions your intelligence as well as your caution.”

“Don’t mistake it for fear,” Durell said.

“No, I know all about that, too.” Smurov all but smirked in his triumph. “After my message gets through, it will take only two hours before my people arrive. All is ready for me. They wait only for my signal.”

Two hours, Durell thought, could change a lot. Ice now rattled against the windows, and the wind clawed through tiny crevices and made the bright curtains blow. He could afford to wait. But they could not afford to have Dr. Eric killed. And he knew that Smurov would not hesitate to bring them all to an icy death rather than be defeated.

He thought he saw a signal in Eric’s eyes, and followed the doctor’s glance toward another door that was shut, but which Smurov hadn’t noticed or chose to ignore. Smurov put his gun beside the radio but kept it close at hand as he waited for the equipment to warm up. Durell saw the door handle slowly turn behind Smurov’s back. Dr. Eric drew a deep breath and Smurov looked up quickly, his little eyes at once suspicious. But then the dials indicated the transmitter was ready, and he turned back to it, rapidly coding a message on a paper pad, using his left hand.

The door opened.

Durell had not known whom to expect. Sigrid, or Elgiva, or one of Dr. Eric’s Laplanders.

But it was none of these.

It was Olaf.

He wore high boots, a heavy sheepskin coat that came down to his knees, and a knitted woolen snow cap. Ice clung to him, and he looked like some demon out of a pagan tale of dreadful Arctic creatures. There was the same glare of madness in his eyes that Durell had seen before. Somehow, Durell was not surpised. Olaf had a habit of turning up at the wrong time and the wrong place.

The roar of Olaf's heavy gun shattered the thick, sudden silence in the room. Smurov lurched up from the radio operator’s seat and tried to turn his gun to face Olaf Jannsen. His mouth gaped. His eyes were incredulous. He looked down at his stomach and gasped something in Russian and collapsed slowly, like a fat balloon. He fell across the radio and slid to his knees and then his eyes slewed to Durell. Durell saw despair and perhaps reproach in Smurov’s look. Perhaps Smurov thought Olaf had entered on Durell’s order, and that Olaf was a K Section man.

But there was no time for anything but the berserker and his gun. Everything happened in a few split-seconds. Eric shouted above the echoes of Olaf's shot, and there was a higher cry, unmistakably from Sigrid, in the study they had just left. Olaf heard it and bit his lip and pointed his weapon at Durell.

“It was necessary,” Olaf said harshly. His eyes were wild. “I came a long way. It was hard. You must forgive me, Dr. Eric.”

“But you were my guest. . . .” Gustaffson whispered.

“I am happy you did not tell these—these people I was here in your house.” Olaf grinned suddenly, then erased it. He waggled his gun nervously. His thick shock of black hair almost touched the low ceiling. Snow melted on his sheepskin coat. He carried one glove in his left hand. His right, holding the gun, looked blue and halffrozen; but he held the weapon steadily at Durell.

“I should kill you,” Olaf whispered. “But I want you with me.”

“Whatever you say.” Durell did not want Olaf roused to more shooting. He tossed his gun on the table. It skidded and fell to the floor at Eric’s feet. The red-haired man looked at it and licked his lips but did not bend to pick it up. Gustaffson said: “Colonel Smurov is dying, Olaf. You have betrayed my hospitality. I have known you since you were a little boy—”

“Spare me the sentiment, Doctor.”

“—and I was willing to help when you said you were in desperate trouble. When you came here last night—”

“Shut up!”

“I am a doctor, Olaf. This Russian needs my help.” Eric was grim. His great bulk was almost as heavy as Olaf's. “He bleeds badly. You did not have to shoot him.” Olaf nodded. “You do not understand. Durell understands. I had to.”

Eric said stubbornly: “But I must help Smurov. I cannot let him die like this.”

“Stand where you are, Uncle Eric.”

“Go ahead and shoot me, then,” Eric said.

He walked around the table to where Smurov lay face down on the floor, under the radio. A pool of blood had collected, and the Russian’s breathing was a rasping, desperate clutch for air. Olaf bit his lip.

Then Sigrid came in.

Durell saw her from the corner of his eye, and Olaf saw her, too, but spared her only a flickering glance. She had found fleece-lined ski clothes, and her face looked absurdly young and frightened above the bulky turtle neck of her Lapp sweater.

“Olaf, darling . . .”

“Go back to the other room, Sigrid.”

“I hoped you would be here,” she said. “Do not point that gun at Uncle Eric. Please don’t do anything like that. I beg of you.”

“Get out, you silly bitch,” he snarled.

“Olaf, for the sake of everything we—”

“Eric, don’t touch that man!” Olaf shouted.

But Dr. Eric was brave enough. He knelt beside Smurov and turned the heavy body over. Smurov’s face was the gray of old pewter. He was dying, Durell thought, and he had not wanted it this way. If only Eric had told him he’d allowed Olaf in the house . . .

Sigrid crossed the room, ignoring Olaf’s gun. Her face was very pale. “Olaf, give it all up. You must come over to our side. I’ve tried and tried to explain it to you. What you do is very wrong. Papa wouldn’t want it this way.” She looked into his mad eyes. “Would you shoot me, Olaf?”

Durell saw his trigger finger tighten. He yelled, and jumped for Olaf as the girl came between them, and Olaf’s gun crashed and Sigrid jerked backward into Durell. He got around her, but Olaf dived for the window. The glass shattered loudly, and there was a sudden roar of wind as an icy blast broke into the room. Snow swirled in with it. Durell jumped over Sigrid and dived for Olaf’s heels. But Olaf had landed in the deep snow outside. He floundered for a moment in the oblong of light, and then he vanished into the wild, driving snow.

Durell turned as Sigrid ran for the door. A small spatter of blood marked her steps. And she vanished, too.

“Sigrid!”

She had gone down the gallery steps before he came free of the study. A rack of skis stood by the door. The Vesper’s crew stood open-mouthed, watching as she snatched up a pair and yanked open the door. Her hair swung wildly as she looked back at Durell.

“Sigrid, he’ll kill you!” Durell shouted.

She shook her head and dashed her hair from her eyes. Her face was wet; he thought it was from her tears. But before he could cross the great council room, she had pulled open the main door and vanished into the night after Olaf.

23

IT WAS midnight. Durell could not remember when he’d had any decent sleep. He ached in every bone. He felt as if he would never get warm again. He almost envied Smurov his unconsciousness; Smurov was out of it all. But it wasn’t over yet. And Durell had to finish it, somehow. He watched Smurov’s breathing after Dr. Gustaffson removed the bullet from him. Gustaffson said they had best leave the Russian in the dispensary.

“He will live,” Eric said quietly. “But I am shocked at Olaf. I cannot apologize for him. I have known him for so long, and he and Sigrid, it was understood—”

“Sigrid told me all about that,” Durell said.

“But he shot her!”

“He’ll do worse if she tries to stop him. And she’s wounded. Have you any idea where they could have gone?”

“I do not know.”

“To Skelleftsvik? To Peter’s laboratory?”

“It is impossible to cross the Walk.”

“Is there ice to go on?”

“It would be suicide.”

“I’ll have to try it,” Durell said.

“But you are tired, you do not know the way, and in this storm—no, no, you would go into the sea.”

“Does Elgiva know the way?”

Gustaffson looked at him with haunted eyes. “I cannot permit it.”

“If Elgiva is willing, I’ll take her with me as my guide.”

“But the enemy wants me, to help my brother, and they will come here soon—”

“We’ll beat them to the punch.”

Gustaffson paused. “If you go, I must go, too.”

“No. You must stay here to greet them, if they come. Put them off guard. We can’t hope to match their strength, even with your Lapps and the Vesper’s crew. They’re armed and disciplined. If you’re missing, they’ll be alerted. Our only chance is to take them by surprise.”

“Just you and Elgiva? You’re as mad as Olaf.” “Perhaps. Maybe it’s the weather. It freezes the soul. In any case, I’ll take two men from the Vesper. I can’t use more.”

He chose Gino and his uncle Mario. The Sicilians looked reluctant to go out into the icy storm. Gino, the boy from Chicago, was scornful.

“You’re out of your skull, dad,” he told Durell. “What’s the profit? I’m no hero. I didn’t ask to come here. If Uncle Mario hadn’t put me on the stupid boat, I’d be balling it up in Palermo right now. Warm and cozy.” Mario spoke in Italian. “The boy will come with us. He will learn to be a man now, or he will die.”

“Listen, my father didn’t mean for you to kill me!” the boy snapped. “He just asked you to take care of me while he’s in the pen—”

“You will be a man,” Mario said tonelessly, “or I shall kill you myself. What is asked of us is most important. I obey orders. Life requires discipline. And so does death.”

Gino was sullen and defiant, then he shrugged his slim shoulders. He seemed built of steel, Durell noted, and might be useful, after all. And the old man would certainly obey any orders he gave.

Elgiva was a more subtle problem.

“Yes, I know the Walk,” she said. “I could take you there.” Her beauty was a quiet glow in the big Viking lodge, empty now except for themselves and the crackling fire on the huge hearth. “I have crossed the Skelleftsvik many times. You say Peter is there?”

“He must be. And his machine, too.”

“Very well. I have come this far. I shall go farther. But I think the old gods have wakened again, and they will only laugh at us.”

Eric got them hunting rifles, small arms and Arctic clothing. The wind seemed more violent as they prepared to go into the storm. Elgiva said it was half a mile to the shore where the Walk began. There was a distant look in her eyes as she spoke of it, as if she did not expect to return.

The wind had scoured the snow from a rocky ledge they followed. For a few steps, the lights of the house guided them. Then there was only a strange gray twilight on the southern horizon, over the raging sea. The snow was mixed with ice spicules that stung the cheek and blinded the eye. They all wore ski masks and goggles and used ski poles to test the ground before them, and they walked in single file, roped together as Elgiva had suggested. The woman was very sure-footed. She led the way, with Durell half a step behind her. The wind blew at their backs at first, and seemed to shove them forward with spiteful violence. The dark loom of the promontory by the mooring cove towered on their right as they descended toward the sea. The combers’ roar filled the air with maniacal rage. Black rocks stood up above the deepening snow. Durell tried to see across the cove in the eerie gloom, but snow intervened, and there were only the blowing curtains of white all around him. Elgiva pointed ahead and downward. The path twisted beside the cliff, down to the beach. Something lay there, shattered and splintered. It was Eric’s longship, torn loose from its moorings and spewed up from the sea.

Durell looked back. The house had been swallowed up by the darkness of the storm.

“How much farther?” he shouted above the noise.

“Not far. There. Ahead.”

He had thought it was an extension of the beach, that roughened tongue of ice that reached outward from the base of the cliff. “That’s the Walk?”

“It is quite shallow. Your boat was almost wrecked on it, getting here. In ordinary winters, it is solid ice.” Half of Elgiva’s words were torn from her lips by the wind. “We often walked across to Skelleftsvik this way. That is how the reef got its name.”

They paused in a niche of rock at the base of the cliff. Snow made a wavering ceiling overhead as it was blown out to sea. Durell tried to make out the island that must be there; but the black waters and the long, fragile tongue of ice reaching outward were all he could see. It was like walking into a dark infinity, with no end in sight. He turned back to Mario and Gino. The boy was all right. The older man was not. Mario looked tortured by the cold, but there was a grimness behind his pain, and if there was fear behind that, it did not show.

“Can you go on?” Durell shouted to him.

“It is not like Sicily,” Mario said.

Gino yelled: “We ought to go back. I ain’t going out on that! You’ll kill us all!”

His uncle spoke angrily. “Are you afraid to follow where a woman leads?”

“She’s a nut. So is Durell. Listen, Uncle Mario, we’re going back.”

The older man lifted one snow-caked arm and back-handed the boy with sudden violence. Gino fell against a rock and sat down. His black eyes were astonished, glittering behind his goggles that filled the slits of his ski cap. Snow made two strange lumps on his shoulders, as if he were deformed. They must all look strange, Durell thought, like creatures out of the prehistoric past, lost and floundering and helpless in the face of the elements.

“Are you ready?” Elgiva called.

“Let’s go.”

“You must follow in each step I take. If one of us goes into the sea, it is the end for that one, you understand? The water is too cold to survive in, for more than a few seconds. You must all be very careful.”

He was grateful for her calm tone. He had not known, two days ago, how remarkable a woman she truly was.

They left the shelter of the cliff with reluctance and crossed the snow-swept beach toward the jumbled ice that marked the Walk. The ice cakes had formed a kind of jetty, based on the shoal under the surface of the sea, and the breakers smashed and foamed over its sides with desperate fury, as if enraged that they should challenge the sea’s power. The first dozen paces were relatively easy. Elgiva led them down the center of the ice pack.

They used the rope to steady themselves. Now and then one of them slipped and stumbled to his knees. The air was filled with spray that froze on their coats as they went on. Fortunately, the wind at their backs pushed them onward as if anxious to help them to their end.

In moments, the dark cliff they had descended was wiped from sight. The world was neither land nor sea, but a confusion of tumbled ice and snow that shook and groaned and creaked against the power of the waves that broke against the windward edge. Durell felt a long slab of ice shift under his weight and slide to one side. He jumped away just in time, was checked by the rope that tied him to Elgiva ahead and Mario behind. His booted foot went out from under him and caught in a crack between the huge ice boulders. For a dreadful instant he felt a pressure as if he were caught in a giant nutcracker. Then the block of ice slid the other way and went down the slope onto the thinner, flatter ice that covered the sea to leeward. He got up, feeling a twinge of pain in his ankle. Elgiva’s gloved hands steadied him.

“Are you all right?”

“We’ll go on.”

“It is not much farther.”

“I do not see any end to it.”

She said: “It cannot be far. We must be halfway across now.”

But she didn’t sound too sure of herself.

The mainland was out of sight, and there seemed to be nothing ahead but the gray turbulence of the storm and the trembling bridge of ice along which they crawled. Young Gino now kept urging his uncle on; but Elgiva paid attention to nothing .but her carefully chosen footsteps.

At last she halted.

“There. There it is.”

There was a darker shadow ahead in the wind and snow. It was a small island at the end of the Walk, a craggy rock that loomed like the black prow of a ship plunging in the spume and spray that dashed against it. Astonishingly, a light burned high above, where Durell glimpsed a square house like a concrete bunker through a rift in the blowing curtains of snow. But when he started forward, anxious to get off the ice jetty, Elgiva put a snow-crusted glove on his arm and checked him.

“The gods laughed at us. We cannot get across.”

She pointed to the ice bridge just ahead, between them and the island shore of Skelleftsvik. The tides and the wind had eroded the jumbled ice that had supported them this far. The ice ahead was thin and flat, showing a darkness under it that betrayed a swift channel current that forced its way between the mainland and the island. Elgiva shook her hooded head and brushed snow from her goggles.

“It will not support us!” she shouted.

Durell shrugged. “We must get across. I’ll try it first.”

“If you go through the ice, you know what it means?”

He nodded. “It must be done.”

He waited for the struggling Gino and Mario to join them, then rearranged their safety lines so that he was in the lead. He felt an inner shiver as he contemplated the fragile ice ahead. He could almost see the black, freezing water beneath. But beyond, in the gloom, there was a rocky ledge bearded with ice, and then steps that went up out of sight toward that single light that beckoned as his goal. He had no love for the risk. He had been warned often enough by K Section’s analysts that his survival factor had long run out. But he could not turn back now. There was a wildness in this storm that no man had ever seen before. It had to be checked. He had come a hard, long way to this point. He had to go on.

He gave Mario and Gino quick instructions, then turned to where Elgiva studied the ice. It was a stretch of about sixty feet, shrouded now and then by mist and snow that blotted out the island. Only the light held steady.

Elgiva turned her back to the wind and took off her goggles. Her eyes were shining and mysterious, filled with an exaltation that reflected her sympathy with the elements. Something else was there—a kind of wonder as she considered Durell’s tall figure, a salute in the way she touched his arm.

“Keep to the right, where the current has piled the ice a bit together. It will be thicker there.”

“When I’m partly across,” Durell shouted in her ear, “Send Gino and Mario after me. You come last.”

She nodded. She had the serenity of a pagan priestess. “Be lucky,” she said.

He clambered down among the jagged ice boulders and stepped out upon the flat, snow-blown ice. The wind was stronger, pushing him toward the thin edge where the sea boiled against the ice. His footing was uncertain, trembling under him. He forged ahead quickly. He had to fight an impulse to run ahead in blind panic to reach the shore. That could only mean complete disaster. Each step had to be calculated. And yet the quaking ice underfoot mocked the care he took. Nothing would matter, if the delicate balance of pressures between ice and sea suddenly shifted. He gained twenty feet, then thirty. He heard a thin, cracking sound that filled him with sudden dread. He gave himself no time to think. He quickened his pace carefully. When he was past the halfway mark, he turned and waved to the three dim figures waiting behind him. Mario and Gino began to follow, stepping like blind men, with painful caution. It would not do, Durell thought. They had to be quicker. The trembling under his feet grew more insistent by the moment.

He cupped his gloved hands and shouted to them. “Come along now, Elgiva!”

The woman moved at once to obey. Durell turned and went on. He was not far from the shore now. The light in the house above showed him the way. The splintered remains of a wooden pier showed up ahead, the planks chewed up by the pressures of the ice. He reached for a timber, felt his glove slip on the ice that coated it, and with another effort hauled himself off the ice bridge to the solidity of Skelleftsvik’s rocky shore.

But when at last, gasping, he looked back, he saw only two figures left on the Walk.

Mario’s chunky form had vanished.

The wind was demoniacal, cutting at the knitted mask over his face, hurling ice spicules at his goggles and blinding him. Durell stepped back to the Walk. He saw the slender Gino waving both arms, and then snow intervened and there was nothing to be seen. He swore grimly and started back. He could not abandon them. Then the wind slackened and visibility improved. He saw Gino flat on his stomach, reaching into a black gap in the thin ice. If Mario had fallen into the sea, there was no chance . . .

Durell broke into a run, heedless of the quaking ice under him. Elgiva waved for him to go back. But he could not go back. Gino’s sullen resentment of discipline, his false bravado because of his father’s imprisonment, had not made the boy untrustworthy, after all. He could have left Mario through cowardice, instead of trying to save him. But before he could reach them, he saw Gino rise, hauling backward, and after him came a dark form, the chunky figure of his uncle. The boy had stepped out on a drifting ice floe to help the older man recover the main bridge. It had been a dreadful risk. Durell saw Mario stagger and fall to his knees and then he was with them again, helping the Sicilian up.

“I was careless,” Mario gasped. “It was stupid of me. You should not have come after me, boy.”

Gino looked surprised at himself. “I didn’t stop to think, Uncle Mario.”

“You were very brave. And foolish. But it is the kind of foolishness that may make a man out of you.”

“He’s a man now,” Durell said.

Gino sneered. “I don’t need nothin’ from you. The old guy was about to hit the water. Anybody’d have—” “All right, Gino. Your uncle is grateful. So am I. Get your rifle and let’s get off this jelly.”

There wasn’t much time left. The ice that had broken off under Mario’s weight was only a warning of things to come. There were other cracking sounds all around them as the pressure of the tide and the wind began to break up the thin bridge to Skelleftsvik. Durell took Elgiva’s hand and they ran for the shore.

As they jumped for the rocks beyond the broken pier, there came a sharper roar behind them, a scream as if from some monster animal, and there came a rush of

seas and a tumbling, twisting, breaking of ice. A small black tidal wave poured through the gap broken at last by the wind.

They were cut off from the mainland now.

24

THEY rested in the lee of a stone fence buried in the snow drifts. The island was not more than a mile across, Elgiva said, but it supported several small farms whose houses were dark and abandoned, their dark red shapes distorted by the long snowdrifts over them. There was road up to the concrete laboratory, defined by the lumpy drifts beside it. Durell thumped his arms against his sides to renew circulation. Mario and Gino talked in Italian, in low tones distorted by the screaming wind. The older man put his arm around the boy’s shoulder and hugged him, and Gino said something and started to draw away, then nodded and patted his uncle’s arm.

Elgiva touched Durell. “Look down there.”

The wind had died for the moment. The sudden silence left an iron ringing in his ears. Below the bunker on the other side of the hill they had climbed was a small cove, and something dark and whale-shaped lay there, canted a little as if the bow had grounded on the snow-covered beach.

It was a submarine of Russian design. It was the submarine Durell had been looking for.

He stood up in the strange stillness. The Arctic midnight was filled with silently falling snow. It was as if the sea itself was momentarily calmed by an omnipotent hand outstretched from the eerie gloom above.

There was no movement on the sub’s deck or the narrow, winged sail. In the lull, he made out the familiar mountings of rocket launchers, fore and aft; but they were not the large size of Polaris-type missiles. He wondered where the crew might be. If they had occupied the bunker lab, his chances were relatively hopeless. They would be tough and desperate, confounded by the monstrous elements they had unleashed, filled with panic—-and therefore all the more dangerous.

“Is that the Chinese U-boat?” Elgiva asked.

“It’s the one they stole from the USSR, according to Colonel Smurov.”

“What are those strange fittings on the deck?”

“Rocket launchers. But they’re small. Perhaps good only for atmospheric weather testing . . .” Durell paused. He did not know what system Professor Peter Gustaffson had devised for his weather control. He felt a sudden rage, a desire to blow up and destroy that mechanism down there. It was an ultimate threat to all mankind. It was the inevitable end of a mad course of toying with infinite destruction. The H-bombs, the space race, the secret and dreadful germ warfare vats—and now the tampering with environment, threatening more destruction than any of them. There was no limit to man’s diabolical inventiveness in using good for evil, in choosing death over life.

“You’re shivering,” Elgiva murmured. “We must move on. It will kill us to rest here much longer.”

He stood up. “You’re right. You’re a remarkable woman, do you know that?”

“I am only a poet,” she said. “And perhaps not a very good one, after all. I dream of the past, and the awful future lies before us while I hide from it.”

“Let’s go,” he said.

He signaled to Mario and Gino, and they stood up and dusted snow from their rifles. Elgiva reached for her own weapon, but he checked her and took the rifle from her. He could see only her eyes through her woolen face mask. They widened as he kept the rifle from her gloved hand. “Just one more thing, Elgiva.”

“What is it?”

“Before we go on—”

“Don’t you trust me with the gun? I am an excellent shot.”

“I don’t doubt that. Back in Saltsjobaden, at your house outside Stockholm, you proved you were a good shot, indeed.”

Her eyes went blank. “I do not understand—”

“But you do. You shot Colonel Traskin, didn’t you?” She turned her head and looked at Mario and Gino, who were crouched behind the shelter of the stone wall. Then she looked up at the blockhouse laboratory on the crest of the snow-clad hill above. She was very still.

“How do you know?” she asked quietly. “It is a terrible thing that you suggest—”

“It’s not a suggestion. It’s fact. Elgiva, you killed Colonel Traskin to make Smurov suspicious of me. Why?”

“How can you be so sure?” she insisted.

“Traskin was killed by one shot. You showed us the broken window and said the bullet came from outside, on the beach. True, the window was broken; and only one bullet had killed Traskin. But I found another slug in the woodwork of your room there. I dug it out. Olsen, our man in Stockholm, has it. I’m sure it will match up with a gun you own, which Olsen has been ordered to find. So you fired two shots. One, the first, killed Colonel Traskin. Then you ran outside, fired through the window on the beach, and then went in again and claimed that an unknown assassin had killed Traskin.”

Her head under the fur-trimmed hood turned this way and that, as if seeking refuge from his implacable words. He wished he could see her face under her ski mask. Her shoulders lifted and fell, in a gesture of resignation. He told himself to be very careful. She was a brilliant and unpredictable woman.

“Why did you do it, Elgiva?” he asked.

There was a distant roaring far off in the gray darkness, a sound of rising wind approaching them at hurricane speed.

“I had to.” She took off her goggles to look at him. Her eyes were clear and brilliant. “Traskin told me they would never let Peter go. Even if they found him and took him from the Chinese, they would not give him back to me. And they would make me serve them as a guide. Can you understand how I felt? Traskin was a scientist, too. His superiors in Moscow wanted Peter, just as much as your people in Washington would like to have him. No, don’t deny it. You’re all cruel, dedicated to violence, to war and rivalry, whatever the cost to mankind. And I love Peter. He never wanted anything like this.” She lifted an arm toward the sound of the approaching wind. “It is the end of everything. Man has climbed up from the ravages of nature for thousands of years. And poor Peter has given man the weapon with which to commit suicide. Raw nature will win and laugh over our graves, and end all poetry and beauty.”

“But you killed him,” Durell insisted.

“He and Smurov—they wanted to take me with them. Without you, of course. North, by plane, to this place. To show them the way, as I’ve shown the way to you.”

“Traskin was a quiet man.”

“But obedient. He took orders. He did as he was told. Nothing I said could change his mind. He tried to force me to leave the house with him. It was his gun I used. I pretended to be willing to go along, and when he relaxed a bit, I grabbed at the gun and it—it went off. I did just as you described. I pretended someone had shot Traskin from the beach, and hid his gun.”

“Yes. It had to be you, Elgiva. Everyone else was accounted for, at another place in Stockholm. There was no one else. And the bullet I dug from your wall clinched it.”

She put on her goggles again and her head lifted in defiance. “What will you do to me now, here in this place? We are all doomed, after this is finished.”

“You can help me to save Peter,” he said.

“For your Pentagon to pick his brains and use the invention he created to destroy the world?”

“No. You can have him back again.”

“Your superiors would not permit it.”

“I’ll arrange it. I promise.”

“I do not believe you. I know the sort of man you are. But I have no choice, I suppose. I’ve gone too far along this road with you.”

“Just trust me,” he said. “Now let’s get on.”

The wind struck at them like the vicious swipe of a wild animal’s paw, enraged that they might escape its brute power. Ice hissed and rattled along the crusted snow beside the road. In an instant, the house was wiped from sight, and the dark air was filled with a blinding horizontal spray of murderous crystals that slanted through their face masks and stung and froze their cheeks, caked on their goggles, and made their hands numb on the weapons they carried. Durell looked back once, but there was nothing to see along the Walk. Nobody could follow them or give them help. They were cut off as effectively as if they had landed on the moon.

If it hadn’t been for the single, lighted window on the hilltop, they would have been lost in that instant. Durell pulled Elgiva up the hill after him, and felt the tug on his life rope as Mario and Gino struggled after them. It was not more than a hundred yards, but it seemed to take forever. He did not think they could make it. The storm was more furious than ever. But they had to make it. There was no hope of return now.

Just before they reached the building, he handed Elgiva her rifle. She held it in both hands, her head turned toward him. She looked like something carved from ice and snow.

Then she nodded stiffly and he went up to the door of the concrete building.

The door opened as Durell approached.

25

THE MAN was tall and slender, with the Mongol cheekbones and flat face of a northern Chinese. His thick black hair was shot through with mature gray, and he wore dark-rimmed glasses over somber, if startled, intelligent eyes. The bitter wind and snow shook him as he stared at them. Behind him, two shorter, chunkier men in high-throated black naval uniforms trimmed with black

piping turned and stared at Durell as he shoved by the first man and covered them with his rifle. Behind him, Gino helped his exhausted uncle over the threshold, then added his weapon to the force Durell exhibited. Elgiva stepped in last and shut the door.

The howl of the gale was abruptly cut off. Everything was silent, except for the distant murmur of a generator.

“Dr. Lin Pi Tsung?” Durell asked harshly. The warm air in the room struck his lungs and made him cough.

“I am he. We were expecting you. Have you brought the surgeon, Dr. Gustaffson, with you? It is very urgent.” The Chinese spoke with a faint California accent. Durell did not doubt that when and if he ever got back to Washington and checked dossiers, he would find that Lin Tsung had probably studied at Berkeley or UCLA. The man said: “Professor Peter is very ill. The agreement was for his brother to operate at once.”

“There is no agreement now,” Durell said sharply. “Move back, please. Tell your two stooges to be very, very careful.”

Tsung blinked. “But—who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter. Where is Professor Peter?”

“Are you Swedish agents? No, you must be the American I heard about. Olaf spoke of you. You’re Durell?” He nodded. “Is Olaf here?”

There was a second’s hesitation. “No. We have not seen him since he went to the Gustaffson house to fetch the doctor. But he should be back soon. I thought you were he, when I saw you coming up the path. In the storm, it is difficult to tell—”

The man was talking too much. Durell silenced him with a gesture and signed to Mario and Gino to disarm the two Chinese naval officers. The men in black uniforms seemed peculiarly stunned, as if worn to the limit of utter exhaustion. Their eyes had the faraway look of men who saw their doom inevitably, had lived with it for days, and had lost the power to initiate action against it. Durell wondered how many more of the submarine crew were here. He turned to Elgiva. She had pushed back her fur-lined hood and was shaking her light brown hair loose. The goggles had left rim marks on her cheeks, and she, too, looked as if she had been pushed to the end of her endurance.

“You know this place well, Elgiva?”

“Of course. I’ve spent many happy hours here.” “Where is the laboratory?”

“Down below. There is a big cellar system, hewn from the rock. The missile silos are just beyond, through some concrete bunkers.”

Durell turned to Lin Tsung. “Where is Professor Peter?”

The man’s eyes began to glitter. “He is in the laboratory. But what do you hope to do against—”

“How many of your men are here with you?”

Again there was a brief hesitation, a shifting of shadows in the dark, intelligent eyes. “Only a few. But what can you do? It is imperative that Professor Peter be saved. I thought you were his brother, really. That is why I let you in. Only a doctor can save us all.”

“It’s as bad as that?”

“Everything is out of control.”

Durell felt only a small gratification that his guesses were proved correct. He gestured with his rifle and urged the Chinese meteorologist and the two Navy men ahead, down a crude concrete corridor. He knew it was only a matter of time before the military men recovered and realized that they faced an enemy who might be better able to cope with the storm they had created. He must give them no time to think or seize the initiative.

The corridor formed a ramp that led up into living quarters. Durell saw that the entire structure had once been a military blockhouse, with a heavy poured-concrete rounded dome above and barracks-like dormitories in two wings spread east and west. The heavy structure, designed to resist bombs, did not yield to the storm. It was warm and comfortable inside, and the howling wind and ice and frantic seas simply did not seem to exist here.

Part of the main blockhouse area, a circle some fifty feet in diameter, was equipped with modern spotlights in the domed ceiling, and had been furnished with living-room chairs and sofas and carpets, with a modem free-form fireplace crackling cheerfully against one wall. The platforms where anti-aircraft rifles had once been emplaced were now used for couches, reading nooks, a hi-fi stereo set. Durell urged the three Chinese in ahead of him. No one else was in sight, and this troubled him. He wanted to know who and how many others were here.

Then Elgiva touched his arm and pointed to the tiled floor. A few spatters of blood still glistened in the electric light.

“Sigrid?” she whispered. “She was hit, I know, before she went out of Eric’s house after Olaf.”

“If she is here, then Olaf is here, too,” Durell said.

“Please be careful, Sam.”

“I intend to be.” He turned back to Tsung, who stood watching them with a strange calm through his big, dark-rimmed glasses. “Take us to the laboratory at once, please.”

“Of course, but—Mr. Durell, you must first listen to me. We need Dr. Eric here to help his brother. It is absolutely imperative.” The Chinese looked at the narrow embrasures of the windows, where snow seemed to flame against the thick panes. “Is there no way you could have brought Dr. Eric here?”

“Not now,” Durell said.

“Then Peter will die. He is an old friend, and I am stricken with grief. More than that, he is the only mar who can reverse the process going on in the atmosphere.’ The Chinese pointed to the domed ceiling of the bunker His hand shook slightly. “It is almost beyond the point o reversal now. But unless it can be reversed, everything will come to an end.”

“What kind of process is it? Surely it’s not silver iodidi crystals—”

“Nothing so simple. Professor Peter went far beyonc those crude methods. It is a matter of sound vibrations at first set off by rockets that released thousands of tin; catalytic mechanisms. But once the process begins, it i like a geometric progression. One movement breeds two others, so to speak. Our cruise originally was one c simple experiment—secret, of course—since Peking needs basic agricultural processes aided by favorable climatic conditions to support the population. We do not have the technological developments of your nations in the West. Believe me, it was not intended as a form of warfare.” “Are you really convinced of that?” Durell asked grimly- “Maybe you’ve been as deluded as Peter was.” “Peter is my friend. His weather control system was designed for peace, for the benefit of all men. Perhaps certain rulers in Peking had other designs in the back of their minds—a form of blackmail. But that would have been all right, too. Eventually, the whole world would have benefited.”

“Under Red Chinese hegemony,” Durell said. “We could do without such blessings.”

Tsung looked distressed. “I do not like to think of political matters. They are not within my province. I am a scientist, nothing else. Professor Peter and I were only concerned with perfecting the process he devised.”

“But it got away from you?”

“Yes,” Tsung admitted. He was sweating now. “We have less than an hour left to correct it. And only Peter knows how to do it. And Peter is unconscious.”

“You could destroy the machinery,” Durell suggested. “Wouldn’t that help to stop the process?”

“We do not know. It may be self-generating by now.” “But it’s worth the risk, isn’t it?”

Tsung said shakily: “I have not the courage to try that.”

Durell kept his eye on a doorway in the opposite wall of the domed room. “You came up here into this bottleneck to get certain machine parts from Professor Peter’s laboratory, didn’t you? Have you found those parts?” Tsung shook his head. “We need Peter’s help. And he is dying.”

“Then the only choice is to destroy it all.”

“It would be a great risk.”

“Better a risk than the certainty of a new Ice Age for the world, isn’t it?”

Tsung rubbed a shaking hand over his mouth. “I cannot make that decision.”

“You can’t—or won’t? Has it been made for you? Does someone prevent you?”

Tsung said: “Olaf Jannsen is in command. He has armed men on guard, and they obey him. He prevents it.”

26

THEY stood in a long concrete corridor that sloped sharply downward into the rocky bowels of the island. Only a few dim lights glowed at intervals along the way. Ice formed where water dripped through a crack in the old fortifications, glittering weirdly in long crystalline daggers from the ceiling. Durell wished now he had taken more of Uccelatti’s crew with him. Mario guarded the rear, and Gino walked beside Elgiva. He kept Dr. Lin Tsung covered with the rifle as they proceeded silently down the long ramp. The two Chinese naval men walked sullenly ahead. Durell had to get rid of them. A small storeroom offered a way. He urged them inside the damp, cold cubicle, then barred the steel door.

Tsung watched, and spoke in a whisper. “Please, you must not destroy anything. It is too valuable. If it were properly adjusted and maintained, it could change the whole world.”

“I don’t think people anywhere want the world changed like this,” Durell said.

“But the blessings of rain in the desert—”

“Maybe. That’s not enough to pay for all the damage done elsewhere.”

“To destroy the machinery may not work,” Tsung insisted. “We risk everything. I told you, the process may not reverse itself.”

“Is the machinery in the sub?”

“No. Peter removed it to this laboratory so he could work on it. And then he fell ill.”

“AH right. Be quiet now.”

Lin Tsung had described the layout, and it seemed impregnable. There was only one approach from inside to the laboratory and the rocket emplacements that were in the embrasures, like concrete blisters in the sides of the bunker. Tsung guessed that Olaf had withdrawn about six seamen from the stolen submarine, to act as guards. In his madness, Olaf would sooner destroy the world than lose his private game of playing god to change the face of the earth. Perhaps, Durell thought, he should have killed Olaf when he had the chance, long ago. Ingrid had warned him, calling him the Black Viking, that awesome figure out of a misty past. Sigrid and Elgiva seemed to believe in such an entity. Could it be true? Durell shook his head. He was tired, and his brain was subject to phantoms and mirages. He drew a deep breath to steady himself. He would have to play it by ear. But that wasn’t good enough. Too much was at stake to risk defeat by gambling. Yet he couldn’t see any other way to proceed. He had to go on. There could be no parley, no compromise with the Black Viking. It was all or nothing. There was no retreat.

They came to a wide area in the corridor, where a flight of ice-coated iron stairs circled up to a railed platform and a door above.

“Where does that go?” Durell asked Tsung.

Elgiva answered for him. “There is a small observation dome up there, used to watch where and how the rockets lift off. But there is no other way down from there.”

“No way out at all?”

She hesitated. “Windows, yes.”

“And straight ahead?”

“The laboratory. Around that comer.”

Durell nodded and turned. “Gino?”

The boy nodded. “Anything you say, dad.”

“Come with me. Can you handle that rifle?”

“I used to belong to a rifle club in Chicago. I’m okay with it.”

“All right. Elgiva? Stay here with Tsung. You and Mario both keep an eye on him. Don’t let him leave under any pretext, and don’t let anyone go by in either direction. If you hear shooting, come into the lab fast.”

“Yes, Sam,” she said.

“Good. Let’s go, Gino.”

He started up the circular ladder to the observation post above. Once through the doorway, with the boy at his heels, he could no longer see the others. He stepped into a gloomy, frigid darkness. The dome obviously had not been equipped with the heating system that served other parts of the structure. It was growing lighter again as the short sub-Arctic night began to wane. Up here, the sound of the wind was like the groaning of a tormented monster, held in check by the thinnest of reins. Faint rectangles of snow-covered glass loomed here and there around the ice-crusted dome. A narrow gallery ran around the top above window level.

“Up you go, Gino. Put on your face mask.”

Gino was doubtful. “We’re going outside again?”

“And back in through the rocket silo. The rear door, so to speak.”

“You do this for a living all the time, Mr. Durell?”

“Not always.”

“But you like it, hey?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Listen, maybe some day you’d take me to your boss in Washington and ask him for me—”

“Maybe. Let’s see how this works out.”

He had difficulty getting one of the windows open. Now and then he paused to listen for a sound of alarm from below; but nothing happened. Gino added his slim weight to the ice-sealed glass, and all at once it yielded and a gust of freezing wind, carrying stinging ice, drove in their faces. Durell put on his own face mask and goggles. He had to pound on the frozen frame for another moment before he got the port open wide enough to squeeze through and tumble outside.

A scene of desolation and gloom greeted him. The storm was worse, the snow had gotten deeper and heavier in the brief quarter hour they had been inside. It seemed to him that the temperature had dropped several more degrees, too. Through the gray of early dawn, he saw cyclonic clouds swirling in heavy, laborious movement above Skelleftsvik. The wind shrieked wildly and tore the window casing from his grip and slammed it shut behind him. Gino instinctively tried to tug it open again, but it would not move.

Durell signaled to go ahead. It was impossible to talk above the roaring gale.

The dome fortunately had a broad lip around it, a ledge wide enough to support them. A roof-line showed dimly through the distorting snow shapes all about, and led them forward. Heads down, shuddering with the cold that lanced through their clothing and hoods, Durell and the boy edged perilously across the roof. At times, they had to pause and crouch to prevent the wind from blowing them helplessly across the icy surface and down over the edge, where ice-flecked surf thundered on the island beach. An ice-crusted railing helped them to proceed. Then Durell saw a hump of snow that projected above the roof platform, and a dim glow of light seeped through the ice crystals. Carefully he knelt and brushed the snow aside, then broke off a lip of ice beneath the snow to look through the heavy glass into the room below.

He was above the laboratory.

There were bright surgical lights hanging from the ceiling on which he lay, making a brilliant scene below. Snow settled swiftly on the skylight, and he moved his gloved hand cautiously to brush it aside and keep his vision clear. He saw a control console, a bank of computer equipment, steel swivel chairs and files, and a table on which a beared man lay, covered with a white blanket. That would be Professor Gustaffson. Durell could not see the lined and aged face clearly, but the mouth was open and the patient’s breathing lifted the blanket in a quick rhythm. He did not look as if he would last long.

Durell wiped snow from the glass again, careful to move slowly so as not to attract attention from the men working in the room under him. The wind cut viciously through his coat, and he shivered; he could hear Gino’s teeth chatter as the boy lay beside him. Half a dozen men were absorbed in their tasks down there. Some wore white jackets, others had on black seamen’s uniforms.

They ignored the sick man on the table. Then he heard a rumbling, and the roof vibrated under him. Through a wide double door at the far end of the room he saw more sailors moving a small rocket, smaller than the outmoded Nikes at home, on a railed trolley. Their destination was beyond his line of vision. The men seemed to be working with a slow but desperate speed.

“There’s a lot of them,” Gino gasped through his chattering teeth.

Durell nodded. He searched for one outstanding figure in the scene. Olaf had to be down there. Olaf—murderer, traitor, renegade. The Black Viking, harbinger of doom, sword of Odin and Thor.

And where was Sigrid? he wondered.

He felt an uneasy responsibility toward her. Tom between love and duty, she had given him a lot of trouble until now; and yet he felt as if he owed her something. Without Sigrid, he could not have gotten up here, would not have known about her father and her uncle Eric. She was somewhere down there, wounded, perhaps as desperately near death as her father who lay gasping out his life on the table below.

Gino clutched his arm. “There he is.”

Olaf strode into the room from the corridor where the men had trolleyed the gleaming rocket out of sight. He wore a heavy parka, with the hood thrown back to reveal his black hair and proud, handsome face. His mouth looked cruel. He pushed Sigrid ahead of him, and the girl stumbled and almost fell. She turned angrily to say something, and then rushed to her father’s side. Olaf watched her for a moment, biting his lip, then went to the technicians working at the computers.

“I’m freezing, man,” Gino muttered.

Durell nodded. It was time. He reversed his rifle and smashed hard at the glass window with the heavy walnut stock. The glass seemed to shatter without a sound as the wind shrieked bitterly around them. Durell was up, crouching at the window frame instantly. It was a long drop down to the floor below. He kept his rifle close to his body.

He counted on surprise, for he knew how swift and deadly Olaf's reactions could be. Even so, it did not work out as he hoped. A girder which he hadn’t seen from the roof caught at his arm and knocked the rifle from his grip. It went spinning aside as he landed with a jolt that winded him. He rolled loosely, and the gun clattered several feet away. At the same time, the technicians at the console ducked and shouted as the broken glass showered on them.

Sigrid screamed. Durell came up in time to get a boot in the side of his head that knocked him halfway across the room. He came up against the surgical table. He glimpsed a complicated array of shining machines, complete with tanks, from one of which a fine white crystal had spilled. His head rang with the shock of Olaf’s kick. His rifle had landed near Sigrid, out of reach. The thought flickered through his mind that maybe Elgiva was right— the ancient gods had taken a hand in the game, snatching his rifle from his grip.

He narrowly missed another savage heel stamping down to crush his throat. Olaf looked dark and enormous, towering over him. The man’s teeth gleamed in a tight grin. His yellow eyes were tigerish. Durell tried to get to his feet and Olaf kicked him again. He rolled away under a table, toward the console. A chair came into his grip as one of the white-smocked technicians scrambled hastily away. He hurled the chair at Olaf, but Olaf ducked and it crashed into some of the machinery. Sparks flew. The icy wind had begun to roar down through the broken ceiling window. Rolling again, he saw Gino’s olive face at the skylight, snow blowing in around him. Gino had his rifle ready, but his young eyes were uncertain.

“We finish it this time, Cajun,” Olaf grunted. “You are too late.”

“You can’t stop the storm with that rocket,” Durell gasped. He was on his haunches, eyes wary, watching the technicians gathered across the room. They were unarmed. But the sailors from the sub had weapons, and would use them if Olaf so directed them. But Olaf still grinned, taking pleasure in a personal resolution of their enmity.

“We do not stop the storm,” Olaf said. “We make certain it goes on. Then our job is done. I have decided.”

“That’s not what Dr. Tsung wants.”

“Tsung is a coward, afraid of what he has created. But I fear nothing. It is the end for you, Cajun.”

Durell saved his breath. Behind the giant Olaf, he saw Sigrid stir, a slim figure near the sparking machinery. Her face was very pale, as white as the snow that blew down from the broken skylight.

“Olaf, listen to me,” she whispered.

He did not turn his head. His eyes watched Durell. “Tell your boy to jump down now. Don’t wait.”

Olaf had a heavy PPSH in his hand.

“Gino?” Durell called. “Did you hear him?”

Gino’s face disappeared from the broken skylight. Olaf grinned. “The boy is foolish. He will die up there when the rocket is flown.”

“Gino!” Durell called again.

The wind howled at the broken glass and cut itself into thin slivers of sound that fell into the big room. It grew colder inside by the minute. The lights flickered, turned blue and dim, then brightened again.

Sigrid spoke in a thin, rapid voice. “Olaf, I have pleaded with you before, I told you that for the sake of our old love, of everything between us, you must give this up and help my father to live.”

“Be quiet,” Olaf grunted.

“I will not. I never thought you would shoot me. I have been asleep all these years. A foolish girl. A stupid girl.” She took a step closer to the machinery, where Durell had thrown the chair. “You must not kill Durell. You must not fire the rocket. Listen to me, Olaf. I beg of you.” Her words were a desperate prayer. The technicians, gathered in a knot at the far end of the room, watched with wondering, Oriental faces. Durell did not dare move as he looked into the dark muzzle of Olaf’s gun. The man’s eyes glared with a wild determination to follow his end toward destruction. Nothing could stop him. Sigrid’s plea was hopeless.

Then Gino’s rifle suddenly blasted the stillness.

Durell caught the movement of the boy’s head in the skylight just an instant before Olaf. He threw himself to the right as Olaf's gun smashed a bullet at him, then spun to his feet and charged the dark, massive figure. Sigrid screamed and hurled herself forward and Olaf back-handed her to the floor. She lay there like a broken doll. Gino’s rifle crashed again, and Olaf suddenly lurched, then spun with feline speed through the door toward the rocket trolley.

Gino leaped lightly down from the roof.

“Cover them,” Durell snapped, indicating the frightened technicians. Then he dived after Olaf.

Iron stairs rang under his heels. He had snatched up his rifle as it lay beside Sigrid, and his mind had filled with a dark fury as he saw the girl’s inert body. He did not know if Olaf had killed her or not. No time to think of her now. He came to the end of the steps.

High and anxious voices, shouted commands, echoed down the dripping concrete corridor ahead. Lights in wire cages cast an eerie blue glow. The storm raging overhead was soundless at this depth. A wild-eyed sailor plunged from a doorway. Durell shot from the hip and saw concrete chip and spray above the man’s head. The sailor backed away, against others trying to follow. Durell slammed a steel door against them, made it secure with a quick drop of a bar, and looked down the corridor after Olaf. Machinery whined and hummed. He went on, more cautiously now, up a steel ladder to a small gallery. As he came through the door, a shot spattered on the wall beside him. He went on through with a rush, saw Olaf struggling alone to manipulate wheels and buttons that hoisted the needle-nosed rocket to an opening in the concrete silo overhead.

“Hold it, Olaf!”

The big man darted behind the missile, fired wildly. Durell jumped from the gallery after him. He heard a loud ticking, a humming, and desperately threw switches and punched buttons whose operation he did not know. Something sparked and sputtered inside the missile. He heard a door slam and a gust of Arctic air blew into the silo.

Olaf had plunged out into the storm.

Durell ran to the door and opened it. The wind blew the hood back from his head and clamped icy fingers on his face. For a moment he could see nothing in the unnatural, raging tempest. But he heard another dim shot and turned through the snow heaped up outside the doorway; he headed left, where the roar of breakers at the foot of the cliff competed with the wild keening of the wind.

The gray gloom of sub-Arctic dawn was shot through with reflecting curtains of snow that caught the glow of light from inside the bunker. Ice glared underfoot. Durell hunkered down behind a snow-capped rock, searching for Olaf. He could not spot him. But the shot had come from above the ice-bound cove where the submarine was moored. Another hour, and the ice would trap the vessel there forever, bound in glittering chains that no human power could break. Durell ran and slid toward the edge of the cliff.

“Durell!”

Olaf’s heavy voice crashed through the tumult of the 'Storm. Durell felt dismay as he realized it came from the left and behind him. Olaf had maneuvered to get Durell between himself and the cliff. His form bulked darkly in the swirling snow, plunging in a charge that would sweep Durell over and down into the abyss.

Durell squeezed the trigger of his rifle. But nothing happened. Ice had frozen it. Apparently the same thing had happened to Olaf’s pistol. It hurtled through the air at Durell’s head, and he ducked just in time. It vanished into the void behind him.

“It is too late for all of us, Durell!”

Durell threw his rifle at him. Olaf slapped it aside as if it were a twig. He grinned in his dark beard, and his eyes were alive with malevolence. His arms came wide to grip Durell in a deadly embrace that would drive him over the cliff to his doom.

The man’s breath puffed hotly in his face.

“If I must go, all the world goes with me,” Olaf gasped. “And you go first, understand?”

The man’s strength was enormous. Durell tried to slip from his grip, but his footing gave on the icy rock and Olaf lifted him and shoved him hard toward the edge of the cliff. For an instant, the snow and sky and open hatch of the missile silo gyrated wildly in his vision. Then his boot caught and held and he staggered to the left, grabbing at Olaf’s arm to haul the big man abruptly forward. Olaf yelled, fell, and slid toward the edge of the cliff.

And a gun cracked dimly through the storm.

Sigrid was at the silo opening, a rifle in her hand. Olaf half rose, and Durell yelled at Sigrid to hold her fire. He wanted Olaf alive. But as Olaf stood, a sudden wild burst of wind roared over Skelleftsvik, and struck him like the flat of a board. For two seconds Durell, too, was blown helplessly toward the cliff. Then he caught a tiny outcrop of frozen shrubbery and clung to it desperately while the insane wind beat at him. His ears were deafened by its uncanny rage. There was nothing left in the world but that final cyclonic blast that leveled snow and ice with its force.

When it ended, Olaf was gone, swept over the edge of the cliff. Sigrid ran toward Durell, her arms wide to keep her balance.

“Get down!” he shouted. “Down!”

She did not hear. When she came within reach, he grabbed her and pulled her into the lee of the rock outcrop at the edge of the cliff.

“The missile!” he yelled. “I aborted the flight—pulled all the switches—it’ll go any minute—”

Then the explosion came.

Inside the silo, there was a dull rumbling that lasted for one long breath. Then the earth shook and a sheet of flame and a cloud of smoke enveloped them, tom by the wind.

It was like the end of the world.

27

FOR SIX hours the storm continued to rage.

No one knew if it would ever end.

Durell had no time to think about it. Sigrid was badly hurt, and her father, Professor Peter, had to be saved. The silo and part of the laboratory was wrecked by the rocket explosion, but the rest of the solid bunker had suffered little damage except for the fires that put the computers out of operation. The submarine crew had suffered some casualties, but Elgiva and Gino and Mario were unhurt.

While the wind still howled, a crude bridge was thrown across the gap in the Walk and Dr. Eric was brought to Skelleftsvik. He began operating at once on his brother Peter. The outcome was still in doubt when the wind suddenly died.

The silence halted everything.

Durell lifted exhausted eyes to the concrete ceiling. The others also raised their heads in stunned, mute surprise. Durell went to one of the bunker ports to look out. The light was brighter. The snow had stopped. The world was a dazzling, crystalline expanse of snow and ragged, spume-tossed sea. Mist crawled along the shore, and he was dimly surprised to see how near the mainland the island really was. The effort to cross the Walk had made the way seem endless. But now he could see the Gustaffson house across the cove, and the white hull of the Vesper was still safe in the lee of the cliff over there.

A single shaft of sunlight pierced the wild clouds and moved like a searchlight across the sea. It shone in his face briefly, and held in its brief moment of brightness the warmth and promise of spring.

“Perhaps,” Dr. Tsung said wearily, “it would have ended by itself, anyway. We cannot know. It seemed to us that we had started a chain reaction in the atmosphere that nothing could halt. We were desperate. Professor Peter told us, before he fell into his coma, that only a revision of the mechanism and a change in formula for the rocket charge in the atmosphere might reverse the weather process. So we came here. But it was too late, for Peter was unconscious. And I did not know what to do.”

Elgiva came from the operating room, stripping off rubber gloves. She had been assisting Eric. Her face was pale, and her eyes lacked the sureness they once had.

“No man knows what the ancient gods intended,” she said quietly. “Evil men will always seek the road to power and death. Olaf is gone. Maybe Peter will die, too. But what happened will never take place here again. Not through Peter or through you, Dr. Tsung. The explosion of the missile destroyed everything Peter had designed over many years. His process for manipulating climate is gone.”

Tsung said hesitantly: “If he recovers, he may rebuild it—”

“No.” Elgiva shook her head. “He will never be the same again. Even if he recovers from the operation, he will not have the capacity to work that he had before. His knowledge will be dead. I would rather that Peter died today, than to see it survive and have him used as you and your masters used him, Dr. Tsung.”

Twenty minutes later, there was the sound of the first plane overhead. It was a Swedish Dragon attack jet, and it was followed by the drone of heavier planes, and then the breathy chop of helicopters. Durell put on his heavy coat and went outside.

The sun was shining.

He blinked in the glare that reflected off the ice-coated world. Water dripped, ran, gurgled and chuckled as it melted off the ice-encrusted, smoke-blackened bunker. He drew a long, slow breath. They might all have died after he pulled the switches that aborted the flight and exploded the missile. But if Olaf had succeeded, then the added charge he had tried to send up might have truly tipped the balance between life and death for everyone.

He stood quietly watching parachutes blossom against the ragged, blown edges of the clouds that fled northward, like the tattered remains of a dark and hostile army. Then he walked toward the big Viking house that Eric had built. Men were already working on the Vesper, restoring the spars that had been damaged by the storm.

“Hey, Mr. Durell?”

Gino ran after him, his young face eager and excited. Durell waited for the boy.

“You did fine, Gino. I want to thank you.”

“Listen, my uncle Mario says I can go back to the States, if you sponsor me. He says I wouldn’t have to worry about my pop being in jail, if you say a good word for me—see, like I could study, maybe, and use the money Pop gave me to get a job like yours. Could I do that, Mr. Durell?”

“It would take some years in college. But why not? I’ll talk to General McFee about you.”

He walked on, alone.

The sun grew brighter and warmer. He began to think about the reports he had to write for McFee. By the time he reached Eric’s house, climbing the steep cliff above the Vesper’s mooring, Swedish paratroopers were scattering all over Skelleftsvik, boarding the nuclear sub that lay half-aground in the cove below the bunker. There would be international recriminations, he supposed, and a certain amount of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get the vessel returned to the USSR. Peking would deny it all, of course. But Dr. Tsung seemed ready to talk his head off. But that was not his job. His work was finished—almost finished, he thought.

The great hall of the Viking house was crowded with armed officers and men from the Swedish paratroop company that had air-dropped as soon as the storm abated. Baron Uccelatti signaled him from a comer of the room and Durell joined the urbane Palermitan nobleman.

“You look tired, my friend,” said Uccelatti, “but at least you are alive. When we heard the explosion, I feared for you.” As always, Uccelatti was quiet and calm. His smile was amused. “I have considered our mutual debts, Cajun, and I think we are both paid off. Square, eh?”

“I couldn’t pay you enough, baróne,” said Durell. “But I’m not finished yet.”

“You have much red tape now, eh?”

“More than enough to untangle.”

“I am thinking—there is so much confusion here—if we slip out in the Vesper, they would have much trouble getting us back. We could go down the Baltic in Finnish waters. You must decide now. Naturally, you must report soon at Stockholm. For myself, I shall go on to Helsinki. I do not wish worldwide publicity, you understand.”

“No more than I,” Durell said. “But I must consult with Sigrid.”

“She is already aboard, awaiting your arrival.” Uccelatti laughed. “She agrees that a quiet day or two would do you both much good.”

True enough, Durell thought. There might be temporary arrest if he stayed, endless questions. His job demanded a first report to General McFee. It would be awkward to answer questions right now to the Swedish military. Sooner or later, he would have to. But there was no hurry. “Let’s go,” he said quietly.

An hour later the Vesper was under full sail, boiling east and south along the Lapland coast for Finnish waters. They had set out openly, and when a young Swedish trooper ran to halt them, Baron Uccelatti had used his most aristocratic manner to confuse the guard, blandly stating he had official authority to proceed to Stockholm. Sigrid had flashed cards and documents that made the officer hesitate, biting his Up, and then trudge back up the hill to question his headquarters by radio. By the time the first helicopter came beating overhead with wild signals for them to return, they had reached Finnish territorial seas and nothing could be done to stop them.

Ice still floated, shimmering blue and white in the restless sea. But the last clouds had vanished as if by a miracle—a man-made miracle, Durell thought grimly, one they could all gladly forget. The sun felt warm and friendly again.

He went below to find Sigrid. She was not in her cabin.

He turned to his own, and she was there in his bunk, studying the miniaturized transistor radio he’d never had occasion to use. It occurred to him that Sigrid never stopped working. He would have to call General McFee on that special wavelength now. Or soon. He looked at Sigrid, took the radio from her, decided it could wait.

“Angry man,” she murmured.

“I’m not angry, Sigrid.”

“You look so—”

“Annoyed?”

She turned her blue eyes upward. The Vesper moved easily through the unsettled sea. The Sicilian crew moved happily on deck at their work, glad to be heading south again to more familiar waters.

“I have been thinking of Olaf,” Sigrid said. “You were always right, of course. He was a dreadful man. I thought I was in love with him. I thought he loved me, too. I never dreamed he would let Papa die—”

“Your father will live,” Durell said.

“Yes. And I shall see him later, when this is all finished and things are quiet again and I can tell him how sorry I am that I doubted him and believed, to the end, that Olaf would help us if I could only convince him—” Durell smiled. “Take it easy, Sigrid.”

“I am nervous,” she said.

“You? That’s not like you.”

“I hate apologies.”

“None are needed.”

“Yes. And I hate this work. I am not really of a temperament to continue in it. Not after I so misjudged Olaf.” She shuddered violently. “I might have killed us all. Killed you, and Papa—and the whole world.” She turned on his bunk, and he could not help but be aware of the smooth, lithe curve of her hip and thigh. She propped her chin in her hand, wincing as her shoulder wound sent a pang through her. It was only a flesh wound; but it was uncomfortable enough, Durell thought. But she was young and strong and scarcely aware of it. There were bruises on her tanned face, where Olaf’s fist had cruelly beaten her. One comer of her mouth was slightly puffed. Somehow, it only served to make her look more appealing. She watched him with great, innocent eyes that glistened with unshed tears. “I’ve been such a fool, darling man. Sam, would you leave your work and stay in Stockholm with me?”

“No,” he said.

“You are not very courteous.”

“Courtesy has nothing to do with it. It’s a great temptation. Perhaps in a few weeks I’ll get some leave—”

“Even that would be nice.”

“Would you settle for that, Sigrid?”

She rolled over on her back. She was silent for a long time. The Vesper rolled, lifted, and forged ahead. Water ran whispering along the fine lines of her hull. Durell sat down beside her on the edge of the bunk. She reached up and touched his mouth with an exploratory fingertip. She wore a sweater and skirt which, woman-like, she had managed to change into after boarding the yacht. Under her tan, her face was still pale, but whether it was from the wound and the bruises she had suffered, or from an inner anxiety and uncertainty, he couldn’t know. Her long, pale hair spread on the pillow about her as she considered him.

“I loved Olaf,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“But I was so mistaken about him. I forgot my work, my duty. I risked my father’s life, everything—”

“Hush. It’s over with.”

“No, it will always be with me. Am I mistaken about you, too, Sam?”

He leaned forward and kissed her. Her lips were cold. He spoke against them. “I’ll ask for two weeks in Stockholm. Try me then, and we’ll see.”

He really had to radio McFee, he thought.

Sunlight came through the cabin port and touched Sigrid’s face. It was warm and friendly. She lifted one arm and clung to his neck and then she kissed him back, an exploratory gesture at first, then suddenly filled with need and longing.

“Fabulous man,” Sigrid sighed.

He decided that McFee could wait.

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