Holliday sensed it before he heard it, and heard it before he saw it. He squinted, looking for something he wasn’t quite sure was there, and then he saw it: a phantom in the mist above the trees, the first flash of sunlight reflecting off the windscreen of a low-flying aircraft. A small plane, maybe a Cessna Caravan, tricked out with floats and painted dark green to blend in with the jungle treetops.

A split second later he spotted a bright double flash from under the wings, followed by a strangely clipped, hollow
whoosh
, like the abruptly terminated sound of a bullet striking water at high speed. The sound was horribly familiar: a pair of underwing Hellfire air-to-ground missles being fired—forty pounds of fire-and-forget high explosive coming at them at roughly a thousand miles an hour.

“Incoming!” Holliday bellowed. And almost before the warning was out of his mouth the Hellfires struck.

Also by Paul Christopher

Michelangelo’s Notebook
The Lucifer Gospel
Rembrandt’s Ghost
The Aztec Heresy
The Sword of the Templars
The Templar Cross
The Templar Throne
The Templar Conspiracy

SIGNET

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DEDICATION

Para mi buen amigo,
Edimburgo Vladimir Cabrera Alfonso,
Con gran afección

“Who will help me grind the corn?” said the Little Red Hen.

—English Traditional

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

—Ernest Hemingway

Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.

—Joseph Heller,
Catch-22

Be careful what you wish for; you might just get it.

—H. L. Mencken

PROLOGUE

A.D. 1039
The Nile River at Karnak
One hundred leagues from Alexandria

His name was Ragnar Skull Splitter and his ship was the
Kraka
, named for the daughter of a Valkyrie and a Viking chief.
Kraka
’s carved wooden image, eyes closed in dreaming sleep, long hair covering her naked body, graced the bow of his warship. It was said that Kraka, like her mother before her, had the power to interpret dreams and see the future. Ragnar fervently prayed that it was so and that she would guide him home once more with her prophecies, because for the last ten days he had traveled a river that seemingly had no end and for five of those days had traveled through what he now knew, despite the blistering heat from the relentless sun, was nothing less than Niflheim, the dark and eternally frozen land of the dead.

Ragnar was the cousin of Harald Sigurdsson, the head of the Varangian Emperors Guard in Miklagard, the Great Walled City, or Constantinople, as the local people called it. Ragnar was Harald’s greatest warrior, and before setting out from that wondrous city at the neck of the world he had vowed to his cousin that he would not return until he had found the secret mines of the ancient king and taken their vast riches in Harald’s name.

If he failed it would not be for the lack of a good ship and good men to sail her. From his position on the steering platform at the high end of the stern he proudly looked down
Kraka
’s length.

She was eighty feet from the carved effigy of her namesake in the bow to the high, elegantly curved line of her sternpost. She was eighteen feet wide and barely six feet deep from the gunwales to the keelson that ran the length of the ship. She was made of solid oak from the shallow slopes of Flensburg Fjord, her clinker-built hull created by overlapping planks attached to the heavy ribs with more than five thousand iron rivets, roved between each plank with tarred rope. The planks became progressively thinner as they rose toward the gunwales, making the boat light, strong and flexible. She drew less than three feet and could be rowed right up on the shallowest beachhead.

At sea with her big sail set,
Kraka
could make an easy ten knots and could travel more than fifty leagues in a single day. Here, on a river as black as night, its waters populated by swimming monsters of dizzying variety, she could barely do two knots and travel six or seven leagues before her thirty-two rowers could no longer lift the ponderous eighteen-foot oars.

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