Chapter 11:
The gunfight still lasted for another twenty minutes after the real SWAT team had arrived. A total of forty fake SWAT officers participated in the attack and caused Muspelheim to lose seven engineers and fifteen guards. The damage that the building received might need a few months to repair. Electricity circuits needed to be replanted, some labs were completely blown apart, and some walls had turned into ashes and debris of concrete.
"What the hell happened here?" Gobber yelled as he, Emma, and Hiccup exited the elevator.
Just like a suicide car bomb struck Sam's office, the wooden furniture turned into black charcoal, those giant glass windows became the sharp, shiny glass pieces on the ground, the walls were carbonated under unidentified heat and turned black, bullet holes wasted the computers and microscopes. Windows shattered into small crystal pieces and the power lines on the roof sparkled. The scariest part was the dead bodies and dismembered arms and legs and even a skull with black combat helmet lay beside Sam's burnt sycamore wood table.
"How is Niflheim?" Sam ran through the mess to Gobber and shook him with great anxiety on his face.
"What happened to you?" Gobber looked at the CEO of this company. Gobber didn't recognize him at first.
Sam's neatly brushed dark hair that was covered by gel had all straightened up like he was touching a plasma globe, some part of his exposed arms and face were burnt and turned slightly black, ashes from the concrete wall covered his white shirt and hair, and a few wounds on his legs which fresh blood still leaked out. He seemed like a soldier who just walked out from the battlefield, clothes covered by gore and dust.
"It doesn't matter," Sam put his hands on Gobber's shoulders and looked at his eyes. "Tell me, brother. Was Niflheim save and untouched?"
"Uhh...I guess so…" Gobber said carefully, looking back at Sam, whose eyes reflected the fear and anxious like a father waiting for his newborn baby. This was the first time Gobber seeing Sam so nervous and so apprehensive. "At least we didn't see anyone descending from the elevator."
After receiving Gobber's confirmation, Sam smiled, revealing his white teeth, which were the only part of his body which still revealed his identity.
"A group of fake SWAT attacked us," Helga walked into the completely destroyed office with a Beretta in her right hand. "And a severe gunfight took place in Sam's office. They firebombed this place."
"I don't care about my office when Niflheim is under potential threat," Sam took out his phone from his pocket, also covered by dust. Then he turned to Hiccup and Emma. "This place is not safe for Project Bifrost to process, and I need to move you two to a safer place."
"Where is Astrid?" Hiccup ignored Sam and asked Helga who stood behind him.
"She is fine, no need to worry about her," Helga shrugged. "I think with Astrid by his side, he will be safe while working at anywhere."
"And you need to fix the ac in Niflheim," Emma pointed at Sam. "Otherwise you should rename that place the 'underground oven.' "
"Those are small problems," Sam tapped a few codes into his phone. "I know Astrid is a skilled agent, but I need to make sure that Project Bifrost is completely secured until we fixed up this mess."
Hiccup didn't listen to what Sam was saying, he walked out of the office. The corridor that he met with Astrid a day ago looked like a tank bombed it, walls covered with bullet holes.
Someone hugged him from behind. It was Astrid. Her blond hair was all tangled up with blood drops among them. A wound on her right shoulder drenched her trench her shirt and trench coat. Another cut on her face extended from her left eyebrow and down to the tip of her nose as if someone dragged a paper-knife across her face. Her black tactical boots reflected the lights in Asgard when she entered the building in the morning, but right now it was covered by gray concrete ash and blood.
"Thank god you are safe," she sighed with great relief and rested her jaw on his shoulder.
Hiccup turned around and pulled Astrid closer to him, massaging her blood-drenched hair. She held onto him so tightly that Hiccup felt that his limbs were going to break. He finally realized that his relationship with Astrid came back on track after around a decade. Helga watched the duo in the corridor. During the gunfight in the lobby, she watched for a while on the second floor before jumping down with the M249. Astrid fought like a female lion protecting her territory, and clearly went through professional training, but in front of Hiccup, she became a sloth holding on to a tree.
"Are you guys done? We still have a building to rebuild," Sam cried at the duo standing outside of his office. "And Astrid Hofferson, I do appreciate your assistant during the raid, but I do not appreciate you distracting our best engineer."
"You said we strike right now?" Evan asked. "The authorities are in there."
"That's kind of hard to do," Axl scratched his head. "We missed the perfect timing."
"More than two dozens of actual SWAT officers around the building… and double the cops…national guards are coming in as well..." Nina reported. She examined the half-ruined concrete building through her binoculars. "What is Helga doing alone on the roof?"
"What do you mean?" David asked.
"Helga is sitting at the edge of the roof, holding some sort of...paper in her hand and reading it," Nina murmured as she maximized the magnifying degree. "No...it's not a paper. It's a photo."
"What photo?" Axl looked at Nina.
Usually, after half an hour of an intense gunfight with bullets missing them by an inch and making small decisions that would've cost their lives, a normal soldier would get some hot tea or coffee, if available, to calm down his or her nerves. Evan, as a witness, even felt uncomfortable when watching the fake officers throwing things like Molotov Whiskey into Sam's office, but Helga decided to look boringly at a picture on the rooftop.
Nina didn't answer. She just held the binoculars before her eyes silently.
"I'm talking to you, Nina," Axl poked her shoulder.
"Look it yourself," Nina in a strange way and handed the dark green, military leveled computer-powered binoculars that could see the face of a man clearly from three miles away to Axl.
He put the scope before his eyes and adjusted his arms into a more comfortable position. Then he silenced when his vision landed on that picture, just like Nina did a few seconds ago.
"Helga you motherfucker," Axl murmured.
"Give this to me," Evan seized the binoculars from Axl's hand. He froze like a statue when his vision landed on the picture in Helga's hands.
"What is it?" David took out his sight from his pocket at mounted it on his HK 416 as a replacement of the binoculars. "Who is that?"
On Helga's photo, a man with dyed sky blue hair and emerald eyes wearing a forest camouflage was smiling. He was at least six and a half feet tall, scars covered his exposed skin as if he just walked out from one-to-one combat with a bear. He rolled up his long sleeves to present his chocolate-colored arm with a tattoo of Apollo's bow, muscles flowed under his skin like rocks and blood vessels traveled across his exposed skin like multiple indigo snakes slithering down his body. A Tac-50 rested beside his feet, the long gun looked like a toy compared to his massive body.
None of the other three members of Heimdall answered David's question. They looked at each other, exchanging silent communications.
"Who is the soldier in that picture?" David asked again.
"How does Helga get his picture?" Axl mumbled loudly, ignoring the bewildered David.
"Helga is his girlfriend," Evan squeezed the words out of his mouth, staring blankly into the forest as if he didn't make that startling conclusion. "He told me that he got himself a girl somewhere...but this is so wrong! We are fighting against our former brother's...girlfriend? It's like when Eisenhower was leading the Allies' attack, but his enemy turned out to be Bradley's wife."
"Who?" David looked at his friends who looked like they saw ghosts floating before them.
"His name is Albert Manstein. A former member of us, a brilliant sniper, " Nina sighed before explaining it to David. Her voice was low and deep, unlike her joyful, careless tone. She put her hand on David's shoulder. "You are an excellent fighter and vanguard, David. But to be honest, you are a replacement. Have you realized that we don't have a sniper in our team?"
"Because you lost your sniper?" David asked carefully.
"Yeah. When we were at the shore of Persian Gulf, in 1999, that's before you joined us, we were on a mission to destroy a harbor that was suspected to host a group of soldiers. A local warlord paid us a lot of money for that, and that was even before Eric sponsored us. We had to take that mission. We needed money to keep living and feeding ourselves," Nina said. "But that was a trap, the so-called warlord was a government agent. The harbor did host some soldiers, but they were prepared for our attack."
"So you guys got ambushed?"
"We got our asses kicked. We were being cornered by at least two companies and an armored battalion. Soldiers pushed us toward the sea and cornered us. Evan got wounded badly, two bullets punched through his Kevlar and into his chest, yet we couldn't stop the bleeding. And when we tried to break their ambush, he volunteered to take the other path to draw away the soldiers," Nina sighed. "It worked. I and Axl ran the hell out of us. We sprinted five miles with all of our gear and carrying Evan in about 20 minutes, and the soldiers finally gave up and turned back and went after him."
"Did he survive?"
"We don't know. After we had a chance to look back, he disappeared. We tried to find him, but we found nothing. Only the sound of his Tac-50 traveled into our ears."
"I see," David replied a bit later. "So to fill in space, you got me."
"That's true."
"Good tale. I believe you guys had a good time with him."
"Yeah, you heard Evan unconsciously calling him 'our brother'?"
"Axl, take them and go! I can distract their attention to give you a chance!" the tall sniper yelled at his commander.
Axl watched Albert numbly, bullets flew beside them. He held the dying body of Evan between his arms, blood burst out from his mouth. Evan still tried to say something, but his blood clogged his throat, his rifle lay beside his body, covered by dirt. Nina constantly fired back at the advancing soldiers, trying to stop the giant wave of armor.
"Axl! If you don't leave now, Evan is going to die!" Albert boomed, trying to talk over the gun firings and explodings. He stood up from behind the boulder and emptied the clip of his Tac-50.
Axl didn't reply. He couldn't leave any of his team behind. But the only way to save Evan was trying to drive away the soldiers' attention.
Albert picked up Evans rifle from the ground, "I'll run to the hills in the south and attract their attention, and you and Nina can take the north route and bring Evan out!" Albert didn't wait for Axl's reply and took off into the open field. The six and a half feet man could run nearly as fast as someone on a bicycle. Axl didn't even know that he could sprint that fast.
Just like what Albert had predicted, the firing toward Axl and Nina suddenly decreased. Soldiers yelled as they turned around and headed for Albert, bullets struck the ground behind him. Military Humvees turned their wheels and headed toward the running figure, the machine gun on their turrets rattled. Infantries followed their armors.
Axl raised from behind the boulder, where he ducked the bullets, and looked toward the direction where Albert took off at. The tall figure of Albert turned into a small black dot next to the horizon. Axl's eyes dimmed, no more of his sharp, philosophical sight. The castle in his heart which was made of their four's friendship collapsed. Since they decided to create "Heimdall", they haven't lost one member. Most of Heimdall's members had no families, so they relied on each other to survive in this world. But when witnessing Albert jumped out from behind the boulder and took off, like a bird being freed from its cage, Axl lost one room of his shaky family.
Nina inserted a new mag into her rifle and turned toward Axl. Right now, with one member of the team running off to attract the attention of their enemy, Evan struggling to keep breathing, and their leader facing mental chaos, Nina decided to take over the team.
"Get up, Axl. We need to get out of this place before Albert being torn apart!" Nina yelled beside Axl's ears as she grabbed his arms, trying to pull him up. "You don't want him to die in vain, don't you?"
Axl knew that Nina was right. Before the soldiers capture Albert and put a bullet through his head, they still had time to run for their lives.
"He sacrificed himself to save me," Evan murmured.
Everyone silenced for a minute.
"We retreat," Axl broke the silence and switched his rifle to safe. He struggled to drag his thoughts back from his flashback. "I need to meet with Davis the alchemist again."
In the dark basement of Eric's villa ten miles away from Asheville, two figures wiggled on two metal chairs which were connected to the concrete floor, trying to break free from the restraints. A heavy boy still wearing his white lab coat and a woman with long dark brown hair. The only light was turned off, and the only illumination came from a small window that was at the top of the wall which provided fresh air for the basement.
"Stop trying, Fishlegs and Heather," Nina said as she walked down the stairs. She wore a simple light blue blouse with jeans. She sauntered around the duo, a steel hawkbill blade spinning around her finger. "No one will show up and rescue you."
"What do you want, bitch?" Heather growled.
"Everything in your brain. Contact information, locations, fire power of your team, everything," Nina bent over and hissed beside Heather's right ear. Then she patted Fishlegs's shoulder. He tried to yell and make enough sound so that pedestrians could hear them from the small open window, but his mouth was gagged by a cloth that someone rolled up into a ball. "Your friend here had told us enough about Asgard, and now I want to know more about its clients. Where is the safe house for DPA Team Foxtrot?"
Heather did not yell or freak out when she realized that someone kidnapped her. A DPA agent would not freak out in front of anyone, even death itself. When Eric's men, who pretended to be police, tried to capture Heather, it took five strong and muscular men to control and restrain her.
"It's in your asshole," Heather spat at Nina.
"Hmmm…" Nina held the blade firmly in her hand. She rested the tip of the blade on Heather's left cheek, not hard enough to cut open her skin, slightly denting Heather's facial skin. Nina then slowly drifted the blade down Heather's face and to her neck, like how a hunter trying to pick the right spot to cut open a deer's stomach that she just shot. The blade then trailed around her collarbone as if Nina was drawing a picture on Heather's skin. "Others like Evan or Axl might have some more patience when talking with you, but I don't. You just wasted your only chance."
"Just cut my head down," Heather raised her head and looking straight at Nina.
"No, no, that would ruin all the fun," Nina replied in a soft, baby-like voice like how a mother comforts her newborn child.
"Wouldn't it be even more fun to chop open someone's head?" her chest rose and fell as Heather breathed heavily. "I would do that if I were you."
Nina didn't reply. She looked at Heather's exposed upper chest when she raised her head. Sweat covered Heather's skin like tiny pieces of crystals that were placed beneath lights. Nina moved the blade to Heather's throat, slowly adding her power onto the tip of the blade.
"You know that I'm not a cold-blooded killer. I don't enjoy killing others. I'm a… weirdo," Nina smirked at Heather.
"What kind of weirdo?" Heather tried her best to lean back and leave more space between her throat and the tip of Nina's blade.
"You know, some crazy gal in a club. A whore, that's what my targets always say."
"You think this can scare me?" Heather snorted.
"I wasn't trying to scare you," Nina knelt before Heather so that she could look at her without looking down. "I want to have some fun for myself until you give up and tell me everything you know."
In the following hours, Fishlegs watched the horrifying scene in the basement: Nina walked around Heather, using her hawkbill blade stabbing and cutting Heather randomly, and sometimes she threw punches at Heather's head or stomach until Nina didn't need ropes to restrain Heather. After a few minutes, Nina cut Heather lose and threw her to the ground like throwing a bag of potatoes. The hawkbill cut Heather's clothes into pieces and stripes, and her skin was covered with blade cuts and wounds. Her right eye swollen and turned red and turned slightly blue after Nina's sidekick landed directly on her face. Nina straddled on Heather and cut open Heather's trench coat and the shirt with interest, indulging the action of removing someone's clothes with a blade, her tongue slipped across her upper lips.
Fishlegs wiggled in his chair, trying to break free and end the inhumane actions. He was an engineer, not a soldier who could withstand these bloody scenes. He knew that even though he wasn't restrained, he couldn't defeat Nina and all the other people who kidnapped him from England. He tried to scream, but only to be muffled by the gag in his mouth. The nylon rope dug into his skin and left numerous red marks on his wrists and arms.
Nina used her knee to pin Heather's neck to the ground and penetrated Heather's shirt with her blade and ripped open her shirt.
Heather tried to fight back, a DPA agent wouldn't go out without a fight, but the hawkbill pierced into her right shoulder and dragged across her muscle, cutting her muscle in half while leaving a wound so deep that her pale white shoulder bone was exposed in the air. Heather yelled furiously, here scream bounced around the gray, concrete walls of the basement. She tried to cover her wound with her left palm so that she wouldn't die because of exsanguination. But that didn't help much, fresh blood dripped out from between her fingers like a small waterfall.
"That's better," Nina laughed as she licked the blood off from the blade.
"What the hell is going on?" David walked down the stairs which was filled with Heather's painful shrieks. "What's this?"
"How to deal with someone who doesn't want to talk," Nina shrugged.
"Ok, you can play, but not too hard, ok?" David watched the half-naked Heather on the ground, tossing and turning as if she was submerged into a pool filled with acid. Nina's hawkbill blade was so sharp that cutting through clothes was like a red hot knife slicing through butter. "What did you do to her clothes?"
"I removed them."
"Jesus Christ," David murmured as he walked up the stairs to get away from the bloody scene. "Don't forget to treat her wounds, we don't want her to die because of infection."
"Fine," Nina complained as she watched David disappeared up the stairs. Then she turned toward Heather on the ground, a small pond of blood gathered beneath her shoulder.
"Lucky girl," she drove her leather boot into Heather's belly with frustration before walking to a closet in the corner and took out a first aid kit, the hawkbill blade still spun among her fingers.
The sky turned completely dark when Hiccup and Astrid stepped into a burger restaurant in downtown Asheville. They sat down at the table next to the entrance, with a window that overlooked the road. Astrid was still wearing her trench coat, but with her two MP7s beneath the cloth. She managed to dig out her guns from Hiccup's Ford which seemed to be "fucked by a thousand bullets", that was what the county sheriff said when he arrived at Asgard. Astrid decided to eat outside to stay away from the danger. Hiccup didn't object. Right now the whole mountain was filled with cops, and the North Carolina National Guards were sweeping through the mountains.
The scene of Sam's burnt office still flashed in Hiccup's brain like a movie. Especially the dead body of a Muspelheim's guard, who got his whole lower body chopped off by something and his upper body turned charcoal black under some sort of extreme heat. Helga said that it was a firebomb.
Although Astrid wasn't sure about whether the gunfight mentally shook her boy, she didn't see that on Hiccup's face. But she could feel Hiccup's body shivered slightly without laying her hand on his skin. Even after all these years, she could still predict Hiccup's emotions and actions.
After watching police cars and military trucks filled with soldiers rushing across the city, downtown became quieter than usual. Normally every night people would fill the theaters, shopping malls, and restaurants in downtown. Today only a few dozens of people wandered on the street, the neon lights of the stores stood alone beside the streets, attracting the clients who would not show up in a few days.
This burger restaurant didn't attract as many customers as usual, and actually, Astrid and Hiccup were the only two people who entered this place the whole night even though that was the best burger restaurant in Asheville.
They focused on their food, but Hiccup constantly turned his head toward a black dictionary sized box computer hard drive beside him. That was the hard drive of his lab's central computer. Every lab in Asgard had a computer system that can access surveillance of the lab and engineers can use this computer system to access the internet and all sorts of databases, communicate with other laboratories around the world on a secure line, and calculate complex scientific equations. This computer system was just an overpowered personal computer. Hiccup stored all the most important data and information about his projects in his computer system, but now he didn't feel safe to leave the drive alone in his lab.
Two people wearing the exact trench coat that Astrid was wearing pulled the door of the restaurant door open and walked in. They grabbed themselves some chairs and sat down beside Astrid. One of the women threw her sheath with a WWI bayonet in it on the table with great tiredness in her actions. The leather sheath slid across the smooth table and stopped beside Astrid's burger.
Hiccup unconsciously placed his left hand on the hard drive to protect it.
"What happened?" Astrid asked the women.
"Charleston was a trap," Valka replied powerless, unlike her deep, commanding tone. Her face lost the usual light pink color and turned slightly white, without the sight of life. "We lost two members. Clever and Ashely."
Astrid stopped chewing. She stared at the golden fries in her plate. The "happy" couple of DPA Team Foxtrot, Clever and Ashely. Astrid knew them very well. They amused everyone in the team by performing dances and playing violin. Astrid wouldn't be surprised that they died due to trying to save each other. DPA didn't have a lot of members, and Team Foxtrot only had twelve agents, so they were like a family without a bloodline, and right now they just lost one-sixth of their family.
"Who killed them?" Astrid groaned.
"No idea," Ruffnut replied. "Clever stepped on a mine, and Ashely tried to disarm it, but there were no wires on that thing. It was a controlled mine. Someone must have been watching and remoting it because the mine went off. We detected radio waves so 99% that was a controlled bomb. That's how they died."
"And we lost contact with Heather," Valka added.
Hiccup watched the three women exchanged conversations quietly. Some were normal chats but some were about classified names and contacts in DPA. Astrid sometimes winked at him, showing that nothing bad was happening, but he could feel the energy flowing through the three women, like an army preparing for battle.
"The good news is that Interpol provided us information that Axl McDowell might show up in Zurich, Switzerland," Valka picked up a fries from Astrid's plate and ate it.
"How does the Interpol suddenly know everything?" Astrid asked.
"Because a person threw a recorder pen with the phone record between Axl McDowell and a professor of Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich into the headquarters of Interpol," Valka pulled out her phone and played a security camera footage of a man throwing a small black box through the doors of a building and ran off.
"Facial identification?"
"Already did it," Valka stared at Astrid. "That dude's name is Albert Manstein. Have you heard about this name before?"
"Sounds familiar," Astrid replied, thoughtfully.
To be continued