Page 76 of Viking Unchained

“No, why would he be?”

“Why, indeed?”

“Huh?”

“Tell me what happened.”

She told him, but then she started to sob. Why she’d been able to hold herself together without tears so far, but break down now, she had no idea.

“Oh, sweetling, do not cry. I will be there soon.”

That caused the tears to dry up real quick. “You will?”

“I am calling on Torolf’s phone from up in the sky.”

“You’re on an airplane?”

“Yea, I am. See the sacrifice I am willing to make for you? In any case, we will be there soon.”

“We? ”

“Believe me, you do not want to know.”

A Norse version of the Motley

Crew . . .

Thorfinn was in another flying bird surrounded by the most lackwitted hird of soldiers a chieftain ever had. A private jet-plane was all they had been able to hire, and even then, they could not leave ’til the next morning.

Airplane, jet-plane, whatever they called them, Thorfinn found riding in them a fist-clenching, heart-thumping, not-to-be-favored experience. What was wrong with a good old horse and cart? Or even an automobile?

But time was of the essence.

When Torolf had explained the danger that Lydia and her family were in, and that it somehow tied in with her ex-husband because he had been a Navy SEAL, every SEAL not on a mission who had ever worked with Dave Denton demanded to come along. That meant Geek, JAM, Sly, Slick, F.U., and several others whose names Thorfinn did not know. All of them carried deadly weapons.

“All for one and one for all,” Ian—Commander MacLean—had told him last night before he reluctantly headed back to the base.

On the remote chance that Mike might actually be his son, and therefore family, the Ericsson men said they were coming along, too, as was their right as elder warriors: Magnus, Jorund, and Geirolf, the three of whom carried their broadswords and battle-axes, which— believe you me—had been hard to explain to the policing folks at the airport.

“There is naught mightier than the sword,” Magnus had asserted.

While Uncle Magnus was a vintner, Uncle Jorund ran an athletics school in Tax-us for crippled people, crippled in mind, as well as body. When Thorfinn asked if he ever taught pole dancing, his uncle’s jaw dropped nigh to his chest. Then there was Uncle Rolf, who had built and managed Rosestead, a reproduction Viking village in far-off Maine, complete with longships, longhouses, and craftsmen.

Thorfinn would like to see that. Many of their wares were marketed on the Internet . . . a place that he did not quite understand involving computers, he had learned from Geek and the bad-breath Blade.

Never let it be said that Vikings did not know how to adapt to the times.

Then Magnus’s six other sons had jumped on board: Storvald, Njal, Jogeir, Hamr, and Kolbein, who had all seen more than twenty winters, and Ragnor, who was over thirty, same as Torolf. Ragnor worked with computers; a strange job for a Viking, if you asked him, which nobody did. But no more unusual than a Viking merchant on the Internet superhighway, he supposed.

“Young blood is needed to get the job done,” Jogeir had declared.

Hamr was a football player, nicknamed The Hammer. Not with the Minnesota Vikings, but the San Diego Chargers. Traitorous, it was, in Thorfinn’s opinion. If a man was going to engage in bloodsport for a living, it may as well be with fellow Vikings and involve a bit of pillaging. Kolbein, who was studying to be a priest— imagine that, a Viking priest! —came, no doubt, to give last rites to the villain, once dead.

Jogeir, who had been lame as a child but was no longer, due to some medical operation, was an Olympic runner who shared his father’s love of farming and would return to Blue Dragon one day. Njal, ever the mischievous one as a child and still was if the twinkle in his eyes was any indication, was a high-up officer in the Navy. Storvald, the eldest son, next to Ragnor and Torolf, was a sword-maker at Uncle Jorund’s Viking village.

What a motley group they all were!

The villain terrorizing Lydia and her family was going to take one look at them and either piss his braies or run for the hills. With them in wild pursuit. He could scarce wait.