The War of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic (Saga of the Iron Dragon Book 5) Read online

  The War of

  the Iron Dragon

  A Novel by Robert Kroese

  Book Five of

  The Saga of the Iron Dragon

  Copyright ©2021 Robert Kroese. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or other—except for brief quotations in reviews, without the prior permission of the author.

  Contents

  Contents

  The Story So Far

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Review This Book!

  Acknowledgements

  More Books by Robert Kroese

  The Story So Far

  I n the 23rd century, humanity has been hunted to the verge of extinction by an alien race called the Cho-ta’an. Earth has been rendered uninhabitable and every other human world is at risk of Cho-ta’an attack. The crew of Andrea Luhman, an exploratory ship in the service of the Interstellar Defense League, has been given a weapon that could alter the balance of the conflict: a “planet-killer” bomb left behind by an extinct race. Pursued by a Cho-ta’an warship, Andrea Luhman flees through a hyperspace gate to the Sol system, but a fluke accident sends them back in time to 883 AD.

  Its primary thrusters badly damaged, Andrea Luhman limps into orbit around Earth, and a small crew, led by engineer Carolyn Reyes, is sent to the surface to fabricate a replacement part. The lander is shot down by a Cho-ta’an ship that followed Andrea Luhman through the gate. The Cho-ta’an ship falls into the North Sea, and the lander crashes in Norway.

  While the crew of the lander fight for their lives in Viking Age Scandinavia, Andrea Luhman is blown to pieces by a second Cho-ta’an ship that followed them through the gate. The planet-killer is destroyed, and the crews of both ships are killed. But there is still hope: if the spacemen can get to the Cho-ta’an ship, they may still be able to retrieve another planet-killer before humanity is defeated. The indomitable spacemen decide to press on.

  Nearly fifty years after the lander crash, the Iron Dragon—a replica of a Titan II rocket carrying a Gemini Launch Vehicle—launches from a secret base in the Antilles. A single young astronaut named Freya, the granddaughter of Carolyn Reyes, reaches the Cho-ta’an ship and sets it on a course to a distant star in the hopes of locating another planet-killer to change the course of the war.

  Some fourteen years later, however, Freya’s ship is intercepted by a warship called Varinga, which is crewed by a group of humans who seem to hail from a previously unknown branch of humanity. The year is 955 A.D., but these people, who call themselves Truscans, possess technology far in advance even of the IDL in 2227. These people, it seems, are the descendants of a group of refugees that left Earth in 134 A.D. on a ship that traveled even farther back in time than Andrea Luhman. With their hyperdrive-equipped starships, the Truscans could be powerful allies against the Cho-ta’an. But the Truscans have their own problems: they are at war with a race of human-like aliens called Izarians—the same race who built the planet-killer. To defeat the Izarians, the Truscans need an army. Freya suggests that her people and the Truscans might come to an understanding….

  “What din there, Bragi,

  as if a thousand shook

  or an overly great host?”

  “All the wainscoted walls are breaking

  as if Baldr might be coming

  again into Odin’s hall!”

  “Talking stupid,” said Odin,

  “you must be, wise Bragi,

  though you know everything!

  For Eirík it rattles,

  who is to come in here,

  king into Odin’s hall.

  “Sigmund and Sinfjötli,

  rise up quickly

  and go to meet the hero!

  Invite him in,

  if it be Eirík!

  My hope of him is now known.”

  “Why in you is hope of Eirík

  rather than of others

  now to Valhalla, in your awareness?”

  “Because many lands

  he has reddened with sword

  and borne a bloodied blade.”

  “Why did he not win victory there,

  he whom you considered to be valiant,

  and was he worthy of victory from the gods?”

  “Because it’s unknown to know,

  when the grey wolf

  will seek out the seat of the gods.”

  From Eiríksmál, a skaldic poem from the late tenth century (translated from Old Norse)

  Prologue

  A statuesque woman with shoulder-length gray-blond hair sat at the bar of the North Star Hotel nursing an Irish coffee and staring out the plate glass windows at the bleak Icelandic landscape. It was nearly noon on a Tuesday in early February, and the bar was deserted except for the blond woman and a wiry bartender with a pencil moustache and goatee who was watching a soccer game on one of several flatscreen TVs hanging from the ceiling. The hotel, a drab modernist structure sheathed in brown wood paneling, was nearly deserted as well. The only other guests were an American novelist who had booked room 313 for the entire month and a young couple from Reykjavik on their honeymoon. The glacier called Vatnajökull, which had been shrinking rapidly for nearly thirty years, was no longer the draw it had once been, and global tourism still hadn’t recovered from the effects of the pandemic that began in 2020. On top of that, it was currently the off-season. The North Star had been in the red for three years; it remained open only because the losses thus far had been small enough to escape the attention of the Japanese conglomerate that had owned it until that morning.

  The woman knew all this about the hotel because as of midnight the previous day, she was its owner. The process of acquiring the hotel had taken a week from start to finish, most of which was spent trying to navigate the byzantine hierarchy of holding companies in an attempt to find someone authorized to sell it to her. Once she found the right person (who spoke passable English, thank Odin), the transaction had been concluded quickly: she had made them an offer they would have been fools to refuse. At the price they had settled on, she couldn’t hope to make a profit in a hundred years, even if Vatnajökull miraculously regained its former grandeur ove
rnight. It was fortunate, then, that she had no intention of making money on the deal. The acquisition of the North Star was only the first step in a much bigger plan.

  She finished her coffee and set it down in front of her with a glance toward the bartender, who was too enthralled by the soccer game to notice. Clearing her throat also failed to prompt a response. She considered pulling rank but rejected the idea. She had gotten this far by keeping a low profile. Little good could come from revealing herself at this point. Astrid van de Lucht was unknown in Iceland—and most of the rest of the world—and she hoped to keep it that way as long as possible.

  The name was an alias, of course—a sort of inside joke with herself. She generally did business through a variety of shell companies, but a sufficiently dogged investigation might reveal that Astrid van de Lucht, born in Linden, Washington on April 29, 1992, was currently the fourth richest person in the world. The evidence of her fortune was mostly public information, but her wealth was scattered across such a wide array of stocks, bonds and other investments, in so many different jurisdictions, that unless one had a reason to total them all up, one would never realize its extent—and she was careful never to give anyone reason. Oh, she’d been scrutinized: the Japanese must have dug at least deep enough to know she’d be good for the $60 million she’d promised for the North Star, for example. But they had neither time nor reason to determine that she owned, for example, $92 million in Netflix stock, $81 million in Bitcoin, $340 million in commercial real estate in Munich, and $181 million in gold in a bank vault in the Cayman Islands. The list went on and on, a bewildering tangle of shell companies and subsidiaries that had only one name in common: Astrid van de Lucht.

  Were she ever to fall under the scrutiny of, say, a thorough SEC investigation, the intrepid sleuths would be rewarded for their efforts with two stunning facts. First, that Astrid van de Lucht was currently worth something like $189 billion; and second, that she had somehow amassed this fortune over the span of just five years, without anyone noticing. A still more thorough investigation would reveal that there were no records of Astrid van de Lucht’s existence prior to 2014. It was as if she had sprung into being ex nihilo at the age of twenty-five.

  She had contingency plans—including several other aliases—in place in case she were found out, but she didn’t relish the prospect of having to start from scratch at this point. Besides, she had gotten used to thinking of herself as Astrid. It had been her mother’s name, and she rather liked it. So she sat, staring across the volcanic plain toward the melting glacier, patiently waiting for the bartender to notice her cup was empty.

  It wasn’t that she expected outing herself as the owner of the hotel to the bartender was going to provoke an SEC investigation; it was the principle of the thing. If she started acting like someone with a lot of money, she would start to think of herself that way. And then, inevitably, she would slip, and somebody—a journalist, a rival, a bureaucrat with too much time on his hands—would start digging. Astrid van de Lucht would have to disappear, and she would have to start over as someone else. It would be much more difficult the second time.

  I’m not getting any younger, Astrid thought, and chuckled. Another joke that only she would get. She had a lot of those—a consequence of spending a great deal of time alone. She conversed with herself frequently, although these days she usually remembered not to do it out loud. She had no doubt she’d developed some serious psychological problems over her long and traumatic existence, but there wasn’t a psychologist in the world who could help her. Hell, just trying to explain how she had gotten so screwed up would probably get her committed. “Anyway,” she said out loud, “I’m coping all right, aren’t I?” She stared at the empty coffee cup in front of her, nervously tapping the counter with her fingertips.

  “You say something, Ma’am?” said the bartender in crisp English. The TVs had been taken over by an advertisement for some kind of face cream.

  Loki’s balls, I hate being called ma’am. She liked to think she could still pass for forty, although she was, by some ways of reckoning, much older. A couple of years ago she had tried to figure out how old she was, in terms of how much time had actually passed for her, but she’d gotten depressed and given up.

  “I could use another,” she said, tapping her index finger on the empty cup.

  “Sure,” he said, and reached for a bottle of off-brand whiskey.

  As he did so, the door to the bar opened and a compactly built man walked in, wearing a gray suit and carrying a briefcase. Spotting Astrid, he nodded and walked toward her. Astrid took a deep breath and tried not to look nervous. She’d never liked face-to-face meetings, preferring to do business at a distance, through intermediaries when possible. But this particular transaction had to be conducted in person, due to its scope and unusual nature. She had requested, though, that the meeting be conducted here, far from prying eyes in Reykjavik, and the man she was meeting had—somewhat to her surprise—agreed. That man stood before her now, his thick mane of silvery hair even more impressive in person than it was on TV. He set down his briefcase.

  “David Magnason,” he said. He held out his hand, and they shook. “You must be Astrid van de Lucht. Shall we have a seat by the window?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course,” she said, getting to her feet.

  “Whiskey, rocks,” said Magnason to the bartender, who had been staring at him since he walked in.

  “Yes, sir!” the bartender said. He put the bottle of whiskey back and retrieved a bottle of Jameson’s.

  Astrid followed Magnason to a table by the huge plate-glass windows, and they sat. A moment later, the bartender delivered a glass of whiskey on the rocks. Realizing he’d forgotten Astrid’s Irish coffee, he mumbled an apology and shuffled back to the bar.

  “Thank you for meeting me all the way out here,” Astrid said. “I realize you must be terribly busy.”

  Magnason waved his hand dismissively while sucking down the whiskey. He emptied the glass and set it on the table with a clink that sounded throughout the quiet bar.

  At least I’m not the only one who’s developed unhealthy coping mechanisms, she thought.

  “Not so busy as you might think,” he said. “Iceland is a small country, and the President handles all the ceremonial business. There isn’t that much for the Prime Minister to do.”

  “Even during the current… situation?” she asked. She had almost said crisis, but thought better of it.

  “Let’s put our cards on the table,” Magnason said. “Our country is in a rough spot. We’re heavily dependent on tourism, and between the pandemic shutting down travel and the melting of the glaciers, we’ve got a lot of businesses going… how do you say it in English? Belly up. Tax revenue is down and social spending is way up. The result is that our national debt now exceeds GDP by a significant margin and continues to grow. This situation is unsustainable. In your call to my office, you suggested that your foundation might be able to help. I had someone do some checking, and you appear to be for real. You seem to have a knack for picking up assets that are just about to rocket to the sky in value.”

  “Skyrocket,” said Astrid.

  “What?”

  Astrid flushed. “I’m sorry, bad habit. The word is ‘skyrocket.’ Assets that are about to skyrocket in value.”

  “Ah. Of course. What is that? Irish coffee?” The bartender had finally returned with Astrid’s drink. “I’ll have one as well.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Prime Minister,” said the bartender. He spun on his heel and returned to the bar.

  “Jesus Christ, I thought he was going to salute me,” Magnason muttered. “Where was I?”

  “You concluded I was the real deal.”

  “Right. You’ve got an impressive portfolio. I had my financial people look into the three companies you told us about. Real estate all over Europe and Asia. All of it purchased within the last seven years, all of it in rapidly growing markets. Your investments are heavily leveraged, allowing you to
realize a return of over eight hundred percent per year. It’s more than impressive. It’s astounding.”

  “Our foundation has been fortunate to hire people who are extremely skilled at identifying trends in—”

  “Kjaftæði.” Astrid’s understanding of Icelandic slang was spotty, but she knew that word: bullshit. She smiled as Magnason continued. “You would need a fortune teller to make those kinds of returns. You sold the last of your real estate in Malaysia three months before the worst typhoon in a hundred years hit. You expect me to believe that was a result of ‘spotting trends’?”

  Astrid shrugged, doing her best to affect nonchalance. “There is, of course, a large element of luck. In this case, bad luck for the Malaysians; good luck for me.”

  “And you expect luck to be on your side in Iceland?”

  “I expect it to be on both our sides,” Astrid said. “If you’re asking whether I expect land in eastern Iceland to skyrocket over the next few years, the answer is no. It is likely to remain stable in value or even decline a bit. The value of this particular endeavor is not in real estate.”

  “How much land are we talking about, exactly?” Magnason asked, gesturing at the view outside the window. Beyond the verdant plain lay steep hills of dark brown volcanic sand. In the distance, partially obscured by a blanket of low-hanging clouds, loomed the great white mass of Vatnajökull. Tendrils of white snaked down the taller hills in the distance, the dying glacier fighting to maintain its hold on the land. “I understand you have already purchased this hotel and several other parcels in the area from private parties.”

  Astrid reached into the bag beside her chair and pulled out a paper map, which she unfolded and placed on the table. It depicted the island of Iceland, with a roughly square section bordering the southeastern coast outlined in red.

  “My word,” said Magnason. “That must be…”

  “Roughly two thousand square kilometers.”

  “What on Earth could you possibly need that much land for?”

  “Research.”