Prologue

  Verily, a time of great suffering shall fall upon the whole of the world for its women will dwindle in numbers. Disease shall soon spread, female babes will not be born, and bloodlines will die out. But, yea, the strong Vikings shall live on for almighty Odin has seen fit to warn us. We are His chosen people.

  Take to the earth, the haven bequeathed to us; the belly of the gods. Dwell below her dirt and leaves, now and forever, untouched by the Outsiders and their ways. Yea, let each warrior cling unto a wife, that his seed may bear fruit and our race prevail. Should a time come when there are fewer females than warriors in our stronghold, then hunt on the Outside and take them.

  By any means necessary, take them.

- Viking Legend

Chapter 1

Arctic Seacoast

Present Day

   It was turning out to be one hell of a long day. The flight schedule had begun at the crack of dawn. She’d flown from Dulles airport in Washington D.C. to Seattle in Washington state, then onward to Fairbanks, Alaska. In Fairbanks, a military chopper had picked her up. The team was currently en route to their destination: nowhere. Almost literally. The highly classified Army complex that operated just north of the Artic Circle was top secret and could only be reached in one of two ways: by helicopter, as they were currently approaching it, or by dogsled.

   Corporal Ronda Tipton of the U.S. Army blinked her eyelids in rapid succession to keep from falling asleep. How anyone could doze off in a loud military chopper was beyond comprehension, but it had been an exhausting day. By the time the aircraft landed, her journey would be seventeen hours from start to finish.

   Staring out the small window on her left to the beautiful winterscape below, Ronda found her mind alternating between fatigue and excitement. This was the first invigorating assignment she’d had in ages. Her last several years in the Army had been on the dull, paper-pushing side of things. All computers and paperwork—no action.

   That state of affairs, however, had been inevitable. She’d taken a bullet to the kneecap from a guerilla’s gun while on active duty in Haiti. Helping two fellow soldiers get to safety had made her something of a hero, but it had also retired her from active duty and landed her with a desk job. Her knee had long since healed, but returning to the field was still out. She’d never pass the Army’s stringent physical requirements for active combat or for any assignment that required more than minimal risk.

   Now, at age thirty-three, Ronda was more than ready to shake up her mundane nine-to-five existence and get away from pushing papers, if even just for a little while. When her boss had offered her the opportunity to oversee a classified military project in the Artic Circle, she’d jumped at the chance. She had joined the Army to see the world and to make a difference, after all, not to sit behind a desk accepting and rejecting expenditures for the military’s budget.

   “What the…?” Ronda’s brown eyes widened as she was suddenly jarred back and forth within her small seat. “What’s going on?” she shouted over the loud buzz of the helicopter’s engine—and over the sound of rotator blades grinding against each other.

   Her heart stilled. Something was very wrong. Ronda had been a passenger on more chopper rides than she could count. She’d never experienced anything like this. The jumping, jarring, and plummeting went way beyond turbulence.

   Her heart began to race. With both hands, she clutched onto the safety harness that came over her head and across her chest until her knuckles turned white. “What is going on!” she yelled again, much louder and more demanding this time. “Lieutenant?”

   Suddenly there was the horrific grinding sound of shredding metal, and all hell broke loose.

   “Hold on, we’re going down!”

   “Oh Jesus—send aid! Command—this is Phantom III—send aid!”

   “Oh my God!” Ronda clutched the harness impossibly tighter. Blood pounded in her ears. Perspiration wetted her forehead and dripped down the side of her face. Her teeth rattled together from the helicopter’s frenetic bumping.

   The chopper was out of control. The small four-seater was being jarred and bumped in so many opposing directions, she could no longer tell up from down or left from right. All she knew was that the snow-capped mountains of ice that had seemed so distant were now suddenly, horrifically, spiraling into bone-chilling view.

   OhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGod…

   The chopper made impact, crashing into the side of a mountain coated with unforgiving ice.

   We’re going to die! Oh My God—nooooo!

   It was Ronda’s last coherent thought. Then, mercifully, the blackness engulfed her until she knew no more.

* * * * *

    She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious. When Ronda pulled herself up from under the wreckage that had once been a part of Phantom III, groaning like the wounded animal she felt to be, she surmised that more than a day had passed. Call it intuition, call it an educated guess, or call it the painful knot that had formed on the side of her head, but she was certain she’d been knocked out cold for a day or two.

   Delicately probing her head for further injuries, she quickly ascertained that she had sustained only the single wound at her left temple. Ronda winced as soon as her fingers grazed over the tender lump. She knew enough about basic survival to realize that, while painful, the knot was not deadly. There was dried blood in the golden curls at her hairline, but she felt no shards of metal in the wound.

   Though the injury to her head probably wouldn’t kill her, the bitter cold snow surrounding her for as far as the eye could see might. She needed help, food, and medical supplies.

   Where am I?

   Ronda’s gaze anxiously darted around, searching for other survivors. Her forehead wrinkled as she noted that the remaining wreckage was much more sparse than it should have been. A piece of metal here, a part of a blade there…

   She stilled. And then, knowing and simultaneously dreading the answer, she weakly dragged her feet toward the edge of the snowy shelf she’d awoken on.

   She moved slowly, cautiously, testing each inch of snow, not sure what was solid mountain and what was white fluff that would disintegrate under her feet upon contact—and send her plummeting below. Finally glancing over the ice-coated cliff, she drew in a deep breath as she visually confirmed what she’d hoped her mind had been wrong about. Sorrow for men she barely knew hit her like a punch to the belly.

   The others were gone. All of them. She was the only survivor.

   Ronda could barely see what was left of Phantom III, but her Army-trained eyes honed in on the fact that nobody—nobody—could have survived that crash. The chopper had fallen too fast and too many thousands of feet below for any of the crew to have escaped certain death. Bloodstained snow and shredded metal were scattered everywhere.

   Ronda shivered, her teeth chattering, as reality set in. The coldness of the snowy mountainside she was stranded on hit home, seeping though the protection of her Army issued snowsuit and into her bones.

   She was alone—all alone. Any flares she might have launched to signal her position had probably gone down with the larger portion of Phantom III and its ill-fated crew.

   How did I survive?

   Her seat must have ripped away from the main cabin of the aircraft. How, she’d never know.

   Now what was of utmost importance was the need to survive. She’d made it this far. She owed it to herself, as well as to the family members of the crew, to get to safety and to tell the Army where the men’s remains were located.

   Backing away from the dizzying view below, Ronda quickly went to rummage through the small bits of Phantom III left on the plateau of ice. Moving so briskly made the pain at the side of her head sting fiercely; she hissed, but otherwise ignored the throbbing at her temple as she poked around the helicopter’s remains.

   Nothing. Not a flare, not a radio, not even a solitary bandage or a crumb of bread. Nothing.

   She sighed, her eyes briefly closing before flicking back open. “What do I do now?” Ronda whispered. “Think, girl. Think.”

   There was but one course of action: find a way off this mountain, and find it now.

   Easier said than done.

   Ronda sat on a sizeable boulder nearby, leaned back against the snowy mountain, and tried to figure out just how in the world she would get out of this nightmare. She wasn’t Superwoman—she couldn’t fly off the damn thing like some comic book hero. And without the proper equipment, she couldn’t climb down off of it either. Which left her…

   Sitting right where she was.

   A part of Ronda morbidly wondered if she’d have been better off going down with Phantom III. The other crewmembers were dead, but at least they had died on impact. She was facing starvation, hypothermia, and a painfully slow death.

   Jaw tight, Ronda forced herself back up to her feet. “I’m not dying like this!” she yelled, her voice echoing throughout the mountains. She took a deep, icy breath and expelled it, realizing how stupid it was to holler out her frustration and fear when nobody would hear it. She needed to conserve her energy for whatever lay ahead.

   “I’m not dying like this,” she repeated more quietly. In active duty—okay. While in enemy territory—okay. But not standing on a cold, lonely mountaintop. Turning to face the boulder, she sank one booted foot in a crevice near its base, leaned a palm against the solid mountain wall to her left, and tried to think. There had to be a way off this mountain.

   Both of Ronda’s parents had died as military heroes: her mother in Russia during the Cold War, her father several years ago in Afghanistan. As a child, the loss of her mom had been a kid’s worst nightmare realized. As an adult, the death of her dad had been more tragic still, for she’d lived with him and loved him for so much longer. Ronda’s only consolation at their funerals was knowing they had died as honored American heroes. Nothing less than what either of them would have wanted.

   She didn’t want to be a hero if it meant dying. Odd as it might sound coming from a career military woman, she wasn’t a pro-war kind of person. She believed that the function of the Armed Forces should be defensive only—to protect and defend the country, that Americans might know peace and safety. She didn’t agree with quite a few stances the military had taken over the years, but she wisely kept her mouth shut and her job intact.

   The payoff was this assignment: a top-secret experiment that just might, after thousands of years of war, bring peace to the entire planet. Her role here, as a paper-pushing geek with an eye for budgets and enough finesse to talk the Pentagon into spending whatever funds were necessary, wasn’t particularly exciting. But the project itself was the most exciting work she’d had in years. And now, because of it, she was facing a slow, painful death.

   “What do I do?” Ronda removed her hand from the mountain wall, absently watching snow fall from where her glove had once rested. “Maybe I—”

   Her dark brown eyes narrowed, a frown marring her features. What the…

   Her hand flew back to the mountain wall and she quickly brushed more snow away. Ronda sucked in her breath when she realized that behind the snow sat a stone door.

   A door?

   Of course! Phantom III must have crashed directly atop the secret military compound! But then why hadn’t Army soldiers come to her rescue? Maybe the compound sat toward the mountain’s root and nobody had heard the crash?

   It didn’t matter. Ronda’s heart was pounding with too much adrenaline to care. Where there was a door, there was bound to be a civilization—and food and warmth and medical supplies. Hope surged inside her.

   She would live! Against all odds, she would survive.

   The door resisted her efforts to open it. She marched back toward the remains of the chopper and found a piece of metal that would work as a crowbar. Where there was a will, there was also a way.

   Ronda excitedly set to work, methodically prying the stone door open from behind the boulder. Her muscles burned and her teeth gritted from the labor, but she didn’t relent. A smile of victory and relief curved her lips when the stone door finally yielded. Not much, but she was pretty sure she’d jacked it open far enough to get in.

   Throwing the makeshift crowbar to the ground, Ronda squeezed through the tight portal...