"I wouldn't say this to her," Aho said, leaning toward him conspiratorially, "but Viking society was always about warrior men. Each man carried an axe, a dagger, and a sword on his person at all times, and wore garments of fox or beaver or even squirrel that left one arm free, his fighting arm. Each woman wore a box on either breast, made of iron, copper, silver, or gold, indicating the wealth of her husband. She also wore a neck ring to show her subservience to him. We had a bit of a row in the schools years ago about how to teach the history of these people." He settled back into his seat. "You can't offend women, you can't offend the British who were victims of the Vikings, you can't offend the Christians who were killed by the heathens-- heathens who didn't want to see their cultures destroyed like those of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Lombards, and Alamanni. Fortunately, accuracy won over political expedience. Can you imagine being ashamed of a history such as ours?"

"No, sir," George said, then looked out at the starry night sky. It was the same sky the Vikings had looked at-- in awe or fear? George wondered. He couldn't imagine that the Vikings were afraid of anything but dishonor. His own training, like the training of Navy SEALs and the Army's Delta unit or the Russian spetsnaz, emphasized attitude as well as physical skills: not just twenty-hour marches with a fifty-five-pound rucksack to keep you in shape, but the belief that while death is fast, failure stays with you for a lifetime. And George believed that utterly.

Still, he couldn't deny that he felt a lot better when he "overdressed": wearing a hip pouch stuffed with flash grenades, a Kevlar bulletproof vest with lapel daggers for hand-to-hand combat, his Leyland and Birmingham respirator, and carrying a few spare 9mm magazines. Instead, in his rucksack, he had AN/PVS-7A night-vision goggles, an AN/PAS-7 thermal viewer to see hidden objects by the heat they generated, and his Heckler & Koch MP5SD3 with a collapsing stock and integral silencer-- even the bolt noise was absorbed by rubber buffers-- which, used with subsonic ammunition, couldn't be heard fifteen feet away. And his passport. He had that too. That was the exit strategy Darrell McCaskey had come up with.

"I don't think your ancestors did anything like what we're doing, though, sir," George said, trying not to let the details distract him. He turned away from the sprawling beauty of the Milky Way as the car entered the city proper and turned onto the main boulevard, the Pohjoesplanadi, the Northern Esplanade, which runs east and west through the center of the city. "I mean, it would've been kind of difficult to sneak a Viking with three weapons and a horned helmet into another country unnoticed."