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"It's also training its guns on us," Baz warned.

Jensen had spotted this himself. His voice came over the intercom. "We're about to take incoming. Evasive action. Hang on tight!"

We grabbed onto whatever we could - seats, bulkheads, the webbing on the walls. Next instant, there was the judder of heavy calibre fire from below. Flashes of tracer fire lit up the Wokka's interior.

Sleipnir pirouetted gracelessly. A few bullets raked the hull. One shattered a porthole.

"Fuck fuck fuckfuckfuck," I breathed as broken glass flew.

The engines bawled, the entire chopper groaned and shuddered from stem to stern, as Jensen poured on the speed and threw us into a steep climb. We clung on for dear life as the cargo bay canted, rapidly reaching 45º from horizontal and getting closer to perpendicular by the second. He was trying to present Fenrir's gunners with as narrow a profile as possible, and at the same time shrinking the size of the target with distance. The comfort and safety of his passengers was a minor consideration. Getting the Wokka out of range of the rotary cannons was the prime directive. If the six of us stayed intact in the interim - bonus.

Soon Sleipnir was near vertical, straining hard against gravity. All at once Paddy lost his grip and started slithering down the bay. He'd have broken an ankle colliding with the closed cargo ramp if Baz hadn't managed to catch him by the arm as he tumbled past. The rest of us kept ourselves attached, though we were dangling around like demented marionettes.

Finally the tracers stopped their mad strobing around us. Jensen powered down a fraction and levelled Sleipnir out.

"All okay?" he asked over the intercom, before adding one of those typically droll RAF apologies. "Sorry for shaking you up like that, but crisis situation, you understand."

A quick glance round showed me no one was injured. Paddy was massaging a sprained shoulder, but winked to say no harm done. I went forward and popped my head into the cockpit.

"Good job, fellas."

"If we go in again, Coxall, those guns are going to rip us to shreds," Jensen said. "This ship isn't built for dogfighting. She handles like a brick shithouse, and even the best pilots can't do anything about that."

"And we are the best pilots," Flying Officer Thwaite chipped in.

"Of course you are," I told him. "And with a cock-duster 'tache like yours, I bet you're pretty popular with the boys down the nightclub, too."

Thwaite's eyeballs bulged in indignation.

"Now," I went on, ignoring his splutters, "we are going in again and you are getting us over and onto that fucking tank. Thor should be running the trolls in any moment. They're our diversion. The tankies will be so busy with them, they won't be concentrating on us. That's the big idea so let's make it happen, shall we?"

Thwaite looked fit to deck me. Jensen, on the other hand, just eyed his instrumentation, glanced out the windscreen, and gave a grim nod.

"Roger that," he said. "We can do this."

"But -"

He cut his co-pilot off. "We can do this."

I clapped them both on the helmet and went back aft.

Guiding Sleipnir into position ought to be relatively straightforward.

Abseiling safely onto Fenrir's back without getting massacred by those rotary cannons - now that was going to be the tricky part.

Fifty-Three

Thor and his brothers held up their end of things just fine. They freed a dozen trolls from the pens and chivvied them in Fenrir's direction. The trolls would normally have turned on the Aesir the moment they had a chance, but the looming mega-tank was bigger, noisier, scarier, altogether more of a threat. So they focused their aggression on it instead.

Fenrir had just broken through the treeline when the trolls attacked. I saw them swarm around it and start clambering on. One of them managed to haul himself onto a gun turret and immediately received a blast full in the face. At a hundred rounds per second, the rotary cannon didn't leave much of his head