Steel Fear

by Brandon Webb

  And there was one staring up at him right now from under the ice on the lake!

  His palms were starting to hurt from the cold, but he couldn’t move a muscle. It was like he was as frozen as the ice.

  He wanted this to be real.

  He wanted so badly for this to be proof that he was right all along, that his brother and his parents and teachers were all wrong, that there really were mermaids, and that Gunnar—not his brother, not his parents, but Gunnar himself—had found one!

  But there was this cold feeling in his tummy, a bad feeling, really bad, bubbling up like Geysir.

  He was terrified.

  Gunnar knew this was not a mermaid.

  He knew this, because the lady in the lake wasn’t moving.

  Not at all.

  Then Gunnar heard a horrible sound, like the shriek of a hockey referee’s whistle, but he didn’t stop to wonder what it was or where it was coming from, didn’t even think to realize it was coming from himself.

  Didn’t think at all.

  He was too busy running.

  2

  Krista Kristjánsdóttir stood over the vague form in the ice and cursed a blue streak.

  She pulled her phone from her vest and tapped the screen to life. “Surface too opaque to see limbs and torso clearly.” She held the phone close and spoke low and quiet, enunciating each word. “Only the face visible.”

  She paused, aware of how inadequate the word was: visible. How about indelible. Haunting.

  The police had arrived within minutes of the boy’s first screams, but not before some citizen showed up with his phone and snapped photos, then trotted off to sell them to the city’s daily newspaper. Terrific. By the time the cops had the scene locked down, the dead girl’s face was staring out through iPad screens in households across the country, over the headline LITLA HAFMEYJAN Á ÍS!

  The little mermaid on ice!

  Krista’s partner, Einar, plodded over, texting as he walked, and relayed a brief from one of the officers on the scene.

  No ID in the woman’s clothing. A lipstick that might be hers, might give up prints, might not. No other clues to her identity. A team of divers was slipping in under the ice sheet right now to see if it was possible to pull her free without damaging the body. Otherwise they’d need to cut her out.

  They waited in silence, puffing clouds of icy breath.

  Moments later the lead diver emerged, looked over at Krista, and shook his head. They’d have to cut out a section of the ice, secure it with a tarp, and transport her to pathology that way. “Like a fly in amber,” murmured Einar, his nimble fat thumbs tap-dancing over his phone again.

  Krista glanced at the crowd along the lake’s edge, pushing up against the barriers they’d hastily put in place, craning to catch a glimpse.

  And cursed again.

  Media.

  She looked at Einar and nodded in the direction of the little throng of reporters. He stopped texting and grinned. No problem, he mouthed. He turned and trundled over toward the pack to give a statement that would say nothing at all, but say it in the most polite and interesting terms.

  Krista hated this part, talking to the press. Always made her feel like a politician. Einar had no problem with it. Which Krista had never understood. It seemed to her that cops and reporters should be natural enemies. Or at least opposites. A detective’s toughest job was getting people to talk. The hardest thing about reporters was getting them to stop talking.

  She watched as an officer brought over a blue vinyl tarp and set it down next to her. Another officer with a portable saw kneeled at the foot of the young woman’s frozen crypt and lowered the spinning blade to the ice. Like a bone saw at an autopsy, its metal edge let out a scream that sliced through the brittle morning air.

  Krista winced.

  3

  At the back of the crowd, a squarish face with oversize eyes watched from under its hooded parka as the little knot of police officers instinctively took a step backward from the scream of the saw. Their elongated shadows stretching out over the lake’s frozen surface reminded the hooded man of the strange statues of Easter Island. Silent sentinels, watching over their people, keeping them from harm.

  Too late, for the woman they were cutting out of the ice.

  He looked around at the city’s storybook architecture, everything illuminated by the liquid amber light. Eleven fifteen, and the sun was just now coming up, struggling to breach the horizon by a few degrees before falling again and plunging the city back into darkness barely four hours later.

  Iceland, the “land of fire and ice,” at the darkest time of year.

  He’d been here before. Visited briefly, years earlier, just before they withdrew all American forces from the nearby air base. A lifetime ago. Before he made chief.

  Back then he was plain Finn, a freshly minted Navy SEAL sniper, on his way to help train a coalition team in Norway. It was summer then, balmy, sunny. Iceland’s famous temperate summers. Herds of tourists—Americans, Canadians, Brits, Malaysians, French, Germans—there to experience the daylight that stretched clear around the clock, to see the glaciers and geysers, the lava fields and lunar landscapes, the milky Blue Lagoon, the ooh and the ahh.

  Not now. Now the tourists were mostly gone. This was the island community in deep winter, when the sun showed its sallow face for no more than a few hours a day. The bitter Arctic climate that forged this people’s national character for a thousand years. No midnight sun, no balmy lava-field tours, no ooh, no ahh. This was not the Iceland of the travel brochures and vacation websites. This was the Iceland outsiders seldom saw. Right now, the land of fire and ice was mostly ice and darkness.

  And death.

  The night before, after being dropped off a few blocks from his destination, Finn had walked the streets of the city. It was an eerie mix of old and new, a mash-up of Heidelberg or Prague or some other quaint European burg with a futuristic scene out of Final Fantasy. Rows of wood-and-corrugated-iron houses brightly painted in pastels and primary colors, a medieval village on an LSD trip. Even as he walked the paved streets of the city, images of the gouts of steam he’d seen geysering up out of the treeless landscape on his ride from the airport were a constant reminder that this was a land carved on the face of a volcanic crack in the earth.

  When he’d gotten safely into his bolt-hole and turned on the tap, the water that poured out was near the boiling point, and it gave off the unmistakable smell of sulfur.

  All the amenities of hell.

  On the ride into the city his driver had asked what he was doing here in Reykjavík. “Research,” Finn told him. “Crime writer.” As good a lie as any.

  The driver snorted. “Then you will have a boring time here, my friend. We’ve got no crime in Iceland worth writing about. We have husbands who beat up their wives and idiots who drink too much and beat up their friends. And this, my friend, is all she wrote.”

  Finn looked back at the lake, the milling crowd pointing at the saw-cut hole in the ice, conversing in whispers as one would in church.

  All she wrote.

  He slipped away and melted into the city, winding through the back streets of Parliament Hill until he arrived at an old town house on a quiet block. He mounted the steps and produced a makeshift house key, which he slid into the lock along with a slim torsion tool.

  Finn felt the lock put up mild resistance for a moment, then gently give way. He turned the knob and the door clicked open a crack—

  “Halló!”

  He glanced over at the town house next door. An old woman’s face poked out at him, its features twisted into a suspicious scowl.

  Finn nodded. “Halló.” The torsion tool salted away in a pocket.

  Her face darkened. “Ert þú vinur Ragnars?”

  You a friend of Ragnar’s?

  Finn nodded aga
in. “Já.”

  The crone took a step out onto her stoop and eyed him up and down a few times, her scowl deepening.

  “He said nothing about any friend,” she grunted in Icelandic.

  Finn shrugged. “Ragnar,” he said, rolling both R’s hard, like machine-gun fire. He sighed and shook his head as if to say, What a dick, am I right?

  The scowl relaxed by half a degree. The woman looked out across the street, gazing in the direction Finn had just come from.

  “Terrible, what happened,” she murmured, still in her native tongue. The Icelandic words reminded Finn of someone gargling.

  “Já,” he murmured.

  Her scowl went harsh again, her voice low and guttural, like a dark priest casting a curse. “Some drunk partier got a little too friendly. Like poor Birna in 2017.”

  “Já,” Finn agreed.

  “Too many foreigners,” she added, spitting the words: “Pólverjar. Finnar. Rússar.”

  Poles. Finns. Russians.

  Finn looked back toward the lake, too.

  “Fuckers,” he said.

  She looked at him in surprise and barked a laugh. “Já,” she said. “Fokking fokk.”

  She turned her gaze out toward the lake again.

  “Greyið,” she said softly. To Finn it sounded almost like the word “crying,” and the look in her eyes conveyed much the same thing.

  Poor thing. What a terrible shame. Crying.

  “Greyið,” Finn echoed.

  The old woman raised one finger in a wave.

  Finn waved a finger back.

  They both retreated into their respective houses.

  Finn closed the door behind him and strode silently through a narrow hallway, coming out into a small living room. The place was spotless, meticulous, tiny. Polished hardwood floors, disappearing black acoustic-tile ceilings, soft recessed lighting. Old made modern, like an Upper West Side apartment. Walls hung in good art—except for one which lay bare, cleared of its artwork, the framed pieces neatly stacked against a far wall.

  Prep, for the task ahead.

  Finn slung his backpack off his shoulder, dropped it on the living room table, which was empty save for three large sketch pads and a dozen charcoal pencils, purchased on an earlier swing through the neighborhood. He began unloading the results of his resupply run.

  Two gaudy, traditional Icelandic wool sweaters, the kind only tourists wore. Two ratty pullovers. A second, scruffier parka and an oversize pair of cargo pants. Expensive suit jacket, dress shirt, and tie. Half a dozen cheap, preloaded flip phones. Two disposable cameras, ball of twine. He didn’t expect to need the hardware, but better to have it on hand, small screwdriver, wire stripper, a foot of insulated wire, a few small screws.

  As he unpacked his gear he thought about what the old woman said.

  Or at least, what he guessed she said.

  Finn neither spoke nor understood a word of Icelandic. Other than “Já.”

  He knew the accent usually fell on the first syllable; knew how to put that assault-rifle roll in his R’s with the tip of his tongue; knew that if he aped a Norwegian accent he wouldn’t be far off. Although he didn’t know any Norwegian, either.

  Not that it mattered much.

  Even in English, most people were a mystery to him.

  Still, he was pretty sure he understood the old woman’s final comment. More or less.

  “Greyið,” he murmured in her voice.

  He took a breath, held it to the count of five, then let it out again.

  This wasn’t why Finn was here.

  He had a quarry to hunt, and scarce time to do it in before the noose tightened.

  No distractions.

  Not his problem.

  He opened one of the sketch pads, selected a charcoal pencil, and began sketching a layout of what he’d seen of the city so far.

  4

  Ten blocks to the east, Krista and Einar sat in their cramped office at the Reykjavík metro police station. The ice-encased, vinyl-wrapped body was making its short trip to the university pathology lab. The pathologist had been called at home and was on his way in, grumbling, to perform an immediate autopsy. Christmas or no Christmas, they needed to get in front of this.

  Krista was especially keen on seeing the results of the tox screen. Drugs. Had to be. What else could explain a girl stripping naked in the middle of the night, in late December, and sliding herself under the ice? “Like a letter through a mail slot,” she murmured.

  “A dead letter,” her partner added with a fat grin.

  In her mind, Krista sighed. That vintage Einar humor: driving her nuts for the past twenty-six years.

  An officer poked his head in the door and handed her the surveillance photos she’d asked for. Good. Take her mind off the scene she’d just left.

  “I’ll leave you to it, then,” said Einar, as he hauled himself out of his chair and lumbered off to hunt down a pastry and hot coffee.

  Einar thought she was wasting her time. He was probably right.

  Krista stared at the first grainy enlargement, a screen capture from CCTV footage taken at the airport the day before. The facial recog software at customs had flagged him, rare for a light-skinned visitor, especially an American, but it was just an A.I. hiccup, and after a cursory passport check by an actual human they’d let him pass. Now, at Krista’s request, they were running another check on the ID he’d used to enter the country. It would come back clear, she’d bet money on it. But something still felt off.

  She looked again at the name from the passport.

  Marlin Pike.

  That seemed an obvious fake to her, but then what did she really know about American names? They all seemed fake to her; strange combinations with no logic or consistency to them. Marlin Pike. Two fish? She sighed. Real as any, she supposed.

  Krista had no love for Americans. Some half a million of them flooded her country each year—half a million too many, in her view. “Their dollars help pay your salary,” as Einar had pointed out a thousand times, to which she would reply: “I’d take a pay cut.”

  But why did this particular American bug her so? She couldn’t say. Some foreigner with an ID issue enters their city, and on the same night an unidentified girl winds up dead in the heart of downtown….No, there was no logical connection. Nothing there but a random confluence of unrelated events. The very definition of coincidence.

  And like any one of ten million other cops on the planet, Krista did not like coincidences.

  She tapped the screen on her phone and began voice-to-texting another memo.

  “Marlin Pike…” She stopped.

  Marlin Pike what? Looked odd? Bothered her?

  “Fuck.”

  She set the thing down. Krista hated her phone as much as Einar lived on his. It was only the relentless mocking from everyone else in the department that had made her finally give up her little notepad and pencil stub and follow the high-tech herd.

  She studied the photo again.

  Oversize eyes, set wide on a squarish face. Expressionless.

  God, she missed that pencil stub. Made it so much easier not to smoke.

  She switched to the second photo, shot at a distance from behind. A little blurred, but she could make out the figure. Short. Lithe. Thin wiry limbs, knobby joints.

  Now she studied the two photos side by side, the face and the frame. Awkward-looking, like a cartoon. Almost geeky. But there was something wary there. An alertness in the eyes. A strange grace in the posture.

  Who was this guy?

  An officer burst into the room. “The mermaid!” he stammered.

  Krista silently cursed and threw the man a weary look. Did her own officers have to refer to the deceased as a “mermaid”?

  “What about her? Isn’t the pathologist there yet?”
>
  “Já, he’s there. He just—he just went in to autopsy the girl.”

  “And?”

  “She’s gone!”

  “Of course she’s gone. She was dead when the boy found her. Probably been under the ice for hours.”

  “No, I mean.” He took a shaky breath. “Her body. It’s gone.”

  By Brandon Webb & John David Mann

  The Red Circle

  The Making of a Navy SEAL

  Among Heroes

  The Killing School

  Total Focus

  Mastering Fear

  Steel Fear

  About the Authors

  Brandon Webb and John David Mann have been writing together for a decade, starting with their 2012 New York Times bestselling memoir The Red Circle. Their debut novel, Steel Fear, is their seventh book together and the first thriller of many to come.

  SteelFear.com

  After leaving home at sixteen, Brandon Webb joined the US Navy to become a Navy SEAL. His first assignment was as a helicopter search-and-rescue (SAR) swimmer and Aviation Warfare Systems Operator with HS-6. In 1997 his SEAL training package was approved; he joined over two hundred students in BUD/S class 215 and went on to complete the training as one of twenty-three originals.

  He served with SEAL Team 3, Naval Special Warfare Group One Training Detachment (sniper cell), and the Naval Special Warfare Center (sniper course) as the Naval Special Warfare West Coast sniper course manager. Over his navy career he completed four deployments to the Middle East and one to Afghanistan, and redeployed to Iraq in 2006–2007 as a contractor in support of the US Intelligence community. His proudest accomplishment in the military was working as the SEAL sniper course manager, a schoolhouse that has produced some of the best snipers in military history.