This Land is no Stranger

by Sarah Hollister

  Through the binoculars, she saw Moro train his own pair of field glasses toward the isolated chalet. A fancy Volvo SUV and a Mercedes sedan were parked next to the building.

  “There,” Brand said. She allowed Hammar a glimpse through the binoculars, not removing the strap from around her neck. “So they are tracking the pipeline after all.”

  She put the glasses to her eyes again. As Brand watched a tall individual emerged from the chalet. He ducked briefly into the Mercedes, and then returned to the house carrying what looked like a bottle of booze.

  “What’s going on?” Hammar said. “What was that?”

  “Male subject, I’d say around six feet, blond, young, maybe about thirty, black leather jacket.”

  “Do you see anyone else?”

  “Not at the chalet,” Brand said. She swung the glasses around to check on Moro and Dollar Boy.

  “Dollar Boy,” Brand muttered. “Where’d he get that handle, I wonder?”

  “I don’t know,” Hammar said. “I had just a quick word with him at the baron’s. I didn’t have time to question him about it.”

  “I notice he’s wearing a hat. Camouflage, hiding the pink hair. It must be hard to get lost in the crowd with a hairdo like that.”

  Hammar examined the darkening sky. “I’d say maybe a half hour to twilight. No moon tonight, so…”

  “So we work by the light of the aurora,” suggested Brand facetiously.

  Downslope, the river twisted around in a long curve. Between ragged sheets of ice, the water was black. Downstream, at the inner crook of the river’s bend stood the chalet. A ridge above the lodge forced the highway off to the south, further isolating the property.

  Held in suspension as the last daylight faded, Brand traded the field glasses back and forth with Hammar. They surveilled the two Roma males as they surveilled the chalet. Finally she saw movement around the Scania.

  “Whoa, here we go,” Brand said. Dollar Boy dropped the back gate on the truck and allowed the muzzled hyena to jump off onto the snow. The animal crouched low, pushing its snout upward.

  “What’s happening?”

  She handed the binoculars to Hammar. Brand still had not totally worked out what had been going on between Varzha, Moro and Dollar Boy, or what the baron’s involvement might be. Clearly, despite the danger, the three Roma principals had somehow been able to remain in communication with each other. And someone—probably Dollar Boy, along with the beast Fenrir—had been following after Varzha and brutally eliminating her abductors at every stop along the human trafficking pipeline.

  Brilliant, Brand thought. Berserker crazy, for sure, but brilliant. Instead of being a victim, the girl had turned the tables and succeeded in becoming the victimizer, first at the first stop in the trafficker’s pipeline, the Manor House, then at Västvall village. Brand believed Varzha might actually deserve a medal for cleaning up her little corner of the world.

  Was the same bizarre business about to happen at the little chalet on the shores of the Hede River?

  “Are we going down there?” Hammar asked.

  “That kid’s got my Glock,” Brand said. “I want it back.”

  “He is also in possession of a very big dog, while you are unarmed, so I’d say the balance of power tips in his direction.”

  Brand shook her head in frustration. “Why don’t Sami immigration lawyers carry firearms? Aren’t you guys natural targets for extremists and nut jobs?”

  “The person most likely to be shot by your own gun is yourself,” Hammar said primly. “Besides I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

  “You’re always attempting to provide evidence of that, yeah.”

  “My hunting rifles are secured in a gun locker in my home.”

  “Well, fuck,” Brand said, primarily because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  She had not allowed her eyes to stray from the binoculars, still focused on the turnout where the Scania had pulled off the highway. The light had become too dim to see much of anything with the naked eye.

  “They’re moving,” she said.

  Brand had parked the Saab on a logging lane that ran up a small rise a couple of hundred meters to the east of the chalet. Without further discussion she and Hammar moved together down the slope through a snow-locked stand of graceful fir trees. They closed in on the chalet from the east. Moro and his blond beast handler, Dollar Boy, were approaching from the west.

  As she slipped and slid down the slope towards the river, Brand’s mind raced, doubts dunning her at an insistent pitch. They were coming at it all wrong, she was convinced. Hammar shared a priority with Moro and Dollar Boy, to extract Varzha from the clutches of the traffickers. But the two Roma men would not stop there. They were bent on revenge, employing Fenrir as their method of terror.

  “Krister,” she said, breathing hard from the exertion of plowing through the deep drifts. They halted beside the icy water edge, part frozen, part roiling with deathly rushing current beneath. A large crack threatened to split the river in two, a natural parting of the seas. The water looked black deep, making Brand shiver just to look at it.

  “We have to split up,” she said. “You head off Moro and the kid. I’ll get into the chalet for the girl.”

  “I have to confess I’m a little hesitant about confronting demon-dogs from Norse mythology,” Hammar said.

  “It’ll be all right,” Brand responded. “Fenrir’s chained and wearing his muzzle.”

  She pushed Hammar in an upriver direction while she turned toward the woods between the riverbank and the chalet. The strategy prompted more questions than it answered. Splitting forces in the face of the enemy was always portrayed as an ultimate mistake in warfare.

  And what was the plan if she somehow managed to slip into the chalet without being detected? Scoop up the girl and run? They had been forced into one of the single worst decisions in any situation: well, we have to do something. Wouldn’t it be better if they just waited for everyone else to battle it out and then step in and pick up the pieces?

  Brand half turned back toward the river to call out to Hammar when what she witnessed stopped her cold.

  A black-masked figure materialized in the fading light. It seemed to levitate out of the woods to land on the river ice. She could hardly believe what she was seeing. An additional actor in the drama had appeared out of nowhere, on skis, wearing snow camouflage and hefting a sleek-looking battle axe.

  The action went down in dead silence, Brand’s scream dying in her throat. A quick, monstrous swipe of the weapon, and the newcomer dropped Hammar where he stood. Brand felt the hit herself, falling to her knees in the snow, her breath knocked out of her. It had clearly been a death blow.

  As if the first figure had magically cloned itself, a second identical one appeared, also flying through the air and landing expertly on skis.

  It happened in an instant. With a single horrible, dismissive movement, the two commandos kick-shoved Hammar’s crumpled body into the river, dumping him as casually as if disposing of a bag of garbage between the sheets of ice. Brand heard the faint splash and saw the body disappear. The two figures whirled around and vanished back into the woods.

  40.

  Dr. Hira Nur examined the tiny cell phone carefully, before dropping it and smashing it with her foot. The sight of the device sent everyone’s head in a spin.

  “You didn’t search her?” screamed the heavy-set Turkish man at Jarl Voss. He sounded panicked. “We’ve been set up!”

  “No, Fevzi, no. It’s nothing. I’ll take care of this,” Voss said.

  “We need to leave,” Hira Nur said to her partner.

  The pair headed down the hallway to the chalet’s front room, leaving Jarl Voss behind to deal with the captive.

  “The face,” Fevzi snarled back at Voss. “Mind the girl’s face!”

  Jarl pushed Varzha back into the tiny bedroom, shoving her roughly onto the bed. He will kill me, she thought. The idea felt curiously irrelevant. She tho
ught of Vago, and, oddly, of Luri, the Romani beggar who always took up a post near Varzha and her brother.

  Her captor retrieved a plastic zip-cuff from his pocket and bound Varzha's hands tightly behind her back. “You’re still goods,” Jarl hissed at her furiously. The girl’s eyes seemed to show contempt, not fear, enraging him further. He tied her further and left her lying on the bed.

  In the main room the Turks rushed to pack up. The handsome driver now avoided Jarl’s gaze.

  “It’s not over,” protested Jarl.

  “Do you think the little bitch didn’t use that fucking phone to contact the police?” Fevzi demanded. “They’re on their way here right now.”

  “Bring out the girl,” Hira Nur said briskly. “We’re taking her with us. You can go to hell.”

  “I checked that idiotic phone,” Jarl said. “There was no signal.”

  Hira Nur pulled a handgun from her voluminous purse.

  “Okay, okay,” Jarl said, raising his hands in surrender. He cursed himself for leaving his little automatic in the SUV.

  As he turned down the hall to the bedroom he stopped short. A strange cackling noise erupted from some kind animal in the woods outside the chalet. All the talk among the Turks halted instantly, the call sounded so odd and so close.

  “Ak-ak-ak-ak-hoo-arool!”

  “What the hell!” Fevzi said.

  Jarl forced a laugh. “You are unfamiliar with our local wolves?”

  “Ak-ak-ak-ak-hoo-arool!”

  In the bedroom, an immense sense of relief flooded through Varzha. She knew what the animal howl meant. Dollar Boy and Moro had come. They were here. She was saved.

  Hearing the chalet’s entry door open, Jarl turned.

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “Hassan, our driver,” Hiru Nu said, still clearly shaken by the bizarre baying from the woods.

  What came up the stairs, however, bore no resemblance to Hassan the driver. The beast seemed to grow in size as it emerged from the stairwell, bringing a foul smell of death along with it. The animal’s spotted blonde fur already showed blood from its murderous work on the Turk driver. In a single bound the hyena blew past Jarl to knock the two Turkish traffickers to the floor. Fevzi and Hiru Nur attempted to crawl out of the way, but both proved within easy reach of the hyena’s tremendous jaws.

  Snapping off a first bite, Fenrir ripped a gobbet from the side of the woman doctor’s neck. Jarl stared in horror as her carotid artery blew a great black gout of blood across the room. The beast barely stopped to swallow. It swung around to dig into Fevzi’s lap, ripping and tearing while the man bellowed. Still bleeding profusely, Hira Nu collapsed forward.

  That was enough for JV. He took a running leap at the chalet’s bank of thermal windows, bounced off them and fell to the floor. Behind him the big beast was still slashing and tearing at the Turks, but briefly swung its scarlet snout toward Jarl. The Voss scion scrambled back to his feet, rattled in panic at the door to the deck, and finally managed to get it open.

  Dollar Boy and Moro halted at the top of the stairs, gazing at the carnage in the main room. Seeing Jarl about to flee, the younger Roma shouted and raised a handgun in his direction, blowing off a single shot that went wide. Jarl tumbled out the door and onto the deck. He crawled to the railing and leaped over, running off into the woods surrounding the chalet.

  Dollar Boy cursed. “Get Varzha!” he yelled, giving a rare order to Moro, a man unaccustomed to being told what to do. But the dire nature of the situation required adjustments on everyone’s part.

  That included Fenrir. The hyena worked at the twin carcasses slumped on the couch, gorging and swallowing, gorging and swallowing, the blond fur of its chest soaked red. The dead still let loose with random wheezes and moans, but they were clearly gone. Dollar Boy jerked the steel chain around the beast’s neck, pulling it off its victims. Fenrir snarled at him, not hyena laughter at all, but a terrible low vocalization that had Dollar Boy believing he might be next.

  He managed to drag the hyena out onto the deck and show him the most tantalizing sight to any predator’s eyes—a prey animal running away. Jarl struggled through the drifts piled deep in the surrounding forest. Fenrir leaped over the deck railing and took the twenty feet into the snow banks below with ease. Dollar Boy trailed behind, giving shrill whistles of encouragement, as the beast closed on the staggering, weeping figure of Jarl Voss.

  It was not to be. Out of the woods came a black-masked figure on skis and in snow camo, wielding a compact crossbow. Dollar Boy didn’t see the bolt fly but saw the effect of its impact. Fenrir fell mid-leap, skidding across the snow and winding up in an unnatural posture, struggling to rise but unable to do so.

  Dollar Boy rushed forward. With its nasty habits and craven behavioral tics, the spotted hyena is a difficult animal to love, but the species had its fans. The pink-haired Romani teen was one of them. He knelt beside Fenrir, real grief washing over him, seeing the shaft of the bolt embedded in the creature’s noble heart.

  In a reflexive move Dollar Boy raised the Glock in his hand. Steadying the weapon, he shot the wielder of the crossbow who had taken down his cherished totem animal. Wild as his aim was, with his heart overcome emotionally and eyes dimmed with tears, he still managed to make a clean hit.

  A kill shot to the head.

  The strange ski commando fell backward into the snow.

  Dollar Boy could not quite believe it, but another similar figure stepped into the place of the dead one. This one held a sleek metallic axe.

  Dollar Boy had a gun. Checkmate, mate. He again aimed the pistol and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. The Glock merely dry-fired with a sickening click. Fetishizing the stolen weapon as he did, petting it obsessively in his cubicle bedroom at the dormitory on the baron’s estate, Dollar Boy had never accurately counted the number of rounds remaining in the magazine. He labored under the delusion that he could go on firing the pistol forever.

  In the last instant of his life, Dollar Boy was gifted with an uncommon vision, the sight of a battle axe arcing through air, about to deliver the blow that would split his head apart. He had not time to form the thought that he had been blessed with a warrior’s way of death, and had thereby gained an automatic entry into Valhalla.

  41.

  Ylva and Malte had formulated their mission that evening with their usual precision. The primary directive was to preserve the life of their common cousin’s worthless son, Jarl. No Voss shall die, no matter how idiotic and feckless he might be. That led to an obvious choice of tactic. Surprise would be the only way to go.

  Tactics determined equipment. Skis, yes, but no rifles, although Ylva and Malte were both Olympic-level athletes in the ski-and-shoot sport of the biathlon. They’d bring along their absurdly customized, deadly accurate Anschutz 1827F .22s, as well as more transportable long-guns, but would leave all the firepower behind in the SUV.

  Instead, they would employ knives, crossbows, and, for flair, the battle axes that they had practiced endlessly with as teens, but never got to use in actual battle. Malte was more than proficient in every weapon imaginable, but in axe technique he yielded to Ylva, who had named her blade after a she-troll.

  “Are we being childish, do you think?” She and her close-as-kissing cousin sharpened their axe blades in the motor pool workshop at the Voss family estate in Västvall.

  “To me, the challenge of limiting ourselves is invigorating,” Malte replied. “If you told me, ‘bare hands only,’ I’d go along with that, too.”

  Ylva felt the same way. Since childhood she and Malte had mirrored each other’s looks, moods, and desires. Twin cousins, they called themselves. “Ylte and Malva,” the other members of the family teased.

  So.

  Silence, stealth, cunning. Their bywords for the mission.

  It was easy enough to pick up the trail of the blue Saab as it left the baron’s estate, heading into the mountains toward the border of Norway. There was only a sin
gle main highway threading through the area, running alongside the Hede River. Malte drove the Porsche Macan turbo, hanging back from their quarry, moving up meter by meter for a visibility check before dropping off again.

  Ylva agreed with Malte that the New York detective and her Sami partner would be forced to stop before the Norwegian border. They were most likely heading to where their idiot cousin Jarl was hiding out. No one in the Voss family could understand how Hammar and Brand were able to track Jarl’s progress through the country so closely. Everywhere Jarl went, the two seemed to show up.

  “Probably some GPS device,” Gabriel Voss had said, igniting a family discussion on whether any technology existed that could track a GPS tracker. After a quick internet search Malte reported that there didn’t seem to be.

  “You’ll have to invent one, Gabriel,” he said lightly to his uncle.

  “Not a bad idea,” the man said. “But you two can’t wait around for that.”

  Following Veronika Brand and Krister Hammar proved to be the next best opportunity. Jarl Voss had clearly gone rogue, embarked on one of his wild-hair adventures. Via GPS tracker or some other mysterious way, Brand and Hammar had known where he was every step of the journey.

  “Find the damned idiot,” Gabriel had told Ylva and Malte. “Bring Jarl back and we’ll put him in a barrel, feed him through a hole. He gives us any more trouble, we plug up the hole.”

  On getting the call from Magnusson, the baron’s man, Ylva and Malte had geared up, commando style, and moved out. While driving they liked to play opera arias at top volume. The Porsche Macan sported a bumper sticker that said, in Swedish, “How to win a biathlon—Anyone passes you on skis, shoot that fucker in the ass.”

  When the Saab had stopped and pulled into the woods, they did the same, posting themselves on a ridge above a cottage along the river.