A couple of dogs howled nearby. It sounded as if they were fighting, but they soon fell silent again. Very silent. There were no sounds. Even the sea was calm.
Tom kicked a pebble, which flew off and hit some empty fish crates. Surely someone in this town must have a telephone and a month’s worth of newspapers.
‘Aluu!’
Tom turned at the sound and saw two boys. One looked about nine, the other a few years older. ‘Hello,’ he said to them. ‘Do either of you know a place here where I can stay the night?’
‘Paasinngilara,’ the older boy said. ‘Qanoq ateqarpit?’
‘I’ve no idea what you’re saying,’ Tom said with a smile. ‘Do you speak Danish? Or English?’
The older boy shook his head. ‘Namik…’
The younger one said something very quickly. The older one looked back at Tom and nodded. Then he pointed to a house with lights in the windows. ‘Ikani.’
‘You want me to go over there?’ Tom said.
‘Yes, over there,’ the older one repeated. Then he nudged the younger one; they turned away and ran down between some boats that had been pulled ashore.
Tom watched them before he started walking to the house they had indicated. It was blue, medium size, made from wood and had a black roof. The light coming from it glowed yellow in the darkness.
The man who opened the door was tall and about sixty years old. When Tom saw the man’s eyes, a feeling of relief washed over him.
‘Hello,’ Tom said. ‘Some boys suggested I tried your house…I think they only spoke Greenlandic.’
‘I’m the only Dane here,’ the man said, sticking out his hand. ‘My name is Jakob. Do come in.’
‘Thank you. My name is Tom. I’ve come…’ He ground to a halt.
‘I know.’ Jakob showed Tom to a table in the living room, pulled out a pile of newspapers and skimmed the front pages. He placed two of them on the table and flicked through them before sliding the open newspapers towards Tom. ‘Are you hungry?’
Tom nodded as he looked at the newspapers.
‘You’re a famous face these days, you might say,’ Jakob said. ‘But don’t be alarmed, the boys you met just now don’t read newspapers, and we don’t have a lot of contact with the rest of the world down here in Qeqertarsuatsiaat.’
Tom closed his eyes and felt the hairs stand up on most of his body. He buried his face in his hands and deliberately slowed down his breathing. ‘What are you going to do now?’
‘I was a police officer once,’ Jakob said. ‘So I’ve seen many guilty people walk free while innocent people were punished. Right now I’m thinking that it’s so unusual for the US military to leak details of an internal murder investigation that there must be a hidden agenda behind all of it. And the fact that a man the US military have reported dead has just turned up on my doorstep is enough to ring my alarm bells.’ He looked Tom in the eye. ‘Tell me your story and we’ll see.’
Tom nodded and removed his hands from his face. Then he started his account. He told Jakob about the experiments, about the murders and about Abelsen forcing him to flee Thule. He told him about Bárdur’s secret world under Færingehavn, the sadism, Mona, the girls and the swimming pool with the dead bodies. Jakob nodded repeatedly, but said nothing until Tom had finished talking.
‘I believe you,’ Jakob then said. ‘I’ve experienced something similar.’ He closed his eyes and rested his hands on his thighs. ‘As soon as you told me about the film footage with the sadistic torture of the little girl, I knew that you had also been in Abelsen’s clutches.’
Tom looked at Jakob with surprise. ‘You know the girl?’
‘I saw the same films in 1973.’
‘And the girl?’
‘I never found her,’ Jakob said sadly. ‘I’m sure that she died. My daughter…my stepdaughter, Paneeraq, was like the girl in the films, but I got her out.’
‘That man is a monster. So what do we do now?’
‘Can you fight him or is it hopeless?’
‘I think it’s hopeless,’ Tom said. ‘It looks like I’ve been set up. I’ll either go to prison for life or I’ll be executed.’
Jakob nodded grimly. ‘I think you need to leave West Greenland for a while. What do you think?’
‘I’ve no clothes or money,’ Tom said. ‘I think I’ve run out of options.’
‘We’ll help you get to East Greenland, but we need to leave now. It’ll be daylight soon, people will wake up and they’ll gather outside to see the man who came sailing under the cover of darkness.’ He looked out of the windows down towards the small harbour. ‘And if that’s Abelsen’s boat you’ve nicked, then he’ll be here soon too, so the boat needs to go as well.’
‘How will you get me to East Greenland from here?’ Tom said.
‘Across the ice,’ Jakob said. ‘I have everything you need.’
‘You mean across the ice cap?’
‘Yes. It’s just under seven hundred kilometres to the town of Isortoq, and if you reach it, you can stay there for a couple of years. There are less than a hundred people living there and there are several empty houses.’
‘So we’re dogsledding across the ice?’ Tom said, chewing his lower lip.
‘No, you are…And it’s no ordinary sledge.’ Jakob slapped his thigh. ‘We’ll discuss the details as we head to the ice cap. I just need to have a word with my wife and Paneeraq. We also need to get you some clothes, pack provisions for you, and you’ll need money.’
‘So you’re coming with me as far as the ice cap?’
‘Yes, all three of us will be. Like I said, you’re not the only one hiding from Abelsen…or the authorities, for that matter.’
‘Thank you…Thank you so much, Jakob.’ Tom ran a hand over his face. ‘Is there a telephone here? I can’t cross the ice without first making a short phone call to Denmark.’
‘There’s a telephone at the school,’ Jakob said. ‘We can use it, if there is a connection today, that is.’
‘Can we get into the school now? I would like to call right away.’
‘Yes, yes, the school is never locked. Paneeraq can walk you over there while I get everything ready here.’
48
THE ICE CAP, WEST GREENLAND, 18 APRIL 1990
Dawn was breaking when they docked a few kilometres from the ice cap at the bottom of the long fjord that reached inland south of Qeqertarsuatsiaat. On the last stretch the growlers in the water had increased in number and they had been forced to sail at a very low speed, weaving in and out between smaller and bigger chunks of ice. Many of the growlers were so big that they could flip the boat, if they suddenly upended in the sea.
Jakob’s wife, Lisbeth, had sailed Abelsen’s boat to begin with, but after half an hour they had stranded the boat and left Tom’s clothing on the rocks, so that it looked as if he had been killed.
When they reached the hunting lodge about four hours later, they dragged their equipment ashore before Jakob sailed out to anchor his boat. He returned to the shore in a rubber dinghy.
Meanwhile, Tom, Lisbeth and Paneeraq had lugged all their boxes and clothes and provisions up to the hunting lodge where the three of them would be staying for a couple of weeks.
Tom looked along the coastline. The tide was out and there were many stranded growlers along the rocky shore. Foundered chunks of glacial ice of all sizes. Some of them were milky white, others crystal clear or turquoise. Some were the size of a truck, others so small that he could hold them in the palm of his hand. He closed his eyes and sniffed the air of the icy sea. There was no purer air in all the world than that on the ice cap and his senses quivered at the freedom he could feel.
‘A thousand years ago the ice came down as far as here,’ Jakob said. ‘You can tell from the rock face. The paler imprints are where the ice reached.’
Tom nodded and looked at the slim, middle-aged man. On their way south and into the fjord Jakob had briefed him extensively about the surface of the ice, the many deep crevasse
s, the nuances of its surface, but more importantly what those nuances revealed: caves, crevasses and meltwater lakes, which might be covered by a thin layer of ice and snow, but could be hundreds of metres deep. To Tom the trek across the ice cap sounded like certain death, but Jakob knew several people who had made the trip and lived, and he himself had often spent several days out on the ice cap, but had never had a reason to cross it.
‘Let me show you the equipment while the girls sort out breakfast,’ Jakob said. ‘I keep everything in the shed round the back.’
‘I think I get the basic idea,’ Tom said. ‘But I would like you to go over it in detail.’ He looked towards the glacier that lay across the sea like a thin wedge between two tall mountains at the bottom of the fjord. He inhaled so deeply that his chest expanded. The air slipped fresh and cool down his throat.
At the back of the hunting lodge Jakob pulled open the door to a narrow shed. ‘I’ll pass everything out to you,’ he said, handing Tom a black metal sledge. ‘It’s lightweight metal,’ he said. ‘I built it myself.’
‘And you’ve driven it?’ Tom said, picking up the light sledge and looking at the narrow runners.
‘For several hundred hours,’ Jakob said with a wry smile, and passed him a heavy bag. ‘This is the parachute. You need to be able to rig everything yourself. Once you’re on the ice, you’ll be on your own, because I can only sail you close to it. You’ll have to manage without me from then on. That means getting onto the ice cap as well as moving across it.’
Tom looked quizzically at the equipment. ‘So this sledge is less than half the weight of a wooden sledge, and rather than being pulled by dogs, it’s pulled by a small parachute with a kite effect?’
‘Yes, it’s the same principle, more or less, and it saves you having to pack a ton of dog food.’ Jakob handed Tom some long reins and ropes full of bights and splicing. ‘These ones must be fastened around your waist and those two down there need to be attached to the front boom of the sledge here.’
Tom put on the harness and adjusted it. ‘Am I attached to both the sledge and the parachute, then?’
‘That’s your choice, but if you wear the harness like that, you have a way of saving yourself should you end up in a crevasse or fall through the ice and into a meltwater lake. Just cut those two straps, which will separate the parachute from the sledge, which will then fall into the void while the parachute will pull you upwards.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘You just need to remember to always wear the small backpack with provisions so you don’t die of hunger instead. You can get water from the ice, so there’s no need to lug that around.’
‘I’m pretty good at withstanding the cold,’ Tom said. ‘But I will need to eat.’ He hesitated, then furrowed his brow. ‘If I lose the sledge, can I continue on foot?’
Jakob shrugged. ‘That’s a very good question, and honestly, I don’t know. In theory, yes, but I’ve no idea how long it would take or how you would react. It’s brutal on the ice. Some people go crazy from the cold and the light, and you won’t survive that on your own.’
‘I’m used to the cold and the light from Thule,’ Tom said. ‘And I’ve been imprisoned and subjected to light torture, so that won’t break me.’ He patted his pocket. There should be enough pills for a trip across the ice.
‘The ice is lethal,’ Jakob went on. ‘But if I didn’t believe in you and my equipment, I wouldn’t let you go.’
‘What about a tent?’ Tom said.
‘I have everything here,’ Jakob said. ‘And we’ll give you whatever you need. Thermal trousers, a jacket, boots, goggles, a rifle, snowshoes. Fortunately you and I are about the same size.’
Tom looked down at the boxes. The parachute, the sledge, the backpacks. ‘I haven’t got any money so I can’t pay you for any of this. And it must be worth a fortune?’
‘I’m rock collector,’ Jakob said with a smile. ‘Not far from here is something we call the red mountain. I spend a lot of time there. It’s a place filled with rubies and pink sapphires.’
Tom looked at Jakob and raised his eyebrows.
‘I’ll give you a bag of those to take as well, so you can manage over there on the east coast,’ Jakob said, surveying the equipment. Then he turned his gaze towards the sky. ‘We need to get you going today. Come on, let’s pack your provisions.’
49
FÆRINGEHAVN, WEST GREENLAND, 5 JUNE 1990
Jakob sat on a stone step in Færingehavn, eating his packed lunch while he looked around the abandoned town. He had been out here a few times as a police officer in the early seventies while the town was still a lively place. Now that everything was empty and dilapidated, it felt odd to sit here. Most windows were smashed and many doors had been forced. It was a waste of good housing, and a waste of a beautiful place, but that was Greenland for you. Its small towns were quietly depopulated without anyone paying much attention, as each generation discovered a much bigger world outside their home town.
He swallowed a bite of his sandwich and nudged an empty bottle on the ground with his foot. Föroya Bjór, beer from the Faroe Islands, except the bottle looked like just a regular Carlsberg.
On the day that Jakob had dropped Tom off close to the ice cap, he had waited at their agreed meeting place until twilight. For many days afterwards he had also sailed there and waited in his boat, but Tom didn’t appear.
While they had gone through the equipment, Jakob had promised Tom that he would sail to Færingehavn in a few weeks’ time to look for Mona and the girls. He had brought along three fishermen from Qeqertarsuatsiaat, since he had thought it unwise to search Færingehavn on his own once he had heard Tom’s description of the underground world. They had been there for hours now and the fishermen were still looking, but they had found nothing; or at least nothing which suggested life or an underground bunker.
Since Tom’s departure, Jakob had carried out some research from his home in Qeqertarsuatsiaat. He had looked for any information indicating a secret army facility in any books and magazines he could find at the town’s small library, but neither the library nor the old friends he rang in Denmark had anything to offer. There was no evidence of an American bunker under Færingehavn. Nothing at all.
He packed his backpack, got up from the step and looked around the buildings closest to him. He could see a couple of the fishermen smoking cigarettes a few houses further down.
A long cloud covered the sun. Jakob gazed at the sky and then looked again towards the laundry from where Tom believed he had emerged.
It was very dirty inside. Most of the windows were still intact, but not all of them. The industrial washing machines were dusty, but they looked as if they might still work. At the back of the room there was a long row of tall drying cupboards. Jakob had tried them one by one, but had been unable to move any of them. There were no locks to be seen, and no way of opening them. It was just like when he had first tried them a few hours earlier, before he did a round of the empty town.
Tom had insisted that this was how he had escaped from the underground world, but not even the dust on the floor offered any evidence that people came here regularly.
Jakob rubbed his eyes with a flat hand, pinched his nose and breathed deeply.
‘Did I make a mistake?’ he whispered to himself. Perhaps Tom really was as crazy as the newspapers claimed. That day out by the ice cap, just before Tom had assembled the sledge and started walking up towards the edge of the ice, Jakob had seen him swallow some small white pills.
Jakob shook his head at himself and walked back to the quay where their rubber dinghy was moored.
The last of the fishermen was sitting near the dinghy.
‘If you row me out to the boat first, you can get the others afterwards,’ Jakob said.
The fisherman nodded and Jakob climbed into the small rubber dinghy. As they sailed, he pondered Tom’s innocence and wondered how to tell fact from fiction. If Tom was guilty, his association with Abelsen must be a cover for something, because the
re was no doubt that Tom knew Abelsen. Then again, no one in their right mind would flee across the ice cap alone unless they had no other choice. Especially not when they had already been declared dead in the newspapers. But whatever the truth was was, Jakob’s own investigation had reached a dead end. If he contacted the police, it wouldn’t take them long to uncover his real identity, and he couldn’t risk anyone looking into his own and Lisbeth’s pasts; the fact that he and Lisbeth were alive would immediately link them to the murders of the men Lisbeth had killed in 1973.
The waves sloshed against the sides of the rubber dinghy. It felt as if the sea was waking up, but it could also just be the tide with the evening wind from the mainland. Jakob couldn’t remember how the sea reacted to those two conditions in this particular fjord between Nuuk and Qeqertarsuatsiaat.
To get back they had to sail past the bunker point on the opposite side of the fjord. The last inhabitant of this place lived over there, as far as Jakob could recall. He might know if there was any truth in Tom’s talk about an underworld in an abandoned American bunker.
THE POOL OF THE DEAD
50
FÆRINGEHAVN, WEST GREENLAND, 26 OCTOBER 2014
The back of Matthew’s head was throbbing. He turned his head and touched his neck carefully. His mouth felt simultaneously sticky and dry, and his saliva tasted metallic.
‘Shit,’ he mumbled to himself. The pain in his neck hadn’t been this bad since the weeks following the car crash.
The room was dark, but not far from him a strip of light slipped through the crack between the door and the door frame.
He reached for one of the water bottles lying on the floor. The liquid smelled like water, but he sipped it cautiously before taking bigger gulps and putting the cap back on.
Cold Fear Page 20