Under Water (Anton Modin Book 3)

by Anders Jallai

  “What the fuck are you doing, Modin?” He shouts loudly into the full face mask. He drags Modin through the door and out into the corridor. He then clasps him round his back and inflates his air wing. They begin to ascend slowly toward the exit. Bergman swims up the stairs to Deck 6.

  On Deck 6, he turns to the left. Modin is now swimming on his own. They rise through the cabin and leave the ship through the porthole like two torpedoes.

  The air in Modin’s diving suit has started to expand and he looks like the Michelin man, though black. Bergman’s head feels like it’s going to explode. He is able to grab hold of Modin to let out the air from Modin’s suit.

  What the hell am I going to do with him, he thinks. Fuck Modin! He grabs Modin’s shoulders and shakes him.

  “What the hell, Modin. Help me, will you!”

  He sees that Modin is stirring. He is reacting. At last! He looks at Bergman. It was as if he has just woken up. Then Modin checks his manometer. He seems to be coming about. Bergman signals him to follow, once the air is out of the suit. Bergman looks at his diving computer: 37 minutes. The manometer is near zero.

  Fuck, we need air! He switches off his flashlight and sees light far ahead. This is the light coming from the submarine. At last! Only fifty yards to go. “Come on!”

  At that point his air runs out. He tries to inhale, but his cheeks and mouth are pulled together. Not one cubic inch of air left in the tanks. He holds his breath but it is a strain.

  Must have air!

  He is not going to make it. He turns to Modin and signals “air shortage.” Modin instinctively hands him the spare mouthpiece.

  Bergman takes a deep breath. They hold onto one another and together slowly swim toward the submarine.

  When Bergman looks up, he can see Jöran Järv approaching at a high speed.

  Bergman looks back again at Modin by his side. Both divers’ movements are clumsy; they are struggling as they are slowly moving forward. They are in the death zone.

  CHAPTER 148

  Bergman signals “air shortage” to Jöran Järv who hands him a spare cylinder. He takes it and opens the tap rapidly, pushes the regulator into his mouth and breathes a few times. He can feel his head spinning, begins to notice the effects of carbon dioxide poisoning.

  There is ordinary air in the cylinder and they are at a depth of some two hundred feet. He had been breathing far too deeply when pulling Modin from the wreck. He casts a glance at Modin who doesn’t look back at him. Modin is still in his own bubble. He takes hold of Modin’s manometer and sees that there is enough air to reach the submarine using the reserve supply.

  How the hell can Modin have so much air left, he wonders. Modin’s cylinder is still a quarter full.

  Bergman takes control of the situation. He makes a clear sign pointing at the submarine and they start to swim toward it.

  When they reach the NR-1, which is still hovering near the M/S Estonia, the idea crosses Bergman’s mind that the submarine is a spacecraft waiting to take them to another planet, to a better world, far away from here.

  Is he hallucinating? He doesn’t really know, but it doesn’t really matter, as long as he keeps kicking toward the submarine. He wants to get out of there, be with his family. He doesn’t belong down here in the realm of the dead. They are uninvited guests, disturbing the peace of the grave. He feels ashamed. All of this for the sake of a few documents. Insanity!

  When they have only about 30 feet to go, two of the submarine’s front lights are turned on.

  Bergman can see silhouettes. Harrison Bolt has sent out divers?

  Two divers dressed in black are swimming toward the stern of the M/S Estonia.

  What the hell are they doing! These are not divers from the submarine.

  Jöran Järv swims past him with frantic kicks. Bergman can see he has pulled out his knife. Bergman takes hold of Järv’s fin and holds on tight. He shakes his head: “No, no. We don’t have enough air. Let them swim.”

  Jöran calms down.

  Who are they and what do they want? And why should I care?

  Bergman feels intoxicated by the depth, indifferent somehow. Two hundred feet is much too deep to dive with compressed air, especially under strain. He stops by the deck of the NR-1 for a moment to get ahold of himself. Modin and Jöran keep swimming toward the rear deck of the submarine, toward the reserve air.

  We must have extra air now! It will take several hours to get back to the surface. As Bergman approaches the reserve air supply, Jöran and Modin look up at him, holding severed hoses in their hands.

  Someone has cut them.

  CHAPTER 149

  Bergman inspects all the cylinders. All the hoses are cut. They have no air for the ascent.

  He knows that Modin has enough air for at least five more minutes. He himself is breathing from a backup air cylinder, but Jöran? Does he have enough?

  As he is thinking frenetically, he sees Jöran’s air run out. Jöran makes a hasty “air run out” sign and swims toward Bergman who shakes his head. Jöran then swims over to one of the spare cylinders on the deck and starts to unscrew the breathing regulator. He seems calm and is working fast but methodically. Bergman is watching him in the background.

  Jöran gets the regulator loose and grabs hold of the air cylinder with both arms. He sits down on the deck of the submarine and opens the tap cautiously. Then he spits out his mouthpiece and breathes directly from the tap by opening and shutting the tap at intervals.

  Bergman smiles. He is impressed by Jöran’s perseverance and the calmness of his actions. It seems to be working nicely. He sees Jöran signal “okay.”

  Jöran takes a few deep breaths every time he opens the tap. Then holds his breath for twenty to thirty seconds. By this time, Bergman has unscrewed one of his own regulators from the empty tanks on his back. He hands it to Jöran, who screws it onto his tank so that he can breathe normally again.

  That should work, Bergman thinks. They have averted the immediate crisis. He bangs on top of the hull of the submarine with the shaft of his knife: “Bonk, bonk, bonk.”

  He puts away his knife. A loud buzz comes from the submarine and they begin to move slowly. The submarine ascends slowly toward the surface.

  They’re leaning back against the conning tower. takes feels exhausted but overjoyed. Even Modin seems satisfied. The submarine rises. Everything’s to be all right.

  What a crazy dive!

  The submarine moves away from the wreck site. They manage to hold on to the deck of the submarine with some difficulty as Harrison Bolt takes the vessel straight to the surface, skipping over roughly two hours necessary for the divers’ decompression.

  CHAPTER 150

  The three divers went straight to the decompression chamber on board the NR-1. There were two bunks, one on each side. Bergman just took the mattress on the floor. The door closed, a handle turned making a metallic sound. They would be compressed again to allow them to decompress slowly to avoid diver’s sickness. Diver’s sickness that in this extreme case could kill them all.

  On their way up, they had heard a number of detonations. Depth charges from the boat that had approached, Harrison explained. They had made it with a margin of only a few minutes. A close call.

  Modin had had a diving time of 45 minutes, at a maximum depth of some 300 feet. He leaned his head back and tried to relax. He was shivering, felt exhausted, but satisfied at the same time. He was still alive, had been to the other side but returned.

  He reached out and realized that the lift-sack was hanging from his belt. He didn’t want to see the contents, not now. Instead, he closed his eyes and thought about Monica. It was almost as if she had returned from the dead. He had met her in the wreck, felt her presence. That was good enough.

  Tomorrow I will bury you, my darling. You and Ellinor.

  CHAPTER 151

  STOCKHOLM, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12

  Göran Filipson rubbed his chin. He was sitting on a comfortable kitchen chair, fully conce
ntrated, engrossed in a document.

  It was around ten in the morning on a clear, cold winter’s day in Salem, just south of Stockholm. Filipson lived in a townhouse of 1,500 square feet with a small garden, a deck outside the living room, a few decent neighbors, and a boat on a trailer in the garage, which could be used for fishing trips in the warmer part of the year. He shared his house with his wife Berit, who had already gone off to work at IKEA.

  The mailman had banged the lid of Filipson’s mailbox and then revved up his moped outside the window. Otherwise, there had been no disturbances.

  Filipson read the Defense Radio material from Grisslehamn he took with him when he left his office for the last time. It was fascinating reading. He had not even had time to stir his morning coffee, as he could not take his eyes off the document. He read the last page right to the end, put down the document on the table in front of him, grabbed a cinnamon bun, and drank some coffee. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and thought about what he had just read.

  The material contained three instances of telephone surveillance and a number of text messages. The three prepaid numbers were linked, just as Fredholm had told him at the office a few weeks earlier. There was indeed a connection to Bulgaria and a foreign intelligence agency. Filipson had also been sent Defense Radio’s own surveillance details from that point in time—surveillance that didn’t officially exist. He had the document in front of him. It said that Defense Radio had a remotely controlled signal surveillance mast at Byholma in Grisslehamn, not far from where Modin lived. Defense Radio had picked up the communication between two CB radio transmitters. One was from a driving car. The other, a weaker signal according to the report, was a handheld device. It sent a signal from the hotel, then later from the port. At midnight on the night of Christmas Eve, a short communication had been picked up from somewhere in the middle of the port, quite likely from the restaurant in the village or from a car close to the restaurant, The Rock. The recipient of the message had been in a car some three miles toward Stockholm. The car had then moved toward Grisslehamn and received a message there at about two in the morning. This time, the message had been sent from the hotel. After that, no more communications had been picked up.

  What does all this suggest, Filipson wondered.

  He filled his cup with lukewarm coffee and took a bite out of his cinnamon bun, squinted up at the sun, and enjoyed being on his own. He did not have to answer his phone, which would go off all the time, didn’t have to be able for emergency calls in the middle of the night. He was free at last. Free to do what he wanted and at his own pace.

  This is how real results are obtained—without time or budget pressure, he thought.

  He looked at the documents again. Evidently, there was one person on the inside, in the hotel. The prepaid phone call had come during Christmas week from the same place. One of the three killers, for that is how many people he believed were involved, was likely a guest at the hotel when Zetterman was killed. The problem was that they had checked out the entire guest list. None of them could be linked to the murder.

  Nevertheless, this was a good start. I will have to go through the guest list again. Someone on that list is the murderer.

  He felt fit and perked up. It was this kind of detective work that was fun, not all that damned cover-up and clean-up after failed operations. For a few moments, he even contemplated starting up a private detective agency, now that he was retired. Many did, and there was plenty of work out there.

  He kept browsing through the Defense Radio report. He found a map with various transmissions drawn as a network of lines, one separate map for each day, including December 24th, the day of the murder. He came to the conclusion that one of the three killers, Assassin Number One, had been sitting at The Rock during the evening, waiting for the right opportunity. Jonas Zetterman had been there, got into a row with his wife, then left the restaurant. Assassin Number One had contacted Assassins Number Two and Three in the car, and let them know that the victim was on his way to the hotel. This would seem a reasonable assumption, even though there were no witnesses who had actually seen Zetterman go back to the hotel. But according to the night receptionist, he had arrived there and gone up to his room. Then Assassins Two and Three had been let into the hotel by Assassin Number One an hour or so later, while Zetterman probably was asleep. Assassin Number One, who was staying at the hotel, must have had the key to the victim’s room. Therefore, it is likely that Assassin Number One had contact with the reception. Either that or the perpetrator had simply grabbed the key without permission. After the deed, Assassin Number One seems to have stayed at the hotel, as there was a brief telephone call from one of the prepaid cellphones the next morning.

  Filipson was working based on the assumption that the untraceable prepaid cellphones belonged to the perpetrators. The conversational pattern of these phones were the only that matched the time and place of the killing. This wasn’t wild guesswork. Cellphone Number One was not used again later. But cellphones Two and Three received calls from the Grand Hôtel during Christmas and the New Year’s weekend and even from a prepaid cellphone somewhere on Långholmen in Stockholm.

  Maybe Assassin Number One was still staying or working at the hotel? We’ve checked and double-checked those working there. Maybe we missed someone. Someone we didn’t think of initially.

  Filipson looked across the road in his neighborhood of town houses. There was a light breeze whisking up the newly fallen snow. A small boy with red cheeks ran past, leaning into the wind as he went, and a dog was barking in the distance.

  Filipson decided to take a trip out to Grisslehamn.

  CHAPTER 152

  NORTHERN BALTIC SEA, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 13

  It went fine,” Modin said.

  “Is that all you have to say,” Harrison Bolt said.

  “Yes, for the time being. Isn’t that enough? You’ve got the briefcase. We’ve done our job. Now it’s your turn.”

  “We very nearly abandoned the whole plan,” Harrison Bolt said. “A military ship turned up. They dropped depths charges. Sorry we had to break off your decompression, but we had no choice.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Harrison Bolt was disappointed. He looked at his second-in-command and received acknowledgement, wanted to hear more, but realized that the briefcase was all they were going to get, at least for now.

  He wondered whether Modin had seen anything else on board, been on the car deck, or had seen any damage to the wreck. He was terribly curious. Modin had succeeded where he and his U.S. Navy divers had failed. Endless trips in the NR-1 down to the wreck in order to carry out diving operations, and coming back to base after yet another failure. That had been exhausting, not only for the divers, but for the whole crew of the submarine.

  Modin had given him the briefcase. He wondered whether everything was still there. Could Modin have taken anything from the briefcase? He realized that this was impossible. The briefcase was dry inside and Modin had given him the briefcase as soon as they came on board, even before they entered the decompression chamber.

  Despite everything, he had to be satisfied without a more thorough report.

  “Where do you want to be dropped off, Mr. Modin?”

  “You can drop us at Black Island. I’m sure you’ll still be able to find your way there,” he said. “That’s the safest. Special Ops are likely to be lying in wait at Jöran Järv’s cottage on Muskö Island. We don’t want to run into them. At least not today.”

  “Will do.” Harrison Bolt took Modin’s hand in both of his and shook it firmly. “Thanks Modin,” he said. “That’s from me, but also from the U.S. Administration, the President, the NSA, and the CIA. We are more than grateful. You succeeded in your mission. I have to say that I am impressed. How do you do it? Nerves of steel?”

  Modin didn’t answer. He looked up at Bolt’s second-in-command who nodded slightly.

  “Anyway, there was no hole,” Modin said looking down at the floor. “I checked i
t out. The ferry was not sunk by the Russians, even though there are many who want us to believe that.”

  CHAPTER 153

  Modin stood next to Harrison Bolt, who closed the briefcase carefully with all its documents inside, then placed it in a small wall closet.

  “What’s in the briefcase?”

  “Secrets,” he said, turning toward Modin.

  “Do they concern Sweden?”

  “Partly.” Harrison Bolt paused before continuing. “They’re about secret operations in Europe and Sweden conducted by the U.S. and NATO. Operations that may still be current or operations that document cooperation between Western nations.”

  “Against Russia?”

  “Among other things, but also China, Iran, Syria, and other dictatorships.”

  “And there I was, thinking the Cold War was over.”

  “So it is, but it could break out again at any time. We must be prepared. After World War I and II, we made the mistake of not being prepared. We lost ground unnecessarily. This time we will not be making that mistake. We will be well armed next time a major conflict breaks out.”

  “As with the former Yugoslavia,” Modin said.

  “Or Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya… whatever may be coming up next. And you are helping us.”

  “Yes, I realize that.” Modin looked over at the black briefcase in the closet as he listened to Harrison Bolt.

  “The methods and agents used during the Cold War are in that briefcase. That’s why it’s so secret. The methods and the agents we used then are still being used today, but in a different way. There are CIA secrets in there.”

  “The CIA infiltration of Sweden,” Modin said and examined Harrison Bolt’s facial expression.

  He looked like a general from the old days. The self-confidence of a representative of the richest and most powerful nation on earth radiated from his whole being.