by Mattias Berg
“Dearest Jesús María, would you mind leaving us alone for a little while? Perhaps make yourself at home in your room, change for dinner?”
“Sure, I can do that. I’ll pull out my fucking quinceañera dress.”
As soon as Jesús María had left the room, Ingrid took out her portable command terminal, left the set of keys in the lock, barricaded the door with a chair pushed under the handle. Sat down on the squeaky four-poster bed and gestured for me to install myself next to her. There was a faint smell of skin and soap about her.
Soon the map of the world could be seen on the screen, the correspondences. I let my eyes run from east to west, between our nuclear weapons bases on home soil. Followed the solid red lines between yellow triangles, then switched my look to the corresponding installations on the European continent.
“In case you’re wondering what we’re doing up here, my treasure.”
She zoomed in on northern Europe, over Sweden, toward the little cross on the map. It could not be too many miles away. Step by step she clicked her way in on Kiruna, the old city center, and put a marker on Hotell Snöflinga. The distance from here to the destination was given on the screen as twenty-six miles. Estimated time to get there on foot: 8 hours, 32 minutes.
“You know about Esrange Space Center, the rocket range—but hardly its full extent. Not many do. Or are aware that Sweden has actually got something of universally strategic value. At least as important as the iron ore in Narvik during the war, or the heavy water in Rjukan. A good enough reason in itself to occupy this whole country.”
On the screen, the security gates looked as neutral as at any space center or nuclear weapons facility. The basic rule was, the more valuable, the more low-key. When Ingrid tried to zoom in further, everything became pixelated: the global digital security setting for top secret installations.
“This, Erasmus, is the world’s leading connections center for the enormous mass of information streaming down from all satellites at any moment. The hub itself, the main exchange. To begin with, the rocket center was mostly focused on weather forecasts and other innocuous things. Then they started getting orders for navigational data, concrete geopolitical mapping, more and more specific with each year. Nowadays our drones could not get too far without Esrange.”
She zoomed out again. Moved along the dotted blue lines leading from the cross here in the northernmost part of Europe, back and forth over the map of the world.
“And I think this might interest you, my treasure.”
The screen image now traveled over the Atlantic and on toward the missile base at Minot in North Dakota. I had recognized it without having to check on the map. Could distinguish this particular anonymity from all the other anonymities since decades back.
When we had zoomed in sufficiently, the display split as usual into smaller split-screen images. One showed the missile itself: its grayish matte surface, like a mighty underground whale. Two others depicted the above-ground exterior. Forested terrain, mountain scenery in the background, a light haze. The largest image was in the middle of the screen and showed the command center itself. The control console, the panels, the forced stillness.
Routinely I checked the co-ordinates at the foot of the screen. Time, temperature, other weather conditions, the pressure inside the missile. All the metrics which the command center needed, including the alert level. And only then did I notice that the launch counter was rapidly spinning down.
The green numbers first turned yellow and then red, before starting to flash frenetically. The command center sent out calls, fully in accordance with regulations—but still nothing stopped. The launch phase too seemed to go according to plan. The smoke and heat development were immense: even the most distant trees on the exterior images had started to burn. I stared at the counter furthest down to the right, what was called the “Body Count”. Was rooted to the spot. Could do nothing at all about it, stop the process, overpower Ingrid.
And it was, of course, already too late. Once everything has gone this far, the security system is designed to ensure that the process is not interrupted, stopping the missile from falling on populated areas in friendly territory instead.
“More or less like that,” Ingrid said.
With a click on the control console she got the entire operation to stop—before it was rapidly rewound. The counter spun back to the beginning with equal speed, the alert level returned to yellow then green. In the end she clicked away the images from the base, as well as the world map, and closed the lid of the command terminal.
An ice-cold drop of sweat ran down my forehead.
“Isn’t it amazing? Most of the conceivable scenarios are already on my computer, from our intensive training exercises around the world. And after our unofficial field trip out there to Esrange, the Magic Mirror will be complete: then I will be able to use this little gizmo to connect to the image streams from each one of the satellites and after that tinker with them to my heart’s desire. From that point on I can simulate any course of events I want, wherever I want. Our pursuers will no longer have the slightest idea what is happening. Or whether they can even believe their own eyes.”
When the drop of sweat ran down the ridge of my nose, I finally flicked it away. Tried to get up from the sunken four-poster bed, which was squealing and creaking, like a drowning cat. Ingrid waited until it was quiet again in the room.
“And above all, my treasure, after that you and I can burn out our entire global nuclear weapons system, from the inside—without anything untoward appearing on the monitors. Guaranteed not one trace. However hard you look.”
3.03
That night I dreamed, not for the first time, that I was the little Japanese girl at an international conference for survivors.
Bashfully I told them how I had been in a tram and saw something like a flash of silver and threw myself onto the ground. Everything became black as ink, so dark that people were running into each other everywhere, like the blind rats which I had seen in the cage at the home of my friend.
When it grew fractionally lighter, I began to walk through the town, by now strange to me. I met a woman with bleeding eyes and a girl who must have been about the same age as me and who was shouting out the same thing all the time: “Help me, help!” Her back was burned to shreds, just ashes and soot, was still glowing like dying embers, the skin hanging down on her hips in strips. Crowds of people were making their way along the river bank. Jumped in and were immediately scalded to death by the boiling hot water.
I met an older woman, ancient, who was crying in the same way as the girl I had seen: also calling out for her mother—though she must have been dead for many years. It was so strange, I told the conference. But the only answer she got was: “Everybody else is in just as much pain as you. Try to put up with it.”
In the end I found my own mother, but hardly recognized her swollen face and her closed eyes. The skin on both her hands was hanging loose, like rubber gloves. She died before the end of the war, I said in my account, and I never saw my father again.
After I had finished—“My thanks to you, I’m called Yukiko and I’m seven years old!”—everybody broke into long applause and then it was time for lunch. Reconvening at 13.15, the conference chairman, the American, said.
On the way out, just as the American had moved to try to hug me, I pulled him down and thumped his head hard into the floor.
Then I ripped out his tear-filled eyes: first one, then the other. Because in any event he could never see what I had seen.
3.04
I worked on it all, on the situation I found myself in, in the only way I knew. The first mornings, short intervals: five reps of 10 × 150 yard sprints just behind the hotel, on the small path where the snow had been cleared to make way for the garbage truck. A resting walk back between sprints and a minute’s recovery between reps. The extreme cold crackled in my nose as I breathed in. Negative twenty-two before the sun rose. Then mid-intensity strength training in my roo
m and an ice-cold shower.
Slowly but surely I also dared to venture further afield, so early that few others had reason to be about. The third morning my wrist-watch showed 04.45 as I unlocked the front door. Warmed up with a few relaxed strides: 5 × 85 yards in the tracks left by the garbage truck. Then I followed the unlit ski track straight in-between the gnarled dwarf birches, silvery with frost, small shining ghostly figures twisted in pain and dread. The snow made my headlamp superfluous. After a few hundred yards my eyes had adjusted. My spikes also held perfectly on the icy surface, my steps unexpectedly light. Despite the cold I was able to maintain 6.9 minutes per mile without too much effort.
The track followed the edge of town, even further down into the sink-hole, in the direction of the mine. Yet I resisted the temptation to try to penetrate further into the area. Didn’t dare to allow myself to be sucked in, dragged down. After three laps—my watch showed just over seven and a half miles—I adjusted the straps on the hybrid and increased my speed to six and a half minutes per mile. It was my benchmark. The indicator that I was at last back in fighting shape after the surgery in Ursvik.
I took the hotel stairs to the conference level in four big steps. The meeting room had been built as a kitschy Lapp hut with low lighting, and it backed onto the sauna and a small gym which time had forgotten. I turned on the aged treadmill and ran another seven and a half miles, at fast distance pace, before I finished off with a hard set of strength intervals.
Only then did I start to approach that state of white exhaustion, dizziness, the absolute limit. The near-unconsciousness which had been my elixir of life for so long. Which had made me able to endure.
Because sooner or later we all become addicted to something in this world. Soldiers in wartime have always been stoned: on drugs, political rhetoric, religious fanaticism. But research showed that even in peacetime a quarter of all military personnel in the U.S. regularly took drugs, not just hash but also cocaine and L.S.D. On a number of occasions hundreds of people had even been arrested after crackdowns at our nuclear bases.
In the sauna I let the key lie in the palm of my hand, burning me. Wondered about showing it to Ingrid after all. Telling her that I was given it by Sixten: that the key to Meitner’s secret underground laboratory had not after all disappeared. And that he had given it to me—not to her.
But I did not, for that very reason. That it was me and not her he seemed to trust.
So the days went by in their curious way, even here. Between meals Ingrid mostly stayed in her room, barricaded behind her locked door. Claimed to need every waking hour—and that was a long time, she told us, most of the day—to complete the process. Connecting all our nuclear weapons around the world.
Jesús María I never even glimpsed. The first days after we came here, to this strange hotel with its meandering corridors and stairs which somehow never seemed to connect, I had on a few occasions tried to find her. Knocked on her door during both day-time and night to ask her how she could know my “Key Sentence”. The basis for my most secret book cipher, which I had shown only to my mother, there by the kitchen table as a prematurely adult thirteen-year-old.
But Jesús María was never in her room—and it took me more than a week to trace her. She had joined the so-called “Girls”, a number of young women without residence permits whom Bettan had taken pity on. One early morning, on my way from the sauna, I caught sight of one of them walking down the next staircase to prepare breakfast in the kitchen area. So I followed the trail to Jesús María, and found her in their midst, as busy as the rest.
That also helped me to solve the mystery of the food. How for breakfast alone they could serve cold poached salmon, reindeer sausage, potato salad with thick home-made mayonnaise, scrambled eggs, Kalix bleak roe and fresh-baked rusks with cloudberry jam. The lunches and dinners were even more lavish: as if they had been meant for many more than just Ingrid, Bettan and me. Which they obviously were.
And soon we found ourselves in November. The passing time was measured by the blasting: at 1.30 a.m. each night everything shook. I had to carry out my checks—even though the briefcase, according to our technicians, was constructed to withstand a direct hit. Take it out of the hybrid, open the lid, continue the ritual up to the point where the electronic eye, the iris recognition, appeared. Then I started closing the case again. Carried out all these complicated commands, pressed long three-letter sequences on the keyboard, in the exact opposite order.
That was my routine, identical in every way, by the light of a single candle which was meant to neutralize the bluish glow from the screen in case anything seeped out through the boards covering the window. In case somebody was keeping me under observation. I ran an eye over the apparatus, looked to see that everything seemed in order after the blasting, and in some way it looked back at me. Everything exactly the same way—until November 2, 2013.
Just before closing the case that night, noticing the timer showing 02.07, I saw a terrifying reflection in the screen. Despite the fact that I had as ever locked the door, with the set of keys still in place, wedged the chair under the door handle, someone had managed to steal up behind my back. Pin my arms and bend my head sharply backward.
Then I felt the warm little kiss on my throat.
“I obviously came in the nick of time, my treasure. On the way to taking matters into our own hands, were we? Completely lost patience?”
There was a smile on Ingrid’s grotesque skeletal face: a mixture of war-paint and Halloween makeup, as if she had been playing around in front of the mirror. But her voice sounded purposeful and crystal clear.
“It’s All Saint’s Day here in Sweden. Yours, Erasmus, and everybody else’s.”
She took out her costume make-up, and in the reflection on the screen I could see how my face was quickly being transformed into a devil’s mask. How her eyes pierced right into me as I slowly answered:
“Yes, Ingrid . . . I was starting to think there would never be any action up here.”
Then it did not take many minutes before we were out on the main road, taking the narrowest streets through the sleeping town. Not a soul anywhere, not the smallest light in any of the cottages. Just snow, the drifts, the thick forest reasserting its mastery as soon as we left the enchanting little wooden quarter behind. The mountain of doom which hung brooding over the area. Through the silence of the night I thought I could hear the town cracking up inch by inch.
The mine gave and the mine took away, as Ingrid had said. In many ways it was the only thing capable of supporting life up here. Yet she said that there were also many who had high hopes for Esrange. For space tourism, Virgin Galactic, Spaceport Sweden. During weekends and holidays, the Swedish Space Bureau’s megaphones blared about free ice cream and movies in Folkets Hus, the People’s House.
The freezing air fizzed in my nose, which I kept free of my balaclava so I could breathe more easily. The extreme cold had returned after a brief pause: a thermometer decorated with neon reindeer on the front of a house showed closer to negative forty, even though the Arctic nights were more than a month away. On December 10, the sun would disappear below the horizon for three endless weeks.
The computer had shown the distance to be almost exactly the length of a marathon, just under 26 miles. We kept up a suitable speed, about seven minutes per mile, despite the hybrid slowing me down by about 10 per cent. It meant that we ought to be at Esrange at 05.30 at the latest, before the night shift finished, according to Ingrid’s information—and with strength remaining for the assignment itself. We could then reasonably be back at the hotel before they cleared away breakfast.
Ingrid ran with a free and springy step, kept up her pace, hips straight and upright, all the way until we stopped a mile or so from the installation. Saw the characteristic light in the sky: the reflection of the searchlights was always at least as revealing as the satellite dishes. At that point we turned off straight east into the forest. The snow was lying feet deep, Ingrid measured the we
ight of her steps exactly right, not breaking through the frozen crust.
Although we had never once trained together, every one of our movements was synchronized. Ingrid must have carried out similar assignments for decades before my own training began. We stole forward toward the seemingly unmanned north-east gate, the moon remaining behind the clouds. It would not be easy for anyone to spot us through this barely half-open terrain. When we reached the gates, I memorized the co-ordinates: E.S.-1219-V. While Ingrid got to work on the code lock, the security system itself, I stood in the dead angle of the surveillance cameras and kept watch, my weapon drawn under my non-reflective black running jacket.
The seconds passed extremely slowly, as they do at times like this—before there was a click from the lock. The upper red lamp lit up for a moment, but by the time we ran through the gates Ingrid had managed to short-circuit the security system. It was silent and excruciatingly cold all around. Our slip-on boot spikes were light-weight and flexible, designed not to betray our steps, no matter what the surface.
And it is hard for an outsider to understand how easy it is to break into an installation, even if it is guarded around the clock. How quickly human psychology falls victim to routine.
Even after years of training, long theoretical rehearsals of security measures, it is different in practice. Card games get in the way, or intense discussions in the middle of the night while sitting in front of screens—about money for the children’s education, the latest baseball games, maybe an imminent divorce, sicknesses and deaths. The inevitable result is brief periods of inattention.
After lengthy searches through his enormous database, Edelweiss had concluded that those periods were generally between 8 and 29 seconds long. “One never has more than half a minute,” he said. “But with the right training, that’s oceans of time.”
Which is why we now moved in quick intervals, randomly interspaced, before finding a new camera shadow and waiting for a few minutes. All the while I expected us to be discovered. Because there is no way of knowing when the periods of inattention occur: at any moment we could run into a couple of sleepy guards. Or maybe some super-professionals called in from N.E.A.T., the world’s largest military training ground, just minutes away by car, in response to an alarm being triggered.