The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

  When finally I started to fall asleep, I kept being woken by a series of flash-like dreams of the mushroom cloud outside the airplane window. That unfathomable power, billowing outward slowly and mercilessly like a colossal thunderstorm. Something so far beyond human scale and yet so near. I felt totally drained, depressed and bewitched, like a drug addict after his first kick.

  It may well sound particular to me, personal, perverse. But this longing for the forbidden, the worst thing imaginable in human history, was a universal symptom. To the extent that our psychologists even had a name for it, a diagnosis: the “Doomsday syndrome”.

  Yet what I had experienced was such a tiny part of what would happen in the actual moment. Edelweiss had done his best to make us understand how high the stakes were. The weight and importance of our assignment. The enormous difference between the atomic and the hydrogen bomb, fission and fusion, nuclear and thermonuclear weapons. That the first ever hydrogen bomb, on just its first test, had an explosive force of 10.4 megatons: one thousand times more than the atom bomb over Hiroshima.

  He kept reading out the stories in his frighteningly gentle voice, from my very first time at West Point, the attempts at descriptions, the eyewitness accounts.

  “I could have sworn that the entire world stood in flames. The heat rays burned my back even though our ship was thirty miles from ground zero. The blinding ball of fire had a three-mile diameter, seemed to hover motionlessly before slowly rising toward the heavens, like a gigantic gas balloon, a foreign planet, another sun”.

  This from a marine, a former Harvard literature student, in a letter home after his first experience of a hydrogen bomb test.

  Edelweiss then turned to actual footage and simulations in the Team’s headquarters. Hour-long sessions four storeys below ground, the lecture hall’s lights dimmed as the giant screen lowered softly from the ceiling. Always starting with what it would have looked like if the “Bikini Baker” atom bomb, with an explosive force equivalent to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, had exploded directly above Manhattan.

  The cloud spread out gradually, as if in slow motion, with a final width of a few hundred yards hanging over our slender island. When the shock wave came, the soundless picture just trembled fractionally, before the fires and destruction. Soon the simulation faded out and the room fell into total darkness. Leaving us in suffocating silence.

  Then the Manhattan skyline once again came hovering out of the darkness. The clock in the bottom corner of the image was counting in thousands of seconds. But now the heavens above the skyscrapers were entirely, blindingly white. The ball of fire covered Manhattan’s width. Then came the devastation itself, whole skyscrapers being snapped off like matches.

  The first time none of us had said a word, we were just trying to fathom what we had seen. After a minute or so of absolute silence, Edelweiss explained—still through loudspeakers with the lights down and not making the slightest effort to create any comfort zone—that this was the clearest way to illustrate the difference between an atom bomb and a hydrogen bomb.

  The first simulation, he went on, showed an old atomic bomb; the second represented the scenario for an early model of the hydrogen bomb, the first ever tested, codenamed “Mike”. Even that would have wiped out the whole of New York’s downtown in one single moment. The greater part of the city.

  Then came all the secondary effects: the fires, the asphalt bubbling on the streets, melting together with the human masses into some sort of new organic composition. The water starting to boil in New York harbor. The unimaginable levels of radiation.

  What Edelweiss was doing, as I now see it, was to imprint the whole situation visually onto us. How vulnerable the world had become with effect from the first test of the first atomic bomb—when the technology showed itself, against all odds, to be possible. How very much more so with the hydrogen bomb.

  And that there was always a small human being sitting deep within the system, carrying out the rituals or even pushing the button. The last link in the chain. So susceptible to temptation, the whole scope of his own humanity.

  Out of the loudspeakers in the jet-black lecture hall, Edelweiss then proclaimed that the “Balance of Terror” was no longer a question of states, military alliances or political or religious ideas. That in peacetime it lay more within each individual person who came sufficiently close to nuclear weapons. That those of us who are furthest within the system first and foremost have to stand up to ourselves. At any given moment.

  Then he had started to run the actual footage. First with “DOG, 81 kilotons, Enewetak atoll, April 1951”. Still not a thermonuclear weapon, but the final test of what came to be called the Mark 6 atomic bomb, which was kept in storage for almost a decade longer. In the foreground about thirty V.I.P. visitors were lined up in white deckchairs on the Officers’ Beach Club on some small Tahitian island paradise, just outside the security zone. In accordance with regulations they were all wearing their dark protective spectacles as they watched the ball of fire light up the sky, like at an outdoor cinema.

  After that came the hydrogen bomb tests. “ERIE, 15 kilotons, Enewetak atoll, May 1956”: Edelweiss used to freeze the picture at the exact moment when the group turned away to protect their eyes. “STOKES, 19 kilotons, Nevada desert, August 1957”, like a jelly-fish with tentacles of sand and fire stretching all the way down toward the dunes. “OAK . . .”, in the same constantly blown-apart atoll, “. . . 8.9 megatons, May 1958”: the soldiers sitting like schoolchildren at a picnic on the edge of a cliff, just far enough away according to the safety regulations of the time. And on he went, onward through the history of nuclear tests—right up to the comprehensive ban in 1996.

  So we really did try to understand, each time Edelweiss showed us these scenes, at least once a week during my almost twelve years in NUCLEUS. All these shifting yet very similar expressions of our most unimaginable invention. The thermonuclear weapon which could not just split the nucleus of atoms but get them to melt together. Manipulate nature itself, simulate the sun’s inner processes, the very pre-condition for life—and from now on also for extinction.

  To comprehend the incomprehensible.

  6.04

  By the time we landed in Palermo, Ingrid had also woken. As elegantly evasive as ever, she answered my hushed questions, again in Swedish and for safety’s sake on our way out through the arrivals hall, in the buzz of the crowd. Kept side-stepping until once again I gave up.

  But so far as I could understand we were now meant to be in the very final phase of her Plan A., likely on the way to the resolution itself. The moment when I and this deranged woman would so literally be holding the fate of the world in our hands. The inhuman weight on our shoulders alone as the circle—the correspondences, the Nuclear Family, all these imperfect metaphors—came to be closed. When the picture on her screen was finally complete, all those triangles and crosses were joined up once and for all. Our entire global nuclear weapons system either short-circuited or launched.

  For some reason I had followed her all the way here, to this very last stop. Maybe so that I could prevent something from happening. Maybe only, as in a movie, because I had to see how it all ended.

  I followed her like a dog on a leash, or a puppet his master. Nothing that Ingrid did was ever predictable. So instead of the airport train we took the bus in from Falcone-Borsellino, named after the two lawyers who fell victim to the Mafia in the early 1990s, blown sky high and at the same time becoming secular martyrs.

  Again we chose to hide in plain sight, among crowds of people. Standing up, in a packed bus, in the firing line, where anyone at all could have picked us off through the windows. And what’s more on the way into the heart of the city, in infernal traffic, right at the start of the riposo.

  I assumed that Ingrid too had counted on us being watched, in one way or another. That one or more people would have followed us—were waiting for us here. That the only possible reason why Edelweiss had let us go was that we were both no
w to be “spools of thread”. That they would wait, possibly until the resolution itself, to see how far up and how deeply the conspiracy had penetrated. The work which, according to Ingrid, she had been pursuing across the world for decades.

  I looked at her as she stood pressed tightly against me with the bulky pack between her feet. Looked at her new face: more Garbo than Ingrid Bergman. The woman who had been my guide and mentor throughout my adult life. First spell-binding lecturer, then supervisor for my dissertation, eventually Alpha for both me and the whole Team. After that some sort of cicerone. Someone who did not lead you out of things, but rather only further inside. Deep into myself, the heart of the entire system. We two against the world.

  She did not look back, kept staring out through the window: hungry, inquisitive, like a charter tourist. I soon took my eyes off her and did the same. I had been here so many times before, had landed directly at Sigonella in the south-eastern region, take-off point for not only our bombers but also the unmanned drones heading for the Middle East. Our fort facing the Muslims.

  I had never before taken the airport bus, and had this ground-level view of the island. It all now became both more and less frightening. From miles up in the air, or on the screen simulations, there were no people to be seen—no-one to be defended or exterminated. Here they were everywhere. On the bus and outside, swarming, sweating, yelling, sounding their horns. The human factor.

  When we got off at Palermo Centrale, Ingrid chose the first person we came across, in an Italian which sounded flawless. It seemed that it was not far from the station to the Palazzo Abatellis she was trying to find. But there was a strangely hot wind blowing through the alleys as we hurried with our heavy bags and, even though there were fewer than forty-eight hours until Christmas Day, I soon found myself sweating. The Mediterranean lay glittering at the end of a few streets, a picture-postcard scene.

  I did not realize where we were going—until we stopped outside a brown-walled building, the Palazzo Abatellis, housing the regional art museum. I had not been there before, but now knew exactly where we were. She had given me a reproduction of that painting on one of my uneven birthdays, a very good miniature to hang in my office next to Bruegel’s better-known version. The one which I had taken out of its frame and hidden away in my combat pack before the flight.

  “16.48. We’ve got twelve minutes, my treasure,” Ingrid said.

  We cut across the breathtakingly beautiful courtyard and walked straight into Hall Two. And there it was. Mighty, imposing, overwhelming.

  Even though I had studied most of what there was to be read about the twenty by twenty-foot fresco, which had to be split into four sections so that it could be moved from the Palazzo Sclafani during the war, and thought that I was prepared for it, it took my breath away. The immense power in this burlesque vision of Doomsday from the mid-fifteenth century. One of many models for Bruegel’s own version, inspired by the Black Death which started to run rampant in Europe during the fourteenth century and, according to the sign next to it, painted by an unknown artist.

  What this version of “The Triumph of Death” was missing was the Fleming’s strangely nuclear sense of doom, the sickly yellowish background, everything burned out and bare. Instead, the skies were full of small out-of-place flowers—and none of the people depicted around the edges were being loaded into what could be seen as railway carriages or other modern death transports, as in Bruegel’s masterpiece.

  On the other hand, the fresco which now filled our vision had an even stronger focus. You could not take your eyes off the skeleton riding in the center of the painting, or avoid being drawn in by its maniacal smile. Not least because it was precisely the central part of the image which had been the most damaged by its hasty transport during the indiscriminate bombing of the city. It really looked as if someone had set out to destroy its central portion—with some kind of acid.

  “Isn’t this insanely beautiful?” Ingrid said, her hand on my shoulder.

  “Yes, insanely,” I said.

  Then, after some time—impossible for me to assess or even comprehend—she led me across the courtyard again. All the way back to the station, just in time to buy tickets and board before our train pulled out, heading south.

  And it was not until we were approaching Sigonella, some hours later, that I woke up properly again. After sunset the darkness had quickly become like a wall outside our window. Since the moon was hidden behind the clouds, not even the contours of all our radar installations up on the mountain ridges were visible.

  Officially we had never had to admit that there were any American military bases at all on Italian soil, not even here at Sigonella, since here too all of the garrisons lay within the walls of the N.A.T.O. bases. But according to Edelweiss’ strategic presentations, in Italy alone we had sixty-four of our own installations. In total more than ten thousand American soldiers, upward of a hundred nuclear warheads.

  What is more, the dream of perfect synchronization of all of our combat forces, not just in Italy but throughout the world, was to be fulfilled after the last step here in Sicily.

  The objective was that nobody should be able to hide from us any longer—and the key to it all was a new creation by the name of M.U.O.S., “Mobile User Objective System”. Not many people knew what its exact function was. Why we spent such huge sums on the gigantic parabolic antennae, which demonstrably caused high levels of harmful electro-magnetic radiation inside the security zone, throughout more or less the whole of Sicily. Or devoted such extravagant efforts to suppressing local opposition to them.

  The system was to consist of five satellites and four enormous ground installations to house the antennae. Soon the last satellite would be ready to be launched from Cape Canaveral—and sometime soon, at the beginning of 2014, the fourth and last base was to be formally inaugurated here in Sicily. The last point on the line around the globe from Western Australia, via Virginia and Hawaii.

  Nowhere had the dishes encountered such protests as in Sicily. In and around the small town of Niscemi, thirty-seven miles south of Sigonella. For that reason we had not even been told the date for the opening of this last M.U.O.S. base.

  So we passed through Sigonella and it was in Niscemi itself that we stepped out onto the platform. The evening breeze was still warm, my wrist-watch showed 68.4 degrees, at 19.39, December 23, 2013.

  The final countdown had begun.

  6.05

  There are levels of believing and knowing. The only thing I believed was that I could never know. Not even what it would occur to Ingrid to do in the very next moment.

  This time she led us hurriedly across the square outside the station. It was filled with festive decorations. We passed a blue neon-lit Christmas tree and went into a supermarket. Homed in on the meat counter. She asked for the pre-ordered turkey in her perfect Italian—and then let the boy manning the vegetable section load the trimmings into the shopping cart. Potatoes, fresh Brussels sprouts, ordinary yellow onions and small white globe ones. Then she picked up some kind of preserve that could have passed for cranberry, butter and flour, onion and seasoning for the gravy, white bread and dried sage for the stuffing. I recognized it all so vividly from my mother’s Christmas arrangements. Also one box of panettone from the huge piles of them, filled with pistachio nuts and chocolate chips, and a few bottles of matured grappa.

  “For our first few week or so,” she muttered half to herself, “so we don’t have to show our faces outside any more this year. Just until the Jesús María business has blown over.”

  Well after closing time, with a sullen young girl in a Santa Claus outfit letting the last customers out, we crossed the square again with an even heavier load. Most people did not spare us a look—despite our voluminous backpacks—as Ingrid took us further into the poorer quarters around the via Dante Alighieri. Our disguise seemed good enough: the son with most of the Christmas shopping. Plodding along with all that weight in his hands, a few steps behind, while his mother scurrie
d along in front with her significantly lighter carrier bag.

  Even though Ingrid was not only taller than me, but at least four inches taller than anyone else we came across. The short Sicilian men in their made-to-measure suits, on the square, on their way home after the stores had closed or maybe after a round or two with colleagues at their bar after work had finished for the Christmas break. The old ladies inside the stores—who were buying things before the weekend in a frenzy—but not to be seen in the street. As if swallowed up by the darkness.

  Step by step Niscemi closed in, drew down the shutters, doused the lights across whole neighborhoods. The Christmas decorations grew scarcer, the presence of neon trees more sporadic.

  But banners remained hanging from balconies in tight succession, as they had been all the way from the square, rainbow-colored, saying “NO M.U.O.S.”. As I put down the grocery bags to rest my arms and check the time, 8.42 p.m., I could see the first aerosol graffiti on the crumbling facades: “MAFIOSO + U.S.A. = M.U.O.S.” Then another message a few feet further on: A SINGLE SPARK CAN IGNITE A REVOLT AS BIG AS A BLUE WHALE, as Ingrid translated it, in the same ominously dripping blood red. Followed by an ever-increasing number of dark messages along the steep via Dante Alighieri.

  Since a couple of years earlier, direct confrontations between the demonstrators and our own security forces had become the rule rather than the exception. After arousing mostly local media interest, the issue then spread to the national media and from there onto the radar of certain strategic military commands—and for the first time NUCLEUS became aware of the local resistance.

  The activists naturally knew how to achieve the greatest impact. In addition to the sprayed slogans on the walls and the banners hanging from the balconies, the well-known graffiti artist Blu had come here, to the small mountain town of Niscemi in this remote corner of the world, and created two enormous murals.