by Mattias Berg
When the clock radio showed 17.00, I switched on the T.V. It was the guards who reminded me because I had lost all sense of time. As the camera swept over the auditorium of the World Forum of Nuclear Weapons Security at The Hague, I could still identify almost all of the ministers, doubles and agents. As well as the “Carriers” of all of the nuclear weapons nations—with their briefcases and professionally neutral expressions: the seven official states’ holders of their secrets, codes and rituals.
The red wine was excellent, as was the beef filet, even if I had left the plate standing for an hour or so on the desk under the T.V. I ate slowly, chewed the meat thoroughly. Really tried to savor my last hour. Observed the new Carrier’s motionless face a foot or so behind the President: the culmination of what had been the Team’s “Revitalization”.
Proof of the fact that they had achieved the improbable feat of persuading the decision makers, the very few who were sufficiently in the know, that it really was worth continuing with an asymmetrical little unit like this to carry out asymmetrical warfare. That it was precisely this that had saved mankind on this occasion—skillfully pursuing two defectors, following them all the way into the heart of the conspiracy that had being going on for decades, and which all the others had failed to uncover, all these cherished institutions like the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A. and the Secret Service.
That unthinkable strategies could only be revealed by unthinkable structures. That the nuclear weapons system had to be defended with the same conceptual madness that created it.
After the President’s formal speech—his constant assurances that a nuclear weapons-free world was the only conceivable solution—I rose to turn off the T.V. Knew that this was what they had wanted to demonstrate. How the show kept rolling on at the nuclear weapons summit, as if nothing at all had happened, while the rest of the world remained in ignorance of the flight and pursuit—as well as the capture. How not even Ingrid and I had been able to make any difference.
But up close to the T.V., I froze. Suddenly I recognized our new Carrier. The same woman I had seen with Sixten in Ursvik, briefly, but long enough for her image to linger. The same guard who took us to Edelweiss’ office at Dulles airport. Her appraising ice-blue gaze in the Interview Room, her supple way of moving with the briefcase a couple of meters behind the President on their way out from the Nuclear Weapons Security Forum. It must be Lisa, Sixten’s daughter. Ingrid’s daughter.
I knocked back the rest of the wine. Thoughts whirled around in my mind. About who I was, about Ingrid, my mother, Lisa . . . This entire tapestry of deception. Who I might once have been. How I had then become somebody entirely different, if Ingrid was ever to be believed. With that lover and that daughter . . .
I tried once more to gather my memories, get them in some semblance of order. The scene at the breakfast table with my mother and the thirteen-year-old who might have been me, her despair, my way of trying to get her to think of something else, the book cipher as distraction, that strange key sentence which had welled up from the darkness inside me. Had this really happened? Could something so real simply never have existed? I tried as best I could to recall what had been said during my and Ingrid’s endless sessions on the dissertation, images which were both seared into my mind and faded. My early days at university—how I had been picked up by the recruiters, chosen for special services or the missile forces, at the same time as I threw myself headlong into Ingrid Bergman’s moral philosophy lectures.
I grimaced, frowned, scribbled fragments of recollections on the back of the last pages in my account for Edelweiss. My witness statement. Myself as example, held up as a warning to posterity.
Once Edelweiss had it, my report of what can happen when two sufficiently dedicated people make common cause, he would destroy it or bury it in some obscure military archive. And as soon as he was pensioned off, if not before, the next person in charge would look at this little notebook as some kind of refuse from the past. When a new special team would have been in existence for a long time, called NUCLEUS II or something of that sort, and the “Revitalization” would have left our nuclear weapons system bigger and more powerful than ever. Long after Ingrid and I had been erased.
When they opened the door, the line-up was as I had expected. Two groups of guards, four thugs in each. One outside my cell, one outside Ingrid’s about fifteen feet away. Her group of guards led by Zafirah, mine by our close combat instructor from Rwanda: with the burns still as a macabre memento from the battle with Ingrid at the M.U.O.S. base. I got to my feet, pushed the notebook into the left-hand thigh pocket of my combat pants, to be delivered to Edelweiss as my last act. Walked through my cell door.
For a moment we stood there like that, both groups. I glanced back at Ingrid. The dark star that had guided me through so much of my life. As impossible to resist as to do her bidding. She who had deceived and transformed me, for good or ill, bewitched me until I no longer had any grasp on who was her and who me. Stately, broad-shouldered, proud and majestic, like Greta Garbo. Like Mata Hari in the movie, on her way to face the firing squad—with no regrets for what she had done.
I had wondered why the director had not used that quotation as a dramatic ending. If, that is, the Dutch dancer and double agent had in fact spoken those words when she was taken from her cell.
But Ingrid used it now.
“I am ready.”
The guards did not react to what appeared to be a gesture of submission, a final acceptance. Their expressions remained blank, they stood immobile, waiting. Even our Close Combat instructor in front of me. Zafirah alone tensed her body, but did not make any move, waiting for orders through her earpiece from Edelweiss.
“Farewell, Ingrid. It always was we two against the world,” I said.
She did not answer directly, but continued with the last part of the trigger command, apparently so harmless:
“Are you ready, Erasmus?”
8
End Run
April 2014
Greenland
8.01
Of the ultra-violence which followed that trigger, I have only sporadic memory.
I know this: I would not have managed my escape without Ingrid. She attacked Zafirah without warning, a diversion so that my sister-in-arms from Afghanistan did not anticipate the stab—swift, sharp—into her eyes, my fingers through the orbital socket to the soft tissue of her brain. The shock of slaughter, of the Team’s most violent fighter, before the killing had even begun, disarming the guards. Even the Rwandan combat instructor, who must not have recovered fully after the defeat at Niscemi. Between us, Ingrid and I erased or maimed—hard to know in the frenzy—them all. Broke out to the corridors and the two armed guards along the way, where—this I believe—Ingrid sacrificed herself as a parting gift to me. Distraction as art. Her action for my freedom. Her line of defense, drawing fire, permitting my exit into the surrounding streets.
Memory returns. I was hidden for some precious hours by local tradesmen, bitter opponents of the Niscemi base. Within their network, they organized my place on a fishing boat and away from Italy. From there, bound for Copenhagen, I hid on a large cargo vessel, then smaller boats, the last an icebreaker with only the most basic storage. Finding or stealing what I needed as I traveled north.
It was not difficult to bypass the checks in Thule harbor, under cover of the crowds that gather when the first ships arrive with packages and the mail after long winter months. All this yearning for home. People in environments for which they were not intended.
After a rapid march, in part a steady run, I completed the 150 miles over the ice to my goal. The temperature rose at first but then it fell, although never becoming unbearable. The moon shone from a clear sky and revealed traces of the facility, both upper and lower parts. The multi-layered secret—like Ingrid’s and Sixten’s work on what they called First, Second and Third Tier development, and from about the same era. The beginning of the 1960s. The time of promise, of lies and illusions, o
f Doomsday dreams.
A slight indentation in the glacier was the only sign. Small but decisive evidence of what could not remain hidden through the decades, although we had been convinced it would. The start of the way in, below. I crept and wormed my way through the metal ventilations shafts, instead of the usual entrance along much wider but already collapsed upper ice tunnels.
And now I sit down here, at my destination. Around me hangs the inner darkness of the continental ice. I let the headlamp I found in a storage room on the cargo vessel play over the walls, and gape, amazed at what mankind can create: cannot stop the tears. I have never seen anything so overwhelming, or so insane. This gigantic hall under the glacier, at least fifteen feet high and three hundred by three hundred in area, excavated and sculpted in the smallest detail, with fixed chairs, benches and work surfaces entirely made out of ice.
It is a little like the Jukkasjärvi Ice Hotel, but in deadly earnest, literally so. Edelweiss told us that ice was the chosen material even here in the command center, making everything as flexible as possible. So that this whole interior could be torn down and built back up again, in a few days at most.
The chair I am sitting on is broad and theatrical, like a frozen throne. Covered with Arctic fox fur, still in perfect condition, from the mammal with the best protection against extreme cold. One of the few which has really adapted to this environment. So we humans have just taken its equipment, put the chalk-white protective material on a number of the bare ice surfaces down here.
But the most remarkable thing stands in front of me: the enormous control panel. The only thing in here not made of ice. The very heart of this command center for the thousands of launch sites which were going to be built under the ice, where hundreds of climate-modified Minuteman missiles, called “Iceman”, were to be aimed at Russia.
This whole construction was intended to be bigger even than the Inner Circle in Ursvik, under a surface area three times the size of Denmark, with a complex tunnel network for the missiles, 2,500 miles long.
So the code name “Project Iceworm” was perfectly apt. Edelweiss had called it an historical high point, never since exceeded, in double-dealing and underground engineering. Above the ceiling of the command center was the official part of the project, called “Camp Century”. What we presented to the Danish authorities as an experimental station for cutting-edge research into how man should not only be able to survive but also thrive in an arctic environment, fully equipped with stores, library and chapel.
Now the control console is as defunct and abandoned as the rest of this masterpiece, both the official upper level and the lower top secret level. The system as a whole was powered by the world’s first mobile nuclear reactor, which was removed before the facility was deserted in the mid ’60s, after only a few years of operation, when the geologists established that Greenland’s pack ice was not at all as stable as had at first been thought. That the elasticity in this natural material would cause the installation to break up, the missile tunnels and command center down here as well as the lodgings and low-temperature laboratories above.
So it was all left behind, in the greatest haste, like the Inner Circle. Was allowed to remain standing as it was—because the falling snow would cause the ice sheet to grow even thicker, burying the secrets under a blanket of eternity.
But then came the greenhouse effect. According to some calculations, it would not take more than a few decades before traces of these highly classified installations would literally surface. Radiation and nuclear fallout had already started to become an issue between our Administration and Denmark’s, each of us N.A.T.O. partners, and soon the new revelations would make the relationship poisonous.
So I find myself sitting here, alternating between writing and just gazing. Everything feels as if in a movie: with the help of my headlamp I can change the scenes, from close-up on the pale bluish sheen on the desk in front of me to wide angle on the similar nuance of the walls. Light up the historic darkness of the Command Center, this palace of ice.
An exploration of my immediate surroundings has revealed much that is still well preserved down here, as if it were a museum of man’s worst fantasies. Even some rudimentary food supplies are largely intact, freeze-dried, but there are also cans and some powdered soups. Some of the gas canisters are still functional. I could keep myself going down here for months more, far longer than I will need.
And when I also discovered the parchment, everything became clear to me. What I would have to do with all that is in my notebook, now that Edelweiss can no longer bury it.
Because the world of paper has been superseded by the digital age, and still nobody knows how long information recorded with either medium will last. All those war directives, indispensable instructions for everything from nuclear weapons to cipher systems, the bureaucracy of conflict. Turning to dust or vanishing into thin air. But parchment on the other hand has a track record. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, are still legible—two thousand years after they were written—having been stored in a cave.
Edelweiss had talked about it during one of his historical presentations on the subject of Camp Century and Project Iceworm at the beginning of the ’60s. Said that among numerous scientific experiments on the effects of extreme cold performed in this location, there had been tests carried out in collaboration with the Library of Congress which showed that very low temperatures were effective in preserving parchment: it remained in the same mysteriously natural state as early man and mammoths found buried in ice. This was interesting to us too, he said, now that the short, digital era appeared to be nearing its end. When the R.S.A. encryption had more or less been cracked—and no form of digital storage could promise data integrity for more than a century at most.
So I take one of the preserved rolls out of the half-century-old metal cupboards and unpack it. One can still make out the veins of the dead animal, the sheep from which the parchment came, a slight blue blemish within the writing surface. With a certain reverence I pick up one of the special pens which I find beside the packages.
Then I start to transcribe my testimony from the notebook to the parchment. Despite the damage it has suffered during the months of my flight, the damp and cold, blood and impact, the journey here, it is mostly legible. I keep adding things as well. Descriptions of nightmares, my inner musings, parts of my dissertation as I still recall them.
In short, the whole of this account as you have now found it and are reading it. You, posterity, whoever you may be. Somewhere in my future and your present. After a certain time—a week, two, more, it is no longer possible to measure time deep under the inland ice—it is finally ready. Now comes the conclusion.
My headlamp does not reach as far as the door at the opposite end of the hall. But the route is familiar to me. I have memorized the sketches ever since Edelweiss’ historical lectures, regarded this as my ultimate goal long before Ingrid began sending her encrypted messages to the cell phone at the playground. When I realized that I would not be lowering the briefcase and myself under the so-called “eternal” ice, as I had dreamed and feared, but would instead meet Alpha somewhere 253.3 feet under the surface of Stockholm. And then proceed onward in her company, without having any idea where we were going.
I shiver—maybe because of the memories, the situation I find myself in, this monumental solitude—but hardly from the cold. The atmosphere down here is as mild as I had expected. Edelweiss told us about the mysterious hot springs found under the continental ice, like discoveries of gold, when work started on producing this ambiguous facility at the end of the ’50s. That they were the reason why the temperature could be markedly higher in this hidden lower level than in the officially open higher one.
This too is where I shall now be going, lowering myself into eternity in the largest of those hot springs. Having hidden my chronicle so that any pursuers will never find it—but you will, when everything is revealed by the parchment. And because the whole installation will surely ris
e to the surface long before my chronicle is irreparably damaged.
This is the only way for you to get to know my story. Start to imagine all these unimaginable things. Realize that NUCLEUS, the Inner Circle and Project Iceworm, the nuclear weapons themselves, did once exist. Were an actual part of our reality.
Because you must understand.
And maybe you finally will.
I brace myself, tense my body, ready myself for the last short stage of all. Get up from the throne of ice, leave the command console, walk through the next, smaller hall, the last one. And there it is: a simple little cross on the door the only sign.
The chapel down here is modeled on the one up there, a part of the whole civilian community built as a trompe l’oeil. Scenery and mock-ups to hide the truth, one level down.
I open the door, which only offers a slight resistance after all these years. The feeling of reverence is almost paralyzing. I move at a snail’s pace, as if sleep-walking. In here, too, everything is made of ice. On Edelweiss’ photographs, the crucifix was reminiscent of the one in Jukkasjärvi.
Then he had also showed us pictures from after the abandonment of the installations. The crucifix had for some reason been the only thing, apart from the nuclear reactor, to have been removed. His theory was that it could well have been a group of curious urban explorers who visited and took this most significant souvenir with them.
I search the wall with the light from my lamp, soon find traces of the upper hole, just visible. Try with a screwdriver from the engine room on the icebreaker. At first I make no progress—but after long enough, with sufficient persistence, the tip finally penetrates the surface. Then I move the screwdriver around to enlarge the gap. The ice which surrounds it is significantly more solid, like cement, almost diamond hard.