Ollie stared back at the hypnotic blue glare. Having to think hard to distinguish history from immediacy. He nodded. ‘I was thinking I’d leave a trap for them.’
A glance down at the AYA… ‘With that?’
‘Yes. A way I think they’d fall for it.’
‘I know all there is to know of traps. If you want my advice on it.’
He explained his idea. Juffu watched his face all the time, frowning as if in faint disapproval, but then agreed: ‘You’re right. It’s good.’ The frown deepened. ‘But it won’t count for Martti. This will be yours, for one of the Americans.’
‘All right.’
No point in telling him he’d already killed four of the Spetsnazi. In fact he’d given it some thought, during the long eastward trek, and he’d decided it might be sensible never to mention it to anyone. If it came out eventually, all right, it would come out, but—
‘Martti gave me this.’ Juffu was gazing down at the Armalite, stroking it like comforting a cat. ‘He had one of this kind, and I admired it, since my own rifle was very old, the barrel worn… A month passed and he visited me again, bringing this as a gift. His vanrikki was with him—’
‘Vanrikki?’
‘Leutnant… They were asking questions I couldn’t answer. I knew nothing of this business then, I’d been resting. I pan gold in summer months you see.’ His chin jerked southward. ‘On the Lemmenjoki, I have a cabin there… But they let me keep this rifle, despite my inability to help them. Then the Ruošas killed him — and the vanrikki also, and another by name Santavuori — slaughtered them like butchering reindeer!’
‘So that was your nephew. I’m sorry.’
‘Set your trap. I’ll wait out there. If you hear a whistle — put out the light, come quickly.’
He began pulling himself backwards down the tunnel. Ollie stopped him, passed him the bergen: ‘Take this with you?’ It vanished slowly, towed out behind the old Lapp. Ollie, alone again in the snow cavern, death chamber, hollow with shock, and surprised as well as ashamed at having come so close to the end of his tether. A year ago he’d have been ready to make that trek again — now, and back again.
And these two had been in his charge, his care.
Booby-trap now. Concentrate…
Or you’ll blow your fucking head off.
The ball of string, first. He tied its end securely to the ski-pole, down at snow-level. The pole was firmly planted, they’d driven it deeply into the snow-platform and it had subsequently frozen in there solidly. OK… Now the bodies. They both had parts to play in this. He didn’t think either of them would have objected to such use being made of them, in the circumstances and in view of the manner of their deaths.
Move Carl first. Gus had to stay here inside the chamber in more or less his original position. So get Carl out first.
He dragged him out through the tunnel. Juffu was out there, close by the hole: he didn’t move or make a sound, but he could smell him. Ollie left Carl’s rigid body outside, went back in and rolled the ball of string out down the slope into the tunnel’s dip. Then he brought out the AYA — loaded but on ‘safe’ — left it lying on top of Carl and went in again to blow out the candle, snuffing its wick between gloved forefinger and thumb. The smell of wax would be enough to alert a visitor to danger, but it wouldn’t last long. Feet-first into the tunnel, then, reaching into the chamber to pull Gus back into his station across the entrance, at the same time clearing the string so that it wasn’t trapped under him but lay across his torso.
Now the tricky bit. Not manoeuvring Carl back into the tunnel: that was easy, since the body was as stiff as a log and could be pushed to slide as easily as a pulk — but wriggling in beside it, into a space designed to accommodate one man’s width of shoulders but not two. And also to have your arms free, to do the work. Carl’s boots outward, right out in the entrance, the shattered remnants of his head inward, his rather short arms stretched — it was a wrenching effort, achieving this — as if reaching to the body in the chamber, the position he’d adopt if he was trying to shift the obstruction. Achieving even this much was a major effort, and it might have been claustrophobic to anyone susceptible to such phobia — which fortunately one was not, could not have served in the SB Squadron if one had been… But the shotgun now. It had to go inside the leg of the trousers, the splinted leg, and be lashed with string to the leg itself. He cut off lengths of string for this, also cut a hole in the material, a slit up on the back of the thigh, to facilitate the operation and then to pass the end of the string in and tie it to the triggers, a loop which he tightened around both triggers inside the guard. The safety-catch was on, so it was all right to take up the slack on the string — by inching Carl’s body backwards, against the pull of it on the ski-pole inside — without danger of firing the gun. But once you’d taken the safety off, any further backward pull on the body would discharge both barrels into the puller’s face.
He removed one glove again, reached in through the hole in the trouser leg, found the safety-catch and slid it forward. Now the trap was live and extremely sensitive. He put the glove on again and backed out, worming out backwards very, very cautiously so as not to risk setting the body sliding back. It wouldn’t take much of a pull. Some Soviet coming to check the trap he’d set would find a body in it, apparently blasted in the act of crawling in. He’d want to pull him out — take a look at him and check whatever might be in his pockets, maybe reset the trap. The only way he could attempt it would be by grabbing hold of the boots — raising the legs would incidentally also raise the gun, pointing the barrels directly at himself — and pull…
*
The viscous liquid burnt its way down, heat radiating outward through gut, flesh, bone and muscle, maybe even reaching into the numbed recesses of the brain. The drink was something Juffu had cooked up: strange, unpleasant taste but miraculous effect. The fire was a glow of red in a central core of smoke that rose to hang thickly under the roofing of timber. They were on a flooring of timber too, a foot-deep mat of branches with reindeer hides on top of it. Breathing smoke, absorbing warmth, while meat and beans de-froze and cooked on a fire fuelled largely with dried reindeer dung smouldering like peat.
From the snow-hole, Juffu had led him down on the same track by which he’d climbed up to it, about an hour earlier he guessed. The track he and Sophie had made. Then off it eastward, through trees growing so thickly you had sometimes to force a way between them, ducking under branches. In normal conditions you’d be using a machete to clear a way through. Then after a few hundred metres they’d been climbing — climbing for ever, it had begun to feel. Mind wandering, mostly to Sophie in an attempt to anchor himself to consciousness and sanity — as if she was the guide… A long, long climb, up through the wood and out of it, over the high bare shoulder of the mountain in a rising wind and a wetness in the freezing air that could have been a threat of snow. This bunker-like refuge was high, on the southern slope of a ridge linking twin peaks. It was one of a chain of pits which Juffu said his ancestors had dug two thousand years ago, reindeer traps. In those days Lapps hadn’t farmed the deer, there’d been no need to because there’d been vast herds all over Lappland; they’d hunted them and lived from them very much as the American Indians had lived from their teeming buffalo herds, and one way of trapping them had been to drive them into places like this one. They’d lined the sides of the pits with stones so that the animals who fell in had no chance of finding hoofholds and climbing out again; and this particular antiquity of a hole in the ground was one Juffu had selected as one of his homes-away-from-home. He had others elsewhere, he said, although usually he lived above ground, only liked to have refuges that he could use in the very worst of the winter storms. And sometimes so that he could disappear. There were so many regulations now — what a man could hunt and what he could not hunt, when, where, how — and one such as Juffu had still to live, the only way he could live.
When they’d been still in the wood, ten minutes
away from the snow-hole, Ollie had been hit by a thought that had stopped him dead. He’d called, ‘I have to go back, Juffu!’ The old guy had halted. He was on skis, although Ollie had been carrying his on his back. Juffu’s skis were very long and narrow, with points at both ends.
‘For what?’
‘Because I should’ve fired a shot for them to hear. Without it how can they believe the trap was sprung?’
Brain must have been bloody frozen. Nothing else for it — go back, unrig it, fire a shot, set the whole damn thing up again…
‘The sound would be muffled in that hole.’ Juffu’s tone was flat and scornful. ‘Even from here you wouldn’t hear it. And there are no Ruošas close to us now.’
‘Can you be sure of that?’
He hadn’t bothered to answer. Only started forward again, grunting, ‘Kom…’ He was completely at home in this wilderness, part of it, as natural an inhabitant as wolf, bear, fox or wolverine. He’d understand them, too — by instinct, not by learning or calculation. And of course it was safe to light a fire up here — which was another thing Ollie had surprised his host by querying. The wind howled and boomed across these mountain heights, there’d be no taint of smoke or cooking at lower levels. No smoke visible outside either, even in daylight; it hung inside, permeating the thick roofing of branches and the snow overlay so gradually that it somehow became absorbed there. It choked and blinded you, but in the short term that was only a minor discomfort.
He’d asked him, ‘Won’t they find our tracks, trail us up here?’
‘They’ll see the track that leads to the snow-hole. That’s why they’ll be sure to go there and to fall into your trap. That’s a deep track, a whole week of snow won’t hide that one.’
‘Are you saying there’s snow coming?’
‘In two hours. Or one. At most, three.’
So then all other recent tracks would be wiped out, and you could move reasonably safely. Back into Norway, where by now large-scale deployments should be in progress. Naval deployments and air as well as ground, he guessed.
And Sophie there. The foot of the rainbow. Incredible…
‘Juffu.’
The eyes opened: sparks of blue through cracks in the brown skin.
‘Is Ruoša-Tsuder a word for Soviets?’
‘Very old word.’ He nodded. ‘Russians from Karelia and thereabouts. My half-uncle Turi wrote of them in his book, how in olden times the Sami people were forced to live in the ground — like this, as we are now — because of the Ruoša-Tsuders. They were very cruel — all over Samiland raiding, burning, killing and stealing, bands of them like wolves…’
‘If you’ll allow another question — how come you talk German so well?’
‘I worked for them, in the war. Fighting, on their side. Many did. They made me a corporal.’ He pointed eastward: ‘Fighting the Neighbour has been a tradition, natural to us Suomi. Do you know that when this last war ended we’d been fighting the bastards for five centuries?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. Leaning forward to look into the stewpot he muttered, ‘And now they’re acting up again. God knows what they’re at. I knew nothing of it when Martti and his vanrikki came. It seemed not to be my business — which is hunting, and the gold in summer. But — they killed him.’ He was poking at the pot’s contents with his sheathknife. ‘It’s ready, we can eat it now…’
*
Waking — however many hours later it was, which he didn’t know because his watch had stopped — he found the blue eyes fixed on him. So this character was real, he hadn’t dreamt all that.
‘Is it day now, or still night?’
‘Dark. And snowing hard enough to fill tracks quickly.’
Collecting thoughts and memory, re—tasting the meal and also that peculiar drink — made, Juffu had told him while they’d been eating, from some herb which he called juobmo. It was cropped in summer and then cooked and mixed with reindeer milk — which was thick, heavy, full of rich protein, only about a cupful obtained at each milking. The mixture was left in a reindeer’s stomach to dry, and to make a drink of it he’d added boiling water. Ollie felt sure it had done him good: he felt as if he’d just woken from some long illness, still weak but on the mend. There was a sense of loss, too: visions of Carl Sutherland’s pulped face, the black hole in Gus Stenberg’s forehead… Focusing on Juffu, he was peering through a haze of smoke that was nothing like as thick as it had been before; the fire still glowed and emitted warmth but it hadn’t been built up or fanned as it had been earlier for the cooking.
The meat in the pot, which he’d expected to be venison, had turned out to be ptarmigan. Juffu had explained that in hard winter conditions ptarmigan moved down into the fir forests and stayed there until spring, and were easy to trap at this time. The meat had been gamey enough to suggest that this particular bird might have been trapped last winter, but he’d been hungry enough to enjoy it.
It was good news that the snow had come, as predicted. But maybe it would be good for the Spetsnazi too.
‘You mentioned one Russian in particular, some big guy you’re after?’
‘A man I know has seen him. Nobody is speaking of these matters, they’re frightened, but to me this one did. Because I’m who I am… They call me the old wolf — and you know what is said about the wolf?’
‘No, I don’t—’
‘That he has one man’s strength and nine men’s cunning?’
‘I don’t think I ever did hear that.’
‘Well, it’s true.’
‘What did your friend tell you about this Russian?’
‘He’s their leader, gives them their orders. So he’d have given the order to kill Martti.’
‘And — you’re looking for him… D’you have any idea where to find him?‘
‘Where to go—’ a nod ‘— where he may be or may come soon — yes.’
‘You were watching the snow-hole, though.’
‘He was there, before.’
‘Did he kill the Americans?‘
‘Martti was first. I have first claim.’
‘All right. What is this place?’
‘I was told by the same person. A store — a secret, hidden place.‘ The eyes shifted, blue lasers on Ollie’s. ‘Explosives. And—’ Glancing down again, as he moved the pot on the fire. It was half-full of water, melted snow he must have collected while Ollie had been asleep. He added, ‘Fuel, ammunition, is what one might suppose.’ Ollie reached into his bergen for tea, powdered milk and sugar, and biscuits. Tea would be the thing now — strong and very sweet. What the old Lapp had just told him matched a conclusion he’d arrived at on his own before this, a guess that they might well have some kind of forward base, near the border, where they could refuel and stock up with ammunition and other essentials. It had stemmed from his thoughts about bridging equipment; but that material would be stashed near the major river crossing points, and as it would only be needed for an advance later in the spring he’d also guessed that such dumps might not have been set up yet.
‘How far is it from here, Juffu?’
Not close, presumably. Or Isak would hardly have been ordered to lead the American party into this area. Except that as the intention had been to kill them, this mightn’t have bothered Isak’s bosses much.
Juffu told him, ‘A day and a night. Or two days… But also, lately there have been tracked vehicles coming and leaving by night, hiding in the forests by day. From the same person again I was told this.’
Nodding: eyes glittering, fixed on Ollie’s. Solitude, more than madness — Ollie hoped — would make a man odd in his mannerisms and speech, no doubt… He wondered how far an elderly but wiry Lapp would travel, presumably on skis, in a day and a night or two days. Maybe between sixty and a hundred kilometres? Tracked vehicles, though… Sophie would have told them — told her people, and Grayling — that the assault was scheduled for end March, early April, the end of the NATO exercise; he’d said nothing to her of his own doubts on that point, because he’
d had nothing solid on which to base them. But would they stock a forward ammo dump in foreign territory eight weeks before they were going to need it?
The water was boiling. He dropped teabags into it. Wind-howl overhead where snow was falling meant blizzard, white-out on these high, exposed slopes. Ptarmigan gave warning of blizzards, Juffu had mentioned during their meal. When they laughed raucously in the depths of the forest, you could expect the worst. But — assessing one’s own options and motives now… Awareness of failure, loss, smarted worse than the soreness in his arm and side: the Americans were dead, it had happened, was permanent, irrevocable… Also, with his mind somewhat clearer now he recognised that his impulse to go north over the border into Norway was roughly ninety-five per cent urge to rejoin Sophie and the rest an interest in personal survival — and the second quotient might spring at least partly from the first. Whereas he was now face to face with a new concept — a job still outstanding here in Finland, and a sense of deepening personal involvement. Compulsion, even. Stirring the tea, he muttered, ‘I think I won’t go north. Might tag along with you, d’you mind?’
12
Sophie said, ‘One spoon of sugar, please.’ The pink light of dawn showed through an uncurtained window behind the general’s desk.
She was at Reitan, near Bodø, at the headquarters of COMNON, Commander North Norway. In this comfortable, well furnished office cum reception room the degree of comfort was far from matching her state of mind, although from her appearance at least she was a lot more composed now than she’d been twenty-four hours earlier when she’d brought a Finnish thirty-tonne truck thundering up Route 93 into Kautokeino, dragged it into a swaying, tyre-screeching swerve on to the side road that ran down past the Lensmanskontor. Even at that pre-dawn hour the Norwegian flag had looked calm and dignified on its pole outside, loftily untouched by any threat to the values it symbolised while she’d hammered on the police-station door, ‘raving’ — police description, later — ‘like a crazy woman…’ Having no idea whether Ollie might by that time have been alive or dead or dying in the snow, but having a dead Finn with her in the truck’s cab and screaming at the astounded, half-awake politi that they’d find the body of the Finn’s killer — a Russian, whom she’d shot — on the roadside somewhere between Oksal and Aiddejavrre.
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