by Jon Stenhugg
*
The mission leader had already driven the Mercedes to the loading dock in Bällsta Cove and had positioned the truck, extending the dual cranes out over the water where the catamaran would soon be arriving.
“Where are you?” the mission leader shouted into the microphone in his sleeve.
Silence.
He waited a long minute, then again, “Where are you?”
“Got my hands full,” was the reply, an exact description of his situation.
As the catamaran had swept to the wrong side of the freighter, both vessels used the narrow channel under the bridge. The wake of the freighter caught the catamaran from the port side, and it bounced hard on the wave. Then it bounced again, this time straining the brake on the forward winch holding its share of the two tons of torpedo between the hulls.
There was a squeal as the brake let go and the front of the torpedo began to dip into the water, ploughing into the waves and sending torrents of spray onto the deck of the catamaran.
On board the freighter men stood at the railing, shaking their fists and shouting epithets in a language the skipper had no time to try to understand. On the deck of the catamaran all three men grabbed the line holding the torpedo, straining to secure it, then began to winch it back into place by hand, their hands leaking blood from the cuts left by the sharp edges of the nylon ribbon.
Over their heads they heard the whine of the AN72 Russian Coaler as it approached Bromma Airport. The crew on the catamaran was nearly as surprised as a pair of plane-spotters living on the island of Kungsholmen, who had never before had the opportunity to check off the overwing, twin-engine military transport which appeared just overhead. They made sure the news was on the internet before the Coaler had landed.
This had been a busy day. Only hours before, the plane-spotters had monitored an emergency request from an American C-130 Hercules to land at Bromma Airport because of engine failure, and watched as the huge four-engined aircraft had approached Bromma Airport with one prop feathered.
“How big is the problem?” asked the mission leader.
“I think…we’ve…fixed it,” the skipper on the catamaran was panting into the microphone.
“ETA?”
“We just passed under Huvudsta Bridge. Maybe two minutes,” came the response.
“Is it disarmed?”
“Not yet.”
Chapter 22
Ekman and Sven were in an unmarked van parked at the end of John Ericsson’s Street overlooking the water, with City Hall and the Parliament Building to their left. Behind them posters in the windows of a travel agency advertised sun-drenched beaches. Sven munched on a sandwich from a small café just down the street. The site of the Rocketfish recovery operation was almost directly in front of them. They both used binoculars to observe the activity taking place at the military command post on the shore of the island.
“How long do you think it will take to disarm it?” asked Sven.
“I’ve never been close to a torpedo, let alone one tipped with a nuclear warhead,” said Ekman, “so I guess the answer is, as long as it takes.”
“Answers like that always make me nervous.”
“You don’t have to be nervous,” said Ekman. “If something goes wrong out there we won’t have time to be frightened. We got the letter from Hoffberg this morning. Can you keep this under your hat?”
“Yeah, sure. We never heard about a letter from Hoffberg.”
“No, and until this morning neither had I. The PM’s personal secretary at Parliament received it last Monday, just two days after Hoffberg was murdered. It was directed to the PM personally and was only a couple of lines long. A simple demand: Do as I say or I’ll set off a nuclear bomb in the centre of Stockholm.”
“What? Why wasn’t that acted upon?”
“It was too bizarre to be believed, and since it was signed by an ex-MP, the mail clerk thought it would be best if the PM was informed first. Then they gave it to us.”
“Yes, and?”
“Well, it went through our organisation at the speed of the Swedish bureaucracy, which means using the one-document-a-day principle. Even our people thought it was just too incredible to be true and assumed it was some prankster. The officer assigned to it didn’t even bother trying to contact Leo Hoffberg to tell him some jerk was using his name to make ridiculous threats to the nation.”
“But his death was on the national news on Monday,” said Sven.
“Yeah, that’s why he stopped his investigation. He assumed the prankster would find another MP’s identity to hijack.”
“Why is it we think anonymous threats are more dangerous than the ones we can identify? There must be something wrong with our system, seriously wrong.” Sven put down his sandwich and picked up his binoculars again to see what was happening at the disarming site.
Ekman did the same. “No, that’s not it. The threat was too incredible to believe. It was too big. If he’d threatened to run over the PM’s wife then maybe we’d have seen it coming, but this? A nuclear device? Especially coming from such a peacenik type of person. It just didn’t fit.”
“Then how did Hoffberg expect the PM to take it seriously?” asked Sven. “I mean, a threat that isn’t understood is exceptionally dangerous. It means the perpetrator has to make good his threat before the victim even understands the danger he’s in.”
“Yeah. A game of poker where one of the players thinks he’s playing bridge. Not a good plan for anyone.”
“The whole thing seems to have been hatched by a madman,” said Sven. “Do we know how Hoffberg got hold of it in the first place?”
“We know Spimler was assigned to execute a dive on the MS Sally after she sank, to do a feasibility assessment about bringing her up to the surface again. He must have found the torpedo then, and hid it somewhere so he could retrieve it later on. We know, uhm, we heard that the torpedo was on board when they sailed from Tallinn that night,” said Ekman as he shook his head back and forth.
Sven looked at Ekman, his mouth open in surprise. “What? We knew it was on board? Why didn’t we do anything about it then?”
“We did,” said Ekman. “That might even have contributed to the sinking of the ship. Customs got a call from the US Army, who told us they’d observed the torpedo being loaded on the MS Sally. They put one of their men on her to coordinate things when the ship arrived in Stockholm the next morning. As soon as customs got the call they organised a team to search every commercial vehicle coming off the ship, and they were briefed about an hour after she left Tallinn.”
“I still don’t understand what that has to do with her sinking.”
“We’re not one hundred per cent certain,” continued Ekman, “but we suspect someone, somewhere, got hold of this information and leaked it to a crew member on board the MS Sally, a person who could arrange to dump the truck carrying the torpedo in the middle of the night when most of the passengers had gone to sleep. We know the ship made a strange turn just before she sank, backing into the wind, which was nearly gale strength that night. We suspect what they tried to do then was to open the outer door, raise the bow visor and roll the truck off into the sea. It was the last vehicle loaded on board that night. From the looks of the damage to the bow visor, which was found over a mile away from the ship, I’d say the ship caught a large wave when the visor was opening and the full weight of the ship was concentrated on a couple of metal hinges as she plunged into the wave. It would have been like driving out of the garage with your car door open, the door would have just popped off and after that there was little they could do, with tons of water coming in every time they pitched into a wave. Radar data indicated they tried to back the ship all the way to Tallinn before they sank.”
“And after Spimler gets hold of it, he and Hoffberg get together and decide to blackmail the government?”
“It looks that way, yes.”
“Could Hoffberg have read about this in one of the official reports to Parliament? I
mean, as a member of the Defence Committee he’d even have access to the parts marked secret.”
Ekman’s moniker in the police force was ‘Rubberlips’, and it became clear why as he looked over at Sven, his facial muscles exercising as he tried to work out how much more he should reveal.
“What you just heard was never a part of the official report. If it had been in there, it would have been an official secret and I wouldn’t have been allowed to tell you anything about it. So no, Hoffberg could never have found out about the torpedo via any of the official reporting. It’s been a very closely guarded secret until now.”
“Who else knows?”
“Very, very few,” said Ekman. “The kind of people who could make the decision to begin to cover up the MS Sally with gravel and cement to seal it off forever.”
“The government,” said Sven. “I’m surprised they’ve managed to keep it a secret so far.”
“It was easy to do as long as the torpedo remained out of circulation. The Russians thought the Americans had stolen it before they got there, the Americans thought the Russians got it in the same way, and we were just happy someone got it when we couldn’t find it either. No one ever expected it to surface again. Certainly not as a tool to do blackmail.”
“Hoffberg must have been crazy. Freaked out big time. I wonder if Spimler knew what was going on.”
“All the evidence indicates they were both in on it,” said Ekman, “but building a case for blackmail will be difficult and not very relevant, since they’re both dead now. Who do you think killed Spimler?”
“Sara thought it might have been Hoffberg that did it – killed him before he went home and got killed himself,” said Sven. “But she doesn’t always use hard evidence for her theories.”
“According to the Medical Examiner it wasn’t murder at all. Just a simple accident. Spimler got pinned down by the torpedo and died from lack of oxygen. Anyway, we can be pretty sure Lemko didn’t do it, since he seems all too eager to be put in jail. If he’d killed Spimler, he’d have admitted to that too. Did you hear about the transfer?”
“Yes, I did. I thought you were behind that.”
“No, it came from over there,” said Ekman, and pointed his finger towards the building where the government was housed: Rosenbad.
“Well, I hope you managed to get something out of Lemko about why he killed Hoffberg.”
“Nothing, actually. He just said he enjoyed it. There’s obviously a link to the torpedo out there, but we haven’t found it yet.”
A black dot surfaced, bobbing up out on the water just off the command post, then the dot started waving his arms in a two-arm criss-cross, a signal to be picked up. A rubber boat was beside him in minutes. Lars Ekman and Sven raised their binoculars and watched as the man was hauled onto the rubber boat.
“Well they’re in a hurry, but I don’t see them running away. You know what the bomb squad guys wear on the back of their t-shirts?” asked Sven.
“Yeah, the part about getting in front of me was almost funny, but I don’t see you laughing.”
Sven put down his binoculars and looked over at Ekman. “You’re not nervous, are you?”
“Not for me,” said Ekman, “I got used to all this years ago. It’s like being a fireman: you’re in the middle of a fire all the time. You know you can do it as long as you follow your training. It’s only when you start to think you can get into trouble. I just hope that those guys out there paid attention during their training.”
“So where’s the Huey?” asked Sven. “I mean, if they’ve disarmed it? What are we going to do with it?”
Ekman’s voice became quiet, dry and businesslike. “I suppose the military knows what to do with it. We’re just spectators at this point. But I do want to know what’s happening so that I can use it when I get to interrogate Lemko again. I’m sure the details will get him off balance. You’ll send me Sara’s report about what he said to her before we got to the ferry terminal, of course.”
“Yes. It’s being done now.”
*
In reality, it wasn’t. Hurtree and Sara were still standing on a bridge overlooking the water, the Parliament Building behind them, just to one side. The red-brick tower of City Hall rose out of a garden at the water’s edge to their right. Directly in front of them, beyond the stretch of agitated water surrounded by the islands making up the centre of Stockholm, they could make out the dark, wooded shore of the southern tip of the island of Långholmen, the dreaded prison island, which until 1975 had hosted the central prison for Stockholm. In 1910 the island had been the scene of Sweden’s last execution; on a cold, wet morning, a murderer had been led to a simple courtyard and a guillotine that had been erected on the cobblestones.
“The prison’s a hotel now,” said Sara, pointing towards the island. “You can sleep in a cell on a simple mattress just like the prisoners did, and they don’t chop your head off unless you can’t pay your bill.”
“Oh, great,” said Hurtree. “I’ll have to stay there sometime. I’m surprised you guys didn’t fix me up there the last time I was here.”
“Yeah, we actually joked about it,” she answered, “but Sven was worried you might get angry. That was before we knew you.”
“Yeah, and now that you do, you know I’d get very angry. Sara, it’s getting dark, but those military patrol boats out there seem to have moved and they’re blocking the view of what’s going on.” He pointed towards the end of the bridge. “Shall we get inside?”
The wind tore at their clothing as they neared the end of the bridge. They stopped and turned towards the source of the flopping sound of twin rotors on the approaching helicopter. On the island of Långholmen pandemonium had broken out.
*
The Russian diver’s search had been fruitless. The Rocketfish was nowhere to be found.
There was feverish activity at the Command Centre on Långholmen. Explanations and accusations were being thrown back and forth, no one being eager to be the one to have to explain how it was possible that the torpedo could have disappeared from under the patrol boats without their knowledge. A Swedish Navy major was shouting at the Captains of the Combat boats. The Russian mission leader was shaking his head as he spoke to his own commander in Kaliningrad, and he held the radio from his ear as the shrill howl of a response arrived. No one seemed to be able to comprehend what had happened to the Rocketfish, but it became clear that everyone was to blame.
The twin rotor blades of the Boeing/Kawasaki helicopter from Muskö Marine Base added to the commotion as it hovered over the Combat boats, waiting to transport the errant torpedo to Bromma Airport.
Sara and Hurtree chose to freeze for one more minute. They watched in silence as the Huey switched on spotlights that focused on the surface of the lake, then flew back and forth.
In Chantilly, Virginia, the crew monitoring the screens of images from the Improved Crystal satellite over Stockholm switched from the camera viewing the Command Centre on Långholmen to Bällsta Cove and the truck with both cranes extended in front of the catamaran. They watched in silent concentration as the torpedo was raised from the water and brought onto the flatbed truck parked parallel to the loading dock.
The men from the catamaran jumped onto the concrete edge of the loading dock and leapt up into the truck, which followed the Mercedes sedan already leaving the industrial area. Both vehicles turned right on Ulvsunda Way and drove for little more than a mile, then exited up to Travar Way, turned right on Bällsta Way and drove nearly a mile to where they made a left at the traffic light. Both drivers waved at the man in the security shed and the vehicles continued into the airport hangar area.
The dark grey C-130 was shielded from the view of others by several large hangars, and stood with all four engines running, the freight door open and ramp extended to the tarmac. A crew member on the C-130 motioned to the driver of the flatbed truck, and he continued driving up the ramp.
“Is it disarmed yet?” The voice of the C-130 pilo
t had a tremor even he didn’t recognise.
“No,” responded the mission leader, buckling himself into his seat. “Get clearance and let’s get outta here. We’ll have company shortly.”
*
The Americans were not the only ones using satellite technology to follow the events taking place in Stockholm. When the Russian mission controller in Kaliningrad focused his view on his AN72 Coaler he increased the magnification to view the wings of the C-130 standing only two hundred yards away. It wasn’t unusual for the Swedish Air Force to bring C-130s into Bromma. Sweden owned and flew eight of them, most of them used to transport goods to rescue missions in other countries.
Then he saw the flatbed truck, with its long, narrow cargo hidden under a tarpaulin, drive into the cargo bay of the C-130. He watched as the aircraft moved out towards the runway. He saw the C-130 turn onto the runway, and sighed in dismay as he noticed the USAF insignia on the wings as it quickly gathered speed and rose in a sharp takeoff, clearing the highway at the end of the runway by nearly thirty yards. He radioed his men at the Command Centre on Långholmen. Their AN72 Coaler was nearly twice as fast as the C-130 Hercules. They would have to scramble, but might be able to catch it before it got to the safety of NATO airspace. They would at least try.
“Bromma Control, this is AN72 Coaler requesting takeoff slot.”
“Coaler, this is Bromma Control. We have a military exercise taking place here. Air traffic not allowed at present. Stand by.”
*
Ekman and Sven were closer than the satellite observers, and had the advantage of binoculars to help them observe the pickup. The men in the water were now obscured by the patrol boats, but the spotlight on the Huey sweeping across the water near the buoy marking the location of the Rocketfish lit up the scene in a kind of white, dreamlike shimmer. Ekman and Sven focused their binoculars on the Huey, and under the lenses, both men wore the same boyish smile, a fascination with the power of men’s mechanical monsters and what they could do.