by Kepler, Lars
‘I don’t know, but he’s got something planned,’ Rinus says, turning the torch off again. ‘Because if I was going to break in here, I’d choose the emergency exit … and I’d assume it was guarded and mined.’
‘Yes.’
As a result, Rinus isn’t planning to mine the door itself, but rather the corridor a little way along. Moving quickly, he feels his way through the darkness, brushes the curtain aside and folds it back, hurries past the stairs and the creaking door. He switches the torch on again, runs over to Lumi’s room, and puts the bag down on the floor.
He looks over at the sealed emergency exit at the end of the corridor, estimates the average stride and pattern of movement.
Immediately behind the doorframe to Lumi’s room he fastens an entire pack of explosives with duct tape approximately one metre off the floor.
The charge is completely invisible from the corridor, and powerful enough to blow up half of the upper floor.
He presses the fuse into the grey mass, then takes down the religious picture from the opposite wall, ties a length of thin nylon thread to the screw, rehangs the picture, stretches the thread diagonally across the passageway to the explosive, and ties it to the pin in the detonator. He removes the safety catch, then slowly backs away from it.
If you stand still and move your torch around, you can just make out the glint of the nylon thread, but otherwise it’s impossible to detect.
You’d have to move very slowly, inching your way forward.
The moment you feel the thread against you, it’s already too late.
Three centimetres is enough to pull the pin out and trigger the detonator.
Rinus sets up a similar trap immediately after the door to Joona’s room, putting the charge behind the fire-extinguisher on the wall and fastening the thread across the corridor to a screw in the skirting board.
He retreats to the kitchen and quickly constructs a fake trap by stretching a thread an inch or two above the floor and fastening it to a bag of empty bottles next to the door.
It will take time to disarm that as well.
He moves back, closes the creaking door to the corridor, glances at the staircase leading down to ground level, then tapes half a pack of explosive at head-height, inserts the fuse, and runs the thread from the detonator to the door handle, then removes the safety catch.
He turns the torch off and goes back to the surveillance room. He knows that Jurek is very experienced, but it would take an entire bomb squad hours to disarm that corridor.
‘He’s driving right round the workshop,’ Lumi says quietly as she hears the loose gravel clattering against the chassis of the car.
She moves sideways to be able to see the car. It slows down and stops in front of the main doors, maintaining an angle that makes it impossible to hit from any of the hatches.
‘It’s stopped,’ she says.
From where they are, only part of the rear bumper and boot are visible.
‘What’s he doing?’
‘I can’t see. The car’s stopped, but I don’t know if he’s still inside.’
Rinus switches to a magazine that he’s marked with a cross of red tape, to indicate that every tenth bullet includes phosphorous that will leave a trail of light in the darkness.
The car is running in neutral, its engine rumbling softly.
The loose garage door is creaking in the wind.
Lumi scans the scene outside again. An empty bottle of washer fluid is rolling across the yard. The bare branches over by the barbed-wire fence are trembling.
The car engine starts to rev louder.
A bird takes off and flies away.
The cloud of exhaust fumes grows, and drifts off on the wind towards the meadows.
The car reverses one metre, stops, and goes on revving.
He wants us to see this, she thinks.
Suddenly he puts the car in gear and accelerates so hard that gravel flies up behind the car. There’s a loud crash as the car drives straight through the double doors, followed by a clanging thud and the sound of breaking glass when it hits the reinforced wall and stops.
The engine falls silent.
One of the garage doors breaks free of its hinges and falls to the ground with a crash.
Lumi hurries across the floor and looks through one of the internal hatches. The garage is dark and silent. A smell of metal and petrol hits her nostrils.
‘Stay back,’ Rinus says, going over to the next hatch.
Without a sound he pushes the barrel of his assault rifle through the hole, angles it downward, then waits several seconds before leaning forward to look through the sights.
The image is blurred and grainy.
As if he’s looking through murky water, he sees a car with its front smashed in. The bodywork is crumpled and the windscreen smashed. Tiny, sparkling cubes of glass are scattered across the bonnet.
Inside the car he can make out the rounded shape of a head in the driver’s seat.
He automatically puts his finger on the trigger, but he can’t fire from this angle.
‘What’s happening?’ Lumi says beside him.
‘I don’t know.’
He moves to the furthest hatch, pushes the barrel through, waits, then looks through the sights. The front right wing of the car has broken off and is lying on the garage floor. One windscreen-wiper is moving sluggishly back and forth even though the glass has gone.
Rinus puts his finger on the trigger again and accidentally knocks the barrel against the side of the hatch, and a metallic sound rings out.
Slowly he moves the barrel towards the driver’s seat, and sees a hand resting on the steering wheel.
He follows the row of white buttons on a blood-stained shirt towards the collar and a gold necklace.
And then he sees the face.
It’s Patrik.
He’s injured, but still alive. Blood is running from his nose, down over his mouth. His glasses have fallen off, and he’s blinking slowly.
Rinus is absolutely certain he didn’t tell Patrik where he was going. He just said he had to go away for work, and never mentioned that he was going into hiding with Joona and Lumi.
But he’s aware that Patrik has known about the workshop for years. As a Jewish homosexual, he got a bit paranoid when the far-right populists were gaining ground in the Netherlands. When things were at their worst, Rinus took him to the workshop in an effort to make him feel safer, to show him that there was a plan if everything went wrong.
90
Rinus’s anguished heart is pounding hard, and the sights tremble. The seconds tick past. Patrik’s mouth is slightly open, the way it usually is when he’s asleep.
With his finger on the trigger, Rinus starts to look for Jurek, scanning the inside of the car through the sights, then around the sides.
The darkness beneath the car looks oddly fluid.
The floor looks wet.
The front tyre is muddy, and curved fragments of the headlamps lie like shells on a beach.
Suddenly the image flares white, and Rinus instinctively jerks his face back.
The glare lingers on his retinas in the darkness.
Lumi is moving between the zones to check their surroundings.
Rinus looks down into the garage again, not through the sights this time, and sees a dancing glow beside the car.
It flits up against the wall, anxious as a caged bird.
Something’s burning.
Rinus quickly switches to another hatch and looks down. A strip of burning cloth is hanging out of the car’s petrol tank.
‘Patrik!’ he yells through the hatch. ‘You have to get out of the car!’
He runs back to the first hatch. In the dancing light he sees Patrik tiredly open his eyes.
‘Patrik!’ he cries. ‘The car’s going to explode! Get out of the garage, you have to get out of—’
The explosion comes in two hard bursts. The garage fills with fire. Metal and glass are blown up at the cei
ling and out into the yard.
Rinus staggers backwards.
Flames shoot out through all the hatches.
There’s a loud clattering sound from the garage as car parts rain down across the floor. The fire roars loudly.
‘Was Patrik still in the car?’ Lumi asks, her voice numb.
Rinus nods, and looks at her with strangely lifeless eyes before he shuts the hatches, one by one.
Lumi hurries to the last zone and opens the hatch. In two places outside the workshop she can see vivid yellow flames, and pitch-black columns of smoke.
‘He’s burning old tyres,’ Lumi says.
She pulls on her lightweight rucksack, thinking that Jurek is trying to divert their attention or distract any thermal cameras.
He’s going to try to break in anytime now, she thinks, and moves to the next zone.
What’s he waiting for?
In the flames of a burning tyre she sees that the large combine-harvester drum is no longer lying in the ditch. The dead grass has been torn away and there are deep tracks running across the yard and round the building.
They hear heavy thuds from the bedroom corridor, and the sound echoes through the building.
Rinus hangs a number of hand-grenades from his belt.
There’s a creak, then several seconds of silence before more thuds, and the alarm linked to the emergency exit goes off.
‘He’s inside, isn’t he?’ Lumi asks, even though she knows the answer.
Adrenalin kicks in at once and her mind becomes icily clear. Jurek has leaned the combine-harvester drum against the wall like a ladder, broken the door open and got in.
‘Come with me,’ she says.
Rinus just turns away and switches the alarm off. A frightening silence descends, then there’s a tinkling sound from the kitchen. Jurek has dismantled the first two traps and made it past the fake one in a matter of seconds.
‘Thanks for everything,’ she whispers.
He has his back to her, and nods to himself, then turns and meets her gaze, unable to bring himself to smile.
Lumi brushes the curtain aside, spots the explosive that’s been fixed to the door to the corridor and hurries down the stairs.
As soon as she’s gone, Rinus sets up one last trap behind the curtain, pulling the thread one metre above the floor and removing the safety catch, then retreating and taking up position.
He hears a scraping sound, then the door to the corridor opens with a soft creak.
There’s no explosion.
Jurek must have nudged the door open very slightly, stuck a thin knife blade through the gap, pulled it up and cut the thread.
Rinus can’t understand how he’s able to identify and disarm the traps so quickly.
It’s as if he had a map and knew exactly where the explosives had been positioned and how they were constructed.
Through the night-sight of the assault rifle Rinus sees slight movement in the curtain, then the glint of a knife blade. It slips up the gap between fabric and wall and cuts the thread to his last trap.
Rinus fires through the curtain in a downward diagonal pattern.
The noise of the shots fills the room, the barrel flares and he feels the familiar recoil of the weapon in his shoulder.
The empty cases clatter to the floor.
Rinus counts the bullets, stops at the ninth, then takes aim at the explosive and fires the tenth shot.
The blazing phosphorous charge leaves a dark trail through the darkness.
The explosive detonates instantly.
He tries to take cover, but the speed of the detonation is incredibly quick.
The pressure-wave hits Rinus’s chest and the back of his head slams into the wall.
The entire section of wall surrounding the curtain disintegrates, the floorboards are ripped up, debris flies through the room. The railing on the stairs and the door to the corridor are gone.
Rinus manages to get up on one knee as splinters and plaster rain down on him and empties the rest of the magazine in three seconds.
He fires through the remains of the wall and the jagged opening to the kitchen.
He quickly rolls sideways, releases the magazine, and inserts a fresh one, but it’s too late.
A thin man is running at him along one wall.
Rinus draws his knife and stands up in the same movement, then swipes in an unexpected direction, from below and off to one side.
But the man deflects his arm and sticks a narrow blade into his side, just below the strap of his protective vest.
Beneath his ribs, up towards his liver.
Rinus ignores the pain and changes the direction of his knife, aiming at Jurek’s neck as he takes a step back and pulls out the pin.
Almost without a sound, the detonator explodes inside Rinus.
His legs buckle and he hits the floor hard, and his eyelids flutter as blood gushes out of the small hole in his side.
Only now does he realise what’s happened.
It wasn’t any ordinary knife.
When Jurek disarmed one of the traps, he took the Russian detonator with him and attached it to some sort of blade or spike.
Rinus raises his head slightly and sees Jurek standing in the window with the night-sight from his assault rifle.
The pain in his side is like a terrible attack of cramp.
The floor is already wet with blood.
He lowers his head again, panting from the exertion, and loosens a hand-grenade from his belt to blow them both up.
But it’s already too late.
Jurek is heading towards the stairs. If he knows about the escape route, he’ll be able to see Lumi running across the fields.
91
Lumi folds in the shoulder-support of her assault rifle, closes the door to the closet, steps over the paper bags full of shoes, forces her way between the hanging clothes and removes the bar across the steel door.
Just as she is about to go into the small hallway she hears stuttering automatic fire, then a loud explosion.
She carefully closes and locks the door behind her.
More automatic fire licks like a metronome in the walls, followed by silence.
Lumi’s hand is shaking as she switches her torch on. She hurries down the narrow concrete steps to a smaller room and another steel door.
She has to shove her shoulder against the door to get it to move. It swings open with a creak, and she shines her torch into a cramped passageway with earth walls. The wooden planks in the roof are held up by thick posts. Small drifts of soil and stones are lying here and there on the loose planks of the floor of the tunnel.
The light of the torch sways as she shines it towards the entrance to a large concrete pipe.
Even though Rinus described the escape route as ‘a tubular section’ two hundred and fifty metres long, she didn’t realise he was literally talking about a buried pipe.
An underground passageway designed to work on one single occasion.
It’s a very simple solution.
Presumably the most difficult bit was the connection between the building and the pipe.
It feels as dangerous as an old mine-shaft.
Lumi lets the steel door swing shut, then hurries across the uneven planks, crouches down and goes into the tunnel.
She runs along it, bent almost double.
Her rucksack scrapes against the roof.
She counts her steps as she moves as quickly as she can.
The light of the torch catches on the joins between the sections of pipe, like a sequence of thin rings ahead of her.
The barrel of the rifle knocks against the side of the pipe.
She stumbles over an uneven join, falls forward and braces herself with her hands, and breaks the glass of the torch. When she gets up again she feels a sharp pain in one knee, but limps on.
Warm blood is trickling down her shin inside her trousers.
The torch is working, but the beam is no longer as focused.
She t
hinks about the explosion and gunfire, and knows she has to keep going. She forces herself to run again.
Jurek could well be dead.
Rinus is very experienced. She’s seen his hands assemble weapons in a matter of seconds as he tells her about Patrik’s many sisters.
He taught her how to make an invisible holster for a pistol using a metal coat-hanger, and a silencer out of a plastic bottle, some aluminium mesh and a bit of wire-wool.
She’s watched him practising knife-fighting in the darkness, seen the precision and speed of his movements.
It doesn’t seem possible anyone would be able to beat him in close combat, but she has to assume the opposite, assume that she’s fleeing for her life.
The light of the torch is bouncing along in front of her, glinting off the water that’s gathered along the bottom of the pipe.
Suddenly she imagines she can hear steps behind her, and terror seizes her heart. It’s probably just the echo of her own movements, but she stops and switches the torch off with trembling hands, points the assault rifle behind her, unfolds the shoulder-support and looks through the night-sight.
There’s nothing in sight and everything is black, seeing as there’s no ambient light down here for the sight to enhance.
She waits and tries to blink away the sweat running into her eyes.
The only sound is her own breathing.
She folds the shoulder-support away again, turns round and switches the torch back on.
It clicks, but doesn’t come on.
She tries again, and shakes it gently, but nothing happens.
She stands there, eyes wide open, staring into total darkness.
Careful not to cut herself, she removes the last of the broken glass and feels the small bulb, presses it in slightly, and tries switching it on again.
It works, shining up towards the low roof in a blurry, elliptical ring.
Crouching down again, she carries on running through the pipe.
The air feels thin, and she’s breathing too shallowly.
As she runs, she multiplies the number of steps and the length of her stride, and when she figures out that she shouldn’t have more than forty metres left, she stops and shines the torch ahead of her.
The beam is blurred, but she can see that the end of the tunnel is full of earth, right up to the top. This end of the tunnel seems to have collapsed, sealing the pipe.
