Land of Hidden Fires

by Kirk Kjeldsen

  LAND OF HIDDEN FIRES

  Praise for Land of Hidden Fires:

  “Kjeldsen tells a small-scale tale about Norwegian resistance to the Nazis in this work that should appeal to historical thriller fans . . . His descriptive prose does a fine job of conveying the breathtaking scenery of the wintry Norwegian mountains.”

  – Publishers Weekly

  “Land of Hidden Fires is a compelling testament to the dangers, and necessity, of resistance. Kjeldsen writes about the quiet horrors of life in wartime with clear-eyed humanity and grace.”

  – Colin Winnette, author of Haints Stay and The Job of the Wasp

  “Creating tension is just one of Kjeldsen’s talents. Another is utterly capturing the mindset of a sheltered teenage girl who is falling in love with her rescued (and indifferent) pilot, imagining herself going to America with him. And third, but far from last, is Kjeldsen’s writing. He has masterfully set a story, fraught throughout with danger, against an icy, white, virtually silent tableau—a story that will stay with you long after you’ve finished it.”

  – New Jersey Star-Ledger

  “A fine wartime tale of survival and resistance, told with clean, compelling prose. The tough and resourceful Kari will linger in your memory, and the evocative setting will leave you shivering beneath the sheets.”

  – Dan Fesperman, author of The Letter Writer and Safe Houses

  “Despite the high drama and action-driven hunt, the story remains at its core a quiet one, focused on the well-developed, internal struggles of the characters and with the careful, evocative use of language . . . Kjeldsen’s writing benefits from a deep underlying knowledge, not only of World War II ranks and weaponry—though history buffs should appreciate the details—but also of farming techniques, the hazards of a winter trek through Scandinavian woods, and animal behavior . . . A quiet and introspective novel of wartime adventure.”

  – Kirkus Reviews

  “As much a love letter to his family’s homeland as it is a thrilling adventure of World War II, Kirk Kjeldsen’s Land of Hidden Fires shows that underneath Norway’s snow and ice lies a burning heart.”

  – Alan Gratz, author of Prisoner B-3087 and Projekt 1065

  “Kirk Kjeldsen’s non-fiction turned novel is a fitting memorial to heroes whose lights shine in dark times . . . The novel is full of suspense and drama, and the author succeeds in casting light on a very dark period of Norway’s history.”

  – The Norwegian American

  Praise for Kirk Kjeldsen’s Tomorrow City:

  “A tight, tense crime novel about a stranger in a strange land trying to outrun the ghosts of his past. Kirk Kjeldsen’s Shanghai is a terrifically fresh and evocative setting, and the action jumps off the page.”

  – Lou Berney, author of Whiplash River, Gutshot Straight, and The Long and Faraway Gone

  “Kjeldsen creates drama and danger with ease, and the events that follow are riveting. This is a literary thriller in the best sense of the term . . . His smart, penetrating story is not to be missed.”

  – New Jersey Star-Ledger

  “Kirk Kjeldsen has written a one-sitting novel with an ex-con protagonist you’ll eagerly follow across the globe as he tries to shake his past. Tomorrow City is as exciting as it is smart as it is heartbreaking.”

  – Michael Kardos, author of The Three-Day Affair and Before He Finds Her

  “Tomorrow City unfolds with grace and power, building to a cinematic climax that reverberates long after you’ve finished reading. This is thriller writing at its finest. Kjeldsen is one to watch.”

  – Carlo Bernard, writer of The Great Raid and executive producer / co-creator of Narcos

  “Tomorrow City is darn near a perfect book—fierce, intelligent, gritty, and absolutely convincing. You can certainly count me as a fan of Kirk Kjeldsen.”

  – Martin Clark, author of The Jezebel Remedy and The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living

  “With spare but riveting prose—and the rare ability to elicit the reader’s sympathy for a criminal—Kjeldsen has produced a thriller with plenty of the requisite shocks, a fully drawn protagonist, and a serious look at issues of justice and morality.”

  – Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “In Tomorrow City, the dark past of a former American criminal catches up with him in the chaotic streets of Shanghai. Exciting action in an exotic setting. Read. You’ll enjoy.”

  – Tom Epperson, author of The Kind One and Sailor

  “I had a twofold pleasure in reading Kjeldsen’s debut. As a writer, I admired his skill at evoking a sense of place and his uncommon ability to evoke sympathy for a criminal. But the real payoff came as a reader: Tomorrow City is such a cracking good story.”

  – Leighton Gage, author of Perfect Hatred, Blood of the Wicked, and Every Bitter Thing

  “Kirk Kjeldsen jabs a needle into the soft spot where nightmares intersect with real life and injects a steady dose of speed. Tomorrow City is a relentless, surprising and harrowing tour of the fascinating underside of Shanghai.”

  – David Rich, author of Caravan of Thieves and Middle Man

  “Tomorrow City is a vicious little tale of men and violence and the sucking black hole of the past. A coiled and sleek throwback noir, best read in one shot. More please.”

  – Elwood Reid, author of If I Don’t Six, Midnight Sun, and D.B.

  Also by Kirk Kjeldsen

  TOMORROW CITY

  THE DEPTHS

  LAND OF HIDDEN FIRES

  A novel

  Kirk Kjeldsen

  Grenzland Press

  Land of Hidden Fires

  By Kirk Kjeldsen

  Published by Grenzland Press

  Copyright © 2017 Kirk Kjeldsen

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9984657-2-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9984657-1-5

  www.grenzlandpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), except for brief citation or review, without written permission from the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  Cover design: Rafael Andres

  Author photograph: SoMi Photographie

  for my father,

  Richard Christian Kjeldsen (1946–1988);

  for Anfinn Michael Oliver Kjeldsen (1903–1984),

  a member of the Norwegian resistance

  who helped stranded members of the 8th U.S. Air Force

  get to Sweden during WWII;

  and for Anfinn Michael Oliver Kjeldsen,

  my son

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Half-Title

  Praise for Kirk Kjeldsen

  Also by Kirk Kjeldsen

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter
22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  “The surface is calm

  in the land of fires,

  nothing can be seen,

  everything is in balance.

  But things are in motion

  at this moment

  like molten avalanches

  in the interior mountains.

  They know it, those few

  who have looked through the fissures

  and felt the heat rise.”

  —Tarjei Vesaas

  (as translated by Anthony Barnett)

  CHAPTER 1

  The Stjørdalen Valley, Norway

  March 1943

  Kari looked up from mending a damaged sheep pen when she heard the faint buzzing noise. At first, it sounded like the blackflies that swarmed up from Lake Rømsjøen every summer, but she knew that couldn’t be, as it was still weeks before the thaw. She scanned the horizon, looking for the origin of the sound. There was nothing but empty grey space in every direction. Then she looked southward and spotted a fighter plane streaking across the sky. Thick black smoke trailed from its fuselage as it plummeted toward the mountains.

  Even if she hadn’t seen its Army Air Force markings, she knew by the whistling sound of its engine that it was a P-47. She’d seen a few in December, over Trondheim, escorting a bomber on its way back to England. She dropped the heavy stone she’d been carrying and hurried back to the barn, clumping through shin-deep snow in men’s boots that were two sizes too big for her. Before long, her thin chest ached from sucking in the cold air, but she rushed onward, unable to contain her excitement.

  She found her father inside their ramshackle barn, hunched over a thin and sick-looking ewe. Erling Dahlstrøm was a mountain of a man, corded with thick, knotty muscles. Even while kneeling, he was almost the same height as his daughter. Broken-faced and ravaged by life, he looked much older than his forty-one years.

  Kari spoke as soon as she entered the barn.

  “There’s a plane,” she said, gasping for breath.

  Erling replied in his gravelly voice without looking up.

  “Not now.”

  “But it’s the Allies—”

  Erling interrupted Kari.

  “It’s none of our business,” he said, finding a swollen and mottled patch of skin on one of the hind legs of the ewe.

  “But father—”

  Erling snapped at Kari.

  “I said no!”

  Before Kari could reply, Erling turned his attention back to the ewe. He unsheathed his knife and lifted the animal’s head.

  Then he slit its throat.

  Kari left the barn, boiling with rage. She got a sledge axe from the shed and went out past the sheep pens to split wood, which she often did when her anger got a hold of her. Though scrawny for a fifteen-year-old and scant through the arms and waist, she worked like a man twice her size. Even though the temperature was near freezing, she quickly worked up a sweat, and she peeled off her ratty wool coat to cool down.

  She piled one stack of splits and then started in on another, and then another. She kept going until the day turned to night, and the sky had become as purple-black as a bruise. After she finished, she put the axe back in the shed and headed to the barn, where she watered and fed the sheep. It didn’t take long, as their dwindling flock was down to seventeen head, or less than a third of what they’d had before Germany had invaded. Most of the sheep that had survived blackleg had succumbed to starvation, and the few that weren’t starving had been sold to the Germans in order to keep from losing the farm.

  She fed the ewes first, the ones she called Rita and Mae West after her favorite Hollywood stars. In better times, they’d had barley to feed their sheep, but they rarely even had hay anymore and were down to feeding them wheat middlings and by-products they got from a nearby distiller. She fed the rams next, Humphrey and Errol and the Duke, and then their lambs, which she didn’t even bother naming, knowing that few would make it to the summer. After she finished with the sheep, she gave some silage to Loki, their old mule, and a bit of hay to Torden, their last horse. Before the war, Erling had had a team of six dun-colored Fjords they’d used for plowing and pulling logs to the river. One by one, they’d sold them off or slaughtered them for food, and they were down to a seventeen-year-old gelding whose best days were behind him.

  After finishing with the animals, Kari made her way back to their run-down house. She looked inside one of the hoarfrosted windows and saw her father eating a meager supper at the kitchen table, eyes cast downward and head bowed like a penitent. Wanting to avoid him, she waited outside in the shadows, shivering and blowing on her hands to keep them warm. To pass the time, she traced the old constellations her grandfather had taught her. She spotted Thor’s chariot, and the fisherman, and Ulf’s Keptr, or the mouth of the wolf. She saw the Asar battlefield, the great wagon, and the road of the dead. She could even make out Aurvandil’s toe, a sign of spring’s coming victory over the winter.

  Once she finished counting the stars, Kari looked back through the window and saw Erling leaving the kitchen, taking a lit oil lamp with him. She continued to wait outside until she saw Erling’s bedroom door close behind him, then carefully opened the front door and entered the house. She crept into the kitchen and got a husk of stale bread from the pantry, choking it down dry. It wasn’t much—before the war, they often had dumplings or herring for lunch, and gjetost and brown bread or sliced egg sandwiches nearly every night—and even though she could taste the gritty sawdust they’d mixed in with the wheat to stretch it out, it was far better than rutabaga fried in cod liver oil, or salted horse meat, or even no supper at all, which was often the case since the Germans had invaded.

  She washed down the bread with some coppery-tasting pail water. Then she lit another lamp and made her way toward her room, pausing or changing tack every time a board groaned beneath her feet. At one point, she heard her father stirring, and she stopped and waited, afraid that Erling might come out and confront her. But Erling didn’t come out, and the stirring soon ceased, and Kari continued on her way.

  She got to her room and slipped inside, gently closing the door behind her. Then she put the lamp atop her dresser and took off her sweaters and trousers, stripping to her long underwear. Glancing out the window, she watched the winds file down the snowdrifts, wondering what had happened to the P-47, and whether it had crashed into the mountains. Surely it couldn’t have made it, she thought to herself. It’d been sinking like a stone, a plume of thick black smoke billowing in its wake. She wondered if the pilot had gone down with the plane, or if the pilot had bailed out, and if the latter, what had happened to him, if he’d actually reached the ground alive.

  She finished undressing, then crawled underneath the bed’s thick covers and waited for the warmth to come. While she lay there, she glanced over at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island postcards that her Uncle Agnar had sent her from New Jersey, where he lived, and the pictures of Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart that she’d cut out of the Film Weekly and Picturegoer magazines she’d found at the rubbish heap. She soon found herself thinking about her mother. What would she have done, Kari wondered, if she’d still been alive, and had seen the plane going down? She’d believed in taking stands, unlike Kari’s father. She’d fought for independence from Sweden as a schoolgirl, and she’d demonstrated for suffrage as a young woman. She’d even struggled valiantly against the cancer that had whittled her to a skeleton before claiming her in her thirty-fourth year. She wouldn’t have just ignored it.

  Kari stared up at the beamed ceiling, unable to sleep. Her thoughts kept circling back to the plane. She turned and looked out the window again, where she saw vacuous shapes merging and breaking apart in the blowing snow.

  After a long moment, she got up and pulled on her clothes.

  CHAPTER 2

  Kari dre
ssed as quietly as she could and draped her covers over her pillow to make it look like she was still sleeping. Then she left her bedroom. She slowly retraced her route back to the kitchen, avoiding the minefield of creaky boards in her path. When she finally got to the front door, she pulled on her ratty overcoat and boots and went outside.

  She carefully closed the door behind her, trying not to rouse her father or their flock. Then she made her way across their property, heading in the direction of the mountains. Overhead, the full moon shone like a bowl of fresh cream, luminous and pale. Since she’d gone inside, the temperature had fallen a few more degrees, and she could see her breath crystallizing in the air before her.

  She soon passed their crumbling barn. A skittish ewe rustled about inside, then stopped when another ewe bleated at it. After crossing their property, Kari went over the frozen brook that served as a border between their farm and the farm of their neighbors, the Jacobsens, who lived in a large yellow house with electricity and indoor plumbing. There were rumors that the Jacobsens were Quislings, and that they supplied information to the Nazis. They had a herd ten times the size of Erling’s, and they even had a number of milking cows, which had been a rarity since the war had broken out.

  Kari stayed along the edge of the large property, not wanting to draw the attention of Audr and Odo, the Jacobsens’ elkhounds. She breathed a sigh of relief when she finally entered the forest and began to wind her way through the rough country. It was darker there, and quieter; all sounds were buffered by the snow and trees. The heavy boughs of the spruces and pines grew back toward the earth as if gravity had reversed itself, laden with snow and ice. Things moved in the shadows, playing tricks on her eyes; trembling branches became the jangling legs of spiders, and heaving pine boughs became the shaggy beards of trolls.