The Serbian Dane

by Leif Davidsen

  Vuk had been busy.

  Early in the morning two days before, he had rented a middle-range car at Avis’s main office in Copenhagen. He had used his British passport and driving licence and his British Eurocard/Mastercard, given an address in south London and said that he would need the car for seven days. He would deliver it in Stockholm, where he would be checking in to the SAS hotel. He had phoned ahead to book the car, so within a mere ten minutes he was able to drive away. His Eurocard number was checked and found to be in order.

  Vuk drove first to Østerbro, where earlier he had passed a sports shop specializing in diving equipment. He was served by a muscly young man with a toothpaste-ad smile, who turned out, nonetheless, to be competent enough and knowledgeable when it came to scuba diving. It took Vuk an hour to choose his equipment. He spoke English to the young man. Explained very briefly that he was from the Czech Republic, and that it was far better and cheaper for him to buy his gear in Denmark, since he could get the tax refunded at the border. The assistant couldn’t have cared less. He received a commission on everything he sold, and he soon found out that Vuk knew what he was talking about, so he helped him to select and try on a wetsuit, explaining as he did so, quite unnecessarily, how the wetsuit worked by allowing the water to seep through it and form a very thin layer between the suit and the skin, thus insulating the body against the cold of the surrounding water. Vuk also bought a mask and snorkel, flippers, a lead-weight belt and a full oxygen tank complete with harness, as well as a small buoy for tying to one’s belt or fixing to an anchor, to warn passing ships of the presence of a diver in the water. To all of this he also added a powerful torch specially designed for use both above and below the water and a little waterproof pouch for hanging around the neck. He paid cash.

  In another water sports shop Vuk bought a detailed chart of the waters between Copenhagen, Saltholm, Flakfortet and Sweden, along with an anchor and anchor chain. He deposited his purchases in the boot of the rented car and made his way down to a shop near Nørreport station specializing in all manner of outdoor gear. Here he bought a lightweight sleeping bag, a sleeping mat and a waterproof rucksack, a battery-driven camping lamp and a waterproof wrist-compass with a luminous dial of a sort used frequently by divers. Again he paid in cash. In the hunting supplies shop Hunter’s House he found a large waterproof bag with a zipper and a drawstring neck for sealing it shut. His last stop was at the Magasin department store, known so well from his childhood and youth. Here he bought a black woollen pull-on hat and a pair of black deck shoes. In the food hall he purchased a pack of sliced bread, salami and cheese. And finally, in the cosmetics department, he picked up some black hair dye.

  He dumped the lot on the floor of the kitchen in Hellerup and made a round of the house to make sure that everything was as it should be. There were no signs that anyone had been inside; there was nothing in the ordinary mailbox except advertising bumph, but in the computer’s mailbox lay messages from all over the world. He did a quick scan of them. They were all for Mikael and all perfectly innocent.

  He drove up to Helsingør on the north coast and took the ferry across to Helsingborg in Sweden. There was no queue; he was able to drive straight on. He had his Danish passport ready, but there was no control when he drove ashore. He drove south, past Malmö and parked the car close to Limhamn harbour, in a quiet residential street with no parking restrictions. Then he took the ferry back across from Limhamn to Dragør on the island suburb of Amager. He ate a steak with onions on board and read the Danish newspapers. There were only a few passengers on the ferry, mostly pensioners returning from a shopping expedition to Sweden.

  Vuk took the bus into the city centre, then the train out to Hellerup. Twilight was falling on the villa, but another tour of the house told him that everything was as normal. He poured himself a vodka from the bar in the sitting room and carried the glass through to the kitchen where he switched on the television to watch the early evening news at 6.30. The news was mainly Danish. It didn’t mean much to him. Minor disputes that were blown up into great dramas simply because things were, by and large, so peaceful here, he thought to himself. There was no news from Bosnia and nothing about Sara Santanda. Normality reigned. He popped a frozen pizza into the oven, got out the sea chart and proceeded to study it. The distance from Copenhagen to Flakfortet was approximately five miles, and about half that from Flakfortet to Saltholm. What interested him most were the international shipping lanes on either side of the patch of Dirty Sea. On the city side there would be markers around the outskirts of the Dirty Sea He remembered how the M/S Langø had sailed in a wide arc from the mouth of Copenhagen Harbour to Flakfortet, instead of heading for the man-made island in a straight line. A quick look at the key map in the Copenhagen A-Z was enough to show him why, but the sea chart gave a very clear picture of the way in which Middelgrund and the Dirty Sea lay like a barrier, a kind of minefield, between the two shipping channels. He assumed that in the shallows of the Dirty Sea lay an old rubbish dump or ships’ graveyard.

  He turned his attention to the weather forecast that followed the news. The weatherman said there would be rain that evening, but that this would clear away during the night. The weather the next day would be cloudy but generally dry, with the possibility of showers later in the evening; but these too would give way to brighter weather, and on the day itself the nice man on the TV promised that the morning would be sunny with scattered clouds, a moderate wind from the east and temperatures a little above normal for the time of year. In the afternoon rain and strong winds would move in across the country from the east. The weather forecast pleased Vuk. Rain and poor visibility at night was exactly what he wanted.

  He picked up the remote control, switched to CNN and turned down the sound. He went on scanning the chart while he ate his pizza, making quite certain of the coordinates he would give to Berlin. They, in turn, would see to it that these were passed on to the captain of the Russian barge, which, with any luck, was already laid up somewhere close by with supposed engine trouble – probably in some small harbour not far from Copenhagen. He called Berlin and had to wait fifteen minutes for them to call him back. He read out the coordinates from the sea chart, first in English and then, to be on the safe side, in German. Between 14:00 hours and 16:00 hours, Thursday. He had his specifications read back to him over the clear line, then said:

  ‘Any problems with the competition?’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘This office will close once the deal has been completed,’ the voice in Berlin said.

  ‘Understood,’Vuk said. ‘I’ll need a note of the new address.’

  ‘We prefer email.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Vuk took down the email address. Now he would be able to get in touch with his employers via any computer with an Internet connection, without anyone knowing what he was writing to them about. This he could do from an Internet café or a library, for example, in Vienna or Belgrade; and they would have no idea of his actual whereabouts. He would head back to Serbia, he had decided. From the news reports he knew that NATO forces in the Balkans now appeared to be actively hunting down and arresting those whom enemies of the Serbs called war criminals. He would get in touch with Emma, and together they would lie low until all the fuss died down. They would never be able to find him on his own home ground. That was the safest place for someone like him right now while the plan of pinning the blame on some fanatical Muslim was given time to work.

  He plotted his course on the sea chart, marking the vital reference points. He would be able to take his bearings from the Nordre Røse lighthouse, Saltholm, Flakfortet, the spires of Copenhagen, and in daylight he would be able to see the innocent-looking buoy he would be dropping on the border between the Dirty Sea and Dutchman’s Deep.

  He packed his diving gear into the rucksack and drew it closed. Into the waterproof bag he stuffed the sleeping bag, the mat and the torch. There was still plenty of room. He laid his b
lack, rubber-soled Ecco shoes on top of the mat. He neatly folded his smart tweed jacket, grey flannels and a light-blue shirt and placed these too in the bag. To these he added a discreetly patterned tie, a pair of dark socks and a small mirror he had found in the bathroom. And lastly he packed in the black jeans, polo-neck and a thick cotton undershirt. He tamped the whole lot down firmly by cramming a large bath towel on top.

  Down in the basement he lifted the black rubber dinghy off its hooks. He did not so much as glance at the bodies of Mikael and Ole under their tarpaulin. His mind was on the dinghy. It was in good nick, if a little soft, looked like it hadn’t been used in a while. In the bottom of the raft lay two short canoe oars and a stubby, double-bladed kayak paddle. He fetched the foot-pump from the corner, pumped up the dinghy with ease. It was a four-man craft, a navy model: a real beauty. He inspected the outboard motor. It seemed well cared-for and relatively new. What luck for him that one of Mikael’s few hobbies, apart from computers, had been to chug up and down the Sound looking at ships. Vuk found an old petrol can in the workroom and filled the motor’s tank. He was beginning to feel tired after having to stay so focused all day. When shopping in town he had been constantly on the lookout for possible tails, or simply for people he knew, who might recognize him.

  Vuk spent the rest of that evening and a good part of the night at the workbench in the basement, making two lock-picks on the well-equipped lathe. That done, he had another glass of vodka and turned in for the night. He slept peacefully, with no worries about nightmares. He knew himself well enough to be aware that both his conscious mind and his subconscious would now be concentrated on the job in hand, allowing no room for anything else. After the successful completion of the job, the demons would return, but right now they were leaving him in peace. He felt perfectly safe in this house. No one knew he was in the country, and no one knew that he had the schedule for the condemned writer’s movements during her stay in Denmark.

  Vuk woke early, but well rested the next morning. The weatherman had been right, he saw, when he looked out of the window. The clouds hung low and looked heavy with rain, but it stayed dry. He made coffee and watched CNN while he had breakfast. After that, he cleared the kitchen table and got out his weapons. He dismantled the rifle and put it back in the case. He would not be using the rifle. They would have police snipers positioned up on the old gun emplacements, of that he was sure. For his escape plan to work he would need to create utter chaos during those few crucial minutes.

  He lifted the pistol. He had checked it and seen that it was okay, but you could never check too often! It could have been bought or stolen. It was a very common model, so in all likelihood it had been obtained legally. It was an Italian gun, a black Beretta 92F, the pistol that had come out on top in field trials carried out by the American military to find a new service pistol. It had replaced the old Colt 45, to which it bore a great similarity. But it was more stable and safer to use. Vuk actually preferred revolvers to pistols. They were more robust and could take a lot more punishment than the more complex pistols, which had a tendency to jam at the most inconvenient moments, but his revolver of choice, the Smith & Wesson, could only take five cartridges, which was too few when there was an element of uncertainty attached to his escape. And the Beretta was a good gun that he knew well. It would give him fifteen bullets in the magazine in its butt plus one in the chamber, and that was all-important. He loaded fifteen 9 mm bullets into the magazine and smacked it up into the butt. Having made sure that the safety was on, he raised the pistol into the firing position, holding it with both hands. The two pounds or so of steel was nicely balanced. Vuk knew that a bullet would leave the barrel at a speed of almost 1,300 feet per second and at the distance at which he planned to use it would go right through the Target and wreak appalling damage on the human body on the way out. He would be able to plant three bullets in the Target in a second or two. Vuk also assumed that the gun had been tested, but he needed to discover for himself how it reacted and which way it pulled. He wasn’t happy about this. Denmark was a small country, no one here was ever very far from anyone else, and hence it was hard to find a place where he could try it out, but he had to. It would have been easier in Sweden, but he wasn’t stupid enough to try carrying a pistol across an international boundary. It was too risky. The odds on getting caught were too high.

  Vuk took the train to Hillerød then switched to the little private line, nicknamed ‘Grisen’ – the Pig – that carried him through the largest forest on Zealand, Grib Skov. He was the only passenger on the train apart from two high school kids conducting a sotto voce discussion about classmates and teachers. Vuk got off at Gribsø and struck off into the forest. He walked for twenty minutes, until he was sure that he was far enough off the beaten track. He had a dense thicket of pines to one side of him and old beech woods to the other. The trees would deaden the sound. The clearing in which he stood measured about two hundred square feet. He picked up three large pine cones and arranged them four inches apart at head height in a hollow in an ancient tree that had been gashed by lightning. He walked back ten paces, cocked the pistol and fired. The gun pulled a little to the right. The bang had not been particularly loud, but it had still sent a bird flapping, screeching, into the air. The bullet had hit home just above the right-hand pine cone. He steadied the Beretta with both hands, aimed along his outstretched arms and fired again. The pine cone disappeared in a cloud of dust. He took two paces forward, at the same time pressing the trigger four times in rapid succession. The other two cones shattered. He walked up to the tree: four bullet holes all in a row. He slipped the gun back into the satchel in which he had transported it. It was of blue canvas, indistinguishable from so many others. He left the forest quickly, going in the opposite direction to that by which he had come and found his way to the station, where he had to wait half an hour for a train. He didn’t meet a single person and had the train to himself for most of the way back to Hillerød.

  Back at the villa he cleaned the pistol and refilled the magazine. He loaded bullets into the reserve magazine, then made himself some tea with lots of sugar and a dash of rum, and a cheese and salami sandwich. He wrapped the sandwich in foil and popped it, along with the thermos of tea and a bottle of water, into the waterproof bag, which he carefully sealed. He packed the pistol and the reserve magazine into a plastic bag and placed this in his satchel, along with the notebook and a ballpoint pen. There would be room here too for his toothbrush and toothpaste, an extra comb and toilet paper. He put what cash he had left, the passport and credit card into the small waterproof bag that he would wear around his neck.

  In the bathroom he coloured his hair and his beard – which, though short, now covered the lower half of his face well – black with the hair dye. He washed the sink thoroughly afterwards and threw the dye tube into the rubbish bin outside the house before climbing into the wet suit. It had a hood, but he pulled on the woollen hat instead. He slipped his bare feet into the black deck shoes.

  Vuk had to push the dinghy onto its side to get it through the basement door and up into the back garden. The rain pelted him in the face as he stepped out onto the sodden grass and dragged the dinghy down to the bottom of the garden and the dark choppy waters of the Sound. He returned to the basement for the outboard motor and mounted it on the dinghy, then lashed the rucksack and the waterproof bag securely to the bottom. He made the buoy fast to the rucksack with the anchor line, in such a way that the anchor was fixed to the rucksack itself.

  He was ready.

  Vuk went back to the house. The rain was getting heavier, and his fingers and toes were a bit cold, but they would soon warm up again. Suddenly he started. The phone was ringing. He stood where he was for a moment, waited till it stopped, then locked the basement door and left the house by the front door, which he could simply slam shut. He went round to the back garden, pushed the rubber raft out into the Sound and used the kayak paddle to row away from the shore before trying to start the outboard
motor. It roared into life at the fourth attempt, but the sound was soon swallowed up by the murky Sound. He checked the luminous dial of his compass and the sea chart, which he had wrapped in thin plastic. The raft skimmed smoothly and steadily over the choppy waves as he headed down the coast towards the edge of the Dirty Sea, which he knew the dinghy, with its shallow draught, could cross without any problem. It was pitch-dark on the Sound, but he could make out the lamps of several boats in the shipping lanes, and the bright lights of ferries on which passengers would be sitting snug and warm over a coffee or the last beer of the night. On reaching the outskirts of the Dirty Sea he put the motor into its lowest gear and glided over the treacherous reef until he reached his position. He checked the compass and, half-standing in the boat, found his reference points. Then he lowered the rucksack, with the anchor attached to it, into the water. Weighted by the anchor and the lead belt it sank swiftly to the bottom, in what was, by his calculations, about eight feet of water – which meant he was on the right side of whatever there was of railway sleepers or concrete blocks and other old junk down there. Once he had felt the rucksack settle on the bottom he paid out another six feet of rope before taking the knife bound to his shin, cutting the line and tying the end to the buoy. He looked at the compass, then over to the shore and down to the right towards Nordre Røse. He could see the Lynneten sewage plant and the lights atop Copenhagen’s spires. He took his bearings, feeling certain that he could find this spot again without much trouble. They had practised this sort of thing hundreds of times during their frogman training at the Special Forces School: infiltration and sabotage, getting in and out again unseen. As it is practised by Special Forces the world over.