The older FSB officer spoke angrily to two of the GRU men. The third had his pistol out, holding it awkwardly, not sure what to do with it. The FSB officers kept their weapons holstered. Mikki’s revolver was concealed. Rake had none. Nilla was openly carrying, her expression cold, her eyes steady. ‘This isn’t about them,’ she said. ‘It’s about you two. The GRU say NATO’s Dynamic Freedom exercise is a preparation for the invasion of Russia. You are foreigners who have been sent as spies.’
‘How do they know we are foreigners?’ said Rake.
‘That’s what I asked. They want to take you to Murmansk for questioning. The FSB guys are trying to fix it. We’re within the thirty-kilometer agreement zone where the FSB has prevailing jurisdiction.’
‘Not if the other side bring in armored vehicles,’ muttered Mikki.
Rake and Mikki were not just any foreigners. They were Americans. Mikki was legitimate, working under the protection of the Norwegian police, Rake a gatecrasher. There was no way they were going anywhere near Murmansk.
The Tigr armored vehicle stood across the road about fifty yards to the north. They could skirt around. The ground on either side was solid. The Russians stayed out of their vehicles, talking in a cluster, breath clouds and cigarette smoke collecting in front of their faces. Their concentration was on each other. Between them and the trailer lay the now empty cordoned area, its metal poles skewed, tape trailing on the snow, smeared with reindeer blood. Nilla’s vehicle was backed up facing north. The E-105 was a good winter road, ice-packed and smooth.
The question was the Tigr and how to stop it. Once that was done, with Nilla at the wheel, they could put in some distance. If the Tigr opened fire, it would chew them up. But why risk killing a Norwegian and start that war between Russia and Norway that hadn’t taken place for a thousand years?
Mikki said, ‘We’ve weapons in the back.’
‘No,’ answered Nilla firmly. Saying nothing, Rake walked away from the vehicle toward the Tigr. He kept his hands loose at his side to show he wasn’t carrying. He trod heavily in the snow, his steps measured. Nilla was about to follow. Mikki touched her shoulder and said something in her ear. She held back. The Russians hadn’t noticed. They kept arguing. Rake wanted to see the Tigr’s weapon, how ammunition was fed, who was behind the trigger.
Twenty yards out, the Russian gunner shouted: ‘Stop!’ Rake held his arms out further, stretched like a bird’s wings. He kept walking.
‘Stop, or I’ll open fire.’
Rake was close enough to be heard. ‘What the hell you guys doing?’ he said in Russian. He jerked his hand back behind him. ‘She’s Norwegian, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I’m following orders.’ He was a conscript, no more than twenty. He wore goggles, so Rake couldn’t see his eyes. His finger was unsteady, tapping the trigger guard, ridden with uncertainty. No hatch opened from below. No senior officer showed his face to back him up.
‘Are you with those losers,’ challenged Rake, ‘or are you army?’
‘Halt,’ he repeated. ‘Right there.’
Rake stopped and raised his hands fully above his head. ‘If you’re army, don’t answer to these idiots. We’ll shoot our way out, if need be. You kill any of us, you’ll be the fall guy. You’ll die in the next few minutes or be sent east for the rest of your time.’
The gunner’s finger darted in and out of the trigger guard. He put his left hand to his earpiece, checking orders. Rake expected the GRU men to be running toward him. They were looking skywards. Rake heard the clatter of helicopter blades. He couldn’t see the aircraft, but it was coming in from the east, wrapped behind clouds. Nilla got into the driver’s seat, Mikki the other side. She started the engine. The gunner took his hand off his weapon and slipped off his goggles. Rake gave him a thumbs up. The young face filled with relief. Mikki reached over and opened the back door. Rake walked back to the vehicle. His best guess was that the helicopter belonged to another agency, called in to see off the GRU. An armed helicopter would prevail over any other weapons.
Rake closed his door. Nilla was on the phone, speaking in Norwegian. The GRU men headed for their SUV, the FSB to their Land Cruiser. They pulled out, drove past, and Nilla followed, skirting round the Tigr. The gunner gave a hesitant wave. Rake brought down his window to look for the helicopter, flying low, and the noise was growing, a thousand feet and descending. It loomed above them, blue-gray and stubby, a Russian navy Ka-27, designed for fire-fighting, anti-submarine work, ferrying troops, available at short notice. The downdraft sent vibrations though the vehicle and snow and ice skidding across the ground. The noise obliterated all other sound.
Nilla kept driving. The helicopter stayed where it was, hovering at about twelve feet, tearing the poles out of the ground, getting close to the GRU vehicle, keeping up the pressure until they drove off. It ascended and headed north-east toward Murmansk or, probably, Severomorsk, the big naval base twenty miles to the north.
Flying time would be at least an hour, and they had been at the scene less than that, which pointed to the helicopter deployment being linked not to Nilla and the FSB, but to the GRU, who were based out of Murmansk. Had the Russian navy been brought in to counter whatever the GRU was planning? Before any military exercise, especially one as intricate as Dynamic Freedom, there would be a web of communications between Russia and NATO to ensure nothing erupted by mistake. A plan to take two Americans into military custody smelt of a rogue operation. Rake looked out the back window. Two local cops were pulling up the cordon poles. The helicopter was a speck, identified only from a flashing fuselage light.
‘I’m sorry you had to go through that,’ said Nilla.
‘Only hope we have a reindeer worth dying for,’ Rake said dryly.
Mikki laughed. Nilla met his eyes in the mirror. ‘How long you been here, Rake, and how much trouble you caused?’
‘I heard it was Mikki they wanted,’ said Rake. ‘They planned to marry him off to one of those Nikel beauties.’
Nilla slowed as they approached the border post. The Russian Land Cruiser pulled off the road to the parking bay. There was no goodbye. No wave. No friendly hazard-warning lights. At the Norwegian post, a customs official waved Nilla to stop. She lowered her window. He peered into the back at Rake. ‘Sir, you have a visitor waiting in the rest bay by the shop. Says it’s urgent.’
As Nilla drove on, Rake said: ‘Pull up.’
‘Your visitor?’ She looked at Rake with uncertainty.
‘Just do it,’ he instructed sharply. ‘Something we need to check.’
Nilla brought the trailer to a rumbling halt. Rake climbed onto it, felt around the right haunch of the reindeer carcass until he found the thread he had spotted. Nilla jumped up beside him. Mikki leant against the side of the vehicle keeping watch both ways. A brown nylon thread made up a series of stitches that formed a square about two inches each side. Rake got out his pocket-knife, cut the thread, and pulled it out of the hide. Nilla had a forensics bag ready. He dropped the thread in. Frozen blood lined the edges of the square like glue. The hide had been cut on three sides. Rake eased in his knife blade to prize it open. He raised it gently and wasn’t sure what he was looking at, something curved and oblong, smeared in blood.
Nilla put on a pair of blue surgical gloves. With her forefinger and thumb, she lifted it out and held it up in the low midday light. A clot of blood fell off, and a mask of horror spread across her face. From the hide of a reindeer, they had extracted a severed human ear.
SIX
Rake in the back seat held two transparent bags of evidence on his lap as they drove through the stone posts to the rest stop just beyond the blue border sign. A Norwegian police car was parked there together with a black jeep showing US military plates, which must be the visitor waiting for Rake. The wind had dropped, and soft light cast a yellow hue on the snow and trees. Two men in civilian clothes walked toward them from the police car.
‘NIS,’ said Nilla. ‘Our foreign intelligence service.
’ She reached for the two bags. Warm and melted, blood streaked the sides of the plastic. ‘You deal with your guys. I’ll deal with mine.’
They watched Nilla hand over the bags, gesticulating, telling the story, body language rigid, stepping back, turning to point to the carcass on her trailer, hand on hips, taking off her hat, banging it against her leg, putting it on again, talking, listening, never taking her gaze off the two intelligence agents in front of her.
‘I’m thinking that our man tried to come over last night and didn’t make it,’ said Mikki. ‘Instead, he loses his ear, which gets sewn into a reindeer hide. Does that even begin to make sense?’
Rake showed him phone pictures of the thread and severed ear. ‘See the cut inside the ear.’ He pointed to a rough but defined circular shape. ‘That isn’t laceration, that’s a carving.’
Mikki grimaced. ‘Sick, the work of a psycho?’
‘Yes, but a well-organized one.’ Rake opened his door.
Nilla saw them and broke away from her conversation. ‘We’re stood down,’ she said angrily. ‘They’re taking the buck and the evidence down to Tromsø.’
‘What’s in Tromsø?’ asked Mikki.
‘Bigger offices.’ Nilla kicked a clump of snow. Loose hair fell onto her face. She took time pushing it back under her hat. This had been her gig. It ran into trouble and had been taken from her. Rake showed her the phone picture of the curving arch of the cut, a jagged black line set against dark red blood and the pale yellow of the flesh of the human ear. Rake thumbed to another shot, close up, with a right-angled edge coming out of the curve. ‘They need to see this.’
The two Norwegian intelligence agents came over. ‘Major Ozenna, I am Einar Olsen,’ said one. ‘What do you have for us?’
Rake held out the phone. ‘It’s elaborate. Organized. It’s a message of some kind. A statement.’
Olsen studied the screen. ‘We have these criminal problems with the Russians all the time.’ He shifted his gaze across the road to a wooden shack that sold souvenirs. ‘But I think you have bigger fish to fry.’
A US Marine sergeant in full Arctic fatigues emerged from the shack and sprinted over, looking at the trailer with the rigid, frozen reindeer with curiosity. ‘Major Ozenna, sir, I’ve flown in from Camp Setermoen and have orders from Camp Denali for you, sir, and Detective Wekstatt is to accompany you.’
The sergeant took an envelope from his tunic and handed it to Rake. Camp Denali was the headquarters of the Alaska National Guard, to which Rake was officially attached. Setermoen was the Norwegian military base, five hundred miles to the west, where US troops were stationed. Rake slit open the envelope and read the printed email inside. He didn’t like what he saw. ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Finish your shopping, I need a few minutes to finish up here.’
‘Sir, they said immediately, and we have a plane—’
‘We could have been days over there, Sergeant. Let’s agree on a few minutes.’
Rake handed Mikki the email.
‘What the fuck!’ Mikki read out the beginning. ‘“Following your lecture at the War College on military–civilian cooperation in Afghanistan, you are needed for a panel at the Center for Political and Global Studies in Washington, DC entitled Military and Civilian Liaison inside Hostile Peace-Keeping Operations. Your contribution—”’ He mimicked the voice of a mythical desk officer who had never seen combat, then broke away from it. ‘You gotta be kidding. Who are these people?’
‘Marching orders. They want us the hell out of here.’
‘But a fucking panel?’
‘My guess is that whatever this operation is or was, it’s gone bad. The US now wants the Norwegians to own it, meaning you and I have to get out of here.’
Mikki handed back the letter. ‘That’s why you made officer and I didn’t.’
‘Norway doesn’t want its long, complicated friendship with Russia confused by two American soldiers accused of being spies.’ Rake put the envelope in his pocket and gave Mikki a self-conscious grin. ‘Besides, not all bad news. Carrie’s just moved to Washington, got a job at a big hospital there.’
‘Oh, shit!’ Mikki face broke into a half smile and half frown. Mikki knew more about Rake’s tempestuous relationship with Dr Carrie Walker than he would wish on anyone. ‘Will you contact her?’
‘Don’t know.’
Carrie had sent a message about the new job. Rake congratulated her but got no reply, which was how it had often been, him chasing, her not responding.
‘Carrie’s not who you are,’ said Mikki. ‘She’ll want you changing, and it won’t work.
Nilla came back and Rake asked: ‘Are you taking shit for what happened over there?’
‘They’re telling bare-faced fucking lies that we have criminal problems like this with the Russians all the time. It’s bullshit and I’m off the case.’
Rake pointed to the US Marine sergeant and showed her his orders. Nilla read it and put on a brief smile. ‘Started good, turned into a shitty day.’ She took both Rake’s hands, leant forward and kissed him on the mouth, deep enough and long enough for Rake to sense a stirring that this was a woman he wanted more of. Mikki was smiling. Nilla’s colleagues didn’t seem to mind. This was Scandinavia, local permissive culture. He had read about it in magazines.
‘Let us know what happens to our buck,’ he said when she eased back. ‘How come he had his antlers and—’
Nilla played her finger sensually around the edges of his lips ‘Hush,’ she whispered. ‘He’s not our buck anymore.’ She gave him a light kiss and jogged back to her colleagues. The sergeant held the car door open. They climbed in. Mikki directed him to the hotel to pick up their stuff. Rake messaged Carrie: Heading to DC. Coffee?
SEVEN
Washington, DC
Rake’s message stayed unseen on Carrie Walker’s phone because she was striding alongside a gurney into the Level 1 Trauma Center at Washington General Hospital. Paramedics relayed the condition of a cycle accident patient, suspected internal bleeding, trachea injury and falling blood pressure, a dangerous 80 over 50.
Blood soaked into the gurney’s left side. Air bubbled up around the patient’s neck. Carrie had seen young men cut up. Her experience lay mostly with bullets, shrapnel, and stones propelled by bombs, or with a human body seemingly unharmed but knocked about so badly that the nerves and fluids would never settle back. She reminded herself this was a routine peacetime road accident.
The patient was white, male, and twenty-seven years old, a bicycle messenger who smashed into the wall of the Dupont Circle underpass after being winged by a truck. A spoke from his mangled wheel was now embedded in his throat.
Trauma surgery was about self-confidence and risk, about making quick decisions with only scraps of information, a truth that didn’t change whether in a desert with nothing or in one of the world’s best-equipped hospitals. Not acting fast enough, even by a few seconds, spelt the difference between life and death.
‘E.R. Now,’ snapped Carrie.
‘Trauma Room Two!’ shouted a nurse.
Carrie had no idea where Trauma Room Two was. This was her second day at the hospital, a lifestyle decision to move from New York, away from family who kept telling her to do this and that, mainly find a man, stay in one place, just like that when Carrie wasn’t that sort of person. She needed something big, complicated, and edgy among people who traveled and understood blood, sand, urgent sex, and power outages. She balked when a friend suggested Washington, DC, an opening at Washington General Hospital in Foggy Bottom, State Department territory. She didn’t like her government, didn’t understand why it kept picking fights with other countries. Her friend begged her to be open to the idea. ‘The heart of the empire that starts the wars where you fix hurt people.’ She thought about it, realized she wanted the job more than anything, and kissed goodbye to the filthy sidewalk of Flatbush, Brooklyn, when the job came through.
Today she was rostered to shadow a trauma unit and, in the after
noon, to take a course on building familiarization about restrooms, fire exits, and cafeterias. The hospital shone with endowment, quality white paint, wide airy corridors, signposts to departments, but none to Trauma Room Two. Her patient was taken down a corridor into the ground-floor area where urgent life-threatening conditions were identified and, if possible, fixed.
Carrie had noted three, maybe four, that might kill her patient within minutes or leave him with permanent brain injury. His airway needed to be secured. The spoke needed to be removed from his throat. There could be injury to the carotid artery, the main blood channel between the heart and the brain. If that were the case, the patient risked bleeding out before they could get him to an operating room.
Carrie flipped open the medical bag she always had with her and brought out doses of propofol and fentanyl to use as anesthetic. She slipped them into her pocket. Medication in the pocket violated the rules of most hospitals but was usually overlooked because every surgeon knew it saved lives. Often in the places she had worked Carrie had been the only doctor. Keeping strong drugs in her pockets had become second nature. She looked back across the gurney, and saw she was standing face to face with a young medic in a freshly laundered white coat.
‘You the anesthesiologist?’
He shook his head. ‘Peter Reynolds. I’ll be shadowing you.’
He thought she was someone else. Carrie looked around for a hospital trauma surgeon and saw none, only two nurses and three paramedics waiting for her lead. There was no time for scrubbing and gowning up. Right now, infection was the least of the dangers. She sanitized her hands, pulled on surgical gloves and mask.
‘Airway,’ she said softly. She swabbed the neck and injected a dose of her local anesthetic.
‘Scalpel.’ A nurse was beside her with a stainless-steel tray. Avoiding the bicycle spoke, Carrie identified the thyroid cartilage, then the cricoid cartilage about an inch down. She made a short horizontal incision. She took a tracheostomy tube to give the patient an alternative breathing pathway and slid it in, just under an inch. She attached a resuscitation bag over his mouth, put her hand around the air balloon, and squeezed two short, sharp bursts of air, paused for five seconds, and squeezed again. The chest rose, faltered, picked up, rose again. Carrie gave it two more breaths. The patient’s breathing stabilized. She looked at the monitors. Blood pressure dropping, heart rate increasing. Carrie had to deal with probable arterial bleeding which could create a build-up of fluid around the heart. Untreated, even if her patient lived, he would wake up brain dead.
Man on Edge Page 3
