Sneakernet: A John Crane Novella

by Mark Parragh

  “Another delivery, and we get some gas,” said August. Crane helped him haul the candy and drinks again. August was flirting with the woman behind the counter, Crane noticed. He slipped outside to the parking lot and powered up the backup phone he’d bought. He dialed the Celebrity customer service number and introduced himself as Peter Drew. They looked up his reservation number and noted he’d failed to join the ship in Reykjavik.

  “Yes, I’m afraid there was a situation that kept me longer than I planned. It’s resolved now, however, and I’ll be able to join the ship at Akureyri.”

  They reassured him that that would be fine, and he hung up just as August emerged from the shop.

  “You coming?” August bellowed.

  Crane trotted over to the truck and climbed in. His backup plan was in place and working, he thought as August started the engine and pulled back out onto the Ring Road. He was invisible here in the truck. He would make it to Akureyri by morning, thanks to August who was turning out to be a surprisingly pleasant traveling companion. He would simply join the crowd of tourists that would flood the town, and follow them back to the ship.

  “So the woman running the store,” said Crane.

  “Lilija.”

  “Yeah, I think she’s into you, man.”

  August roared with laughter, and the truck drove on into the night.

  Chapter 9

  Einar Persson strode back and forth on the ramp in his tuxedo while his crew refueled the helicopter. There were about eight hundred liters of aviation fuel burned for nothing, he thought. The man he was searching for had simply dropped off the map. There had been no reports of movement from the southern teams, the dragnet of people he had around Reykjavik and guarding the highway to Keflavik. His spotters on the Ring Road to the north were reporting nothing. And Einar understood why. He’d burned most of that eight hundred liters of fuel flying around the Ring Road himself, and he’d seen nothing. It was the dead of night. There was no traffic at all. There was nowhere for his quarry to hide.

  So where the hell was he?

  Einar glanced up at the sky. Cloud cover was rolling in. It was almost 2:00 a.m. now. The sun would be rising in another hour, but it was going to be a gray day. In more ways than one. The executive board already knew what had happened, of course. They’d have been informed immediately of a brushfire event, even if it meant pulling them out of bed. But they’d be pretending otherwise for the time being. They’d give him a chance to bring the situation under control before they intervened. But by morning, it would be impossible for them to remain uninvolved. He’d have to report on the situation, and it would be better if he had good news for them.

  An airport worker glanced over at Einar as he walked by. He realized how out of place he looked standing here in his tuxedo, but he hadn’t had time to change yet. He’d have to have a spare duty uniform brought out to him somewhere. Of course he didn’t know where he was going to be. This was a mess, he thought.

  His phone buzzed. It was the signals team. Thank God, thought Einar as he answered it. Perhaps some good news at last.

  “What have you got?” he said.

  “New SIM on the network, sir,” said the voice at the other end. “It registered, made one overseas call, then went dark again.”

  Einar felt a quick rush of adrenaline. That was his man. He had him.

  “Where?”

  “Call was placed six minutes ago, from Borgarnes.”

  “Borgarnes? Are we sure about that?”

  “Yes, sir, location near the Ring Road in central Borgarnes.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Of course you’re sure. Who did he call?”

  “Call was placed to an 800 number. It maps to a call center run by Celebrity Cruise Lines.”

  A cruise ship! Of course! There had been a huge white cruise liner docked at Skarfabakki harbor that morning, but it had left by mid-afternoon. It would be bound for Akureyri where it would spend a day before leaving Icelandic waters. That was his backup plan. He was making for Akureyri.

  “Thank you,” he told the signals team operator. “Keep watching and let me know if it activates again. And tell your team they’ve done well.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Einar slipped his phone back into his jacket and strode toward the helicopter.

  “How soon can we be airborne?” he shouted at the pilot.

  “Five minutes, sir!”

  Einar nodded and stood impatiently by as the crew topped off the tanks. He wanted to be moving, but he knew it was wise to have as much fuel as he could carry. It gave him more options, especially up north where aviation fuel would be harder to find on short notice.

  Something still bothered him. He checked his watch again. What the hell was the man doing in Borgarnes? It didn’t make sense. He couldn’t have walked all the way there. He must have gotten his hands on a car somehow. But if he had a car, he should be halfway to Akureyri by now. What was keeping him?

  As the helicopter lifted off into the pre-dawn twilight, he still couldn’t make sense of it. He wished they had a police report of a stolen car someplace. It would at least give them a make and model to look for. But at this time of night, it was likely the car’s owner wouldn’t notice it missing for hours.

  Still, they had a position and a direction now. That was something he could work with. The positions of Einar’s men were charted on a ruggedized tablet clipped to the helicopter’s bulkhead. He pulled it down. There was a blinking dot on the Ring Road in Bifröst, about 30 kilometers north of Borgarnes. He switched the radio handset to the proper frequency.

  “Spotter team eight,” he said, “Come in.”

  A moment later the radio crackled. “Team eight, sir.”

  “Stay alert. He’s coming your way.”

  “Do you have a vehicle ID, sir?” the spotter asked.

  “No,” said Einar. “But he just left Borgarnes, headed north. He should reach you in less than 30 minutes.”

  “He’ll be easy to spot, sir. There’s been no traffic at all out here but a few commercial trucks.”

  “When you spot him, contact me. Keep eyes on him and guide us in. We’re headed for your position now.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Einar closed the channel and sat back in his seat, thinking. The spotter team would pick him up. The helicopter would have him on the scene in minutes. By the time he had to report to the executive board, he’d have the man and he would have recovered the data. The brushfire event would be history, and they could focus on damage control and improving their counter-intrusion techniques.

  Still, something kept nagging at the back of his mind. What had kept him? Had he been forced to walk farther than Einar expected before he found a car to steal…or a truck?

  Commercial delivery trucks. That was what the spotters were seeing because they owned the roads at this time of night. They serviced the little grocery stores and gas stations in the settlements strung around the Ring Road. They drove from one town to the next, and then they stopped to unload cargo. It would take them longer to cover the distance than a man in a car trying to escape from pursuers.

  That was why there had been no stolen car reports to track down. He hadn’t stolen a car at all. He’d hitched a ride with a trucker. Einar pulled a map book from the pouch on the bulkhead and flipped to the appropriate page. The timing was right, he realized. A trucker who stopped in Akranes, and then again in Borgarnes, for twenty to thirty minutes in both places. Of course! Of course. They were looking for a truck.

  Chapter 10

  Driving north out of Borgarnes, August put on some old pop music and tapped happily along on the Volvo’s steering wheel.

  “No more work for a while,” he said. “No more stops until Blönduós. We can make up some time.”

  Crane sat back and stretched. Datafall’s people were probably looking for him well to the south. If Georges and the pilots had followed his instructions, they’d be out of Icelandic airspace by now. He wasn’t home fr
ee yet by any means, but he could feel the distance between himself and his pursuers opening up. Things had gone off the rails back inside the complex, but he was close to recovering it and bringing the mission home.

  Coming out of Borgarnes, the road turned eastward, and the truck rolled through mostly flat, empty land that had been carved up into large fields separated by long, straight drainage ditches. Beyond them, Crane saw low, broken hills. In the dim light he could see the bare slopes rising to an undulating ridgeline. Nothing broke the smooth line of the hilltops as far as he could see. Beyond them he could make out a line of mountains. They looked equally bare.

  “Why aren’t there any trees in Iceland?” he asked August. “Not none, but … damn close. Is it the winters?”

  “No, no,” said August. “Trees will grow. The volcanoes play hell with them.” He waved his hand at the landscape. “That’s all old lava fields out there. Good farming. But mostly, people just cut them all down back in the old days. Now we’re trying to grow them again. The government pays you to grow trees on your land. We’ll get the forests back. It will take a while, though.”

  A sound was breaking through the music, Crane realized, meshing with the beat. It took him a moment to realize what it was. Rotor blades. It was not a good sound.

  Crane swept the landscape, but saw no lights, no sign of human habitation at all. If they made him, there was nowhere for him to hide. He considered trying to stash the data tap somewhere in August’s truck, but they’d search it.

  August heard the helicopter now. He was leaning forward, peering up around the edge of the truck’s roof, trying to see it. The sound was louder now, unmistakable.

  Then, with a roar, the helicopter swept over them, lights blinking. The rotor wash shook the truck. The helicopter slewed ahead of them, turning perpendicular to the road. Crane saw the side door open, revealing a dark interior.

  “What the hell is he doing?” Einar shouted over the roaring engine. The helicopter was no more than twenty feet above the roadway, sliding sideways in front of them. Crane could see movement inside.

  Einar slowed and steered toward the shoulder. “This guy’s a madman!”

  Suddenly Crane knew with a dreadful certainty what was about to happen. He released his seatbelt and slid down into the foot well, behind the metal front of the cab. He grabbed August’s arm.

  “Get down!”

  August looked at him like he was insane, fought him to keep his grip on the wheel. Then the gunner inside the helicopter opened up and the cab exploded around them. Shattered glass rained down, smoke filled the cab. August roared in confusion and shock, and Crane felt the truck veer to the left, felt the wheels rumble off the edge of the shoulder, heard the crackle of automatic fire and the bullets slamming into the truck’s bodywork.

  The truck veered sharply back across the pavement and leaned to Crane’s left. He felt it start to tip and braced himself against the door and the seat. He caught a glimpse of August and of blood sprayed across the back wall of the cab. Bullets were still slapping into the top of the truck. Then they were rolling. Crane fell on top of August, and the noise of the helicopter engine, even the gunshots, were drowned out by the shriek of metal.

  When it stopped, Crane was jammed up against the steering wheel and the dashboard. He was lying on top of August. The dashboard lights were still on, and Crane could just make out August’s face, his blank, staring eyes. There was nothing he could do for him.

  The shooting had stopped, but he still heard the clatter of the helicopter. He kicked out the safety glass at the bottom of the spider-webbed windshield, making a hole he could crawl through.

  “I’m sorry, August,” he said. Then he grabbed his pack by one of the straps and pushed his way out onto the cold pavement.

  Crane crawled around the wrecked cab until the bulk of the truck shielded him from view, then peered back around a torn fender panel. The helicopter had landed on the road perhaps fifty yards away. The engine was still idling, the blades spinning. It was ready to lift off again on short notice.

  Then a figure jumped down from the side door and strode toward the wreck. It was a tall blond man, wearing a tuxedo of all things, and carrying a light machine gun. That was the man who had killed August. Crane studied the cruel features, burning that face into his memory.

  As the man with the gun came closer, Crane looked around desperately for some plan of action. The land was flat all around. There was no cover except a deep drainage ditch along the side of the highway. Crane had been seeing them for a while. They ran along the road and between fields, a network of them, like the Icelandic version of barbed wire fences. If he could get to it unnoticed, he could follow it away from the highway.

  Crane searched through his pack for the plastic tube with its one remaining foil pouch, then he pulled the straps over his shoulders and got ready to run. He discarded the tube and held the pouch in one hand. The smell of diesel fuel was strong. The Volvo’s tanks had ruptured when it rolled, and there was vapor in the air. It would do. Crane tore the pouch open and slapped the doughy, white ball against the nearer tank. He heard the sizzle of water boiling away from the metal, heard the tank creak as it rapidly heated.

  He ran straight down the road, away from the truck, keeping it between himself and the man with the machine gun. Then behind him, the truck went up in a loud fireball, and Crane instantly sprinted for the roadside, counting on the flash and the explosion to hide him. He dove into the ditch like he was going into a swimming pool.

  He hit the dirt hard and tumbled into cold mud at the bottom. He could hear shouting on the roadway above. Crane ignored it. The only thing he could do now was get as far away as possible and figure out what to do next.

  The ditch was maybe six feet deep. He crawled on his hands and knees through the cold, grasping muck at the bottom until he reached another ditch. This one cut off at a right angle, leading away from the road and back into the fields.

  Crane followed it. He had no idea where he was going. That would come later. He thought of poor August, whose only crime was picking up a lost hiker. He remembered the face of the man in the tuxedo.

  A lot of things would come later.

  Chapter 11

  It was twenty minutes before the volunteer fire department from Bifrost showed up. Einar and his men had gotten the fire under control and combed through the burnt-out wreckage of the truck. It was a dirty and unpleasant task. Einar’s throat burned from the thick diesel smoke. His tuxedo was a lost cause. And all just to find the body of a short, doughy man who was obviously the driver. Of the passenger who’d caused so much trouble, there wasn’t a trace. They’d searched the area to make sure he hadn’t been thrown clear. They’d poked through the charred ruins of the cab for some sign of the device he’d taken. They’d found nothing.

  Now Einar had a squad of hurriedly dressed first responders with extinguishers and rescue equipment to deal with.

  The first volunteer to reach the scene piled out of a sedate looking family sedan and rushed toward him.

  “Is anyone hurt?” he shouted.

  “The driver!” Einar shouted back. “He went very quickly. There was nothing we could do for him.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” said Einar. “We saw it burst into flame, and so we landed to see if we could help. But…” he pointed back to the smoking wreck with a gesture of resignation.

  “What are you doing out here?” the man asked in confusion.

  Einar was already retreating toward his helicopter. The device wasn’t here. The intruder had survived and gotten away with it. That was the only way it could have happened. That meant he’d done all he could do here. Any more delay was just giving his target more of a head start.

  “Geodetic survey!” he shouted and gestured toward the helicopter. “Interior ministry.”

  The man looked confused but didn’t question it. He didn’t seem to know what to think. More firefighters were arriving now, putting out t
he rest of the scattered fires, the small pools of burning fuel in the road. A bright red pickup with foam tanks in the back pulled up, and men began uncoiling hoses.

  Einar waved his men back toward the helicopter.

  “Wait,” said the volunteer fireman. He followed Einar back toward the helicopter until he decided the whirling blades were too close for comfort. “We called the police station in Borgarnes! They’ll want to talk to you.”

  Einar pointed to the gray sky growing brighter as the sun rose again. He let it vaguely suggest people rising, heading for work. “Have to clear the highway!” he shouted. “Have them contact the ministry!”

  “Geodetic survey?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly right.”

  Then Einar leapt back aboard the helicopter, and it immediately lifted off into the gray morning. Einar looked down as the ground receded. A cluster of confused firemen looked back up at the helicopter, no doubt wondering why the interior ministry would have sent a man in a tuxedo out in a helicopter to do mapping work by night.

  Smoke still rose from the charred wreck of the truck. The volunteers were spraying the engine compartment with foam. The fire had been intense. Along with the damage from the wreck, Einar hoped the explosion and fire would conceal the damage from gunfire. Datafall’s executive board was composed of very powerful people. They would be able to make all this go away. But the idea was to kill the intruder and recover or destroy the stolen data. They wouldn’t appreciate having to cover up such a public action that didn’t even get them what they wanted.

  Einar looked across the broken ground below, at the deep green and brown shades of grass. He was waiting for the pilot to ask where they were going. At the moment Einar had no idea. He glanced back one last time at the blackened mass of the truck and the tendril of smoke spiraling up from it. What a damn waste. Nothing was going his way.