Marin leaned forward and talked with Sasha for a moment. Sasha nodded and pointed at a couple of the lighter sections. Marin leaned back. “I think we might be able get something out of them,” he said. “Not to worry. We will let Sasha work at them for a while.”
Sasha brought up an image editing program and opened one of the murky pictures. Within a minute, he had five dialogues open and was sliding bars and clicking on buttons. He zoomed in and out of various sections, panning around the image, muttering to himself, his right knee hammering the bottom of the table. But the image remained stubbornly incoherent. He shook his head and brought up the second image, which looked equally opaque to Rygg. Sasha worked for a while on this one, zoomed out, and the image was considerably lightened. There seemed to be a curved area on the bottom right of the image, and a cluster of jagged lines to the right. Marin leaned forward and circled the lines with a finger. Sasha nodded and zoomed in so the lines filled the screen. Then he worked at clarifying, sometimes moving in so close that he was working on individual pixels, darkening one here, lightening one there. For twenty minutes, he worked while Marin and Rygg leaned forward on the bed, watching. Finally Sasha scraped his chair back and spread out his hand, palm up, and shrugged. The lines were clearer, but still made no sense to Rygg.
Marin nodded slowly. He said something in Russian. Sasha scrolled through images, and brought up the picture of the missile on the back of a truck that Rygg had seen the first day, projected onto the wall. “Zoom,” Marin said, and Sasha moved in so they were focusing on some Cyrillic text near the missile cone. He brought up the clarified image from Yuri and placed the two side by side. After some adjustment, he sat back. Marin went and crouched by the screen. Then he pointed to two sections on Yuri’s photo: a heavy, squarish line, and a triangular knob, and matched them with similar shapes on the other picture. He nodded and patted Sasha on the shoulder. Then he looked back at Rygg.
“It’s the S-400,” he murmured. He said something to Sasha, who brought up an image of four green trucks with missiles mounted on them, angled into the sky. “Russia has several types of missiles,” Marin said. “Some – the S-75, the S-200 – are babies. You can use them to kill your neighbor’s dog, maybe. And most of the missiles Russia exports are not very important. African countries buy them, Indonesia buys them, Venezuela buys them, and no one cares, because they have a range of a few miles, and they are not so accurate. But Russia also has among its missiles a queen. The S-400. They do not make many, and they are very expensive. Many people think America is only concerned for uranium, for nuclear, but a nuclear weapon is nothing if you cannot lift it.”
“Bearing capacity of twenty tons, if I remember correctly,” Rygg said. “And a range of 400 kilometers. Twice the range of the American Patriot missiles and almost ten times the reach of our Penguins.”
Marin looked at him in surprise.
“I keep track of this stuff,” Rygg told him. “So, do you think it is possible that someone is smuggling S-400s out of Russia?”
“That is what appears to be happening,” Marin said.
Sasha clicked, and they were watching one of the missiles launch, in slow motion. The fire welled at its base, and the rocket rose on a fat stamen of smoke, arcing into the blue. “Four hundred kilometers,” Torgrim said again. “That is from Brussels to London. Helsingborg to Oslo. Damascus to Jerusalem.”
April 27
Dmitri lay in his bunk. Wolfie was snoring on the floor – they took turns sleeping on the floor, and it always seemed to make Wolfie’s snore louder. It was hot, and the air that sloshed in through the open porthole was like a warm washcloth against his cheek. They had been on the ship for a month, all but one day of which had been under the hijackers, and a couple of the crew had started to go crazy.
The day before yesterday, Jonas had begun weeping in the middle of supper. The crew ate in two shifts now, watched over by a couple commandos. They were not allowed to speak, and were given ten minutes to shovel in the food. Dmitri had made a stew, using a potato per person, and a few scraps of meat and carrot to fill it out. The kitchen commando supervised the doling out of the stew, making sure that each bowl received a single ladle. They were allowed a slice of bread. And suddenly, amid the clinking of the spoons and wet sounds of eating, there was a noise like someone trying not to sneeze: a rising, hiccupping whine. The clinking ceased immediately and everyone looked down to the end of the table, where Jonas sat staring into his bowl, his spoon held upright in one fist. He looked around at them, and his face brought a cold sweat into Dmitri’s palms. Jonas’s eyes were panicky. He seemed to be looking at them for help. The sobbing whines emerged from his mouth like little barks. The two commandos looked at each other. One shouted at Jonas to shut up, but Dmitri saw that he couldn’t. Jonas seemed to have lost control over his voice, and it was clearly terrifying him. One of the commandos started to step forward, but before he reached Jonas, Ludo, who was sitting two chairs away, stood and leaned across the table and grabbed Jonas’s jaw. Dmitri saw his thumb and forefinger squeezing into the stubbled skin. With his other hand, Ludo slapped Jonas’s face twice, hard. Jonas tried to look away and Ludo slapped him again and peered into his eyes. Then he let him go. Ludo sat back down and picked up his spoon and deliberately ate a mouthful. The others slowly started eating again as well. Dmitri watched Jonas, whose hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t control the spoon. Tears fell into the stew, but at least he had stopped the horrible sound.
That afternoon, while they were preparing supper, the kitchen commando was called away, and Ilya and Dmitri whispered furiously together, leaning over the bread dough. Ilya told him that Jonas had lost it completely after he returned to the cabin: he’d started throwing his clothes out the window, and one of the commandos had given him an injection. Jonas was now comatose in the hold. “It’s too hot,” Ilya whispered. “It’s too hot, and there’s no end to this voyage. More sailors are going to go nuts, watch out.”
“Do you know where we are?” Dmitri asked.
“The captain won’t say – he’s trying to protect us. But we passed the Dover cliffs a couple of days ago and are heading south by southwest. So I’m guessing we’re in the Atlantic, somewhere off the coast of Africa.”
“Why the Atlantic?”
“Less traffic, less communications noise. And we’re out of territorial waters. Did you notice that the commandos were tense as we moved past Dover, then seemed to relax a bit? Or some of them were – the tattooed guys don’t seem to know what’s up. Ludo thinks they must have pulled something to get us past the coastguard stations.”
“Is it possible to put out a false AIS?”
“That’s what I asked, and the captain told me to shut up. He knows, but he’s protecting us. It’s safer if we’re ignorant.”
“I can’t understand. If they’re after the goods, why wouldn’t they take us to a port? How are they going to offload the ship in the middle of the Atlantic?”
“Maybe they’re after a ransom.”
“Ransom? They might get twenty rubles out of my mother. And I can’t believe you’re worth much more.”
“I’m a fucking orphan, man, no one’s going to give a shit about my skinny ass. I know what you’re saying, though. Something’s up, and it’s not normal. We can’t figure it out. I think the captain knows, but he’s not going to say a word.”
The commandos also seemed to be affected by the sweltering heat and the dreary days. Dmitri had heard a few more sharp words than normal, and he’d seen one of the elites push one of the Siberians down the stairs. And then, this morning, as he was going to the galley, he’d seen three of the Siberians talking together. The kitchen commando had dispersed them with a short: “Back to stations!”
Lying in bed, sopping with sweat, he wondered if it would ever end. Already, Kaliningrad seemed like a past life. It was strange how tedious the routine had become. However, he was unprepared for the havoc the morning would bring.
It was mid-mo
rning, and Dmitri and Ilya were making bread, kneading the dough in two huge, separate batches. Dmitri slowly became aware that the murmur of voices from the deck was growing louder. The kitchen commando ran off, and Ilya crept up to the top of the steps, with Dmitri telling him to be careful. But the shouting rapidly crescendoed, and Ilya motioned him to come up. Dmitri crawled up the stairs and cautiously poked his head out above Ilya’s. Four commandos were in the glassed control room: two elites and two Siberians. The Siberians were shouting at the elites, and one of them brandished his machine gun over his head. Dmitri caught the word ‘drugs’ and something about time. But as they watched, three more elites dashed onto the deck and up the stairs. One kicked his way through the door and, with the butt of his gun, bashed the shouting Siberian on the back of the neck. The commando crumpled immediately, dropping below the edge of the window, and there was a moment of complete silence. Dmitri immediately slithered back down the stairs, but Ilya kept watching. Dmitri heard a series of bumps, as though someone was beating on the metal deck with a mallet. After an interval of a minute, there was a splash. Immediately, Ilya slid down into the galley, and started kneading the dough violently.
“What was it?” Dmitri whispered. “What happened?”
But Ilya jerked his elbow into his ribs, and he realized that the kitchen commando was at his post again.
Not until the next morning did he find out what had happened: the shouting commando had been dragged down the stairs by his heels. His clothes were stripped off him and he was dumped overboard. But by that time, Dmitri had already figured out that dynamics had shifted on board. The gray brothers, who up until now had eaten with the rest of the crew, though they had their own room together, had suddenly joined the commandos. At breakfast, Alexei, the tall brother, was watching over them, with one of the elites. Two of the Siberians seemed to have been relegated to crewmember status, because they were sitting with them at the table. One bore an enormous, messy bruise on his cheekbone. The skin had split and was curled back from the wound. The other’s hand was bandaged. They ate sullenly, not looking up from their plates.
April 29
Rygg slept from seven-thirty in the evening to six-thirty the next morning, and woke feeling as though he’d been fused to the cot. He pried himself loose and stumbled out to the main room. It was empty, but there was the ever-present coffee pot on the table. Through the window, he saw Marin sitting on the top rung of the fence like a schoolboy, looking up at the mountains. Steam rose from one fist, smoke from the other.
Rygg joined him. He leaned his elbows on the splintery wood and sipped his coffee. “You’re up early,” he said and Marin laughed shortly. Rygg looked at him. Marin’s face was grayer than usual, and his eyes were sunk in pockets of purple shadow. “You haven’t been to sleep, have you?” Rygg accused.
Marin dropped his butt on the ground. He took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and tapped one up and lit it. There were five butts on the scuffed earth beneath the fence.
“Sasha and I were doing some investigations in the night,” he said. “We got onto a trail, and had to find out where it led.”
“And where did it lead?”
Marin did not answer for a minute. He sipped his coffee, then set the mug on the post beside him.
“Torgrim,” he said. “You arrived for me like an angel, in the square, in Orfeoplatz. I owe you my life. And now you have given us a greater gift. Your work in Hamburg has shown us what we are dealing with. This is news of enormous importance, I can assure you. However, it is also very dangerous. Simply the knowledge that twelve S-400 missiles are on the ship is like a target posted to your back. And now, I am afraid, they know who you are. They know your name, they know your work, they know everything about you. What Sasha was able to discover they will be able to discover, easily. Except, perhaps, your whereabouts at this minute.”
“What are you saying?”
“I am saying that I have put your life in danger, and I am distressed and sorry.”
Rygg shrugged. “I’ve been through worse,” he said. “I’ll deal with it.”
Marin seemed not to have heard him. “However, we have put in place some measures.”
“Yes?”
“There are … we have done some things – ‘pulled some strings’, I think the English say – to demonstrate that you were not in Hamburg.”
“They were in the hotel room, Marin. It’s over.”
“Already the records of your stay at the hotel have been wiped. We have intercepted a message from their Hamburg agent – in fact, the woman who came after you on Speicherstadt – and altered it slightly, to the effect that she was mistaken. It was not in fact Torgrim Rygg she saw outside the Café Mendelssohn, but a man with a mustache and yellow hair. We have provided evidence that you were at a meeting in Langenfelde.”
“Jøss! You can do that?”
“There is no privacy anymore, as I told you.”
“So I’m in the clear?”
“As clear as we can make it. The funds have been transferred to your account. You will find an airline ticket to Oslo in your suitcase.”
“For when?”
“For this evening.”
Rygg was silent. He held the mug against his lower lip, letting the steam waft up against his cheek. A breeze had risen, and the spume of cloud along the snowcaps was already eroding. It was going to be a pretty day.
“Is that what you were doing all night?”
“No, we accomplished this in the evening.”
“So what kept you up?”
Marin got down from his perch. He leaned back against the fence and crossed his arms. “Now that you are no longer in our employ, so to speak, Torgrim,” he said, “I do not wish to further encumber you. You know, better than me perhaps, that information is the equivalent of a weapon. Like a bomb in your pocket.”
“Slutt å kødde. Don’t fuck around with me, Marin. You’re onto something, aren’t you? Tell me what it is.”
Marin nodded. “We are onto something.”
“And you’re not going to let me in on it?”
Marin shook his head.
“But the pictures,” Rygg said. “Yuri’s photo. Wasn’t that enough? You know it’s the S-400.”
“In my line of journalism it is not enough, I am afraid. Images, and especially digital images, are not considered evidence these days. I am certain that the Alpensturm is carrying a load of twelve S-400 missiles. But before I make my report, I need to know who is behind the transaction, and where the shipment is heading.”
Rygg looked up at the mountains again. A sudden image of the gray screen in his cubicle at Aker Brygge, the scrolling numbers, floated against the backdrop of clouds and forest. It made him nauseous to think of flying back into Oslo, jerking with the traffic along the highway to Drammen, past the silos and old factories, to his grim apartment. Suddenly he heaved himself free of the fence and stood before Marin.
“I’m not going back,” he said. He brandished his mug at Marin, who looked very small and pale in the sunshine.
“I think you will be safe; do not worry.”
“You don’t understand. I’m not going back there. You need someone. You need someone like me, someone with my experience. Someone with my background. Someone anonymous – that’s what you said.”
“You are not anonymous any longer.”
“I’m with you now, Marko. I’m involved. You can’t get rid of me.”
“But your job—”
“Drit i det. Fuck that. I’m not going back to that hellhole. I’ve decided that for sure.”
Marin looked up at him, and within his haggard face his eyes were bright. “I will not deceive you, Torgrim. Some part of me wished you would stay with us. But I did not have a very big hope.”
“I’m yours for as long as you need me. Let’s get this job done.”
Over breakfast, Marin told Rygg and Lena what they had discovered during the night.
“Before you left, I told yo
u that the Alpensturm had reappeared in the Dover straits.”
“I remember that,” Rygg said.
“It reappeared for a few hours, long enough to give a signal, and then disappeared again.”
“So how does that help us?”
“Well, it informs us that the ship is heading south, as I told you, and probably into the Mediterranean. But what we have been working at for the last five days is trying to establish the identity of the spotter.”
“Spotter?” Rygg asked. “Like the guy who assigns targets for the sniper?”
Marin had dismantled a piece of bread, pulling off the crusts. He shook his head without looking up. He dabbed his hand along the edge of the bread. “Along the English coast, a leftover from World War II, there are several watching stations. They look out to sea and check the identity of the passing ships. Each is staffed by spotters, who work in shifts. At any time, one spotter is on duty. They have a nice life, I think – like the life of a lighthouse keeper. Maybe a bit lonely. They read their books, they drink their tea, they look out at the waves, and when a ship passes they record the number.”
“Can you get for me this work?” Lena asked.
Marin looked at her and put a hand tenderly over hers. “Lena is a bit stressed up.”
“Stressed out.”
“Stressed out, yes. She thinks I should take a break. A holiday. But there is no time. No time.” He said something to her in Russian and she looked down at her cup, then out the window.
Marin went on. “Now, we found the station which received the signal from the Alpensturm. Okay. And we have been trying to discover who the person on duty that evening was. Finally yesterday we found out that it was a woman named Ann Devonshire. She is forty-one, she has worked at this job for five years. She lives in Dover town, she has two Labradors that she walks along the cliffs and she likes to play Scrabble with her friend. Quite a normal person. And, like many quiet English ladies, she takes her holidays in England. She goes to Lake Windermere for a week, or to Cornwall. Once, for an adventure, she went on a holiday to Paris. For one weekend, only. This occurred three years ago, but she mentions it in many of her emails even now.”
Chasing the Storm Page 8
