Chasing the Storm

by Martin Molsted

  Marin took a sip of his beer.

  Rygg shook his head slowly. “You are a cold-blooded fucker, did you know that, Marko?”

  “Everything was necessity.”

  “Okay. Okay. I see that you’ve been ahead of everyone here, including Sokolov. But there’s still something I’m not getting.”

  “What is that?”

  “Why did Sokolov let you publish? Why didn’t he nab you before that? Or have Sasha knock you off?”

  Marin nodded. “This, of course, is why we are in Bujumbura,” he said. “This afternoon we have an appointment to meet someone who will have very interesting information for us.”

  “Who is it?” Lena asked.

  “His name is Dmitri.”

  After lunch, they took a taxi up into the hills behind Bujumbura, winding through mango groves and little coffee plantations. They went through three checkpoints – just ropes stretched across the road, manned by drunken soldiers, who haggled with the driver for a few minutes, until he slipped some cash into their hands. At intervals, battered vans passed them. Behind every van, clinging to door handles and hinges, were bicyclists with stems of green bananas on their heads. And occasionally, unburdened bicyclists would zip past them in the opposite direction, huge cigarettes of raw tobacco twisted into corn husks clenched between their teeth.

  Soon the air was cooler, and they passed girls holding out baskets containing mushrooms as big as their heads. The hills were a patchwork of little cultivated plots and thatched huts, between which women walked with babies strapped to their backs and baskets on their heads: storybook Africa. After forty minutes or so, they got to a town called Gitega. There was a central market filled with goats and squawking chickens and hillocks of beans spread on burlap sacking. Marin gave the driver directions in French, and they moved through the town, to a hill on its outskirts. On top of the hill, behind a fence of bamboo slats, was a bungalow of cut stone. A tree with flowers like flames leaned over its tiled roof. The lawn was perfectly trimmed.

  They crunched over the gravel driveway, got out of the car, and went up to the door. Marin knocked cautiously. An improbably beautiful woman opened it. She was tall and willowy, with sepia skin and sleepy eyes. “Oui?” she said. “Je peux vous aider?”

  Marin told her that they were there to see Dmitri and she shrugged. “Attendez,” she said. And a moment later, a boy who looked to be in his late teens came to the door. He had an unruly thatch of blond hair, but his eyes were older than his face. Rygg thought he recognized him from somewhere, but couldn’t think where. The boy stood looking at them for a minute, his hand on the doorknob, as though he were thinking about shutting it again. Then he sighed and stood back.

  He led them right through the house, which was decorated with masks and spears and delicately carven bas reliefs of Burundian village scenes, and out double doors onto a veranda. Cane chairs were scattered around a low glass-topped table. The view, past the lawn and a couple bougainvillea bushes, was spectacular: hills receding into the distance, every shade of blue, with tendrils of smoke rising here and there. “Nice,” said Rygg, standing at the edge of the veranda and looking out.

  Dmitri smiled at him and suddenly Rygg snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “I know,” he said. “I’ve got it! You were the boy in that picture with Yuri.”

  “What?” said Marin.

  “You remember. One of those pictures we got from Yuri, he was standing in front of the boat, with another sailor.”

  Dmitri nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yuri was my friend. You know him?”

  “I met him,” Rygg said.

  “And how is he?”

  “Uh … he’s dead, I’m afraid. He was shot in Hamburg.”

  Dmitri’s mouth worked, and he looked as if he were going to start crying.

  “Sorry, man,” Rygg said.

  It took a couple minutes before Dmitri was able to look up at them. “I am sorry,” he said. “I am still … it is still difficult for me. I am emotional. What would you like to drink?”

  The willowy girl brought them vodka and fresh passion fruit juice and set out a platter of cheeses and crackers. Dmitri poured and handed out glasses. Then he sat back and looked at Marin.

  “So,” he said. “The agreement?”

  “Yes. I will make sure that your mother and brother are moved to a new house in Kaliningrad and that your mother receives the treatment she needs.”

  “And there is no possibility that my name will be connected with your report?”

  “None.”

  Dmitri nibbled at a slice of gruyère thoughtfully, looking out at the hills. “This is Ludo’s place,” he said. “But I think I’ll find my own, close by. It’s nice here. I like waking up in the morning and drinking my coffee looking out at the hills. The girls are pretty. I might start a small coffee farm. Burundian coffee is the best, did you know that? Twenty dollars a kilo on the international market.”

  “You deserve it,” said Marin. “After what you’ve been through, you deserve everything.”

  “Okay,” Dmitri said. “Okay. I’ve read your reports, of course, like everyone else. You did amazing work, I have to say. Amazing.”

  “I thank you.” Marin lit a cigarette and sat back.

  “It was just over a week ago, wasn’t it? Just over a week ago that we got into Larnaca port. I’ve been here for five days, but already it seems like a lifetime.” He paused, and looked out at the hills again. Then he sighed. “Your report made a lot of sense. I read it the day after we got off the boat – we all read it. The Siberians were used as scapegoats, to allow the Israelis to escape detection. Yes. The missiles were headed to Iran. Yes. A deal was done between Israel and Russia to allow them to return the missiles without the international attention. Yes. But then …”

  Marin just smoked and watched him. Inside the house, some busy, guitar-heavy music was playing on a scratchy radio.

  Looking out at the hills, Dmitri told his story. He and the rest of the crew had been put up in a nice hotel in the center of the city. The agents watched them, but didn’t seem that concerned – they’d all signed the agreement. Anyway, what motivation did they have to release the information? Dmitri had a room with Ilya. He was unpacking his bag, after the first night, and realized that he had forgotten his cross – the little silver cross with a few bits of amber that had been his grandfather’s and then his father’s. It had been through two wars. He’d forgotten it on a hook in the galley. He told Ilya and was in some distress. Ilya, always a bit crazy, said he’d cover for Dmitri if he wanted to slip out. So that night, they made a fake Dmitri under the sheet, with a rolled carpet and a mop. And about two in the morning, he climbed across three balconies, around to the fire escape, and down to the street. He wandered down to the port – he still had his pass – they hadn’t thought to take it away. He went in, expecting to see all kinds of guards around the Alpensturm, or at any rate the journalists, but the Alpensturm wasn’t there.”

  Marin leaned forward abruptly. “What?” he said.

  “It wasn’t there,” Dmitri repeated. “Berth 42C. Nothing. Empty. Well, I guessed it had sailed – where to I couldn’t imagine, and with what crew. I was sad, because the cross was precious to me. But I shrugged and started walking back along the wharf.”

  Dmitri looked at his guests, smiling gently at them. “I was about to go out of the gate again, when I saw something. Right at the far end of the port, over where the beat-up ships got worked on there were always a couple half-sunk hulks. I saw a little cluster of aerials. And I knew those aerials, the way you know a friend from his walk, even from a distance. Keeping to the shadows, I crept up to the ship. Sure enough, it was the Alpensturm – I could have sworn to it. Same portholes, same size. But the name was painted out. They’d moved the ship and changed her name to the Diana.”

  Dmitri went on to share how he was crouching behind a dumpster, looking at the ship, wondering if it would be safe to try to get on board, when a truck drove in – one of th
ose monsters they use for cargo. It parked right beside the ship and turned the lights off. Then they started to offload the truck. But in the dark. “In the fucking dark.” Dmitri shook his head. “Usually we have spotlights all over. But even the port lights beside the ship were off. There was just the yellow beacon on the top aerial. I couldn’t see who was doing the work, or what exactly they were loading, except that they needed a crane. There were twelve objects. I don’t know what they were – they were long, that was all I could see.”

  “How long?” Marin interjected.

  Dmitri shrugged. “Maybe twice as tall as a man. I couldn’t say for sure. It was dark, as I said. Anyway, I stayed until they got them all on board and the truck drove off again. Then I went back to the hotel. Things were looking fishy and I wasn’t going to risk my life for a cross.” He glanced at Marin, with an almost pleading look in his eyes.

  Marin leaned forward and slowly spread some camembert on a cracker, getting it out to the edges, making sure it was just right. While they all watched him, he ate it slowly, then washed it down with a swig of vodka and brushed a crumb from his finger. He looked as if he was going to say something. But suddenly he began to laugh. In the month and a half he’d known him, Rygg couldn’t remember seeing Marin laugh before – certainly not with this abandon anyway. He had a pleasant, easy laugh that crinkled the corners of his eyes. Throwing his head back, he closed his eyes, let his arms hang loose by his sides, and just laughed and laughed. And after a minute, they joined him, even Dmitri, though they hardly knew why.

  Finally Marin dropped his head and clasped his hands across his chest. He shook his head. “Sokolov,” he said. “Sokolov.”

  “What is it, Marko?” Lena asked.

  “We were outmaneuvered. It was a chess game. I thought I had achieved checkmate, but he had the last move. And we lost.”

  “Tell us,” she gently urged.

  “Haven’t you seen? This is why Sokolov needed us. We were part of the game; we were on his side the whole time. And what a strange and beautiful place to put the last piece of the puzzle into place.” He stretched out a hand to the hills and the smoke from his cigarette joined the tendrils rising out there. “The center of Africa.”

  “Marko …” Lena said tenderly.

  He nodded. “Okay. Sokolov played it almost straight. As straight as he could, really, without giving the game away. He watched me gather the information, piece things together. Yuri, Ann Devonshire, the Ministry of Defense. With Sasha feeding him the information it was almost absurdly easy. There were a couple things that threw him off. Your involvement, of course, Torgrim. But he was able to adjust admirably to the changing situation. He knew that I would begin to suspect something, so in Moscow he had to come close to killing us, to convince us that he was serious. But he wasn’t prepared for your resourcefulness, Torgrim. He didn’t expect that you would escape in the resort, for example. But he dealt with it very well. Through Sasha, he could feed us little bits of information here and there. And finally, in Larnaca, I had put the puzzle together, and published it. But it was his puzzle. I was publishing his document.” He tapped the ash off his cigarette and gave a little chuckle. “You see, Sokolov knew that it would be almost impossible for Russia to get the missiles to Iran. They had tried it before, in 2004, and the ship had been taken by Mossad off Corsica. There are too many people watching. Watching the movement of weapons, watching the ports, watching the money. Mossad and the CIA have deeply infiltrated both Iran and Russia.

  “So this time, Sokolov decided on a new tactic. He would once again try to smuggle the weapons, using the same high levels of secrecy. But there was one small difference this time. One tiny difference.” He paused and looked around at them. “The weapons were not on the boat.”

  “What?” Rygg said.

  “No, you are wrong,” Dmitri waggled a finger. “Even the Siberian I spoke to—”

  Marin raised a hand. “Wait,” he said. “Listen. There were twelve shells on the Alpensturm. Twelve replicas of the S-400 missiles, identical in every way, except that they contained no explosives. Filled with cement, probably.”

  “So this whole thing has been a wild goose chase for nothing?” Rygg was completely exasperated.

  “Listen to the brilliance of Sokolov’s scheme. The simple brilliance. He knew all along that the ship would dock eventually at Larnaca port, which is only 200 kilometers from the Syrian coast. Under heavy police scrutiny, and with journalists from around the world watching and filming the whole procedure, twelve long objects are removed from the Alpensturm, transported to the airport, and loaded onto the An-124. Perfect cover. Incontrovertibly, the missiles are being returned to Russia and the whole episode is over. Mossad has won this round. But what Mossad and we and nobody else realized was that the real missiles, twelve genuine S-400s, had been flown in on the An-124. They were offloaded at the airport, presumably warehoused in a hangar.

  “The next night, when everything had blown over and all the journalists had gone home, the Alpensturm was quietly moved to another berth, and given a new name and new papers. I suppose that these were prepared long in advance. Then, in the simplest way possible, the real missiles were driven in, loaded onto what was now the Diana, and ferried across the Aegean to Syria. They have, I would guess, been in Iran for nearly a week. And nobody would have known, if it had not been for Dmitri’s grandfather’s silver-and-amber cross.”

  The three of them sat staring at Marin in stunned silence. “So in the hotel in Larnaca …” said Rygg. “When Lena and I were there with Sokolov …” He was having a hard time disentangling the real from the fake.

  Marin nodded. “That, at last, was genuine,” he said. “He would really have tortured you until he gathered the information he needed. I had published, which was what he wanted, but then he needed me out of the way, so I could not do … what I am doing now. Discovering the true evil of the plot.”

  On the way back down to Bujumbura, they hardly spoke. Rygg kept going back over the events of the last few weeks and shaking his head. “It’s not possible. Ikke faen. It’s not fucking possible,” he said, over and over. Lena sat in back with Marin, clutching his arm.

  Marin directed the taxi to drive down to a hotel along the lake and they got out. The hotel was tiny – just six rooms – and had a lawn fronting the lake. Before they went to their rooms, they walked across to the little stony beach. Two fishermen were poling an outrigger dugout, dropping a net. Kingfishers clung to the air. The sun was setting behind the Congolese mountains across the lake.

  Marin gathered a handful of stones and stood with the tips of his shoes in the water, letting the gentle waves lap over them. He cast them out into the water, watching them land with little ripples and hearing the splash from their impact.

  “So what are you going to do now?” Rygg asked him. “Are you going to publish Dmitri’s story?”

  Marin shook his head. He tossed another stone. “The missiles are in Iran. Sokolov has won.”

  “So you’re just going to let Sokolov get away with it?”

  “You asked if I was going to publish Dmitri’s story. I am not. But Sokolov … Yes, we will have to somehow deal with Sokolov …”

  “And what about you, Torgrim?” Lena asked, taking his arm. “What are you going to do now?”

  He looked out across the lake. He felt suddenly very tired. “Well, the first thing I’m going to do is have a good meal and a nice long sleep. And then, you know what I might do?”

  “What?” she asked gently.

  “I might just look up Ann Devonshire from Dover,” he said. “She was good company and I could use a Scrabble game or two.”

  Lena laughed and laid her head on his shoulder. She grabbed Marin’s elbow with her other arm and dragged him to her. “My two men,” she said.

  “Å, fanken!” said Rygg suddenly.

  Marin and Lena looked at him in alarm. “What is it, Torgrim?” Lena asked.

  “I left Anna Karenina in the fucking ta
xi,” he said. “I only had one chapter to go.”

  Did you enjoy this novel?

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  About the author

  Martin Molsted

  Martin Molsted (aka Martin Mølsted aka Martin Mölsted) lives in a small place called Asker, between the greater cities Oslo and Drammen, Norway. He is married and lives together with his wife and two daughters. No cat. No dogs. He is an archivist, writer, and film producer.

  Chasing The Storm is his debut novel and several more are on the way.

  Visit him on http://www.molstedfiction.com

  Acknowledgements

  To my beloved wife for your knowledge, patience and love and for sticking with me through all these years, to my fantastic daughters for your endless supply of laughs, fun, pranks and love, my sister, mum and dad.

  Thanks to

  Keith, Jill and Brian for insightful advice and edits and to Dexter Petley and Harry Bingham of The Writers’ Workshop UK for great help and advice – without you there would be no novel.

  Table of Contents

  Fact

  Chapter 1

  Orfeoplatz

  Chapter 2

  Marin

  Chapter 3

  Drammen

  Chapter 4

  Croatia

  Chapter 5

  Yuri

  Chapter 6

  Speicherstadt

  Chapter 7

  Debriefing

  Chapter 8

  Paros

  Chapter 9

  Miss Devonshire’s Story

  Chapter 10

  Moscow