by Mattias Berg
Nevertheless Ingrid and Sixten kept watch over each other with small stolen glances. Things that would never normally be noticed—except by someone whose life-long job has been to observe.
If I had kept drinking the alcohol, instead of pouring most of it into a bushy weeping fig next to where I was sitting, I’m sure I could have asked them myself, let all inhibition go. Even in Aina’s presence, I could have wondered about Ingrid and Sixten’s common history. What exactly they had together.
But I did not ask it. Not even when Aina stayed in the kitchen to take care of the dishes, she said, and the rest of us went back to the living room, shut the door and sat down next to each other on the mustard-yellow sofa; Sixten still with a brandy balloon in his hand. I in the armchair opposite.
While Ingrid took her “computer”—the same sort of portable command terminal that I had only seen Edelweiss use before—out of its small case and started it up, Sixten began his questioning. It became increasingly tough, like some sort of lie detector test without the detector.
“Tell me, Erasmus . . . you had a family, right? And left them, just like that. Because of the cause?”
His gaze was like veiled hypnosis: gentle and yet razor-sharp. I tried to catch Ingrid’s attention—she hardly looked up from the screen before answering my implied question.
“He’s snow white, Erasmus. Had the highest security clearance of us all. Including me. Only the Lord himself was more blessed.”
Ingrid continued to stare into the screen. I sensed the static in her gaze, she was on edge, like a hand grenade with the pin pulled, capable of saying anything.
I sat and said very little, hesitant. Then I went for it. Since I now had nothing else to cling to, nothing whatsoever in the entire universe—and since this man invited trust. It felt like a confession. I spoke as slowly as I could without becoming incomprehensible.
“Yes, a wife and kids. Two girls and a boy between seven and eleven. My wife gave them slightly unusual names: Unity, the boy Duality, Trinity.”
“And you’ve been deceiving that woman for all these years? Kept her in the dark as to what you were doing, even that you were in the military, living a double life? Used your research post at university—moral philosophy, wasn’t it—as your cover?”
“Yes, sir. Fully in line with regulations.”
“Of course, of course . . . But still, what a thing to have to deal with.”
Sixten looked at me again, I felt the heat of his proximity on my face. I was not sure if he meant me or Amba—but did not want to ask. In the silence, all you could hear was Ingrid clicking away at her keyboard. After what must have been a minute, Sixten poured brandy into Ingrid’s balloon and then into his own. Slowly he took a sip.
“But then you left all that behind? Wife, children, the Team, your job as Carrier of the briefcase? In the middle of this official visit to Sweden?”
“That is correct.”
“And what is your plan now?”
That was as far as I could go. Partly because I did not know how far our trust in Sixten should stretch in the present context. Partly because I had no idea myself.
Apart from the summons to meet Alpha in a fallout shelter 253.3 feet down in the bed-rock in the course of our trip to Stockholm, I had not received one single concrete detail. The rest had been an unresolved puzzle. Circumstantial evidence, some leads, more or less educated guesses.
In the end I had placed my life in Alpha’s hands. Maybe everybody’s lives, the whole of mankind’s. We two against the world.
I began to formulate an answer for Sixten. Something which would be vague enough, and not betray the fact that I knew no more than he did himself. There was a taste of blood in my mouth. Without thinking I raised my glass to my wounded lips, only to discover it was empty. Sixten poured a generous measure of brandy into his balloon and pushed it over to my side of the table. I drained it in one, felt the warmth spread through my chest, and was ready to break the silence.
If Ingrid had not got in ahead of me.
“He knows as little as you do, Sixten. I hadn’t wanted to lead any of you into temptation. Until now.”
She made a small gesture to me—and I squeezed next to her on the sofa. There was just enough room there for the three of us. She smelled of skin, and something else, maybe disinfectant following the operation. We all stared into the screen.
“This is our most satanic work of art. The only thing created by man which is a constant threat to all of his other creations. No-one can imagine its possible uses, the full consequences. Not the military. Not the politicians, the general public, not the individual. Not even me.”
Ingrid squinted at Sixten on her left, then at me, and then she looked straight ahead.
“And that is the only reason this work of art still exists. You can’t fathom its proportions: neither calculate its effects in any understandable way, nor present it to the public—without seeming alarmist or unseemly. That nobody really knows anything about the real effects of the present-day nuclear weapons system. Whether mankind could survive a world war using those means. Now that not only we, but the enemy too, have access to them.”
I blinked, my eyes tearing up from the bright light of Ingrid’s portable command terminal, and I searched my memory. The image was well-known and at the same time totally strange, as if from another era. Before the escape.
I had seen it so many times in those days, as part of Edelweiss’ repellent scenarios, the simulated nuclear weapons attacks designed to eradicate mankind; had them welded into my consciousness for more than a decade now. The warheads neatly distributed all over the globe—every one of them more powerful than the one that fell on Hiroshima. No longer just fission, splitting the atom, but now fusion too: atomic nuclei molten together in what were called “hydrogen bombs” or “thermonuclear weapons”.
And behind these neutral-sounding scientific expressions was the same process as in the sun’s incessant internal explosions. With immeasurably high temperatures and very real Doomsday potential.
Not even we in NUCLEUS had been allowed to know the exact number of our own nuclear weapons. The official figure was 7,700 of those separate, apocalyptic suns. It was reckoned the Russians had 9,500, but in our training we counted on them having significantly more. Roughly two thousand of the world’s warheads were thought to be at the highest state of alert, ready to be connected and co-ordinated in one way or another, with or against each other.
For us the real number made no difference. It was in any case far more than we needed to simulate absolutely anything.
When Ingrid pressed the keys on the terminal, red lines appeared one by one between the yellow triangles covering the world map. They showed the over-arching structure: how connections ran from or to our nuclear weapons bases, which nodes should be protected and where, and how. I tried to recall the details. It felt like a lesson from an earlier life. My head was bursting with alcohol, pain and exhaustion. Soon the whole surface of the world was covered in red lines and yellow triangles—in some places so thickly that the countries under them could hardly be seen.
Then Ingrid zoomed in on the U.S. All places I knew in my sleep, every foot both above and beneath the surface. The tunnels we had run, crept and wormed our way through. Trained all day long to prepare for what was called “Unauthorized nuclear weapons launch”. First to protect, and then to counter-attack, with our own Doomsday tools.
There were now no longer any names on the screen, but they were not necessary: just a number of angry yellow warning triangles. During our first week in West Point’s sealed wing we had to learn by heart everything about our seven nuclear weapons bases. Rattle off their geographical locations, mark them on a skeleton map, learn everything about manning and threats and alarm systems, so we would be able to recite it all, as Edelweiss put it, even when unconscious.
So the letters popped up automatically in my mind. It tended to arrange everything in sequences of three, just like the nuclear weapons code
s or the sets of genes in living organisms. From east to west the initials of the active bases’ names and states produced SJN CWM BLM NDW WMM KW—standing for the air force bases Seymour Johnson in North Carolina, Whiteman in Missouri and Barksdale in Louisiana, the missile bases Minot in North Dakota, Warren in Wyoming and Malmstrom in Montana and the Kitsap submarine base up in the north-west corner of Washington State. From north to south the sequence was MND KWM MWW WMS JNC BL.
Then Ingrid zoomed out from the map, followed the red lines from one continent to the next. When she zoomed in again, on Europe, the names of our active nuclear weapons bases there came to my mind as readily.
Running from the south, the initials of the bases and countries hosting nuclear weapons for us read ITG TIA IRG BGK BBV HLU K. In other words Incirlik in Turkey, Ghedi Torre in Italy, Aviano in Italy, Ramstein in Germany, Büchel in Germany, Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Volkel in Holland and Lakenheath in the United Kingdom. From the west, LUK KBB VHB GRG GTI AII T.
When Ingrid had zoomed in far enough, I could see that some of the lines on her map were dotted. Two of them ran from Kleine Brogel in Belgium to each of Volkel in Holland and Büchel in Germany.
The rest of these lines went to two places which I did not know of as nuclear weapons bases—altogether different locations, marked on the map with black crosses. One in the southernmost part of Europe, on the tip of Italy, in this resolution perhaps Calabria, possibly Sicily. The other in the far north of Norway, possibly in Sweden: in any event, a long way inside the Arctic Circle. From each cross, a thin dotted blue line connected to the yellow triangles all over the world, all of our nuclear weapons bases.
I had never seen that link—and had absolutely no idea what it could represent. To judge from Sixten’s reaction, he too was in the dark. At last she started to explain:
“So, I’ve been tampering with our own global system. Pushing the nodes around. Reprogramming the system of connections. Day and night, over many years, whole decades. Baudelaire would probably have called them correspondences, all these secret underground linkages. I prefer to call it all the Nuclear Family. In any case, it’s now impossible for those back home, on the other side of the Atlantic, to tinker with the structure. There’s quite simply no longer any living being who can work out what will happen when one goes into the nuclear weapons system at any particular point: for example, tries to disconnect your briefcase, Erasmus. Not those who are pursuing us, not the President, not you, scarcely even me. But the risks of trying it are far greater than the upside. That’s the only thing I can guarantee.”
In the silence, I could hear Aina bustling about in the kitchen, the gentle clatter of dishes, the dishwasher being started up. Doors in modern houses are rarely well sound-proofed—although these ones might have been reinforced. Ingrid lowered her voice further.
“But I didn’t manage to finish all the preparations before we were forced to leave. So you see that some of the lines are still dashed or dotted. What we now need is some peace and quiet, here in our safe haven, plus a few field trips sooner or later. Then with Erasmus I can conclude the work.”
I turned to her. Saw how she licked the corners of her mouth: her stitches too must have broken open.
“The idea therefore,” she said, “is first to link up each of these points and lines, our hellish charges across the globe, to complete the circle—and then to disconnect them all at one and the same time. To short-circuit the whole damned Nuclear Family in one blessed moment.”
I closed my eyes, could clearly hear Aina humming. Unless it was my imagination.
“And that will be the end of the system. Every single circuit burned out from the inside. Can you imagine how complicated it would be to reconstruct? No politician would be able to push anything like that through, given what it would cost, given the ethical complications. For nearly half a century now this has been like a secret little movement. A number of people in the know have been involved from the ground up, contributed their little bit to ensure that the system appears watertight from the outside, but with significant cracks within. Waiting for someone to have the technology one day to bring all these invisible weaknesses together: to come as a savior. Or as several saviors.”
Sixten gave a little cough. Poured the last of the brandy into his balloon glass. Took a swallow before putting his question.
“But doesn’t that sort of . . . linkage exist? Isn’t it possible now to fire off America’s nuclear weapons all over the world? I reckon that quite a few of us were under that impression. But we’ve been imagining it?”
“No—and yes. Never before have the connections been put together in this way: fully mobile-driven. Beyond their control, without any of the networks passing through Centcom.”
“And the other briefcases? The Vice President’s, the Secretary of Defense’s?”
“Already disconnected, Sixten. The moment Air Force One became airborne on the way here, to your and my little promised land. Only the angels on high were watching it happening.”
Ingrid turned from the screen and gave each of us a triumphant look, as if expecting applause.
“That will bring to an end the era of nuclear weapons. The first epoch in mankind’s cultural history in which it could have destroyed its own species unopposed.”
Sixten seemed as dumbfounded as I was. He emptied his brandy glass before asking the obvious question.
“But what did you have in mind for the rest of the world, Ingrid? Russia? North Korea? Iran? It seems to me that America would be a lame duck if your plan really were carried through. Open goal for the first long-range ballistic missile that comes along, if I understand you.”
“We’ll deal with that as soon as we’re done with the U.S. and its European allies: the rest of the global contact net has already been rigged. The future has to begin somewhere, after all. In any case, everything’s going to look perfectly normal on the screens, like a magic mirror—we’ve spent decades building up a parallel fictitious system. Not even the most realistic training exercises will reveal anything out of the ordinary. Not until we’re about to fire off nuclear weapons for real, in a crisis, for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And at that point it won’t be possible.”
I swallowed, with some difficulty. Ingrid’s plan was insane, of course. Grandiose, deadly dangerous for us all, for the whole of mankind. I had known nothing about what lay ahead, what sort of plan Alpha had made for us following the escape. Yet I did not believe even her about all this. I could feel how she was looking at me from the side, scrutinizing me, trying to read me.
“And then we’ll all have to say our very best prayers that no-one manages to capture our souls. To make us do the exact opposite in that lonely little moment when everything is to be unplugged—and fire off the whole system instead. Because all of the weapons have to be put online for them to be short-circuited, all of our thousands of warheads across Europe and the U.S. The weight of all creation will be on our shoulders alone. Do you think you can cope with that, Erasmus?”
She could sense my doubt even though I said nothing. The smell of adrenaline, fear, which people say dogs can sniff through thick walls.
“I know, my treasure. It’s a high-risk plan. The most dangerous since the dawn of time. But to get rid of the nuclear weapons system you unfortunately need the same conceptual madness as for its introduction. Banish pain with pain.”
Again silence, thick as the velvet in the blackout curtains, these reinforced doors. I looked furtively at my watch: the time was close to zero four hundred. It had taken so long, or so little time, to understand who was leading this operation. The wide reach of just one person. Ingrid’s unimaginable impact.
Sixten cleared his throat, seemed to be having trouble keeping his voice steady.
“And what role had you envisaged for me, Ingrid? Beyond being your safe haven, as you described it?”
“That’s more than enough, Sixten. The gods are already singing your praises. There’s nowhere else in the
world where we can vanish like this, as if swallowed up by the bed-rock.”
“And you know that I don’t want to become any more involved than that, Ingrid: I’ve done my bit. This is critical for me. And it’s even more important for my wife.”
“You don’t need to say that, dear friend.”
The silence which followed was even denser, if that was possible. The noise coming from Aina out in the kitchen had stopped as well. I tried to say something, if only to break the mood—but could not find any words. In the end, Sixten continued with his questions.
“But you had somebody else with you, didn’t you? A nurse, who you nevertheless chose not to bring with you here tonight?”
“Correct. She’s very good to have along, gets things done in her own unique way. But not everybody has to know everything.”
“You’ve referred to her as just ‘J.M.’ in our contacts, Ingrid. Is there anything in the way of a real name?”
“Possibly. They say she was originally called Jesús María, a promising textile artist from some nowhere town in Mexico. But she’s been with us for ever, behind the scenes. Can transform whomever into whatever, heal and cut, likes working with human skin, but she also produces miracles out of other materials. I tend to think that textile warfare is her specialty. Mostly she tries things out on herself, is the undeclared U.S. champion of body modification. I managed to get her to come along. It wasn’t easy: Erasmus had to put on a bit of amateur theatricals on departure, simulate a sudden, momentary collapse—and you’re not exactly the most talented actor, my treasure, if you don’t mind me saying so. But in the heat of the moment, just on the way out to the helicopters, the security people did after all follow my orders that Jesús María needed to come along too, to keep Erasmus under close observation. So she got foreign travel permission. For the first time ever.”
