The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

  I did not answer, glanced at my watch. Not long to go till midnight.

  “It took about a year before we moved here. For that I will always be grateful to Ingrid: that she brought me and Aina together again in this way. To the end of time.”

  The hum from the motorway had as good as dried out. Silence crept in, you could feel it through your clothes.

  “So how was it for you, Erasmus? Was it the double life, all the lies to your wife and kids, which eventually reached their natural limit? Or the cause itself? I know it’s often a combination of different factors—but still, could you pick out any one thing that finally got you to take this rather grandiose decision?”

  I had been expecting the question. Knew that even genuine confidences are barter goods of sorts: you have to give in order to get. For a moment I was quite sure that I was about to say something decisive and irrevocable. About the long-faded sessions with Ingrid on my dissertation, about how the decision had grown imperceptibly, seemingly beyond my control.

  Then the icy cold returned, the shivering through my whole body. He may have thought that I was only shrugging.

  “It was no doubt as you say, Sixten: a combination of factors, hard to distinguish one from another. But I’m starting to get a bit cold. Can we move a little, do you think?”

  2.10

  I tightened the straps on the hybrid, looking for that weightlessness, and frequently had to adjust the balance as Sixten increased our pace. First to less than ten minutes per mile, then steadily nearer to eight. Maybe to test me, two runners competing with each other, to see what I was capable of, even in my current condition. Or perhaps to warm me up again.

  But my body did not respond anywhere near as well as I would have liked. Even when the pressure was on, regulations prescribed at least fourteen days of rehabilitation after surgery or physical trauma, although in practice that was seldom possible.

  The sentry box on the far side of the wooded area made me start, instinctively, feeling exposed. I glanced at Sixten. The area within the gates was bathed in a sharp yellow light.

  “You can relax, Erasmus. The box has been unmanned for decades. The construction company puts up the spotlights, to scare away the kids who play here in the evenings—and the night watchman doesn’t start his rounds for another hour.”

  I checked my watch again: just past midnight. Then we squatted to get under the bars and stopped in front of two low barrack buildings with peeling gray paint.

  “So here it is: the scene of the crime. The facilities for all of those who worked on the nuclear weapons program at the National Defense Research Institute, the F.O.A., a maximum of two thousand people in the mid ’60s. On your left you have the Women’s Building and on your right the significantly bigger Men’s Building. But most of us with high security clearance were stationed deep underground.”

  We walked a long curve through the area, with Sixten a step or two in front. Outside the half-collapsed fence behind the barracks there was a smaller section of forest. On the top of the slope above it one could make out a building covered in plastic sheeting. He nodded up at it.

  “The Office. They’re going to turn the whole site into an independent school. You’ve come in the nick of time to see anything at all.”

  Sixten ran ahead, ducked through a hole in the fence. After that the forest path became extremely steep, in fact almost too much for me to handle, more climbing than running. It cannot have been anyone’s plan that people come this way.

  Once we had got up onto the illuminated asphalt-covered space, which would probably be the schoolyard when the conversion was finished, Sixten led us into the gloom beyond the reach of the spotlights. Up to the electricity box next to some flat cables by the darkened building’s emergency exit. After he had keyed in the code on the concealed set of buttons, again eight beeps, the double doors opened and the floor inside was bathed in light.

  “Excuse the mess, Erasmus. They had to check the levels of radioactivity in here: how much was literally in the walls.”

  What we saw, squinting against the light, was demolished offices on either side of the corridor. Rooms lay ruined to the right and left, only the most basic elements remained, plaster was splitting from the ceiling, whole sheets of it fallen, holes smashed in the partitions with a sledgehammer.

  Sixten made his way purposefully through the familiar corridor—and turned around with a little smile when we had emerged into a sort of wrecked light-well with at least fifteen feet of clearance up to the ceiling.

  “But there’s one thing the vandals haven’t got at yet.”

  He clambered nimbly in behind a mound of debris to the enormous, white-painted wall and waved at me to follow.

  “Do you see anything, Erasmus?”

  I looked for the usual signs: developing cracks, uneven surfaces—or perhaps in this chaos, any sign at all of structure.

  “Nothing. What are we looking for?”

  Sixten took off his backpack and got out a multi-purpose tool—which he stuck straight into the bottom right-hand corner of the wall. As soon as he began to dig around in there, plaster flakes fell away in a puff of crumbs and dust.

  “A trifle, of course, artistically speaking. Although Ingrid said that she had never seen anything more beautiful.”

  In what had now become visible of a naïve painting, one could see four people in green protective suits busy with a decontamination operation after a radiation accident, or possibly a nuclear weapons test. Sixten continued to uncover more and more of the fresco. Large pieces, sometimes a whole hand-sized section of plaster in one go.

  “So far as I know, nobody else was aware of who painted this, although the signature should have been a clue, what with all the cryptological talent concentrated here. But it was only Ingrid and I who were up so late at the Office—and it didn’t take me much more than a couple of weeks of intensive night-time work, while we still had some sort of free time. And then we disappeared down underground like mountain trolls. Lived pretty much furthest down on the laboratory levels for many years after that.”

  From the time Sixten managed to pull away the first piece of plasterboard, it took no more than a quarter of an hour before the whole enormous mural was uncovered. It was at least thirty feet by ten, a highly revealing witness to a highly classified activity. In the bottom right-hand corner, the four decontamination workers in their protective suits formed their own little gray-green square—and on the left-hand side was a chemical section with flasks, bottles and molecules.

  But the center of the picture was devoted to the atom bomb project. Three soldiers with pocket torches were lined up alongside an imposing, stylized green missile. At the top, along most of the width of the painting, a white mushroom cloud spread out. And in the very middle of it all you could see a couple close together. He had crew-cut dark hair and brown loafers, she wore pink flat shoes and had a blond pageboy cut. The man was handing a small black box, with “F.O.A.” written on it, to the woman.

  So there was no doubt. The couple could only be Ingrid and Sixten themselves, back in the day—and it must have been a ring inside the box.

  The signature in the left-hand corner was a small cryptological masterpiece. The allusion to the nuclear weapons system, the missiles in their underground cages, created simply by combining the couple’s initials in the right way: “SILO 1962”. Sixten, Ingrid, Lundberg, Oskarsson.

  The artist observed me expectantly.

  “What do you say, Erasmus? Not too bad?”

  I kept quiet now, too: what could I say? Let my eyes continue to play across the mural.

  “The new boss of the F.O.A., who came here when the program was to be buried at the start of the ’70s, was not that amused, apparently. But the work of covering the traces had to be done in a hurry, so plasterboard would have to do.”

  Sixten stuffed the multi-purpose tool back into his backpack and took out a system camera.

  “I’ve promised Ingrid to keep a record of the painting,
before they destroy that too. We called it our ‘engagement picture’ because there was no other way for us to formalize it. Relationships of that sort were not allowed inside the organization, in theory, although we weren’t the only ones in practice.”

  He walked right up to the lovers in the center of the painting, then changed to a wide-angle lens to be able to capture the whole subject and backed away as far as he could in the light-well. Then he put away the camera and took a spray canister out of the backpack. Quickly and in a matter-of-fact way, he covered up not just the lovers in the middle but also all faces in the painting as well as the signature with a thick layer of white. Then he looked at his watch.

  “Right, job done. The night watchman will be starting his rounds soon. Which means we’ve got about thirty minutes from now before we have to be off the site.”

  My watch showed 00.52. As best I could, since he took them two steps at a time, I followed Sixten all the way up six floors.

  There was not the same scene of devastation at the top. The impression was more that it had been abandoned in great haste. The line of rusty metal desks along the right-hand wall seemed untouched since the heyday of the Swedish nuclear weapons program. Traces of the mainframe computer had been allowed to remain at the far end of the windowless corridor, beyond the two half-open, broken, electric sliding doors. Holes for the cables had been drilled into the walls.

  “Well, Erasmus, here you can see the Liaison Center: the entire, rather impressive whole which we managed to put together. All of those underground laboratories with the tunnel system and then this office above ground.”

  Sixten pulled a chair out for me by one of the metal tables in front of the perforated short wall. Then sat beside me and again started to poke around in his backpack. Got out two small packets, one for each of us, and a thermos of coffee. I tried hard to undo the sandwiches with the same care which had obviously gone into wrapping them, to follow the same procedure in reverse, without really succeeding. It was perfectionism, down to the smallest detail. The slices of liver paté lay in the exact center of the rye bread, the pickled gherkin not a knife’s edge out of line. And when he poured the still-steaming coffee into the plastic mugs, there was precisely the same level in both—as if he had used a pipette.

  Then he went on with his account. Step by step, year for year, while we stared into the holes left behind by the mainframe computer.

  “At first I mostly had to sit here and test initiation mechanisms, calculate implosion processes, long days and nights, not getting much sleep. But I was a wet-behind-the-ears engineer, don’t forget, and found pretty much all of it extremely exciting.”

  I glanced at the time, tried to get him to hurry up. Fourteen minutes left until we had to be gone.

  “Progress in the actual scientific work was quick, almost frictionless. The official designation of the S. program was “Research program for shelter and defense against atomic weapons”. And who would be opposed to that? To find out how one protects oneself against something of that sort? But the significant thing for us was the L. program, where the loading wash constructed. Everything under cover of the S. program’s smoke-screen.”

  Sixten poured the last of the coffee, again dividing it equally between the two cups, and said that public opinion began to get too hot for them, in spite of the camouflage. As early as 1956, Sweden’s National Federation of Social Democratic Women had taken a stand against the country’s nuclear weapons program, and opposition spread rapidly. When in a newspaper interview in 1957 the head of the F.O.A. openly claimed that Sweden could have its own atomic weapon in as few as six or seven years, he was promptly sacked. Popular writers, the minister of foreign affairs, all sorts of celebrities came out against the Bomb.

  I nodded with impatience, already knowing enough about all this from my dissertation.

  “But just then, in the program’s darkest hour, along comes this young girl, straight from high school in Kiruna. You could say she was a godsend. The word was that she was a master cryptologist, a natural talent, at seventeen years old. Before long she proved to be not only exceptionally good at encryption—but also at pulling the wool over people’s eyes. That applied to everybody: the most senior politicians as well as our immediate superiors. Formally she started as an assistant clerk, on salary grade F.2 if memory serves, and ended up as a departmental head. In practice, irreplaceable.”

  “Ingrid Oskarsson.”

  “Right. I should say that she could encrypt reality itself.”

  I stole another look at my watch: 01.14. Eight minutes until the time by when Sixten had said that we absolutely needed to be out of here. Yet no trace of urgency in his voice.

  “And not a peep was heard for thirty-five years. Not a word about the program: that Sweden had once planned to have its own nuclear weapons. Not a word about secret tests or underground laboratories, the F.O.A.’s actual role, before a series of articles came out in 1985. I cannot say that I was innocent of the cover-up. But Ingrid was the architect behind all these magnificent smokescreens and the shell organizations.”

  Then he looked at his watch. Perhaps now a touch of haste in the way Sixten gathered up the mugs, plates and thermos and put them in the backpack, even though he took time to fold up the sandwich paper. When we got to our feet, I had to ask about the strange pale rectangle on the wall to the left of where I had been sitting. It looked as if somebody had removed a painting from there too.

  “Yes, that’s where the control panel used to be. The one that regulated the lighting system, the diodes in the tunnels, the sliding doors up here, everything mechanical and hydraulic, all the electronics. That too disappeared without trace when the program was buried.”

  Then he pressed right there, in the very center of the empty square on the wall—which opened soundlessly. At that exact moment, when the lighting across the whole floor went out and before the wall closed behind us again, I could spot the night watchman’s torch flickering in the staircase at the far end of the corridor.

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s no big deal. Just a toy. But it is amazing how much of this still works,” Sixten replied.

  He hurried on ahead through the pitch-black stairwell, his headlamp unlit. I had to keep a firm hold of the handrail so as not to lose my footing. Once on level ground—I reckoned it to be a floor below the one we had come in on—he keyed in something on another concealed control panel, to judge from the sound. A circle opened up in the floor. Underneath, the red L.E.D.s showed the way back down into the underworld. Sixten continued his secret history while we followed the path.

  “The objective of the military authorities was that we in Sweden should produce at least ten nuclear charges annually by the end of the ’60s. Each one of them was to have an explosive force equivalent to that of the Nagasaki bomb, that’s to say ten to twelve kilotons, and rising a good deal higher than that. I assume you must be wondering how a small country like ours could have such economic muscle—and there I can say that only part of the funds came out of the government’s published means, or out of coded transfers to the F.O.A. from other bodies within the defense department. The biggest part came from our top secret financier.”

  I did not ask any follow-up questions, or did not want to reveal either my knowledge or my ignorance. At 155.5 feet below ground, the track of diodes came to an end at a massive protective steel door. Sixten pressed in the code on the control box and we passed through the shock-wave tunnel, the blast doors. Once we had passed the last lock, he gestured at the room and shook his head.

  “The Plutonium Laboratory. It was in here that our First Tier nuclear weapons program foundered.”

  The rock chamber was significantly smaller than all the other corresponding laboratories I had seen. When Sixten pushed the black rubber-covered button, the neon lights came slowly on. There might have been nobody in here for decades. The laboratory looked as if it had been theatrically left to history: one clean mug; an unused notepad; a loose elect
ric lead on a desk. A collection of props from Sweden’s dreams of becoming a nuclear weapons nation. Its new era as a great power.

  “And plutonium, especially Pu-239, is a gnarly little bastard, as you know, Erasmus. Not just the alpha particles and the impressive toxicity. Also pyrophoric to such a degree that it can ignite at any time, which at first made it troublesome for us even to handle the substance. Yet all of this was only a smokescreen.”

  Even now, I resisted my urge to ask questions. He rapidly opened and closed the protective doors to the different laboratories, sometimes with such speed that I hardly managed to see anything. From my dissertation research, I did of course recognize the terms on the signs, even in Swedish. CRITICALITY ROOM straight ahead of me, METALLURGY to the left, MECHANICAL INITIATION to the right and further along the same side NUCLEAR INITIATION. Beautiful capital letters in chrome, seemingly covered in the same red-gray gunpowder dust as in the Test Rooms. The march of history.

  We passed the air locks at the far end of the laboratory and were suddenly out in the tunnel system again, on the far side of the Plutonium Laboratory. Sixten picked up his story, in the dreamlike glow of the diodes—as the history itself grew ever more unreal.

  “And all the time we had to move ever deeper into the bed-rock. For Second and Third Tier development we needed highly specialized sites, with only the smallest number of the select few having any insight. That’s when we had the Test Rooms blasted out. 325 feet down in the bed-rock of the Fenno-Scandinavian Shield. We chose an exclusive little team of researchers, highly qualified but also sufficiently old that they would probably not be alive when the secrets leaked out, as eventually they would. So that they could never be witnesses.”

  Sixten’s voice became hoarse, almost a whisper.

  “And our researchers did die, as planned, one after the other—but much quicker than expected. Partly due to age and partly the secondary effects, I would guess. At first I admit I saw it more as a curse: something along the lines of what happened after Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened, and I just awaited my turn. But when nothing happened, I started to think about exposure times and realized that the researchers had spent far more time down there than Ingrid and I did. And when I then came down to the Test Rooms again, a year or two ago, for the first time in four decades, I got to see how dreadful the condition of the animals and humans in the display cases was. Then it wasn’t hard to imagine how the researchers had gone through the same process of systematic disintegration.”