The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

  And it had been so long since the adrenaline last pumped through my body in this way. I enjoyed that feeling of being on edge, the watchfulness even while moving at top speed. How this natural drug made me reckless and incredibly strong.

  Ingrid was in the lead, I followed her light steps. We passed through some interior doors with unexpected ease. Despite the strategic importance of the center—the other evening, Ingrid had said, Swedish television news revealed that Esrange had made possible our latest spy satellite over the Middle East—the security personnel here too seemed to be neglecting some of their routines. After all these years without incident it was so easy to ignore, or simply forget, to seal all doors fully in accordance with regulations.

  Edelweiss had compared it to brushing one’s teeth: if you begin to neglect one single ritual, others will soon follow. He would therefore sometimes ask us to breathe on him, even in the most tense situations. In his book bad breath justified as hard a punishment as more concrete breaches of regulations.

  Most surveillance centers were also wrongly built from the start, something one only noticed if one thought offensively—like an attacker, not a defender. The guards would look out into the night, toward the gates, up into space, at all their screens. But rarely right behind their backs.

  “I’m ready,” Ingrid whispered only a few feet from the control board. Her skeletal face turning toward my devil’s mask and the guards still with their backs to us.

  “Are you, Erasmus?”

  I nodded—and in the next moment she dashed toward the hard discs, the storage center for all the launch footage the satellites sent streaming down, while I took care of both guards more or less at the same time. I pressed lightly on the soft spots behind the ears of the first one and his chin immediately sunk onto his chest, as if he had fallen asleep at his post. The second one just had time to defend himself. As he raised his hands to his head, to protect against direct blows from behind, I pinned them together and thumped his head lightly onto the control board. It does not take much to knock somebody out.

  After a few minutes, Ingrid stuck the U.S.B. into her jacket and we set off at top speed in the direction we had come. When other guards appeared with drawn weapons from a sliding door in the wall, we both stopped in mid-movement. It was Ingrid they wanted: they hardly looked at me. I stood stock-still, registering the scene around me. The flashing bright red lights, two heavily armed special guards, the alarm pumping straight into my brain.

  Edelweiss had preached that no human being can know exactly how he will react in the most critical situations. An entire life of training can’t make us absolutely sure of ourselves. “Not even you, Erasmus,” he had said. “Not even me.”

  Yet it did not take many seconds before I knew. The guards who just before had seemed so invincible, beasts straight up from the underworld with their automatic weapons pointed at Ingrid’s temples, were now more like two pitiful small beings in a terrifying medieval painting out of one of her lectures. It could have been Caravaggio, Bosch, or maybe Bruegel’s eternal struggle between heaven and hell.

  It was a moment of white fury, violence which was both uncontrolled and fully focused. First one, then the other. And I managed to tie both their arms together behind their backs, creating an impossible creature, a kind of physical paradox, so it was not clear where the one began and the other ended. It must have been a torture for them, their screams cut through my head like knives, until I managed to close the heavy and thick protective door behind us. Silence once more as we rushed out onto the enormous asphalt area, heading toward the gates.

  “You didn’t have to take them down in that way, Erasmus. Their cries alone must have activated every guard post in Norrbotten County. There was no need for an alarm,” Ingrid said when we got back into the cover of the pine trees beside the main road.

  I both nodded and shook my head. Out here you could not hear a sound from the installation, no flashing red lights could be seen, nothing to interrupt the serenity. The alarm had only gone off behind the scenes. After one mouthful of drink each, Ingrid led us a much more remote way back. One could already make out the first signs of dawn. Gradually we got our speed down to under 7 minutes per mile so as to be back in good time.

  It did not take long before the nausea washed over me. After vomiting twice in quick succession, and covering the result with snow like a dog, things improved: the ultra-violence cleared from my mind. We were back at the Snowflake by 08.43. I had time to take an ice-cold shower, rinse away the last few mental images, before we went down separately to the dining room for breakfast.

  3.05

  The day passed without any reference on the local news, either radio or T.V., to an incident at Esrange. Which was only to be expected.

  This type of break-in at a highly classified site rarely became public. Neither intruder nor those in authority had any interest in spreading information about it. Those who were called “Our new principals” on Esrange’s homepage, and who had already put a stop to the Tourist Office’s guided tours at the base, definitely did not want that.

  Come evening there was still no leak, even on encrypted specialist blogs. During dinner Ingrid said that we should celebrate.

  “With whom were you thinking?”

  I looked around the spacious dining room, at the crystal chandeliers and the murals with local motifs. As usual only she and I were sitting at the table; the Girls and Jesús María presumably came only when we had left.

  “Bettan must have gone to bed. She’s an early bird: says that the blast at 1.30 a.m. is her alarm clock. But I’m going to fetch a special guest,” she said.

  We were still standing in the Ice Queen, when Jesús María came in, like a reluctant teenager. Without a word she went behind the bar and started to mix margaritas.

  “And what are we celebrating?” she said.

  “Go on, Erasmus, tell her! Excuse me, I have to make a call,” Ingrid said and disappeared.

  Yet again: I’d been trained in all sorts of mind games, since decades back. But I still could not see through Ingrid’s strategies. I assumed that even this was some kind of test. That she would later learn from Jesús María what I had said, how much I revealed. If I really was someone worth holding by the hand as the world was ending.

  “It’s my birthday today. Fifty-one.”

  “Sorry, my poor Erasmo. You’ll have to contain yourself a few months more before celebrating. To be precise . . . 104 days, isn’t that right?”

  Jesús María must have known pretty much everything about me even before our escape. Now the two of us were alone together for the first time since she had written her message in the condensation on the train window, more than a week ago. She crunched on an ice cube from her glass, raised her eyes from her drink and looked me straight in the eye.

  “Feel nice to be able to fight a bit? This morning?”

  I kept quiet, followed my usual tactic. Let the opponent lead. Show their cards.

  “What else has the Witch said about me?”

  “Not much . . . that you have terrible memories from home.”

  “That I have a forked tongue?”

  “As distinct from Ingrid?”

  “No, seriously, Erasmo, I’ll show you.”

  As Jesús María put out her tongue, I looked down into my glass—but still managed to catch sight of a deep groove: full of glitter that might have been diamonds, but more likely cheap bling. Then I emptied my drink and put the question.

  “How come you knew my key sentence?”

  Now it was her turn to wait, to divert.

  “Did you know that some researchers see weaving as the first binary system, nine thousand goddam years ago?” she said at last.

  “That the weft thread which goes over and under the warp threads, up and down, can quite easily be transformed into digital stuff, you know: on and off, one and zero? And that’s why the loom was so perfect for industrialization—punch cards could easily communicate with them. And why machines
can knit but not crochet.”

  “So what you’re saying is that even someone like you could master coding and decryption.”

  “Exactly. And even someone like you.”

  She looked at me, long enough for it to begin to mean something.

  “But no-one can escape, Erasmo, however fast one runs. Neither you nor me. Not even Ingrid.”

  She took a piece of paper and the weed—or whatever it was—out of her pocket, put her glass down, started to roll a cigarette.

  “Ingrid’s and my paths crossed, our destinies as she would say, at an Army base on the Mexican border. There was only one other woman there at the time, in the late ’60s. Damaged goods, just as I was. Had to sew her up from inside out.”

  I looked at this strange little figure, with her cloven tongue, who could not possibly have turned forty.

  “But you can’t have been at the base at that time. You’d be at least sixty-five by now.”

  “Didn’t the Witch tell you what a good craftswoman I am?” Jesús María said as she walked out, leaving me alone in the Ice Queen.

  It must have taken at least half an hour, maybe more, before I made my way to Ingrid’s room. Knocked three times, short pause, then twice more—and finally one loud knock. The usual signal. Yet Ingrid still only opened when I whispered her name, pressed tightly to the door.

  “What did Sixten say?” I said.

  Ingrid went back to the bed and her computer, kept tapping away at the keyboard, did not seem surprised by my question.

  “They have been harassing him since our operation out at Esrange. Poor Aina too. Even Lisa.”

  Ingrid still had her eyes fixed on the screen.

  “So they’re on their way here now.”

  “Sixten and Aina?”

  “No, the others, those who are after us.”

  The bed squeaked as she got up and crossed the floor toward me, still standing just inside the door. Looked me straight in the eye.

  “Sixten is also on his way. He’s finally been given permission by Aina to become more directly involved in the cause. He’ll be here as soon as he can.”

  Perhaps I did put up some resistance when Ingrid then gently lifted the hybrid from my shoulders, took out the briefcase, laid it with the lid open on the bed next to her computer and made all the necessary preparations. Perhaps not. In any case the images appeared on the screen again: the same as when Ingrid showed me the trick a few weeks ago. Exterior and interior scenes from our intercontinental missile base at Minot. Four smaller scenes from the surveillance cameras—and one larger one in the middle, from inside the command center itself.

  Everything seemed to be normal, according to the indications at the bottom of the screen. Pressure inside the missile, humidity, alert level.

  “So now it’s our move, my treasure.”

  When Ingrid began to enter commands on her keyboard, I fell in with her rhythm, like a musician. At the same time I keyed 122 129 on the keyboard in my briefcase: the code which I had shown my mother there at the kitchen table, at the dawn of time. Which clearly became “HELP” by way of my strange key sentence.

  Our little four-hands piece had immediate effect. The green markings quickly turned to yellow, then red, as they had before. Everything felt at the same time terribly heavy and unbearably light. A soft murmuring in the deepest recesses of my mind, as if from something electric, a fan perhaps, a humming refrigerator. The launch counter was quickly spinning down to zero. The exterior images showed the wide expanses to the north, west and south of the base beginning to vibrate as the hatches in the ground opened up revealing our silos with the hundreds of ageing Minuteman-3 missiles, dinosaurs from the Cold War; as if a minor earthquake had struck. The ground shook, smoke from the ignition engines billowed over the surface.

  And despite the indicators blinking with apparent anger, the desperate warning cries which could be heard crackling through the base’s loudspeaker system, this time the events just continued to unfold. The missiles really were launched—even if they all then exploded still deeply embedded in their silos.

  The smoke spread all the same, the gas and flames quickly broadening out through the support tunnels. The missile operators in Global Strike Command ran for their lives. The body count in the screen’s bottom right-hand corner had risen to eighteen in less than a minute.

  Then Ingrid closed down the image on her portable terminal, all with a single command, which made the same happen on the screen in the lid of my briefcase. I felt her watching me—and turned to meet her gaze: that ice-gray challenge.

  “I don’t think we can cope with seeing more for now. Forgive me, my treasure. But it was in the heat of the moment.”

  3.06

  There was a painting. I had never seen it. And yet I had seen it, before my own eyes, day and night. Always carried the reproduction hidden in my combat pack.

  I had never been able to experience the original, at the Prado Museum in Madrid, because it had been to all intents and purposes impossible for me to get security clearance for private visits overseas. I knew that it was a relatively small painting—like so many other truly great works of art: not more than four feet by five and a half. Yet he had managed to include so many terrifying details in it.

  I brought it out again, the night after Ingrid’s simulated attack on Minot, to comfort me or mark my despair. There were no nuclear wars at the time of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the middle of the sixteenth century, we must assume, so he may have had second sight. The painting showed exactly what the aftermath of the big bang would look like. Scorched earth and bare trees, the feeling that nothing at all had survived, could survive, wandering skeletons milking the soul out of the few things remaining to be plundered, driving around a cart full of skulls, piles of dead bodies. Everything moreover steeped in a sickly yellow-brown tone. This was what Bruegel called “The Triumph of Death”.

  But the strangest things of all were in the painting’s bottom right-hand corner. The terror-struck people, the few still living, who together with phantoms and corpses seemed to be being herded—or themselves fleeing—into what looked very much like a railway cattle truck. And outside the open door one could see something resembling an iron cross.

  Bruegel’s painting was truly prophetic. And not just about nuclear war—also the Holocaust, the transports to the concentration camps, the killing toward the end of the Second World War.

  You must understand. But you won’t.

  Just as we had never understood, before it was too late.

  *

  On September 3, 1949, one of the American W.B.-29s patrolling the airspace beyond the Kamchatka Peninsula recorded unusual readings on its sensors. Some sort of radioactive debris had been picked up, three hundred times stronger than the established maximum safety level. Further testing determined that the radiation was caused by nuclear fission. Ten days later U.S. military experts assigned this military event the code name “Joe 1”, from Stalin’s nickname “Joe”. The Soviet Union had detonated an atom bomb.

  Barely three weeks after the radioactivity had been registered near Kamchatka, the news reached the committee of researchers and industrialists who were to decide on next steps.

  From then on it was not only a question of whether the U.S. should try to develop a weapon with perhaps one million times the explosive power of the atom bomb: with a realistic possibility of wiping out mankind. But also whether the Soviet Union would soon acquire a weapon with the same potential.

  In reply to a question about the effectiveness of this new weapon, the hydrogen bomb, General James McCormack gave this answer:

  “If all of the theory turned out to be true, you can have it any size up to the sun or thereabouts if you wanted . . . one million times more powerful than the atomic bomb.”

  True, there were theoretical problems to be overcome. Many of the scientists had not only technical but also strong ethical doubts over the development of the hydrogen bomb.

  Hans Bethe was one of thos
e scientists, another of the prominent nuclear physicists among the intellectual diaspora gathered in the U.S.to work on the atom bomb. In 1933 he lost his research post in Germany because of his Jewish heritage, and during the war became the head of the theoretical division at Los Alamos. In due course he also became an active participant in the development of what was called the thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb: what was at first only referred to in conversation as “Super”.

  Bethe went into the project with a secret hope that the technology would turn out never to function. During the intensive ethical discussions in the fall of 1949, he went for a long walk with his Austrian colleague Victor Weisskopf, across the campus of Princeton, trying to imagine the effects of a full-scale thermo-nuclear war. Much later he revealed what they had concluded:

  “We both had to agree that, after such a war, even if we were to win it, the world would not be like the world we want to preserve. We would lose the thing we were fighting for.”

  The General Advisory Report, which in 1949 eventually resulted from the intensive discussions of American researchers and industrialists on the subject of the hydrogen bomb, was also unambiguous. Thermonuclear weapons should never be developed. The atom bombs already in the U.S.’s arsenal were more than sufficient, it said, to counter even a large Soviet attack.

  “In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb,” it said, “we see a unique opportunity to provide by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus to limit the fear and to arouse the hope of mankind.”

  The continuation, in the minority report, is a classic example of applied scientific ethics: