by Mattias Berg
I kept close to Ingrid, even more so after the incident on the Luossa slope, watching everywhere for signs of Zafirah and the surviving Kurt-or-John. But there was just one other person in this terrible place: Jesús María stood stock-still and admired the work.
“I’d like to live here,” she said.
We left her in front of her namesake and went out to the Ice Bar, which was packed full of people even though only three minutes had passed since its opening at 4.00 p.m. Ingrid somehow found a place at the bar and immediately ordered a vodka cranberry. I took a Virgin Mary and as we drank slowly, I sensed a feverish energy rising in her as we waited. The wall clock of snice struck 5.00 p.m. and she stared at it, then at her cell phone.
The noise level in the bar became more oppressive with each passing minute, a strangely lustful bellowing, Sodom and Gomorrah 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle. People crowded in on all sides around our bulky packs. Played and lost crazy sums at the roulette table, cut directly from the ice of the Torne river: every time the ice ball came to a stop, there was an ear-shattering cacophony of rejoicing and dismay.
Eventually Ingrid’s cell phone did ring. Or at least it must have done—I heard nothing at all through the din. Just saw that she started, as if shot.
“Suite 325,” she then shouted in my ear with the cell phone still in her hand. Her breath was heavy with vodka cranberry.
“He’s waiting for us there. Glory be to God on high.”
When we got to the suite, there was no sign of Jesús María. On the door Sixten had put his own handwritten piece of paper over the suite’s name. It now read “ERASMUS’ MARTYRDOM”.
All these games. Sixten’s cool temperament, even in a situation like this.
I could not help but smile, recalling our first late-night dinner at Ursvik. How he, as part of his conversational performance piece, had discussed Poussin’s interpretation of the myth surrounding the saint who bore my name. How Sixten himself had apparently once hovered around “The Martyrdom of St Erasmus” at the Vatican Museum. Finally he walked away, but not being able to forget it, went back that same day. Then repeated this ritual several times during his week’s holiday. The savagery of it had made a deep impression on him. How Saint Erasmus just lay there on a bare bench while his intestines, according to the myth, were wound out of his stomach by a windlass.
Sixten was now sitting in Suite 325, in splendid solitude, facing away from us on the double bed of ice, in the darkest part of the room. He continued to play his games. Pretended to be reading a book, not even to notice our arrival.
“Ah, so there’s my knight in shining armor!” Ingrid exclaimed.
I hurried forward to take the book from his hand and gain his attention, without first studying the situation. Only close up could I make out the title: The Soft Spots. The textbook to which our instructor in extreme close combat always referred.
Then everything went haywire. People were pulling and tearing at me from different directions. Blurred contours, imprecise movements, insufficiently synchronized pressure against the spots on my temples. Confusion, some form of combat perhaps. Zafirah’s face inches above my own, the black of her eyes, without life, reflected nothing. I froze. A sharp stab to my neck as the needle pierced the vein. Slowly I started to lose consciousness, felt how the hybrid was lifted off me and my back was pressed directly onto the bare ice of the bed. I heard shouts, agitated voices, ultra-violence. Right there and yet somehow far off. As if I were under the surface, sensing everything through a tiny hole in the ice.
It took some moments before the initial numb feeling from the cold began to fade and my brain registered the pain. Just before I experienced the sensation of skin against ice, heat rather than cold, I gave Sixten another appreciative little smile. At how precisely he had managed to recreate Poussin’s painting—as a living tableau.
My own terrible martyrdom.
4
Second Down
December 2013
Peer, Belgium
4.01
That night was one long stream of visions, hallucinations, images. Lucid dreams. Beyond reality.
I was waterboarded five times in succession in the water of the wishing well, a fraction above freezing. Then I was skewered by the unicorn’s three-foot-long horn of ice—before my innards were slowly rolled up on it.
The experience of having died, if only temporarily, made the dreams worse than ever.
Not even Edelweiss had allowed us to take our practice sessions all the way. We could after all not be totally sure that the resuscitation exercises would be as effective as the killing methods. “And once you’re dead you’ll never be the same again,” he had proclaimed without a trace of a smile.
As I regained consciousness, I dreamed that I was our most lauded president and was making a speech at a top-level meeting about nuclear weapons during the early years of the Cold War.
“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable,” I began.
“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. The mere existence of modern weapons—ten million times more powerful than any that the world has ever seen, and only minutes away from any target on earth—is a source of horror, and discord and distrust.
“I speak of peace because of the new face of war. If only one thermonuclear bomb were to be dropped on any American, Russian, or any other city, whether it was launched by accident or design, by a madman or by an enemy, by a large nation or by a small one, from any corner of the world, that one bomb could release more destructive power on the inhabitants of that one helpless city than all the bombs dropped in the Second World War.
“A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than sixty minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than three hundred million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, ‘the survivors would envy the dead’. For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors.
“In an age when both sides have come to possess enough nuclear power to destroy the human race several times over, the world of communism and the world of free choice have been caught up in a vicious circle of conflicting ideologies and interests. World order will be secured only when the whole world has laid down these weapons which seem to offer us present security but threaten the future survival of the human race.
“So let us turn the world away from war. Let us make the most of this opportunity, and every opportunity, to reduce tension, to slow down the perilous nuclear arms race, and to check the world’s slide toward annihilation.”
The applause which greeted the end of my speech would not die down. I bowed, gestured to the president of the other superpower, my opponent and new partner in the dreams of disarmament.
When the congenial formal dinner was over, I met the military advisors in my room for a final polishing of our plans for a full-scale and irreversible nuclear weapons attack on the other superpower.
I took one last close look at the calculations for the devastation. Felt a warmth through my body, like endorphins after a run.
4.02
And that was my frame of mind as finally I woke up, with a smile on my lips.
It did not take too many seconds before my mouth stiffened into a grimace and the warmth in my body was replaced by freezing cold. The lit-up ice figure of Jesus on the cross was staring me in the face, paralyzed with agony, just like me.
I tried to lift my naked back. But just the first inch of movement gave an indication of how bad the pain would be when my body tried to free itself from the bluish block of ice. Although I would be largely anesthetized by the cold.
The smell of Zafir
ah’s heavily spiced scent—enough to provoke headaches even under normal conditions—was still hanging in the air, or maybe just in my memory. The steel-gray short wig, as well as Sixten’s turquoise shell jacket, lay discarded beside the ice bed. As dysfunctional as my brain was, this made me realize that he had probably never been here.
I managed to get up after a number of unsuccessful attempts. It was like tearing off a Band-Aid. Except that it covered my entire back—and that it was my own efforts which were ripping open the wound.
I staggered around among the objects which had been spread across the suite. The hybrid was still there, but without the briefcase. My weapon, field knife, and the medical pack containing the treasured anesthetics and things far worse which could bring an end to everything at once, were also gone. As well as my notebook, the crunch cookies, the cell phone from the playground, my watch: everything that could keep me oriented. And the key which Sixten had given me.
But they had left most of the contents of the pack, including my field glasses, latest passport, currency, the matching credit cards in one of the hybrid’s secret pockets. Probably hoping to keep me under electronic surveillance, waiting to see where the tracks would lead. Or they had simply been in a hurry.
My sweater and down vest lay just inside the hybrid’s upper lid. I put my clothes on incredibly slowly, a few inches at a time, adding layer after layer with infinite care as if I were made of cracked glass. With some effort I also managed to get my winter boots on as well as the black snowmobile suit with the words “THE INNER STATION. Niklas’ Adventures” on the breast pocket. I strapped on the noticeably lighter hybrid as loosely as I could, opened the unlocked door to Suite 325, “The Martyrdom of Christ”, and went down into the sparse night lighting of the Ice Lobby. Scanning the area, I looked for some sign of either Ingrid or Jesús María. When the receptionist informed me they had checked out, I thanked her, turned, and—without a backward glance—made for the cover of the Polar night.
Our psychologists had told us that nobody could really explain how our will to live functions. Why it could suddenly stop. Or why it did not.
So I walked away from the hotel, reflexively, instinctively, although I could have headed down into the river instead. The clock outside the souvenir store showed 05.01, December 12, 2013. Everything was crystal clear and unreal. The area surrounding the hotel in power-save mode, the transfer buses like giant bugs sleeping along the main road.
But the vast restaurant on the other side, scaled to accommodate mass tourist assault, was still open at this time of night: for the most part as a gesture to a few individual truckers who had slept in their vehicles. One of them was sitting at a table inside, finishing his breakfast.
“Are you headed near Kiruna station?” I said.
“Certainly am, but I’m leaving right now.”
“Do you have any alcohol in the truck? I can pay you for it.” I showed him money. He nodded, got slowly to his feet and I followed him out to the biggest eighteen-wheeler on the road.
When I jumped down at the station he handed me a small, transparent, plastic bottle without a label. It could just as easily have been home-distilled spirit or face cleanser—an impression which downing the bottle in the bathroom on the train did nothing to dispel. But it did to some extent deaden the pain, and the effect of feeling frozen solid began to wear off.
I removed the jumpsuit and pulled on the neutral, black gear which I had taken out of the combat pack in the hybrid. I stared at the face in the mirror, still strange to me. The new lips, the fleshy nose: Jesús María’s attempt to make me look like General Shubin. The face in the mirror looked back at me, searching for some trace of the man before the martyr. I saw the wreckage of a person—not only after the trials of the night, my temporary death. But also the psychological warfare.
By the time we arrived at Luleå, after not many hours’ journey, the locomotive succumbed to the cold. While we were waiting, I went to the station store and bought a ballpoint pen and a notebook. Then eventually I sat down in the restaurant car of the new train, put the hybrid under the table and ordered an inedible Pyttipanna with cream sauce, sliced beetroot and two fried eggs. Carefully noted down in the new notebook everything that had happened since we left the Snowflake, barely two days ago.
When I was finished, my left temple started to burn with pain, as well as much of my back—I needed something else to concentrate on. I began a comprehensive analysis of the situation in my new notebook.
I made the basic assumption that the core team was now up and running. If not immediately after the launch at Minot, then in any case since the Ice Hotel. Apart from Zafirah and Kurt-or-John—together or separately—Edelweiss was presumably as ever at headquarters in Washington. On top of that, elements of the President’s own forces had presumably been assigned to take us down. But in accordance with the directives, few, if any others at all, would be informed: not even the Vice President.
The remaining authorities, all of our jumble of more or less rival agencies, would probably have no idea either. Likely not the C.I.A. Presumably neither the F.B.I. nor the N.S.A. Almost certainly not the Secret Service either—or the S.S., as Edelweiss sometimes used to label them, the meaning hidden yet clear. They would only be thinking that NUCLEUS were away on yet another top secret training maneuver somewhere around the globe.
Even I was no longer aware of much more than pieces of the puzzle. I had no idea who had my briefcase or Ingrid’s portable command terminal. Who were the hunters, who the hunted.
So I wrote down the names of the people in chronological order, without specifying their respective roles. In order of appearance during our flight: first Jesús María, then Ingrid, Sixten, Aina, Lisa, Bettan, Niklas. After that I added my ageing senile mother, as well as Amba and the children.
Then I put a cross underneath those who might be dead. That made at least half, maybe all of them. Eliminated in silence, as always during our classified assignments overseas. Later there would be talk of accidents and illnesses, chance fateful encounters: only we would know the whole picture, had sufficient numbers of paid informants.
Finally I added our nuclear weapons bases, both at home and in Europe, as well as other strategic targets—and began to sketch in the connections. Solid arrows between the squares represented movements which had already taken place, ones with dashed lines meant upcoming ones, double lines between people indicated that they trusted each other while single lines suggested fundamental uncertainty. And soon it all became one solid cloud of ink.
But come Stockholm, I had abandoned the analysis. There was only one way to clarify the situation, and that was empirically. At one particular place, and one only, on just one particular date. It was a guess. But an educated one.
After purchasing a night-train ticket costing an arm and a leg, I got some headache pills, water and a copy of the New York Times from a kiosk. There was still a quarter of an hour before departure, so I sat down among the businessmen who were smoking on the bench furthest along the platform, beyond the glow of the light. The newspaper was a day old: from December 11. I found what I was looking for, even though it had only been given one small square at the very bottom of the front page—so I leafed to the foreign pages and read on. The award of the Peace Prize in Oslo seemed once again to have passed without incident. And the views expressed about the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons were as effusive as ever.
Mobilizing public opinion against chemical weapons had been much more successful than in the case of nuclear weapons, since they never represented any direct threat to our own military power. Nerve gas had therefore already been banned long ago, even in wartime.
I laid the newspaper on the bench in order to take a few painkillers and rinse them down with the water. Only then did I catch sight of the article.
The entire top left-hand corner of the first page was covered with General Falconetti’s picture. Edelweiss’ most important playmate, in dress uniform, with a chest
full of shining medals. A small column on the first page of the home news section listed all of Falconetti’s areas of responsibility: full operational charge of our nuclear weapons submarines, aircraft and land-based launch ramps. Highest supervisory authority over the military space program, as well as the entire digital war effort.
I pinched my arm and closed my eyes. But the article was still there when I opened them.
The most senior person responsible for the nuclear weapons system—at least officially, outside the Team, and therefore our nearest colleague—had been caught red-handed manipulating digital one-armed bandits.
A background article listed all the other incidents which had apparently come to light in the American nuclear weapons system during this fall alone. An entire unit of missile operators at the Malmstrom base had been failed during a security spot check, and the joint commander of two other unnamed nuclear weapons bases had recently been dismissed after similar controls.
In the article the Commander-in-chief talked of moral failings among personnel who had constantly to be at full readiness without ever being “deployed”, as he put it. A psychoanalyst agreed in an interview that people who are “deprived of purpose” in the end also lose their judgment.
At the foot of the page there was a timeline of the revelations. As I read it, I was stunned. Because it was not now—as news of this unthinkable incident was becoming public—that General Falconetti had been dismissed from the military.
It had happened on October 24. The day after Aina turned seventy, the attack during her birthday celebration, our escape from the window of the burning house. It could be a coincidence—but probably not.
4.03
I had been to Bruxelles-Central only once before. During an exercise in the heart of the city, simulating a terror attack, the President’s stand-in had taken shelter in the grand old station awaiting orders for evacuation. I had stood right next to him.
