by Mattias Berg
At the same time, an amorphous system like this made Ingrid’s work in linking it all together even more complex. But, as she herself used to say in reply to the students’ repeated complaints that everything was so endlessly complicated, all these links between different disciplines and centuries constituted the very historical framework of moral philosophy: “And who ever said that it was going to be simple?”
But there was still nothing on the news about our flight, hers or mine. About the briefcase itself having been removed from the system, together with one of the two portable command terminals. Not a word about the most fateful thing of all.
And that same evening I found the courage to ask Ingrid why. She turned her eyes away from the televisions. Explained it once more, as if to a child.
“Ed and we are still chained to each other, my treasure. He knows very well that I’ll reveal everything as soon as he makes any serious attempt to capture us. And what’s more that I’ve planted a Plan B. with some other person on this earth—without him having any idea who it is. Who might be the Needle in the Haystack, among the world’s seven billion inhabitants. Who won’t be able to cause as much damage as you and I, it’s true, but with the help of some of my chosen supporters still enough to eliminate nuclear weapons as a military strategic tool for decades to come, if not longer.”
“Was that why Edelweiss let us go at Dulles?” I said.
“Perhaps. Or else he wants to see where it all leads, follow the threads the whole way. Or maybe just give himself time to understand our irrational style of play. The fact that we were prepared to offer up Jesús María in exchange for John: a black knight for a pawn. Or maybe he’s just turned.”
Then she said nothing more—and I did not ask.
When C.N.N. at last changed topics, we switched to the local news. Ingrid no longer needed to translate the items about the M.U.O.S. base, very close to us here, 3.24 miles according to her computer. The pictures told their own story. The protests and incursions, the whole resistance, seemed to grow by the day. As did the violence of the reaction. The T.V. images showed another encounter between encroaching activists and the local authorities: that is to say a loose mixture of Sicilian policemen, N.A.T.O. forces and American security guards. Young women being beaten nearly unconscious with batons. A soldier stamping three times on an activist who already lay on the ground, trying to shield his head with his hands.
The next feature showed another eruption on Etna. We sat spellbound, watching that thick, glowing mass consuming everything in its path. A natural weapon that still nobody could protect themselves against. I could not help thinking of the parallel with our assignments, now and always. The merciless snail’s pace, that slowly gnawing panic, terror, petrification or obliteration.
* * *
But when the signal finally came, toward the end of February, it was unmistakable. I knew it in the same instant that I saw the headlines on C.N.N. This would be Ingrid’s starting point—as well as that of the military authorities at the M.U.O.S. base. The moment when everyone would be looking in another direction.
The fuzzy images in the darkness showed soldiers without uniforms. Quick, almost invisible movements in low resolution. Their clothes tight-fitting and jet-black, darker than the surrounding night, what was called “general combat wear”. In theory they could have been any mercenaries. Yet all those in the know were very clear about where they came from. That the persistent rumors to the contrary were disinformation, cyberattacks, red herrings. Just the sort of hybrid warfare that we ourselves had been trained for—and against—throughout our adult lives.
There had been many warnings that Russia would occupy Ukraine, probably going in via Crimea, even from our own observers. Those who had long been obsessing about the traditional enemy. That it was Russia which would continue to be our main sparring partner, regardless of the fact that the headlines were talking about al-Qaeda or Iran or I.S. Whatever that alarming group now happened to call itself.
The C.N.N. commentators seemed almost relieved that the natural order of things had been re-established. That it was us versus them once more, west against east. One of the presenters already used the expression “Cold War 2.0”.
And if Ukraine had not, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, handed over its nuclear weapons to Russia, in return for what was then called protection, the tension could rapidly have become apocalyptic. When the images shifted to Moscow—where soldiers were seen leaning out of train windows, their loved ones cheering and crying all at once, and men in bars were following the crisis on wide-screen T.V.s as if it were a sporting event—I came to think of the crowds on docks and station platforms waving soldiers off to the First World War. To what was meant to be a triumphal march, a walk in the park.
According to the experts in the studio, Russia had brought its new S.S.27 long-range missiles into service just a week or so earlier. And days after the Russians’ gigantic training maneuvers on the theme “Simulated large-scale nuclear weapons attack”, which they otherwise used to hold in the fall, our forces had replied with yet another comprehensive “Global Lightning” exercise. So the game was already in full swing.
In addition, what our security services had been warning us about for many years had now been made public in the usually reliable magazine Foreign Policy. The C.N.N. anchor asked the experts for their views on what the Russians themselves simply called “Status-6”. Their plans for a new underwater drone armed with a powerful thermonuclear weapon, causing especially high levels of radiation, designed, for example, to attack New York’s harbor area. Making the city essentially uninhabitable for decades to come, through both its primary and secondary effects. Rather like Edelweiss’ simulations: the hydrogen bomb over Manhattan slowly blossoming out on the screen.
Some of the experts in the studio pointed out another remote but natural association: between the continuing “Nuclear Weapons Scandal”, with burned-out missile operators cheating on safety tests as a matter of routine, and the growing crisis in Crimea. That a cure for the missing sense of purpose they had felt was perhaps near at hand. And that “our boys”, as he expressed it, might now have an objective in their minds following the Crimean crisis. Not just the underground missile forces, but also the men handling our nuclear missiles on submarines, or bombs from aircraft. That this would at least get them to pull themselves together.
I tried to read his facial expression. Whether he was being serious, or just trying to be amusing. In this situation.
The wind had been building up over the last few days; the first scirocco of the year was rattling the window panes. Even the indoor temperature rose by the hour in line with the strength of the wind. I put aside thoughts of going for a last run around the area, some sort of meaningless reconnaissance. Instead I went to bed at the same time as Ingrid turned off the T.V.s and returned to her terminal.
“It’s confirmed,” she said, “the inauguration of the M.U.O.S. base will be tomorrow.”
6.10
I dreamed I was General Curtis LeMay, some time during 1954, the year which he had foretold as Ragnarök. When we were for the first time to confront the full military potential of the Soviet Union, following the introduction of nuclear weapons into the world.
We sat gathered together before an early form of computer, the whole potent little command group of S.A.C., Strategic Air Command. I had finally managed to plant at least the idea in their minds. Let our spy planes fly so close to the frontier that they could ratchet up Russian preparedness to the point where an attack against them might feel justified.
There is an historic moment, I said, breaking the silence, when we could win a nuclear conflict with Russia. That moment is now. Not earlier, not later. The Russians will need a month to deploy their 150 hydrogen and atomic bombs in total. Our 750 will need no more than a few hours.
The bulky computer helped me to illustrate the unthinkable, unfolding events step by step. With the help of an astonishing level of technology for the time, suc
cessive maps showed the evolution hour by hour, how the Soviet Union was being covered by ever thicker lines. Each line represented a separate flank in the attack. Everything pointed straight at the heart of Russia, Moscow, and on the way there the rest of the country was being wiped out as collateral.
The final image was not a map but a manipulated photograph. It represented the whole of enemy territory as one single smoking, radioactive, stony desert. Across the picture was a single line, in vivid yellow capital letters: “THE SOVIET UNION, 1917–54. R.I.P.”
Then I pressed the button, transforming simulation into reality. A calm warmth spread through my body.
6.11
I was woken up by my cell phone. A Swedish number, one that I did not recognize. After a while I decided to answer—just as the caller rang off.
Waiting for a message to be left, I looked at my wrist-watch. Time 02.31, indoor temperature 82.2. The mattress was soaked with sweat in the stifling scirocco heat. I thought about opening a window, but there was no catch to hold it. The wind would immediately have smashed the cracked pane against the wall.
I listened, looked, and listened again, but no message came into my voicemail. Ingrid was sitting at the kitchen table, turned away from me, with the costume make-up spread out over the wax tablecloth. The light of the moon was so strong that she needed no lamp. Its bluish sheen tinged the whole apartment in a new tone, with the whining of the wind as an eerie backdrop of sound.
“Who was that?” she said, without turning around.
“I’ve no idea.”
I got up from the mattress, showed her the cell phone, the numbers still on the display.
“That’s Aina,” she said.
“What would she want with me? And no message either . . .”
“Women of our generation don’t like leaving them, you know. Or what was on her mind was something she didn’t feel like recording. Why don’t you call her, my treasure?”
When I pressed the green button, the recall function, I tried to picture Aina lying there alone on a February night in Ursvik. How Sixten might have just left her and started to make his way down here. Having heard the news from Crimea last night and understood the significance. How Aina might not have been able to get any sleep in his rare absence. Staring out of her window at the snowdrifts—before picking up the phone at last, and choosing me to call.
I called back, but pressed the red button before she answered. Did not pick up her next call, or the one after that. Could not really find room for Aina’s anxiety too. For Sixten, for the world—and maybe for us.
Then I laid the cell phone aside, sat down on the other side of the kitchen table and looked at Ingrid’s changing face. How it seemed older with each dab of costume make-up. How she was overtaking her real age, somewhere around seventy if I was to believe her stories. How she placed the Lucia crown on her head, tried it out, grimaced into her pocket mirror.
There is something about the scirocco. In Sicily it is said to be a mitigation for women who kill their husbands under its influence.
“A penny for your thoughts, Erasmus.”
She turned to me in the pale blue-light of the moon, this suddenly aged woman. Or perhaps it was my own imagination which made her look different. It was as if I too were feeling the effects of the scirocco, its faintly occult power, the bewitching wind which ripped and tore at the shutters.
“None at all, Ingrid. Not a single one,” I said.
She let her gaze dwell on me, waiting. Then filled my silence.
“I spotted you immediately, my treasure, already during that first lecture. Saw your full potential. And now it’s time for your exam. We two against the world.”
Ingrid got up, put on her pack. Passed the hybrid to me: I accepted it without a word. Looked at my wrist-watch. At 04.00, the witching hour, we left our safe house for the last time. Swapping some sort of security for a fundamental uncertainty. Not only for us, but for the whole of mankind.
Once we were outside, my watch showed 75 degrees, in the middle of the night, February 22. My cheeks began to glow as I followed Ingrid along a new path in the shelter of the mountains, below the ridge, hidden from the moon—much quicker than the calm miles during my evening runs. The weight of the hybrid was distributed equally between my back and stomach, thanks to Jesús María’s genius. There was not a cloud in the sky and the light was magical. I looked up, into space, experienced the weight and lightness of the moment. Felt like a reed in the warm strong wind, a mere insect, a dwarf spider. Shivered again despite the temperature.
Once we had come some way into the ravine, Ingrid forked off due south, through a small cleft leading to the durum fields which ran gently down to the sea. It was of course only a diversion. The sort of thing that people like us did without even thinking, as synchronized now as in Kiruna. Then she found her way back to our original course, a classic zigzag, adapted to the natural obstacles of the mountain.
Soon our pace was down below 8.3 minutes per mile, even with the hot south-east wind directly in our faces. Ingrid was always in the lead, the “Destroyer of the Universe” coursing through the illuminated landscape. Since the full moon was like a spotlight, keeping close to the lee of the mountains, we sought out shadows.
In the hollow down near the M.U.O.S. base itself—where we could, for the first time, make out the enormous antennae, the topography having concealed them until then—we paused. Drank, ate one crunch cookie each, checked our surroundings from the shelter of the last small olive grove above the facility. Gazed at the anarchic mass of people and tents, which left very little open space on the vast, steppe-like slope below us.
This area alone must have been nearly four square miles in size, 2470 acres, the equivalent of almost two thousand football fields. It had of course been strategically correct to put the base here. So as not to risk being hemmed in by any form of attack, as could have been the case in a bowl between the mountains. It had allowed us to hold frequent joint maneuvers of air and ground forces on a larger scale. Have the space to really roll out the foot soldiers. Sometimes entire divisions with tens of thousands of infantrymen, rehearsing chaotic combat operations with drones hovering overhead.
But the enormous open space in front of the base also offered a perfect gathering place for activists. And even if half a million of them were to turn up here for the inauguration today, at this remote corner of the island, they would still have twenty-one square feet of ground apiece.
Not as many as that had come, at least not yet. But the distinctive noise of the mass—a roar of whistles, songs and chanted slogans, both in unison and dissonant—could be heard clearly all the way up in our olive grove, about a half a mile away, even though it was not yet 5.00 a.m. In all likelihood none of them would have slept that night. Just stayed awake and watchful, let the jungle drums sound out, after having picked up the same news that Ingrid received on her portable command terminal. That the inauguration would take place some time during the coming day. That the authorities believed the peace movement too would be focusing on Crimea, on “Cold War 2.0”, and not this place. Which seemed a gross misjudgment given the number of activists who had gathered around the base.
The first activists must have been in place for days and nights, maybe even weeks. In the sharp light of the full moon we could see that the tent villages had a permanent look about them, seemed fully established, homely in a chaotic way, with swim-wear and towels hung out to dry, their dots slowly climbing up the surrounding slopes. At regular intervals, delighted little cries even penetrated the mass when the scirocco gusted across the slope before the base, making the camps in their entirety shiver, the costumes flutter.
When Edelweiss held his special presentations we had often expressed surprise at the tactical thinking—or rather the lack of it—of the peace activists. But he made it clear that it was not a matter of short-term tactics but rather of a long-term strategy. That for them it was at least as important just to be seen, to shape opinion and stimulat
e debate, as it was to make their way into the base unseen.
With the help of their different costumes, they could also bring together the conflicting objectives of the protesters in a lighthearted way: they attracted attention as well as offering camouflage. The way in which the activists dressed up had also developed in international demonstrations in recent years. Become a sort of pacifist haute couture, some kind of arms race of love. And here in Sicily the costumes really seemed to have become one with the age-old carnival traditions of the island.
After the sun had come up at 06.41, and dawn began to draw out the colors of the activists, Ingrid and I could just tick off the standing figures. All these complex anti-heroes borrowed from the dramas of antiquity. Ten or so Lysistratas and as many again Medeas. And in addition the authentic heroes: Mahatma Gandhi, Alva Myrdal, Eleanor Roosevelt, any number of each of them. Edelweiss had assured us that this too was a part of the activists’ cold-blooded strategy. That a large number of entirely disparate individuals, ranging from real idealists to genuine terrorists, could wear exactly the same outfits. So that the powers-that-be should never know who lay behind which disguise.
Here too as at Kleine Brogel there were a number of examples of what he had, during his presentations on the threats posed by peace demonstrations, called the Love Dress. Pink wigs and glitter on cheeks, piercings everywhere, grotesquely large lips and breasts, false penises, much naked flesh on both women and men.
