The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

  This nearly pacifist strategy was of course made all the easier for the military by the media’s presence. The fact that all the journalists and photographers had dared to mingle with the activists, were rushing around with their cameras and notebooks, penetrating ever further into the burlesque chaos of fancy dress and heavily armed special forces. As at Kleine Brogel—but on an even larger scale here, with even more people in uncontrolled motion—there was quite simply no alternative but to admit us all. Despite the huge strategic importance of the installations.

  Ingrid and I let ourselves be washed along in the wave. Ran quickly but carefully over a collapsed fence, giving the razor wire a wide berth: it had already injured a number of people on the way in, cutting open clothes and flesh on any who were not aware of its multiple function, how it grabs onto things as well as slicing into them.

  Blood from the activists’ lacerated calves and thighs could be seen against the pale gray of the cement flooring inside the gates. But still the tide of people kept rolling forward. Surging, spreading out in all directions at once, like water or gas.

  One might think that a mass like this is a single flood wave, streaming in a certain direction. And in this case there must have been tens of thousands moving from the gate all the way over to the gigantic parabolic antennae—soon to be made famous by the direct transmissions of the T.V. companies’ morning reports.

  But Edelweiss used to stop the reels during his lectures on mass psychology, winding forward and backward to demonstrate that only rarely was there any collective movement. Many of those who were now here, dragged along without any clear idea of what they were doing, would certainly have liked to turn back had they been able, were not after all willing to risk so much for their ideological convictions. Some others had already been panicked by the crush. Yet more had specific objectives, such as picking up some trophy from within the base.

  The secret lay not so much in understanding that a mass heading in a certain direction always contains people moving against the flow—but rather how they do so. And then to match one’s own movements scrupulously to this pixelated pattern.

  Ingrid showed herself to be a master of just this. We were therefore able to move both with and against the swarm toward the eastern periphery of the facility, while the main wave surged toward the western part, where the M.U.O.S. antennae stood brooding on their secrets. One Lucia among certainly hundreds, perhaps more. One bearded martyr lost in a crowd of them. Without anybody apparently taking any notice of us.

  The sweat was now itching inside my beard and costume. Not even Jesús María’s perforated fabric wicked enough of the condensation in what must have been approaching 104 degrees in the boiling sun. I did not take the time even to glance at my wristwatch, only kept looking straight ahead, following Ingrid’s sure course through the sea of people. The hot wind lifted us forward, until I caught sight of our objective a few hundred feet ahead, through the chaos of costumed people. Everything grew quiet around me. I felt the hybrid against my body. Saw the whole train of events like a simulation on a computer screen. The activists, the soldiers, the choices of route open to us.

  But in the end there is a limit to what is achievable. Ingrid’s strategy showed itself to be a classic—and yet it would prove impossible. To take the back way into the underground level, through the emergency exit, in the opposite direction to the builtin logic of all security systems. The protective doors at our facilities could only ever be opened in one direction: nobody was allowed to move against the flow. And that is therefore the very thing that we were now going to attempt.

  The air-intakes were the sign. We had always pointed out that the small ventilators were still not small enough, and therefore not invisible enough, to deter the enemy. Our technicians had just shaken their heads and said that they could not be made any smaller. If we were wanting to house more people underground, often for even longer periods according to our increasingly opaque scenarios, the air-intakes had to be larger.

  So we knew what our target should be. As did, to judge from their actions, the two female figures who blocked our path, one about thirty feet in front of the other.

  Alva Myrdal, the leading figure of the Swedish U.N. disarmament committee from the ’60s, came straight at me. In other words Zafirah in the guise of the venerable stateswoman. Her body compact and small, the center of gravity low. It seemed to me that she had become more solid since I had last seen her, even more terrifying. The Team’s most committed ultra-violence specialist.

  It all went extremely fast. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ingrid moving toward the air-intakes—but also another masquerade figure moving even faster in the same direction. Yet one more Eleanor Roosevelt, tall and sinewy with her muscles clearly visible through the long sleeves of her dress. It could hardly be anyone other than our Close Combat instructor. A nameless, melancholy woman from Rwanda, with unconventional techniques honed during their civil war. The only one who could defeat Zafirah in training.

  But I was forced to shift focus. As Zafirah came in for the attack she began screaming. I looked at the open mouth behind the Alva Myrdal outfit and make-up, saw it move in slow motion, but heard no more sound whatsoever. Just focused on sliding into the fight zone. Minimizing the chances of her getting me onto my back, as she usually did, putting pressure on my larynx until the air ran out.

  Much more easily than I would have expected, like in a dream, I got in close. As I grabbed hold of Alva Myrdal’s wavy hair and managed to twist her head, with the same crunching sound as when you break the neck of a pike, she seemed to be trying to say something to me. Her mouth was still wide open. I knocked her over backward with a powerful shove to her chest, and kept banging her head against the cement, and then there was no longer any question of her speaking.

  All this took place in silence, as if the volume had been turned off. I registered a very specific smell. Familiar, yet impossible to place, under the thick stench of blood and brain tissue in the heat.

  I left the lifeless woman behind me. Rushed up to the two surviving women by the air-intake, the protective doors. Saw Eleanor Roosevelt throwing herself headlong over St Lucia. Heard the Close Combat instructor’s surprisingly deep bellow cut through the hum of the crowd when she got Ingrid down onto the ground.

  But St Lucia had a weapon to fight back with. From flat on her back she raised her upper body, in a slight bow, as the instructor sat down on top of her—setting fire to Eleanor Roosevelt’s wig with her chemical crown of candles.

  Although our tough instructor fought with immense courage as the flames spread inexorably through the wig, she had no chance in the end. However much she tightened her grip on Ingrid, trying to drag her down to hell with her, set her alight too. Because this Lucia was wearing a nightshirt made from a special impregnated fabric of Jesús María’s.

  Then I was paralyzed, frozen in movement as if I had been shot.

  Because just as I reached Ingrid, and the combat instructor ran screaming like a banshee away across the base, with the flames reaching her scalp, spreading fire to other victims around the facility, I was suddenly able to place the smell which had risen from Alva Myrdal’s dead form.

  It was a ladies’ perfume, perhaps the best known of them all. But I had met only two women who actually used Chanel No. 5 as their signature fragrance. The first was my mother, who was now in secure accommodation in an idyllically located home for dementia sufferers in northern Connecticut.

  And the other was Aina.

  6.13

  So it turned out to be a classical drama after all. A tragedy of mistaken identity.

  I suppressed the thoughts of Aina as we moved on silently through the low, dark system of culverts, in the opposite direction to what was intended, from the emergency exit inward rather than the other way around. I did not even raise my eyebrows when Ingrid simply led us in by pressing eight symbols on the buttons on the concealed control box and the doors opened.

  Both the alarm and the surv
eillance cameras appeared to have been knocked out already, as well as the emergency lighting. Ingrid’s Lucia crown lit the way for us. The glow projected my shadow onto the wall, flickering jerkily, the smell of raw rubber and fuel nauseating in the stifling tunnels. Whatever was burning in the crown must have been napalm or some more modern pyrochemical substance.

  We had only occasionally had the opportunity to rehearse a scenario like this. It was based on the assumption that a mole had prepared the way in the facility in question, one of our missile bases under the prairies of the Mid West. Ingrid must have done something similar here in Niscemi—as part of all her planning over so many years, decades according to her, that secret global folk movement. All aiming for just this moment.

  I felt the weight of our mission growing heavier step by step. The hybrid seemed suddenly to be filled with lead. Every step required an effort, as if I were moving under water. After a few minutes we reached the door: marked with a simple “C.C.” in neutral gray letters. Thoughts were racing through my mind. On the other side was the place where not just our fate would be decided—but also yours, the fate of all future generations.

  Reflexively I readied myself for close combat with the guards inside the command center, no doubt reinforced for the inauguration. Tensed myself. Drew my weapon, in case there was going to be space enough.

  But Ingrid stopped fifteen feet short of the door. Began to fumble at the ceiling, until she found the control box for the entrance. The light from her Lucia crown now fell in a way which let me see what she was keying in on the tiny set of buttons under the lid—not the symbols themselves, but the movement of her fingers. The code had been the same up in Ursvik: everything is easy once you know. When she keyed in her “LISA 1969”, a sliding door opened soundlessly to the right in the metal wall.

  I had to work hard to follow Ingrid as she ran at top speed down the spiral stairs on the other side of the door, turn after turn. So as not to lose the light from her crown but at the same time keep my dizziness under control, and the nausea from the pyrochemical smell. I clung onto the handrail. The piercing alarm must have been a figment of my imagination, all the mental warning lights flashing red in my mind. Yet they no longer helped: I paid no heed to her, just flung myself after.

  Once down on level ground I just had time to see Ingrid open one more invisible door, following the same ritual, with the same code. Here too the sliding door opened in silence. When it closed again, sealing us off from the world, Ingrid turned to me and made a sweeping gesture across the control console.

  “Ecco. What I amused myself with while the M.U.O.S. began to be built over our heads—since I had to be in the vicinity but invisible, as Alpha. I had help from more or less the same construction team who were working up there on the surface, but at odd times. And also a number of others who were ideologically committed. Activists, moles, daredevils. People who signed up for the military only to deconstruct it. The sort whose silence one never has to buy.”

  In here too the lights were out, but Ingrid’s napalm candles were more than enough. She pulled out one of the two chairs in front of the control console for me and sat down in the other. I sank into my seat. Scrutinized every one of the controls, all the possible functions, repeated the exact sequences of this technological-occult ritual for myself while Ingrid continued.

  “The only thing we really needed to communicate to the local commanders was the huge importance of the installations. That even if the sky were to fall, the project had to go on. No details beyond that—only that nothing was to be obstructed, that the M.U.O.S. protests had to be suppressed at all costs. So I never had to make myself known. Could just hover around down here like an underworld spirit, an Alpha who gave her oracular orders digitally, everywhere and nowhere.”

  I laid the hybrid on the floor, unlocked the keyboard, made the whole apparatus operational. Shut my eyes and just listened to that melodic voice.

  “Yet not one of our secret helpers understood what I was doing during all those years; they were just working on a single piece of the puzzle and sometimes hardly even that. So no-one other than I, not even Ed, knew that this installation represented something so much bigger than the completion of the M.U.O.S. system. That the key to the whole of our nuclear weapons system was to be found here, 138.13 feet below the upper command center.”

  She took out her computer, the portable command terminal, opened up the lid, started to key in the access sequences. I did the same, following the rhythm exactly. The cold-blue light of the screen blended with the warm glow from her crown of candles. My own shadow quivered on the steel wall to my left, like a ghost, an unholy spirit.

  “The thought was that nobody other than Sixten and I would need the codes down here. My thought during all the years—the thing that honestly kept me sane, just enough, kept the pot simmering—was that it would be him and me sitting here now. Reunited in just this moment.”

  I said nothing, nor could I utter a sound, just kept clicking my way into the system. Completed the first complicated series. Just what was necessary for the screen to be revealed in the lid, the simulated fabric screen slowly sliding away to the right, Alpha’s increasingly mannered security rituals. The puzzle pieces in the map of the world softly slid together, step by step: the sign that every one of the sequences was correct.

  Only once the whole map became visible did the yellow triangles appear, one after the other, each needing another correct sequence of at least twenty-one and up to twenty-nine symbols. First our nuclear bases in Europe, now joined together with solid red lines. Then the image zoomed out over the Atlantic, to the U.S., the home nuclear bases. The numbers flickered before my eyes. I heard Ingrid’s words as a part of this whole ritual, everything seeming to flow together.

  “Because it was important for me to keep to our regular security routines, just in case one of us might not be able to resist the temptation, the Doomsday syndrome. So there has to be two of us, we two, even in here: No Lone Zone. But it had to be you instead of him, my treasure, my best stand-in. Sixten should instead be standing guard at the bottom of the spiral staircase outside this door. That is what he and I agreed when we spoke on Christmas Day.”

  I hacked ever deeper into the system, heard the muted sound of her keyboard at the same pace as mine. Her portable command terminal and my nuclear football. The man with the briefcase, the Carrier, with his Alpha. It ended with the blue lines meeting all across the world—all the way from Esrange in Kiruna to the one here in Niscemi. The Nuclear Family was now complete, all these correspondences under and above ground. Man had at last gained control over his own Fall.

  I watched in awe as Ingrid stood up and placed a U.S.B. stick into one of the ports on the desk. The control console came alive, all the different screens lit up in blue and green, the monitor started with the same image as was on her computer and the inside of the lid of my briefcase. The world map, the bases, the yellow triangles.

  Then she moved her chair closer to mine. I looked across at her—and she glanced back, gave me that look, before she fixed her gaze on her keyboard. Waited for me like an old jazz pianist. Counted the rhythm for herself.

  The scene from the movie, when Mata Hari begins to tug at General Shubin’s arm to stop him from revealing her beloved Rosanoff as a spy, flickered past in my subconscious. Then I saw the clear text in my mind’s eye, “THESE ARE THE CODES . . .” I keyed in the sequences following exactly the same rhythm as Ingrid: 151 221 621 11R 211 612 21C 19D 216.

  On all the screens—both hers and mine, as well as on the large round monitor on the control console—the red circle above the globe, between all of our nuclear weapons bases, started to blink rhythmically. The text “RED ALERT” soon covered the world map.

  My whole field of vision grew small, seemed to be sucked in toward my brain with a strange fizzing sound, soon vanished almost completely. My hands became heavy and stiff. However hard I tried, I could not move them an inch in any direction.

  Throu
gh my tiny hole to the world I could see how Ingrid was now looking right into the innermost part of me, as if I had neither skin nor skeleton. Once again she waited out my own rhythm, the next step in our mission, the message which en clair read “THAT WILL MAKE THE CODES SUPERFLUOUS”. The life-critical sequences, so that she could synchronize her own movements and do the same.

  But since I sat there immobile, doing absolutely nothing, the alert status soon switched over to “FIRING MODE”. All of our warheads around the world were now linked and ready to be fired off.

  The text which appeared next on the screen I had never seen before. Not during any of Edelweiss’ most unthinkable scenarios, our very worst simulations, had I been able to imagine that any conceptual possibility like this was indeed built into the system. “WARNING: EXTINCTION MODE,” it said.

  Yet my hands still lay there, like pieces of dead meat. The circles above the world started to blink in a fuzzy lilac, almost fluorescent color. This was the beauty of the apocalypse. A gentle electronic chirping sounded around the room. It could have been a shrieking alarm, maybe at full volume—but if so then tempered by my enclosed being, receptive only through that little hole to and from the world.

  The yellow triangles on the monitor penetrated in my eyes, luminous with all their inconceivable significance. Villages, remote areas, hardly even places as such, which for some reason had been chosen to host our nuclear weapons according to the strategy we called “sharing”. Who were allocated their predetermined roles in this classical tragedy.

  I heard a ghostly voice in the room. It took a moment to realize that it was I myself who was rattling off the names, like a medieval incantation: “Incirlik, Araxos, Aviano, Ghedi Torre, Ramstein, Büchel, Volkel, Kleine Brogel, Lakenheath, Kings Bay, Whiteman, Barksdale, Minot, Warren, Malmstrom, Kitsap. And then Niscemi . . . Niscemi . . . Niscemi.” The key to the entire system. The secret of secrets.