by Jon Stenhugg
“You’re right.” Sven’s voice was now stern. “It is.”
“Then shouldn’t we be informing a bunch of agencies and the public?”
“We have to know what it is we’re dealing with first. You can’t tell the public something which will send them into a dizzy tailspin unless it benefits them. Right now we don’t have enough facts. So get back to your desk and start giving me something more to work with on your new case. No, wait. Call Spimler’s wife. Maybe she can recognise some of the diving equipment.”
“Thanks, boss, I knew you’d find something nice for me to do.”
Sven followed Sara out of his room and she saw him stressed for the first time ever. Ekman had just come over from the NSS and had taken over everything. Sven caught him in the middle of an instruction to one of the officers who happened to be passing by in the corridor, and he said, “Ekman, let’s talk. Now.”
Both men went back into Sven’s room.
“We’ve got to get some help on this,” said Sven. “The military has to get involved if we’ve found what we think we’ve found, and I don’t think there’s time for the normal bureaucratic round of meetings.”
“I agree,” said Ekman, and he started a call to the Chief of the Navy. It took several minutes for the connection to be made, and during that time Ekman and Sven put a large map of Stockholm on the table in front of them. Sven used his pen to mark the spot where the patrol boat had been anchored. “It’s here,” he said to Ekman. “Should we empty the city? How many people can we get out? Where should we put them?”
“Let’s talk to the military first,” said Ekman, still holding the phone to his ear. “It’s important not to panic. We can use their expertise to give us an idea of what kind of threat we’re – yes. Hello, Admiral. It’s Lars Ekman at the NSS. I don’t have time for niceties. We have an emergency situation, and we need your help immediately.”
Ekman explained briefly what they knew, and he began to answer the Admiral’s questions. “Yes, it’s in the middle of the city. Yes, Stockholm. I haven’t been able to verify it yet, but our best intel indicates a Soviet Shkval torpedo, a VA-111. I don’t know if it’s armed. We only have a report that it bears the markings of a Shkval. No, Admiral, I’m not sure if the Prime Minister has been available for contact yet.”
Ekman looked at Sven, who shook his head. “No, we’ve sent messages, but we have no confirmation that he’s received them yet. We have two police patrol boats at the site, keeping other boats away. There’s also a police helicopter over the site, providing us with real-time images from their on-board video camera…Yes, I’m sure we can patch that over to you. Just give us the technical details. Yes, Admiral, I agree. We’ll keep our equipment there until your men arrive. How long will it take to get the Combat Boat 90 to the scene? OK, Admiral, we’ll keep our men there until it arrives.”
Ekman’s eyes rolled towards the ceiling as he waited for the Admiral to finish his rant. “Admiral, we’re creating a lot of attention with all this hardware in the centre of the city. What do we tell the press? OK, I’ll get someone to create a press release which will cover it until we have a better handle on the situation. What about evacuation? According to the procedures in the new Emergency Situations Manual, we have to consider evacuation. Do you know how much armament a Shkval torpedo can carry? Five kilotons of TNT?” asked Ekman, and he caught Sven’s eye. “What would that mean in terms of damage?” Ekman sat on Sven’s chair as he got the answer. “The whole central part of the city? You must be joking. Yes, Admiral. I understand, ten million pounds of TNT, the entire central part of the city, I understand.”
*
Sven and Ekman continued to handle the administrative details of the crisis. They set up a command post at the south end of Långholmen after soldiers had cordoned off everything east of the bridge which cut the island in two.
This was the same place where a JAS-39 fighter aircraft had crashed and burned one hot summer afternoon only two years before, at the apex of a military air show in the middle of Stockholm. The island and the bridge had been crowded by onlookers that afternoon, amazed to see the pilot eject and the plane go into an uncontrolled, flat spin, finally crashing onto the island only yards from the bridge. Oak trees next to the bridge still bore scars of the fire which had consumed the plane. Fortunately very few people were on the island this time; it would be much easier to empty the civilian population of twenty people.
The walk back to Sara’s office seemed to take her longer than usual. The Hoffberg room had been cleaned out and she had to look up Mrs Spimler’s telephone number in the phone book.
“Hello, Mrs Spimler,” said Sara. “I was wondering if you’ve heard anything from your husband recently?”
“No, I haven’t. But I’ve been thinking about our boat, the Little Miss Perfect. Martin loves that boat, even though it’s just an old military scow. Will we get it back sometime?”
“Yes, certainly. As soon as Forensics have finished with it. Mrs Spimler, we’ve had a development in your husband’s disappearance. I’m going to send someone out to speak with you, if that’s OK. When would be a good time?”
Sara heard the gasping, the sob, the same sound she always heard when people figured out her news was bad news. She wished there was some way to avoid it, some way to quickly get to the next stage without having to cross that bridge, but it was always there, with no way to keep it from happening.
“He’s dead, isn’t he? I’ve been expecting something like this, actually,” said Mrs Spimler. “Couldn’t I just come into your office?”
“We can meet at my office if you want. Would you be able to get here this afternoon?”
“Now? What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing.” Sara closed her eyes as she tried to keep from telling a lie. “There are just a couple of details you could help us with. Looking over some equipment, things like that.”
There was a silence, and Sara imagined she could hear Mrs Spimler’s thoughts stuttering their way through the telephone line. “OK, I’ll be there. I’ll have to fight the rush hour, but I’ll be there as soon as I can. You left your card. Is that where you want me to go?”
“Yes, that’ll be fine, Mrs Spimler,” Sara said. “And maybe you could bring in your husband’s telephone records during the last few months, if you can find them easily.”
“Of course,” she said. “Do you know anything about how he died?”
“We’ll speak about it when you get here. There’s some equipment I’d like you to look at, if you can.”
Sara called out to the patrol boat for an update and the officer told her the Combat Boat had just arrived. A team had been sent down to assess the threat, to see if they’d be able to remove the body without setting off the torpedo, and the Medical Examiner was already there waiting for a closer look. She’d have her answer soon, he said.
She went down to the café to wait for Mrs Spimler. By the time she got there, Sara was in a mild state of shock herself. When she got back from Sven’s room she’d found a note the receptionist had put on her desk about a call from the hospital where her grandmother was a patient.
After speaking to Mrs Spimler, she got a cup of tea and called the nurses’ desk in the ward. The head nurse told her that her grandmother had passed away last night. They had tried to contact her several times. She should contact a Miss Gomez tomorrow, who would help her make the arrangements. The news wasn’t unexpected for Sara, but not being able to share her grief with anyone made it hard to keep her thoughts together. She got memory jogs from her childhood and the sound of her grandmother’s voice only a few days ago, complaining about the staff at the nursing home. That voice would never be anything more than a memory now, and Sara wished for some kind of receptacle where she could store it along with all the other memories before they faded from her mind and were no longer recallable. Well, Sara thought, I won’t have to worry about getting her evacuated. She’s already as far away as she can be.
*
Sara sat in her office, waiting for Mrs Spimler to be ushered in from the reception desk, and images of a long green cylinder, shaped like a rocket she’d seen in the manual, flashed through her jumbled mind, combined with the sound of gravel being sprayed on her car when Lemko had come shooting up the hill on his electric motorcycle. She was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and probably the worst person to be meeting Mrs Spimler under those circumstances.
“Hello, Mrs Spimler, I’m so sorry about all this,” said Sara, reciting the ritual phrase supposed to get them off the hook.
“You said you didn’t know if he was dead. Has there been a change in that?”
“No. I’ve been exposed to some dramatic events myself today. I’m a little off balance. Please forgive me. Nothing has changed regarding your husband. If you’ll come with me to the Medical Examiner’s office we can look at some equipment we found. You might be able to help us in our investigations.”
“To tell you the truth, right now I’d almost be glad to hear he was dead, just to get the uncertainty cleared up. Of course I’d be much, much happier if he were to walk in the door, but that hasn’t worked so far. Is it far away, the Medical Examiner’s office?”
“It’s close to Karolinska Hospital, in Solna. It won’t take us long. Do you want to follow my car out there?”
“I couldn’t drive,” said Mrs Spimler. “I took a taxi here.”
“No problem, we’ll go in my car.” Sara was happy to have something else to think about for a few minutes. She called the Medical Examiner before they left to make sure the body had arrived, and they told her it had already been identified using their zip-zap fingerprinting methods, but they would be happy to meet with the widow and help take care of her. Sara wondered if they’d be as thoughtful at the hospital where her grandmother was lying, but rushed the thought out of her mind as they drove the few minutes over the bridge to neighbouring Solna, the home of the implantable pacemaker, prostaglandins and the Medical Examiner’s office for Stockholm; the Coroner, handler of bodies which died unnatural deaths.
Sara looked over at Spimler’s wife as they stopped at a traffic light, and she could see Mrs Spimler was nearing a frantic state. She was in a bad place right now, with bills to pay, a life to get on with and a husband who was missing and presumed dead.
Sara asked about the Fish Project: water pollution in the lake? Mrs Spimler knew nothing, except that her husband’s primary interest was in amphibians.
“You know, frogs and toads,” she said, keeping Sara, the poor dumb cop, informed in case she’d missed out on primary school. Then she told her she’d overheard Hoffberg and her husband discussing some kind of project only a few months ago, when Hoffberg was visiting. She said Hoffberg was sure they were going to change the course of the world, and all Martin would have to do would be to help out a little. It was shortly before their trip to Tallinn.
*
Sara could tell from the reception they got when they arrived that not only did they know it was the body of Martin Spimler, but the coroner was pretty sure about the cause of death.
A curator took care of Mrs Spimler. Standing outside the curtain, Sara could hear her explain that quite probably he’d died because of an accident. He’d been trapped under a heavy object during a dive and his air had run out. The curator explained that because of the type of diving gear he’d been using he’d experienced no pain or discomfort, just a dizziness followed by unconsciousness, then death from carbon dioxide asphyxiation. There was a quiet moment as the curator showed Mrs Spimler a photograph of Martin’s wedding ring and a tattoo he had on his left shoulder.
“Yes, that’s Martin,” she said softly. “Could I just say goodbye?”
Sara went into the cold room to meet with the coroner and found him busy working on Spimler’s body. He looked up from an incision he was about to make. “We’ve identified your victim as Martin Spimler, missing for nearly two weeks now, and from what I can see on the screen, also a suspect in the Hoffberg murder case. The evidence so far would indicate that you can scratch him off the list. He was very likely dead at the time of Hoffberg’s murder.”
“That makes life easier,” said Sara. “What about cause of death? Could he have been murdered too?”
“It’s hard to say until I get my hands dirty,” said the coroner, “but the quick money is on an accident: carbon dioxide poisoning, causing hypoxia. Rather hard to find traces in a body, but his breathing device was a CCUBA, a recirculator that filtered out the CO2 until it finally became so fully charged it simply passed the CO2 back into his breathing tube. Your diver wouldn’t have experienced any difficulties in breathing, but the amount of oxygen he’d have been getting in during each breath would at one point have become too low to sustain life. He would have experienced a second of panic just before passing out and dying from lack of oxygen.”
“Could the device have been tampered with?” Sara asked, still looking for a murder.
“Of course. It’s the amount of fresh soda lime in the filter that determines how long you can use it before dying. I’ll look at it closer when I’m done here, but from the looks of it I’d say he just got pinned down by the green cylinder in the picture over there and died waiting for someone to find him.”
Sara went over to the photographs taken by the Navy divers, and could see Spimler’s body pinned at the midsection by an object about two feet across and twenty feet long. The CCUBA breathing device was on a table below the picture.
“I don’t see any air tubes at all. Why would he be using this kind of device?” asked Sara.
“Like I said, a CCUBA,” said the coroner. “Attack divers use them when they don’t want someone on the surface to see their exhaust bubbles. This kind of device doesn’t leave any exhaust bubbles at all. It recirculates the gases.”
“The Spimler widow is outside. Do you think she could get to see her husband before you chop him up? She’s come in all the way from Stallarholmen.”
The coroner looked up with a scowl and put his scalpel down on the tray next to where the body was lying. “It’s highly unusual, and you should know that most people don’t react very well to the stench of formaldehyde,” he said, “but I can put a sheet over his body and she can come in for a quick look if you’re sure that she won’t be involved as a suspect at any time in the future.”
When Sara returned with Spimler’s widow, the coroner had not only covered the body from the chin down, but had also rolled the table with the CCUBA gear closer to the door, and taken down the photographs pinned to the wall. Mrs Spimler turned away almost as soon as she came through the door, gave a little gasp and covered her mouth.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said weakly as she turned away. “I’ll say goodbye at the funeral.”
“OK,” said Sara. “I thank you very much for your time, Mrs Spimler, and I’ll help you get a taxi home if you like.”
It would be a lonely evening for Mrs Spimler, but she could cry herself to sleep knowing instead of guessing or hoping. Within a few days she could begin to take steps to rebuild her life.
After she’d gone Sara went back into the cold room and looked at the photographs again.
“Still looking for a murder?” asked the coroner.
“I’m not sure. But I am wondering how he got pinned down by whatever this is.”
“Maybe he wasn’t working alone. Maybe someone else dropped it on him.”
“That sounds like a better explanation than him squirming his way underneath it to get trapped. When will you have the results of the autopsy?”
“The head of the National Police Board called to tell me I’ll be getting paid double overtime if he can get the results before 10 pm, if that tells you anything.”
“It tells me this case just got very important,” Sara said on her way out. “It also tells me I won’t be able to get the results at all in this century.”
*
CIA Station Chief Michael Rice put together a list of equipment an
d team members deemed necessary to complete the three contingency plans his mission group had compiled. It was a long list, dealing with three possibilities: finding the weapon on land, underwater, or least likely, on some aircraft. Each solution included a diversion. Common to all the plans was the probable necessity to disarm the warhead if it had been armed. This would require a demolitions expert with a long list of skills, including dealing with the VA-111 and language skills in Russian. Nearly all the demolition experts he could find filled the latter requirement. None of them, however, had any experience with a Rocketfish. Diving gear, extraction vehicles for underwater or land use, satellite surveillance technology – all this was available within hours, if he needed it. How his team would disarm a nuclear warhead if it had been armed made his stomach grumble, and he chewed on another tablet to soothe his burgeoning ulcer.
*
Sara drove back to her office, thrown off track by the thoughts of her own loss. She’d have to let her mother and father know about Grandma’s death; there was no guarantee the hospital would have been able to contact them on their own. Her mother would be easy to reach if she was still in the country, but her father wouldn’t even be on the list. It wasn’t something Sara wanted to think about right now. It was easier to keep trying to understand how Spimler had become pinned down by the torpedo.
She went to her office, entered without turning on the lights and sat down, staring out the window, focusing on a single star in the winter sky. She tried to imagine Spimler working by himself, lowering the torpedo onto the bottom of the lake, a piece of rope suddenly breaking and the torpedo landing on him. That seemed impossible, and a new image formed, with two men, both guiding the torpedo, and a rope breaking to send it onto Spimler’s stomach. That didn’t seem very likely either, and finally Sara saw Spimler looking up at the torpedo as it hung from a boat just above him. She watched him signalling to someone on the surface to lower first the back end of the torpedo, then, after it had been aimed at the House of Parliament, motioning to lower the nose that carried the warhead. Sara saw him make a final adjustment, sweeping off some debris from the bottom just where the torpedo would have to lie, then, too late, feeling the torpedo as it touched his back.
