Chasing the Storm (8 page)

Chapter 7

Debriefing

April 28

The train pulled
into the Westbahnhof station in Vienna at dawn. It was foggy, and he didn’t recognize Lena among the figures on the platform until he stepped out. Then she came forward. She was wearing a gray sweater and a blue skirt, and seemed improbably beautiful. Droplets of dew spangled her hair. She tossed her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “Well done,” she whispered, and he felt that this time her greeting was genuine.

“I’m happy to see you,” he laughed. “So what do we do from here?”

“I have the car outside.”

“You drove up?”

“I left as soon as Sasha got the message. I arrived only half an hour before.”

“You must be tired.”

“And you.”

“I’ve decided that I’m never going to sleep again.”

She waited until they were in the car and moving through the quiet morning streets, past houses like confections of sugar, to ask whether he’d received the information. He patted his pocket. “Right here,” he said. “Or at least, I hope it is. I haven’t even looked inside. Could be just a fucking pack of cigarettes.”

“Marko will be happy one way or another,” she said, and they laughed together. “So did you use the knife?” she asked, looking at him with a twinkle.

“I took it out at one point,” he said, and involuntarily brushed his hand against his trouser leg as he remembered the old man’s lips trembling beneath his palm.

“Why did you take the knife?”

And then he was telling her the whole story, starting with the walk to the first meeting with Yuri. It felt great to be telling it, moving the story outside of his chest, looking at it from a bit of a distance. It was good having someone to talk to.

She laughed when he described the woman in the mirrored bank window, and again when he told her how Yuri had ladled up the
aalsuppe
. But she grew serious when he related the events around the Café Mendelssohn, and put her hand on his arm. Her fingers were cool and slender.

“You put your life in danger. We will not forget this, Torgrim,” and he felt as though a giant sunflower had suddenly sprouted beneath his ribs.

Despite his assertion that he’d never sleep again, he dropped off while they were still in Austria, and woke up when they were past Zagreb.

“I must be very boring,” Lena laughed. “I stop twice, for tea and for toilet, and you do not wake up.”

“You’re anything but boring, Lena. I was just very tired, I guess.”

He told her he’d read the Chekhov stories on the train and they talked about those for a while. “I am so happy you like,” she said. “Chekhov for me, and Tolstoy, is like, is like the air. I must have.”

“I need to read Tolstoy,” he told her.

When they pulled up to the farmhouse, Marin came running out, with Sasha shuffling behind him. Marin embraced Rygg, exclaiming relief at seeing him. Sasha stood to one side grinning feebly, plucking at a bitten thumbnail. It felt like a homecoming, and he had to remind himself that he’d known these people for less than a week. Before they’d even gone inside, Rygg took the pack of Marlboros out of his pocket and handed it over.

“Torgrim,” Marin said, holding out both hands and making a little ceremony of accepting the packet. “Come inside. Let’s hear your story. If you are not too tired.”

“I could use a coffee.”

“Coffee we have.”

“And maybe a finger of Løiten Linie.”

So they went inside. They sat on the mismatched chairs before the fireplace, and drank coffee and aquavit, while he told the story once more. Marin listened intently, making him go over certain portions again and again. In particular, he grilled him about the first conversation with Yuri. He asked four times about the contents of the hold of the
Alpensturm
, each time phrasing the question slightly differently. He also seemed interested in the woman Rygg had seen near the Café Mendelssohn, and made him describe her clothes and her hair. Finally he nodded slowly.

“You have gone above and beyond, Torgrim,” he said. “Sasha will put the rest of the money into your bank account today. And you can keep the extra money that should have gone to Yuri. As a bonus.”

“I don’t want it,” Rygg said. “I don’t want any of it, but especially not Yuri’s money. Keep it.” He was suddenly angry. “Use it to figure out what’s happening, to catch these bastards.”

Marin nodded, then stood up. “Come,” he said. “Let us see what Yuri acquired for us.”

They went into the back room, where Sasha was deep into one of his games. On the screen, a creature with a lizard tail, burdened by a colossal flamethrower, scampered around a parking lot. Marin sat on the bed and set the cigarette pack beside him. He opened it and dumped out the cigarettes, then pulled up the gold paper. Holding the pack to the light, he peered into it. Then he ripped it carefully along the seams. At the base of the pack was a small square tablet, taped to the card. Gingerly, Marin peeled away the tape. He handed the tablet to Sasha, saying something in Russian. Sasha looked at it and nodded. He rummaged in a cardboard box under the computer table and brought forth a digital camera trailing a tendril of wire. Snapping open a side panel on the camera, he clicked out a card and placed Yuri’s card inside, then closed the panel. He plugged the camera into the computer, and a loading bar popped up, saying it was adding images. There were twenty-one altogether.

“Yuri said he only took two pictures,” Rygg said.

Sasha brought up another window, and started clicking through images. The first two were murky black squares. These were followed by eighteen pictures of a plump, unsmiling, black-haired woman in various states of undress. She glared at the camera as she pulled aside her purple panties or squeezed her enormous mottled breasts together. “That must be Yuri’s Turkish whore with the big ass,” Rygg commented, shaking his head.

In the last picture, Yuri stood with his arm around a dark-haired boy who looked to be in his late teens. The boy was smiling, but Yuri’s lips were firmly clamped together, hiding his harelip. Behind them was a ship: the yellow railings and clustered antennas of the
Alpensturm
.

“Okay,” said Marin, as Sasha returned to the first two images. “These are what Yuri has provided for us.”

“Sorry,” said Rygg. “I guess they didn’t take.” The pictures were almost entirely black, with little glimmers of paler color here and there.

Marin leaned forward and talked with Sasha for a moment. Sasha nodded and pointed at a couple of the lighter sections. Marin leaned back. “I think we might be able get something out of them,” he said. “Not to worry. We will let Sasha work at them for a while.”

Sasha brought up an image editing program and opened one of the murky pictures. Within a minute, he had five dialogues open and was sliding bars and clicking on buttons. He zoomed in and out of various sections, panning around the image, muttering to himself, his right knee hammering the bottom of the table. But the image remained stubbornly incoherent. He shook his head and brought up the second image, which looked equally opaque to Rygg. Sasha worked for a while on this one, zoomed out, and the image was considerably lightened. There seemed to be a curved area on the bottom right of the image, and a cluster of jagged lines to the right. Marin leaned forward and circled the lines with a finger. Sasha nodded and zoomed in so the lines filled the screen. Then he worked at clarifying, sometimes moving in so close that he was working on individual pixels, darkening one here, lightening one there. For twenty minutes, he worked while Marin and Rygg leaned forward on the bed, watching. Finally Sasha scraped his chair back and spread out his hand, palm up, and shrugged. The lines were clearer, but still made no sense to Rygg.

Marin nodded slowly. He said something in Russian. Sasha scrolled through images, and brought up the picture of the missile on the back of a truck that Rygg had seen the first day, projected onto the wall. “Zoom,” Marin said, and Sasha moved in so they were focusing on some Cyrillic text near the missile cone. He brought up the clarified image from Yuri and placed the two side by side. After some adjustment, he sat back. Marin went and crouched by the screen. Then he pointed to two sections on Yuri’s photo: a heavy, squarish line, and a triangular knob, and matched them with similar shapes on the other picture. He nodded and patted Sasha on the shoulder. Then he looked back at Rygg.

“It’s the S-400,” he murmured. He said something to Sasha, who brought up an image of four green trucks with missiles mounted on them, angled into the sky. “Russia has several types of missiles,” Marin said. “Some – the S-75, the S-200 – are babies. You can use them to kill your neighbor’s dog, maybe. And most of the missiles Russia exports are not very important. African countries buy them, Indonesia buys them, Venezuela buys them, and no one cares, because they have a range of a few miles, and they are not so accurate. But Russia also has among its missiles a queen. The S-400. They do not make many, and they are very expensive. Many people think America is only concerned for uranium, for nuclear, but a nuclear weapon is nothing if you cannot lift it.”

“Bearing capacity of twenty tons, if I remember correctly,” Rygg said. “And a range of 400 kilometers. Twice the range of the American Patriot missiles and almost ten times the reach of our Penguins.”

Marin looked at him in surprise.

“I keep track of this stuff,” Rygg told him. “So, do you think it is possible that someone is smuggling S-400s out of Russia?”

“That is what appears to be happening,” Marin said.

Sasha clicked, and they were watching one of the missiles launch, in slow motion. The fire welled at its base, and the rocket rose on a fat stamen of smoke, arcing into the blue. “Four hundred kilometers,” Torgrim said again. “That is from Brussels to London. Helsingborg to Oslo. Damascus to Jerusalem.”

April 27

Dmitri lay in his bunk. Wolfie was snoring on the floor – they took turns sleeping on the floor, and it always seemed to make Wolfie’s snore louder. It was hot, and the air that sloshed in through the open porthole was like a warm washcloth against his cheek. They had been on the ship for a month, all but one day of which had been under the hijackers, and a couple of the crew had started to go crazy.

The day before yesterday, Jonas had begun weeping in the middle of supper. The crew ate in two shifts now, watched over by a couple commandos. They were not allowed to speak, and were given ten minutes to shovel in the food. Dmitri had made a stew, using a potato per person, and a few scraps of meat and carrot to fill it out. The kitchen commando supervised the doling out of the stew, making sure that each bowl received a single ladle. They were allowed a slice of bread. And suddenly, amid the clinking of the spoons and wet sounds of eating, there was a noise like someone trying not to sneeze: a rising, hiccupping whine. The clinking ceased immediately and everyone looked down to the end of the table, where Jonas sat staring into his bowl, his spoon held upright in one fist. He looked around at them, and his face brought a cold sweat into Dmitri’s palms. Jonas’s eyes were panicky. He seemed to be looking at them for help. The sobbing whines emerged from his mouth like little barks. The two commandos looked at each other. One shouted at Jonas to shut up, but Dmitri saw that he couldn’t. Jonas seemed to have lost control over his voice, and it was clearly terrifying him. One of the commandos started to step forward, but before he reached Jonas, Ludo, who was sitting two chairs away, stood and leaned across the table and grabbed Jonas’s jaw. Dmitri saw his thumb and forefinger squeezing into the stubbled skin. With his other hand, Ludo slapped Jonas’s face twice, hard. Jonas tried to look away and Ludo slapped him again and peered into his eyes. Then he let him go. Ludo sat back down and picked up his spoon and deliberately ate a mouthful. The others slowly started eating again as well. Dmitri watched Jonas, whose hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t control the spoon. Tears fell into the stew, but at least he had stopped the horrible sound.

That afternoon, while they were preparing supper, the kitchen commando was called away, and Ilya and Dmitri whispered furiously together, leaning over the bread dough. Ilya told him that Jonas had lost it completely after he returned to the cabin: he’d started throwing his clothes out the window, and one of the commandos had given him an injection. Jonas was now comatose in the hold. “It’s too hot,” Ilya whispered. “It’s too hot, and there’s no end to this voyage. More sailors are going to go nuts, watch out.”

“Do you know where we are?” Dmitri asked.

“The captain won’t say – he’s trying to protect us. But we passed the Dover cliffs a couple of days ago and are heading south by southwest. So I’m guessing we’re in the Atlantic, somewhere off the coast of Africa.”

“Why the Atlantic?”

“Less traffic, less communications noise. And we’re out of territorial waters. Did you notice that the commandos were tense as we moved past Dover, then seemed to relax a bit? Or some of them were – the tattooed guys don’t seem to know what’s up. Ludo thinks they must have pulled something to get us past the coastguard stations.”

“Is it possible to put out a false AIS?”

“That’s what I asked, and the captain told me to shut up. He knows, but he’s protecting us. It’s safer if we’re ignorant.”

“I can’t understand. If they’re after the goods, why wouldn’t they take us to a port? How are they going to offload the ship in the middle of the Atlantic?”

“Maybe they’re after a ransom.”

“Ransom? They might get twenty rubles out of my mother. And I can’t believe you’re worth much more.”

“I’m a fucking orphan, man, no one’s going to give a shit about my skinny ass. I know what you’re saying, though. Something’s up, and it’s not normal. We can’t figure it out. I think the captain knows, but he’s not going to say a word.”

The commandos also seemed to be affected by the sweltering heat and the dreary days. Dmitri had heard a few more sharp words than normal, and he’d seen one of the elites push one of the Siberians down the stairs. And then, this morning, as he was going to the galley, he’d seen three of the Siberians talking together. The kitchen commando had dispersed them with a short: “Back to stations!”