Norwegian by Night (36 page)

This is better and makes the job easier.

The Black fires the rifle into the window of the truck, shooting the driver in the face. Blood splatters across the windscreen. The other man, obviously unaccustomed to war and its necessary responses, is frozen in place like the animals he undoubtedly hunts. The Black takes aim, flicks the Winchester's lever again, and kills him.

There is shouting at the back of the truck now. He hears a commotion, and then footsteps on the steel slats. He crouches to the ground and looks between the wheels of both vehicles to see whether they have come down from the truck and are trying to run. He knows from experience that if they run directly away from the truck he will be unable to see them, and will need to move off to the left or right in order to gain the needed line of sight.

He sees no feet, but believes he soon will.

When he stands again to look over the roof of the car to the truck, there is a slightly chubby man with dirty blond hair holding a rifle above the truck's cabin. His arms are shaking. Before the Black can reacquire a target, the man shoots.

The bullet passes the Black's head closely enough for him to hear it, and it leaves a terrible buzz and ringing in his ear.

He then reacquires his target and shoots the man. His aim is slightly off, as his shot seems to have hit the man lower in the face than he intended. But the target drops from view, and this is all that concerns him for the moment.

He crouches down again, and this time does see their feet.

The boy's smaller feet are to the right and running with one of the men. The other man is making for the woods to the left. There is a chance he might make it, too, because the Black has to make a choice. If he steps to his right to sight the man with the boy, he will obscure his view of the other who is making for the woods. If, on the other hand, he steps left, he will be able to shoot the one making for the woods, but will then have to chase his targets. And he does not want to chase his targets.

He is surefooted and moves quickly. Stepping behind the Fiat, he sees the man running with the boy, and manages to shoot him. But the shot is especially low, and catches him in the lower back. The man writhes and screams on the ground. The boy, on the other hand, stops running and turns to face the Black.

He is crying, but is mercifully silent. Crying upsets the Black, and he has made a concerted effort to stay away from children for that reason. It is the remaining sound — aside from cats howling in the night from hunger — that continues to touch some nerve.

He jogs forward so he clears the truck and has a complete view of the road. The other man has indeed escaped into the woods. In his youth he might have pulled the .45 and peppered the forest with random shots, but he does not do this sort of thing any longer.

The Black now walks slowly. There is no immediate hurry. His concern is that the survivor has a telephone, and will call the police. This is likely. Everyone in Scandinavia has a mobile phone.

He stands beside the boy and looks down. He runs his thumb under the boy's eye, and wipes away a tear. The two look at each other. When the Black looks into the boy's face it reminds him, just a bit, of what he no longer sees when he looks in the mirror.

The one who was shot in the back is Mads. He is still alive, though his eyes are already vacant. There is no need to shoot him in the back of the head. He will either die quickly enough, or he will not. In either case, his life is not significant compared to the one who fled.

What is significant, however, is the sound coming from the truck behind him.

The Black turns to look at the pick-up and is genuinely surprised to see the fat one holding the rifle and pointing it at him. He has lost part of his face, but the bullet did not penetrate the cranium. He is evidently able to wield a rifle.

The Black puts down the rifle and takes out the pistol. As he takes aim, however, he feels a sudden pain in his knee. He turns to see that the boy has struck him — forcefully — with some kind of stick that has a handkerchief tied to the end.

And in that moment there is a rifle shot.

Tormod's bullet hits the Black in the upper thigh and rips out a piece of his leg, but it has missed the femoral artery — which is lucky, because that would have killed him. It was, considering Tormod's condition, a brave effort. It is also his last because, on one knee, the Black uses the bullets from the pistol that he has not fired into the woods to kill Tormod.

The Black says to the boy in Albanian, ‘Come with me,' but the boy does not move. More strangely, he does not respond at all. It is as though he does not speak Albanian. So the Black says it again, this time in English, and again the boy is immobile. Confused but undeterred, the Black grabs a handful of the boy's shirt between the shoulder blades and drags him back to the car.

Picking up the rifle, he limps into the Fiat, bleeding from the leg. He opens the glove box again and stitches himself together, using thread and a needle that is already prepared in the medical kit. He bandages his leg and then takes a long drink of water from a canteen stored under the passenger-side seat. The boy's tears have stopped flowing. Perhaps it is now shock. It hardly matters either way.

Truly, the Black cannot understand when and why emotions begin and end, morph from one into another. This no longer even prompts speculation in him. There are no more mysteries when the soul is dead. Only problems.

When Enver answers, the Black's report is brief.

‘I have the boy. The police are going to find the cabin. I'll be there soon. I'm injured. Be prepared to leave.'

‘We're ready,' says Enver.

The Black removes the chip from his mobile phone and snaps it in two. He replaces it with another SIM card.

Satisfied, he closes the driver's side door and starts the car. He should be at the road to the summer house in less than ten minutes.

Chapter 21

Donny moves quietly, one small step at a time, further into the woods. His balance is not what it used to be, so it is harder to for him hold himself steady on one foot and to find the right placement for the other. He is still far enough from the road that he thinks it safe to remain upright, but he will crawl and become one with the ground as he gets closer.

He stops abruptly.

Just off the private road that leads to the mews and on to the house itself, he catches a glint of metal just off to the side in a gully. He is on level ground now, and instead of moving closer he moves farther back onto a small rise and sinks into a prone position.

Without making any wide movements, he takes the binoculars from his belt and brings them to his eyes. Out of habit, he does not use his trigger finger to adjust the focus, to avoid getting a splinter from the focus wheel.

Sheldon does not know much about motorcycles, but he can recognise the badge on the fuel tank well enough. It is the unmistakeable blue-and-white wheel of a BMW, and the bright-yellow fuel tank means it is Lars's bike.

It has crashed in the gully facing towards the main road and away from the house, as though it were on the way to leaving the property.

He does not see any people near it. No one dead or injured. The wheels are not spinning. He cannot hear the engine knock or whine.

Whatever is going to happen has already started.

It is not the exertion that will kill him at eighty-two, but the simple adrenaline. His heart beats faster, and a thin layer of cold sweat has already formed on his forehead, threatening a chill, pneumonia, and death. The cool breeze that was a blessing only moments ago ushers in a future without him.

Sheldon keeps the binoculars to his eyes, and scans to his left. The forest and light blur until he catches the slightest glimpse of the colour red. It is a red that was once the colour of a sports car or a vibrant sunset. It is faded now, and pleasing. It makes the summer house both at one with, but always apart from, the sheltering wood.

He cannot see any windows from here. He cannot see the sauna. And that is where Moses and Aaron are hiding.

Convinced he is alone, he moves more quickly now. He knows that the human eye is most attuned to movement and only then registers colour. We are prey. We are not the hunters. We are designed as prey, and our senses control us like prey. His staff sergeant was clear on the matter.

When we see movement, our eyes dilate and we stare at it like idiots. Our adrenaline pulses through our hearts. We panic and prepare to flee, but we don't flee. Why? Because we aren't fast, and we don't have any teeth worth mentioning, and we don't have claws, and we can barely swim, and we can barely climb, and we aren't half as clever as we think we are. We are food. But my job is to turn you from food into Marines! You cannot even imagine how hard my job is. I might as well turn lead to gold! I might as well turn my wife into Rita Hayworth! The only reason I am not involved in either of those useless but potentially gratifying pursuits is that the US Marine Corps is not paying me to pursue those other pursuits. They are paying me twelve cents a week to turn you from prey into predators! And do you know how the running, scared prey becomes the predator? Do you? I'll tell you how! By stopping. And turning around. And deciding to kill. I will now teach you how to do that. You! Horowitz, what did I just say?

Sir! Eat or be eaten, sir!

He needs to cover ground and find the sauna, but not allow the enemy to spot him. He has done it before. But that was almost sixty years ago.

Eight-two years old. His eyes now let in only one-quarter of the light that a young man can see.

One fall, and his bones will break.

The high registers of sound are only a memory.

What can he even hear? Can he hear a leaf crackling under the heels of an enemy? A weapon being cocked? A bird taking flight, signalling that he is not alone?

He is no hunter now. He is a dreamer. A dying specimen. A useless man.

‘I'm dressed like a bush.'

‘Yes, you are, Donny. Wasn't that the idea?'

‘Who am I fooling? Is it just myself?'

‘Are you sure you were a sniper? Not a file clerk, like you told Mabel?'

‘How would I know how to make the suit?'

‘You're very smart, Sheldon. Maybe you figured it out.'

‘It's more than that. There's muscle memory here. I know how to step. I know how to look. These are memories that are a part of me. And it's about more than that. It's not just what I remember. It's what I don't remember.'

‘How so?'

‘I don't remember filing anything.'

‘Either way, Sheldon, here you are. And what are you going to do about it? That's the only persistent question in life.'

‘I'm going to find the rifles.'

‘Well, if that's what's going to happen, you should get on with it.'

The land dips into a long, shallow valley before rising up to the house. The earth is cooler here. It is moist beneath the leaves. It is easier to step on and find sure footing. The light is still strong, and the Nordic sun is high, casting only short shadows. He recognises the shallow valley as an alluvial rift created by a glacier or river aeons ago. It is helpful to know because it means the valley continues in two directions, and he can use that knowledge of the land to his benefit. It means the sauna will not be where floodwaters gather. It is not here or on the other side of the mews. It will be on higher ground. Drier ground. It will be up and behind the house.

I'll take it wide and away.

A younger man might have taken an approach closer to the house, which he now approaches from the left and hundreds of metres into the wood. A younger man might have worried about Rhea with such intensity that he would have armed himself only with the short knife and used it as a weapon. But Sheldon is not a younger man. He cannot overpower anyone. From a seated position he can barely push the knife through the wall of the cotton canvas bag.

When we look into a forest to find the source of a sound, we look at the spaces in between. Between the trees where the light shines through. Between the branches to glimpse the blue sky, or the grey and silver linings of the heavens. Our eyes look for light, and search for something to carry us from the darkness of the wilderness.

And so Sheldon moves among the shadows. He clings to the base of trees. He lies flat for moments at a time where the ground is uneven, and he becomes the floor of the forest. He uses his knees and elbows to steady himself, because there is not enough strength in his chest any longer to keep his frail body above the earth for very long.

How much time has passed?

It's been about an hour. Forty minutes for the Ghillie suit, and only twenty minutes on the move. Is that possible? It feels like much longer.

He would grow cold here if it were not so hot under the tarp. He should be wearing gloves. They always told him that. Leather is best. Drivers of race cars and horseback riders wear gloves to absorb the sweat and keep a grip on the reins. Metal workers and woodsmiths wear them. Gardeners and mountain climbers use them.

Such gentle hands
, Mabel had once whispered to him.