Trophy (29 page)

They watched the ninety-second movie and fell silent.

‘Johanne Reimers,’ Lene said at last. ‘The woman who flew with black kites in the Himalayas.’

The young Dane had won the World Paragliding Championship before she started flying with the famous black kites in Sagarmatha, a national park in northern Nepal, not far from Mount Everest. However, in October 2006 she had vanished without a trace along with Ted Schneider, an American photographer from
National Geographic
. Several search and rescue teams had looked for them in vain.

‘No one ever found out what happened to them, did they?’ she asked.

‘Now we know why,’ Michael said.

Lene looked up Johanne Reimers on Wikipedia and also found half a dozen good photographs of her on Google. Johanne Reimers was smiling in all of them, but was always deep in concentration. She was not only of this world, but also of others. She must have been absolutely fearless, Lene thought, or rather too wise to be fearless. She had had the
mental strength to cut through the fear that anyone suspended some kilometres up in the air underneath a thin nylon parachute must inevitably feel, or perhaps the thrill of flying with the kite’s perspective, agility and company was simply too magical to give up.

And it wasn’t a freak storm, a miscalculation, a technical malfunction, a gust of wind or an unexpected hole in the thermal systems that had killed the twenty-seven-year-old woman. It had happened one day in October 2006 on a narrow path carved into the raw granite of the rock face, high above a valley where a silver stream wound its way through the mountain ranges until, a thousand kilometres to the south, it merged with one of India’s mighty, holy rivers.

It had rained that afternoon, the rocks were glistening with moisture, the air was dense and grey with humidity, and a stream trickled down the middle of the path. They could hear quick, rasping breathing and see two dark figures stumbling along. Upwards, all the time upwards, following the sharp bends of the path. The man, who had to be the American photographer, called out to the woman in English. Johanne Reimers slipped and fell on her hands and knees; he stopped as well and rested his hands on his side. His face was pale and he was wheezing.

The person holding the camera also stopped. The picture heaved and sank with his laboured breathing.

The American watched the woman a few metres behind
him who was trying to get up. Then he looked back at his pursuers on the path and undoubtedly calculated his chances of getting away – with or without her. He staggered back, put his arm around her and dragged her with him with superhuman effort. He continued to stagger upwards, but stopped halfway through his third step when a bullet tore through his chest. His anorak billowed slightly on impact, but his body didn’t move.

Johanne Reimers fell to the ground, raised herself up on her hands and looked at the American. He was rigid and stared straight ahead with puzzled eyes as if he had forgotten something or wanted to tell her something important. She got up on her knees and reached out her hands to him as he slowly fell through the air, across the path and tumbled down towards the river far, far below them.

Johanne Reimers stood up and faced her pursuers. Her arms fell down her sides. Her face was a pale oval and her hair hung in dark, wet strands.

The others copied her and became just as inert and still. Like an audience watching a chamber play. The cameraman didn’t move and the camera was steady.

Johanne Reimers furrowed her brow and her gaze became alert; she opened her mouth as if she wanted to ask a question, but then she closed it again. She shook her head while someone loaded a rifle. She walked over to the cliff edge and stared into the abyss.

‘I can’t,’ she called out very clearly to them.

In Danish.

The camera zoomed in until her mouth filled the picture.

‘I can’t,’ she called out again.

The picture zoomed away from her face with dizzying speed, a shot was fired and Johanne Reimers fell to the ground and stopped moving.

Lene buried her face in her hands. She had recognized the woman’s expression from Josefine’s one open eye on the computer screen. The emptiness, the lack of understanding. Her own daughter’s face slipped effortlessly in place under the hood of Johanne Reimers’s anorak when Lene closed her eyes.

‘Bastards,’ she muttered, and stared at Michael’s battered, but composed face. Somehow it was reassuring, almost comforting to look at him. He was close and he was real.

He stretched his hand across the table and grabbed hers for a moment.

‘What did her last words mean?’ Lene asked.

‘I think they gave her the choice between jumping into the void … or getting shot. But someone like her would never kill herself.’

‘And they knew it,’ she said.

‘Of course.’

‘They’re insane. Totally insane and sadistic.’

‘Not according to the psychologists,’ Michael said.

‘I doubt the psychologists have seen this movie,’ she said.

Michael nodded. She noticed that a nerve was throbbing
below one eye. The skin around his eyes was dark and sunken, and he looked just as exhausted as she felt.

‘They certainly have an unusual urge to document their cruelty,’ he mumbled.

‘Is it that unusual? It reminds me of those pictures and films from ghettos and mass graves which the Nazis took. Perhaps they met up to view the recordings.’

‘The Nazis?’

‘The hunters, Michael.’

‘And Kim filmed the killings?’

‘What if he wasn’t supposed to keep or copy the recordings? What if he only did it as an insurance policy? So that he could expose the others if they threatened him. Perhaps the plan was for the client to have the recording and for the original to be destroyed.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘The client’s trophy was the recording. That was what they paid for. To own something no one else had.’

Michael pulled the laptop across the table and his index finger hovered over the files.

‘Another one?’ he asked.

Oh, God, no, she thought desperately, but knew very well that she had to. That it was her agonizing duty.

Lene got up and looked over his shoulder at the screen.

‘Musa Qala,’ she said, and pointed to a file. ‘Allan Lundkvist talked about that place. I believe it’s some kind of
regional capital in Afghanistan. The Taliban and the Allies take it in turns to gain control of it.’

‘The picture of the five men was taken outside Musa Qala,’ he said.

*

After the dark, wet afternoon in the Himalayas, the desert was very bright. Two of the four soldiers were bare-chested despite the fierce sun, the third was wearing a khaki T-shirt and shorts, and the fourth had a loose uniform shirt hanging outside his baggy camouflage trousers. All of them had chequered, black or red partisan scarves – keffiyehs – tied around their necks or faces because the desert wind whipped up sand and dust from the empty, white road and the bleak, scorched fields.

Lene recognized all four of them: Robert Olsen, Kenneth Enderlein, Allan Lundkvist and Thomas Berg.

The camera moved in a restricted arc and the recording was speckled with green reflections.

Michael pointed to the shadow on the road in the foreground.

‘A Humvee,’ he said. ‘A light armoured vehicle with a heavy machine gun on its roof. The cameraman is filming from inside the vehicle. The reflections are from the bullet-proof windows.’

The four men were armed with automatic carbines, which they never put down. Two were deep in conversation in the
foreground while the others squatted patiently in the shadow of the Humvee without talking.

In the distance blue wood smoke hung over a cluster of low, clay houses with flat roofs which were the beginning or maybe the end of the town called Musa Qala. A narrow green ribbon crept past the buildings and lost itself in the horizon. They could make out some scrawny scrub and bushes growing along the river.

‘What on earth do people live on in a place like that?’ Lene wondered.

The soil looked as if it couldn’t support thistles.

‘Opium and goats,’ Michael said.

Lene pointed to one of the two standing men.

‘Thomas Berg,’ she said.

‘Talking to Allan,’ he nodded.

‘They’re waiting for someone,’ Lene said.

The two men stopped talking and turned towards the desert. The other two got up and dusted themselves down. One of them tossed a pair of binoculars, which Allan Lundkvist caught in mid-air and held up to his eyes. The camera zoomed in on the tall, swaying column of dust balancing on the heat haze in the distance. At the bottom of the column something white was moving swiftly. The men got ready.

They loaded the carbines and one of them – whom Lene recognized as Kenneth Enderlein – went back to the Humvee. He opened the door and flashed a broad, white grin at the camera before pushing his way past the cameraman. You
could see his legs and boots. A bolt was pulled back and released with a bang.

‘He’s standing in the gun turret,’ Michael informed her. ‘And he has just loaded his machine gun.’

The white dot grew larger and turned into a Toyota pick-up that seemed to sail across the road in the shimmering, metallic heat.

None of the soldiers spoke to each other. Everything seemed practised, unhurried and routine. The man with the scorpion on his neck raised his hand and waved to the pick-up, which was approaching at high speed. His muscles rippled under the tattoo when he called out something incomprehensible by way of greeting. An arm came out of the Toyota’s side window and waved back. The arm stayed outside and a brown hand tapped the warm, white car door in time to the music from the car radio. The car skidded to a halt on squealing, worn tyres. The white column of dust travelled on, overtook the car and dispersed.

‘They’re nervous, but don’t want to show it,’ Michael said, pointing to the two people in the pick-up.

‘They have my sympathy,’ Lene said in a hollow voice. There was something ominous and inevitable about the soldier’s movements. They were natural born killers, she thought, and no longer of this world.

Allan Lundkvist also greeted the new arrivals and in the same movement pulled his red chequered scarf over his mouth and nose and tightened it. His sunglasses were silver
and reflected the surroundings. He looked at his partner for a moment and then he nodded.

They walked up to the pick-up, which had no registration plates or other identifying features. The two middle-aged men in the Toyota were dressed in traditional, loose-fitting and baggy Afghan clothes. They got out with the engine running and the atonal music continued to blare out from inside the car. White turbans, black waistcoats, Kalashnikovs strapped across their shoulders, broad smiles. The smaller but sturdier of them wore black sunglasses. The men embraced each other. The four of them appeared to communicate without difficulty in a mixture of English, Farsi and gestures. The taller of the two Afghans had a short, black beard, a sharp, birdlike face and narrow, dark eyes. He looked at the Humvee, spotted the camera and the man holding it inside the vehicle and started gesticulating while a stream of angry words poured from his mouth which had only three teeth. He covered the lower half of his face with one end of his turban. Allan Lundkvist placated him with smiles and gestures. The smaller of the two Afghans didn’t seem to mind being filmed. He waved to the camera and took out his own mobile to photograph the Humvee. The two Danish private first class soldiers watched him. Their smiles had frozen.

‘He shouldn’t have done that,’ Michael said.

‘Taken the picture?’

‘He’s mad. What an amateur.’

‘What are they doing?’ Lene whispered, and wondered
why she was whispering, but somehow it seemed appropriate.

‘Raw opium. Afghanistan is the world’s biggest exporter. How do you think it gets out of the country? They fly it out with damaged equipment, with the wounded or in sealed coffins with dead soldiers.’

Michael was whispering as well.

‘Are those goats at the back of the truck?’ she asked.

They could hear a faint, tremulous braying from the densely packed, long-haired animals behind the barred sides of the pick-up.

‘Camouflage.’

The Afghan with the bird-of-prey face pointed to the back of the pick-up and his stocky companion leaped with remarkable agility over the side, forced his way through the noisy, skinny and filthy goats and started passing down small brown bags. Allan Lundkvist and the man they knew as Thomas Berg took the hessian sacks and stacked them in a pyramid on the ground. The man on the pick-up lifted up an animal by its horns and threw it to the back to make room.

‘Poor creature,’ Lene muttered.

‘Twenty-four sacks,’ Michael said.

The short, stocky Afghan jumped down from the pick-up, and his Kalashnikov swung round in its shoulder strap and hit him in the face. For the first time his companion let his guard down. He threw back his head, laughed out loud and slapped his thighs.

The two Danes didn’t move a muscle.

Lene held her breath. She expected that blood would be spilled at any moment, but the clumsy opium smuggler merely rubbed his bearded cheek and joined in the laughter. She remembered reading that the ordinary Afghan was the most hospitable, humorous and lovable person you could hope to meet. Hospitality was a sacred duty and whoever showed a stranger the door or turned his back on him was the lowest creature on Earth.

Michael put his hand on her forearm.

‘Something is wrong,’ he muttered. ‘Who the hell is that?’

A fifth soldier had appeared on the scene. He was carrying two aluminium boxes that looked heavy. He put down the boxes in front of the group and greeted the smugglers, who appeared to know him since a round of fresh handshakes and brief embraces followed, and they showed no surprise at seeing him. The new arrival positioned himself next to Allan Lundkvist while Thomas Berg, as usual, stood slightly apart from the others.

The man turned around. Long hair, desert hat, long beard, the usual sunglasses, but his naked upper body was covered with easily recognizable tattoos. The camera swept across the tableau and zoomed in on the opium sacks.