Sohlberg and the White Death (13 page)

Once Navalny got inside the luxury Mercedes SUV he failed to recognize the driver or the passenger up front. The two men looked ex-KGB or current FSB. So did the other gorilla who sat on the back seat by the window. Navalny took the middle seat and Zubkov climbed in behind him.

Col. Zubkov’s stainless steel teeth glimmered when he spoke inside the car’s dark interior. “Did you bring the blank arrest warrants and the extradition papers?”

“Yes.”

“If you didn’t then we won’t be able to cross the border.”

Zubkov’s unusual set of instructions started making sense. The E-18 Highway would take them northeast into the border with Finland. From St. Petersburg they had a 190-mile drive to the Finnish capital of Helsinki.

As soon as the convoy went east—in the opposite direction of Helsinki—an alarmed Navalny tried to sound as calm as possible. “I thought we were going to Finland.”

“Shut up,” said Zubkov while he filled out the arrest warrants and extradition papers. “Shut up before I do something that
you
are going to regret.”

The convoy’s route became less of a mystery as soon as the two vehicles got on the M-18 Highway and headed north. “Let me guess . . . north to the Port of Kandalaksha . . . then west to Kovdor . . . then across Finland into Norway?”

“I told you to shut up. I’m not going to repeat myself a third time.”

Navalny smirked. “You can count that high?”

“Shut up before I do something
you
are going to regret.”

Zubkov’s threat meant little. Navalny had greater worries. The 800-mile northern route into remote and mostly uninhabited wilderness meant that he was in far bigger danger than expected.

Only desperate criminal operatives and extremely sensitive intelligence operations used the old Cold War smuggling route which went through the most desolate regions of the beautiful lake-and-forest taiga of north Europe. If this business went bad then his body would never be found in the endless ocean of pine and spruce and larch.

Chapter 9/Ni

RINGVASSØY ISLAND, NORWAY:

SUNDAY JULY 17, OR THREE MONTHS

AND 5 DAYS AFTER THE DAY

Ervin Vikøren sailed around Ringvassøy Island which is also known as Ringvassøya. He pretended that he was fishing. Pretending was easy to do and quite believable because he fished for himself and he leased out his 100-foot boat as a deep-sea charter for fishermen. Vikøren held a commercial fishing license for cod and haddock and halibut and salmon. But he also caught anything and everything that he could whether it was legal or illegal. Endangered species weren’t off limits.

“Hey there . . . is that you Ervin?” said Henrik Holstrøm over the radio from a boat that was a quarter-mile away and heading to Iceland for cod. Holstrøm was an old boyhood friend. “Ervin Vikøren . . . is it you? . . . Or is someone else on
The Asgard
?”

“It’s me. I’m still on Cloud Nine,” said Ervin Vikøren in a clever play on words over his ship being named for the highest world in Norse mythology—
Asgard
—the homeland of a mighty race of warrior gods.

“Really? . . . I thought Ida got
The Asgard
and kicked you out of the home of the warrior gods.”

“Never,” said Ervin Vikøren as he tensed up at the sound of his ex-wife’s name. “Life’s been very good without Ida.”

Ida Hjort had demolished his heart and bank accounts four years ago.

“That’s not what I heard.”

“What did you hear?”

“That you lost your trawler to her father after he proved that he loaned you all of the money to buy the boat.”

“Not true.”

“Really? . . . I heard that her father’s legal maneuvers forced you to get into debt to buy your new boat.”

“Not true.” Ervin Vikøren closed his eyes as if by closing them he could cool down the roaring fire inside him. He certainly wasn’t going to let Ida have the final word. No. He would do very well without her. “Life’s been very good without Ida.
”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Life’s been very good without Ida
.

He had his freedom. He could finally do whatever he wanted. He could enjoy any woman whenever he felt the urge. But with his newfound freedom he was having problems making the huge monthly payments on
The Asgard
by the first day of each month. Unfortunately that was the problem with a high-interest loan from some faceless banker in distant Oslo. Those sharks liked to repossess boats by the fifth if the late payment wasn’t deposited along with usurious penalties by the third. Life was much better and easier when he had a no-interest loan from Ida’s father—whom he rarely paid.

Life’s been very good without Ida
.

Ida-free life was good but he rarely got to see his two sons aged 10 and 7. That killed him even worse than the boat payments.

Life’s been very good without Ida
.

Life may have been good but he had gotten lonely without his wife and children. The emptiness drove him into sleep-around binges with as many women as he could bed down in and around Tromsø.

The result of his roaming?

He was now shacked up with and tied down to The Bossy Hussy. She was fantastic in the sack but greedy for money and always pushing him to earn more. Ervin Vikøren hated his new life and he knew why he had dug himself into a pit: he had hit the bong pipe one time too many since high school.

The result of his doping?

One dumb decision after another.

Vikøren was trying to cut back on the wacky weed. But it was hard when the psychological addiction was so strong. He knew that he smoked pot because he had always been ashamed about his lack of education and lack of success. After the divorce he had slipped down depression’s ugly little chute to become a slut in the bedroom and business world. Even now—four years after the divorce—the education, good manners, and dignified social standing of Ida and her parents made him feel grossly inferior specially when he thought about his own failures, his coarse manners, and his family of vulgar ignoramuses.

Ervin Vikøren wasn’t stupid. He also knew that he was paying a heavy price for giving in to the hormonal urges that led him to cheat one time too many on Ida—his childhood sweetheart.

Life’s been very good without Ida
.

His new woman demanded more and more in bed and the bank account. She was grinding him down literally and figuratively. For extra income he poached by taking far more fish than the maximum catch allowed by law. He also liked to pilfer other fishermen’s catch from their lobster traps or their fish shacks. And for the right price he smuggled people and illicit goods coming in or out of Norway by way of Sweden or Finland or Denmark or Russia. His smuggling enterprises sometimes ventured as far away as United Kingdom and Iceland. The most lucrative run had been a shipload of cocaine a year ago from Columbia via England into Russia.

Life’s been very good without Ida
.

One problem with his Ida-free life was the danger of getting caught in foreign waters with a ton or two of cocaine. That risk far exceeded any profits. A stint in any foreign prison—specially a Russian prison—would surely end with his murder or suicide. So he had retired from trans-shipping the white powder after only one boatload. Unfortunately he did
not
use the fabulous coke profits to pay off the mortgage on
The Asgard
. Coca profits instead went to buy a new house and new cars and new furniture and new clothes and new appliances to make his new bedmate happy.

Life’s been very good without Ida
.

Debt-loaded post-Ida life was
so
good that he had agreed to pick up a couple of shady characters that his London cocaine contacts wanted imported into the United Kingdom from Norway.

Life’s been very good without Ida
.

Ervin Vikøren wasn’t stupid. He knew that only the most dangerous of characters—or the most wanted of criminals—would pay for such an evasive route that snaked deep under the customs and immigration radar of any country.

Life’s been very good without Ida
.

He was to retrieve the disreputable and possibly dangerous characters in nearby Furuflaten and take them to Scotland. The pickup site required him to take his boat deep inside the desolate and mountain-ringed fjords of Troms County. He had to pass Reinøya Island and then head east until he rounded Lyngen Peninsula. From there he would go south into the Lyngen fjord until he reached the little bay just north of the small town of Furuflaten which sat on the west side of the fjord. The proposed enterprise sent off the wrong vibes.

Life’s been very good without Ida
.

After picking up his
don’t ask-don’t tell
clients he had to immediately return to the Norwegian Sea and navigate 14 miles out into international waters to avoid all law enforcement. At that point he would steer south and stay within safe and easy reach of Norway’s coast for the 1,200 mile trip to Stavanger. Then he’d put to open sea and plow through 300 risky miles of rough and unpredictable North Sea waters.

He would only get paid the remaining 50% of his fee if he dropped off his passenger cargo at the isolated sand dunes of Rattray Head—some 30 miles north of Aberdeen Scotland. His clients had been very specific about the secluded location and the exact day and time. They had also advanced him the money to buy a
Bombard AX yacht tender
with its own engine. The fully equipped Zodiac boat was the best in the industry: inflatable; storable below deck; and very fast and stable for sea-to-shore commutes.

Life’s been very good without Ida
.

He needed to be lucky enough to have clients who would
not
execute him and his crew. After all he and his crew were inconvenient eyewitnesses. It was not beyond the realm of the impossible for his clients to kill him and his crew and then sink their bodies and his ship out at sea to eliminate witnesses to the illegal shipment of human cargo. It would be easy: the killer or killers could use the Zodiac to return to shore after scuttling the unwanted evidence.

Life’s been very good without Ida
.

La Vida Loca Without Ida required that he did not have a run-in with Norwegian or Scottish law enforcement. Otherwise his clients, the authorities, and his shrew would demand a lot of explanations or worse. Of course that assumed he would live to do the explaining.

Life’s been very good without Ida
.

And now he was running errands for his cocaine contacts in London and these dangerous people wanted him to secretly bring human cargo into Scotland.

Why?

What kind of people would go to such trouble and expense to avoid detection?

At least he had stowed onboard his trusty Beretta 92 FS semi-automatic handgun. His beloved sawed-off 12-gauge pump-action Remington 870 shotgun was hidden away behind an array of deep-sea fishing tools—gutting knives and harpoons and gaffs and monster hooks that could also serve as battle-tackle. All of his little friends might just come in handy.

Chapter 10/Ti

TROMS COUNTY, NORWAY: MONDAY

JULY 18, OR THREE MONTHS AND

6 DAYS AFTER THE DAY

Only 1,242 miles separate Tromsø from the North Pole. The same amount of miles separate Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay from the North Pole. Tromsø however is much warmer and more hospitable to human life thanks to the Gulf Stream. The current hauls warm waters all the way up to Norway from the sunny hot climes of Florida and the Caribbean. But geography—like the stars—is not at fault for human events.

“I’ve never seen so many bodies,” said Constable Lars Rasch of the Troms politidistrikt. He did not exaggerate. Rasch had never come across
one
homicide victim during his five years as a policeman in the northernmost city of Norway. He stared at the row of frozen bodies buried in the permafrost.

“Look like sardines in a can . . . don’t they Rasch?”

The constable said nothing. Instead he looked in disgust at Per Moen—the owner of the fish shack which had become a tomb for nine corpses. Rasch turned his gaze upon the sea. The morning’s storm had washed the sky and the ocean and the islands in depressing shades of gray that seemed to merge into one mournful salute to the dead.

“Hey Rasch . . . how soon can you move the stiffs out? . . . I need to store my stock out here. It’ll cost me a fortune if I have to move my inventory elsewhere. . . . I imagine I’ll be compensated for my building getting torn apart to get these popsicles out of here . . . no?”