The Dark Chronicles (93 page)

‘You murdered my father,’ said a voice, startling me. It was Lundström, and the gentle tone he’d used before was now choked with rage. He hadn’t left me here, but was standing outside the door making sure I couldn’t escape. I turned to find the precise location of his voice – he was talking to me through the crack in the door.

‘Jan!’ I said. ‘Please, for the love of God let me out of here so we can talk about this. I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I can assure you I had nothing to do with your father’s death—’

‘You had everything to do with it!’ He laughed bitterly. ‘You have no idea how many times I thought of trying to find you. Once I even planned a trip to England, but I soon realized it was useless. I knew so little about you. But now here you are; you’ve fallen into my lap. It must be fate.’

I tried to move nearer to the door again, but the waves of heat were still too strong.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ I said. ‘Please open this fucking door before we all die!’

He laughed again. ‘You think I believed your crazy story about the world being on the brink of a nuclear war? No. You are on a mission, naturally, but that is surely not what it’s about. You claim to be the great hero who has come to rescue us all but I know who you really are, and what you’re doing. You are using me, just as you used my father. But I will not make the same mistake he did, which was to believe you.’

Had he gone mad? He sounded it. He threw more water onto the stove and the heat came again, spreading through me even more rapidly. My eyes felt like they were bulging from my head, and that they might disconnect. I wondered how much more of this I could take, and whether or not I could find a way to end it. Just slip to the ground. Yes, how easy that would be. The world can hang. We’ll all be dead anyway…

No, think,
think
. There must be some way out of here. Get to the door – he is pouring water on the stove through a gap in the door.

‘The Russians came to see us the morning after you left,’ he said. ‘Pappa stonewalled them, and said he had never heard of any British agents visiting. But he was not a good liar, or they had other evidence. They went away but returned shortly after, with a very cruel man in charge – I think he had come from Moscow. He didn’t believe Pappa’s story, and so he had come out himself to question him. He brought several other men with him, and some… equipment. They took Pappa to a basement in their headquarters in Mariehamn and tortured him for three days. When that didn’t work, they locked him inside a sauna much like this one and tried to boil him alive. By the end of it, he had told them everything – about you, the U-boat captain and the other agent. Now you are here, and I am going to make you suffer as they made Pappa suffer. I have a sauna nearly every day, and I know very well just how to make it hurt you: how much water to pour on, how long to wait. You’ll see.’

I believed him.

‘The man from Moscow,’ I said, struggling to breathe. ‘What was his name?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Can you describe him?’

There was no answer.

‘Please, Jan, I promise you I had no intention of any of that happening. But this is important. Do you remember what he looked like?’

‘He was evil, that is all I can say. He looked like a… like a little boy, or a troll. He was pure evil.’

I fell back onto the bench.

Yuri.

Yuri had been here in 1945 – before he had recruited me in Germany.

I heard the hiss and knew what I had to do. I had about a second before the heat would hit me again. I leapt towards the door and slammed my shoulder into it, breaking it open. I lunged forward
and grabbed Lundström by the collar as he stumbled backwards, his arms flailing. I brought my right hand down hard onto his wrist and gripped it, then swivelled into a half-turn and swung my other hand around to grab the barrel of the Lahti from below, jerking it back until it was parallel with the ground. He let out a scream as his trigger finger snapped, and the pistol dropped into my hand.

It was a heavy pistol. It reminded me of Father’s Luger. I trained it on him.

‘I’m sorry about your father,’ I said. ‘But there are more important things at the moment. Make another sound and I’ll blow your head off. Understand?’

He nodded, his eyes darting wildly. He was still clutching a ladle in one hand and I took it from him and dropped it in a bucket of water on the floor. The steam was still blasting in the sauna behind me, and a thought came to me. ‘How did you know it would be on?’ I said. ‘The sauna.’

‘I know the coastguards. They have saunas every Monday night and it’s someone’s job to prepare it. So I knew it would already be hot.’

‘What time do they have their sauna?’

‘Midnight.’

I checked the watch on his wrist.

‘That’s in fifteen minutes. You meant to kill me before then? What if I hadn’t died that fast and they had interrupted?’

He gave a cruel smile. ‘They would understand. Half the people on this island know who you are, and what you did to my father.’

Enough. There was no time for this. I pressed the pistol against the back of his neck.

‘Where can I find diving equipment?’

I had a couple of questions, but this was the most important one. I had to get to those canisters. But he didn’t answer, and just glared at me.

‘I don’t know.’

I swivelled him round so he was facing me.

‘Give me your best guess. You told me yourself there are few secrets here.’

He didn’t respond, just jutted out his chin and glared. Generals in Moscow were debating launching a nuclear strike, and this man might be my only chance of stopping it.

‘Tell me where I can find diving equipment or I’ll shoot.’

Nothing – only a clench of his jaw, his eyes wild with fury. I couldn’t get to the U-boat without a diving suit. If he knew enough to know the timetables of the coastguards’ saunas, there had to be a good chance he would know where to find a suit. But he was stubborn. Perhaps he wanted me to kill him. Perhaps he was so mad he’d forgotten what fear was. No – he’d known how to scare me well enough. It gave me an idea. I grabbed him by the neck until he was standing, then motioned to the door of the sauna with the pistol.

‘Get in,’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘Get in now!’

He opened the door and I pushed him into the space I’d been in just a few minutes earlier. A blast of heat hit me as I stepped in after him, and my skin prickled at the memory of the pain. Lundström had already started sweating. I grabbed one of his hands and placed the palm above the burning coals of the stove.

‘Where can I find diving equipment?’

I thought I saw fear growing in his eyes then, but he didn’t answer.

I slammed his hand down onto the coals, and he shrieked out. I removed it immediately – it had only been on for a fraction of a second. But it was enough.

‘Next door,’ he gasped, and pointed to the room adjacent.

I locked the sauna door then ran through and turned the light on. It was a dressing room: there was a line of towels and a poster illustrating the health benefits of the sauna. And laid out all along the benches and on the floor was diving equipment: suits, masks
and air tanks. I found the suit that looked the newest, then picked up a mask and an attached hose and air tank, the mark Aga Divator.

Carrying my bounty over my arm, I returned to Lundström, who was whimpering and weeping with the pain.

‘I’m sorry about your father,’ I said. ‘I never meant for that to happen. But I never said I was a hero.’

I locked the door behind me, then walked down the steps and headed through the bushes, back towards the jetty.

Lundström’s map was just under the dashboard. I took it out and located Storklubb and Söderviken on it. It was thirty-six nautical miles away, but from memory the U-boat was easily found once at Söderviken. I started the boat up slowly, then once I’d reached open water took her as fast as she could go. The horizon was barely visible in the darkness, but my mind was cold and clear: now I was the gun dog.

I reached the area around Söderviken about an hour and a half later. In 1945, I’d been sure that the hatch leading to the crew’s quarters had been sealed tightly. Clearly I’d been wrong, but had it just cracked open a little, allowing the liquid in the canisters to leak out through it, or had it opened entirely, in which case the canisters themselves might have floated out? If the latter had happened, I might get down to the U-boat only to find there were no canisters left, having floated off miles away. So I divided up the map into quadrants around the area to make it easier to search, then cut my speed and began drifting on the waves, looking for any telltale signs.

A wind was picking up, and I urged it to pass by – I could only dive if it remained calm, so a storm now would scupper everything. It was also playing tricks on my ears, and I kept imagining I heard the sound of an approaching helicopter. The thought of that filled me with dread. If Sasha and his men found me floating out here now, it was all over. But if I could get to the canisters first…

I took out the radio transmitter and looked it over. It had gone silent, but that might be because they had found Zelenin’s body and realized I’d taken it, and didn’t want to give me any more information by broadcasting anything I could pick up. But it had survived the heat of the sauna, and if I could transmit with it that might be the way through.

I drifted between islets, trying to locate the spot where I’d gone down in 1945. But it all looked the same. Then, finally, I saw something emerge in an area that was in the far north-eastern quadrant of my map – it looked a shade darker. I accelerated towards it and my heart started pounding. Yes, there was oil on the surface: a long thin coil of it stretching into the distance, growing thicker.

This was it. This was where U-745 had sunk.

I quickly dressed in the wetsuit, which was thick and heavy but a great improvement on the Clammy Death, and attached the mask and breathing tank. In one of the cupboards under the dashboard I found some waterproof sacking and took it out so I would have something to put the canisters in. I cut the engine, gave a last check that all the valves were secured, and recited the magic lines:

Then I climbed overboard and slipped down into the water.

*

It was much darker underwater but I saw the U-boat at once, lying like a giant wounded shark on the bed. I swam towards it, suddenly afraid I would be unable to carry the canisters up in the bag. How many would be enough to convince Sasha that this was the source of the ‘attacks’ in Estonia? Just one, or would I need more?

I hit a cold current and wondered if I were well enough protected
in the diving suit. Was it thick enough? I thought of the tremors that had nearly killed me when I’d crashed in the helicopter with Raaitikainen. I dismissed it from my mind: there was no point in worrying about such things now.

I reached the boat and swam through the main deck, then down the flight of stairs and into the loading bay. The corpses of some of the crew were still there, sitting just as they had been when I was here twenty-four years earlier, and as I had seen them sporadically in my nightmares since. There was a rubber-soled shoe jammed against the furred-up pipes, and I remembered that crewmen had worn those during attacks so as not to alert the enemy. One of the men seemed to be looking at his wristwatch, but half his face had collapsed in on itself, and tiny fish were swimming through the crevices of his eyes.

I grimaced and turned away, then rounded the corner to the place I remembered the canisters had been. As I did, my forebrain began tingling before my eyes registered it. There was a hole where the steel hatch leading to the officers’ quarters should be. Something was terribly wrong. I swam through in a daze, but I already knew what I would find.

The canisters were gone.

I let the waterproof bag drop from my hands, and swam through, seeing if perhaps they had dislodged somewhere. But they hadn’t – they were gone. There had been twenty or thirty of them here in 1945. If the hatch had burst open, they could all have tumbled out. But someone had been down here and
cut
the hatch open. It was a neat rectangular hole, and could only be man-made.

Who had done this, and when? And, more importantly, what had caused the leak to the bases? My stomach clenched, horrified I could have been so wrong.

It had been an attack all along.

Yuri had been right, back in the bunker in Moscow. Following the discovery that I was a double, the Service would have combed through every single document related to my career, both to assess the damage and to see if there was anyone else who had covered my tracks or turned a blind eye to my behaviour. And at some point someone must have come across Templeton’s report on my operation here in 1945, and that had revealed an unexpected prize: a lovely little chemical weapon sitting at the bottom of the Baltic.

This discovery would have woven its way through the in- and out-trays until someone at Porton Down had confirmed that Winterlost was extremely effective and was still very much worth getting hold of, and so they had decided to come back to see if the canisters were still here and could be retrieved. In 1945 I had had to come in by seaplane under cover to reach this wreck, but nowadays
they could simply fly a team of divers to Helsinki via BEA. Under cover of a diving expedition or something similarly innocuous, they could have cut open the hatch, hauled the canisters onto a boat, and then slipped into the Gulf of Finland and released them into the water along the coast near Paldiski. Then they could have simply sailed away again, and waited for the stuff to seep onto the shoreline and do its damage. Personnel at two of the Soviets’ naval bases would then be incapacitated, and nobody could be blamed.