The Carrier

8.01

Of the ultra-violence which followed that trigger, I have only sporadic memory.

I know this: I would not have managed my escape without Ingrid. She attacked Zafirah without warning, a diversion so that my sister-in-arms from Afghanistan did not anticipate the stab—swift, sharp—into her eyes, my fingers through the orbital socket to the soft tissue of her brain. The shock of slaughter, of the Team’s most violent fighter, before the killing had even begun, disarming the guards. Even the Rwandan combat instructor, who must not have recovered fully after the defeat at Niscemi. Between us, Ingrid and I erased or maimed—hard to know in the frenzy—them all. Broke out to the corridors and the two armed guards along the way, where—this I believe—Ingrid sacrificed herself as a parting gift to me. Distraction as art. Her action for my freedom. Her line of defense, drawing fire, permitting my exit into the surrounding streets.

Memory returns. I was hidden for some precious hours by local tradesmen, bitter opponents of the Niscemi base. Within their network, they organized my place on a fishing boat and away from Italy. From there, bound for Copenhagen, I hid on a large cargo vessel, then smaller boats, the last an icebreaker with only the most basic storage. Finding or stealing what I needed as I traveled north.

It was not difficult to bypass the checks in Thule harbor, under cover of the crowds that gather when the first ships arrive with packages and the mail after long winter months. All this yearning for home. People in environments for which they were not intended.

After a rapid march, in part a steady run, I completed the 150 miles over the ice to my goal. The temperature rose at first but then it fell, although never becoming unbearable. The moon shone from a clear sky and revealed traces of the facility, both upper and lower parts. The multi-layered secret—like Ingrid’s and Sixten’s work on what they called First, Second and Third Tier development, and from about the same era. The beginning of the 1960s. The time of promise, of lies and illusions, of Doomsday dreams.

A slight indentation in the glacier was the only sign. Small but decisive evidence of what could not remain hidden through the decades, although we had been convinced it would. The start of the way in, below. I crept and wormed my way through the metal ventilations shafts, instead of the usual entrance along much wider but already collapsed upper ice tunnels.

And now I sit down here, at my destination. Around me hangs the inner darkness of the continental ice. I let the headlamp I found in a storage room on the cargo vessel play over the walls, and gape, amazed at what mankind can create: cannot stop the tears. I have never seen anything so overwhelming, or so insane. This gigantic hall under the glacier, at least fifteen feet high and three hundred by three hundred in area, excavated and sculpted in the smallest detail, with fixed chairs, benches and work surfaces entirely made out of ice.

It is a little like the Jukkasjärvi Ice Hotel, but in deadly earnest, literally so. Edelweiss told us that ice was the chosen material even here in the command center, making everything as flexible as possible. So that this whole interior could be torn down and built back up again, in a few days at most.

The chair I am sitting on is broad and theatrical, like a frozen throne. Covered with Arctic fox fur, still in perfect condition, from the mammal with the best protection against extreme cold. One of the few which has really adapted to this environment. So we humans have just taken its equipment, put the chalk-white protective material on a number of the bare ice surfaces down here.

But the most remarkable thing stands in front of me: the enormous control panel. The only thing in here not made of ice. The very heart of this command center for the thousands of launch sites which were going to be built under the ice, where hundreds of climate-modified Minuteman missiles, called “Iceman”, were to be aimed at Russia.

This whole construction was intended to be bigger even than the Inner Circle in Ursvik, under a surface area three times the size of Denmark, with a complex tunnel network for the missiles, 2,500 miles long.

So the code name “Project Iceworm” was perfectly apt. Edelweiss had called it an historical high point, never since exceeded, in double-dealing and underground engineering. Above the ceiling of the command center was the official part of the project, called “Camp Century”. What we presented to the Danish authorities as an experimental station for cutting-edge research into how man should not only be able to survive but also thrive in an arctic environment, fully equipped with stores, library and chapel.

Now the control console is as defunct and abandoned as the rest of this masterpiece, both the official upper level and the lower top secret level. The system as a whole was powered by the world’s first mobile nuclear reactor, which was removed before the facility was deserted in the mid ’60s, after only a few years of operation, when the geologists established that Greenland’s pack ice was not at all as stable as had at first been thought. That the elasticity in this natural material would cause the installation to break up, the missile tunnels and command center down here as well as the lodgings and low-temperature laboratories above.

So it was all left behind, in the greatest haste, like the Inner Circle. Was allowed to remain standing as it was—because the falling snow would cause the ice sheet to grow even thicker, burying the secrets under a blanket of eternity.

But then came the greenhouse effect. According to some calculations, it would not take more than a few decades before traces of these highly classified installations would literally surface. Radiation and nuclear fallout had already started to become an issue between our Administration and Denmark’s, each of us N.A.T.O. partners, and soon the new revelations would make the relationship poisonous.

So I find myself sitting here, alternating between writing and just gazing. Everything feels as if in a movie: with the help of my headlamp I can change the scenes, from close-up on the pale bluish sheen on the desk in front of me to wide angle on the similar nuance of the walls. Light up the historic darkness of the Command Center, this palace of ice.

An exploration of my immediate surroundings has revealed much that is still well preserved down here, as if it were a museum of man’s worst fantasies. Even some rudimentary food supplies are largely intact, freeze-dried, but there are also cans and some powdered soups. Some of the gas canisters are still functional. I could keep myself going down here for months more, far longer than I will need.

And when I also discovered the parchment, everything became clear to me. What I would have to do with all that is in my notebook, now that Edelweiss can no longer bury it.

Because the world of paper has been superseded by the digital age, and still nobody knows how long information recorded with either medium will last. All those war directives, indispensable instructions for everything from nuclear weapons to cipher systems, the bureaucracy of conflict. Turning to dust or vanishing into thin air. But parchment on the other hand has a track record. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, are still legible—two thousand years after they were written—having been stored in a cave.

Edelweiss had talked about it during one of his historical presentations on the subject of Camp Century and Project Iceworm at the beginning of the ’60s. Said that among numerous scientific experiments on the effects of extreme cold performed in this location, there had been tests carried out in collaboration with the Library of Congress which showed that very low temperatures were effective in preserving parchment: it remained in the same mysteriously natural state as early man and mammoths found buried in ice. This was interesting to us too, he said, now that the short, digital era appeared to be nearing its end. When the R.S.A. encryption had more or less been cracked—and no form of digital storage could promise data integrity for more than a century at most.

So I take one of the preserved rolls out of the half-century-old metal cupboards and unpack it. One can still make out the veins of the dead animal, the sheep from which the parchment came, a slight blue blemish within the writing surface. With a certain reverence I pick up one of the special pens which I find beside the packages.

Then I start to transcribe my testimony from the notebook to the parchment. Despite the damage it has suffered during the months of my flight, the damp and cold, blood and impact, the journey here, it is mostly legible. I keep adding things as well. Descriptions of nightmares, my inner musings, parts of my dissertation as I still recall them.

In short, the whole of this account as you have now found it and are reading it. You, posterity, whoever you may be. Somewhere in my future and your present. After a certain time—a week, two, more, it is no longer possible to measure time deep under the inland ice—it is finally ready. Now comes the conclusion.

My headlamp does not reach as far as the door at the opposite end of the hall. But the route is familiar to me. I have memorized the sketches ever since Edelweiss’ historical lectures, regarded this as my ultimate goal long before Ingrid began sending her encrypted messages to the cell phone at the playground. When I realized that I would not be lowering the briefcase and myself under the so-called “eternal” ice, as I had dreamed and feared, but would instead meet Alpha somewhere 253.3 feet under the surface of Stockholm. And then proceed onward in her company, without having any idea where we were going.

I shiver—maybe because of the memories, the situation I find myself in, this monumental solitude—but hardly from the cold. The atmosphere down here is as mild as I had expected. Edelweiss told us about the mysterious hot springs found under the continental ice, like discoveries of gold, when work started on producing this ambiguous facility at the end of the ’50s. That they were the reason why the temperature could be markedly higher in this hidden lower level than in the officially open higher one.

This too is where I shall now be going, lowering myself into eternity in the largest of those hot springs. Having hidden my chronicle so that any pursuers will never find it—but you will, when everything is revealed by the parchment. And because the whole installation will surely rise to the surface long before my chronicle is irreparably damaged.

This is the only way for you to get to know my story. Start to imagine all these unimaginable things. Realize that NUCLEUS, the Inner Circle and Project Iceworm, the nuclear weapons themselves, did once exist. Were an actual part of our reality.

Because you must understand.

And maybe you finally will.

I brace myself, tense my body, ready myself for the last short stage of all. Get up from the throne of ice, leave the command console, walk through the next, smaller hall, the last one. And there it is: a simple little cross on the door the only sign.

The chapel down here is modeled on the one up there, a part of the whole civilian community built as a trompe l’oeil. Scenery and mock-ups to hide the truth, one level down.

I open the door, which only offers a slight resistance after all these years. The feeling of reverence is almost paralyzing. I move at a snail’s pace, as if sleep-walking. In here, too, everything is made of ice. On Edelweiss’ photographs, the crucifix was reminiscent of the one in Jukkasjärvi.

Then he had also showed us pictures from after the abandonment of the installations. The crucifix had for some reason been the only thing, apart from the nuclear reactor, to have been removed. His theory was that it could well have been a group of curious urban explorers who visited and took this most significant souvenir with them.

I search the wall with the light from my lamp, soon find traces of the upper hole, just visible. Try with a screwdriver from the engine room on the icebreaker. At first I make no progress—but after long enough, with sufficient persistence, the tip finally penetrates the surface. Then I move the screwdriver around to enlarge the gap. The ice which surrounds it is significantly more solid, like cement, almost diamond hard.

The result is quite simply the perfect hiding place. When I push in the rolls of parchment, as I soon will, and then cover the hollow with ice which has fallen while I was digging away, nobody will be able to find it. Not before the walls melt, and the ceiling, this entire place is laid bare by the effects of climate change.

But before I complete my account for you in what I hope will still be some sort of posterity, I sink or perhaps fall on my knees here in the chapel. Clasp my hands and for the first time in many years say a prayer. For our nuclear weapons future. For you, for us, for myself. Whoever I might be.

Then I pick up the pen again, scratch the last lines into the parchment. Close my eyes, listen to the silence, feel the mild air of the eternal ice against my eyelids.

In just a few minutes it will definitely be over: when I have walked the four hundred feet or so from here to the hot spring and disappeared for ever.

After that, it will all be up to you.