The Moscow Option

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.

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:

Our plesance here is all vain glory,

This fals world is but transitory,

The flesh is bruckle, the Feynd is slee:

Timor mortis conturbat me.

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.