Liza Marklund: Red Wolf

He could well remember the fear he had felt at the mouth of the tunnel when the shot rang out. Not a dead reporter , he had thought, anything but a dead reporter, please .

He stopped looking at the bunker of the embassy and sat down on his chair.

‘It’ll all crumble around you one day,’ Annika Bengtzon said as she closed the door behind her.

He didn’t bother to smile. ‘I can afford a new one. The paper’s on a roll,’ he said.

The reporter cast a quick, almost furtive glance at the graphs on the desk. Schyman leaned back, studying her as she carefully sat down on one of the heavy chairs.

‘I want to do a new series of articles,’ she said, looking at her notes. ‘Next week is the anniversary of the attack on the F21 airbase in Luleå, so it would make sense to start there. I think it’s time for a proper summary of what happened, all the known facts. There aren’t many of those, to be honest, but I could do some digging. It’s over thirty years ago, but some of the employees from those days will still be in the Air Force. Maybe it’s time for someone to talk. You don’t get any answers if you don’t ask the questions…’

Schyman nodded, folding his hands on his stomach. Once all the fuss had died down last Christmas, she had spent three months at home. A sabbatical, they had agreed to call it. When she returned to work at the start of April she had insisted on being an independent investigative reporter. Since then she had chosen to focus on terrorism, its history and consequences. Nothing remarkable, no revelations – routine reports from Ground Zero and 9/11; a few follow-up pieces about the bombing of that shopping centre in Finland; interviews with survivors of the Bali bombings.

The fact was that she hadn’t really done much lately. Now she wanted to investigate even deeper into past acts of terrorism. But just how relevant was all this, and did it make sense to embark on that battle right now?

‘Okay,’ he said slowly, ‘that could be good. Dusting off our old national traumas, the hijack at Bulltofta, the siege of the West German embassy, the hostage crisis on Norrmalmstorg-’

‘And the Palme murder, I know. And out of all of them, the attack on F21 is the least written about.’

She dropped her notes in her lap and leaned forward.

‘The Defence Department has kept the lid on this, applying a whole arsenal of secrecy legislation. There were no media-trained PR people on the defence staff in those days, so the poor bastard in charge of the base had to stand there in person shouting at reporters to respect the security of the nation.’

Let her run with it a bit longer , he thought.

‘So what do we know?’ he said. ‘Really?’

She looked dutifully down at her notes, but he got the distinct impression that she knew all the facts by heart.

‘On the night of the seventeenth of November nineteen sixty-nine a Draken fighter-plane exploded in the middle of the F21 base at Kallax Heath outside Luleå,’ she said quickly. ‘One man was burned so badly that he died of his wounds.’

‘A conscript, wasn’t it?’

‘That only came out later, yes. He was transferred by air ambulance to the University Hospital in Uppsala, and hovered between life and death for a week before he died. The family was gagged. They kicked up a real stink a few years later because they never got any compensation from the Air Force.’

‘And no one was ever arrested?’

‘The police interrogated a thousand people or so, the security police probably even more. Every single leftwing group in Norrbotten was pulled in, down to their least significant members, but nothing was ever found. It wasn’t as simple as all that, though. The real left had managed to stay pretty tight-knit. No one knew all their names, and the whole lot of them used codenames.’

Anders Schyman smiled nostalgically. He himself had gone under the name of ‘Per’ for a short period. ‘You can never keep stuff like that secret, though.’

‘Not completely, of course not. They all had close friends in the groups, after all, but as far as I know there are still people in Luleå who only recognize each other by the codenames they used in left-wing groups at the end of the sixties.’

She could hardly have been born then , he thought.

‘So who did it?’

‘What?’

‘Who blew up the plane?’

‘The Russians, probably. That’s the conclusion the armed forces came to, anyway. The situation was completely different then, of course. We’re talking about the height of the arms race, the deepest freeze of the Cold War.’

He closed his eyes for a moment, conjuring up images and the spirit of the time. ‘There was a huge debate about the level of security at military bases,’ he suddenly remembered.

‘Exactly. Suddenly the public – or rather the media – demanded that every single base in Sweden had to be guarded better, which was completely unrealistic, of course. It would have taken the whole of the military budget to do it. But security was certainly stepped up for a while, and eventually secure zones were established within the bases. Dirty great fences with video cameras and alarms and what have you around all the hangars and so on.’

‘And that’s where you want to go? Which one of the editors have you spoken to?’

She glanced at her watch. ‘Jansson. Look, I’ve got an open plane ticket for this afternoon. I want to meet a journalist on the Norrland News up there, a bloke who’s found out some new information. He’s going off to south-east Asia on Friday, away until Christmas, so I’m in a bit of a hurry. I just need you to give the okay.’

Anders Schyman felt the irritation rising again, maybe because she was excusing herself so breathlessly.

‘Couldn’t Jansson do that?’

Her cheeks started to go red.

‘In principle,’ Annika Bengtzon said, meeting his gaze. ‘But you know what it’s been like. He just wants to know that you’re not against it.’

He nodded.

She closed the door carefully behind her. He stared at the space she had left, understanding exactly what she meant. She works without boundaries , he thought. I’ve always known that. She hasn’t got any instinct for self-preservation. She gets herself into all sorts of situations, things normal people would never dream of doing, because there’s something missing there. Something got lost long ago, yanked out, roots and all, the scar fading over the years, leaving her exposed to the world, and to herself. All she’s got left is her sense of justice, the truth like a beacon in a world full of darkness. She can’t do anything else .

This could get really messy .

The editorial team’s euphoria over the sales figures for the Christmas holiday had come to an abrupt halt when it emerged that Bengtzon had got an exclusive interview with the murderer while she was being held captive. It had been typed on the murdered Olympic delegate’s computer. Schyman had read it, it was sensational. The problem was that Annika, like a real pest, had refused to let the paper publish it.

‘That’s just what the bastard wanted,’ she had said. ‘And because I’ve got copyright I can say no.’

She had won. If they had published without her consent, she had promised to sue them. Even if she might have lost the case, he wasn’t prepared to challenge her, considering the amount of good publicity the story had already got them.

She’s not stupid , Anders Schyman thought, but she might have lost her bite .

He stood up, went over to the graphs again.

Well, there would be further cutbacks in the future.

The sunset was spreading a fiery glow in the cabin of the plane, even though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon. Annika looked for gaps in the whipped-cream clouds beneath her but found none. The fat man next to her drove his elbow into her ribs as he spread out his copy of the Norrland News with a sigh.