Henning Mankell - The Troubled Man

He fell silent, took a sip of coffee, and sucked at his pipe, which had gone out. And that was the moment, in that insulated little room where the only sound was a faint hum from the party guests outside, that Wallander realized Håkan von Enke was scared. He had seen this many times before in his life: a person frightened of something, real or imagined. He was certain he wasn’t mistaken.

The conversation started awkwardly, with von Enke reminiscing about the years when he was still on active duty as a naval officer.

“The fall of 1980,” he said. “That’s a long time ago now, a generation back, twenty-eight long years. What were you doing then?”

“I was working as a police officer in Ystad. Linda was very young. I’d decided to move there in order to be closer to my elderly father. I also thought it would be a better environment for Linda to grow up in. Or at least, that was one of the reasons why we left Malmö. What happened next is a different story altogether.”

Von Enke didn’t seem to be listening to what Wallander said. He continued along his own line.

“I was working at the east coast naval base that fall. Two years before I had stepped down as officer in charge of one of our best submarines, one of the Water Snake class. We submariners always called it simply the Snake. My posting at the marine base was only temporary. I wanted to go back to sea, but the powers that be wanted me to become part of the operations command of the whole Swedish naval defense forces. In September the Warsaw Pact countries were conducting an exercise along the East German coast. MILOBALT, they called it. I can still remember that. It was nothing remarkable; they generally had their fall exercises at about the same time as we had ours. But an unusually large number of vessels were involved, since they were practicing landings and submarine recovery. We had succeeded in finding out the details without too much effort. We heard from the National Defense Radio Center that there was an awful lot of radio communication traffic between Russian vessels and their home base near Leningrad, but everything seemed to be routine; we kept an eye on what they were doing and made a note of anything we thought important in our logbooks. But then came that Thursday — it was September 18, a date that will be the very last thing I forget. We had a call from the duty officer on one of the fleet’s tugs, HMS Ajax , saying that they had just discovered a foreign submarine in Swedish territorial waters. I was in one of the map rooms at the naval base, looking for a more detailed chart of the East German coast, when an agitated national serviceman burst into the room. He never managed to explain exactly what had happened, but I went back to the command center and spoke to the duty officer on the Ajax . He said he’d been scanning the sea with his telescope and suddenly noticed the submarine’s aerials some three hundred yards away. Fifteen seconds later the submarine surfaced. The officer was on the ball, and figured out that the submarine had probably been at periscope depth but had then started to dive when they saw the tug. The Ajax was just south of Huvudskär when the incident happened, and the submarine was heading southwest, which meant that she was parallel with the border of Swedish waters but definitely on the Swedish side of the line. It didn’t take long for me to find out if there were any Swedish submarines in the area: there were not. I requested radio contact with the Ajax again, and asked the duty officer if he could describe the conning tower or the periscope he had seen. From what he said I realized immediately that it was one of the submarines of the class NATO called Whiskey. And at the time they were used only by the Russians and the Poles. I’m sure you’ll understand that my heart started beating faster when I established that. But I had two other questions.”

Von Enke paused, as if he expected Wallander to ask what the two questions were. Some peals of laughter could be heard on the other side of the door, but they soon faded away.

“I suppose you wanted to know if the submarine was in Swedish territorial waters by mistake,” said Wallander. “As was claimed when that other Russian submarine ran aground off Karlskrona?”

“I had already answered that question. There is no naval vessel as meticulous with its navigation as a submarine. That goes without saying. The submarine the Ajax had come across intended to be where it was. The question was what exactly it was up to. Why was it reconnoitering and surfacing, apparently not expecting to be discovered? It could have been a sign that the crew was being careless. But of course, there was also another possibility.”

“That the submarine wanted to be discovered?”

Von Enke nodded, and made another attempt to light his reluctant pipe.

“In that case,” he said, “to encounter a tugboat would be ideal. A vessel like that probably wouldn’t even have a catapult to attack you with. Nor would the crew be trained for confrontation. Since I was in charge at the base, I contacted the supreme commander, and he agreed with me that we should immediately send in a helicopter equipped for tracking down submarines. It made sonar contact with a moving object we decided was a submarine. For the first time in my life I gave an order to open fire in circumstances other than training exercises. The helicopter fired a depth charge to warn the submarine. Then it vanished, and we lost contact.”

“How could it simply disappear?”

“Submarines have many ways of making themselves invisible. They can descend into deep troughs, hugging the cliff walls, and thus confuse anybody trying to trace them with echo sounders. We sent out several helicopters, but we never found any further trace of it.”

“But couldn’t it have been damaged?”

“That’s not the way it goes. According to international law, the first depth charge must be a warning. It’s only later that you can force a submarine up to the surface for identification.”

“What happened next?”

“Nothing, really. There was an inquiry, and they decided that I’d done the right thing. Maybe this was the overture for what was to follow a couple of years later, when Swedish territorial waters were crawling with foreign submarines, mainly in the Stockholm archipelago. I suppose the most important result was that we had confirmation of the fact that Russian interest in our navigational channels was as great as ever. This happened at a time when nobody thought the Berlin Wall would fall or the Soviet Union collapse. It’s easy to forget that. The Cold War wasn’t over. After that incident, the Swedish navy was granted a big increase in funding. But that was all.”

Von Enke drained the rest of his coffee. Wallander was about to stand up when his host started speaking again.

“I’m not done yet. Two years later, off we went again. By then I’d been promoted to the very top of the Swedish naval defense staff. Our HQ was in Berga, and there was a combat command on duty around the clock. On October 1 we had an alarm call that we could never have imagined, even in our wildest dreams. There were indications that a submarine, or even several, were in the Hårsfjärden channel, very close to our base on Muskö. So it was no longer just a case of trespassing in Swedish territorial waters; there were foreign submarines in a restricted area. No doubt you remember all the fuss?”

“The newspapers were full of it, and television reporters were clambering around on slippery rocks.”

“I don’t know what you could compare it to. Perhaps a foreign helicopter landing in a courtyard at the heart of the royal palace. That’s what it felt like, having submarines close to our top secret military installations.”