Red Wolf

‘We ran that last Friday,’ he said.

She was shocked. She hadn’t heard anything about new revelations in any of the media.

Pekkari dropped three lumps in his mug.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘But you’re on one of the biggies; you don’t know what it’s like for locals. The agencies only care about Stockholm. As far as they’re concerned, our scoops are worth less than cats’ piss.’

Not true, she thought to herself, it depends on the quality of the material. She suppressed the thought and looked down at her lap.

‘I started out on the Katrineholm Post,’ she said, ‘so I know exactly what it’s like.’

The man stared at her, eyes wide open. ‘Then you must know Macke?’

‘On sport? Of course I do. He’s an institution.’

An out-of-control alcoholic even when I was there, Annika thought, smiling at Pekkari.

‘What did you have for Ekland?’ the man said, slurping his coffee.

‘A few historical summaries,’ she replied quickly. ‘Mostly archive material from the seventies, pictures and text.’

‘Must all be online,’ Pekkari said.

‘Not this.’

‘So you weren’t trying to get his story?’

The man’s eyes stared fixedly at her over the edge of the mug, and she calmly met his gaze.

‘I have many good qualities,’ she said, ‘but mind-reading isn’t one of them. Benny called me. How else would I know what he was up to?’

The editor took another lump of sugar, sucking on it thoughtfully as he drank his coffee.

‘You’re right,’ he said, once he had swallowed with an audible gulp. ‘What do you need?’

‘Help to get access to Benny’s articles on terrorism.’

‘Go down to the archive and talk to Hans.’

Every newspaper archive in the whole of Sweden looks like this, she thought, and Hans Blomberg looks like archivists have always looked. A dusty little man in a grey cardigan, glasses and a comb-over. Even his noticeboard contained the anticipated prerequisites: a child’s drawing of a yellow dinosaur, a noisy ‘Why aren’t I RICH instead of BEAUTIFUL?’ sign, and a calendar counting down to an unspecified goal with the words ‘NEARLY THERE!’

‘Benny was a stubborn bastard,’ the archivist said, sitting down heavily behind his computer. ‘Worse than a mule, never gave up. Wrote more than anyone else I’ve come across, sometimes at the expense of quality. You know the type?’

He looked at Annika over the rim of his glasses, and she couldn’t help smiling.

‘Not to speak ill of the dead,’ the man went on, conducting a slow waltz on the keyboard with his index finger, ‘but we might as well be honest.’

He batted his eyelashes at her.

‘His death seems to have affected people here badly,’ Annika said tentatively.

Hans Blomberg sighed. ‘He was the star reporter, the darling of the management team, the union’s hate- figure, you know? The boy who dances into the newsroom after one job and cries, “Get me a picture byline, because tonight I’m immortal!”’

Annika burst out laughing. She had actually seen someone do precisely that. She thought it might have been Carl Wennergren, one of the former newsroom morons.

‘Well then, young lady, what exactly are you looking for?’

‘Benny’s series about terrorism, especially the article on F21 that was published the other day.’

The archivist looked up, his eyes twinkling. ‘Aha. So a nice young girl like you is interested in dangerous things?’

‘Dear Uncle Blomberg,’ Annika said, ‘I’m married and I’ve got two children.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Feminists… Printouts or cuttings?’

‘Copies, preferably, if it isn’t too much bother,’ Annika said.

The man groaned and got up again.

‘This business with computers,’ he said, ‘everything was going to get so much easier, but it hasn’t. Twice the work, that’s what computers have meant.’

He disappeared in amongst the cabinets, muttering ‘T… T… terrorism…’, opening drawers and huffing and puffing.

‘Here you are,’ he said a few moments later, triumphantly holding out a brown envelope. ‘Terrorism a la Ekland. You can sit over there. I’m here till six o’clock.’

Annika took the envelope, opening it with sweaty fingers as she went over to the desk he had indicated. Cuttings were infinitely superior to computer printouts. On screen all the headings were the same size, all articles the same size, every picture just as small. On the page the articles could live and breathe beneath noisy or subtle headlines: the typeface alone could tell her a lot about what the editors were hoping to achieve, what signals they wanted to send. The number of pictures, their layout and technical quality told her even more: how important the item was deemed to be, but also how important this picture or article was in the general torrent of news that day. The skills of an entire profession of editors had been wiped out by the electronic archive.

But she had serious stuff to study here.

The clips were arranged in date order, oldest at the front. The first text had been published at the end of April and provided tasty details from the history of Swedish terrorism, including the story of the inventor, Dr Martin Ekenberg from Toreboda, who really only succeeded with one invention: the letter bomb. She paused when she recognized several phrases she herself had used in articles on the same subject published just weeks before. She concluded drily that Ekland had evidently allowed his colleagues to inspire him in a very direct way.

She leafed through the pile of cuttings. A lot of it was old padding, but some of it was new to her. She read with growing interest about the fuss on the Norrbotten islands in the spring of 1987 when the military spent days searching for submarines and Spetsnaz brigades that had been landed on the skerries. A stubborn, fifteen-year- old rumour had it that a Russian frogman had been shot in the leg by a Swedish officer. The officer’s dog picked up a scent and started barking, and the officer dashed into some bushes, where bloody tracks were later found, leading to the water. Benny Ekland had been more interested in retelling the rumour as entertainingly as possible than in getting to the bottom of what had really happened. There was a brief quote from military command in Boden, to the effect that the atmosphere was completely different in the late eighties, that everyone misjudges things sometimes, even the Swedish military, and that it had never been ascertained that there had ever been any submarine encroachment in northern Swedish waters.

At the bottom of the pile was the article she was interested in, and it contained information entirely new to her.

Benny Ekland wrote that during the late sixties the old Lansen planes of the Norrbotten air defences were being switched for more modern Drakens, for search and reconnaissance purposes. The airbase was subjected to numerous acts of sabotage against the new planes, mostly in the form of matches being inserted in the planes’ pitot tubes. These tubes sat like small spears at the front of the planes, and were used to measure airspeed, pressure, and so on.

It was thought fairly obvious that left-wing groups from Lulea, probably Maoists, were responsible for the sabotage. No damage was ever done, and none of the match-wielders was ever caught, but the article cited anonymous sources in F21 claiming that these acts were the basis of the more serious attack that followed. The Maoists were believed to have discovered something that had catastrophic consequences.

After each flight, when the plane was on the tarmac, absorbent material had to be spread on the ground, or a stainless-steel container placed behind the plane. Not all of the fuel in the engine was burned off, so it had to be drained after the engine had stopped. On the evening of the attack, the night of 18 November 1969, the whole base had been involved in a large exercise. Afterwards the planes remained on the tarmac, and that was when the terrorists struck.

Instead of sticking the match in the pitot tube as usual, they lit it and tossed it into the bucket of surplus fuel