Red Wolf: A Novel Read Free

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 timefor 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