The other side was a river except where it broadened into narrow black lakes, with an eighteen-inch wall doing its best to keep us on the road. The ragged gaps every few hundred yards gave me the idea its best wasn't always good enough.
Willie asked, 'How far to go now?'
I flashed a torch on the map. 'Ten kilometres, about. I'll wake Kari in a minute.'
'No rush. Light me another cigarette, would you?'
I took his packet, lit one, passed it over. He was driving with solid concentration, mostly third-gear work but never letting the engine get away from him.
'You never smoked yourself? ' he asked.
'Tried it as a boy, of course. But once I was in I Corps it didn't seem a good thing. An interrogator shouldn't have habits that give away his own mental state. He should try, anyway.'
He gave me a snap glance and smiled. 'The compleat professional, what?' And then, more thoughtfully, 'But how did you get into the bodyguarding business, what? '
'When I was with NATO Intelligence, they asked me to form a small section. I was already interested in pistols and stuff then, so…'
'Did the Russians really try assassinations, then?'
'Russians be damned, the worst times we had were when some clever German general wanted to go and revisit the scene of his nineteen-forty triumphs in France or Holland. In uniform, of course. Those lads really needed protection.'
He chuckled gently to himself, and after a time said, 'I thought the old boy did rather well in the boat tonight.'
'Was it difficult, that stuff with the engine? '
'No, not really. But how quickly he decided it was the filter, the way he took it down and put it together, you know. Then that trick with the whisky…'
'I'm glad he knows two tricks with whisky.'
'Yees… But I never realised he was quite that scared of fire.'
'I suppose it's natural – if you've seen your ship and most of its crew burnt up. And he's not kidding; he nearly went through the ceiling once when he thought I was going to light a cigarette.'
'God, I must remember that.' He looked anxiously in the mirror.
'Don't worry, he's asleep.'
'The smell doesn't bother him?'
'Doesn't seem to. But even your cigarettes don't smell like methane and burnt flesh.'
'Thanks, old boy. Better wake Kari now, if you can.'
It wasn't a village: the cabins were too standardised, too scattered, for that. More like a formalised gold-rush camp, each cabin standing on its own little claim across the shallow bowl in the hillside. Between them, the snowy ground was broken with boulders and small gulleys, bridged with single planks. Not a light showed anywhere.
Willie pulled carefully off the road, skidded through a small snowdrift, and stopped just before a gulley. In the abrupt silence, you could hear the distant whispering roar of a waterfall that fell almost vertically down the slope across the river, glowing to itself in the starlight.
'Which cabin?' Willie asked.
She pointed to one about thirty yards up the slope, solidly roofed with snow and nicely decorated with icicles. A thick pile of snowed-up logs sat by the steps up to the door.
The three of us got out and started organising, leaving David and Nygaard asleep for the moment. We certainly weren't the first up there this year: the snow was rutted and flattened in places, and some of the snow on the roofs was melted around the chimney-pots.
'They come at the weekend to ski,' Kari explained.
'Ski?' Willie said, shocked. 'Here?'
I knew what he meant, although I didn't know anything else about skiing. The place looked like a piece of the moon: any slope less than vertical was spotted with boulders the size of rabies.
'This is not Switzerland,' Kari said coldly. To ski we do not need a mountain four thousand metres high and a cocktail bar at the top.'
Willie grinned and started unpacking the car.
The cabin itself was a bit over twenty feet long by fifteen wide, split in two crossways and then one half split again; you ended up with one big room – well, say eleven by fifteen – and two small bedrooms. A small hutch beside the front steps hid (more or less) a proper flush toilet, except it couldn't be flushed. You just dumped buckets of water down it until Scandinavian standards had been restored. The water came from a communal tap down by the road, so it was cement-sandwich country as far as I was concerned.
Inside, the furniture was a table, wooden chairs and benches, a few cupboards, and one big old stove in the middle, backing on to the dividing wall so that the bedrooms might get a bit of heat as well. Might. Right now the wind was whispering through the plank walls and the whole place was as cold as a penguin's kiss.
'Welcome to the Arctic Hilton,' Willie said, and dumped an armful of sleeping bags and blankets on a bench. Kari lit a hurricane lamp, then started working on the stove.
Five minutes later, by the time we'd hauled the rest of everything and everybody inside, the stove was crackling and spitting from the ice melting down inside the chimney, the hurricane lamp was hissing gently to itself, and the place was smelling of wood-smoke, paraffin – and even warmth. Nygaard had gone slap off to sleep on the bench, not noticing the stove.
Kari dragged a Primus from under the table and asked un-hopefully, 'Do you want a hot drink now?'
'No thanks,' Willie said quickly. 'I'll have whisky – now I've stopped driving." The Norwegian law on that had come as a bit of a shock to him; I wondered if he yet knew he wasn't supposed to smoke while driving through towns. Well, that couldn't be too serious.
Kari looked at David, but he just smiled sleepily and shook his head. So she pushed the stove back again. 'I think if we stay, we will use the other rooms also. But perhaps tonight, for warmth, we should all sleep here?' She glanced anxiously at Willie to see if she'd offended the Code of the Winslows.
He smiled and said, 'Fine, fine,' and poured me a Scotch in an enamel mug. 'Well, cheers.'
'Cheers. You'd better hide that stuff before tomorrow.'
'Oh, Lord, yes. Outside, I suppose? Whisky isn't supposed to freeze, is it?' He looked at Nygaard. 'I suppose we'd better get him to bed, too.'
It took three of us five minutes to get his shoes and overcoat off, cram him into the sleeping bag, and zip it up. By then, David was in his own bag and asleep again. The girl went outside, presumably for a private leak.
Willie looked thoughtfully down at Nygaard and whispered, 'It is going to be cosy in here, what? I mean, he does rather smell like a dead horse.'
'Shut your nose and think of England. And if the cabin burns down, don't wake me till it's too late.' I wrapped myself firmly in three blankets, spread my sheepskin over my feet, and shut my eyes tight. A few minutes later, the lamp went out.
Forty-two
It was nine o'clock in the morning when I finally decided to admit I was awake and sit up. I wasn't too sure I'd ever been to sleep, except that I'd remembered waking up twice before: once when Kari got up to fill the stove again, and once when Nygaard's snoring almost unwrapped me from my blankets. And I remembered the stove glowing a dusky red and thinking of that first winter in the Army up at Catterick…
Kari, Willie, and David were already sitting at the table sipping coffee; Nygaard still down and out. I unwound myself, stood up, stretched, and took the cup Kari poured for me. Nobody said anything, though for a moment David looked as if he were about to.
The room had two small, dirty windows, and the day beyond them was thick and cloudy, the mountainside opposite fading into cloud a couple of hundred feet higher.
Kari said, 'It may snow, I think.'
Well, that would probably be warmer than a clear sky.