Day of Wrath

The young Norwegian let her buy him a beer, then circulated around the room, asking here and there. She couldn’t follow the conversations, but headshakes and “Nei” were easy to understand.

Another bust.

Peter and Helen left the Grand Cafe and headed for another bar, Ole Bull, and after that a place called Sjoboden. By this time it was almost ten at night, and she was getting worried that anyone with a day job would be heading home.

Sjoboden was another pub with nautical decorations scattered around.

It looked a little rougher than the other places they’d been in, but it was also the most crowded, nearly filled with strong-looking men.

The buzz of conversation did not change when Peter and Helen entered, and a few of the dockworkers, sizing Helen up, even greeted her with “Goddag” and a smile. It looked to her like they’d had more than a few beers, but they still had an eye for a pretty woman.

One of them spoke English, but to Helen’s consternation he’d heard all about the Star of the White Sea, and the fate of her crew.

To her relief, though, her informant knew someone who actually helped unload her.

He pointed to a pair of men who willingly made room at their table for Helen and Peter when they came over. She let the conversation run on for a while, hoping to steer the talk in a useful direction.

The oldest, Olaf Syverstad, had the most to say. “This is a bad business. We haven’t had too much drugs here. But soon these criminals and smugglers will be squeezing us.”

In his sixties, Olaf was concerned more for his son, Karl, who still worked at the docks.

Karl Syverstad had been translating for his father, and was delighted to have a chance to practice his English. Blond like his father, Karl’s back and shoulders were as broad as a house. He’d been a longshoreman for five years.

“Ja, I worry now. Now that I know what is going on. Then, I liked working on the Star. They paid us overtime to stand by, and unload her as soon as she came.”

“What did she carry?” asked Helen.

“Mostly scrap metal and fish,” the younger Syverstad answered.

“And they were in a hurry to unload that?” Helen didn’t have to act puzzled.

“Not all of it,” the big Norwegian said. “There were five metal crates that came off first. They went straight across the pier to another ship, and that ship left right away — less than an hour, I think.”

“What ship was that?” Helen forced herself not to sound too eager.

Her story was supposed to be about the murders on the Star.

“Baltic Venturer. She was bound for Wilhelmshaven. In Germany.”’ “How do you know that?” Helen asked.

“It was her home port. Painted on her stern. And I heard the crew talking.”

Helen looked over at Peter, who was listening intently, but seemed content to let her do the talking. She continued. “So you only saw them unloading scrap metal, fish, and these crates?” She held out her hands, as if to describe the size of a box.

The younger Syverstad nodded. “Ja, pretty much. But those crates were big things, big enough for an auto maybe.”

Bingo, Helen thought. His description matched the rough sizes of the Su-24 engines Serov had showed them. She leaned forward. “And what did the Star carry back to Russia?”

The Norwegian shook his head. “Nothing, she went back empty. I was on her for two days unloading. I saw nothing.”

His father tapped the table for emphasis. “And a good thing, too, boy.

Or you might have wound up dead — just like those poor Russian sods.”

Helen let them talk for a while longer, about drugs, other ships to Russia, crime in Bergen, but finally found a graceful pause in the conversation and made their goodbyes.

It was chilly outside, the midsummer twilight holding only a little warmth and a sea breeze from the west stripping even that away. Helen shivered slightly, but then glanced at Peter. “Well, what do you think?”

“I think we head for Wilhelmshaven, don’t you?” he replied quietly.

“Yep.” She couldn’t hide the satisfaction in her voice. The trail left by the people who’d ambushed them and murdered Alexei Koniev hadn’t grown completely cold after all. They’d found another link in the chain.

“What do you think about passing this information back to the Bureau?”

Peter asked.

Helen thought about that a moment. She doubted they had enough hard data to penetrate the FBI’s bureaucratic inertia yet, but that shouldn’t stop them from trying to prod Washington into taking official notice that something very strange was going on with whatever material Serov and his officers had smuggled out of Kandalaksha. At a minimum, it wouldn’t hurt to leave a paper trail of their findings — just in case they ran into trouble somewhere along the line.

She looked back at Peter and nodded. “Fine. But I’d rather not give the Bureau a chance to zero in on us just yet.”

He slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Not to worry, Special Agent Gray. We’ll be the very soul of discretion.”

Leiter, a trim, telegenic man in his early forties, read the document intently.