The Ministry for the Future

62

Sibilla Schmidt, officer in charge. We took subject Mary Murphy under protection 7 AM June 27. My team for this mission: Thomas, Jurg, Priska, me. Priska did her best to make M feel comfortable. M was clearly not happy.

Her ministry was thought by some in the intelligence division to have been involved with the hijacking of Davos, so Jurg suggested to Thomas that she shouldn’t be so picky now. Of course he was professionally polite and did not say this around her. I told him to keep such thoughts to himself from now on. We’re a good team, rated best in the Swiss federal secret service’s internal evaluations. Of course our branch came in for heavy criticism after the Davos incident, and many people felt we must have been involved in that somehow, that we were complicit in it, or allowed it to go on longer than it should have. Always an obvious pleasure in criticizing us, especially when coming from the political figures we protect. The Spasspolizei, they call us, the killjoys, but they don’t usually reject our services when required. Switzerland is a very free and safe place compared to most.

Old European joke: in heaven the cooks are French, the police British, the engineers German, the lovers Italian, while in hell the cooks are British, the police German, the engineers Italian. The Swiss are in the joke somehow too, but I forget as what. Maybe the same job in both heaven and hell? Schedulers? Bankers? Security force? I can’t remember. Maybe it’s a Swiss joke.

We moved M in one of our vans, bulletproofed, road bomb resistant, darkened windows, secure comms. Priska and Thomas made perfunctory compliments on how light M traveled. We put her in back with Priska, the rest of us sat in the middle seat and up front. Jurg drove. Highway to Bern, no incidents. Bern to Thun, then up the western shore of the Thunersee. Up twists and turns into Heidi Land, big wooden houses lined with red geraniums, green alps rising to the dark cliffs of the Berner Oberland. I prefer Graubünden.

In Kandersteg we left the highway and took the track up to the Oeschinensee, using their private service road beyond the upper cable car terminal. On the way Priska explained to M why Kandersteg was a backwater, pointing around us; basically because of no skiing, simply because all the town’s surrounding slopes are cliffs. Only way out of the box canyon is through the old train tunnel to the Rhone, one of the oldest tunnels of all. So it’s quiet, like all the alpine canyons too steep to ski. There are far fewer paragliders than skiers.

Drove by sheep on an alp and M said it looks like Ireland, if you don’t look up. Ridge to south very tall.

Arrived at the Oeschinensee, 10:40 AM. Substantial round lake under tall cliff, a curving wall of gray granite at least a thousand meters high, all in a single leap up from the lake, very dramatic. Lake an opaque blue, sign of glaciers somewhere overhead.

Priska told M about the Oeschinensee, explained to her that it was rare to have a lake this big this high, because all the alpine valleys had been so smoothed by the giant glaciers of the ice age that no ribs of rock remained to hold water. So no ponds or lakes until you got down to the giants of the Mitteland. But here a landslide had fallen off the cliff overhanging the valley, creating a blockage that eventually filled with a natural reservoir of melted snow. The lake has no outlet stream, Priska said, because its water seeps through the landslide and comes out in a big spring partway down to Kandersteg. I didn’t know about this either, and found it interesting, but M just nodded, too distracted to be interested.

We drove by the mountain hotel on the lakeshore to its second building, reserved for us. Family owners aware of our situation, helping as they have before.

One of the SAC huts above the lake was being cleared for our use, without a fuss, so that it would take a couple of days. So now we stayed in the lakeside hotel’s second building. Two days were spent walking around the lake with M. She refused to stay in building, and I felt the walks were secure enough, confirmed that with Bern. Paths around the lake partly forested, rising into alps above treeline. M always paused to inspect the wooden statues in forest, carved from tree trunks not cut down. Primeval figures, beast faces, local folklore, the Böögen, etc., all looming in shadows among trees. Higher up the trail runs through a krummholz, trees small and gnarled. Typical Berner Oberland, Priska said. As we walked she told M about the Alps, mostly things we all know, but Priska knows more.

The cliff backing the lake really is very dramatic. Every day scraps of cloud hung partway up the cliff, showing how tall it was. M said the cliff was all by itself taller than the tallest mountain in Ireland. Its height, and the strange pastel cobalt color of the lake, gives the area the look of bad computer imagery or a painted paperback cover, too improbable and fantastic to be real. I definitely prefer Graubünden.

M spoke with the hotel’s owners one evening. They are now middle-aged; I met them once when they were younger, when my parents brought me here. Now their children are grown enough to run the place. The son will be fifth generation to own and run place, they told M. She commented on how unusual that was, and they nodded. They felt lucky, they said. They like it here.

M asked if one could hike all the way around the lake, gesturing at the cliffs. Priska shook her head at this. There’s a crux, the son replied, pointing across the lake. It can be done, but there’s one ledge, pointing at a green line crossing the cliffs about halfway up. It can be done, he said, but I only did it once, and I was young. I wouldn’t do it again. There’s one spot where it’s too narrow for comfort.

As so often, M said.

The son nodded, said There’s always a crux.

Next day we went up to the SAC Fründenhütte, now emptied for us. 5:20 AM departure. A thousand-meter ascent, hard in places. M was tired from the start, and seemed frustrated we hadn’t stayed at lake. Orders from Bern, I told her. Standard procedure. The real safe house here is the SAC hut.

Six hours steep uphill walk, always on trail. Cable handholds lining one steep wall section. M maybe suffering from altitude. She was slow and quiet.

Fründenhütte was imposing, a big stone box faced with red and white chevroned window shutters. Strange to see in such high remote location, as always with SAC huts. Each more unlikely than the next, it’s a game they play to amuse their fellow climbers and hutkeepers. This one located on a rise in the bed of a glacier now gone, the remnant ice still hanging on at the top of the basin. An old terminal moraine extends in low curves to each side of the hut. Photos on the hut’s dining room wall show the Fründengletscher in 1902, a big ice tongue almost reaching the hut, looming over it. Then four more photos through the years, two aerial, showing ice recession. Now just a scrap of grayish white, pasted up there under the cliff at the low point of the ridge.

M rested that afternoon. I suspected a touch of altitude, and gave her Diamox. Later she made a few phone calls on an encrypted connection we made for her. After that she napped, woke in time for sunset. Strong alpenglow against clear sky, some high clouds to east also pink. M said she could work by phone and hide here for a while very happily. A good sign.

Another good sign was her appetite that night. Cooks did raclette and rosti, salad and bread. Hutkeepers a middle-aged couple, with a pair of young assistants. They led M to a dorm room, all they had, which meant she had an entire matratzenlager to herself. She laughed to see that. The single mattress extended down the whole length of the room, with numbers on the long headboard marked for twenty sleepers, a duvet and pillow for each. She took two pillows and said good night. 9:10 PM.

Next day, hut empty except for us and the hutkeepers. M breakfasted in dining room, did her e-mail and made calls on encrypted lines provided to her. Then drinking coffee on patio overlooking lake, 1,200 meters below. The Alps are big, she remarked to Priska.

Later that day she asked to go for a walk, and we led her up to the foot of the Fründengletscher, some six kilometers up basin. Less steep than the ascent to hut had been the day before. Priska explained why this was when Mary remarked on it: instead of going up the side of a big glacial U valley, as we had yesterday, we were now walking along the bottom of a smaller higher U valley. Rock-strewn floor of a hanging valley, much less steep than where it falls into the bigger valley below. Same as always. Less moss and lichen and alpine flowers the higher we ascended, until bare rock, probably under ice until just a few years ago. By midafternoon we reached the foot of the glacier, which was mostly covered with black rubble fallen off the ridge, but also cut by white vertical melt incisions, making the glacial ice visible, and in the deepest parts of cracks, quite blue.

It must be depressing, M remarked. You can really see the glaciers are melting.

It’s bad, Priska said. Maybe not as bad as the Himalayas, where the melt is their water supply. Still, it changes things here too. We lose some water, some hydro power. And it feels wrong. Like a disease. Some kind of fever, killing our glaciers.

Even so, the remaining wall of this glacier’s foot stood about fifteen meters overhead. Getting onto the glacier proper would involve climbing a lateral moraine, then crossing the gap between moraine and ice. Possibly a job for crampons going up the ice itself, unless a good level bridge of rock or ice were found. Not on this day’s program.

Hiked with M back down basin, seeing better just how steep our ascent had been. Pleasant evening at hut.

We all woke at 2:46 AM to a very loud roar and clatter. We rushed to M, prepared for trouble, Jurg with pistol ready. To windows to look out, but a moonless night, nothing to see. The sound had ended, nothing more to hear or see. Avalanche, Priska suggested. No, rock fall, said one of the hutkeepers; not snow but rock. Rock for sure, he said, the noise had been so loud. It had lasted perhaps thirty seconds. The hut was set on its little rise of rock, well away from the cliffs flanking it, so the hutkeeper said we shouldn’t be in any trouble from rock fall or the run-outs that sometimes happened.

Back to bed for most of us, but Jurg and Priska and I stayed up for a while outside M’s room, sitting on floor not sleepy. Thomas and one of the hutkeepers went out to have a look around, came back reporting a new mass of rock now lay just west of the hut. We alerted Bern, wondered what was going on, if we had been attacked. Waited to hear back from Bern about incident, get their take on possibility that hostiles had located M and sent something her way.

At dawn we went out and saw it; a new rockslide, yes. It had come off the steep ridge to the west of the hut. The run-out across the basin floor had reached almost to the hut. Immense boulders of schist and gneiss and granite now stood tall on the basin floor. Contact between different kinds of rock was always a weak point, Priska said. The biggest chunks had rolled the farthest, in the usual way. One boulder, almost as big as the hut, lay only about twenty meters from it. Looked like a rough statue of the hut itself. It would have crushed the hut if it had run into it with any momentum at all. One more roll of this big dice, in other words, and boom, we would have been crushed.

I conferred with my team, in Schwyzerdüütsch so M couldn’t understand us. This is too much of a coincidence, I told them. I have a bad feeling about this. We are now code red. We moved into that protocol.

Bern agreed. Code red for sure. Get ready to leave, they said. We’ll get back to you with an evacuation plan as soon as we have it. Cover must be blown.

We considered that. If cover was blown, it would be dangerous to extract by helicopter. Drone attacks were all too possible. Of course the hut itself vulnerable as well. Bern said the plan for us would be ready within the hour.

Long before that Priska proposed her own plan. I called Bern and ran it by them. They took it in, put us on hold, got back to us fast. Do it, they said.

We told M: We must leave.

Again? she cried.

Again. Bern thinks your location may be somehow known to hostiles.

Do you really think someone could trigger a rockslide as big as that?

Possibly yes. The hutkeepers say the cliff there had an overhang. Could have fallen naturally, but if the overhang got hit by a missile, maybe not even an explosive missile, just an inert mass hitting at speed, the cliff could have come down. That would bury all signs of a missile, and look like an accident. The rockslide could very well have crushed the hut. It just missed. Couldn’t have been sure about it until trying it.

It couldn’t just have been a coincidence?

Cliff falling now, after all the centuries of standing there, right when you are here? On that day, it falls?

It could still be a coincidence, she said. That’s what coincidences are.

Thomas shook his head. They’ve seen something in Bern, he told her. They don’t think it’s a coincidence.

All right, M said, looking more and more disturbed. Where to now?

We told her our plan.