8

It did not take long before the two men reached an abandoned air field with a surprisingly long runway, considering the modest size of the nearby village. And Bjørn remarked on this, also mentioning that he had seen the control tower from the ferry on the way into the port.

"It is a cold war relic," Ante explained. "The idea was to air lift soldiers and equipment into the area on short notice. This whole bay was to act like a fortress, impenetrable by the advancing red army. There are nuclear bunkers out there, remnants of a missile defence system, and all sorts of stuff."

"It was never properly opened," Ante continued. "All of Finnmark was unilaterally declared a demilitarized zone by the government to please the Russians, so this complex was never officially anything but a local air field. But it was closed down almost immediately after the fall of the Berlin wall, and it was completely abandoned when the village was de-inhabited after the iron mine closed a few years later."

"So it never saw much activity," Bjorn asked, intrigued by the strange site.
"Never. There were about twenty men here at the most, back in the sixties. The idea was to get troops and equipment up here super fast in the event of an attack, not to have stuff parked up here before hand. There was almost no interaction with the locals, though. I guess they were under strict orders not to mingle, so as not to give away any secrets. You see, the missile defence system was parked here all along, and it was fully operational. This was top secret of course. Very few knew of it before they started shipping the missiles out of here, and everyone could see what had been transported in at night over the decades, in big anonymous crates, so not to let anybody see what they were up to. The missiles were hidden in under ground silos. All part of a large system of bunkers."

Bjorn looked back at the empty expanse of tarmac, the tower, and a few barracks, as Ante approached a hill and a curve. The airfield disappeared out of view, and Bjorn turned back to look at the road ahead of them. When they reached the crest of the hill, they could see Lundby clearly in the distance. There was an intense orange glow from the setting sun illuminating the cloudy sky from behind the mountains to the west of the village.

Little wooden houses were scattered around on the side of a hill protruding out into the fjord, partly hidden from view by a nearer hill. Two cranes sticking up from behind the nearest hill bare witness of building activity, presumably in anticipation of the great influx of asylum seekers that would be moved to Lundby from other centres around Norway in the coming months.

More than ten thousand asylum seekers would have to either move to Lundby, or get out of the country by the end of the year. And this ultimatum had already had the effect of dramatically reducing the flow of asylum seekers to Norway, especially since all new arrivals were moved directly to Lundby. The expectation was therefore that less than half of all the asylum seekers currently in Norway would choose Lundby to deportation. But that would still mean an influx of several thousand people, so the building activity was still warranted.

Bjorn's thoughts drifted back to the woman on the ferry. He felt anxious on her behalf at the thought of the many desperate people who would soon be living in close proximity of her. He wondered if she fully realized what sort of danger she was setting herself up for. Moving into her grandparents' place at a time when the whole place was being turned into a modern day gulag was such an insane thing to do that he could not make any sense of it.