Chain of Events by Fredrik T. Olsson

Author:Fredrik T. Olsson [Olsson, Fredrik T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780751553383
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2014-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

It wasn’t until a minute later, as he watched Christina report her findings into his camera, that Leo grasped the magnitude of what had happened.

The green standby symbol in the corner had changed into a red one labelled live, and the further she got into her story the more he had to fight to hold the phone steady.

The furrow that the plane had ploughed was over a hundred metres wide, she reported. It started as a crater of soot and soil along the northern edge of the Amstelpark where the plane had hit the ground, and then extended as a vast swathe of levelled rubble and wreckage where the airliner had careered across Euroroute 19 and on through the residential neighbourhood of Scheldebuurt.

Apartment buildings and offices and a school had been razed to the ground in the airliner’s wake. The wings had been torn from the fuselage, slid across the ground like giant razors, bounced up and dug themselves back down straight through the flatness of the landscape, until the gigantic pile of steel had eventually come to rest more than a mile from the point of impact.

Schools had still been open. Office hours weren’t over. People had sitting in meetings or in classes or crouching over toys; everyone had been full of dreams and plans, and the next moment everything was gone.

‘The rescue workers,’ Christina said, ‘estimate the number of casualties to be several thousand.’

And behind his camera Leo clenched his jaw, let his front teeth dig deep into his lip to stop himself from crying. Not there, not in front of Christina Sandberg, not now.

He shouldn’t even have been there.

He should have been at home in his bed on Södermalm, he should have let the phone ring, because who in their right mind calls at five in the morning anyway? But here he was, at the edge of a field on the outskirts of Amsterdam, and everywhere he looked a dreadful reality stared back at him, black and present and full of odours that would stay with him for ever. For the first time in his life he couldn’t just take a remote control and change it to something better.

Leo Björk was twenty-four years old.

This was the worst day he’d ever known.

And yet, it paled in comparison to what had already started on the other side of the city.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.