Stieg Larsson - Millennium Trilogy 3 The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest

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Published: May 2010
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN-13: 9780307593672
ISBN-10: 0307593673

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CORRIDOR

It is estimated that some six hundred women served during the AmericanCivil War. They had signed up disguised as men. Hol ywood has missed asignificant chapter of cultural history here or is this historyideological y too difficult to deal with? Historians have oftenstruggled to deal with women who do not respect gender distinctions,and nowhere is that distinction more sharply drawn than in the questionof armed combat. (Even today, it can cause controversy having a womanon a typical y Swedish moose hunt.)

But from antiquity to modern times, there are many stories of femalewarriors, of Amazons. The best known find their way into the historybooks as warrior queens, rulers as well as leaders. They have beenforced to act as any Churchil , Stalin, or Roosevelt: Semiramis fromNineveh, who shaped the Assyrian Empire, and Boudicca, who led one ofthe bloodiest English revolts against the Roman forces of occupation,to cite just two. Boudicca is honoured with a statue on the Thames atWestminster Bridge, right opposite Big Ben. Be sure to say hello to herif you happen to pass by.

On the other hand, history is quite reticent about women who werecommon soldiers, who bore arms, belonged to regiments, and played theirpart in battle on the same terms as men. Hardly a war has been wagedwithout women soldiers in the ranks.

Friday, 8.iv

Dr Jonasson was woken by Nurse Nicander five minutes before the helicopter was expected to land. It was just before 1.30 in the morning.

What? he said, confused.

Rescue Service helicopter coming in. Two patients. An injured man and a younger woman. The woman has a gunshot wound.

Alright, Jonasson said wearily.

He felt groggy although he had slept for only half an hour. He was on the night shift in A. & E. at Sahlgrenska hospital in Gteborg. It had been a strenuous evening. Since he had come on duty at 6.00 p.m., the hospital had received four victims of a head-on col ision outside Lindome. One was pronounced D.O.A. He had treated a waitress whose legs had been scalded in an accident at a restaurant on Avenyn, and he had saved the life of a four-year-old boy who arrived at the hospital with respiratory failure after swal owing the wheel of a toy car. He had patched up a girl who had ridden her bike into a ditch that the road-repair department had chosen to dig close to the end of a bike path; the warning barriers had been tipped into the hole. She had fourteen stitches in her face and would need two new front teeth. Jonasson had also sewn part of a thumb back on to an enthusiastic carpenter who had managed to slice it off.

By 12.30 the steady flow of emergency cases had eased off. He had made a round to check on the state of his patients, and then gone back to the staff bedroom to try to rest for a while. He was on duty until 6.00 in the morning, and seldom got the chance to sleep even if no emergency patients came in. But this time he had fal en asleep almost as soon as he turned out the light.

Nurse Nicander handed him a cup of tea. She had not been given any details about the incoming cases. Jonasson saw lightning out over the sea. He knew that the helicopter was coming in in the nick of time. Al of a sudden a heavy downpour lashed at the window. The storm had moved in over Gteborg.

moved in over Gteborg.

He heard the sound of the chopper and watched as it banked through the storm squal s down towards the helipad. For a second he held his breath when the pilot seemed to have difficulty controlling the aircraft. Then it vanished from his field of view and he heard the engine slowing to land. He took a hasty swallow of his tea and set down the cup.

Jonasson met them in the emergency admissions area. The other doctor on duty, Katarina Holm, took on the first patient who was wheeled in an elderly man with his head bandaged, apparently with a serious wound to the face. Jonasson was left with the second patient, the woman who had been shot. He did a quick visual examination: it looked like she was a teenager, very dirty and bloody, and severely wounded. He lifted the blanket that the Rescue Service had wrapped round her body and saw that the wounds to her hip and shoulder were bandaged with duct tape, which he considered a pretty clever idea. The tape kept bacteria out and the blood in. One bul et had entered the outer side of her hip and gone straight through the muscle tissue. Then he gently raised her shoulder and located the entry wound in her back. There was no exit wound: the round was still inside her shoulder. He hoped it had not penetrated her lung, and since he did not see any blood in the womans mouth he concluded that probably it had not.

had not.

Radiology, he told the nurse in attendance. That was all he needed to say.

Then he cut away the bandage that the emergency team had wrapped round her skul . He froze when he saw another entry wound. The woman had been shot in the head and there was no exit wound there either. Dr Jonasson paused for a second, looking down at the girl. He felt dejected. He had often described his job as being like that of a goalkeeper. Every day people came to his place of work in varying conditions but with one objective: to get help. It could be an old woman who had col apsed from a heart attack in the Nordstan gal eria, or a fourteenyear-old boy whose left lung had been pierced by a screwdriver, or a teenage girl who had taken ecstasy and danced for eighteen hours straight before col apsing, blue in the face. They were victims of accidents at work or of violent abuse at home. They were tiny children savaged by dogs on Vasaplatsen, or Handy Harrys, who only meant to saw a few planks with their Black & Deckers and in some mysterious way managed to slice right into their wristbones. So Dr Jonasson was the goalkeeper who stood between the patient and Fonus Funeral Service. His job was to decide what to do. If he made the wrong decision, the decide what to do. If he made the wrong decision, the patient might die or perhaps wake up disabled for life. Most often he made the right decision, because the vast majority of injured people had an obvious and specific problem.

A stab wound to the lung or a crushing injury after a car crash were both particular and recognizable problems that could be dealt with. The survival of the patient depended on the extent of the damage and on Dr Jonassons skil . There were two kinds of injury that he hated. One was a serious burn case, because no matter what measures he took it would almost inevitably result in a lifetime of suffering. The second was an injury to the brain. The girl on the gurney could live with a piece of lead in her hip and a piece of lead in her shoulder. But a piece of lead inside her brain was a trauma of a whol y different magnitude. He was suddenly aware of Nurse Nicander saying something.

Sorry. I wasnt listening.

Its her.

What do you mean?

Its Lisbeth Salander. The girl theyve been hunting for the past few weeks, for the triple murder in Stockholm.

Jonasson looked again at the unconscious patients face. He realized at once that Nurse Nicander was right. He and the whole of Sweden had seen her passport photograph on bil boards outside every newspaper kiosk for weeks. And now the murderer herself had been shot, which was surely poetic justice of a sort.

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