Operation Napoleon (11 page)

VATNAJÖKULL GLACIER,

SATURDAY 30 JANUARY

The Delta operators worked tirelessly at clearing away the snow. They were digging from both sides of the wreck simultaneously, throwing up great mounds, and in the growing light the plane became steadily more distinct. The nose now jutted up at a twenty-degree angle, though the tail was still buried in dense, hard-packed ice on which it was difficult to make any impact. The door, which was supposed to be located on the left-hand side behind the row of windows, had yet to be uncovered. From what they could tell, the fuselage was largely intact and not much snow appeared to have penetrated inside.

Powerful floodlights shed a yellowish glow over the scene during the night, but as the daylight grew stronger they were switched off, their hot surfaces sending a fine vapour rising and curling over the crust of the glacier. A number of white tents stood huddled on the ice, each containing a gas lamp that burned night and day for warmth. Largest of all was the communications tent. Electricity was provided by portable oil-powered generators, and the surrounding area was littered with oil barrels, snowmobiles, tracked vehicles, and beyond them large pallets for transporting the wreckage.

The work was progressing well. The wind was light and the temperature on the glacier hovered at around –15°C. Some of the men had been detailed to work with pickaxes to break up the hard surface, while another small group was busy cutting the plane in half with powerful blowtorches. The sections would then be loaded on to the pallets and towed down to where the trucks were waiting to drive them west to Keflavík Airport. Ratoff stood outside the communications tent, watching the blue flare of the oxyacetylene and the showers of sparks which flew from the metal carcass. By his reckoning, the job was on schedule. A storm was forecast but it was expected to blow over quickly.

In many ways it was fortunate that the plane had been found in winter. Of course, the weather was changeable in the extreme and the conditions for travel might prove difficult, but their activities were protected by the darkness and the lack of traffic in the area at this time of year.

As Ratoff watched, the men on the far side of the plane wreck abandoned their digging and gathered to peer at something in the ice. After a moment, one of them yelled to him. He set off towards them, ducked under the nose of the plane and joined the soldiers, to be met by the sight of a leg protruding from the ice next to the fuselage. The leg was encased in a black army boot that reached almost up to the knee and greyish trousers. Ratoff ordered the men to uncover the body and soon the entire corpse, or what was left of it, became visible.

It looked to Ratoff as if it had been deliberately laid there beside the plane. Some of the passengers had evidently survived the crash and been capable of moving around and tending to those who had died on impact. The man was dressed in the uniform of a high-ranking German officer, though Ratoff did not recognise the insignia. He wore an Iron Cross at his neck, his hands were crossed over his breast and his face was covered with a cap. His other leg was missing: apparently it had been ripped off at the hip. The gaping wound, revealing the white bone, was clearly visible but the leg itself was nowhere to be seen. Ratoff bent over the body with the intention of examining its face but found the cap frozen to it.

Straightening up again, he ordered his men to free the body from the ice and take it into one of the tents. He wondered how long the passengers had survived after the crash-landing. The accident had happened at this time of year. Ratoff and his men were clad in special Arctic-survival gear but even so the cold pierced them to the bone. They also had the gas lamps and had been specially trained to endure the cold. The passengers of the plane, on the other hand, would have been utterly defenceless. Those who survived the crash must have slowly frozen to death. It could not have taken many days.

Thirty-five miles away, eight members of the Reykjavík Rescue Team stood staring down into the blue depths of a jagged fissure in the ice, from which they could hear the faint ringing of a mobile phone. They had set out shortly before daybreak and soon found the tracks of the snowmobiles; the trail had changed direction about two hours from the team’s base camp, heading due west towards a large belt of crevasses. Back at camp they succeeded in pinpointing the mobile phone signal and the rest had been easy. The snowmobiles appeared to have careered into the chasm at full speed, as if Elías and Jóhann had not seen it coming until it was too late.

One of the rescue team lowered himself into the crevasse on a rope; his two comrades lay at a depth of about eight metres. As he came alongside them, he could see that their injuries were horrific, as if they had crashed repeatedly into the walls of the fissure as they fell and the snowmobiles had then landed on top of them, rendering them almost unrecognisable. Their faces were reduced to raw, featureless pulp; eyes obscured by a mass of swelling, ears bloody clumps, bodies twisted into unnatural shapes as if every bone in them were broken. He had never seen anything like it before and, turning his head away, he vomited.

The team set to work, first hauling up the snowmobiles, then lowering stretchers on to which they strapped Elías and Jóhann. These they raised in turn with slow care to avoid bumping the battered bodies against the ice walls, and set the stretchers in the back of the team’s snow-cat. A bitterly cold north-easterly had started to blow, whirling up loose snow which cut into any exposed skin like razorblades and soon hid all sign of their tracks around the crevasse.

Júlíus stood watching the operation, his head bowed, oblivious to the cold. He had been leading expeditions for fifteen years; there had been accidents and injuries before but nobody in his charge had ever died. Now he had lost two young men for whom he was responsible, two boys whom he had given permission to leave camp to test-drive the new snowmobiles. He might have known they would get carried away, forget the time and end up in trouble, but this was far beyond his worst imaginings. He heard someone calling him from the vehicle. One of the volunteers, a medical student called Heimir, was resting two fingers over Elías’s neck. Júlíus waited, holding his breath.

‘It’s weak but there’s still a pulse,’ Heimir announced.

‘He’s alive?’

‘Just about. But I doubt he’s got long.’

‘Can we tend to him here or should we take him back to camp and summon a helicopter?’

‘Like I say, he could go at any minute. It’s probably safest not to try and move him. We should do the best we can and call the helicopter. How quickly can it get here?’

‘It shouldn’t take long,’ the leader said, switching on his radio. ‘But I still think we should get him out before the storm hits. There’s severe weather expected any minute and we’d be better off back at camp than in the open. Let’s move.’

Suddenly Elías gave a faint moan. His blue lips moved slightly.

‘Is he trying to say something?’ Júlíus asked.

Heimir bent down to Elías’s bloodstained face and laid his ear to the boy’s mouth. After a minute he straightened up and looked at Júlíus.

‘He’s drifting in and out of consciousness.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘It was very unclear. I think he may have said “Kristín”.’

‘Yes, he would,’ Júlíus said. He remembered how he had assured her that Elías was safe and a pang of self-recrimination went through him.

But when he called the Coast Guard helicopter it transpired that the only available aircraft was currently fetching a wounded fisherman from a trawler halfway between Iceland and Greenland. In cases when the Coast Guard could not get to the scene, it was customary to call the Defense Force at Keflavík Airport and ask them for help. Júlíus was assured that the Coast Guard would contact the Americans and ask them to send a helicopter to pick up the two men.

Why had Elías’s sister thought he was dead? Júlíus wondered, as he walked back to the edge of the crevasse and looked down into the chasm. How could she have found out before us?

He dreaded having to tell her that she was right. Elías was not dead yet but he was unlikely to pull through. His injuries were severe, he had been lying in the ice for hours, and he would certainly be hypothermic. Júlíus scanned the horizon, willing the helicopter to arrive before the storm struck. It was Elías’s only hope.

US EMBASSY, CENTRAL REYKJAVÍK,

SATURDAY 30 JANUARY, 0100 GMT

She woke up at the third ring. Monica Garcia worked as the director of the Fulbright Commission in Iceland, an educational exchange programme based at the US embassy in Reykjavík, where she had an apartment. She disliked being called in the middle of the night and stirred sleepily; she had been hoping for a peaceful night after the extraordinary last twenty-four hours at the embassy. But the strident ringing persisted until at last she propped herself up on her elbow and snatched up the receiver.

‘Monica?’ said a voice.

‘It’s one in the morning,’ she protested, registering the luminous numbers on her radio alarm. ‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Steve. I’m sorry, but it’s an emergency.’

‘Steve? Why are you calling me in the middle of the night?’

‘I think some men from the embassy are trying to kill me.’

‘Why would anyone want to kill you, Steve? What have you been smoking?’

Groping for the lamp on the bedside table, she switched it on, just managing to avoid knocking over a glass of water and dislodging a small pile of books on which an open copy of
War and Peace
lay uppermost.

‘Two men, both around six foot, blond, neatly dressed in civilian clothes. They’re after my friend as well. I told you about Kristín. She knows something about military activities on Vatnajökull and whatever it is, it’s important enough for them to send paid assassins round to her house. She came to the base to find me, and the men turned up at my place shortly afterwards but we managed to escape.’

‘She fled
to
the base? Steve, I don’t understand a word of this.’

She sat up in bed and shivered: the room was freezing as the radiator had broken again.

‘I know, it’s complicated. I’ll explain later but you have to trust me.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘I’m still on the base. What’s going on at the embassy? What’s happening on the glacier? Do you know?’

‘Everything’s been turned upside down. That’s all I can tell you. I’ve no idea why.’

‘How do you mean upside down?’

‘Military intelligence has assumed control by direct order of the defense secretary. Some sort of special operations personnel showed up, took over everything and sent the ambassador on leave. Three special forces companies landed at Keflavík just over twenty-four hours ago and may well have gone to Vatnajökull, for all I know. Beyond that I really don’t know what’s going on. It’s as if there’s been a military coup. They installed a whole load of computer equipment – I don’t have a clue what it’s for – and set up a command and control centre. The embassy staff aren’t being told anything. We’ve been ordered to stay out of the way and keep our mouths shut. They say they’ll only be here for a few days.’

‘Have you come across a man by the name of Ratoff?’

‘No, never heard of him. Who is he?’

‘It’s a name Kristín overheard. He may be in charge. Look, I have to hang up. Is there anything you can do to help me, anything at all, Monica?’

‘I’ll try to dig something up for you. If special forces have taken over the embassy, they’re probably in control of the base too, so I’d be very careful about looking for help there. Do you remember the Irish pub in Reykjavík? The one downtown?’

‘Yes.’

‘Call there at 4 o’clock today or come down yourself. I’ll see what I can find out for you in the meantime.’

‘Thanks, Monica.’

‘And Steve, for Christ’s sake, be careful.’

He put the phone down and turned to Kristín. They were in his office in one of the army administration blocks. Kristín was keeping watch by the window, the profile of her face silhouetted against the glass, black against black. She had phoned air traffic control in Keflavík, posing as a journalist from Reykjavík, and asked if there had been a plane crash recently on Vatnajökull. She was informed that no plane had crashed on the glacier for decades, not since the famous Loftleidir incident. When they asked what paper she was calling from, she had hung up.

Kristín vaguely remembered the accident. ‘A Loftleidir plane – that’s the old Icelandic airline – was forced to make an emergency landing on the glacier,’ she told Steve. ‘Everyone survived.’

‘Is that the plane Elías saw then?’ Steve asked.

‘I haven’t a clue. I don’t know what happened to the wreckage. And anyway, what would the army want with an old Loftleidir plane? It must have been forty years ago. It’s absurd.’

They had been in the office around ten minutes and Kristín was growing jumpy. Although they had parked Steve’s car a few hundred yards away among other vehicles outside a large apartment block, it would not remain undiscovered for long if the men put out a search. The office had been Steve’s first thought as he accelerated away from his block, leaving Ripley and Bateman behind in the parking lot. But he had not come here to hide as his workplace would be an obvious location for them to check; rather, the building housed part of the Defense Force archives, to which he had access.

He and Kristín ran down the long ground floor corridor and descended into the basement where the archives were kept. Punching in a code to deactivate the alarm, Steve turned a key in the heavy steel door and pushed it open. Inside stood another door, covered in wire netting, which opened into one of the archives. The storeroom was divided into several compartments by coarse wire netting which formed a series of cages, each of which was filled with long rows of filing cabinets, and beyond them shelves of files and boxes.

‘Welcome to America’s memory,’ Steve whispered.

‘How are we supposed to find anything in this warren?’ Kristín asked, gazing in dismay at the rows of units stretching off into the distance. ‘What are you looking for anyway?’

‘There may be something here about operations on Vatnajökull,’ Steve said. He was familiar with the archives, having temped there one summer, and knew where to lay his hands on records of surveillance flights over Iceland in the last fifty years. If there was a plane on the glacier, he reasoned, it might well belong to the US Air Force or Navy.

He was so happy that Kristín had turned to him in her hour of need that it did not even occur to him to refuse her request. No longer in any doubt about the danger she was in, he was determined to stand by her, to help her in any way he could; besides, his journalistic instincts had been roused and he was becoming increasingly curious about the case on his own account.

They walked rapidly along the shelves, checking the labels on cupboards and files. Some way towards the back, Steve stopped and pulled out a box. He looked inside, then replaced it and continued searching. He did the same thing several times; took out a box containing a number of files, leafed through them, then put it back. It was hopeless – he had no idea where to start in this sea of information – and before long they returned to his office, empty-handed.

For some minutes he stood by the window, peering out, chewing his lip in frustration. ‘A friend of mine has access to more files than me,’ he announced finally. ‘We should see what he says.’

‘I’m sorry to have landed you in all this. I didn’t know where else to turn,’ Kristín said as they left the building.

‘Forget it,’ Steve answered, his eyes flickering round nervously. ‘I’m as interested as you in finding out what’s up there.’

They decided to leave the car behind and walk. Steve knew the base very well and kept to the back alleyways, stealing through communal gardens, darting hurriedly across brightly lit streets where necessary, taking care to stay under cover. Kristín had no idea where they were going. As for most Icelanders, the base was a foreign country to her. The only time she had been to Midnesheidi was with her parents to the international airport in the days before the new terminal had been built. She recognised the Andrews movie theatre, and glimpsed in the distance the old terminal building and officers’ mess. She remembered two of her old classmates from school who had gone on to work for Icelandic contractors on the base and used to come home to Reykjavík every weekend laden with cigarettes and vodka that they bought cheap from the American servicemen, to the great envy of their friends.

‘I never expected to see you again,’ Steve ventured as they picked their way through the snow behind one of the apartment blocks.

‘I know,’ Kristín said.

‘I always meant to try to talk to you about it but somehow . . .’

‘I’ve thought the same. It was my fault.’

‘No, it wasn’t. No way. It was nobody’s fault. Why does everything always have to be somebody’s fault?’

When Kristín did not answer, Steve let the subject drop. There was little traffic in the area although they twice spotted military police patrols. Steve stopped by a building not dissimilar to his own but in an entirely different part of the base. They all looked identical to Kristín. He told her to wait, he would not be long, so she lurked round the side of the block trying to make herself inconspicuous, stamping her feet, blowing on her hands and pulling her hood tight against the chill air. It was about fifteen minutes before he returned, accompanied by a man whom he introduced to her as Arnold. He was plump, about Steve’s age, with sweaty palms, shifty eyes and a lisp. They climbed into his car and drove off.

‘Arnold’s a librarian,’ Steve said smiling. ‘He knows his way round the archives and he owes me a favour.’

Kristín had no idea what this implied and Arnold did not enlighten her, just glowered at Steve.

He pulled up at a two-storey administration block not far from the old terminal. After letting them in through the back entrance, he led them straight down to a basement archive, considerably larger than the one they had visited earlier, occupying three levels.

‘What years are we talking about?’ Arnold asked flatly.

‘Flights over Vatnajökull since the beginning of the war, I suppose,’ Steve replied. ‘I don’t know what for. Routine surveillance flights, maybe, or reconnaissance. Aerial photography. Nothing major, as I said. Nothing risky. Nothing that presents a threat to US national security.’

‘Surveillance? Aerial photography?’ Arnold scoffed, not even trying to disguise his irritation. ‘You’ve no idea what you’re on about.’

‘Forced landings as well. Crashes on the glacier. A plane. Anything like that. Pilots who might know about flights over the glacier. Anything at all like that.’

Shaking his head, Arnold walked down to the next level. They followed, their footsteps echoing hollowly against the walls. Kristín found the noise they were making unbearable. Arnold passed a row of shelves, slowed and stopped. Turning back, he descended to the level below, clattering down the metal staircase, and walked along one of the rows. There he took down a box file and opened it, then closed it again. Eventually they came to a large filing cabinet and Arnold pulled out one of the drawers.

‘Here’s something,’ he said to Steve. ‘Records of photographic surveillance flights in 1965. By the old U-2 spy planes, just before they switched to satellites.’ Arnold stepped aside as if to avoid getting any closer to this irregularity than he already was, then announced that he would wait for them by the entrance upstairs and vanished. Steve squatted down.

‘Let’s see . . . what have we here? . . . Nothing. Only some crap about routine surveillance flights off the north coast. Nothing about Vatnajökull. Nothing about aerial photography.’ He examined more of the files.

‘Maintenance reports!’ he sighed. ‘Technical jargon. Wait a minute, here are some names of pilots.’ There were several. Steve took out a pen and paper and started to scribble them down.

‘Arnold’s a laugh a minute,’ Kristín observed.

‘He smuggles more dope into the base than anyone else I know,’ Steve said matter-of-factly.

‘I thought he was a librarian?’

‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing.’

‘So what did you say to him?’

‘Some lie about you being – what do you call it? – a GI baby? That you’re trying to trace your father.’

‘Who was a pilot?’

‘You got it.’

‘And he didn’t think we kept rather unorthodox hours?’

‘All these guys must be dead,’ Steve muttered, without answering. He was still busy noting the pilots’ names.