Operation Napoleon (12 page)

‘What do the reports say?’

‘Nothing of any interest. Just descriptions of routine surveillance flights. Very limited information. Naturally they don’t keep anything important down here.’

‘Nothing about Vatnajökull? Or photographs?’

‘Not that I can see.’

‘Might Arnold know?’

‘No harm in asking. I’m going to check if we’ve got anything on these pilots.’ He finished copying down the names.

Arnold was hovering by the door when they came back upstairs. Telling Kristín to wait a minute, Steve went over and had a word with him in private. Arnold looked extremely nervous. They argued for a while, then Steve came back.

‘He says he doesn’t know anything about Vatnajökull and I believe him. He’ll give us five minutes to look up the names of these pilots on his computer.’

Arnold led them down a long corridor, cursing all the while, opened the door to his office, groped his way to the computer and turned it on. He reached out to switch on his desk lamp but Steve stopped him; the blue glow from the computer screen provided the only illumination in the room. Before long they had opened the army employment records and were looking up each name in turn. Kristín stationed herself by the window, terrified that the glow from the computer would attract attention. What was it that Elías had seen?

‘They’re either dead and buried or repatriated to the States long ago,’ Steve sighed and typed in one last name. Arnold had disappeared.

‘Hang on, there’s something here. Michael Thompson. Retired. Still resident on the base. Pilot. Born 1921. He’s been here at Midnesheidi since the sixties. He lives nearby. Come on,’ Steve said, jumping out of his chair. ‘We’ll have to wake the poor bastard up. Maybe he’ll have some answers.’

They left by the way they had come in. Arnold was nowhere to be seen and Steve told Kristín he had probably slipped off home. The snow was still falling incessantly as they made their way through the darkness to the oldest part of the military zone. Compared to others the US army had established around the world, the base was tiny. The NATO Defense Force had numbered only four to five thousand personnel at its height but its population had been dramatically reduced since the end of the Cold War. Many of the accommodation blocks now stood empty and derelict, especially in the oldest quarter, relics of a forgotten war. It did not take them long to get there, despite wading through knee-deep snow on little-used paths. They did not speak on the way except once when Steve expressed surprise that Michael Thompson should still be living on the base. Most of the servicemen sent to Iceland could not wait to move on to their next posting after completing their maximum three-year tour of duty, usually praying fervently for somewhere tropical.

KEFLAVÍK AIR BASE,

SATURDAY 30 JANUARY, 0330 GMT

Thompson’s name was on the entry-phone. Steve rang the bell. The retired pilot lived in an apartment block like Steve’s but more rundown. No maintenance had been carried out for years; the paint had flaked off here and there exposing the concrete, the light above the front door was broken and only a handful of the apartments looked occupied.

Steve pressed the doorbell again and they waited, glancing around anxiously. He rang the bell a third time, holding the button down for so long that Kristín tapped his hand. Shortly afterwards there was a crackle from the entry-phone and a reedy voice uttered a hesitant: ‘Hello?’

‘Is that Michael Thompson?’ Steve asked.

‘Yes,’ replied the voice.

‘I’m sorry to wake you like this but I need to talk to you urgently. Could you let me in?’ Steve said, trying to speak as quietly as possible.

‘What?’

‘Could you let me in?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘May I come in?’

‘What is it you want exactly? I don’t understand.’

‘It’s about Vatnajökull.’

‘What?’

‘Vatnajökull,’ Steve said. ‘I want to ask you about flights over Vatnajökull. I know it’s very unexpected and an extra . . .’

‘Flights?’

‘Lives are at stake, man. For Christ’s sake, please open the door.’

After a short pause and more crackling on the entry-phone, the lock buzzed and Steve ushered Kristín inside in front of him. They did not turn on the light in the hall but groped their way up the stairs, holding on to the banister. Thompson lived on the first floor. They tapped on his door and he appeared in the rectangle of light, peering out at them. He had put on slippers and a robe, beneath which his legs protruded, chalk-white and bony. He was very thin, with a stoop and a Clark Gable moustache, long since turned white, barely visible against his pale skin.

‘It must be serious to make you barge in on me in the middle of the night like this,’ Thompson commented, showing them into the living room. They sat down on a small, black leather sofa and he took a seat facing them, looking at them sceptically in turn.

‘My brother called me earlier this evening,’ Kristín began, feeling that it might just as well have been a month ago. ‘He was on a training exercise on Vatnajökull when he spotted a plane and some soldiers. Then his mobile phone was cut off and I haven’t heard from him since. Shortly afterwards two Americans turned up at my apartment in Reykjavík and tried to kill me. I escaped and came to Steve for help because if there are soldiers on the glacier, I assumed they must have come from here.’

‘You say they tried to kill you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What are you talking about? What do you mean by barging into my home and spinning me a story like this? And anyway, what’s it got to do with me?’

‘You’re a pilot. You’ve been here a long time. Do you know anything about a plane on Vatnajökull?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ the old man answered angrily. ‘Now please leave before I call the police.’

‘Wait. I know we must seem crazy,’ Steve said, ‘but we’re desperate. This is not a hoax, we’re not nuts and we don’t mean to be disrespectful. If you can’t help us, we’ll go. But if you can tell us anything that might help, we’d be incredibly grateful.’

‘My brother witnessed something he wasn’t supposed to see,’ Kristín said. ‘And soldiers who presumably must come from this base. They believe he told me more about what he saw than he did and now they’re after us too. Steve had the idea that if there was a plane on the glacier then a pilot like you would know about it.’

‘But who is this
they
you keep going on about?’ Thompson asked.

‘We don’t know,’ Steve said. ‘There are two men. We don’t know who sent them.’

‘But we’ve heard,’ Kristín added, ‘that special forces troops landed here in Keflavík a short time ago, on their way to Vatnajökull.’

Thompson was silent.

‘They were going to kill you?’ he asked again.

They stared back at him without speaking.

‘There used to be so many rumours,’ he said at last in a resigned tone. ‘We never knew for certain what they were looking for. We thought it might be a plane and that it must have had some extremely dangerous cargo; they organised regular monitoring flights over the country and the sea to the north of it. Once a month we flew over the glacier, over the south-eastern section, photographing the surface of the ice. Our commanding officer, Leo Stiller, organised the flights. I never spotted anything myself, but every now and then they would believe they had seen something that gave them strong enough grounds to take a closer look.’

‘Leo Stiller?’ Steve repeated.

‘A good guy. Killed in a helicopter accident here on the base. His wife moved to Reykjavík after he died. Her name’s Sarah Steinkamp.’

‘Who analysed the photographs you took?’ Steve asked.

‘I believe they were sent to military intelligence headquarters in Washington. I don’t know much about that end of things. Only that all sorts of rumours used to do the rounds; they still crop up from time to time. Leo was into all kinds of conspiracy theories. He never did know when to shut up. I’m sorry to hear about your brother. Judging from the way they’ve behaved in the past I imagine he’d be in danger up there.’

‘So what is this plane?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why’s it important?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘But what do you believe is in the plane?’ Kristín asked. ‘What did you pilots think when you talked amongst yourselves?’

Instead of answering her, Thompson rose slowly to his feet and suggested he make some coffee; they looked chilled to the bone and he could never really get going in the morning until he had had a coffee, he explained. ‘Not that it’s morning yet,’ he corrected himself, ‘but it’s near enough; not much point going back to bed after a night like this.’

As he clattered around in the little kitchen that opened off the living room, Kristín gesticulated frantically at Steve.

‘We can’t sit around drinking fucking coffee whilst he takes a trip down memory lane,’ she whispered urgently. ‘Elías is out there . . .’

He signalled to her to slow down, relax, let the old man decide the pace.

‘I was wondering,’ Steve called into the kitchen, ‘if it’s not rude to ask, why you’re still here. I’d have expected you to have gone home to the States long ago. Everyone else leaves here the first chance they get. Isn’t there some sort of rule about it?’

Thompson reappeared carrying three mugs.

‘Do you take milk or sugar?’ he asked.

Kristín rolled her eyes in despair. Steve shook his head.

‘Coffee’s no good unless it’s strong and black.’ Thompson looked at Steve. ‘It’s hardly surprising you should ask,’ he said. ‘I came to this strange little island in 1955. I flew helicopters in Korea and was posted here when the war was over – if it is over. Before that I was stationed in Germany and the Philippines. It was quite a shock to the system, I can tell you, coming here to the far north where the climate’s miserable, it’s cold and dark for half the year, there’s nothing to do on the base and the locals despise us. Yet here I am.’

‘Why?’ Kristín asked. ‘And I’m not sure all the people despise Americans,’ she added.

‘You Icelanders have a very ambivalent attitude. You discourage all contact and behave as if the army has nothing to do with you, but then you say you can’t manage without it. I don’t understand you. You make a huge profit out of us; we pump billions into your economy, have done for decades, yet you behave as if we didn’t exist. Sure, you’re a small nation and I can understand that you want to protect your independence. You’ve always protested, standing outside the gates here with placards and chanting slogans, but now the Cold War’s over and the military operations are being scaled down, suddenly those voices are silenced and instead everybody wants to keep the base. Just so long as you don’t have to have anything to do with it. We’re the ones who are effectively living on an island out here on Midnesheidi.’

‘If that’s the case, why are you still here?’ Kristín asked.

‘
Because of a woman
,’ Thompson said, switching without warning to Icelandic. Kristín was so startled that she spilt the scalding coffee she was sipping.

The white Ford Explorer pulled up in front of the administration block where Steve worked. The doors opened and Ripley and Bateman climbed out. They had found Steve’s car and followed the trail to this building, accompanied by military police and a number of soldiers in jeeps. With the cooperation of the admiral, Ripley and Bateman had organised a manhunt; search parties were moving through the base, stopping traffic, setting up roadblocks and searching the buildings, aircraft hangars and residential blocks. Information was also being gathered about any friends and colleagues Steve might conceivably turn to on the base.

Ripley and Bateman walked up to the entrance of the office block and tried the door. It was locked. They walked round the building to the back door.

‘And here they are,’ Ripley announced, eyeing twin sets of tracks that led away through the fresh snow in the direction of the oldest residential quarter.

‘Who did he call?’ Bateman asked, as they set off to follow the trail on foot.

‘Her name’s Monica Garcia. Works for the Fulbright Commission.’

The snow crunched underfoot.

‘We need dogs,’ Ripley said.

Kristín put down her coffee mug on the table, staring at the old pilot in surprise. Steve understood nothing of their conversation after they switched to Icelandic. Like most Americans stationed in Iceland, he knew no Icelanders apart from Kristín and rarely left the base except on official business. The base was a world to itself, with all the services necessary to support a small society. In that it was no different from any other American military base around the world. A number of Icelanders worked there but they lived in the surrounding towns and villages and went home at the end of the working day. The base had always been cut off, not merely geographically but also politically and culturally, from the rest of Iceland.

‘You mean an Icelandic woman?’ Kristín asked.

‘She had one of those unpronounceable names you lot go in for: Thorgerdur Kristmundsdóttir, but I knew her as Tobba which was much easier to say. She passed away several years ago now. Lived in a village not far from here. Taught me Icelandic. But she was married and wouldn’t dream of leaving her husband. She worked at the store on the base – that’s how I got to know her, how we were able to meet. She awakened my interest in this country and little by little I became as captivated by Iceland as I was by Tobba. Then the whispering started: that she was involved with a Yank up at the base. I suppose that’s the kiss of death for an Icelandic woman.’

Kristín glanced at Steve who was watching them uncomprehendingly.

‘I kept applying to stay on – you have to do that every three years, and after she died I didn’t know where else to go. They gave me a special dispensation and now they’ve stopped bothering me. I travel around the country a lot in summer; I’ve even worked as a guide taking small groups of servicemen to the historical sites as well as the usual tourist spots: Gullfoss, Geysir and Thingvellir.’

Thompson fell silent.

‘I sometimes visit her at the cemetery,’ he added.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Thompson,’ Kristín said. ‘But we’re in a desperate hurry . . .’

‘Yes, of course. The biggest commotion over that plane was in 1967,’ Thompson said, gathering himself. He seemed to have returned to the present and had reverted to speaking English. ‘I believe four soldiers lost their lives on the glacier that time. Are you old enough to remember the astronauts?’

‘The astronauts?’

‘Armstrong and co.?’

‘Neil Armstrong? The first man on the moon?’

‘The very same. Well, did you know that he and a number of other American astronauts came to Iceland for a training exercise two years before he landed on the moon?’

‘Sure, everyone knows that.’

‘Well, for a time in ’67, Leo was in command of surveillance flights. It was a routine job, all the pilots had to do it. But on one flight Leo thought he saw something below him on the ice and flew back and forth taking photographs. I wasn’t involved; Leo told me this afterwards. They tried and failed to land a helicopter but it was in the middle of winter, like now. So they sent a small expeditionary force up there with a metal detector and after that preparations began for a major operation, conducted in the utmost secrecy. But everyone heard about it; it’s a very small community here.’