Operation Napoleon (22 page)

VATNAJÖKULL GLACIER,

SATURDAY 30 JANUARY, 2300 GMT

They were well equipped with powerful torches, good climbing boots and warm winter overalls provided by Jón but the temperature had risen after the earlier storm, turning the snow soft underfoot and making every step a struggle. The moon dipped in and out of the clouds, shedding a pale light on the rim of the glacier. The temperature was falling again.

In the end they had not managed any sleep but the rest had done them good. Before setting off, Kristín had tried once more, unsuccessfully, to reach her father, then had finally gathered enough courage to call the police. She was put through immediately to the detective investigating the city centre shooting. He listened attentively to her detailed account of the improbable events that had occurred and her explanation of why she had not contacted the police sooner. She concluded by telling him that she was now at the foot of Vatnajökull.

‘So the man we found in your flat – Runólfur – had no connection with any of this,’ the detective commented when Kristín had finished speaking. Far from disputing her account, he went out of his way to give the impression of taking what she said seriously. He did not want to risk making her hang up by arguing with her. It was late and the entire force was working round the clock on the shooting and murder.

‘No connection at all,’ Kristín confirmed; she had tried to give as clear and impartial an account as possible. ‘In fact, I think he saved my life.’

‘They told me at the ministry that you might have killed him and gone into hiding as a result. They thought it was plausible. But that, if so, you would have been acting in self-defence. They said this Runólfur bloke had been threatening you.’ His voice, friendly, steady and sensible, had a calming effect on Kristín. She sensed she could trust this man and tried to put a face to the voice but somehow could not imagine what he would look like.

‘That’s why I didn’t know where to turn. And because the men who attacked me referred to a conspiracy. They murdered a man in my flat. Don’t you see, I was desperate?’

He absorbed this information. Kristín’s account, crazy as it was, nevertheless tied in with what he had found out so far, and he could see no reason to disbelieve her. Her willingness to work with the police was obvious but he sensed the extreme difficulty of her situation.

‘We detained the man from the Irish pub briefly,’ the detective continued, ‘but the embassy insisted he be moved to the US military hospital on the base. The Icelandic government conceded to their wishes, on condition that he doesn’t leave the country.’

‘That’s insane. He’ll be halfway across the Atlantic by now,’ Kristín said.

‘I agree. First Class.’

‘And what about the other one?’

‘We know nothing about the other man. We went to the embassy which is, as you say, crawling with soldiers, and talked to a general, some kind of stand-in ambassador, but couldn’t prise anything out of him. We know they have something to hide; we need your help to find out what it is.’

Her manner was so convincing that he had decided to take a gamble and trust her, at least more than he trusted the Americans.

‘I know what it is,’ Kristín said. ‘It’s to do with the wreck of a plane on Vatnajökull and I’m on my way there now. I’ve only got a single name, Ratoff. That’s all. Maybe he’s in charge of the operation.’

‘We’ve heard nothing about any plane wreck,’ the detective commented.

‘My brother saw it.’

There was a pause while the man on the phone thought.

‘Why don’t you come and see us in town and we’ll try to sort it out from here.’

‘It’ll be too late. It would be better if you sent some of your people here. And why don’t you get in touch with the rescue team on the glacier? The man in charge is called Júlíus. He can confirm what I’ve told you about Elías and Jóhann.’

‘You know that a travel ban has just been announced for the Vatnajökull area due to a volcanic eruption alert? There have been newsflashes on all channels. They’ve declared a state of emergency.’

‘Eruption alert? What bullshit! What do you think American soldiers are doing there if there’s a risk of an eruption? What you mean is that the spineless, arse-licking government has kowtowed to the Yanks yet again.’

The detective suppressed a laugh. He was beginning to like her. ‘I believe the term is “fostering positive relations”.’

‘I’m on my way,’ Kristín said again.

‘You really ought to come in to the station and tell me more. What’s this plane you keep talking about?’

‘I haven’t got time to go into it but there’s something inside the wreckage that they’re determined to hide. I don’t know what. It could be anything.’

‘And that’s the big secret?’

‘Exactly. It’s up to you what you do, but I’m going to the glacier,’ Kristín repeated, and ended the conversation. Part of her wanted to trust the detective, who seemed a decent man, but she knew the only way for her to uncover the whole truth was to go and find it out for herself.

Steve was four metres behind her and the gap between them was growing. The weather was still but cold. Their overalls creaked, the snow creaked and she felt as if her lungs were creaking too. Jón had given them very precise directions as to the best way to access the glacier, yet she was surprised to find how easy the route was, in spite of everything. The only thing holding them back was their lack of fitness. She could hear Steve puffing and blowing behind her, swearing profusely every now and then. She was out of breath herself, every footstep she took in the snow an effort.

Kristín did not know what to expect when she reached the glacier. Hopefully she would find Júlíus there and possibly even members of the Coast Guard. Besides notifying the police, she had called an acquaintance on the national TV news desk to ensure that the media would quickly start following up the rumours of American troops on Vatnajökull and the possible presence of a German World War II plane on the glacier. The Yanks would not be able to cover it up much longer and she had every intention of being on the spot when the story broke.

She had barely slept a wink since she woke up at the crack of dawn two days ago, dreading a confrontation with Runólfur at the office, and exhaustion was beginning to take its toll as she laboured up the steep slope to the ice cap.

‘Do you know what I saw in you?’ Steve had asked as they lay in bed at Jón’s farm.

‘Saw in me?’

‘The first time I met you.’

‘At that reception?’

‘You seemed a bit lonely, as if you didn’t know many people.’

‘Receptions are not my favourite . . .’

‘I’ve never had such a powerful response to anyone.’

‘What do you mean?

‘I’m not sure what it was. It’s hard to explain.’

‘What response?’

‘I saw . . . I knew at once that I . . . I wanted to get to know you, to find out who you were, hear you speak, see you laugh and smile, be with you, just you and me.’

Kristín smiled. ‘You’re not very good at this, are you?’

‘No, I guess not,’ he replied, smiling. ‘I’m just trying to tell you how I felt the first time I saw you.’

From Steve, Kristín’s thoughts moved on to Elías. He would have made light work of a climb like this and teased her for being such a wimp. Well, he had finally succeeded in forcing her out into the wilderness. She saw the rim of the glacier drawing nearer in the moonlight. A little way to the east the land was scored by deep gullies and ravines, in one of which Jón had found the German.

She pictured her brother in the hands of the soldiers, and lying, critically injured, at the bottom of the crevasse. It was not the first time she had suffered this choking sensation on Elías’s account.

She had been eighteen, Elías eight, and she had sent him to the shop for a bottle of Coke. When he came out of the shop, she heard later, he had run straight into the road without looking and was hit by a car. He landed on the bonnet, bounced on to the windscreen, shattering it, then was flung over the roof, fetching up on the road. He was knocked unconscious and a large pool of blood had accumulated under his head. They did not live far from the shop, so Kristín had heard the shrill sirens accompanying the arrival of police and ambulance, and knew instinctively that they were for Elías. She set off at a run and saw men lifting his small frame off the road and into the ambulance. Kristín could see no sign of life in her brother. The driver who had hit him was sitting on the kerb, clutching his head in despair and a group of bystanders had gathered. She walked over to the ambulance in a daze and was permitted to ride with Elías to the hospital.

Elías was in surgery for eight hours. He had cracked his skull and suffered a brain haemorrhage; he had also broken a leg and two ribs, one of which had pierced his right lung, and fractured his right arm in two places. Kristín sat in the waiting room, consumed with guilt, rocking to and fro, staring into space, now and then emitting anguished whimpers from deep within. She had sent her brother out for a bottle of Coke and now he was dying.

Her parents cut short their holiday in the Canaries and flew home, but only after she had managed to convince them that Elías was seriously injured. They blamed Kristín not only for what had happened to him but also for spoiling their holiday; she had found it hard to tell which upset them more. She was supposed to look after her brother. It had always been that way. They had placed the responsibility on her shoulders and she had failed.

She would never be free of the guilt. Even though Elías later made a full recovery, the guilt remained deep inside her like a malignant tumour that could not be excised. Stranger still, she could never shake off the conviction, however absurd, that if anything happened to Elías later in life, it would be because of the accident, because of his head injury. That because of her, he might be more vulnerable to falls or car accidents. That was why she could not bear his lust for adventure – the skydiving, scuba diving, glacier trips – and did her best to curtail such activities. She often felt that he went out of his way to provoke her, yet she had never told him of her fear, of the guilt that gnawed away inside her. Did not dare put it into words. Perhaps she had bottled it up inside her until she needed it, like now.

‘Wait for me,’ Steve shouted and she realised that she had forged far ahead.

Work on the glacier was proceeding at full speed again. The snow had been cleared from one side of the Junkers but the other was still surrounded by deep drifts. Nevertheless, men were busy fixing slings around the front half of the plane. Ratoff was expecting two helicopters. As soon as the slings had been fixed around the fuselage, the bodies would be put back inside the cabin and the opening would be sealed off, enabling the helicopters to remove all the detritus in one go. Inevitably the use of the choppers would compromise the secrecy of the mission, but the men would spread tarpaulins over the wreckage in an attempt to disguise it. Not that Ratoff was worried about rumours: the more the better.

The head of communications gestured to the radar screen. A cluster of small green dots was crawling down the glass, their movement so slow as to be almost imperceptible.

‘The rescue team is on the move, sir.’

‘Get me the embassy,’ Ratoff ordered.

Ratoff watched the two dots approaching from the south, crawling slowly up the green radar screen in the communications tent. He saw the rescue team converging from the north, creeping down the screen. He was prepared and had sent soldiers to intercept them in an attempt to stop or at least delay them, but the two dots in the south were a mystery to him. He wondered if it could be that pain-in-the-ass of a girl from Reykjavík, the young man’s sister. His mouth twisted in a smile: she had certainly made fools of Bateman and Ripley, even put one of them in hospital.

A reception committee was on its way to meet them at the edge of the glacier. Incidentally, he noted from the screen that the troops he had sent in the opposite direction to meet the rescue team had come to a halt.

VATNAJÖKULL GLACIER,

SATURDAY 30 JANUARY, 2315 GMT

Júlíus watched the soldiers approaching, the powerful headlamps of their snowmobiles lighting up the darkness. There were about twenty of them, clad in helmets and goggles which completely obscured their faces, with rifles slung over their backs. Within a minute they had halted in unison and stood waiting for the rescue team, as if they had drawn an invisible line that they had every intention of defending. Júlíus’s team consisted of some seventy men and women, travelling on skis, snowmobiles and two tracked vehicles. As they neared the soldiers, Júlíus signalled to them to slow down, and they eventually came to a standstill about ten metres from the waiting troops. It was an improbable meeting in the dark, snowy wasteland: the troops armed with automatics and revolvers, clad in Arctic camouflage, the winter uniform of soldiers who wished to pass unseen, and facing them, the unarmed Icelandic rescue team whose luminous orange jackets recalled, in contrast, the necessity of visibility in their work.

Júlíus, who was travelling in one of the tracked vehicles, told his team to stay put while he talked to the soldiers. He stepped out of his vehicle and walked towards the waiting men, noticing as he did that one of them dismounted from his snowmobile and came forward to meet him. The other soldiers rapidly followed suit. They met halfway, standing not quite toe-to-toe. The officer pulled the scarf down to uncover his mouth but even so Júlíus found it hard to make out his face behind the goggles. He looked young, though, much younger than Júlíus himself.

‘You have entered a US military prohibited zone,’ the officer announced in American-accented English. ‘I have orders to prevent you from proceeding any further.’

‘What do you mean a US military prohibited zone?’ Júlíus responded. ‘We’ve heard nothing about any prohibited zone.’

‘I am not at liberty to reveal any further details. The zone won’t be in force for long but whilst it is we insist that it is respected. It would be simplest for everyone if you cooperated with these instructions.’

Anger welled up inside Júlíus. He had seen the broken bodies of his team members lying at the bottom of a crevasse, one dead, the other unlikely to live, and was convinced that the men in white camouflage were behind the apparent accident. And now, to cap it all, these foreign soldiers were trying to deny him free movement in his own country.

‘Cooperate! You’re a fine one to talk about being cooperative. What are you up to here? Why did you have to kill one of my men? What’s this about a plane on the glacier? What’s all this fucking secrecy?’

‘I need to ask you to hand over all your communications equipment, mobile phones, walkie-talkies, and any emergency flares,’ the officer ordered, ignoring Júlíus’s question.

‘Our communications equipment? Are you insane? We’re responding to a distress signal from your so-called prohibited zone. There are Icelanders in danger . . .’

‘You are mistaken. There are no Icelanders in this area apart from yourselves,’ the officer interrupted. He remained calm and impassive, though his tone betrayed a hint of impatient arrogance. Júlíus took exception to his conceited manner; under any other circumstances, this was a man he would be only too happy to punch. He was not afraid of the other soldiers and their guns; the entire situation seemed farcical and unreal more than dangerous.

‘And what if we refuse? Will the American army shoot us?’

‘We have orders.’

‘Well you can shove your orders up your arse. You have no right to stop us. There is no prohibited zone on the glacier. All we’ve heard about is a volcanic eruption alert but I bet that’s a fabrication as well. You have no right to throw your weight about in Icelandic sovereign territory. And you certainly aren’t having any of our equipment.’

They stood eye to eye. A biting northerly wind was blowing over the glacier, sending loose ice crystals rippling across the surface like smoke. The rescue volunteers stood in a silent pack behind Júlíus, showing no sign of fear in the face of armed soldiers. Like their leader, they had no intention of being pushed around by a foreign military power.

‘We’re carrying on,’ Júlíus announced.

He turned and walked back towards his team, so failed to notice the officer signalling to the man nearest him. The soldier removed his rifle from his back and knelt to assume a firing position. Júlíus had almost reached the first tracked vehicle when a volley of shots rang out. Instantly, the grille and bonnet of the vehicle in front of him were riddled with holes, the silence split by a deafening series of cracks as the bullets punctured the steel. Júlíus flung himself down on the ice. Fire blazed up from the engine and a small detonation blew the bonnet sky-high, to land with a crash on the roof of the vehicle. The members of the rescue team who were sitting inside it kicked open the doors, hurled themselves out on to the ice and crawled to safety. Soon the entire vehicle went up in flames, illuminating the winter darkness.

The shooting stopped as quickly as it had started. His breathing coming in gasps, heart hammering in his chest, Júlíus rose up from the ice, stunned at what had just happened. Calmly, the young officer walked right up to him again. The soldiers had all unslung their weapons and now had the rescue team comprehensively covered.

‘Your mobile phones, radios and emergency flares,’ the officer repeated in the same flat, toneless voice. Júlíus stared at the flaming wreckage. He had never experienced anything like this before, never encountered military force, or seen weapons used in combat, and for a moment his anger gave way to trepidation about what might await him and his team. He tried to penetrate the soldier’s goggles, taking in the grey forest of weaponry behind him. None of the men’s faces were visible. His gaze turned to his own people, some of whom had fled the burning vehicle while the others were standing at a loss by their snowmobiles. It was fifteen degrees below zero on the glacier and he could feel the warmth from the blaze.

Kristín spotted them first. She and Steve had approached the glacier at a point where the edge was not particularly high or steep, so they barely noticed the change in terrain from snow-covered rocks to ice and were already some way on to the surface of the ice cap when she saw lights ahead in the darkness. Four snowmobiles. She had stopped to wait for Steve who had been lagging behind again. By the time he caught up the snowmobiles had reached her.

Both had the same thought as their eyes met. They had assumed that the glacier would be kept under close surveillance, so it came as no surprise that a reception committee had been sent to meet them, but the speed at which they had been intercepted was shocking. There was no hope of outrunning the snowmobiles, but then they had no intention of trying. As the familiar sensation of fear bloomed again in Kristín, she reminded herself that those who needed to know had been informed of what was happening. That was her life insurance. Whether it would work or not was another matter. She and Steve stood still and waited. Strangely, given the circumstances, it was her feet that preoccupied her at that moment. From painfully cold they were beginning to turn numb, despite the extra pair of woollen socks that Jón had lent her.

The four men surrounded them on their snowmobiles. One, whom Kristín took to be the officer in charge, switched off his engine and dismounted. He was clad in goggles and Arctic survival gear like the other three, with thick gloves on his hands. He drew the scarf down from his mouth.

‘I must ask you to turn around and leave the glacier,’ he said. ‘You have entered a US military prohibited zone.’

‘Prohibited zone?’ Kristín repeated contemptuously. She knew instinctively that these were the soldiers her brother had seen, perhaps precisely those who had intercepted him on the glacier. Perhaps the very men who had thrown him into the crevasse.

‘Correct. A US military prohibited zone,’ the soldier repeated. ‘We have permission to carry out exercises here. The area is closed to all unauthorised personnel. Please turn back.’

Krístín stared at him and had difficulty hiding her feelings. Rage boiled up inside her. After all the trials she had gone through since the two men burst into her flat, at last she was standing face to face with the truth. These soldiers were proof that the US army was involved in activities on the glacier that would not tolerate the light of day. They were proof that her brother had not had an accident but had seen something he was not supposed to see. And now this man was standing in front of her, giving her orders; an American soldier throwing his weight around in her country as if he ruled the place.

‘Turn back yourself,’ she snarled, snatching at his goggles and looking him in the eye. He jerked his head away and the goggles snapped back on to his nose. The cold intensified the pain and, momentarily losing control of himself, he struck Kristín in the face with the butt of his rifle, knocking her on to the ice. Steve tried to jump him, seizing him around the shoulders, but the soldier drove the butt into his stomach with all his strength and Steve bent double and fell to his knees, winded. As she tried to pull herself up, Kristín was bleeding from mouth and nose but the officer shoved her down with his foot, knocking her flat on her back again.

‘Turn back,’ he ordered.

‘Tell Ratoff I want to meet him,’ Kristín choked.

‘What do you know about Ratoff?’ the officer asked, unable to conceal his surprise and realising belatedly that he had said too much.

Kristín smiled despite the cut on her lip.

‘I know that he’s a murderer,’ she replied.

The soldier stared at her impassively and then at Steve, as if wondering what action to take. After weighing up the options, he fished a mobile phone from his breast pocket, punched in a number that was answered instantly, and stepped aside, making it hard for Kristín to hear what he was saying.

‘A male and a female, affirmative, sir,’ he said in a low voice. ‘She knows your name. Just a minute, sir.’ Turning, he walked back to where Kristín lay, propped up on her elbows in the snow.

‘Are you Kristín?’ he asked.

She met his gaze without answering.

‘Do you have a brother who was up here on the glacier yesterday?’ the officer asked.

‘I don’t know. You tell me,’ Kristín hissed from between clenched teeth.

‘That’s right, sir,’ the officer said into the phone. ‘Understood,’ he added, then ending the call, turned to his men.

‘We’re taking them with us,’ he announced.