Operation Napoleon

by Arnaldur Indridason

  ‘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 w
ouldn’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.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Military intelligence, mainly. They knew the Icelanders were sensitive about troop movements, especially in those days, so someone had the brainwave of sending Armstrong and the astronauts to Iceland for training exercises in the lava fields to the north of the glacier. The Icelanders welcomed the astronauts with open arms, of course, and were very understanding about all the military manoeuvres connected with the mission. You were told that the landscape in the interior resembled conditions on the moon. Preposterous! But you guys swallowed it. In actual fact, it was designed to deflect attention from the biggest movements of troops and equipment undertaken by the Americans in Iceland since the war. Whatever that plane contains, those are the lengths some people are prepared to go to in order to find it.’

  ‘But why not go to Hawaii if they needed to practise in a lava field?’ Steve asked.

  ‘I have a notion where the idea came from,’ Thompson continued, seemingly invigorated by recounting these long-ago events. ‘There was a pilot here with the Defense Force from around 1960 who flew Scorpion fighter jets: Parker, Captain Parker was the name. When a group of astronauts made a refuelling stop here at Keflavík, incognito, in the summer of ’65, the press office decided to cash in on the fact and the story really caught the public imagination. This guy Parker was in charge of the group. So when they needed to send an expedition to Vatnajökull in ’67 without attracting any attention, Parker had the bright idea of inviting Armstrong over, figuring that it would cause even more of a sensation, because by then Armstrong had commanded a spaceflight, the Gemini 8 mission.’

  ‘And nobody knew about this?’ Steve asked.

  ‘So many people were involved that something must have leaked out, though none of it could ever be confirmed. They failed to find the plane – if indeed it exists. The whole thing was a complete fiasco. It was rumoured that the secret service had taken control of the embassy in Reykjavík during the operation, as well as the base here in Keflavík. The leader of the expedition was called Carr, General Vytautas Carr. Old-school. Hard as nails.’

  ‘But they didn’t find the plane?’

  ‘I don’t know what happened. It was April but winter was far from over. There was one of those Easter blizzards, as you call them – a storm that blew up out of nowhere and lasted for days. They simply weren’t prepared for Arctic conditions in April, became blinded by wind and snow, and had to get off the glacier, losing four men in the process. Two of them fell into a crevasse, the other two got separated and died of exposure. They were driven off the glacier, exhausted and defeated, and by the time the weather improved, the plane had vanished, if it was ever there. Like I said, Leo and the others often used to discuss it but I don’t know how much is true, though the astronauts did come here, that’s for sure.’

  ‘If the plane has emerged from the ice and the soldiers saw my brother . . .’ Kristín left the sentence unfinished.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Thompson replied. ‘I don’t know what to say, dear. You must hope for the best but there’s something about that plane. According to one guy, it crashed shortly after the end of the war and the plan had been to dismantle it and remove it from the glacier. He claimed it had come from Berlin. For a long time there was talk of gold, the Third Reich’s last gold reserve. The story went that American soldiers stole it from the Germans and meant to fly it across the Atlantic. But it was also rumoured to be carrying a cargo of those art treasures the Germans plundered from all over Europe.’

  Nobody spoke.

  ‘And what do you think the plane contains, Mr Thompson?’ Kristín asked eventually.

  ‘You heard what I said. There are so many possibilities.’

  ‘What do you regard as most likely then?’

  ‘Someone said it was carrying a bomb built by the Nazis that we intercepted before the Russians could lay hands on it and that we were trying to get it back to the States.’

  ‘A bomb?’ Steve asked. ‘What kind of bomb?’

  ‘I don’t know but it might explain why they’re so obsessed with finding the damn thing.’

  ‘Do you know who Ratoff is?’ Kristín asked.

  ‘Never heard the name,’ Thompson said. His mind was clearer now; he had a good memory and had no difficulty recalling the distant past once he had got going.

  ‘Where did they approach the glacier from? Do you know?’

  ‘From the south. I can’t remember what the place was called. A couple of brothers lived nearby and acted as their guides. Farmers. That’s all I know, I swear to God. And that’s nothing but gossip and half-truths. I don’t believe anyone knows the whole truth.’

  Arnold’s head snapped back as Bateman struck him a violent blow to the face and a new cut opened above his eyebrow. He would have screamed but they had bound him to the chair and gagged him with duct tape. He breathed frantically through his nose, his eyes goggling at the two men in white ski-suits. Blood seeped into his eye.

  They had burst into his apartment, demanding to know if he owned the old Toyota in the parking lot in front of the building. Their tracker dogs had stopped by the car, refusing to budge, and the bonnet felt warm to the touch. It had taken a single phone call to trace the owner, and Arnold’s name was on the doorbell. This was the second time Arnold had been woken that night and he was in such a foul temper when the men tried to question him over the entry-phone that he refused to let them into the building. Before he knew what was happening, the door to his apartment had been kicked in.

  He told them what he knew: he had taken the couple to the archives and left them there. But the men wanted to know far more – what Steve and Kristín were looking for, where they were now and how they intended to leave the area. Arnold inwardly cursed that son of a bitch Steve.

  His face was
covered in blood; these men did not waste time. It was not the first occasion Arnold had been in trouble with the military police but he had never seen these two before, nor had he experienced their methods of interrogation. They tied him to a chair and quite simply beat him to a pulp. He did not have a clue where Steve and the Icelander were or what they were looking for. He held out as long as he could, determined not to tell his interrogators the one thing that might come in useful, but his stamina was limited.

  Bateman took out a thick roll of silver tape and bit off a ten-centimetre strip. Like Ripley, he was wearing white rubber gloves. Holding the tape in both hands, he stuck it firmly over Arnold’s nose and mouth, then stood in front of him, observing his vain attempts to gasp for oxygen with scientific detachment. When it looked as if Arnold was losing consciousness, Bateman grabbed one corner and tore it away from his nose, leaving a red welt where it had taken a small piece of skin with it.

  Arnold’s nostrils flared frantically as he sucked in air. The tape still covered his mouth but he inhaled with all his might. Bateman picked up the roll of tape again, bit off another strip and wordlessly fixed the tape over his nose.

  ‘I’m not going to resuscitate you if you keep this up much longer, Arnold,’ Ripley said to him.

  He writhed in the chair, his blood-drenched face becoming as suffused and swollen as a balloon. Bateman tore the tape off his nose again, this time removing it from his mouth as well.

  ‘I own a Zodiac,’ Arnold shouted breathlessly, when he could finally speak between desperate gulps of air. ‘Steve knows where it is. He’ll use it to get off the base. Don’t do it again; I beg you, for Christ’s sake, let me breathe.’

  ‘A Zodiac?’ Bateman asked.

  ‘I use it for smuggling. I smuggle drugs in and out of the base. I’ve been doing it for two years. Mostly cocaine but also speed and dope and . . . I sell it in Reykjavík. I have two contacts there called . . .’