Running Blind / The Freedom Trap

by Desmond Bagley

  I looked at her. ‘Elin,’ I said, ‘The man’s dangerous. Either he’s gone off his nut—which I think is unlikely—or…’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said despondently. ‘It’s too damned complicated and I don’t know enough. But I do know that Slade wants me dead. There’s something I know—or something he thinks I know—that’s dangerous for him; dangerous enough for him to want to kill me. Under the circumstances I don’t want you around—you could get in the line of fire. You did get in the line of fire this morning.’

  She slowed because of a deep rut. ‘You can’t survive alone,’ she said. ‘You need help.’

  I needed more than help; I needed a new set of brains to work out this convoluted problem. But this wasn’t the time to do it because Elin’s shoulder was giving her hell. ‘Pull up,’ I said. ‘I’ll do the driving.’

  We travelled south for an hour and a half and Elin said, ‘There’s Dettifoss.’

  I looked out over the rocky landscape towards the cloud of spray in the distance which hung over the deep gorge which the Jökulsô ô Fjöllum has cut deep into the rock. ‘We’ll carry on to Selfoss,’ I decided. ‘Two waterfalls are better than one. Besides, there are usually campers at Dettifoss.’

  We went past Dettifoss and, three kilometres farther on, I pulled off the road. ‘This is as close to Selfoss as we can get.’

  I got out. ‘I’ll go towards the river and see if anyone’s around,’ I said. ‘It’s bad form to be seen humping bodies about. Wait here and don’t talk to any strange men.’

  I checked to see if the body was still decently shrouded by the blanket with which we had covered it, and then headed towards the river. It was still very early in the morning and there was no one about so I went back and opened the rear door of the vehicle and climbed inside.

  I stripped the blanket away from Graham’s body and searched his clothing. His wallet contained some Icelandic currency and a sheaf of Deutschmarks, together with a German motoring club card identifying him as Dieter Buchner, as also did his German passport. There was a photograph of him with his arm around a pretty girl and a fascia board of a shop behind them was in German. The Department was always thorough about that kind of thing.

  The only other item of interest was a packet of rifle ammunition which had been broken open. I put that on one side, pulled out the body and replaced the wallet in the pocket, and then carried him in a fireman’s lift towards the river with Elin close on my heels.

  I got to the lip of the gorge and put down the body while I studied the situation. The gorge at this point was curved and the river had undercut the rock face so that it was a straight drop right into the water. I pushed the body over the edge and watched it fall in a tumble of arms and legs until it splashed into the grey, swirling water. Buoyed by air trapped in the jacket it floated out until it was caught in the quick midstream current. We watched it go downstream until it disappeared over the edge of Selfoss to drop into the roaring cauldron below.

  Elin looked at me sadly. ‘And what now?’

  ‘Now I go south,’ I said, and walked away quickly towards the Land-Rover. When Elin caught up with me I was bashing hell out of the radio-bug with a big stone.

  ‘Why south?’ she asked breathlessly.

  ‘I want to get to Keflavik and back to London. There’s a man I want to talk to—Sir David Taggart.’

  ‘We go by way of Myvatn?’

  I shook my head, and gave the radio-bug one last clout, sure now that it would tell no more tales. ‘I’m keeping off the main roads—they’re too dangerous. I go by way of the Odádahraun and by Askja—into the desert. But you’re not coming.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said, and tossed the car key in her hand.

  III

  God has not yet finished making Iceland.

  In the last 500 years one-third of all the lava extruded from the guts of the earth to the face of the planet has surfaced in Iceland and, of 200 known volcanoes, thirty are still very much active. Iceland suffers from a bad case of geological acne.

  For the last thousand years a major eruption has been recorded, on average, every five years. Askja—the ash volcano—last blew its top in 1961. Measurable quantities of volcanic ash settled on the roofs of Leningrad, 1,500 miles away. That didn’t trouble the Russians overmuch but the effect was more serious nearer home. The country to north and east of Askja was scorched and poisoned by deep deposits of ash and, nearer to Askja, the lava flows overran the land, overlaying desolation with desolation. Askja dominates north-east Iceland and has created the most awesome landscape in the world.

  It was into this wilderness, the Odádahraun, as remote and blasted as the surface of the moon, that we went. The name, loosely translated, means ‘Murderers’ Country’. and was the last foothold of the outlaws of olden times, the shunned of men against whom all hands were raised.

  There are tracks in the Odÿdahraun—sometimes. The tracks are made by those who venture into the interior; most of them scientists—geologists and hydrographers—few travel for pleasure in that part of the Óbyggdir. Each vehicle defines the track a little more, but when the winter snows come the tracks are obliterated—by water, by snow avalanche, by rock slip. Those going into the interior in the early summer, as we were, are in a very real sense trail blazers, sometimes finding the track anew and deepening it a fraction, very often not finding it and making another.

  It was not bad during the first morning. The track was reasonable and not too bone-jolting and paralleled the Jökulsá á Fjöllum which ran grey-green with melt water to the Arctic Ocean. By midday we were opposite Mödrudalur which lay on the other side of the river, and Elin broke into that mournfully plaintive song which describes the plight of the Icelander in winter: ‘Short are the mornings in the mountains of Mödrudal. There it is mid-morning at daybreak.’ I suppose it fitted her mood; I know mine wasn’t very much better.

  I had dropped all thoughts of giving Elin the slip. Slade knew that she had been in Asbyrgi—the bug planted on the Land-Rover would have told him that—and it would be very dangerous for her to appear unprotected in any of the coastal towns. Slade had been a party to attempted murder and she was a witness, and I knew he would take extreme measures to silence her. As dangerous as my position was she was as safe with me as anywhere, so I was stuck with her.

  At three in the afternoon we stopped at the rescue hut under the rising bulk of the great shield volcano called Herdubreid or ‘Broad Shoulders’. We were both tired and hungry, and Elin said, ‘Can’t we stop here for the day?’

  I looked across at the hut. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Someone might be expecting us to do just that. We’ll push on a little farther towards Askja. But there’s no reason why we can’t eat here.’

  Elin prepared a meal and we ate in the open, sitting outside the hut. Halfway through the meal I was in mid-bite of a herring sandwich when an idea struck me like a bolt of lightning. I looked up at the radio mast next to the hut and then at the whip antenna on the Land-Rover. ‘Elin, we can raise Reykjavik from here, can’t we? I mean we can talk to anyone in Reykjavik who has a telephone.’

  Elin looked up. ‘Of course. We contact Gufunes Radio and they connect us into the telephone system.’

  I said dreamily, ‘Isn’t it fortunate that the transatlantic cables run through Iceland? If we can be plugged into the telephone system there’s nothing to prevent a further patching so as to put a call through to London.’ I stabbed my finger at the Land-Rover with its radio antenna waving gently in the breeze. ‘Right from there.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it being done,’ said Elin doubtfully.

  I finished the sandwich. ‘I see no reason why it can’t be done. After all, President Nixon spoke to Neil Armstrong when he was on the moon. The ingredients are there—all we have to do is put them together. Do you know anyone in the telephone department?’

  ‘I know Svein Haraldsson,’ she said thoughtfully.

  I would have taken a bet
that she would know someone in the telephone department; everybody in Iceland knows somebody. I scribbled a number on a scrap of paper and gave it to her. ‘That’s the London number. I want Sir David Taggart in person.’

  ‘What if this…Taggart…won’t accept the call?’

  I grinned. ‘I have a feeling that Sir David will accept any call coming from Iceland right now.’

  Elin looked up at the radio mast. ‘The big set in the hut will give us more power.’

  I shook my head. ‘Don’t use it—Slade might be monitoring the telephone bands. He can listen to what I have to say to Taggart but he mustn’t know where it’s coming from. A call from the Land-Rover could be coming from anywhere.’

  Elin walked over to the Land-Rover, switched on that set and tried to raise Gufunes. The only result was a crackle of static through which a few lonely souls wailed like damned spirits, too drowned by noise to be understandable. ‘There must be storms in the western mountains,’ she said. ‘Should I try Akureyri?’ That was the nearest of the four radiotelephone stations.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘If Slade is monitoring at all he’ll be concentrating on Akureyri. Try Seydisfjördur.’

  Contacting Seydisfjördur in eastern Iceland was much easier and Elin was soon patched into the landline network to Reykjavik and spoke to her telephone friend, Svein. There was a fair amount of incredulous argument but she got her way. ‘There’s a delay of an hour,’ she said.

  ‘Good enough. Ask Seydisfjördur to contact us when the call comes through.’ I looked at my watch. In an hour it would be 3:45 p.m. British Standard Time—a good hour to catch Taggart.

  We packed up and on we pushed south towards the distant ice blink of Vatnajökull. I left the receiver switched on but turned it low and there was a subdued babble from the speaker.

  Elin said, ‘What good will it do to speak to this man, Taggart?’

  ‘He’s Slade’s boss,’ I said. ‘He can get Slade off my back.’

  ‘But will he?’ she asked. ‘You were supposed to hand over the package and you didn’t. You disobeyed orders. Will Taggart like that?’

  ‘I don’t think Taggart knows what’s going on here. I don’t think he knows that Slade tried to kill me—and you. I think Slade is working on his own, and he’s out on a limb. I could be wrong, of course, but that’s one of the things I want to get from Taggart.’

  ‘And if you are wrong? If Taggart instructs you to give the package to Slade? Will you do it?’

  I hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’

  Elin said. ‘Perhaps Graham was right. Perhaps Slade really thought you’d defected—you must admit he would have every right to think so. Would he then…?’

  ‘Send a man with a gun? He would.’

  ‘Then I think you’ve been stupid, Alan; very, very stupid. I think you’ve allowed your hatred of Slade to cloud your judgment, and I think you’re in very great trouble.’

  I was beginning to think so myself. I said, ‘I’ll find that out when I talk to Taggart. If he backs Slade…’ If Taggart backed Slade then I was Johnny-in-the-middle in danger of being squeezed between the Department and the opposition. The Department doesn’t like its plans being messed around, and the wrath of Taggart would be mighty.

  And yet there were things that didn’t fit—the pointlessness of the whole exercise in the first place, Slade’s lack of any real animosity when I apparently boobed, the ambivalence of Graham’s role. And there was something else which prickled at the back of my mind but which I could not bring to the surface. Something which Slade had done or had not done, or had said or had not said—something which had rung a warning bell deep in my unconscious.

  I braked and brought the Land-Rover to a halt, and Elin looked at me in surprise. I said, ‘I’d better know what cards I hold before I talk to Taggart. Dig out the can-opener—I’m going to open the package.’

  ‘Is that wise? You said yourself that it might be better not to know.’

  ‘You may be right. But if you play stud poker without looking at your hole card you’ll probably lose. I think I’d better know what it is that everyone wants so much.’

  I got out and went to the rear bumper where I stripped the tape from the metal box and pulled it loose. When I got back behind the wheel Elin already had the can-opener—I think she was really as curious as I was.

  The box was made of ordinary shiny metal of the type used for cans, but it was now flecked with a few rust spots due to its exposure. A soldered seam ran along four edges so I presumed that face to be the top. I tapped and pressed experimentally and found that the top flexed a little more under pressure than any of the other five sides, so it was probably safe to stab the blade of the can-opener into it.

  I took a deep breath and jabbed the blade into one corner and heard the hiss of air as the metal was penetrated. That indicated that the contents had been vacuum-packed and I hoped I wasn’t going to end up with a couple of pounds of pipe tobacco. The belated thought came to me that it could have been booby-trapped; there are detonators that operate on air pressure and that sudden equalization could have made the bloody thing blow up in my face.

  But it hadn’t, so I took another deep breath and began to lever the can-opener. Luckily it was one of the old-fashioned type that didn’t need a rim to operate against; it made a jagged, sharp-edged cut—a really messy job—but it opened up the box inside two minutes.

  I took off the top and looked inside and saw a piece of brown, shiny plastic with a somewhat electrical look about it—you can see bits of it in any radio repair shop. I tipped the contents of the box into the palm of my hand and looked at the gadget speculatively and somewhat hopelessly.

  The piece of brown plastic was the base plate for an electronic circuit, a very complex one. I recognized resistors and transistors but most of it was incomprehensible. It had been a long time since I had studied radio and the technological avalanche of advances had long since passed me by. In my day a component was a component, but the microcircuitry boys are now putting an entire and complicated circuit with dozens of components on to a chip of silicon you’d need a microscope to see.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Elin with sublime faith that I would know the answer.

  ‘I’m damned if I know,’ I admitted. I looked closer and tried to trace some of the circuits but it was impossible. Part of it was of modular construction with plates of printed circuits set on edge, each plate bristled with dozens of components; elsewhere it was of more conventional design, and set in the middle was a curious metal shape for which there was no accounting—not by me, anyway.

  The only thing that made sense were the two ordinary screw terminals at the end of the base plate with a small engraved brass plate screwed over them. One terminal was marked ’ + ’ and the other ’ - ‘, and above was engraved, ‘110 v. 60~.’ I said, ‘That’s an American voltage and frequency. In England we use 240 volts and 50 cycles. Let’s assume that’s the input end.’

  ‘So whatever it is, it’s American.’

  ‘Possibly American,’ I said cautiously. There was no power pack and the two terminals were not connected so that the gadget was not working at the moment. Presumably it would do what it was supposed to do when a 110 volt, 60 cycle current was applied across those terminals. But what it would do I had no idea at all.

  Whatever kind of a whatsit it was, it was an advanced whatsit. The electronic whiz-kids have gone so far and fast that this dohickey, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, could very well be an advanced computer capable of proving that eVmc2 or, alternatively, disproving it.

  It could also have been something that a whiz-kid might have jack-legged together to cool his coffee, but I didn’t think so. It didn’t have the jack-leg look about it; it was coolly professional, highly sophisticated and had the air of coming off a very long production line—a production line in a building without windows and guarded by hard-faced men with guns.

  I said thoughtfully, ‘Is Lee Nordlinger still at the base at Keflavik?’


  ‘Yes,’ said Elin. ‘I saw him two weeks ago.’

  I poked at the gadget. ‘He’s the only man in Iceland who might have the faintest idea of what this is.’

  ‘Are you going to show it to him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly. ‘He might recognize it as a piece of missing US government property and, since he’s a commander in the US Navy, he might think he has to take action. After all, I’m not supposed to have it, and there’d be a lot of questions.’

  I put the gadget back into its box, laid the lid on top and taped it into place. ‘I don’t think this had better go underneath again now that I’ve opened it.’

  ‘Listen!’ said Elin. ‘That’s our number.’

  I reached up and twisted the volume control and the voice became louder. ‘Seydisfjördur calling seven, zero, five; Seydisfjördur calling seven, zero, five.’

  I unhooked the handset. ‘Seven, zero, five answering Seydisfjördur.’

  ‘Seydisfjördur calling seven, zero, five; your call to London has come through. I am connecting.’

  ‘Thank you, Seydisfjördur.’

  The characteristics of the noise coming through the speaker changed suddenly and a very faraway voice said, ‘David Taggart here. Is that you, Slade?’

  I said. ‘I’m speaking on an open line—a very open line. Be careful.’

  There was a pause, then Taggart said, ‘I understand. Who is speaking? This is a very bad line.’

  He was right, it was a bad line. His voice advanced and receded in volume and was mauled by an occasional burst of static. I said, ‘This is Stewart here.’

  An indescribable noise erupted from the speaker. It could have been static but more likely it was Taggart having an apoplexy. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he roared.

  I looked at Elin and winced. From the sound of that it appeared that Taggart was not on my side, but it remained to be found if he backed Slade. He was going full blast. ‘I talked to Slade this morning. He said you…er…tried to terminate his contract.’ Another useful euphemism. ‘And what’s happened to Philips?’