The Chill Factor

by Richard Falkirk

  I looked for the island that had suddenly sprung from the sea in a fountain of fire and smoke. But I couldn’t see it.

  We sank lower and went into circuit. I mentally recited some of my homework: ‘The centre of Iceland consists of a rift from SW to NE. This is part of a vast rift running the length of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge south from Iceland to the Azores, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha … thought to represent a line of fracture along which the Atlantic Ocean may first have opened … from which basalts have been pouring out for millions of years.’

  The runway was a few feet below, wet and fast. ‘Of the volcanic rocks the tertiary plateau basalts are the oldest dating from Eocene to Pliocene …’

  We bumped once, then settled and the first sign I saw said: ‘US Navy Ops Field Elevation 169 ft’.

  I considered asking Gudrun, now in scarlet jacket and hat, out to dinner. But reluctance to invoke a clause of the tired businessman’s travel manual prevented me; just such reluctance could make a man an octogenarian celibate.

  I said goodbye to her breezily and squeezed past her on to the landing steps. She looked hurt, I thought; but it was too late now. I was on the tarmac and the runway accelerating across the airfield like buckshot.

  At the duty-free counters I debated prices with a morose sales assistant so that I could be last through formalities and customs and proceed unnoticed to my own nearby destination.

  I was still deep in low finance when Gudrun rounded the corner, a galleon in full sail. She dropped anchor in front of me and said: ‘You did not pay for your vodkas.’

  Interest animated the face of the sales assistant.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, searching my pockets for the kronur I bought at London Airport.

  She considered the coins in my hand. ‘Why are you staying around like this? Reykjavik is thirty-five kilometres from here and you will miss the bus.’

  ‘I prefer to go by cab.’

  ‘That will cost you much money. You are very rich?’

  ‘Not rich at all.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘In a guest-house in Baragata.’

  ‘Then you are certainly not so rich.’

  ‘A lot of scientists stay there. It’s very peaceful, I’m told.’ I held out the coins. ‘Take whatever I owe you.’

  ‘I do not want your money,’ she said.

  Which was perplexing. My body, perhaps? I put the coins back in my pocket and waited optimistically.

  She said: ‘Tomorrow I will introduce you to a man who knows all about volcanoes.’

  Which was what I needed like a crater in the head.

  ‘Do you know the Saga Hotel?’

  I shook my head. ‘It wasn’t here in my day.’

  ‘You will find it very easily.’ Her face challenged me not to find it. ‘I shall be there at eight o’clock tomorrow evening. Perhaps the three of us may dine and dance.’

  ‘The three-step?’

  ‘You are not anxious to meet my friend?’

  ‘Not if he’s your boyfriend. Perhaps’ – consulted the tired businessman’s manual – ‘perhaps you and I could have dinner tomorrow at the Saga and meet your friend some other time.’

  She smiled as the conversation degenerated into a cliché of her profession. ‘Very well.’ She paused. ‘But what about all those poor cattle dying?’

  I looked concerned. Which I supposed I was because I like cattle. And birds, and human beings sometimes. ‘There’s nothing I can do for them. I can only try and stop it happening again.’

  She looked relieved. ‘Very well. Eight o’clock in the downstairs bar. We have many things to discuss. And now – can I give you a lift into Reykjavik? I have a little car.’

  A single lie spawns with great fertility. I pointed at an Orion P3 anti-submarine surveillance aircraft brushing up wings of spray on the runway. ‘I have to meet someone off that plane.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘An American scientist. He’s been rushed in. We’ll be working together on this project.’

  She looked at the unorthodox passenger aircraft with surprise. But the surprise was prevented from being inflated into suspicion by sudden emotion. ‘Britain and America helping little Iceland,’ she said. ‘It is vonderful.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said.

  And so it was.

  2

  Charlie Martz

  The NATO base at Keflavik, which also serves as one of the capital’s two airfields, once belonged to the British. They occupied it when they occupied Iceland on May 10, 1940, to prevent the Germans doing the same thing. Later in the war the Americans took over the job because Britain had other commitments.

  But after the war the Americans were reluctant to leave Iceland vacant for new post-war enemies to occupy and in 1951 Keflavik became a NATO base staffed predominantly by Americans. There are some 2,000 Naval personnel, 1,000 Air Force and two Army men.

  The welfare authorities do their best. Cinema, theatre, sport, domestic television and radio. But it is difficult to make a site on a lava field homely. In the winter it gets light at 10 a.m. and dark at 2 p.m.; there is a daily announcement of the Chill Factor (temperature multiplied by wind velocity) by which the mathematically-minded can calculate how quickly they could die from exposure; even tourist literature, which can normally transplant a palm tree almost anywhere, admits that Keflavik ‘is rather bleak and barren’.

  In high summer it never gets dark, which is not such a relief from winter gloom because you can get bored with looking at military buildings, unaffected by the influence of Le Corbusier, and hangars and lava. There is also a possibility of volcanic activity under the base. Many servicemen consider Keflavik to be the worst foreign posting after Vietnam.

  Strenuous efforts are also made by the Military to foster goodwill between Americans and Icelanders. These efforts succeed to an extent but there is still some opposition to the ‘Army of Occupation’ which declined to depart after the war. The United States then argued that the war was not over until an actual peace treaty had been concluded with Germany; In 1946 a new agreement was drawn up permitting the Americans to stay at Keflavik. Opposition to this was fierce and partly responsible for a change in Government. Five years later the tenancy was extended under the auspices of NATO.

  The hostility emanates mostly from Communists within the divided People’s Union which holds nine of the sixty seats in Parliament. It manifests itself in demonstrations which were recently concentrated against the Americans’ own television. They were asked to adjust the transmitter so that Icelanders’ artistic appreciation was not debased. Thus the islanders were deprived in one political move of Rawhide, Captain Kangaroo, The Flying Nun and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Demonstrators further emphasised their views on American entertainment by entering the base and pouring paint over the TV equipment.

  I walked from the civilian air terminal to the entrance to the base. Past raw blocks housing Service families – each apartment a microcosm of Los Angeles or New York City or Seattle, with Chevrolet, Ford or Volkswagen parked outside on concrete or black volcanic ash.

  The reception room was a small hothouse occupied by an American military policeman, scrubbed and stroppy and gingery, and an Icelandic policeman in black uniform playing patience. An invisible barrier preventing communication stood between them and on the wall hung a Pam-Am calendar displaying a coloured photograph of Novodevichy Monastery in Moscow.

  I spoke to the American guard, as resentful as a dog with bitten ears. ‘I think I’m expected …’

  He interrupted me with a jerk of his thumb towards the young Icelandic policeman, picked up the phone and embarked on a wearily obscene conversation with someone called Irwin.

  ‘My name’s Conran,’ I said. ‘I believe Commander Martz is expecting me.’

  The military policeman stopped talking on the phone and accused me headily through his spectacles. Why hadn’t I told him who it was I wanted? He said: ‘I’ll call you back, Irwin.’ But by th
at time the Icelandic policeman had spoken to Charlie Martz and put an eight of hearts under a nine of clubs.

  We drove to Martz’s Nissen hut offices in a Land Rover. British hut, British truck.

  He called for coffee, offered cigarettes, put one foot on his desk, flashed a gold tooth somewhere at the back of his mouth, called me ‘an old son of a gun’ a couple of times, massaged the chopped stalks of his harvested hair and inquired with totally spurious concern about the flight, the weather in London and my health.

  On his desk were several files, a photograph of his wife and kids and, unaccountably, a toilet roll. On the walls of the office, built austerely for war, were pictures of Charlie Martz with John Kennedy, Charlie Martz with various admirals, Charlie Martz with the boys. Charlie Martz ostensibly in the carefree days before they shore-based him and lumbered him with security and liaison – and British agents.

  But he was a nice man, was Charlie. Fortyish, intensively off-duty in windcheater and concertina slacks, with a broad, frank face that was his greatest asset – I was never quite sure how devious he was behind his props. Or at what stage in the pictorial history of Charlie Martz boyishly displayed on the walls his training in counter-espionage, and perhaps espionage, had begun. Anyway he still looked as if there should have been a compass or a periscope instead of a desk in front of him.

  Currently Charlie was trying to equate liaison with counterespionage. As liaison officer he spent much time trying to convince a phlegmatic world that great camaraderie was burgeoning between American and Icelander: as a counter-espionage expert he had called in a British agent to help him stamp out subversion. The equation didn’t equate and now he gave up.

  ‘Bill, old buddy,’ he said, ‘it’s gotten worse.’

  ‘How much worse?’

  ‘Lots worse.’

  ‘You mean they’ve painted your TV cameras again?’

  ‘Nothing like that.’

  The painting had occurred just after my last visit. I had been flown in by the United States Air Force for a briefing and returned to London to await developments without even seeing Reykjavik.

  Martz walked to the window and stared in the direction of the herring-filled sea. Momentarily back at the helm. He said: ‘We calculate that there are now thirty-five Russians in Reykjavik. Thirty-five, Bill, for a population of 200,000.’

  ‘You mean diplomats?’

  ‘Diplomats and their families and staff.’ He lit a cigarette with a gun-metal, wind-shielded lighter. ‘And as if that were not enough, Goddamnit, the news agency Novisti is starting operations here. At the moment the Soviets are occupying seven buildings in Reykjavik, not to mention some rooms let to them by the Poles.’

  ‘At least you know where they all are.’ So far the only difference to the situation on my previous visit three months earlier was numerical.

  Martz sat down again and replaced his foot on the desk. ‘That’s just the Goddamn trouble, Billy boy, we don’t.’

  ‘But diplomats can’t take off and strike camp on Vatna Jökull.’

  ‘Diplomats can’t. Spies can.’ He paused. ‘You remember all the stories about the Germans landing agents here during the last war to start a Fifth Column?’

  ‘They weren’t just stories. The British found transmitters in caves in the north-east on the Langanes Peninsula. They also landed some Icelanders who had been living in Berlin. They thought they’d got them brainwashed, but they hadn’t – the agents went straight to the local police. We reckon the Soviets are trying something similar right now.’

  ‘To little old Iceland?’

  ‘Little old Iceland nothin’. The key to the North Atlantic more like. And as you know, Bill’ – he dropped the old buddy when things were getting really serious – ‘the Soviets think a long way ahead. They’re seeing another war five, ten, twenty years ahead. Or maybe next year. And they want to have a great big foot in Iceland if and when that war comes.’

  ‘What evidence have you that the Russians are landing agents?’

  ‘Nothing hard until the other day. A lot of indications though. As you know there’s been a lot of Soviet Naval activity around these shores. Not to mention the fishing fleets. They call it Red Square now up on the East Coast.’

  Still nothing that we hadn’t covered on my previous visit. ‘So?’

  ‘Every now and again a Soviet trawler puts into a fiord claiming a breakdown or something. By the time our guys or the Icelanders get there the engine has been put right and more than likely a passenger is missing somewhere in Iceland. And there’s another funny thing …’ He waited to give the funny thing more effect.

  ‘What funny thing is that?’

  ‘According to the guys who reach the Soviet trawlers none of the crews ever smelt of fish.’

  Silently we ruminated on the olfactory evidence. Rain machine-gunned the corrugated-iron roof. A 727 came in low from the sea looking for the glistening canal that was the runway.

  Finally I said: ‘Perhaps they use deodorant.’

  Charlie Martz said: ‘Perhaps.’ The way you humour a facetious child. Then he said: ‘There’s one anchored somewhere near Vopnafjorthur right now if you’d like to go and have a looksee.’

  ‘Okay. But surely you’ve got a little more to go on than Russian fishermen who don’t smell of fish.’

  We eyed each other across the toilet roll. Allies playing poker. A common cause but different methods, different personalities, miserly with our secrets, lavish with suspicion.

  ‘There is a bit more,’ he said reluctantly.

  ‘This is killing you, isn’t it?’

  The bonhomie had departed for a while, an unwanted guest. He eyed me with resignation because I wasn’t his sort of agent; maybe he didn’t even like me; maybe my dossier – perhaps it was in one of the files on the table – didn’t appeal to him. Something like: ‘First assignment since crack-up, fondness for drink and women increased since this breakdown, flippant in manner, invaluable to this project because of his knowledge of Iceland and Icelandic. Hobbies – ornithology.’ For Christ’s sake – a bird watcher!

  I said: ‘Look, Charlie, if we’re going to do this job we’ve got to do it together. If you don’t want me to share your secrets why in God’s name did you send for me?’

  ‘You know why I asked for you. Not you in particular. But a limey.’

  ‘Because there are a lot of Icelanders around who wouldn’t take too kindly to an American nosing among their affairs?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Well, you got me and you’d better come clean or I might as well catch the next plane home.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, reaching for straws of friendliness. ‘Five days ago a Russian agent was picked up at Egilsstathir. How’s that for openers?’

  ‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘Not bad at all.’

  ‘At least we think he was a Russian agent.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘But we can’t be sure.’

  ‘Why can’t you be sure?’

  ‘Because he’s dead,’ Martz said.

  The difficult part was over now and Martz began to talk with something like his usual loquacity.

  ‘As you probably know,’ Martz said, ‘Egilsstathir is one of the few places in Iceland with any trees. Or the forest at Hallormsstathur rather. A local cop was out rambling or something when he came across signs of human habitation. The ashes of a fire, a gnawed bone, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Wasn’t there snow up there?’

  ‘Not in the Lagarfljot valley. Anyway the lawman got angry because it seems he reckons that part of the forest belongs to him. So he waited around. After about an hour this guy comes up carrying a sleeping bag and a radio transmitter. The cop came out of hiding and challenged him but he ran for it. The cop called on him to stop but he just kept on running. Then a shooting match started.’

  ‘You see, we nature-lovers can be quite tough when we feel like it.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He explored the stubble on his scalp with the ti
ps of his fingers. ‘Yeah, I guess so. Anyway this cop must have been quite a marksman because he holed our spy right between the eyes with a pistol from seventy-five yards.’

  ‘That wasn’t very clever,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t say it was very clever.’ Martz did a reconnaissance patrol of his study and sat down again.

  ‘Any identification papers?’

  Martz nodded. ‘All Icelandic. Ingolfur Gislason. Forgeries – but good ones. Someone by that name was expected to rent a room in Egilsstathir the day after he was killed. The landlord still had the letter signed Gislason.’

  ‘Where was it posted?’

  ‘In Reykjavik.’

  ‘And the transmitter and sleeping bag?’

  ‘Swedish and Danish respectively. But that doesn’t mean a damn thing. You can buy both in Iceland.’

  ‘Then why the hell do you think he was Russian?’

  ‘There had been a Soviet trawler anchored off the coast the day before. About forty miles away. The crew of a C-130 reckoned they saw a man heading across the snow from the trawler in the direction of Egilsstathir.’

  ‘I thought you said there wasn’t any snow up there?’

  ‘There’s plenty of it outside the valley. The roads are still impassable up north.’

  ‘And that’s the only evidence you have that the dead man was a Russian?’

  ‘As I told you we’ve suspected for some time that they’ve been landing agents like the Germans did. This is the nearest we’ve got to proof. I reckon Mr Gislason spoke fluent Icelandic, had a prepared Icelandic background and contacts to back up his stories just like a British agent parachuted in to France in 1941 would have contacts in the Resistance.’

  ‘Do you have any ideas?’

  ‘Our Mr Sigurdson does.’

  ‘Who the devil is he?’

  ‘My opposite number in the Icelandic police. Liaison with the Americans and counter-subversion. The trouble is he gets a little confused as to who the enemy is. He wants the Russians out but he’s not crazy about having the Americans in.’

  ‘What are Mr Sigurdson’s ideas?’