The Chill Factor

by Richard Falkirk

  ‘He had two suspects. He was keeping them under surveillance. Waiting for an agent to contact them. He had nothing definite on them – just Icelandic intuition.’ Martz’s voice implied that this was a formidable quality. ‘They’re both Communists, both highly mobile. They’ve both had dealings with the Russians and the Czechs.’

  ‘What do you mean had two suspects?’ Martz issued his information in cliff-hangers.

  ‘He’s now got three.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Sigurdson flew up to Egilsstathir immediately after the shooting. On a slip of paper among Gislason’s forged documents he found a name – Hafstein.’

  Which was a relief in a country where the second names are so alike that phone numbers are listed under Christian names. ‘And who is Hafstein?’

  ‘It seems he’s a guy working in the national register – the Thjodskrain. It figures. That way the Soviets could plant forged birth certificates and other documents confirming their agents’ identities if they ever came under suspicion.’

  In the adjoining office someone battered on Martz’s door and a voice bawled: ‘You in there, Charlie?’

  The other Charlie Martz bawled back: ‘Sure am, Harry. What can I do for you?’

  The door opened and a basketball player’s head about 6 ft 4 ins from the ground looked around. Appraised me, dismissed me and concentrated on Martz. ‘You working late or something?’

  ‘Something like that, Harry. This is Bill Conran, an old buddy of mine from London, England.’

  Harry smiled at me because I was Martz’s buddy and swivelled back towards Martz. ‘Well, when you’ve finished get your fat ass out of that chair and buy me a beer. Bring Mr Conran along too.’

  ‘Not tonight, Harry, you old sonofabitch. You buy me one tomorrow, eh?’

  Harry grimaced, shrugged, shut the door; we heard his retreating voice decrying Martz’s unsocial behaviour in fundamental terms.

  Martz stretched in his swivel chair. ‘Great guy, Harry. We were on a destroyer together once.’ He finished stretching and became the wary raconteur again. ‘Anything else you want to know?’

  ‘I suppose I’d better make contact with Mr Sigurdson.’

  ‘He’s expecting you. He’s not the most forthcoming of guys because he reckons Icelandic security should be left to Icelanders. He has a point, I guess – if there were enough Icelanders to do the job. And if they had an Army …’

  ‘What’s he like apart from that?’

  ‘You’ll like him. A great drinker, a great joker – like most Icelanders. But cunning beneath it all.’

  ‘Not unlike Charlie Martz.’

  ‘That’s not kind,’ Martz said. The sun came out and discovered his gold tooth.

  ‘Was there nothing else at all to confirm that Gislason was a Russian?’

  ‘As a matter of fact there was. He had a steel tooth. You should know those teeth’ – Martz was telling me that he knew I’d worked in Moscow – ‘like a mouthful of bullets.’

  I did know those teeth because it had once cost me £100 to go to Helsinki to avoid Russian dentistry. ‘How the hell did the Russians overlook that?’

  Martz shrugged. ‘God knows. But there it was, at the back of his lower jaw.’

  But it didn’t really surprise me. The KGB was both the most efficient and inefficient network in the world. Machiavellian intrigue hampered by strokes of wondrous incompetence.

  Martz stood up and replaced the mask that faced the world. ‘Come on, Billy boy, let’s go take a look at that spy ship.’

  In Iceland the weather can change by the minute. Now the sky was ice-blue and clear of cloud. We walked across the tarmac to the waiting C-130.

  Beneath me Iceland. Twice in one day. It was 10 p.m. and the heavens were as blue-bright as if it were 10 a.m. Behind us the playing cards of Reykjavik, below the black and khaki moss, ahead the mountains finding the snow as they grew taller.

  Then I saw Hekla – and heard her above the drilling of the Hercules’ engines. An umbrella of smoke and a turbulence of clouds: and beneath all this the red mouths spewing lava into the sky. It was difficult to see the craters in detail because of the smoke, but from the aircraft the earth’s crust looked very frail.

  Martz had similar feelings. ‘Makes you feel pretty puny, doesn’t it?’ he shouted.

  ‘It makes what we’re doing seem even more puny,’ I shouted back. ‘Can’t we get any nearer? Get under that smoke?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  We left Hekla behind and took up the northern boundaries of Vatna Jökull, the largest glacier in Europe. In 1783 the Laki fissure had erupted west of this glacier poisoning sheep, horses and cattle and killing twenty per cent of Iceland’s population through famine. The peaks and caverns of the Ice Age, discarded by time, accepted a bluish glow from the sky. Then we were over its last white fingers, groping as ponderously as evolution itself.

  The Hercules dipped towards the coast and we sat back in the old leather seats. The aircraft banked and we looked down at a fiord, the water motionless inside its mountain barricades. In the middle, just getting up steam, was the Russian trawler looking as innocent as a pleasure boat on Lake Lucerne, a red flag flying pertly from her mast.

  Martz made an extravagant gesture towards her; the gesture could have been triumphant in the face of my scepticism, or defeatist because they were getting away.

  We went as low as the mountains would allow and the little men on the deck waved at us.

  ‘Will she get intercepted?’ I yelled at Martz.

  ‘She might’ His voice implied that the interception would be pretty futile.

  We did another circuit, then headed back across the primeval countryside. It was 11.25 p.m. and as we settled down over the capital the sun was just going down, ready to bounce up again without letting dusk make night. The sea was bronze, wheeling with seagulls. And Reykjavik, which means Smoky Bay – so named because of the steam from the hot springs noticed by the Norse settlers in 874 – looked very innocent from the air with its churches and clean houses and small waves losing themselves on its shores.

  ‘So now I’d better find Sigurdson,’ I shouted at Martz on the tarmac, forgetting that there was no longer any need to raise my voice.

  ‘Don ‘t worry about that Billy boy – he’ll find you.’

  The prospect pleased him because he clapped me on the back with one large hand.

  ‘Does he know all about me? My cover and everything?’

  ‘He sure does. And I hope you know your subject because Icelanders are very inquisitive. Very friendly, very inquisitive, very tough. They also like to tell you about their dreams. But then you know all that.’

  ‘I was only a kid,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll have to go up and take a look at Hekla, seeing as that’s supposed to be the reason you’re here.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And do some bird watching at the same time.’ Just to re-activate his doubts.

  We stopped outside his Nissen hut. It wasn’t the most august building on the base. Perhaps he had been relegated to it when the mob of students subverted the barbed-wire fences and painted the TV cameras.

  The weather did a quick-change and the rain returned.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Now the car and the gun and the little bugging devices they seem to think you’re so clever with.’

  The car was a pale green Chevrolet, the gun a Smith & Wesson.

  ‘Anything more?’ he asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t say no to some ammunition.’

  The old-buddy smile once again erased the doubts. ‘Jesus, I nearly forgot.’ He gave me a box of bullets. ‘Nothing intentional.’ He shook my hand. ‘Good luck, Billy boy. See you tomorrow. Be good.’

  I released my hand and smiled because I liked Charlie Martz. ‘And you,’ I said.

  I started the Chevrolet and headed across the lava field in the direction of Smoky Bay.

  3

  The Welcome

  The initial greetings to a country af
fect your whole stay. They lodge in your brain and stay there until you leave. At least there was no doubt about the spirit of the greeting on the way to Reykjavik from Keflavik. And it nearly did lodge in my brain – permanently.

  It happened somewhere near the hill called Stapi which is reputed to be haunted – Icelanders are much affected by wights and ghosts and the toughest put away their muscles when the Huldufolk are mentioned.

  There was nothing ghostly about the bullet. The sea was on my left, the lava field stretching away to my right, more desolate than any desert. The rain bounced on the bonnet, the wipers moved like metronomes. Then, crack, the metronomes were wiping glass cracked into a million sugar cubes and there was a hole the size of a new potato just above my head.

  I braked, skidded slightly, stopped and crouched on the floor. The bullet, which had ricocheted around inside the car, lay on the passenger seat, warm and bright and hardly scratched. I crawled to the passenger side, opened the door and lay on the ground.

  Then I reached up, took the Smith & Wesson from the glove compartment and peered round the fender. There was a lava mound ahead, greeny-brown and cracking at the top, scaled with lichen and cushioned with moss round the base. I guessed that the sniper was behind it; but there wasn’t much I could do about it unless he showed himself; if I showed myself in the all-night light or tried to drive away then I was dead.

  I glanced at my watch. Midnight, June 30th.

  I took aim from behind the wheel and potted one of the cubes of pumice on top of the mound. Fairground stuff. I thought I detected a movement behind the mound but I couldn’t be sure. The rain bowled down the long empty road plastered my clothes to my body. It was going to be a question of whose patience became exhausted first.

  Then a pair of headlights showed in the uncertain light about a mile down the road. There was a movement behind the lava mound and I potted another chunk of lava; the marksman must have seen the headlights and realised that the driver would stop. He was probably backing away into the bleak cover behind.

  The headlights stopped, rain lancing their beams. It was a red Broncho truck. I stood up and prayed; nothing happened. I explained to the driver – an old seaman by the look of him – that a pebble had struck the windscreen. And before he noticed the bullet-hole I punched out the frosted glass.

  Then I drove on to Reykjavik past lines of dried fish hanging out like laundry, past the new Swiss aluminium plant at Straumsvik. With the windscreen gone it was like driving underwater. The houses and apartment blocks of the capital looked very welcome and I congratulated Ingolfur Arnarson, the first settler, on his choice.

  The house in Baragata, near the city centre, was white and old, surrounded by an uncertain lawn of new grass. The landlady was still up; so, it seemed, was half of Reykjavik. She welcomed me and in a series of shambling little sentences assured me that the weather had been fine until my arrival, described the eruption of Hekla and deplored the consumption of strong drink.

  She showed me my ground-floor room, whisked me upstairs for the inevitable coffee, treated me to flurry of comment on young people’s morals – it was their parents’ fault – and then allowed me to return to my room because I must be tired.

  When I opened the door there was a crate of ginger ale and soda water on the floor and two bottles on the table dividing the single beds. And a man sitting in the wickerwork chair.

  He grinned and began to stand up.

  ‘Don’t get up,’ I said. ‘You’re Mr Sigurdson, I believe.’

  The grin faltered a little.

  Einar Sigurdson looked as tough as a trawlerman. About forty with a broad face, smiling creases from nose to mouth, a round scar on his neck, faded eyes and longish pale hair cut at an awkward length around the sides so that it stuck out. But Sigurdson was not a man who needed to bother with the fripperies of fashion: his strengths were deep in his searching eyes, rasping in his voice, sheathed in his ordinary suit. He was a man’s man and a lady’s man.

  He was also an exuberant man. He proceeded with the grin, grasping my fingers with one hand, my bicep with the other. ‘It is good to see you,’ he said; his bluff sincerity was more convincing than Charlie Martz’s. ‘Welcome to Iceland.’

  ‘I’ve already been welcomed.’ I showed him the bullet, snug in my hand.

  ‘You were shot at?’ Incredulity, mirth and concern contended for dominance.

  ‘I was.’

  He disposed of the incredulity, briefly proffered the concern, then indulged the mirth. ‘You seem to be very accident prone,’ he said.

  How much did he know of Moscow? I wondered. ‘I don’t call a bullet through the windscreen an accident.’

  ‘But you are alive and that is vonderful.’

  ‘Wery,’ I said.

  ‘We must drink to that.’

  ‘Isn’t it a little late?’

  ‘It is never too late to do anything in Iceland. To drink or make the love. At least not in the summer when we have no night. In the winter it is different – then we sleep. I have here a bottle of aquavit and a bottle of Black Death.’

  ‘That sounds interesting.’

  ‘It’s like schnapps. Once upon the time it was forbidden to stick a gay label on a bottle of liquor so they stuck this black one on – that is how it got its name. You like to try?’

  ‘All right,’ I said. I didn’t recall Black Death in my childhood.

  He poured half an inch of colourless liquid in a thick glass for me and an inch of aquavit for himself. He topped up the aquavit with ginger ale. ‘We call that asni – it means mule. We Icelanders like a long drink. You would like some ginger ale?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll take it neat.’ Like I had once taken a Stolichnaya, oily from a deep freeze, and woken up much later far from home. You didn’t necessarily learn from your mistakes: but then I didn’t really care any more.

  ‘Skal,’ he said.

  ‘Skal,’ I said. It was like vodka, only faintly aromatic.

  He swallowed half his mule and examined the little whitewashed room. ‘I have been here some time,’ he said. ‘The front door is open always. When you came down just now I took myself to the toilet.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have asked the landlady if you could wait?’

  He shook his head violently so that the pale hair swung across his forehead. ‘She is the enemy. A member of the International Order of Good Templars. They are teetotallers and they are very influential in this country of ours. It is,’ he added unnecessarily, ‘a country of extremes. Your lady would have smelled the drink on my breath and banished me from her house.’ He finished his drink and poured us both another. ‘We must be very quiet.’ He raised his glass and stared into my eyes guide-book style.

  I sipped at death and said: ‘Okay, Einar, let’s be quiet and get down to business. I’ve got a lot of questions I want to ask you.’

  ‘And I have a lot to ask you. First of all, why do you wish to help the Bandarizkur?’ He put a pillow against the wall and lay down on one of the beds, asni beside him, hands behind his sturdy neck.

  ‘You speak as if I were helping a Nazi in the last war. Are they so unpopular, the Americans?’

  He shook his head, fringing his forehead again. ‘No. We like them. They are wonderful people. But not all Icelanders want them here. It is, after all, our country. Although it is a little country and we realise that we cannot make the rules.’

  ‘They are here to protect you.’

  ‘Would they be here to protect us if we were not in such a – how do you say it? – strategic position?’

  I applied myself to my Black Death without answering.

  He went on: ‘And would Britain have been so keen to protect us in 1940 if we hadn’t been in such a position of strategy?’

  ‘It doesn’t alter the fact that you’re a member of NATO and the military presence of the Americans is desirable to shield a fellow member.’ I poured myself another drink to dispel the diplomatic clichés – if there was one thing I dislike
d more than diplomats it was their clichés. ‘Would you rather have the Russians here?’

  ‘We would rather just have Icelanders here.’

  ‘If you don’t have the Americans then as sure as night is day in Iceland you’ll have the Soviets.’

  ‘You are right, of course.’ He considered the gloomy truth. ‘That is why I have agreed to help you.’

  He passed me a copy of the morning newspaper, Morgunbladid, with four sentences underlined—

  Despite progress in military technology the Atlantic Ocean is still very important militarily. Icelanders must keep this in mind when they think about their own security. They must also keep an open eye on those that now seek a position on the Atlantic, i.e. the Soviet Union. Isn’t its increased interest in Iceland a clear witness to that?

  Sigurdson mixed himself another asni and said: ‘You see, my friend, we realise the truth. But that doesn’t stop us wishing that we were not a prawn in the Big Power Game.’

  ‘Pawn,’ I said. ‘But in any case that’s a pro-Government newspaper.’

  ‘I am trying to give you a complete picture,’ he said, and handed me a copy of the Opposition paper Timinn. It described a protest march which halted predictably outside the American Embassy. There a student ‘challenged all imperialists and preached world revolution’.

  He also handed me the Communist paper Thjodviljinn which described the protest march and added for good measure: ‘It is now the task of the young to join the occupation opponents and relieve the nation of the yoke of the occupation.’

  ‘You see?’ Sigurdson said.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We are very democratic.’

  I read a bit more of Morgunbladid because it contained a report on the Hekla fall-out. ‘Tests of samples taken of ash from the Hekla eruption indicate that the fluor contents are much higher than in the eruption of 1947. Sheep on a number of farms in the vicinity of Hekla have become sick, and it is suspected that they suffer from acute fluor poisoning.’

  Perhaps I would be helping Iceland more by applying myself to my spurious rather than my true profession.

  The bed creaked as Sigurdson, curious to see what had caught my interest, came up behind me. I could feel his gun inside his heavy grey jacket pressed against my back.