WASHINGTON DC,
FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, 1500 EST
During a long
military career that had taken him all over the world, Vytautas
Carr had only once visited Iceland. He was aware that the US air
base at Keflavík had been established after World War II on a
wind-blasted site amid the lava fields known as Midnesheidi, about
an hour’s drive south-west of the capital, Reykjavík. In its time,
the base had been one of the most vital strategic links in the
West’s chain of defences; the island’s location in the middle of
the North Atlantic proved ideal for a military superpower at the
height of the Cold War, offering a superb vantage point for
monitoring the movements of Soviet submarines, shipping and air
traffic in the Arctic region.
He knew too that the
British had occupied the country at the beginning of the war,
before handing over their defence role to the Americans in 1941.
The US headquarters had initially been in Reykjavík with the
original detachment of troops later reinforced by the 5th Infantry
Division under the command of Major General Cortlandt Parker, who
had fought in Tunisia until the surrender of the Axis forces in
Africa. The American occupying force had peaked at some 38,000
troops.
The presence of the
US army had been a source of political friction in the country ever
since the end of the war. The signing of the defence treaty in 1949
triggered a riot outside the Icelandic parliament and the left-wing
political parties had been bitter in their opposition to the base
over the years, though to little effect.
Government policy had
always decreed that the nation should derive no profit from the
NATO presence on its shores, and accordingly the military had never
paid directly for their facilities at Keflavík Airport.
Nevertheless, tens of millions of dollars had been poured into the
pockets of the civilian contractors and service companies that
carried out work on behalf of the military or held important
contacts in favourably inclined political parties. In addition, the
economies of the neighbouring villages had come to depend on the
presence of the Iceland Defense Force, which meant that the
decision to scale down operations on Midnesheidi at the end of the
Cold War was met by vociferous protests from the
locals.
Carr rehearsed this
background as he made his way to his weekly meeting with the US
Secretary of Defense. He would be called upon to explain why a
C-17, on loan from the Air Transport Division in Charleston, was
standing idle in Iceland indefinitely in the middle of winter. He
would also have to account for the presence of Delta Force
operators. Carr experienced a wave of nostalgia for the days when
covert operations were covert. Nowadays a crowd of politically
elected officials had to be kept apprised of every last detail of
military intelligence activities in every corner of the
world.
The defense secretary
kept Carr waiting outside his office for fifteen minutes –
deliberately, Carr was certain – before calling him inside.
Relations between the two had been less than cordial during the six
years the secretary had held office and Carr was now aware of an
even greater chill from that quarter. They exchanged the briefest
of handshakes. The secretary had learnt of Carr’s attempts to find
compromising information on him – evidence of mistresses, a
penchant for gambling or any other vice that could get him into
trouble. Carr even went as far as to scrutinise his tax returns,
bank accounts and credit card transactions. It was a precaution he
took with every new defense secretary, and one which on occasion
had proved useful when he needed leverage. But his luck was out
this time: as far as he could establish, the secretary was as pure
as the driven snow.
He was one of the
Democrats’ brightest stars, a youthful, reforming orator, with a
wife and children and two pets; reminiscent of Carter in his prime.
A forthright opponent of state secrecy, the secretary had made
several speeches about the need for openness in relation to the
operations of the secret service, which had acquired a new and more
wide-ranging role after the end of the Cold War. What the secretary
meant by ‘new’ and ‘wide-ranging’ was uncertain, but he was without
doubt one of the most vocal advocates of cutting back expenditure
on the secret services and of bringing their activities under
scrutiny.
Carr could not stand
the secretary’s political posturing. It had pained him that he had
failed to discover any disgrace in his past.
‘What’s this about a
plane in Keflavík?’ the secretary started before they had even sat
down. ‘What are you up to in Iceland? A C-17 costs $350,000 a day.
Delta Force the same again. We cannot afford that kind of
extravagance unless we’re talking about a serious emergency. And
Ratoff’s a psychopath who in my opinion should not be on our
payroll.’
Carr offered no
answer. Under normal operational procedures, the secretary was not
supposed to be aware of the existence of men like Ratoff. He
reached into his briefcase for a sheaf of satellite images of
Vatnajökull and handed them to the secretary.
‘What have you got
there?’ the secretary asked. ‘What are these?’
‘Satellite images, Mr
Secretary, of the south-eastern section of an Icelandic glacier
known as Vatnajökull; the biggest glacier in Europe; a huge sheet
of ice in a permanent state of flux. The enlarged image shows what
we believe to be an aircraft that crashed on the glacier in the
closing stages of World War II.’
‘What kind of
aircraft?’
‘German transport, Mr
Secretary. Most likely a Junkers.’
‘And we’ve only just
found it?’
We, thought Carr to himself. Who’s we? Christ, politicians. They were always putting
themselves centre-stage. Especially Democrats, with their demands
for open government, for having everything transparent and above
board.
He
continued:
‘As I said, Mr
Secretary, it crashed during the closing stages of the war. An
expedition was mounted from our HQ in Reykjavík a few days later.
It was the middle of winter and visibility on the glacier was close
to zero. The wreckage was buried in snow and eventually swallowed
up by the glacier but it seems to be returning it to us now, a
whole lifetime later.’
‘Returning it? What
are you talking about?’
‘It’s not unheard of.
To reiterate, Vatnajökull is constantly on the move. It covers an
area of 3,200 square miles, including several active volcanoes.
It’s composed of a number of smaller glacial tongues and its ice
mass changes according to climatic variation. Anything that
vanishes into the ice can resurface decades later. Which is
apparently the case with the German aircraft.’
‘But how do we know
that a German plane crashed on the glacier if it was never
found?’
‘Two brothers living
at the edge of the ice cap saw it fly past their farm at low
altitude. And the first expedition found the plane’s nose
wheel.’
‘The first
expedition?’
‘A two-hundred-man
team searched the glacier shortly after the plane crashed but all
they found was the wheel. We mounted a second, much larger,
expedition in 1967 but were driven off the ice by more bad weather.
This is the third expedition.’
‘What on earth was
the plane carrying?’ the secretary asked.
‘The wheel gave us an
idea of the size and type of aircraft,’ Carr continued. ‘We’ve been
keeping the glacier under close surveillance and I think it’s safe
to say that we’ve never been as near to finding the plane as
now.’
‘You don’t seem very
happy about it.’
‘It might have been
better if the glacier had held on to the plane for ever,’ Carr
replied. ‘We’re in no hurry to recover it, as long as it stays well
hidden. In fact, it’s so well hidden that we’ve been reluctant to
go to the trouble of systematically searching the glacier and
digging for it. Our main concern has been to check that it hasn’t
reappeared, which, as I say, seems to be the case
now.’
‘You mean we’ve been
monitoring the glacier all these years?’
We. You would think the secretary had been hunched
over a screen scouring satellite images for the last forty years
himself.
‘The wheel gave a
clue as to the plane’s position,’ Carr said, evading the question.
‘Military intelligence has been monitoring changes in the ice in
the specified area since the end of the war, first by aerial
photography from spy planes, later from space after the advent of
satellites.’
‘Satellites? Spy
planes? What the hell is this aircraft? Why are we so anxious to
dig it up now that it’s reappeared?’
Carr cleared his
throat.
‘I repeat: what the
hell was the plane carrying? And why’, the secretary added, ‘is
this a covert operation? Why involve Delta Force and that maniac
Ratoff?’
Carr pretended to
pause for thought.
‘Are you familiar
with the story of the Walchensee gold, Mr Secretary?’ he
asked.
‘Gold?’ the secretary
responded, a mixture of suspicion and alarm crossing his telegenic
face. ‘Are you telling me there’s gold on board? No, I’ve never
heard of it.’
‘It caused us one
hell of a headache at the time. Shortly before the fall of Berlin,
just before the Red Army took over the city and closed all routes
in and out, it seems that a small freight train left for the Alps.
On board were more than three hundred little bags, each containing
a gold bar. The gold was being shipped out of the Reichsbank on
Hitler’s personal orders. It was the Third Reich’s last remaining
gold reserve.’
Carr gathered his
thoughts briefly. He had the secretary’s full
attention.
‘We don’t know
precisely where it was heading but in the event the gold got no
further than the Bavarian town of Walchensee,’ he continued, ‘where
it was buried in an undisclosed location near the Obernach power
plant. Not long afterwards it was dug up by some of our troops, at
which point it vanished. This was in February of ’45. The war was
ending. It is alleged that our men got wind of the gold by chance,
dug it up and shipped it home to the States. The US government has
always refused to comment on the story but it caused a political
stink, and the German media resurrect the Walchensee gold story
every few years. No one here knows what became of it but naturally
the Germans don’t believe us.’
‘Christ, you mean to
say it’s inside the plane on the glacier?’ the secretary said,
aghast. He had swallowed it, hook, line and sinker.
‘According to our
best intelligence, American soldiers stole a Junkers from the
Luftwaffe, painted it in our camouflage colours, filled it with
gold and took off from Munich. They made a secret stopover at
Prestwick in Scotland and were intending to make a similar
refuelling stop in Reykjavík en route to the States but met a storm
and crashed on the glacier. None of them ever made it off the ice
alive so we assume there were no survivors. Our sources, however,
are not wholly reliable. Understandably, none of the men involved
in the theft has ever come forward and admitted it, but there is no
specific reason to doubt the broad truth of the
story.’
‘How much bullion are
we talking about here?’
‘Six to eight
tons.’
‘That’s a problem all
right,’ the secretary said, as if to himself. He was visibly
shaken; the tables had been expertly turned on him by Carr, whom he
had summoned for a tongue-lashing about the endless covert
operations and private vendettas he was engaged in. He was not used
to being so comprehensively wrong-footed but could not suppress a
grudging respect for Carr’s expertise.
‘And that’s not all,
Mr Secretary,’ Carr added.
‘There’s more?’ There
was no mistaking the note of anxiety.
‘It makes this gold
story a very sensitive issue for us, politically
speaking.’
‘What? What is it?’
the secretary asked. His progress to date had been assured and free
from blemish, a spotless record which was now under
threat.
‘It concerns the
origin of the gold.’
‘What do you mean?
What about its origin? What’s so politically
sensitive?’
‘The bulk of the gold
was acquired from concentration camps,’ Carr replied.
The secretary took a
moment to grasp the implications.
He groaned. ‘You mean
this is Jewish gold? Teeth? Jewellery? You are telling me that we
have a plane which crashed under US command full of plundered
Jewish gold?’
Carr drove home his
advantage. ‘If we said it was stolen by a handful of rogue American
soldiers no one would believe us. The whole country would be under
suspicion: the President, Congress, and of course the secret
service organisations.’
‘My
God.’
‘So as you see, Mr
Secretary, it’s a delicate matter.’
The secretary
considered his non-existent options.
‘You’re right.
Absolutely right,’ he said finally.
‘Mr
Secretary?’
‘That plane must
never ever be found.’
‘That’s what the
secret service is for, sir,’ Carr concluded, the hint of a wry
smile playing around his mouth.