VATNAJÖKULL GLACIER,
FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, 1930 GMT
Ratoff advanced
towards the boys from the Icelandic rescue team. They were barely
out of their teens, both dressed in the rescue team’s uniform of
orange cold-weather overalls, with its logo emblazoned on breast
and shoulder. They looked petrified. When the soldiers had swiftly
borne down on them they had tried to make a break for it but after
a brief pursuit had been headed off and brought to Ratoff. The men
had found the phone on the boy who said his name was Elías. The
other, Jóhann, had no phone or other transmitter. The boys were
both tall, blond and good-looking. Ratoff, short and unremarkable
himself, assumed that all Icelanders looked like this.
Their snowmobiles had
been picked up on the little Delta Force radar screen, and Ratoff
had watched as they broke away from their main party and branched
out on their own. They maintained a course directly towards the
plane and he had been unable to think of a plan to deflect them. At
least the main rescue team, located some forty-five miles away,
posed no immediate danger; the only members to leave the party were
these two boys.
The Icelanders were
escorted to Ratoff’s tent where they waited, flanked by armed
guards. They had seen the plane, the swastika below the cockpit,
the team digging the wreckage out of the ice; they had seen upwards
of a hundred armed soldiers moving about the area, and although
they could not have any understanding of what was going on, they
had seen too much. Ratoff would have to conduct his interrogation
with care; there must be no visible signs of violence, yet neither
could it take too long. Above all, it was imperative to prevent the
rescue team from searching for them in this sector. Ratoff was up
against the clock, but it was how he worked best.
Elías and Jóhann were
too frightened to feign ignorance of English. In fact, like most
Icelanders they spoke the language remarkably well. And they were
too naive to dream that they had anything to hide.
‘Kristín,’ Ratoff
said in a dry, rasping voice, walking up to Elías. ‘She is your
sister?’
‘How did you know
that?’ Elías asked in surprise, glancing from Ratoff to the armed
guards and back again. It was barely fifteen minutes since his
phone had been confiscated.
‘Did you call anyone
else?’ Ratoff asked, ignoring his question.
‘No, no
one.’
‘You weren’t in
contact with your team at all?’
‘My team? Why? How
did you know about my sister? How do you know her name’s
Kristín?’
‘Questions,
questions,’ Ratoff sighed. He looked into the middle distance as if
lost in thought, then backed away from the boys, glancing around
until his gaze alighted on a tool box which stood on a
trestle-table at the back of the tent. He went over to the box,
opened it and nonchalantly rummaged inside with one hand, first
taking out a screwdriver and contemplating it thoughtfully before
replacing it in the box. Next he took out a hammer and weighed it
in his hand before returning that too. Elías spotted a pair of
pincers. The boys were staring at the little man with blank
incomprehension. He gave the impression of being very composed,
almost polite: his manner was cool, calm and deliberate. They had
no idea what a dangerous scenario they had stumbled upon. Closing
the tool box, Ratoff turned back to face them.
‘How about I promise
not to stab your friend, would that put an end to your questions, I
wonder?’ he asked Elías, as if weighing up the possibility. His
hoarse voice was soft enough for Elías to miss the violence of his
threat at first.
‘Stab?’ Elías
repeated in shock, his eyes on his friend. ‘Why would you do that?
Who are you? And what’s that plane with the swastika?’
He hardly saw the
movement. All he knew was that Jóhann shrieked, clutched his right
eye and fell on the ice where he lay writhing in agony at his
friend’s feet.
‘If I promise not to
stab him again, would that encourage you to stop wasting our time?’
Ratoff asked Elías. His voice was difficult to hear over Jóhann’s
screams. In one hand he was holding a small metal awl.
‘What have you done?’
Elías gasped. ‘Jóhann, can you see? Talk to me.’ He tried to bend
down to tend to his friend but Ratoff seized him by the hair,
dragged him upright and pushed his own face close to
Elías’s.
‘Let’s try again.
What coordinates did you give your team before you set
off?’
‘None,’ Elías
stammered, dazed with shock. ‘We said we were going to test-drive
our snowmobiles and might be away for four to five
hours.’
‘Did they know where
you were headed?’
‘We didn’t give them
an itinerary. We were only going to try out the snowmobiles.
They’re new. We never meant to wander far from the
team.’
‘How long have you
been away?’
‘About half that
time. Maybe three hours.’
‘When will they start
looking for you?’ The questions came one after another, he was
disorientated by them and by his bleeding, sobbing friend; he had
no sense of what he should or should not be saying, and this was
precisely what Ratoff intended.
‘Very soon if we
don’t turn up on time. They’ve probably started looking already.
How do you know about Kristín?’ It was beginning to come home to
Elías that his life was in danger but he was more worried by the
fact that this man knew his sister’s name.
‘What did you tell
your sister on the phone?’
‘Only that I was
trying out a new snowmobile. That’s all, I swear,’ he
said.
‘No more than twelve
minutes had elapsed from when you talked to her to when I got hold
of your phone. Which means that you would have been quite close to
here when you called her. What does she know, Elías? Do remember
that your friend’s sight is at stake. Perhaps you described what
you saw? It is out of the ordinary. Why wouldn’t you?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t
tell her anything. I ended the call when I saw the soldiers coming
towards us and we tried to escape.’
Ratoff sighed once
again.
His attention turned
to Jóhann who had been helped to his feet by two of the guards.
Ratoff stepped up close to him and stared into his good eye. The
awl flashed and screams rang out from the tent again, carrying a
long way through the still air on the ice cap. The men by the plane
paused briefly in their digging and looked up, before resuming
their work without comment.
Ratoff emerged from
the tent with a thin spattering of blood on his face. He walked
rapidly to the communications tent where he found two messages
waiting for him. He would talk to Ripley first. Finding a cloth, he
dried his face deliberately and thoughtfully, as if he had just
washed.
‘A regrettable
suicide?’ he asked when Ripley came on the line.
‘I’m afraid not,
sir,’ Ripley replied. ‘The target escaped and we were forced to
leave a body behind in her apartment.’
There was nothing but
static from Ratoff’s end of the line.
‘She had a visitor,
sir, whilst we were with her. An unforeseen eventuality. Our orders
were to move in directly and we had no time to
prepare.’
‘So what now?’ Ratoff
asked eventually.
‘We find her,
sir.’
‘Do you need more
men?’
‘I don’t think so,
sir.’
‘And how do you
propose to find her?’
‘Is her brother still
alive?’
‘More or
less.’
‘We need any
available information, sir. Does she have a boyfriend, any friends
– old or new – or family? Anything we could use. Did he manage to
pass on anything?’
‘Only to his sister.
She knows the glacier is swarming with armed soldiers, she knows
there’s an airplane in the ice, she knows her brother’s disappeared
and I’m reasonably sure she knows where Elvis is hiding. If you
imbeciles hadn’t let her give you the run-around, we’d be in the
clear.’ Throughout this speech, one of Ratoff’s longest in days,
neither the tone nor the volume of his voice changed in the
slightest.
‘We’ll find her, sir.
We’ll track down her family. We have her credit and debit card
numbers and can monitor any use of them. She’ll turn up and when
she does, we’ll be waiting.’