VATNAJÖKULL GLACIER,
SATURDAY 30 JANUARY
The Delta operators
worked tirelessly at clearing away the snow. They were digging from
both sides of the wreck simultaneously, throwing up great mounds,
and in the growing light the plane became steadily more distinct.
The nose now jutted up at a twenty-degree angle, though the tail
was still buried in dense, hard-packed ice on which it was
difficult to make any impact. The door, which was supposed to be
located on the left-hand side behind the row of windows, had yet to
be uncovered. From what they could tell, the fuselage was largely
intact and not much snow appeared to have penetrated
inside.
Powerful floodlights
shed a yellowish glow over the scene during the night, but as the
daylight grew stronger they were switched off, their hot surfaces
sending a fine vapour rising and curling over the crust of the
glacier. A number of white tents stood huddled on the ice, each
containing a gas lamp that burned night and day for warmth. Largest
of all was the communications tent. Electricity was provided by
portable oil-powered generators, and the surrounding area was
littered with oil barrels, snowmobiles, tracked vehicles, and
beyond them large pallets for transporting the
wreckage.
The work was
progressing well. The wind was light and the temperature on the
glacier hovered at around –15°C. Some of the men had been detailed
to work with pickaxes to break up the hard surface, while another
small group was busy cutting the plane in half with powerful
blowtorches. The sections would then be loaded on to the pallets
and towed down to where the trucks were waiting to drive them west
to Keflavík Airport. Ratoff stood outside the communications tent,
watching the blue flare of the oxyacetylene and the showers of
sparks which flew from the metal carcass. By his reckoning, the job
was on schedule. A storm was forecast but it was expected to blow
over quickly.
In many ways it was
fortunate that the plane had been found in winter. Of course, the
weather was changeable in the extreme and the conditions for travel
might prove difficult, but their activities were protected by the
darkness and the lack of traffic in the area at this time of
year.
As Ratoff watched,
the men on the far side of the plane wreck abandoned their digging
and gathered to peer at something in the ice. After a moment, one
of them yelled to him. He set off towards them, ducked under the
nose of the plane and joined the soldiers, to be met by the sight
of a leg protruding from the ice next to the fuselage. The leg was
encased in a black army boot that reached almost up to the knee and
greyish trousers. Ratoff ordered the men to uncover the body and
soon the entire corpse, or what was left of it, became
visible.
It looked to Ratoff
as if it had been deliberately laid there beside the plane. Some of
the passengers had evidently survived the crash and been capable of
moving around and tending to those who had died on impact. The man
was dressed in the uniform of a high-ranking German officer, though
Ratoff did not recognise the insignia. He wore an Iron Cross at his
neck, his hands were crossed over his breast and his face was
covered with a cap. His other leg was missing: apparently it had
been ripped off at the hip. The gaping wound, revealing the white
bone, was clearly visible but the leg itself was nowhere to be
seen. Ratoff bent over the body with the intention of examining its
face but found the cap frozen to it.
Straightening up
again, he ordered his men to free the body from the ice and take it
into one of the tents. He wondered how long the passengers had
survived after the crash-landing. The accident had happened at this
time of year. Ratoff and his men were clad in special
Arctic-survival gear but even so the cold pierced them to the bone.
They also had the gas lamps and had been specially trained to
endure the cold. The passengers of the plane, on the other hand,
would have been utterly defenceless. Those who survived the crash
must have slowly frozen to death. It could not have taken many
days.
Thirty-five miles
away, eight members of the Reykjavík Rescue Team stood staring down
into the blue depths of a jagged fissure in the ice, from which
they could hear the faint ringing of a mobile phone. They had set
out shortly before daybreak and soon found the tracks of the
snowmobiles; the trail had changed direction about two hours from
the team’s base camp, heading due west towards a large belt of
crevasses. Back at camp they succeeded in pinpointing the mobile
phone signal and the rest had been easy. The snowmobiles appeared
to have careered into the chasm at full speed, as if Elías and
Jóhann had not seen it coming until it was too late.
One of the rescue
team lowered himself into the crevasse on a rope; his two comrades
lay at a depth of about eight metres. As he came alongside them, he
could see that their injuries were horrific, as if they had crashed
repeatedly into the walls of the fissure as they fell and the
snowmobiles had then landed on top of them, rendering them almost
unrecognisable. Their faces were reduced to raw, featureless pulp;
eyes obscured by a mass of swelling, ears bloody clumps, bodies
twisted into unnatural shapes as if every bone in them were broken.
He had never seen anything like it before and, turning his head
away, he vomited.
The team set to work,
first hauling up the snowmobiles, then lowering stretchers on to
which they strapped Elías and Jóhann. These they raised in turn
with slow care to avoid bumping the battered bodies against the ice
walls, and set the stretchers in the back of the team’s snow-cat. A
bitterly cold north-easterly had started to blow, whirling up loose
snow which cut into any exposed skin like razorblades and soon hid
all sign of their tracks around the crevasse.
Júlíus stood watching
the operation, his head bowed, oblivious to the cold. He had been
leading expeditions for fifteen years; there had been accidents and
injuries before but nobody in his charge had ever died. Now he had
lost two young men for whom he was responsible, two boys whom he
had given permission to leave camp to test-drive the new
snowmobiles. He might have known they would get carried away,
forget the time and end up in trouble, but this was far beyond his
worst imaginings. He heard someone calling him from the vehicle.
One of the volunteers, a medical student called Heimir, was resting
two fingers over Elías’s neck. Júlíus waited, holding his
breath.
‘It’s weak but
there’s still a pulse,’ Heimir announced.
‘He’s
alive?’
‘Just about. But I
doubt he’s got long.’
‘Can we tend to him
here or should we take him back to camp and summon a
helicopter?’
‘Like I say, he could
go at any minute. It’s probably safest not to try and move him. We
should do the best we can and call the helicopter. How quickly can
it get here?’
‘It shouldn’t take
long,’ the leader said, switching on his radio. ‘But I still think
we should get him out before the storm hits. There’s severe weather
expected any minute and we’d be better off back at camp than in the
open. Let’s move.’
Suddenly Elías gave a
faint moan. His blue lips moved slightly.
‘Is he trying to say
something?’ Júlíus asked.
Heimir bent down to
Elías’s bloodstained face and laid his ear to the boy’s mouth.
After a minute he straightened up and looked at
Júlíus.
‘He’s drifting in and
out of consciousness.’
‘Did he say
anything?’
‘It was very unclear.
I think he may have said “Kristín”.’
‘Yes, he would,’
Júlíus said. He remembered how he had assured her that Elías was
safe and a pang of self-recrimination went through
him.
But when he called
the Coast Guard helicopter it transpired that the only available
aircraft was currently fetching a wounded fisherman from a trawler
halfway between Iceland and Greenland. In cases when the Coast
Guard could not get to the scene, it was customary to call the
Defense Force at Keflavík Airport and ask them for help. Júlíus was
assured that the Coast Guard would contact the Americans and ask
them to send a helicopter to pick up the two men.
Why had Elías’s
sister thought he was dead? Júlíus wondered, as he walked back to
the edge of the crevasse and looked down into the chasm. How could
she have found out before us?
He dreaded having to
tell her that she was right. Elías was not dead yet but he was
unlikely to pull through. His injuries were severe, he had been
lying in the ice for hours, and he would certainly be hypothermic.
Júlíus scanned the horizon, willing the helicopter to arrive before
the storm struck. It was Elías’s only hope.