KEFLAVÍK AIR BASE,
SATURDAY 30 JANUARY, 0330 GMT
Thompson’s name was
on the entry-phone. Steve rang the bell. The retired pilot lived in
an apartment block like Steve’s but more rundown. No maintenance
had been carried out for years; the paint had flaked off here and
there exposing the concrete, the light above the front door was
broken and only a handful of the apartments looked
occupied.
Steve pressed the
doorbell again and they waited, glancing around anxiously. He rang
the bell a third time, holding the button down for so long that
Kristín tapped his hand. Shortly afterwards there was a crackle
from the entry-phone and a reedy voice uttered a hesitant:
‘Hello?’
‘Is that Michael
Thompson?’ Steve asked.
‘Yes,’ replied the
voice.
‘I’m sorry to wake
you like this but I need to talk to you urgently. Could you let me
in?’ Steve said, trying to speak as quietly as
possible.
‘What?’
‘Could you let me
in?’
‘What’s going
on?’
‘May I come
in?’
‘What is it you want
exactly? I don’t understand.’
‘It’s about
Vatnajökull.’
‘What?’
‘Vatnajökull,’ Steve
said. ‘I want to ask you about flights over Vatnajökull. I know
it’s very unexpected and an
extra . . .’
‘Flights?’
‘Lives are at stake,
man. For Christ’s sake, please open the door.’
After a short pause
and more crackling on the entry-phone, the lock buzzed and Steve
ushered Kristín inside in front of him. They did not turn on the
light in the hall but groped their way up the stairs, holding on to
the banister. Thompson lived on the first floor. They tapped on his
door and he appeared in the rectangle of light, peering out at
them. He had put on slippers and a robe, beneath which his legs
protruded, chalk-white and bony. He was very thin, with a stoop and
a Clark Gable moustache, long since turned white, barely visible
against his pale skin.
‘It must be serious
to make you barge in on me in the middle of the night like this,’
Thompson commented, showing them into the living room. They sat
down on a small, black leather sofa and he took a seat facing them,
looking at them sceptically in turn.
‘My brother called me
earlier this evening,’ Kristín began, feeling that it might just as
well have been a month ago. ‘He was on a training exercise on
Vatnajökull when he spotted a plane and some soldiers. Then his
mobile phone was cut off and I haven’t heard from him since.
Shortly afterwards two Americans turned up at my apartment in
Reykjavík and tried to kill me. I escaped and came to Steve for
help because if there are soldiers on the glacier, I assumed they
must have come from here.’
‘You say they tried
to kill you?’
‘That’s
right.’
‘What are you talking
about? What do you mean by barging into my home and spinning me a
story like this? And anyway, what’s it got to do with
me?’
‘You’re a pilot.
You’ve been here a long time. Do you know anything about a plane on
Vatnajökull?’
‘I haven’t the
faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ the old man answered
angrily. ‘Now please leave before I call the police.’
‘Wait. I know we must
seem crazy,’ Steve said, ‘but we’re desperate. This is not a hoax,
we’re not nuts and we don’t mean to be disrespectful. If you can’t
help us, we’ll go. But if you can tell us anything that might help,
we’d be incredibly grateful.’
‘My brother witnessed
something he wasn’t supposed to see,’ Kristín said. ‘And soldiers
who presumably must come from this base. They believe he told me
more about what he saw than he did and now they’re after us too.
Steve had the idea that if there was a plane on the glacier then a
pilot like you would know about it.’
‘But who is this
they you keep going on about?’ Thompson
asked.
‘We don’t know,’
Steve said. ‘There are two men. We don’t know who sent
them.’
‘But we’ve heard,’
Kristín added, ‘that special forces troops landed here in Keflavík
a short time ago, on their way to Vatnajökull.’
Thompson was
silent.
‘They were going to
kill you?’ he asked again.
They stared back at
him without speaking.
‘There used to be so
many rumours,’ he said at last in a resigned tone. ‘We never knew
for certain what they were looking for. We thought it might be a
plane and that it must have had some extremely dangerous cargo;
they organised regular monitoring flights over the country and the
sea to the north of it. Once a month we flew over the glacier, over
the south-eastern section, photographing the surface of the ice.
Our commanding officer, Leo Stiller, organised the flights. I never
spotted anything myself, but every now and then they would believe
they had seen something that gave them strong enough grounds to
take a closer look.’
‘Leo Stiller?’ Steve
repeated.
‘A good guy. Killed
in a helicopter accident here on the base. His wife moved to
Reykjavík after he died. Her name’s Sarah Steinkamp.’
‘Who analysed the
photographs you took?’ Steve asked.
‘I believe they were
sent to military intelligence headquarters in Washington. I don’t
know much about that end of things. Only that all sorts of rumours
used to do the rounds; they still crop up from time to time. Leo
was into all kinds of conspiracy theories. He never did know when
to shut up. I’m sorry to hear about your brother. Judging from the
way they’ve behaved in the past I imagine he’d be in danger up
there.’
‘So what is this
plane?’
‘I don’t
know.’
‘Why’s it
important?’
‘I don’t know that
either.’
‘But what do you
believe is in the plane?’ Kristín asked. ‘What did you pilots think
when you talked amongst yourselves?’
Instead of answering
her, Thompson rose slowly to his feet and suggested he make some
coffee; they looked chilled to the bone and he could never really
get going in the morning until he had had a coffee, he explained.
‘Not that it’s morning yet,’ he corrected himself, ‘but it’s near
enough; not much point going back to bed after a night like
this.’
As he clattered
around in the little kitchen that opened off the living room,
Kristín gesticulated frantically at Steve.
‘We can’t sit around
drinking fucking coffee whilst he takes a trip down memory lane,’
she whispered urgently. ‘Elías is out
there . . .’
He signalled to her
to slow down, relax, let the old man decide the pace.
‘I was wondering,’
Steve called into the kitchen, ‘if it’s not rude to ask, why you’re
still here. I’d have expected you to have gone home to the States
long ago. Everyone else leaves here the first chance they get.
Isn’t there some sort of rule about it?’
Thompson reappeared
carrying three mugs.
‘Do you take milk or
sugar?’ he asked.
Kristín rolled her
eyes in despair. Steve shook his head.
‘Coffee’s no good
unless it’s strong and black.’ Thompson looked at Steve. ‘It’s
hardly surprising you should ask,’ he said. ‘I came to this strange
little island in 1955. I flew helicopters in Korea and was posted
here when the war was over – if it is over. Before that I was
stationed in Germany and the Philippines. It was quite a shock to
the system, I can tell you, coming here to the far north where the
climate’s miserable, it’s cold and dark for half the year, there’s
nothing to do on the base and the locals despise us. Yet here I
am.’
‘Why?’ Kristín asked.
‘And I’m not sure all the people despise Americans,’ she
added.
‘You Icelanders have
a very ambivalent attitude. You discourage all contact and behave
as if the army has nothing to do with you, but then you say you
can’t manage without it. I don’t understand you. You make a huge
profit out of us; we pump billions into your economy, have done for
decades, yet you behave as if we didn’t exist. Sure, you’re a small
nation and I can understand that you want to protect your
independence. You’ve always protested, standing outside the gates
here with placards and chanting slogans, but now the Cold War’s
over and the military operations are being scaled down, suddenly
those voices are silenced and instead everybody wants to keep the
base. Just so long as you don’t have to have anything to do with
it. We’re the ones who are effectively living on an island out here
on Midnesheidi.’
‘If that’s the case,
why are you still here?’ Kristín asked.
‘Because of a woman,’ Thompson said, switching
without warning to Icelandic. Kristín was so startled that she
spilt the scalding coffee she was sipping.
The white Ford
Explorer pulled up in front of the administration block where Steve
worked. The doors opened and Ripley and Bateman climbed out. They
had found Steve’s car and followed the trail to this building,
accompanied by military police and a number of soldiers in jeeps.
With the cooperation of the admiral, Ripley and Bateman had
organised a manhunt; search parties were moving through the base,
stopping traffic, setting up roadblocks and searching the
buildings, aircraft hangars and residential blocks. Information was
also being gathered about any friends and colleagues Steve might
conceivably turn to on the base.
Ripley and Bateman
walked up to the entrance of the office block and tried the door.
It was locked. They walked round the building to the back
door.
‘And here they are,’
Ripley announced, eyeing twin sets of tracks that led away through
the fresh snow in the direction of the oldest residential
quarter.
‘Who did he call?’
Bateman asked, as they set off to follow the trail on
foot.
‘Her name’s Monica
Garcia. Works for the Fulbright Commission.’
The snow crunched
underfoot.
‘We need dogs,’
Ripley said.
Kristín put down her
coffee mug on the table, staring at the old pilot in surprise.
Steve understood nothing of their conversation after they switched
to Icelandic. Like most Americans stationed in Iceland, he knew no
Icelanders apart from Kristín and rarely left the base except on
official business. The base was a world to itself, with all the
services necessary to support a small society. In that it was no
different from any other American military base around the world. A
number of Icelanders worked there but they lived in the surrounding
towns and villages and went home at the end of the working day. The
base had always been cut off, not merely geographically but also
politically and culturally, from the rest of Iceland.
‘You mean an
Icelandic woman?’ Kristín asked.
‘She had one of those
unpronounceable names you lot go in for: Thorgerdur
Kristmundsdóttir, but I knew her as Tobba which was much easier to
say. She passed away several years ago now. Lived in a village not
far from here. Taught me Icelandic. But she was married and
wouldn’t dream of leaving her husband. She worked at the store on
the base – that’s how I got to know her, how we were able to meet.
She awakened my interest in this country and little by little I
became as captivated by Iceland as I was by Tobba. Then the
whispering started: that she was involved with a Yank up at the
base. I suppose that’s the kiss of death for an Icelandic
woman.’
Kristín glanced at
Steve who was watching them uncomprehendingly.
‘I kept applying to
stay on – you have to do that every three years, and after she died
I didn’t know where else to go. They gave me a special dispensation
and now they’ve stopped bothering me. I travel around the country a
lot in summer; I’ve even worked as a guide taking small groups of
servicemen to the historical sites as well as the usual tourist
spots: Gullfoss, Geysir and Thingvellir.’
Thompson fell
silent.
‘I sometimes visit
her at the cemetery,’ he added.
‘I’m sorry, Mr
Thompson,’ Kristín said. ‘But we’re in a desperate
hurry . . .’
‘Yes, of course. The
biggest commotion over that plane was in 1967,’ Thompson said,
gathering himself. He seemed to have returned to the present and
had reverted to speaking English. ‘I believe four soldiers lost
their lives on the glacier that time. Are you old enough to
remember the astronauts?’
‘The
astronauts?’
‘Armstrong and
co.?’
‘Neil Armstrong? The
first man on the moon?’
‘The very same. Well,
did you know that he and a number of other American astronauts came
to Iceland for a training exercise two years before he landed on
the moon?’
‘Sure, everyone knows
that.’
‘Well, for a time in
’67, Leo was in command of surveillance flights. It was a routine
job, all the pilots had to do it. But on one flight Leo thought he
saw something below him on the ice and flew back and forth taking
photographs. I wasn’t involved; Leo told me this afterwards. They
tried and failed to land a helicopter but it was in the middle of
winter, like now. So they sent a small expeditionary force up there
with a metal detector and after that preparations began for a major
operation, conducted in the utmost secrecy. But everyone heard
about it; it’s a very small community here.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Military
intelligence, mainly. They knew the Icelanders were sensitive about
troop movements, especially in those days, so someone had the
brainwave of sending Armstrong and the astronauts to Iceland for
training exercises in the lava fields to the north of the glacier.
The Icelanders welcomed the astronauts with open arms, of course,
and were very understanding about all the military manoeuvres
connected with the mission. You were told that the landscape in the
interior resembled conditions on the moon. Preposterous! But you
guys swallowed it. In actual fact, it was designed to deflect
attention from the biggest movements of troops and equipment
undertaken by the Americans in Iceland since the war. Whatever that
plane contains, those are the lengths some people are prepared to
go to in order to find it.’
‘But why not go to
Hawaii if they needed to practise in a lava field?’ Steve
asked.
‘I have a notion
where the idea came from,’ Thompson continued, seemingly
invigorated by recounting these long-ago events. ‘There was a pilot
here with the Defense Force from around 1960 who flew Scorpion
fighter jets: Parker, Captain Parker was the name. When a group of
astronauts made a refuelling stop here at Keflavík, incognito, in
the summer of ’65, the press office decided to cash in on the fact
and the story really caught the public imagination. This guy Parker
was in charge of the group. So when they needed to send an
expedition to Vatnajökull in ’67 without attracting any attention,
Parker had the bright idea of inviting Armstrong over, figuring
that it would cause even more of a sensation, because by then
Armstrong had commanded a spaceflight, the Gemini 8
mission.’
‘And nobody knew
about this?’ Steve asked.
‘So many people were
involved that something must have leaked out, though none of it
could ever be confirmed. They failed to find the plane – if indeed
it exists. The whole thing was a complete fiasco. It was rumoured
that the secret service had taken control of the embassy in
Reykjavík during the operation, as well as the base here in
Keflavík. The leader of the expedition was called Carr, General
Vytautas Carr. Old-school. Hard as nails.’
‘But they didn’t find
the plane?’
‘I don’t know what
happened. It was April but winter was far from over. There was one
of those Easter blizzards, as you call them – a storm that blew up
out of nowhere and lasted for days. They simply weren’t prepared
for Arctic conditions in April, became blinded by wind and snow,
and had to get off the glacier, losing four men in the process. Two
of them fell into a crevasse, the other two got separated and died
of exposure. They were driven off the glacier, exhausted and
defeated, and by the time the weather improved, the plane had
vanished, if it was ever there. Like I said, Leo and the others
often used to discuss it but I don’t know how much is true, though
the astronauts did come here, that’s for sure.’
‘If the plane has
emerged from the ice and the soldiers saw my
brother . . .’ Kristín left the sentence
unfinished.
‘I don’t know,’
Thompson replied. ‘I don’t know what to say, dear. You must hope
for the best but there’s something about that plane. According to
one guy, it crashed shortly after the end of the war and the plan
had been to dismantle it and remove it from the glacier. He claimed
it had come from Berlin. For a long time there was talk of gold,
the Third Reich’s last gold reserve. The story went that American
soldiers stole it from the Germans and meant to fly it across the
Atlantic. But it was also rumoured to be carrying a cargo of those
art treasures the Germans plundered from all over
Europe.’
Nobody
spoke.
‘And what do
you think the plane contains, Mr
Thompson?’ Kristín asked eventually.
‘You heard what I
said. There are so many possibilities.’
‘What do you regard
as most likely then?’
‘Someone said it was
carrying a bomb built by the Nazis that we intercepted before the
Russians could lay hands on it and that we were trying to get it
back to the States.’
‘A bomb?’ Steve
asked. ‘What kind of bomb?’
‘I don’t know but it
might explain why they’re so obsessed with finding the damn
thing.’
‘Do you know who
Ratoff is?’ Kristín asked.
‘Never heard the
name,’ Thompson said. His mind was clearer now; he had a good
memory and had no difficulty recalling the distant past once he had
got going.
‘Where did they
approach the glacier from? Do you know?’
‘From the south. I
can’t remember what the place was called. A couple of brothers
lived nearby and acted as their guides. Farmers. That’s all I know,
I swear to God. And that’s nothing but gossip and half-truths. I
don’t believe anyone knows the whole truth.’
Arnold’s head snapped
back as Bateman struck him a violent blow to the face and a new cut
opened above his eyebrow. He would have screamed but they had bound
him to the chair and gagged him with duct tape. He breathed
frantically through his nose, his eyes goggling at the two men in
white ski-suits. Blood seeped into his eye.
They had burst into
his apartment, demanding to know if he owned the old Toyota in the
parking lot in front of the building. Their tracker dogs had
stopped by the car, refusing to budge, and the bonnet felt warm to
the touch. It had taken a single phone call to trace the owner, and
Arnold’s name was on the doorbell. This was the second time Arnold
had been woken that night and he was in such a foul temper when the
men tried to question him over the entry-phone that he refused to
let them into the building. Before he knew what was happening, the
door to his apartment had been kicked in.
He told them what he
knew: he had taken the couple to the archives and left them there.
But the men wanted to know far more – what Steve and Kristín were
looking for, where they were now and how they intended to leave the
area. Arnold inwardly cursed that son of a bitch
Steve.
His face was covered
in blood; these men did not waste time. It was not the first
occasion Arnold had been in trouble with the military police but he
had never seen these two before, nor had he experienced their
methods of interrogation. They tied him to a chair and quite simply
beat him to a pulp. He did not have a clue where Steve and the
Icelander were or what they were looking for. He held out as long
as he could, determined not to tell his interrogators the one thing
that might come in useful, but his stamina was
limited.
Bateman took out a
thick roll of silver tape and bit off a ten-centimetre strip. Like
Ripley, he was wearing white rubber gloves. Holding the tape in
both hands, he stuck it firmly over Arnold’s nose and mouth, then
stood in front of him, observing his vain attempts to gasp for
oxygen with scientific detachment. When it looked as if Arnold was
losing consciousness, Bateman grabbed one corner and tore it away
from his nose, leaving a red welt where it had taken a small piece
of skin with it.
Arnold’s nostrils
flared frantically as he sucked in air. The tape still covered his
mouth but he inhaled with all his might. Bateman picked up the roll
of tape again, bit off another strip and wordlessly fixed the tape
over his nose.
‘I’m not going to
resuscitate you if you keep this up much longer, Arnold,’ Ripley
said to him.
He writhed in the
chair, his blood-drenched face becoming as suffused and swollen as
a balloon. Bateman tore the tape off his nose again, this time
removing it from his mouth as well.
‘I own a Zodiac,’
Arnold shouted breathlessly, when he could finally speak between
desperate gulps of air. ‘Steve knows where it is. He’ll use it to
get off the base. Don’t do it again; I beg you, for Christ’s sake,
let me breathe.’
‘A Zodiac?’ Bateman
asked.
‘I use it for
smuggling. I smuggle drugs in and out of the base. I’ve been doing
it for two years. Mostly cocaine but also speed and dope
and . . . I sell it in Reykjavík. I have two
contacts there called . . .’
‘Arnold,’ Ripley said
in a level voice. ‘I’m not interested in your little schemes. Tell
me where the boat is.’
‘I keep it in a bay
to the west of the base. There’s a gap in the perimeter fence where
the road from the big tool store takes a right turn into the lava
field. The boat is hidden about five hundred yards away, pretty
much directly below the gap in the fence.’
‘Excellent. And where
are they headed, Arnold?’
‘To a beach just
outside Hafnir. You’ll find it on the map.’