SOUTH-EAST ICELAND,
SATURDAY 30 JANUARY, EVENING
Kristín lifted the
tattered German uniform jacket and ran her hands over the cloth,
feeling buttons, pockets, lapels. The fabric was surprisingly soft
to the touch; it was a peculiar thought that it had belonged to a
German officer who had died in it up by the glacier. There were
three medals pinned to the left breast. She handed the jacket to
Steve who also examined it carefully.
‘I found him in a
small gully not more than five kilometres above the farm to the
east,’ Jón said slowly, his eyes shifting from one of them to the
other. ‘I buried him on the spot, the little that was left of him.
Put up a small cross. The way I saw it, he was one of them. You’re the only people I’ve told. There was
nothing left of the poor sod but bones.’
‘How long ago did you
say this was?’ Kristín asked.
‘About twenty
years.’
‘Hang on, are you
saying he’d been lying practically on your doorstep for more than
thirty years?’
‘Hardly on my
doorstep. No, he was quite some way from here, well hidden among
the rocks.’
‘Why didn’t you
report your discovery?’
‘It was nobody else’s
business. This was ten years after the major recovery expedition
and there’s hardly been any sign of the military round here since.
It’s not for the likes of me to go contacting senior officers in
the army. I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘So why did you take
the jacket? Why didn’t you bury it as well?’
‘I don’t really know.
Maybe I wanted a souvenir. As I said, I’m very interested in the
war and anything to do with it. It was Karl’s hobby too, before he
died. I remember when the plane flew over; Karl and I used to
speculate about it endlessly. It’s easy to climb on to the glacier
from here; hardly more than a gentle slope for those who know it
well, though you have to watch out for crevasses. We scoured the
glacier time and again in search of the plane but we never found
it. The glacier’s like that. It’s quick to swallow up anything that
sinks into it.’
‘Then spits it out
again a hundred years later,’ Kristín added.
‘Yes. Or longer. Or
never.’
While Kristín found
it impossible to imagine what a German plane would have been doing
this far north, Jón assured her that it was not unusual to see
enemy aircraft flying over the south-eastern corner of the country
during the war. They came from the airport at Stavanger in Norway,
he explained, having been specially adapted to carry extra fuel;
the return flight across the North Atlantic lasted more than eleven
hours, during which time the temperature in the cockpit could drop
to –30°C or lower. The planes were mostly Junkers Ju 88s. Generally
these were reconnaissance missions but occasionally the Germans
carried out air raids. He remembered a Heinkel He 111 fighter, for
example, carrying out a machine gun attack on the British camp at
the village of Selfoss in 1941, during which one man was killed.
German aircraft were also spotted on rare occasions flying over
Hornafjördur; they hugged the mountain range before disappearing
from view behind Mount Eystrahorn. And a Focke-Wulf 200 once bombed
the British tracking station just outside the village of Höfn. So
Jón was not particularly surprised that a German plane should have
crashed on the glacier. What did puzzle him was that it should have
happened in the closing stages of the war when it could not have
taken off from Norway, which was no longer occupied by then. It
could only have come from Germany.
Jón also told Kristín
about an American military aircraft that crashed on the
Eyjafjallajökull glacier during the war. There had been little
information about the accident at the time due to the news
blackout, but everyone had survived and made it safely back to
civilisation.
‘When Miller first
turned up here, Karl and I remembered the Eyjafjallajökull accident
and were eager to do anything we could to help him. I suppose our
sense of loyalty may have been a bit exaggerated but we gave him
our word and we kept it. We kept our promise. That’s all there is
to it.’
Steve ran his hand
over the German jacket again, examining the three medals on the
breast. He did not recognise them or know what they would have been
awarded for but they indicated that whoever owned the jacket must
have been fairly senior in the German army. He wondered what the
German officer had been doing up there on the glacier all those
years ago.
‘There was a box
half-buried in the ground beside the German,’ Jón said at last, as
if as an afterthought. ‘I took that as well. It looked as if it had
been handcuffed to him. He still had the cuff round his wrist. Must
have lugged it down off the glacier.’
‘A box!’ Kristín
exclaimed.
‘Yes, or something of
the sort. It should be here as well.’
Jón rummaged around
in the chest again. Kristín and Steve looked round at the horses
which were watching them with ears pricked.
‘I don’t really know
whether to call it a box or a case,’ Jón said. ‘It’s made of metal.
Here it is.’ He lifted up a scratched and dented metal box, the
size of a small briefcase, with a handle and a lock that had
clearly been tampered with. The metal had rusted clean through in
places. Jón opened the box.
‘I found some papers
inside. All ruined. Nothing else. I haven’t taken anything out.’ He
passed the box to Kristín. She inspected it for any outer markings,
then looked inside and saw the papers. They had been badly damaged
by the weather, years of relentlessly alternating heat and cold,
and fell apart when any attempt was made to separate out the
sheets, but the odd word could still be made out on the most intact
piece. The documents had been typewritten but the individual
letters were now mostly blurred or illegible, though she could tell
they were in German. In one place it was still possible to make out
the words ‘Operation Napoleon’.
‘Have you any idea
what this means?’ she asked Jón.
‘I don’t understand a
word of German,’ he said. ‘But it must have been important if he
was prepared to lug that case on his wrist all the way over the
glacier in the middle of a storm.’
‘Thompson said
something about a bomb on board the plane,’ Steve reminded
Kristín.
‘What was that?’ Jón
asked. He had been a farmer all his life and had never seen any
reason to learn English or German or any other language, for that
matter, apart from his native Icelandic.
‘We heard there was a
Nazi bomb on board that the Americans were transporting to the
States.’
‘A
bomb?’
‘Yes. A hydrogen bomb
that the Germans had been planning to drop on London at the end of
the war. Or on Russia. Who knows?’
‘Wait a minute,
didn’t you say you’d put a cross on the German’s grave?’ Kristín
asked. ‘Is it still there?’
‘No, it isn’t, I’m
afraid. I didn’t do a very good job. I don’t really know why I did
it at all. It was just two pieces of wood nailed together. I
haven’t been there for a long time but the cross fell down years
ago. I . . .’
Jón broke
off.
‘What?’ Kristín
prompted.
‘I don’t like to say.
I’m rather ashamed of myself.’
‘Why?’
‘I marked the
cross.’
‘Marked
it?’
‘I carved a name on
it.’
‘A name? You mean you
knew the German’s name?’
‘Goodness me, no. It
wasn’t a man’s name.’
‘Not a man’s name?
What do you mean?’
‘I had an old dog
that I was forced to put down at around that time, so I buried him
with the German. I don’t know what came over me. Bloody
disrespectful, I know. I rather regret it now, but I comfort myself
with the thought that he probably didn’t deserve any better. Few of
them did.’
‘So you marked the
cross with the name of the dog?’
‘Yes,
Ogre.’
‘Ogre?’
Jón looked at his
feet and smiled ruefully as he recalled his ill-tempered and mangy
old companion. ‘He was a tiresome dog.’
Kristín glanced at
Steve who shrugged.
‘Could I use your
phone?’ she asked Jón.
He mumbled his
assent. They went back out into the blizzard, Kristín carrying the
metal box, Steve the uniform jacket, and followed Jón into the
house, oblivious to the incessant ringing of the car-phone in the
jeep.