C-17 TRANSPORT PLANE, ATLANTIC AIR
SPACE,
SUNDAY 31 JANUARY, 0545 GMT
Kristín listened in
silence. She no longer felt the cold; her mind was too preoccupied.
Her side ached where Ratoff had stabbed her but it seemed he had
not injured her seriously. The wound had bled quite heavily at
first but it was a compact puncture, if deep, and gradually the
bleeding had slowed until it stopped altogether.
Miller was lost in
reminiscence. He and his brother had both joined up in December
1941 in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor but had no say where
they were posted. Miller had been appointed to army intelligence HQ
in Washington, while his brother was assigned to the air force and
sent all over Europe, to Reykjavík among other places. During his
time there he had flown over Iceland and Greenland, and later also
flew missions from bases in Britain and Italy.
They had kept in
touch as far as circumstances allowed. His brother saw more action
than he ever did and Miller was dogged by worry about him. They met
only twice during the war, once in London, and again in Paris, when
Miller gave his brother his assignment. They would write, however,
keeping up to date with each other’s movements, and looked forward
to being reunited after the war.
The assignment
required a pilot from the Allied forces, one familiar with the
route, who could make the necessary contact with the Allied air
traffic control centres. The mission was to fly to Iceland and then
to cross the Atlantic. His brother by this stage could have flown
it blindfolded so Miller had put forward his name as pilot. The war
was in its final phase and he had believed that he had his
brother’s best interests at heart; they would meet up in Reykjavík
and fly on to South America, far from enemy planes and
anti-aircraft defences, where they could enjoy a few days’ leave.
It was a straightforward mission, a safe way of ticking off another
precious parcel of time survived before the war ground to its
inevitable end.
Miller was kept
ignorant of where the idea had originated and who was behind its
implementation. He did not even know which division of the army had
formulated it. All personnel involved were given only partial
information, with no more than a handful of senior officers aware
of its ultimate purpose. Miller was merely following orders,
conducting his part of the operation as efficiently as possible. He
did not know the details, did not know the agenda of the
Allied–German talks, or the identities of those who attended the
meeting in Paris. All that was revealed later. At first the plan
had been for the Germans to provide an Allied plane that they had
in their possession, but this course was abandoned and they instead
decided to paint a Junkers Ju 52 in Allied colours.
Miller had arrived in
Iceland with two other intelligence agents two days before his
brother was scheduled to fly the German delegation over from
Berlin. The agents took rooms at Hotel Borg. Reykjavík was packed
with US servicemen but they avoided company, kept a low profile and
checked the facilities at the aerodrome the British had built
within the city limits at Vatnsm¥yri. The plane would have a
three-hour stopover in Reykjavík to take on provisions and refuel
before continuing its journey west. For the next two days the
weather forecast was fine; after that the outlook was less clear,
but there was an inevitable degree of uncertainty at this time of
year.
The meeting in Berlin
had dragged on. Miller did not know why. They had been issued with
a rigid schedule from which they were not to deviate under any
circumstances, but it was no good. By the time his brother took
off, a deep low-pressure weather system had formed to the south of
Iceland and was moving steadily towards the north-east of the
country and the barometer was plunging at an alarming rate. Snow
and low visibility were now forecast. Air traffic control in
Prestwick, Scotland, was the last to make contact with the plane
four hours after it left Berlin. By then it was north of the
Scottish coast but still within their airspace. After that, whether
its radio had stopped working or not, no further news was received
until the brothers turned up in the village of Höfn to report that
they had seen a plane flying so low that it must have crashed on
the glacier.
Miller was informed
as soon as it became clear that contact with the plane had been
lost; somehow he knew instantly that it had crashed. He sensed it.
He waited in a hangar on the airfield, hoping in vain to hear from
his brother. Days passed and the storm that had raged in the
south-east of the country now passed over Reykjavík, trapping
people indoors for days on end. It was Miller’s belief that the
plane had either crashed into the sea or that his brother had
turned back to Scotland when the conditions deteriorated and gone
down there. He clung to the forlorn hope that his brother might
have survived the crash-landing and would eventually turn up,
staggering out of one wilderness or another to some outpost of
civilisation. But it was not to be.
When news of a plane
sighting in the vicinity of Vatnajökull reached the occupying force
in Reykjavík, Miller was appointed leader of the rescue mission. He
had spent the entire time since the plane lost contact wandering
between Hotel Borg and the aerodrome on Vatnsmy¥ri, preoccupied
with potential explanations and scenarios, unable to go anywhere or
do anything. The intelligence officers were scheduled to leave
Iceland shortly and return to Washington but Miller could not bear
the prospect of never learning his brother’s fate. When the report
came in from Höfn, he felt as if he had received a cold electric
shock. He knew his brother was found. He might even be alive,
though no one appreciated better than Miller how remote a
possibility this was. At the very least he would be able to take
his body home with him.
What he did not know
were the particular difficulties of the wintry land he found
himself in. It was impossible to fly in the storm that had now
blown up and he was dismayed to discover that driving to Höfn along
the south coast was made impossible by wide, unbridgeable rivers
that flowed from the ice cap over vast glacial outwash plains to
the sea. The northern route was the only alternative, despite its
many challenges. Major General Cortlandt Parker, commander of the
US occupying force in Iceland, provided him with two hundred of his
best men, some of whom had taken part in exercises on the
Eiríksjökull glacier earlier that winter. Few had experience in
searching in snow, however. They followed rough winter tracks
around the country, at times digging the convoy of vehicles out of
snowdrifts as high as a man’s head. The days wasted on the northern
route were hard to endure for Miller.
Their luck improved,
however, and they had good weather and reasonable conditions for
their drive south through the East Fjords, finally reaching Höfn on
the fourth day. Miller headed directly to the foot of the glacier
to find the two brothers who had been the last to sight the plane;
they were eager to help. They told him about the glacier and warned
him against high expectations. Miller was surprised to find how
easy it was to approach the ice cap from their farm, despite the
heavy snowfall over the last few days. Pointing him and his men in
the direction they believed the plane had taken, the brothers
accompanied him to the glacier, lent him horses and assisted in any
way they could. They ended up becoming friends.
But it was all in
vain. Miller had seen it in the brothers’ faces the first time he
explained his mission. Saw the glances they exchanged. The soldiers
carried out a painstaking search, dividing the glacier
systematically into sections and combing the ice in long lines,
inserting slender three-metre-long poles into the snow. But without
success. All they found was the plane’s nose wheel. Every other
fragment and trace had been consumed by the glacier.
The day Miller gave
orders to abandon the hunt, he walked out further on to the ice
sheet than before, far beyond the outer limit of their earlier
searches, scanning the surroundings for hours on end before finally
heading back, defeated, to his company. The weather had turned fine
and the storm now seemed a distant memory. The sun shone high in a
clear blue sky and there was not a cloud to be seen in the perfect
stillness. The glacier stretched out, a pristine white expanse, as
far as the eye could see. Miller could not help but be struck by
its magnificent desolation, and would later think of this moment of
solitude, cold and calm when recalling Iceland.
But beneath this
awareness of the beauty of his surroundings ran the churning,
appalling feeling that somewhere below his feet, in the ice, at
this very moment, his brother was trapped inside the plane, dying
of cold and hunger.