C-17 TRANSPORT PLANE, ATLANTIC AIR
SPACE,
SUNDAY 31 JANUARY, 0600 GMT
Kristín studied the
brothers, now reunited after all these years, one so young, the
other stamped by conflict and old age.
‘So you were looking
for your brother as much as Napoleon,’ she said eventually, trying
to feel her way, to encourage Miller to continue his story. Every
utterance was now calculated to lead him to believe that she knew
more than he had suspected. Miller raised his eyes from his brother
to Kristín’s face and stared at her. At last, he seemed to come to
a decision.
‘Napoleon wasn’t on
board the plane,’ he said in the same quiet voice. Kristín could
not hide her excitement.
‘Where was he then?’
she asked.
‘I don’t know,’
Miller said, his eyes returning to his brother. ‘And I don’t know
where he is now. I’m not sure anyone does any longer.’
He fell silent and
Kristín waited.
‘You have to
understand that only a tightly controlled number of people within
the army knew about Operation Napoleon,’ Miller continued at last.
‘Even I never knew exactly what it entailed, what the documents
contained. I only knew the contents by hearsay. I was nothing but a
pawn, an errand boy, assigned to solve a specific problem. My
brother too.’
He trailed off
again.
‘I believe it was
conceived and planned by a handful of generals based in Europe –
American generals, that is. I don’t know where the idea came from
or who took the initiative, but however it came about, talks were
entered into with the Germans. Ever since it had become clear that
the Germans were going to lose the war there had been discussions
about how Europe would be split into Allied- and Russian-occupied
territories. By the time the end was approaching and the Russians
were pouring into Eastern Europe, people were beginning to talk in
earnest about whether we should invade Russia and finish off what
the Germans had failed to do; arrange an armistice with the
Germans, prior to tackling the Red Army. The only person to float
the idea openly was General Patton but no one took him seriously.
People were tired of war. They wanted peace.
Understandably.’
‘But what’s the point
of all this?’ Kristín asked impatiently. ‘This is all common
knowledge. Even I’ve heard of it. There was an article in the
British papers recently saying that Churchill had drawn up plans to
invade Russia as soon as Germany had surrendered.’
‘Operation
Unthinkable was its name,’ Miller replied.
‘Exactly. That can
hardly be the secret your people are prepared to torture and kill
for. It’s old news.’
‘As a matter of fact,
it’s quite a big question, in the light of history,’ Miller said.
‘The division of Europe. The Cold War. The nuclear threat. The
Vietnam War. Could we have avoided all that? We defeated the
Japanese and today they’re an economic superpower. Might the same
have happened in Russia?’
Now he’s just wasting
time, Kristín thought. Can’t he see that we have no time? I have to
have answers now.
Vytautas Carr was
sitting in the flight cabin. Since he could no longer hear Ratoff’s
screams above the noise of the engines, he concluded that he must
have given in. They all did in the end, even the Ratoffs of this
world. It was merely a question of when. He did not know what they
had done to him, did not want to know; the sordid details were
irrelevant. They were short of time and Ratoff had been shown no
mercy. It was futile to withstand the pincer movement of drugs and
physical horrors; and no one understood that better than Ratoff
himself.
Carr looked out into
the night. He would retire when all this was over. It was his last
assignment and he felt as if he had spent his whole life waiting to
be able to close this chapter. To be able to draw a line under this
little footnote left over from the war years, one which the world
had forgotten and no one cared about any more.
One of Carr’s men
materialised beside him and bent to his ear.
‘We have it,
sir.’
‘Is he still alive?’
Carr asked.
‘Just about, sir,’
the man answered.
‘Have you made
arrangements to retrieve the documents?’
‘It won’t be a
problem, sir. They’re on their way to the base at Keflavík. We’ve
arranged to have the convoy intercepted and the documents
destroyed. As you asked.’
‘Right.’
‘What should we do
with Ratoff, sir?’
‘We have no further
need of him. Just do whatever’s necessary. And don’t tell me about
it.’
‘Understood. There’s
nothing further, sir.’
‘One thing – the
bags. Have you checked the body-bags since we took
off?’
‘No,
sir.’
‘It’s probably
unnecessary. The temperature back there should be low enough to
preserve the bodies. Not that it matters. Except perhaps to
Miller.’
Carr
paused.
‘Where is Miller?’ he
asked.
‘No idea, sir. I
thought he was with you.’
‘He was here not long
ago. Find him and bring him back.’
‘Yes, sir. By the
way, I checked on the bags when the two halves of the plane were
loaded and all seven were present.’
Carr was silent. He
looked again through the cockpit window at the blackness beyond.
The man was turning away.
‘Seven? You mean
six,’ Carr corrected him.
‘No, sir. There are
seven bags.’
‘No, there were only
six bodies on the glacier. There should have been seven but one of
them was missing. There are six bags.’
‘There are seven
bags, sir.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.
Why seven? That can’t be right.’
‘Sir, I couldn’t say.
But I definitely counted seven bags.’
‘It was the second
round of talks with the Nazis,’ Miller went on, his eyes on his
brother’s face. ‘We were testing the flight route and the plane, at
the same time as transporting the gold and some of the Nazis in the
negotiating committee. These two crates were meant as an appetiser.
They still had to agree on a final destination in
Argentina.’
‘Who?’
‘The
Nazis.’
‘Were they
escaping?’
‘Of course. They all
wanted to escape. Cowardly assholes, the whole damn lot of
them.’
‘Lots of them escaped
to South America,’ Kristín said, willing him to continue. Since the
old man appeared to offer no threat to her, she had temporarily
forgotten the danger she was in. At the forefront of her mind was
the insistent conviction that she had to fish for more information,
that any scrap she could glean might prove crucial. She was in the
endgame now, and though she dimly expected some final
confrontation, she knew that she would need to gather everything
she had if she was to evade the trap which was closing around her.
‘Adolf Eichmann,’ she added. ‘He was caught in
Argentina.’
‘I believe we let
them have Eichmann,’ Miller replied.
‘What do you
mean?’
‘We led them to
Eichmann.’
‘You did
what?’
‘Besides being
ruthless, Mossad are tireless. Like bloodhounds. You can’t keep
anything hidden from them indefinitely. When the Israelis had
sniffed out too much, we arranged things to look as if the trail
led to Eichmann. They were satisfied and took the bait. But they
would never have found him without our intelligence.’
Kristín had the
sensation of being in freefall. Her mind was at once quite empty
and yet overwhelmed with trying to take in the implications of
Miller’s revelation. The individual words were barely registering
as sounds but the sense of what he was saying seemed to penetrate
her mind obscurely. Her face betrayed no emotion, no great
astonishment as Miller went on. She had, it might have looked to
Miller, entered a state of suspended animation.
‘The Germans were in
no position to lay down conditions for a ceasefire. They were
defeated; it was only a question of time before the war ended. They
were so terrified the Reds would reach Berlin first that many of
them were prepared to join us in the final months if we could be
trusted to turn on the Russians.’
‘The trail to
Eichmann?’ Kristín said, as if to herself. ‘Whose trail were they
on then?’
‘A Swedish count
acted as intermediary between us and the Nazis,’ Miller continued,
ignoring her question. ‘It may have been his idea, put to a handful
of people. Or the Nazis may have raised it first. Himmler wanted to
do a deal with the Allies over fighting the Communists; he counted
on becoming the new head of government. Meanwhile Churchill drafted
a plan to attack Russia with German support and I believe the idea
was hatched after that. The Nazis couldn’t dictate conditions but
they could put in a request. I don’t think the plan originated with
the US generals but once they considered it, the idea didn’t seem
so preposterous. After all, there was a historical precedent. There
was Napoleon.’
‘What’s Napoleon got
to do with all this? Why Napoleon?’
But to Kristín’s
horror, Miller appeared to catch himself, to come out of the mist
of recollection and confession into which he had drifted, and to
regain some measure of control.
‘I can’t tell you
anything else. I’ve already said more than enough.’
‘You haven’t said
anything.’
‘That’s because I
don’t know anything for certain. I never saw the
documents.’
‘What are you talking
about?’
‘The Operation
Napoleon papers. I never saw them. Never saw what the final plan
looked like.’
‘Who drafted
it?’
‘I can’t tell you any
more. And you don’t want to know any more. Believe me. You don’t
want to know. No one wants to know. It doesn’t matter any more.
It’s irrelevant. It’s all buried and forgotten.’
‘What?’
Miller looked down at
his brother without speaking, and Kristín saw tears welling up in
his eyes. She did not understand what he was insinuating and was
fast losing patience with his evasions; here he was, perched on the
precipice of giving up whatever precious information he had guarded
so jealously for so long. She fought back the instinct to shake the
last shreds out of him.
‘Ask yourself what
became of Napoleon,’ Miller said abruptly.
‘What became of him?
He died in exile on St Helena. Everyone knows that.’
‘Well, they did the
same thing.’
Kristín stared at the
old man, forgetting to breathe.
‘That’s why they
called it Operation Napoleon.’
‘And
Napoleon?’
‘He was to be allowed
to take his dog with him. A German shepherd called Blondi. Nothing
else. I’ve wondered about this all my life but never had any
confirmation. I don’t know if the suggestion that his life should
be spared originated as part of the negotiations with the German
war cabinet, or if he was handed over to the Allies to smooth the
way for negotiations, or if the British and Americans were
competing with the Russians to get to him first. Perhaps there was
another, more obscure reason. The Germans’ last hope was to drive a
wedge between the Allies, to encourage friction between them. After
all, they knew Churchill was no friend of the
Russians.’
Miller
paused.
‘My brother was
supposed to fly him,’ he said eventually.
‘Your brother?’
Kristín said, her eyes on the body-bag.
‘He didn’t know.
Didn’t know the real purpose of the journey, I mean. I was going to
tell him when we met but I never got the chance.’
‘But this is absurd!’
Kristín said.
‘Yes, absurd,’ Miller
agreed. ‘That’s the word for it. Can you imagine what would have
happened if news had got out that the Americans had helped him to
escape and kept him in detention?’
‘But the Russians got
him.’
‘No. Somewhere near
the bunker, in the chaos and wreckage of Berlin, the Russians found
the burnt body of a man who could have been anybody. It suited
them, and us, and everybody else to make certain assumptions, to
draw conclusions. In any case they later mislaid the remains. That
made proving his identity impossible and allowed the space for what
were always written off as crackpot conspiracy theories to
flourish.’
‘So where is
he?’
‘I haven’t read the
documents. I hardly know anything, really. It was only a
plan.’
‘Do you mean they
never followed it through?’
‘I haven’t a clue. I
don’t know if they did. I don’t think any one person was in charge.
People were involved on a need-to-know basis.’
‘But you mentioned
Eichmann. You said the Americans had directed the Israelis to
Eichmann when they stumbled across the trail.’
‘I’m only inferring,’
Miller said and Kristín could see that he was belatedly trying to
backtrack, regretting having said so much. He had become wary now,
unwilling to compromise himself any further. He looked vaguely
ashamed of himself, somehow childlike. Even though the genie was
out of the bottle, long-held habits of discretion were vainly doing
battle with this newer taste for confession.
‘Where is
Napoleon?’
‘I don’t know. I’m
telling you the truth. I don’t know.’
‘They put him on an
island?’
But Miller had come
to the end. His shoulders slumped, his head bowed, he looked
physically smaller and more fragile, a husk of a man finally
overcome by burdens of grief and concealment.
‘Which
island?’
Silence.
‘After all these
years, what are you scared of? Can’t you see it’s
over?’
Before he could
answer, if he ever meant to, the dim light of his flickering torch
went out and they were plunged into darkness.