REYKJAVÍK,
AUGUST
The days passed,
turning into weeks and months, and the media furore caused by the
US army opening fire on an Icelandic rescue team gradually died
down. Kristín spent much of her time at the hospital with Elías who
soon regained consciousness and was able to tell her about his
encounter with Ratoff. His recovery was slow but steady. Their
father returned from abroad and learnt about Elías’s condition, but
he did not seem particularly interested in hearing the
details.
‘All this bloody
messing about on snowmobiles,’ he said. ‘It’s time you grew up.’
Four days later he was off on another trip.
Kristín broke the
news to Elías about his friend Jóhann. To her surprise, Jóhann’s
parents were satisfied with the explanation that the two men had
fallen into a crevasse. Kristín and Elías debated whether to tell
them the truth and finally decided they would. Once Elías was
stronger, they asked Jóhann’s parents to the hospital and told them
about the circumstances of their son’s death and the eventual fate
of his murderer. They chose not to mention anything relating to the
German plane. Although Elías had witnessed the incident, Kristín
pointed out, it was obvious that the army would not admit to any
kind of violence, let alone murder, and no witnesses would come
forward from among its ranks to support their
statement.
Jóhann’s parents,
however, a wealthy, middle-aged couple, were determined to find out
the truth. They called on Elías, Kristín and Júlíus as witnesses
but as Kristín had suspected, the charges they submitted to the
public prosecutor’s office and the subsequent investigation failed
to yield any results and their case was not considered strong
enough to mount a prosecution. The army spokesmen declared
themselves astonished by the accusation that they were harbouring a
killer in their ranks; they disclaimed all knowledge of the
presence of Delta Force operators or a C-17 plane in the country.
The legal proceedings dragged on, the media whipped themselves into
a new feeding frenzy, but this too ultimately fizzled
out.
Runólfur’s murder
remained unsolved. Kristín was summoned again and again by the
police for cross-examination but stubbornly insisted on her
innocence. After an exhaustive investigation, the police concluded
that there were no grounds for prosecution. The decision was taken
on the recommendation of the two detectives handling the case, one
of whom was the sympathetic man that Kristín had talked to on the
phone while at Jón’s farm. The case ended up deadlocked between the
Icelandic police and the Defense Force in Keflavík.
It was announced that
Steve had been found not far from the Andrews movie theatre on the
base, shot in the head by an unidentified gunman, and his body was
repatriated to the States for burial.
During all the legal
proceedings in which she was involved over the following years
Kristín never once spoke of the plane’s secret, but in her spare
time she read up on the history of Nazi Germany and the fall of the
Third Reich. To her surprise, she discovered that many different
theories had surfaced over the years as to Adolf Hitler’s fate. She
knew he had left orders for his remains to be burnt in the Berlin
bunker when the Russians took the city. After the war, however,
many doubted that this had truly been his fate. She learnt that the
doctor’s report on his remains, published by the Russians some time
after his death on 30 April 1945, concluded that the body was
probably that of Hitler; they also claimed immediately after the
war ended that they had compared the skull to his dental records
and had confirmed that it was Hitler’s. Yet before long rumours
began to circulate that he was being held prisoner in the
British-occupied sector of Berlin, while at the summit meeting in
Potsdam in July of 1945, Stalin announced that the Russians were
ignorant of his fate; they had not found his body, and Stalin even
hinted that he might be hiding in Spain or South America. This gave
birth to a host of wild conjectures that he was staying in a
Spanish monastery or on a South American ranch. Kristín came across
yet another theory that the British had put him on board a
submarine and taken him to a remote island. Indeed, towards the end
of the war Stalin had suspected the British of engaging in secret
talks with the Germans.
She also read that
Hitler had been quoted as saying that in the end he would have only
two friends – Eva Braun and his dog, Blondi.
One summer’s evening,
about six months after the traumatic events, she was sitting in the
kitchen after a simple supper, her thoughts wandering, as so often
before, back to the glacier and what had happened there, when she
remembered the piece of paper she had found in the pocket of her
overalls. She had emptied them before throwing away the
bloodstained clothing and put the bits and pieces she found in a
kitchen drawer where they had been sitting untouched ever since.
Rising, she went over, opened the drawer and rummaged in the
accumulated junk until she found the folded scrap of paper. Opening
it, she read again the words OPERATION NAPOLEON. It was a fragment of
the document that Jón had found on the body of the German officer.
She placed it under a bright light and set about trying to decipher
the rest of the typewritten text.
She could only read
the odd word here and there but she wrote these down, along with
any letters she could make out from the illegible words. Having
copied down everything she could, she took her notes to a friend at
the foreign ministry who had been a diplomat in Germany, and asked
him to translate the text into Icelandic and, if possible, fill in
the blanks to the best of his ability. She declined to tell him
what it was about, where she had acquired the text or what it was
part of. As she watched over his shoulder, he did his best to
translate it and make some sort of sense of the whole, though he
could make no suggestion as to what it added up to:
. . . put ashore on a remote island off the southernmost tip of Argentina. There is a small uninhabited archipelago which might provide a suitable location. Although inhabited in earlier centuries, the islands were long ago abandoned on account of their harsh climate and barren terrain. The island we have in mind is known as Borne in the local language. It is the final option. The other two locations proposed for OPERATION NAPOLEON . . .
That was as far as it
went. Kristín took the notes home with her, along with the
translation. She told no one of her discovery, not even Elías or
Júlíus, just tried to put the knowledge out of her mind. But it was
no good: she had been beginning to find her feet when she came
across the document but now she was once again possessed by
memories of the glacier, of Steve, of Miller’s story. After
studying it, however, she found that she was still none the wiser
about what to do, so she put the piece of paper in a drawer and
locked it.