Arnaldur Indriðason - Operation Napoleon

‘What have you done?’ Elías gasped. ‘Jóhann, can you see? Talk to me.’ He tried to bend down to tend to his friend but Ratoff seized him by the hair, dragged him upright and pushed his own face close to Elías’s.

‘Let’s try again. What coordinates did you give your team before you set off?’

‘None,’ Elías stammered, dazed with shock. ‘We said we were going to test-drive our snowmobiles and might be away for four to five hours.’

‘Did they know where you were headed?’

‘We didn’t give them an itinerary. We were only going to try out the snowmobiles. They’re new. We never meant to wander far from the team.’

‘How long have you been away?’

‘About half that time. Maybe three hours.’

‘When will they start looking for you?’ The questions came one after another, he was disorientated by them and by his bleeding, sobbing friend; he had no sense of what he should or should not be saying, and this was precisely what Ratoff intended.

‘Very soon if we don’t turn up on time. They’ve probably started looking already. How do you know about Kristín?’ It was beginning to come home to Elías that his life was in danger but he was more worried by the fact that this man knew his sister’s name.

‘What did you tell your sister on the phone?’

‘Only that I was trying out a new snowmobile. That’s all, I swear,’ he said.

‘No more than twelve minutes had elapsed from when you talked to her to when I got hold of your phone. Which means that you would have been quite close to here when you called her. What does she know, Elías? Do remember that your friend’s sight is at stake. Perhaps you described what you saw? It is out of the ordinary. Why wouldn’t you?’

‘Nothing. I didn’t tell her anything. I ended the call when I saw the soldiers coming towards us and we tried to escape.’

Ratoff sighed once again.

His attention turned to Jóhann who had been helped to his feet by two of the guards. Ratoff stepped up close to him and stared into his good eye. The awl flashed and screams rang out from the tent again, carrying a long way through the still air on the ice cap. The men by the plane paused briefly in their digging and looked up, before resuming their work without comment.

Ratoff emerged from the tent with a thin spattering of blood on his face. He walked rapidly to the communications tent where he found two messages waiting for him. He would talk to Ripley first. Finding a cloth, he dried his face deliberately and thoughtfully, as if he had just washed.

‘A regrettable suicide?’ he asked when Ripley came on the line.

‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ Ripley replied. ‘The target escaped and we were forced to leave a body behind in her apartment.’

There was nothing but static from Ratoff’s end of the line.

‘She had a visitor, sir, whilst we were with her. An unforeseen eventuality. Our orders were to move in directly and we had no time to prepare.’

‘So what now?’ Ratoff asked eventually.

‘We find her, sir.’

‘Do you need more men?’

‘I don’t think so, sir.’

‘And how do you propose to find her?’

‘Is her brother still alive?’

‘More or less.’

‘We need any available information, sir. Does she have a boyfriend, any friends – old or new – or family? Anything we could use. Did he manage to pass on anything?’

‘Only to his sister. She knows the glacier is swarming with armed soldiers, she knows there’s an airplane in the ice, she knows her brother’s disappeared and I’m reasonably sure she knows where Elvis is hiding. If you imbeciles hadn’t let her give you the run-around, we’d be in the clear.’ Throughout this speech, one of Ratoff’s longest in days, neither the tone nor the volume of his voice changed in the slightest.

‘We’ll find her, sir. We’ll track down her family. We have her credit and debit card numbers and can monitor any use of them. She’ll turn up and when she does, we’ll be waiting.’

BUILDING 312, WASHINGTON DC,

FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, AFTERNOON

General Vytautas Carr was sitting in his office when a call came through on his private line. His thoughts had been wandering while he waited for Ratoff to make contact. Carr had parted from the defense secretary having given an assurance that no news about the plane in the ice would ever reach the public domain. The young Democrat had pronounced with great solemnity that the operation was to remain clandestine and that he did not want to know the details; in fact, he did not want to hear another word about it until it had been successfully concluded. Then, and only then, would he apprise the President of the essential facts. That way, if anything went wrong, the President would not have to tell any lies but could claim in all honesty that he had had no idea about any plane full of Jewish gold stolen by the US army. Nevertheless, the secretary could not restrain himself from asking for clarification of a few points.

‘What are you planning to do with the plane?’ he asked as they wrapped up the meeting.

Carr was prepared for the question, as well as the inevitable follow-up.

‘We’ll remove it from the glacier along with any wreckage we find, including bodies and other contents, and bring it back to the States. That’s what the C-17’s for, Mr Secretary. It has unlimited weight-bearing capacity. It’ll depart from Keflavík and fly without refuelling stops to our facility at Roswell, where the Nazi plane will disappear permanently.’

‘Roswell?’ the secretary queried. ‘Isn’t that the alien town?’

‘I can’t think of any better hiding place. After all that alien nonsense anything reported about Roswell and what goes on there is dismissed as bullshit, except by a tiny minority of UFO nuts. If the news gets out that we’re hiding a Nazi plane at Roswell, it’ll raise an even bigger laugh.’

‘And the gold?’ the secretary asked.

‘No need to waste it. I imagine it’ll disappear into the Federal Reserve Bank, unless you have another suggestion.’

They had parted on better terms than before. The defense secretary’s appreciation of the role of the secret service had improved dramatically, creating a new degree of understanding between them. Not that that mattered a damn to Carr, though he did derive a private satisfaction from having brought the secretary to heel. By the end of their meeting Carr could have ordered him to stand on one leg and stick out his tongue and he would have obeyed without hesitation.

Carr had come a long way from his Lithuanian origins. His original surname had been Karilius but in an attempt to integrate into his adopted country he had shortened it to Carr. His parents had emigrated to the US in the 1920s and he was their only child; he was eleven years old when the US entered the Second World War and used to follow the news reports from the frontlines avidly. As soon as he was old enough, he joined the army and was rapidly promoted through the ranks, being appointed US army liaison officer to NATO. But desk work did not suit him and he had himself transferred to active duty when the Korean War broke out, going on to set up the covert operations service there, and undertaking numerous missions behind enemy lines. After Korea, he joined the army intelligence corps.

Carr inherited the aircraft on Vatnajökull in the early seventies when he took over as chief of the organisation, and during the five years it took him to learn his role fully, his predecessor gradually filled him in on the background to the presence of a German plane in the ice. By the end of that time, Carr knew all about the plane and what it was carrying and how to act if the plane was ever found. What they were following now was a prearranged procedure that Carr reviewed every few years. Only a handful of individuals in the highest echelons of the army were aware of the plane’s existence or the procedure for dealing with it. For fifty-four years the knowledge had been kept strictly confidential, successfully limited to this tiny group, passed down from generation to generation, from one incumbent of office to the next. Even Carr did not know the whole story, though he knew enough. Enough not to want to imagine the fallout if news about what the plane was carrying ever got out.