Arnaldur Indriðason: Operation Napoleon

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.

On the day of her departure she woke up in the early hours, as she had every morning since her escape from the glacier, feeling cold and empty, as if something inside her had died.

She had neither heard nor seen anything of Carr or his henchmen since her conversation with him on board the plane in the last year of the old millennium, but there were times when she was assailed by an overwhelming conviction that she was being followed or that someone had been in the flat or rifled through her files at the office. That she was not alone. She had no idea who Carr and Miller were, or what organisation they belonged to, and made no attempt to find out. Indeed she was careful to do nothing that could risk connecting her to the plane on the glacier.

An intense paranoia filled her. She was convinced now that there had been a link between her turning on the light in her flat the morning she woke up on the sofa and the phone call she had received with the warning not to cross Carr. Someone, or more than one person, had been watching her windows and knew when she woke up and switched on the light. Sometimes when she entered her flat she sensed a presence that made her profoundly uneasy. Yet she never received another phone call.

She adopted a new way of life. She never left the city and abandoned foreign travel. Any relationships were short-lived, never intended to last. She did not have children. Not even among her tiny circle of friends did she confide in anyone about what had really happened on the glacier. Shortly after the millennium her father died, going to his grave with nothing but the vaguest idea of what his children had gone through. As she had planned, she left the ministry to open her own practice, and led a quiet, solitary sort of existence, though she and Elías remained close and Júlíus was a frequent visitor. They spent hours discussing what had happened on the glacier, but never more than that.

Hardly a day passed when she did not recall the camp, the plane, the swastika, the bodies in the tent, Ratoff, or the secret knowledge she possessed. The years passed, but however hard she tried she could not quite forget the island called Borne off the southern tip of Argentina. She tried to block the memory, to convince herself that the matter was over and had nothing to do with her, but it had its claws in her and in fact it developed into a mild obsession as time went by. As if the affair were somehow unfinished.