Arnaldur Indriðason: Operation Napoleon

‘Returning it? What are you talking about?’

‘It’s not unheard of. To reiterate, Vatnajökull is constantly on the move. It covers an area of 3,200 square miles, including several active volcanoes. It’s composed of a number of smaller glacial tongues and its ice mass changes according to climatic variation. Anything that vanishes into the ice can resurface decades later. Which is apparently the case with the German aircraft.’

‘But how do we know that a German plane crashed on the glacier if it was never found?’

‘Two brothers living at the edge of the ice cap saw it fly past their farm at low altitude. And the first expedition found the plane’s nose wheel.’

‘The first expedition?’

‘A two-hundred-man team searched the glacier shortly after the plane crashed but all they found was the wheel. We mounted a second, much larger, expedition in 1967 but were driven off the ice by more bad weather. This is the third expedition.’

‘What on earth was the plane carrying?’ the secretary asked.

‘The wheel gave us an idea of the size and type of aircraft,’ Carr continued. ‘We’ve been keeping the glacier under close surveillance and I think it’s safe to say that we’ve never been as near to finding the plane as now.’

‘You don’t seem very happy about it.’

‘It might have been better if the glacier had held on to the plane for ever,’ Carr replied. ‘We’re in no hurry to recover it, as long as it stays well hidden. In fact, it’s so well hidden that we’ve been reluctant to go to the trouble of systematically searching the glacier and digging for it. Our main concern has been to check that it hasn’t reappeared, which, as I say, seems to be the case now.’

‘You mean we’ve been monitoring the glacier all these years?’

We . You would think the secretary had been hunched over a screen scouring satellite images for the last forty years himself.

‘The wheel gave a clue as to the plane’s position,’ Carr said, evading the question. ‘Military intelligence has been monitoring changes in the ice in the specified area since the end of the war, first by aerial photography from spy planes, later from space after the advent of satellites.’

‘Satellites? Spy planes? What the hell is this aircraft? Why are we so anxious to dig it up now that it’s reappeared?’

Carr cleared his throat.

‘I repeat: what the hell was the plane carrying? And why’, the secretary added, ‘is this a covert operation? Why involve Delta Force and that maniac Ratoff?’

Carr pretended to pause for thought.

‘Are you familiar with the story of the Walchensee gold, Mr Secretary?’ he asked.

‘Gold?’ the secretary responded, a mixture of suspicion and alarm crossing his telegenic face. ‘Are you telling me there’s gold on board? No, I’ve never heard of it.’

‘It caused us one hell of a headache at the time. Shortly before the fall of Berlin, just before the Red Army took over the city and closed all routes in and out, it seems that a small freight train left for the Alps. On board were more than three hundred little bags, each containing a gold bar. The gold was being shipped out of the Reichsbank on Hitler’s personal orders. It was the Third Reich’s last remaining gold reserve.’

Carr gathered his thoughts briefly. He had the secretary’s full attention.

‘We don’t know precisely where it was heading but in the event the gold got no further than the Bavarian town of Walchensee,’ he continued, ‘where it was buried in an undisclosed location near the Obernach power plant. Not long afterwards it was dug up by some of our troops, at which point it vanished. This was in February of ’45. The war was ending. It is alleged that our men got wind of the gold by chance, dug it up and shipped it home to the States. The US government has always refused to comment on the story but it caused a political stink, and the German media resurrect the Walchensee gold story every few years. No one here knows what became of it but naturally the Germans don’t believe us.’

‘Christ, you mean to say it’s inside the plane on the glacier?’ the secretary said, aghast. He had swallowed it, hook, line and sinker.

‘According to our best intelligence, American soldiers stole a Junkers from the Luftwaffe, painted it in our camouflage colours, filled it with gold and took off from Munich. They made a secret stopover at Prestwick in Scotland and were intending to make a similar refuelling stop in Reykjavík en route to the States but met a storm and crashed on the glacier. None of them ever made it off the ice alive so we assume there were no survivors. Our sources, however, are not wholly reliable. Understandably, none of the men involved in the theft has ever come forward and admitted it, but there is no specific reason to doubt the broad truth of the story.’

‘How much bullion are we talking about here?’

‘Six to eight tons.’

‘That’s a problem all right,’ the secretary said, as if to himself. He was visibly shaken; the tables had been expertly turned on him by Carr, whom he had summoned for a tongue-lashing about the endless covert operations and private vendettas he was engaged in. He was not used to being so comprehensively wrong-footed but could not suppress a grudging respect for Carr’s expertise.

‘And that’s not all, Mr Secretary,’ Carr added.

‘There’s more?’ There was no mistaking the note of anxiety.

‘It makes this gold story a very sensitive issue for us, politically speaking.’

‘What? What is it?’ the secretary asked. His progress to date had been assured and free from blemish, a spotless record which was now under threat.

‘It concerns the origin of the gold.’

‘What do you mean? What about its origin? What’s so politically sensitive?’

‘The bulk of the gold was acquired from concentration camps,’ Carr replied.

The secretary took a moment to grasp the implications.

He groaned. ‘You mean this is Jewish gold? Teeth? Jewellery? You are telling me that we have a plane which crashed under US command full of plundered Jewish gold?’

Carr drove home his advantage. ‘If we said it was stolen by a handful of rogue American soldiers no one would believe us. The whole country would be under suspicion: the President, Congress, and of course the secret service organisations.’

‘My God.’

‘So as you see, Mr Secretary, it’s a delicate matter.’

The secretary considered his non-existent options.

‘You’re right. Absolutely right,’ he said finally.

‘Mr Secretary?’

‘That plane must never ever be found.’

‘That’s what the secret service is for, sir,’ Carr concluded, the hint of a wry smile playing around his mouth.

VATNAJÖKULL GLACIER, ICELAND

FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, 1900 GMT

Ratoff held the phone belonging to the boy who claimed his name was Elías and, as he walked into the communications tent that had been erected beside the aircraft, checked the last number he had dialled. According to the screen, the call had lasted long enough, Ratoff thought, for the boy to have described the area and their activities in detail. It was the only number that showed up on screen. Otherwise the phone appeared new and barely used.

‘Have the embassy trace this number,’ Ratoff ordered the chief communications officer. ‘And I need to talk to Vytautas.’

‘Vytautas, sir?’ the officer asked.

‘Carr,’ Ratoff breathed. ‘General Vytautas Carr.’

Ratoff left the tent again. The plane was now half clear of the ice. In the glare cast by four powerful floodlights a swarm of troops was busy digging it out with spades. The nose, which was relatively intact, jutted into the air like a raised fist. Ratoff could now confirm Carr’s theory that it was a Junkers Ju 52, known familiarly to Allied troops during World War II as ‘Iron Annie’ or ‘Auntie Ju’. The Ju 52s were Germany’s principal transport aircraft, often used for carrying paratroopers and powered by three vast BMW engines, the third of which was situated on the nose. And there the propeller still hung, its blades mangled by their collision with the ice. Below the window of the cockpit the outline of a black swastika was just visible under the flaking camouflage paint, while two of the seven windows that lined the sides of the plane could now be seen above the ice. The tail-end was still buried but the wings had evidently been sheared off and would probably never be found.