Desmond Bagley - Running Blind / The Freedom Trap

I finished scraping my face and, as I rinsed the lather away, I ran through in my mind the things I had to do, the most important of which was to contact Taggart as soon as it was a reasonable hour to find him in his office. I wanted to give him the detailed case against Slade.

Elin came up with the coffee pot. ‘More?’

‘Thanks,’ I said, holding out my cup. ‘We’ll have a lazy day.’ I nodded towards the lake at the bottom of the crater. ‘Fancy a swim?’

She pulled a face and moved her wounded shoulder. ‘I can’t do the crawl, but perhaps I can paddle with one arm.’ She looked up at the sky, and said, ‘It’s a lovely day.’

I watched her face change. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘The radio antenna,’ she said. ‘It’s not there.’

I whirled around. ‘Damn!’ That was very bad. I climbed up and looked at the damage. It was easy to see what had happened. The rough ground in Central Iceland is enough to shake anything loose that isn’t welded down; nuts you couldn’t shift with a wrench somehow loosen themselves and wind off the bolts; split-pins jump out, even rivets pop. A whip antenna with its swaying motion is particularly vulnerable; I know one geologist who lost three in a month. The question here was when did we lose it?

It was certainly after I had spoken to Taggart, so it might have gone during the mad dash for Askja when we raced the storm. But I remembered the metallic clatter I had heard during the night; the antenna might have been loosened enough by the bumping to have been swept away by the strong wind. I said, ‘It may be around here – quite close. Let’s look.’

But we didn’t get that far because I heard a familiar sound – the drone of a small aircraft. ‘Get down!’ I said quickly. ‘Keep still and don’t look up.’

We dropped flat next to the Land-Rover as the light plane came over the edge of the crater wall flying low. As it cleared the edge it dipped down into the crater to our left. I said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t lift your head. Nothing stands out so much as a white face.’

The plane flew low over the lake and then turned, spiralling out into a search pattern to survey the interior of the crater. It looked to me like a four-seater Cessna from the brief glimpse I got of it. The Land-Rover was parked in a jumble of big rocks, split into blocks by ice and water, and maybe it wouldn’t show up too well from the air providing there was no movement around it.

Elin said quietly, ‘Do you think it’s someone looking for us?’

‘We’ll have to assume so,’ I said. ‘It could be a charter plane full of tourists looking at the Óbyggdir from the air, but it’s a bit early in the day for that – tourists aren’t awake much before nine o’clock.’

This was a development I hadn’t thought of. Damn it, Slade was right; I was out of practice. Tracks in the Óbyggdir are few and it would be no great effort to keep them under surveillance from the air and to direct ground transport by radio. The fact that my Land-Rover was the long wheelbase type would make identification easier – there weren’t many of those about.

The plane finished quartering the crater and climbed again, heading north-west. I watched it go but made no move. Elin said, ‘Do you think we were seen?’

‘I don’t know that, either. Stop asking unanswerable questions – and don’t move because it may come back for another sweep.’

I gave it five minutes and used the time to figure out what to do next. There would be no refreshing swim in the lake, that was certain. Askja was as secluded a place as anywhere in Iceland but it had one fatal flaw – the track into the crater was a spur from the main track – a dead end – and if anyone blocked the way out of the crater there’d be no getting past, not with the Land-Rover. And I didn’t have any illusions about the practicability of going anywhere on foot – you can get very dead that way in the Óbyggdir .

‘We’re getting out of here fast,’ I said. ‘I want to be on the main track where we have some choice of action. Let’s move!’

‘Breakfast?’

‘Breakfast can wait.’

‘And the radio antenna?’

I paused, indecisive and exasperated. We needed that antenna – I had to talk to Taggart – but if we had been spotted from the air then a car full of guns could be speeding towards Askja, and I didn’t know how much time we had in hand. The antenna could be close by but, on the other hand, it might have dropped off somewhere up the track and miles away.

I made the decision. ‘The hell with it! Let’s go.’

There was no packing to do beyond collecting the coffee cups and my shaving kit and within two minutes we were climbing the narrow track on the way out of Askja. It was ten kilometres to the main track and when we got there I was sweating for fear of what I might find, but nothing was stirring. I turned right and we headed south.

An hour later I pulled up where the track forked. On the left ran the Jökulsá á Fjöllum , now near its source and no longer the mighty force it displayed at Dettifoss. I said, ‘We’ll have breakfast here.’

‘Why here particularly?’

I pointed to the fork ahead. ‘We have a three-way choice – we can go back or take either of those tracks. If that plane is going to come back and spot us I’d just as soon he did it here. He can’t stay up there forever so we wait him out before we move on and leave him to figure which way we went.’

While Elin was fixing breakfast I took the rifle I had liberated from Graham and examined it. I unloaded it and looked down the bore. This was no way to treat a good gun; not to clean it after shooting. Fortunately, modern powder is no longer so violently corrosive and a day’s wait before cleaning no longer such a heinous offence. Besides, I had neither gun oil nor solvent and engine oil would have to do.

I checked the ammunition after cleaning the rifle. Graham had loaded from a packet of twenty-five; he had shot one and I had popped off three at Slade – twenty-one rounds left. I set the sights of the rifle at a hundred yards. I didn’t think that if things came to the crunch I’d be shooting at much over that range. Only film heroes can take a strange gun and unknown ammunition and drop the baddy at 500 yards.

I put the rifle where I could get at it easily and caught a disapproving glance from Elin. ‘Well, what do you expect me to do?’ I said defensively. ‘Start throwing rocks?’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ she said.

‘No, you didn’t,’ I agreed. ‘I’m going down to the river to clean up. Give me a shout when you’re ready.’

But first I climbed a small knoll from where I could get a good view of the surrounding country. Nothing moved for as far as I could see, and in Iceland you can usually see a hell of a long way. Satisfied, I went down to the river which was the milky grey-green colour of melt water and shockingly cold, but after the first painful gasp it wasn’t too bad. Refreshed, I went back to tuck into breakfast.

Elin was looking at the map. ‘Which way are you going?’

‘I want to get between Hofsjökull and Vatnajökull,’ I said. ‘So we take the left fork.’

‘It’s a one-way track,’ said Elin and passed me the map.

True enough. Printed in ominous red alongside the dashed line which denoted the track was the stern injunction: Adeins faert til austurs – eastward travel only. We wanted to go to the west.

I frowned. Most people think that because Greenland is covered with ice and is wrongly named then so is Iceland, and there’s not much ice about the place. They’re dead wrong. Thirty-six icefields glaciate one-eighth of the country and one of them alone – Vatnajökull – is as big as all the glaciated areas in Scandinavia and the Alps put together.