Operation Napoleon (31 page)

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.

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.

What convinced her was the thought that Steve had died because of this knowledge. He was in her mind every day and she relived his death over and over again, during her waking hours or in her dreams. He had left a void in her life that would never heal, nor would she have it any other way. But if the matter ended like this, he would have lost his life for nothing, and that she found unbearable.

It was a ship’s captain who first made her consider the possibility seriously. He engaged her to handle his divorce and a sort of friendship had developed between them. He was captain of a merchant vessel and once confided in Kristín that he had helped a young Icelandic woman flee her husband with her two children by smuggling her from Portugal to Iceland. Kristín could have chosen an easier way and flown to Argentina via Spain or Italy, but she did not dare. Did not dare risk the surveillance cameras, the passenger lists, passport control.

Even after taking the decision she did nothing precipitate. She tried as far as possible always to use cash, never credit or debit cards for transactions, to avoid places with CCTV, including some streets in the city centre where the police had installed cameras, and never used the internet at home. She fled from every aspect of the surveillance society.

She went about it as if she were organising a long holiday. The island existed, after all; she had located it with the help of the British Royal Geographical Society, whose website she visited at the National Library. Their information about the island was mainly of geographical interest, although it included a brief description of its history and the coordinates for its exact location. She considered flying to South America via Europe, or travelling there via a variety of other routes but none of these had the same attraction of invisibility.

When her friend the captain told her one day that he would shortly be sailing to Mexico to deliver an Icelandic trawler to its new owner, she decided to enlist his help. Initially he refused because she would not explain why she wanted to stow away on board his ship and slip ashore unseen in Mexico. The captain was not unaccustomed to taking passengers – there were always people who were afraid of flying and preferred to sail on merchant ships – but he wanted nothing to do with anything illegal.

She never knew why he changed his mind but one day he came and agreed he would help her, if that was what she wanted. She had asked it as a favour of a friend, he said, and who was he to deny her?

Until the very last minute she dithered about whether to go. In the end, however, she reasoned that she was approaching forty and would never make the trip if not now. The only person she told was her brother Elías. She did not want to get Júlíus involved, the way she had with Steve. She could manage her brother, but Júlíus was another matter.

The ship sailed early in the morning. She stood on deck, watching the land sink below the horizon. It was summer and her face was warmed by the sun which had already been up for several hours. The voyage was uneventful and when the ship docked at a small town on the east coast of Mexico, she managed to slip ashore without passing through customs or immigration. She had enjoyed long conversations with the captain during the voyage and they parted on good terms.

She selected a reliable car, paid for it in cash, and drove south through Mexico like any other tourist, sleeping at motels, seeing the historical sites, lingering here and there to enjoy the scenery, to savour the national cuisine and hospitality. During the journey she felt more relaxed than she had allowed herself to feel in a long time. It was delightful to be abroad again.

Several days later she reached Buenos Aires. Evening had fallen by the time she drove into the capital city. She found herself a room at a reasonably priced hotel and purchased a detailed road map on which she marked out the route south. She was confident that she was not being followed, that she had managed to make it to Argentina unremarked.

Two days later she set off from Buenos Aires. She sold the car and made the first leg of the journey by plane, landing that afternoon at Comodoro Rívadavía in the middle of Patagonia. There she bought a bus ticket and calculated that the journey to the south of the country would take a further three days. The route ran for the most part along the coast. She stayed the first night at Caleta Olivia, travelling the next day through the farming settlements of Fitzroy and Jaramillo, from where she headed due south across the Rio Chico and by ferry across the Magellan Straits to the town of San Sebastián in Puerto Harberton, a town of about 15,000 people just north of the Chilean border.

She arrived towards evening and took a room at a small hotel. The following day she walked down to the harbour and found a sailor who spoke a little English. He was in his fifties, bearded and toothless, and reminded her pleasingly of an Icelandic fisherman. She asked about the island and he nodded, waving his arm in a wide arc. It was a long way out, she gathered. They negotiated a fee and agreed to meet early next morning to sail out to the island.

She spent the day strolling around the town, browsing the shops and the market. Noticing other tourists, she did her best to mingle. Although it was out of season, she had met countless travellers on her journey through the country; no matter how small the backwater, they could be found examining wares and lounging in cafés.

The fisherman was waiting for her down by the harbour next morning and as they sailed out in his little boat the day was perfectly calm, the air warm on her skin. She paid half the fare in advance; he would get the rest when they returned, as they had agreed. She tried to question him about the island’s history but he seemed completely uninterested, saying dismissively that he knew nothing about Borne, that there was nothing to know.

They chugged along at a comfortable speed past rocks, islets and archipelagos for about five hours until finally he nudged her and pointed ahead. She watched the island rise out of the sea, surrounded by a few smaller skerries. It reminded Kristín of the rugged Icelandic island of Drangey, not as high but at least three times larger, an inhospitable rock supporting some vegetation but no bird life at all. It was enveloped by silence. They sailed round the island until the fisherman thought he spied a place where Kristín could clamber up the cliffs. He intended to stay behind in the boat.

In the event it was not a difficult climb; a gravel path led from the beach to the cliffs where there was a fairly easy incline to the top. On reaching the plateau, she saw some ruins in the middle of the island and headed that way. As she got closer she observed tumbledown wooden walls, a beaten-earth floor and a doorstep. She made a circuit of them, noticing something that reminded her of an old kitchen hearth. The island had indeed been occupied in earlier centuries.

She walked among the remains, searching carefully for any clue that might support her suspicions. But in vain; there was simply nothing there. She was surprised to find that this prompted no sense of disappointment in her, despite the journey halfway round the world. Afterwards she walked the length of the island to the brink of the precipice and gazed at the waves breaking on the cliffs while the sea breeze caressed her face. For the first time in years she felt a weight lift off her chest.

Turning round, she retraced her steps through the ruins. A short distance beyond them, on the way back to the waiting boat, she tripped on a rock lying buried in the long grass. She glanced down and was about to carry on – the fisherman would be wanting to leave – when she noticed its shape. It was no ordinary rock. It was thin, about half a metre long, square at the bottom and rounded at the top. She looked down at it in puzzlement, before crouching and trying to turn it over. It was heavy but with some effort she managed to raise it on its edge, then let it fall back on to the other side.

Squinting down at the stone, and rubbing at the accumulated dirt with her finger, she made out a crude carved inscription:

BLONDI

1947