Operation Napoleon (5 page)

‘Your phone’s useless!’

‘Don’t be like that. When . . . you coming . . . glacier trip with me?’

‘You’ll never get me to set foot on any bloody glacier.’

She heard her brother say something unintelligible then call out to his companion.

‘Jóhann!’ she heard him shout. ‘Jóhann, what’s that?’ Kristín knew that Jóhann was a good friend of her brother’s; it was he who had been responsible for getting him involved with the rescue team in the first place.

‘What are all those lights?’ she heard Elías shouting. ‘Are they digging up the ice?’

‘You should see this. There’s something happening up here,’ he told his sister, the pitch of his voice suddenly higher. She heard him turn away from the phone and shout something to his friend, then turn back.

‘Jóhann thinks . . . in the ice,’ he said.

This was followed by a long pause.

‘They’re coming!’ Elías exclaimed suddenly, the words sounding in fits and starts over the poor connection. The excitement had vanished and he sounded panic-stricken, his breathing ragged.

‘Who?’ she asked in astonishment. ‘Who’s coming? What can you see?’

‘Out of nowhere. We’re . . . by snowmobiles. They’re armed!’

‘Who?’

‘They look . . . soldiers . . .’

‘Elías!’

‘. . . a plane!’

But the connection was abruptly severed and however much she yelled down the phone, alarm now rising within her, all she could hear was the dialling tone. She set the receiver gently back into its cradle and stared blankly at the wall.

WASHINGTON DC,

FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, 1500 EST

During a long military career that had taken him all over the world, Vytautas Carr had only once visited Iceland. He was aware that the US air base at Keflavík had been established after World War II on a wind-blasted site amid the lava fields known as Midnesheidi, about an hour’s drive south-west of the capital, Reykjavík. In its time, the base had been one of the most vital strategic links in the West’s chain of defences; the island’s location in the middle of the North Atlantic proved ideal for a military superpower at the height of the Cold War, offering a superb vantage point for monitoring the movements of Soviet submarines, shipping and air traffic in the Arctic region.

He knew too that the British had occupied the country at the beginning of the war, before handing over their defence role to the Americans in 1941. The US headquarters had initially been in Reykjavík with the original detachment of troops later reinforced by the 5th Infantry Division under the command of Major General Cortlandt Parker, who had fought in Tunisia until the surrender of the Axis forces in Africa. The American occupying force had peaked at some 38,000 troops.

The presence of the US army had been a source of political friction in the country ever since the end of the war. The signing of the defence treaty in 1949 triggered a riot outside the Icelandic parliament and the left-wing political parties had been bitter in their opposition to the base over the years, though to little effect.

Government policy had always decreed that the nation should derive no profit from the NATO presence on its shores, and accordingly the military had never paid directly for their facilities at Keflavík Airport. Nevertheless, tens of millions of dollars had been poured into the pockets of the civilian contractors and service companies that carried out work on behalf of the military or held important contacts in favourably inclined political parties. In addition, the economies of the neighbouring villages had come to depend on the presence of the Iceland Defense Force, which meant that the decision to scale down operations on Midnesheidi at the end of the Cold War was met by vociferous protests from the locals.

Carr rehearsed this background as he made his way to his weekly meeting with the US Secretary of Defense. He would be called upon to explain why a C-17, on loan from the Air Transport Division in Charleston, was standing idle in Iceland indefinitely in the middle of winter. He would also have to account for the presence of Delta Force operators. Carr experienced a wave of nostalgia for the days when covert operations were covert. Nowadays a crowd of politically elected officials had to be kept apprised of every last detail of military intelligence activities in every corner of the world.

The defense secretary kept Carr waiting outside his office for fifteen minutes – deliberately, Carr was certain – before calling him inside. Relations between the two had been less than cordial during the six years the secretary had held office and Carr was now aware of an even greater chill from that quarter. They exchanged the briefest of handshakes. The secretary had learnt of Carr’s attempts to find compromising information on him – evidence of mistresses, a penchant for gambling or any other vice that could get him into trouble. Carr even went as far as to scrutinise his tax returns, bank accounts and credit card transactions. It was a precaution he took with every new defense secretary, and one which on occasion had proved useful when he needed leverage. But his luck was out this time: as far as he could establish, the secretary was as pure as the driven snow.

He was one of the Democrats’ brightest stars, a youthful, reforming orator, with a wife and children and two pets; reminiscent of Carter in his prime. A forthright opponent of state secrecy, the secretary had made several speeches about the need for openness in relation to the operations of the secret service, which had acquired a new and more wide-ranging role after the end of the Cold War. What the secretary meant by ‘new’ and ‘wide-ranging’ was uncertain, but he was without doubt one of the most vocal advocates of cutting back expenditure on the secret services and of bringing their activities under scrutiny.

Carr could not stand the secretary’s political posturing. It had pained him that he had failed to discover any disgrace in his past.

‘What’s this about a plane in Keflavík?’ the secretary started before they had even sat down. ‘What are you up to in Iceland? A C-17 costs $350,000 a day. Delta Force the same again. We cannot afford that kind of extravagance unless we’re talking about a serious emergency. And Ratoff’s a psychopath who in my opinion should not be on our payroll.’

Carr offered no answer. Under normal operational procedures, the secretary was not supposed to be aware of the existence of men like Ratoff. He reached into his briefcase for a sheaf of satellite images of Vatnajökull and handed them to the secretary.

‘What have you got there?’ the secretary asked. ‘What are these?’

‘Satellite images, Mr Secretary, of the south-eastern section of an Icelandic glacier known as Vatnajökull; the biggest glacier in Europe; a huge sheet of ice in a permanent state of flux. The enlarged image shows what we believe to be an aircraft that crashed on the glacier in the closing stages of World War II.’

‘What kind of aircraft?’

‘German transport, Mr Secretary. Most likely a Junkers.’

‘And we’ve only just found it?’

We
, thought Carr to himself. Who’s
we
? Christ, politicians. They were always putting themselves centre-stage. Especially Democrats, with their demands for open government, for having everything transparent and above board.

He continued:

‘As I said, Mr Secretary, it crashed during the closing stages of the war. An expedition was mounted from our HQ in Reykjavík a few days later. It was the middle of winter and visibility on the glacier was close to zero. The wreckage was buried in snow and eventually swallowed up by the glacier but it seems to be returning it to us now, a whole lifetime later.’

‘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.