Operation Napoleon (7 page)

Bateman and Ripley shut the door behind them, re-emerged from the flat five minutes later and climbed wordlessly into the Explorer.

VATNAJÖKULL GLACIER,

FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, 1930 GMT

Ratoff advanced towards the boys from the Icelandic rescue team. They were barely out of their teens, both dressed in the rescue team’s uniform of orange cold-weather overalls, with its logo emblazoned on breast and shoulder. They looked petrified. When the soldiers had swiftly borne down on them they had tried to make a break for it but after a brief pursuit had been headed off and brought to Ratoff. The men had found the phone on the boy who said his name was Elías. The other, Jóhann, had no phone or other transmitter. The boys were both tall, blond and good-looking. Ratoff, short and unremarkable himself, assumed that all Icelanders looked like this.

Their snowmobiles had been picked up on the little Delta Force radar screen, and Ratoff had watched as they broke away from their main party and branched out on their own. They maintained a course directly towards the plane and he had been unable to think of a plan to deflect them. At least the main rescue team, located some forty-five miles away, posed no immediate danger; the only members to leave the party were these two boys.

The Icelanders were escorted to Ratoff’s tent where they waited, flanked by armed guards. They had seen the plane, the swastika below the cockpit, the team digging the wreckage out of the ice; they had seen upwards of a hundred armed soldiers moving about the area, and although they could not have any understanding of what was going on, they had seen too much. Ratoff would have to conduct his interrogation with care; there must be no visible signs of violence, yet neither could it take too long. Above all, it was imperative to prevent the rescue team from searching for them in this sector. Ratoff was up against the clock, but it was how he worked best.

Elías and Jóhann were too frightened to feign ignorance of English. In fact, like most Icelanders they spoke the language remarkably well. And they were too naive to dream that they had anything to hide.

‘Kristín,’ Ratoff said in a dry, rasping voice, walking up to Elías. ‘She is your sister?’

‘How did you know that?’ Elías asked in surprise, glancing from Ratoff to the armed guards and back again. It was barely fifteen minutes since his phone had been confiscated.

‘Did you call anyone else?’ Ratoff asked, ignoring his question.

‘No, no one.’

‘You weren’t in contact with your team at all?’

‘My team? Why? How did you know about my sister? How do you know her name’s Kristín?’

‘Questions, questions,’ Ratoff sighed. He looked into the middle distance as if lost in thought, then backed away from the boys, glancing around until his gaze alighted on a tool box which stood on a trestle-table at the back of the tent. He went over to the box, opened it and nonchalantly rummaged inside with one hand, first taking out a screwdriver and contemplating it thoughtfully before replacing it in the box. Next he took out a hammer and weighed it in his hand before returning that too. Elías spotted a pair of pincers. The boys were staring at the little man with blank incomprehension. He gave the impression of being very composed, almost polite: his manner was cool, calm and deliberate. They had no idea what a dangerous scenario they had stumbled upon. Closing the tool box, Ratoff turned back to face them.

‘How about I promise not to stab your friend, would that put an end to your questions, I wonder?’ he asked Elías, as if weighing up the possibility. His hoarse voice was soft enough for Elías to miss the violence of his threat at first.

‘Stab?’ Elías repeated in shock, his eyes on his friend. ‘Why would you do that? Who are you? And what’s that plane with the swastika?’

He hardly saw the movement. All he knew was that Jóhann shrieked, clutched his right eye and fell on the ice where he lay writhing in agony at his friend’s feet.

‘If I promise not to stab him again, would that encourage you to stop wasting our time?’ Ratoff asked Elías. His voice was difficult to hear over Jóhann’s screams. In one hand he was holding a small metal awl.

‘What have you done?’ Elías gasped. ‘Jóhann, can you see? Talk to me.’ He tried to bend down to tend to his friend but Ratoff seized him by the hair, dragged him upright and pushed his own face close to Elías’s.

‘Let’s try again. What coordinates did you give your team before you set off?’

‘None,’ Elías stammered, dazed with shock. ‘We said we were going to test-drive our snowmobiles and might be away for four to five hours.’

‘Did they know where you were headed?’

‘We didn’t give them an itinerary. We were only going to try out the snowmobiles. They’re new. We never meant to wander far from the team.’

‘How long have you been away?’

‘About half that time. Maybe three hours.’

‘When will they start looking for you?’ The questions came one after another, he was disorientated by them and by his bleeding, sobbing friend; he had no sense of what he should or should not be saying, and this was precisely what Ratoff intended.

‘Very soon if we don’t turn up on time. They’ve probably started looking already. How do you know about Kristín?’ It was beginning to come home to Elías that his life was in danger but he was more worried by the fact that this man knew his sister’s name.

‘What did you tell your sister on the phone?’

‘Only that I was trying out a new snowmobile. That’s all, I swear,’ he said.

‘No more than twelve minutes had elapsed from when you talked to her to when I got hold of your phone. Which means that you would have been quite close to here when you called her. What does she know, Elías? Do remember that your friend’s sight is at stake. Perhaps you described what you saw? It is out of the ordinary. Why wouldn’t you?’

‘Nothing. I didn’t tell her anything. I ended the call when I saw the soldiers coming towards us and we tried to escape.’

Ratoff sighed once again.

His attention turned to Jóhann who had been helped to his feet by two of the guards. Ratoff stepped up close to him and stared into his good eye. The awl flashed and screams rang out from the tent again, carrying a long way through the still air on the ice cap. The men by the plane paused briefly in their digging and looked up, before resuming their work without comment.

Ratoff emerged from the tent with a thin spattering of blood on his face. He walked rapidly to the communications tent where he found two messages waiting for him. He would talk to Ripley first. Finding a cloth, he dried his face deliberately and thoughtfully, as if he had just washed.

‘A regrettable suicide?’ he asked when Ripley came on the line.

‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ Ripley replied. ‘The target escaped and we were forced to leave a body behind in her apartment.’

There was nothing but static from Ratoff’s end of the line.

‘She had a visitor, sir, whilst we were with her. An unforeseen eventuality. Our orders were to move in directly and we had no time to prepare.’

‘So what now?’ Ratoff asked eventually.

‘We find her, sir.’

‘Do you need more men?’

‘I don’t think so, sir.’

‘And how do you propose to find her?’

‘Is her brother still alive?’

‘More or less.’

‘We need any available information, sir. Does she have a boyfriend, any friends – old or new – or family? Anything we could use. Did he manage to pass on anything?’

‘Only to his sister. She knows the glacier is swarming with armed soldiers, she knows there’s an airplane in the ice, she knows her brother’s disappeared and I’m reasonably sure she knows where Elvis is hiding. If you imbeciles hadn’t let her give you the run-around, we’d be in the clear.’ Throughout this speech, one of Ratoff’s longest in days, neither the tone nor the volume of his voice changed in the slightest.

‘We’ll find her, sir. We’ll track down her family. We have her credit and debit card numbers and can monitor any use of them. She’ll turn up and when she does, we’ll be waiting.’

BUILDING 312, WASHINGTON DC,

FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, AFTERNOON

General Vytautas Carr was sitting in his office when a call came through on his private line. His thoughts had been wandering while he waited for Ratoff to make contact. Carr had parted from the defense secretary having given an assurance that no news about the plane in the ice would ever reach the public domain. The young Democrat had pronounced with great solemnity that the operation was to remain clandestine and that he did not want to know the details; in fact, he did not want to hear another word about it until it had been successfully concluded. Then, and only then, would he apprise the President of the essential facts. That way, if anything went wrong, the President would not have to tell any lies but could claim in all honesty that he had had no idea about any plane full of Jewish gold stolen by the US army. Nevertheless, the secretary could not restrain himself from asking for clarification of a few points.

‘What are you planning to do with the plane?’ he asked as they wrapped up the meeting.

Carr was prepared for the question, as well as the inevitable follow-up.

‘We’ll remove it from the glacier along with any wreckage we find, including bodies and other contents, and bring it back to the States. That’s what the C-17’s for, Mr Secretary. It has unlimited weight-bearing capacity. It’ll depart from Keflavík and fly without refuelling stops to our facility at Roswell, where the Nazi plane will disappear permanently.’

‘Roswell?’ the secretary queried. ‘Isn’t that the alien town?’

‘I can’t think of any better hiding place. After all that alien nonsense anything reported about Roswell and what goes on there is dismissed as bullshit, except by a tiny minority of UFO nuts. If the news gets out that we’re hiding a Nazi plane at Roswell, it’ll raise an even bigger laugh.’

‘And the gold?’ the secretary asked.

‘No need to waste it. I imagine it’ll disappear into the Federal Reserve Bank, unless you have another suggestion.’

They had parted on better terms than before. The defense secretary’s appreciation of the role of the secret service had improved dramatically, creating a new degree of understanding between them. Not that that mattered a damn to Carr, though he did derive a private satisfaction from having brought the secretary to heel. By the end of their meeting Carr could have ordered him to stand on one leg and stick out his tongue and he would have obeyed without hesitation.

Carr had come a long way from his Lithuanian origins. His original surname had been Karilius but in an attempt to integrate into his adopted country he had shortened it to Carr. His parents had emigrated to the US in the 1920s and he was their only child; he was eleven years old when the US entered the Second World War and used to follow the news reports from the frontlines avidly. As soon as he was old enough, he joined the army and was rapidly promoted through the ranks, being appointed US army liaison officer to NATO. But desk work did not suit him and he had himself transferred to active duty when the Korean War broke out, going on to set up the covert operations service there, and undertaking numerous missions behind enemy lines. After Korea, he joined the army intelligence corps.

Carr inherited the aircraft on Vatnajökull in the early seventies when he took over as chief of the organisation, and during the five years it took him to learn his role fully, his predecessor gradually filled him in on the background to the presence of a German plane in the ice. By the end of that time, Carr knew all about the plane and what it was carrying and how to act if the plane was ever found. What they were following now was a prearranged procedure that Carr reviewed every few years. Only a handful of individuals in the highest echelons of the army were aware of the plane’s existence or the procedure for dealing with it. For fifty-four years the knowledge had been kept strictly confidential, successfully limited to this tiny group, passed down from generation to generation, from one incumbent of office to the next. Even Carr did not know the whole story, though he knew enough. Enough not to want to imagine the fallout if news about what the plane was carrying ever got out.

The phone on his desk purred and he picked up the receiver.

‘We’re on schedule, sir,’ Ratoff announced.

‘No trouble locating it?’

‘It was buried but the coordinates were correct. We’ve already uncovered half the fuselage. I estimate that we’ll have it in Keflavík in three to four days at the outside.’

‘No hitches?’

‘Nothing significant. There’s a rescue team from Reykjavík conducting a training exercise on the glacier. It’s located some distance away but two of its members managed to stray into our area.’

Carr tensed: ‘And?’

‘They lost their lives in an accident about thirty-five miles from here. Drove their snowmobiles into a deep crevasse. We’ll ensure they’re found quickly so the team doesn’t wander into our area looking for them.’

‘Were they young?’

‘Young? I don’t understand the relevance, sir. They were old enough to see us and the plane.’

‘So everything’s in hand then?’ Carr concluded

‘One of them had a sister in Reykjavík.’

Carr’s disappointment was impossible to conceal.

‘He made contact with her by phone after he entered the area. We know who she is but she gave us the slip. We’re tracing her now.’

‘Who’s
we
?’

‘Ripley and Bateman. The best available option in the circumstances.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Ratoff, try to control yourself. The Icelanders are our allies.’

Carr put down the receiver, picked it up again immediately and started dialling. It was time to put phase two of the operation in motion. The defense secretary had been concerned about Ratoff’s involvement and now even Carr was beginning to have his doubts about his choice of mission director. Carr knew the alarming details of his army career better than anyone. Ratoff undeniably delivered results but he tended to be over-zealous.

He had to wait a good while for his call to be answered, and spent the time mapping out his next moves. He would have to fly to Iceland. But first he would honour an old promise.

‘Miller?’ he said. ‘It’s Vytautas. The plane’s turned up. We need to meet.’