access to more files than me,’ he announced finally. ‘We should see what he says.’
‘I’m sorry to have landed you in all this. I didn’t know where else to turn,’ Kristin said as they left the building.
‘Forget it,’ Steve answered, his eyes flickering round nervously. ‘I’m as interested as you in finding out what’s up there.’
They decided to leave the car behind and walk. Steve knew the base very well and kept to the back alleyways, stealing through communal gardens, darting hurriedly across brightly lit streets where necessary, taking care to stay under cover. Kristin had no idea where they were going. As for most Icelanders, the base was a foreign country to her. The only time she had been to Midnesheidi was with her parents to the international airport in the days before the new terminal had been built. She recognised the Andrews movie theatre, and glimpsed in the distance the old terminal building and officers’ mess. She remembered two of her old classmates from school who had gone on to work for Icelandic contractors on the base and used to come home to Reykjavik every weekend laden with cigarettes and vodka that they bought cheap from the American servicemen, to the great envy of their friends.
‘I never expected to see you again,’ Steve ventured as they picked their way through the snow behind one of the apartment blocks.
‘I know,’ Kristin said.
‘I always meant to try to talk to you about it but somehow…’
‘I’ve thought the same. It was my fault.’
‘No, it wasn’t. No way. It was nobody’s fault. Why does everything always have to be somebody’s fault?’
When Kristin did not answer, Steve let the subject drop. There was little traffic in the area although they twice spotted military police patrols. Steve stopped by a building not dissimilar to his own but in an entirely different part of the base. They all looked identical to Kristin. He told her to wait, he would not be long, so she lurked round the side of the block trying to make herself inconspicuous, stamping her feet, blowing on her hands and pulling her hood tight against the chill air. It was about fifteen minutes before he returned, accompanied by a man whom he introduced to her as Arnold. He was plump, about Steve’s age, with sweaty palms, shifty eyes and a lisp. They climbed into his car and drove off.
‘Arnold’s a librarian,’ Steve said smiling. ‘He knows his way round the archives and he owes me a favour.’
Kristin had no idea what this implied and Arnold did not enlighten her, just glowered at Steve.
He pulled up at a two-storey administration block not far from the old terminal. After letting them in through the back entrance, he led them straight down to a basement archive, considerably larger than the one they had visited earlier, occupying three levels.
‘What years are we talking about?’ Arnold asked flatly.
‘Flights over Vatnajokull since the beginning of the war, I suppose,’ Steve replied. ‘I don’t know what for. Routine surveillance flights, maybe, or reconnaissance. Aerial photography. Nothing major, as I said. Nothing risky. Nothing that presents a threat to US national security.’
‘Surveillance? Aerial photography?’ Arnold scoffed, not even trying to disguise his irritation. ‘You’ve no idea what you’re on about.’
‘Forced landings as well. Crashes on the glacier. A plane. Anything like that. Pilots who might know about flights over the glacier. Anything at all like that.’
Shaking his head, Arnold walked down to the next level. They followed, their footsteps echoing hollowly against the walls. Kristin found the noise they were making unbearable. Arnold passed a row of shelves, slowed and stopped. Turning back, he descended to the level below, clattering down the metal staircase, and walked along one of the rows. There he took down a box file and opened it, then closed it again. Eventually they came to a large filing cabinet and Arnold pulled out one of the drawers.
‘Here’s something,’ he said to Steve. ‘Records of photographic surveillance flights in 1965. By the old U-2 spy planes, just before they switched to satellites.’ Arnold stepped aside as if to avoid getting any closer to this irregularity than he already was, then announced that he would wait for them by the entrance upstairs and vanished. Steve squatted down.
‘Let’s see… what have we here?… Nothing. Only some crap about routine surveillance flights off the north coast. Nothing about Vatnajokull. Nothing about aerial photography.’ He examined more of the files.
‘Maintenance reports!’ he sighed. ‘Technical jargon. Wait a minute, here are some names of pilots.’ There were several. Steve took out a pen and paper and started to scribble them down.
‘Arnold’s a laugh a minute,’ Kristin observed.
‘He smuggles more dope into the base than anyone else I know,’ Steve said matter-of-factly.
‘I thought he was a librarian?’
‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing.’
‘So what did you say to him?’
‘Some lie about you being – what do you call it? – a GI baby? That you’re trying to trace your father.’
‘Who was a pilot?’
‘You got it.’
‘And he didn’t think we kept rather unorthodox hours?’
‘All these guys must be dead,’ Steve muttered, without answering. He was still busy noting the pilots’ names.
‘What do the reports say?’
‘Nothing of any interest. Just descriptions of routine surveillance flights. Very limited information. Naturally they don’t keep anything important down here.’
‘Nothing about Vatnajokull? Or photographs?’
‘Not that I can see.’
‘Might Arnold know?’
‘No harm in asking. I’m going to check if we’ve got anything on these pilots.’ He finished copying down the names.
Arnold was hovering by the door when they came back upstairs. Telling Kristin to wait a minute, Steve went over and had a word with him in private. Arnold looked extremely nervous. They argued for a while, then Steve came back.
‘He says he doesn’t know anything about Vatnajokull and I believe him. He’ll give us five minutes to look up the names of these pilots on his computer.’
Arnold led them down a long corridor, cursing all the while, opened the door to his office, groped his way to the computer and turned it on. He reached out to switch on his desk lamp but Steve stopped him; the blue glow from the computer screen provided the only illumination in the room. Before long they had opened the army employment records and were looking up each name in turn. Kristin stationed herself by the window, terrified that the glow from the computer would attract attention. What was it that Elias had seen?
‘They’re either dead and buried or repatriated to the States long ago,’ Steve sighed and typed in one last name. Arnold had disappeared.
‘Hang on, there’s something here. Michael Thompson. Retired. Still resident on the base. Pilot. Born 1921. He’s been here at Midnesheidi since the sixties. He lives nearby. Come on,’ Steve said, jumping out of his chair. ‘We’ll have to wake the poor bastard up. Maybe he’ll have some answers.’
They left by the way they had come in. Arnold was nowhere to be seen and Steve told Kristin he had probably slipped off home. The snow was still falling incessantly as they made their way through the darkness to the oldest part of the military zone. Compared to others the US army had established around the world, the base was tiny. The NATO Defense Force had numbered only four to five thousand personnel at its height but its population had been dramatically reduced since the end of the Cold War. Many of the accommodation blocks now stood empty and derelict, especially in the oldest quarter, relics of a forgotten war. It did not take them long to get there, despite wading through knee-deep snow on little-used paths. They did not speak on the way except once when Steve expressed surprise that Michael Thompson should still be living on the base. Most of the servicemen sent to Iceland could not wait to move on to their next posting after completing their maximum three-year tour of duty, usually praying fervently for somewhere tropical.
