From Steve, Kristin’s thoughts moved on to Elias. He would have made light work of a climb like this and teased her for being such a wimp. Well, he had finally succeeded in forcing her out into the wilderness. She saw the rim of the glacier drawing nearer in the moonlight. A little way to the east the land was scored by deep gullies and ravines, in one of which Jon had found the German.
She pictured her brother in the hands of the soldiers, and lying, critically injured, at the bottom of the crevasse. It was not the first time she had suffered this choking sensation on Elias’s account.
She had been eighteen, Elias eight, and she had sent him to the shop for a bottle of Coke. When he came out of the shop, she heard later, he had run straight into the road without looking and was hit by a car. He landed on the bonnet, bounced on to the windscreen, shattering it, then was flung over the roof, fetching up on the road. He was knocked unconscious and a large pool of blood had accumulated under his head. They did not live far from the shop, so Kristin had heard the shrill sirens accompanying the arrival of police and ambulance, and knew instinctively that they were for Elias. She set off at a run and saw men lifting his small frame off the road and into the ambulance. Kristin could see no sign of life in her brother. The driver who had hit him was sitting on the kerb, clutching his head in despair and a group of bystanders had gathered. She walked over to the ambulance in a daze and was permitted to ride with Elias to the hospital.
Elias was in surgery for eight hours. He had cracked his skull and suffered a brain haemorrhage; he had also broken a leg and two ribs, one of which had pierced his right lung, and fractured his right arm in two places. Kristin sat in the waiting room, consumed with guilt, rocking to and fro, staring into space, now and then emitting anguished whimpers from deep within. She had sent her brother out for a bottle of Coke and now he was dying.
Her parents cut short their holiday in the Canaries and flew home, but only after she had managed to convince them that Elias was seriously injured. They blamed Kristin not only for what had happened to him but also for spoiling their holiday; she had found it hard to tell which upset them more. She was supposed to look after her brother. It had always been that way. They had placed the responsibility on her shoulders and she had failed.
She would never be free of the guilt. Even though Elias later made a full recovery, the guilt remained deep inside her like a malignant tumour that could not be excised. Stranger still, she could never shake off the conviction, however absurd, that if anything happened to Elias later in life, it would be because of the accident, because of his head injury. That because of her, he might be more vulnerable to falls or car accidents. That was why she could not bear his lust for adventure – the skydiving, scuba diving, glacier trips – and did her best to curtail such activities. She often felt that he went out of his way to provoke her, yet she had never told him of her fear, of the guilt that gnawed away inside her. Did not dare put it into words. Perhaps she had bottled it up inside her until she needed it, like now.
‘Wait for me,’ Steve shouted and she realised that she had forged far ahead.
Work on the glacier was proceeding at full speed again. The snow had been cleared from one side of the Junkers but the other was still surrounded by deep drifts. Nevertheless, men were busy fixing slings around the front half of the plane. Ratoff was expecting two helicopters. As soon as the slings had been fixed around the fuselage, the bodies would be put back inside the cabin and the opening would be sealed off, enabling the helicopters to remove all the detritus in one go. Inevitably the use of the choppers would compromise the secrecy of the mission, but the men would spread tarpaulins over the wreckage in an attempt to disguise it. Not that Ratoff was worried about rumours: the more the better.
The head of communications gestured to the radar screen. A cluster of small green dots was crawling down the glass, their movement so slow as to be almost imperceptible.
‘The rescue team is on the move, sir.’
‘Get me the embassy,’ Ratoff ordered.
Ratoff watched the two dots approaching from the south, crawling slowly up the green radar screen in the communications tent. He saw the rescue team converging from the north, creeping down the screen. He was prepared and had sent soldiers to intercept them in an attempt to stop or at least delay them, but the two dots in the south were a mystery to him. He wondered if it could be that pain-in-the-ass of a girl from Reykjavik, the young man’s sister. His mouth twisted in a smile: she had certainly made fools of Bateman and Ripley, even put one of them in hospital.
A reception committee was on its way to meet them at the edge of the glacier. Incidentally, he noted from the screen that the troops he had sent in the opposite direction to meet the rescue team had come to a halt.
Chapter 29
VATNAJOKULL GLACIER,
SATURDAY 30 JANUARY, 2315 GMT
Julius watched the soldiers approaching, the powerful headlamps of their snowmobiles lighting up the darkness. There were about twenty of them, clad in helmets and goggles which completely obscured their faces, with rifles slung over their backs. Within a minute they had halted in unison and stood waiting for the rescue team, as if they had drawn an invisible line that they had every intention of defending. Julius’s team consisted of some seventy men and women, travelling on skis, snowmobiles and two tracked vehicles. As they neared the soldiers, Julius signalled to them to slow down, and they eventually came to a standstill about ten metres from the waiting troops. It was an improbable meeting in the dark, snowy wasteland: the troops armed with automatics and revolvers, clad in Arctic camouflage, the winter uniform of soldiers who wished to pass unseen, and facing them, the unarmed Icelandic rescue team whose luminous orange jackets recalled, in contrast, the necessity of visibility in their work.
Julius, who was travelling in one of the tracked vehicles, told his team to stay put while he talked to the soldiers. He stepped out of his vehicle and walked towards the waiting men, noticing as he did that one of them dismounted from his snowmobile and came forward to meet him. The other soldiers rapidly followed suit. They met halfway, standing not quite toe-to-toe. The officer pulled the scarf down to uncover his mouth but even so Julius found it hard to make out his face behind the goggles. He looked young, though, much younger than Julius himself.
‘You have entered a US military prohibited zone,’ the officer announced in American-accented English. ‘I have orders to prevent you from proceeding any further.’
‘What do you mean a US military prohibited zone?’ Julius responded. ‘We’ve heard nothing about any prohibited zone.’
‘I am not at liberty to reveal any further details. The zone won’t be in force for long but whilst it is we insist that it is respected. It would be simplest for everyone if you cooperated with these instructions.’
Anger welled up inside Julius. He had seen the broken bodies of his team members lying at the bottom of a crevasse, one dead, the other unlikely to live, and was convinced that the men in white camouflage were behind the apparent accident. And now, to cap it all, these foreign soldiers were trying to deny him free movement in his own country.
‘Cooperate! You’re a fine one to talk about being cooperative. What are you up to here? Why did you have to kill one of my men? What’s this about a plane on the glacier? What’s all this fucking secrecy?’
‘I need to ask you to hand over all your communications equipment, mobile phones, walkie-talkies, and any emergency flares,’ the officer ordered, ignoring Julius’s question.
‘Our communications equipment? Are you insane? We’re responding to a distress signal from your so-called prohibited zone. There are Icelanders in danger…’
‘You are mistaken. There are no Icelanders in this area apart from yourselves,’ the officer interrupted. He remained calm and impassive, though his tone betrayed a hint of impatient arrogance. Julius took exception to his conceited manner; under any other circumstances, this was a man he would be only too happy to punch. He was not afraid of the other soldiers and their guns; the entire situation seemed farcical and unreal more than dangerous.
‘And what if we refuse? Will the American army shoot us?’
