Operation Napoleon

by Arnaldur Indridason

  ‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?’ the general asked. With him was a thin young man who introduced himself as Smith and took up position at a carefully calculated distance behind the general.

  The detective cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard but there was a shooting incident in the city centre earlier today involving a vehicle registered to the Defense Force. An American citizen was injured and is now in hospital.’

  ‘I’ve been made aware of events, Inspector, and I find it shocking that those men should have set on him like that. Have you discovered any motive for this outrage? I hear it was a brawl between fishermen and our man got caught in the middle. Naturally we will be demanding a thorough investigation.’

  ‘Well, General, the fishermen claim that he not only started the brawl but that his companion, who also sounded like an American, entered the pub waving a gun and subsequently started firing in the street.’

  ‘That’s preposterous. Are you trying to pin this on our man?’

  ‘I am merely reporting how witnesses described the incident.’

  ‘But it’s ludicrous. I hear the fishermen were blind drunk. Do you mean to blame an American citizen for their barbaric behaviour?’

  ‘We’re keeping an open mind, sir. But reports indicate that the man’s companion pursued an Icelandic woman, firing shots at her. His vehicle is registered to the Defense Force. Can you enlighten us as to what might have been happening?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I cannot. I haven’t had any contact with the Defense Force about the matter yet. If it transpires that the man came to the aid of his companion in the pub by pulling out a gun, it would of course be reprehensible, but perhaps understandable in the circumstances.’

  ‘Ask him if he knows the identity of the man in hospital,’ the elder detective interrupted in Icelandic. He had until now been sitting quietly, surveying the room with an air of supreme indifference.

  The general listened to the question but did not reply.

  ‘What do you mean when you say “our man”?’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘You said “our man”, as if he came from the embassy.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Ask him if it’s normal practice for a three-star general to take over the embassy when the ambassador is on leave.’

  The younger officer put the question. The general smiled broadly, his strong teeth gleaming, and leant forwards.

  ‘I don’t think the way we run our embassy has any bearing on the matter.’

  ‘Ask him if he knows who Kristín is.’

  ‘No, I don’t know anything about her,’ the general answered.

  ‘Ask Jaws here if it’s possible that the gunman and his companion were at the pub on military business.’

  The younger detective hesitated, then repeated the question in English. Smith bent down to the general who smiled even more broadly.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve been watching too many Hollywood movies. We don’t shoot at Icelanders. We protect them and consider them friends of the United States. We also direct unprecedented sums of money their way by means of generous contracts. I’m afraid I can’t help you gentlemen any further. If you came here to offend a friendly nation, you did a good job of it. Good day.’

  He rose. Smith came round to the front of the desk and waited for the policemen to stand, which they did, belatedly. The elder detective with the hat looked Smith up and down, then turned to Wesson.

  ‘Smith and Wesson? Is that some kind of joke?’ he asked.

  Smith smiled thinly. ‘You’re the joke, buddy,’ he replied in fluent Icelandic.

  The two men’s eyes met.

  ‘Who are you really? What are you hiding?’

  ‘Gentlemen, you will have to excuse me. Smith will show you out. I have no further comment.’

  As the two detectives drove away from the embassy, the car-phone started ringing. The call came direct from the switchboard of the National Commissioner of Police. The man on the line introduced himself as a lawyer before launching into a tirade about his jeep being stolen.

  ‘I lent my jeep to my ex-girlfriend, the woman you’re looking for, and she hasn’t returned it,’ he announced.

  ‘Are you talking about Kristín, the woman wanted for questioning?’ the elder policeman asked.

  ‘Yes, her,’ the lawyer replied irritably. ‘Thank God one of you lot is a bit quicker on the uptake. I’ve been passed from one fool to another by your switchboard.’

  ‘What did she want with the jeep?’

  ‘I don’t see how that matters,’ the lawyer said indignantly. ‘I’m asking you to please just find my vehicle.’

  ‘Did she say where she was going?’

  ‘Well if I knew where she was going or where she was now, I wouldn’t be wasting my time reporting this.’

  ‘Is there a phone in the jeep, a car-phone perhaps?’ The detective’s patience was wearing thin.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Have you tried calling it, sir?’

  ‘Of course I’ve called the phone, officer. She’s either not picking up or has it switched off.’

  The lawyer gave them the number.

  ‘So are you going to find her then?’ he demanded.

  ‘Sir, the Reykjavík police force will not rest until your precious car is recovered,’ the detective said wearily and hung up. It was not long before the phone rang again. This time it was the chief inspector.

  ‘Have you been offending our friends at the American embassy?’ he asked angrily.

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ the policeman answered. He sounded genuinely astonished. News travels fast, he thought.

  ‘I’ve just had the justice minister on the line. He’s had a call from some chap who said you’d made fun of the appearance of the most senior official at the embassy. And mocked their names to boot. Is that right?’

  ‘We’re investigating a crime and they could have been more accommodating. We’ve got a body and a shooting on our hands. Do you really think this is the moment to worry about a man who could chew carrots through a barbed wire fence?’

  ‘Don’t give me that, Detective Inspector. I’m told you were rude and arrogant.’

  ‘He wasn’t even the ambassador, just some general who looks like a cod and is about as cooperative.’

  Knowing his officer of old and realising that it would be futile to pursue this, the chief inspector tried a new line of attack.

  ‘This Kristín you’re advertising as wanted for questioning, have you any idea where she is?’

  ‘Not a clue,’ the detective admitted, scratching his head.

  SOUTH-EAST ICELAND,

  SATURDAY 30 JANUARY, EVENING

  Kristín lifted the tattered German uniform jacket and ran her hands over the cloth, feeling buttons, pockets, lapels. The fabric was surprisingly soft to the touch; it was a peculiar thought that it had belonged to a German officer who had died in it up by the glacier. There were three medals pinned to the left breast. She handed the jacket to Steve who also examined it carefully.

  ‘I found him in a small gully not more than five kilometres above the farm to the east,’ Jón said slowly, his eyes shifting from one of them to the other. ‘I buried him on the spot, the little that was left of him. Put up a small cross. The way I saw it, he was one of them. You’re the only people I’ve told. There was nothing left of the poor sod but bones.’

  ‘How long ago did you say this was?’ Kristín asked.

  ‘About twenty years.’

  ‘Hang on, are you saying he’d been lying practically on your doorstep for more than thirty years?’

  ‘Hardly on my doorstep. No, he was quite some way from here, well hidden among the rocks.’

  ‘Why didn’t you report your discovery?’

  ‘It was nobody else’s business. This was ten years after the major recovery expedition and there’s hardly been any sign of the military round here since. It’s not for the likes of me to go contacting se
nior officers in the army. I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  ‘So why did you take the jacket? Why didn’t you bury it as well?’

  ‘I don’t really know. Maybe I wanted a souvenir. As I said, I’m very interested in the war and anything to do with it. It was Karl’s hobby too, before he died. I remember when the plane flew over; Karl and I used to speculate about it endlessly. It’s easy to climb on to the glacier from here; hardly more than a gentle slope for those who know it well, though you have to watch out for crevasses. We scoured the glacier time and again in search of the plane but we never found it. The glacier’s like that. It’s quick to swallow up anything that sinks into it.’

  ‘Then spits it out again a hundred years later,’ Kristín added.

  ‘Yes. Or longer. Or never.’

  While Kristín found it impossible to imagine what a German plane would have been doing this far north, Jón assured her that it was not unusual to see enemy aircraft flying over the south-eastern corner of the country during the war. They came from the airport at Stavanger in Norway, he explained, having been specially adapted to carry extra fuel; the return flight across the North Atlantic lasted more than eleven hours, during which time the temperature in the cockpit could drop to –30°C or lower. The planes were mostly Junkers Ju 88s. Generally these were reconnaissance missions but occasionally the Germans carried out air raids. He remembered a Heinkel He 111 fighter, for example, carrying out a machine gun attack on the British camp at the village of Selfoss in 1941, during which one man was killed. German aircraft were also spotted on rare occasions flying over Hornafjördur; they hugged the mountain range before disappearing from view behind Mount Eystrahorn. And a Focke-Wulf 200 once bombed the British tracking station just outside the village of Höfn. So Jón was not particularly surprised that a German plane should have crashed on the glacier. What did puzzle him was that it should have happened in the closing stages of the war when it could not have taken off from Norway, which was no longer occupied by then. It could only have come from Germany.

  Jón also told Kristín about an American military aircraft that crashed on the Eyjafjallajökull glacier during the war. There had been little information about the accident at the time due to the news blackout, but everyone had survived and made it safely back to civilisation.

  ‘When Miller first turned up here, Karl and I remembered the Eyjafjallajökull accident and were eager to do anything we could to help him. I suppose our sense of loyalty may have been a bit exaggerated but we gave him our word and we kept it. We kept our promise. That’s all there is to it.’

  Steve ran his hand over the German jacket again, examining the three medals on the breast. He did not recognise them or know what they would have been awarded for but they indicated that whoever owned the jacket must have been fairly senior in the German army. He wondered what the German officer had been doing up there on the glacier all those years ago.

  ‘There was a box half-buried in the ground beside the German,’ Jón said at last, as if as an afterthought. ‘I took that as well. It looked as if it had been handcuffed to him. He still had the cuff round his wrist. Must have lugged it down off the glacier.’

  ‘A box!’ Kristín exclaimed.

  ‘Yes, or something of the sort. It should be here as well.’

  Jón rummaged around in the chest again. Kristín and Steve looked round at the horses which were watching them with ears pricked.

  ‘I don’t really know whether to call it a box or a case,’ Jón said. ‘It’s made of metal. Here it is.’ He lifted up a scratched and dented metal box, the size of a small briefcase, with a handle and a lock that had clearly been tampered with. The metal had rusted clean through in places. Jón opened the box.

  ‘I found some papers inside. All ruined. Nothing else. I haven’t taken anything out.’ He passed the box to Kristín. She inspected it for any outer markings, then looked inside and saw the papers. They had been badly damaged by the weather, years of relentlessly alternating heat and cold, and fell apart when any attempt was made to separate out the sheets, but the odd word could still be made out on the most intact piece. The documents had been typewritten but the individual letters were now mostly blurred or illegible, though she could tell they were in German. In one place it was still possible to make out the words ‘Operation Napoleon’.

  ‘Have you any idea what this means?’ she asked Jón.

  ‘I don’t understand a word of German,’ he said. ‘But it must have been important if he was prepared to lug that case on his wrist all the way over the glacier in the middle of a storm.’

  ‘Thompson said something about a bomb on board the plane,’ Steve reminded Kristín.

  ‘What was that?’ Jón asked. He had been a farmer all his life and had never seen any reason to learn English or German or any other language, for that matter, apart from his native Icelandic.

  ‘We heard there was a Nazi bomb on board that the Americans were transporting to the States.’

  ‘A bomb?’

  ‘Yes. A hydrogen bomb that the Germans had been planning to drop on London at the end of the war. Or on Russia. Who knows?’

  ‘Wait a minute, didn’t you say you’d put a cross on the German’s grave?’ Kristín asked. ‘Is it still there?’

  ‘No, it isn’t, I’m afraid. I didn’t do a very good job. I don’t really know why I did it at all. It was just two pieces of wood nailed together. I haven’t been there for a long time but the cross fell down years ago. I . . .’

  Jón broke off.

  ‘What?’ Kristín prompted.

  ‘I don’t like to say. I’m rather ashamed of myself.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I marked the cross.’

  ‘Marked it?’

  ‘I carved a name on it.’

  ‘A name? You mean you knew the German’s name?’

  ‘Goodness me, no. It wasn’t a man’s name.’

  ‘Not a man’s name? What do you mean?’

  ‘I had an old dog that I was forced to put down at around that time, so I buried him with the German. I don’t know what came over me. Bloody disrespectful, I know. I rather regret it now, but I comfort myself with the thought that he probably didn’t deserve any better. Few of them did.’

  ‘So you marked the cross with the name of the dog?’

  ‘Yes, Ogre.’

  ‘Ogre?’

  Jón looked at his feet and smiled ruefully as he recalled his ill-tempered and mangy old companion. ‘He was a tiresome dog.’

  Kristín glanced at Steve who shrugged.

  ‘Could I use your phone?’ she asked Jón.

  He mumbled his assent. They went back out into the blizzard, Kristín carrying the metal box, Steve the uniform jacket, and followed Jón into the house, oblivious to the incessant ringing of the car-phone in the jeep.

  VATNAJÖKULL GLACIER,

  SATURDAY 30 JANUARY, EVENING

  We’re trapped inside the plane. I can’t hear the wind any longer and it’s not as cold as before. We have two kerosene lamps; I don’t know how long they’ll last. Don’t know how long we’ve been here. Don’t even know where ‘here’ is. Probably the Vatnajökull glacier. At times the fuselage groans as if it’s being wrenched apart. Our only hope is Count von Mantauffel, but it’s not much of a hope. We’ll probably never be found. He took the metal box with him, handcuffed to his wrist, as if he didn’t even have a key to it himself. And if he doesn’t, who does? Or maybe it contains something so important that he daren’t leave it behind. I’m sitting in the cockpit, keeping away from the Germans. There are two of them still alive, talking their gibberish, scowling at me occasionally. Blaming me for everything.

  If we could force the door off its hinges we might be able to dig our way out. The windows are too small to squeeze through. We didn’t realise we’d be trapped. Crazy weather the whole time. We haven’t started thinking rationally yet. It’s horrible having the corpses in here, all battered from the landing. I didn’t see the glacier
until we crashed into it. God! I couldn’t see a thing. I thought I was off the south coast. One minute we were in the air, the next I was skimming the ice. The two men who were standing over me in the cockpit were hurled back into the cabin. Killed instantly. I’d asked them repeatedly to sit down.

  We’re trying to keep ourselves warm. We don’t talk much. Sometimes I hear them mention von Mantauffel. I haven’t told them but there’s a chance we were spotted. I was flying so low that I saw buildings below me through the blizzard. That’s when I knew we were done for. I tried to gain height but we were too near the glacier. There were two men standing by the house gazing up at the plane – they must have seen us. They’re bound to report it. They have to report it.

  Berlin was bombed flat like London. The airport had been destroyed, so we took off from outside the city. The delegation I’d arrived with stayed behind. Who was the Swede? An exceptionally courteous man. Seems they’re all counts there. I’m going to try to write down what happened in case you ever find us. It passes the time, too.

  After we parted in Copenhagen I went to meet the two intelligence officers you mentioned. They never told me their names. They were waiting for me in the park just like you said. They drove me out of the city in a military jeep, heading south to a town called Flensborg where two Germans met us, a lieutenant and a major, and the Swedish count, a member of the royal family apparently. From there we drove toward the front line. The roads were full of refugees and bomb craters – the battle of the Ardennes had been going on for several days at this point. We drove through Schleswig-Holstein where I was given a German uniform to change into. Next we passed through Hamburg where there was gasoline waiting, then on, following the course of the River Elbe, to Berlin, reaching it that evening. If anyone stopped us, all the Swedish count had to do was wave his papers and we’d be ushered through.