Black Ice

by Colin Dunne

'Needs must,' he said.

  'I'd like to think you didn't make up the trio when these gents called on the old lady.'

  He did look genuinely appalled at that. 'Sam, my dear boy, however could you even begin to imagine that?'

  'Christopher Bell, then?'

  He pulled a don't-ask-me face and gave a deep sigh at the same time. 'Whatever are we doing mixed up in all this?'

  'I can only speak for myself, Ivan, and I'm not.'

  He shook his head rapidly, drawing in his breath at the same time a gesture of deep distaste. Then he opened his eyes wide.

  'I mean, it's nothing to do with us really, is it?'

  'Not to do with me, but then, I'm not a patriot.'

  He bit his bottom lip and jerked his head to the front. I was almost sorry then. He was a delicate little flower, our Ivan, and I suppose he'd hoped that I'd let him play innocent-victims with me. And I thought we'd got well past that stage.

  'One thing you can tell me - why me?'

  He turned back, his head on one side, and appeared genuinely surprised.

  'Why you, Sam? Well, because apparently a gentleman in

  Whitehall thought you would be a sound influence on the delicious Solrun. As a matter of interest, were you?'

  'I didn't join in. Is she going to defect? Is that it?'

  He raised his eyebrows. 'Dash for freedom you always call it when they come from East to West.'

  'It is rather a one-way traffic.' Outside, the houses had slipped away and we were heading out into the country. The driver spoke to the other man in the back and he studied the road behind, then answered him. Whatever he said, it meant there's no one behind.

  'That's why our chaps wanted you there,' Ivan went on. He was choosing his words with care. This was I van being official.

  'Whenever we give a press conference in Moscow of someone who's run Eastwards, our fellow diurnalists tend to mock and say it's staged. So we thought, since you were here already, that you might like to act as an independent witness.'

  I remembered what the others had said about my neutrality. At this moment, I wasn't sure I liked it any more.

  'I'm hardly likely to write it your way, am I?'

  He made a beautiful gesture of indifference with hands, shoulders and every facial muscle. 'You'll write it in your inimitable style, as always, dear boy, but I think you'll be obliged to admit it isn't fixed. That's all. But, as you'll see, we're doing it anyway.'

  So that was why he'd fed me titbits of information. Oscar's name. The young Russian. Whenever I came to a halt, good old Ivan was always there to point me in the right direction. And I'd followed the trail they'd left me like a faithful old hound, right up to this point. At least it wasn't a kill. So far.

  As Dempsie said, they'd become the world's best PR men.

  They even wanted me to endorse their product now.

  'How do you know for certain that Solrun will turn up?' Ivan turned again. 'I do wish you wouldn't talk to me as though I'm responsible for the whole thing.'

  'You're not?'

  His face sagged and, side-glancing at the driver, he mouthed: 'You know how I hate all this.'

  I still wanted an answer. 'I was under the impression she'd gone missing.'

  'Apparently, she had. She was in one of those summer-house things. Everyone was looking for her, including your tattooed friend and his exotic visitor. We were all ready for this press conference when I flew in, then she did a runner which led to any number of frayed nerves all round, as I dare say you noticed. However, she turned up.'

  'Last night?'

  'Yes, last night. Apparently she was hoping that an old chum would throw her a lifeline but he declined.'

  I was trying to work out who that could be when I saw the watchful look on his face, and suddenly I knew. He meant me. I wanted to ask him how he knew she'd been to see me, and what he meant by it, but he cut off my thoughts.

  'Don't worry, we know all about her late-night call. You rather muffed your chance there, I think. So she returned to Kolai, our handsome prince. No doubt someone will give him a biscuit.'

  'Wasn't he .. .' I didn't trust myself to ask him about my part. 'Wasn't there a time when he was supposed to be coming West?'

  It was a silly question and it showed all over his face.

  'Really? I should be most surprised if Kolai's superior

  officers encouraged too much of that line of thinking.' He even managed a small laugh.

  Piece by piece, it all began to slot together. Poor old Oscar gets pulled out by the Americans to avoid diplomatic embarrassment. Heartbreaker Nikolai is put in by the Russians to fill the gap. He offers to defect to demonstrate his sincerity, then asks her to do the same instead.

  Then, in case she's in any doubt, the Russians provoke Oscar into returning on a half-mad mission to find his daughter. Oscar was the ferret they'd put in to frighten her into the net. No wonder the Russians had the best ballet. The choreography was perfect.

  The only remaining puzzle was why Ivan thought Solrun had appealed to me for help. The rest of his information was uncannily good- that was a puzzle in itself- so how could he get that so wrong? Muffed my chance. That was what he'd said. I didn't understand. Why did he think that I might stop playing Switzerland, abandon my neutral status and try to drag her back? Surely he knew me better than that. Unless he knew something I didn't.

  'There's something else I have to tell you.' This time he didn't turn round. I found myself studying the back of his scrawny neck.

  'What's that?'

  'It's not .. .' I could see him plucking at his fingers. 'It's not something that makes me terribly proud actually. I'd like you to know that.'

  The driver was whistling through his teeth with some country music on the car radio. The one beside me was fingering his swollen lip. All I could see was Ivan's neck. My heart was bouncing against my ribs.

  'Tell me, then.'

  'Well, have a care before you speak out of place, Sam As a friend, I suggest you simply watch the proceedings. No more.'

  'Why?' One blank word.

  'For Sally's sake.'

  'Sally?'

  'They've arranged ... someone's holding her in London. If

  you do anything to make yourself unpopular ...'

  He was fast, I'll give him that. The gorilla next to me had my hands before they had Ivan's neck, but not by much. He slammed me back in the seat, smacked me once on the side of the jaw, then held me there. I didn't mind.

  Ivan was cowering forward to get out of my reach. He needn't have worried. The urge to kill him went as swiftly as it came. All I wanted now was to hear the explanation.

  'Don't worry, Sam. It'll be perfectly all right. It's all under control. They're holding her, that's all. And when this has gone off successfully, as it will, the word will go back and she'll be released. Not a hair of her head ...'

  My mind was spinning but I was beginning to grasp it. 'Just to make sure I don't foul things up for them tonight?'

  'Yes, that's all.' He was almost pleading. 'I mean you can imagine how I feel about this, can't you, old dear? You know how I love the wondrous Sally.'

  I thought of all the drinks and dinners we'd had and how I'd laughed at his limp jokes about cricket. Friends. Yes, we'd been good friends. No doubt about that. I heard the catch in his voice and saw his sad wet eyes.

  'You disgusting bastard, Ivan, you must've told them. That's the only way they could know what a good arm-twister that would be.'

  'I swear I didn't, Sam. On my life. Insurance, they said. It's only insurance. Do please remember that nothing at all will happen to her. She is perfectly safe.'

  I stared out of the window. I couldn't bear to see his face. The

  gorilla eased his grip on me. He knew it was over.

  'As a matter of interest, what made you give them that tasty morsel, Ivan? What did they say to tease that out of you? It must've been good.'

  'Oh, Sam,' his voice whined with self-pity. 'Moscow. Imagine it. Me in M
oscow. I'd die, dear boy, I'd simply die.' There were a lot of things I could've said to that, and none he'd have wanted to hear. But I didn't. Ahead, I'd just seen a foaming spout of water shoot up into the air. It was Strokkur.

  We were there.

  48

  Immediately, I knew why. If you wanted to shoot a film that was unmistakeably Iceland, that's where you'd do it.

  There's no other stretch of countryside quite like it. At the foot of a red-stained hump of a hill, water and steam sizzle and bubble in the holes in the earth's crust. The Great Geysir- the one that gave its name to the whole lot of them - sulks underground now, but the rest of the springs boil steadily away. Strokkur, the one I'd seen from the road, blasts up a thirty- or forty-foot column every few minutes. All around, over an area the size of a football field, steam hisses and spits through fissures in the rocks; mud holes like vast paint-pots, every colour from pale blue to burnt brown, bubble; in others, waters of pellucid clarity swirl, rising and sinking. Put in your finger and it'll skin it. And even the stiff wind that night couldn't shift the stink of sulphur.

  That's what they were all set to do: shoot a film.

  Three men - one with a shoulder camera, one with a hand mike, one with a clipboard- were testing angles around where Strokkur had erupted. Watching them, and chipping in occasionally with his own comments, was Christopher Bell. Ivan was standing deferentially a yard or so behind him.

  Down by the road, our Range Rover was parked near a Helix helicopter, one of those fat-bellied models that looks like a flying cow, which I van told me had ferried the camera crew in from the destroyer, Udaloy. Our driver and his mate had taken up their positions by the car, as relaxed as chauffeurs in the car park at Ascot.

  When it dawned upon me that no one cared where I went or what I did, I walked up the hillside where I could watch the film crew prepare for action. Even so, I kept my distance, perhaps thirty yards or so away from them. In some ways I'd have been happier as a prisoner. Being unrestrained made me feel as though I was in collusion with them. It was an odd feeling. Quickly I saw why they weren't worrying about me. What could I do? Run to Reykjavik? And at this time - the middle of the night- no one would be coming here. They were perfectly safe for hours yet.

  But when people watched the film on their front-room tellies, they'd see the jewelled light, the eggshell sky, the miniature mountains in the distance - all as innocent as a country wedding.

  'Ah, there you are.'

  Christopher turned away from the group by the water and came towards me. He was so little concerned about security that he hadn't bothered to see where I'd gone.

  He was wearing a cheap imitation sheepskin and he had to hold his hair down in the wind. At first I couldn't think what it was that was wrong about him, then I knew. Nothing was wrong. He still had the same merry look in his black eyes, and the same boyish quality of mischievous innocence. Despite what I'd learned, he was the same man.

  'Did you know this was what we were after?' Again, inexplicably, I expected him to have acquired a foreign accent. But he still spoke the same prep-school English, and with the same gushing enthusiasm.

  When I didn't answer, he looked into my staring eyes and nodded in understanding. 'Of course, Sally. Sorry, I should've realised.'

  'Where is she?'

  'Perfectly safe so long as this goes off okay. That's all you need to remember. She's my guarantee of your good behaviour, if you like.'

  'And if I don't behave?'

  He frowned and pushed his lips out as he looked around. 'All we need now is the bride and bridegroom. There they are, I do believe.' He pointed to a puff of dust making its way up the road.

  'And if l don't?'

  He shot me one of his clever sideways looks. 'Fair enough. Perhaps you should know. If not, then she's run over by a hit and-run driver. Killed. Tragically.'

  He could see the anger inside me but he didn't back away or show any apprehension at all.

  'So you see,' he said, with a quick smile. 'No nonsense, eh?' He jerked round again at the sound of men's voices. Strokkur had fired again. A tall column of boiling water stood in the air, then crashed down. On the windward side of the pool, not a drop had fallen. But two of the Russians had strayed towards the other side, and the shouting came as they scrambled back to safety.

  Christopher called over to them in Russian. To me, he explained: 'I told them to watch that equipment. I had a terrible job getting it issued.'

  I felt as though I didn't know what to say to him. All the stuff about cricket and stuffed puffins didn't apply now. Yet we were the same people. Absurdly, and to my own confusion, my reaction to him was still the same: to like him.

  He must have sensed this because he reached up and slung his hand over my shoulder. 'Don't worry about the little girl, she'll be fine.' He gave me a reassuring smile. 'It isn't personal, you know. It's a game. We played rather better than you this time, that's all.'

  I could hardly bring myself to ask the question. 'What about

  Solrun's mother? She was clean bowled, was she?'

  He gave one of those small impatient signs that you save for favourite children on their bad days. 'Really, Sam. What about the pensioners who die of hypothermia? What about the miners who die of pneumoconiosis? What about the Light Brigade? What about the Holocaust? People die of politics every day, I’m afraid. There's no halting that. All we can decently do is to make sure they don't die in vain. To make sure their deaths bring us a little closer to a better world. Hers will, you know.'

  I remembered her scalped skull. 'How?'

  He marked off a square in the air like film producers are supposed to. 'That's the scene. Solrun, symbol of Iceland's proud patriotism, stands there and tells what it is like to have your land occupied by a foreign power. She even holds a child she was given by a foreign soldier. What's worse, a black soldier. In that picture, Icelanders - certainly the older ones - will see their daughters being despoiled and their race which has until now been little more than a large family being tainted by unwanted outsiders. I'm not saying they're right. I'm saying that's what they will see on their screens. And Solrun has a story to tell. She will tell how desperately she regrets this, and how, once she decided to speak out against the crimes of the colonialist power who occupies her country, she was hounded. The man who made her pregnant, a homicidal American, was unleashed to hunt her down and kill her. Even her own mother was tortured and killed by the Americans. And what you must admit, Sam, as a man who knows something about publicity, is that it is very close to the truth.'

  The look on my face was all he needed to continue.

  'Oscar Murphy is homicidal- yes?'

  'By now he is, the poor devil.'

  'You and I know that we had to prime him a little to get him in that state but the fact remains that it's true.'

  'Are you seriously saying the Americans killed her mother? It was you. You and those two thugs down there.'

  He held out his hands in a gesture of open honesty. 'But it would never have happened if the Americans weren't here. You must admit it, Sam. And what the viewers will see is a happy ending. That's what they love, isn't it? I'm sure it'll make a great story for Grimm. The heroine swept off to safety by the handsome hero. To Russia. Mark my words. Ten years from now there won't be an American left on this island. And here, unless I'm much mistaken, are the happy couple.'

  I felt lost without confetti to throw.

  The black car pulled up on the road. Very correctly, the driver came round and opened the door. Solrun, baby in her arms, got out. Kirillina, immaculate in his naval officer's uniform, came round and took her arm and posed beside her.

  . Despite the strip of plaster across the corner of his left eye, and the other scrapes and bumps on his face, he was debonair, attentive, polished. You could almost hear how all the mums would catch their breath when they saw him on their screens.

  This time, I thought, it's Solrun who's in a dream. She

  looked beautiful, but she
couldn't really look otherwise. She certainly hadn't dressed up for the event as Kirillina obviously had. She was wearing one of her crinkly cotton things, turquoise trousers and jacket, which instantly became glamorous when she put them on.

  But she seemed isolated from all this weird scene. If she knew Kirillina was there, she gave no sign of it. She lifted her chin up another notch and, with short graceful steps, began to mount the gentle slope towards the hissing, smoking pools.

  At that point, ludicrously, the camera crew gave a small ragged cheer. That was another layer of irony. If they were technicians, of course, they probably did believe she was a gallant freedom-fighter who was escaping to Mother Russia.

  Christopher hurried down the hill to meet them by Strokkur.

  I didn't move. I watched. I saw him talking to them, and setting them with their backs against the geyser, and then shouting instructions to the camera crew. Solrun continued to stare ahead, even when Kirillina whispered in her ear.

  This was what it was all about. All the lies, all the blood. I walked down to listen to what she would say.

  'English version first,' Christopher was saying. 'This is the one for the whole world. I need hardly say that this is the one that matters. When you're ready, Solrun .. .'

  She didn't speak. Instead she tilted her head even higher.

  But still the tears ran down her smooth tight cheeks.

  'That's okay.' Christopher sounded pleased. 'Quite natural. Crying at having to leave her beloved country. We'll have some of that, I think. Ah, Sam, just the man. Give her some encouragement, will you?'

  'Encouragement?' He was so informally cheerful that I had

  to make a conscious effort to remember what he'd done- and, even now, what he was doing.

  He nodded towards her. 'Last-minute doubts. Not uncommon, I dare say. Tell her she's doing the right thing.'

  I've no idea what expression he saw on my face. Horror? Disgust? Whatever it was, he leaned over and said the one word: 'Sally.'

  When I turned towards her, Solrun saw me for the first time. Awkwardly, her arms tight around the child, she shook off Kirillina's grasp and ran forward to me. I put my arms out to hold her and the child. That was the least I could do.