When he spotted the plane, half-protruding from the ice, his heart skipped a beat. He saw the men digging on either side of it, their tents and vehicles forming a semicircle around the wreck, and the glow of the blow-torches as they began the task of cutting the fuselage in half.
‘Are we recording this?’ Carr asked.
‘Sure,’ Phil said. ‘I guess we should be getting a glimpse of the cargo soon, sir?’ he added with a grin.
‘Yes, the cargo. Quite.’
Carr watched the men on the glacier for many minutes in silence. The image was grainy, the men no more than dots swarming over the surface of the ice, the plane indistinct. But the job appeared to be progressing well; Ratoff was on schedule, and the work was being carried out in an orderly fashion. The plane would soon be free of the ice.
Without warning, the rhythm of the movements on the screen changed and there was a commotion on the glacier: from thousands of miles away, Carr watched as men rushed over to the plane. Even from that great distance, it looked to Carr as if it had broken in half. The plane was open.
Ratoff hurried out of the communications tent when he heard the calls and ran down to the wreck. As he was forcing his way through the crowd that had gathered, distracted from their jobs, the front of the plane bent and the fuselage broke in half, collapsing under its own weight on to the ice with a deafening screech and crash, leaving the tail-end still half-submerged. Ratoff peered through the gaping hole into the cabin, then turning to the soldiers, ordered them to prepare the severed section for removal from the glacier. At the same time he issued orders that no one was to enter the plane without his express permission.
The men with the blow-torches moved aside with their equipment to give Ratoff room to climb inside the plane. Bending slightly, he stepped into the cabin, the first passenger aboard in over half a century, and as he did so the sounds outside were instantly muted; he was met by a heavy silence that had not been disturbed in all these years. The experience was like stepping back in time and it filled him with a sense of mingled excitement and anticipation. Four Delta Force officers stood guard outside; they knew their orders. Meanwhile the soldiers scattered again, returning to their tasks, and soon it was as if nothing had happened.
In the weak daylight that penetrated this section of the fuselage, he found two bodies, both middle-aged men, one dressed in the uniform of a German army officer, the other, to his astonishment, in the uniform of a two-star US general. An American! He bore insignia that Ratoff did not recognise and looked to be in his late fifties. A strong-looking aluminium briefcase with heavy locks was handcuffed to his left wrist.
That’s three bodies so far, Ratoff noted. They lay close together on the floor, side by side, as if carefully arranged. Where it was visible, their skin was bluish-white and he could see no sign of decay, the ice having preserved them as well as any morgue. Ratoff assumed these men had not survived the crash; those who did must have laid them here. One had a gaping wound to his head and must have died during the landing. The other appeared largely unscathed; his fatal injuries must have been internal. He looked better prepared for the cold, wrapped up in two overcoats and a fur hat, not that they had done him much good.
Ratoff turned and retraced his steps, re-emerging into the daylight. The tail section was still largely trapped in the ice and Ratoff needed a leg-up from one of the Delta officers to climb in through the opening. Inside it was dark, so he took out a torch, shining it towards the rear of the cabin where he made out three other bodies huddled together as if the men had been trying to share body heat during the final miserable hours of their lives. So the plane contained six corpses, counting the one found outside: according to Ratoff’s briefing, there should have been seven.
Once again, any exposed skin was a translucent bluish-white, taut and firm to the touch, and as before Ratoff found no signs of decomposition. He noted crudely made splints on the legs of a couple of the bodies and again was baffled to discover that one of them was dressed in an American uniform. He must be the pilot; the leather bomber jacket he wore was standard World War II issue for US fighter pilots. There was a small American flag sewn on to the sleeve and the man’s name was embroidered on a strip of black linen on his left breast. The name was American too; there was no mistaking it. He could not have been much more than twenty-five years old.
It was inexplicable. What was an American fighter pilot doing flying German officers and an American general across the Atlantic in a Nazi plane painted in US camouflage colours?
To reach the innermost part of the Junkers’ tail, Ratoff had to bend double. With the help of his torch it did not take him long to find two wooden boxes the size of beer crates, one of which he dragged towards the front of the plane where the light was better. The lid was nailed down but he found a severed piece of iron stanchion on the floor and, using it as a lever, was able to force the lid, the nails screeching as they were slowly torn from the wood. Soon the box opened fully to reveal rows of small white bags, each tied at one end. There must have been about twenty of them. Ratoff picked one up, discovering that it was made of soft velvet and felt heavy in his hand. Releasing the drawstring, he slid out an ice-cold gold bar with a swastika, the emblem of the Third Reich, stamped in the centre of it. Ratoff stared at the bar, weighing it in his hand with a smile, then cast his eyes around.
But only two crates, he thought. A tiny haul. So where was the rest? Ratoff had been anticipating far more than these two boxes; he had expected the plane to be packed with gold bars bearing the Nazi seal. He slid the bar back into its bag and replaced it in the crate, closing the lid and hammering the nails back in again.
Could they have moved it out of the plane? Moved the entire cargo and buried it in the ice somewhere nearby? Or somewhere further afield even? When Ratoff considered it, however, it dawned on him that the plane was hardly big enough to have carried all the gold he had been assured it contained: he had been expecting at least several tons. So if Jewish gold was not behind the organisation’s interest in monitoring this godforsaken, frozen desert for half a century, he reasoned, what on earth was? Two crates of gold would hardly trigger the Third World War. Two pathetic boxes. What other secrets did the plane harbour? What was this icy tomb carrying that caused his superiors to have a heart attack every time they thought it was re-emerging from the ice?
Ratoff’s eyes had by now adjusted to the gloom inside the wreckage, but although he searched high and low, he could find no more boxes. The only personal item he discovered belonging to any of the passengers was the briefcase. Carr had given him special orders to remove all documents from the plane, of whatever type. Frustrated by the absence of the treasure trove he had pictured in his mind’s eye, he attacked the briefcase with the scrap of metal that he had used on the crate, and with some difficulty succeeded in forcing the lock. Nothing but worthless files and papers. He would take a better look at them later. A search of the bodies also yielded an unremarkable cache of wallets and passports. The men in German uniform ranged in age from forty to sixty. One bore a rank that Ratoff thought might be that of a general. He wore several unfamiliar medals on his chest, and like the man who had been laid beside the plane, had an Iron Cross fixed at his throat between the points of his collar, the German army’s highest honour in the war.
On re-emerging despondently into the light, Ratoff noted that his men were already preparing to transport the front section of the plane down to the base. He gave orders for the corpses to be removed from the wreckage and taken to the tents to be placed in body-bags, then returned to the front section of the Junkers, heading straight for the cockpit, intent on piecing together a fuller picture. There were seats for a co-pilot and navigator but from the bodies of the other personnel on board, it appeared that the American had flown the plane single-handedly. Spotting the flight chart the pilot had made, he shoved it in his pocket, along with the log book and was just turning to leave the cabin when he caught sight of a small red exercise book protruding from under the co-pilot’s seat. He scooped it up and put that in his pocket as well.