‘Let’s look for your brother,’ Kristín suggested, making a great effort to curb her temper. She would have liked to seize Miller and shake him; force him to tell her what he knew about the plane, the Germans, Napoleon. But she would have to handle him carefully, extract the story piece by precious piece. She was too close to the truth now to jeopardise it with more impatience; she swallowed a bitter taste at the thought of what that had cost her already. And yet time was so very short. Ratoff must be nearby, and other soldiers with him; she was trapped in an aeroplane somewhere over the Atlantic with no prospect of escape. The old man held the key to the riddle, tantalisingly, right here in front of her. She had to win his trust, give him more time. Though she placed little faith in his claim that he could protect her, he had about him the air of another outsider, of another person whose place in this scheme was suspect and perhaps unwanted, and this gave her some meagre hope.
Miller nodded, and they stooped down to inspect the body-bags. He found his brother in the last one. Kristín lowered the zip, revealing the face of a man who must have been in his twenties. She stepped aside for Miller, handing him the torch. He bowed over the body of his brother, scrutinising his face.
‘At last,’ Miller whispered.
Kristín studied the brothers, the man breathing beside her and the still, silent boy in the bag, and marvelled at how well the body had been preserved. The glacier had been gentle with it; not a scratch was visible. The face was utterly drained of colour, the taut skin like thin white paper. The young man had strong features: a high forehead, finely drawn brows and prominent cheekbones. His eyes were closed and his face, though she wished there were some other way of expressing it, looked at peace. It reminded Kristín of a book she had at home containing photographs of dead children. They looked like china dolls: immaculate, frozen, cold. This face too appeared cast from porcelain.
A tear fell, shattering on the hard shell of the cheek. She looked from one face to the other.
‘He’s only twenty-three,’ Miller said.
Chapter 39
C-17 TRANSPORT PLANE, ATLANTIC AIR SPACE,
SUNDAY 31 JANUARY, 0545 GMT
Kristín listened in silence. She no longer felt the cold; her mind was too preoccupied. Her side ached where Ratoff had stabbed her but it seemed he had not injured her seriously. The wound had bled quite heavily at first but it was a compact puncture, if deep, and gradually the bleeding had slowed until it stopped altogether.
Miller was lost in reminiscence. He and his brother had both joined up in December 1941 in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor but had no say where they were posted. Miller had been appointed to army intelligence HQ in Washington, while his brother was assigned to the air force and sent all over Europe, to Reykjavík among other places. During his time there he had flown over Iceland and Greenland, and later also flew missions from bases in Britain and Italy.
They had kept in touch as far as circumstances allowed. His brother saw more action than he ever did and Miller was dogged by worry about him. They met only twice during the war, once in London, and again in Paris, when Miller gave his brother his assignment. They would write, however, keeping up to date with each other’s movements, and looked forward to being reunited after the war.
The assignment required a pilot from the Allied forces, one familiar with the route, who could make the necessary contact with the Allied air traffic control centres. The mission was to fly to Iceland and then to cross the Atlantic. His brother by this stage could have flown it blindfolded so Miller had put forward his name as pilot. The war was in its final phase and he had believed that he had his brother’s best interests at heart; they would meet up in Reykjavík and fly on to South America, far from enemy planes and anti-aircraft defences, where they could enjoy a few days’ leave. It was a straightforward mission, a safe way of ticking off another precious parcel of time survived before the war ground to its inevitable end.
Miller was kept ignorant of where the idea had originated and who was behind its implementation. He did not even know which division of the army had formulated it. All personnel involved were given only partial information, with no more than a handful of senior officers aware of its ultimate purpose. Miller was merely following orders, conducting his part of the operation as efficiently as possible. He did not know the details, did not know the agenda of the Allied-German talks, or the identities of those who attended the meeting in Paris. All that was revealed later. At first the plan had been for the Germans to provide an Allied plane that they had in their possession, but this course was abandoned and they instead decided to paint a Junkers Ju 52 in Allied colours.
Miller had arrived in Iceland with two other intelligence agents two days before his brother was scheduled to fly the German delegation over from Berlin. The agents took rooms at Hotel Borg. Reykjavík was packed with US servicemen but they avoided company, kept a low profile and checked the facilities at the aerodrome the British had built within the city limits at Vatnsm¥yri. The plane would have a three-hour stopover in Reykjavík to take on provisions and refuel before continuing its journey west. For the next two days the weather forecast was fine; after that the outlook was less clear, but there was an inevitable degree of uncertainty at this time of year.
The meeting in Berlin had dragged on. Miller did not know why. They had been issued with a rigid schedule from which they were not to deviate under any circumstances, but it was no good. By the time his brother took off, a deep low-pressure weather system had formed to the south of Iceland and was moving steadily towards the north-east of the country and the barometer was plunging at an alarming rate. Snow and low visibility were now forecast. Air traffic control in Prestwick, Scotland, was the last to make contact with the plane four hours after it left Berlin. By then it was north of the Scottish coast but still within their airspace. After that, whether its radio had stopped working or not, no further news was received until the brothers turned up in the village of Höfn to report that they had seen a plane flying so low that it must have crashed on the glacier.
Miller was informed as soon as it became clear that contact with the plane had been lost; somehow he knew instantly that it had crashed. He sensed it. He waited in a hangar on the airfield, hoping in vain to hear from his brother. Days passed and the storm that had raged in the south-east of the country now passed over Reykjavík, trapping people indoors for days on end. It was Miller’s belief that the plane had either crashed into the sea or that his brother had turned back to Scotland when the conditions deteriorated and gone down there. He clung to the forlorn hope that his brother might have survived the crash-landing and would eventually turn up, staggering out of one wilderness or another to some outpost of civilisation. But it was not to be.
When news of a plane sighting in the vicinity of Vatnajökull reached the occupying force in Reykjavík, Miller was appointed leader of the rescue mission. He had spent the entire time since the plane lost contact wandering between Hotel Borg and the aerodrome on Vatnsmy¥ri, preoccupied with potential explanations and scenarios, unable to go anywhere or do anything. The intelligence officers were scheduled to leave Iceland shortly and return to Washington but Miller could not bear the prospect of never learning his brother’s fate. When the report came in from Höfn, he felt as if he had received a cold electric shock. He knew his brother was found. He might even be alive, though no one appreciated better than Miller how remote a possibility this was. At the very least he would be able to take his body home with him.
What he did not know were the particular difficulties of the wintry land he found himself in. It was impossible to fly in the storm that had now blown up and he was dismayed to discover that driving to Höfn along the south coast was made impossible by wide, unbridgeable rivers that flowed from the ice cap over vast glacial outwash plains to the sea. The northern route was the only alternative, despite its many challenges. Major General Cortlandt Parker, commander of the US occupying force in Iceland, provided him with two hundred of his best men, some of whom had taken part in exercises on the Eiríksjökull glacier earlier that winter. Few had experience in searching in snow, however. They followed rough winter tracks around the country, at times digging the convoy of vehicles out of snowdrifts as high as a man’s head. The days wasted on the northern route were hard to endure for Miller.