Part 2 (1/2)

'h.e.l.lo,' said a voice that she immediately recognised as her brother's.

'Elias!'

'h.e.l.lo,' her brother repeated. 'Can you hear me?'

'Loud and clear...'

But the connection was lost and she hung up. She waited beside the phone for a while in case Elias rang straight back but nothing happened, so she went and shut the front door, took off her coat and hung it in the cupboard. She had just sat down at the kitchen table when the phone rang again.

'h.e.l.lo,' she said. 'Is that you, Elias?'

No answer.

'Are you on the glacier?'

No answer.

'Elias?'

Down the line she heard the faint sound of breathing and the suspicion flashed into her mind that it might be Runolfur. She stopped talking and listened intently.

'Who is this?' she asked eventually but there was no answer. 'Is that Runolfur?' she asked, adding after a moment's thought: 'Pervert!' and hung up.

She thought back over her meeting with the chairman and foreign minister's aide as she tucked into a sandwich and drank some orange juice. Later, she took a pile of doc.u.ments out of her briefcase and tried to concentrate on work. Feeling sleepy, however, she lay down on the sofa in the sitting room and thought about making coffee, until she realised that she had forgotten to buy any milk. She ought to drag herself out to the shop before it closed, but could not be bothered and tiredness overtook her.

Kristin did not know how long she had been asleep. She got up and put on her jacket and gloves. The local shop was only round the corner, she really ought to force herself out. Coffee was no good unless it was made with hot milk. She had just reached the door when the phone started ringing again, making her jump.

'What the h.e.l.l is going on?' she asked, picking up the receiver.

'Hi, it's Elias. Can you hear me?'

'Elias!' Kristin exclaimed. 'Where are you?'

'I've... trying to get hold of you... day. I'm on the glacier...'

The connection was poor; her brother's voice kept breaking up.

'Is everything all right?' she asked, still groggy from her nap. She had got up far too early that morning.

'Everything's grea... Two of us... taken off on snowmobiles. Per... weather. It's... dark.'

'What do you mean, two of you? Where are the others?'

'We're... bit of a test drive... fine.'

'This is hopeless. I can only hear the odd word. Will you please go back and join the rest of the team.'

'We're turning round... lax. The phone cost seven... thousand. Can't you hear me?'

'Your phone's useless!'

'Don't be like that. When... you coming... glacier trip with me?'

'You'll never get me to set foot on any b.l.o.o.d.y glacier.'

She heard her brother say something unintelligible then call out to his companion.

'Johann!' she heard him shout. 'Johann, what's that?' Kristin knew that Johann was a good friend of her brother's; it was he who had been responsible for getting him involved with the rescue team in the first place.

'What are all those lights?' she heard Elias shouting. 'Are they digging up the ice?'

'You should see this. There's something happening up here,' he told his sister, the pitch of his voice suddenly higher. She heard him turn away from the phone and shout something to his friend, then turn back.

'Johann thinks... in the ice,' he said.

This was followed by a long pause.

'They're coming!' Elias exclaimed suddenly, the words sounding in fits and starts over the poor connection. The excitement had vanished and he sounded panic-stricken, his breathing ragged.

'Who?' she asked in astonishment. 'Who's coming? What can you see?'

'Out of nowhere. We're... by snowmobiles. They're armed!'

'Who?'

'They look... soldiers...'

'Elias!'

'... a plane!'

But the connection was abruptly severed and however much she yelled down the phone, alarm now rising within her, all she could hear was the dialling tone. She set the receiver gently back into its cradle and stared blankly at the wall.

WAs.h.i.+NGTON DC,

FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, 1500 EST

During a long military career that had taken him all over the world, Vytautas Carr had only once visited Iceland. He was aware that the US air base at Keflavik had been established after World War II on a wind-blasted site amid the lava fields known as Midnesheidi, about an hour's drive south-west of the capital, Reykjavik. In its time, the base had been one of the most vital strategic links in the West's chain of defences; the island's location in the middle of the North Atlantic proved ideal for a military superpower at the height of the Cold War, offering a superb vantage point for monitoring the movements of Soviet submarines, s.h.i.+pping and air traffic in the Arctic region.

He knew too that the British had occupied the country at the beginning of the war, before handing over their defence role to the Americans in 1941. The US headquarters had initially been in Reykjavik with the original detachment of troops later reinforced by the 5th Infantry Division under the command of Major General Cortlandt Parker, who had fought in Tunisia until the surrender of the Axis forces in Africa. The American occupying force had peaked at some 38,000 troops.

The presence of the US army had been a source of political friction in the country ever since the end of the war. The signing of the defence treaty in 1949 triggered a riot outside the Icelandic parliament and the left-wing political parties had been bitter in their opposition to the base over the years, though to little effect.

Government policy had always decreed that the nation should derive no profit from the NATO presence on its sh.o.r.es, and accordingly the military had never paid directly for their facilities at Keflavik Airport. Nevertheless, tens of millions of dollars had been poured into the pockets of the civilian contractors and service companies that carried out work on behalf of the military or held important contacts in favourably inclined political parties. In addition, the economies of the neighbouring villages had come to depend on the presence of the Iceland Defense Force, which meant that the decision to scale down operations on Midnesheidi at the end of the Cold War was met by vociferous protests from the locals.

Carr rehea.r.s.ed this background as he made his way to his weekly meeting with the US Secretary of Defense. He would be called upon to explain why a C-17, on loan from the Air Transport Division in Charleston, was standing idle in Iceland indefinitely in the middle of winter. He would also have to account for the presence of Delta Force operators. Carr experienced a wave of nostalgia for the days when covert operations were covert. Nowadays a crowd of politically elected officials had to be kept apprised of every last detail of military intelligence activities in every corner of the world.