The Chill Factor

In high summer it never gets dark, which is not such a relief from winter gloom because you can get bored with looking at military buildings, unaffected by the influence of Le Corbusier, and hangars and lava. There is also a possibility of volcanic activity under the base. Many servicemen consider Keflavik to be the worst foreign posting after Vietnam.

Strenuous efforts are also made by the Military to foster goodwill between Americans and Icelanders. These efforts succeed to an extent but there is still some opposition to the ‘Army of Occupation’ which declined to depart after the war. The United States then argued that the war was not over until an actual peace treaty had been concluded with Germany; In 1946 a new agreement was drawn up permitting the Americans to stay at Keflavik. Opposition to this was fierce and partly responsible for a change in Government. Five years later the tenancy was extended under the auspices of NATO.

The hostility emanates mostly from Communists within the divided People’s Union which holds nine of the sixty seats in Parliament. It manifests itself in demonstrations which were recently concentrated against the Americans’ own television. They were asked to adjust the transmitter so that Icelanders’ artistic appreciation was not debased. Thus the islanders were deprived in one political move of Rawhide, Captain Kangaroo, The Flying Nun and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Demonstrators further emphasised their views on American entertainment by entering the base and pouring paint over the TV equipment.

I walked from the civilian air terminal to the entrance to the base. Past raw blocks housing Service families – each apartment a microcosm of Los Angeles or New York City or Seattle, with Chevrolet, Ford or Volkswagen parked outside on concrete or black volcanic ash.

The reception room was a small hothouse occupied by an American military policeman, scrubbed and stroppy and gingery, and an Icelandic policeman in black uniform playing patience. An invisible barrier preventing communication stood between them and on the wall hung a Pam-Am calendar displaying a coloured photograph of Novodevichy Monastery in Moscow.

I spoke to the American guard, as resentful as a dog with bitten ears. ‘I think I’m expected …’

He interrupted me with a jerk of his thumb towards the young Icelandic policeman, picked up the phone and embarked on a wearily obscene conversation with someone called Irwin.

‘My name’s Conran,’ I said. ‘I believe Commander Martz is expecting me.’

The military policeman stopped talking on the phone and accused me headily through his spectacles. Why hadn’t I told him who it was I wanted? He said: ‘I’ll call you back, Irwin.’ But by that time the Icelandic policeman had spoken to Charlie Martz and put an eight of hearts under a nine of clubs.

We drove to Martz’s Nissen hut offices in a Land Rover. British hut, British truck.

He called for coffee, offered cigarettes, put one foot on his desk, flashed a gold tooth somewhere at the back of his mouth, called me ‘an old son of a gun’ a couple of times, massaged the chopped stalks of his harvested hair and inquired with totally spurious concern about the flight, the weather in London and my health.

On his desk were several files, a photograph of his wife and kids and, unaccountably, a toilet roll. On the walls of the office, built austerely for war, were pictures of Charlie Martz with John Kennedy, Charlie Martz with various admirals, Charlie Martz with the boys. Charlie Martz ostensibly in the carefree days before they shore-based him and lumbered him with security and liaison – and British agents.

But he was a nice man, was Charlie. Fortyish, intensively off-duty in windcheater and concertina slacks, with a broad, frank face that was his greatest asset – I was never quite sure how devious he was behind his props. Or at what stage in the pictorial history of Charlie Martz boyishly displayed on the walls his training in counter-espionage, and perhaps espionage, had begun. Anyway he still looked as if there should have been a compass or a periscope instead of a desk in front of him.

Currently Charlie was trying to equate liaison with counterespionage. As liaison officer he spent much time trying to convince a phlegmatic world that great camaraderie was burgeoning between American and Icelander: as a counter-espionage expert he had called in a British agent to help him stamp out subversion. The equation didn’t equate and now he gave up.

‘Bill, old buddy,’ he said, ‘it’s gotten worse.’

‘How much worse?’

‘Lots worse.’

‘You mean they’ve painted your TV cameras again?’

‘Nothing like that.’

The painting had occurred just after my last visit. I had been flown in by the United States Air Force for a briefing and returned to London to await developments without even seeing Reykjavik.

Martz walked to the window and stared in the direction of the herring-filled sea. Momentarily back at the helm. He said: ‘We calculate that there are now thirty-five Russians in Reykjavik. Thirty-five, Bill, for a population of 200,000.’

‘You mean diplomats?’

‘Diplomats and their families and staff.’ He lit a cigarette with a gun-metal, wind-shielded lighter. ‘And as if that were not enough, Goddamnit, the news agency Novisti is starting operations here. At the moment the Soviets are occupying seven buildings in Reykjavik, not to mention some rooms let to them by the Poles.’

‘At least you know where they all are.’ So far the only difference to the situation on my previous visit three months earlier was numerical.

Martz sat down again and replaced his foot on the desk. ‘That’s just the Goddamn trouble, Billy boy, we don’t.’

‘But diplomats can’t take off and strike camp on Vatna Jökull.’

‘Diplomats can’t. Spies can.’ He paused. ‘You remember all the stories about the Germans landing agents here during the last war to start a Fifth Column?’

‘They weren’t just stories. The British found transmitters in caves in the north-east on the Langanes Peninsula. They also landed some Icelanders who had been living in Berlin. They thought they’d got them brainwashed, but they hadn’t – the agents went straight to the local police. We reckon the Soviets are trying something similar right now.’

‘To little old Iceland?’

‘Little old Iceland nothin’. The key to the North Atlantic more like. And as you know, Bill’ – he dropped the old buddy when things were getting really serious – ‘the Soviets think a long way ahead. They’re seeing another war five, ten, twenty years ahead. Or maybe next year. And they want to have a great big foot in Iceland if and when that war comes.’

‘What evidence have you that the Russians are landing agents?’

‘Nothing hard until the other day. A lot of indications though. As you know there’s been a lot of Soviet Naval activity around these shores. Not to mention the fishing fleets. They call it Red Square now up on the East Coast.’

Still nothing that we hadn’t covered on my previous visit. ‘So?’

‘Every now and again a Soviet trawler puts into a fiord claiming a breakdown or something. By the time our guys or the Icelanders get there the engine has been put right and more than likely a passenger is missing somewhere in Iceland. And there’s another funny thing …’ He waited to give the funny thing more effect.

‘What funny thing is that?’

‘According to the guys who reach the Soviet trawlers none of the crews ever smelt of fish.’

Silently we ruminated on the olfactory evidence. Rain machine-gunned the corrugated-iron roof. A 727 came in low from the sea looking for the glistening canal that was the runway.

Finally I said: ‘Perhaps they use deodorant.’

Charlie Martz said: ‘Perhaps.’ The way you humour a facetious child. Then he said: ‘There’s one anchored somewhere near Vopnafjorthur right now if you’d like to go and have a looksee.’

‘Okay. But surely you’ve got a little more to go on than Russian fishermen who don’t smell of fish.’

We eyed each other across the toilet roll. Allies playing poker. A common cause but different methods, different personalities, miserly with our secrets, lavish with suspicion.

‘There is a bit more,’ he said reluctantly.

‘This is killing you, isn’t it?’

The bonhomie had departed for a while, an unwanted guest. He eyed me with resignation because I wasn’t his sort of agent; maybe he didn’t even like me; maybe my dossier – perhaps it was in one of the files on the table – didn’t appeal to him. Something like: ‘First assignment since crack-up, fondness for drink and women increased since this breakdown, flippant in manner, invaluable to this project because of his knowledge of Iceland and Icelandic. Hobbies – ornithology.’ For Christ’s sake – a bird watcher!

I said: ‘Look, Charlie, if we’re going to do this job we’ve got to do it together. If you don’t want me to share your secrets why in God’s name did you send for me?’

‘You know why I asked for you. Not you in particular. But a limey.’

‘Because there are a lot of Icelanders around who wouldn’t take too kindly to an American nosing among their affairs?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Well, you got me and you’d better come clean or I might as well catch the next plane home.’

‘Okay,’ he said, reaching for straws of friendliness. ‘Five days ago a Russian agent was picked up at Egilsstathir. How’s that for openers?’

‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘Not bad at all.’

‘At least we think he was a Russian agent.’

‘Ah.’

‘But we can’t be sure.’

‘Why can’t you be sure?’

‘Because he’s dead,’ Martz said.

The difficult part was over now and Martz began to talk with something like his usual loquacity.

‘As you probably know,’ Martz said, ‘Egilsstathir is one of the few places in Iceland with any trees. Or the forest at Hallormsstathur rather. A local cop was out rambling or something when he came across signs of human habitation. The ashes of a fire, a gnawed bone, that sort of thing.’

‘Wasn’t there snow up there?’

‘Not in the Lagarfljot valley. Anyway the lawman got angry because it seems he reckons that part of the forest belongs to him. So he waited around. After about an hour this guy comes up carrying a sleeping bag and a radio transmitter. The cop came out of hiding and challenged him but he ran for it. The cop called on him to stop but he just kept on running. Then a shooting match started.’

‘You see, we nature-lovers can be quite tough when we feel like it.’

‘Yeah.’ He explored the stubble on his scalp with the tips of his fingers. ‘Yeah, I guess so. Anyway this cop must have been quite a marksman because he holed our spy right between the eyes with a pistol from seventy-five yards.’

‘That wasn’t very clever,’ I said.

‘I didn’t say it was very clever.’ Martz did a reconnaissance patrol of his study and sat down again.

‘Any identification papers?’

Martz nodded. ‘All Icelandic. Ingolfur Gislason. Forgeries – but good ones. Someone by that name was expected to rent a room in Egilsstathir the day after he was killed. The landlord still had the letter signed Gislason.’

‘Where was it posted?’

‘In Reykjavik.’

‘And the transmitter and sleeping bag?’

‘Swedish and Danish respectively. But that doesn’t mean a damn thing. You can buy both in Iceland.’

‘Then why the hell do you think he was Russian?’

‘There had been a Soviet trawler anchored off the coast the day before. About forty miles away. The crew of a C-130 reckoned they saw a man heading across the snow from the trawler in the direction of Egilsstathir.’

‘I thought you said there wasn’t any snow up there?’

‘There’s plenty of it outside the valley. The roads are still impassable up north.’

‘And that’s the only evidence you have that the dead man was a Russian?’

‘As I told you we’ve suspected for some time that they’ve been landing agents like the Germans did. This is the nearest we’ve got to proof. I reckon Mr Gislason spoke fluent Icelandic, had a prepared Icelandic background and contacts to back up his stories just like a British agent parachuted in to France in 1941 would have contacts in the Resistance.’

‘Do you have any ideas?’

‘Our Mr Sigurdson does.’

‘Who the devil is he?’

‘My opposite number in the Icelandic police. Liaison with the Americans and counter-subversion. The trouble is he gets a little confused as to who the enemy is. He wants the Russians out but he’s not crazy about having the Americans in.’

‘What are Mr Sigurdson’s ideas?’

‘He had two suspects. He was keeping them under surveillance. Waiting for an agent to contact them. He had nothing definite on them – just Icelandic intuition.’ Martz’s voice implied that this was a formidable quality. ‘They’re both Communists, both highly mobile. They’ve both had dealings with the Russians and the Czechs.’

‘What do you mean had two suspects?’ Martz issued his information in cliff-hangers.

‘He’s now got three.’

‘Ah.’

‘Sigurdson flew up to Egilsstathir immediately after the shooting. On a slip of paper among Gislason’s forged documents he found a name – Hafstein.’

Which was a relief in a country where the second names are so alike that phone numbers are listed under Christian names. ‘And who is Hafstein?’

‘It seems he’s a guy working in the national register – the Thjodskrain. It figures. That way the Soviets could plant forged birth certificates and other documents confirming their agents’ identities if they ever came under suspicion.’

In the adjoining office someone battered on Martz’s door and a voice bawled: ‘You in there, Charlie?’

The other Charlie Martz bawled back: ‘Sure am, Harry. What can I do for you?’

The door opened and a basketball player’s head about 6 ft 4 ins from the ground looked around. Appraised me, dismissed me and concentrated on Martz. ‘You working late or something?’

‘Something like that, Harry. This is Bill Conran, an old buddy of mine from London, England.’

Harry smiled at me because I was Martz’s buddy and swivelled back towards Martz. ‘Well, when you’ve finished get your fat ass out of that chair and buy me a beer. Bring Mr Conran along too.’

‘Not tonight, Harry, you old sonofabitch. You buy me one tomorrow, eh?’

Harry grimaced, shrugged, shut the door; we heard his retreating voice decrying Martz’s unsocial behaviour in fundamental terms.

Martz stretched in his swivel chair. ‘Great guy, Harry. We were on a destroyer together once.’ He finished stretching and became the wary raconteur again. ‘Anything else you want to know?’

‘I suppose I’d better make contact with Mr Sigurdson.’

‘He’s expecting you. He’s not the most forthcoming of guys because he reckons Icelandic security should be left to Icelanders. He has a point, I guess – if there were enough Icelanders to do the job. And if they had an Army …’

‘What’s he like apart from that?’

‘You’ll like him. A great drinker, a great joker – like most Icelanders. But cunning beneath it all.’

‘Not unlike Charlie Martz.’

‘That’s not kind,’ Martz said. The sun came out and discovered his gold tooth.

‘Was there nothing else at all to confirm that Gislason was a Russian?’

‘As a matter of fact there was. He had a steel tooth. You should know those teeth’ – Martz was telling me that he knew I’d worked in Moscow – ‘like a mouthful of bullets.’

I did know those teeth because it had once cost me £100 to go to Helsinki to avoid Russian dentistry. ‘How the hell did the Russians overlook that?’

Martz shrugged. ‘God knows. But there it was, at the back of his lower jaw.’

But it didn’t really surprise me. The KGB was both the most efficient and inefficient network in the world. Machiavellian intrigue hampered by strokes of wondrous incompetence.

Martz stood up and replaced the mask that faced the world. ‘Come on, Billy boy, let’s go take a look at that spy ship.’

In Iceland the weather can change by the minute. Now the sky was ice-blue and clear of cloud. We walked across the tarmac to the waiting C-130.

Beneath me Iceland. Twice in one day. It was 10 p.m. and the heavens were as blue-bright as if it were 10 a.m. Behind us the playing cards of Reykjavik, below the black and khaki moss, ahead the mountains finding the snow as they grew taller.

Then I saw Hekla – and heard her above the drilling of the Hercules’ engines. An umbrella of smoke and a turbulence of clouds: and beneath all this the red mouths spewing lava into the sky. It was difficult to see the craters in detail because of the smoke, but from the aircraft the earth’s crust looked very frail.

Martz had similar feelings. ‘Makes you feel pretty puny, doesn’t it?’ he shouted.

‘It makes what we’re doing seem even more puny,’ I shouted back. ‘Can’t we get any nearer? Get under that smoke?’

‘Are you crazy?’

We left Hekla behind and took up the northern boundaries of Vatna Jökull, the largest glacier in Europe. In 1783 the Laki fissure had erupted west of this glacier poisoning sheep, horses and cattle and killing twenty per cent of Iceland’s population through famine. The peaks and caverns of the Ice Age, discarded by time, accepted a bluish glow from the sky. Then we were over its last white fingers, groping as ponderously as evolution itself.

The Hercules dipped towards the coast and we sat back in the old leather seats. The aircraft banked and we looked down at a fiord, the water motionless inside its mountain barricades. In the middle, just getting up steam, was the Russian trawler looking as innocent as a pleasure boat on Lake Lucerne, a red flag flying pertly from her mast.

Martz made an extravagant gesture towards her; the gesture could have been triumphant in the face of my scepticism, or defeatist because they were getting away.

We went as low as the mountains would allow and the little men on the deck waved at us.

‘Will she get intercepted?’ I yelled at Martz.

‘She might’ His voice implied that the interception would be pretty futile.

We did another circuit, then headed back across the primeval countryside. It was 11.25 p.m. and as we settled down over the capital the sun was just going down, ready to bounce up again without letting dusk make night. The sea was bronze, wheeling with seagulls. And Reykjavik, which means Smoky Bay – so named because of the steam from the hot springs noticed by the Norse settlers in 874 – looked very innocent from the air with its churches and clean houses and small waves losing themselves on its shores.

‘So now I’d better find Sigurdson,’ I shouted at Martz on the tarmac, forgetting that there was no longer any need to raise my voice.

‘Don ‘t worry about that Billy boy – he’ll find you.’

The prospect pleased him because he clapped me on the back with one large hand.

‘Does he know all about me? My cover and everything?’

‘He sure does. And I hope you know your subject because Icelanders are very inquisitive. Very friendly, very inquisitive, very tough. They also like to tell you about their dreams. But then you know all that.’

‘I was only a kid,’ I said.

‘You’ll have to go up and take a look at Hekla, seeing as that’s supposed to be the reason you’re here.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And do some bird watching at the same time.’ Just to re-activate his doubts.

We stopped outside his Nissen hut. It wasn’t the most august building on the base. Perhaps he had been relegated to it when the mob of students subverted the barbed-wire fences and painted the TV cameras.

The weather did a quick-change and the rain returned.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Now the car and the gun and the little bugging devices they seem to think you’re so clever with.’

The car was a pale green Chevrolet, the gun a Smith & Wesson.

‘Anything more?’ he asked.

‘I wouldn’t say no to some ammunition.’

The old-buddy smile once again erased the doubts. ‘Jesus, I nearly forgot.’ He gave me a box of bullets. ‘Nothing intentional.’ He shook my hand. ‘Good luck, Billy boy. See you tomorrow. Be good.’

I released my hand and smiled because I liked Charlie Martz. ‘And you,’ I said.

I started the Chevrolet and headed across the lava field in the direction of Smoky Bay.

3

The Welcome

The initial greetings to a country affect your whole stay. They lodge in your brain and stay there until you leave. At least there was no doubt about the spirit of the greeting on the way to Reykjavik from Keflavik. And it nearly did lodge in my brain – permanently.

It happened somewhere near the hill called Stapi which is reputed to be haunted – Icelanders are much affected by wights and ghosts and the toughest put away their muscles when the Huldufolk are mentioned.

There was nothing ghostly about the bullet. The sea was on my left, the lava field stretching away to my right, more desolate than any desert. The rain bounced on the bonnet, the wipers moved like metronomes. Then, crack, the metronomes were wiping glass cracked into a million sugar cubes and there was a hole the size of a new potato just above my head.

I braked, skidded slightly, stopped and crouched on the floor. The bullet, which had ricocheted around inside the car, lay on the passenger seat, warm and bright and hardly scratched. I crawled to the passenger side, opened the door and lay on the ground.

Then I reached up, took the Smith & Wesson from the glove compartment and peered round the fender. There was a lava mound ahead, greeny-brown and cracking at the top, scaled with lichen and cushioned with moss round the base. I guessed that the sniper was behind it; but there wasn’t much I could do about it unless he showed himself; if I showed myself in the all-night light or tried to drive away then I was dead.

I glanced at my watch. Midnight, June 30th.

I took aim from behind the wheel and potted one of the cubes of pumice on top of the mound. Fairground stuff. I thought I detected a movement behind the mound but I couldn’t be sure. The rain bowled down the long empty road plastered my clothes to my body. It was going to be a question of whose patience became exhausted first.

Then a pair of headlights showed in the uncertain light about a mile down the road. There was a movement behind the lava mound and I potted another chunk of lava; the marksman must have seen the headlights and realised that the driver would stop. He was probably backing away into the bleak cover behind.

The headlights stopped, rain lancing their beams. It was a red Broncho truck. I stood up and prayed; nothing happened. I explained to the driver – an old seaman by the look of him – that a pebble had struck the windscreen. And before he noticed the bullet-hole I punched out the frosted glass.

Then I drove on to Reykjavik past lines of dried fish hanging out like laundry, past the new Swiss aluminium plant at Straumsvik. With the windscreen gone it was like driving underwater. The houses and apartment blocks of the capital looked very welcome and I congratulated Ingolfur Arnarson, the first settler, on his choice.

The house in Baragata, near the city centre, was white and old, surrounded by an uncertain lawn of new grass. The landlady was still up; so, it seemed, was half of Reykjavik. She welcomed me and in a series of shambling little sentences assured me that the weather had been fine until my arrival, described the eruption of Hekla and deplored the consumption of strong drink.

She showed me my ground-floor room, whisked me upstairs for the inevitable coffee, treated me to flurry of comment on young people’s morals – it was their parents’ fault – and then allowed me to return to my room because I must be tired.

When I opened the door there was a crate of ginger ale and soda water on the floor and two bottles on the table dividing the single beds. And a man sitting in the wickerwork chair.