Black Ice (15 page)

Then  I thought  of the ID  tag which  marines have on their shirts,  inside and just  below the collar  where  they  have  their name,  rank and  number. Someone  else had  thought of it too. Name   rank   and   number  had   been  snipped  off.  All  that remained was the assurance that  this shirt  met USMC specifications. It was  when  I  was  trying  to fold  the  shirt  as neatly as I’d found it that  I felt the photograph in the pocket.  I say photograph, but it was only one of those instant snaps, so the focusing wasn't  too good and  there  was a lot of glare from the snow.

Even so, it couldn't have been anyone  but Solrun. She was standing on  a  wooden  verandah outside what  looked  like a sumarhus- the country cabins  the Icelanders race to for their summer weekends. You could see the snow in the background and Solrun  was wrapped in hood and gloves. So was the baby she was holding  up for the camera.

If that's what  it  was. It was  baby-shaped. It  wore  baby clothes. But that was all you could see. It looked like one of the in-arms models- much the same as the one I'd seen here earlier -rather than  the running-around ones. That was about as far as my infant  recognition  took me.

I wasn't expecting to find that.  I wasn't expecting  the knock on the door  either.

The  first  knock was  hesitant. The  second  was more forceful. The  third  rattled  the door on its hinges, and there were raised voices behind  it too.

By then I'd shoved the photo back in the shirt and put it back on the pile. As I raced through  to the bathroom I was taking off my jacket and  tie, and  I prayed  that the shaky-looking shower fitting worked as I stuck my head under and turned it on. It did. Then all I needed was a towel- I found one that had apparently been  used for mucking  out  elephants- before I answered  the door.

What  I  saw  was  the  man  in  the  leather   jerkin   I'd   encountered earlier, and a watery-eyed woman he'd pulled in as a witness. What  they saw was a half-dressed  man who was in the middle  of washing  his hair.

'Ja?'  I asked,  giving my head another scrub.

The man, who'd  been poised for action but had now dropped

back  a step  in puzzlement, aimed  some  hesitant  Icelandic at me. I retaliated with a minute and a half of rapid German  along the lines of my being Palli's  best friend from Hamburg. I mentioned Palli 's name four times just  to make sure.

'Ah,  Palli?'  he said,  eventually.

'Ja,' I said,  congratulating him as though  he'd just won the pools. 'Friend,' I said in English,  tapping myself on the chest.

'Friend,' the  woman  said,  treating me to a brown-toothed smile. Still trying to smile at me, she shot a volley out of the side of her mouth  at her husband. What it said, at a guess, was what the hell was he playing at, dragging her out of her flat with a lot of  nutty   talk  about   burglars and   then  disturbing innocent tourists in the middle of their  toilet preparations. After all, whoever  heard  of a burglar hanging  about  to wash his hair?

'Guten morgen,' she said to me, in a moment of inspiration. She led him off by the arm  and  the moment  their door closed she was at him like an angry  monkey.

Five  minutes   later   I  left.  It may  not  have  been  a  very profitable  morning,  but  at  least  I'd  got  my  hair  washed.  I wanted  to look my best for the US Navy top brass, didn't I?

26

Forget  East  meets West. Forget about  those places like Berlin and Korea where they've scratched a line in the dust across the road  so  they  can  stand  eyeball  to eyeball.  These  are  quaint rituals, as formalised  and  lifeless as the quadrille.

Instead, turn  the globe on its side. Up  on top of the world, that's the place. Without walls or barbed  wire, without  salutes or ceremony, no check-points, no stiff courtesies, no furtive soldiers' button-swapping, the two sides are already  engaged. Battle is joined. Warfare has commenced. Only so far this is an exhibition fight: like karate  killers demonstrating their  skills, they stop always a fraction  short  of death.

Between Canada and Scotland there is a 1600-mile stretch of water  that  has  been called  the most strategic highway  in the world. From their naval  base at Kola, the Russian  submarines slip unseen down this highway and out into the Atlantic. There, if  they  felt  like  it,  they  could  s and   between  America  and Europe, or  simply  sit  on  America's front  doorstep slotting rockets in at short  range.

Anyone who enjoys a symbol  might like to think about this: the name  which  the Russians  give to the  base from which  all this wickedness is unleashed, in America- phonetically at any rate- is the name of a fizzy drink.  Kola. Cola. The sinister, the frivolous.

It's    not   quite  so  charmingly simple,    of   course.    The Americans don’t just sit around with their Cokes. Slap-bang in the middle of this route south is Iceland. As long ago as 1920, a man who later earned  something of a reputation as a tactician was talking  about  the strategic importance of the country; his name  was Lenin.  Early  in World  War  II, the  Brits  and  the Americans grabbed it before Hitler could, and after the war the Americans left, then moved  back in.

The Russian submarines-some twice the size of jumbo jets- may be unseen  but they are not undetected. Like cuddly  black nosed  pandas, Orion P-3C's  and AWACS with the giant mushrooms on their  backs, trudge backwards and forwards, to and  fro, over the cold sea. Beneath  it electronic eavesdroppers called sonar buoys pass back details of all the passing traffic. So finely, so accurately can  they do this, that  the Americans can recognise individual vessels. 'I see old Igor still hasn't  got that bearing fixed,'  they  say. They  sit there  counting the ships  as easily  as little  boys collecting train  numbers.

It is a game  of blind  man's bluff. Both are  blind.  Both, we hope,  are  bluffing.

That would  be an  acceptable way of preserving the status quo  if it  wasn't for one  thing- the chance  Russians  have of changing it. They  can't invade,  of course.  This  isn't  Afghanistan: it is a part  of Europe. They  can't  nurture revolution: it's one  of the  few countries in  the world  that  is prosperous and classless.

No, they have one chance. And that is to make the Americans so hated  that  they have to pack up and go home.

27

'That's what  I'd do,' said Andy Dempsie, sawing off a chunk of steak  no bigger than a standard house brick. He held it in midair as he finished  his statement. 'Make 'em hate us. That's what I'd  do if l was sitting  down  in Gardastraeti. You bet.'

The  steak  brick vanished.

He  wasn't in  Gardastraeti where  the  Russians  had  their embassy. He  was facing  me across a bare-topped table in the Navy  Exchange snack  bar on the NATO base at Keflavik. It was one of those places you couldn't hope to describe without a hatful  of hyphens - it was a no-frills, fast-food,  stand-in-line, serve-yourself place. All the phrases that in Britain guaranteed you a hamburger you could  heel your  shoes  with,  but  here it meant a pizza as deep as his steak and just as delicious. And the Milwaukee  beer was sweeping  up the remains  of the hangover from my long night  with Palli.

'So,' he went on, 'when you phoned so early this morning- a London  newspaperman, would  you  believe - and  said  you wanted  to talk about one of our guys, I thought, here we go, it's happened. What's he done,  this Murphy? Murdered a coupla dozen Iceland  kids and every damn one of them as cute as hell? It's got to happen. One of these days. But it's not like that,  you say?'

I told him again  that  it wasn't  like that.  I'd  told him before when I arrived  at the Public Affairs office, and  he'd  left one of his clerks to pull out the records on Oscar Murphy while we ate. It wasn't  hard  to see why he was their  Public  Affairs man. With  his wide-open  face and  non-stop chatter,  plus  a  hair trigger laugh,  he was one of those blessed men who made  you smile the minute you saw him. I've met a few with that gift, but not many. It's the sort of talent that opens doors and minds and mouths  and  if I could choose any talent,  that's the one I'd  go for.

He was a big-framed  man and, although time and good times had added another chin and stomach, he still looked fit. He was wearing loose, colourful  golf-course clothes.

'Another beer? Sure you want another beer. Now, where was I .. .' He'd  kept up three  lines of conversation since  we met, and still managed  to keep eating. 'Oh yeah, the doc. So I says to him, sure  I smoke, forty-a-day, sometimes fifty. Do you drink? he asks, and I says, you bet I do, a few beers, a jugful of martinis before  dinner,  wine,  a  few  big  brandies  later.   I  thought, dam mitt, I'm not going to lie to these medics, they rule our lives. He writes it all down then he looks up and says, "Mr Dempsie, you're  in great shape. Whatever you're doing don't stop." Not bad,  huh?'

Rich  laughter  rolled from  him  at  the  thought  of how  he'd cheated  the medical  profession.  He finished  off the steak,  and speared  the last dozen  chips before pushing  the plate  away.

As he sat back, rocking the chair  up on its rear legs, he lit a menthol cigarette and said: 'Nothing personal, Sam, but I truly am sorry  to see you here.'

'Me?  Why?'

'Because you're the guys who win and lose wars. Most of the time you win 'em for someone  else and  lose 'em for us.'

'But  you're the country that invented  advertising and public relations.'

'I know. And we keep getting whipped  at it. Stay there.'  He got up and came back a minute later with two more beers. 'One of the  political  boys was up from Washington doing a report and  he said,' Dempsie  puffed out  his chest  and  lowered  his voice,  ' "The greatest threat  to the American  presence  in the North  Atlantic is the interface between the American  male and the Icelandic female." That's what  he said  and  it's  true.  But you wouldn't believe what  we do to stay out of trouble.'

He recited it. They vetted servicemen to make sure they were suitable. They  brought as many  married couples  as possible. Single men only stayed  a year. They gave them everything they could  to  keep  them  on  base:  food at  a quarter of Reykjavík  prices, shops,  clubs, sport, country lodges for fishing and skiing and  night-classes in everything short  of nuclear  physics.

They  were so low-profile,  he said,  they were almost  under ground. No men were permitted off base in uniform. Even out of uniform  they  had  to be back on  base  before the Reykjavik night-life   had  begun  to  move.  They  even  piped  their  three television channels around the camp so that it wouldn't get into the Iceland  homes and  corrupt them.

'You  ever seen a US serviceman walking around in uniform in this country?'

I thought about that. 'I've not seen a US serviceman at all, as far as I know.'

He slapped the table with his non-smoking hand. 'There you are.  Five thousand here,  including dependents, and  you wouldn’t even know it. We are so careful, Sam, I'm  telling you so very very careful.'

'You're winning, then.'

With a sigh and a shake of the head, he murmured: 'We don't stand a  chance.' He  waved  his  cigarette hand  at  a  man  in aviator glasses  who was feeding  the juke-box. 'That's the man who's  getting the computer to cough  up on Oscar Murphy.'

'Why don't  you stand  a chance?' I didn't  want that  to get lost.

He assumed an expression of candid philosophical despair.

'Have you seen these Icelandic women?' He ground  his cigarette out in an ashtray. 'And we have to persuade our fellers to stay in and study basic home economics? That's the interface he meant. Oh boy. Now you're going to tell me that Murphy's mixed up in some girl trouble?'

'Well .. .'

That was enough. He came bolt upright and rested his arms on the table and stared at me, waiting for the rest. I couldn't have lied to him. He seemed to have half-guessed anyway.

'Not  necessarily trouble, but I'm  writing a piece about  an Icelandic girl and he's been ...'

I pulled an apologetic face. He nodded and chewed his top lip.

'To be absolutely honest,' I added,  'I don't  think he's here any more. But I thought you might have something on your records. Now I suppose I don't get any help?'

He scrubbed that out of the air with his hand. 'We can help, we will. That's where we're so stupid. Free press, open society.

Christ! No wonder we don't  have any control.'  Somehow he dredged  that  big laugh  up from somewhere. 'Don't look so grim, Sam, we'll sort it out.'

He lit another  cigarette  and  the hospital smell of menthol drifted over.

'What  I was saying before, I have a lot of sympathy  for the Icelanders who don't  want us here. They'd  only just got their full independence from Denmark when we moved in during the war.'

I thought it was time I showed that I'd done some homework too. 'But  don't  all the  polls show that  two-thirds  want  you here?'

'They do, sure they do. Politically, rationally they know that. But I think that emotionally they'd like to be neutral. All those hundreds of years when they had the shit knocked out of them day after day  by good old Mother  Nature - I mean,  if you weren't suffocated in a ten-foot snow drift then you had your ass burned off by a volcano- no one was interested then. Now it's strategically important, and  they're pulling in the bucks too as it happens, and suddenly everyone wants to be their best friend. I can see they wouldn't like that.  I can see they'd  feel mightily inclined to tell us all to get the hell out. I'd feel like that  too. It wouldn't  take   too  much   to  turn   that   two-thirds one-third round.'

'What would  it take?'

'Like  I said,  we pick our guys very carefully and we look after them  too. But one day one of our fellers will sniff something or drink  something or just go off the wall like people do sometimes, in  the  best  ordered  societies,   and   he'll  run  round   burning Reykjavik  down  and  we'll  be in  big,  big  trouble.' He drank some beer from the can. 'I hope to God I'm  not on duty when it happens. Come  on  back to my office for some coffee.'