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intelligence activities in every corner of the world.
    The defense secretary kept Carr waiting outside his office for fifteen minutes – deliberately, Carr was certain – before calling him inside. Relations between the two had been less than cordial during the six years the secretary had held office and Carr was now aware of an even greater chill from that quarter. They exchanged the briefest of handshakes. The secretary had learnt of Carr’s attempts to find compromising information on him – evidence of mistresses, a penchant for gambling or any other vice that could get him into trouble. Carr even went as far as to scrutinise his tax returns, bank accounts and credit card transactions. It was a precaution he took with every new defense secretary, and one which on occasion had proved useful when he needed leverage. But his luck was out this time: as far as he could establish, the secretary was as pure as the driven snow.
    He was one of the Democrats’ brightest stars, a youthful, reforming orator, with a wife and children and two pets; reminiscent of Carter in his prime. A forthright opponent of state secrecy, the secretary had made several speeches about the need for openness in relation to the operations of the secret service, which had acquired a new and more wide-ranging role after the end of the Cold War. What the secretary meant by ‘new’ and ‘wide-ranging’ was uncertain, but he was without doubt one of the most vocal advocates of cutting back expenditure on the secret services and of bringing their activities under scrutiny.
    Carr could not stand the secretary’s political posturing. It had pained him that he had failed to discover any disgrace in his past.
    ‘What’s this about a plane in Keflavík?’ the secretary started before they had even sat down. ‘What are you up to in Iceland? A C-17 costs $350,000 a day. Delta Force the same again. We cannot afford that kind of extravagance unless we’re talking about a serious emergency. And Ratoff’s a psychopath who in my opinion should not be on our payroll.’
    Carr offered no answer. Under normal operational procedures, the secretary was not supposed to be aware of the existence of men like Ratoff. He reached into his briefcase for a sheaf of satellite images of Vatnajökull and handed them to the secretary.
    ‘What have you got there?’ the secretary asked. ‘What are these?’
    ‘Satellite images, Mr Secretary, of the south-eastern section of an Icelandic glacier known as Vatnajökull; the biggest glacier in Europe; a huge sheet of ice in a permanent state of flux. The enlarged image shows what we believe to be an aircraft that crashed on the glacier in the closing stages of World War II.’
    ‘What kind of aircraft?’
    ‘German transport, Mr Secretary. Most likely a Junkers.’
    ‘And we’ve only just found it?’
    We , thought Carr to himself. Who’s we ? Christ, politicians. They were always putting themselves centre-stage. Especially Democrats, with their demands for open government, for having everything transparent and above board.
    He continued:
    ‘As I said, Mr Secretary, it crashed during the closing stages of the war. An expedition was mounted from our HQ in Reykjavík a few days later. It was the middle of winter and visibility on the glacier was close to zero. The wreckage was buried in snow and eventually swallowed up by the glacier but it seems to be returning it to us now, a whole lifetime later.’
    ‘Returning it? What are you talking about?’
    ‘It’s not unheard of. To reiterate, Vatnajökull is constantly on the move. It covers an area of 3,200 square miles, including several active volcanoes. It’s composed of a number of smaller glacial tongues and its ice mass changes according to climatic variation. Anything that vanishes into the ice can resurface decades later. Which is apparently the case with the German aircraft.’
    ‘But how do we know that a German plane crashed on the glacier if it was never