Kristín travels to Borne Island in search of clues

Kristín’s journey to Borne Island turns a fragment of a secret wartime document into a destination she can pursue, and transforms years of fearful remembering into an uncertain search for evidence. She travels under conditions of deliberate invisibility, following a route from Iceland through Mexico and Argentina to a remote island. There, after finding no immediate confirmation of her suspicions among the ruins, she discovers a carved stone marked BLONDI and 1947. The expedition gives her neither a full explanation nor a resolution, but it makes the past materially present again.

The document and the decision

About six months after the traumatic events on the glacier, Kristín is sitting in her kitchen after supper when she remembers a scrap of paper from the pocket of her overalls. She had emptied the bloodstained clothing before throwing it away, leaving the objects she found in a kitchen drawer. The paper, a fragment of the document Jón took from the German officer’s body, bears the words OPERATION NAPOLEON. Under a bright light she tries to decipher the typewritten text, but can make out only isolated words and letters.

She copies what she can read and takes her notes to a friend at the foreign ministry, a former diplomat in Germany, asking him to translate the fragment into Icelandic and fill in the gaps as best he can. She does not tell him what the document concerns, where it came from, or what larger text it belonged to. The translated passage describes a possible landing on a remote island off the southernmost tip of Argentina, in an archipelago abandoned after earlier habitation because of its harsh climate and barren terrain. It identifies Borne as the final option, referring to two other proposed locations without naming them in the surviving fragment.

The translation gives Kristín a place-name, not an explanation. She tells no one of the discovery, not even Elías or Júlíus, and locks the paper away. Instead of settling the questions raised by the glacier, it draws her back into memories of the camp, the plane, Steve, and Miller’s account. In the aftermath, she continues to fear that Carr or his men may be watching her, though she has heard and seen nothing of them since speaking with Carr aboard the plane. She avoids actions that might connect her to the aircraft. The gap between what the document suggests and what it actually proves becomes part of the burden she carries.

From obsession to a plan

The thought of Borne does not disappear. Kristín tries to treat the affair as finished, but memories of the camp, the plane, the swastika, the bodies in the tent, Ratoff, and the secret knowledge she possesses recur so persistently that the island becomes a mild obsession. She returns to the question partly because of Steve. She relives his death in waking hours and dreams, and believes he died because of what they knew. If the matter simply ended with his death and her silence, she feels, he would have lost his life for nothing.

A merchant captain helps make the prospect of reaching Argentina seem possible. Kristín has handled his divorce, and a friendship has developed between them. He once told her that he had smuggled a young Icelandic woman and her two children out of Portugal to help them escape her husband. When Kristín considers her own journey, the example suggests a way to travel outside the ordinary systems of documentation and inspection. She rejects flying through Spain or Italy because she does not want to risk surveillance cameras, passenger lists, or passport control.

Her preparations are correspondingly cautious. She tries to use cash rather than credit or debit cards, avoids places with CCTV—including some camera-monitored streets in the city centre—and stops using the internet at home. She approaches the trip as though arranging a long holiday, but its practical logic is evasion. At the National Library she consults the British Royal Geographical Society’s website to establish that Borne exists, find its coordinates, and learn what little history is recorded there. She considers several routes to South America, but none seems to offer the same degree of invisibility as the plan she eventually adopts.

The passage to Borne

When the captain says he will sail to Mexico to deliver an Icelandic trawler to its new owner, Kristín asks him to let her stow away and slip ashore unseen. He initially refuses: he is used to carrying passengers who prefer merchant ships to flying, but wants no part in illegal activity, and she will not explain her purpose. Later, without her ever learning why he changed his mind, he agrees to help. He says she has asked a friend for a favour and he cannot deny her.

Kristín hesitates until almost the last moment. She finally reasons that she is approaching forty and may never make the journey if she does not go now. Elías is the only person she tells. She deliberately leaves Júlíus out of it, unwilling to involve him as she once involved Steve; she believes she can manage her brother, but that Júlíus is different. When the ship sails early in the morning, she watches land sink below the horizon. The voyage is uneventful, and at a small town on Mexico’s east coast she gets ashore without going through customs or immigration. After long conversations with the captain at sea, they part on good terms.

In Mexico, she buys a reliable car with cash and drives south as an ordinary tourist, staying in motels and visiting historical sites. She pauses to enjoy the scenery, food, and hospitality, and finds herself more relaxed than she has been for a long time. This stretch of apparent leisure contrasts with the care that has governed her preparations: she can enjoy being abroad again because she has made concealment the condition of the journey.

She reaches Buenos Aires in the evening, checks into a reasonably priced hotel, and marks a southbound route on a detailed road map. Confident that she has not been followed, she sells the car two days later and flies to Comodoro Rívadavía in Patagonia. From there she continues by bus, calculating that the journey south will take another three days. The route follows the coast for much of the way: she stays overnight at Caleta Olivia, passes the farming settlements of Fitzroy and Jaramillo, crosses the Rio Chico, and travels by ferry across the Magellan Straits to San Sebastián in Puerto Harberton, a town of about 15,000 people near the Chilean border.

The island and the inscription

In the evening Kristín finds a room in a small hotel. The next day she walks to the harbour and asks about Borne. A bearded, toothless sailor in his fifties, whose appearance reminds her pleasantly of an Icelandic fisherman, says little beyond gesturing toward the distance. They agree on a fee and arrange to sail the following morning. Kristín spends the intervening day walking around town, browsing the shops and market, and making an effort to mingle with other tourists.

The sea is calm when the fisherman collects her. She pays half the fare in advance, with the balance due when they return, and tries to ask about the island’s history. He dismisses the question, saying he knows nothing about Borne and that there is nothing to know. They travel for about five hours past rocks, islets, and archipelagos before he points to the island, which rises from the sea among smaller skerries. Kristín finds it reminiscent of the Icelandic island of Drangey, though lower and at least three times larger: a rugged, inhospitable rock with some vegetation, no bird life, and an enveloping silence. The fisherman circles it until he finds a place where she can climb ashore, then stays behind in the boat.

The climb proves easier than expected. A gravel path leads from the beach toward the cliffs, where an incline provides access to the plateau. In the middle of the island Kristín finds ruins: fallen wooden walls, a beaten-earth floor, a doorstep, and what looks like an old kitchen hearth. The remains confirm that the island was occupied in earlier centuries, as the translated document had indicated. She searches them carefully for evidence that might support her suspicions, but finds nothing. Surprisingly, the lack of a discovery does not disappoint her. At the island’s precipice she watches waves break against the cliffs, and for the first time in years feels a weight lift from her chest.

On her way back through the ruins, a short distance beyond them, Kristín trips over a rock buried in long grass. At first she is ready to continue to the waiting boat, but the stone’s shape catches her attention. It is thin, about half a metre long, square at the bottom and rounded at the top. She crouches, struggles to turn it over, and rubs the accumulated dirt from its surface. The crude inscription reads BLONDI, with the date 1947 beneath it. Earlier, Kristín had read that Hitler was quoted as naming his dog Blondi among the only two friends he expected to have in the end. The name on the stone therefore joins the island’s otherwise inconclusive remains to the wider mystery surrounding Operation Napoleon. It supplies a sharply specific trace, but not the explanation Kristín sought: her expedition ends with a new clue and the secret still unresolved.