C-17 transport plane

The C-17 transport plane is the vast, enclosed setting for the aircraft wreckage’s removal from Iceland and its secret passage across the Atlantic. Its cavernous hold first swallows the disassembled Junkers; during the flight, it becomes a cold, monitored space where Miller searches the wreck, Kristín emerges from concealment, and Ratoff is carried toward the open rear ramp.

Recovery and Transport

On Sunday 31 January, two helicopters took off ten minutes apart, and the second narrowed the gap as they approached Keflavík Airport. They flew directly to the C-17 at the end of runway seven. Each half of the German aircraft was lowered onto a special pallet and rolled into the transport plane; the wreck was its only cargo. Loading took no more than half an hour, a strikingly brief interval for transferring an old aircraft into a hold large enough to make its front section look tiny.

Ratoff hurried down the runway, knowing that Carr was waiting aboard. The Delta Force operators were not making the Atlantic crossing with them: they were to return to the base over the next fifteen hours with their equipment and vehicles, after which the C-17 would fly back to collect them. Ratoff followed the rear section up the ramp and paused inside the brightly lit hold, watching the loading among the smell of metal, oil, and high-octane fuel. The old aircraft, once a flying machine, was now cargo isolated in a military transport’s immense interior.

The C-17 took off at three in the morning and, after an hour heading west over the Atlantic, curved south. At 35,000 feet, it moved through perfect flying conditions, its engines filling the otherwise empty hold with a thunderous drone. The aircraft’s size and machinery made the wreck accessible as freight, but did not make it secure: cameras along the hold allowed the flight deck to monitor the cargo, and the plane’s heavy steel door separated that exposed space from the cabin.

The Hold as a Hidden Interior

About two hours into the flight, Miller passed through the heavy steel door between the flight cabin and the cargo hold, accepting the risk posed by the CCTV cameras that let the flight deck monitor the cargo. The hold’s floor was made of rows of thick, mechanised rollers, designed to move equipment and armaments; now they lay beneath the German wreck in a space several degrees below freezing, dimly lit by fluorescent strips. Miller loosened the tarpaulin over the section where he believed the fuselage was open. When the heavy sheeting would not come away, he hacked a hole in it and crawled inside with a powerful torch.

The C-17’s machinery had transported the wreck intact, but the hold offered Miller no clear account of what it contained. He found himself in the front half of the Junkers, moving through its unexpectedly narrow cabin beneath a low roof. At the cockpit he saw broken windows, cracked dials, switches, the joystick, and the levers once used to fly the plane. The wreck prompted him to picture again the young pilot’s final impact with the ice; after lingering briefly, he turned back. The transport plane had carried the aircraft across the Atlantic, but its cargo still enclosed the deaths and unanswered questions that had brought Miller aboard.

Kristín was hidden in a body bag among the wreckage. As the helicopter lifted the rear half of the plane from the ice and carried it west, she tried to force open the bag’s jammed zip, but managed only to shift it a few centimetres. She could breathe, yet remained in darkness, her fingers bleeding from the struggle. When the wreck was loaded onto a pallet at Keflavík Airport and rolled into the C-17’s hold, she felt the impact only faintly. The snowsuit she wore offered little protection from the cold seeping through the bag, and the engine’s roar and the hollow sensation of takeoff told her she was being carried farther than she had expected.

With the zip still stuck, Kristín feared she would freeze before anyone found her. A light appeared through the narrow opening, followed by the sound of someone struggling nearby. Hands fumbled with the fastening until it finally gave; Kristín shut her eyes and held her breath, then found Miller leaning over her, bewildered. The C-17’s cargo had concealed not only a wreck but a living passenger, turning the aircraft’s sealed hold into an accidental refuge and the means of her escape from the glacier.

The Rear Ramp and the Cabin

At 6:15 a.m., the C-17 began losing altitude, and the change in pressure made Kristín wonder whether the flight was already descending. Crawling through the Junkers fuselage to the hole Miller had cut in its tarpaulin, she saw the transport’s vast rear ramp slowly lowering against the moonlit sky. The cargo hold was not pressurised, but its opening brought a freezing wind and the roar of the engines; three unfamiliar men stood nearby, their words lost in the noise. Then a pallet emerged from the dark interior. Ratoff lay strapped to it, stripped to the waist, bloodied and cut, his arms spread and legs bound. As the pallet moved inexorably toward the open ramp, he strained against his bonds, but the engine noise drowned out his cries. The C-17’s cargo operation had become a passage not only for the wreck but for the violent conflict surrounding it.

By 6:30, Carr, Miller, and Kristín were seated in the cramped flight cabin. Kristín did not know what had happened to the other men or how many people were aboard; to her, the unnamed occupants belonged to a world of shadows. Someone handed her coffee, but she could not place her last meal or establish the day, week, month, or length of time she had been awake. She knew only that she was somewhere over the Atlantic and that Steve was dead. Carr told her that Miller was trying to persuade him she knew nothing about the German plane’s sensitive contents, making the C-17’s cabin a setting for the next dispute over what the recovered wreck concealed.

The Journey’s Human Cost

At 5:45 GMT, still aboard the C-17, Kristín listened in silence. The cold had receded from her awareness, displaced by the pain in her side where Ratoff had stabbed her. The wound had bled heavily at first, but proved to be a deep, compact puncture rather than a serious injury; by then, the bleeding had gradually stopped. The change in what occupied her attention marks a shift from the hold’s immediate physical threat to the injury and danger she carried out of it: the transport plane moved her away from the glacier without making its violence disappear.