Keflavík Airport and US Base

Keflavík Airport and US Base serves as the operation’s crucial point of transfer: the German aircraft is brought in from the glacier, loaded for a flight out of Iceland, and kept within a military-controlled space. The same site that enables the removal also becomes the place where the operation’s secrecy is exposed to public scrutiny, as members of the Icelandic rescue team are released outside its gates and report that American forces fired on them.

Operational setting and secrecy

During the recovery operation, the base is presented as the destination for the helicopters carrying the wreckage and as the staging point for the C-17 that will take it overseas. The aircraft’s removal is not treated as an ordinary shipment. Ratoff is told by a pilot that regulations require him to verify what the crew will transport. He reassures the pilot that the German aircraft, dating from the Second World War, is safe and says that no bomb has been found. The assurance is part of a wider effort to control what military personnel know: rumors about Nazis, an astronaut search, and a hydrogen bomb circulate on the base, while Ratoff denies that there is a bomb in the plane.

The explanation of the operation’s secrecy elsewhere in the story gives the concealed cargo political weight. Vytautas Carr tells a secretary that the Walchensee gold was moved out of Berlin near the end of the war, and reveals that most of it had been taken from concentration camps. The secretary recognizes the implication: the recovered aircraft is connected to plundered Jewish gold. The location’s role is therefore more than logistical. Keflavík Airport and US Base is where a secret operation directed at removing the wreck becomes a means of removing evidence whose contents could provoke public and political consequences.

Extraction and transfer

The airlift reaches Keflavík Airport on Sunday, 31 January. The helicopters take off ten minutes apart; the second makes better progress and narrows the distance between them. They fly directly to the C-17 at the end of runway seven. Each half of the German aircraft is lowered onto a special pallet, then rolled into the transport plane. There is no other cargo on the trip, and loading the old Junkers takes less than half an hour.

The wreck has been divided into front and rear sections for removal from the glacier. Both halves are lifted with their contents untouched, and their openings are sealed with heavy-duty plastic sheeting. The rear section contains the bodies from the wreck. Ratoff, the only passenger aboard the helicopter carrying the front section, watches the load being raised from the ice; at the airport, he hurries down the runway knowing that Vytautas Carr is waiting aboard the C-17. The aircraft’s physical passage—from an icy tomb to a pallet and into the transport plane—makes the airport the hinge between its concealment in the glacier and its intended removal from Iceland.

The C-17 is prepared for a long journey. The air force calls it the Keiko plane, after a killer whale that had recently been flown to Iceland from Newport, Oregon. To save time and reduce discomfort for its unusual passenger, the C-17 has refuelled in mid-air and is expected to do so again. Once the Junkers is loaded, it is to fly halfway around the world. The Delta Force operators are not on this outward flight; they are expected to return to the base over the next fifteen hours with their equipment and vehicles, after which the C-17 will make a return trip to collect them. The transfer is thus organized around the wreck itself, with the rest of the operation’s personnel and equipment following on a separate schedule.

The base perimeter and the rescue team

Keflavík’s boundary becomes important when the American forces release Júlíus. Vytautas Carr tells Kristín that Júlíus, leader of the rescue team on the glacier, is safe and will be set down outside the gates of the base, where he can support her account. Carr also says that Elías is alive and has been admitted to a Reykjavík hospital. The information changes what Kristín knows about the fate of her brother and her fellow rescuer, while linking their release to the military site from which the recovery operation is being run.

Júlíus later recounts what happened after the team was prevented from going to join Kristín. The Americans let him go outside the gates; he watched the convoy disappear back inside, then made his way into town and contacted the rescue team. He says American forces had shot at them. Newspapers carry the story under headlines reporting an attack on the rescue team and shots fired at the Reykjavík rescue team, accompanied by photographs of the team’s bullet-riddled vehicle. The base perimeter marks the point at which the team is expelled from military custody and the incident becomes available to the public.

Secrecy, authority, and consequences

The American authorities’ account conflicts with the rescue team’s report. Army spokesmen describe the presence of Dutch and Belgian NATO forces as part of conventional winter exercises conducted with the US Army, deny an intention to obstruct the Icelanders, and attribute the shooting to soldiers overreacting to a perceived threat. They promise an inquiry and compensation, but disclaim knowledge of Elías and Jóhann’s fate and deny knowing anything about Kristín. Júlíus’s account and the newspaper coverage make the base’s controlled boundary a site of competing narratives: the military can restrict access and issue its own version, but it cannot entirely prevent the rescue team from reaching the press.

That struggle over information echoes the emergency meeting between American and Icelandic officials. The American admiral insists that nothing said there leave the room; later, when the Icelandic prime minister threatens a formal protest, a public investigation, road closures between the glacier and the base, and a national address, a general invokes the danger of an old German bomb on the glacier and urges the government to recall the rescue team. In the end, Carr tells Kristín that misinformation about the mission is already being disseminated and predicts that few people will believe her, even though she will be free to speak to the authorities, press, family, and friends after American personnel and equipment have left. Keflavík Airport and US Base concentrates the operation’s competing purposes: transport and military control on one side, and the uncertain possibility of testimony and accountability on the other.