Kristín hides in a body bag to escape the glacier

Kristín hides in a body bag to escape the glacier after U.S. soldiers move to remove the German aircraft wreckage and its dead. The escape turns the military operation’s own method of clearing the scene into her means of survival: concealed among the corpses, she is carried off the ice with the wreck, then transported toward Keflavík Airport. The plan gets her away from the glacier, but leaves her sealed in darkness, cold and unable to control where she is taken, until Miller discovers her alive inside the aircraft.

The Body Bags and the Opportunity

The possibility of using a body bag emerges amid the wreck’s other buried dead. Ratoff’s men have uncovered bodies preserved in the ice, including a German officer whose face remains hidden beneath a cap frozen to it. When Ratoff later enters the broken fuselage, he finds more bodies, among them a two-star American general with a locked aluminium briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. The frozen passengers are not merely evidence of the crash: they become part of the military’s practical problem of removing the wreck and everything associated with it.

Kristín and Steve glimpse the corner of a grey body bag beneath a tarpaulin in the tent. As she draws the canvas aside with her foot, they see a dead middle-aged man wearing a peaked cap marked with an eagle and swastika. The sight confirms that the bags contain bodies, but it also shows Kristín what the soldiers are using to handle the dead. When the operation to remove the wreck gets under way, that knowledge gives her a narrow, dangerous possibility of escape.

Choosing Concealment

On the C-17 transport plane on Sunday, 31 January, Kristín is still struggling with the zipper after being left alone. Her thoughts return to the rifle butt striking Júlíus in the face and his body falling onto the ice. More soldiers enter the tent and carry her outside. She has been clinging to Steve, and Júlíus has to prise her away from him and lay his body on the snow. His blow to her face stops her howling; when she comes to herself, she frantically searches for a way out.

She sees empty body bags beside the wall where the corpses have been laid out. Júlíus does not understand at first what she is indicating, and tries to drag her out of the tent. Kristín points to herself and the bags, then shouts for him to help her into one. He refuses, but she tears away and opens a bag herself. Recognizing that the soldiers are about to arrive and that there is no time left, Júlíus helps her climb inside. He zips the bag shut, leaving a small opening, and lays it beside the other bodies just before the soldiers enter. The escape depends on his quick change from resistance to assistance, and on making Kristín look like one more corpse awaiting removal.

Carried off the Glacier

The bag is roomy and has handles at each corner. Four soldiers lift it easily. Kristín lies rigid on her back, trying not to move, and sees only a tiny ray of starlight through the gap Júlíus has left in the zipper. The bag is dumped onto the floor of the plane; the light disappears. She hears a helicopter directly overhead, then feels the wreckage jerk and swing as it is lifted from the ice and carried west.

Kristín tries to open the zipper but can force it down only a few centimetres before it jams. Though she has enough oxygen to breathe, the blackness is complete. She barely registers the rear half of the plane being set down on a transport pallet at Keflavík Airport, or the wreck being driven into the C-17’s freight hold. The change in sound and movement tells her that she is travelling by air, and the engine’s roar suggests a journey longer than she expected. Her thick snowsuit offers limited protection as the cold penetrates the bag. Her fingers become bloody from fighting the stuck zip, and she begins to fear that she will freeze before anyone finds her.

Discovery Aboard the Aircraft

A rustling sound from within the German plane brings a new uncertainty: someone is nearby, and Kristín wonders whether it might be Ratoff. Instead, she hears wheezing and groans, followed by fumbling at the zipper. She closes her eyes and holds her breath as the bag is opened. When she looks again, Miller is leaning over her, bewildered by the sight of someone he had taken for a corpse rising out of the bag.

The discovery ends her concealment, but not her danger or uncertainty. Kristín immediately demands to know who Miller is, where she is, and where the plane is taking her. Her escape has succeeded in carrying her away from the glacier and into the aircraft, but the method that saved her has also left her hidden through the removal operation and the start of an onward journey whose destination she does not know. The body bag changes function—from container for the dead to disguise for the living—and makes the wreck’s grisly cargo the means by which Kristín survives.