The Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland’s exposed southwestern headland, gives the story a landscape in which military movement can disappear into ordinary traffic and access is sharply divided between civilian and restricted space. Its lava fields, gale-force winds, and sparse vegetation make the surroundings feel remote and inhospitable; near Keflavík, that terrain also conceals the preparations for the operation on Vatnajökull.

Landscape and Military Setting

At the westernmost tip of the peninsula, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization base occupies a bleak stretch of lava fields, lashed by constant gale-force winds and almost devoid of vegetation. The military landscape includes hangars, barracks, shops, a cinema, and administration blocks. Its naval air station had served as a centre for reconnaissance flights during the Cold War era in Iceland, though its activities had since been greatly curtailed.

The airport and military zone sit beside one another but are not equally open to the public. After Icelanders built a civil aviation terminal and took over the international airport in the 1980s, public access to the military zone became severely restricted. A high fence marks the boundary; two guarded gates provide the only entrances, while military police patrol the residential area.

A Covert Departure

On the evening of 28 January 2000, a C-17 transport plane landed at Keflavík Airport and taxied to the end of runway seven, reserved for the base. Personnel unloaded snowmobiles, tracked vehicles, skiing equipment, and other supplies for work on the glacier. The remote peninsula thus served not merely as scenery but as a logistical threshold between an overseas military arrival and the journey inland to Vatnajökull.

The equipment left in four trucks of different models, departing at half-hour intervals. Their ordinary appearance helped conceal the movement: the first was a German Mercedes-Benz bearing only Icelandic licence plates, and the trucks merged with civilian traffic on the road south. The contrast between conspicuous military preparations at the runway and unremarkable vehicles on public roads makes the peninsula a landscape of controlled visibility, where secrecy depends on passing as ordinary.

The Fence and the Residential Edge

The same boundary becomes physical in Kristín’s attempt to enter the base. She directs a taxi to a new housing estate beside the perimeter, waits for it to leave, then runs to the fence and climbs over its barbed wire. The spikes tear her clothes and scratch her hands; after dropping about three metres into soft snow, she finds that her ankle aches but continues toward the residential buildings.

Those buildings are part of the military accommodation on the peninsula: three-storey blocks with thick concrete walls, small, heavily glazed windows, and construction designed to withstand earthquakes and the harsh local climate. Kristín reaches one of them and presses a doorbell; a voice answers over the entry-phone, and she asks for Steve. The scene connects the peninsula’s strategic enclosure to its domestic edge: the base is guarded and difficult to enter, yet its housing stands immediately beside Icelandic civilian streets.