Flying always makes me sleepy.
Even on this icy morning I felt slumber coming on as we rose into the air aboard the Soviet-era transport helicopter from the non-descript pad in the southeast corner of Keflavik Air Base. The cluster of non-descript and weathered buildings surrounding the pad cleverly disguised the underground technical ops center for our Icelandic operations.
The Council had maintained a presence in Iceland since 1952, shortly after the US Navy established a Naval Air Station in Keflavik under the orders of NATO. Ostensibly the base was to provide US military assets to defend Iceland against attack, but even the most naïve observer saw the geographic convenience of the base for spying on the Soviet Union during the cold war.
The US had been a begrudging ally of our council since the Revolutionary War. Throughout history the council had quietly influenced global history by introducing novel ideology or planting the seeds of dissent at strategic moments. In all likelihood the US would have remained a British protectorate even in modern times without the council’s influence. Even though they didn’t like it the US made it’s newly commissioned naval air station available to the council without restriction.
In exchange the council provided certain “support services” to the US and it’s military. Our advanced technology, particularly in communications, helped establish the Naval Radio Transmission Facility in Grindavik, and had also provided a hardened high-speed network connecting Iceland and the US in the late 1980s. All of this would be conveniently left out of history books, as were all of our actions for hundreds of centuries.
Although it was an unpopular decision, the Council moved it’s main headquarters from Ingolstadt in Bavaria to Keflavik shortly after World War II. The Bavarian shard had it’s beginnings in the late 16th century and it had quietly survived the turmoil of the subsequent centuries.
Although it came through two world wars unscathed, the council was apprehensive about the growing tension of the cold war and relocated far away from Germany, which was undergoing increasing scrutiny on the world stage.
On this particular morning I found myself surprisingly comfortable, even though I was sitting on a flimsy canvas seat strung between two metal bars that served as cargo anchor points. Before pulling my nomex balaclava up over my nose and mouth for warmth I did one last press check on my pistol and opened the bolt slightly on my P90 to ensure a round was in-battery before settling in for a nap.
Before my eyes closed they came to rest on one of several unpatched bullet holes in the walls of the aircraft. Despite having the latest and greatest engine technology and cutting-edge avionics hiding under the battered fuselage, the airframe was showing it’s age. I assumed the bullet holes were left over from one of the several “tactical landings” (apparently the Soviet phrase for “crash”) in the early ‘80s as part of the Afghanistan invasion.
To the casual observer the outside of the aircraft would be seen as nothing more than another aging relic used by the lowest bidding contractor to fly research teams to areas of volcanic activity on the island. In our case the contractor would appear to be the bottom of the barrel, and thus the least interesting, of the many on the island.
As we passed through translational lift and the vibrations settled to a dull hum I quickly fell into a deep sleep which would last for the next hour and a half until we arrived at council HQ on a plateau in the middle of nowhere.