Prologue

The night was stormy, and the campfire was growing dim. Five of the six campers were sound asleep, zipped-up in their tents which danced with the wind. It was a strange night. The fire had taken all six of them to prepare, and the tents...well, it was anything but a routine camping night. They were near a deserted fuel terminal known as the Fields of Farau. It was early 2006 in a remote region of the scarcely inhabited southern coast of Iceland.

The fierce wind made it nearly impossible to distinguish between individual sounds. The six were so fatigued that they were indifferent to whatever voices cared to join the heralds of the coming big storm. They realized that attempting to get out of its way was useless. It was chest-to-the-storm either way.

The Fields of Farau, however, was a nationally renowned site of weird manifestations back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a few years after the government confiscated the property following the grotesque murders that had taken place there. The victims were the owner's wife, two daughters and three sons, whose lives he himself had taken, drowning them in a cement reservoir filled with liquid asphalt. The reason for the murders is said to have been his suspicion that his terribly mistreated family and long betrayed wife had all conspired against him, intending to inform the authorities about his unlawful activities in the company yard which was by then at the height of its prosperity. The owner and his four associates were all sentenced and were imprisoned for life. But the owner was influential and crafty enough to have saved a good sum of his fortune from confiscation; part of which he used to be released on parole in the ninth year of his imprisonment, after which he left Iceland and headed to the Faeroe islands.

Now that urbanism was again creeping towards the deserted fields it seemed time for the Fields' victims to rise for this long-repressed murder claim. Still, it was only a group of three young couples, tenting peacefully, laying low from the storm that hovered above the trees.

One of the young men was unable to sleep, apparently not just because of the wind. He moved around a lot, until his fiancée asked him what was bothering him.

"Hush…listen…" he said. Then, indifferent to the weather, he unzipped the tent and crept out. He stood for a moment inspecting the dark with sharp inquisitive eyes. He heard a sudden eerie metallic sound. One of the high tower-tanks behind the trees appeared to be shrouded by thick fog and there, beyond the fog, a frail transparent figure appeared, wrapped in a dim light. The figure made its way between the two tanks.

The light gown it wore flickered behind it in the wind as it moved and then disappeared on the top of the other tank. The guy was nailed to the ground, certain it wasn't his imagination. Luckily, his fiancée had not seen it, or he would have had to wake their friends and start walking home through the stormy dark forest, still hours from daybreak. He went back in and had a large sip of bitter coffee to sober up and allow him to take control of his stiff fright. His fiancée realized he had seen something but had no idea what: a ghost was the last thing to occur to her.

A few minutes after he re-entered the tent, the rest of the campers were awakened by strange sounds like whispering wind-blasts and hair-raising wheezes. They spent the rest of their night hanging on to one another, frightened stiff. As day dawned, all three couples packed up and headed back, only one of them aware of what was out there on top of that tower-tank. He realized that, almost forty years since the old tale had first been told, there was still substantial evidence for its authenticity.

Their town was Vik, 40 kilometers to the west. They could ride there, but not before a good walk along an unpaved highway. They got there and that's when the case was re-opened -- not because the camper told anyone about his relatively close encounter, but because a convoy of trailers and an army of fuel refinery workers were making their way towards that long forsaken territory, planning on reviving the old field. It was a Canadian firm this time, whose executives believed not at all in the supernatural and certainly not in ghosts. It was life they were planning to give that place, and not an additional aspect to its reputation for death.

The resurgence of interest in the old fuel terminals was motivated by a NATO plan for constructing a major fuel base in the upper North Atlantic to serve as central headquarter for an abundant fuel supply in a region characterized by remoteness and scarcity of re-supply locations, at a time of growing need for better NATO force-mobility. What could be better than a location like Iceland, centered at a meeting point between Western Europe, the North American continent, the Arctic bases; Scandinavia and the Barents Sea, which is the gateway to the northern coasts of Russia? Well, the place was there, tempting enough, requiring only a campaign of renovation and modernization that was on its way.

Read on to find out what actually happened.