Burning Angels (2 page)

Wirth turned and vomited.

He heaved the contents of his stomach through the wire mesh of the cage, seeing the watery liquid splatter deep into the shadows far below. He retched until there was nothing left, the dry heaving subsiding into short, stabbing, painful gasps.

Hands clawing at the mesh, he hauled himself off his knees. He glanced upwards at the glaring floodlights, which threw a fierce, unforgiving blaze into the shadowed ice chasm, reflecting all around him in a crazy kaleidoscope of frozen colour.

Kammler’s so-called Var – his beloved ancient Nordic princess: well, the General was welcome to her!

SS General Hans Kammler: what in the name of God was Wirth going to tell – and show – him? The famed SS commander had flown all this way to witness her glorious liberation from the ice, and the promise of her resurrection, so that he could deliver the news in person to the Führer.

Hitler’s dream, finally brought to fruition.

And now this.

Wirth forced his gaze back to the corpse. The longer he studied it, the more horrified he became. It was as if the ice maiden’s body had been at war with itself; as if it had rejected its own innards, disgorging them from every orifice. If she had died like this, her blood and guts becoming frozen within the ice, she must have been alive and bleeding for some considerable time.

Wirth didn’t believe any more that it was the fall into the crevasse that had killed her. Or the cold. It was whatever ancient, devilish sickness had held her in its grasp as she stumbled and crawled her way across the glacier.

But weeping blood?

Vomiting blood?

Sweating blood?

Urinating blood, even?

What in the name of God would cause that?

What in the name of God had killed her?

This was far from being the ancestral Aryan mother figure they had all hoped for. This wasn’t the Nordic warrior goddess he had dreamed of for countless nights – proving a glorious Aryan lineage stretching back five thousand years. This was no ancient mother to the Nazi
Übermensch
– a perfect blonde, blue-eyed Norse woman rescued from far before the reach of recorded history.

Hitler had thirsted for so long for such proof.

And now this – a devil woman.

As Wirth gazed into her tortured features – those empty, bulging, blood-encrusted eyes, full of the terrifying glaze of the walking dead – he was struck by a sudden blinding realisation.

Somehow he knew that he was staring through a doorway into the very gates of hell.

He stumbled backwards from the ice corpse, reaching above his head and tugging violently on the signal rope. ‘Up! Get me up! Up! Start the winch!’

Above him an engine roared into life. Wirth felt the cage lurch into motion. As it began to lift, the horrifying, bloodied block of ice retreated from his view.

The dawn sun was throwing a faint blush across the wind- and ice-whipped snow as Wirth’s hunched figure rose above the surface. He climbed exhaustedly from the cage and stepped on to the hard-packed, frozen whiteness, the sentries to either side attempting to click their heels as he passed. Their massive fur-lined boots made a dull clump, their rubber soles caked in a thick layer of ice.

Wirth snapped up a half-hearted salute, his mind lost in tortured thoughts. Setting his shoulders into the howling wind, he pulled his thick smock closer around his numb features and pushed onwards towards the nearby tent.

A savage blast whipped the black smoke away from the chimney that protruded through the roof. The stove had been stoked, no doubt in readiness for a hearty breakfast.

Wirth figured his three SS colleagues were already awake. They were early risers, and with today being the day the ice maiden would rise from her tomb, they would be doubly eager to face the dawn.

Originally there had been two fellow SS officers with him – First Lieutenant Otto Rahn and General Richard Darre. Then, with no warning, SS General Hans Kammler had flown in on an aircraft equipped with ice skids, to witness the final stages of this epic operation.

As the overall commander of the expedition, General Darre was supposedly in charge, but no one was pretending that General Kammler didn’t wield the real power. Kammler was Hitler’s man. He had the Führer’s ear. And in truth, Wirth had thrilled to the fact that the General had come to witness in person his moment of greatest triumph.

Back then, barely forty-eight hours earlier, things had been looking golden; the perfect ending to an impossibly ambitious undertaking. Yet this morning . . . Well, Wirth had little appetite to face the dawn, his breakfast, or his SS brethren.

Why was he even here? he wondered. Wirth styled himself as a scholar of ancient cultures and religions, which was what had first brought him to Himmler and Hitler’s attention. He’d been awarded his Nazi party number by the Führer himself – a rare honour indeed.

In 1936 he had founded the Deutsche Ahnenerbe, the name meaning ‘inherited from the forefathers’. Its mission was to prove that a mythical Nordic population had once ruled the world – the original Aryan race. Legend had it that a blonde, blue-eyed people had inhabited Hyperboria, a fabled frozen land of the north, which in turn had suggested the Arctic Circle.

Expeditions to Finland, Sweden and the Arctic had followed, but all without any great or earth-shattering revelations. Then a group of soldiers had been sent to Greenland to establish a weather station, and there they had heard tantalising reports that an ancient woman had been discovered entombed within the Greenland ice.

And so the present, fateful mission had been born.

In short, Wirth was an archaeological enthusiast and opportunist. He was no diehard Nazi, that was for sure. But as the Deutsche Ahnenerbe’s president, he was forced to rub shoulders with the darkest fanatics of Hitler’s regime – two of whom were in the tent before him right now.

He knew this would not end well for him. Too much had been promised – some of it directly to the Führer. Too many lofty expectations, too many impossible hopes and ambitions hinged upon this moment.

Yet Wirth had seen her face, and the lady of the ice had the features of a monster.

2

Wirth ducked his head and thrust it through the double layer of thick canvas: one layer to keep out the murderous cold and the storm-whipped snow; the second, inner layer to keep in the heat thrown off by live human bodies and the roaring stove.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee hit him. Three pairs of eyes looked at him expectantly.

‘My dear Wirth, why the long face?’ General Kammler quipped. ‘Today is the day!’

‘You didn’t drop our lovely
Frau
into the bottom of the crevasse?’ Otto Rahn added, a wry grin twisting his features. ‘Or try to kiss her awake, only to get slapped around the face for your troubles?’

Rahn and Kammler guffawed.

The diehard SS general and the somewhat effeminate palaeontologist seemed to share a peculiar brand of camaraderie. Like so much in the Reich, it made no sense to Wirth. As to the third seated figure – SS General Richard Walter Darre – he just scowled into his coffee, dark eyes smouldering under hooded brows, thin lips clamped tight shut as always.

‘So, our ice maiden?’ Kammler prompted. ‘Is she ready for us?’ He swept his hand across the breakfast spread. ‘Or do we have our celebratory feast first?’

Wirth shuddered. He was still feeling nauseous. He figured it might be better if the three men got to see the Lady of the Ice before they ate.

‘It’s perhaps best, Herr General, to do this before your breakfast.’

‘You seem downhearted, Herr Lieutenant,’ Kammler prompted. ‘Is she not all we were expecting? A blonde-haired, blue-eyed angel of the north?’

‘You have freed her from the ice?’ General Darre cut in. ‘Her features are visible? What do they tell you about our Freyja?’ Darre had borrowed the name of an ancient Norse goddess – meaning ‘the lady’ – for the woman entombed within the ice.

‘Surely she is our Hariasa,’ Rahn countered. ‘Our Hariasa of the ancient north.’ Hariasa was another Nordic deity; her name meant ‘the goddess with the long hair’. Three days earlier, it had seemed entirely fitting.

For weeks the team had been carefully chipping away at the ice so as to enable a closer look. When finally they managed it, the ice maiden proved to be turned into the wall of the crevasse, with only her back showing. But it was enough. She had revealed herself to possess glorious tresses of long golden hair, plaited into thick braids.

At that discovery, Wirth, Rahn and Darre had felt a bolt of excitement burn through them. If her facial features likewise matched the Aryan racial model, they were home and dry. Hitler would shower his blessings upon them. All they needed to do was free her from the wall of the crevasse, turn the block of ice around and get a proper look at her.

Well, Wirth had had that look . . . and it was utterly stomach-churning.

‘She’s not quite what we were expecting, Herr Generals,’ he stammered. ‘It’s best you come see for yourselves.’

Kammler was the first to his feet, a faint frown creasing his forehead. The SS General had appropriated the name of a third Nordic goddess for the frozen corpse. ‘She will be cherished by all who set eyes upon her,’ he had declared. ‘That is why I have told the Führer that we have named her Var – “the beloved”.’

Well, it would take a true saint to love that bloody, corrupted corpse. And of one thing Wirth was certain: there were few saints in that tent right now.

He led the men across the ice, feeling as if he were heading his own funeral cortège. They entered the cage and were lowered, the floodlights flaring to life as they sank beneath the surface. Wirth had ordered the lights kept extinguished, unless someone was working on or inspecting the corpse. He didn’t want the heat thrown off by the powerful illumination melting the ice and thawing out their lady-in-waiting. She would need to remain utterly deep-frozen for safe transport back to the Deutsche Ahnenerbe’s
headquarters in Berlin.

He glanced across the cage at Rahn. His face lay in dark shadow. No matter where he might be, Rahn wore a wide-brimmed black felt fedora hat. A self-styled bone-hunter and archaeological adventurer, he had adopted it as his trademark.

Wirth felt a certain camaraderie with the flamboyant Rahn. They shared the same hopes, passions and beliefs. And, of course, the same fears.

The cage came to a lurching halt. It swung back and forth for an instant like a crazed pendulum, before the chain holding it brought it to some kind of standstill.

Four sets of eyes stared into the face of the corpse entombed within the block of ice; ice that was streaked with hideous swirls of dark red. Wirth could sense the impact the apparition was having upon his SS colleagues. There was a stunned, disbelieving silence.

It was General Kammler who finally broke the quiet. He turned his gaze on Wirth. His face was inscrutable as ever, a cold reptilian look flaring behind his eyes.

‘The Führer expects,’ he announced quietly. ‘We do not disappoint the Führer.’ A pause. ‘Make her a figure worthy of her name: of Var.’

Wirth shook his head disbelievingly. ‘We go ahead as planned? But Herr General, the risks . . .’

‘What risks, Herr Lieutenant?’

‘We have no idea what killed her . . .’ Wirth gestured at the corpse. ‘What caused all—’

‘There is no risk,’ Kammler cut in. ‘She came to grief on the ice cap five millennia ago. That’s five thousand years. You will clean her up. Make her beautiful. Make her Nordic, Aryan . . . perfect. Make her fit for the Führer.’

‘But how, Herr General?’ Wirth queried. ‘You have seen—’

‘Unfreeze her, for God’s sake,’ Kammler cut in. He gestured at the block of ice. ‘You Deutsche Ahnenerbe people have been experimenting on live humans – freezing and unfreezing them – for years, have you not?’

‘We have, Herr General,’ Wirth conceded. ‘Not myself personally, but there have been human freezing experiments, plus the salt-water—’

‘Spare me the details.’ Kammler jabbed a gloved finger at the bloodied corpse. ‘Breathe life into her. Whatever it takes, wipe that death’s-head smile off her face. Banish that . . . look from her eyes. Make her suit the Führer’s prettiest dreams.’

Wirth forced out a reply. ‘Yes, Herr General.’

Kammler glanced from Wirth to Rahn. ‘If you do not – if you fail in this task – on your heads be it.’

He yelled an order for the cage to be lifted skywards. They rose together in silence. When they reached the surface, Kammler turned to face the Deutsche Ahnenerbe men
.

‘I have little stomach for breakfast any more.’ He clicked his heels together and gave the Nazi salute. ‘
Heil Hitler!
’

‘
Heil Hitler
,’ his SS colleagues echoed.

And with that, General Hans Kammler stalked across the ice, heading for his aircraft – and Germany.

3

Present day

The pilot of the C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft turned to eye Will Jaeger. ‘Kinda overkill, buddy, hiring a whole C-130 for just you guys, eh?’ He had a strong southern drawl, most likely Texas. ‘There’s just three of you, right?’

Through the doorway into the hold Jaeger eyed his two fellow warriors, seated on the fold-down canvas seats. ‘Yeah. Just the three.’

‘Bit over the top, wouldn’t you say?’

Jaeger had boarded the aircraft as if ready to do a high-altitude parachute jump – decked out in full-face helmet, oxygen mask and bulky jumpsuit. The pilot had not the slightest hope of recognising him.

Not yet, anyway.

Jaeger shrugged. ‘Yeah, well we were expecting more. You know how it is: some couldn’t make it.’ A pause. ‘They got trapped in the Amazon.’

He let the last words hang in the air for a good few seconds.

‘The Amazon?’ the pilot queried. ‘The jungle, right? What was it? Jump that went wrong?’

‘Worse than that.’ Jaeger loosened the straps that held his jump helmet tight, as if he needed to get some air. ‘They didn’t make it . . . because they died.’

The pilot did a double take. ‘They died? Died like how? Some kinda skydiving accident?’