Burning Angels

1

16 October 1942, Helheim Glacier, Greenland

SS Lieutenant Herman Wirth brushed aside the flakes of swirling snow that obscured his vision. He forced himself closer, so that his face and hers were barely a foot apart. As he stared through the intervening mass of ice he let out a strangled gasp.

The woman’s eyes were wide open, even in her death throes. Sure enough, they were sky blue – just as he’d known they would be. But there his hopes came to a sudden, crashing end.

Her eyes drilled into his. Crazed. Glazed. Zombie-like. A pair of red-hot gun barrels boring into him from out of the translucent block of ice that held her.

Unbelievably, when this woman had fallen to her death to be entombed within the glacier, she had been crying tears of blood. Wirth could see where the oozing, frothy redness had streamed from her eye sockets, only to be frozen into immortality.

He forced himself to break eye contact and flicked his gaze lower, towards her mouth. It was one that he had spent countless nights fantasising about, as he shivered in the Arctic cold that penetrated even his thick goose-down sleeping bag.

He had envisaged her lips in his mind. He’d dreamed about them ceaselessly. They would be full and pouting and gorgeously pink, he’d told himself; the mouth of a perfect Germanic maid who had waited five thousand years for a kiss to revive her.

His kiss.

But the more he looked, the more he felt a wave of revulsion rise within his guts. He turned and dry-retched into the icy blast of wind that seared and howled through the crevasse.

In truth, hers would be the kiss of death; the embrace of a she-devil.

The woman’s mouth was encrusted with a deep red mass – a frozen bolus of engorged blood. It thrust into the ice before her like a ghastly swirling funeral shroud. And above the mouth, her nose too had been voiding a tidal wave of crimson fluid, a gruesome haemorrhage.

He swung his gaze lower and to left and right, letting his eyes rove across her frozen, naked flesh. For some reason this woman of the Ancients had torn off her clothes, before crawling across the ice sheet and stumbling blindly into this crevasse that cut through the glacier. She had come to rest on an ice shelf, becoming frozen solid within a matter of hours.

Perfectly preserved… but far from perfect.

Wirth could barely believe it, but even the ice woman’s armpits were streaked with thick, stringy beads of crimson fluid. Before she had died – as she had died – this so-called Nordic ancestor goddess had been sweating out her very lifeblood.

He let his gaze creep lower still, dreading what he would find there. He was not mistaken. A thick frozen smear of red surrounded her nether regions. Even as she had lain there, her heart pounding its last, thick gouts of putrid blood had flowed from her loins.

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.