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.