Burning Angels

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.