Crusader Gold

by David Gibbins

  Macleod nodded at the crewman, who pulled the starter cord and fired up the engine. The Zodiac turned back in the direction of the open sea and then accelerated towards the shore, its wake rocking the brash that extended out from the fjord in long tendrils of white. The crewman found a patch of clear water and opened the throttle wide, planing the Zodiac in a wide arc towards the rocky promontory that marked the northern edge of the fjord. Jack held on to the safety line and leaned back from the pontoon where he was sitting near the front of the boat, letting the freezing spray lash his face and relishing the tang of salt in his mouth. It had been several months since he had dived and he had missed the taste of the sea. He saw Maria smile at him as she clung on beside him, and he watched as Macleod and Costas ducked down and held their hoods against the spray. He remembered his last dive with Costas, deep in the bowels of the volcano six months before, a dive that had reawakened his worst trauma.

  The dive they planned now was even more confining, and would be one of the most extraordinary they had ever undertaken. The fears were still there, but under control, and all he felt now was a sense of overwhelming elation. The Golden Horn project had reignited his passion for archaeology, but it had been directed from the bridge of a ship, one crucial step removed from revealing history with his own hands. He was itching to get underwater again, to be the first to see and touch fabulous treasures lost for centuries in the ocean depths.

  As the engine powered down, the roar of the outboard was replaced by an eerie chorus of howling and yipping, and they realised that the valley ahead was dotted with dogs chained to posts, some of them baying with hunger and others gorging on hunks of meat left for them in their muddy pens.

  “The Greenlanders still use dog sleds in winter,” Macleod said, his hood now pushed back. “Much of the terrain’s too rugged for snowmobiles, and the ice cap’s a long way from fuel. They keep the dogs chained up all summer long and shoot them when they get too old to work. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but then they’re not pets.”

  “I seem to recall that when they excavated the last abandoned settlements of the Norse Greenlanders, they found dog bones with cut marks on them, their final meal,” Jack said. “Ancestors of these dogs.”

  “Maybe that’s why they’re howling,” Costas said.

  Maria stared apprehensively at the dogs after the others had scrambled over the bow on to the pebbly beach, and it took Jack proffering his hand to persuade her to join them. Macleod quickly led them to higher ground, above the danger zone from berg displacement, then responded to a call on his two-way radio and handed it to Maria. She stopped and spoke briefly into it, then passed it back to Macleod and resumed her place beside Jack.

  “That was Jeremy,” she said. “He stayed on board to finish analysing the Mappa Mundi inscription. He thinks he’s got something else. It could be really exciting, but he needs a bit more time.”

  “Should be just ready for us when we finish our dive,” Jack said. “We’ll need to sit down and work out where we go from here.”

  “I still can’t believe you’re doing it,” she said, gazing at him with concern.

  “Sometimes I think you have a death wish.”

  “This is your first time with IMU in the field.” Jack grinned. “As James said, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  Despite the warmth of the summer sun, they kept their survival suits zipped up against the insects, and followed Macleod from the beach escarpment up an eroded path towards a low saddle in the valley. No vegetation stood more than a few feet high, but the bleak rock of the surrounding ridges was offset by lush beds of moss and grass that carpeted the valley floor.

  “The ruins ahead are ancient Sermermiut,” Macleod said. “A sacred place for the local Inuit. People have lived here for at least four thousand years, since the first Greenlanders made their way across the frozen sea from the Canadian Arctic.

  The town of Ilulissat is over the ridge to the north, but it was only founded in 1741 with the modern Danish occupation of Greenland. The Danes called it Jacobshavn, but the Greenlandic name is a little more appropriate.”

  “What does Ilulissat mean?” Costas asked.

  “Icebergs.”

  Costas grunted, and they trudged off the path over a marshy depression towards the ancient site, waving away the clouds of midges that seemed to rise from the bog like mist. “What about the Vikings?”

  “To the Norse this whole stretch of coast up to the polar ice cap was Nordrseta, the northern hunting grounds, a forbidding place where hardly any Viking remains have ever been found.” Macleod stopped, waiting for Costas to catch up. “The Norse only settled permanently where they could have some hope of a traditional Scandinavian way of life, stock-raising and basic agriculture. In Greenland that meant the fertile fjord valleys near the southern tip, where Eirik the Red arrived with his family in the early eleventh century. Most of the colonists came from Norway and Iceland. Eventually there were hundreds of homesteads, a population that peaked at several thousand, and they even built crude stone churches after they converted to Christianity.”

  “What happened to them?” Costas asked.

  “One of the most haunting mysteries of the past,” Macleod said. “They clung on for generations, trading walrus ivory and furs back to Europe, but the last known contact was in the fifteenth century. When the Catholic Church sent an expedition to Greenland in 1721 to check that they were still God-fearing Christians, they found no sign of them.”

  “Believe it or not, the Crusades were probably a factor,” Maria said.

  “Huh?” said Costas. “The Crusades?”

  “In 1124 the Norwegian king Sigurd Jorsalfar established an episcopal see in Greenland. That meant the Church could impose taxes on the Norse settlers, adding greatly to their hardships. Sigurd was known as ‘The Crusader,’ one of a number of Scandinavians who joined the Crusaders in the twelfth century. He had the gall to exact a special tax for the Crusades from Greenland, of all places.

  They paid it in walrus tusks and polar bear hides.”

  “That’d be handy in Jerusalem,” Costas muttered. “The Crusades really were a global madness.”

  “The Church was undoubtedly an economic burden,” Macleod said. “But others think the Norse in Greenland were wiped out by the natives, or by English pirates, or even by the Black Death. I think environment was the biggest factor.

  The so-called Little Ice Age of the medieval period blocked off the sea routes that were their lifeline back home, with sea ice remaining all summer long round the coasts. The cold would also have ruined their agriculture, and maybe they were unable or unwilling to adapt to the native way of life and survive by hunting and fishing.”

  “So the last of the Vikings were done in by climate change,” Costas said. “Not exactly a glorious end for a warrior elite, was it?”

  “Let’s wait and see,” Jack murmured. “It could be that the real warriors among them got farther west than this.”

  The ruins of the ancient site were barely recognisable, humps of turf and low circles of unworked rocks set close into the ground, some of them nearly swallowed up by the alluvial soil and others exposed in patches of peaty bog. On a slight platform on the seaward edge was a low, dome-shaped tent about fifteen feet across, its frame of whalebones covered with layers of sealskins and musk-ox hide. A thin wisp of smoke rose from a hole in the centre.

  “Some of these stones are tent circles, used to batten down tents against the wind,” Macleod explained. “You see them all over the Arctic, the main evidence of ancient habitation. People haven’t lived in this place for generations, but it’s hallowed ground for the Inuit of Ilulissat. Sometimes the elders who remain close to the old ways come here to prepare for death. Their families erect traditional tents inside the sacred stone circles of their ancestors when they know the time is close.”

  A team of lean white huskies had been chained to stakes surrounding the tent, and as Macleod led the others forward the dogs strained at
their fetters and slavered menacingly at them. Maria held back uncertainly, but Jack led her on, careful to keep outside the radius of the chains. The growling had alerted the occupants of the tent, and a flap opened, revealing a Greenlander woman wearing a traditional sealskin parka, her dark hair tied back and embellished with beads. As she looked up they recognized Inuva, who had left Seaquest II by Zodiac an hour before them. She hushed the dogs and beckoned to Macleod, who knelt down and exchanged a few words with her before the flap closed again.

  “Inuva’s the old man’s daughter.” Macleod turned back to the others and spoke quietly. “He knows Danish but will only speak Kalaallisut, the local Inuit dialect, so Inuva will translate for us. His name is Kangia, which is also their name for the icefjord. He’s well over eighty years old, a great age for these people. They have a tough life. In his youth he was one of the most renowned hunters of Ilulissat, venturing hundreds of miles along the edge of the ice cap with his dogs, paddling his umiak far beyond the last settlement to the north.”

  They stooped under the flap as Macleod held it open, then he followed them in.

  Jack’s eyes smarted from the acrid smoke rising from the hearth, fed by slabs of dried musk-ox dung. Macleod motioned for them to sit down below the smoke on a ring of hides arranged around the fire. As their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, they could see that the far side of the tent was occupied by a wooden sled, its rails dark with age but beautifully carved with flowing animal shapes. Sitting on the edge, draped in blankets, was an old Inuit man, his face leathery and gnarled and his long white hair flowing free over his shoulders. As he looked at them they could see that his eyes were dimmed by snow blindness, and his skin had the grey pallor of approaching death. With great effort he began to speak, and Inuva translated the soft clicking sounds of the native Greenlandic every time he paused.

  “My father says that since time immemorial his people have lived here, and outsiders have come and gone,” she said softly. “Now it is nearly time for him to leave and join the dog sleds of his ancestors, as they speed across the ice cap for all eternity.” The old man extended a wizened hand out of the blankets and picked up a worn photograph on the sled beside him, nodding silently at Macleod as he passed it to him.

  “This is why we’re here,” Macleod said. “Inuva told him about our research ship in the fjord, and it was she who summoned me to Kangia two days ago. Take a look at the picture.”

  Macleod passed the photograph to Jack, and Maria and Costas shifted closer to get a better view. It was a faded black-and-white image of a group of men dressed in full polar gear, standing beside wooden sleds laden with equipment and surrounded by dogs.

  “Some time before the Second World War, judging by the gear,” Jack said. “The 1920s, maybe 1930s.” He paused, then peered more closely. “That older man in the centre. Isn’t that Knud Rasmussen? I know he was born in Jakobshavn.”

  “Kangia was one of his dog-handlers,” Macleod said. “He’s the boy on the left.”

  “So Kangia knew Knud Rasmussen!” Jack looked in awe at the old Inuit, then glanced at Costas. “One of the most celebrated polar explorers, half Danish, half Inuit. The first person to make it all the way across the Greenland ice cap.”

  “Rasmussen was a father figure to Kangia, and encouraged him to keep the old ways. Kangia revered him and admired his respect for native traditions. Which is more than can be said for these characters.” Macleod took a waterproof photograph sleeve out of his inner jacket pocket and passed it over. “Kangia also gave me this.”

  “Ahnenerbe?” Jack’s expression suddenly became grim.

  “Correct. I scanned the picture and did some research before you arrived. A German expedition came to Jakobshavn in 1938, a year before the war. They needed dog-handlers, and Kangia was an obvious choice.”

  The photograph showed two European men standing against a backdrop of rock and ice. From the shape of the promontory the setting was clearly Sermermiut, near where they were now, but the line of the icebergs formed a continuous wall along the threshold of the fjord, as it had done more than fifty years ago before the glacier began to recede. Both men were dressed in the standard expedition gear of the day, thick sweaters, heavy woollen jackets and plus-four trousers tucked into knee-high socks. The man on the right was tall and handsome, perhaps in his mid-thirties, with a shock of blond hair, but was standing slightly apart as if reluctant to be photographed. The other man was small, dark-haired, with pinched features, with one leg bent and his right hand on his knee, staring imperiously into the camera. With his left hand he was holding a pair of measuring calipers over the head of a young Inuit man sitting awkwardly on a rock in front of him, easily recognisable from the previous picture as Kangia. It was like a hunter posing with his trophy, only it was far more chilling than that.

  On his left arm the European man was wearing a red band bearing the black symbol of the swastika.

  Jack glanced at Costas. “Ahnenerbe meant ‘Ancestral Heritage.’ It was a department of the SS set up before the war by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s deputy. Devoted to the investigation of the ancestral origins of the Aryan race.”

  “What on earth were they doing here?”

  “Believe it or not, probably searching for Atlantis.” Jack gave Costas a wry look.

  “The Nazis thought the Atlanteans were the original Aryans. In the late 1930s the Ahnenerbe sent expeditions all over the world—to Tibet, to the depths of Mesoamerica, to the Arctic. They believed they could find the purest descendants of the Atlanteans in the remotest regions, in areas cut off from the rest of humanity. One of their techniques was phrenology, measuring heads for so-called Aryan features. That’s what this moron is doing in the picture. The science was medieval, but the genuine anthropologists conscripted by the Ahnenerbe had to bow to the Reichsführer’s demented obsessions. They even called it Himmler’s crusade.”

  Macleod nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And the expedition to Greenland was doubly bizarre. The Nazis were also obsessed with Welteislehre, World Ice Theory, a cosmological fantasy cooked up by an insane Austrian at the turn of the century.

  It was one of the many weird theories that gained adherents after the First World War, that seemed to offer order and explanation in a world gone mad.

  According to the theory, everything about the universe was a perpetual struggle between ice and fire. The Aryan master race was born in a realm of ice, and had been scattered across the globe by floods and earthquakes. Where better to find evidence of the original Aryans than the Greenland ice cap, the last great remnant of the Ice Age.”

  “It would be laughable if it wasn’t for the poisonous racism underlying everything the Ahnenerbe did,” Jack said. “Because they only told Himmler what he wanted to know, their activities helped to solidify his views about Aryan superiority. Remember he was the chief architect of the Final Solution, the liquidation of the Jews.”

  “So these two guys were Nazis.” Costas had picked up the photograph and was scrutinising it with Maria.

  “According to Kangia, the greasy-haired one with the armband was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, constantly ranting on about Hitler and treating the Greenlanders like dogs,” Macleod said. “But the other guy seems to have been more reasonable, apparently attempting to befriend Kangia and pulling his weight on the expedition. He was fascinated by the oral traditions of the Greenlanders and promised to visit them one day by himself to record them.

  Apparently he became a decent dog-sledder and earned the Greenlanders’

  respect. The two Germans loathed each other and hardly spoke.”

  “Do you have any idea who they were?” Inuva spoke quietly from the bedside where she had been listening, her hand on her father’s brow.

  Macleod turned to her. “Records of the expedition disappeared mysteriously from the Ahnenerbe headquarters at the outbreak of war, so this picture and Kangia’s memory are all we’ve got to go on. I emailed the scan back to the IMU

 
library yesterday. They couldn’t identify the smaller man with any certainty, a face that blurs with a thousand other thugs, but the other guy has quite a history.”

  “Of course. Now I recognise him,” Maria suddenly exclaimed. “The blond one.

  Surely it’s Rolf Künzl, the renowned archaeologist?”

  “Correct.”

  “One of the founders of Viking archaeology,” Maria enthused. “His doctoral thesis on the Norse settlement of Greenland remains a benchmark for the subject. A precocious career cut short by war.”

  “Then you know what happened to him.”

  “The von Stauffenberg conspiracy,” Maria replied.

  Macleod nodded. “One of a raft of genuine scholars forcibly recruited into the Ahnenerbe to shore up Nazi fantasies about a Norse master race. Künzl had little choice but to play the game, even though he was openly contemptuous of the lunatic fringe who ran the Ahnenerbe, mostly crackpots and failed scholars who owed their careers to the Nazis.”

  “The lunatics were running the asylum,” Costas murmured.

  Macleod nodded again. “But Künzl was never inducted into the SS because he was from an old Prussian military family, a reserve officer in the Wehrmacht, and managed to wheedle his way out of Himmler’s tentacles when the war began.

  He fought for two years under Rommel in the desert, reaching the rank of colonel and winning the Knight’s Cross, but then was recalled to Berlin and given a menial job. Himmler seems to have singled him out for special bullying, repeatedly accusing him of having stolen records of the Greenland expedition and concealing what they’d found. But Himmler must have given up on him by September 1944, when Künzl was arrested and strung up with piano wire alongside von Stauffenberg for attempting to assassinate Hitler.”