The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  “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 Reichsfuhrer 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 Reichsfuhrer’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 Kunzl, 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 repli
ed.

  Macleod nodded. “One of a raft of genuine scholars forcibly recruited into the Ahnenerbe to shore up Nazi fantasies about a Norse master race. Kunzl 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 Kunzl 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 Kunzl was arrested and strung up with piano wire alongside von Stauffenberg for attempting to assassinate Hitler.”

  “One of the good guys,” Costas murmured.

  “None of the conspirators was a saint,” Macleod replied. “Kunzl had been one of the most effective Panzer commanders in the Afrika Korps and had plenty of Allied blood on his hands. He knew about the racial policies of the Nazis from his Ahnenerbe days and had apparently done nothing. But he detested Hitler and wanted the war finished before it destroyed Germany. If you look at the other man in that picture you can see where Kunzl’s loathing for the Nazis came from.”

  Kangia suddenly began to speak, the soft clicking tones filling the tent as if a gentle wind were ruffling the sealskins. He reached out for the photograph and Costas handed it to him, and they watched as he jabbed his finger at the image of the taller man. Inuva leaned over intently as the old man spoke and then looked back at the others.

  “Three days into the expedition they’d reached the edge of the ice cap, due east from here, and found a way up the ice to the top. After a day of hauling the sledges across the ice they were suddenly pinned down by a piteraq, a windstorm.”

  Kangia heard his daughter repeat the Greenlandic word and suddenly became animated, the shadows of his arms arching high against the tent wall as he gesticulated in the flickering firelight.

  “It was a ferocious storm, the worst my father had ever seen,” Inuva said. “The expedition was at the northern edge of the glacier, where a tributary ice stream begins to flow towards the fjord. The two Germans insisted on crossing on to the glacier and seeking shelter behind an ice ridge, one of the undulations where the glacier had buckled. But the Greenlanders refused, knowing it was too dangerous, and braved it out with their dogs on the exposed ice cap, huddled behind their sleds.”

  The old man put his fists together, pulled them apart while making a cracking sound and then spoke again to his daughter. “There was a mighty noise,” she translated. “The glacier had pulled apart and the Germans had disappeared into it. I, Kangia, was the only one courageous enough to crawl through the wind to the edge of the crevasse, where I looked down through the swirling snow and saw an incredible sight.”

  The old man had been following his daughter’s intonations and nodding emphatically, but suddenly he coughed painfully and lay back on the pile of furs, his face grey and drawn.

  “He has not got long now.” Inuva gently caressed her father’s arm and then looked up apologetically at Macleod. “I think it might be time for you to go.”

  Macleod nodded slowly and began to get up, but the old man held out a wavering arm and spoke once more, his words almost inaudible. His daughter leaned close and then translated again.

  “It was far below, as deep as the icebergs in the fjord are high.” Macleod sat back down as she spoke. “At the bottom of the crevasse was the prow of a ship, curving up to a fearsome face, its timbers blackened and old. I, Kangia, knew what it was as soon as I saw it. Legend passed down told of giants sheathed in steel, Kablunat, who arrived from across the sea and set one of their great ships alight on the ice. I, Kangia, heard the story as a boy from my grandfather, inside this very tent circle.” The old man stopped and coughed, and Inuva looked at the others. “Our Inuit ancestors, the Thule, arrived here from the Canadian Arctic to settle about eight hundred years ago, after the native people who lived here before had died out. But Thule hunters had already been coming here before that and had encountered the bearded giants who lived in stone houses in the south of Greenland. My ancestors called them Kablunat.”

  “My God,” Jack whispered. “A ship in the ice. It couldn’t be.”

  “Wait. There’s more.” Inuva held her hand up and listened again as the old man spoke. “The ice began to move beneath me,” she translated. “I, Kangia, threw down a rope and hauled up the two men. The crevasse closed with a crash just as they came out. The ship had disappeared in the ice. The piteraq continued for many days and we returned to Ilulissat. That was the end of the expedition. The Germans sailed away and we never saw them again.”

  The old man reached under the blankets Inuva had laid over him and pulled out a package wrapped in white sealskin. With trembling hands he held it out. Macleod took it from him, bowing his head gravely as he did so. In full view of the old man he passed it on to Jack, who cradled the soft leather in his hands and looked questioningly at Macleod.

  “This is why you had to come in person,” Macleod said. “When I spoke to Kangia two days ago he said he had an object he wished to pass on. I told him you were our boss, and he said only you could receive it from him.”

  Jack looked at the old man and bowed his head solemnly, then carefully began to unwrap the package. Maria and Costas shifted closer for a better view as the folds of sealskin fell away.

  Maria gasped, her face pale with excitement. “It’s a runestone!”

  The object was a polished slab of dark green a little longer than Jack’s hand, roughly squared at the corners and with a flat upper surface. Crudely inscribed on it were three lines of runes, several of the symbols immediately recognisable to Jack as he angled it towards the light.

  “It’s fantastic,” Maria murmured. “The runes are Old Norse, no doubt about it. There are some odd symbols and I don’t recognize the words, but Jeremy should be able to help.”

  “My father told me the story but never showed this to me,” Inuva murmured. “There’s one just like this in the museum at Upernavik, about a hundred miles north of here, found on a remote burial cairn at a place called Kingigtorssuaq. It’s the most famous Viking find in Greenland, the most northerly runestone ever discovered in the Arctic.”

  “Wait till you hear where this one came from,” Macleod said. “When Kangia rescued Kunzl and the other German from the crevasse they were struggling over something, but the smaller man slipped and nearly lost his hold. Kangia had seen him slash at the other man with a knife but drop it into the crevasse. He was in a fury about something else he’d lost, but with the storm raging it became a matter of life and death to get them out and the struggle was forgotten. Before they left the ice cap Kunzl gave this stone to Kangia for safekeeping. He said it came from the ship in the ice. Kunzl apparently told the Nazi he’d dropped it in the crevasse, but the smaller man suspected he still had it and was rifling through his belongings in the night. Kunzl told Kangia it was a sacred stone, that he must never let the other man know he had it. Kangia loathed the Nazi and was only too happy to oblige.”

  “Kunzl must have translated it,” Maria murmured. “He was the best runologist of his day, an expert in all the Norse scripts. In those few desperate moments in the crevasse he must have read something that made him determined never to let it fall into the hands of his despised SS colleagues in the Ahnenerbe.”

  “Kunzl told Kangia that if he was unable to return to Greenland Kangia must keep the stone secret for the rest of his life, and only pass it on to another who in his heart he could trust. The war sealed Kunzl’s fa
te, and now you are that man.”

  While the others were talking, Kangia’s arm had fallen back over his chest and he had begun to breathe in shallow rasps, his eyes half closed and staring at the ceiling. Inuva turned and looked at them with urgency in her expression. “Now it is truly time.”

  Macleod nodded and they all got up to leave, ducking in single file under the flap at the entrance to the tent. Jack remained to the last, and before going he turned back and knelt down beside the old man, talking quietly to him and then saying a few words to his daughter. He touched Kangia’s hand before getting up and following Maria out into the bleak ruins of the old settlement.

  “What did you say to him?” Maria asked.

  “I wished him and his dogs godspeed across the ice, wherever their journey should take them. I told him that he had been right to pass on his treasure to us, that we would hold his trust sacred.”

  Inuva appeared at the tent flap to bid them farewell.

  “What will happen to him?” Maria asked, her voice soft.

  “After the shaman comes we will help him to the high cliff overlooking the fjord, to the place we call K?llingekloften. We will leave him there, and tomorrow he will be gone.”

  “You mean suicide?” Maria said in a hushed voice.

  “At K?llingekloften we gather every year to watch the sun appear for the first time over the glacier after the weeks of winter darkness, and at that same place those who are tired of life leap into the icy depths of the fjord to join the spirit world. It is the traditional way. My father has finished here now and is eager to go on his next journey.”