Burning Angels Read online

  Dedication

  For Roger Gower, killed by poachers while flying conservation patrols over East Africa, and for the Roger Gower Memorial Fund and Tusk Trust, two foremost conservation charities.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  Chapter Ninety

  Chapter Ninety-One

  Chapter Ninety-Two

  Chapter Ninety-Three

  EPILOGUE

  Also by Bear Grylls

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Copyright

  Daily Mail, August 2015

  Nazi Gold Train is FOUND: deathbed confession leads treasure hunters to secret location as Polish officials claim they have seen proof on radar.

  A Nazi gold train has been found in Poland after the man who helped hide it at the end of the Second World War revealed its location in a deathbed confession. Two men, a German and a Pole, last week claimed they had found the train – believed to contain treasure – close to the small town of Walbrzych in south-west Poland.

  Piotr Zuchowski, Poland’s National Heritage and Conservation Officer, said: ‘We do not know what is inside the train. Probably military equipment, but also jewellery, works of art and archive documents. Armoured trains from this period were used to carry extremely valuable items, and this is an armoured train.’

  Local lore says Nazi Germany ordered the vast underground rail network, which snakes around the massive Ksiaz Castle, be built to hide Third Reich valuables. Concentration camp inmates were used to build the huge tunnels – code-named Riese (Giant) – to use as production spaces for strategic weapons, as the site was safe from Allied air raids.

  Sun, October 2015

  History tells us that the Special Air Service regiment created in 1942 was disbanded in 1945 . . . But a new book by acclaimed historian Damien Lewis has revealed that in fact one lone, top secret 30-man SAS unit fought on. This group ‘went dark’ at the end of the war to go on an unofficial mission to hunt down Nazi war criminals.

  Their aim was to find the SS and Gestapo monsters who had murdered their captured comrades, as well as hundreds of French civilians who had tried to help them. By 1948 the band had captured more than 100 of the war’s worst killers – many of whom had avoided facing justice at Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946 – and brought them to trial.

  This tiny SAS unit, dubbed ‘the Secret Hunters’ was run from a shadow HQ based in the Hyde Park Hotel in London. It was funded off the books by an exiled Russian aristocrat working for the British War Office, Prince Yuri Galitzine.

  And it was members of this group who were the earliest to uncover the full horror of the Nazi extermination camps . . . The Natzweiler concentration camp near Strasbourg had been the scene of horrific experiments by the Nazis. It was there that commandant Josef Kramer experimented with the technique of using gas to murder Jewish prisoners.

  BBC, January 2016

  OETZI THE ICEMAN HAD A STOMACH BUG, RESEARCHERS SAY.

  Microbes extracted from the insides of a 5,300-year-old mummy have shown he was suffering from a stomach bug before he died, scientists have discovered. Oetzi the Iceman, the name given to the frozen body discovered in the Alps in 1991, had a bacterial infection that is common today, researchers said.

  A genetic analysis of the bacteria – Helicobacter pylori – was carried out, helping to trace the history of the microbe, which is closely linked to the history of human migration.

  Professor Albert Zink, head of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman, at the European Academy in Bolzano, said: ‘One of the first challenges was to obtain samples from the stomach without doing damage to the mummy. Therefore we had to completely defrost the mummy, and could finally get access by an opening . . .’

  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.

  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 s
torm-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.

  ‘So, our ice maiden?’ Kammler prompted. ‘Is she ready for us?’ He swept his hand across the breakfast spread. ‘Or do we have our celebratory feast first?’

  Wirth shuddered. He was still feeling nauseous. He figured it might be better if the three men got to see the Lady of the Ice before they ate.

  ‘It’s perhaps best, Herr General, to do this before your breakfast.’

  ‘You seem downhearted, Herr Lieutenant,’ Kammler prompted. ‘Is she not all we were expecting? A blonde-haired, blue-eyed angel of the north?’

  ‘You have freed her from the ice?’ General Darre cut in. ‘Her features are visible? What do they tell you about our Freyja?’ Darre had borrowed the name of an ancient Norse goddess – meaning ‘the lady’ – for the woman entombed within the ice.

  ‘Surely she is our Hariasa,’ Rahn countered. ‘Our Hariasa of the ancient north.’ Hariasa was another Nordic deity; her name meant ‘the goddess with the long hair’. Three days earlier, it had seemed entirely fitting.

  For weeks the team had been carefully chipping away at the ice so as to enable a closer look. When finally they managed it, the ice maiden proved to be turned into the wall of the crevasse, with only her back showing. But it was enough. She had revealed herself to possess glorious tresses of long golden hair, plaited into thick braids.

  At that discovery, Wirth, Rahn and Darre had felt a bolt of excitement burn through them. If her facial features likewise matched the Aryan racial model, they were home and dry. Hitler would shower his blessings upon them. All they needed to do was free her from the wall of the crevasse, turn the block of ice around and get a proper look at her.