“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 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. 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.”