Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Titles by Richard S Young
Acknowledgements
Title page
Foreword
Prologue: 8.33pm - Sunday 12th March 1939Kufstein Fortress, Kufstein, Tyrol, Austria.
06.43am – 8th April, present day.Mirpur - Pakistani administered Kashmir (Azad Kashmir)
09.27am – 8th April, present day.Mirpur - Pakistani administered Kashmir (Azad Kashmir)
09.27am – 8th April, present day.Montaillou, Rue du Village, Montségur, Occitanie, France.
10.23am – 8th April, present day.Mirpur - Pakistani administered Kashmir (Azad Kashmir)
11.13am – 8th April, present day.Montaillou, Rue du Village, Montségur, Occitanie, France.
11.18am – 8th April, present day.Mirpur - Pakistani administered Kashmir (Azad Kashmir)
4.23pm – 8th April, present day.Mirpur - Pakistani administered Kashmir (Azad Kashmir)
12.22pm – 9th April, present day.Wagah - Lahore District, Punjab, Pakistan
10.03am – 10th April, present day.The Rozabal Tomb, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India
6.43am – 10th April, present day.Montaillou, Rue du Village, Montségur, Occitanie, France.
10.13am – 10th April, present day.Junction of Nalamar Road and Ganderbal Road, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India
9.13am – 10th April, present day.Montaillou, Rue du Village, Montségur, Occitanie, France.
12.04pm – 10th April, present day.Outside Jnyandeep Medhansh’s house, Nalamar Road, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India
11.23am – 10th April, present day.Interpol, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, Lyon, France
14.03pm – 10th April, present day.Rama Shresth’s house, Kongamdara Road, Pathanpora, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India
16.04pm – 10th April, present day.Outside Jnyandeep Medhansh’s house, Nalamar Road, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India
17.03pm – 10th April, present day.Rama Shresth’s house, Kongamdara Road, Pathanpora, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India
02.31am – 11th April, present day.The Excelsior Hotel, Mirpur - Pakistani administered Kashmir (Azad Kashmir)
03.01am – 11th April, present day.The Excelsior Hotel, Mirpur - Pakistani administered Kashmir (Azad Kashmir)
05.10am – 11th April, present day.Inter-Service Intelligence Headquarters – Aabpara, Islamabad, Islamabad Capital Territory, Pakistan
10.03am – 11th April, present day.Peshawar Cantonment Railway Station, Pakistan.
10.03am – 11th April, present day.Srinagar Police Headquarters, Airport Road, Peer Bagh, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India
12.13pm – 11th April, present day.Montaillou, Rue du Village, Montségur, Occitanie, France.
16.23pm – 12th April, present day.NATO Allied Land Command (LANDCOM), Vecihi Akin Garrison, Şirinyer, İzmir, Turkey
09.23am – 13th April, present day.Ancient city of Pergamon, north-east of Bergama, northern Turkey.
14.23pm – 14th April, present day.Interpol, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, Lyon, France
19.13pm – 14th April, present day.Montaillou, Rue du Village, Montségur, Occitanie, France.
08.14am – 15th April, present dayJónas Broncksgøta, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands.
20.23pm – 15th April, present day.Montaillou, Rue du Village, Montségur, Occitanie, France.
2. 34pm – 16th April, present day Vágar International Airport, Faroe Islands.
4. 34pm – 16th April, present day Vágar International Airport, Faroe Islands.
5.51pm – 16th April, present dayKirkjubøur, Streymoy, Faroe Islands.
6.11pm – 16th April, present dayKirkjubøur, Streymoy, Faroe Islands.
Epilogue: 11.42am – 19th April, present day Tinganes Peninsula, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands.
About the Author
The youngest son of a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) and a Faroese mother, Richard Young – aka ‘Siggy’ – has spent much of his working life with the Scottish Court and Tribunal Service. During this time, he has also forged a fine reputation as an accomplished amateur cricketer and also as a cricket historian. Young’s extensive cricketing background and passion for sport, allied to his long career in the processes of the law and an innate capacity for forensic probing, combined to produce, in 2014, the acclaimed ‘As the Willow Vanishes’, a remarkable work of scholarship and myth-busting revisionist history that has since made a significant contribution to the sizeable canon of Scottish sporting and social literature.
But while he was conducting the in-depth research for ‘As the Willow Vanishes’, Young discovered bizarre connections and coincidences in that, perhaps, his own family’s history itself had a fascinating story or two to tell. This resulted, in 2016, with the publication of ‘The Stream’, a first time novel with a plot-line that made the reader, reconsider historical events.
Writing in an engagingly descriptive and informative style, ‘Thor’s Haven’ is the sequel with a story-line that will make you certainly question established history, religion, faith and belief. What is actually the truth and what is just myth?
Read on and decide for yourself.
By Richard S Young
As the Willow Vanishes
The Stream
Thor’s Haven
Acknowledgements
I have many people to thank for their help and assistance in enabling me to write this book, but in the first instance, special praise has to be given to my three good friends, Muir, Paul and Vivienne, for all of their help along the way.
Of course I have to thank all of my Nordic relatives, especially Simona, Jørgen and Anni for their help, assistance and advice, but I also have to thank the Faroe Islands themselves, for providing, yet again, such a dramatic back-drop landscape to parts of the tale.
Grateful thanks to the Føroya Politi for providing me with the detailed specifications concerning their operational practices.
Special thanks must be given to Debbie Brazendale for her unexpected, but welcome, inspiration and to Derek, Diane, Liz and Aileen for their continued support and input. To my Indian and Pakistani cricketing friends, as well as my many school chums and work colleagues - you know who you are – thanks again for all your help, advice and support.
Finally, I have to thank my wife, Lesley, and my daughter, Freya, for their patience, and their support, in allowing me to finalise the completion of this latest project.
Thor’s Haven
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s vivid imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 Richard S Young
All rights reserved
Foreword
Having previously created a fictional character in the form of Daniel Lauridsen, it would have been remiss of me to have only written the one adventure for him.
Admittedly, I have probably gone to great lengths to create the character, explain his back story, give an insight to his personality, but most importantly, give the reader an individual that is plausible and realistic, and hopefully one that the reader can also root for while digesting his latest adventure.
There aren’t many fictional action/adventure characters that portray this type of individual, and it is my hope, that whilst giving the reader some information about Daniel, Denmark and the Faroe Islands throughout the story, the same reader learns something that they didn’t know before.
I hope you enjoy this adventure yarn, and take it for what it is – a twist on religio
n and mythology that maybe broadens perceptions.
Whatever you may finally surmise or conclude, I hope the book provides you with some enjoyment, intrigue and mystery.
There are a lot more Daniel Lauridsen adventures to come...
Richard S Young
Prologue
8.33pm - Sunday 12th March 1939
Kufstein Fortress, Kufstein, Tyrol, Austria.
Kufstein, a smallish town to be found in the Austrian state of Tyrol, is the administrative seat of the larger Kufstein District. With a population of about 8,500, it is the second largest Tyrolean town after the state capital Innsbruck. The greatest landmark in the town is the Kufstein Fortress, first mentioned as Castrum Caofstein in a document in 1205.
Sitting atop an elevated promontory rising some 90 metres above the compact buildings of the medieval town, the view to behold from the battlements of the Kufstein Fortress looking towards the Brandenberg Alps is somewhat impressive, but at this moment in time, admiring the view was not a pressing matter for Otto Rahn. The biting coldness of the wind tore at him as he struggled moving forward in the now horizontal sleet, and with each step that he took, his mind processed all manner of possible variables and permutations to find a justifiable reason that would satisfactorily explain his current predicament. Whatever he had done to upset Himmler, he convinced himself that he could try and resolve the situation in the morning, but that action would have to wait for now as he concentrated on the problems of his current situation - he needed to escape from his unknown pursuers - they were somewhere behind him and closing in fast. The narrow cobbled path along the battlements afforded Otto little cover from the weather and he hoped that he would be able to chance upon an opening or a staircase that would take him away to safety, to people and to another tomorrow.
Short of breath, he reflected on the vicissitudes of his life over the past few years. From relative obscurity, he had been thrust upon the world on the orders of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, and tasked to find and then bring before his Nazi masters, the fabled biblical treasures of the Temple of Solomon such as the Chalice of the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. But his own personal theories and whimsical presuppositions had been his greatest downfall. With the publication of his 1933 book Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (Crusade towards the Grail), he had supported the ideas of Ariosophy, a belief that the Nordic races once had a great and ancient past. These mythical pre-Christianity Nordic peoples were learned, wise, philosophically and spiritually attuned races and not the all-slaughtering barbarians described by the modern day populist depictions of the Vikings.
But all of this legendary Nordic history had been lost throughout Europe as a result of nearly twenty centuries of suppression under the heel of Roman Catholicism and its associated doctrines. However, the concept of Ariosophy had recently gathered notable supporters in previous decades, such as Guido von List, an Austrian occultist, journalist, playwright and novelist who expounded a modern Pagan religious movement known as Wotanism. Up until his death in 1919, List had promoted a millenarian view that modern society was degenerate and was in desperate need to be cleansed through apocalyptic events to create a new Pan-German Empire worshipping Wotanism. But unknown to List, he had an ardent disciple and follower, and one that was determined to modify the concept to have an even more racial and anti-Semitic component. That follower was none other than Reichsführer SS Himmler himself, and the religion was Nazism with its perverse theories of racial hierarchy and the creation of a homogeneous society, unified on the basis of racial purity.
Otto Rahn had been made to join Himmler’s staff as a junior officer and went on to become a full member of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary organisation operating within the ranks of the Nazi party, in 1936. It had been an uneasy partnership for Rahn right from the start of joining, and with him being openly homosexual, frequenting anti-Nazi circles, and having recently fallen out of favour with the Nazi leadership, he had decided to resign from his post within the SS. But Otto knew deep down inside himself that his resignation wouldn’t be accepted meekly by the hierarchy and there would be certain repercussions upon him. He feared that he was now about to face them.
He turned a corner in the dark and discovered that the path he was following suddenly stopped at a viewing area. There were no other obvious exits to be seen and Otto ran frantically around the vantage point looking for an escape but to no avail. He peered through the wintry weather at the twinkling lights of the town below and then at the greyness of the flowing River Inn, the natural border between Austria and Germany before joining the Danube, but there was now nowhere left for him to go, at least of his own volition.
He scrambled open his briefcase and retrieved the white stone from inside it. His pursuers could never possess this artefact. It was too important a relic for mankind to have, let alone the Nazis. He held the stone in his right palm and had a final gaze at its strange inscriptions. Footsteps rang out behind him and Otto threw the stone as hard as he could towards the River Inn. Two sets of hands grabbed him while a third snatched away his briefcase. He couldn’t hear anyone talking and his last feeling was the sickening scrunch of a baton being whacked off the back of his head.
The following morning, Monday 13th March 1939, a young Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS), or SD officer, was called to the village of Söll, about nine miles to the south of Kufstein, with reports of a body having been discovered on a mountainside.
Otto Rahn’s lifeless body was found lying face down on the ground, frozen to death, beside an alpine path. His death was officially recorded as a suicide…
06.43am – 8th April, present day.
Mirpur - Pakistani administered Kashmir (Azad Kashmir)
The warm sunlight filtered through the gap in the curtains, its beam cutting a swathe through the darkness of the room. Dust particles, illuminated in the sun’s ray, appear to dog-fight with each other as the beam crosses the room.
Lying in a bed located in a corner, a body starts to stir. A bare foot, exposed from underneath the bed covers, becomes the focus of the sun’s rays as they gather on the sole. The man in the bed begins to toss and turn as the warmth of the sun increases on his skin while his brain tries to process what is happening to him. A grunt, a groan, a flicker of his right foot, a turn of the body, but still the warm sensation increases. Wide-eyed, the man sits up, confusion reigns then dissipates as he realises what has happened to him. He looks at his watch, 06.43am and it’s already getting hot inside the room.
Having shaved, showered and dressed, the man leaves his room and heads for the dining area within the hotel. He checks the time on his watch again and sees that it is now 07.57am and that he still has an hour before his driver collects him for his day trip excursion. Sitting at a window table, he orders breakfast and a pot of strong coffee and starts to read a copy of The Express Tribune, an English language edition newspaper in partnership with The International New York Times, a Pakistani produced newspaper that offers the reader a global perspective of world events while still delivering and reporting local and Asian issues.
The man finishes his breakfast, drains his coffee cup and neatly folds the newspaper and leaves it on the table. He thanks the waiter for his service and walks back to his room. Another glance at the watch confirms that the time is now 08.44am and he has 15 minutes to gather his bits and bobs together and be waiting outside for his driver to arrive.
Waiting under the canopy of the faux-column entrance portico to the hotel, the man leans against a pillar and watches for his car and driver to arrive. The man is Daniel Lauridsen, a 45 year old Danish national and a security management consultant and professional diver currently working on repairs to the Mangla Dam, the twelfth largest reservoir dam facility in the world. The main dam is 10,300 feet (3140 metres) long and 454 feet (138 metres) high with a reservoir of 97.7 square miles (253 km²) and is not far from the
city’s edge.
But Daniel was not just a security consultant and professional diver, he was more than that. His previous working life had been as an operative for Denmark’s Frømandkorpset, the Royal Danish Navy’s elite and ultra secretive special-forces unit, and he was the possessor of certain skills and problem solving attributes that now helped him with his return to the normalities of civilian life. His compulsory enforced-retirement from military service and the Frømandskorpset at the age of 35 had made Daniel form his own business, working as a free-lance security management consultant and professional diver. Some early successes with his bespoke security management training courses, tailored in the main for banking and financial institutions, had caught the eye of corporate business and word of mouth recommendation had become extremely profitable for his solo business venture.
When not providing security management training courses, he would take on professional diving contracts. From the laying of cables to the checking of the structural competency of the stanchion legs of a North Sea oil platform, Daniel wasn’t fussy as to what he was doing, as long as he was doing something. He needed the cut and thrust of working on a project to occupy his time and couldn’t sit on his hands and watch the world go by, and occasionally, he would work as an expendable freelance contractor for his former military employer, but luckily for him, those days seemed to be rarer and rarer.
But all of that had changed eighteen months earlier for him, when what seemed like a simple business trip to the Faroe Islands in the middle of the North Atlantic, had become a race against time to save a 17 year old Scottish girl from the clutches of a mad Nazi sympathiser called Torstein Lindemann, a man who was using the resources of his own global company as a cover for the pursuit of madness. Daniel had been able to thwart the actions of this madman, save the young girl from almost certain harm and prevent a perverse lunatic from realising some delusional conception dating right back to 1930s Berlin and the evils of the Third Reich. But in doing what he had had to do, Daniel had also brought about the financial collapse and destruction of an internationally renowned Swiss pharmaceutical company called Das Volker Syndicate, and that act of disintegration had become a constant news article in the media ever since. Having spent years living anonymously working for the Frømandskorpset or for himself, Daniel had become an extremely popular person that the world’s media desperately wanted to interview.
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