Thor's Haven

by Richard S Young

  Daniel’s way to respond to the relentless and persistent media interest that he was faced with was relatively uncomplicated. He just simply disappeared and tried to work where he wasn’t known or people had little interest in him or the Das Volker Syndicate story.

  An initial few months of rest and relaxation spent with his girlfriend, Sólrun Jacobsen, in the Faroe Islands was interrupted almost as soon as it had started. He had bade farewell and explained he would come back as soon as matters quietened down, but time had flown by and it had been over a year since he had last seen her. From leaving the serene tranquility of the Faroe Islands, he had undertaken short-term contracts that took him to Brazil to Chile to Vietnam and now to Pakistan, but wherever he went, some story-hungry journalist would eventually get wind of the fact that Daniel Lauridsen was working in the country and would then try to secure an ‘exclusive’ interview with him. But Daniel wasn’t interested in providing any ammunition to further fuel an old story. He just wanted to get on with his life while questioning why the world’s media couldn’t understand that he had got caught up in a situation not of his own making, a vile conspiracy, and that he had no other choices to make when saving a young girl from harm.

  He sorely missed Sólrun and her spiky personality but he couldn’t subject her, or the Faroe Islands and its people, to the relentless invasive scrutiny of a global media circus that seemed to be permanently fixated upon rehashing the story about the Das Volker Syndicate and its nefarious interests. It appalled Daniel that journalists all around the world seemed to revel in trying to maintain an incessant mass media interest in the very public collapse, disgrace and dismemberment of a once global company and its associated empire through the need for almost constant documentary investigation.

  He thought about Freyja Fulton, the young Scottish girl that he had previously saved from the evil clutches of modern-day Nazis. She would be nearly 20 now and he wondered how she was coping with the many faces of a new identity and then having to endure the round the clock professional protection from those that would wish her harm, or worse, harass her endlessly for her unique story.

  He straightened himself up from leaning on a pillar and walked down the short flight of steps onto the roadway as a black landrover entered the reception driveway of the hotel and stopped beside him. The driver got out and asked him if he was Daniel Lauridsen.

  09.27am – 8th April, present day.

  Mirpur - Pakistani administered Kashmir (Azad Kashmir)

  The city of New Mirpur lies a short distance away from the main Peshawar-Lahore Grand Trunk road at Dina Tehsil. The modern city was built in the late sixties on the banks of the Mangla Lake, a huge artificially created reservoir and dam that holds 97.7 square miles (253 km2) of waters from the Jhelum River. The dam was constructed between 1961 and 1967 and lies about 67 miles (108 km) to the south-east of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

  The sheer scale of the dam project had resulted in a huge displacement and resettlement programme to be undertaken with the local population, with over 280 villages, as well as the substantial towns of Mirpur and Dadyal, being submerged beneath the waters of the newly-created artificial lake. A large percentage of the people displaced by this dam construction were given entrance visas and work permits for the United Kingdom by the Government of Pakistan, and as a direct result, the majority of the current Pakistani ethnic community now to be found within the United Kingdom actually originated from this Mirpur-Dadyal area of Azad Kashmir. There are estimated to be about 747,000 Mirpuris and their descendents in the United Kingdom alone, forming about 70% of the current British ethnic Pakistani community.

  The remains of the old city of Mirpur, normally submerged under the vast waters of the Mangla Lake, can often be seen during colder months when the water levels decrease, with minarets from the mosques, a Sikh gurdwara and a Hindu mandir all sitting proud of the water. But today, Daniel was receiving a rare treat – a chance to go and wander around the ruins themselves. The great lake had been drained to allow for various repairs and modifications to be made to the dam and its associated defences. It had taken nearly three weeks for the waters to subside to a level that would allow the work to be carried out safely, and having done so, the ruins of the old city of Mirpur had appeared like a ghost in the middle of a near-dry lake. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity to be able to go and explore the revealed city, something that few will ever experience in their lifetimes.

  His driver, Rifatullah Khan, was a local man who seemed to be known to everyone that was working at the dam complex itself and to anyone in the surrounding community. When Daniel had asked for permission if it would be possible for him to go out to visit the city ruins, his project manager said he would have to make a few enquiries but would revert back to him with a yes or a no answer.

  The work on the dam was minimal at the moment while the lake drained, and Daniel’s skills were more in demand for him to check the structure’s integrity as the lake refilled and the water pressure increased, so his services could be spared for him to have a few days off to go sightseeing in the region. A few days had passed by before he was told he would be able to go and explore the ruins of Mirpur City and general sightseeing on the condition that he had a local guide accompany him at all times, and that was to be Rifatullah Khan. Daniel didn’t ask why he needed to have the services of a local guide for his explorations but thanked the project manager for arranging things for him anyway.

  Rifatullah Khan was in his late 50s and had a raffish look about him. A shock of unkempt black hair was brushed backwards in a haphazard manner and served as a disarming distraction to the shining white teeth on show when he smiled. He was a pleasant enough companion for Daniel to have and was very enthusiastic when explaining what all the various sites were on their journey towards the old city of Mirpur. Daniel had picked up a particular brogue to his accent and decided to ask Rifatullah what it was and where it was from.

  “Your English is very good Rifatulluh and can I ask where your accent is from, if you don’t mind?” asked Daniel.

  “Not at all and call me Rifat, by the way. I was born and brought up here in old Mirpur, but my father emigrated to the United Kingdom when I was about 10 and he took the family with him. When they were building the dam, the government was offering chances for families to move there and he decided to go. We lived in a place called Glasgow. Do you know it?”

  “I was there a few years ago on business. It’s a nice city and the people are interesting.” replied Daniel.

  “Tell me about that. Sometimes I wish I was still back there but I had to come back to Mirpur when my parents wanted to return home. I miss the Glasgow weather actually. It never got too warm and it rained a lot. We don’t get that type of weather here much.” and laughed.

  Rifat obviously enjoyed talking about his past life in the United Kingdom and regaled Daniel about what he and the family had done while they had lived there. The family had owned a convenience cum grocery store that his father ran and where Rifat and his siblings would work in when they were not at school. Rifat, as the oldest son, on leaving school, had branched out on his own with a takeaway fast food shop which was quickly followed by taking possession of an existing Indian restaurant. He had made a comfortable life for himself in Glasgow, had seen his two sisters married off to local Asian men in the community and all seemed good in the world. But then his father suffered a severe stroke and wished to return to his native Pakistan for his final days.

  His father’s health never improved and he died a few months after returning home. Rifat didn’t have the heart to leave his mother all alone in Pakistan for him to then return to the United Kingdom, so he stayed behind and set up a couple of small businesses to tide him over. One business was an office supplies operation and the other was a driver/car for hire service targeting the dam’s foreign national employees as the main clients while also providing some essential transportation services to the
local towns and cities such as Gujrāt, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

  The landrover bumped along the ground as it left the smoothness of the roadway and traversed across terrain normally submerged by water. In the distance, the eerie remains of the old city of Mirpur could be seen. Rifat crunched the landrover through its gears as he manoeuvred the vehicle around the drying sludge and silt now exposed by the drainage of the lake. The vehicle suddenly stopped bumping and Rifat explained that he had found the remains of the old road that led to the city. Daniel looked all around at the desolation caused by over 50 years of continual submergence under water - no vegetation to be seen and the landscape must be what the surface of the planet Mars must look like after a rain shower, he mused.

  Rifat occasionally drove the landrover off the roadway to get around giant boulders that blocked the route, presumably displaced by floods and currents and then carried along by the continuous flow of water towards the dam. The tarmac appeared to be rotting as it dried out in the warmth of the overhead sun. As Daniel looked back over his shoulder towards the dam to gauge its size, its sheer length resembled an imposing, blackened-concrete snake, slithering along the various geographical contours while serving as a connecting barrier wall between points of land, he whimsically sniggered to himself as he appreciated that the height of the dam was the same depth that he had dived down to when he had salvaged a box of coins from a shipwreck in the Faroe Islands. That had been the last time he had been deep-diving.

  Rifat had noticed the snigger.

  “What’s so funny? What are you laughing at to yourself?” he asked.

  “Nothing really. I was just looking back at the dam there and I realised that its height is about the same measurement of the depth I went down to the last time I undertook some deep-diving.”

  “Was that when you went down to the shipwreck of the SS Sauternes?” asked Rifat.

  Daniel’s senses flicked into full alert mode and he focused on what this Rifat, his appointed driver, had just said to him. How did he know the name of the ship that he had dived down to? With his right hand, he pulled hard on the hand brake and caused the landrover to veer and career over the roadway. With his left hand, Daniel grabbed the external carotid artery on the left hand side of Rifat’s neck. His thumb and forefinger were squeezing the artery tightly.

  “You better stop the car as you’re about 10 seconds away from having an aneurysm and about 15 seconds away from certain death, so I suggest you do as I say and then tell me how you know about the SS Sauternes?”

  09.27am – 8th April, present day.

  Montaillou, Rue du Village, Montségur, Occitanie, France.

  The small village of Montségur is a commune to be found in the Ariège department of the Occitanie region of southwestern France. With a population of only 127, the village is famous with tourists and historians for its ruined fortification, the Château de Montségur, built on the mountain overlooking it. The ruins are the remains of the last stronghold of the Cathars, a religious sect that was considered heretical by the Catholic Church during the middle ages. This faith of Catharism was an early Christian movement that incorporated both Gnostic and Dualistic ideals into its interpretation of the scriptures. They believed that all human beings contained within them an element of the Divine Light trapped in bodies of matter by ‘the Prince of this world’, Satan, who had created the material universe as a consequence of his rebellion against the Holy Father, God. Jesus Christ was an emissary of God, sent into this world to help human beings return to the Holy Father.

  Cathars believed in a concept of reincarnation, in that the individual soul was being repeatedly born into a world of suffering and pain until it reached a state of inner purification, and when having achieved this aim, it could then return, ascend, to the Holy Father. Through this interpretation of the ideal of Eternal Life in Jesus Christ, they argued for a return to the essence of Christ’s teaching, an embracing of the Apostolic ideal of human behaviour and rejected the workings of the Catholic Church as it was viewed as ‘the Synagogue of Satan’ for having turned its back on Christ’s message with its vast material power, wealth and corruption.

  The Cathar community, in much the same manner as many of the other Christian sects of the time, was divided into two distinct groups comprising the spiritual elite and the ordinary believers. This spiritually elite group were known as the Perfecti while the rest were known as Credentes, or Believers. The Credentes formed the majority of the Cathar religious belief and were not expected to adopt the austere lifestyles of the Perfecti, who, as they believed they were the carriers of the Holy Spirit, lived their lives in extreme poverty and abstained themselves from practices such as sexual contact and eating meat.

  As a haven and refuge for the Cathars, Montségur had gained a reputation of both symbolic and strategic importance in its continued resistance fight against the Catholic Church and the loyal French forces at its beck and call. However, for a nine month period starting in May 1243, those Cathars who had sought refuge within the walls of the Montségur fortress were now besieged by some 10,000 French troops. The fortress was defended by a scant force of only 100 fighters but was also the final home for the remaining pacifist Perfecti, many Credentes and a large number of civilian refugees who had fled within the battlements from the surrounding areas. In March 1244, the Cathars finally surrendered to the besieging forces and 244 of them were then burned to death, en masse, in a huge bonfire at the foot of the mountain fortress when they refused to renounce their faith and revert back into accepted Catholicism.

  Although this religious sect of Catharism was now effectively destroyed, its organisational hierarchy burnt at the stake and the followers suppressed and forced into the will and doctrines of the Catholic Church, there was always a suspicion that perhaps three or four of the Perfecti elite had survived this final annihilation of their religion. In the weeks prior to the surrender, a small group had escaped the fortress walls and made their way to a nearby forest to recover the treasures of the Cathar faith. The treasure was said to contain valuables, documents and relics and was also purported to contain the most sought after artefact of them all of the Christian faith, the Chalice of the Holy Grail itself. Nothing about this treasure’s whereabouts is known and has been the subject of an interminable search by mankind for nearly 800 years.

  The two-story terraced buildings that lined either side of the Rue du Village in Montségur were fairly bland to look at with their stucco walls painted in varying shades of magnolia and topped with terracotta tiled roofs bleached blonde by the sun. At the southern end of the street however, an impeccably pristine building stood out from its neighbours in the morning sunshine. Three parked cars directly outside denoted that there were people inside, and on the lintel above the door entrance, a wide name-plate declared that the building was called Montaillou.

  Montaillou may have just looked from the outside as an office space in amongst a street of residential houses, but the inside of the building was, in fact, the headquarters for a splinter group of the original Cathar religious sect. Although Catharism as a religious concept had been effectively destroyed and suppressed by the Catholic Church in the years following the siege of Montségur, the sect had survived through extreme secrecy and had managed to maintain adherents, although relatively few in numbers, to the cause. As time had progressed through the centuries, the sect had also diversified itself from its original path of belief, and this house called Montaillou, was now the epicentre of an extreme fundamentalist branch of Catharism, The Path of Belibasta, a branch solely dedicated to the discipline and enlightenment of one of the last recorded Perfecti, Guilhèm Belibasta, who was captured by the Inquisition, tortured, then burnt at the stake in Villerouge Termenes in 1320.

  The Path of Belibasta had deviated somewhat from its original pursuance of true enlightenment over the centuries and now viewed themselves as the righteous protectors and eternal guardians of
all of the modern day variations and interpretations of what would be classed as Gnostic Christianity. Although credited with less than 20,000 followers around the world, The Path of Belibasta influenced, discretely, the direction, actions and teachings of many of the still operating ancient religions whose own adherents shunned the trappings of the modern material world and wholly embraced their own spirituality, through gnosis, and the ever-constant search for knowledge, enlightenment, salvation, emancipation or ‘oneness with God’. While they still retained the original Perfecti and Credentes Cathar groups within their order, The Path of Belibasta had developed a third group of followers, the Sergites, whose role was to enforce the will of its order by any means possible. These Sergites, of which there were only around 100 of them, were highly trained and educated individuals who each had given a lifelong oath to serve and protect the interests of The Path of Belibasta. These Sergites represented the original 100 fighters who had defended the Montségur fortress some 800 years previously and were duty bound to continue the defence of their faith.

  Sitting at his desk in an office on the ground floor, Markus Bruscante studied the charts and calendars spread out before him. He understood all of what he was looking at but he was annoyed. The common acceptance is that Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon, on or after, the vernal equinox, the astronomical event in which the plane of the Earth’s equator passes through the centre of the Sun, twice each year, around 20th March and 23rd September and that day and night are of equal duration all over the planet. The dates for Easter were plotted out in a set of tables that used a complex mathematical formula to work out the future dates of the full moon and the vernal equinox. They had been originally developed by bishops at the Council of Nicea, convened in 325AD by the Roman Emperor Constantine, who wanted to set a common Sunday for Easter celebrations to be held around the known world and to have advance guidance when it would fall in future years.