“Hyperborea, Shambhala… Bifrost… Ah, Thule, that way, just popping up right on the horizon! Can’t wait to get there for a boiling soup and a good sleep after this crap of a- wait, Jens, what are you doing over there? The surveys say we should start drilling here, exactly here: stay focused for once, don’t you know how much all this stuff costs? You screw up again, I swear to Woden I’m not saving your ass no more!”
You will be disappointed:
this is no piece about mythical northern realms or an account regarding our people’s true origins – something we know would be much appreciated by our audience. Our “Thule” is not the ancestral homeland whence the first Aryans set out to conquer the Eurasian steppes. No, ours is just a forlorn US Space Force base in the far northwest of Greenland, only a few yards away from the magnetic pole. But, even if much more mundane, this place is still somewhat of a kingdom; now, after a brief succession crisis last year, due to the rebelliousness of his predecessor, here the throne is firmly occupied by Colonel Shawn Lee.
Col. Lee informally keeps calling his domain (bestowed upon him thanks to the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement, according to which Denmark granted the US full permission for military installations on the island) by the good ole “Thule Air Base”, which sounds much more badass to him, albeit he knows well that the base has been officially renamed “Pituffik” in 2023 to “reflect the original native name of the area and respect the traditions of the local population” and all of this woke baloney – “ah, those goddamn DEI hires, lucky me now we’ve got Trump down there in Washington, he surely knows how to deal with this shit and get straight back to business!”.
He cannot be blamed: since Trump’s second arrival at the White House, his duties have significantly been expanded. Not just anymore he takes care of boring tasks like monitoring the NORAD systems or feeding his 821st Space Base Group; now it’s the time to drill, baby drill and the lucky colonel was told he had a huge, untapped titanium deposit right outside his door. His mission: ensure the safety and protection of the scientific and technical teams deployed on site against any potential attempt at disruption by foreign agents.
With each passing day
it becomes clearer to everybody that the island of Greenland is not just a large, icy floating rock, nor only another simple tile in the so-called global competition: it’s the last and ultimate frontier of human exploration, pure and untouched, rich with plenty of loot and with bountiful fruits to reap within the reach of hand; not to mention the highly strategic position of the island for military matters, serving as a natural wedge between North America and Europe, or the benefits the holder would get from the opening of the much-talked-about Northeast Passage, emerging out of the melting ice caps.
It’s one of those legendary lands that excite the spirit of adventurers, civilizers, marauders and religious fanatics. And everyone wants it: Russians, Chinese and Americans, all have high stakes and want to play the game. A game, however, played on European soil, that should belong to us and to us only, but where the Americans not only feel at home, so much so that the President’s son believed he was justified to stick his nose into the island’s internal affairs, but have even begun to push further claims on the Crown of Denmark’s dependency.
Sitting at his desk by the dimming light of the hewn lamp the former king (a queen, actually) forgot to take back home, Col. Lee scans, over and over, the data and statistics of the hidden treasures laying beneath his feet, obsessively muttering each figure as he reads them during the pauses between a dull tap of his beloved fountain pen, a gift of his dear wife, and another: “Oil… 17 billion barrels… Gas… 138 trillion cubic me-… Rare-earths… 40 million tons… eighth in the wor-…”. He dreams about starting his own extraction company one day, so as to become a true king of his own hill, an African warlord of this white, barren desert, where once again the dauntless and the renegades can reclaim their fair share of riches and glory. For the moment, though, his duty is to prevent no Sergeij or Zhou can stretch out their greedy hands on his much-craved booty. To his credit, he is usually said to take his job very seriously.
And the Danes?
At first slightly bewildered when he received his new orders, the colonel quickly grasped that he shouldn’t be bothered at all by the natives’ activities, least of all by any Jens’.
“Hey, come see here what I found!”, Rasmus was frantically digging a probing hole when a black, thin and small, rod-shaped object peeped out of the hard-packed snow. “Ah, it’s just a stupid pen, wonder how it ended up here in this hell of a place. You want to keep it?”. Jens spun the odd find around a couple times until the blinding sunlight reflecting on the lucid resin finally revealed an engraving with a typical dedication: “To my dear love Shawn”. With a pleased smirk, he carefully stored the pen away in his heavy parka’s right front pocket and immediately got back to work.
To the victor belong the spoils.