Pandora's Curse

by Du Brul, Jack

  “Yes, Dr. Mercer. The Nazis were looking for a piece of the Tunguska meteor that exploded over Siberia on June 30, 1908.”

  “How? Why?”

  Puhl looked at the blank faces of the others. “For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Tunguska explosion has remained an enigma since it occurred. Some theorized it was an asteroid, others a comet or black hole. Some even believe it was the detonation of a UFO’s nuclear power plant. What everyone does agree on is that it leveled a thousand square miles of forest, although trees at the very epicenter were left standing like certain buildings in Hiroshima after the atom bomb. Seismographs as distant as Washington, D.C., registered the shock wave, and an unearthly glow was seen as far away as Copenhagen. Furthermore, eyewitness accounts say that a portion of the object was observed continuing in a northwesterly direction and was actually gaining altitude after the explosion.

  “To answer Mercer’s questions as to how and why the Germans were searching for the wayward fragment those witnesses saw, I have to give a bit more history.” Erwin accepted the brandy bottle when Ira passed it to him. “The first scientific expedition to search for the site wasn’t conducted until 1927 by a man named Leonid Kulik. He is important to remember because he was captured by the Germans and died at a prison camp in 1942. During weeks of brutal interrogation he revealed everything he knew about the mysterious impact.

  “After they learned the truth about the blast, the Germans spared nothing to secure his research notes. In fact they sacrificed thousands of troops in what became one of the most desperate battles of the entire war just to find a couple of notebooks.” He paused again, more contemplative than dramatic. “When the war broke out, Kulik had sent his more secret findings to an associate in Stalingrad.”

  “Are you saying the Battle of Stalingrad was all about a couple of notebooks?” Marty scoffed. “Give me a break.”

  “No, but hundreds of commando teams were sent behind Russian lines during the fighting to find them. Thousands of men died in the search. When it came to Hitler’s obsessions, fact is a lot stranger than fiction. Let me tell you another story to illustrate this.” Erwin lectured as if to a child. “In April of 1942, he sent a team of scientists equipped with state-of-the-art radar gear to Rugen Island in the Baltic Sea to test a new theory that he had. Hitler had become convinced that while the Earth was indeed round, we didn’t live on its outer surface but on the inner curve of a hollow sphere, like insects in a salad bowl. The scientists spent weeks beaming radar waves into the sky hoping for a rebounded signal from the British naval base at Scapa Flow.

  “You must realize at the time Germany lagged far behind the Allies when it came to radar equipment and yet Der Führer,” Puhl mocked the title, “wasted valuable resources on a quest doomed to fail.”

  “What’s this have to do with Tunguska?”

  “Not all of the ludicrous scientific avenues the Nazis pursued during the war were such dismal mistakes. The Pandora Project was much more successful. As I said, the first official investigation into the Tunguska blast didn’t occur until 1927. However, there had been a great deal of local interest. The first unofficial search was sent out a year after the celestial impact, although they were turned back because of weather and the site’s inaccessibility. It wasn’t until two years after that, in 1911, that anyone saw the devastation first hand.

  “While Tunguska is one of the most remote tracts in the Siberian taiga, news of this success reached the Imperial capital of St. Petersburg in 1912 because so many of the explorers died in the forest or shortly after their return from the site. Their deaths were horrifying, a mysterious disease that dissolved the flesh from their bodies. They ended up as nothing more than skeletal figures.”

  Mercer’s mind flashed to the photograph of Stefansson Rosmunder lying in a hospital bed in Reykjavik, knowing now what had killed him.

  “The peasants believed,” Puhl continued, “that the devil had punched the forest, leveling the trees, and it was his residual evil that killed their men. Some returned from the impact zone with pieces of a strange rock that was warm to the touch, claiming it was pieces of Satan’s skin. Entire settlements where this unknown rock was stored died of the same wasting disease, usually just days after the explorers’ home-coming. Priests called in said they knew what dark forces were at work and had all the samples encased in golden icons, confident that they would contain the evil that had killed an estimated one thousand people. Their idea worked.”

  His statement was met with skepticism until Mercer spoke. “That was a hell of an idea even if they didn’t understand why. If the rocks they collected were radioactive fragments from the meteor, gold would act as an effective shield because of its density. Not as good as lead, but efficient nonetheless.”

  Erwin nodded his head. “Kulik’s research later proved that gold dampened the radiation much more effectively than lead. He was never able to explain why this radioactivity behaved so differently, and in his defense, little was known about radiation at this time. It was a mysterious force only a few were even aware of.”

  Mercer’s scientific background allowed him to see the hole in Puhl’s story. “How is it such a potent radiation source didn’t kill all the men who went to the impact site?”

  “Kulik knew that all radioactive material decayed in what is termed ‘half-lives.’ His theory was that the meteor pieces decayed unevenly, from the outside in, and as the surface becomes inert in a few months, it shields itself from more decay. He believed this phenomenon was caused by a reaction with our atmosphere or perhaps an effect of solar radiation breaking down something within the fragments. Neither he nor anyone else is really certain. He guessed that only those chunks the peasants handled roughly and broke away the nonreactive coating were the ones that caused the deaths.”

  Noting a number of flaws with this theory, Mercer held his tongue. He wasn’t a planetary geologist. They were talking about an element that had never been seen on earth before and had never been examined by modern science. He didn’t know what fantastic substances could be swirling around the universe on the backs of interstellar comets. Every few years, scientists working with particle accelerators added new elements to the end of the periodic table. It was possible that the meteor was composed of some stable element we hadn’t yet discovered.

  “Okay, back to my story,” Erwin said, and the group became attentive again. Few of them understood or cared about the physics. They just wanted to hear the rest of his enthralling tale. “In 1912, Czarina Alexandra sent her most trusted emissary to Vanavara, the city closest to the blast, to discover what was killing her people. The man had a religious background and quickly adopted the idea of sealing the fragments in golden icons. He had teams sent into the forest to scour for more bits of ‘Satan’s Fist,’ as he called it.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Mercer exclaimed. “That explains why nothing of the original meteorite has ever been found at Tunguska. Someone cleaned the site before Kulik or any subsequent expedition ever reached it.”

  “Precisely,” Erwin agreed. “Even with protective boxes to seal the meteorites as soon as they were discovered, hundreds more perished in the task. This priest had a golden suit made for himself so he could work with the samples, making sure that they would never again harm another soul.”

  “Who was the priest?” Ira asked.

  “His given name was Grigori Efymovich Novykh.”

  Anika Klein was so wrapped in the story it took her a second to realize she knew that name. Or at least the more famous one the man was known by. “Rasputin!”

  “Yes, Rasputin was the Czarina’s emissary and he spent two years at Tunguska recovering the meteorites. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, he refused to tell anyone about what he had found. World War One had just begun and he feared that his discovery would be used as a weapon. Even when the Germans first used poison gas at Bolimov in January 1915, he would not divulge the presence of this extraordinary killer. As the war dragged on, rumors sur
rounding what he’d found grew and he knew it was only a matter of time before he was tortured to reveal what had killed the villagers in Tunguska. With pressure against him mounting, Rasputin formed the Brotherhood of Satan’s Fist, enlisting a few trusted priests so they would continue to protect the secret after he was gone. Rasputin was murdered in December of 1916, not because of his influence over the royal family as the history books record, but because he wouldn’t tell certain military men what he knew.”

  “So he wasn’t the psychotic demon people think he was?”

  Erwin chuckled with dark humor. “Oh, he was that too. Tales of his debauchery are, if anything, milder than the truth. But those in the Brotherhood saw him as a man who might have saved humanity from its own destructive impulses.”

  “So how does this involve the Nazis?”

  “The first Russian revolution swept through St. Petersburg a few weeks after Rasputin’s murder, and those who knew the rumors about Satan’s Fist were exiled or executed. Interest in the Tunguska blast waned. The Brotherhood hid the fifty icons containing the meteorite fragments in various churches and monasteries around the country, moving them often as communist forces either confiscated or razed the buildings. And as members grew older, new people were brought in. Leonid Kulik was one of them, the first who wasn’t a priest. He was asked to join so he would not reveal some of the anomalous findings he had made at the impact site, like the fact that he knew others had been there before him.”

  “How many members were there at any given time?” Mercer asked. Like the others, he’d already deduced that Erwin Puhl and Igor Bulgarin were part of the Brotherhood.

  “Usually never more than six or eight. Our small size helped ensure our anonymity. It was Kulik who determined the true nature of what the Brotherhood safeguarded, and it was his recommendation shortly before Germany invaded the Soviet Union that the icons be destroyed. He would not allow this horror to be unleashed on the world. Much more was known about radiation by then and he feared that physicists could build an atomic bomb from the fragments.

  “All but one icon were encased in cement and transported far out to sea, where they were dumped. Because gold won’t corrode in seawater, they will remain dormant forever. At the same time this was going on, Kulik calculated the trajectory of the piece of meteor that eyewitnesses said skimmed off the atmosphere and vanished. His next goal was to track down this other piece to ensure it didn’t get discovered by anyone else. That is when the Nazis launched their lightning strike into the Soviet Union. Kulik was captured before the last icon could be shipped from the isolated abbey where it had been hidden and before he could organize an expedition to find the other fragments.”

  “Which landed here?”

  “Yes.” Erwin soothed his throat with another sip of brandy. “The Nazis eventually learned of the missing icon from Kulik, sent a commando team deep into Russia to steal it, and secured his notebooks from Stalingrad, which gave the coordinates to where the last piece of Satan’s Fist had landed.”

  Anika’s dark eyes shimmered with the same passion that so infected her grandfather. “Then they launched the Pandora Project using looted gold to build their own storage boxes for any radioactive material they discovered. Once they found the meteorites, they sent Otto Schroeder to dig them out of the ice.”

  Nodding, Erwin polished his glasses. “By this time the allies were regularly flying over Greenland in aerial convoys ferrying aircraft to England.”

  “The ‘Lost Squadron’ we were talking about earlier was just such a flight,” Mercer added.

  “Yes. The radioactive heat generated within the stones had melted the fragments down to bedrock. Because of these flights, the Germans couldn’t risk tunneling to them from the surface, so they approached from the sea in submarines, eventually finding a cavern under a glacier that was within five miles of where the meteor landed. They planned to use the cave as a staging area before driving a long tunnel through ice and rock to reach the fragments.” Erwin looked over to Anika, who still had the journal open on her lap. “You don’t need to finish Schroeder’s journal. I’ve already read it. They had completed the air shaft and pier for the sub and had just commenced the tunnel to the cache when Schroeder was injured. He didn’t know what happened here after he was injured.”

  “Do you?” Marty asked.

  “No one knows except the poor slave Mercer found in Camp Decade.”

  Something Puhl had said struck Anika. Her brow furled and her thin eyebrows arched. Her tone was accusatory. “When did you read Schroeder’s journal?”

  Erwin looked away, pained. “Shortly after you went to interview him,” he said evasively.

  “How shortly?” Her anger rose because she was pretty sure of the answer.

  “We found it in his house after driving off Rath and his neo-Nazi thugs.”

  Anika exploded. “Those snipers were your people? You son of a bitch! You were there the whole time and you let Schroeder die. You let me get shot.” And then everything else came clear. “It was you who set this whole thing up—my opa, me. You fucking bastard!”

  She lunged from her seat and would have reached Puhl had she not gotten tangled in her sleeping bag and fallen. Mercer dove to pin her to the deck, holding her arms over her head so she couldn’t squirm free. She was a foot shorter than he, eighty pounds lighter, but for a few desperate seconds he was afraid she’d beat him. Fury augmented her strength, so she was like an enraged animal.

  “Anika, stop it,” Mercer pleaded, his teeth gritting against the pain as she bit his shoulder.

  She got a hand free and went for his eyes, her fingers cocked like talons. Mercer ducked his head and felt her try to tear a piece of skin from his cheek. And then it was over. Anika went completely limp. Mercer opened his eyes, confused, wondering what had calmed her. Chef Hilda stood over them massaging one fist. She said something over her shoulder for Erwin to translate.

  “She knew you would never strike a woman, so she did it for you.”

  Hilda gave Mercer a proud smile and a wink.

  “Danke,” he replied, checking on Anika. She had a growing bruise under her left eye, but otherwise she’d be fine. He moved her back to her seat, secured her seat belt to stop her from charging the instant she woke and leveled a gaze at Erwin. “She’s right, you know. You are a son of a bitch. What gives you the right to drag innocent people into your fight?”

  “In this fight, no one is innocent. The Brotherhood of Satan’s Fist has spent nearly a century protecting the world from what we know. I think for that kind of dedication we should be allowed to involve others if we need them.”

  “But why involve Anika and her grandfather? Or me?”

  “I will answer your second question first,” Erwin said calmly. “We did not get you involved. You were already scheduled to come to Greenland with Geo-Research. It was just luck on our part. We mentioned your name to Schroeder as a possible ally in case something went wrong with our plans. You have a reputation for being a very capable man.”

  Mercer remained unconvinced, but if Erwin was revealing the truth about the cavern and Anika’s grandfather, why would he lie about him?

  “I don’t know this Charles Bryce you mentioned earlier,” Puhl continued, “so I think his invitation for you to join the expedition to Camp Decade was legitimate.”

  “And Anika?”

  “We sent information to her grandfather that would lead him to Schroeder in the hopes that he would be able to expose the Kohl Company and the Pandora Project. It wasn’t until we followed Anika to Schroeder’s house that we realized our security had been compromised. Gunther Rath, who is the special-projects director for Kohl, somehow learned about Schroeder and had beaten us there. We suspect that Anika’s grandfather’s office in Vienna was bugged.

  “Igor and I chased off Rath and his group. Well, Igor and another Brother chased them off. I don’t know the first thing about guns. We broke into Schroeder’s house and found the diary he kept hidden. We gave i
t to a lawyer in Munich to forward to you. The operation was falling apart and once we reached Greenland we feared we would need your help, considering Rath’s brutality. By this time Anika had vanished, so we couldn’t warn her off. I didn’t know her whereabouts until we heard the SOS from that helicopter. We never intended for anyone to get hurt. None of us were supposed to be here. Geo-Research’s expedition would have been canceled had Anika been able to reveal what we intended her to learn.” His voice trailed off.

  Mercer sat back in his seat, trying to absorb everything. It would take a while, he knew, maybe forever. It was an amazing story. Meteors, radiation, secret brotherhoods, Rasputin, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Nazi hunters, and a planeload of innocent people trapped on a glacier between a Gunther Rath and his goal. “What do you think, Ira?”

  “Since we kicked ass in W.W. Two, we can assume that the Germans never got the meteorites. Which means they’ve been down there for the sixty years since the start of the Pandora Project.”

  “Go on.”

  “Makes me wonder why this Rath character is so hot to find them now. This thing’s been in the works for a while, considering Kohl bought Geo-Research to spearhead their hunt a year ago. What I want to know is what happened last year to make this such a priority. Any ideas, Erwin?”

  “We don’t know,” he admitted.

  “Ah, guys,” Marty called. “This has been very interesting but it doesn’t help us. We’ve survived one murder attempt but I doubt we’ll survive the next if we stick around.”

  “We should try for the air shaft,” Mercer said, looking at Puhl. “Rath knows that Igor Bulgarin was part of the Brotherhood because of his interest in the body. Do you think he’s aware you’re part of it too?”

  “Since they didn’t kill me at the base, I doubt it. There have been only a few Brothers who weren’t Russian and Rath knows I’m German. When Igor set up our being here, he falsified some of my records so it didn’t show I had studied in Moscow when East Germany was their vassal state. Rath has nothing to connect me to the Brotherhood.”