The control room was filled up to their knees in heavy chlorine gas, wisps rising up like fog from a haunted moor.
“Marty, are you right- or left-handed?” Mercer asked and finally started drawing breath from his own cylinder. Marty held up his left hand. “Bring us two points to starboard for a minute and on my command crank us to port.”
If Mercer’s guess was wrong, they would plow straight into the far side of the turn at roughly six knots. That kind of blow would crumple the bow like aluminum foil. “Helm, steer us to one hundred and thirty degrees.” Everyone felt the tension in his voice.
Angled over so they had to brace themselves, the sub went through the turn, gas pooling against the bulkheads like a liquid. Mercer held his breath. They all did. The beat of the propellers through the water sounded like a distant drumroll. By Mercer’s watch they were halfway through the turn. He checked the chart and lurched. The bottom of the tunnel had dropped away and the ceiling had lowered. They were supposed to be at seventy meters!
“Dive!”
Ira twisted open valves to flood the bow ballast tanks at the same time Anika and Hilda cranked the dive planes as far as they could go. The sub seemed to stand on its nose, loose articles crashing to the deck all along the length of the vessel. Mercer’s feet came out from under him and he swung free, dangling from a steel pipe.
They didn’t quite make it. The top of the conning tower crashed into the underside of the subterranean channel, ripping away both periscopes in a wrenching squeal of torn metal. Water flooded the attack center located in the sail and would have filled the ship if it weren’t for one more watertight hatch. A wall of chlorine gas as dense as smoke raced down the boat, cutting visibility to almost zero until Anika brought the bow back up, leveling her out at eighty meters just as her keel began to scrape the bottom. The noxious cloud settled again, reaching up to Mercer’s waist.
“Bring us to seventy meters. Ira, neutral buoyancy again.” Mercer checked the compass and saw that Marty had them perfectly on course. “Good job. That was my fault. Sorry.”
Mercer paid for complimenting them. Seared by gas, his lungs went into convulsions and vomit shot from his mouth. He sucked great drafts from his air bottle, cleansing the tortured tissue. They had only one more change of depth to clear a peak in the channel and fifteen more minutes to go.
He knew they wouldn’t last that long. Marty had been on his bottle much longer than he had, and Mercer could imagine poor Erwin had been hyperventilating since they’d left the cavern. He changed the figures on the chart, making a quick guess rather than an accurate calculation. “Maximum revolutions!”
The tachometer peaked at two hundred twenty RPMs. “Bring us to thirty meters on my mark.” Mercer could feel the sub racing along the bottom of the tunnel, careening toward a bump on the seafloor that rose nearly a hundred feet. Come up too soon and they slammed into the ceiling of the passage. Too late and they would barrel into the mount. “Ten degrees up on the planes. Mark!”
Mercer made up for his earlier mistake. His timing was perfect. Like a crop duster swooping over a field, the two-hundred-fifty-foot-long submarine rose off the bottom of the tunnel and climbed the sloped side of the hill, her keel never more than ten feet from its irregular surface. At thirty meters, the U-boat cleared the top of the mound with the ceiling of the tunnel now only forty feet above her ruined conning tower. Level once again and her screws churned with every remaining amp in her batteries. From here it was a race to the open sea. Mercer’s gamble had saved them nearly eight minutes.
“When we surface,” Ira said and took another draw from his breathing tube, “I’m going to blow compressed air through the boat to vent the gas. Be prepared for a pressure change.”
Once he was satisfied they had cleared the tunnel and entered the fjord, Mercer ordered Ira to blow the tanks. The climb from a hundred feet seemed to take forever. His air supply was about exhausted, and each breath was a supreme effort that left his chest aching. Anika and Ira were in even worse shape.
Come on, damm it. We are so close. He gave Anika a draw off his supply and she sucked at it greedily. Hers must be empty, he thought. Passing through twenty meters, Mercer felt his vision begin to close in on him and he took the breathing tube back for a moment. He could taste Anika on the mouthpiece.
Somehow, Erwin found the strength to climb the ladder to the escape hatch. He wasn’t going to remain on the U-boat one second longer than necessary, pushed more by fear of confinement than of the gas.
The sub emerged from the sea bow first, lifting forty feet from the water before slamming back again, blowing off sheets of frothing water. Protected from the waves of the Denmark Strait by the fjord’s towering mountains, the cauldron of turgid water around the sub was the only mark on the otherwise calm bay. She rolled for a moment as Ira pumped up the air pressure in an effort to vent the poison gas.
As soon as the ex-Navy man nodded to Erwin, he undogged the hatch. Air pressure blew the hatch outward, sucking out a majority of the gas. Icy water from the flooded attack room rained into the control space, showering the crew. Erwin scrambled up the ladder, twisting around the bent remains of the two scopes to reach the next ladder. The outer hatch spun freely and he threw it open, reveling in their first sight of daylight in a week, Hilda and Anika at his heels. He clambered the rest of the way out of the sub and stood fully upright, facing eastward to the open end of the fjord several miles away.
No one heard the shots hammering the conning tower, but the metallic twang of ricochets sounded clearly, lead and fractured steel exploding in all directions.
Erwin felt a twin sting as his brain registered what was happening and he went limp, allowing himself to fall back into the attack center. His blood stained the pooled water pink. Hilda screamed. Even as the barrage continued against the U-boat’s steel hull, Anika began to check his injuries.
Like her, Mercer didn’t hesitate. It was as if he’d expected such an ending to this hellish trek. He raced back to his cabin and reemerged with a machine pistol in each fist, spare clips tucked into the pocket of his snow pants. Wordlessly, he tossed one MP-40 to Ira, racked back the cocking handle on his own, and climbed for the bridge.
THE ICE SHEET ABOVE THE PANDORA CAVERN
The Geo-Research Bell Jetranger 414 flared into a maelstrom of ice and snow that its rotors had just kicked up. The impenetrable fog settled only after the blades began to slow, dusting the two idling Sno-Cats, a dozen men, and a cargo sledge stacked with the recovered Pandora boxes. The smaller box, found in the antechamber at the top of the air vent, was kept separate. The snow around the vent had been trampled flat by the frantic work to recover the golden chests. Nothing remained of the tunnel itself but a stain of dust that had belched from it when it had been dynamited. The men who had completed the work waited for the rotor-stat to come and carry the boxes away.
Klaus Raeder was sitting in the insulated Sno-Cat and hadn’t heard the chopper’s approach until it was nearly upon them. The flash of anger that jolted his body gave way to an eerie calm. There was no need for the chopper here. That meant Rath was about to make his play for the deadly hoard. For the tenth time in the past hour, he glanced into the cargo area behind the ’Cat’s rear seat. The two assault rifles used to sink the fuel drums in the cavern were safely locked into an integrated rack. Raeder stripped off his heavy glove and jammed his right hand into his snowsuit pocket, where he had the loaded automatic pistol he’d taken from his office. He’d had no problem sneaking the weapon out of Germany. Customs paid little attention to corporate jets.
He opened the vehicle’s door and stepped out. There was little wind, but the air was as clear and cold as crystal. Gunther Rath stood a short way off with Greta and the professional driver, Dieter. Before Raeder took two paces, a shadow passed overhead. He looked up. The rotor-stat had come over the crest of the mountains that divided the ice sheet from the sea, its bulk eclipsing the weak sun for a moment. It was an otherworldly sight, more befit
ting Titans than men. The four engine pods mounted on the side of her great white hull were larger than the Jetranger helicopter sitting insectlike in the snow.
The pitch of its airship’s engines changed as it began to slowly settle toward earth.
Raeder approached Rath. “What is the helicopter doing here?”
“The rotor-stat won’t be able to land out here without a mooring mast. We’ll attach her lifting cables to the cargo and then follow in the chopper as she heads out to sea to drop the boxes.”
“No.” Raeder wouldn’t pretend to go along with this charade. “I’m not going to let the Pandora boxes out of my control until I know they will be dumped. We are getting on the rotor-stat.”
“Klaus, she can’t pick us up without a mooring mast,” Rath said placidly. “We can watch from the chopper.”
The noise of the descending airship increased as she fell below the tops of the mountains, the drone of her power plants echoing off the rock. The downdraft from her rotors began to stir the surface snow.
Rath’s logic was reasonable. It was always reasonable, Klaus reflected. His special-projects director could find excuses for murder and torture and make it sound sensible, as if there was no other way. But there were always other ways—only it had been easier for Raeder to let Rath give in to his brutality. No more. Raeder had just a few minutes left. The boxes would slip from his grasp if the dirigible took off without him. “This is as far as I’m going to let you go, Gunther. Tell the airship pilot to pick us up.”
Raeder’s pistol came out in an easy maneuver, unwavering and deadly.
And then the gun was lying in the snow ten feet away and Klaus Raeder’s arm was numb from fingertips to elbow.
Klaus Raeder looked first at his limp hand and then at the gun and finally at Gunther Rath. Expecting the pistol to paralyze Rath, Raeder had not anticipated the lightning kick that sent the automatic flying. Rath stood implacably, a trace of a smile on his face as if inviting Raeder to dive for the weapon. He was closer by ten feet, but when he peered beyond Greta and Rath, Raeder saw that the workers who’d emptied the Pandora cavern had watched the one-sided confrontation. And each man was armed with either an assault rifle or a pistol. The guns in the back of the Sno-Cat weren’t the only ones Rath had brought to the area. Raeder realized too that he didn’t have the men’s loyalty. They were Rath’s.
“Klaus, I don’t blame you for trying to stop me. I think I would have been disappointed if you hadn’t.” Gunther picked up the fallen pistol and handed it to Greta.
Knowing he had been outmaneuvered, Raeder accepted temporary defeat. “What do you plan to do with them? No one will ever be able to build a bomb with the meteor fragments.”
“They don’t need a chain reaction, Klaus. Hitler’s plan was to load bits of it into V-2 rockets at Peenemunde and launch them at London. They were designed to explode a thousand feet above the ground and spread their radioactive payload over a tremendous area. Since much of London was rubble, the Pandora dust would have lain there undetected with all the other debris, silently poisoning an entire population. It was estimated that just six warheads would have killed every living thing in London within two months.
“It seems, though, that the U-boat used to transport the fragments must have been lost during the mining operation and an accident in the cavern killed everyone else. I assume Der Führer lost interest in the proj ect then.
“However, in today’s world, the Pandora fragments have a certain value as a terrorist weapon. It’s less random than a chemical weapon, easier to maintain than a biologic one and unlike other radiation sources, it is completely untraceable. Just a few grams placed in, say, a busy subway station would consign every person walking by to a lingering death. As it decays, it creates its own shielding and can be removed safely. I can’t think of a better weapon for terrorism, can you?”
“You’re going to sell them?”
Rath looked pleased with himself as he replied, “I had three different bids to choose from. North Korea offered the most money, but I can’t see exiling myself to Pyongyang. Ditto goes for Iraq. I ended up accepting the Libyan offer since it’s close enough to Europe to sneak over occasionally.”
“What about your precious Nazi Party now? Are you abandoning them?”
“Who do you think gets most of the hundred million dollars?”
Thirty minutes later, the cargo pallet laden with the boxes was secured to the airship’s lifting cables. Raeder, Rath, and Greta Schmidt were in the back of the stripped-down Bell helicopter. The workers were already aboard the two Sno-Cats and on their way back to the temporary northern camp, where they would disassemble everything for the return to Camp Decade. Because the weight of the cargo approached her maximum limit, the rotor-stat had to first fly out over the ice sheet to build up aerodynamic lift before turning back for the coast. It took the dirigible twenty minutes to gain the thousand feet of altitude she needed to clear the mountains. Only then did the Jetranger take off with the smallest Pandora box resting between Rath and Raeder. Greta sat next to her lover, the confiscated pistol clutched on her lap.
Klaus Raeder twisted in his window seat to get a glimpse of the rotor-stat trailing the helicopter. The airship was sailing a half mile behind them and yet seemed ready to swallow the chopper. After being airborne for ten minutes, they were still over Greenland’s jagged coast of bays, inlets, and fjords. That was when Raeder saw the research ship Njoerd in a narrow bay two thousand feet below them.
He realized that the cargo would be transferred to the ship but didn’t understand why. He asked Rath.
“For one, we need the rotor-stat to return the Sno-Cats to Camp Decade. Also the airship tends to advertise her presence wherever she is. My plan is for the Njoerd to take the boxes to Tripoli while the rotor-stat returns to Europe for the completion of her test flights.”
A large area of deck behind the Njoerd’s superstructure had been cleared to receive the cargo of golden crates, and workers were preparing to guide the nets into position. The chopper swung wide to leave plenty of room for the ponderous dirigible as it descended toward the ship. Hovering a quarter mile astern and five hundred feet up, the pilot spun so that his passengers could watch the delicate placement of the cargo.
Suddenly, a portion of sea just fifty yards from the research ship came alive, as if the water was being boiled. Like Leviathan rising, a gray torpedo shape emerged from the swelling waves, rising into the air until a quarter of the vessel’s length was exposed. “Mein Gott!” Rath, Raeder, and Schmidt said at once. They recognized the antique U-boat at the same time and knew where it had come from.
Still bobbing on the swells of its own creation, the conning tower hatch crashed open and a figure emerged. Rath ordered the pilot in for a closer look, hoping it was Mercer who had exited the submarine first because some of his guards were already at the rail of the Njoerd armed with assault rifles.
Before Rath could discern the man’s features, winking lights shot from the weapons and the man vanished in a red mist. “Patch me through to the rotor-stat,” Rath ordered.
A moment later the airship’s pilot came over the radio. “What do you want me to do?”
“Abort the cargo transfer until we take care of the submarine.”
“I don’t know if I can. The engines are straining just to slow our vertical descent.”
The airship’s four rotors whipped the air so strongly, they rippled her Kevlar skin. The dirigible would need to build up forward speed so her airfoil shape gave her additional lift. The cargo nets dangled only fifty feet from the surface of the bay. Her heavy mooring lines already trailed in the water. Rath looked back to the sub just as another person gained access to her protected bridge. It was Mercer, and he remained huddled out of sight from the Njoerd. His attention was on the airship, so he didn’t notice the helicopter hovering behind him.
Making sure his seat belt was tight and Greta had Klaus covered, Gunther Rath opened the Jetranger’s side door. Arcti
c air blasted him like a hurricane and numbed his face and hands. He couldn’t wear his gloves and fire accurately, so he left them off when he drew his pistol. He activated the weapon’s specially mounted laser sight. With the sub rolling and the chopper bouncing, he doubted he could get off an accurate shot, but all he wanted was Mercer’s attention until the rotor-stat could bull its way out of the fjord. The red dot of light wavered all over the top of the conning tower until it streaked across Mercer’s stooped form. Rath began firing.
From his vantage, Mercer couldn’t see the rotor-stat. He could only hear it thundering above him. Its noise drowned out everything. Figuring they couldn’t see him, he chanced a look over the lip of the bridge’s coaming. That was when he spotted the Njoerd and the men lined at her side with weapons trained at him. He ducked again as fire raked the conning tower. When Erwin had fallen back into the sub and he’d heard the dirigible, Mercer had assumed the shots had come from above. Now he knew who had fired the scathing fusillade. They’d surfaced right in the middle of the cargo transfer.
“If it weren’t for bad luck . . .” he whispered. Ira’s head appeared through the hatch. “How’s Erwin?”
“Anika’s working on him now. I don’t think it’s too bad. What happened?”
“The Njoerd is about fifty yards off the port side, and the rotor-stat’s hovering just beyond her. She’s coming this way. Get back below and crank up the compressors. Fill the ballast tanks with air and prepare to dive. Leave your gun. I have an idea.”
“I don’t like it when you say that,” Ira remarked and disappeared below.
Mercer was preparing to take another look at the airship when a shard of white-hot steel ricocheted inside the bridge and buried itself in his thigh. He fell heavily, clamping a hand over the burning wound, and looked up. A big Bell helicopter hung in the sky behind him with its side door opened. He could clearly see the pistol in Gunther Rath’s hand and the sick smile on his face. Fluidly, Mercer pulled the MP-40 from under him and squeezed the trigger. The heavy machine pistol bucked like he was holding a live wire and jammed after half its thirty-two-round magazine emptied. As he recocked to clear the fouled breach, the chopper twisted out of range.
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