Pandora's curse m-4

by Jack Du Brul

  “Neither do I,” Mercer agreed. “But I’m beginning to wonder what our mission really is.”

  He spent the remainder of the day with his Geiger counter, traversing the snow piled on top of Camp Decade to get a more accurate fix of any radiation readings. Mercer didn’t expect to find anything new, but he needed the hours of solitude. He tried to put what had happened in some sort of perspective and found there wasn’t any. Igor was dead and no amount of thought would change that fact. He could only hope that, when he discovered why the Russian had gone to Camp Decade, he would be able to dispel his misguided feelings of responsibility.

  Every few hours Mercer returned to the mess hall to inquire about the communications problems. Each time he was told that they had only received broken transmissions from the Njoerd and absolutely nothing from the office in Iceland. The technicians doubted that their own signals were getting out and all agreed that the problem would persist for a few days at least.

  It was at dinner that the first clear call came through. Mercer and the rest of his team were trying to keep Erwin’s mind occupied by playing lazy games of poker over stale coffee when the short-wave transceiver in the corner of the room burst to life. Even through the squawking distortion of static, everyone could hear the hysteria in the voice.

  “…ayday! Mayday! Geo-Research base camp!.. eo-Re… rch… camp!.. is inbound helo from Njoerd. I am… ixty kilometers east. Turbine is… ailing. We are… oing down!”

  The comm officer scrambled to get his headphones on. Around him a dozen people clustered shoulder to shoulder. “Inbound helo, this is base camp. We understand you are sixty kilometers east of our location and are declaring an emergency.”

  “…ank God!” the pilot of the helicopter screamed through the ether. “Storm approaching. Tried to beat it. Engine o… heat. I can’t keep us in the…”

  Mercer pulled Werner Koenig away from the group of anxious listeners so his voice wouldn’t disturb the radio operator. The Geo-Research supervisor was shaken by what he was hearing. Not wanting to add to Werner’s distress, Mercer spoke calmly, reassuringly. “You still have Sno-Cats out there, right?”

  “Yeah.” Koenig couldn’t tear his eyes away from the radio, his concentration on the drama that was unfolding too quickly for him to comprehend. “There are two teams on the ice.”

  “Where?” When Werner didn’t answer immediately, Mercer grabbed his arm, allowing his voice to rise slightly. “Where?”

  “Ah, team one is coming in from the south.” He looked at his watch. “They should be here in another twenty minutes.”

  “And the other team?”

  Werner suddenly understood why Mercer was asking about the ’Cats. He sounded miserable because the answer was one he did not want to give. “They’re due west of us, maybe fifty kilometers away.”

  “Damn it.” Any chance of a successful rescue depended on each second Mercer could gain. “Where’s your rally driver, Dieter?”

  “He’s with team two. What are you going to do?”

  Thinking furiously, Mercer’s brain shifted back to the pilot’s strident call. “…titude down to one thousand feet. Dr. Klein says… smoke… air vents.”

  That did it. His moment of hesitancy evaporated. There was a passenger on board. The pilot had made the choice to fly through a storm, but Anika Klein was different. She was simply along for the ride. Deep down he knew he would have gone even if the pilot had been alone. “Ira, get on the other radio and keep me updated. I’ll be in the Land Cruiser.”

  Mercer was at the door before anyone realized he’d moved. He didn’t bother with the moon boots. His sneakers would have to do. He thrust his arms into a lightweight outer jacket that was the topmost coat on the rack near the exit.

  “Dr. Mercer!” Greta Schmidt shouted, running toward him. “I forbid you to go. We will organize a proper search.”

  “And when you’re done you can follow me,” he snapped, jerking the zipper to his throat. “Ira, you with me?”

  The wiry mechanic had already muscled his way to the short-range set they used to coordinate communications with the Sno-Cats. “Move your ass.”

  “No! You will wait.” Greta grabbed Mercer’s sleeve in a fierce grip that felt like it went all the way to the bone. “This is a wasted gesture. Wait until we know where they land. Going alone is suicide.”

  Mercer had just a second before two more Geo-Research workers joined her. Though he had never struck a woman, he was sorely tempted to break that rule. Why couldn’t she see that the only chance the pilot and Anika Klein had was if someone left now?

  He yanked free and reached the door. The pressure of wind slammed it open when he turned the handle. The wind was a solid force that made him stagger back until he got better traction, hunched his shoulders and bulled his way forward. The blowing snow and gathering dusk swallowed him.

  Despite her fury, Greta made no move to follow. She slammed the door closed again, her body shivering with just that brief contact with the frigid gusts. She stepped over to Ira, her expression one of ill-disguised contempt. “That was the most stupid thing I have ever seen.”

  “No need to tell me,” Ira said with a smirk. “But at least he’s doing something. Get your damned search party ready and follow him.”

  A few minutes later, Mercer came over the radio. “Ira, you there?”

  “Nice and snug,” he drawled. “How about you?”

  “I’m going to need the Jaws of Life just to get my testicles to drop. According to the thermometer in the cab it’s fifteen degrees below zero out here. Any word from the chopper?”

  “They’re still in the air and still heading this way. Pilot said the GPS puts him twenty-one miles due east. How’s your speed?”

  “I’m pushing it now. Doing twenty.”

  “Take it easy out there. I don’t think Greta’s gonna stop for you if you get stuck.”

  “She’ll never see me,” Mercer replied with a grave-yard chuckle. “Visibility’s pure shit. I can’t see more than fifty feet in front of me.”

  “How do you expect to find a crashed helicopter?” Ira asked, alarmed.

  “Tell the pilot to have Dr. Klein fire a flare just before they crash.” He didn’t need to add that neither would likely be in any condition to do it afterward.

  “Roger, good idea,” Ira was shouting into the microphone because Mercer’s transmission kept fading. His radio had much less power than the chopper’s. “I’m telling the comm officer to relay your message now.”

  It took two minutes for the pilot to acknowledge the request. But even if they were able to do it, Ira had doubts that Mercer would see the flare. The helicopter was down to three hundred feet and Mercer was still between five and ten miles away.

  Ira kept his misgivings to himself. “Mercer, the pilot will comply. He estimates he can hold her aloft for another five minutes.” He heard nothing but static. “Mercer, do you copy? Over.”

  There was a small window above the radio sets. It was dark, but with the floodlights on, he could see how the wind raced first in one direction and then another. The captured snow and ice looked like it was caught in a tornado. Ira estimated the gusts at forty miles per hour. He prayed Mercer brought back the pilot so he could kill the stupid son of a bitch for daring to fly in this kind of weather. No resupply mission was worth it.

  “Mercer, do you copy? Over.”

  The comm officer was listening hard to his own earphones, talking with the pilot in easy tones despite the fear they all heard from the speaker.

  “…ifty feet… iring flare now.” It was a cruel twist of atmospherics that the last seconds of broadcast from the helicopter came in so crisply that it sounded like the pilot was in the room with them. His scream was piercing enough to shatter crystal.

  “Mercer, chopper’s down! Chopper’s down! They fired the flare. Did you see it?” Ira mashed the earphones to his head. “Mercer, are you receiving? Over.”

  Nothing.

  He tried again ev
ery thirty seconds for the next half hour. And the results were always the same. Mercer was gone.

  ROTTERDAM, HOLLAND

  Amid the rusting tankers, bulk carriers, and container ships, the Sea Empress gleamed like a new Rolls Royce parked in a junkyard. Her upperworks were snowy white, trimmed with black and gold, with twin raked funnels topped by aerodynamic wings not much smaller than those on a private jet. She was longer than most of the ships around her, and her eight-story superstructure towered above every vessel in the busy port. Designed as a catamaran, her two hulls were nearly a thousand feet in length and each had a ninety-foot beam. The cavernous gap between them was used to lower any number of watercraft, from two-hundred-passenger lighters to glass-bottomed excursion boats to Jet Skis.

  She could comfortably accommodate four thousand passengers as well as her full-time staff of three thousand. Her list of world records for a cruise liner included everything from number of restaurants — thirty-nine — to casino square footage to having a four-hole pitch-and-putt golf course. Her cost too was a world record likely to hold for years — $1.7 billion.

  Despite the ascetic beliefs of many of those who would be sailing on her, few could help but be awed by the sight of her snugged against a concrete pier. The Sea Empress was a high expression of the beauty mankind was capable of creating.

  Because of the tight security surrounding the Universal Convocation, the quay was quiet except for the guards posted all along the length of the ship. Harbor patrol boats buzzed along her starboard side, and overhead military helicopters kept the roving media choppers at a safe distance. So far there hadn’t been a single credible threat against the ship or her passengers, but with so much world attention focused on the greatest religious meeting in history, the authorities were taking no chances. After lengthy interrogations, her crew had been sequestered aboard for the past week, and she was searched daily with bomb-sniffing dogs.

  Getting the ship ready and secure had been a massive operation, and now that the passengers were embarking, those in charge of security had redoubled their vigilance. Each passenger, from the pope down to the lowliest secretary, was escorted through unobtrusive metal detectors calibrated to allow nothing bulkier than religious medals to pass through. The latest generation of chemical-sniffing devices was also used to detect the most minute amount of gunpowder. Even if someone sneaked a ceramic pistol past the metal detectors, traces of gunpowder from the bullets would be picked up on these machines.

  It had been agreed earlier that only the pope’s Swiss Guard would be allowed to carry weapons on the Sea Empress. There had been some difficulty with the thirty Sikhs attending the convocation since their tradition demanded each carry a small knife at all times. The pope had gladly given them permission to maintain the practice.

  Neils Vanderhoff was a guard at a manifest checkpoint assigned to verify each of the lesser-known passengers against a master list, authenticating their identity with a computer database of photographs compiled from six different sources. The pictures dated back at least a year before the Convocation’s announcement to prevent terrorists from using carefully built false legends to slip aboard.

  In front of him now was a tall, middle-aged man wearing a shiny suit that cost more money than Vanderhoff made in three months. His face was deeply tanned and smooth, and he had the whitest teeth the Dutchman had ever seen. He sported a diamond-encrusted Rolex and an elaborate ruby pinky ring. While his hair was thinning and silver at the sides, on top it was as dense and jet black as a sable’s pelt. Neils wondered why the man spent so much on his wardrobe, teeth bleaching, and jewelry yet wore such an obvious toupee.

  Clutching his elbow was a sight Vanderhoff would never forget. The man’s wife might have been pretty once, but her fight against time had been a long, bloody campaign that had left the battlefield in ruins. She wasn’t that much younger than her husband but her face had been so frequently lifted that it was as tight as the head on a snare drum. She looked like a poorly cast wax model of herself. Behind black false lashes, her eyes bulged from one too many tucks. Her makeup was as overvibrant as that applied to a corpse by a color-blind mortician. Above her eyes were thick slashes of blue and yellow, her cheeks were so rouged they looked sunburned, and her collagen-puffed lips had been troweled over with layers of frost white. Her big hair was brass blond and piled six inches high. She had maintained her figure, or possibly had it maintained for her, but still her hips and backside strained against a skirt sized for a woman fifteen pounds lighter. Her breasts were silicone fantasies that threatened to spill over the top of her lame blouse.

  In her arms was a nervous Pekingese that yapped continuously. The woman made no move to quiet her rodent-size dog.

  She popped a piece of chewing gum as her husband passed over their passports. Tommy Joe and Lorna Farquar from Nashville, Tennessee, USA. As if Neils couldn’t tell they were Americans. He stared at the caricatures slack-jawed.

  “I know what you’re thinking, son.” Tommy Joe’s enormous teeth flashed like a mirror pointed at the sun, and he spoke as if addressing a crowd of ten thousand. “You’ve seen my ministry on television, and you can’t believe you’ve gotten a chance to meet me.”

  “Honey, they don’t carry our show in Europe, ’cause they don’t talk American here.” Lorna Farquar had a little-girl voice with an adult’s ignorance. “Do they, Pookie? They haven’t been saved yet. No, they haven’t.” The Pekingese’s whine was deeper than its mistress’s.

  “Sure they do, Lorna. It’s on satellite feed, don’t you remember?”

  “I’m sure I don’t,” she simpered, her eyelashes tangling like fighting spiders when she blinked up at him.

  Neils Vanderhoff shook off his amused incredulity and typed their names into his workstation. Instantly a series of pictures appeared on the screen, mostly publicity shots of the couple at a blue satin altar adorned with the words MIRACLES OF JESUS CHRISTIAN MINISTRIES. He noted wryly that Mrs. Farquar’s bosom had been noticeably smaller last year.

  Craning her head to see what the customs man had chuckled at, Lorna wailed, “Oh, sweet Jesus! Those pictures are from before I had my titties done.”

  “There, there, dear.” Tommy Joe patted her hand.

  Vanderhoff checked to see the most recent entry stamps on their passports as per his orders. He was on the lookout for any suspicious travel since the Convocation had been announced. The Farquars’ passports had numerous stamps to Caribbean islands but nothing in the past six months. He handed them back without a word, praying they would move on without braying at him again.

  The next person in line was a large man traveling alone, and by the dark robes he wore, heavy silver cross hanging from a chain around his neck, and his full beard, Neils recognized him as a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The priest must have heard the exchange, so Vanderhoff gave him a conspiratorial smile. The black-robed figure didn’t change his stony expression. He handed over a Russian passport.

  Feeling rebuffed, the customs agent noted that Father Anatoly Vatutin had been in Germany before coming to Holland for the Convocation. He punched up the name, comparing the fierce-eyed cleric in front of him to photographs taken a few years earlier at an Eastern Rites meeting in Istanbul. Vatutin had more gray in his beard and hair now but time had not softened his hawkish features. Giving back the passport, Vanderhoff felt a chill when the intense priest nodded in acknowledgment.

  Anatoly Vatutin slid his passport back into his battered shoulder bag and hurried along the corridor. Before reaching the exit, he passed the obnoxious television minister, who had stopped so his trashy wife could let her dog lift its leg against a wall. A dark puddle formed on the carpet, and the woman scooped up the Pekingese before its feet became soiled. The thought that these people worshipped the same god he did made Vatutin wince.

  Unlike many who had preceded him, Father Vatutin did not pause when he got his first look at the luxury liner. He paid scant attention to the guards either. Head down and cheap sho
es clomping, he moved across the pier toward one of four embarkation points, his expression one of anxious determination. The sun soaking into his black clothes was only partially responsible for the sweat that caught in his beard and trickled down his flanks.

  He presented his ticket to a uniformed woman at the top of the gangway, not returning the cheery greeting. “You are in cabin E429, Father Vatutin,” the assistant cruise director said in passable Russian. “That’s on the starboard hull. Go straight into the ship, and when you reach the first atrium, you’ll see a broad hallway to your right. That’s the Champs Elysees, one of four main throughways connecting the two hulls. When you reach the atrium on the other hull, another attendant will direct you to the elevator bank closest to your cabin.”

  “Spesiva,” Vatutin grunted, clutching at his shoulder bag as if afraid the bubbly attendant would take it.

  He moved quickly through the ship, pausing for a flicker of a second to gaze upward when he reached the lofty, glass-crowned atrium that was the centerpiece of each side of the vessel. The balconies ringing the upper floors dripped with flowering plants, reminding Vatutin of an artist’s rendition of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. He found the long corridor called Champs Elysees, then threaded through clusters of people conversing in excited bursts. He noted that the men outnumbered the women by a factor of fifty.

  At the next atrium, he again presented his ticket and was directed to an elevator bank near the stern of the vessel, where he took one of the cars downward to the lowest of passenger decks. While his Spartan cabin had a small porthole, it presented a shadowy view of the channel between the hulls. The cabin pulsed with the vibration of the Sea Empress’s engines. He paid no attention to the view or the vibration. His heavy antique wooden chest had already been delivered and sat in the middle of the tiny room, taking up so much space that Vatutin had to tuck his legs under the bed to face it. He checked the lock carefully, relieved to see that it hadn’t been tampered with. He had no idea what kind of scrutiny the luggage was given, and he had been concerned that if the contents had been examined, he wouldn’t have a ready explanation for what lay within.