Pandora's curse m-4

by Jack Du Brul

  Mercer felt something warm and wet on his cheek, and he turned his head quickly. The chef lying beneath him was awake and her mouth was pressed to him in a grateful kiss. Her voice was muffled but he could hear her muttering, “Danke, danke.”

  The harder Mercer tried to lift himself from her, the tighter she held him in an embrace. She had a pleasant face, he noticed, and tears made her soft eyes look liquid, but her mustache was thicker than his if he skipped a day of shaving. She planted a long kiss on his mouth, easily smothering his struggles to free himself.

  “Taking advantage of a woman in such a vulnerable state,” Ira teased when Mercer finally regained his feet. “I expected more from you.”

  Mercer smiled, relieved at being alive despite the awful deaths of the pilots and the three others. He would not give in to survivor’s guilt. “You okay?”

  Lasko stood and brushed snow off his spare body. “I will be as long as she doesn’t realize I helped save her.”

  “We lost five, Ira, including Ingrid.”

  “And we saved six,” the ex-submariner replied sagely. “Don’t think of the names. Just consider the numbers. It’s the only way.”

  Anika Klein approached, limping slightly. She’d smeared some of the blood on her head trying to stanch the flow. She studied the wreckage before turning to Mercer. “I’ve got a feeling that one of us is jinxed, and I think it’s me.”

  “If you knew what I’ve been through in the past couple of years, you’d know I’m the one with the bad juju.” Mercer was only half joking. “Hey, Ira, can you check over the plane and make sure nothing’s on fire? Erwin, how about an inventory of everything we’ve got that’ll help us?”

  “You got it.”

  “What about me?” Anika asked.

  “As the only doctor in our ranks who can actually doctor people, you’re in charge of our medical needs. Which begins with yourself. Your head’s still bleeding. Then check on Marty. Ingrid died in the crash and he’s… I don’t know. Just check on him.”

  Mercer’s next words were cut off by a shout from Ira Lasko. He was kneeling on the half-buried nose of the plane, scooping away snow as fast as he could. “One of the pilots is still alive!”

  Marty Bishop reacted quicker than any of the others, racing to the entombed cockpit. He pushed aside Ira and attacked the snow clogging the windscreen as if frenzy alone could somehow expunge whatever he felt about Ingrid’s death. In moments he was able to thrust his upper body through the shattered glass and touch the leather-clad arm thrusting out of the snow and ice. From the position of the arm, it was the copilot who grabbed on to Marty’s offered hand and refused to let go.

  Mercer and Ira swung around the plane and approached the cockpit from the cabin. Using pieces of torn fuselage as shovels, they began the laborious digging. Whenever they paused, they could hear Marty reassuring the stricken aviator through the snow. It took twenty minutes to clear away enough of the frozen debris for Anika Klein to worm her way into the cockpit to administer whatever aid the copilot needed.

  “Mercer,” she called from the hollow they had dug, “I need two lengths of metal or wood for a splint. His arm is broken. Also, get my bag. I’ve got medical supplies in there I’ll need.”

  Hilda had already retrieved the kit and passed it forward. The next ten minutes passed in anxious silence punctuated once by a single shrill scream when Anika reset the arm. It seemed the despair over the deaths of the others had been suspended while she worked.

  Slowly, Anika’s backside emerged from the cockpit as she half led, half dragged the wounded man from where he’d been trapped. His arm was bandaged and strapped to his chest, and the countless lacerations on his face had been cleaned. She’d already stitched closed the worst. His skin was stained with antiseptic. “He’s going to be fine. I’ve got him pretty doped up,” she said. “He’s got to be kept warm to minimize shock.” She turned to Marty, who had just entered the cabin from his vigil outside. “I need someone to stay with him. Are you up to it?”

  Marty looked from the prone figure on the floor to where Ingrid still sat under a blanket Erwin had draped over her. His voice was iron. “I’ll take care of him.”

  “Nice job,” Mercer told Anika when they were outside. “With the copilot, and with Marty.”

  “He’s stronger than you give him credit for. Only he doesn’t know it, so neither does anyone else.” She used snow to clean her hands.

  Ira came up to them. Whatever mental trick he had used to get over the horrors of the past hour had worked. He seemed as unruffled and composed as always. “What’s our next move?”

  “I need to check on the crashed C-97. I want you to get this wreck site into shape. It’s going to be our home for a while. Make sure Marty’s sat-phone is okay so that when the solar max lets up we can get ourselves rescued.”

  Once everyone was organized and working, Mercer decided it was time to go. He made sure he had his Geiger counter and a few protein bars stuffed in his sample bag before beginning his walk to the other plane crash. He also took an ice ax, a silver “space blanket,” and a small can of Sterno in case he couldn’t get back before nightfall.

  The trek was brutal. Each step broke through the crust of snow, sinking him to his knees. It was an exhausting process to lift his foot clear to take another pace, and quickly his motion more resembled wading than walking. The wind scouring the flank of the mountain range hit him full in the face as he walked, oftentimes powerful enough to arrest his forward progress. He began sweating, and his breaks became more frequent. At each rest stop he would check the Geiger counter, mystified that it had yet to show any radiation. He began to wonder if Delaney’s contamination had come from another source.

  Although the wreckage of the C-97 Stratofreighter was only three miles away it took him two hours to reach it. From the air, they had seen only part of one wing and a scrap of fuselage, but as he approached he could see other pieces of debris — a landing gear assembly, a section of the retractable flaps, and a blade from one of her four props. Fifty years of ice movement had obliterated any semblance of order to the debris field, and Mercer was surprised to find as much as he had.

  Two hundred yards beyond the wing fragment, the Geiger counter began to click. Mercer clamped his hand to the earphones, checking the display on the handheld unit. The amount of radiation was barely detectable, and his heart slowed again.

  Using the counter as a guide, he searched for the area that showed the highest readings. In this fashion he found the bulk of the plane. It lay in a saddle of rock, wedged in place and nearly covered by ice. Only the stump of its vertical stabilizer sticking from the ice was exposed. He swept the Geiger counter along the length of the plane, noting the readings were strongest where he estimated the cockpit would be.

  “Why there?” he wondered aloud. If there was a radiation leak on the plane, surely it would come from the cargo section at the rear.

  Under the mantle of ice, he could see places were the fuselage had been ripped open by either the crash or avalanche that once covered the plane. He selected one of these darker shadows close to the cockpit and began working with the ice ax. Soon he had settled in to an easy rhythm. He rested every hour, aware that the sun could go down before he got back to the others, but he had to make certain he didn’t get overheated, an ironic condition considering the temperature had dropped below freezing.

  By three in the afternoon, he’d chopped his way to the aircraft’s metal skin. The rip in the aluminum wasn’t large enough for him to crawl through, forcing him to hack at it with the ax. Strips of metal tore away each time he heaved back on the handle. It took a further half hour to open a large-enough hole. The slightly elevated radiation reading when he’d penetrated into the plane was still well below a dangerous level.

  All the time he’d been working, he’d mentally prepared himself to enter the plane. Yet now that he was ready, apprehension struck. He didn’t know what he would find inside or what it would mean to the survivors relyi
ng on him. Resigned to the task, Mercer lowered himself into the aircraft’s belly.

  The interior was dim and he flicked on a small penlight. It revealed a ruby-crusted corpse staring at him sightlessly. Mercer scrabbled backward, tripping over his feet and falling heavily. He remained on the floor, ignoring the pain of freezing air in his lungs as he hyperventilated. He’d known there were bodies on the plane, but he hadn’t been ready.

  When he was calm again, he levered himself upright and flashed the light at the body that he assumed had been the radioman/navigator. The ruby effect that had so startled him was the result of frozen blood around the man’s mouth and splashed over his flight jacket. It looked like he’d also bled from the nose and… Mercer leaned closer. Jesus, his eyes. He had bled from his eyes.

  There was more blood in the snow on the cabin floor, pools and strings of it like some obscene abstract painting. He flicked the beam toward the cockpit. Nearly all the windscreens had been smashed in by the crash fifty years ago. The snow forced into the cockpit had solidified into a misshapen block of ice. The copilot was strapped in his seat, his head turned away as if the light could still bother him. The snow piled up to his chest was stained crimson. He too had mysteriously bled out.

  Mercer had been right. With the navigator in his seat and the copilot focused in the beam of light, the body he’d found in Camp Decade was the pilot, Jack Delaney. He flicked the light to the pilot’s seat to make sure. What he saw made him stumble back again.

  Major Delaney sat there as if still flying the plane, his cap still in place although he no longer wore his leather coat. Much of his face had turned gray and shriveled over the years, so his dazzling teeth looked particularly gruesome. A death’s head smile with aviator glasses.

  ON THE ICE

  Anika didn’t know how many times she had checked her watch or cleared the condensed breath from the window. The routine had become automatic, although with the setting of the sun her pace had increased. Her lower lip felt raw from constant chewing.

  Mercer hadn’t said anything about staying at the other wreck until the next morning, nor had he taken enough supplies to sustain him. The thick ground fog that had settled in the past hour only served to increase her anxiety. Since they could be stranded for weeks, they couldn’t waste anything for a signal fire, and if Mercer lost sight of his footprints coming back, he’d never find the DC-3.

  Initially, she’d told herself her concern had come solely from the fact that Philip Mercer was the undisputed leader of the group. His actions had saved them all, and his absence, even for a few hours, had left the others sullen and pessimistic. Their dinner had been eaten with a minimum of conversation, and everyone had retreated to separate areas of the fuselage to sleep. Anika had stayed awake to check on Magnus, the thirty-five-year-old Icelandic copilot. Marty had been by her side until he too had succumbed to exhaustion. Ira Lasko had remained awake the longest, falling asleep only an hour ago and telling her she should do the same. He’d also assured her that Mercer knew what he was doing.

  She wasn’t so sure. While she’d never been to Greenland, she’d spent more time in harsh conditions than any of the other survivors. She knew the dangers of hypothermia, had seen the effects of deep frostbite, and knew how fragile a lone man was outside with the temperature down well below freezing.

  Now that she was in the second hour of her lonely vigil, Anika allowed her mind to wander to the other reason for her concern, a more personal reason. She didn’t know Mercer well enough to think beyond the physical, but on that level she was attracted to him. His was a natural masculinity that other men strove to attain through bravado and swagger. Yet there was a self-deprecation in him, as if he tried to hide his talents. He was a year or two older than her but he was like a buoyant teen who hadn’t yet gotten used to becoming an adult. It was charming.

  Anika remembered the look he’d given her after they had run the gauntlet of fire. It had been a reflection of her own desire. Experience told her to temper her feelings because of the drama surrounding their first meeting and everything since. She’d taken lovers whom she’d shared dangers with, mostly fellow rock climbers, and every relationship had crumbled under the weight of the subsequent normalcy. While it was unfair to compare Mercer to these other men, she suspected the results would be the same.

  Still, it was fun to think otherwise.

  She didn’t know she’d fallen asleep until a noise startled her awake. The survivors had built a snow wall to screen the gaping hole at the rear of the aircraft, fashioning a crude door at the bottom with a section of bent metal. They used tarps found in the remaining cargo to cover the other holes in the fuselage. As a result the plane, though chilly, was warm enough to keep them alive. It was the door being pushed aside that woke her.

  The apparition who entered in the faint glow emitted by their single gas lantern looked like some mythical creature. It was covered from head to foot in snow, with icicles dangling from the scarf covering its mouth. The fur trim around its head was a solid halo of ice. As it moved, knots of snow fell away like it was shedding its skin. It was Mercer.

  Without a word, he lumbered down the aisle and doused the lantern, plunging the cabin into total darkness.

  “Mercer, what is it?” Anika asked, confused and still half asleep.

  “Quiet!” His labored breath sounded as though he’d run a marathon.

  Then she heard it — a steady and deep thumping that seemed to come from every direction at once. She didn’t recognize the strange sound, but the others who’d been roused by Mercer’s entrance did.

  “It’s the rotor-stat,” Ira said at last.

  “I heard it about half an hour ago.” Mercer unwound his scarf and pulled down his hood. “I was afraid you might have a signal fire going, so I ran back as fast as I could. Even with the fog, I could see the lantern through the window a good way off.”

  “What is it doing here?” Erwin could be heard fumbling for his glasses. “Looking for us?”

  “They don’t know we’re here.” Mercer’s parka was so ice crusted it remained erect when he dropped it on the floor. “And I think the airship is miles away. We’re just hearing its echo ricocheting off the mountains.”

  “Then why is it in the area?” Marty asked.

  Chills racked Mercer before he could answer, his body quaking so strongly that he had to clamp his jaw. “I assume it’s moving Geo-Research’s base northward like they wanted all along.”

  “Are they looking for Delaney’s downed Stratofreighter?” Ira had a towel to hand to Mercer, whose hair was a mass of frozen sweat.

  “I think they’re searching for something else, considering Jack Delaney and the rest of his crew are still sitting in the plane.”

  Mercer’s bombshell was met with a collective gasp. In the following silence, the sound of the dirigible began to fade. It was Ira who finally asked the question on all their minds. “If Delaney’s in his plane, whose body did we find at Camp Decade?”

  He let the question hang for a moment before turning to Anika. “You want to answer that one?”

  Anika’s stomach gave a sickening slide, and she had to grab on to a seat to steady herself. Earlier, she’d thought that hearing Gunther Rath at the base camp had brought everything full circle. That hadn’t been quite true then, but it was now. This had started with her grandfather’s search for hidden Nazi treasure and an interview with a man who had been an engineer. The two together meant a secret cache someplace, obviously in Greenland since Rath, Mercer, and she were here. Until this instant she’d never considered whom the Nazis had forced to dig their repository and never imagined that any of them could have survived on this bleak wasteland long enough to reach Camp Decade. Ten years had passed from the end of the war until the base was abandoned and yet there was no other explanation.

  Her voice was barely above a whisper. “He was the last victim of the Holocaust.”

  Mercer relit the lantern, setting it to a weak flicker, and crawled into
his sleeping bag. “Tell us what you know.”

  “My grandfather has spent his life trying to recover property looted from the Jews during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Recently he received some information from an unknown source in Russia about a shipment of gold taken from Stalingrad and sent to Hamburg. The documents also revealed that an engineer named Otto Schroeder had played a role in this transfer, an operation I learned was called the Pandora Project.” As she got further into the story, Anika’s voice firmed and her outrage returned stronger than ever.

  “Up until ten days ago, Schroeder was living outside of Munich. I went to interview him about the gold. When I arrived at his house, he was being tortured by a group of men led by Gunther Rath, the man who planted the bomb on this plane. With his dying breath, Schroeder said that the gold — and I’m talking about tons of it — was only part of the operation and that Philip Mercer was someone who could help me.” She looked to him, searching for an answer in his eyes as to why.

  “Around this time,” Mercer said, “I received an e-mail from a lawyer in Munich telling me that an unnamed client was sending me a package of documents.” He dug them out of his sample bag and held them close to the lamp for the others to see. “Until this journal arrived, I’d never heard of Otto Schroeder. Nor do I know why he would send it to me. And since it’s written in German, I have no idea what’s in it.”

  Anika picked up the tale again. “Just before I left the Njoerd, I learned that Mercer was at the Geo-Research base. I knew that somehow we had been set up. Right after the helicopter crash, I went through the mailbag and buried anything addressed to him. I couldn’t take the chance that Schroeder’s information might be passed to someone I didn’t know or trust. I had planned to go back later to retrieve the letter I’d hidden a hundred meters from the chopper.”

  Ira looked at Mercer. “Our stowaway wasn’t a stowaway after all.”