Pandora's curse m-4

by Jack Du Brul

  “She told me just before we discovered the bomb.” Mercer shifted in his sleeping bag. “Because of a practical joke played on me by my friend Harry, she never got the letter she was looking for. I suspect the envelope Anika took was from Charlie Bryce.” He indicated that she should continue.

  “Because Schroeder was an engineer, my grandfather and I believe that he was involved with creating a secret storehouse for Nazi plunder far from where the Allies would find it. An enormous hoard of treasure was recovered in old salt mines at the close of the war, but there are still billions of dollars’ worth of art, antiques, jewelry, and gold bullion that was never found. Schroeder’s statement that the gold we sought was only part of the project made us think we had stumbled onto another of their hidden depositories.”

  “Here on Greenland?” Marty Bishop asked. “Seems a bit excessive even for the Nazis.”

  “I would agree if Mercer and I weren’t here with Rath.”

  “How did Schroeder know the two of you were coming here?”

  “I don’t know,” Anika admitted.

  “It was part of the setup.” Mercer took a sip from his brandy bottle, which had survived the crash. “The Russians who sent the information leading Anika’s grandfather to Otto Schroeder chose him rather than better-known Nazi hunters because they already knew the gold is on Greenland and that Anika was coming here. I’m willing to bet that they were the ones who told Schroeder that Anika could trust me.”

  “You’re right,” she cried. “He said that he received a mysterious call about you a few weeks before his murder.”

  “That doesn’t explain how they knew Mercer would be here,” Ira pointed out.

  “Either they got that information from the Surveyor’s Society Web site and just chose to include me,” Mercer said. A dark implication came clear and he hesitated. “Or because Charlie Bryce engineered it so that I was here at the same time as Anika.”

  “That would mean Charlie’s part of this too,” Marty said doubtfully. “I’ve known him for years. He’s not a Nazi hunter or anything like that.”

  “I’ve known him a long time too,” Mercer agreed. “As unlikely as it sounds, that’s the only explanation that works.”

  “So what did you mean that the body at Camp Decade was the last victim of the Holocaust?” Hilda asked. Because she didn’t speak English, Erwin Puhl had been translating the conversation for her.

  “I think he was a Jewish slave laborer used to excavate some sort of cave for the Germans to hide their plunder.” Tears welled in Anika’s eyes. “Somehow he was left behind and managed to survive for ten years until he discovered Camp Decade. I can’t imagine the horror and isolation he endured only to find his one chance at rescue had already been abandoned.”

  The bitter irony left a long vacuum in their discussion, each thinking about the terror of such a death.

  “He could have been a German soldier,” Ira offered after several long minutes.

  “No,” Mercer replied. “The evidence was on his arm.”

  Anika sniffled and wiped her cheeks. “You noticed?”

  “I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now its significance is apparent.” Everyone hung on his words. “The body we found had a scar on the inside of his arm as if he’d been burned. I think it was self-inflicted to erase the identification number the Nazis tattooed on his skin when he became a victim of their Final Solution.”

  “Is there any proof to this?” Marty asked.

  “If there is, it’ll be in here.” Mercer handed Schroeder’s journal to Anika. “Figure out what you can. We’ve got other problems to discuss.”

  Moving close to the lamp, Anika took the leather-bound manuscript and began thumbing through to the relevant sections.

  “So what about-”

  Mercer cut Ira off. “We’ll get to the other questions later. With Geo-Research moving their operation up this way, we can’t risk staying with the plane. They’re going to spot it once the fog lifts.”

  “The number one rule of survival is staying with your vehicle,” Marty reminded.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Mercer countered him. “If Rath finds us, we’re dead. Our only option is to keep moving.”

  “How long do you think we’ll last without shelter?” Marty snapped. He’d been prepared to fight Geo-Research to return to Greenland, but Ingrid’s death had once again sapped him of his drive. He didn’t care about Nazis and looted treasure and Holocaust survivors. He wanted this nightmare to end.

  “Longer than we’d survive if Rath finds us,” Mercer flared before checking his irritation. He had to remind himself how far the survivors were out of their league. He studied the others and saw fear reflected in their eyes. “Sorry. None of us deserve what’s happened, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re in this together. We’ve managed to hold on this long, and I think I know a way to keep us safe.”

  “How?”

  “It all depends on what Anika finds in that journal,” Mercer answered. “It’s pretty clear that Geo-Research’s scientific cover story is just that — a story. They, or whoever’s behind them, are on Greenland to find the treasure. Now, in order to save themselves thousands of man-hours, I suspect that the Nazis expanded an existing cavern for their warehouse rather than mine a whole new chamber. It’s my experience that if there’s one cave in an area, there are bound to be more. We can hide out in one far from the one the Nazis used until Rath and his merry band leave or we get the sat-phone working again.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me.” Ira looked around the dim cabin for agreement.

  “How far do you estimate we are from the cave?” Erwin asked anxiously.

  “About thirty kilometers,” Mercer said and just then realized something he’d overlooked earlier. The distances on the map he’d discovered in Camp Decade were written in the metric system. An American pilot would have used standard or nautical miles. He shook his head in self-reproach. He should have noticed such a discrepancy immediately. He’d already calculated the deflection in compass headings, so the navigation had been done. His earlier foray told him that they were in for a grueling march.

  “Can you lead us there?” Hilda asked through Puhl.

  “No.” Mercer wasn’t going to risk their lives by pretending he had all the answers. “But Anika has experience in these conditions. I trust her to get us to safety.”

  “We’ve got a problem.” Anika looked up from Otto Schroeder’s journal, her eyes pinched from the strain of reading in such low light. “I haven’t finished the whole thing yet but I have something that makes your plan unfeasible.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Otto Schroeder was a combat engineer in the German Army. Before that he had trained as a mining engineer. He was sent to Greenland in 1943 as part of the Pandora Project to help expand a network of caverns discovered under a glacier. The orders had been cut by Hitler himself. He never knew what became of his work, because two months into the project he was caught in a rockslide and had to be evacuated. He says in his journal that a thousand Jewish and Gypsy slaves were being used in the excavation and that the scope of the mining was increasing. He also said that they were dying off at an average of ten a day.”

  The figure was sobering. With his intimate knowledge of mining practices, Mercer had a better grasp at the unspeakably brutal conditions those poor souls had faced.

  Anika continued. “Schroeder’s principal task before tunneling commenced was to mine an air shaft to the surface through an estimated thousand feet of ice.”

  “Hold on.” Her statement didn’t make sense. Mercer thought she’d read it wrong. “Are you sure he had to mine an air shaft first? That would mean they started underground and worked their way up.”

  “That’s the problem.” Anika paused. “The cavern is buried under a mountain at the end of a fjord and was accessible only by submarine. After completing the air shaft, Schroeder was to create a dock for the supply submarines and hack out more spa
ce in the cave for dormitories and other work spaces.”

  Mercer cursed. “The air shaft is what Rath is looking for.”

  Anika nodded. “Which means there aren’t any other caves for us to hide in.”

  “And we haven’t addressed one issue that we need to.” Ira shot Mercer a significant look. Mercer knew what he was about to say and nodded. “We didn’t tell you that the body we found in Camp Decade is radioactive. He may have picked up the contamination from the C-97 when he took Delaney’s flight jacket but Mercer and I already discounted the idea that the U.S. military would leave atomic materials lying around.”

  “I checked the plane,” Mercer interrupted. “Readings were the same there as in Camp Decade. It’s not the source.”

  “That means the radiation came from the cavern we’re going to be humping our way toward,” Ira concluded. “Since he still gave a reading on the Geiger counter after fifty years, whatever’s down there has gotta be hotter than hell.”

  Mercer looked to where Erwin Puhl huddled silently in his sleeping bag, the lantern glow reflecting off his glasses like tiny sunbursts. “How about it, Erwin? Are you ready to drop your cover story and tell us what you know?”

  It was such an unexpected question that they all turned to the German meteorologist. For his part, Erwin tried to look shocked, but he’d experienced too much trauma in the past few days to sustain the facade. “How did you know?” he asked simply.

  “Your friendship with Igor Bulgarin,” Mercer said. Erwin knew what he meant but the rest waited for an explanation. “When Igor and I first met, he told me he was coming to Greenland to search for meteor fragments. The only problem with his story is that finding meteorites on Greenland is next to impossible. They do it in Antarctica all the time because there’s so little precipitation that much of it is considered a desert. Chunks of space rock can lie around for years waiting to be picked up. Here, they’re usually buried in minutes.”

  He looked around the cabin. “I read about an expedition in 1998 that spent six weeks on Greenland’s west coast looking for microscopic bits of the Kangilia meteor. That one weighed an estimated one hundred tons and there was a video and satellite information telling them where to look. They didn’t find a trace. There’s no way that one man walking around the ice could ever hope to find extraterrestrial debris.” Mercer returned his gaze to Erwin. “I figured that, since you were friends for years, you already knew that Igor’s cover was bullshit and knew what he was really doing here.”

  Puhl didn’t deny the accusation.

  Mercer took his deductions to their obvious conclusion. “He must have known about the Nazi cache and gone into Camp Decade because he suspected the body might have come from the cavern. Someone in Geo-Research knew what he was doing and murdered him to keep it a secret.”

  Erwin’s lack of reaction told Mercer that the meteorologist had already figured out Igor’s “accident” was premeditated murder. His near-catatonia in the past few days was likely due to the fear that his friendship with Bulgarin meant he was next.

  “Do you know who killed him?” Ira asked Mercer.

  “Since Igor was struck on the back of the head, the murderer had to be someone he didn’t suspect and would turn his back to. The killer also had to be strong enough to bludgeon a man who was the largest in the camp. And finally the killer dragged the corpse out of officers’ area and abandoned it when he reached the first major obstacle. This means he wasn’t strong enough to actually carry the body.”

  “Makes sense. So who was it?”

  “The only person who fits all three criteria is Greta Schmidt,” Mercer answered and received a number of dubious looks.

  “I think he’s right,” Erwin said after a moment. “Although Igor and I didn’t think Geo-Research knew who we really were and why we were on Greenland, we did discuss people we should be careful about. Neither of us considered that Greta could be part of this.”

  “Erwin, do you know if Geo-Research is affiliated with a company called Kohl?” Anika asked. “Schroeder mentioned the name in his journal as the company given the actual contract to dig the cavern. He was among a handful of military experts sent to help.”

  “Kohl bought Geo-Research last year so they could hide behind their scientific credentials and execute their true aim.”

  “Which is the recovery of the gold?” Marty asked.

  Erwin echoed Schroeder’s words. “The gold is only a small part of what’s going on.”

  “What were the Germans hiding?”

  “They weren’t hiding anything. They were trying to recover something, something that was never meant to be on this planet.”

  Mercer put it together quicker than the others. “A radioactive meteorite that landed here in 1943?”

  “Not quite,” Erwin said. “Most of it slammed into Russia in 1908.”

  The sudden insight came to Mercer in a rush, and despite the horror surrounding this search and the loss they had already felt, he couldn’t help but be excited. They were talking about one of the greatest scientific mysteries of the twentieth century. There was a hushed awe in his voice. “Tunguska.”

  “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 Fuhrer,” Puhl mocked the title, “wasted valuable resources on a quest doomed to fail.”

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

&nb
sp; “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.”