Pandora's curse m-4

by Jack Du Brul

  The thought that their lives hung in the balance carried him the next half mile. He was two-thirds home, but knew he was tapped out. His breathing raged painfully. His thigh throbbed even stronger, an agony that made him cry with each footfall.

  He reached the cavern floor before he knew it, his determination able to push him far beyond what he knew where his limits. The cave was completely dark, and he could hear nothing over his own pained gasps. Up the shaft he could just discern a faint ghost’s glow of light, a distant flicker that warned him he had only a few minutes. He left his own light off, relying on years of subterranean experience to guide him across the cavern to where the sub should be. When he thought he was close, he splayed his fingers across the Maglite to diffuse its beam and flicked it on.

  His sense of direction was perfect. He stood a couple yards from the gangway. He looked up to see Anika Klein standing atop the conning tower. She saw him and her face lit up with undisguised relief. “Come on.”

  Beyond the sub, the lagoon was littered with a hundred empty fuel drums that would disguise the one Ira had bolted to the top of the U-boat’s snorkel and the gas can he’d mounted to hide the attack periscope.

  “Tell Ira to dive,” Mercer wheezed.

  “We heard the ball fifteen minutes ago. We’re ready.”

  He swept his light across the dock. Nothing remained of their equipment. Rath would never know they were here. Using his arms and one leg, he climbed the ladder welded to the conning tower, grateful that Anika was there to drag him up the last few rungs.

  Mercer didn’t waste seconds he didn’t have by climbing into the sub. He launched himself through the open hatch and fell to the floor of the fire-control space located above the main control room. Anika followed him through, stopping to dog the hatch above them. The sub was watertight.

  “Ira, now!” she shouted down to the control room.

  A steady hiss echoed throughout the U-boat as Ira opened valves to the sea, flooding them with enough water to put the sub on the bottom of the lagoon, sixty feet below the keel. He knew to trim the flooding to compensate for the sub’s tendency to sink stern first because of her engines. She went under with barely a ripple.

  Mercer gingerly lowered himself into the control room. As cramped as the room was, it was the largest space on the U-boat, but the low ceiling, clutter of pipes, wires, and conduits as well as the myriad duty stations made it claustrophobic. Around the large tube for the boat’s second periscope, Ira stood in front of the dive controls, adjusting the dizzying array of flow valves and knobs. Marty was seated at the planesmen’s station, his hands kept well away from the twin wheels. The others were in the forward torpedo room to distribute weight.

  Gently, the sub settled on the bottom. Ira forced a little air into the saddle tanks to prevent suction forming against the silty seabed. For fifteen minutes he continued to trim the U-boat, set the depths for the snorkel and periscope, and generally made certain they were secure. He scampered around with the agility of a man half his age. It was clear that retirement hadn’t deadened his training. Because no one had his specialized knowledge, the others wisely stayed out of his way.

  “By the end of the week,” he said at one point, “all of you are going to know how to run this tin can in your sleep.”

  “If sleep is a prerequisite, after I do a little spying through the periscope, I’m heading for a bunk to get a jump on everyone else,” Mercer joked but pain clipped each word.

  “No, you’re not,” Anika snapped with clinical professionalism. “You’re getting to bed right now. You can barely stand.”

  Mercer made to argue and thought better of it. Anika had to support his shoulder as she led him to the captain’s cabin, the only private spot on the two-hundred-fifty-foot relic.

  “You or Hilda should have this cabin,” Mercer said when Anika stripped off his parka.

  “Sweet gesture.” She smiled. “But we took a vote yesterday. By unanimous decision, this one’s yours.”

  She gave him several painkillers, which he washed down with a mouthful of brandy. “No operating heavy machinery for twelve hours,” she admonished.

  “I promise I won’t even lift my eyelids.”

  Her more-than-concerned kiss lingered on his lips long after she’d closed the curtain on the wood-paneled cabin.

  GEO-RESEARCH NORTHERN CAMP, GREENLAND

  “Say again?” Gunther Rath snarled into the static filled radio. “Your last transmission not understood.”

  “We have located the cavern,” came the response from Dieter, the driver of one of the Sno-Cats. “Advance team has penetrated the access tunnel and verified contents.”

  Rath looked up from the radio and caught a smile on Greta’s lips. Klaus Raeder stood behind her, but his expression did not change. He had just arrived at the base after a series of weather problems delayed his flights. “Excellent, Dieter. We have your location from the tracking device on the ’Cat. I will recall all vehicles and converge on your location.”

  The solar max swallowed Dieter’s reply. The tenuous link was gone.

  Rath got to his feet. “Klaus, I told you I could handle this.”

  “I didn’t doubt it,” Raeder replied sarcastically. Face-to-face with Rath, his confidence and certainty had returned. “It’s your tactics I question, not your abilities. Greta, would you excuse us?”

  The northern camp was composed of only one of the dormitory buildings flown up from the main base by the rotor-stat. By removing a few partitions, they had converted four of the bedrooms to an operations center and makeshift galley. Greta Schmidt didn’t like being ordered to leave but knew Gunther would tell her later what Raeder had to say. She went to her room without a word.

  Raeder’s voice was tight. “You will now explain why you felt it necessary to murder a planeload of people.”

  “Maybe I should start by explaining why I murdered a man named Otto Schroeder outside of Munich first. And why Greta had to kill the Russian scientist, Igor Bulgarin, here in Greenland.” Rath smirked at Raeder’s stunned expression. “You don’t know how close this expedition was to being compromised from the very beginning.”

  “Obviously not,” Raeder said when he found his voice.

  “In the Kohl archives we burned, do you remember transcripts of Leonid Kulik’s interrogation by the Gestapo where he said he belonged to a group called the Brotherhood of Satan’s Fist? Far from dying out during the war, the Brotherhood exists to this day. I learned through contacts I maintain in Russia that this group has been feeding information to a Nazi hunter in Austria in an attempt to stop us from securing the Pandora boxes. We weren’t able to stem the flow of documents, so I had a team eavesdrop on the Jew and learned that Otto Schroeder had been a mining engineer who worked on the cavern, apparently the only living person with firsthand knowledge of what happened here.

  “During our” — Rath paused to find the right word — “discussion, not only did a group of snipers open fire on us, but Anika Klein, who I have since learned is the Austrian Jew’s granddaughter, showed up. Schroeder was silenced, but Klein escaped and frustrated our attempts to locate her before she arrived in Greenland. Somehow she discovered the connection between Geo-Research and us after she arrived here and obtained the support of Philip Mercer. I had no choice but to silence them all.”

  “And what about the Russian you mentioned? The one Greta killed?”

  “On your orders to check the body in Camp Decade, she discovered him already checking the corpse for clues about his true identity. Realizing that Igor Bulgarin could be a member of the Brotherhood, Greta beat him to death with a tire iron.

  “Dr. Klein didn’t believe the false clues Greta left to make the murder look like an accident, and she tried to return to the scene of the crime with Mercer the day after she arrived here. Greta almost succeeded in stopping them by burning Camp Decade with them inside. However, luck was with Dr. Klein again and they survived.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of
this?” Raeder demanded.

  “These were details you pay me to handle,” Rath said smoothly, knowing that his superior’s anger was evaporating. “The evacuation plan we’d put together earlier was no longer viable since at least two people knew the truth about Bulgarin. I had to kill them before they reached Iceland. The only way to do that without causing even more suspicion was destroying the transport plane en route.”

  “There had to be another way,” Raeder said, though he had already seen that there wasn’t anything else Rath could have done.

  Rath put as much sincerity in his voice as he could muster. “I thought long and hard about what I did, believe me. It wasn’t an easy decision. I admit I was a little rough with Otto Schroeder, but his death was the result of the sniper attack. Bulgarin died because Greta panicked. I’ve been reacting to a situation out of my control. We both know my past, so I won’t pretend that violence isn’t an option, but I drew the line at murder long ago. I took no pleasure from what I did.”

  Raeder searched Rath’s eyes, hoping to see truth in them. He decided to believe Gunther. It was easier than the alternative. Since he was here, he could better control his special-projects director. While he would allow Rath to coordinate the destruction of the evidence in the cavern, Raeder was still wary about the fate of the Pandora boxes. When it came time to dispose of them, he would make sure Rath couldn’t implement any hijacking scheme he might have planned. “Okay. What happens now?” he said at last.

  “My men will empty the cave of everything we can move and burn what we can’t. Explosive charges will seal the place forever, so even if there is another survivor like Otto Schroeder, there will be no way to find the base. Then we’ll haul the Pandora boxes out to sea with the rotor-stat and dump them in the deepest water we can find.”

  “How long do you think it will take?”

  “Just a few days. We’ll have this building and the Sno-Cats back to the main base near Camp Decade in plenty of time if the Danish government decides to revoke our permit. And if they don’t, we’ll turn everything over to the Japanese team as scheduled. Don’t worry, Klaus.” Rath smiled. “No one will ever know what we’ve done. Kohl can pay the Jews a pittance compared to what we really owe.”

  When Raeder went to the bathroom, Greta Schmidt returned to the op-center. “Well?”

  “He bought the whole thing.” Gunther struggled not to laugh.

  “We knew he would,” she purred, massaging his shoulders. “I was thinking. Werner Koenig is the only person here not under our direct control. He knows that we aren’t in Greenland for any scientific research.”

  “Dr. Koenig’s ‘accident’ is already planned.”

  “I want to do it,” Greta said quickly, her face flushed.

  Laughing, Rath pulled her down to his lap and bit her ear. “You liked killing Bulgarin, didn’t you?” There was no need for her to reply. “I bet you got off when he died.”

  “Not then,” she said hoarsely. “But later, in the shower.”

  “You are a sick bitch.”

  “That’s why you love me.”

  “I don’t love you.”

  Her breath was coming faster now, her eyes glassy. She was near orgasm just thinking about murdering her former lover. “All right. That’s why you fuck me then.”

  THE PANDORA CAVERN

  Torn between his fear of cramped spaces and being choked again by Ira Lasko, Erwin Puhl chose to crush his claustrophobia by acting as the crew’s lookout on the periscope. By watching the activities of the black-clad Geo-Research men working in the cavern, he could pretend that he wasn’t trapped in an elongated coffin sixty feet under water. The powerful floodlights the Germans had installed gave him a small measure of security. It was only when he returned to the main part of the U-boat to sleep that the terror threatened to engulf him once again. Lasko made sure that Erwin’s bunk was above his own in the amidships officers’ quarters, just in case.

  He had his face pressed against the eyepiece when Mercer came up the ladder from the control room.

  “How’s the view?” Mercer asked and handed him a cup of water.

  “Same as it was yesterday and the day before.” Erwin stood. “Take a look.”

  Mercer replaced him on the steel seat and studied the cavern through the lines of the scope’s crosshair reticle. All the Pandora boxes had been moved to the air shaft entrance on dollies Rath’s men had brought, and several had already been dragged to the surface by winches anchored at regular intervals along the tunnel’s length. The three wooden buildings had been dismantled and burned, and Rath had had teams of men remove Kohl’s name from each piece of equipment with torches before dumping it into the water. A few pieces of gear had hit the submerged U-boat, producing a hollow echo that startled everyone inside the first time it happened.

  From the wavering glow radiating from the slave annex, Mercer could tell that the five hundred bunk beds were also being reduced to ash. He carefully turned the scope so the fuel drum bolted to it didn’t act too unnaturally as it pivoted through the water. He was searching for Gunther Rath and spotted him near the remains of the administration building, talking with Greta Schmidt and a fortyish man with brushed-back bronze hair whom Mercer didn’t recognize. He flicked a lever on the scope to double its magnification. The stranger had the sleek look of someone with power and he guessed that this was Rath’s boss, the head of Kohl AG.

  Mercer committed his face to memory.

  Although the interior of the sub was thirty-one degrees and their breath was like clouds around their mouths and noses, Erwin Puhl was sweating when Mercer looked up from the periscope. “Thanks, Erwin. Take back your window on the world.” The German jumped back to his normal position.

  The stiffness had gone out of his leg, but Mercer still didn’t put his full weight on it when he descended back to the control room.

  “What’s happening topside?” Ira asked. He was training Marty and Hilda how to operate the planesmen’s stations. Anika Klein was at the small chart table rereading the captain’s logbook. She had already translated the sections pertaining to how they would negotiate the twists and turns necessary to escape the cavern through the submarine channel. It promised to be an interesting trip.

  “Rath has already dragged a few boxes to the surface, and everything else is about destroyed. I bet they’ll clear out within twenty-four hours.”

  “How is Erwin doing?” Anika asked.

  “Fine as long as he has his periscope.”

  “Mercer!” Erwin called from above them. “They’re about to shoot at the barrels.”

  “What?”

  “There are three men with assault rifles at the edge of the dock. Rath’s talking with them. I think they’re going to sink the fuel drums in the lagoon.”

  “Shit. Rath’s a thorough son of a bitch, isn’t he?” Mercer recognized the implication immediately. “Stand by to lower the scope.”

  “Why?” Puhl’s voice cracked.

  “Because of the barrel covering it. They’ll know something’s up if it doesn’t sink when they shoot it.” Ira had already moved to the snorkel controls “I… I can’t.” He was terrified. “They’re shooting now. Barrels are sinking.”

  “He has to tell me when,” Ira said. “You go up there.”

  “No. Erwin needs to do this or he won’t last five minutes once we’re cut off.”

  “Oh, God, they’re aiming right at me,” Puhl screamed.

  “Lower your goddamned voice,” Mercer hissed. They all heard a fusillade of rounds pound the barrel above them. “Now!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Now!” Mercer snapped. “Or so help me Christ, claustrophobia’s going to be the least of your problems.”

  “They hit the snorkel.”

  Mercer nodded at Ira to retract their only access to fresh air. “Lower the scope, Erwin.”

  The terrified meteorologist didn’t reply but the hydraulics activated and the attack periscope sank into its well. Erwin came dow
n a moment later and ran forward, staggering at the circular hatch leading out of the control room. He almost made it to the tiny lavatory before he threw up.

  “I should check on him.” Anika got up from her seat.

  “Leave him,” Ira said. “Mercer’s right. He needs to get through this on his own.”

  Blind, cut off from oxygen, and stuck in what amounted to a narrow tube, even Mercer felt the walls start to close in. Filling the batteries with acid would do them no good now because they couldn’t run the charging generator without fresh air and a way to vent the exhaust. They were trapped on the bottom until Geo-Research left the cavern.

  “Never thought I’d say this, but I hope Rath hurries the hell up.”

  “Amen.”

  There was no reason for the crew to sleep on a regular schedule except habit, but at midnight the U-boat was lit by a single red bulb in the control room. The only sound came from the patter of condensation dripping from nearly every surface. They had spent the day under Ira’s gifted tutelage learning everything they would need to guide the sub out of the cavern when the time came.

  Anika lay awake in her bunk above Hilda Brandt’s. The tension of the past days, the horror of it all, was finally cracking her resolve. Erwin had his burning drive to prevent the meteorite fragments from falling into Kohl’s hands to give him strength. Marty sustained himself by knowing he’d become more of a man in the past week than he’d ever been. As a trained sailor, Ira Lasko seemed immune to the stress. She didn’t know how Hilda held herself together, her time in the Bundeswehr, Germany’s army, perhaps.

  And Mercer? He accepted every situation so calmly that Anika couldn’t envision a crisis that would faze him. She was sure he was as scared as the rest of them but his impassive demeanor allowed him to work through it effortlessly. Anika recalled her first shifts on ER duty and the near-paralyzing fear she’d felt. It took months of experience to build the confidence necessary to overcome her anxiety. She wondered at Mercer’s experience — what he’d done in the past to let him handle bomb threats, plane crashes, infernos, and everything else thrown at them.