by Jack Du Brul
Once Anika had navigated them back to their original course, the pain-racked journey continued. Without cloud cover, the temperature dropped dramatically, and every breath was like inhaling acid. It froze tender lung tissue and caused nosebleeds if air was drawn through unprotected nostrils. Mercer had to continuously rotate his scarf when the fleece became clogged with frozen mucus and condensation.
“Where’s that global warming we were promised?” Ira grumbled at lunch.
The terrain eased some, quickening their pace, but it took its toll. Legs that seemed fresh following a break began aching after only a few steps and they constantly had to adjust their clothing as frigid air found tiny entrances, piercing right to the flesh before they could recover themselves. Urinating was done only when absolutely necessary. The women suffered the most during the act but the men made a bigger deal out of it. Ira had the best line when he described the process as making a “dickcicle.”
His humor and positive outlook helped keep the exhaustion at bay.
At four that afternoon, Mercer’s estimate put the air shaft a half mile ahead. He could see that their march had led them to the mountains thrusting through the glacier at the head of the fjord he’d seen from the cockpit of the DC-3. The mountains — bald round hills really — were a thousand feet high and had been so ravaged by glacial movement that their domed sides were riven with scars. He was looking to the west, toward the interior of Greenland, to survey the surroundings, when he suddenly dropped flat to the snow, screaming at the others to do the same.
If the sky hadn’t been free of clouds, he never would have seen the distant speck. It was the rotor-stat plying its way serenely northward. Knowing the clarity of polar optics, he guessed the dirigible was five miles away.
“Bury yourselves!” Like a beached seal, Mercer paddled snow onto his back, struggling to camouflage his red parka and green pack. His heart pounded painfully, and he took a bite of snow to moisten his dry mouth. Jesus, that was close.
He peered over his shoulder and saw the team had followed him without question. In seconds they were nothing more than six innocuous-looking lumps in the snow. He couldn’t chance reaching for his binoculars because the sun’s reflection off the lens would flash like a beacon. Since the airship was continuing past his estimated position for the air shaft, Mercer’s earlier opinion that Rath didn’t have its exact location was true. They were moving their secondary base too far north. This would buy Mercer the time they desperately needed.
“Be thankful the weather has been so rotten,” he said when the airship vanished around a promontory. “It’s delayed them as much as it has us.”
“How much time do you think we have?” Anika asked, brushing snow off his back.
“I don’t know,” Mercer replied absently, watching the spot where the rotor-stat had disappeared. “Not as much as I’d like.”
“Figure they’ll bring three Sno-Cats up here and at least one building,” Ira said. “Four round-trips, six hours flight time, an hour loading. That’s a little over twenty-four hours if they fly around the clock.”
“Or half that if they’d already moved stuff before the pitaraq,” Mercer added.
With a renewed urgency, they continued walking. Mercer had the point and pushed at a brutal pace. His legs burned from the strain of clearing a path for his people, and yet he maintained a gait not much slower than a trot. He kept watch for the rotor-stat and studied the rock formations as he moved. The mountains were like a string of beads impeding the glacier from reaching the sea, and as they rounded one more in the long line, a wicked smile split Mercer’s chapped lips.
“Anika, you still have that map?”
“Yes.”
“Take a look at it and tell me what you see above the X.”
“Looks like the profile of a face. A face with a big nose.”
“Kind of like the one on the side of that mountain up there?” Mercer pointed at a natural design cut into the stone by aeons of erosion. It looked remarkably like a human face in profile. The lips were out of proportion, but the nose was unmistakable, as were the deep-set eyes. The formation loomed like a sentinel high above the ice.
“My God,” she breathed.
“The last piece of the puzzle.” Mercer grinned. “I wondered about that drawing when I first saw it. Now I get it. It was the laborer’s way of telling us exactly where to look.”
“With a little imagination you can even think the face up there is Jewish.”
“If you’re referring to the nose, that’s an ugly stereotype.”
“I’m Jewish. It’s okay. You ought to see the beak on my grandfather.” She smiled up at him. “You think the air shaft is beneath the face?”
“We’ll know soon enough.” Before Mercer let them proceed, he spent a few minutes with the Geiger counter checking for radiation. As they followed far behind him, he kept his eyes on the monitor, fearful that the counter would peg over at any second. So far it was giving just faint chirps of background radiation.
A hundred yards from the near-vertical mountain, the Geiger began to tick a little more rapidly. Mercer held up his hand to halt the others and paused to see how far the readings would go. The level was slightly higher than he’d encountered in the C-97 but a few weeks’ worth of exposure would be below the danger level provided no one got X-rayed for a while.
There were certain fears Mercer couldn’t purge from his brain, and radiation was one of them. He hated it. It reminded him of firedamp gas in coal mines, invisible in its touch and insidious in its death. There was no defense except avoidance.
He walked slowly. The snow near the base of the mountain had become ankle-deep slush. He wondered how close Stefansson Rosmunder had been to this very spot fifty years ago during his search for the C- 97. Close, he estimated, considering the dose needed to kill him so swiftly. Not knowing the half-life or dissipation rate of an extraterrestrial element, Mercer proceeded with deliberation, like he was walking through a minefield.
Tick. Tick. Tick, tick, tick. Tickticktick.
Mercer’s eyes dropped to the Geiger counter. Twenty-five RADs, about a quarter of the dose needed to cause radiation sickness or about eight times the average yearly exposure people received from background radiation. They would be safe for a while, but each moment brought an increased possibility of cancer later in life.
Nothing around him looked like a likely radiation source. There was no meteor impact evidence on the side of the mountain nor were there signs of Otto Schroeder’s air shaft, no tailings of waste rock from their mining. He looked up and saw he was still ten yards to the left of the face. Moving laterally and trying to ignore the clicking counter, Mercer knew he was close. The ice had become even more watery, as if heated from below. Erwin had told them that pieces of the meteor kept in the Russian villages melted snow even in winter.
Without warning, the ground opened up and swallowed Mercer in a wet rush. He fell about ten feet and landed heavily on his backside in a small ice cave. It was an antechamber at the head of the Nazi air shaft. Ahead of him was the long tube descending into the glacier. A wall of icy slurry surged down the eight-foot-diameter tunnel. Had this cave not had a level floor, it would have carried him headlong into the earth as though he’d been flushed down an enormous drain. The moment of terror that had tripped his heart gave way to awe as he surveyed his surroundings. He wasn’t even aware of the pain from the fall.
Then he saw the body.
It was badly decomposed, merely a skeleton dressed in gray rags adorned with brass buttons and piping and medals. He recognized the rotted insignia on the corpse’s uniform. He had been a sailor in the German Kreigsmarine, specifically the U-boat service. If Mercer needed any more proof that Erwin Puhl’s story was true, here it was. But that wasn’t what filled him with wonder. It was what lay next to the seated body: the two-foot-square box of pure gold stamped with the swastika-clutching eagle of the Third Reich.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he breathed, sup
erstitious ripples charging his skin like static. The Nazis had called their operation the Pandora Project, meaning he was looking at a true Pandora’s box, its contents as deadly as the evils the mythological one once contained.
“Mercer? Are you all right?” Anika yelled from above, her voice strained by concern.
“Yes,” he replied. “Stay back.”
The Geiger counter had been turned off by the fall and he flipped it back on. The meter thankfully registered the same dosage as he’d found before his sudden plunge. He held the probe first to the box and then the corpse, finding that it was the sailor’s body emitting radiation and not the container of Satan’s Fist. The reading was significantly higher than from the survivor he’d found at Camp Decade, meaning this man had received a much more powerful dose, fatal in minutes rather than weeks.
But what about Stefansson Rosmunder and the crew of the C-97? Mercer wondered. How strongly had they been hit? Was it exposure to the corpse or the meteor itself that killed them? Rosmunder had lasted six months after returning from this area, so Mercer guessed it was an acute dose of residual radiation from the body. Considering how they had all bled out, he presumed the airmen were killed by a radioactive blast from the fragment sealed in the box. The sailor must have opened it, killing the flight crew and himself.
Why, after surviving for ten years, did he commit suicide and murder? Madness? Desperation?
Mercer put his hand on the gilded crate, noting that its surface was warm to the touch. Then he realized why the shaft hadn’t been buried any deeper. The environment and the box had come to a kind of balance, melting away much of the snow that fell here but leaving enough to cover the tunnel’s entrance. That was why there weren’t hundreds of feet of ice blocking the shaft. It wasn’t until he came along that his added weight overcame the equilibrium between Arctic cold and radioactive warmth and exposed the air vent. Eventually, as the meteor fragments decayed, the heat would diminish and the glacier would forever seal the tunnel.
He gave the box a shove and realized that, while it was heavy, it wasn’t solid. Straining to gain traction on the slick floor, he pushed it against the corpse, pressing the disintegrated pile of bones into the wall of the excavation, partially shielding the space from its deadly rays. The Geiger counter dropped noticeably. Next he unfolded the thermal blanket from his pack and draped it over the box to reduce the amount of heat it radiated. He would use the other blankets each person carried to further dampen the warmth, so when they blocked the entrance, the container wouldn’t melt away their effort.
“Hey down there, what’d you find?” It was Ira.
“What’s left of a German sailor and part of his set of golden luggage. Mind tossing me a rope?”
“Have you out in a second.”
Back on the surface, Mercer changed his wet parka and snow pants for the spare ones they’d brought for an emergency, and he told the others what he’d found. The idea of walking past the radioactive body had a chilling effect on them even after he explained that their exposure wouldn’t be too dangerous. Like him, they were all terrified by radiation.
It took a half hour to pile enough snow near the opening to seal the hole and erase their presence. With the Pandora box, as Mercer already thought of it, covered by the “space blankets,” the slush would freeze to concrete hardness in a few hours. Rath would need weeks and a lucky break to find them. Both of which, Mercer mused grimly, he would no doubt have.
They lowered each other one by one into the antechamber until only Mercer remained on the surface. He mounded snow around the hole, shrinking the aperture until it was barely large enough to admit him. He took one last look at the setting sun and allowed himself to fall into the ice, his landing cushioned by waiting arms below. Flashlights had already been snapped on, their beams vanishing into the bowels of the glacier.
“We ready?” he asked brightly, hoping to dispel their apprehension.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Marty said as he looked down the stygian air shaft.
“It drives me nuts when they use that line in the movies.” Mercer stopped and turned, his eyebrows raised in a mocking expression. “Marty, do you think any of us have a good feeling about walking through an oversize Nazi sewer pipe that leads to a radioactive chamber filled with God knows what?”
Together, they started the long descent into the unknown.
HEADQUARTERS OF KOHL AG, HAMBURG, GERMANY
Klaus Raeder waited a moment before answering Reinhardt Wurmbach’s question. He carefully unlaced his fingers and placed his hands palms down on the tabletop, fixing his stare as if pondering his response. “No,” he said at last.
“No, you won’t agree to pay the reconciliation commission two hundred and twenty-five-million-mark settlement, or no, you won’t counter with two hundred million like you promised before?”
“No to both,” Raeder replied, delighting in the veins that bulged like tumors on Wurmbach’s forehead. “Tell the lawyers that we’ll consider one hundred and seventy-five million.”
“Damn it, Raeder, what are you doing?” The lawyer did nothing to hide his anger. “We agreed at the last board meeting that we would pay out the two hundred and consider ourselves lucky. Why make this more difficult by prolonging the negotiations with the Jewish groups?”
“Because we have a fiduciary responsibility to pay as little as absolutely necessary,”
“What about our moral responsibility?” asked Reinhardt’s deputy counsel, Katrine Groener.
“Our shareholders don’t pay us for that,” Raeder answered, annoyed that the woman would ask such a ridiculous question. “Too bad if we offend some delicate sensibilities. This is a business decision.”
“Which is costing the company money,” Katrine persisted. “Our increased expenditures to marketing and advertisement have yet to stem the loss of customers. And in the past week we’ve seen NATO cast doubts over Kohl receiving the contract to build the computers for the Eurofighter unless we come to a quick resolution with the reconciliation commission.”
Raeder remained impassive, refusing to betray his anger over the possibility of losing the Eurofighter contract. That had come as a complete shock a week ago when a friend at NATO headquarters in Brussels had telephoned with the confidential decision. Now the deal was being openly discussed in capitals all over the Continent. The French especially were putting pressure on NATO to pull the contract from Kohl, a company they screamed had yet to make amends for its Nazi past. The irony was that the electronics firm in Toulouse that would fill the order if Kohl lost out had made a fortune selling radio gear to the wehrmacht right up until D day.
Katrine Groener waited for Raeder to respond, and when he didn’t, she continued. “Our warehouses are filling with products we have no buyers for as our market share diminishes. Kohl Heavy Construction has no new work lined up for the remainder of the year. And” — she sifted through some pages in front of her — “ah, here it is. While the corporation is hemorrhaging money, I’ve found we’ve spent roughly twenty million marks on a project with an accounting number I can’t find in any of our books: 1198-0.”
Wurmbach did a poor job hiding his astonishment that she knew about 1198-0. He wasn’t even sure what the code signified, only that it was being handled by Raeder’s pet fascist, Gunther Rath. “Katrine, that’s a special project still deemed too secret to put through normal channels. It, ah, has to do with, ah, a new steel-milling process,” he improvised lamely. “Forget you know about it.”
“Fine, whatever,” she said, looking from the sputtering Reinhardt to the glacially cool Raeder.
“Just to satisfy your curiosity,” Raeder said when he saw that the young attorney wasn’t impressed with Reinhardt’s pathetic explanation, “there will be no further expenditures on 1198-0. As to the Eurofighter contract, we’re not out of the running yet. Once we come to terms with the reconciliation commission, we’ll get that deal. If they won’t go for the one seventy-five, Reinhardt will give them
two hundred million and they’ll leave us alone. It’s my decision to wait them out a little longer and save ourselves money we sorely need.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime we’ll be denounced by fringe groups and lambasted in the media for harboring Nazi secrets, but in a few weeks no one will remember any of this.” Raeder’s confidence wasn’t forced. He was as certain of his plan now as he was when it had been conceived. His intercom buzzed. “Yes, Kara?”
“Herr Raeder, I know you asked not to be disturbed, but Herr Rath is finally on the line from Greenland.”
“Thank you. Put him through.” He clamped his hand over the mouthpiece to address Wurmbach and Groener. “Excuse me please.” He didn’t speak again until the two lawyers had left his office. “Gunther, what the hell is going on out there? I’ve been getting panicked calls from Ernst Neuhaus at the Geo-Research office in Reykjavik. The plane with the Surveyor’s Society people and the other team is two days overdue. What happened to the evacuation?”
“The evac went as planned.” Rath’s voice was faint as the solar max stripped power from the radio he used to patch through to the Njoerd and then on to Hamburg. Raeder couldn’t be sure of the emotion in his special-projects director but it sounded like defiance. “They left right on time.”
“Where are they?” Raeder feared what he was about to hear.
“There was an accident on the flight back to Iceland. The plane was lost with all hands.”
The full horror telescoped in on Raeder so quickly he felt like he was going to be ill. He knew there had been no accident. Gunther Rath had killed those people, murdered them in cold blood. Oh, God, it isn’t supposed to be like this. Raeder and Rath had done many illegal things in their career together but nothing approaching murder. Yes, there had been that arson early on, but that was the only time. And since then their tactics had lost any trace of brutality. Industrial espionage and veiled threats were one thing, but this?
