Pandora's Curse - v4 (34 page)

“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.”

“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 space 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.”