Pandora's Curse - v4 (39 page)

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?

What have I done?
Raeder finally saw that he didn’t control Gunther Rath, never had. Thinking he was using Rath’s special propensities in the business world, Raeder had allowed the neo-Nazi into corridors of power he’d never known existed, showing him the real meaning of strength. Now Rath was turning the tables, unveiling to Raeder what depravity actually lurked in his heart. And Raeder had handed Rath the tools he needed to execute the plans of his fascist masters.

“We are proceeding with the rest of the operation,” Rath continued, misunderstanding Raeder’s silence as tacit approval for his actions. “From corporate records we have the general area of the air vent, but a weather front has delayed our establishment of the northern base. Using the rotor-stat and Sno-Cats we’ll find the tunnel in a day or two.”

What is the man talking about? He’s killed a dozen people and thought that everything was going according to plan. How could I have possibly thought that I could civilize a man like Rath? He’s an animal who worships a cult of evil and death.
Raeder knew he had to put a stop to this. He couldn’t let Rath continue. Not like this. He made his decision quickly. It was an effort to keep revulsion from his voice when he spoke. “I’m leaving for Greenland immediately, Gunther.”

“Why? We haven’t found the cavern yet.”

“Watch what you say! This is an open channel.” Like facing a rabid dog, Raeder had only one choice: put the animal down. He would send Rath back to Germany and take over the recovery of the Pandora boxes. Once that was done, he would decide what to do with his special-projects director.

“I will be there sometime tomorrow,” Raeder snapped. “I don’t want you to take any more actions until I arrive. Is that clear?”

“Klaus, I’m close. You don’t need to be here.”

He had another agenda, Raeder realized. The only thing that made sense was that Rath wanted the boxes for his Nazi bosses. He’d told them what was in that cavern and was under orders to recover them so they could either be used or sold. Either option was too horrifying to consider

Raeder softened his voice. He had no idea what the neo-Nazi hierarchy had in store for him if he interfered. “I know I don’t need to be there, my friend. It’s just that I want to be. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He killed the connection before losing control of his emotions. He raced for the private bathroom next to his office because he thought he was going to vomit. He heaved and heaved but nothing came out. Responsibility and remorse couldn’t be so easily purged. He studied himself in the mirror above the gold-and-marble vanity. He looked the same. His hair was in place, his complexion smooth, his teeth brilliantly white. It was in his eyes that he saw the corruption.

“Get through this and you’ll be fine,” he told himself. He liked how that sounded so he repeated it, adding, “I didn’t kill those people. He did. It was his choice, not my order. No matter what, I am not a murderer. We’ll pay the commission, destroy all the Pandora boxes, and I’ll fire Rath. He’ll remain silent because to reveal what he knows would be an admission of guilt. He’s trapped himself.”

He drank a palmful of water and went back to his desk, hitting the intercom. “Kara, is Reinhardt still out there?”

“Yes, Herr Raeder. Would you like me to send him back in?”

“No. Tell him to pay whatever the commission is currently asking for. I think it’s two hundred and twenty-five million marks. Then page our pilots and have the company jet ready for an immediate flight to Iceland. Have my car brought around to the front of the building.”

“Yes, sir.”

Raeder dialed his summer house in Bavaria, hoping to reach his wife. His eleven-year-old son, Jaegar, answered the phone. “Papa!” the boy cried before restraining his emotions as his father had taught him. “How are you, sir?”

Squeezing his eyes at hearing how he’d turned his son into an automaton, Raeder needed a moment to answer. When this was over, a lot of things in his life were going to change
. Oh, God, please let me see them one more time.
“I miss you. I miss all of you. Is your mama home?”

“No. She went shopping with Frau Kreiger from next door. Fatima is watching Willi and me.” Willi was Jaegar’s six-year-old brother; Fatima, their Turkish housekeeper.

“I need you to take a message for me. Tell Mama that I had to go away this weekend on a trip.”

“You aren’t coming to Bavaria?” The boy’s en-grained reserve could not contain his fierce disappointment.

“I’m sorry, son. I just can’t.”

“When will you be coming?”

Reader considered his reply, knowing a lie would only add to his family’s disillusion. “Not for a long time, I’m afraid. I love you, Jaegar. I’m sorry. Tell your brother that I love him too. And your mother” —
God, this hurt
— “give her a big hug for me.”

Raeder knew his uncommon burst of concern would confuse the boy. But if things didn’t go as planned in Greenland, he’d be glad he’d made the call. It could be the last his family heard from him. On his way out of the office, he opened his safe to retrieve his licensed pistol, a holdover from the kidnapping threats he’d received before coming to Kohl.

T
he flashlight beam pushed back the gloom for only a few dozen yards before being swallowed by impenetrable darkness. With Mercer in the lead, the group chased the retreating ring of light, marching downward at a steady pace, protected by a thin bubble of illumination in an otherwise cold black realm. Otto Schroeder had engineered the sloping tunnel so those walking through it would never lose traction on the icy floor, and every hundred feet the entire shaft leveled out for a yard or two in case someone did fall.

Without the wind, the air was a constant thirty-two degrees, and after so long in below-freezing conditions, many of them had unzipped their parkas. None of them were yet comfortable enough to speak. The walk through the passage was punctuated only by the rustle of equipment and the slap of their boots. Even the Geiger counter in Mercer’s free hand had remained silent since they’d slipped past the corpse at the tunnel’s entrance. They continued ever downward, wending through living rock and glacial ice.

After thirty minutes, Mercer estimated they had walked nearly two miles into the mountain and had descended a thousand feet. He knew they had to be approaching sea level. Suddenly the light that had cocooned them no longer brushed the walls. It had vanished into an enormous gallery. Mercer stopped, checking the floor to see that it had leveled out. The ground was bare rock, mined smooth during World War Two.

“I think we’ve reached the bottom.”

Training the light upward, he could just barely see the underside of the cavern, an ugly mixture of ice and rock hanging fifty feet above them. Others snapped on their own lights and more details emerged. The cavern was roughly circular, at least five hundred feet in diameter, and domed. All around them, huge tongues of glacial ice were being forced into the cave through fissures in the stone. In a few centuries, the ice would eventually reclaim the space that the Nazis had carved for themselves. Ahead, the floor dropped off to still black water. Mercer imagined that somewhere across the water was another entrance to the cavern, a submerged grotto accessible only by submarine. He strode across the cavern to the water’s edge. By the high-tide lines staining the edge of the quay he knew that the path to the open ocean had remained clear after all this time.

“Must be the tides that keep it open,” Ira said as he approached. “If you look closely you can see currents in the water.”

Mercer dropped to his belly so he could reach over the side of the pier that Otto Schroeder had built and dipped his hand in the frigid water. He tasted it and spat back into the pool. “Typical salinity. It hasn’t been diluted by ice melt.”

“I bet if we had a submarine we could get out of here without Rath ever knowing it.”

Mercer’s attention was fixed on a large gray shape in the water at the far side of the pier. “I’ll be goddamned. Wishing it makes it true.”

Ira Lasko had to jog to catch up. Mercer called to the others with lights and they converged at the water’s edge, close to one side of the chamber. “I can’t believe it.”

Low in the water sat a German U-boat that looked like she’d just slipped down the ways. The paint on her upper works seemed freshly applied and there were only a few streaks of surface rust along the side of her outer hull. Her conning tower stood about twelve feet above her flat deck, ringed halfway up by a tubular steel railing. Her designation, U-1062, was stenciled on her tower, and she looked as sleek and deadly now as she had generations ago.

“No deck gun,” Ira said after a moment’s examination.

“What?”

“This is a type VII, the most widely constructed version. Over seven hundred, if I remember correctly. She should have an 88mm cannon just forward of the conning tower.” He rubbed the sprouting beard on his chin. “I think this is one of the special torpedo resupply subs the Germans built. She wouldn’t need armament if they were using her to transport cargo in and out of this cave. Notice the rubber membrane on the conning tower. That’s Tarnmatte, an antiradar coating. She was built for stealth.”

“I’m glad I never took up your trivia challenge about submarines,” Mercer said, impressed by the breadth of Lasko’s knowledge.

“When you spend your life in one of these monsters, it’s good to know their history.” The gangway spanning the narrow gulf between sub and shore was a short distance away. Ira shot Mercer a look.

“Let’s explore the rest of this place before we board her.”

“You have a plan?”

Mercer grinned. “Always.”

“A good one?”

“Rarely.”

For the next hour, they split into teams and scoured the chamber. There were four separate caverns carved off the main cave as well as a long tunnel bored parallel to the air vent. This shaft did not rise up into the glacier but ran level for eighty yards until ending abruptly in a pile of loose boulders and chunks of ice, obviously the result of a cave-in. One of the side chambers had been a machine shop for repairing mining equipment, such as generators, pneumatic drills, lights, and small utility loaders. Ira Lasko remained in the workshop while the others continued their exploration.

Another cavern, about half the size of the central one, had been a dormitory and was filled with rows of bunk beds stacked four high. Mercer confirmed the slave laborers had used it when he found a Star of David painstakingly carved into the underside of one of the beds. There were enough bunks for five hundred people, double or even triple that if the workers were forced to sleep in shifts. Most were neatly made, the single blanket stretched taut. A few were rumpled and he could see the outline of the last person to sleep there. That was all that remained of the man or woman. An impression.