Pandora's Curse - v4 (41 page)

Mercer checked his watch. He was stunned to see it was past midnight. Without the sun to guide his circadian cycle, he hadn’t realized that they’d been on the move for twenty straight hours. “We’ll start that after we grab a few hours’ sleep.”

Hilda sagged when she recognized the English word sleep.
“Danke.”

“Where the hell are Anika and Erwin?” Marty asked, dropping to the stone floor and propping his back against a barrel.

“Obviously they found something of interest.” Ira climbed down the conning tower and crossed the gangway to the dock.

Hilda took over cooking duties from Mercer when he started gathering provisions from the packs, freeing him to find Anika. He found her slumped over the desk in the administration building’s largest office. Erwin Puhl was asleep on a threadbare couch. Mercer touched Anika’s shoulder and she came awake with a guilty start.

“Oh, God. I am so sorry.” She saw that Erwin had also succumbed to exhaustion. “We were reading and took a quick break” — she looked at her watch — “three hours ago.”

“That’s okay.” Mercer smiled. “We’ve just knocked off outside. Have you found anything?”

“Everything,” Anika replied, fire replacing the sleep in her eyes. “Names, dates, orders, procedures, the works. If we get out of here, Kohl AG is finished.”

“What about the two men who survived the accident that killed everyone else. Did they leave any kind of a journal?”

“That’s what Erwin was reading.”

The scientist came awake when he heard his name. He slipped on his glasses. “You were right about a great many of your conjectures, Mercer. One of them was a Jewish slave laborer named Isidore Schild. The other was the submarine’s chief engineer, Wolfgang Rossler. They were on the glacier when one of the Pandora boxes dropped from a crane and spilled its contents. The radiation blast killed everyone in the chamber an hour after they got the fragments safely into another box. Schild and Rossler remained outside for two weeks, freezing and starving until they felt it was safe to enter again. The protective suits the Germans brought couldn’t take a direct blast of radiation, but it did shield them when they moved the contaminated bodies into the excavation and backfilled it by blowing up what they called the hanging wall.”

“That’s a mining term for the ceiling of a tunnel,” Mercer explained. “They must be talking about the shaft leading to where the meteorite fragments came to a rest after melting down to bedrock.”

“Yes, that’s right. They couldn’t operate the submarine with only the two of them, so they were marooned. Necessity ended any animosity between the two men. They lived off the food supplies and killed the few seals that came into the cavern. For the first few years they tried to signal Allied aircraft that ventured nearby on their flights to and from England, but it was rare any planes came this far north. They assumed after several years that when no more planes approached the war had ended.”

“Jesus.” Mercer shuddered at the idea of being isolated for so long.

“Schild’s journal is filled with anecdotes about their time here. He was a remarkably generous man toward Rossler, considering the circumstances. I’ll tell you the details later if you’d like. They decided that the only way to attract attention was if they could shoot down one of the passing planes. Since they had only small arms from the submarine, the only weapon capable of crashing an aircraft was the radiation from one of the boxes. They dragged the smallest one to the surface and took turns every day waiting for a plane to fly low enough and close enough for a direct dose of Pandora radiation to kill its crew. For eight long years they waited until the C-97 flew over. Rossler was at the entrance, so Schild doesn’t know the exact details. He guessed that maybe the plane had engine trouble. Anyway, Rossler opened the box, sacrificing his own life for Schild’s, and downed the plane.

“As soon as the radiation dissipated enough for his suit to protect him, Schild went in search of the plane but couldn’t find it. After two weeks he returned to the cavern. Despondent, he finally gave up a short while later and left, packing up enough provisions to sustain him for a week. The seals had long stopped coming, so he was dying of scurvy anyway. He wrote a beautiful suicide note at the end of his journal, which leads me to believe he knew nothing of Camp Decade.”

“Want to know the sickest part of this?” Mercer said when Erwin fell silent. “Had he stayed in the vicinity of the cave entrance after the plane crash, he probably would have seen Stefansson Rosmunder as he searched for the wrecked Stratofreighter. He passed near enough to this place to give himself a fatal dose of radiation from Rossler’s body.”

The tales of Japanese soldiers surviving on remote islands long after the war were tame compared to the hardships Rossler and Schild endured only to die so close to rescue.

“There are other parts of Schild’s journal,” Anika said, “that are much, much worse.” She held out her hand to Erwin for the journal. She thumbed through to the passage she wanted, pausing to build the strength to reread it. “This takes place at the height of the mining operation.” Her translation came fluidly, as though she’d already memorized the passage.

August 11, 1944
Can the Nazis leave any beauty uncorrupted? We learned again today that they cannot. We fooled ourselves into thinking the guards didn’t know about Sara’s pregnancy. Yes, her belly was hidden under loose clothing, but there were more obvious signs of the life within her. She was happy. An unknown aberration from this living hell. That she’d been raped by guards who planted this seed no longer vexed her as her time approached. She’d been beautiful and the guards’ favorite. We didn’t understand why they had left her alone these past months. Now we realize they were under orders not to touch her. She gave birth this morning, straining as much to free the child as to maintain her silence. Many of the older women who knew midwifery helped her. And as if they knew the due date, Herman Kohl, nephew of the industrialist Volker Kohl and here on an inspection tour, appeared moments later with Sturmbannführer Kress. They took the child to the dock. The wailing infant was forever silenced by the still waters. I write now to the sounds of the old women crying and the snuffling of the guards once again raping Sara. I pray for the strength to hide from the suicidal thoughts plaguing me since my first day here so that mother and child will never be forgotten.

The heavy silence in the room served to amplify Anika’s sobs. Mercer too felt the salty sting of tears in his eyes. A handful of the abstract six million had names and faces for him now. He made a silent vow to stop at nothing until Kohl paid for what they had done. For him there was no ambiguity about responsibility. “Kohl AG is going down.” He was unaware he spoke aloud.

Anika looked at him and was a bit frightened by what she saw. His rage was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. It shimmered off him like heat waves. For the first time she realized Mercer’s capacity for revenge.

Since they didn’t know how long they would remain isolated, their meal was a light one. Their rations would be proportioned to sustain them for a week to ten days. Too exhausted to let rumbling bellies distract them, they slept like the dead until Ira Lasko’s watch alarm roused them six hours later.

Because of the physical strength needed to move the three-hundred-fifty-pound fuel drums, Erwin and Anika were given the job of degreasing the machinery in the U-boat with rags under Ira’s guidance. He spent the morning cleaning the sub’s port diesel engine and checking that her electric motor would operate by jumping it with the portable generator. Ira had to scavenge wiring from the starboard power plant to get it running smoothly but was satisfied with his efforts. Mercer spent part of the morning rigging a trip wire device near the surface entrance. He formed a sheet of lead into a tight ball that would roll down the tunnel once a lanyard was brushed by passing feet. He placed a metal plate at the bottom of the tunnel that would reverberate like a bell when the ball struck it. Even if Rath’s men sprinted down to the cavern, the ball would beat them by ten minutes, giving Mercer and his group enough time to submerge the boat. The whole setup looked innocuous enough to evade suspicion once Rath found it.

They put in eighteen hours of work that day and slept, if possible, harder that night. Before Mercer would let them into their sleeping bags, he made certain that all evidence of their presence had been erased and that everything was packed for the dash to the U-boat if necessary. They’d considered sleeping on the boat but didn’t have enough people to move one of the heavy Pandora boxes into it to provide heat.

The following morning, the exertion and cold made them lethargic and ill-tempered. They loaded fuel all morning, a filthy job that left them reeling from the fumes. By lunch, Ira had tested all the sub’s valves and he was confident that, when the time came, she would dive. With her air tanks charged off her compressor, she would resurface too. He’d also managed to coax a few minutes of running time off the port engine and knew what needed to be done to get it running at full power. He announced that they were ready with the exception of her batteries.

He’d filled a few with acid so they would hold a charge for lighting the boat but the rest remained empty. That job would have to wait until they were ready to leave. Most of the batteries had cracked in the past decades and were unusable. Those that Ira salvaged still tended to seep acid. Because it was impossible to completely dry the bilge spaces, the leaking hydrochloric acid would mix with the seawater contamination. The resulting clouds of poisonous chlorine gas would quickly fill the U-boat’s pressure hull. To limit their exposure, Mercer decided they would fill the batteries just before leaving the cavern.

After his meager meal, Mercer gave his team a few hours’ rest before tackling the batteries. As they gratefully fell into their sleeping bags he made the long trek up the tunnel to check his warning device. He’d thought of a better system to release it and wanted to make the modification. Climbing a thousand feet in a two-mile-long shaft wouldn’t normally bother him, but he was more tired than he could remember. The lack of food and cold so sapped his energy that two-thirds the way to the surface he decided to turn back. He couldn’t afford to waste his dwindling reserves on building what amounted to a better mouse trap.

With a fraction of a second’s warning, a bounding shadow flitted through the beam of his flashlight. Mercer tried to dodge out of the way as his ten-pound lead ball came bouncing out of the darkness toward him. It smashed his thigh like a baseball bat at full swing, crumpling him to the ground like he’d been shot. The ball continued its plunge to the cavern a mile and a half away.

He bit his lip to keep from crying out and tasted blood. Lying on the floor of the tunnel, he strained to see anything farther up the pipe, cursing his stupidity for coming up here. Even if he couldn’t see Rath’s men, he knew they were coming. As he lurched to his feet, his right leg would barely take his weight. It was dead all the way to his toes.

“Son of a bitch,” he grunted and began loping down the tunnel, a shuffling gait that hammered pain to the top of his skull with every step.

Mercer knew the leg wasn’t broken and tried to convince himself that he could run through the agony. With a half-mile advantage he could only hope that Rath would need time to assemble his men at the entrance before descending into the earth. At his pace, Mercer’s lead would vanish fast. There were no tricks he could think of to lessen the pain, nothing he could do to increase his speed except push himself harder.

Ira and the others must have heard the ball slamming into the metal plate at the bottom of the tunnel. He wondered if they would wait for him and prayed they wouldn’t. To be captured now because of his mistake was something he couldn’t take. He knew, though, that they would wait right up until it was too late.

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.