Pandora's Curse - v4 (45 page)

He realized that the cargo would be transferred to the ship but didn’t understand why. He asked Rath.

“For one, we need the rotor-stat to return the Sno-Cats to Camp Decade. Also the airship tends to advertise her presence wherever she is. My plan is for the
Njoerd
to take the boxes to Tripoli while the rotor-stat returns to Europe for the completion of her test flights.”

A large area of deck behind the
Njoerd
’s superstructure had been cleared to receive the cargo of golden crates, and workers were preparing to guide the nets into position. The chopper swung wide to leave plenty of room for the ponderous dirigible as it descended toward the ship. Hovering a quarter mile astern and five hundred feet up, the pilot spun so that his passengers could watch the delicate placement of the cargo.

Suddenly, a portion of sea just fifty yards from the research ship came alive, as if the water was being boiled. Like Leviathan rising, a gray torpedo shape emerged from the swelling waves, rising into the air until a quarter of the vessel’s length was exposed.
“Mein Gott!”
Rath, Raeder, and Schmidt said at once. They recognized the antique U-boat at the same time and knew where it had come from.

Still bobbing on the swells of its own creation, the conning tower hatch crashed open and a figure emerged. Rath ordered the pilot in for a closer look, hoping it was Mercer who had exited the submarine first because some of his guards were already at the rail of the
Njoerd
armed with assault rifles.

Before Rath could discern the man’s features, winking lights shot from the weapons and the man vanished in a red mist. “Patch me through to the rotor-stat,” Rath ordered.

A moment later the airship’s pilot came over the radio. “What do you want me to do?”

“Abort the cargo transfer until we take care of the submarine.”

“I don’t know if I can. The engines are straining just to slow our vertical descent.”

The airship’s four rotors whipped the air so strongly, they rippled her Kevlar skin. The dirigible would need to build up forward speed so her airfoil shape gave her additional lift. The cargo nets dangled only fifty feet from the surface of the bay. Her heavy mooring lines already trailed in the water. Rath looked back to the sub just as another person gained access to her protected bridge. It was Mercer, and he remained huddled out of sight from the
Njoerd
. His attention was on the airship, so he didn’t notice the helicopter hovering behind him.

Making sure his seat belt was tight and Greta had Klaus covered, Gunther Rath opened the Jetranger’s side door. Arctic air blasted him like a hurricane and numbed his face and hands. He couldn’t wear his gloves and fire accurately, so he left them off when he drew his pistol. He activated the weapon’s specially mounted laser sight. With the sub rolling and the chopper bouncing, he doubted he could get off an accurate shot, but all he wanted was Mercer’s attention until the rotor-stat could bull its way out of the fjord. The red dot of light wavered all over the top of the conning tower until it streaked across Mercer’s stooped form. Rath began firing.

From his vantage, Mercer couldn’t see the rotor-stat. He could only hear it thundering above him. Its noise drowned out everything. Figuring they couldn’t see him, he chanced a look over the lip of the bridge’s coaming. That was when he spotted the
Njoerd
and the men lined at her side with weapons trained at him. He ducked again as fire raked the conning tower. When Erwin had fallen back into the sub and he’d heard the dirigible, Mercer had assumed the shots had come from above. Now he knew who had fired the scathing fusillade. They’d surfaced right in the middle of the cargo transfer.

“If it weren’t for bad luck…” he whispered. Ira’s head appeared through the hatch. “How’s Erwin?”

“Anika’s working on him now. I don’t think it’s too bad. What happened?”

“The
Njoerd
is about fifty yards off the port side, and the rotor-stat’s hovering just beyond her. She’s coming this way. Get back below and crank up the compressors. Fill the ballast tanks with air and prepare to dive. Leave your gun. I have an idea.”

“I don’t like it when you say that,” Ira remarked and disappeared below.

Mercer was preparing to take another look at the airship when a shard of white-hot steel ricocheted inside the bridge and buried itself in his thigh. He fell heavily, clamping a hand over the burning wound, and looked up. A big Bell helicopter hung in the sky behind him with its side door opened. He could clearly see the pistol in Gunther Rath’s hand and the sick smile on his face. Fluidly, Mercer pulled the MP-40 from under him and squeezed the trigger. The heavy machine pistol bucked like he was holding a live wire and jammed after half its thirty-two-round magazine emptied. As he recocked to clear the fouled breach, the chopper twisted out of range.

He next aimed blindly toward the
Njoerd
and pulled the trigger again, raising himself as the barrage scattered the gunmen at the vessel’s rail. In the moment’s reprieve before they regrouped, he slammed home a fresh magazine. He yelled down the hatch, “Marty, I need help!”

“Screw this. Let’s get out of here.”

Though angered, Mercer couldn’t bring himself to blame Martin Bishop. Sealing the hatch and motoring away would be the smart thing to do. But Mercer wouldn’t let that happen. Not when he had a chance to end this once and for all. The Pandora boxes were vulnerable, and judging by the width of the fjord and the height of the mountains, the bay was a thousand feet deep. More than enough.

“Goddamn it, Marty, get your ass up here.” The rotor-stat was struggling over the
Njoerd
’s deck, slowly building speed that would become altitude in a few moments. While the cargo nets were out of range, the airship’s mooring lines made parallel V’s as they were dragged through the calm water. They would sweep across the U-boat’s forward deck in twenty seconds or less. The monstrous gas bag blotted out the sun as it came toward him, its shadow spreading across the bay like a malignancy. Prop wash stirred the water behind her.

“What do you need?” Marty appeared at the hatch, his firm voice in opposition to his frantic eyes.

“Take this.” Mercer handed him Ira’s MP-40. “Point it at the helicopter if it gets too close or at the
Njoerd
if those men get organized again.”

“I’ve never fired a gun in my life. What if I need to change the clip?”

“If you need that much ammo, I’ll probably be dead.”

In his nervousness, Mercer cocked his gun again by mistake and ejected an unused round. The chopper was a quarter mile away, watching from a safe distance. Rath’s pistol was no match for a submachine gun. The men who’d been at the
Njoerd
’s rail had found cover behind her gunwale or pieces of equipment. They darted looks at the stationary submarine and fired occasional rounds to keep Mercer pinned. They seemed content with the stalemate because it allowed the rotor-stat the time it needed to get clear.

“Screw that,” Mercer said and unleashed a burst at the research vessel, satisfied by the angry sparks of lead meeting steel. He vaulted over the bridge rail on the opposite side of the conning tower and landed on the deck in a heap. Rath’s chopper roared at him, but when he raised his weapon it banked away again. Rath took a snap shot as it pirouetted and hit nothing.

The dirigible was directly overhead, looming like a forty-story building. Emptying a clip into its belly would have had the same effect as spitballs against an elephant, so Mercer ignored it. The mooring lines were what he wanted. They dangled from her bow to the sea, crossing over the sub’s hull in the center of the U-boat’s forward deck. In seconds, the fleeing airship would draw them out of reach. Mercer would need to cross thirty feet of metal no-man’s-land with an unknown number of gunmen holding him in their sights. His mouth was dry and his leg strobed with pain in time with his heart. Now or never.

“Cover me, Marty!” He couldn’t be sure he had been heard over the airship’s quad rotors, but he launched himself anyway.

The firing began at once and was met by a burst from the conning tower. Mercer ran on, weaving along the deck until his foot caught against a hatch and he sprawled. Bullets searched him out and he scrambled to his feet, firing to his left as he cradled the MP-40. The mooring ropes were manila, at least three inches around, permanently attached to the airship’s internal structure and strong enough for ground handlers to haul the rotor-stat against a stiff breeze. As one oozed across the deck like a fleeing snake, Mercer dropped to his knees, fired the last of his clip at the
Njoerd
, and tossed aside his weapon. He needed both hands to lift the line. It was slick with seawater and doubly heavy. He ran back to the conning tower, Marty’s wild bursts keeping the gunmen at bay for precious seconds. The rough line smeared skin off his hands as the rotor-stat towed it past the U-boat. By the time he reached cover, only fifty feet remained before the end would slither through his grasp.

He looked up to see the chopper returning. Rath must have realized what he was attempting and was coming in to stop him. Rath’s clothes whipped in the downbeat of the helo’s rotor. The noise drowned the report but Mercer knew the German had fired from the recoil of his gun arm. He wrapped a loop of the mooring rope around a railing stanchion so it wouldn’t be dragged back forward.

A shouted warning to Marty was muffled by the rotor-stat, so all Mercer could do was pray as he threw himself off the side of the sub, more shots pinging against the U-boat’s metal hide.

The frigid water sucked his breath out the instant it reached his skin. The cold was solid, like ice, but much, much worse. It pounded against his skull and lanced into his joints. The wound in his leg went numb. Mercer’s clothes quickly became saturated, and he felt himself being dragged under the surface. Kicking first one foot and then the other, he managed to remove his moon boots, saving himself several pounds, but the swim back up was agonizingly slow.

His head broke the surface. He reached for and grabbed one of the many slits in the sub’s outer hull. The Bell Jetranger was showing her tail as she moved out of range again. Marty must have chased him off. Mercer struggled to climb the side of the boat, the rough edges in the slits digging into his stocking feet like razor blades.

A hand touched his arm and he saw Anika Klein reaching for him. She must have joined Marty on the bridge and jumped to the deck when she saw Mercer dive into the water.

“Tie off the landing line!” The shout sounded distant in Mercer’s frozen brain.

“Marty’s doing it.” She got a grip on Mercer’s forearm and heaved him up to the deck. A couple of feet away Marty worked knots into what little remained of the disappearing landing rope, threading the line through a number of larger hull slits.

It came taut just as he got the line secured to the sub. He looked up to see the rotor-stat come up short against its leash. Straining, the huge dirigible pivoted around its bow, losing altitude until her deadly cargo dipped into the ocean for a moment. Her engines screamed. “Got you, you son of a bitch,” Marty shouted.

“Let’s finish this.” Mercer stood. Above them the
Schmeisser
rippled again, and Hilda Brandt motioned them to hurry, the black gun smoking in her beefy hands.

Like a fish struggling for its life, the airship whipped back and forth on the end of its tether, straining to break free from the U-boat. Rath must have radioed the pilots and told them that if they released the Pandora boxes their survival would be short-lived.

Mercer’s hands were frozen claws as he climbed the ladder to the bridge under Hilda’s covering fire. Anika’s shoulder was under his backside as she headed to the top of the conning tower. Once they were safely on the bridge, Hilda directed them to get below. She would keep up a steady barrage to prevent anyone from the
Njoerd
launching a boat and cutting the line.

As he reached the control room, Mercer saw Erwin Puhl propped against the chart table. His shirt was off, and seeping bandages covered his shoulder and wrapped under his arm. The meteorologist was ashen, his lips pressed tight in pain.

“Are you okay?” Mercer asked through chattering teeth.

“Anika said I am. The first bullet went in and out under my arm. The other was a ricochet buried in my shoulder. It hurts but…”

“Ira,” Mercer gasped as he started stripping off his wet clothes. “Are you ready?”

“Say the word.”

“Close the hatch, Marty, and get down here.”

Anika helped Mercer remove the remainder of his clothes. He stood naked and dripping watery blood, his skin blue and puckered. “Don’t judge me in this condition,” he said when she glanced at his groin. She threw blankets over him as Hilda and Marty descended into the sub.

“Dive!” The ballast tanks gurgled as they filled with water, and the boat slowly began to sink.

Above them, the rotor-stat pilot saw the swirl of air bubbles around the antique sub and knew what was going to happen next. His loyalty to Rath ended at that instant, and he nodded to his copilot. “Don’t do it,” he heard Rath screaming over the headset. “The
Njoerd
is sending out a boat to cut the mooring line. You can hold on.”

“Dump it,” the pilot said. The copilot hit a switch that severed the cables securing the cargo nets to the airship. Thirty tons of gold plundered by the Nazis and a ton of the deadliest element on the planet fell away from the dirigible. It splashed into the sea and vanished.

The rotor-stat rose like a child’s balloon until it once again came up against the rope. Nose down and engines straining, she fought a tug-of-war against the sinking U-boat trying to pull her into the ocean. They would be free if they could hold out long enough for men from the
Njoerd
to cut the rope. The entire craft shuddered with the power of her four engines and massive rotors.

The pilot jettisoned fuel in an attempt to lighten his ship further, but it made no difference as the altimeter unwound slowly. He didn’t need to look out the cockpit window to know it wouldn’t even be close.