Pandora's Curse

GEO-RESEARCH STATION, GREENLAND

At the appointed time, Mercer saw Anika approaching the mess hall from the direction of the dormitories. She was bundled in a red one-piece Gore-Tex snowsuit with a hood pulled tight around her face. With her back to the wind, snow dusted the knapsack over her shoulder. For the past hour he had been sitting with the radio operator trying vainly to get a message out to Reykjavik. Other than static and a burst of conversation that sounded like it came from the Njoerd, they had received nothing. The electronic interference from the sun’s massive coronal ejections ensured the base was completely isolated. When he saw Anika through the steam-clouded window, Mercer thanked the radioman, pulled on his parka, and stepped out into the gale.

“How are you feeling?” he shouted over the wind.

“Fine. Let’s go.”

Mercer led her to the cold-temperature lab at the far end of the camp, first making sure she was clipped to the guide rope. The blowing snow swallowed their feet with each step, so they appeared like legless torsos gliding through the swirling ice. Once Geo-Research got geared up, the cold lab would house ice cores and snow samples. For now it held just the two bodies.

The building was made of plastic, with a couple of windows on each side. Drifts had grown on the windward flank, piling almost to the eaves, but the structure had been placed in such a way that the entrance was mostly clear of snow. Like all the buildings, there was a wide-bladed shovel clipped near the door, and after a few minutes of digging their path was cleared. Mercer didn’t need to worry about warmth escaping the lab, so he held the door for Anika to enter first.

He snapped on the overhead lights, long banks of fluorescents that provided plenty of light but generated little heat that could damage frozen samples. Under tarps at the far end of the room, two recognizable shapes were laid out on adjacent worktables.

Out of the wind, Mercer and Anika pulled back their hoods and shook snow off themselves. She ignored his gesture to sweep snow off her back in a rush to reach the bodies. The first tarp she drew back covered the pilot’s corpse, and after just a second she replaced the shroud. She already knew what had killed him.

She said nothing as she uncovered Igor, looking first at his ghastly white face before beginning to examine him with single-minded intensity. It was as if Mercer wasn’t there. Starting with his booted feet and moving upward across his still-clothed body, she ran her hands over every part of him. Mercer had no idea what she hoped to accomplish since the body was as stiff as the table beneath it. Because Igor’s mouth was open, she pulled a penlight from her knapsack and explored his teeth and gums, grunting when she saw something of interest.

“What is it?” Mercer asked.

“Russian dentists. These are the worst fillings I’ve ever seen. Igor had to have been in constant pain.”

She removed her thick outer mittens and replaced them with a pair of surgical gloves, probing his mouth with her finger. From deep in his throat she withdrew out a bit of frozen saliva mixed with snow. She studied it for a second before dropping it on the table. Without a proper lab to examine the material, it did her little good to keep it. Next she bent close to look at the deep scrapes on his nose and forehead, grunting again, but this time Mercer kept his silence.

He was fascinated by her. With her eyes narrowed and her brows pulled down in concentration, she looked like a child worrying at a particularly tough school problem. But she was an adult, examining a corpse, and he was captivated by the dichotomy of her appearance and profession. He imagined that she’d been underestimated many times in her life and pitied the people who did it.

Finished with Igor’s face, she ran her hands over his skull, pressing various points with her fingertips. “Can you give me a hand?” she asked without looking up.

“What do you need?” Mercer moved to her side.

“I want to roll him over.”

They did, and because Igor Bulgarin was so heavy and broad, it was like flipping a king-size mattress.

When Mercer retreated again, she combed aside the frozen knots of blood and hair at the base of his skull, tracing the wound with a finger. She scowled and reached into her bag for a magnifying glass. There was a palpable tension in her as she scrutinized the wound under the glass, her face so close to Igor’s head that her breath snaked through his hair like steam. After two minutes, Anika straightened and looked around the room intently.

“What did you find?” Mercer closed the gap between them, infected by whatever had so unsettled her.

She said nothing, moving by him to grab a crowbar left on another of the worktables. She looked at the piece of steel for a moment, feeling its weight, not caring that the metal was freezing her hand. Unsatisfied, she dropped it unceremoniously, and rummaged under the table, where more tools had been left in plastic crates. She came up with a twenty-inch-long handle from a portable screw jack. It was only then she remembered Mercer was in the room with her. She looked at him clinically, as if weighing a decision, and nodded when he passed some sort of unspoken test. She couldn’t hide the fear lingering in her eyes, but she spoke in a calm tone.

“Igor was murdered,” she stated. “He was then dragged from where it happened and left in a place where someone could stage an avalanche to cover the killing.”

On some intuitive level Mercer wasn’t surprised. Somehow it made sense to him. Though he’d not voiced them, not even to himself, he’d had misgivings about the entertaining Russian. But his professional skepticism wouldn’t allow him to accept her statement without proof. “How do you know?”

She hefted the jack handle, carrying it to the body. “This is a little thinner than the murder weapon — shorter and lighter too, I would guess — but it’ll give you an idea what happened.” She placed the handle into the long wound at the base of Igor’s skull. “As you can see it fits almost perfectly in the gash, a straight impact line that runs from side to side beneath the occipital bulge. This wound wasn’t the result of ice hitting him. It’s too symmetrical. He was killed by a very strong person swinging such a tool like a baseball bat. The blow would have crushed a portion of the cerebellum and the medulla spinalis, killing him instantly.”

Mercer peered at the injury. Quelling his uneasiness, he lifted the handle, and then placed it back in the wound as Anika had done. He had to admit that it was indeed a pretty damn good match.

“If you notice, the scrapes on his face all go in the same direction. Add the fact that he rigored with his hands over his head, and it’s logical to conclude that someone dragged him by his hands, facedown, over a rough surface like a wooden floor. The snow I found jammed down his throat is consistent with this hypothesis.”

Mercer remembered thinking how strange it was that Igor’s arms had been over his head when they found the body. At the time he’d assumed the cuts on Igor’s face had been from falling ice hitting him. But now? She presented a plausible scenario. As he looked at Anika, his eyes asked his next questions.

“I don’t know why he was killed, Mr. Mercer. Or who did it.”

“It’s Dr. Mercer, actually, but everyone just calls me Mercer,” he said automatically.

Who would have done this? A strong person, she had said. That description fit nearly everyone at the camp. If the timing had been different, he would have considered the stowaway who’d left the tracks around the helicopter, but the crash occurred well after Igor’s death. He was left with the unpleasant option that apart from everything else going wrong, there was a killer in their midst. Now he knew where Anika’s fear had come from. He shared it.

“You’re getting your wish,” he said after a moment.

“Wish?”

“You wanted to examine the corpse we found in Camp Decade. That’s the only thing of even remote interest in the facility. If Igor was killed for a reason, I bet that body’s it.”

“You said the base wasn’t safe.”

“You just told me that someone caused the avalanche to cover Igor’s murder. If you’re right, the ceiling in Camp Decade’s still structurally sound.”

“What if I am wrong?” Suddenly it seemed the thought of going into the underground base wasn’t quite as appealing to her.

“You should trust your instincts,” Mercer said. “Considering what you’ve just discovered, I’d say they’re right on.”

Leading Anika once again, he made his way across the base, this time walking into the wind. The flying ice felt like glass shards when it hit his face below his tinted goggles, and no amount of tugging could tighten the hood enough to eliminate all the gaps. It was like being attacked by a swarm of wasps. They reached the long trench carved over the entrance of Camp Decade, and once they were below ground level, the punishing wind would release its hold. They could walk upright again and hold a conversation.

“Before you left the Njoerd, did you learn how long this wind’s supposed to last?” Mercer climbed into the Sno-Cat to fire the engine and power the winch.

“All day today and they think there’s only a couple-hour gap tomorrow before an even stronger storm front hits.”

“Erik the Red was one hell of a salesman,” Mercer joked. Anika looked at him quizzically. “When the old Viking was banished from Iceland in 982 A.D., he sailed west and landed here. He wintered someplace on the east coast. When he returned home, he told people about the beautiful island he had discovered, calling it Greenland to describe its lushness. That probably wasn’t the first marketing lie ever told, but it certainly was one of the most effective. He convinced twenty-five ships’ worth of settlers to follow him back.”

He jumped down from the ’Cat and reached across the twenty-foot void to grab the dangling bucket they used to get to the bottom of the shaft. Anika stepped in without a moment’s consideration with Mercer right behind her.

“Not afraid of heights?” he asked as the bucket started its slow descent.

“I climb mountains for relaxation. I could probably climb down this tube faster than this contraption of yours.”

Mercer didn’t doubt her. At the bottom, he checked the chains he and Ira had used to secure the doors after removing Igor’s body. It didn’t appear they had been tampered with, so he jammed home the lock’s key and twisted. Once inside, he handed one of the flashlights left there to Anika and kept another for himself. Cutting through the darkness, their powerful beams were like lances.

The feeling that ghosts were watching him was stronger this time. Memories of Igor Bulgarin flooded Mercer’s mind. He led her toward the officers’ quarters, where Jack Delaney’s body had lain undisturbed for five decades. When they had pulled Igor out, Mercer and Ira had cleared a lot of the snow that had once clogged the passage, but still they had to clamber over heaps of ice. Even in her snowsuit, Anika moved with fluid efficiency, not slipping or misplacing a hand or foot as she climbed. Mercer was having a harder time. He was used to tight spaces like this, made his living in them, but he wasn’t as deft at judging the slick surfaces.

Once they cleared the final obstacle, they trained their lights at the floor. Anika got on her knees for a better look and spotted what she’d expected. The claret streaks on the floor were blood. Igor Bulgarin’s blood. The faint marks continued down the dark passage.

“You were right,” Mercer said, not knowing how he felt about that.

“So were you. Igor was checking the body.”

They reached the officers’ annex in a moment and passed down the hallway until they came to room number ten. Jack Delaney looked as he had when Mercer first found him. His face was gaunt to the point of starvation, drained of all color except around his mouth, which was a lighter shade, almost gray. His hands were clutched at his chest, skeletal fingers interlaced as if he’d been praying at the final moment of his death. It took no imagination to think of the bitterness he must have felt after surviving for so long only to discover Camp Decade had already been abandoned. The loneliness of his death was in the vacant stare of his long-dead eyes.

“Does he look like he’s been disturbed?” Anika’s question snapped Mercer from his grim reflections.

“No.” He checked the floor and found more blood, a few drops scattered near one wall. He could tell by the pattern and their tearlike appearance that they had sprayed from the wound. “Igor died in this room. Either attacked by someone preventing him from examining the body or murdered to cover up someone else’s investigation.”

“But before he could do anything to the body?” Anika persisted.

“Yes, neither person appears to have touched the corpse. Thinking about the timing, Igor would have gotten down here at about 4:30 in the morning. His killer could have been a few minutes behind, seen him in here, bludgeoned him, and immediately started hiding the evidence. Since people get up about six, that only gave the murderer an hour and a half, barely enough time to stage the avalanche and get back to his dorm before anyone noticed.”

“We’re lucky.” Anika set her knapsack on the desk next to the bed. As with Igor Bulgarin, she began her examination at Delaney’s feet and slowly worked her way up. Mercer stood at her shoulder, following her hands with his flashlight so she could see what she was doing. When she reached his mouth and studied his teeth, she called him closer. “Look at this.”

Delaney had only a few teeth remaining in his mouth, black stumps so cracked it was doubtful the airman could have used them to chew. His gums looked like raw meat. For a few seconds Anika tried to find traces of dentistry, but there was nothing left. “He’s very thin.”

“Considering what he’d been through, I’m not surprised.”

Anika said nothing and took a tape measure from her bag. Delaney was just five feet six inches tall in his boots. Awfully short, Mercer thought, but since he didn’t know what kind of height restrictions the military maintained for its pilots, he didn’t say anything. Next, Anika pulled up Delaney’s sleeves.

“You shouldn’t move him until the Air Force arrives,” Mercer admonished but not very sternly. He was just as curious as she was.

He checked his watch. They’d been here for ten minutes. He would give her five more before leaving. He was conscious of the body’s mild radioactivity. He realized that could have explained the tooth loss and the fact that under his woolen hat, Delaney was completely bald — another symptom of acute radiation poisoning.

“What do you think?” Anika pointed to a rectangular scar on his left forearm.

“Looks like a burn.”

“More like a brand mark,” she countered. “But there’s nothing to it except scar tissue, no symbols or words.”

When she tugged his sleeves down again, a piece of paper that had been clutched in Delaney’s hands came loose, a small corner showing from under one long finger.

“What’s that?” Mercer asked.

“Good eyes. I would have missed it.” She used a pair of surgical forceps to slide out the folded piece of paper, careful not to dislodge the original position of Delaney’s hands.

The smoke hit them as she handed it to Mercer. It came in a solid black wave sweeping through the underground base, dense and impenetrable. In moments the beams from their Maglites were nothing more than feeble spots of light unable to cut more than a foot into the roiling haze.

“What the…?” Anika started coughing before she could finish the question.

Mercer pushed her to the floor, where the air was marginally cleaner. Anika’s eyes were red rimmed and weeping. Her lungs convulsed for a few more seconds until she could purge the worst of the smoke.

“What happened?” she gasped, fighting not to throw up.

“Fire. I don’t know. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“How?”

Mercer crawled to the door. Even through the pall of smoke he could see the dancing glow of a fire at the exit of the officers’ quarters. The fire appeared to grow in ferocity in the few seconds he stared transfixed. On the other side of the advancing wall of flames was the only way out of Camp Decade.

Anika joined him at the door. “We’re trapped!”

Mercer didn’t need to voice his agreement.

Everything was happening too fast for panic to be a problem. His mind was sharp and ready to figure a way out, but as he watched the growing flames, inspiration remained beyond his grasp.

You’re trapped underground by fire. There’s one way out and it’s blocked. The flames have plenty of fuel considering this whole place is made of wood and it won’t starve for oxygen before you’re cooked. Like a natural chimney, smoke would be billowing up the access shaft at the same time the fire sucked down more air to keep itself going.

“Mercer!”

You’ve been here before, he reminded himself. At different times and at different places. How did you get out?

He knew the answer to that was an unlikely solution. The underground fires he’d faced before had been in coal mines where teams of trained experts battled the inferno to save him.

You know how to get out of this. You’ve done it before. How?

It came to him. “Air shaft,” he shouted over the noise of Camp Decade being consumed from within.

“It’s in the middle of the fire.” Anika choked. “We won’t make it.”

“Not the main shaft we came down. With this much smoke, we’ll never find it. We have to go all the way through the fire to reach the garage on the other side.”

“How?”

“Run like hell.”

“Why not try to find the exit doors?”

“Anika, there’s nothing down here that could have started this fire. It was intentionally set by whoever killed Igor to stop us from proving his murder.” A paroxysm of coughing racked her when she gasped. “We can’t risk stopping in the middle of the blaze to search for the doors because they are most likely blocked. We have to reach the far side. There will be air shafts in the garage used to vent engine exhaust when the military stored Sno-Cats there. It’s our only chance.”

Mercer shuffled to the bed holding Delaney’s body and unceremoniously shoved the corpse aside to strip away the blankets he’d been lying on. The encroaching fire had melted a tremendous amount of ice and snow, so water rippled down the hallway and past the bedroom door. Mercer dumped the blankets in the stream, soaking them through. The water was near freezing and burned his exposed hands like acid. “Take off your snowsuit,” he ordered.

“Are you nuts?”

He turned to face her. “Yes. Take off your snowsuit.”

As she did what he asked, Mercer took off his own parka, sloshing it in the torrent of meltwater. Before he put it back on, he dropped onto his back, gasping when he came in contact with the icy river. Even as he splashed more water on his legs, he could feel crusts of ice forming and breaking with each movement.

“We’ll freeze to death.”

He splashed handfuls of water on his face and hair. “I’d rather freeze than burn.” He took Anika’s red suit and soaked it, motioning her to douse herself in the water as he worked.

Her lips were blue by the time she was done, her jaws chattering uncontrollably. Mercer imagined he looked as bad. If they made it through the fire, they would have only a few minutes before hypothermia overcame them. He handed her the one-piece and worked his arms back into his dripping parka. The garment weighed at least ten pounds more than it had. He could only hope it retained enough water to insulate him.

The fire roared only fifteen yards away by the time they were dressed again, their delay caused by numb fingers that refused to work properly. Assuming that it spread evenly, they would need to run through a sixty-yard gauntlet before reaching open air again.

He pulled his hood around his face, covering his eyes with his goggles and making sure that Anika was similarly protected. “Be careful when we reach the middle of the fire. I don’t know if all that snow has melted completely, so there could still be piles of it.”

“What happens if the fire’s bigger than you think?”

Mercer’s gallows humor didn’t fail him. “Then all those people who’ve told me to go to hell will get their wish. Are you ready?”

“No.”

Mercer gave her a reassuring smile and draped a few wet blankets over her. “We’ll make it.”

“Okay, AK, let’s do it,” Anika said softly and watched Mercer launch himself down the hallway like a javelin. She waited for a heartbeat and went after him.

Mercer kept his eyes open for as long as he dared. When the heat hit him full blast, he pulled his own blanket over his head, hunched his shoulders, and ran as fast as he’d ever run in his life. Behind his closed lids and through the now-steaming blankets, light still danced against his vision, ragged swirls of flame that licked upward from the floor. Over the raging inferno, he could hear the blankets sizzling as the water boiled away. Ten yards into the blaze the heat intensified. He hadn’t considered that parts of the roof would be collapsing at any moment, creating obstacles that could trap them in the middle of the fire.

Twenty yards and he knew he was approaching the avalanche that had buried Igor Bulgarin. His boots sloshed through a thick slurry of snow and water that pulled at each step. It was like wading through liquid mud. Yet he started to drag his feet, pushing aside the slush to clear a path for Anika. Somewhere behind him he heard a rumbling crash. A portion of ceiling had succumbed to the flames and given way. If Anika was on the other side of the blockage, he would never be able to reach her. He continued to run. The blanket felt like it was starting to smolder.

Mercer’s foot hit a snow pile at full stride, pitching him forward. Had he not been prepared for it, he would have sprawled headlong. As his center of balance shifted, he tucked his shoulder, still clutching the blanket around him. He hit hard, shoulder rolled, and heaved himself back to his feet. His momentum was too much, and he was about to go down again when a steadying hand grabbed his arm.

Miraculously, Anika had been running even faster than he had. She saw what happened and was ready to keep him on his feet. Mercer chanced opening his eyes. It was like standing at the very bottom of hell. Flames encircled them, racing up the paneled walls to meet at the roof in shimmering sheets. The heat seared his breath. He managed to regain his orientation before a veil of smoke closed off his vision, saving him from seeing that they had covered barely a third of the distance.

Side by side, they ran onward, spurred by the primal fear of fire. The water saturating Mercer’s clothes began steaming. He could sense Anika Klein at his shoulder, running hard.

In the few seconds they’d been in the conflagration, Mercer had become accustomed to its consuming roar, so when the sound receded behind him he knew they had cleared the fire. He didn’t dare stop, but he let the blanket fall from his shoulders and opened his eyes. He saw nothing but blackness. Smoke.

“Anika, get down,” he shouted, diving like an All Star for home plate.

She followed his slide and at the floor they found fresher air. Although her blanket was smoldering, her snowsuit seemed untouched. Together they crawled onward, finally reaching a set of heavy doors at the end of the corridor. Once through, they slammed them closed.

Even without light they could tell by the way their coughs echoed that the garage they stumbled into was huge. The air, mercifully, hadn’t yet been fouled by smoke.

“Are you all right?” Anika wheezed when she regained her breath. She snapped on her light.

Mercer nodded, his head down, tarry smoke coming from his mouth with each cough. “I have a friend,” he panted. “He smokes two packs a day. I bet he would have gone through that and had a nicotine craving afterward.”

Getting to his feet, Mercer began to undress, retrieving his flashlight before discarding the parka. Next went his sweaters and shirts. “You know we have to,” he said when Anika hadn’t started doing the same. “It can’t be below freezing in here because the snow covering the base acts like insulation. We can stand that for a while as long as we minimize heat loss. Wet clothes will draw heat away from us many times faster than the air.”

“I know.” Anika started to strip. “I was just wondering about the bullet scar on your shoulder.”

“Oh, that. Ancient history.” The furrow cut into the top of Mercer’s shoulder was from an assassin’s bullet years earlier. “Thanks for what you did back there. If I had gone down, I wouldn’t have gotten back up.”

“We’re even.” A trace of a smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “Do you think we’ll be okay until they get the fire out?”

“Not unless we let them know we’re here. Remember, we didn’t tell anyone we were headed for Camp Decade.”

Wearing nothing but boxer shorts, with his breath condensing around his head, Mercer tried to organize his thoughts, fighting not to let the cold sap his energy. He couldn’t help but feel vulnerable and he imagined Anika felt even more so in her cotton panties and sports bra. She didn’t appear to be self-conscious about her lack of attire.

“First things first.” Mercer hadn’t spent much time in this section of the base, but he recalled that there were a few lockers located next to a small washroom.

Snapping open the doors, he found what he wanted. Because so much equipment had been left behind in the 1950s there were still some mechanics’ overalls in a couple of the lockers. He grabbed four of them and tossed two to Anika.

“You knew about this?” she asked, gratefully pulling on the stained garments.

“Other than the reactor that powered the facility, the Sno-Cats, and the men’s personal gear, everything was abandoned here. I wasn’t sure we’d find these but I knew there’d be something we could use.”

A minute later he found some boots. He started to feel like they had a chance. He handed Anika a cigarette lighter.

“Don’t tell me you smoke.” She scowled with disgust.

“Never, but I carry a few when I’m on an expedition like this. Boy Scout training. Can you make us a fire?”

While she got to work, he wandered around the garage. He noted that in one corner of the room sat a large fuel cylinder for the military’s Sno-Cats. He rapped it with a hammer left on a workbench. The dull thud indicated it was at least half full. A long coil of rubber hose with a standard nozzle hung from a bracket welded to the tank’s support cradle. At the far end of the workshop was a series of wide doors that had once led to snow ramps to the surface. Next he played his light on the trussed ceiling fifteen feet over his head, discovering several large air vents. They were more than big enough for what he had in mind. All he needed now was a ladder and a long pole, like the center post for an army tent. He found both items in a utility closet.

The smell of burning wood was becoming distracting. It would take a while to reach a dangerous level but it was a constant reminder that on the other side of the fireproof doors was an out-of-control blaze.

Anika huddled next to the fire she’d built from packing crates, cupping her hands as if receiving a gift from the flames. “Strange to think this would feel good after the run through the hallway,” she joked.

“We’re not done yet. It’s time to put an old adage to work.” She shot him a questioning glance. “Fight fire with fire.”

After he explained what he had in mind, she had only one question. “How do you know the diesel will still burn?”

“Fuels don’t lose their combustibility over time, just their efficiency. Once we drain the sediment and water from the bottom of the tank, we’d be able to fill our own vehicles with it and suffer just bad mileage and burned piston rings.” That was an exaggeration, he knew, but it was close enough.

“Let’s do it.” Anika got to her feet, convinced because Mercer seemed so certain. He’d said earlier that he trusted her. For now, she had no choice but to reciprocate.

Mercer set his ladder near the largest of the air shafts, climbing up to remove the circular grate protecting it. The vertical tube was more than large enough to accommodate him and Anika. Flashing his light upward, he could see the vent had been battered and dented by glacial movement, but it was still clear for a good fifteen feet before becoming clogged with ice. He estimated that there would be ten additional feet of snow above it before he could see daylight.

Anika spent her time unfurling the fuel hose, using some rope she’d found to secure the end of the flexible pipe to the tip of the ten-foot tent pole. Her knots were tight and professional. While Mercer checked the spigot attached to the tank, she used his pocketknife to cut the gas nozzle from the hose. The rubber was brittle but remarkably resilient, demanding all her strength.

With the tank resting four feet above the polished concrete floor, Mercer knew it was gravity driven rather than relying on a mechanical pump to fill the vehicles that were once stored here. Without the restricting nozzle, an arcing jet of diesel would spew from the hose once he opened the tap.

“Are you ready for a test?” Mercer asked Anika, who was fifteen yards away, silhouetted by her flashlight.

“Okay.” She pointed the open end of the tube away from her, not knowing how powerful the stream would be.

“Here we go.” Mercer needed both hands and the considerable power of his shoulders to crack the initial seal on the spigot. Once the wheel began to turn, it spun freely.

“Jesus!” Anika screamed in surprise, prompting Mercer to close the tap quickly.

He raced to her side. “Well?”

She raised the focus of her flashlight, following the shimmering wet streak staining the floor. The trail led for fifty feet before it vanished beyond the light’s range. “Powerful enough for what you had in mind?”

“Overkill.” Mercer laughed, delighted that his idea might just work.

He sobered quickly when a thick wave of smoke reached them. The temperature in the garage was starting to climb. The doors segregating the garage from the rest of the base weren’t nearly as fireproof as Mercer had hoped.

“Get on the ladder,” Anika said, already in motion. “I’ll operate the valve.”

Mercer moved the ladder away so he could hold the hose under the air vent while staying away from the fuel that would be pouring back down. High above the floor, the air was fouled with smoke. He pulled the collar of his coveralls over his mouth, but the musty cloth was ranker than the air.

“Just give me the word and I’ll start the fuel flowing,” Anika yelled, her voice echoing.

Mercer heaved the pole into position, resting the tip into the vent shaft to balance it, the hose tied to it dangling to the floor and away toward the storage tank. Bracing himself against the sturdy ladder, he could maintain a firm grip without the pole’s weight becoming too much to hold steady. By pressing the end of the pole into his stomach, he managed to free one hand. Once Anika turned the tap, he would need that hand for only a moment.

“Open her up.”

Through the pole he could feel the attached hose pulsate as diesel fuel surged toward the outlet, forced across the garage and upward into the vent shaft by the tremendous impetus of its own weight. His makeshift flamethrower shuddered, nearly dislodging him from his perch before he got a better grip. In a rush, diesel climbed the hose and exploded up the shaft, splattering the underside of the ice plug like it had exploded from a fire hydrant. As soon as the fuel started falling back to the floor, Mercer snicked open the Zippo lighter and tossed it into the incendiary liquid raining from the roof.

The fuel ignited in a concussive whoosh, an explosion of orange and red and black that blinded him before he could turn away. It looked like the exhaust from a rocket motor. Even from ten feet away the heat was intense, and Mercer felt sweat begin to pour into his eyes. Beneath him, the widening lake of fire found the gutters cut into the concrete and began to run in rivers to underground waste tanks.

Amid the flaming fuel draining from the vent, water too began to flow, ice that had melted under the brutal thermal onslaught. Mercer had no way to judge how quickly the ice plug was being dissolved, but each second brought an acceleration to the amount of water diluting the fiery pool.

“It’s working,” he heard Anika shout over the noise of the fire.

“Did you have any doubts?” Mercer grinned down at her. He looked like a demon backlit against the pillar of flames.

Swept up in the euphoria of the moment, Anika returned his cocky smile. “Not for a second.”

With the burning fuel ducted into the drainage hollows under the floor, Mercer’s fear of starting a fire worse than the one they had just escaped were unfounded. He let the flaming jet of diesel bore into the ice for five minutes before shouting to Anika to kill the flow. They didn’t need to wait for him to move the ladder under the vent to see they had been successful. Shining into the puddle of flames on the floor was a perfect circle of daylight.

They were through!

It took a few minutes for the fire on the floor to extinguish itself completely, and as it died they could see smoke being drawn up the vent from deeper into the base.

“It’s just a matter of time before someone fighting the fire at the main entrance sees smoke billowing out of this vent and comes to investigate,” Mercer said, looking up at the sky.

He turned to Anika. She had an enigmatic smile on her face, a mixture of astonishment and respect.

She placed her arms on his shoulders and drew him down, planting a feather-soft kiss on his cheek. “That’s twice you saved me. Now I owe you.”

Mercer’s heart tripped. He believed she was going to kiss him on the mouth. He thought he had recognized that look and for a selfish moment he wished she had. But he was glad she hadn’t. Shared danger did strange things to people, created instant bonds, and he’d learned that such passions weren’t real. The emotions were usually nothing more than the aftereffects of adrenaline and relief.

He recalled some of her accomplishments that Igor had mentioned, realizing that she probably handled this kind of stress much better than he did. It was his own relief he’d seen reflected in Anika’s expression, not hers.

“We’re even.” His gruff tone covered his embarrassment.

From above, a voice called, “Hello.” It was Erwin Puhl.

Startled that their signal had been seen so quickly, Mercer checked his watch. Thirty minutes had passed since the fire had started, more than enough time for the expedition members to begin combating the subterranean blaze at the facility’s entrance.

“Erwin, it’s Mercer.”

“When you weren’t leading the firefighting efforts, we feared you were trapped down there. Is Dr. Klein with you? No one has seen her in a while.”

“Yeah, she’s with me. Can you lower a rope? The smoke is getting pretty thick, and the heat’s rising.”

“Back in a minute.”

“Hurry. Once the flames break through the fire doors protecting the garage, there’s going to be one hell of an explosion.” Mercer eyed the diesel tank hulking behind the wavering glow of Anika’s campfire. “Also warn the others who are working at the main entrance to clear the area.”

Ten minutes later, they were pulled up the air vent by the winch mounted on the front of a Sno-Cat Ira had driven out to rescue them. “Everyone’s back at the base camp,” Ira said as they jumped into the boxy vehicle.

“Let’s go. We’ve only got a few more minutes. The fire doors can’t hold much longer, and it must be over a hundred degrees in the garage already.” The drop in temperature from inside to out had left Mercer light-headed and trembling.

Ira didn’t need to hear anything further. He put the Sno-Cat in gear, twisted it around on its axis and tore off across the ice, feathers of churned snow blooming from under its treads. He circled around the long access trench near Camp Decade’s entrance. Smoke streamed from deep underground and a huge swath of snow was stained with soot.

He braked once they reached the mess hall a quarter mile away. Mercer was just stepping down when out across the frozen plain, the fuel tank erupted like a volcano, vaporizing a ragged eighty-foot circle of glacier. Chunks of ice the size of automobiles blasted into the sky, propelled by a towering column of flame. The concussion hit a second later, rocking the Sno-Cat on its suspension and tossing Mercer onto his backside.

Powdered ice drifted for many minutes before falling back to earth. When the last of the snow finally settled, smudge continued to billow from the hole, smearing the pristine horizon.

“What the hell were you two doing down there?” Ira asked sharply after hauling Mercer back to his feet.

Mercer fingered the scrap of paper they’d retrieved from Jack Delaney’s dead fingers. “I’m not sure yet.”