Pandora's Curse

GEO-RESEARCH STATION, GREENLAND

As soon as the hatch closed and the DC-3 began lumbering across the ice, Greta took Gunther Rath by the hand and led him toward her quarters at an urgent pace. He knew by the predatory gleam in her eye what she wanted, and his need surpassed hers. However, now was not the time. He snatched his arm away after a few steps.

“Later, Greta.” His voice was made harsher by the suppression of his own desires. “We don’t have time.”

“Yes, we do,” she breathed, her hand reaching for his groin, not caring if others saw. “It has been far too long.”

“Not for me,” he snapped with intentional cruelty, which only seemed to inflame her more.

“I’ve had to deal with Werner’s sulking for a week. We’re going to my room right now and you are going to screw me until I can’t walk.”

“Keep this up and I’m taking you back to your room to slap you unconscious.”

“You can do that too,” she simpered demurely, reveling in the presence of his overwhelming strength. It was the old game they were playing and invariably she would win. She knew his needs far outstripped hers. And the longer he held out the more violent, and satisfying, was their eventual sex. The heat between her legs grew with anticipation. Touching his groin again, she could feel him swelling.

This time Rath couldn’t stop himself. He grabbed her by the arm. “Which is your dorm building?”

Greta knew not to gloat. She lowered her eyes and pointed.

She wondered who had seduced whom last year when the company Gunther represented negotiated to buy Geo-Research. At the time she had been with Werner for nearly two years, happy, and yet couldn’t explain why she was putting off his marriage proposals. They lived a vagabond existence aboard the Njoerd, working wherever his contracts took them. In all it had been satisfying, but somehow she felt she was being rushed to normalcy. Werner wanted children and a home to come back to from his voyages. Greta had mouthed she wanted those things too and knew she was lying. She didn’t know what she wanted. And then Gunther Rath had come into their lives with a blank check and the promise of noninterference in the company. He’d said purchasing Geo-Research was merely an investment for Kohl AG, a way for them to defer taxes.

She’d known from the first that the expensive suits he wore hid something far different from his corporate image. He retained the unstudied social disdain of the wanna-be rebels who had thrilled her and her girl-friends as teenagers, but grown-up and with a lot more to offer than exciting rides on shoddy motorcycles and small bags of low-grade marijuana. At that first meeting, when Werner stared wide-eyed at the figures Rath was willing to pay for Geo-Research, Greta found herself showing off. Nothing obvious, nothing that Werner would even detect, but Gunther had known it the way a lion can sense a female in estrus.

Whenever the three would meet in the weeks it took to sign over the company, Greta had thought she was just playing a game to see how far she could push the flirtation. But like any game without rules, she had to act more brazen to elicit the same animal reaction she’d felt the first day. She believed she was controlling him with her ploys, not once realizing she was manipulating herself into what he wanted. In the end, when she was nearly throwing herself at him, he had finally sought her out, allowing her to think that she had done the seducing. But now, a year later, knowing what their relationship had become, she realized he had gone to her only to prove his dominion. The relationship was almost that of master and slave, and she found herself greedy for any degradation he heaped on her.

At the dorm, she first made sure the building was empty. A minute later they were naked in her room, with no others around to hear the slaps or the cries of pain and climax. Rath’s practiced hands did not leave marks where they were visible, but it would be a while before Greta could sit comfortably.

While she cleaned up in satisfied euphoria, Gunther Rath searched for Werner Koenig and found him in the mess hall with Dieter, the rally driver. “What’s the status of the search?”

Werner looked up, feeling the old pang of jealousy. He could tell by Rath’s expression that he’d just taken Greta. Since the day she’d left him, Werner had held out hope that some vestiges of his former lover remained. He knew now that wasn’t the case. Rath had reduced her to nothing more than a vessel for his warped dysfunctions. The once-sweet Greta had become a whore, yet he continued to mourn the loss of the woman who might have been his wife. Making it worse, Rath had insisted she come along on this expedition to be his eyes and ears. Werner suspected that Rath enjoyed this humiliation more than anything else — it was the kind of primitive behavior that would appeal to his Neanderthal mentality.

“Three teams have been out for a few days now, but as you suspected we are too far south to find anything.”

“With the others gone,” Gunther said, “we can end this charade and move a portion of the base northward. I passed on the fake weather report to the pilot of the DC-3 so they’ll swing far to the north before turning to Iceland. They’ll never see the rotor-stat flying in to ferry us.”

“How is that possible? The airship is under tight flight guidelines until it receives its certification.”

“Because it’s owned by one of Kohl’s subsidiaries. We can do anything with it we want. It should be here in another couple of hours. There actually is a fog prediction for this area that’ll last for at least a day, so moving a building and the ’Cats is going to be tricky. It should be a good demonstration of the airship’s capabilities. With the Surveyor’s Society out of the way, we have two and a half weeks until their replacements arrive and we have to return everything back here.”

“Damn Danish government,” Dieter said. He was actually a longtime Kohl employee. “If they hadn’t amended our permit, none of this would be necessary. We should have fought them harder when they told us to move our operation to Camp Decade to accommodate the Americans.”

“If we’d argued they might have barred us from Greenland completely.” By his tone it was clear Rath didn’t want to debate the point again. “Pressure against Kohl in Europe is mounting. We have to find the cavern.”

Werner didn’t want to hear how the recent buyers of Geo-Research had perverted his company for their own ends. He had agreed to sell at the overvalued price because Rath and a battery of Kohl lawyers had assured him that Geo-Research would continue to operate as it had in the past. He was told they would do nothing to damage the hard-won reputation he’d built for clear scientific research.

That promise had lasted until this mission, just one year later. Trapped now by a moment of greed, he and Geo-Research were being corrupted by Gunther Rath and his boss, Klaus Raeder, for a mission Werner didn’t fully understand. He had no idea why they were searching for a cavern or what was inside. Nor did he care. He just wanted the operation to be over so they would give him his company back and leave him alone.

“Werner, you don’t look well,” Rath mocked.

“I was just thinking how glad I’ll be when you are gone.”

“It won’t take us long. Once we finish clearing out the cave, our interest in Geo-Research is over. Your company will continue under the Kohl umbrella but in a much less hands-on role.”

“What happens if you don’t find the cavern before the next team of researchers arrives from Japan?”

“For their sake, let’s pray we do.” Rath looked out the window in the direction the DC-3 had vanished. “Go make preparations to move a dorm building and Sno-Cats.”

Bern Hoffmann was stationed in the communications alcove, a pair of sleek headphones covering his ears. He’d just finished rewiring a couple circuit boards and was replacing an access panel at the back of the set. Rath walked over and touched his shoulder to draw his attention. “Have you fixed our solar-max problem?”

“Just about, Gunther.” While he used Rath’s Christian name, there was subordination in Hoffmann’s voice. Like most of the people at the base, he was actually part of Rath’s security force. “There are legitimate atmospheric problems, but nothing like what we led the Surveyor’s Society to believe. We can communicate with the Njoerd just fine.”

“And you’re sure the plane’s radios are dead?” While the pilots were outside the aircraft, Rath had watched as the young technician sabotaged the radios.

“I doubt the pilots will realize they’ve been wrecked until they’re halfway to Iceland.”

“Which is as far as they’ll get.”

Anika’s statement extinguished any anger Mercer had been harboring. Even when they were facing the fire in Camp Decade, he hadn’t seen such naked fear. She was like a raw nerve, exposed and pained. By admitting that she had searched his room, he no longer had a reason to doubt her. She hadn’t gotten the name Otto Schroeder from him, which meant she had additional information from another source, information that he needed. He said nothing, studying her with his depthless gray eyes, a patient, nonjudgmental scrutiny that invited her to continue. Emotion continued to play across her face as she struggled to regain her composure. He knew she was deciding how to overcome her natural suspicion and take him in her confidence.

Only the forward half of the DC-3’s open cabin had seats. The rear portion was given over to cargo, which lay under mesh netting secured to eyebolts in the floor. Mercer and Anika were in the rearmost seats. Forward sat Marty and Ingrid, who were talking with their heads almost touching. Ira was a couple rows behind them, looking around nostalgically, obviously transported to another time and place by the utilitarian aircraft. The remainder of the passengers either stared out the square windows or had already settled in to a book.

“Anika, please,” Mercer said as gently as the rattling aircraft would allow. “I think between the two of us we know what’s going on, but alone we know nothing. We have to share if we’re going to figure out who killed Igor and why.” He had already assumed a connection between Bulgarin’s murder and Otto Schroeder’s.

Anika looked into his face, searching for the strength she hoped he possessed because hers was gone. Everything had come full circle too quickly. Hearing Schroeder’s killer outside just now had abolished any desire she had for justice. She wanted to run from all of this, to go to Vienna to be with her Opa. He would know what to do.

“I hadn’t heard of Otto Schroeder until I opened the package from Germany,” Mercer continued, his gaze never leaving Anika’s eyes although the plane pitched and vibrated. “I was warned by an e-mail before I left the States that something was being sent. I had no idea what it was. I still don’t. This journal Schroeder sent me is written in German.”

“You haven’t read it?” Anika asked. It was a neutral question, one that gave nothing away.

“I can barely read English,” Mercer joked, but Anika didn’t respond. “All the German words I know are either food related or naughty.”

“What did that man say when you got on the plane?” There was a sudden urgency in her voice. She had a premonition that this wasn’t the time to compare notes. Not yet anyway. There was a more pressing issue. There were now two murderers at the base camp, and she was beginning to see conspiracies behind everything.

“He told me his name is Gunther Rath and wished us a good flight.”

“We don’t have time to go into the whys, wheres, and hows but that man put a bullet in my leg last week and presided over the torture of Otto Schroeder, an old soldier I was interviewing for my grandfather. Just before Schroeder died, he mentioned your name and said you were someone who could help. It can’t be a coincidence that you, me, and Rath are in the same place at the same time. We’ve all been manipulated.”

“Does Rath know Schroeder was going to send me something?”

“No, he’d been driven away by snipers.”

Mercer’s eyes widened. “Remind me to ask you the whole story sometime. Rath probably didn’t recognize you because everyone looks the same under ten layers of clothes. Yet you still think he’s a threat.”

“Don’t you?”

Mercer did, but he didn’t know how immediate a threat. It wasn’t a great leap of deductive reasoning to guess that Rath was working with Igor Bulgarin’s killer. Greta Schmidt? Possibly, but unimportant right now. He put himself in their position and knew the murderers’ first priority would be to eliminate all traces of the crime. The physical evidence, Igor’s body, lay unguarded at the base. And the only two people who had firsthand knowledge of the killing were on the same antique plane. With another convenient fire in the cold laboratory and a plane crash, the killers would be in the clear.

Mercer didn’t forget that Gunther Rath had been on the DC-3 while the pilots were peeing in the snow. And then he remembered Rath mentioning Elisebet Rosmunder. He unstrapped his seat belt and ran for the cockpit. If his sudden hunch was wrong, no harm done, but if he was right…

Taped to the bulkhead was a manila envelope. He tore it away from the wall. Unsealing it with trembling fingers, he tipped out the contents. Photographs. The first was the shot of Mrs. Rosmunder’s son, Stefansson, before his ill-fated trip to Greenland. The second was the one a nurse took shortly before his death. And the third picture, Mercer balled in his fist after just a glance. The bullet hole in the old woman’s forehead was like an obscene third eye.

The rage began someplace deep inside, and he let it come, let it grow until it filled every fiber and nerve. He vibrated with it. For long seconds he allowed it to consume him like an internal fire, waiting for that moment of transmutation when rage became hate. And it came too, sharper than any he’d felt before. Unfocused anger was corrosive, worthless, but the hate was a weapon he could control. The ability to harness it was the gift that had allowed him to face so much ugliness in the past without destroying his soul.

He looked down the length of the cabin, knowing that his responsibility lay here. His revenge for Mrs. Rosmunder’s murder would come once he was sure these people were safe.

The door separating the cockpit from the rest of the plane was open. Out the windscreen, Mercer could see that the black ocean far below them was dotted with icebergs, as murderous a sea as he’d ever seen. The pilots were both young Icelanders dressed in vintage-looking bomber jackets.

“Have you been in touch with anyone on the radio?” Mercer asked, his voice calmer than it had any right to be. If communications had been intentionally blacked out at the camp, he was sure Rath would have interfered with them here too.

“Sir, you should be in your seat,” the copilot said automatically. “This crate wasn’t designed for stability.”

“Just tell me if your radios work.”

Mercer’s urgency prompted the pilot to dial Reykjavik tower. “Papa Sierra 11 to Reykjavik, come in please.” The headphones he wore prevented Mercer from hearing the reply but when the pilot repeated his call he knew there hadn’t been one. The pilot tried a third time before dialing another station and then another and another. His glance at his copilot told Mercer everything he needed to know.

“The radios are dead, aren’t they?”

“Could be the solar-max effect. We’ve been having problems for a while.” The attempted reassurance sounded flat.

“Don’t bet on it,” Mercer replied grimly. “How far are we from Iceland?”

“About two hours with this head wind.”

Mercer doubted they had that much time. “Not an option. What’s the closest airport?”

“Kulusuk is a bit closer, but we’re flying northeast to avoid a storm front we were told about at your research base. In a few minutes Iceland will be closer.”

The trap had been set and they’d flown right into it. There was no storm. It was another fabrication, like the Danish evacuation order. Okay, Mercer, think. They didn’t have time to damage the engines or contaminate the fuel supply, so how would you crash a cargo plane with perhaps the greatest safety record in history?

The answer was as obvious as it was chilling.

A bomb.

“There’s no storm front,” he said, forcing the terror out of his voice. “Keep on course for Iceland, but be prepared to turn back because we may not have the time.”

Mercer returned to the cabin and prodded Ira, who had slumped against a skeletal frame member as if it were a pillow. “Wake up. We could have a problem.”

“Stewardess forget your drink?”

“I think there’s a bomb on the plane.” Mercer didn’t care that the others heard him. They would know soon enough.

Their search was systematic and quick. After checking under all the seats and behind any removable panels in the cockpit and cabin, they began shifting the stacks of cargo in the rear of the plane. Marty and Anika were helping by this point while everyone else had been ordered to their seats, their frightened stares never leaving the searchers.

Mercer unhooked the netting over the last cargo pallet, a neatly stacked pile of boxes at the very rear of the hold. The cabin’s heaters couldn’t overcome the chilling drafts, and yet he was covered with sweat. It felt like a lead weight had settled in his stomach. He checked each box thoroughly before lifting it from the stack to hand to Ira. Had the bomb been motion activated, the plane would have exploded as soon as it began moving across the ice, so his biggest concern was a booby trap around the device.

Ira and Anika were carefully examining the tape seals on the boxes to see if any had been opened but they hadn’t found anything. Mercer reached the last carton. He nearly missed the filament of wire running from a tiny hole in the cardboard to a bulkhead, where it had been glued to the steel. It was an anti-tampering wire designed to detonate the bomb if the box was moved.

“Got it!” he called, both relieved and sickened.

The tape on the box’s lid had been slit open. Ira held the box steady while Mercer lowered himself until the top of the carton was at eye level. Gingerly he opened one flap, mindful that there could be another trip wire attached to its underside. It appeared clear, so he opened the other side. Anika gave a startled gasp, and he nearly jostled the box.

Rath had made a hollow in one corner of the container by removing a bundle of paper towels. In their place was the bomb. It consisted of six dynamite sticks bundled with tape and a high-tech detonator held in place by wires and more tape. The trip wire attached to the plane disappeared into the side of the activator, so Mercer couldn’t tell how it was pretensioned. Cutting the wire or moving the bomb could conceivably obliterate the plane.

The LED numbers spinning backward in a window at the top of the device read sixty-eight minutes, twelve seconds. Eleven seconds. Ten seconds.

“You can deactivate it, right?” Anika asked hopefully. “You’re a mining engineer. You know all about explosives.”

“Ah, no.” Mercer’s voice caught in his throat, and he had to swallow heavily to clear it. “I don’t know the first thing about bombs. Ira, any suggestions?”

“Land.”

“Marty, go tell the pilot we have a bomb on board and we’ll never make it to Reykjavik. Have him turn back to Greenland.”

“What happens when we return to the Geo-Research camp?” Anika asked. “Rath’s trying to kill us now. What’s to stop him from just doing it later?”

Mercer made sure that Ira had a firm grip on the box before he stood, bracing himself as the DC-3 went through a steep banking turn. “Because we’re not going back to the base. Give Ira a hand packing stuff around the bomb so it doesn’t shift and pull the trip wire. We’re not out of this fight yet.”

The plan was a desperate one, but as Mercer reached his seat he felt there was a slim chance of hope. Because the DC-3 was equipped with skis, he wasn’t worried about landing. What concerned him was the amount of time they might be stranded on the ice. Once the bomb went off, he doubted there would be enough of the plane to protect eleven people from the elements. He had to find them shelter. Mercer had a location in mind, but finding it depended on a man who’d been dead for fifty years.

He unfolded the map he’d recovered from Major Delaney and studied the figures the airman had penciled in. Mercer’s immediate urge was to tell the pilots the heading Delaney had used to reach Camp Decade from the crash site. Finding the wreck would have been a simple geometry equation.

And it would have been wrong.

A fact largely ignored by modern navigators because of global positioning satellites and other artificial aids is that the magnetic North Pole is not a stationary point. It can migrate up to fifty miles in a single day and averages a northwestern drift of approximately nine miles every year. Earth’s iron core, which generates the magnetic field, is slightly out of phase with the rotation of the crust, creating this observable movement. To find the plane, Mercer had to factor fifty years’ worth of drift to Delaney’s heading, a difference of about four hundred and fifty miles.

With a calculator and a pen, he did the math as quickly as he could, aware of the bomb’s remorseless countdown. He could do nothing about Delaney’s estimate that he’d walked three hundred kilometers to reach the abandoned Air Force facility. Once they established themselves above his route and began backtracking, Mercer could only hope they would spot his plane. Erwin had said a few days ago that the region around where Mercer believed the C-97 had crashed had less snow cover now than at any time in decades. That was just one of the many lucky breaks they would need.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up. It was Erwin Puhl. “Anything I can do?”

“Get Marty’s sat-phone.”

Erwin shook his head. “Marty already tried it. He can’t get a lock on any satellites. It’s the solar max.”

“In that case, are you a praying man?”

“I am now.”

“Me too.”

The pilots didn’t question Mercer’s orders when he told them the new course to fly because he was the only person who had an idea how to save them. He returned to the rear of the plane, where Ira, Marty, and Anika had buried the bomb under as much cargo as they could pack around it. It was a makeshift redoubt, but any bit would help. “How much time?”

Ira checked the timer on his digital watch. “Forty-five and a half minutes.”

“We’ll be feet dry over Greenland again in fifteen and over our target area a couple minutes after that.”

“Doesn’t give us much time,” Marty pointed out.

“If we don’t find Delaney’s plane, we’ll still be able to put down and hope there’s enough of this one left to sustain us.”

“We pulled some of the better food stores, camping supplies, and cooking fuel away from the bomb,” Ira explained. “We can each grab an armload when we make a run for it.”

“Good idea. I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Don’t thank me. It was Dr. Klein’s idea.”

Mercer smiled at Anika. “Intelligent, brave, and quick thinking. Do you have any faults?”

“I get drunk on a single glass of wine.”

“You call that a fault?” Mercer chuckled, trying to reduce the gloom that had permeated the cabin. “I call that a reason for a weekend together in the Napa Valley.”

Anika made a face of mock horror. “Ugh. You Americans sicken me. The Loire Valley or nothing.”

The banter didn’t last. The enormity of their situation overshadowed everything. Once they cleared the ramparts of the Greenland coast, Mercer had everyone at a window watching the snow and ice and rock below. Even though they had a few more minutes before reaching Delaney’s reported path, he wanted them accustomed to the rough topography so they were better prepared to spot anything anomalous.

To intercept Delaney’s route, they had to fly thirty miles into the hinterland before swinging north-northeast, back toward the coast at a shallow angle, their altitude reduced to a thousand feet above the ground. Hunched between the pilots’ seats with the Geiger counter in his hands, Mercer estimated they were about forty miles south of where the plane went down.

Watching the terrain scroll under the DC-3, everyone kept a lookout for a flash of sunlight striking a metallic surface or any unnatural straight edges, like a wing. As Erwin had predicted, there wasn’t anywhere near the amount of new snow here as had been around the Geo-Research camp. Large patches of bare rock appeared at irregular intervals, jagged peaks that showed above the ice. There were still enough snow-covered sections to land the plane, which also meant there was an increased possibility that the C-97 had been buried as deeply as Camp Decade. They’d know soon.

Far ahead he could see a fjord carved deep into the ice sheet, protected on all sides by sheer mountains. A quick guess put the plane wreck just south of where the narrow bay terminated. Mercer checked his watch. They had ten minutes before he would call off the search and order the pilots to land. He’d cut the margin as close as he could, balancing the need to locate the wreck with the time it took to find a safe landing site.

“Mercer!” It was one of Erwin’s teammates, Wilhelm Treitschke, seated immediately behind the lavatory. “Ahead about four kilometers, just before that rock that looks like a shark fin.”

Looking out the windshield, Mercer spotted the feature Will described and concentrated on the shadow staining the clear ice in front of it. For an instant he thought they’d found it. The size was right and it had an airplane’s cruciform shape, but as he looked closer, he could tell it was just a rocky projection that hadn’t quite broken through the surface. His mouth turned bitter.

“Good eyes, but that’s not it. Keep looking.”

A minute later, the copilot hit Mercer on the shoulder with the back of his hand and pointed. “There!”

Near where a wall of mountains rose before falling off into the fjord was a piece of debris sticking up from the ice like a tombstone. Battered and bent by decades of glacial movement, it was still recognizable as a section of an aircraft’s wing. There was another piece of wreckage sitting on top of a low ridge of stone maybe a hundred yards from it.

The shape of the mountain looming over the wreck indicated that the plane had had the added misfortune of coming down in an avalanche channel. He imagined that when the C-97 crashed in the 1950s, its impact must have triggered an avalanche that buried it, hiding the wreckage from both air and ground searches. But now, with temperatures on the rise and record low snowfall, the aircraft had melted out of its frozen tomb. Since this part of Greenland went largely unexplored, it was possible the plane had lain exposed for years.

The dial on the radiation monitor hadn’t twitched since he’d turned it on but Mercer was still concerned that the old plane was contaminated. He’d earlier instructed the pilot that if they did find the aircraft to land no closer than three miles from it. He looked at his watch again. Two minutes remained on his search timetable, which gave them only twelve minutes to land and get clear of the DC-3.

He tapped the pilot, pointed to the ground, and went to the rear to strap in. “We found it,” he announced as he reached his seat. “We’re landing now. Everyone, tighten your seat belts.”

He sat next to Anika in the last row of seats, accepting a bundle of clothes to use as a cushion when they assumed the head-down crash position. “I’m scared,” she said as the pitch of the engines changed.

“You shouldn’t be. What are the chances that you survive a helicopter crash only to die in a plane crash?”

“How can you be so calm?”

“I’m faking it. Don’t forget, this plane is designed to land on ice and snow, and the pilots know what they’re doing. We’ll be fine.”

A moment before the landing, the copilot ordered the passengers to brace themselves. Mercer tucked his head into his lap, grabbing the back of his thighs as tightly as he could. He knew the landing would be rough and he thought he was prepared.

He wasn’t. None of them were.

Flared nose up, the DC-3 skimmed the ground for a moment, its skis hissing and banging across the uneven surface. Then one of them hooked into a hardened piece of ice. The plane slammed hard, a jarring impact that nearly tore the fuselage apart. No longer moving in a straight line, the aircraft skipped and skidded, scrubbing off airspeed in a rapid deceleration that pitched the tail high. Amid the screams of the passengers was the explosive sound of the windscreens imploding. A solid wall of snow filled the cockpit and erupted through the connecting door. The two seats behind the bathroom tore free from the floor and launched themselves into a bulkhead. Wilhelm Treitschke and his companion, Gert Kreigsburg, were crushed against the metal wall, their necks snapping in identical pops.

As its momentum expended, the tail of the DC-3 dropped to the ground in a wrenching crash that bent the airframe and blew open the rear hatchway. The plane finally came to an uneven stop. The lash of cold air whipping into the cabin revived Mercer. He looked behind him. Ira had done a remarkable job securing the cargo. Despite the violence of the crash, the stack of crates hadn’t shifted under the netting and pulled the trip wire.

Mercer unbuckled his lap belt and stood, swaying against a wave of nausea. The sounds assaulting his ears were pitiable. Several people were still screaming in pain and fear while others sobbed uncontrollably. Worse was the silence from the front of the plane. The wall of snow filled the door leading to the cockpit. Buried somewhere inside were the pilots.

“We’ve got two minutes,” Mercer bellowed, hoping to galvanize the survivors with his voice. Each word felt like a hammer pounding against his temples. He ached everywhere. “Anyone who can move grab a bundle of supplies and get the hell away.”

Ira Lasko was the first to find his feet. He had to lift Erwin Puhl from his seat and hold him steady for a moment before they each took handfuls of gear and disappeared outside.

“Come on, Anika. You’re next.” Mercer tugged at her seat belt, freeing her.

“I’m okay,” she said groggily, a trickle of blood escaping from her hairline, where she’d hit her head against the seat back in front of her.

“We’ve got to add ‘lucky’ to your list of attributes. We made it,” Mercer said before turning serious. “Can you get out on your own?”

“I think so.”

It was clear that she couldn’t. “Ira,” Mercer yelled out, “I need a hand in here.”

Ira dashed back to the plane to help Anika and unload more gear while Mercer went forward to check on Marty, Ingrid, and Hilda. He didn’t need to check the two meteorologists or pilots. Their fate was all too apparent.

“Let’s go, Marty,” Mercer shouted when he reached his seat and then fell silent. Marty had pushed Ingrid back in her seat and was trying to get her head to remain erect. He couldn’t. The delicate bones in her neck were as pliable as rubber. She was dead. He looked up at Mercer blankly.

Mercer’s voice dropped. “We can’t help her, Marty. I’m sorry.”

“I think she looked up just as the plane hit.” He spoke with an unsettling monotone. “I even think I heard her neck break.”

The clock was ticking. “Can you get out by yourself?”

“Yes, I, ah, yes.” He stood and walked toward the rear exit as calmly as a seasoned passenger coming off a regular flight. He was in shock.

The heavyset Hilda, who Mercer recalled could move fifty-pound bags of potatoes with one beefy arm, was still folded over in the crash position, her arms dangling to the floor. He suspected she was dead until he saw that her shoulders were shaking. There were only a few seconds left.

He roughly pushed her back in her seat and unhooked her belt. The woman neither helped nor hindered his efforts. She was unconscious. And she weighed about two hundred pounds. Bending so he could dig a shoulder into her ample belly, Mercer heaved her limp body into a modified fireman’s carry and strained to straighten again. His body had been pummeled by the accident and it protested every inch he rose but he managed to stand, staggering to find his balance.

“Oh Jesus,” he groaned, moving down the aisle in a faltering lurch. “Did you have to sample every dish you prepared?”

On the way out the door he grabbed his leather sample bag by its strap. Ira had returned to the plane once again and helped Mercer jump to the snow. Together they hefted the inert chef away. They made it fifteen yards before the beeper on Ira’s watch went off.

“Down!” he shouted and fell flat, collapsing the woman and Mercer.

The explosion was muffled by the cargo stacked around it, and its detonative energy was concentrated on the far side of the aircraft. Still the concussion hit with enough force to suck the air out of Mercer’s lungs. Bits of debris and a hail of snow pelted him as he lay over Hilda to protect her from the worst of the blast. The bomb was far enough from the fuel tanks that there were no secondary detonations, which had been Mercer’s biggest fear. He looked over his shoulder as the rumble died away.

The entire tail assembly was twisted away from the remainder of the fuselage and the roof above the bomb had vanished. Such a blast during the flight would have dropped the DC-3 out of the sky like a brick. Thankfully, the explosion wasn’t powerful enough to completely destroy the aircraft. Enough remained to provide shelter until they were rescued. If they were rescued.

Mercer felt something warm and wet on his cheek, and he turned his head quickly. The chef lying beneath him was awake and her mouth was pressed to him in a grateful kiss. Her voice was muffled but he could hear her muttering, “Danke, danke.”

The harder Mercer tried to lift himself from her, the tighter she held him in an embrace. She had a pleasant face, he noticed, and tears made her soft eyes look liquid, but her mustache was thicker than his if he skipped a day of shaving. She planted a long kiss on his mouth, easily smothering his struggles to free himself.

“Taking advantage of a woman in such a vulnerable state,” Ira teased when Mercer finally regained his feet. “I expected more from you.”

Mercer smiled, relieved at being alive despite the awful deaths of the pilots and the three others. He would not give in to survivor’s guilt. “You okay?”

Lasko stood and brushed snow off his spare body. “I will be as long as she doesn’t realize I helped save her.”

“We lost five, Ira, including Ingrid.”

“And we saved six,” the ex-submariner replied sagely. “Don’t think of the names. Just consider the numbers. It’s the only way.”

Anika Klein approached, limping slightly. She’d smeared some of the blood on her head trying to stanch the flow. She studied the wreckage before turning to Mercer. “I’ve got a feeling that one of us is jinxed, and I think it’s me.”

“If you knew what I’ve been through in the past couple of years, you’d know I’m the one with the bad juju.” Mercer was only half joking. “Hey, Ira, can you check over the plane and make sure nothing’s on fire? Erwin, how about an inventory of everything we’ve got that’ll help us?”

“You got it.”

“What about me?” Anika asked.

“As the only doctor in our ranks who can actually doctor people, you’re in charge of our medical needs. Which begins with yourself. Your head’s still bleeding. Then check on Marty. Ingrid died in the crash and he’s… I don’t know. Just check on him.”

Mercer’s next words were cut off by a shout from Ira Lasko. He was kneeling on the half-buried nose of the plane, scooping away snow as fast as he could. “One of the pilots is still alive!”

Marty Bishop reacted quicker than any of the others, racing to the entombed cockpit. He pushed aside Ira and attacked the snow clogging the windscreen as if frenzy alone could somehow expunge whatever he felt about Ingrid’s death. In moments he was able to thrust his upper body through the shattered glass and touch the leather-clad arm thrusting out of the snow and ice. From the position of the arm, it was the copilot who grabbed on to Marty’s offered hand and refused to let go.

Mercer and Ira swung around the plane and approached the cockpit from the cabin. Using pieces of torn fuselage as shovels, they began the laborious digging. Whenever they paused, they could hear Marty reassuring the stricken aviator through the snow. It took twenty minutes to clear away enough of the frozen debris for Anika Klein to worm her way into the cockpit to administer whatever aid the copilot needed.

“Mercer,” she called from the hollow they had dug, “I need two lengths of metal or wood for a splint. His arm is broken. Also, get my bag. I’ve got medical supplies in there I’ll need.”

Hilda had already retrieved the kit and passed it forward. The next ten minutes passed in anxious silence punctuated once by a single shrill scream when Anika reset the arm. It seemed the despair over the deaths of the others had been suspended while she worked.

Slowly, Anika’s backside emerged from the cockpit as she half led, half dragged the wounded man from where he’d been trapped. His arm was bandaged and strapped to his chest, and the countless lacerations on his face had been cleaned. She’d already stitched closed the worst. His skin was stained with antiseptic. “He’s going to be fine. I’ve got him pretty doped up,” she said. “He’s got to be kept warm to minimize shock.” She turned to Marty, who had just entered the cabin from his vigil outside. “I need someone to stay with him. Are you up to it?”

Marty looked from the prone figure on the floor to where Ingrid still sat under a blanket Erwin had draped over her. His voice was iron. “I’ll take care of him.”

“Nice job,” Mercer told Anika when they were outside. “With the copilot, and with Marty.”

“He’s stronger than you give him credit for. Only he doesn’t know it, so neither does anyone else.” She used snow to clean her hands.

Ira came up to them. Whatever mental trick he had used to get over the horrors of the past hour had worked. He seemed as unruffled and composed as always. “What’s our next move?”

“I need to check on the crashed C-97. I want you to get this wreck site into shape. It’s going to be our home for a while. Make sure Marty’s sat-phone is okay so that when the solar max lets up we can get ourselves rescued.”

Once everyone was organized and working, Mercer decided it was time to go. He made sure he had his Geiger counter and a few protein bars stuffed in his sample bag before beginning his walk to the other plane crash. He also took an ice ax, a silver “space blanket,” and a small can of Sterno in case he couldn’t get back before nightfall.

The trek was brutal. Each step broke through the crust of snow, sinking him to his knees. It was an exhausting process to lift his foot clear to take another pace, and quickly his motion more resembled wading than walking. The wind scouring the flank of the mountain range hit him full in the face as he walked, oftentimes powerful enough to arrest his forward progress. He began sweating, and his breaks became more frequent. At each rest stop he would check the Geiger counter, mystified that it had yet to show any radiation. He began to wonder if Delaney’s contamination had come from another source.

Although the wreckage of the C-97 Stratofreighter was only three miles away it took him two hours to reach it. From the air, they had seen only part of one wing and a scrap of fuselage, but as he approached he could see other pieces of debris — a landing gear assembly, a section of the retractable flaps, and a blade from one of her four props. Fifty years of ice movement had obliterated any semblance of order to the debris field, and Mercer was surprised to find as much as he had.

Two hundred yards beyond the wing fragment, the Geiger counter began to click. Mercer clamped his hand to the earphones, checking the display on the handheld unit. The amount of radiation was barely detectable, and his heart slowed again.

Using the counter as a guide, he searched for the area that showed the highest readings. In this fashion he found the bulk of the plane. It lay in a saddle of rock, wedged in place and nearly covered by ice. Only the stump of its vertical stabilizer sticking from the ice was exposed. He swept the Geiger counter along the length of the plane, noting the readings were strongest where he estimated the cockpit would be.

“Why there?” he wondered aloud. If there was a radiation leak on the plane, surely it would come from the cargo section at the rear.

Under the mantle of ice, he could see places were the fuselage had been ripped open by either the crash or avalanche that once covered the plane. He selected one of these darker shadows close to the cockpit and began working with the ice ax. Soon he had settled in to an easy rhythm. He rested every hour, aware that the sun could go down before he got back to the others, but he had to make certain he didn’t get overheated, an ironic condition considering the temperature had dropped below freezing.

By three in the afternoon, he’d chopped his way to the aircraft’s metal skin. The rip in the aluminum wasn’t large enough for him to crawl through, forcing him to hack at it with the ax. Strips of metal tore away each time he heaved back on the handle. It took a further half hour to open a large-enough hole. The slightly elevated radiation reading when he’d penetrated into the plane was still well below a dangerous level.

All the time he’d been working, he’d mentally prepared himself to enter the plane. Yet now that he was ready, apprehension struck. He didn’t know what he would find inside or what it would mean to the survivors relying on him. Resigned to the task, Mercer lowered himself into the aircraft’s belly.

The interior was dim and he flicked on a small penlight. It revealed a ruby-crusted corpse staring at him sightlessly. Mercer scrabbled backward, tripping over his feet and falling heavily. He remained on the floor, ignoring the pain of freezing air in his lungs as he hyperventilated. He’d known there were bodies on the plane, but he hadn’t been ready.

When he was calm again, he levered himself upright and flashed the light at the body that he assumed had been the radioman/navigator. The ruby effect that had so startled him was the result of frozen blood around the man’s mouth and splashed over his flight jacket. It looked like he’d also bled from the nose and… Mercer leaned closer. Jesus, his eyes. He had bled from his eyes.

There was more blood in the snow on the cabin floor, pools and strings of it like some obscene abstract painting. He flicked the beam toward the cockpit. Nearly all the windscreens had been smashed in by the crash fifty years ago. The snow forced into the cockpit had solidified into a misshapen block of ice. The copilot was strapped in his seat, his head turned away as if the light could still bother him. The snow piled up to his chest was stained crimson. He too had mysteriously bled out.

Mercer had been right. With the navigator in his seat and the copilot focused in the beam of light, the body he’d found in Camp Decade was the pilot, Jack Delaney. He flicked the light to the pilot’s seat to make sure. What he saw made him stumble back again.

Major Delaney sat there as if still flying the plane, his cap still in place although he no longer wore his leather coat. Much of his face had turned gray and shriveled over the years, so his dazzling teeth looked particularly gruesome. A death’s head smile with aviator glasses.