Pandora's Curse

ON THE ICE

Anika didn’t know how many times she had checked her watch or cleared the condensed breath from the window. The routine had become automatic, although with the setting of the sun her pace had increased. Her lower lip felt raw from constant chewing.

Mercer hadn’t said anything about staying at the other wreck until the next morning, nor had he taken enough supplies to sustain him. The thick ground fog that had settled in the past hour only served to increase her anxiety. Since they could be stranded for weeks, they couldn’t waste anything for a signal fire, and if Mercer lost sight of his footprints coming back, he’d never find the DC-3.

Initially, she’d told herself her concern had come solely from the fact that Philip Mercer was the undisputed leader of the group. His actions had saved them all, and his absence, even for a few hours, had left the others sullen and pessimistic. Their dinner had been eaten with a minimum of conversation, and everyone had retreated to separate areas of the fuselage to sleep. Anika had stayed awake to check on Magnus, the thirty-five-year-old Icelandic copilot. Marty had been by her side until he too had succumbed to exhaustion. Ira Lasko had remained awake the longest, falling asleep only an hour ago and telling her she should do the same. He’d also assured her that Mercer knew what he was doing.

She wasn’t so sure. While she’d never been to Greenland, she’d spent more time in harsh conditions than any of the other survivors. She knew the dangers of hypothermia, had seen the effects of deep frostbite, and knew how fragile a lone man was outside with the temperature down well below freezing.

Now that she was in the second hour of her lonely vigil, Anika allowed her mind to wander to the other reason for her concern, a more personal reason. She didn’t know Mercer well enough to think beyond the physical, but on that level she was attracted to him. His was a natural masculinity that other men strove to attain through bravado and swagger. Yet there was a self-deprecation in him, as if he tried to hide his talents. He was a year or two older than her but he was like a buoyant teen who hadn’t yet gotten used to becoming an adult. It was charming.

Anika remembered the look he’d given her after they had run the gauntlet of fire. It had been a reflection of her own desire. Experience told her to temper her feelings because of the drama surrounding their first meeting and everything since. She’d taken lovers whom she’d shared dangers with, mostly fellow rock climbers, and every relationship had crumbled under the weight of the subsequent normalcy. While it was unfair to compare Mercer to these other men, she suspected the results would be the same.

Still, it was fun to think otherwise.

She didn’t know she’d fallen asleep until a noise startled her awake. The survivors had built a snow wall to screen the gaping hole at the rear of the aircraft, fashioning a crude door at the bottom with a section of bent metal. They used tarps found in the remaining cargo to cover the other holes in the fuselage. As a result the plane, though chilly, was warm enough to keep them alive. It was the door being pushed aside that woke her.

The apparition who entered in the faint glow emitted by their single gas lantern looked like some mythical creature. It was covered from head to foot in snow, with icicles dangling from the scarf covering its mouth. The fur trim around its head was a solid halo of ice. As it moved, knots of snow fell away like it was shedding its skin. It was Mercer.

Without a word, he lumbered down the aisle and doused the lantern, plunging the cabin into total darkness.

“Mercer, what is it?” Anika asked, confused and still half asleep.

“Quiet!” His labored breath sounded as though he’d run a marathon.

Then she heard it — a steady and deep thumping that seemed to come from every direction at once. She didn’t recognize the strange sound, but the others who’d been roused by Mercer’s entrance did.

“It’s the rotor-stat,” Ira said at last.

“I heard it about half an hour ago.” Mercer unwound his scarf and pulled down his hood. “I was afraid you might have a signal fire going, so I ran back as fast as I could. Even with the fog, I could see the lantern through the window a good way off.”

“What is it doing here?” Erwin could be heard fumbling for his glasses. “Looking for us?”

“They don’t know we’re here.” Mercer’s parka was so ice crusted it remained erect when he dropped it on the floor. “And I think the airship is miles away. We’re just hearing its echo ricocheting off the mountains.”

“Then why is it in the area?” Marty asked.

Chills racked Mercer before he could answer, his body quaking so strongly that he had to clamp his jaw. “I assume it’s moving Geo-Research’s base northward like they wanted all along.”

“Are they looking for Delaney’s downed Stratofreighter?” Ira had a towel to hand to Mercer, whose hair was a mass of frozen sweat.

“I think they’re searching for something else, considering Jack Delaney and the rest of his crew are still sitting in the plane.”

Mercer’s bombshell was met with a collective gasp. In the following silence, the sound of the dirigible began to fade. It was Ira who finally asked the question on all their minds. “If Delaney’s in his plane, whose body did we find at Camp Decade?”

He let the question hang for a moment before turning to Anika. “You want to answer that one?”

Anika’s stomach gave a sickening slide, and she had to grab on to a seat to steady herself. Earlier, she’d thought that hearing Gunther Rath at the base camp had brought everything full circle. That hadn’t been quite true then, but it was now. This had started with her grandfather’s search for hidden Nazi treasure and an interview with a man who had been an engineer. The two together meant a secret cache someplace, obviously in Greenland since Rath, Mercer, and she were here. Until this instant she’d never considered whom the Nazis had forced to dig their repository and never imagined that any of them could have survived on this bleak wasteland long enough to reach Camp Decade. Ten years had passed from the end of the war until the base was abandoned and yet there was no other explanation.

Her voice was barely above a whisper. “He was the last victim of the Holocaust.”

Mercer relit the lantern, setting it to a weak flicker, and crawled into his sleeping bag. “Tell us what you know.”

“My grandfather has spent his life trying to recover property looted from the Jews during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Recently he received some information from an unknown source in Russia about a shipment of gold taken from Stalingrad and sent to Hamburg. The documents also revealed that an engineer named Otto Schroeder had played a role in this transfer, an operation I learned was called the Pandora Project.” As she got further into the story, Anika’s voice firmed and her outrage returned stronger than ever.

“Up until ten days ago, Schroeder was living outside of Munich. I went to interview him about the gold. When I arrived at his house, he was being tortured by a group of men led by Gunther Rath, the man who planted the bomb on this plane. With his dying breath, Schroeder said that the gold — and I’m talking about tons of it — was only part of the operation and that Philip Mercer was someone who could help me.” She looked to him, searching for an answer in his eyes as to why.

“Around this time,” Mercer said, “I received an e-mail from a lawyer in Munich telling me that an unnamed client was sending me a package of documents.” He dug them out of his sample bag and held them close to the lamp for the others to see. “Until this journal arrived, I’d never heard of Otto Schroeder. Nor do I know why he would send it to me. And since it’s written in German, I have no idea what’s in it.”

Anika picked up the tale again. “Just before I left the Njoerd, I learned that Mercer was at the Geo-Research base. I knew that somehow we had been set up. Right after the helicopter crash, I went through the mailbag and buried anything addressed to him. I couldn’t take the chance that Schroeder’s information might be passed to someone I didn’t know or trust. I had planned to go back later to retrieve the letter I’d hidden a hundred meters from the chopper.”

Ira looked at Mercer. “Our stowaway wasn’t a stowaway after all.”

“She told me just before we discovered the bomb.” Mercer shifted in his sleeping bag. “Because of a practical joke played on me by my friend Harry, she never got the letter she was looking for. I suspect the envelope Anika took was from Charlie Bryce.” He indicated that she should continue.

“Because Schroeder was an engineer, my grandfather and I believe that he was involved with creating a secret storehouse for Nazi plunder far from where the Allies would find it. An enormous hoard of treasure was recovered in old salt mines at the close of the war, but there are still billions of dollars’ worth of art, antiques, jewelry, and gold bullion that was never found. Schroeder’s statement that the gold we sought was only part of the project made us think we had stumbled onto another of their hidden depositories.”

“Here on Greenland?” Marty Bishop asked. “Seems a bit excessive even for the Nazis.”

“I would agree if Mercer and I weren’t here with Rath.”

“How did Schroeder know the two of you were coming here?”

“I don’t know,” Anika admitted.

“It was part of the setup.” Mercer took a sip from his brandy bottle, which had survived the crash. “The Russians who sent the information leading Anika’s grandfather to Otto Schroeder chose him rather than better-known Nazi hunters because they already knew the gold is on Greenland and that Anika was coming here. I’m willing to bet that they were the ones who told Schroeder that Anika could trust me.”

“You’re right,” she cried. “He said that he received a mysterious call about you a few weeks before his murder.”

“That doesn’t explain how they knew Mercer would be here,” Ira pointed out.

“Either they got that information from the Surveyor’s Society Web site and just chose to include me,” Mercer said. A dark implication came clear and he hesitated. “Or because Charlie Bryce engineered it so that I was here at the same time as Anika.”

“That would mean Charlie’s part of this too,” Marty said doubtfully. “I’ve known him for years. He’s not a Nazi hunter or anything like that.”

“I’ve known him a long time too,” Mercer agreed. “As unlikely as it sounds, that’s the only explanation that works.”

“So what did you mean that the body at Camp Decade was the last victim of the Holocaust?” Hilda asked. Because she didn’t speak English, Erwin Puhl had been translating the conversation for her.

“I think he was a Jewish slave laborer used to excavate some sort of cave for the Germans to hide their plunder.” Tears welled in Anika’s eyes. “Somehow he was left behind and managed to survive for ten years until he discovered Camp Decade. I can’t imagine the horror and isolation he endured only to find his one chance at rescue had already been abandoned.”

The bitter irony left a long vacuum in their discussion, each thinking about the terror of such a death.

“He could have been a German soldier,” Ira offered after several long minutes.

“No,” Mercer replied. “The evidence was on his arm.”

Anika sniffled and wiped her cheeks. “You noticed?”

“I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now its significance is apparent.” Everyone hung on his words. “The body we found had a scar on the inside of his arm as if he’d been burned. I think it was self-inflicted to erase the identification number the Nazis tattooed on his skin when he became a victim of their Final Solution.”

“Is there any proof to this?” Marty asked.

“If there is, it’ll be in here.” Mercer handed Schroeder’s journal to Anika. “Figure out what you can. We’ve got other problems to discuss.”

Moving close to the lamp, Anika took the leather-bound manuscript and began thumbing through to the relevant sections.

“So what about—”

Mercer cut Ira off. “We’ll get to the other questions later. With Geo-Research moving their operation up this way, we can’t risk staying with the plane. They’re going to spot it once the fog lifts.”

“The number one rule of survival is staying with your vehicle,” Marty reminded.

“We don’t have a choice,” Mercer countered him. “If Rath finds us, we’re dead. Our only option is to keep moving.”

“How long do you think we’ll last without shelter?” Marty snapped. He’d been prepared to fight Geo-Research to return to Greenland, but Ingrid’s death had once again sapped him of his drive. He didn’t care about Nazis and looted treasure and Holocaust survivors. He wanted this nightmare to end.

“Longer than we’d survive if Rath finds us,” Mercer flared before checking his irritation. He had to remind himself how far the survivors were out of their league. He studied the others and saw fear reflected in their eyes. “Sorry. None of us deserve what’s happened, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re in this together. We’ve managed to hold on this long, and I think I know a way to keep us safe.”

“How?”

“It all depends on what Anika finds in that journal,” Mercer answered. “It’s pretty clear that Geo-Research’s scientific cover story is just that — a story. They, or whoever’s behind them, are on Greenland to find the treasure. Now, in order to save themselves thousands of man-hours, I suspect that the Nazis expanded an existing cavern for their warehouse rather than mine a whole new chamber. It’s my experience that if there’s one cave in an area, there are bound to be more. We can hide out in one far from the one the Nazis used until Rath and his merry band leave or we get the sat-phone working again.”

“Sounds reasonable to me.” Ira looked around the dim cabin for agreement.

“How far do you estimate we are from the cave?” Erwin asked anxiously.

“About thirty kilometers,” Mercer said and just then realized something he’d overlooked earlier. The distances on the map he’d discovered in Camp Decade were written in the metric system. An American pilot would have used standard or nautical miles. He shook his head in self-reproach. He should have noticed such a discrepancy immediately. He’d already calculated the deflection in compass headings, so the navigation had been done. His earlier foray told him that they were in for a grueling march.

“Can you lead us there?” Hilda asked through Puhl.

“No.” Mercer wasn’t going to risk their lives by pretending he had all the answers. “But Anika has experience in these conditions. I trust her to get us to safety.”

“We’ve got a problem.” Anika looked up from Otto Schroeder’s journal, her eyes pinched from the strain of reading in such low light. “I haven’t finished the whole thing yet but I have something that makes your plan unfeasible.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Otto Schroeder was a combat engineer in the German Army. Before that he had trained as a mining engineer. He was sent to Greenland in 1943 as part of the Pandora Project to help expand a network of caverns discovered under a glacier. The orders had been cut by Hitler himself. He never knew what became of his work, because two months into the project he was caught in a rockslide and had to be evacuated. He says in his journal that a thousand Jewish and Gypsy slaves were being used in the excavation and that the scope of the mining was increasing. He also said that they were dying off at an average of ten a day.”

The figure was sobering. With his intimate knowledge of mining practices, Mercer had a better grasp at the unspeakably brutal conditions those poor souls had faced.

Anika continued. “Schroeder’s principal task before tunneling commenced was to mine an air shaft to the surface through an estimated thousand feet of ice.”

“Hold on.” Her statement didn’t make sense. Mercer thought she’d read it wrong. “Are you sure he had to mine an air shaft first? That would mean they started underground and worked their way up.”

“That’s the problem.” Anika paused. “The cavern is buried under a mountain at the end of a fjord and was accessible only by submarine. After completing the air shaft, Schroeder was to create a dock for the supply submarines and hack out more space in the cave for dormitories and other work spaces.”

Mercer cursed. “The air shaft is what Rath is looking for.”

Anika nodded. “Which means there aren’t any other caves for us to hide in.”

“And we haven’t addressed one issue that we need to.” Ira shot Mercer a significant look. Mercer knew what he was about to say and nodded. “We didn’t tell you that the body we found in Camp Decade is radioactive. He may have picked up the contamination from the C-97 when he took Delaney’s flight jacket but Mercer and I already discounted the idea that the U.S. military would leave atomic materials lying around.”

“I checked the plane,” Mercer interrupted. “Readings were the same there as in Camp Decade. It’s not the source.”

“That means the radiation came from the cavern we’re going to be humping our way toward,” Ira concluded. “Since he still gave a reading on the Geiger counter after fifty years, whatever’s down there has gotta be hotter than hell.”

Mercer looked to where Erwin Puhl huddled silently in his sleeping bag, the lantern glow reflecting off his glasses like tiny sunbursts. “How about it, Erwin? Are you ready to drop your cover story and tell us what you know?”

It was such an unexpected question that they all turned to the German meteorologist. For his part, Erwin tried to look shocked, but he’d experienced too much trauma in the past few days to sustain the facade. “How did you know?” he asked simply.

“Your friendship with Igor Bulgarin,” Mercer said. Erwin knew what he meant but the rest waited for an explanation. “When Igor and I first met, he told me he was coming to Greenland to search for meteor fragments. The only problem with his story is that finding meteorites on Greenland is next to impossible. They do it in Antarctica all the time because there’s so little precipitation that much of it is considered a desert. Chunks of space rock can lie around for years waiting to be picked up. Here, they’re usually buried in minutes.”

He looked around the cabin. “I read about an expedition in 1998 that spent six weeks on Greenland’s west coast looking for microscopic bits of the Kangilia meteor. That one weighed an estimated one hundred tons and there was a video and satellite information telling them where to look. They didn’t find a trace. There’s no way that one man walking around the ice could ever hope to find extraterrestrial debris.” Mercer returned his gaze to Erwin. “I figured that, since you were friends for years, you already knew that Igor’s cover was bullshit and knew what he was really doing here.”

Puhl didn’t deny the accusation.

Mercer took his deductions to their obvious conclusion. “He must have known about the Nazi cache and gone into Camp Decade because he suspected the body might have come from the cavern. Someone in Geo-Research knew what he was doing and murdered him to keep it a secret.”

Erwin’s lack of reaction told Mercer that the meteorologist had already figured out Igor’s “accident” was premeditated murder. His near-catatonia in the past few days was likely due to the fear that his friendship with Bulgarin meant he was next.

“Do you know who killed him?” Ira asked Mercer.

“Since Igor was struck on the back of the head, the murderer had to be someone he didn’t suspect and would turn his back to. The killer also had to be strong enough to bludgeon a man who was the largest in the camp. And finally the killer dragged the corpse out of officers’ area and abandoned it when he reached the first major obstacle. This means he wasn’t strong enough to actually carry the body.”

“Makes sense. So who was it?”

“The only person who fits all three criteria is Greta Schmidt,” Mercer answered and received a number of dubious looks.

“I think he’s right,” Erwin said after a moment. “Although Igor and I didn’t think Geo-Research knew who we really were and why we were on Greenland, we did discuss people we should be careful about. Neither of us considered that Greta could be part of this.”

“Erwin, do you know if Geo-Research is affiliated with a company called Kohl?” Anika asked. “Schroeder mentioned the name in his journal as the company given the actual contract to dig the cavern. He was among a handful of military experts sent to help.”

“Kohl bought Geo-Research last year so they could hide behind their scientific credentials and execute their true aim.”

“Which is the recovery of the gold?” Marty asked.

Erwin echoed Schroeder’s words. “The gold is only a small part of what’s going on.”

“What were the Germans hiding?”

“They weren’t hiding anything. They were trying to recover something, something that was never meant to be on this planet.”

Mercer put it together quicker than the others. “A radioactive meteorite that landed here in 1943?”

“Not quite,” Erwin said. “Most of it slammed into Russia in 1908.”

The sudden insight came to Mercer in a rush, and despite the horror surrounding this search and the loss they had already felt, he couldn’t help but be excited. They were talking about one of the greatest scientific mysteries of the twentieth century. There was a hushed awe in his voice. “Tunguska.”

“Yes, Dr. Mercer. The Nazis were looking for a piece of the Tunguska meteor that exploded over Siberia on June 30, 1908.”

“How? Why?”

Puhl looked at the blank faces of the others. “For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Tunguska explosion has remained an enigma since it occurred. Some theorized it was an asteroid, others a comet or black hole. Some even believe it was the detonation of a UFO’s nuclear power plant. What everyone does agree on is that it leveled a thousand square miles of forest, although trees at the very epicenter were left standing like certain buildings in Hiroshima after the atom bomb. Seismographs as distant as Washington, D.C., registered the shock wave, and an unearthly glow was seen as far away as Copenhagen. Furthermore, eyewitness accounts say that a portion of the object was observed continuing in a northwesterly direction and was actually gaining altitude after the explosion.

“To answer Mercer’s questions as to how and why the Germans were searching for the wayward fragment those witnesses saw, I have to give a bit more history.” Erwin accepted the brandy bottle when Ira passed it to him. “The first scientific expedition to search for the site wasn’t conducted until 1927 by a man named Leonid Kulik. He is important to remember because he was captured by the Germans and died at a prison camp in 1942. During weeks of brutal interrogation he revealed everything he knew about the mysterious impact.

“After they learned the truth about the blast, the Germans spared nothing to secure his research notes. In fact they sacrificed thousands of troops in what became one of the most desperate battles of the entire war just to find a couple of notebooks.” He paused again, more contemplative than dramatic. “When the war broke out, Kulik had sent his more secret findings to an associate in Stalingrad.”

“Are you saying the Battle of Stalingrad was all about a couple of notebooks?” Marty scoffed. “Give me a break.”

“No, but hundreds of commando teams were sent behind Russian lines during the fighting to find them. Thousands of men died in the search. When it came to Hitler’s obsessions, fact is a lot stranger than fiction. Let me tell you another story to illustrate this.” Erwin lectured as if to a child. “In April of 1942, he sent a team of scientists equipped with state-of-the-art radar gear to Rugen Island in the Baltic Sea to test a new theory that he had. Hitler had become convinced that while the Earth was indeed round, we didn’t live on its outer surface but on the inner curve of a hollow sphere, like insects in a salad bowl. The scientists spent weeks beaming radar waves into the sky hoping for a rebounded signal from the British naval base at Scapa Flow.

“You must realize at the time Germany lagged far behind the Allies when it came to radar equipment and yet Der Führer,” Puhl mocked the title, “wasted valuable resources on a quest doomed to fail.”

“What’s this have to do with Tunguska?”

“Not all of the ludicrous scientific avenues the Nazis pursued during the war were such dismal mistakes. The Pandora Project was much more successful. As I said, the first official investigation into the Tunguska blast didn’t occur until 1927. However, there had been a great deal of local interest. The first unofficial search was sent out a year after the celestial impact, although they were turned back because of weather and the site’s inaccessibility. It wasn’t until two years after that, in 1911, that anyone saw the devastation first hand.

“While Tunguska is one of the most remote tracts in the Siberian taiga, news of this success reached the Imperial capital of St. Petersburg in 1912 because so many of the explorers died in the forest or shortly after their return from the site. Their deaths were horrifying, a mysterious disease that dissolved the flesh from their bodies. They ended up as nothing more than skeletal figures.”

Mercer’s mind flashed to the photograph of Stefansson Rosmunder lying in a hospital bed in Reykjavik, knowing now what had killed him.

“The peasants believed,” Puhl continued, “that the devil had punched the forest, leveling the trees, and it was his residual evil that killed their men. Some returned from the impact zone with pieces of a strange rock that was warm to the touch, claiming it was pieces of Satan’s skin. Entire settlements where this unknown rock was stored died of the same wasting disease, usually just days after the explorers’ home-coming. Priests called in said they knew what dark forces were at work and had all the samples encased in golden icons, confident that they would contain the evil that had killed an estimated one thousand people. Their idea worked.”

His statement was met with skepticism until Mercer spoke. “That was a hell of an idea even if they didn’t understand why. If the rocks they collected were radioactive fragments from the meteor, gold would act as an effective shield because of its density. Not as good as lead, but efficient nonetheless.”

Erwin nodded his head. “Kulik’s research later proved that gold dampened the radiation much more effectively than lead. He was never able to explain why this radioactivity behaved so differently, and in his defense, little was known about radiation at this time. It was a mysterious force only a few were even aware of.”

Mercer’s scientific background allowed him to see the hole in Puhl’s story. “How is it such a potent radiation source didn’t kill all the men who went to the impact site?”

“Kulik knew that all radioactive material decayed in what is termed ‘half-lives.’ His theory was that the meteor pieces decayed unevenly, from the outside in, and as the surface becomes inert in a few months, it shields itself from more decay. He believed this phenomenon was caused by a reaction with our atmosphere or perhaps an effect of solar radiation breaking down something within the fragments. Neither he nor anyone else is really certain. He guessed that only those chunks the peasants handled roughly and broke away the nonreactive coating were the ones that caused the deaths.”

Noting a number of flaws with this theory, Mercer held his tongue. He wasn’t a planetary geologist. They were talking about an element that had never been seen on earth before and had never been examined by modern science. He didn’t know what fantastic substances could be swirling around the universe on the backs of interstellar comets. Every few years, scientists working with particle accelerators added new elements to the end of the periodic table. It was possible that the meteor was composed of some stable element we hadn’t yet discovered.

“Okay, back to my story,” Erwin said, and the group became attentive again. Few of them understood or cared about the physics. They just wanted to hear the rest of his enthralling tale. “In 1912, Czarina Alexandra sent her most trusted emissary to Vanavara, the city closest to the blast, to discover what was killing her people. The man had a religious background and quickly adopted the idea of sealing the fragments in golden icons. He had teams sent into the forest to scour for more bits of ‘Satan’s Fist,’ as he called it.”

“I’ll be damned,” Mercer exclaimed. “That explains why nothing of the original meteorite has ever been found at Tunguska. Someone cleaned the site before Kulik or any subsequent expedition ever reached it.”

“Precisely,” Erwin agreed. “Even with protective boxes to seal the meteorites as soon as they were discovered, hundreds more perished in the task. This priest had a golden suit made for himself so he could work with the samples, making sure that they would never again harm another soul.”

“Who was the priest?” Ira asked.

“His given name was Grigori Efymovich Novykh.”

Anika Klein was so wrapped in the story it took her a second to realize she knew that name. Or at least the more famous one the man was known by. “Rasputin!”

“Yes, Rasputin was the Czarina’s emissary and he spent two years at Tunguska recovering the meteorites. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, he refused to tell anyone about what he had found. World War One had just begun and he feared that his discovery would be used as a weapon. Even when the Germans first used poison gas at Bolimov in January 1915, he would not divulge the presence of this extraordinary killer. As the war dragged on, rumors surrounding what he’d found grew and he knew it was only a matter of time before he was tortured to reveal what had killed the villagers in Tunguska. With pressure against him mounting, Rasputin formed the Brotherhood of Satan’s Fist, enlisting a few trusted priests so they would continue to protect the secret after he was gone. Rasputin was murdered in December of 1916, not because of his influence over the royal family as the history books record, but because he wouldn’t tell certain military men what he knew.”

“So he wasn’t the psychotic demon people think he was?”

Erwin chuckled with dark humor. “Oh, he was that too. Tales of his debauchery are, if anything, milder than the truth. But those in the Brotherhood saw him as a man who might have saved humanity from its own destructive impulses.”

“So how does this involve the Nazis?”

“The first Russian revolution swept through St. Petersburg a few weeks after Rasputin’s murder, and those who knew the rumors about Satan’s Fist were exiled or executed. Interest in the Tunguska blast waned. The Brotherhood hid the fifty icons containing the meteorite fragments in various churches and monasteries around the country, moving them often as communist forces either confiscated or razed the buildings. And as members grew older, new people were brought in. Leonid Kulik was one of them, the first who wasn’t a priest. He was asked to join so he would not reveal some of the anomalous findings he had made at the impact site, like the fact that he knew others had been there before him.”

“How many members were there at any given time?” Mercer asked. Like the others, he’d already deduced that Erwin Puhl and Igor Bulgarin were part of the Brotherhood.

“Usually never more than six or eight. Our small size helped ensure our anonymity. It was Kulik who determined the true nature of what the Brotherhood safeguarded, and it was his recommendation shortly before Germany invaded the Soviet Union that the icons be destroyed. He would not allow this horror to be unleashed on the world. Much more was known about radiation by then and he feared that physicists could build an atomic bomb from the fragments.

“All but one icon were encased in cement and transported far out to sea, where they were dumped. Because gold won’t corrode in seawater, they will remain dormant forever. At the same time this was going on, Kulik calculated the trajectory of the piece of meteor that eyewitnesses said skimmed off the atmosphere and vanished. His next goal was to track down this other piece to ensure it didn’t get discovered by anyone else. That is when the Nazis launched their lightning strike into the Soviet Union. Kulik was captured before the last icon could be shipped from the isolated abbey where it had been hidden and before he could organize an expedition to find the other fragments.”

“Which landed here?”

“Yes.” Erwin soothed his throat with another sip of brandy. “The Nazis eventually learned of the missing icon from Kulik, sent a commando team deep into Russia to steal it, and secured his notebooks from Stalingrad, which gave the coordinates to where the last piece of Satan’s Fist had landed.”

Anika’s dark eyes shimmered with the same passion that so infected her grandfather. “Then they launched the Pandora Project using looted gold to build their own storage boxes for any radioactive material they discovered. Once they found the meteorites, they sent Otto Schroeder to dig them out of the ice.”

Nodding, Erwin polished his glasses. “By this time the allies were regularly flying over Greenland in aerial convoys ferrying aircraft to England.”

“The ‘Lost Squadron’ we were talking about earlier was just such a flight,” Mercer added.

“Yes. The radioactive heat generated within the stones had melted the fragments down to bedrock. Because of these flights, the Germans couldn’t risk tunneling to them from the surface, so they approached from the sea in submarines, eventually finding a cavern under a glacier that was within five miles of where the meteor landed. They planned to use the cave as a staging area before driving a long tunnel through ice and rock to reach the fragments.” Erwin looked over to Anika, who still had the journal open on her lap. “You don’t need to finish Schroeder’s journal. I’ve already read it. They had completed the air shaft and pier for the sub and had just commenced the tunnel to the cache when Schroeder was injured. He didn’t know what happened here after he was injured.”

“Do you?” Marty asked.

“No one knows except the poor slave Mercer found in Camp Decade.”

Something Puhl had said struck Anika. Her brow furled and her thin eyebrows arched. Her tone was accusatory. “When did you read Schroeder’s journal?”

Erwin looked away, pained. “Shortly after you went to interview him,” he said evasively.

“How shortly?” Her anger rose because she was pretty sure of the answer.

“We found it in his house after driving off Rath and his neo-Nazi thugs.”

Anika exploded. “Those snipers were your people? You son of a bitch! You were there the whole time and you let Schroeder die. You let me get shot.” And then everything else came clear. “It was you who set this whole thing up — my opa, me. You fucking bastard!”

She lunged from her seat and would have reached Puhl had she not gotten tangled in her sleeping bag and fallen. Mercer dove to pin her to the deck, holding her arms over her head so she couldn’t squirm free. She was a foot shorter than he, eighty pounds lighter, but for a few desperate seconds he was afraid she’d beat him. Fury augmented her strength, so she was like an enraged animal.

“Anika, stop it,” Mercer pleaded, his teeth gritting against the pain as she bit his shoulder.

She got a hand free and went for his eyes, her fingers cocked like talons. Mercer ducked his head and felt her try to tear a piece of skin from his cheek. And then it was over. Anika went completely limp. Mercer opened his eyes, confused, wondering what had calmed her. Chef Hilda stood over them massaging one fist. She said something over her shoulder for Erwin to translate.

“She knew you would never strike a woman, so she did it for you.”

Hilda gave Mercer a proud smile and a wink.

“Danke,” he replied, checking on Anika. She had a growing bruise under her left eye, but otherwise she’d be fine. He moved her back to her seat, secured her seat belt to stop her from charging the instant she woke and leveled a gaze at Erwin. “She’s right, you know. You are a son of a bitch. What gives you the right to drag innocent people into your fight?”

“In this fight, no one is innocent. The Brotherhood of Satan’s Fist has spent nearly a century protecting the world from what we know. I think for that kind of dedication we should be allowed to involve others if we need them.”

“But why involve Anika and her grandfather? Or me?”

“I will answer your second question first,” Erwin said calmly. “We did not get you involved. You were already scheduled to come to Greenland with Geo-Research. It was just luck on our part. We mentioned your name to Schroeder as a possible ally in case something went wrong with our plans. You have a reputation for being a very capable man.”

Mercer remained unconvinced, but if Erwin was revealing the truth about the cavern and Anika’s grandfather, why would he lie about him?

“I don’t know this Charles Bryce you mentioned earlier,” Puhl continued, “so I think his invitation for you to join the expedition to Camp Decade was legitimate.”

“And Anika?”

“We sent information to her grandfather that would lead him to Schroeder in the hopes that he would be able to expose the Kohl Company and the Pandora Project. It wasn’t until we followed Anika to Schroeder’s house that we realized our security had been compromised. Gunther Rath, who is the special-projects director for Kohl, somehow learned about Schroeder and had beaten us there. We suspect that Anika’s grandfather’s office in Vienna was bugged.

“Igor and I chased off Rath and his group. Well, Igor and another Brother chased them off. I don’t know the first thing about guns. We broke into Schroeder’s house and found the diary he kept hidden. We gave it to a lawyer in Munich to forward to you. The operation was falling apart and once we reached Greenland we feared we would need your help, considering Rath’s brutality. By this time Anika had vanished, so we couldn’t warn her off. I didn’t know her whereabouts until we heard the SOS from that helicopter. We never intended for anyone to get hurt. None of us were supposed to be here. Geo-Research’s expedition would have been canceled had Anika been able to reveal what we intended her to learn.” His voice trailed off.

Mercer sat back in his seat, trying to absorb everything. It would take a while, he knew, maybe forever. It was an amazing story. Meteors, radiation, secret brotherhoods, Rasputin, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Nazi hunters, and a planeload of innocent people trapped on a glacier between a Gunther Rath and his goal. “What do you think, Ira?”

“Since we kicked ass in W.W. Two, we can assume that the Germans never got the meteorites. Which means they’ve been down there for the sixty years since the start of the Pandora Project.”

“Go on.”

“Makes me wonder why this Rath character is so hot to find them now. This thing’s been in the works for a while, considering Kohl bought Geo-Research to spearhead their hunt a year ago. What I want to know is what happened last year to make this such a priority. Any ideas, Erwin?”

“We don’t know,” he admitted.

“Ah, guys,” Marty called. “This has been very interesting but it doesn’t help us. We’ve survived one murder attempt but I doubt we’ll survive the next if we stick around.”

“We should try for the air shaft,” Mercer said, looking at Puhl. “Rath knows that Igor Bulgarin was part of the Brotherhood because of his interest in the body. Do you think he’s aware you’re part of it too?”

“Since they didn’t kill me at the base, I doubt it. There have been only a few Brothers who weren’t Russian and Rath knows I’m German. When Igor set up our being here, he falsified some of my records so it didn’t show I had studied in Moscow when East Germany was their vassal state. Rath has nothing to connect me to the Brotherhood.”

Mercer remembered Erwin making certain that none of the Geo-Research people were in earshot when he explained how he knew about Igor’s alcoholism aboard the Njoerd. In retrospect, his secrecy seemed well warranted.

“Better and better. Rath doesn’t know we’re aware of the cave. When he finds this plane abandoned, he’ll assume we made a run for the coast, our only logical choice. If we can reach the air shaft before him, we can seal ourselves inside and wait until he gives up looking for it. He can’t search forever because Geo-Research has obligations to other scientific teams coming to their camp in a few weeks. We can make it until then.”

“How?” Marty asked. “That cave is full of deadly radiation, for Christ’s sake.”

“No, it isn’t. And the survivor we found at Camp Decade proves it. He lived down there for ten years, eating supplies left by the Nazis, no doubt, until loneliness or madness forced him to leave.”

“And how do you know a sudden radiation leak didn’t force him out?”

“Erwin said that Russian villagers exposed to the radiation died within days. If he’d been dosed, he never would have made it to Decade.”

“Okay, but why do you think we can beat Rath? His company dug the damned air shaft. The rotor-stat is probably moving them there as we speak.”

“I doubt it. Remember, they brought four Sno-Cats here as well as the Land Cruiser. There’s no need for that many vehicles if they know the vent’s exact location. They need to search for it, and thanks to the map I found at Camp Decade, we know right where to look.”

“You’d make a good detective.” It was Anika. She’d been awake, listening, but hadn’t stirred.

“Are you okay?” Concern lowered Mercer’s voice to a whisper.

“Yes. I’m sorry about that.” She included Mercer and Erwin in her apology. “I just… I don’t know. It was all too much for a second.”

“You had every right,” Erwin said. “I am more sorry than I can ever tell you.”

Ira scraped some snow off the wall and bundled it in a handkerchief for Anika. She gratefully pressed it to her swollen eye. “Who hit me?”

“Hilda, Germany’s finest combat chef. If her Wiener schnitzel doesn’t get you, her right cross will.”

Switching to German, Anika addressed the stout woman with a smile. “Remind me never to insult your cooking and get you really angry.”

“It’s nearly midnight,” Mercer announced. “If we leave at first light we’ll only need to spend one night on the ice to reach the cave. I for one am exhausted. I’m usually in bed by ten on days I’m in a plane crash.”

When Mercer had been returning from the C-97 crash scene, the survivors had slept far from one another. With him back now, they huddled close, drawn into a cohesive group by his strength. This didn’t go unnoticed by him. And he was glad for it, because as much as they looked to him for leadership, he needed them for the encouragement to keep going. They had been through a lot together and he knew the worse was yet to come. He also noticed, as he settled into his sleeping bag, that Anika was at his side, her delicate face turned to him.

“Anika,” he whispered and her eyes fluttered open. “Can you do me a favor? I’m pretty sure Hilda has a crush on me. Do you think you could be my bodyguard?”

She suppressed a laugh. “My hero.” Then her expression turned serious, a worried frown pulling at her mouth. “I’m thankful for what you said earlier about me being able to lead us to the cave, but I don’t think I can do it.”

Mercer could see how much this admission cost her. It was in her eyes. The defiance she normally showed the world had evaporated. “Why?”

She was wrenched by such doubt that she questioned the very thing she had always believed defined her. “When I go mountain climbing or hiking in some rain forest, I think I’m being daring,” she said, “but I’m really just pretending. None of it’s real. It’s make-believe. With a rescue chopper only a radio call away, I’m never in any actual danger unless I do something stupid. This is different. Lives depend on us reaching the cavern. I can’t take that kind of responsibility. I’ve been kidding myself to think I’m brave, Mercer. I’m a fake, a fraud.”

He snaked a hand out of his bag to stroke her short hair. “Anika, we’ve barely met and yet I can tell you that you’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever known. You’ve already proven that you are cool under fire. Literally. You can think on your feet and” — he touched the red mark on his cheek where she’d raked him — “you have unbelievable determination. To me, that’s the definition of courage. Only a fool goes in search of danger. A brave person avoids it when he can but faces it when he has to. Your hobby is dangerous to be certain, but that’s not what makes you brave. You’re brave because you know the difference between fantasy and reality. And when reality hits you, you strike back.

“I won’t patronize you by tossing around platitudes like ‘I’m sure you’ll do fine’ because I don’t know. However, I believe you can do it. For me that’s enough.”

She simply said, “Thank you,” because there was no phrase that fully expressed her gratitude.

“You’re welcome,” Mercer said because any other reply would have betrayed how much he wanted to kiss her. Anika fell asleep with a trace of a smile on her lips and he wondered if she already knew.