Pandora's Curse

ON THE ICE

The following morning, Mercer found Marty Bishop standing over the graves the team had dug while he was investigating the Air Force Stratofreighter. The others were preparing for the trek, packing everything from sleeping bags and extra Arctic clothes to a cooking stove, propane cylinders, and as much food as they could carry. There had been a few arguments over items individuals felt they had to bring — Marty’s videotapes for his father, Erwin Puhl’s thick journal, even Hilda’s personal recipe book. Mercer won them all. They stripped themselves to the absolute essentials, and even then they were dangerously overloaded. Only Magnus, the Icelandic pilot with the broken arm, would walk unencumbered. Mercer made up for him by carrying the heaviest pack at sixty pounds.

“I didn’t really know her,” Marty said when he felt Mercer’s presence. Ingrid’s tombstone was a piece of metal with her name scratched on one side.

“Doesn’t matter. For a few days she was part of your life. That’s more than enough time to feel grief.”

“We were just having some fun, you know. It would have ended as soon as we got to Iceland.” He wiped his cheeks with a glove. “I would have walked away. Now I can’t.”

“No, you can’t,” Mercer agreed. “She’s going to be with you for a long time. Nothing is as casual as we’d like to think. Especially people.”

“I’ve never spent much time thinking about consequences.”

“I have a feeling you’ll be thinking of nothing else for a while.” Mercer put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll give you a couple more minutes. Then we have to go.”

“Thanks.”

While the fog had lifted, the tracks Mercer had left on his trip to the C-97 had been nearly obliterated by Greenland’s constant wind. For this, he was grateful. It meant that by tomorrow there’d be no trace of their trek, no trail Rath could follow. They reached the Stratofreighter before noon and spent a couple of hours burying what pieces of wreckage were exposed. No one wanted Rath to make the same discovery Mercer had about Major Jack Delaney.

Because he knew the route to the plane, Mercer led, but when they started the long march to the air shaft, each member of the team took a turn at point. Trailblazing in the deep snow was exhausting work that only he and Ira could maintain for more than an hour at a time. Anika spent the day behind the leader, keeping track of their course with a handheld compass taken from the DC-3’s emergency kit. When not at the head of the column, Mercer walked with Marty as he helped Magnus. Anika had found a balance of painkillers to keep the aviator alert yet comfortable for the march. He was young and strong and could maintain their pace despite being unbalanced by his slinged arm.

Protected in the latest foul-weather gear, they had no problem handling the cold. It was exhaustion that slowly ground them down. Because of her size, he’d expected Hilda to have the greatest difficulty, but it was Erwin who needed the most encouragement. By five, the group had covered only a third of the distance, and their pace was a quarter of what it had been when they’d commenced. Mercer’s plan to spend only one night in the open wasn’t going to happen.

Rather than push them beyond their level of endurance, he decided to find cover for the night. Mercer was at point when he made the decision and he veered toward the jagged mountains on their right, hoping to find protection from the strengthening wind. It would have been too much to hope for a cave, but a natural windbreak would have been sorely welcome.

It took another hour of marching to stumble across a V-shaped outcropping of rock that would shield them from the gusts. Gathering storm clouds created a false twilight. Taking a lesson from sled dogs, they began to burrow individual holes in the snow on the rock’s leeward side.

“Not like that,” Anika cautioned when the work began. “We need to double up to share body heat. We won’t survive the night if we don’t.”

She had removed her tinted goggles and her eyes met Mercer’s as the group began to pair off. The invitation was there but she had a duty to her patient. “Magnus, you’re with me.”

The pilot was ashen from the ordeal but managed a cocky grin. “I knew breaking my arm would have a benefit.”

Anika spoke to Hilda, and the chef began expanding her burrow so it would have room for the three of them together. She then whispered to Mercer, “I’ll make sure she doesn’t sneak over to you while you’re asleep.”

Even with the added snow insulation, the night was miserably cold. If not for their deep exhaustion, none of them would have slept. Sometime after midnight, the wind reversed directions and quickly stripped the snow cover from their dens. They scrambled to dig new ones on the other side of the low ridge. This time they hollowed out one large chamber and slept in a tight, uncomfortable ball.

At daybreak, it took several minutes to tunnel back to the surface through the two additional feet of snow that had accumulated above them. They continued onward after a meager breakfast of protein bars and snow melted on their single stove. The wind was driving at their backs. Behind them, their footprints vanished like a jetliner’s dissipating contrail, scoured away by the relentless gusts. Hour after hour they marched north, mindlessly following the person in front of them. It was a demonstration of faith in Anika as their navigator and in Mercer as their leader.

That was why he pushed himself the hardest, taking point when the snow became deeper or the trail more difficult. The responsibility was a weight the others didn’t carry, and for him it was far heavier than the overloaded pack on his shoulders.

At eleven they came across the first really tough terrain. The ice was broken with pressure ridges that had to be climbed and long crevasses measuring at least fifteen feet deep. While some could be jumped, others had to be crossed by descending into the glacier and climbing up the other side, with ropes slung to assist Magnus. Most polar expeditions carried lightweight ladders to cross such formations but Mercer and the others didn’t have the luxury. Their pace was cut in half.

Yet no one complained openly. Their frustration and pain were evident in every movement, but no one said they’d had enough. These five men and two women, strangers until a few days ago, were willing to suffer indescribable agony and deprivation for one another because the others were willing to do it for them.

Surrounded by ice and bitter cold, few of them expected the raging thirst they felt. Not only were they sweating from the exertion, dangerous in itself, but every breath expended precious fluids because the air was desert dry, devoid of all but a trace of humidity. They kept canteens close to their bodies to prevent them from freezing, and still they had to stop every couple of hours to boil snow to replenish them. When they found shelter that evening, an hour later than the first night on the ice, Mercer estimated they hadn’t yet covered the second third of their trip.

Erwin Puhl seemed to be suffering the most from the exposure. The wind had found a chink in his face mask so the tops of his cheeks were showing frostbite. When Anika had him remove his boots, several toes were an unnatural pale white.

“Don’t play hero,” she said angrily as she began to work on him. “If your feet freeze, call a halt to warm them again. If you get severely frostbitten, we won’t be able to carry you.”

“But our pace is too slow as it is,” Erwin countered through gritted teeth as pain splintered his warming toes. “I won’t be the one to let the others down.”

“You will if we have to leave you,” Anika snapped as she rubbed the blood into his feet.

High above, the clouds that had hidden the sky for two days finally cleared. The night exploded in a dazzling display of northern lights, dancing curtains in an otherworldly light show. On the scientific level, Mercer knew the ribbons of color were a result of the solar wind striking certain molecules in the atmosphere — red for nitrogen, violet for ionized nitrogen, and green for oxygen — but it was the aesthetics of the borealis that made him gape with the others. The aurora was visceral, pulsing and seemingly alive.

They watched the show for five minutes before Mercer realized the wind had died.

The pitaraq is a gravity-driven wind. It starts from south and then there is calm. You have about ten minutes to find shelter. It was Igor Bulgarin’s voice Mercer heard in his head.

“Everybody, find cover! Now!” Mercer was in motion even as he spoke.

Like the previous night when the wind had shifted, their hideouts would be on the wrong side of a ridge when the pitaraq struck. Mercer dumped the food he was cooking, cinched his pack, and lunged over the rocky crest. He tumbled down the other side until he landed in deep snow. Quickly he began to dig, scooping out armfuls of snow in a frantic race. A few seconds later, the others joined him. Mercer didn’t bother to explain his actions. His frenzied digging was enough to galvanize them. They tunneled into the snow, burrowing toward the protection of the rocks. Mercer had no way to judge how deep they needed to be. Even when he heard a gentle whisper of wind whistling across the entrance to his tunnel he continued mining snow, trying to pack it behind him as he dug downward.

He flipped on a flashlight, and glittering snow crystals reflected the light like jewels. For an illusionary moment he felt safely cocooned in the snow’s embrace. His breathing was ragged and his hands felt stiff and frozen. He’d dug his tunnel without his gloves. He donned them, massaging his fingers to get the blood flowing again.

“Can anyone hear me?” His voice was deadened by the weight of snow.

“Yes,” Anika replied. She sounded like she was many yards away but was doubtlessly much closer.

“Can you reach me?”

“Yes, I see your light through the snow.”

That was the last voice Mercer heard for the rest of the night, even when Anika bored her way to him and Ira and Erwin found them a short time later. A few feet over their heads, the millions of tons of air that had been blowing northward to form a massive high-pressure area came back in a screaming fury. The transition from a dead calm to a hurricane-force gale was measured in seconds. Snow and ice that had accumulated for years was whipped away, exposing rock that hadn’t seen the surface in decades, if ever.

The noise was a banshee cry that scraped along nerves like an electric current. Even though they were screened by layers of snow, it was still impossible to speak into the shrieking onslaught. Anika burrowed into Mercer’s arms, her body pressed to him as if he could somehow protect her if the wind found them. Ira was mashed to Mercer’s other side and by the other man’s movements Mercer could tell he was clutching one of the others. Marty was on the far side of Anika, lost in Hilda’s panicked embrace.

No power on earth could sustain the amount of energy the wind carried for very long, and after five minutes Mercer was certain the storm had expended itself. The sound seemed to be fading.

He could just barely hear Anika crying.

Then the true wind hit them. The first gust had merely been the prelude to the actual pitaraq. Driven by its own weight, the collapsing high-pressure front acted like water, pouring across the ice, ripping away everything in its path at a speed approaching a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Torn and tortured, the glacier’s surface came alive with raking barrages of snow and ice and rock. They could feel the ground shudder as large chunks of ice slammed into the wall of rock protecting them. Ice cracked like exploding artillery shells. Mercer pressed his gloves to his head, trying to save his hearing from the sound of ten thousand steam whistles erupting at once.

It went on without letup for an hour. Then two. Then three. Screaming just above them with a rapacious hunger unlike anything they had ever heard. Nestled below the surface, Mercer knew that if the wind found them he’d never know it. They’d be pulled from their burrow and tossed miles before the act could register. It would be a quick way to die, and by the fifth hour he was wondering if death would have been preferable to the relentless fear of surviving the storm.

Slowly, slowly it began to register that he could hear Anika again. She was mumbling, a prayer perhaps, but what mattered was that her voice could be heard above the storm’s screech. Mercer sagged in relief. He pulled her face from where it was buried under his arm. Her eyes were enormous, and yet he could see determination in them.

“The wind’s dying.”

She nodded in understanding, barely able to hear his voice. Her grip relaxed to a hug that in any other circumstance Mercer would have enjoyed. He reached across her and felt for Marty’s hand, giving him a reassuring squeeze before turning so he could speak to Ira.

“Think we can chance digging ourselves out?” the submariner asked before Mercer could pose the same question. “Erwin’s on the other side of me, and it turns out he’s claustrophobic. I don’t want to be here when he regains consciousness.”

“What happened to him?”

“He held on until about an hour ago and then he freaked out. I had to put a choke hold on him.”

Mercer was impressed by the unorthodox cure. “You learn that trick in the Navy?”

In the glare of the flashlight, Ira flashed a wry smile. “Actually I did. The current captain of the attack sub Tallahassee owes his career to me for getting him over his fear of cramped spaces.”

As the pitaraq subsided, Mercer and Ira began to claw at the surface of their den, compressing the fallen snow to the side or beneath themselves as they expanded the burrow. In ten minutes they could kneel upright, and in twenty they could stand, using the hollows where they’d waited out the storm for the waste snow.

“I feel like a goddamn mole,” Ira said.

“You go a few more days without a shower, you’ll smell like one too.” Mercer felt they were almost to the surface. “Any idea about Magnus?”

“I lost track shortly after the storm hit.”

“While I’m digging, see if you can find him.”

“You got it.”

By Mercer’s watch, it was a quarter of three in the morning when the tunnel face collapsed on him. He thrashed against the snow and suddenly found himself free. He stood, quickly shaking snow off himself like a dog after a water retrieve, not realizing how warm the tunnel had become until he tasted the crisp Arctic air once again. In the dim light of a hidden moon he looked around. It appeared as if nothing had changed but the drift that had entombed them was substantially deeper and longer than it had been. Other than that, the snow ripped from the ice had been replaced by identical snow from farther up the coast. Even in the face of such an awesome force as the pitaraq, Greenland remained virtually unchanged.

Erwin was the next to emerge, clawing his way out like a monster in a 1950s B movie, and then came the others. Marty was the last to crawl out of the hole. While Mercer dug, they had spent the past hour in a vain search for Magnus. Mercer feared the worst.

A hundred yards south was another outcropping of rock similar to the one that had protected them. Its windward side was cleaned of all traces of snow. Mercer fished a pair of binoculars from his pack, but there wasn’t enough light to discern details on the ridge’s shadowed face. He told Ira to reorganize the remaining gear and started out, swimming through the snow as much as walking. Twenty yards from the crest he saw what remained of the pilot.

The pitaraq had plucked Magnus from his tunnel like a raptor snatched its prey and slammed him into the rock. The wind had acted like a sandblaster, stripping him nearly naked and ripping away much of his skin so that frozen blood pooled around the crumpled body. From a distance, Mercer could see that the pilot’s skull had been flattened by the collision.

Returning to the tunnel entrance, where the others had gathered, Mercer told them that the pilot had been killed by the storm. They slept for the remainder of the night in the tunnel, and this time Mercer didn’t make any excuses for Anika not to rest in his arms. It felt too right not to let it happen. He drifted off with the memory of her lips on his cheek and her whispered “You saved six of us. Don’t think about the one you didn’t.” She knew he would take Magnus’s death personally.

They emerged from their underground shelter when the sky was still a shimmering canopy of stars. By the looks on their faces, many of them had already come to grips with Magnus’s loss. Rather than dwell on their failure, they took strength from knowing the icy island had thrown the worst it had at them and they had survived. They had another twelve miles to cover.

Just before they started out again, Marty took Mercer aside, his face a mask of shame. “I lost the satellite phone,” he mumbled. “I was testing to see if I could get a signal when the wind hit us. I managed to keep my backpack, but the phone… I’m sorry.”

Mercer remained silent. There was nothing he could do or say to change what had happened. They had just lost their only means of communication, and the odyssey facing them had become doubly difficult. It was no longer enough to evade Rath until he abandoned his search for the Pandora cavern. Now they would have to trek back to civilization again.

Once Anika had navigated them back to their original course, the pain-racked journey continued. Without cloud cover, the temperature dropped dramatically, and every breath was like inhaling acid. It froze tender lung tissue and caused nosebleeds if air was drawn through unprotected nostrils. Mercer had to continuously rotate his scarf when the fleece became clogged with frozen mucus and condensation.

“Where’s that global warming we were promised?” Ira grumbled at lunch.

The terrain eased some, quickening their pace, but it took its toll. Legs that seemed fresh following a break began aching after only a few steps and they constantly had to adjust their clothing as frigid air found tiny entrances, piercing right to the flesh before they could recover themselves. Urinating was done only when absolutely necessary. The women suffered the most during the act but the men made a bigger deal out of it. Ira had the best line when he described the process as making a “dickcicle.”

His humor and positive outlook helped keep the exhaustion at bay.

At four that afternoon, Mercer’s estimate put the air shaft a half mile ahead. He could see that their march had led them to the mountains thrusting through the glacier at the head of the fjord he’d seen from the cockpit of the DC-3. The mountains — bald round hills really — were a thousand feet high and had been so ravaged by glacial movement that their domed sides were riven with scars. He was looking to the west, toward the interior of Greenland, to survey the surroundings, when he suddenly dropped flat to the snow, screaming at the others to do the same.

If the sky hadn’t been free of clouds, he never would have seen the distant speck. It was the rotor-stat plying its way serenely northward. Knowing the clarity of polar optics, he guessed the dirigible was five miles away.

“Bury yourselves!” Like a beached seal, Mercer paddled snow onto his back, struggling to camouflage his red parka and green pack. His heart pounded painfully, and he took a bite of snow to moisten his dry mouth. Jesus, that was close.

He peered over his shoulder and saw the team had followed him without question. In seconds they were nothing more than six innocuous-looking lumps in the snow. He couldn’t chance reaching for his binoculars because the sun’s reflection off the lens would flash like a beacon. Since the airship was continuing past his estimated position for the air shaft, Mercer’s earlier opinion that Rath didn’t have its exact location was true. They were moving their secondary base too far north. This would buy Mercer the time they desperately needed.

“Be thankful the weather has been so rotten,” he said when the airship vanished around a promontory. “It’s delayed them as much as it has us.”

“How much time do you think we have?” Anika asked, brushing snow off his back.

“I don’t know,” Mercer replied absently, watching the spot where the rotor-stat had disappeared. “Not as much as I’d like.”

“Figure they’ll bring three Sno-Cats up here and at least one building,” Ira said. “Four round-trips, six hours flight time, an hour loading. That’s a little over twenty-four hours if they fly around the clock.”

“Or half that if they’d already moved stuff before the pitaraq,” Mercer added.

With a renewed urgency, they continued walking. Mercer had the point and pushed at a brutal pace. His legs burned from the strain of clearing a path for his people, and yet he maintained a gait not much slower than a trot. He kept watch for the rotor-stat and studied the rock formations as he moved. The mountains were like a string of beads impeding the glacier from reaching the sea, and as they rounded one more in the long line, a wicked smile split Mercer’s chapped lips.

“Anika, you still have that map?”

“Yes.”

“Take a look at it and tell me what you see above the X.”

“Looks like the profile of a face. A face with a big nose.”

“Kind of like the one on the side of that mountain up there?” Mercer pointed at a natural design cut into the stone by aeons of erosion. It looked remarkably like a human face in profile. The lips were out of proportion, but the nose was unmistakable, as were the deep-set eyes. The formation loomed like a sentinel high above the ice.

“My God,” she breathed.

“The last piece of the puzzle.” Mercer grinned. “I wondered about that drawing when I first saw it. Now I get it. It was the laborer’s way of telling us exactly where to look.”

“With a little imagination you can even think the face up there is Jewish.”

“If you’re referring to the nose, that’s an ugly stereotype.”

“I’m Jewish. It’s okay. You ought to see the beak on my grandfather.” She smiled up at him. “You think the air shaft is beneath the face?”

“We’ll know soon enough.” Before Mercer let them proceed, he spent a few minutes with the Geiger counter checking for radiation. As they followed far behind him, he kept his eyes on the monitor, fearful that the counter would peg over at any second. So far it was giving just faint chirps of background radiation.

A hundred yards from the near-vertical mountain, the Geiger began to tick a little more rapidly. Mercer held up his hand to halt the others and paused to see how far the readings would go. The level was slightly higher than he’d encountered in the C-97 but a few weeks’ worth of exposure would be below the danger level provided no one got X-rayed for a while.

There were certain fears Mercer couldn’t purge from his brain, and radiation was one of them. He hated it. It reminded him of firedamp gas in coal mines, invisible in its touch and insidious in its death. There was no defense except avoidance.

He walked slowly. The snow near the base of the mountain had become ankle-deep slush. He wondered how close Stefansson Rosmunder had been to this very spot fifty years ago during his search for the C- 97. Close, he estimated, considering the dose needed to kill him so swiftly. Not knowing the half-life or dissipation rate of an extraterrestrial element, Mercer proceeded with deliberation, like he was walking through a minefield.

Tick. Tick. Tick, tick, tick. Tickticktick.

Mercer’s eyes dropped to the Geiger counter. Twenty-five RADs, about a quarter of the dose needed to cause radiation sickness or about eight times the average yearly exposure people received from background radiation. They would be safe for a while, but each moment brought an increased possibility of cancer later in life.

Nothing around him looked like a likely radiation source. There was no meteor impact evidence on the side of the mountain nor were there signs of Otto Schroeder’s air shaft, no tailings of waste rock from their mining. He looked up and saw he was still ten yards to the left of the face. Moving laterally and trying to ignore the clicking counter, Mercer knew he was close. The ice had become even more watery, as if heated from below. Erwin had told them that pieces of the meteor kept in the Russian villages melted snow even in winter.

Without warning, the ground opened up and swallowed Mercer in a wet rush. He fell about ten feet and landed heavily on his backside in a small ice cave. It was an antechamber at the head of the Nazi air shaft. Ahead of him was the long tube descending into the glacier. A wall of icy slurry surged down the eight-foot-diameter tunnel. Had this cave not had a level floor, it would have carried him headlong into the earth as though he’d been flushed down an enormous drain. The moment of terror that had tripped his heart gave way to awe as he surveyed his surroundings. He wasn’t even aware of the pain from the fall.

Then he saw the body.

It was badly decomposed, merely a skeleton dressed in gray rags adorned with brass buttons and piping and medals. He recognized the rotted insignia on the corpse’s uniform. He had been a sailor in the German Kreigsmarine, specifically the U-boat service. If Mercer needed any more proof that Erwin Puhl’s story was true, here it was. But that wasn’t what filled him with wonder. It was what lay next to the seated body: the two-foot-square box of pure gold stamped with the swastika-clutching eagle of the Third Reich.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he breathed, superstitious ripples charging his skin like static. The Nazis had called their operation the Pandora Project, meaning he was looking at a true Pandora’s box, its contents as deadly as the evils the mythological one once contained.

“Mercer? Are you all right?” Anika yelled from above, her voice strained by concern.

“Yes,” he replied. “Stay back.”

The Geiger counter had been turned off by the fall and he flipped it back on. The meter thankfully registered the same dosage as he’d found before his sudden plunge. He held the probe first to the box and then the corpse, finding that it was the sailor’s body emitting radiation and not the container of Satan’s Fist. The reading was significantly higher than from the survivor he’d found at Camp Decade, meaning this man had received a much more powerful dose, fatal in minutes rather than weeks.

But what about Stefansson Rosmunder and the crew of the C-97? Mercer wondered. How strongly had they been hit? Was it exposure to the corpse or the meteor itself that killed them? Rosmunder had lasted six months after returning from this area, so Mercer guessed it was an acute dose of residual radiation from the body. Considering how they had all bled out, he presumed the airmen were killed by a radioactive blast from the fragment sealed in the box. The sailor must have opened it, killing the flight crew and himself.

Why, after surviving for ten years, did he commit suicide and murder? Madness? Desperation?

Mercer put his hand on the gilded crate, noting that its surface was warm to the touch. Then he realized why the shaft hadn’t been buried any deeper. The environment and the box had come to a kind of balance, melting away much of the snow that fell here but leaving enough to cover the tunnel’s entrance. That was why there weren’t hundreds of feet of ice blocking the shaft. It wasn’t until he came along that his added weight overcame the equilibrium between Arctic cold and radioactive warmth and exposed the air vent. Eventually, as the meteor fragments decayed, the heat would diminish and the glacier would forever seal the tunnel.

He gave the box a shove and realized that, while it was heavy, it wasn’t solid. Straining to gain traction on the slick floor, he pushed it against the corpse, pressing the disintegrated pile of bones into the wall of the excavation, partially shielding the space from its deadly rays. The Geiger counter dropped noticeably. Next he unfolded the thermal blanket from his pack and draped it over the box to reduce the amount of heat it radiated. He would use the other blankets each person carried to further dampen the warmth, so when they blocked the entrance, the container wouldn’t melt away their effort.

“Hey down there, what’d you find?” It was Ira.

“What’s left of a German sailor and part of his set of golden luggage. Mind tossing me a rope?”

“Have you out in a second.”

Back on the surface, Mercer changed his wet parka and snow pants for the spare ones they’d brought for an emergency, and he told the others what he’d found. The idea of walking past the radioactive body had a chilling effect on them even after he explained that their exposure wouldn’t be too dangerous. Like him, they were all terrified by radiation.

It took a half hour to pile enough snow near the opening to seal the hole and erase their presence. With the Pandora box, as Mercer already thought of it, covered by the “space blankets,” the slush would freeze to concrete hardness in a few hours. Rath would need weeks and a lucky break to find them. Both of which, Mercer mused grimly, he would no doubt have.

They lowered each other one by one into the antechamber until only Mercer remained on the surface. He mounded snow around the hole, shrinking the aperture until it was barely large enough to admit him. He took one last look at the setting sun and allowed himself to fall into the ice, his landing cushioned by waiting arms below. Flashlights had already been snapped on, their beams vanishing into the bowels of the glacier.

“We ready?” he asked brightly, hoping to dispel their apprehension.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Marty said as he looked down the stygian air shaft.

“It drives me nuts when they use that line in the movies.” Mercer stopped and turned, his eyebrows raised in a mocking expression. “Marty, do you think any of us have a good feeling about walking through an oversize Nazi sewer pipe that leads to a radioactive chamber filled with God knows what?”

Together, they started the long descent into the unknown.