Pandora's Curse

THE PANDORA CAVERN

The flashlight beam pushed back the gloom for only a few dozen yards before being swallowed by impenetrable darkness. With Mercer in the lead, the group chased the retreating ring of light, marching downward at a steady pace, protected by a thin bubble of illumination in an otherwise cold black realm. Otto Schroeder had engineered the sloping tunnel so those walking through it would never lose traction on the icy floor, and every hundred feet the entire shaft leveled out for a yard or two in case someone did fall.

Without the wind, the air was a constant thirty-two degrees, and after so long in below-freezing conditions, many of them had unzipped their parkas. None of them were yet comfortable enough to speak. The walk through the passage was punctuated only by the rustle of equipment and the slap of their boots. Even the Geiger counter in Mercer’s free hand had remained silent since they’d slipped past the corpse at the tunnel’s entrance. They continued ever downward, wending through living rock and glacial ice.

After thirty minutes, Mercer estimated they had walked nearly two miles into the mountain and had descended a thousand feet. He knew they had to be approaching sea level. Suddenly the light that had cocooned them no longer brushed the walls. It had vanished into an enormous gallery. Mercer stopped, checking the floor to see that it had leveled out. The ground was bare rock, mined smooth during World War Two.

“I think we’ve reached the bottom.”

Training the light upward, he could just barely see the underside of the cavern, an ugly mixture of ice and rock hanging fifty feet above them. Others snapped on their own lights and more details emerged. The cavern was roughly circular, at least five hundred feet in diameter, and domed. All around them, huge tongues of glacial ice were being forced into the cave through fissures in the stone. In a few centuries, the ice would eventually reclaim the space that the Nazis had carved for themselves. Ahead, the floor dropped off to still black water. Mercer imagined that somewhere across the water was another entrance to the cavern, a submerged grotto accessible only by submarine. He strode across the cavern to the water’s edge. By the high-tide lines staining the edge of the quay he knew that the path to the open ocean had remained clear after all this time.

“Must be the tides that keep it open,” Ira said as he approached. “If you look closely you can see currents in the water.”

Mercer dropped to his belly so he could reach over the side of the pier that Otto Schroeder had built and dipped his hand in the frigid water. He tasted it and spat back into the pool. “Typical salinity. It hasn’t been diluted by ice melt.”

“I bet if we had a submarine we could get out of here without Rath ever knowing it.”

Mercer’s attention was fixed on a large gray shape in the water at the far side of the pier. “I’ll be goddamned. Wishing it makes it true.”

Ira Lasko had to jog to catch up. Mercer called to the others with lights and they converged at the water’s edge, close to one side of the chamber. “I can’t believe it.”

Low in the water sat a German U-boat that looked like she’d just slipped down the ways. The paint on her upper works seemed freshly applied and there were only a few streaks of surface rust along the side of her outer hull. Her conning tower stood about twelve feet above her flat deck, ringed halfway up by a tubular steel railing. Her designation, U-1062, was stenciled on her tower, and she looked as sleek and deadly now as she had generations ago.

“No deck gun,” Ira said after a moment’s examination.

“What?”

“This is a type VII, the most widely constructed version. Over seven hundred, if I remember correctly. She should have an 88mm cannon just forward of the conning tower.” He rubbed the sprouting beard on his chin. “I think this is one of the special torpedo resupply subs the Germans built. She wouldn’t need armament if they were using her to transport cargo in and out of this cave. Notice the rubber membrane on the conning tower. That’s Tarnmatte, an antiradar coating. She was built for stealth.”

“I’m glad I never took up your trivia challenge about submarines,” Mercer said, impressed by the breadth of Lasko’s knowledge.

“When you spend your life in one of these monsters, it’s good to know their history.” The gangway spanning the narrow gulf between sub and shore was a short distance away. Ira shot Mercer a look.

“Let’s explore the rest of this place before we board her.”

“You have a plan?”

Mercer grinned. “Always.”

“A good one?”

“Rarely.”

For the next hour, they split into teams and scoured the chamber. There were four separate caverns carved off the main cave as well as a long tunnel bored parallel to the air vent. This shaft did not rise up into the glacier but ran level for eighty yards until ending abruptly in a pile of loose boulders and chunks of ice, obviously the result of a cave-in. One of the side chambers had been a machine shop for repairing mining equipment, such as generators, pneumatic drills, lights, and small utility loaders. Ira Lasko remained in the workshop while the others continued their exploration.

Another cavern, about half the size of the central one, had been a dormitory and was filled with rows of bunk beds stacked four high. Mercer confirmed the slave laborers had used it when he found a Star of David painstakingly carved into the underside of one of the beds. There were enough bunks for five hundred people, double or even triple that if the workers were forced to sleep in shifts. Most were neatly made, the single blanket stretched taut. A few were rumpled and he could see the outline of the last person to sleep there. That was all that remained of the man or woman. An impression.

It was all that remained of any of them.

Fists clenched, he backed out of the dormitory, refusing to turn away until he returned to the main cavern.

Buildings for administration, planning, and housing of the Nazi overseers had been erected in the central chamber. Walking through them was like stepping into a museum. Uniforms hung neatly in closets, dishes were stacked in cupboards, and a deck of cards had been left on a table as if the players had just stepped away for a moment.

“Where are the bodies?” Marty Bishop asked when they left the Germans’ dorm.

“I’m not sure.” Mercer had been scanning everything with the Geiger counter and had yet to find any trace of the Pandora radiation.

“Hey, Mercer.” Erwin Puhl was at the water’s edge, standing between a storage dump of forty-four-gallon fuel drums and crates of other cargo.

As he approached, Mercer could see that Erwin had stripped a tarpaulin from a pile of boxes. When his light fell on the topmost, a golden reflection flashed back at him. Pandora boxes. He estimated there were at least thirty of them, and all were larger than the one they had found at the surface. These measured about five feet square and were three feet tall. He waved the counter over the neat stack, detecting nothing. The Germans had obviously learned how to properly seal the meteorite fragments.

There was a palpable amount of heat washing off the gilded crates. Meltwater dripped from the ceiling high above them, running off the pier and into the sea.

“Look at this.” Erwin indicated the top box, and Mercer climbed the pile.

This one did not have a lid and he could see that the interior was baffled with diminishing sized boxes like a Russian nesting doll, though all were made of sheets of pure gold.

“Any idea why they made them like this?” Erwin asked.

“Heat dissipation,” Mercer replied, jumping back to the ground. He felt along the edge of another box, where its internal structure would be attached to the outer shell, and found it was warmer there than on the flat sides. “They couldn’t make the boxes solid for cost and weight reasons, so they used as little gold as possible, designing them this way so the whole thing didn’t become too hot to handle.”

“Clever bastards,” Marty remarked sardonically.

A shrill scream pierced the air. Mercer led the two men as they raced across the chamber to where Hilda stood with Anika Klein. The chef’s face was pale and tears were running down her rounded cheeks. Anika stroked Hilda’s hair, trying to calm her.

“What happened?”

“In there.” Anika gestured to a small aperture in the towering rock wall that Mercer hadn’t noticed before.

Tensed as he ducked into the hole, Mercer held the Geiger counter at the ready. He moved through the cramped space, twisting his body as he scraped along the rough stone, the beam of his light showing nothing. The passage ended at a ledge overlooking another cave, the bottom of which was littered with tens of thousands of cans and a heavy scattering of bleached white bones.

Closing his eyes and taking a deep, calming breath, Mercer braced himself for a more careful examination. He studied the bones for a moment and fell back against the wall, a wave of relief momentarily robbing him of energy. He backed out of the passage to rejoin the others.

“It’s a garbage dump. Hilda saw bones in there and thought they were human. They’re not. They’re seal bones.”

“Seal?”

“To supplement the food the Germans brought here, the two survivors hunted seals that ventured into the cavern through the submarine tunnel.”

“That’s how they survived for ten years down here,” Ira said, wiping grease from his hands. “The provisions couldn’t have lasted from the war until 1953.”

“I bet they could,” Mercer countered. “With a thousand people working in here, they needed tons of stores. If the accident that killed everyone occurred right after a supply run there would have been more than enough canned goods to support two men for ten years. Especially if they killed an occasional seal.”

“That explains why the man at Camp Decade had such rotten teeth,” Anika said as Hilda composed herself once again. “Even with fresh meat, ten years without fruits and vegetables would cause scurvy.”

“But where is everybody?” Marty asked for the second time.

“Since I haven’t found any radiation,” Mercer answered, “I think the corpses have been moved to another chamber and sealed inside to protect the two men who survived the accident.”

“You think it was a radiation leak that killed them?”

“What else could it have been?” Mercer said. “They all died at the same time. Otherwise, they would have escaped on the sub. The man we found at Camp Decade and the one at the entrance must have been on the surface when the cave was dosed with radiation. They could have waited up there for the radiation to dissipate to a safe level before returning underground. Then they could have moved the bodies to a side chamber and buried them.”

“How is it they didn’t get killed by the residual radioactivity still in the bodies?” Anika asked. “The ones we found are still radioactive after sixty years.”

“I don’t know.”

“The Germans must have had protective clothing for themselves,” Erwin offered.

“Why didn’t the Navy officer use it when he opened the box when the C-97 flew over?”

No one had an answer to Ira’s question.

“Let’s get closer to the Pandora boxes, where it’s warmer, and discuss our options,” Mercer suggested. “I have a surprise and an idea.”

“I’ll meet you there in a second,” Ira said and went back to the repair shop.

Once they were settled, Mercer pulled a nearly full brandy bottle from his pack. “Surprise.”

“I couldn’t take my father’s videotapes and you brought booze?” Marty said angrily. “That’s not very fair.”

“I said essentials only.” Mercer took a pull. “I consider alcohol an essential. If you don’t want any, feel free to give up your share.”

“I didn’t say that,” Marty backpedaled. “So what’s your idea?”

A low rumbling sound prevented Mercer from replying, and from the side of the chamber, a bright glow appeared in the machine shop before being suddenly doused. “Damn!” Ira cursed. A moment later the light returned and stayed on.

“What did you do?” Mercer shouted as Ira appeared from the shop. Lasko’s grin went from ear to ear.

“Played a hunch,” Ira said. “I noticed the uniform shoulder tabs on the body up the tunnel were the brass cog wheels of the Kreigsmarine engineer corps. The guy had been the sub’s chief engineer. As a mechanic myself, I guessed that he spent the last ten years of his life making sure everything in this place was in perfect running condition. It’s what I would have done.”

“But in the fifty years since he died, wouldn’t everything rust? And wouldn’t the fuel go bad?” Erwin asked.

“In normal conditions this place would resemble a scrap heap but the low temperature means there’s virtually no humidity. Nothing rusts. Hell, the brass buttons on the uniforms are barely tarnished. As to the fuel, the Germans used diesel with a low cloud point for Arctic conditions. All I had to do was drain the water at the bottom of a can as a result of phase separation, strain out the sediment, and preheat it over a can of Sterno to put the paraffin back in the solution. I had to crank the generator like a bastard to flush the kerosene our German friend used as a rust inhibitor, but it should smooth out in a minute or two as it lubricates itself.”

“I just can’t believe it,” Erwin persisted. “My car won’t start after just one cold night.”

“You’re hearing and seeing the proof. The generator works like a charm. With proper care, you can leave an engine for decades and all you need to start it is a good battery. That’s what prevents your car from turning over. Cold temperature saps their power. Since the portable generator starts off a flywheel, all it required was about fifty pulls on the cord. It’s the lightbulbs that have lost their seals over time. The first one blew as soon as the electrical current hit it.”

“Well this changes a few things,” Mercer said as his original idea evolved. “I had a feeling we’d find a sub down here when Erwin first mentioned that’s how this base was supplied. The Germans would have kept one here at all times so they could transport the fragments as soon as they were ready, which means its crew would have died with everyone else. I’d thought that we could hide from Rath in it by submerging in the lagoon.”

“Without power how would we have surfaced again?”

“By opening a hatch and swimming out,” Mercer answered. “Can’t be that deep in here. Now I wonder if we need to hang around at all.”

Ira guessed at Mercer’s intention. “Just because I got a one-cylinder generator running doesn’t mean the sub’ll still work.”

“If the engineer took that much time on the generator, it stands to reason his U-boat is in excellent condition too.”

Ira weighed Mercer’s logic for a second and nodded. “Possibly.”

“You’re proposing we sail it out of here?”

“Without Ira I never would have considered it, but he used to teach submarine operations at the Navy’s sub school in Groton, Connecticut. If he can train teenagers to run a nuclear vessel, he can teach the six of us how to maneuver this antique. Correct me if I’m wrong, Ira, but the principles haven’t changed much in fifty years.”

“Haven’t changed much in a hundred years really,” Lasko agreed. “Nuke boats have a lot more automated controls. That fish over there is bare bones, uses muscles to open and close valves.”

“If nothing more, we can use the U-boat to hide ourselves. But if we can get her running, I think our best bet is to get the hell out of here.” Mercer looked each of them in the eye as he spoke. “Without Marty’s satellite phone we’re still stranded when Rath and his goons leave here. It’ll take weeks to walk the six hundred miles to Ammassalik. Considering we barely survived the past couple of days, I doubt we’d make it a quarter of that distance.”

“Why the hell did you bring us up here instead of having the pilot land us closer to Ammassalik?” Marty asked angrily. “None of this needed to happen. Radioactive bodies. Golden boxes filled with Christ knows what. Maybe Ingrid would have—”

“Marty, calm down!” Ira shouted right back. “Mercer had a good goddamned reason. The plane would have crashed a hundred miles from the town. We’d have died closer to it — that’s all. Ingrid would have been just as dead. I’m sorry. At least now we have a chance.”

“But my sat-phone?”

“Probably wouldn’t have gotten a signal until long after we froze,” Ira stated. “Mercer’s been buying us time every step of the way, so cut him some slack. All right?”

Marty fell silent.

Capping the brandy bottle, Mercer looked around the circle of expectant faces, proud of them all for handling the past days so well. “Here’s my plan. I would like Anika and Erwin, since you read German, to search the administrative offices thoroughly for evidence. I’ve noticed Kohl’s name is stenciled on a lot of the equipment lying around, and now I’m pretty sure Rath’s job is to destroy it and erase any link his company has to this place. We need paperwork and documents that implicate Kohl for when this nightmare is over. Just make sure you don’t leave any indications that we were here. Marty and Hilda can give Ira a hand with anything he needs.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to work with Ira.” He looked at Anika. “As soon as your search is done, join us. We don’t have much time.”

“Okay, boys and girl, let’s get busy,” Ira said with the mock cheer of a drill instructor.

“What’s first?”

“I’m going into the boat to check it out. I want you three to start on the fuel. You need to drain the bottom few inches of water from each drum without stirring up the sediment. There’s a chain fall in the machine shop you can bring out to lift the barrels. Later, we’ll devise a filtering system. I should be able to jury-rig a preheater aboard the boat so we don’t need to cook each drum when we’re ready to load.”

“How much fuel do you think we need?” Marty asked, eyeing the hundred or more barrels stacked next to the U-boat. It would be an exhausting job.

“Let’s see. The typical type VII has two six-cylinder supercharged G.W. diesels that could push them along at about sixteen knots on the surface and double-commutator electric motors that produce about five hundred horsepower for a top submerged speed of approximately seven knots.” Ira looked upward as if doing mental arithmetic and then grinned sadistically. “That means we need all the fuel we can get into her.”

“I was afraid of that.”

By the light from the portable lamps wired to the generator, Mercer and the others got to work while Ira disappeared into the U-boat. After establishing a system and a rhythm, they had managed to prepare fifty of the drums when the slender submariner reemerged from the vessel. His parka and snow pants were streaked with grime, and his face was tiger-striped by smudge marks.

“How’s she look?” Mercer called to Ira, who stood atop the conning tower surveying their progress.

“That engineer knew what the hell he was doing.” He laughed. “I’ve seen new cars fresh off the assembly line in worse condition than this old girl.”

“You think this is going to work?”

“I honestly think it will. I was worried about the rubber gaskets and hoses, but they’ve been treated with something. While they’re stiff as hell, they should hold okay once they warm up. Just in case, I’m only going to run one engine and have the hoses from the other ready as spares.”

“What about the batteries? We’ll need to charge them if we’re going to get out of here.”

“He drained the hydrochloric acid from them and stored it in big glass bottles, so none of the batteries have been eaten away. I’ve just started refilling the sixty-three cells in the aft battery room. That should be enough juice to clear the tunnel and reach the surface.”

“Our priority is to make sure we can submerge her once Rath shows up. We’ll worry about getting out of here later.”

“In that case, we’ll start loading the diesel into her main tanks as soon as I check them for water seepage. This way we can use her Junkers compressor to fill the air tanks for when we want to surface again.”

Mercer checked his watch. He was stunned to see it was past midnight. Without the sun to guide his circadian cycle, he hadn’t realized that they’d been on the move for twenty straight hours. “We’ll start that after we grab a few hours’ sleep.”

Hilda sagged when she recognized the English word sleep. “Danke.”

“Where the hell are Anika and Erwin?” Marty asked, dropping to the stone floor and propping his back against a barrel.

“Obviously they found something of interest.” Ira climbed down the conning tower and crossed the gangway to the dock.

Hilda took over cooking duties from Mercer when he started gathering provisions from the packs, freeing him to find Anika. He found her slumped over the desk in the administration building’s largest office. Erwin Puhl was asleep on a threadbare couch. Mercer touched Anika’s shoulder and she came awake with a guilty start.

“Oh, God. I am so sorry.” She saw that Erwin had also succumbed to exhaustion. “We were reading and took a quick break” — she looked at her watch — “three hours ago.”

“That’s okay.” Mercer smiled. “We’ve just knocked off outside. Have you found anything?”

“Everything,” Anika replied, fire replacing the sleep in her eyes. “Names, dates, orders, procedures, the works. If we get out of here, Kohl AG is finished.”

“What about the two men who survived the accident that killed everyone else. Did they leave any kind of a journal?”

“That’s what Erwin was reading.”

The scientist came awake when he heard his name. He slipped on his glasses. “You were right about a great many of your conjectures, Mercer. One of them was a Jewish slave laborer named Isidore Schild. The other was the submarine’s chief engineer, Wolfgang Rossler. They were on the glacier when one of the Pandora boxes dropped from a crane and spilled its contents. The radiation blast killed everyone in the chamber an hour after they got the fragments safely into another box. Schild and Rossler remained outside for two weeks, freezing and starving until they felt it was safe to enter again. The protective suits the Germans brought couldn’t take a direct blast of radiation, but it did shield them when they moved the contaminated bodies into the excavation and backfilled it by blowing up what they called the hanging wall.”

“That’s a mining term for the ceiling of a tunnel,” Mercer explained. “They must be talking about the shaft leading to where the meteorite fragments came to a rest after melting down to bedrock.”

“Yes, that’s right. They couldn’t operate the submarine with only the two of them, so they were marooned. Necessity ended any animosity between the two men. They lived off the food supplies and killed the few seals that came into the cavern. For the first few years they tried to signal Allied aircraft that ventured nearby on their flights to and from England, but it was rare any planes came this far north. They assumed after several years that when no more planes approached the war had ended.”

“Jesus.” Mercer shuddered at the idea of being isolated for so long.

“Schild’s journal is filled with anecdotes about their time here. He was a remarkably generous man toward Rossler, considering the circumstances. I’ll tell you the details later if you’d like. They decided that the only way to attract attention was if they could shoot down one of the passing planes. Since they had only small arms from the submarine, the only weapon capable of crashing an aircraft was the radiation from one of the boxes. They dragged the smallest one to the surface and took turns every day waiting for a plane to fly low enough and close enough for a direct dose of Pandora radiation to kill its crew. For eight long years they waited until the C-97 flew over. Rossler was at the entrance, so Schild doesn’t know the exact details. He guessed that maybe the plane had engine trouble. Anyway, Rossler opened the box, sacrificing his own life for Schild’s, and downed the plane.

“As soon as the radiation dissipated enough for his suit to protect him, Schild went in search of the plane but couldn’t find it. After two weeks he returned to the cavern. Despondent, he finally gave up a short while later and left, packing up enough provisions to sustain him for a week. The seals had long stopped coming, so he was dying of scurvy anyway. He wrote a beautiful suicide note at the end of his journal, which leads me to believe he knew nothing of Camp Decade.”

“Want to know the sickest part of this?” Mercer said when Erwin fell silent. “Had he stayed in the vicinity of the cave entrance after the plane crash, he probably would have seen Stefansson Rosmunder as he searched for the wrecked Stratofreighter. He passed near enough to this place to give himself a fatal dose of radiation from Rossler’s body.”

The tales of Japanese soldiers surviving on remote islands long after the war were tame compared to the hardships Rossler and Schild endured only to die so close to rescue.

“There are other parts of Schild’s journal,” Anika said, “that are much, much worse.” She held out her hand to Erwin for the journal. She thumbed through to the passage she wanted, pausing to build the strength to reread it. “This takes place at the height of the mining operation.” Her translation came fluidly, as though she’d already memorized the passage.

The heavy silence in the room served to amplify Anika’s sobs. Mercer too felt the salty sting of tears in his eyes. A handful of the abstract six million had names and faces for him now. He made a silent vow to stop at nothing until Kohl paid for what they had done. For him there was no ambiguity about responsibility. “Kohl AG is going down.” He was unaware he spoke aloud.

Anika looked at him and was a bit frightened by what she saw. His rage was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. It shimmered off him like heat waves. For the first time she realized Mercer’s capacity for revenge.

Since they didn’t know how long they would remain isolated, their meal was a light one. Their rations would be proportioned to sustain them for a week to ten days. Too exhausted to let rumbling bellies distract them, they slept like the dead until Ira Lasko’s watch alarm roused them six hours later.

Because of the physical strength needed to move the three-hundred-fifty-pound fuel drums, Erwin and Anika were given the job of degreasing the machinery in the U-boat with rags under Ira’s guidance. He spent the morning cleaning the sub’s port diesel engine and checking that her electric motor would operate by jumping it with the portable generator. Ira had to scavenge wiring from the starboard power plant to get it running smoothly but was satisfied with his efforts. Mercer spent part of the morning rigging a trip wire device near the surface entrance. He formed a sheet of lead into a tight ball that would roll down the tunnel once a lanyard was brushed by passing feet. He placed a metal plate at the bottom of the tunnel that would reverberate like a bell when the ball struck it. Even if Rath’s men sprinted down to the cavern, the ball would beat them by ten minutes, giving Mercer and his group enough time to submerge the boat. The whole setup looked innocuous enough to evade suspicion once Rath found it.

They put in eighteen hours of work that day and slept, if possible, harder that night. Before Mercer would let them into their sleeping bags, he made certain that all evidence of their presence had been erased and that everything was packed for the dash to the U-boat if necessary. They’d considered sleeping on the boat but didn’t have enough people to move one of the heavy Pandora boxes into it to provide heat.

The following morning, the exertion and cold made them lethargic and ill-tempered. They loaded fuel all morning, a filthy job that left them reeling from the fumes. By lunch, Ira had tested all the sub’s valves and he was confident that, when the time came, she would dive. With her air tanks charged off her compressor, she would resurface too. He’d also managed to coax a few minutes of running time off the port engine and knew what needed to be done to get it running at full power. He announced that they were ready with the exception of her batteries.

He’d filled a few with acid so they would hold a charge for lighting the boat but the rest remained empty. That job would have to wait until they were ready to leave. Most of the batteries had cracked in the past decades and were unusable. Those that Ira salvaged still tended to seep acid. Because it was impossible to completely dry the bilge spaces, the leaking hydrochloric acid would mix with the seawater contamination. The resulting clouds of poisonous chlorine gas would quickly fill the U-boat’s pressure hull. To limit their exposure, Mercer decided they would fill the batteries just before leaving the cavern.

After his meager meal, Mercer gave his team a few hours’ rest before tackling the batteries. As they gratefully fell into their sleeping bags he made the long trek up the tunnel to check his warning device. He’d thought of a better system to release it and wanted to make the modification. Climbing a thousand feet in a two-mile-long shaft wouldn’t normally bother him, but he was more tired than he could remember. The lack of food and cold so sapped his energy that two-thirds the way to the surface he decided to turn back. He couldn’t afford to waste his dwindling reserves on building what amounted to a better mouse trap.

With a fraction of a second’s warning, a bounding shadow flitted through the beam of his flashlight. Mercer tried to dodge out of the way as his ten-pound lead ball came bouncing out of the darkness toward him. It smashed his thigh like a baseball bat at full swing, crumpling him to the ground like he’d been shot. The ball continued its plunge to the cavern a mile and a half away.

He bit his lip to keep from crying out and tasted blood. Lying on the floor of the tunnel, he strained to see anything farther up the pipe, cursing his stupidity for coming up here. Even if he couldn’t see Rath’s men, he knew they were coming. As he lurched to his feet, his right leg would barely take his weight. It was dead all the way to his toes.

“Son of a bitch,” he grunted and began loping down the tunnel, a shuffling gait that hammered pain to the top of his skull with every step.

Mercer knew the leg wasn’t broken and tried to convince himself that he could run through the agony. With a half-mile advantage he could only hope that Rath would need time to assemble his men at the entrance before descending into the earth. At his pace, Mercer’s lead would vanish fast. There were no tricks he could think of to lessen the pain, nothing he could do to increase his speed except push himself harder.

Ira and the others must have heard the ball slamming into the metal plate at the bottom of the tunnel. He wondered if they would wait for him and prayed they wouldn’t. To be captured now because of his mistake was something he couldn’t take. He knew, though, that they would wait right up until it was too late.

The thought that their lives hung in the balance carried him the next half mile. He was two-thirds home, but knew he was tapped out. His breathing raged painfully. His thigh throbbed even stronger, an agony that made him cry with each footfall.

He reached the cavern floor before he knew it, his determination able to push him far beyond what he knew where his limits. The cave was completely dark, and he could hear nothing over his own pained gasps. Up the shaft he could just discern a faint ghost’s glow of light, a distant flicker that warned him he had only a few minutes. He left his own light off, relying on years of subterranean experience to guide him across the cavern to where the sub should be. When he thought he was close, he splayed his fingers across the Maglite to diffuse its beam and flicked it on.

His sense of direction was perfect. He stood a couple yards from the gangway. He looked up to see Anika Klein standing atop the conning tower. She saw him and her face lit up with undisguised relief. “Come on.”

Beyond the sub, the lagoon was littered with a hundred empty fuel drums that would disguise the one Ira had bolted to the top of the U-boat’s snorkel and the gas can he’d mounted to hide the attack periscope.

“Tell Ira to dive,” Mercer wheezed.

“We heard the ball fifteen minutes ago. We’re ready.”

He swept his light across the dock. Nothing remained of their equipment. Rath would never know they were here. Using his arms and one leg, he climbed the ladder welded to the conning tower, grateful that Anika was there to drag him up the last few rungs.

Mercer didn’t waste seconds he didn’t have by climbing into the sub. He launched himself through the open hatch and fell to the floor of the fire-control space located above the main control room. Anika followed him through, stopping to dog the hatch above them. The sub was watertight.

“Ira, now!” she shouted down to the control room.

A steady hiss echoed throughout the U-boat as Ira opened valves to the sea, flooding them with enough water to put the sub on the bottom of the lagoon, sixty feet below the keel. He knew to trim the flooding to compensate for the sub’s tendency to sink stern first because of her engines. She went under with barely a ripple.

Mercer gingerly lowered himself into the control room. As cramped as the room was, it was the largest space on the U-boat, but the low ceiling, clutter of pipes, wires, and conduits as well as the myriad duty stations made it claustrophobic. Around the large tube for the boat’s second periscope, Ira stood in front of the dive controls, adjusting the dizzying array of flow valves and knobs. Marty was seated at the planesmen’s station, his hands kept well away from the twin wheels. The others were in the forward torpedo room to distribute weight.

Gently, the sub settled on the bottom. Ira forced a little air into the saddle tanks to prevent suction forming against the silty seabed. For fifteen minutes he continued to trim the U-boat, set the depths for the snorkel and periscope, and generally made certain they were secure. He scampered around with the agility of a man half his age. It was clear that retirement hadn’t deadened his training. Because no one had his specialized knowledge, the others wisely stayed out of his way.

“By the end of the week,” he said at one point, “all of you are going to know how to run this tin can in your sleep.”

“If sleep is a prerequisite, after I do a little spying through the periscope, I’m heading for a bunk to get a jump on everyone else,” Mercer joked but pain clipped each word.

“No, you’re not,” Anika snapped with clinical professionalism. “You’re getting to bed right now. You can barely stand.”

Mercer made to argue and thought better of it. Anika had to support his shoulder as she led him to the captain’s cabin, the only private spot on the two-hundred-fifty-foot relic.

“You or Hilda should have this cabin,” Mercer said when Anika stripped off his parka.

“Sweet gesture.” She smiled. “But we took a vote yesterday. By unanimous decision, this one’s yours.”

She gave him several painkillers, which he washed down with a mouthful of brandy. “No operating heavy machinery for twelve hours,” she admonished.

“I promise I won’t even lift my eyelids.”

Her more-than-concerned kiss lingered on his lips long after she’d closed the curtain on the wood-paneled cabin.