Pandora's Curse

THE ICE SHEET ABOVE THE PANDORA CAVERN

The Geo-Research Bell Jetranger 414 flared into a maelstrom of ice and snow that its rotors had just kicked up. The impenetrable fog settled only after the blades began to slow, dusting the two idling Sno-Cats, a dozen men, and a cargo sledge stacked with the recovered Pandora boxes. The smaller box, found in the antechamber at the top of the air vent, was kept separate. The snow around the vent had been trampled flat by the frantic work to recover the golden chests. Nothing remained of the tunnel itself but a stain of dust that had belched from it when it had been dynamited. The men who had completed the work waited for the rotor-stat to come and carry the boxes away.

Klaus Raeder was sitting in the insulated Sno-Cat and hadn’t heard the chopper’s approach until it was nearly upon them. The flash of anger that jolted his body gave way to an eerie calm. There was no need for the chopper here. That meant Rath was about to make his play for the deadly hoard. For the tenth time in the past hour, he glanced into the cargo area behind the ’Cat’s rear seat. The two assault rifles used to sink the fuel drums in the cavern were safely locked into an integrated rack. Raeder stripped off his heavy glove and jammed his right hand into his snowsuit pocket, where he had the loaded automatic pistol he’d taken from his office. He’d had no problem sneaking the weapon out of Germany. Customs paid little attention to corporate jets.

He opened the vehicle’s door and stepped out. There was little wind, but the air was as clear and cold as crystal. Gunther Rath stood a short way off with Greta and the professional driver, Dieter. Before Raeder took two paces, a shadow passed overhead. He looked up. The rotor-stat had come over the crest of the mountains that divided the ice sheet from the sea, its bulk eclipsing the weak sun for a moment. It was an otherworldly sight, more befitting Titans than men. The four engine pods mounted on the side of her great white hull were larger than the Jetranger helicopter sitting insectlike in the snow.

The pitch of its airship’s engines changed as it began to slowly settle toward earth.

Raeder approached Rath. “What is the helicopter doing here?”

“The rotor-stat won’t be able to land out here without a mooring mast. We’ll attach her lifting cables to the cargo and then follow in the chopper as she heads out to sea to drop the boxes.”

“No.” Raeder wouldn’t pretend to go along with this charade. “I’m not going to let the Pandora boxes out of my control until I know they will be dumped. We are getting on the rotor-stat.”

“Klaus, she can’t pick us up without a mooring mast,” Rath said placidly. “We can watch from the chopper.”

The noise of the descending airship increased as she fell below the tops of the mountains, the drone of her power plants echoing off the rock. The downdraft from her rotors began to stir the surface snow.

Rath’s logic was reasonable. It was always reasonable, Klaus reflected. His special-projects director could find excuses for murder and torture and make it sound sensible, as if there was no other way. But there were always other ways — only it had been easier for Raeder to let Rath give in to his brutality. No more. Raeder had just a few minutes left. The boxes would slip from his grasp if the dirigible took off without him. “This is as far as I’m going to let you go, Gunther. Tell the airship pilot to pick us up.”

Raeder’s pistol came out in an easy maneuver, unwavering and deadly.

And then the gun was lying in the snow ten feet away and Klaus Raeder’s arm was numb from fingertips to elbow.

Klaus Raeder looked first at his limp hand and then at the gun and finally at Gunther Rath. Expecting the pistol to paralyze Rath, Raeder had not anticipated the lightning kick that sent the automatic flying. Rath stood implacably, a trace of a smile on his face as if inviting Raeder to dive for the weapon. He was closer by ten feet, but when he peered beyond Greta and Rath, Raeder saw that the workers who’d emptied the Pandora cavern had watched the one-sided confrontation. And each man was armed with either an assault rifle or a pistol. The guns in the back of the Sno-Cat weren’t the only ones Rath had brought to the area. Raeder realized too that he didn’t have the men’s loyalty. They were Rath’s.

“Klaus, I don’t blame you for trying to stop me. I think I would have been disappointed if you hadn’t.” Gunther picked up the fallen pistol and handed it to Greta.

Knowing he had been outmaneuvered, Raeder accepted temporary defeat. “What do you plan to do with them? No one will ever be able to build a bomb with the meteor fragments.”

“They don’t need a chain reaction, Klaus. Hitler’s plan was to load bits of it into V-2 rockets at Peenemunde and launch them at London. They were designed to explode a thousand feet above the ground and spread their radioactive payload over a tremendous area. Since much of London was rubble, the Pandora dust would have lain there undetected with all the other debris, silently poisoning an entire population. It was estimated that just six warheads would have killed every living thing in London within two months.

“It seems, though, that the U-boat used to transport the fragments must have been lost during the mining operation and an accident in the cavern killed everyone else. I assume Der Führer lost interest in the proj ect then.

“However, in today’s world, the Pandora fragments have a certain value as a terrorist weapon. It’s less random than a chemical weapon, easier to maintain than a biologic one and unlike other radiation sources, it is completely untraceable. Just a few grams placed in, say, a busy subway station would consign every person walking by to a lingering death. As it decays, it creates its own shielding and can be removed safely. I can’t think of a better weapon for terrorism, can you?”

“You’re going to sell them?”

Rath looked pleased with himself as he replied, “I had three different bids to choose from. North Korea offered the most money, but I can’t see exiling myself to Pyongyang. Ditto goes for Iraq. I ended up accepting the Libyan offer since it’s close enough to Europe to sneak over occasionally.”

“What about your precious Nazi Party now? Are you abandoning them?”

“Who do you think gets most of the hundred million dollars?”

Thirty minutes later, the cargo pallet laden with the boxes was secured to the airship’s lifting cables. Raeder, Rath, and Greta Schmidt were in the back of the stripped-down Bell helicopter. The workers were already aboard the two Sno-Cats and on their way back to the temporary northern camp, where they would disassemble everything for the return to Camp Decade. Because the weight of the cargo approached her maximum limit, the rotor-stat had to first fly out over the ice sheet to build up aerodynamic lift before turning back for the coast. It took the dirigible twenty minutes to gain the thousand feet of altitude she needed to clear the mountains. Only then did the Jetranger take off with the smallest Pandora box resting between Rath and Raeder. Greta sat next to her lover, the confiscated pistol clutched on her lap.

Klaus Raeder twisted in his window seat to get a glimpse of the rotor-stat trailing the helicopter. The airship was sailing a half mile behind them and yet seemed ready to swallow the chopper. After being airborne for ten minutes, they were still over Greenland’s jagged coast of bays, inlets, and fjords. That was when Raeder saw the research ship Njoerd in a narrow bay two thousand feet below them.

He realized that the cargo would be transferred to the ship but didn’t understand why. He asked Rath.

“For one, we need the rotor-stat to return the Sno-Cats to Camp Decade. Also the airship tends to advertise her presence wherever she is. My plan is for the Njoerd to take the boxes to Tripoli while the rotor-stat returns to Europe for the completion of her test flights.”

A large area of deck behind the Njoerd’s superstructure had been cleared to receive the cargo of golden crates, and workers were preparing to guide the nets into position. The chopper swung wide to leave plenty of room for the ponderous dirigible as it descended toward the ship. Hovering a quarter mile astern and five hundred feet up, the pilot spun so that his passengers could watch the delicate placement of the cargo.

Suddenly, a portion of sea just fifty yards from the research ship came alive, as if the water was being boiled. Like Leviathan rising, a gray torpedo shape emerged from the swelling waves, rising into the air until a quarter of the vessel’s length was exposed. “Mein Gott!” Rath, Raeder, and Schmidt said at once. They recognized the antique U-boat at the same time and knew where it had come from.

Still bobbing on the swells of its own creation, the conning tower hatch crashed open and a figure emerged. Rath ordered the pilot in for a closer look, hoping it was Mercer who had exited the submarine first because some of his guards were already at the rail of the Njoerd armed with assault rifles.

Before Rath could discern the man’s features, winking lights shot from the weapons and the man vanished in a red mist. “Patch me through to the rotor-stat,” Rath ordered.

A moment later the airship’s pilot came over the radio. “What do you want me to do?”

“Abort the cargo transfer until we take care of the submarine.”

“I don’t know if I can. The engines are straining just to slow our vertical descent.”

The airship’s four rotors whipped the air so strongly, they rippled her Kevlar skin. The dirigible would need to build up forward speed so her airfoil shape gave her additional lift. The cargo nets dangled only fifty feet from the surface of the bay. Her heavy mooring lines already trailed in the water. Rath looked back to the sub just as another person gained access to her protected bridge. It was Mercer, and he remained huddled out of sight from the Njoerd. His attention was on the airship, so he didn’t notice the helicopter hovering behind him.

Making sure his seat belt was tight and Greta had Klaus covered, Gunther Rath opened the Jetranger’s side door. Arctic air blasted him like a hurricane and numbed his face and hands. He couldn’t wear his gloves and fire accurately, so he left them off when he drew his pistol. He activated the weapon’s specially mounted laser sight. With the sub rolling and the chopper bouncing, he doubted he could get off an accurate shot, but all he wanted was Mercer’s attention until the rotor-stat could bull its way out of the fjord. The red dot of light wavered all over the top of the conning tower until it streaked across Mercer’s stooped form. Rath began firing.

From his vantage, Mercer couldn’t see the rotor-stat. He could only hear it thundering above him. Its noise drowned out everything. Figuring they couldn’t see him, he chanced a look over the lip of the bridge’s coaming. That was when he spotted the Njoerd and the men lined at her side with weapons trained at him. He ducked again as fire raked the conning tower. When Erwin had fallen back into the sub and he’d heard the dirigible, Mercer had assumed the shots had come from above. Now he knew who had fired the scathing fusillade. They’d surfaced right in the middle of the cargo transfer.

“If it weren’t for bad luck…” he whispered. Ira’s head appeared through the hatch. “How’s Erwin?”

“Anika’s working on him now. I don’t think it’s too bad. What happened?”

“The Njoerd is about fifty yards off the port side, and the rotor-stat’s hovering just beyond her. She’s coming this way. Get back below and crank up the compressors. Fill the ballast tanks with air and prepare to dive. Leave your gun. I have an idea.”

“I don’t like it when you say that,” Ira remarked and disappeared below.

Mercer was preparing to take another look at the airship when a shard of white-hot steel ricocheted inside the bridge and buried itself in his thigh. He fell heavily, clamping a hand over the burning wound, and looked up. A big Bell helicopter hung in the sky behind him with its side door opened. He could clearly see the pistol in Gunther Rath’s hand and the sick smile on his face. Fluidly, Mercer pulled the MP-40 from under him and squeezed the trigger. The heavy machine pistol bucked like he was holding a live wire and jammed after half its thirty-two-round magazine emptied. As he recocked to clear the fouled breach, the chopper twisted out of range.

He next aimed blindly toward the Njoerd and pulled the trigger again, raising himself as the barrage scattered the gunmen at the vessel’s rail. In the moment’s reprieve before they regrouped, he slammed home a fresh magazine. He yelled down the hatch, “Marty, I need help!”

“Screw this. Let’s get out of here.”

Though angered, Mercer couldn’t bring himself to blame Martin Bishop. Sealing the hatch and motoring away would be the smart thing to do. But Mercer wouldn’t let that happen. Not when he had a chance to end this once and for all. The Pandora boxes were vulnerable, and judging by the width of the fjord and the height of the mountains, the bay was a thousand feet deep. More than enough.

“Goddamn it, Marty, get your ass up here.” The rotor-stat was struggling over the Njoerd’s deck, slowly building speed that would become altitude in a few moments. While the cargo nets were out of range, the airship’s mooring lines made parallel V’s as they were dragged through the calm water. They would sweep across the U-boat’s forward deck in twenty seconds or less. The monstrous gas bag blotted out the sun as it came toward him, its shadow spreading across the bay like a malignancy. Prop wash stirred the water behind her.

“What do you need?” Marty appeared at the hatch, his firm voice in opposition to his frantic eyes.

“Take this.” Mercer handed him Ira’s MP-40. “Point it at the helicopter if it gets too close or at the Njoerd if those men get organized again.”

“I’ve never fired a gun in my life. What if I need to change the clip?”

“If you need that much ammo, I’ll probably be dead.”

In his nervousness, Mercer cocked his gun again by mistake and ejected an unused round. The chopper was a quarter mile away, watching from a safe distance. Rath’s pistol was no match for a submachine gun. The men who’d been at the Njoerd’s rail had found cover behind her gunwale or pieces of equipment. They darted looks at the stationary submarine and fired occasional rounds to keep Mercer pinned. They seemed content with the stalemate because it allowed the rotor-stat the time it needed to get clear.

“Screw that,” Mercer said and unleashed a burst at the research vessel, satisfied by the angry sparks of lead meeting steel. He vaulted over the bridge rail on the opposite side of the conning tower and landed on the deck in a heap. Rath’s chopper roared at him, but when he raised his weapon it banked away again. Rath took a snap shot as it pirouetted and hit nothing.

The dirigible was directly overhead, looming like a forty-story building. Emptying a clip into its belly would have had the same effect as spitballs against an elephant, so Mercer ignored it. The mooring lines were what he wanted. They dangled from her bow to the sea, crossing over the sub’s hull in the center of the U-boat’s forward deck. In seconds, the fleeing airship would draw them out of reach. Mercer would need to cross thirty feet of metal no-man’s-land with an unknown number of gunmen holding him in their sights. His mouth was dry and his leg strobed with pain in time with his heart. Now or never.

“Cover me, Marty!” He couldn’t be sure he had been heard over the airship’s quad rotors, but he launched himself anyway.

The firing began at once and was met by a burst from the conning tower. Mercer ran on, weaving along the deck until his foot caught against a hatch and he sprawled. Bullets searched him out and he scrambled to his feet, firing to his left as he cradled the MP-40. The mooring ropes were manila, at least three inches around, permanently attached to the airship’s internal structure and strong enough for ground handlers to haul the rotor-stat against a stiff breeze. As one oozed across the deck like a fleeing snake, Mercer dropped to his knees, fired the last of his clip at the Njoerd, and tossed aside his weapon. He needed both hands to lift the line. It was slick with seawater and doubly heavy. He ran back to the conning tower, Marty’s wild bursts keeping the gunmen at bay for precious seconds. The rough line smeared skin off his hands as the rotor-stat towed it past the U-boat. By the time he reached cover, only fifty feet remained before the end would slither through his grasp.

He looked up to see the chopper returning. Rath must have realized what he was attempting and was coming in to stop him. Rath’s clothes whipped in the downbeat of the helo’s rotor. The noise drowned the report but Mercer knew the German had fired from the recoil of his gun arm. He wrapped a loop of the mooring rope around a railing stanchion so it wouldn’t be dragged back forward.

A shouted warning to Marty was muffled by the rotor-stat, so all Mercer could do was pray as he threw himself off the side of the sub, more shots pinging against the U-boat’s metal hide.

The frigid water sucked his breath out the instant it reached his skin. The cold was solid, like ice, but much, much worse. It pounded against his skull and lanced into his joints. The wound in his leg went numb. Mercer’s clothes quickly became saturated, and he felt himself being dragged under the surface. Kicking first one foot and then the other, he managed to remove his moon boots, saving himself several pounds, but the swim back up was agonizingly slow.

His head broke the surface. He reached for and grabbed one of the many slits in the sub’s outer hull. The Bell Jetranger was showing her tail as she moved out of range again. Marty must have chased him off. Mercer struggled to climb the side of the boat, the rough edges in the slits digging into his stocking feet like razor blades.

A hand touched his arm and he saw Anika Klein reaching for him. She must have joined Marty on the bridge and jumped to the deck when she saw Mercer dive into the water.

“Tie off the landing line!” The shout sounded distant in Mercer’s frozen brain.

“Marty’s doing it.” She got a grip on Mercer’s forearm and heaved him up to the deck. A couple of feet away Marty worked knots into what little remained of the disappearing landing rope, threading the line through a number of larger hull slits.

It came taut just as he got the line secured to the sub. He looked up to see the rotor-stat come up short against its leash. Straining, the huge dirigible pivoted around its bow, losing altitude until her deadly cargo dipped into the ocean for a moment. Her engines screamed. “Got you, you son of a bitch,” Marty shouted.

“Let’s finish this.” Mercer stood. Above them the Schmeisser rippled again, and Hilda Brandt motioned them to hurry, the black gun smoking in her beefy hands.

Like a fish struggling for its life, the airship whipped back and forth on the end of its tether, straining to break free from the U-boat. Rath must have radioed the pilots and told them that if they released the Pandora boxes their survival would be short-lived.

Mercer’s hands were frozen claws as he climbed the ladder to the bridge under Hilda’s covering fire. Anika’s shoulder was under his backside as she headed to the top of the conning tower. Once they were safely on the bridge, Hilda directed them to get below. She would keep up a steady barrage to prevent anyone from the Njoerd launching a boat and cutting the line.

As he reached the control room, Mercer saw Erwin Puhl propped against the chart table. His shirt was off, and seeping bandages covered his shoulder and wrapped under his arm. The meteorologist was ashen, his lips pressed tight in pain.

“Are you okay?” Mercer asked through chattering teeth.

“Anika said I am. The first bullet went in and out under my arm. The other was a ricochet buried in my shoulder. It hurts but…”

“Ira,” Mercer gasped as he started stripping off his wet clothes. “Are you ready?”

“Say the word.”

“Close the hatch, Marty, and get down here.”

Anika helped Mercer remove the remainder of his clothes. He stood naked and dripping watery blood, his skin blue and puckered. “Don’t judge me in this condition,” he said when she glanced at his groin. She threw blankets over him as Hilda and Marty descended into the sub.

“Dive!” The ballast tanks gurgled as they filled with water, and the boat slowly began to sink.

Above them, the rotor-stat pilot saw the swirl of air bubbles around the antique sub and knew what was going to happen next. His loyalty to Rath ended at that instant, and he nodded to his copilot. “Don’t do it,” he heard Rath screaming over the headset. “The Njoerd is sending out a boat to cut the mooring line. You can hold on.”

“Dump it,” the pilot said. The copilot hit a switch that severed the cables securing the cargo nets to the airship. Thirty tons of gold plundered by the Nazis and a ton of the deadliest element on the planet fell away from the dirigible. It splashed into the sea and vanished.

The rotor-stat rose like a child’s balloon until it once again came up against the rope. Nose down and engines straining, she fought a tug-of-war against the sinking U-boat trying to pull her into the ocean. They would be free if they could hold out long enough for men from the Njoerd to cut the rope. The entire craft shuddered with the power of her four engines and massive rotors.

The pilot jettisoned fuel in an attempt to lighten his ship further, but it made no difference as the altimeter unwound slowly. He didn’t need to look out the cockpit window to know it wouldn’t even be close.

“What are we going to do?” his copilot asked.

Finally glancing out and seeing the smooth bay rising to meet them, the pilot’s answer was just one word. “Die.”

The bow of the airship struck in a colossal explosion of spray, and her remorseless downward plunge was checked. She continued to hang there, her nose like a dimple in the sea.

On the U-boat, they all felt the hull lurch when the rotor-stat hit the surface. Even with the ballast tanks full, the sub couldn’t overcome the buoyancy of 1.2 million cubic feet of helium. The tug-of-war had come to a standstill.

“What’s our depth?” Mercer gasped as he drew a mouthful of brandy to warm his insides.

“Forty meters and holding. We can’t pull her under.”

“We don’t need to.” Mercer’s expression was savage. “Blow the tanks and surface.”

Not fully understanding Mercer’s plan, Ira blew compressed air back into the ballast tanks and watched the fathometer as the sub ascended once again.

Because of the airship’s near-vertical position, the rotors were no longer adding lift, so when the sub rose and tension was released off the bow line, her tail dropped before the pilots could compensate. The massive underfin sliced into the water like a knife blade as she belly flopped and then she began a roll onto her side. Powered by jet turbines, the rotors sliced air in a blur, but when they came in contact with the water, the Teflon blades came apart like scythes. Hundred-foot slashes appeared in her skin and helium burst from the envelope in a screaming torrent. It was her death cry.

Half deflated and waterlogged, the airship settled into the water and began to sink, internal pressure pooling her lifting gas into pockets within her envelope that ruptured like boils. Part of her envelope fell across the stern of the Njoerd, Kevlar fabric tangling and snaring on her deck cranes. Men scrambled to cut away the entanglements before the huge weight capsized the ship. The airship’s other engine pods struck the ocean, and more pieces of blade ravaged the gas bag and the Njoerd.

A hundred feet from the dirigible’s limp bows, the U-boat appeared once again as plucky as a bathtub toy.

Gunther Rath had watched the destruction from a safe distance and when he saw the sub, he went berserk. “Get closer,” he shouted at the pilot, loading a fresh magazine into his Glock.

He could see movement in the conning tower as two people came out on the deck. One held an ax while the other had a Schmeisser.

“There’s nothing we can do,” the pilot said.

“Get me down there!” Rath screwed the gun’s muzzle into the pilot’s ear.

The chopper came at the sub like a hawk in a stoop and raced into a burst of 9mm rounds from the MP-40. Rath got off only one shot of his own before the charge carried him out of range. In the moments it took the pilot to swing around for another pass, one of the men had leapt to the deck and was hacking at the rope with the ax. It parted at the third swing.

“I’ll kill you!” Gunther Rath raged.

“I doubt it.” Klaus Raeder laughed over the wind swirling through the helicopter’s cabin. “You’ll get one more shot off while they pump a dozen rounds into us. And then they’ll close the hatch and there won’t be a thing you can do.”

“Darling, he’s right,” Greta said. “The boxes are gone, but we still have this one.” She nudged the golden chest at her feet. “We can land on the Njoerd and be far away by the time they reach civilization.”

For a second she thought he was going to shoot her for suggesting it. Instead, Rath reholstered his pistol and turned his gaze out to the ruined airship draped across the stern of the Njoerd. Greta wasn’t going to risk asking him to close the door, so she hunkered deeper into her parka. Rath looked across to Klaus Raeder, sizing him up as if he were a commodity. He said nothing, but Raeder recognized the feral look of a cornered animal.

Rath was about to lash out. The emotion was there, just at the surface and ready to explode. Gunther reached into his coat again and withdrew the Glock. With a casual flick he tossed it out the door.

“I would have killed you if I hadn’t,” he explained. “By the time they get Njoerd’s deck cleared enough to get under way, Mercer will be halfway to Kulusuk. We’ll never be able to catch him, so we’re altering our plans. We’re going someplace where I’m going to need you.”

It took twenty frustrating minutes for the helipad on the Njoerd to be cleared of debris from the destroyed airship. Once they were down, Rath learned that there wasn’t enough aviation fuel on the ship to use the chopper for the next leg of their journey. They un-lashed one of the powerful boats stored on the research vessel. By then the U-boat was long gone. An hour later, Gunther Rath, Greta Schmidt, and four of Rath’s best security men were aboard the sleek, oceangoing boat. Klaus Raeder was trussed in the hold with the last box of meteorite fragments.

At thirty knots, the boat had a range of three hundred miles. They would make their destination shortly before nightfall.