Pandora's Curse

ABOARD THE U-1062

Oily smoke billowed from the port diesel and poisonous vapor rose from the battery compartment, forcing the crew to leave all the sub’s hatches open. Ira futilely waved a rag above the clattering forest of con-rods, cams, and lifters, trying to see what was fuming so badly. The noise of the faltering motor absorbed his string of curses.

“How’s it look?” Mercer shouted over the din.

Lasko wiped grease from his face. “Like we aren’t going to make it to Iceland, Kulusuk, or anywhere else.” He spat a black glob onto the deck. “Piston rings are shot in at least two cylinders, gaskets are failing all over the place, and if it weren’t for the oil I salvaged from the starboard engine, this pig would be dead in about an hour.”

“What can you give us?”

Ira scratched the stubble now fringing his otherwise bald head. “Four hours, maybe five. We can return to the Greenland coast, but we’ll be right back where we started from.”

“So we’ve got a decision to make.”

“Yup. Talk to the others. I’ll go along with whatever you decide. I have to stay here and coax her along.”

Mercer carefully backed out the narrow alley between the engines and ducked through two watertight hatches to reach the control room. He yelled up to the bridge at the top of the conning tower, where Marty was acting as lookout. Hilda Brandt sat at the helmsman’s station, making sure the boat stayed on course. Anika had just come back to the control room after checking on Erwin, who was resting in his bunk.

Marty clambered down the ladder and moved to Anika’s side.

“What’s Erwin’s condition, Doctor?” he asked her.

“He’s fine. I’ve got antibiotics keeping infection at bay and he didn’t lose enough blood for shock to be a concern. The bullet fragment in his shoulder should come out, but isn’t doing much harm in the short term. The one that passed through under his arm didn’t hit any major blood vessels or bone. I just wish there was something I could do for his pain.”

“Erwin’s a lot tougher than he looks,” Marty opined.

“That’s for sure.”

“Okay, folks,” Mercer began. “The good news is, we have enough brandy for an impromptu party. The bad news is, we can’t invite guests since it appears we won’t make it to civilization.” His tone then became serious. “Ira says the engine won’t last for more than five hours, meaning that if we continue east we’ll stop long before Iceland, and if we turn south we won’t reach Kulusuk either.”

“What are our options?” Anika asked, confident by now that Mercer would find a way.

“A: we don’t reach Kulusuk. And B: we don’t reach Iceland. That’s about it.”

“Can we return to the coast of Greenland to wait for rescue?” Marty asked.

Mercer shook his head. “I doubt anyone will find us. Remember, this is one of the most remote places on earth. Providing we find a suitable place to beach, our food’s just about gone, and without communications gear we’ll be marooned again.”

“We have guns. We can hunt seals,” Marty said reasonably.

“Once Rath gets the Njoerd under way, he’ll scour the coast looking for us. He’ll spot the sub from his helicopter on the first pass. If you think we can submerge until he flies away, you can forget about it. Because we know about the Pandora boxes, Rath won’t leave until he’s certain we’re dead.”

No one spoke for a minute because none could think of an argument. Their fear further chilled the control room.

“We have a third option.” It was Erwin Puhl. He stood at the hatchway connecting the crew’s quarters to the control room. His upper body was swathed in bandages. A wad of surgical tape at the bridge of his nose held the broken halves of his glasses together. “I heard you talking.”

Anika crossed to him in three strides, bracing his shoulder with hers. She led him to the seat behind the plotting table. Her expression was a mix of concern and annoyance. She didn’t want him out of bed, but the determination on his face led her to believe that any admonishments would be wasted. By the time she eased him into the chair, Erwin was trembling. In the dim light of the control room, his skin had become gray. A map of the Denmark Strait was flattened against the plotting table with the broom-handle Mauser pistol and the captain’s log. “Where are we exactly?” he wheezed.

Mercer indicated a spot about eighty miles off the coast of Greenland, a bit south of the fjord they had just escaped.

“And today’s date is the fifteenth, right? There is a ship coming through the strait tonight that will be about here in five hours. Well within our range.”

“There isn’t much shipping through these waters,” Mercer said. “How do you know?”

“Because another member of the Brotherhood of Satan’s Fist is on her to take possession of the last remaining icon that Rasputin commissioned — the one Leonid Kulik never destroyed.”

Realization struck like a punch. “The Universal Convocation aboard the Sea Empress?”

“Yes. The pope is returning the icon to the Russian Orthodox Church, and Brother Anatoly Vatutin is there to receive it.”

Mercer was silent for a second, thinking. “I remember when we first met you mentioned the Empress would be coming through the strait. I thought it was strange that you knew her route, considering it was supposed to be secret. Your colleague on the ship told you the sailing schedule.”

“That’s right,” Erwin agreed.

“Why is the ship this far north?” asked Anika.

“To take advantage of the spectacular aurora borealis created by the solar-max effect.”

Mercer didn’t like coincidences and he was suspicious about this one. He thought there could be another reason the Sea Empress happened to be in these waters, but he kept it to himself. “How sure are you of this information?” he asked Erwin.

The scientist’s voice firmed. “Positive. The top delegates had to approve the route long before they sailed. Brother Anatoly stole the schedule from Bishop Olkranszy, his superior at the convocation.”

After Anika translated the conversation for Hilda’s benefit, Mercer could see that the group was evenly mixed about their options and decided that this wasn’t the time for a vote. It would be smarter just to make the decision himself.

He had gambled many lives over the years, his own the most often, and the burden never got lighter. The five other survivors had put their trust in him and as their leader Mercer had to do what he felt was necessary. Life, he’d learned, wasn’t about making the most right decisions. That was simple. The true test was being able to minimize the effects of the wrong ones. And he felt he’d made so many of the latter in the past weeks that just one chance remained to put everything right again.

He carefully worked out the vector on the chart. “Anika, have Hilda steer one hundred and four degrees. Marty, run back to the engine room and tell Ira to open her up as much as he dares.”

His orders were carried out instantly. “I’ll be topside,” he said, his voice suddenly becoming thick in his throat. “I need some air.”

Like the night the Titanic sank a thousand miles south of their position, the ocean was as calm as a millpond. Darkness was creeping across the cloudless skies and already faint waves of light were appearing high in the heavens. The aurora was going to be breathtaking. Its added illumination would also reveal any drifting icebergs in plenty of time to maneuver around them. Mercer tightened the hood of his parka, jamming his fists into his pocket.

He was left alone on the bridge for a half hour until Anika bobbed up through the hatch. Wordlessly, she handed him two protein bars for dinner. They munched in silence. The cup of water had a skin of ice when she took a sip. Her eyes rarely left Mercer’s face. “Pfennig for your thoughts.”

“With the exchange rate, that’s about half a cent,” he said darkly. “Sounds like you’re overpaying.” His words stung her. “Sorry. I’d like to be alone right now.”

“So you can brood?” she challenged.

“So I can think.”

“For you, I believe it is the same thing. Why do you continue to blame yourself? Without you, we’d all have been dead on the plane from Camp Decade. Because I interviewed Otto Schroeder, if anyone is to blame it is me.”

“No. It’s Gunther Rath.”

Mercer had fallen for her trap. Anika smiled, a kaleidoscope of color from the aurora shimmering off her jet hair. “See, you know the truth and yet you beat yourself up as if everything is your fault. That is foolish.”

“For me, it’s inevitable.”

“Because you let it.”

Mercer couldn’t respond and they lapsed into silence again.

Anika fidgeted as if she had something she wanted to say and didn’t know how. When she finally spoke, her voice faltered. “Back in the fjord, I should have stayed below to tend to Erwin. I am a doctor and my duty was to my patient. Instead I went up to the conning tower. I thought I just wanted to help. Now I realize what I really wanted was to take the gun from Hilda and shoot those men on the Njoerd. I’ve trained my entire life to ease suffering and all I could think about was killing them for being part of the same evil that murdered all those people in the cavern sixty years ago. I have never wanted to kill before.” The admission cost her.

“But you didn’t. Wanting to do something isn’t a crime, Anika. I want to cheat on my taxes every year. That doesn’t make me a criminal.”

“Yes, but you haven’t taken an oath to pay your taxes the way I have to heal people. My place was with Erwin, not indulging in my desire for revenge.” She paused. “You’ve… you’ve killed people before, haven’t you?”

“Yes. The crew on the blimp being the most recent.”

“How do you, you know, handle it?”

I don’t. I justify it by telling myself that they would have killed me if I hadn’t acted first. Then I bury the guilt as deep as I can, praying that one day the nightmares go away. But Mercer didn’t say it, afraid that voicing the truth would somehow crack the barricade he’d built around those emotions. “The same way you deal with the trauma patients you lose. You concentrate on those you did help.”

Anika searched his eyes and saw the lie. She let it pass because the joyrider who’d died in the ER before she came to Greenland was the fifty-seventh patient she’d lost and she had no idea how many she’d saved. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry. How’s your leg?”

“It hurts a bit but the stitches you laid feel fine, thanks.” Mercer recognized that she’d let him off the hook. “I should make you my full-time doctor.”

“After the helicopter and the DC-3, I’m never getting on a plane again. Don’t expect me to come to the States for a house call.”

Mercer smiled. “I’ll only get hurt in Europe.”

They talked easily for the next couple of hours, not about anything in particular, just enjoying the sound of each other’s voice. The cold finally forced Anika below again. She paused at the hatch, unable to resist returning to the subject they had left behind. “If you ever want to compare nightmares,” she said, “I’ll be there for you.”

She ducked out of sight before Mercer could respond.

Ira Lasko came up the hatch a moment later and found Mercer laughing to himself. “What’s the joke?”

“Me. I’m learning that I’m a lot more transparent than I thought. How you doing down there?”

“My head’s about ready to explode from fumes, but I’m hanging in. We should be about an hour from the Sea Empress. I think the engine’s going to make it. I’ve even managed to cobble together enough good batteries to give us some electrical power to maneuver once the diesel kicks out.”

“Great job.”

“You think we’ll find the cruise ship?”

“She’ll be lit up like a carnival, and the weather’s cooperating for once. I think we’ll spot her.” Mercer moved to the hatch. “I might as well let a couple of the others stand watch. I’m freezing my ass off.”

Marty took over on the conning tower while Mercer spent a few minutes in the engine room, soaking up heat from the big diesel. He was back in the control room when, with a grinding crash, the port engine seized. The thrashing propeller stopped so suddenly that the entire boat torqued over. The eerie silence seemed unnatural after so many hours of clanking noise.

“You goddamned whore!” Ira was heard shouting. “You filthy piece of shit! You can do better than this.”

“Chief, you’re supposed to whisper sweet nothings to machinery,” Mercer yelled back.

“This is a German engine. They like the rough stuff.” He came forward. “Sorry, folks. The bus stops here. We’ve got about twenty minutes of juice in the batteries if we just creep along.”

Mercer double-checked the chart and his position estimates. “We should be right in front of the Sea Empress when she comes through. With any luck we won’t need that much from the batteries.”

“Have you thought of how we’re going to board her? With antiradar coating on the conning tower, she’ll never see us and if we do appear on her scopes we’re going to look like a tiny iceberg that she can plow right over.”

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” Mercer answered. “You’ve never seen a picture of the Sea Empress, have you? She’s a huge catamaran capable of launching boats from between her hulls. We just line up in the gap and let her come right over us. Once abeam of her integrated marina, we jump aboard.”

“I’ll be damned.” Ira nodded in admiration. “Teachers must have hated you in school.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because you have an answer for everything.”

After half an hour of waiting on the still waters, Marty shouted to the control room, “Mercer, I see her. She looks like she’ll pass to our starboard.”

Mercer joined him on the icy bridge to judge for himself. He took a pair of binoculars from Bishop. As he’d predicted, the Sea Empress blazed like a small city under the wavering curtains of the northern lights. She looked beautiful. And she looked like she would indeed pass them to starboard. “Okay, get below and prepare to move the sub.”

As the cruise ship drew nearer, Mercer could better judge her speed and direction and ordered the U-boat positioned accordingly. The sub crept forward at a fraction of her normal power and barely made a ripple as she came about. Ira had been generous saying they had twenty minutes of juice remaining. They’d be lucky to maneuver into the path of the fast-approaching hundred-and-fifty-thousand-ton monster.

They got the stern of the sub pointed directly at the Sea Empress. “All right. Hold us here. Anika, you and Hilda get Erwin up to the front deck.”

Through the binoculars Mercer could clearly see her twin hulls and the yawning channel between them. He continued to order small bearing corrections, making sure the U-boat was properly aligned with the Sea Empress. She was now close enough for him to see individual windows along the front of her wide superstructure. If he stood perfectly still he could feel the power of her whirling props through the water.

“Jesus, she’s huge,” he said to himself as the ship continued to widen as she closed, eating further and further into his range of view. They had to pass between her hulls at the exact center to avoid being slammed against one side or the other. Even a glancing blow would capsize the U-boat. “Ira,” he yelled down, “when I give the order, give her everything she’s got. Marty, you’ll need to move the boat a little to port or starboard to get close to the dock. I won’t know which way until we’re between the hulls.”

“Aye, aye.”

He watched as it came at them, the sub in position. Bow waves peeling off the hulls reached the U-boat before she entered the gap, rocking her violently before she could find her center. The wide span of the superstructure didn’t begin until fifty feet back from the prow of each hull, so for a moment it felt like they were motoring between two stationary ships. The water pulsed.

Then they were under the main part of the vessel and their perception of motion changed. Instantly, they could all see just how fast the Sea Empress was cutting through the water around them. The underside of the superstructure towered thirty feet above the surface of the ocean, creating an echoing tunnel between the hulls. There was enough light from the inside portholes to see a mural painted on the ceiling scroll past in a murky blur.

Mercer was as awed as the rest but snapped himself out of it quickly. “Ira, full ahead and flood the tanks.” He studied the sides of the twin hulls, and spotted an alcovelike pier on the left side near the stern. Beyond the marina were tall garage-type doors for launching larger boats. “Marty, give me ten degrees to port and get up here.”

Marty and Ira scrambled up the ladder as the U-boat accelerated and heeled over to the left. Their increased speed was far slower than that of the cruise ship, but it would give them a margin of safety when they leapt for the built-in landing. They assembled on the forward deck. Marty carried a knapsack full of documents from the cavern as well as the sub’s log book. Mercer had the Schmeisser and the broom-handle Mauser. Ira had swiped the Enigma decoding machine from the U-boat’s radio room as a souvenir.

“Nice touch,” Mercer said.

“Almost as good as you writing ‘Kilroy was here’ on the side of the bridge.”

“Just messing with a future marine archaeologist.”

Air bubbled around the U-boat as her tanks filled with seawater and she continued to angle toward the marina. The dock was nothing more than a long fiberglass ledge cut into the hull. It was accessible from the interior of the ship through a standard hatchway placed next to two garage doors for launching personal watercraft. Farther aft were the bigger doors that shielded the storage area for the Empress’s larger excursion boats.

Although the portholes along the hull were small, they got an occasional glimpse of people in their cabins and once a face appeared at eye level across just a few feet of frothing water. Everyone waved cheerily. The startled person, an elderly priest, blinked hard, and when he looked again they had passed out of his view.

“That’ll make him lay off the sacramental wine.”

The force of water hissing along the Sea Empress’s hull created a cushion between her and the U-boat, a gap of about two feet that widened as the sub slowed due to the weight of her filling tanks.

Frigid water began to wash along the deck plates. “Shit, I opened ’em too wide,” Ira cursed.

“Get to the stern of the sub.” Mercer prodded Anika and Hilda, then helped Erwin. He began to run, kicking up spray as the ocean reached his ankles. “It’ll reach the landing first.”

With every step the water rose higher. It was at Mercer’s calves by the time they reached the back of the U-boat. The dock was still twenty feet too far. Slowed by the added drag, the sub continued to sheer away from the towering side of the Sea Empress. As the cruise liner overtook the U-boat, the landing drew abreast of the floundering submarine. Mercer took two sloshing steps and launched himself across the four-foot gulf, calling back as soon as he landed, “Do it!”

They had five seconds at most before the U-boat was no longer alongside the dock. Erwin’s struggling leap would have dumped him in the sea had Mercer not grabbed his good arm. He cried out and slumped to the deck. Anika came across like a bounding gazelle. Marty and Ira leapt with less grace but equal results.

“Hilda, you can make it,” Anika cried. Water surged past the cook’s thighs. Hilda rushed like a charging hippopotamus but couldn’t make herself leap the widening gap. The water flooding across the sub’s deck was too deep.

Frantic, Mercer spied a life ring mounted on the wall. He coiled the end of the rope around his wrist and tossed it to the stricken woman just as she floated free from the sinking U-boat. He wasn’t sure she’d caught the life ring until the drag of her body against the cruise ship’s fifteen-knot headway yanked him off his feet. It would have hauled him into the water if he hadn’t braced his legs against a bollard.

The effect of water pulling against her body meant Mercer had a five-hundred-pound weight at the other end of the line. His wrist was about to snap. “Help!” he cried. It came out as a strangled croak.

The others grabbed the line, taking up the strain, and like dragging an anchor up a raging stream, hauled Hilda Brandt back to the marina.

“Anika,” Mercer gasped when Hilda clawed her way onto the dock. “Tell her she’s the most beautiful mermaid I’ve ever caught.”

Panting from the exertion, Ira helped Mercer to his feet. “Now that we’re here, O great cruise director, and finished with our north Atlantic tug-of-war, what’s the next shipboard activity?”

“Foraging for a cabin, food, and booze — in whatever order you’d like. Shuffleboard’s at ten. Me, I’m going for the bar first.” The next joke died on Mercer’s lips. In the rush to save them, he’d forgotten that the ship’s being here might not be as coincidental as they’d thought.

Anika was the first to notice the change in him. “What’s wrong?”

Mercer didn’t reply. Behind them was the watertight door leading into the ship. It opened into the Jet Ski garage. In the glow of a couple of night-lights, dozens of the personal watercraft sat on AstroTurf pads next to racks of scuba gear and other aquatic toys. Also in the garage were two mahogany-decked thirty-foot Aquariva speedboats. A sophisticated track crane mounted to the ceiling could launch any of the small vessels.

There was a glass-sided office at the far side of the garage for the boat attendants to handle the paperwork of their job. Mercer crossed to it and found the door locked. He used the machine pistol to smash the pane of glass in the door and let himself in. Switching on a desk lamp, he spotted what he was looking for: an invoice pad for passengers to charge a Jet Ski rental to their cabin. The ship’s letterhead was on the top of the pages in bold script. At the bottom he found the name of the vessel’s owners.

“Son of a bitch.”

“What is it?” The group had gathered behind him after helping themselves to handfuls of fluffy towels.

“This ship’s owned by a company called Rhine-marine.”

“So?”

“It’s a division of Kohl AG.”